Sustainability
drawbacks are making them harder to fund and clear – and, once carbon is properly priced, considerably more costly – than ever before.
Nonetheless, while the use of coal necessarily releases carbon into the atmosphere, and it can’t be mined without fugitive methane emissions, it’s closer to the exception than the rule. As James Whiteside, global head of corporate research at Wood Mackenzie, points out, “there’s nothing about mining, in most cases, that needs to be carbon emissive”. He lists three major determining factors for decarbonising – or, more accurately, the cost of decarbonising – mining operations: location, deposit type and technology.
Location is important in how it relates to power supply, which makes up roughly 60% of the emissions at a mine site, though that can vary greatly depending on the commodity being mined. To date, the sustainability focus of most mining companies has been in bringing renewable power sources to what Whiteside calls “amenable” locations. “That’s where solar works, where wind works,” he adds. “And even with basic lithium-ion storage, in some cases, it’s a profitable venture: it has a negative carbon abatement cost.”
Even so, due to the intermittency of many renewable power sources, and the costs and limitations of current battery technology, it’s rarely possible – or, at least, economical – for mines in off- grid locations to get more than 50% of their power requirements from renewables. McIlvenna Bay, however, happens to be plugged into to one of the world’s few fully renewable electric grids. “You’ve got to have clean power,” says Myerson. “That’s the biggest thing for mining, and it gives us a major head start in reaching carbon neutrality.” Saskatchewan’s hydroelectric infrastructure is a significant part of the reason Myerson feels Foran’s work is, “honestly, not all that impressive”. Helpfully, more and more locations – Whiteside highlights Chile and Brazil – are beginning to replicate it. “If you’re taking power from the grid, your carbon footprint is going to reduce over time,” Whiteside contnues. “And a lot of mining companies are signing specific power purchasing agreements to make 100% of their power supply renewable.”
The second determinant, deposit type, directly impacts extraction method. As such, it accounts for coal’s unavoidable spew of fugitive methane, as well as the emissions currently associated with using high-pressure acid leaching to produce nickel. Less directly, ore body also affects the cost and difficulty of decarbonising mining fleets, which cause another large proportion of scope one and two emissions in most mines. Whiteside points out that it’s not yet possible to source electric trucks large and powerful enough to operate in many open-pit mines, although the smaller equipment required for underground
World Mining Frontiers /
www.nsenergybusiness.com
Foran has sought to engage consultants with sustainability expertise from other industries, such as construction.
operations is already easy to purchase and cheap to run. In Myerson’s experience, the attention and investment companies like Sandvik, Epiroc and Caterpillar have put into electric equipment over the past five years has made assembling the fleet for McIlvenna Bay quite a straightforward task. Even so, he agrees with Whiteside that smaller players simply don’t have the capital available to drive the third factor: technological development. “If you’re Rio Tinto, you can develop your own inert anode technology,” says the WoodMac analyst, “but most junior, or even mid-tier, miners simply don’t have the capital available to invest over the long term in making some of these technologies economic.” Rio Tinto is a particularly timely example, as the company recently announced a $7.5bn plan to halve its scope one and two carbon emissions by 2030. An important step for the industry, it was also bad news for the company’s share price. Around the same time, Anglo American laid out a relatively detailed plan for achieving net-zero across all its operations by 2040, but, perhaps wisely, refrained from putting a dollar number next to it. “Most of these projects are not economic at the moment,” explains Whiteside. “Some of the numbers are really eye-watering. They’re going to have to really, really invest, if we’re thinking in today’s costs – or those costs are going to have to come down significantly.” Moreover, major operators are handcuffed by their ageing – and thus increasingly energy intensive – mine portfolios, not to mention the sunk costs of their emissive diesel fleets, which Whiteside expects will be phased out in the 2030s. So, while majors may have the funds to develop and pilot specialised technologies over the next 20 years, it’s on the unencumbered
19
million
Additional tonnes of copper will need to be produced each year by 2040 in order to reach net zero by 2050.
Wood Mackenzie 27
Foran
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45
