Subsurface Resources, Energy Transition, a Scale Discrepancy

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

Founded in 2009, HiPhiS is an interuniversity seminar organized by the universities of Montpellier and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Montpellier. It offers high-quality popular science presentations on the interdisciplinary and philosophical issues of contemporary science, bringing together perspectives from various 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 resource use and territorial tensions surrounding geological deposits. As key players in characterizing and assessing the resources needed 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 (which can take up to millions of years) and their extraction and 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 the 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 discrepancy 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?