[Scott] Next on "Energy Switch," all energy impacts the land.

We'll dig in with two leading experts.

- So the whole direction of society, in my view, morally and economically, should be driven towards land use minimization.

Footprint reduction.

- We know there our impacts, but quantifying them is a challenge.

[Scott] Mm-hmm, yeah.

- You drill the well primarily because you wanna make money from oil.

Gas just comes along with it.

Should you allocate the land impact of that drilling to do natural gas?

- So let, let me decide for you.

[laughing] Pro, prorate it.

[laughing] [Scott] Coming up on "Energy Switch," environmental impacts of energy on land and how we could reduce them.

[Announcer] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.

And by EarthX, an international nonprofit working towards a more sustainable future.

See more at earthx.org.

- I'm Scott Tinker and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn and illuminate and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

We're often focused on the climate impacts of energy, but sometimes overlook its land impacts.

All energy systems cover land, but they also use land in the mining and processing of the materials that go into the energy generators, power lines, and pipelines, and use land for their ultimate disposal and recycling.

As we seek to understand all environmental impacts of energy and how to reduce them, we'll look deeper at land with Dr. Gürcan Gülen.

He's a principal at G2 Energy Insights.

An energy economist working with the Bureau of Economic Geology on a life cycle analysis of energy systems, particularly their land use.

He's joined by Mark Mills.

He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a faculty fellow at the Engineering School at Northwestern University, a best-selling energy and tech author and investor.

On this episode of "Energy Switch," Energy Impacts on Land.

What are the ways that energy impacts land?

- So, I mean, the simplest, the use of land.

If you allocate a piece of land for energy, either an extraction of a resource or building a power plant, building a pipeline, whatever it is, right, you cannot use it for something else.

So if you build something on a crop land, fertile land, you cannot grow crops.

So there is a cost from an agricultural perspective.

But then, of course, there are the environmental impacts-- people talk about the biodiversity and ecological impacts.

When you build something which is industrial, what impact does it have on the species and flora and fauna in that location?

- Sure.

All forms of energy impact land.

- Of course.

[Scott] any additions to that?

- We occupy this, sort of, call it fragile, but, but thin, fragile layer of habitable skin on this planet.

So, when it comes to energy, my operating principle is, always and everywhere to minimize the quantity of that precious land we consume to provide essential food and fuel.

So the whole direction of society, in my view, morally and economically, should be driven towards land use minimization.

Footprint reduction.

- Well, how do we analyze the impacts of different energies on the land?

What, what are some of the ways we do that?

- Right now we're conducting a research on life cycle analysis.

So what it is, you look at the total life cycle of an asset, or the term that is used is "cradle to grave."

Well, what is the cradle for coal?

Well, it's the coal mining.

So you have to start from coal mining, processing, and transportation of that coal to the power plant, building and operating of that power plant for 30 to 40 years, whatever it is, all the emissions included, but, then at the end of operational life, useful life, disposal of the equipment and stuff like that.

Same applies for wind and solar.

You have to mine certain minerals.

Even for batteries, you have to mine for cobalt, lithium, nickel, graphite.

So they have to be processed, they have to be transported, they have to be used in manufacturing the solar panels, and so on.

And now you build the facility, you operate the facility, and then at the end of life, you dispose of these things.

How you dispose of them is also important.

So that's the life cycle analysis.

- Right.

- Roughly speaking, just across all the materials, it's about a thousand percent increase in materials to deliver the same unit of energy service, going, wind, solar, batteries versus hydrocarbons, oil, gas, coal, roughly a thousand percent more.

So this would be the same as saying, "Well I wanna replace the highways, so I'm gonna replace all those highways with a, a new kind of highway that happens to use a thousand percent more material per mile of highway."

The highway will function the same way.

But, you don't have to be an economist to know it's probably expensive, and you don't have to be an environmentalist to know that probably has a big environmental impact.

[Scott] Right.

Especially when it's wearing out, then.

- Faster.

- Faster.

Yeah, I don't think we understand that, and the reason for that is something called energy density.

[Gürcan] That's where- - What is, what is that?

- For me, all the life cycle cost analyses are all derivative from the basic principle: the more energy dense the primary energy source you're pursuing, the more likely it is to be cheaper over time, and have a lower land footprint, a lower environmental footprint.

Imagine you had to move, you know, to the next town or village, years and years ago, and you had all your savings of $10,000, and you were given two choices, in, in density terms, of how to carry your savings with you.

You could carry all your savings in the form of pennies or gold coins.

- Mm-hmm.

- The $10,000 is still $10,000, you could argue as an economist would say, but the infrastructure and in economic costs associated with moving $10,000 of pennies is a lot higher.

- Right.

- And that's exactly what's happening with green, so-called green energy.

All the penumbra of infrastructure costs including on the far end, which is waste disposal and recycling, all those costs are bigger by, not 10%, but by a thousand percent.

- Mm-hmm.

You see it the same way?

- To a certain extent.

[Mark laughing] It is true.

But, however, if you care about, you know, in the long term, what can you need in terms of energy needs of a modern society, and how can you meet it?

And meet it without, you know, replenishing it.

For example, gas fire generation versus a wind farm.

So a gas fire generation plant can last 40, 50 years, but you have to keep drilling new wells to supply new gas to them.

- Right, right.

[Gürcan] Because the wells have a, have a certain life.

It's an exhaustible resource.

- Exactly.

- Land that you use for wind or solar to generate the same amount of electricity as a gas fire power plant is gonna be much larger in the beginning.

But presumably you can use that land forever because we can replenish the solar panels and so on and so forth.

That replenishment has a cost.

- Yup.

- That's for sure, on the environment and the economics-wise, right?

But then the other way to think about that, that land used for wind and solar is permanent even if you're gonna keep reusing it.

But the wells, if you reclaim the land of the wells, that's not a permanent impact on the land.

- Right, right but- [Gürcan] If you can reclaim it.

- The problem is the replacement cycle of the machinery, which is- - That's right.

[Mark] Two or three times higher, requires mining, which- - Correct.

- Has the same characteristics as the oil and gas- [Gürcan] Correct.

- Extraction.

So you end up with this other, impermanent, we'll call it exhaustible, not because the atoms disappears, because once you mine them and use them- - That's right.

[Mark] They functionally disappear from the economy.

- That's right.

- Till you, quote, recycle 'em, and which has another cost and has- [Gürcan] That's right.

- So, this, this labyrinth is, is complex, but I would argue that it, that the outcomes all start from the density of the primary- [Gürcan] Correct.

- energy source.

Which is why the holy grail is nuclear fission or fusion one day.

- Mm-hmm.

- I mean all energy facilities occupy some land.

[Gürcan] That's right.

- So just rip through 'em for me, just quick, best we can, the land impacts of oil production and use.

What are they?

- Yeah, I mean, like any extraction you have to drill wells and depending on where you are, this is another interesting thing about land impacts.

If you're in the deserts of Saudi Arabia, the quality of the land is different than West Texas, than, you know, offshore Venezuela or wherever you are, right?

So the location matters, in terms of the land impacts, but drilling has an impact.

Refining to produce the products that we consume has a land impact.

And of course gas stations and things like that, the delivery mechanisms, they have land impact.

- Yeah, how about coal?

- Coal mines are big, not as big as copper mines, but they're big, and ya have to move the coal.

It's, it's a low density fuel compared to oil.

You have to have disposal for the ash from the, when you burn it, you produce ash.

It has a far bigger footprint than oil or gas.

- Yeah.

- Because it's a lower energy density fuel.

It's a far lower footprint than the other stuff we'll talk about.

- Mm-hmm.

Let's talk natural gas.

Pretty similar to oil?

- Pretty similar to oil.

But natural gas, given its molecular composition, it has less other impacts, land-wise is the same, but that raises another issue.

This is some internal discussion that we are having right now.

Like, one of us argue that if it's associated gas that we are using [Mark laughs] it to run our power plant.

- Associated with oil.

- Associated with oil, right.

You drill the well primarily because you wanna make money from oil and other liquids.

Gas just comes along with it.

Should you allocate the land impact of that drilling to the natural gas life cycle?

You know, one of us argue that "no, you shouldn't," others argue that "no you should."

[Mark laughs] - So, but let me decide for you.

[Scott and Gürcan laughing] Prorate it.

- Prorate it.

- It's not complicated, come on.

Economists do prorating all the time.

- Oh, prorating is the, the, the, maybe fair solution.

[Mark] Exactly.

- But it's not the rational solution because what is the rationale for drilling?

- Yeah.

[Gürcan] Liquids.

- Yeah.

- Not natural gas.

[Mark] Correct.

- Because without the liquids, you would not have a commercial reason to drill that well.

- So, this is- [Gürcan] Therefore, the land impact should be allocated to oil, not to gas.

- I think I know what side you argued.

How about solar panels?

- Solar panels are just like computers.

They have enormous overhead, and land use, and energy and materials, but you don't see them.

They're buried, they're disappeared.

Yeah, there's a lot of land use by the solar panels, everybody knows that; that's the least of it.

And there's a very good argument to be made that you can get dual use out of the land.

You put solar panels on roofs, the buildings, the land's already used.

Should I count that land?

Probably not.

- Not, yeah.

- But the tons of material are required per unit of energy delivered for solar is higher than any other energy form.

The materials being used upstream somewhere, the land being used, the mine process, the coal being dug up to make the polysilicon.

Solar uses more aluminum than any other energy form by a factor, again, of over a thousand percent.

[Scott] Yeah.

- It's a big aluminum consumer.

Aluminum is very energy-intensive and very land-intensive.

- Right.

We know where the oil and gas and coal go, go when we burn them.

The atmosphere [Mark laughs] is the trash can for CO2 and methane leaks.

Where does, where do the solar panels go when they wear out?

- Landfill.

Long and short.

They aren't recyclable in any significant way.

Maybe someday.

- And is it toxic, solar panels?

- Yeah, well this is gets into the slippery zone.

The metals in them are toxic.

I'm not in the camp that worries about that.

[Scott] Okay.

- Because the metals are locked up in the glass.

They're essential to stabilize the glass, not just the solar modules themselves.

And the chance that they leak out physical and in the gonna water table are infinitesimally small.

Just, I mean, I'm just not in the hair-on-fire camp for that.

But what people are worried about is in sheer quantity of landfill.

For other things, they should really be worried about wind turbine blades and solar panels.

- Right.

- Because the quantities of landfill required are truly unprecedented.

- Why don't we recycle 'em?

- Well- - We could, I mean, why don't we?

- We, yeah, we looked into recycling for our life cycle analysis to decide whether to include it or not because we need data, the impacts associated with recycling 'cause recycling itself is not without impacts.

- Right.

- Right?

- Somebody has to go to the solar farm, collect the expired panels, transport them to a recycling facility, and that recycling facility is gonna have land requirements, energy requirements, and so on and so forth, right?

So it's not the end of it.

So from a practical perspective, there is not much of it going on, neither for solar or wind.

From a theoretical perspective, more of the ingredients of a solar panel can be apparently, mend, recycled.

- Sure.

- But it's not being done much yet because it's not commercially viable.

- Okay.

- At this stage.

- It's cost.

- It's cost.

- Let me just put a different number in, in, into perspective.

Usually the recycling is offered as a way to reduce the materials requirement there for the future land use.

The problem is the magnitude of stuff available for recycling is a trivial share of the magnitude of material we need to build the path that people imagine.

By trivial, I mean, even if you had a hundred percent recycling and it were free, you might get 10 or 20% of the materials you need.

We have crazy demands for minerals that we're not gonna solve with the recycling.

That's just a fact.

- And people looking down the road 50 years say, "But we will then."

- Okay, wait till then!

[Scott laughs] Okay?

[Scott and Mark laughing] - How about hydro?

Oh, we didn't do wind.

Sorry.

- Yeah, wind, wind, wind is one that gets really messy.

What is the direct impact?

Is it simply the footprint of the tower?

[Scott] Mm-hmm.

- Because in between, yeah, there's the maintenance roads and things like that, but then in between, people can do grazing of their animals, they can even do some farming, and so on and so forth.

But then the swept area of the wind turbines when they're turning, I mean, that has some impact on the local ecology.

So, in the literature people look at, the one diameter impact zones to eight diameter impact zones.

From an energy density perspective, this is different than environmental footprint, however, right?

This is an important distinction.

So from a power density perspective, a wind farm is designed optimally, requires all that land, including the space in between the wind, individual wind turbines.

But if you can use a lot of the land in between for other activities, from an environmental impact perspective, it's not that large.

[Scott] Yeah.

- So, you have to deal with these kind of nuances.

- But here's, here's a nuance that's missed.

For the land use requirement per unit of energy, they just use the same number as for all electric power systems.

It's, if you produce this many kilowatt hours, you have this many... You just take a pro rata share the transmission lines.

This is a mistake.

- That's right.

- As you know.

Because the wind farms are always, almost always, sited further away from where the power is used, because you have to go chase where the wind is and build more transmission lines.

You should factor in the additional land use given the fact that the resource is further away than optimal and you have to use more land to get the energy to supply- - For the power lines.

- Yeah.

- And you have to mine.

- Materials for those.

- Materials for those.

Material life cycle.

How about hydro?

- Hydro?

Depending on if it's a run off the river is one thing, but that's not usually generating a lot of electricity, if it's a large dam, and depends how you calculate the water coverage.

That's the land impact, right?

I mean, the most recent that I know is the Chinese moved, what, thousands of people?

- One million.

[Mark] One million.

- When they were building the Three Gorges, right?

Okay, that's a huge dam, but, I mean, in the small dinky town that I live at, there's a water reservoir and they moved hundreds of people in 1940s to build a dam and reservoir.

So that's a direct impact, environmental impact, social impact.

So that's usually the main impact of hydro.

How much reservoir-- - And a lot of cement.

- And a lot of cement.

The manufacturing of the cement.

[Scott] Right.

- The taller the dam, the higher the generation capability, but the more cement do you need.

- Cement is produced with mostly coal, and then natural gas, and some oil.

- Yeah, I think most of us people don't understand that electricity won't make some things.

- A lot of coal.

- It just takes a lot of heat, you're burning molecules for that.

- Correct.

- How about the nuclear side on land?

- Unequivocally, the lowest land use by far but, but not by a little bit.

Maybe, minimally, at least 10 X less, possibly, in the right kind of designs, a hundred X less.

The path to astonishing reduction in land use, astonishing reduction in environmental impacts, is clearly next-generation nuclear plants.

If there is a game changer that you'd think the two camps, where we'll call it the "I don't want carbon dioxide camp" and "I want cheap energy camp," which you'd, merging those two camps is really hard, that's the only technology that merges 'em.

- So, we've talked about moving energy, land impacts of that.

What's the land component of those power lines, pipelines, and moving the energy around?

- It's less than a tenth.

So, if you do in the pantheon of the, the things you all add up, the land per unit of energy, or power.

- Right.

- The choice matters.

A tenth, roughly.

- That sounds about right.

- And what's interesting about delivering energy, of course, is that if it's a pipeline or a power line, interestingly, have roughly the same energy density.

They're very similar, and you can bury the power lines if you want them to be buried.

It costs roughly two to three times more.

[Gürcan] Exactly.

- But as society gets wealthier, the one thing about, I mean, my operating principle is that, if we don't Sovietize our economy, we get wealthier.

And in a wealthier future, we choose to spend more money on things like aesthetics, land use, and we'll, we'll bury more power lines because we can afford it, not because they're cheaper.

- That's right.

[Mark] Which is a good thing.

- Certainly, aesthetically it's better.

Keeping all this stuff in mind, which forms of energy have the lowest impacts and which form have the highest impacts on the land?

- If you were doing it simplistically, you go up tenfold each time, roughly.

- Mm-hmm, okay.

- So you, we've got an acre to get your service with a nuke, you're gonna use 10 acres with oil and gas, you're gonna use 100 acres with wind and solar.

And if you add batteries, you don't wanna use any wind and solar, you add another 10 X.

- Okay.

So if land were the only metric, it would be an easy sorting function.

[Gürcan] Yup.

- How do we reduce it, then?

All energies.

How do we get the land footprint down?

- Okay, I'm gonna give you my answer, which you're not gonna like.

So that demand response in every sense of the world, word is very important in my mind as an economist, to reduce total upfront investment, we need to- [Mark] Yeah, sure.

- make and the capacity we need to keep operational, and just for electricity system, but in economy, you know, at large, right?

So the consumers, you know, we want clean air, clean water.

We say we want all of these things, right?

But we won't do enough just out of the goodness of our hearts to reduce our energy footprint ourselves.

[Scott] Right.

So we need to see the price of everything else that we want.

If you want clean water, you have to pay for clean water.

- Yeah.

- We don't pay for water, so we don't know what it costs to clean it and bring it to us.

Same thing with clean air and everything else.

- Mm-hmm, so you're saying if we, if we put a cost on these things- - If we put a tax on it.

- We would reduce our use somewhat and lower our impacts.

- Most people would.

[Scott] Can data help here?

- The big problem with data and information is it's not useful.

And if I wanna make things easy across the entire supply chain on my choices, that have energy impacts, they have to be intuitively easy.

Natural language interfaces with artificial intelligence is the, the hot thing.

What that really means is I get to use a supercomputer by talking to it anytime, anywhere to ask it a question about my behavioral choices.

And if it tells me, you know, "If you choose to do X instead of Y, you'll probably save this money and do these other beneficial things."

And I'll, a lot of people will change their behavior.

[Scott] Right.

- Big reductions are possible.

But doesn't change.

- Right.

[Mark] Big demands are coming as well.

- It's just, we will moderate them a lot more than we have in the past.

And thank goodness.

- Hopefully- - The rebound effect is real.

- Yeah.

- We tend to use more, we become more efficient, but we maybe can rebound less.

Is that what I hear you're saying Mark?

We can, we can use information and data.

- Yeah.

I think, the rebound effect, it tampens down the, the bounce height.

So you go- [Scott] Yeah, yeah.

- You go from Super Ball to medicine ball.

- So we've been talking about cost-benefit and options and trade-offs.

Climate is a, a big discussion globally now.

How do you balance climate and land?

How would you counsel young people or students of any age to, to think about that, to balance those two things?

- What I would say, different people value these things differently.

For, again, six billion people, climate change is not a concern at all.

They're trying to feed themselves, have a healthy lifestyle, clean water, access to sewage and stuff like that.

And you cannot do these things without modern energy.

And so you have to allow for everything.

So banning investment in new oil and gas to open in Africa is unethical and immoral, in my view.

- Banning it.

- Banning it.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, how about you?

How do you balance those two things?

- You can't monomaniacally focus on one thing.

That's not how the world works.

World works with trade-offs.

The three things that governments have always focused on and engineers who build energy systems of all kind, have always focused on the three metrics, making it cheap, making it reliable and, and, and minimizing the impact.

They've always focused on the, on that difficult balance of the three.

If you choose only one of those, you get bad outcomes in the others.

And that's what's happening, that's bad.

- It's Whac-A-Mole, Scott.

Whac-A-Mole.

- It's Whac-A-Mole energy.

- If you focus on one thing, you know, you hit that one thing.

Other problems pop up.

- Or the balloon, it's like, I imagine the, you know, when you squeeze a balloon.

[Gürcan] That's right.

[laughs] Somewhere else.

- That's how, that's the economies work.

- So we're getting near the end of our time here, which has gone very quickly, but just give you each a chance to sum it up a little bit.

How are we gonna meet our future energy demands with the least impact on the land?

- Wow, I mean, I'll pick up where Mark left off.

I think the technology is certainly gonna be key, right?

But there are eight billion people on this planet.

We're talking about few hundred million people here, most of the time.

And there's six billion people who does not consume modern energy the way we consume it.

And they want to.

- Yup, exactly.

- So how are we gonna get that with least impact?

Well, by all of the above really.

I mean, it sounds cliché, but all of the above, and cost-benefit analysis is a must.

[others laughing] I mean, as an economist, I have to, you know... we cannot pick and choose winners early on because we don't know enough.

I mean, this life cycle analysis we're doing, we are finding out that data is still missing in a lot of these life cycle impacts.

- Yeah, yup.

[Gürcan] We know there are impacts, but quantifying them is a challenge.

- Yeah.

- We need to understand what people value, where all of these things are gonna happen to supply our current modern life in the West, but at the same time, bringing them up to a certain, you know, standard of living.

- Yeah, we're, we're on the same page.

The, I think the, if I were distilling it to more of a... Because this is a very political issue.

Policy matters.

Land matters because nothing is more political than land, always has been.

It's just, it's the measure of, of our territory, of our wealth, so it matters.

There are choices and, and the choices vary in cultures and geography, but the choices will include, and are including, in the world we live in, every energy form, including all the hydrocarbons, oil, gas, and coal.

So, what governments should be doing is making the use of those choices have declining impacts.

And it matters to be apolitical, and, and I mean that in a literal sense, on chasing technologies that reduce footprints.

Because you get, you'll get more bang for the buck, making internal combustion engines universally 10% more efficient than all the current car subsidies.

[Scott] Sure.

- That's right.

Why not do that, too?

- Great visit, great conversation.

- Thank you.

- Appreciate your candor, as always.

- Thanks.

[Scott] What I heard from our guests is that calculating the life cycle land impact of energy systems is complicated, and involves many variables.

Still, Mark's research indicates, and Gürcan largely agreed that nuclear has, by far, the smallest impact on land per unit of energy, due largely to its high energy density.

Oil and natural gas use more land.

Coal, more than that.

Hydro, solar, and wind, much more than those.

And if backed up exclusively by batteries, even more still.

This takes into account not only the land used by the systems, but the land and ore for the mining, and landfill for disposal, as well as transportation and transmission.

The surest way to reduce land impacts of all types of energy is to reduce energy use through demand response and efficiency.

[dramatic music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Announcer] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.

And by EarthX, an international nonprofit working towards a more sustainable future.

See more at earthx.org.