MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines does not need to expand its mining activities to meet the requirements necessary for energy transition, think tank and civil society groups said.
Center for Energy, Ecology, and Development (CEED) held a webinar on Monday, October 7, to debunk the rationale that increasing mining operations will contribute to the country’s full transition to renewable energy by 2050.
Mining engineer Joshua Miguel Lopez, the think tank’s senior policy analyst, presented literature pointing to the country’s large copper and nickel supply.
Why transition metals? According to the United Nations Environment Programme, copper and nickel are transition metals that occur naturally and are well-suited for renewable technologies as alternatives to coal.
Unlike coal, which emits significant carbon and other greenhouse gasses when burned, transition metals produce little to no emissions.
How long to produce enough transition metals? Citing data from the Mines and Geosciences Bureau, CEED estimates that it would take about 4.6 years to produce 1,376.8 kilotonnes of copper — the amount prescribed by the Climate Analytics Scenario (CES) to facilitate the transition to solar, wind and other renewable energy sources.
For nickel, the think tank said that it would take less than two months to meet the CES requirement of 29.5 kilotonnes.
Lopez based these calculations on the 10-year average production of copper and nickel from 2012 to 2021, which captures the period when mining was banned in the Philippines.
According to data from the mines bureau, the country was able to extract an average of 298.2 kilotonnes of copper and 290.4 kilotonnes of nickel annually, even during the mining moratorium.
The moratorium. In 2012, former President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III issued Executive Order 79, which prohibited the government from entering into new mineral agreements until a new law is enacted to clarify how revenue generated from mining should be shared.
The mining moratorium was in place for nearly a decade until former President Rodrigo Duterte lifted the ban by amending the order with EO 130 on April 14, 2021.
Lopez emphasized that the main issue is accessibility to transition metals, rather than whether the country is mining enough.
“So, we have enough supply from the existing mines. Even without lifting the moratorium, we already have more than enough to meet the demand for our energy transition needs,” Lopez said in a mix of English and Filipino.
Increased demand. Both copper and nickel are transition metals that are in increasing demand due to the country’s goal of producing more electric vehicles for a privatized transportation system, Lopez said.
He added that this increase in demand is not primarily due to reducing carbon emissions, which is a more critical objective.
“The projected increase in demand for transition minerals is driven mostly by continued prioritization of private over public transport and centralized over decentralized power generation,” Lopez said.
Minerals as raw materials, not finished products
While the Philippines is rich in minerals, CEED said the mining sector primarily exports them as ores and concentrates, without processing them domestically.
“The bigger concern is whether we have access to the metals we are mining, especially since we export the minerals as ores or concentrates. We don’t process them here in the Philippines,” Lopez said in Filipino.
He explained that the Philippines sells its raw minerals to other countries at a low price while importing technologies that use these minerals at a higher cost, which inevitably results in a loss for the country.
Bantay Kita president Cielo Magno, who is also an economics professor, attributed this to the lack of “downstream processing” in the Philippines.
She described downstream processing as a mechanism that maximizes mineral production by creating jobs for Filipinos in the manufacturing sector, converting minerals from raw materials into finished products.
“We won’t benefit from our minerals if we continue extracting these minerals to respond to the greater demand of Western countries,” Magno said in Filipino.
However, the economist also said that increasing mining activities to meet the country’s energy transition demands is not enough of a justification because “we are exporting raw minerals from our land.”
Magno added that policymakers are not discussing whether the extraction of minerals should be taxed more or whether exporting raw ores should be banned to benefit the country and promote local processing.
“The only way for us to gain from this is to first raise the taxes and ensure that our share of the profits from mining is at least 40 to 50%, not the current reduction to 20 to 25%,” she explained in Filipino.
Detrimental to food security and water safety
According to CEED, mining activities have contaminated water sources to the point where potable water has become scarce in the Guiuan islands, such as Manicani and Homonhon, which are naturally surrounded by water.
This has forced Guiuan islands to import potable water from the mainland, Lopez said.
The situation is similar for food security, as farmlands in the country are significantly impacted by worsening climate change, leading to more severe droughts and floods that result in lower harvests.
What more when natural hazards turn into disasters because of the country’s low resilience? This was the question posed by the think tank in reference to the Apex Mining landslide that claimed around 100 lives and affected 7,000 people in February 2024.
“Typhoons will become more frequent, more intense, and more destructive. Considering that the rain from Apex Mining is just rain and not even a typhoon, our mining operations will be increasingly exposed to the effects of climate change,” Lopez said in a mix of English and Filipino.
Aaron Pedrosa, co-chair of the Energy Working Group at the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice, also highlighted that regions contributing significantly to the country’s metallic mineral production also rank among those with the highest poverty incidence.
Pedrosa warned that if policymakers fail to consider the socioeconomic impacts of expanding mining operations for transition minerals, both environmental and economic issues will only worsen.
“We need to address (these problems), not exacerbate them,” he said.
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