Mining is part of a low-carbon future

Wednesday, 29 May 2019

OPINION: Dunedin is the latest New Zealand city to be visited by climate activism in the form of Extinction Rebellion. Earlier this week the loosely formed group along with other activists descended on the town hall, jostling police, glueing themselves to doors, and generally trying to disrupt a mining conference.

There was some singing, a guy in a penguin suit and pink tutu, and a bit of a rugby scrum, especially around the doors where conference goers where trying to get in and protesters were trying to stop them and police were in the middle.

The crowd called out things like 'get a job in solar,' and 'you're on the wrong side of history mate' and those inside eventually got on with discussing everything from mine investment and safety to coal, gold and lithium.

It's all cast as a familiar enough pantomime, with the citizen heros on the outside sticking up for the planet, and the villains on the inside with their calculators selling away the future.

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Mining has always been a bit of a lightning rod for discontent. Lax safety once dogged the industry, ditto environmental concerns like tailings and emissions. But these days the criticism has shifted.

It no longer centres on immediate risks like contaminated groundwater and injury to workers. Anti-mining sentiment now tilts at the much more distant problem of man made climate warming.

The problem is that protesters are shouting down the very industry with the best hope of fuelling a low-carbon future. Those touted solar panels are mineral hogs. The list of components for batteries to store the generated power, so it can better replace fossil fuel, looks like an abbreviated periodic table.

In 2017, the World Bank investigated which metals are likely to rise in demand as a carbon-constrained future emerges.

Using wind, solar and energy storage batteries as proxies to examine where demand will build, it predicted a rising need for: aluminium (including bauxite), cobalt, copper, lead, lithium, nickel, manganese, silver, iron ore (yes, that still requires coking coal), and rare earth metals including cadmium, molybdenum and neodymium. That's not even a complete shopping list.

The reality is that all of that stuff comes from holes in the ground. If New Zealand wants to transition to a zero carbon future, as the Government is now plumping for in legislation, it needs to consider where the minerals will come from.

The trouble is, it isn't clear the Government can get past the villainous mining caricature.

In the throne speech in 2017 Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern promised to prevent any new mines on New Zealand's conservation land which covers a third of the country.

That would be a significant expansion of protected land over the status quo and a serious curtailment of land available to mine.

Ardern may well regret this promise. Elected officials haven't volunteered a word on the subject for more than a year when Conservation Minister and Green Party MP, Eugenie Sage promised a discussion document.

The delivery date for that document passed last September and Sage's office didn't respond to a request for an update.

Still, it's a huge cloud of uncertainty to leave hanging over an industry that must invest its money long in advance of seeing any payoff. In fact, it looks like the prime minister would prefer to see miners quietly pack their swags and invest in other parts of the world.

That way she wouldn't have to create middle ground in her shaky coalition between pro-development NZ First on one side, and the anti-development Greens on the other.

But the uncomfortable conversations shouldn't stop there. The New Zealand public should be told that cheap and plentiful coal still fills the electricity gap in this country, particularly when the wind doesn't blow, and water levels drop behind hydroelectric dams.

Coal met 6.3 per cent of electricity demand last year, but that small percentage masks the job it does during peak demand, when other generation cannot be simply increased.

While that still happens, as it will for more than a decade according to government-controlled electricity generator Genesis, it might be a good idea to burn our own coal rather than the Indonesian stuff the company's been importing recently.

It's true, we could go without. But we'd also be in for spiking electricity prices and the possibility of rationing.

There's really nothing like a few weeks of rolling blackouts to switch around the heros and the villains. It might even inspire the guy in a penguin suit to rework his chant.

'What do we want?'

'Lithium mines.'

'When do we want them?'

'Now.'

Kate MacNamara has been a journalist for 20 years. She covered business and trade for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and also as a contributor for the BBC.

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