Assessments of prospective material use, reuse, and environmental impacts of decarbonization strategies

Natural resource use is positively correlated with a wide range of human-induced environmental challenges and continues to increase. Climate change mitigation, the most pressing of these challenges, paradoxically requires a vast increase in resource extraction and processing to deploy cleaner energy technologies. This requirement raises concerns over the environmental and social consequences, along with its feasibility given the technological and political complexities of rapidly scaling global supply chains. Increasing material efficiency is one approach to ease these constraints and is the central focus of this dissertation.

This dissertation advances existing strategies for reducing the material intensity of the energy transition by deepening our understanding of factors affecting material efficiency. Through an industrial ecology perspective, the study asks to what extent, and in what ways, material use shapes the effectiveness of electric vehicles, biodiesel, wind energy systems, and the digital infrastructure to enable them. Using complex systems modeling and network design, the research quantifies the potential to circularize material flows and maps domestic critical material supply chains, including prospective recovery pathways. Through various extensions of economic input-output analysis, it also benchmarks prospective critical mineral requirements and evaluates the cascading emissions debt of low-carbon energy systems delivered by way of conventional supply chains and those adapted to enable reuse.

The findings reveal that battery-derived material could reduce U.S. demand for primary materials in electric vehicles (EVs) by 48%-93% by 2050, depending on battery type, EV adoption rates, and disposal choices. The research also identifies cost-optimal configurations for national battery recycling infrastructure under future market uncertainties. Regional agricultural waste reuse is shown to generate a net increase in economic activity. The analysis of offshore wind indicates planned projects would have a carbon payback period of less than 6 months and an economic payback period similar to other energy technologies. Additionally, a substantial portion of recent demand for fluorine-based chemicals was estimated to be necessary to support two of many emerging applications, and the analysis identifies where to focus data collection efforts to improve hybrid input-output modeling of such materials. Collectively, this work contributes to the development of methods for modeling the interactions between material consumption, low-carbon energy deployment, and supply chain structure, and clarifies the impact of material efficiency as a strategy for addressing resource constraints.