The Abundance of Copper

xrotaryguy · Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 3:08 pm Post subject: The Abundance of Copper

I have been personally pushing the battery-electric vehicle (EV) as a solution to the US' dependence -and perhaps even the world's depoendence- on a rapidly diminishing liquid fuel supply. However, one of the arguments that I have heard against battery-electric cars is that the earth simply lacks enough raw materials to support this type of transportation fleet.

This argument has some validity as electric cars would probably use a fair amount of copper and the estimated crustal abundance of copper is only 60mg/kg. Copper is a very good conductor of both heat and electricity. As such, it is one of the most common materials found in electrical equipment today.

However, copper is not the only suitable element for this type of use. Aluminum is also quite good. In fact, much of the wiring that we find in over head power lines is an alloy of aluminum and steel. Granted, aluminum conducts neither heat nor electricity as readily as copper, but an aluminum wire's lesser electrical conductivity properties can be overcome in most cases by simply increasing the wire's diameter. Better yet, the estimated crustal abundance of aluminum is a whopping 8,230mg/kg.

As mentioned above, one of the more common materials to alloy with aluminum is steel, which is an alloy of iron and carbon. Again, iron is in great abundance compared to copper at 5,630mg/kg.

Some electronics do not work well with aluminum circuitry, but most can be made to work very well with aluminum in place of copper. Nearly all high tension lines are are an aluminum-steel alloy, House wiring cane be made from aluminum. Automobile circuitry can be made from aluminum. AC motors can use aluminum windings. (An AC motor has no rotor windings. A DC motor would probably not work so well with aluminum rotor windings). Transformers are often built with aluminum windings. The list goes on and on.

The argument that the earth does not contain enough copper to exclusively wire the entire world is probably correct. Fortunately, using copper exclusively is not necessary.
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Brian Jackson: Weird, old, and rare car preservatinist.

61 Corvair Van, Turbo Charged 62 Corvair Rampside, Retired SCCA Improved Touring 74 Rx2 Road Race Car, 75 Rx4 Sedan, 79 Triumph Spitfire, and a couple of boring practical cars.

americandream · Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 5:50 pm Post subject: Re: The Abundance of Copper

Assuming for a second that we have this planet wide reconfiguration as you contempate in your article, what do you run the foundries fabricating these base materials on?

Once the door to a new technology is flung open to rampant consumerism, without due thought, another set of problems arise. With the internet, we were all fed the usual blather about decentralising employment, online shopping, paperless commerce etc, etc. Very little of that has come to pass, instead the internet has opened the planet to a new level of even more rampant consumerism. I'm not knocking this ourtcome...after all, it would have been naive not to have expected business to seize this new tool.....but we do seem to invariably land ourselves deeper in the crap I notice.
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BigTex · Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 6:01 pm Post subject: Re: The Abundance of Copper

Isn't aluminum manufacturing an especially resource intensive process?
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Ainan · Heavy Crude Joined: Feb 18, 2008 Posts: 266

You are quite right, aluminum is in fact the most abundant metal in the earths crust, but it rarely exists in pure form. I believe it consumes 2% of all the worlds electric supply to produce our current levels. We would be much better off recycling all the copper, aluminum and other metals just piled up in dumps than mining more though.

More to the point, when we have consumed the reserves of copper and such to make these EVs, how do we power them into the future? If you develop a working He-3 fusion reactor then we can talk, probably about population reduction.
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xrotaryguy · Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 7:12 pm Post subject: Re: The Abundance of Copper

Aluminum is very electricity intensive. However, we would not need to step up aluminum production very much to start using it in the stead of copper. We don't really use that much copper. It's just that we don't have very much of it to play with.

Most of the US' supply of aluminum is produced along the Columbia Gorge. These plants are near the gorge because of the cheap surplus electricity generated by the dams on the gorge. This is energy that the utility needs to dump somehow. It's worth mentioning here that EVs would generally do the majority of their charging in a similar fashion, off peak. This is part of the reason why aluminum cans are super cheap. At any rate, the energy source that this nation's aluminum plants rely on is sustainable for as long as the dams aren't rendered useless with silt.

I am certainly not claiming that automobiles are environmentally friendly. I am only claiming that EVs are the most environmentally friendly (and the only technically viable) alternative option that we have to ICE powered automobiles.

American Dream: I do disagree with you to some extent. I do much of my shopping on the internet. I actually use my E-Bike to go grocery shopping or my Honda CRX HF (that's the 40mpg model). I usually ride 16 mi/day commuting on the E-Bike unless the weather stinks. When my electric car is done, I will use that. I am also a full time student. I take all of my notes on a tablet pc and I do most of my homework on a the tablet too. My internet classes require no paper of course. I can't remember the last time I paid a bill on paper. Obviously my class mates use lots of paper (not everyone has a snazzy tablet pc), some people still pay bills with paper (the darn utility companies still send paper to our house), and very few people use an electric bicycle today, so your point is very valid. However, I am only trying to point out that one of the perceived obstacles (copper availability) to a new transportation infrastructure is actually a non-issue.

Thank you for the respectful responses.
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Brian Jackson: Weird, old, and rare car preservatinist.

61 Corvair Van, Turbo Charged 62 Corvair Rampside, Retired SCCA Improved Touring 74 Rx2 Road Race Car, 75 Rx4 Sedan, 79 Triumph Spitfire, and a couple of boring practical cars.

smallpoxgirl · Moderator Joined: Nov 08, 2004 Posts: 5733

The problem with aluminum wiring is not that it isn't a good conductor. The problem is that it oxides easily. Copper oxide conducts electricity. Aluminum oxide doesn't. Aluminum wiring was popular in manufactured housing in the 70's. The problem was that the splices tended to oxidize leading to fires. Probably if you soldered all the splices, they'd be fine. It would just be a lot more effort to be sure that it was used safely.

Manufacturing aluminum requires massive amounts of electricity. While certain places like the Columbia Gorge have traditionally had electricity surpluses that were more or less disposable I don't know that it can be counted on into the future. Internet companies are starting to eye that electricity for their server farms. The tech industry in Eastern Washington is booming.
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yesplease · Fission Joined: Oct 03, 2006 Posts: 2316

Revi · Fusion Joined: Apr 25, 2005 Posts: 3255 Location: Maine

I have heard that with the cost of power it's hard for aluminum to make a profit these days. Here's a story from 2006 that talks about the problem:

http://daily.sightline.org/daily_score/archive/2006/08/02/aluminum-not-foiled

This "congealed electricity" is another thing that was everywhere in the 20th century, but may become as rare and precious as it was back when Louis the 8th had a tea set made of aluminum, which was an incredible luxury in the 19th century.

We're building our solar-electric car now, before it all runs out:

www.sunnev.com
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thylacine · Heavy Crude Joined: Jan 19, 2006 Posts: 114

Denny · Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 10:19 pm Post subject: Re: The Abundance of Copper

It isn't just the possible electric vehicles which will be putting a great demand on copper, but the ongoing infrastructure development in India and China. Also, the heat exchange properties of copper make it a growth metal for air condtioning condensers and evaporators. Do you think a newly middle class Chinese or Indian may just crave some air conditioning? I do.

Then, look at alternative electrical energy. Both wind and solar power suffer from intermitency, such that the installed base of wind and solar generation will require more copper than conventional electrical generation modes. If it takes three times the peak generation potential for alternative sources to net out where you need to be to supplement or replace current power generation , then you'll need three times the copper in the windings of the generators and transformers that collectively form the distribution network. Something to think about. And, wind power in particular tends to be off the beaten path, so you are looking at long spans of high voltage lines.

xrotaryguy · Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 11:41 pm Post subject: Re: The Abundance of Copper

Smallpoxgirl: You're definitely right that aluminum tends to have oxidization problems. Back when I worked at the auto parts store, many of my customers would only buy ignition parts that were made from copper. It's not that the aluminum stuff didn't work. The copper just worked better. Heck, I have been running the same distributor cap in my Rx4 for years, and it still works fine. So yeah, copper is better... but aluminum is good enough. Smile

As yesplease stated, energy companies dump a huge amount of energy off peak. Some of my EV driving buddies actually go down to one of the local utilities' generation facilities and charge for free at night just for grins and giggles. The guys that work at the plant are more than happy to give the energy away. It is simply being wasted at that hour.

The US has a long way to go before it seriously needs to worry about its electrical infrastructure. We currently use considerably more energy than all western European countries combined (125 vs. 80 quadrillion btus/year). That's right, 300 million Americans use 45 quadrillion more btus per year than 700 million Europeans. Experts claim that this country can actually. If we really start running into problems with production, we have a massive cushion to fall back on using more efficient energy practices.

Revi, that's an interesting article. It's amazing that the Bonneville Power Annex (BPA) is selling energy to aluminum manufacturers for as little as $12 per MWh. That's only 1.2 cents per kWh. I wish my electricity was that cheap. I'm over here choking on my price gouging 9 cents per kWh energy bill. haha. Seriously though, the fact that the aluminum NEEDS its energy to be that cheap speaks to the incredibly energy intensive nature of aluminum production. Wow!

Thylacine, I can not argue with you about the necessary quality of aluminum ore. However, given the massive disparity between the availability of aluminum and copper, it stands to reason that significantly more aluminum of acceptable concentration than there is of copper.

As for using diesel in mining... I don't have a definitive answer for that. Many machines can actually be powered directly off the grid. Actually the mining industry uses drag-link-type machines more than just about any other industry (sounds like a good solution for farm machinery too if you ask me). But running a bunch of dump trucks around with power cords following them is obviously not a good idea. Battery powered heavy machinery sounds pretty unlikely too. I think that we're fairly stuck with diesel for many of these types of machines. The diesel will need to be bio-diesel though whether or not producing a sufficient amount of bio-diesel is possible is questionable.

Again, using copper in an AC system, or for any other type of system that uses a heat exchanger is not necessary. The condenser in my household AC unit is made of aluminum. Actually, the condensers in every air conditioned house that I have ever lived in has been aluminum. I think that copper has been a little spendy for this application for qhite some time. Automotive radiators haven't been made out of copper (brass actually) for more than a decade. Copper heat exchangers really are not terribly common, and again, they aren't necessary. Aluminum works very well in nearly all heat exchange applications. Even high performance race car radiators and intercoolers are made out of aluminum.

Even so, you're right that the developing world is placing higher demand on all raw materials at a frightening rate. No two ways about that.

Thanks again for the constructive responses everyone. I think this is the longest one of my threads has ever gone without things turning nasty on this forum. Maybe things have changed since I was here last time?
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Brian Jackson: Weird, old, and rare car preservatinist.

61 Corvair Van, Turbo Charged 62 Corvair Rampside, Retired SCCA Improved Touring 74 Rx2 Road Race Car, 75 Rx4 Sedan, 79 Triumph Spitfire, and a couple of boring practical cars.

pedalling_faster · Intermediate Crude Joined: Dec 10, 2005 Posts: 848

Tanada · Posted: Tue May 06, 2008 12:23 pm Post subject: Re: The Abundance of Copper

Much as we discussed copper clad steel wiring in the theives thread there is also the option os copper electoplated aluminum wire, which solves the corrosion problem nicely while retaining the light weight of Aluminum and only a small cost penelty for the more expensive copper.

CCA Wire wiki

xrotaryguy · Posted: Tue May 06, 2008 6:22 pm Post subject: Re: The Abundance of Copper

[quote=pedalling faster]depends on the definition of a good conductor. aluminum has about 1/2 the conductivity of copper[/quote]
I think you're pretty close. The conductivity of aluminum is notably lower than copper. This is an issue in applications where the mass of the aluminum or the number of windings is critical, but in many other applications, the wire can simply be made of a larger diameter.
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Brian Jackson: Weird, old, and rare car preservatinist.

61 Corvair Van, Turbo Charged 62 Corvair Rampside, Retired SCCA Improved Touring 74 Rx2 Road Race Car, 75 Rx4 Sedan, 79 Triumph Spitfire, and a couple of boring practical cars.

smallpoxgirl · Moderator Joined: Nov 08, 2004 Posts: 5733

Element Electrical resistivity (microohm-cm)

Aluminum 2.655
Copper 1.678
Gold 2.24
Silver 1.586
Platinum 10.5

source
_________________
"So while you sit and whistle Dixie with your money and your power.
I can hear the flowers a-growin in the rubble of the towers.
I hear leaders quit their lying
I hear babies quit their crying.
I hear soldiers quit their dying, one and all." - OCMS