Recycling steel and copper from fossil fuel infrastructure to build wind turbines, solar panels, and the like could save as much as 1.95 billion metric tons of carbon emissions and US$11.69 trillion in costs to society, according to a new study.
A thorny paradox of the green transition is that building renewable energy infrastructure requires a lot of materials like steel that have large carbon and environmental footprints. The neat realization underlying the new analysis is that there’s a lot of steel and other materials tied up in fossil fuel infrastructure – which will no longer be needed in a renewable energy world.
“A significant amount of the materials that will be needed for the energy transition could be taken from decommissioned oil, gas, and coal infrastructure,” says study team member Hauke Schlesier, a graduate student at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science & Technology (EMPA). “This can not only reduce environmental damage but also saves costs for society.”
The new study is the first to quantify the potential of “digesting” – as the team’s delightfully organic phrasing puts it – fossil fuel infrastructure to produce green energy infrastructure.
Schlesier and his collaborators first quantified the amounts of various materials contained in coal mines, oil and gas rigs, pipelines, and fossil power plants around the world. They matched these sums up with estimates of materials needed to build out renewable energy systems and then calculated the environmental and monetary savings from using recycled materials.
Current fossil fuel infrastructure contains a total of 6.39 billion metric tons of materials, the researchers calculated. Granted, not all of it aligns perfectly with renewable energy needs. But there’s massive potential in recycling steel and copper.
Steel represents the largest stock of metal (and second-largest material stock overall) in fossil fuel infrastructure at 1.34 billion metric tons. That’s almost one-and-a-half times as much as is projected to be required for building green energy systems through 2050.
Fossil fuel infrastructure also contains 10.03 million metric tons of copper, about one-third of what’s needed for the green energy transition.
Overall, using this recycled steel and copper for green energy infrastructure could save nearly 2 billion metric tons of carbon emissions through 2050. A knock-on effect of this is that green technologies get even greener: wind and solar power would see their carbon footprints fall by one-third, for example.
Using recycled materials could also save up to US$11.69 trillion in societal costs from damage to human health and ecosystems, the researchers calculated. “It is surprising that such a large share of the total costs of steel and copper production is comprised of externalized costs,” Schlesier says. “To our knowledge, these costs were not quantified before.”
Green energy infrastructure could also be tweaked to better take advantage of materials available. For example, what if mounting systems for solar panels were built from recycled fossil-fuel steel, rather than aluminum as is currently standard? That would cut greenhouse gas emissions from solar panel production by 24.8-39.2%, the researchers found.
Another new study by some of the same researchers suggests that this swap would ease aluminum supply chain bottlenecks, potentially accelerating the green transition by up to two decades. “We find the idea of replacing aluminum in photovoltaic systems with steel very interesting,” Schlesier says.
And the current study barely even scratches the surface of recycling and repurposing potential: incorporating barite, a component of drilling fluids, into cooling paints; using oil wells to tap geothermal heat sources; converting oil drilling platforms into wind energy projects; and so on. Those are topics for future analysis, says Schlesier.
Source: Schlesier H. et al. “Recycling fossil infrastructure for cleaner energy transitions.” Nature Communications 2026.
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