Subsurface resources, energy transition, a scale mismatch

HiPhiS (History and Philosophy of Science) Lecture by Bénédicte Cenki and Benoît Gibert, geologists and Professors the Faculty of Sciences, Montpellier Geosciences Laboratory (GM UMR5243).

Created in 2009, HiPhiS is an inter-university seminar organized by Montpellier universities and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Montpellier. It offers high-level scientific outreach on the interdisciplinary and philosophical issues of contemporary science, bringing together perspectives from different disciplines.

Conference summary

The “energy transition” and the technological changes it entails are driving overwhelming demand for underground natural resources: base metals (Fe, Cu, Al, Pb, Zn…), strategic metals (rare earth elements, Ge, Ga, In…), low-carbon energy (geothermal energy, natural hydrogen…), with a high risk of conflicts over usage and territorial tensions surrounding geological deposits. As key players in characterizing and assessing the resources required for these technological shifts in our societies, geologists observe a major leap in the scale of time and space between the formation of natural deposits (taking up to millions of years) and their extraction/consumption through human activity (with a useful life of only a few weeks to a few years).

Two examples will illustrate the issues at stake:

1. the multiscale processes involved in the formation of geological deposits, as illustrated by rare earth elements and critical metals associated with historic zinc mines and their still-visible waste;
2. the challenges faced by geologists due to the scale mismatch between the natural formation of resources and the conditions under which they are exploited, as illustrated by geothermal energy development in Iceland. Will technologies for exploiting subsurface resources provide solutions to reconcile these different scales?