Our Longest Nerve.

We're going to need more copper.

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1. ExxonMobil has said global oil demand will remain virtually unchanged by 2050 and warned that any move to curtail investment in fossil fuels would trigger a new energy price shock. In a forecast released on Monday, the US supermajor said oil demand would stay above 100 million barrels a day (b/d) over the next 25 years — a forecast that assumes an energy transition will fail to curb the world’s thirst for fossil fuels. Exxon warned of a new global oil shock if companies failed to keep investing to match that demand, saying crude prices could quadruple as supply fell. Exxon’s prediction contrasts sharply with UK oil major BP, which expects oil consumption to decline to 75 million b/d in 2050. The International Energy Agency projects oil demand would fall to 54.8 million b/d if governments met their climate pledges on time. (Source: ft.com)

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2. The battle cry of energy transition advocates is “Electrify everything.” Meaning: Let’s power cars, heating systems, industrial plants, and every other type of machine with electricity rather than fossil fuels. To do that, we need copper—and lots of it. Second to silver, a rarer and far more expensive metal, copper is the best natural electrical conductor on Earth. We need it for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. (A typical EV contains as much as 175 pounds of copper.) We need it for the giant batteries that will provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. We need it to massively expand and upgrade the countless miles of power cables that undergird the energy grid in practically every country. In the United States, the capacity of the electric grid will have to grow as much as threefold to meet the expected demand. A recent report from S&P Global predicts that the amount of copper we’ll need over the next 25 years will add up to more than the human race has consumed in its entire history. “The world has never produced anywhere close to this much copper in such a short time frame,” the report notes. The world might not be up to the challenge. Analysts predict supplies will fall short by millions of tons in the coming years. No wonder Goldman Sachs has declared “no decarbonization without copper” and called copper “the new oil.” (Source: wired.com, italics mine)

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3. An experiment conducted by researchers from Leibniz University Hannover in Germany show how quantum information and the classic 1s and 0s of conventional data could be beamed down the same optical fiber. Potentially, that means an internet that's almost hack-proof – and the possibility of using existing infrastructure to connect multiple quantum computers in networks that might one day provide a unique means of processing power that could solve otherwise insurmountable computing tasks. Quantum communication requires closely-related waves of light to be sent in isolation to protect their delicately entangled relationship, which means they need to be transmitted separately to conventional data-carrying light waves. That makes it tricky to send everything down the same pipe. "To make the quantum internet a reality, we need to transmit entangled photons via fiber optic networks," says physicist Michael Kues, from Leibniz University Hannover. "We also want to continue using optical fibers for conventional data transmission. Our research is an important step to combine the conventional internet with the quantum internet." (Sources: sciencealert.com, uni-hannover.de)

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4. CSIS on subsea fiber-optic cables:

Subsea fiber-optic cables, a critical information and telecommunications technology (ICT) infrastructure carrying more than 95 percent of international data, are becoming a highly consequential theater of great power competition between the United States, China, and other state actors such as Russia. The roughly 600 cables planned or currently operational worldwide, spanning approximately 1.2 million kilometers, are the world’s information superhighways and provide the high-bandwidth connections necessary to support the rise of cloud computing and integrated 5G networks, transmitting everything from streaming videos and financial transactions to diplomatic communications and essential intelligence. The demand for data center computing and storage resources is expected to increase in the wake of the artificial intelligence revolution. Training large language models takes enormous, distributed storage to compute, and if those networks are globally oriented, they will require additional subsea capacity to connect them. These geopolitical and technological stakes necessitate a consideration of the vulnerabilities of subsea systems and the steps the United States can take to fortify the digital rails of the future and safeguard this critical infrastructure.

The scale and exposure of undersea infrastructure make it an easy target for saboteurs operating in the gray zone of “deniable attacks short of war.” In 2023, Taiwanese authorities accused two Chinese vessels in the area of cutting the only two submarine cables that supply internet to Taiwan’s Matsu Islands, plunging its 14,000 residents into digital isolation for six weeks. Although there was no clear confirmation of a deliberate attack, Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) pointed to a remarkable frequency of Chinese vessels causing cable disruptions—27 times since 2018—and accused Beijing of harassing Taiwan in a classic case of “gray-zone aggression.” Similarly, in October 2023, a Baltic Sea telecom cable connecting Sweden and Estonia sustained damage at the same time as a Finnish-Estonian gas pipeline and cable. Carl-Oskar Bohlin, Sweden’s minister for civil defense, said the Swedish-Estonian cable was damaged as a result of “external force or tampering” and that Estonian officials had concluded that the three incidents were “related.” An investigation focused on a Russian-flagged ship and a Chinese-owned vessel operating in the area as the likely sources of the alleged sabotage.