Download or read book The Material Limits of Energy Transition Thanatia written by Alicia Valero and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Earth has become a huge mine, with a greater quantity and variety of fundamental mineral resources being extracted year after year. Technology, from electric cars to everyday electrical equipment, consume vast amounts of scarce raw materials. On a planet with limited resources, are these minerals being properly assessed? Will there be enough raw materials to meet the demand of a world population on track to reach 10 billion people? What will be the consequences of accelerated resource depredation? Will the planet one day become 'Thanatia', a resource-exhausted Earth? This book allows readers to understand the mineral heritage of the Earth, considering the demand for raw materials in society, comparing it with the availability of resources on Earth and the impact of mining. The basics of physical geonomics are exlpained, allowing readers to analyse the loss of mineral resources on the planet. The impact of renewable energies and technologies, including electric vehicles, are studied. The book concludes with possible solutions to mineral depletion, from increasing recycling rates, ecodesign measures or alternative sources of mineral resources. Providing numerous tables and illustrations, 'The Material Limits of Energy Transition: Thanatia' gives readers a thorough understanding of mineral depletion. Exploring geology, geochemistry, mining, metallurgy, the environment and thermodynamics, this is a truly holistic book.
Download or read book Critical Materials and Sustainability Transition written by Arda Işıldar and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2023-12-21 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical minerals play a vital role in the ongoing energy transition, which aims to shift global energy systems towards more sustainable and low-carbon alternatives. These minerals, also known as critical minerals, are essential components in various clean energy technologies such as wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, and energy storage systems. They possess unique properties that enable efficient energy generation, storage, and transmission. For instance, neodymium, a rare earth element, is crucial for the production of high-performance magnets used in wind turbines and electric motors. Lithium, another critical mineral, is a key component in rechargeable batteries powering electric vehicles and energy storage solutions. As the demand for clean energy technologies continues to rise, securing a sustainable and reliable supply of critical minerals becomes increasingly important to support the global energy transition and reduce dependence on fossil fuels. In this book, we investigate various aspects of critical mineral governance in the context of sustainability transition. We give perspectives around the critical metal requirements of sustainability transition in a forward-looking manner. We discuss the answers to the following questions: What role do the critical raw materials play in the transition to a sustainable economy and energy systems transformation? What are the bottlenecks in achieving a sustainable critical material supply? How do the critical minerals enable renewable energy transition and sustainable development? What is their role in the sustainability transition? How is mineral criticality assessed? And how critical are minerals? What are some regional differences in terms of critical mineral availability, processing capacity, and the supply chain? What strategy should be followed in deciding between primary raw materials and secondary raw materials in supplying critical raw materials for the transition to a sustainable economy? What is the (known) critical material budget, and how does it fit with the climate pledges? The authors of the chapters of this book take a multi-perspective approach and provide insights from industrial ecology, environmental engineering, and sustainable management of natural resources. The information provided will help readers to understand critical metal requirements of present and future key technologies and will help societies to develop and implement sustainable supply strategies.
Download or read book Thanatia written by Antonio Valero Capilla and published by World Scientific Publishing Company Incorporated. This book was released on 2014 with total page 629 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Gaia becoming Thanatia, a resource exhausted planet? For how long can our high-tech society be sustained in the light of declining mineral ore grades, heavy dependence on un-recycled critical metals and accelerated material dispersion? These are all root causes of future disruptions that need to be addressed today. This book presents a cradle-to-cradle view of the Earth's abiotic resources through a novel and rigorous approach based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics: heat dissipates and materials deteriorate and disperse. Quality is irreversibly lost. This allows for the assessment of such depletion and can be used to estimate the year where production of the main mineral commodities could reach its zenith. By postulating Thanatia, one acquires a sense of destiny and a concern for a unified global management of the planet's abiotic resource endowment. The book covers the core aspects of geology, geochemistry, mining, metallurgy, economics, the environment, thermodynamics and thermochemistry. It is supported by comprehensive databases related to mineral resources, including detailed compositions of the Earth's layers, thermochemical properties of over 300 substances, historical energy and mineral resource inventories, energy consumption and environmental impacts in the mining and metallurgical sector and world recycling rates of commodities.
Download or read book Electric Cars and the Resource Challenge written by Theo Henckens and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-20 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to fully explore the short- and long-term impact of the global electric car rollout on the supply of raw materials. The world has gone from zero to almost 1.5 billion fossil fuel cars in circulation today, contributing significantly to the global climate crisis and necessitating a total transition to electric vehicles in the coming decades. This book responds to key questions surrounding the increase of electric car usage, such as will there be sufficient resources available to permanently supply a future world population of ten billion with electric cars? What is the risk that the supply of essential raw materials will be hampered by geopolitical problems, or that mining capacity cannot be quickly scaled up? How does the switch from fossil fuel vehicles to electric cars impact the recycling of scrap cars? It contains detailed information about the material composition of electric and fossil fuel cars in relation to stocks and relative scarcity of corresponding materials in the earth’s crust and estimates the ultimate annual consumption of metals based on predicted population growth. This book is an important tool for decision- makers in national ministries and international bodies, highlighting how to adopt a global long-term raw materials policy to protect the interests of future generations and global fairness. It provides necessary forecasting insight to industry leaders and specialists, policymakers, and researchers.
Download or read book Digital Economy Report 2024 written by United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and published by Stylus Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2024-07-10 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Digital Economy Report 2024 turns the attention to the environmental footprint of digitalization. The Report discusses environmental impacts along the life cycle of digital devices and information and communications technology infrastructure with regard to raw material extraction and processing, manufacturing, distribution; use and the end-of-life phase. The direct effects on natural resources, including transition minerals, energy and water, as well as greenhouse gas emissions and waste-related pollution can be said to constitute the “environmental footprint” of the ICT sector. There are also indirect environmental effects from the use of digital technologies and services in different sectors of the economy, and the Report includes a dedicated chapter on e-commerce. The report underlines the need to maximize the positive impact of digitalization while minimizing the negative impacts on environmental sustainability.
Download or read book The Material Basis of Energy Transitions written by Alena Bleicher and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2020-08-05 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Material Basis of Energy Transitions explores the intersection between critical raw material provision and the energy system. Chapters draw on examples and case studies involving energy technologies (e.g., electric power, transport) and raw material provision (e.g., mining, recycling), and consider these in their regional and global contexts. The book critically discusses issues such as the notion of criticality in the context of a circular economy, approaches for estimating the need for raw materials, certification schemes for raw materials, the role of consumers, and the impact of renewable energy development on resource conflicts. Each chapter deals with a specific issue that characterizes the interdependency between critical raw materials and renewable energies by examining case studies from a particular conceptual perspective. The book is a resource for students and researchers from the social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering, as well as interdisciplinary scholars interested in the field of renewable energies, the circular economy, recycling, transport, and mining. The book is also of interest to policymakers in the fields of renewable energy, recycling, and mining, professionals from the energy and resource industries, as well as energy experts and consultants looking for an interdisciplinary assessment of critical materials. Provides a comprehensive overview of key issues related to the nexus between renewable energy and critical raw materials Explores interdisciplinary perspectives from the natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences Discusses critical strategies to address the nexus from a practitioner's perspective
Download or read book Thermodynamics for Sustainable Management of Natural Resources written by Wojciech Stanek and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-05-27 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines ways of assessing the rational management of nonrenewable resources. Integrating numerous methods, it systematically exposes the strengths of exergy analysis in resources management. Divided into two parts, the first section provides the theoretical background to assessment methods, while the second section provides practical application examples. The topics covered in detail include the theory of exergy cost and thermo-ecological cost, cumulative calculus and life cycle evaluation. This book serves as a valuable resource for researchers looking to investigate a range of advanced thermodynamic assessments of the influence of production processes on the depletion of nonrenewable resources.
Download or read book Elgar Encyclopedia of Ecological Economics written by Emilio Padilla Rosa and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2023-09-06 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With diverse contributions from over 100 authors around the globe, this comprehensive Encyclopedia summarises the developments of ecological economics from the fundamental contributions to the more recent methodological debates in the field. It provides an expansive list of topics including sustainable development, the limits to growth, agroecology, implications of thermodynamic laws for economics, integrated ecologic-economic modelling, valuation of natural resources and services, and renewable and non-renewable resources management. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.
Download or read book Critical Materials for the Energy Transition written by Dolf Gielen and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical materials have become a focus for the energy transition and governments have a role to foster long-term solutions. The use of critical materials should be considered early on and governments should plan ahead to avoid potential delays to energy transition due to critical materials shortfalls and also avoid emerging geopolitical challenges related to critical materials supply as well as price increases caused by scarcity. However, a number of strategies can be deployed to avoid major supply challenges in the period leading up to 2050. These strategies include increased extraction, product design to avoid or minimise critical materials use, and recycling of products to recover scarce materials. Recent trends suggest that, for example, battery producers are already reducing their exposure to critical materials supply risks. This technical paper assesses how the growth of renewables will put critical materials at the centre of the energy transformation. The critical materials and their supply situation and outlook are discussed, with a focus on copper and neodymium.
Download or read book Energy Complexity and Wealth Maximization written by Robert Ayres and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the mechanisms of wealth creation, or what we like to think of as evolutionary "progress." The massive circular flow of goods and services between producers and consumers is not a perpetual motion machine; it has been dependent for the past 150 years on energy inputs from a finite storage of fossil fuels. In this book, you will learn about the three key requirements for wealth creation, and how this process acts according to physical laws, and usually after some part of the natural wealth of the planet has been exploited in an episode of "creative destruction." Knowledge and natural capital, particularly energy, will interact to power the human wealth engine in the future as it has in the past. Will it sputter or continue along the path of evolutionary progress that we have come to expect? Can the new immaterial wealth of information and ideas, which makes up the so-called knowledge economy, replace depleted natural wealth? These questions have no simple answers, but this masterful book will help you to understand the grand challenge of our time. Praise for Energy, Complexity and Wealth Maximization: “... people who run the modern world (politicians, economists and lawyers) have a very poor grasp of how it really works because they do not understand the fundamentals of energy, exergy and entropy ... those decision-makers would greatly benefit from reading this book ...” - Vaclav Smil, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Manitoba “... A grandiose design; impressive, worth reading and reflecting!” - Prof. Dr. Ernst Ulrich von Weizäcker, Founder of Wuppertal Institute; Co-President of the Club of Rome, Former Member of the German Bundestag, co-chair of the UN’s Resource Panel “... The book is a must read for concerned citizens and decision makers across the globe.” - RK Pachauri, Founder and Executive Vice Chairman, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and ex-chair, International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Download or read book The Seneca Effect written by Ugo Bardi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essence of this book can be found in a line written by the ancient Roman Stoic Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca: "Fortune is of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid". This sentence summarizes the features of the phenomenon that we call "collapse," which is typically sudden and often unexpected, like the proverbial "house of cards." But why are such collapses so common, and what generates them? Several books have been published on the subject, including the well known "Collapse" by Jared Diamond (2005), "The collapse of complex societies" by Joseph Tainter (1998) and "The Tipping Point," by Malcom Gladwell (2000). Why The Seneca Effect? This book is an ambitious attempt to pull these various strands together by describing collapse from a multi-disciplinary viewpoint. The reader will discover how collapse is a collective phenomenon that occurs in what we call today "complex systems," with a special emphasis on system dynamics and the concept of "feedback." From this foundation, Bardi applies the theory to real-world systems, from the mechanics of fracture and the collapse of large structures to financial collapses, famines and population collapses, the fall of entire civilzations, and the most dreadful collapse we can imagine: that of the planetary ecosystem generated by overexploitation and climate change. The final objective of the book is to describe a conclusion that the ancient stoic philosophers had already discovered long ago, but that modern system science has rediscovered today. If you want to avoid collapse you need to embrace change, not fight it. Neither a book about doom and gloom nor a cornucopianist's dream, The Seneca Effect goes to the heart of the challenges that we are facing today, helping us to manage our future rather than be managed by it.
Download or read book Critical Raw Materials for the Energy Transition written by Aude Pommeret and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics written by Clive L. Spash and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 787 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since becoming formally established with an international academic society in the late 1980s, ecological economics has advanced understanding of the interactions between social and biophysical reality. It initially combined questioning of the basis of mainstream economics with a concern for environmental degradation and limits to growth, but has now advanced well beyond critique into theoretical, analytical and policy alternatives. Social ecological economics and transformation to an alternative future now form core ideas in an interdisciplinary approach combining insights from a range of disciplines including heterodox economics, political ecology, sociology, political science, social psychology, applied philosophy, environmental ethics and a range of natural sciences. This handbook, edited by a leading figure in the field, demonstrates the dynamism of ecological economics in a wide-ranging collection of state-of-the-art essays. Containing contributions from an array of international researchers who are pushing the boundaries of the field, the Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics showcases the diversity of the field and points the way forward. A critical analytical perspective is combined with realism about how economic systems operate and their essential connection to the natural world and society. This provides a rich understanding of how biophysical reality relates to and integrates with social reality. Chapters provide succinct overviews of the literature covering a range of subject areas including: heterodox thought on the environment; society, power and politics, markets and consumption; value and ethics; science and society; methods for evaluation and policy analysis; policy challenges; and the future post-growth society. The rich contents dispel the myth of there being no alternatives to current economic thought and the political economy it supports. The Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics provides a guide to the literature on ecological economics in an informative and easily accessible form. It is essential reading for those interested in exploring and understanding the interactions between the social, ecological and economic and is an important resource for those interested in fields such as: human ecology, political ecology, environmental politics, human geography, environmental management, environmental evaluation, future and transition studies, environmental policy, development studies and heterodox economics.
Download or read book Thermoelectricity written by Robert R. Heikes and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book ENERGY TRANSITION written by and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Energy Alliance for Realistic and Profitable Energy Transition written by Mustapha Hatti and published by . This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Energy Transition written by and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
