CLEAN ENERGY MINERALS ARE NOT CLEAN
As the planet moves away from fossil fuels towards a green future, the focus now is on the ramping up of mining for various rare earth minerals like Lithium, Cobalt and Nickel. These minerals are crucial for the production of batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines which are going to replace our fossil fuel-based society in the future by 2040. To achieve this objective, we will see a 4 to 6 times increase in the overall requirement of these minerals by 2040: for Lithium, it is 40 times higher, and for Cobalt and Nickel 20 to 25 times higher. However, the ramping up of these minerals has been slow enough to meet the energy transition goals of the Paris Agreement as it is plagued by a lot of hurdles like technical barriers, environmental and ethical issues. First, their mining is a time taking process and it often takes nearly 5 t...