The steel for the energy transition sits in old fossil infrastructure

Oil platforms, coal mines and power stations going out of service contain enormous quantities of steel and copper. According to the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, recycling them would cover the entire steel requirement of the energy transition and about a third of the copper. Recycling plants worldwide would already have enough capacity to do so.

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, starts from a simple observation: as the energy transition advances, the infrastructure built for fossil fuels becomes obsolete. The Empa research group set out to quantify what raw materials remain locked inside those installations and how they can be put back into circulation.

The work is part of the European CircEUlar project. The Zurich specialists examined twenty-two different materials found worldwide in coal mines, oil and gas platforms, power stations and crude oil pipelines.

The environmental and economic account

Recycling metals pays off on both counts, the researchers argue. It is markedly gentler on the environment than primary extraction. Steel production generates slag and carbon dioxide, copper mines produce toxic waste; recycling mainly requires electricity.

The figures cited are large. By 2050, between 4000 and 11,000 billion dollars could be saved, between 3260 and 8970 billion francs at the current exchange rate, in costs tied to environmental and health damage. Up to two billion tonnes of CO2 could also be avoided, roughly fifty years of Swiss emissions.

The obstacle, the authors say, is not technical but economic. The incentives are missing. Publicly owned companies may have an interest in reducing the costs that fall on the community; in most cases that does not hold for private energy firms. Targeted state incentives could remedy this, the researchers suggest. Whoever dismantles a plant decides alone today whether that metal returns to circulation or stays where it is.