'Renewables' increase fossil fuel demands

In the transition to so-called clean and green electricity, critical minerals and metals bring new challenges to electricity security.

Solar plants, wind farms, and EVs generally require more minerals to build than their fossil fuel-based counterparts. A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired plant. Since 2010 the average amount of minerals needed for a new unit of power generation capacity has increased by 50% as the share of wind and solar renewables in new investment has risen.

Our electricity is increasingly dependent on rare earth minerals and metals mined for those wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries under atrocious slave labor and environmental conditions in other countries that the DOE and bureaucrats ignore.

• China controls a stranglehold 80% of the global supply monopoly on rare earth minerals and metals, with the Congo in Africa a 90% source of vital cobalt.
• Graphite: On a total component basis for an EV battery, graphite is about 25% to 28% of the whole EV battery. Turkey has the largest reserves of graphite, followed by Brazil and China. Together these three countries accounted for 66% of the estimated world graphite reserves.

It should concern everyone that all those "blood minerals" come from mining at locations in the world that are never seen by environmentalists, policymakers, or EV buyers.

• For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, just one Tesla EV battery requires the processing of more than 500,000 pounds of materials somewhere on the planet.
• A battery for a heavy-duty electric truck can weigh up to 16,000 pounds, which is 16 times more than the Tesla battery!!!! A single truck battery requires 8,000,000 pounds of earth to be dug up. That's astounding – digging up 8 million pounds of earth for each truck battery!

Policymakers setting "green" policies are oblivious to the reality that Electricity came AFTER the discovery of oil 200 years ago.

• ALL electrical generation from hydro, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, and solar are ALL built with the products, components, and equipment that are made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.
• All EV's, solar panels, and wind turbines are also built with the products, components, and equipment that are made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.
• Further, all cars, trucks, excavating equipment, cranes, merchant ships, planes, and trains are also made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.

Our advanced society uses those oil derivatives manufactured from black cruddy crude oil to make fuels for larger jets, ships, and space launches, and to make those 6,000 products made from oil that did not exist 200 years ago. If we weren't such an advanced society, there would be no need for so-called "big oil".

We're coming up on three and a half years into the Biden presidency - a presidency which from the outset promised an "all of government" regulatory onslaught to force a transition away from fossil fuels to "green" electricity.

Demand for the products from oil is stressing the supply, thus continuously spiking the cost of the products and fuels from fossil fuels to meet the materialistic demands of society.

And MOST importantly, there is a lost reality that the primary usage of crude oil is NOT for the generation of electricity, but to manufacture derivatives and fuels which are the ingredients of everything needed by economies and lifestyles to exist and prosper, i.e., all products that did not exist pre-1800's.