Running on Empty: Copper | Hacker News Reader

Running on Empty: Copper

thehonestsorcerer.substack.com

83 pointsthe-needful61 comments

I think the author is speaking authoritatively about things they may be less familiar with, or where they really want to push a particular doomsday / degrowth agenda (the only prescription at the end the article is that we need to stop technological progress). This paragraph in particular caught my eye:

> Bah! Who needs copper anyway, when we have so much aluminum?! > Have you thought about how aluminum is made? Well, by driving immense electric currents through carbon anodes made from petroleum coke (or coal-tar pitch) to turn molten alumina into pure metal via electrolysis. Two things to notice here. First, the necessary electricity (and the anodes) are usually made with fossil fuels, as “renewables” cannot provide the stable current and carbon atoms needed to make the process possible. Second, all that electricity, even if you generate it with nuclear reactors, have to be delivered via copper wires.

This seems to be trying to say that we can't make aluminum without copper, but that seems nonsensical. First, power can be delivered by wires made out of aluminum and indeed, it often is - I don't think that much of the transmission grid is copper. Second, the comparatively tiny amount of material needed for electrodes is a completely wacky argument. And renewables not being able to provide "the stable current" needed for smelting?

I'm not cherrypicking here, there's a lot of assertions of this type in the article. Essentially, everything is doomed and there's nothing we can do, because we're going to run out of copper. And fossil fuels. And there's absolutely nothing that can replace them, ever. And therefore, we shouldn't build AI datacenters? That's what it says...

I don't know about other countries but in Canada, I can think of a few aluminum smelting operations and they're all geolocated in close proximity to hydroelectric dams.

Other countries are very much the same. Almost always located near giant hydroelectric generation facilities. Brazil + Russia are two big ones that come to mind. Probably China too.

Iceland has a massive amount of geothermal and hydroelectricity. A large portion of that electricity is exported in the form of aluminum.

What a fascinating sentence to read!

It's an interesting way to frame it, like how California exports water to Saudi Arabia via alfalfa

Aluminum can be thought of as "solid electricity". Base mineral is abundant but transfomation is energy-expensive.

In New Zealand, a hydroelectric dam was effectively build for an aluminium smelter [0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwai_Point_Aluminium_Smelter

I heard a story from a usually reliable friend, that there are old decommissioned aluminium smelters on the river or in the mountains east of Portland, that closed up back in the early 2000s or so when Google and Amazon and other datacenters started showing up and buying all the capacity from the hydroelectric dams nearby.

> First, no, power can be delivered by wires made out of aluminum and indeed, it often is, I don't think that much of the transmission grid is copper

Seconded, aluminum works just fine as a conductor. I’m pretty sure that all overhead utility distribution conductors are a steel core wrapped with aluminum conductors and air for insulation, and I’d bet that underground distribution conductors are also aluminum.

SER cable from the utility transformer secondary to your meter socket also uses aluminum conductors.

You usually need to go up a couple of sizes for aluminum vs copper (#1/0 Cu ~= #3/0 Al) but it depends on the specific ampacity.

> I’m pretty sure that all overhead utility distribution conductors are a steel core wrapped with aluminum conductors

That's the classical setup, but there's been some innovation. These days there's also stuff like aluminium alloys which don't need steel reinforcement, or aluminium reinforced with carbon fiber.

But indeed, copper is vanishingly rare.

Thanks for the additional info, I’m interested in learning more technical details about the electrical grid, like conductor size/ampacity but it’s hard to dig up information about it. I work in commercial construction and the highest voltages I ever deal with are 4160V and sometimes 5kV and 15kV, so I know a bit about medium voltage equipment and conductors but I’d like to know more about the utility side.

Are you on a mobile device? Ampacity charts for aluminum conductor steel-reinforced cable are pretty easy to find but most of them appear to be PDFs, like this one:

https://www.prioritywire.com/specs/acsr.pdf

Cables in that table are rated for between 105 to 1,751 amps under these conditions:

"Current ratings based on 75˚C conductor temperature, 25˚C ambient temperature, emissivity 0.5, 2ft/sec wind in sun"

> as “renewables” cannot provide the stable current

Stopped reading right after that nonsense.

It's a double whammo, because aluminium smelting doesn't require stable current. Modern smelters can modulate their power significantly, with even multi-hour full shutdowns not being a huge problem.

Considering how energy-intensive it is, this means there is quite a big future for using aluminium smelting to soak up dirt-cheap excess renewable energy. Renewables not being stable has suddenly become a feature.

Indeed.

Aluminum is actually a (far) superior conductor to copper per unit mass. It would be used on transmission lines even if it was the same price as copper, because the towers can be cheaper and farther apart. It's in increasing use in EVs due to the lower mass.

Copper is still used when the conductive density matters, like the windings of an electric motor. But if copper prices increase further, manufacturers will make sacrifices to efficiency and power density in order to save cost. And they'll figure out how to better balance the use of Al vs. Cu, perhaps using Cu only for the conductors closest to the core.

We also use copper for transformers, which are fairy "dumb" in their usual design. Solid-state transformers exist, which use much less copper, but are currently more expensive. They will no longer be more expensive if the price of copper goes up too much. And they'll probably get cheaper in the long run anyway, regardless of copper price, in the same way that switch mode power supplies have totally replaced linear supplies in the consumer space.

I've seen increasing use of copper in fairly mundane uses, like computer heat sinks, that used to be aluminum. The performance is a little better, but it won't be worthwhile if copper gets way more expensive. They'll just go back to aluminum, or use some other innovation (carbon heat spreaders, etc.) if price becomes an issue.

> I've seen increasing use of copper in fairly mundane uses, like computer heat sinks, that used to be aluminum.

Copper heatsinks go in and out of style... Copper heat pipes have stayed en vogue, but typically embedded in aluminum blocks.

I'd suppose the fashion goes somewhat with the price of copper, though I haven't tracked it. The heatsinks themselves have gotten far larger as CPUs and GPUs have gotten more power hungry, not to mention RAM and SSDs. A material that's a good tradeoff at one scale isn't necessarily one at a different scale.

At any rate, one should expect many of these trades to go the way of Al if Cu gets more expensive (which it might not). Not all of them, but we'll probably see a bias towards physically larger systems in cases where space isn't at a premium. And also a bias towards active systems over passive, liquid cooling over air, and so on.

We even use aluminium on "dumb" transformers for power transmission. Dry-type transformers tend to be physically larger because they use air and resin (rather than a tank of oil) to insulate, and so the major downside to aluminium conductors (needing a larger cross-section to carry the same current for the same loss) is no longer a limiting factor performance-wise. In most substations, and extra 20-30% physical size of the transformer is a fine trade-off for cheaper construction.

There has been substantial development in a replacement for all copper wires in the form of CCA - copper clad aluminum conductors.

This product combines the advantages of both materials - low price and mass, stable connection, can be soldered etc. while using a small fraction of copper. It's making inroads into aviation and motor vehicle harnesses, and will probably be the default low cost option for new homes in a few decades.

>This seems to be trying to say that we can't make aluminum without copper, but that seems nonsensical.

The far better argument is that, if it were simple to replace copper with aluminum, this would create a ceiling on the price of copper. However, this hasn't happened. Many applications of copper can theoretically be replaced by copper, but in practice the reactivity and thermal performance issues of aluminum can be challenging. Aluminum wiring in homes, for example, has a very bad reputation.

This isn't fatal, but it is a problem. And if society doesn't plan for it, it could become a more painful problem.

> Aluminum wiring in homes, for example, has a very bad reputation.

It has an undeserved bad reputation now, but it deserved the bad rep back in the 60s and 70s. The problem wasn’t solely the aluminum conductors themselves, it was also the terminals on wiring devices. The material the terminals and screws were made out of worked fine with copper, but the thermal expansion profile did not work well with aluminum conductors. That caused arcing and fires, so the wiring device manufacturers figured out a material that works well with both copper and aluminum for wiring device terminations. Wire manufacturers also made changes to ensure better terminations. If you look at the terminals of a light switch or receptacle, it will say Cu/Al on it, signifying it is suitable for use with either type of conductor.

This was solved 50 years ago, it’s similar to being scared of flying on a modern jetliner because the De Havilland Comet ripped itself apart in the 1950s due to the engineers not understanding the stresses from repeat pressurization cycles.

For existing installations of pre-1972 wire, you can buy splicing devices (similar to a WAGO lever nut) that connect to the aluminum conductors inside the box and allow you to connect a copper pigtail to the wiring device, you also have to use an anti-oxidant grease to prevent oxidation.

That being said, I’d still wire a house with copper because you can use #14 Cu for a 15A circuit but you need #12 Al for the same circuit, the NEC does not allow use of #14 Al romex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring

> In North American residential construction, aluminum wire was used for wiring entire houses for a short time from the 1960s to the mid-1970s during a period of high copper prices. Electrical devices (outlets, switches, lighting, fans, etc.) at the time were not designed with the particular properties of the aluminum wire being used in mind, and there were some issues related to the properties of the wire itself, making the installations with aluminum wire much more susceptible to problems. Revised manufacturing standards for both the wire and the devices were developed to reduce the problems. Existing homes with this older aluminum wiring used in branch circuits present a potential fire hazard.

I live in a home built after 2000 that had aluminum wires run to its heat pump. A few years back coolant leak from the heat pump lead to huge electric usage before the aluminum wiring lit on fire and shorted itself out. Since repaired, but was told at the time original installer didn't correctly do the aluminum grease on the exposed wire parts.

That said I think the wiring there is still thick aluminum.

Not sure I really have a point - all things equal I'd prefer copper, but it seems like aluminum can be fine when done right too - just riskier when done to the quick and dirty homebuilder standard.

> Since repaired, but was told at the time original installer didn't correctly do the aluminum grease on the exposed wire parts.

I know nothing about grease, but it's pretty obvious that a fuse was missing. You might want to check that such of correct rating is in place now.

It’s more likely to be a breaker in a sub-panel than a fuse.

> Aluminum wiring in homes, for example, has a very bad reputation.

Not just in homes. The U50C tried aluminum wiring in railroad locomotives. That also got a bad reputation.

> Second, all that electricity, even if you generate it with nuclear reactors, have to be delivered via copper wires.

This is indeed a massive red flag. You need conductors, but the material they are made of is pretty much irrelevant.

These days you'd have to search quite a bit to find not-ancient copper conductors in the larger electric grid. Aluminium might have a slightly higher resistance, but when you can just use a thicker wire it's almost always the more attractive choice.

If you don't even know that the grid mostly uses aluminium, you probably shouldn't be making big claims about what is and isn't possible with copper wiring.

You can sometimes see green copper transmission lines, but they're all rather old and becoming far less common

Another red flag vis-a-vie energy source is ignoring hydro electric. High energy consumers and areas with a constant surplus of hydro are a good match. One of the new mega dams on Central Asia was restarted and funded primarily by an aluminium conglomerate - cheap and stable pricing at industrial scales.

This is why one of the two major Aluminum smelters is located in Washington. The economics of using hydropower to run the smelter are really good.

It’s an ideology that’s been consistently and often staggeringly wrong since it first became very popular in the 1970s. Historically it’s been popular on the left, while demographic doomer stuff is more popular on the right.

These ideologies are normally used as “problemist” lead ins to the ideology the author is really pushing. For the left it’s usually Marxism or anarcho-primitivism of some kind. For the right it’s cultural authoritarianism, racism, and anti-feminism.

Because it’s problemism, there can be no solution other than what the author advocates. We can’t engineer our way out of scarcity. Only giving up on tech, or maybe a planned economy, can save us. We can’t prevent demographic decline by importing immigrants, heavens no, or by subsidizing reproduction the way we subsidize other long term needs. No, we have to take away women’s rights and push a return to ultra-orthodox religion. It’s the only way.

This hits the nail on the head exactly.

Indeed, an early use for hydroelectric power (1886) was the Cowles process for reducing aluminum. Using solar or wind power is more difficult, but does not have, IMO, insurmountable complications.

On aluminum, the author says:

> “renewables” cannot provide the stable current and carbon atoms needed to make the process possible

This is untrue. Iceland has a huge aluminum industry, using mainly geothermal power: https://energytransition.org/2023/03/geothermal-iceland-this...

Iceland alone accounts for 1/10th of global aluminum production! https://www.riotinto.com/en/operations/iceland/isal

You do need constant, reliable power, as even a brief interruption makes a huge mess when the aluminum/slag freezes in the processor.

Hydro power as well, and usually they put the smelter rather close to the power source to minimize transmission.

But maybe we're still low on copper, IDK, but making aluminum should be rather possible.

> You do need constant, reliable power, as even a brief interruption makes a huge mess when the aluminum/slag freezes in the processor

On the other hand: it has a gigantic thermal mass. Combine this with the energy requires to melt it, and you end up with molten aluminium being trucked over our highways [0]. A brief interruption isn't a big deal when it takes ages to solidify.

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3h6r2e/this_truck_car...

Iceland is a tiny country with unusual amounts of energy. Not all renewable sources are the same -- hydropower is fairly reliable too, for example -- but Iceland is just not a useful example for the whole world. The largest geothermal plant in the world by far is in California, but it's a small portion of our total energy use so no one cares. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geysers

You can locate an aluminum plant pretty much anywhere you want, as the energy required to make aluminum is large compared to the cost of mining/shipping bauxite. This solves the main problem with geothermal, which is that it's in random locations around the world that don't necessarily have many people living there.

Any place with significant volcanic activity (e.g. Hawaii) could probably do geothermal power if they wanted to.

Hawaii did do geothermal, but in fact it's so geothermically active their main geothermal plant went offline for a while because lava got shot up their boreholes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puna_Geothermal_Venture

Minor nitpick:

The energy (electricity) they use to smelt aluminium mainly comes from hydropower, around 70% of it. The geothermal boreholes are mainly used for district heating, which is quite a big energy drain in Iceland. And that means that geothermal is the source of around 65% of the energy used in Iceland.

Taking a different tack to much of the commenters:

We’re collectively sitting atop every piece of copper we’ve ever refined, they’re just sitting and rotting in landfills instead of mines.

If I were a gambling dinosaur, I’d wager that landfill mining in developed economies will be a decently-sized business in a few decades, as we seek to recapture minerals and materials we once felt were disposable - but whose easily-available raw amounts we’d gradually withered down via mining or extraction. Depending on how material science and metal valuation goes, it might become practical or necessary to extract those metals from water sources or industrial waste sites.

It ain’t pretty, but we were never going to be able to mine Earth indefinitely - and we’re already at a point where, as a planetary species, we need to be more organized and restrictive about the use of non-renewable resources for optimal outcomes and long device/product lifespans.

The era of disposability has passed, we just need more companies to swallow that bitter pill and start adapting.

Very well said!

I was with you until the 9th word from the end.

I'd say this is a governments issue rather than companies issue.

Oh, I’m 100% with you that governments should be regulating the hell out of this in general. We’re at a place in evolution where we have the capability to exploit the entire planet’s resources and yet have no central planning or regulation authority ensuring we don’t screw ourselves in the process.

But until governments and their people acknowledge their role in dealing with the long term issues, we’re stuck with the infinite-growth perspective of Capital. Considering that’s where the accelerator is pushed down, we need to firmly rebuke and shame their yearly iteration nonsense and promote more sustainable outcomes.

Something I could use some clarification on:

> Even though the industry would be willing to pay top dollar for each pound of metal delivered, there is simply not much more to be found. Copper bearing formations are not popping up at random, and there is no point in drilling various spots on Earth prospecting for deposits, either. The major formations have already been discovered, and thus the ever increasing investment spent on locating more copper simply does not produce a return.

How do we "know" there isn't any major formations we haven't found yet? I find it hard to believe we've prospected every possible area.. or are deposits more predictable than it seems?

We don’t know. The entire article is garbage.

As defrost points out, we have a pretty damn good idea from the sampling maps we've built, and geological knowledge we've learned.

But the article is garbage.

The mining majors, BHP, Rio Tinto, et al have petabytes of surface geochemistry, samples, near surface magnetic maps that penetrate into the crust, 3D seismic maps, drill cores, technical reports on every mine ever, surrounding geology, and good models on where economic feasible (at particular price points) amounts of desirable metals can be found.

For example, there are only so many places significant masses of porphyry copper deposit will be found (although these aren't the only types of copper deposit).

For people interested in subscribing, there are databases such as the S&P portal that scratch some of that industry knowledge.

https://www.spglobal.com/en/research-insights/market-insight...

although they seem to have backed off from a public page about the GIS portal to the mining databases they purchased.

So; pretty much most areas have been scratched - Antartica is still open, the Artic has possibilities .. but should we.

There are known untapped masses of copper, eg: in the US there's a mass that will take 64 years to mine .. that's on Apache land so, you know, it'll be US history all over again poking that one.

* US Supreme Court spurns Native American challenge to Rio Tinto's Arizona copper project - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/us-supreme-court-spur...

I can’t take it too seriously. It’s peak oil all over again.

We ran out of cheap pure copper a long time ago. Now we're producing copper out of ores that contain a very small proportion of copper. If the price goes up we'll produce copper from ores that contain an even smaller fraction of copper.

Copper is 60 ppm of the crust. As long as the price keeps going up, we'll never run out.

Seafloor massive sulfides and manganese nodules also have significant amounts of copper.

But I would like to see improvements in copper recycling and in breeding of copper hyperaccumulator plants.

It's also an asymmetric process: getting setup for less pure ore is capital intensive, but once you are the available abundance of your new feedstock can push prices lower then they were before.

We don’t prospect too many years beyond current requirements, the economics don’t warrant it. We also consider development costs and regulatory overhead when deciding where to prospect. Copper mining is capital intensive, ore grade contributes less to the calculus than you might think. No one has exhaustively scoured the globe for copper, the incentives to do so aren’t there.

Companies have strong incentives to sandbag reserve estimates from existing mines. Anecdotally I’ve heard rumors that whisper reserves for copper specifically have materially expanded in recent years, driven by market demand that justifies that effort.

Are there any copper-rich asteroids out there?

Googling: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003206332...

> Asteroids have since long been considered to host significant resources of siderophilic elements such as Fe, Ni, Co, Cu, that could be exploited in situ. However bulk rock mining would be largely impractical. In this paper, we report on abundance and mineral occurrences of copper in H chondrites, identify Cu carrier minerals and interpret their distribution in the context of processes that must have affected parent bodies. This leads us to suggestion that some parts of S-type asteroids contain Cu in a form and amount that would satisfy requirements of potentially economically and environmentally more efficient exploitation.

Other HN users have pointed out the many outright falsehoods present in this article, so I'll just get straight to the point: This is nonsense from a fearmongering collapse blog that doesn't understand what they're trying to speak authoritatively about.

Other headlines currently present from the frontpage of this same site:

> Collapse Will Look Nothing Like the Movies

> How I Came To Believe That Civilization Is Unsustainable

> 2025: A Civilizational Tipping Point

Even if you find that content compelling, it's dishonesty and objective inaccuracy in which it substantiates its points suggests you shouldn't waste your time.

Perhaps we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater here? Cut through the underbrush of technical inaccuracies and you're left with a very simple core premise: our civilization is predicated on continuous growth while having only a finite pool of non-renewable resources to draw upon to achieve it. That this arrangement results in some fairly serious problems isn't really in question, so all we're really arguing about is timelines.

For contrast (and with no AI involved) the dot points from a Sept 2024 BHP copper report are roughly:

* Total global copper demand has grown at a 3.1% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the last 75 years – but this growth rate has been slowing. It was only 1.9% over the 15 years to 2021. Looking to 2035, however, we expect this growth rate to jump back to 2.6% annually.

Considering global demand expectations, electrification trends, etc. this moves to:

* Putting all these levers together, we project global copper demand to grow by around 70% to over 50 Mt per annum by 2050 – an average growth rate of 2% per year.

On the supply side, considering recycling, the aluminium usage transition point, etc:

* We estimate that the world will need about 10 Mtpa new mined copper supply in the next 10 years.

To get this ...

* Copper reserves and production are concentrated in Latin America, Australia and Africa.

* We expect supply growth over the next 10 years to be dominated by the same regions – Latin America Africa and Asia Pacific – with Africa having the highest growth rate (albeit off a much lower base than Latin America), and Latin America continuing to make the most significant contribution in absolute terms.

Existing mines are falling off (they always are!):

* Currently operating copper mines are expected to provide more than half of the copper required to meet future global demand over the next decade. Even so, we estimate existing mines to be producing around 15% less copper in 2035 than they do today.

* We expect between one-third and one-half of global copper supply to face grade decline and ageing challenges over the next decade, which will drive increased unit costs and the requirement for capital reinvestment. While an incredible orebody can make a big difference, many older operations move up the cost curve as they progress through their life cycle. Given the strong demand signals, however, we expect the industry to vigorously pursue options to extend the life of these copper mines.

Brownfield developments will expand old mines; the practice of processing satellite deposits ignored early on.

Truly new mines:

* Greenfield projects continue to attract significant excitement and interest from developers and investors. They can avoid the challenges of aging facilities and grade decline and can unlock large and higher-grade copper deposits, develop new frontiers, and allow for the application of technology advances without the challenge of retrofitting.

* But they also have potentially even greater challenges to brownfield developments, such as long lead times with environmental and social concerns needing to be navigated for the first time, and uncertainties associated with new jurisdictions or regions. And not all problems can be solved with money. For some projects, it is not a question of investability, but of executability.

* The current pipeline of ‘all possible’ greenfield deposits are generally at the higher-difficulty end of the spectrum – and many are experiencing delays. When we investigated a selection of today’s 30 largest (by expected production volume) undeveloped greenfield projects, we found that analysts (ourselves included) had continually moved the forecast supply stack out in time. We expect these projects to contribute around 5 Mtpa of copper by 2035, or 14% of total possible supply.

The report, in full, is: https://www.bhp.com/news/bhp-insights/2024/09/how-copper-wil...

There are other similar reports from the IEA and other majors.

This is the literal ever ongoing dance of extraction, exploration, and development.

Every cent that goes to exploration is whinged over and penny pinched - it's all buckets of money out the door with no return other than bluesky hope.

As prospects appear and are firmed out, speculative money starts to flow, once Technical Feasibility Reports are in the works a frenzy begins, the bets may or may not pan out when such reports land in a Prospectus seeking forward capital investment.

Silver and copper are the best investments exactly because of present and future underuspply.

one problem i see with aluminium replacing copper are PCB. how will you solder things to aluminium in your garage?

Yet another author who does not understand the meaning of reserves vs resources. Reserves are are deposits that can be recovered at cost at current market price. Increase the price and miraculously, reserves increase. Like with most commodities, price spikes are followed by price drops as supply catches up. Remember when we were running out of lithium? Prices are down 90% from that peak.

They are deposits that have been proved out and can be recovered at the current market price.

There may be other deposits, as yet undiscovered or confirmed, that can also be produced at the current market price, but those don't get included in "reserves".

Why is this nonsense degrowth article back only a week or so after it showed up here only about a week ago?

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