Can A Mining Truck Be Carbon Neutral?

A dumptruck-load of iron for a wind turbine will provide energy for more than 100 years: now Caterpillar will dig it up with a giant EV

While it's not the pleasantest prospect for a treehugger like me to dwell on, there is stuff we need to dig out of the earth, even to build the clean power economy.

I am not thinking here of tar-sands, oil or coal, because we can substitute clean power for these environmental disasters.

But to put solar panels on more roofs, we need to mine silicon. To build the batteries to run an electric vehicle nation we will need to mine lithium. To build more wind turbines we need...you get the picture.

Initially at least, to build turbines and solar panels, the raw materials like steel and silicon needed to make clean energy are dug out of the earth, just like the dirty energy supplies of fossil fuels like oil and coal.

The huge difference is that a dumptruck-load of steel for a wind turbine will provide energy for more than 100 years, but a dumptruck-load of tar-sand, coal or oil will just goes up in smoke in a few hours.

Making mining eco-friendlier is going to be part of a carbon-neutral world. In response to this need, this week at the Nevada mining truck expo, Caterpillar is unveiling a 345 ton all-electric-power mining truck, the worlds largest EV to date.

It will go into production in 2010. They will also display another one at a mere 250 tons, presumably for moving smaller vast piles of dirt, that one will be available in either electric or combustion engine options. 80 year old Caterpillar has a corner on this market: no other manufacturer is attempting to build mining trucks over 200 tons with an electric motor rather than using the 100 year old internal combustion engine. That may have something to do with Caterpillar joining the carbon-responsible industry group USCAP.

In the late 1960s Caterpillar was one of the first manufacturers to try electric-drive trucks but abandoned that line of vehicles with the end of the Age Of Aquarius, but now that we are counting our carbon emissions, Caterpillar has opted for a building a climate friendlier mining industry.

To be environmentally friendlier, electric powered mining trucks would need to be charged using clean power, say from wind, solar, geothermal etc. Currently, mining silicon is dirty because of mining truck diesel emissions.

Frequently wind's greatest potential is out where people don't live (they don't live there because it's too windy) but there is still mining to be done there. Solar is best where the solar radiation is so intense that there's now evaporated seas-full of lithium that will need to be mined there to run all our EVs. Think of the salt deposits of Nevada.

But what if an industrial scale solar or wind farm in those areas supplied the charging power for electric mining trucks. I wonder how much this would reduce at least the carbon costs of mining?

For Matter Network

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Geothermal Projects Up 20% Since January

The Geothermal Energy Association has released a new report which shows a 20% increase since January of new projects starting in the US. Iceland and Tibet currently power the highest percentage of their electricity from Geothermal sources - 25% and 30% of each nations power comes from Geothermal energy respectively. Geothermal energy today meets the total electricity needs of some 60 million people worldwide, roughly the population of the United Kingdom.

The new projects underway will power 4 million homes with 4000 megawatts of geothermal power. The report lists projects being started in 14 states, mostly in the Pacific Rim states but also, surprisingly, Florida.

Volcanic areas are typically those that best tap Geothermal potential such as Iceland which is the world leader in the percentage of its electricity that comes from Geothermal power. Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. When developed, these projects could provide nearly 4,000 megawatts (MW) of new electric power, enough electricity to meet the needs of roughly 4 million homes.

Of these projects, 45 will be in Nevada, 21 in California, 11 in Oregon, Idaho and Utah will have 6 each, 5 in Alaska, 2 each for Arizona and Hawaii, and Washington, Colorado, Wyoming and Florida will each have one project. With the new additions, US geothermal power will be close to 7,000 MW.

Google is investing $11 million in Geothermal power, and also has previously invested in electric vehicles powered by Lithium, a side product of Geothermal drilling.

From Renewable Energy World
and the Geothermal Energy Association

Photo by Phil Mercer

For Matter

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Got Lithium?

A new paper on the Recovery of Minerals and Metals from Geothermal Fluids has some great news for those of us hoping we can green up our drives in 2010 with lithium-powered electric vehicles. There is a real symbiotic relationship between geothermal power and the battery electric car.

Geothermal fluids contain significant concentrations of potentially valuable mineral resources. This paper focuses on extracting silica, lithium and zinc, the resources that have the greatest potential to be economically extracted. Mineral content was often considered more a nuisance than an asset, because they can cause corrosive scaling both in the plant and in reinjection wells, which creates operational limitations in Geothermal power plants.

We will need these minerals, especially lithium, for powering the batteries for the many electric vehicles that are due on the market in the next few years. The lithium automotive market could reach $1.6 Billion by 2015 .

Many constituents of geothermal fluids are valuable if they can be separated and purified. The geothermal waters have had intimate and lengthy contact with the layers of the earth’s crust that they flow through, resulting in dissolution of minerals and metals from the rocks, and solution into the hot water. These aqueous solutions can be processed to recover minerals and metals, such as silica, zinc and lithium.

Mineral recovery improves the economics of geothermal energy production by helping to minimize the nuisance of corrosive scaling, and there is now increasing interest in improving the economics of geothermal energy by co-producing and marketing some of the dissolved constituents: in particular the easiest to extract economically, which turn out to be silica, zinc and lithium.

In the early history of geothermal resource development, boric acid, sulfur, and ammonium salts were recovered commercially until they lost economic competitiveness to other mining processes.

Although the enrichment of target elements in geothermal fluids is not as high as the enrichment in fluids commonly treated with hydrometallurgical methods, the costs associated with resource extraction from geothermal fluids are potentially low for several reasons:

Plant costs are split between power and mineral production. Geothermal power plants already pump and process the fluids. Mineral extraction would consist of an additional treatment step added to existing plant facilities and would be economically feasible for several reasons.

1. There are no costs associated with mining and physical processing of the ore, and no negative environmental impacts;
2. There are no costs associated with dissolution of ore minerals into an aqueous phase because they are already in solution;
3. Geothermal systems process large volumes of water, commonly tens of millions of gallons per day, so that the mass of mineral resource is large in spite of relatively low concentrations.

This is good news. Lithium for all our electric vehicles could be readily mined along with clean geothermal energy to supply the sockets in our garages the juice to power our plug in vehicles.

Photo by WorldIslandInfo

For MatterNetwork

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