Engaging Energy

Based upon the research that I detailed in my previous post we can say the following with a reasonable degree of certainty;
The UK will need to increase its raw copper imports by at least 10%, from 2007 levels, if it is to achieve its wind power objectives AND manufacture the components of that new industry on British soil.
The further offshore that wind farms are built, the more copper they use per MW of installed generating capacity (kind of obvious but you still need to crunch the numbers to show it).
The UK currently exports more copper scrap per year than would be required by the proposed new wind industry, based on figures from the British Geological Survey.
The copper cables that are being buried during wind farm construction are not planned to be recovered upon decommissioning. This policy constitutes a planned consumption of copper that is contradictory to the principles of sustainable development since it ‘offshores’ energy consumption and environmental impact associated with copper production in preference to reuse. However, it provides the UK with a readily available source of copper in the form of recoverable buried cables with a known location. This could be considered a hedge against security of copper supply in the long term.

I have found no evidence that this possible long-term hedge against copper supply risk is a conscious and explicit government-led policy, but given that we have another 3 billion people coming to tea before 2075 and that copper has no viable substitute for 100% of its applications, it sounds like it might be a sound policy from a security of supply standpoint. Completely unethical of course, harvesting resources from other nations to hoard for future use, pushing up prices by artificially constraining supply and forcing developing nations to utilise resources earlier in their development cycle than they would have otherwise. But pragmatically better to establish a new form of copper mine within UK territory before supply really gets constrained.

The question is what are the alternatives ?

The obvious answer that I came up with was recycling. The UK only recycles about 42% of its scrap copper (from the BGS again). Of that 37% comes from manufacturing (offcuts, the remains after pressings, and the like), the rest is recycling as you and I know it. The old copper heating pipes and wires from old motors that we have finished with only make up 5% of the UK’s total copper (re-)consumption, 19 times more comes from new mined resources and from the pristine factory scrap. That is massively wasteful on all sorts of levels.

I recently read a paper on a Markov Chain analysis of copper (Eckelman & Daigo, 2008) use that concluded that the average copper atom was used 1.9 times for technology in the 60 years between its extraction from geological reserve and its dissipation back into the environment. If we assume that copper should theoretically be used around 20 times before it is dissipated (using a conservative 5% reprocessing loss), we currently have a copper system in the UK that is roughly 10% efficient.

That has to offer massive opportunities to the copper recycling business, as well as opportunities to decrease the environmental impact of the copper cycle without compromising the ability of the UK to meets its wind power goals.