Contents
Introduction
What Is Resource Capacity
Calculation
Concluding Remarks
Bitesize Edition
One aspect of energy transition that is often underappreciated is the raw materials and resources that are necessary to undertake this endeavour. Some materials, such as silver and copper, will see a sharp rise in demand. It’s questionable whether we have the supply to fulfil this rising demand. Take Mexico as an example. They are the largest producer of silver in the world, accounting for 24% of global production, and the government is considering a ban on open pit mining in Mexico.
On the surface, banning open pit mining sounds wonderful for the environment, and this is a positive. However, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Ban open pit mining, and silver production falls, at a time when demand is rising. This premise is the idea behind my series on resource availability.
Today, I’ll explore resource capacity. With resource capacity, we have enough of our aspired resources, and we hope to calculate the amount of energy we can extract from this. I’ll perform some calculations for a renewable solar farm, and a fossil fuel oil well.
Introduction
In continuation with the topic of energy, I’ll now shift to a new subtopic of resource availability. Especially as we try to clean up our energy generation mix, we have to carefully consider the raw materials required for this endeavour. Currently, there are many scarce resources required to do this, but little consideration as to where we will magically gather these resources from. Unfortunately, if you want a solar panel, you need silicon that we can gather from rocks, or wind turbines require steel created at very high temperatures. We have to pick our battles carefully here, but the limitations of the physical resources we possess in our world is one such battle I’ll happily fight. With this in mind, let’s explore our first metric to help measure resource availability, and that is the resource capacity.
What Is Resource Capacity?
Resource capacity refers to the maximum potential energy that can be extracted from a specific resource over a given period. Importantly, this places some limitations on us that can be represented mathematically.
Firstly, we have the physical limitations based on the amount of reserves possessed of a resource, or the total amount we suspect is available in nature. For example, we know the reserves of coal, crude oil, or natural gas we hold in storage, and can attempt to calculate the expected number of barrels we could realistically expect to receive from an oil well based on the lifecycle of previous oil wells that eventually dried up. As for renewables, we can cater the resources to an environment possessing suitable characteristics to increase efficiency. For example, if your environment is windy but gets no sunlight, don’t build a solar panel. In other words, if the resource capacity of a particular area is low, consider alternative energy systems.
We are also limited by our technology. Currently, our biggest limitations are efficiency caps, especially in wind and solar systems. For solar, the limit is the Shockley-Queisser Limit based on the portion of the sun’s light spectrum that silicon can convert into electricity. This is at 33% efficiency. Wind power’s efficiency limit is Betz Law, which due to the amount of kinetic energy captured from the wind is up to 59.3%. Other technological limitations include power plant capacity and the capability of storage systems.
In looking to the long-term future, we need to adopt a long time frame through which we analyse resource capacity. This would naturally lead to renewables since these methods utilise resources we don’t use up, but we need these intermittent systems backed with clean, baseload power. This, in my opinion, comes from nuclear, with natural gas helping us transition to this world. Even when considering renewables, however, we need to still address any environmental impacts. For example, if using biomass, what is the rate of forest regrowth, or how will river flow and wildlife be affected by hydropower? In a sentence, resource capacity can help us to assess the limitations of our energy systems.
There are many strings we can pull upon when exploring resource capacity. To paint a more real-world representation, let’s dive into an example calculation.
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