Recycling steel and copper from fossil fuel infrastructure to build things like wind turbines and solar panels could save 1.95 billion tonnes of carbon emissions and US$11.69 trillion in social costs, according to new research.
A troubling paradox of the green transition is that building renewable energy infrastructure requires large amounts of materials such as steel, which have high carbon emissions and environmental impacts. A clear realization underlying the new analysis is that much steel and other materials are tied up in fossil fuel infrastructure, and that they are no longer needed in a renewable energy world.
“A significant amount of the materials needed for the energy transition could be extracted from decommissioned oil, gas and coal infrastructure,” says research team member Hauke Schlesier, a graduate student at the Swiss Federal Institute for Materials Science (EMPA). “This not only reduces damage to the environment, but also reduces costs to society.”
This new study is the first to quantify the potential for “digesting” fossil fuel infrastructure to create green energy infrastructure.
Schlezier and his collaborators first quantified the amounts of various substances in coal mines, oil and gas rigs, pipelines, and fossil power plants around the world. They matched these totals with estimates of the materials needed to build the renewable energy system and calculated the environmental and financial savings from using recycled materials.
The researchers calculated that the current fossil fuel infrastructure contains a total of 6.39 billion tonnes of the material. Admittedly, not all of them are perfectly aligned with renewable energy needs. However, there is great potential for recycling steel and copper.
At 1.34 billion tonnes, steel makes up the largest metal inventory in fossil fuel infrastructure (and the second-largest material inventory overall). This is almost 1.5 times the amount projected to be needed to build a green energy system by 2050.
Fossil fuel infrastructure also contains 10.03 million tonnes of copper, about a third of the amount needed for the transition to green energy.
Overall, using this recycled steel and copper in green energy infrastructure could save nearly 2 billion tons of carbon emissions by 2050. The ripple effect of this is that green technologies become even more environmentally friendly. For example, wind and solar power reduce carbon emissions by a third.
Researchers estimated that using recycled materials could save up to US$11.69 trillion in societal costs due to damage to human health and ecosystems. “It is surprising that externalized costs account for such a large proportion of the total cost of steel and copper production,” says Schlesier. “To our knowledge, these costs have not been previously quantified.”
Green energy infrastructure can also be tailored to make better use of available materials. For example, what if solar panel mounting systems were made from recycled fossil fuel steel instead of the currently standard aluminum? This would reduce greenhouse gas emissions from solar panel production by 24.8 to 39.2 percent, the researchers found.
Another new study by some of the same researchers suggests this swap could ease bottlenecks in the aluminum supply chain and accelerate the green transition by up to 20 years. “I think the idea of replacing aluminum with steel in photovoltaic systems is very interesting,” says Schlesier.
And current research has barely scratched the surface of recycling and reuse possibilities. Barite, a component of drilling fluid, is incorporated into the cooling paint. Use oil wells to harness geothermal sources. Converting an oil drilling platform into a wind energy project. and so on. These are topics for future analysis, Schlezier says.
Source: Schlesier H. others. “Recycling Fossil Infrastructure for the Transition to Cleaner Energy.” nature communications 2026.
Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine / AI generated.
