There may not be enough minerals and metals in the world to achieve the planned EV growth
By Ronald Stein
Ambassador for Energy & Infrastructure, Irvine, California
The worldwide plans for EV domination of the vehicle population are like having the plans to build a large house without sufficient materials being available to ever finish the house.
The pressure to go green is increasing as countries are announcing plans to phase out petrol and diesel cars. Germany will stop the sale of all new petrol and diesel cars from 2030, Scotland from 2032, and France and the UK from 2040.
Even California, the current leader in America with 50 percent of the EV’s in country being in that state, has jumped onto the EV train with Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who will be on the 2021 Recall ballot, issued an Executive Order in 2020 to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles in California by 2035.
A Tesla lithium EV battery weighs more than 1,000 pounds. While there are dozens of variations, such an EV battery typically contains about:
- 25 pounds of lithium,
- 30 pounds of cobalt,
- 60 pounds of nickel,
- 110 pounds of graphite,
- 90 pounds of copper,
Looking upstream at the ore grades, one can estimate the typical quantity of rock that must be extracted from the earth and processed to yield the pure minerals needed to fabricate that single battery:
- Lithium brines typically contain less than 0.1% lithium, so that entails some 25,000 pounds of brines to get the 25 pounds of pure lithium.
- Cobalt ore grades average about 0.1%, thus nearly 30,000 pounds of ore to get 30 pounds of cobalt.
- Nickel ore grades average about 1%, thus about 6,000 pounds of ore to get 60 pounds of nickel.
- Graphite ore is typically 10%, thus about 1,000 pounds per battery to get 100 pounds of graphite.
- Copper at about 0.6% in the ore, thus about 25,000 pounds of ore per battery to get 90 pounds of copper.
In total then, acquiring just these five elements to produce the 1,000-pound EV battery requires mining about 90,000 pounds of ore. To properly account for all the earth moved though—which is relevant to the overall environmental footprint, and mining machinery energy use—one needs to estimate the overburden, or the materials first dug up to get to the ore. Depending on ore type and location, overburden ranges from about 3 to 20 tons of earth removed to access each ton of ore.
This means that accessing about 90,000 pounds of ore requires digging and moving between 200,000 and over 1,500,000 pounds of earth—a rough average of more than 500,000 pounds of ore per battery.
According to Cambridge University Emeritus Professor of Technology Michael Kelly, replacing all the United Kingdom’s 32 million light duty vehicles with next-generation EVs would require huge quantities of materials to manufacture 32 million EV batteries:
- more than 50 percent of the world’s annual production of copper.
- 200 percent of its annual cobalt.
- 75 percent yearly lithium carbonate output; and
- nearly 100 percent of its entire annual production of neodymium.
One can easily see that the world may not have enough minerals and metals for the EV batteries to support the EV growth projections roadmap when you consider that today:
- Combined worldwide car sales in 2019 were more than 65 million vehicles annually.
- There are 1.2 billion vehicles on the world’s roads with projections of 2 billion by 2035.
Today, there are less than 8 million EV’s operating on the world’s highways. If EV projections come to reality by 2035, 5 to 7 percent of the 2 billion vehicles would equate to 125 million EV’s on the world’s roads, and potentially double that number if governments step up the pace of legislative change. However, looking at the UK study of the materials required for only 32 million EV batteries, there may not be enough materials in the world to finish the EV conversion plans.
Further bad news is that a single digit penetration into the worlds projected 2 billion vehicles would also represent more than 125 BILLION pounds of lithium-ion batteries, just from those 125 million EV’s that will need to be disposed of in the decades ahead.
Zero and low emission vehicles are generally from the hybrid and electric car owners which are a scholarly bunch; over 70 percent of EV owners have a four-year college or post-graduate degree. This likely explains why the average household income of EV purchasers is upwards of $200,000. If you are not in that higher educated echelon and the high-income range of society, and a homeowner or resident of a NEW apartment that has charging access there may not be an appetite for an EV.
A recent 2021 California study shows that EV’s are driven half as much as internal combustion engine vehicles which further illustrates that EV’s are generally 2nd vehicles and not the primary workhorse vehicle for those few elites that can afford them.
Getting back to those plans to build a large house with an insufficient supply of materials to ever complete the house, maybe we should learn from the UK study of the materials required for only 32 million EV batteries (less than 7 percent of 2 billion vehicles in 2035) and set our sights on achieving an EV population that the world’s supply of the minerals and metals can support.
Ronald Stein, P.E.
Ambassador for Energy & Infrastructure
Intro – ENERGY MADE EASY (energyliteracy.net)
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We call that, “Well Duh!!”
The bleedin’ obvious comes home after the Millennial kiddies have been indoctrinated to scam that renewables are the future. A dystopian future only because it is the one they have chosen. Other futures are possible. Futures with abundant energy from hydrocarbons.
Now the kiddies are about to find that the only way to renewable batteries and wind + solar are through environmental destruction and expensive energy, a destruction writ large and enabled with child labor in Central Africa in the cobalt mines. And an expense that for that energy that only the richest elites (Gates, Bezos, Soros, Steyer, Bloomberg, Rockefellers) and their government bought cronies will afford.
Ron,
Appreciate the wake up, of course the impact of mining these relatively “rare” metals will be many times greater than current mining efforts. If demand does soar (ie the world doesn’t come to its senses), then the average grade of ore will almost certainly fall, so the grades you quote will be replaced with much lower grades, resulting in a steady increase in effort, energy and environmental impact to get the same amount of product. A vicious cycle in many ways, never mind the egregious methods used to mine some of the “blood metals” for example.
We also need the electric to power EV’s. I don’t know where that is coming from
tonyb
In Australia mostly from fossil fuelled generators.
I wonder what materials are going to be needed to build all the extra distribution network. Power lines, distribution stations, etc.
And that’s before we calculate all the extra materials that go into building all the extra power sources. Be they wind, solar, coal, gas or nuclear.
Include the high cost of closing and demolition of liquid fuel supply facilities, and the loss of ICEV value for owners.
brian.jackson10@talktalk.net
Great contribution Ron, you got it dead right. As a Mining Engineer of 50yrs experience I can say for sure that the energy expended hunting down and mining ever declining ore grades, will far outweigh any energy saved in the EV’s. Plus, the costs will increase exponentially, because of the exponentially larger and larger volumes of overburden that have to be removed to expose the ore, at ever increasing depths. These costs will stop the EV rush in its tracks. Only the rich will be able to afford a car. Volume car production will simply stop, unless the madness stops and we return to something like rational behavior.
Brian j.
You are absolutely correct about the soaring costs, Brian. As a life-long mineral exploration geologist I have encountered undeveloped ore grades of all of the elements you mention, however, they were in corrupt countries, with difficult metallurgy, and sometimes in settings where a social license to operate a mine was impossible. As per this report, it looks like the Green Weenie crowd, et al, are rushing forward into a deepening disaster.
Piling on to what Ron added, these
third worlddeveloping nations don’t exactly have a thriving infrastructure, legal, economical, social and educational base to build and maintain such an infrastructure. This will likely require an advanced and aggressive nation (e.g. China) to colonize and take-over the region, who will, by their own standards of environmental stewardship and humanitarian concerns, exploit the hell out of everything involved.Nice article, Ron! It shows, in detail, what most of us on this site know, either intuitively or from knowledge on the material science, to be the case.
It would be nice if even one of the mainstream media outlets would tell the general public the facts about this heinous scam being committed by governments and green ideologues.
Keep up the good work.
Try telling this to your government and see if you get a sensible (or any) response.
In my many experiences either an acknowledgement and no other comment or a government propaganda media-type release statement.
And membership of the mushroom club.
Filled my car up yesterday. 450 miles since last tank, odometer reckoned another 60 miles in the tank.
THAT range is the biggest obstacle to EVs together with the massive grid upgrades needed.
On Sunday, I drove 900 miles from Provo, Utah to So Arizona in one shot, 12 hours, 900 miles. Could not have done that one batteries in an EV.
Even if the grid had been able, the batteries could not.
Cooperative enroute cops !
That’s only 75mph. Most interstates out west have that as the set speed limit.
Most of the time you can go 5mph over the speed limit without worrying about the cops.
Imagination travelling by EV during a national holiday period.
With four people, luggage, in freezing temperatures, with the heater on, the windscreen wipers on and the headlights on plus the radio. Lets hope the route isn’t hilly
tonyb
And it only took 5 min to add 450 mile range to your car, not 12 hours.
Because of the intolerable cost in human suffering and environmental degradation needed to produce an EV, there is no way I would drive one, even if it were given to me, and I can’t help but feel a degree of contempt for those who have paid even the highly subsidized balance for one. If you have one, I spit on your feet.
In Australia many or most of the few EV registered are company vehicles, leased for executives, and the Federal Government has gifted leasing firms $300 million to promote EV to fleet operators.
I see Jaguar want to go 100% electric in 2025.
And will go bust.
How do you get an electric Landrover to cross the Sahara?
On the tray of a 4WD flat bed Diesel engine truck?
You could tow a trailer equipped with a diesel generator.
And another trailer for eating and sleeping in while waiting for recharging to finish
And Land Rover.
We have ten years supply of cobalt and lithium and 100+ years of oil. I’ll wait.
End Of The Age Of Abundance, the book, points out that coal should now be reserved for liquid fuel production in the future, use nuclear energy and/or thorium molten salts reactor technology for electricity generation (hydro where practical).
We have 400 years of oil and gas, closer to 1000 years for coal.
Now compare the technology of today to the technology available 400 and 1000 years ago.
Worrying about how people 400 and 1000 years from now are going to solve a problem is a fool’s errand. The best use of that oil, gas and coal is to use it today in order to create the wealth that will give our descendants the resources to solve this problem in their time.
That’s 10 years of supply at current consumption rates. The proposal means the consumption rate is going up by several orders of magnitude.
Closer to 400+ years of oil.
FYI, the UK is to eliminate the sale of new ICE cars by 2030 not 2040. It was originally to be 2040, then brought forward to 2035 by Theresa May after the first XR insurrection, then not to be outdone, to 2030 by Bojo.
One of the reasons why I will never again vote for Boris.
Chris
Vote Boris, get Princess NutNutz (UK’s answer to Alexandria Occasional Cortex)
To be fair I think that making decade-out promises is good virtue signalling politics even when you know its utter testicles. Boris has a virus and a bureaucracy to fight without taking on the greens right now. Or his ‘fiancée’…
..and in due course when the blackouts happen, like the Americans, Boris can be relied upon to do the right thing….
…after he has exhausted all other alternatives…
Rolls Royce, in dire trouble over jet engines, is assembling all it needs to do to make simple bog-standard small modular boring old pressurised water reactors running of the fuel they all know and love…uranium.
I think that amongst technical people there is a growing tacit assumption that whilst it’s too early to cry ‘testicles’ on Climate Change, having an oven-ready resonably priced zero carbon energy source that works is a smart move.
The problem is the lack of any sensible alternative. Labour are going down the Woke route and focusing on minority issues so making themselves unelectable.
Increased demand produces increased supply: there are already multiple new lithium mining sites opening up worldwide.
I see that producing batteries without cobalt is being trialled.
Look at how oil production moved offshore and into the arctic…
You may have enough wood for a house, but the nails are out 😀
Yes, as the price of a commodity increases as a result of increasing demand, marginal supplies can be developed. However, that means the price of the product — EV battery — increases. So, the consumer pays more for less, and has less discretionary spending left over. However, that can’t go on indefinitely. Eventually, the cost becomes prohibitive and substitutes have to be found (typically degrading performance), or a different technology has to be developed.
Just because something is being tried doesn’t mean it will be successful. There may be some breakthroughs in battery technology, but it doesn’t look all that promising. It is best to plan on what is known, rather than what is hoped.
You once again demonstrate that you uncritically accept the propaganda of the Green Agenda, probably because of your limited understanding of the Big Picture, or your ideological bias — maybe both!
Griff, I didn’t realise that you were so supportive of the mining and oil industries.
And in the meantime, griffies fellow conspirators are doing everything in their power to make sure that no new mines are opened, anywhere.
Griff, please take a basic course in Micro Economics and start with the “Law of Supply and Demand”.
“ You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.” -Inigo Montoya
There is a legislative block on practical EV batteries that work at usual ambient temperatures, are affordable, and do not self destruct. When GM was finished with their EV-1 experiment, the battery technology was sold to Chevron. They locked it up by insisting on long production runs for Nicad automotive battery sales. Since the market was never allowed to develop, the batteries will not be available either. Toyota tried with their proprietary batteries for the RAV SUV developed in Japan. They were fined $300 million to discourage such efforts.
Every now and then I do a web search for ammonia fuel stories from the last month. example example Ammonia has its own set of problems but it does solve a whole bunch of other problems. For example, ammonia can be used in combustion engines and thereby obviates the need for batteries and fuel cells.
The shipping industry is particularly interested in ammonia fuel and my guess is that their motivation, which I haven’t seen explicitly stated, is that they can continue using their diesel engined fleet. They could just change fuel tanks rather than having to scrap a whole ship.
The first linked example above refers to Japan’s plans to burn ammonia along with coal in electric power plants. The initial plans would lead to a 20% reduction in CO2 produced. It doesn’t sound ambitious but it does make evident that coal will be an important part of the fuel mix for the foreseeable future.
It’s not at all obvious that, for reasons stated in the story above, lithium batteries are the solution to the problems of renewable energy.
Is burning ammonia a tradeoff between CO2 and NOx?
Sure, but NOx isn’t a magic molecule (yet).
I do see NOx mentioned occasionally. It just doesn’t get the press that CO2 does.
Also the short life of batteries at about 5-8years compared to a well maintained combustion engine easily 40 plus years. At the same time massive battery storage required for renewable power storage to support the grid. Question, can the battery components be effectively recycled.
The article doesn’t mention that increased demand for these raw materials will inevitably push up their price. This will make electric cars even more unaffordable for the average person. Some greens see this as a feature, not a bug. The stated aim of a number of prominent greens is to reduce the number of cars on the road. The best way to achieve this is to make cars affordable only for the rich; the peasants can make do with public transport.
What public transport ??? that’s only for urbanites.
Useful public transport is not available in most country areas.
I live 24 miles from our nearest hospital (~35 mins by car)
Fastest public transport to the hospital takes 2hrs 17mins.
First public transport from our village (a 3 miles walk away) is at 9:22.
So if I have a 10 AM appointment on Wed …
I would have to leave the house ~8AM Tues !!
Can’t you just wait for the ambulance or don’t the electric cables stretch that far?
use a taxi or call the public ambulance thingie. I was amazed that there is on the NHS a service to take you home for free after an emergency visit to the hospital…in an ambulance.
Great Reset, build back better, new green deal.
Control and manage the people, steal their assets and make them welfare (living wage) dependent, travel outside of immediate home area by permit only.
I suspect that, looking at stuff that almost works, the future for urban and suburban plebbery will be Uber summoned driverless electric cars that drive themselves to charge points, where they sit until needed…
…most people will be unable to actually drive, which is probably a huge step forward in road safety…
If you can imagine why most people buy their own cars, even though taxis are currently available, then you will be able to understand why driverless electric cars are not an improvement.
Driverless cars are another unaffordable fantasy. The infrastructure needed for them to ‘see’ where they are going is too costly. And they will kill people as they don’t possess human abilities. Consider aircraft – who lands the plane when it is really windy with crosswinds? The living pilot.
That’s the plan, they’re not expecting 32 million electric cars on UK roads. A few hundred thousand at best, for the rich who can afford them. The rest of us may be allowed the privilege of push bikes or overcrowded buses and trains. Welcome to building back better ………. and by the way you’re welcome to it
No new ICE cars after 2030? A solid second hand ICE vehicle may finally become a good investment instead of a wasting asset…
Can you imagine the ICE sales in 2028 and 2029? The bozos haven’t really thought this through. Or maybe they have and they figure they won’t be around in power by then.
I just hope the factories will be geared up for the surge in demand. I wonder if ICE-carjacking will be a growth crime?
I come from the school of engineering that says, if a product is designed to fail it must fail as designed.
Normally, items so engineered are there to stop a catastrophic event. Pressure relief valves bursting discs, weak links, sheer pins etc.
Now we have a complete reversal of that safety principle.
We now have systems being adopted that engineers know, will fail. Worse they will fail, precisely when they are supposed to provide reliable life saving/impacting service.
Engineering institutes, are now willingly party to a movement in vehicle design, and energy provision generally, that will not only fail, but fail with huge human casualties.
It is very disturbing..
When your need for reliable power is at its greatest, i.e. during severe weather events, the fragile but mandated weather dependent generating systems will fail. It’s incredible to think, but sadly a fact, the authorities who mandated such energy fragile systems know that will be the case?
It is worse when you remember, the prime driver of engineering is resilience and reliability. Not any longer it would seem.
The old fit for purpose principle, was a reasonable guide for designers. Ultimately replaced by Deming and others promoting reduction in variation via statistical manufacturing controls to achieve ever better quality products. The Deming cycle, Plan, Do, Check it, Act, is now part of basic manufacturing practice. The objective always being, less variation equals less failures in the field, leading to greater customer satisfaction.
Now we have a movement, championed by the Climate Alarmists and advanced by socialists to knowingly, yes knowingly, make systems society relies upon, less resilient with uncertainty being built into every aspect of our lives. Their guiding cycle is, Plan to Do but Check it Fails
Deming would be turning in his grave if he could see what is going on here in the twenty first century. People are in real danger of freezing to death, because unreliability and variation, is now built into every public service. That is what’s being promoted by government for our uncertain future.
Why are the engineering institutions allowing this?
One reason (certainly not the entire reason) is that engineering schools are now an “industry”. Turning out graduates, not necessarily engineers, is the metric now…
Most institutions, including scientific and engineering ones, have been taken over by the woke.
Go back to First Principles. In this case, “You can’t fight City Hall”……not even when it has been hijacked by the UN.
Stop arguing about transition to renewable energy, electric vehicles and all the other political theatre and find out what the propaganda smokescreens and mirrors are really about.
Like ending industrialisation in developed nations in favour of developing nations like China, controlling and managing people in the world with no borders, one world government.
Discover what the Fabians plan and then research modern times beginning with United Nations infiltration by the globalist leftists.
Yes indeed. When you look at the political statements, the agendas, the tactics and the gross suppression of information etc. emanating from the top down these conclusions are obvious.
In addition one may well ask by what means this 500,000 Lbs of earth needed for my EV battery is to be moved. Will it be by a raft of mega batteries fed by wind turbines or will it be by Congo Kids fed from biomass scraped from the ground?
Remember “We have to pass the bill to see what is in the bill.”? Well, “We have to destroy the environment to save the environment.” is clearly the new normal.
Quote:
“”blah blah…. requires digging and moving between 200,000 and over 1,500,000 pounds of earth—a rough average of more than 500,000 pounds of ore per battery“”
So, 30 million new UK Light Vehicles will produce about 7 Gigatonnes tonnes of ‘waste earth’
Is that a problem? How is that a problem – humans already move 60 Gigatonnes annually ‘ just scratching around’
Sorry, I digressed.
That much ‘earth’ or crunched up rock as it actually is, would be sufficient to re-mineralise the entire corn growing area of the US (go in at a rate of 75 tonnes per acre)
You’d only need do it once, do somewhere else next year.
MAYBE, come back after 25 or 30 years.
You’d be in for a hideous shock.
The snow would melt and not come back, Arctic cold and snow really would be a distant memory.
The summers would be pleasant and warm, not hellish hot.
The Polar Vortex would stay, quelle shocke horreur, at The Pole
In short, The Climate would change.
Just like picky young girls in shops, supermarkets and dinner tables discarding the fat & gristle ** in the their food, in mining all that stuff, we are actually throwing The Good Stuff away. ##
Pythonesque in extremis
## Apart from the Lithium, = a vital element for maintaining mental health.
And just like its chemical siblings sodium & potassium, is one of THE first things to disappear in rapidly eroding (tilled, plowed, cultivated, nitrogen-fertilised) soils and ancient ‘earth’
Might explain a few things doncha think…
** Gristle being= Connective tissue being = Collagen = Animal protein
Its what holds us together, especially our joints, connects muscles to bone and esp important for the girls as they age, it holds our skin (complexion) together.
Slows the onset of ‘dry skin’ and wrinkles. For boys also.
Because if the girls don’t feel ‘pretty’ or ‘attractive’, how might that affect the very thing that they were made pretty & attractive for in the first place?
ho hum, yet more babies bite the dust even before they’ve been conceived..
Add that into the dysfunctions, disorders and mental midgetry that Lithium deficiency creates, how the fook are the girls ever going to find a GSOH – the very thing they all aspire to as an aid in in the biz of baby making.
If you have ever bought crushed rock or screened gravel by tonnage, then you would realize that you are primarily paying for a haulage fee. The farther a corn field is from the quarry, the more it will cost to apply it. There comes a point where it doesn’t make sense to pay for the ‘mineralizer.’ However, the waste rock from mining operations may contain undesirable levels of toxic heavy metals, or have sulfides present that will affect the pH of the field as they oxidize.
You can double all of the material inputs because the rest of the economy will have to work overtime to pay for the tax credits for the rich and spending programs for the designated losing sectors. Heads I go tax free, tails you pay the costs.
GM recently announced that they were going to stop producing any internal-combustion engined cars by 2035… if I were a stockholder, my first question would be “where are you going to get all the batteries needed for just a year’s production?” Second question would be, “How are you going to keep costs of vehicles down when raw material costs are going through the roof?”
It’s a plan with failure written all over it, and somebody needs to tell Ms. Barra that she’s (metaphorically) naked.
If I were a stockholder, my first question would be
“What’s my broker’s phone number?”
Yes but if we wish really really hard, this problem will vanish. Right?
Disney’s First Law: Wish and it will come true!
Yes but the time frame keeps catching me out, I am still waiting for the mini sub that was advertised on the back of comics in the 1960s
Maybe you aren’t wishing hard enough!
Nice article and elaborate calculations. But just out of interest, shouldn’t there be some assumptions about material reuse? All those metals, are they completely lost once the vehicle is taken out of operation?
Have you found anyone that will take old electronics off your hands without you paying them?
Few things are actually designed with the idea of them being re-cycled, thus it becomes very problematic. If the wrong elements get in the pot it can ruin everything.
I would imagine that batteries that are designed for recycling would end up being bigger, heavier and less efficient.
Hakon,Clyde,
According to a Nov 2019 MIT report on BEV vs ICE vehicles there is currently no economical way to recycle Lithium batteries.
And doing a total life cycle of the cars [from mining the minerals to recycling the car at end-of-life] that BEV will not be cost equivalent to an ICE for ~ 10 years.
https://energy.mit.edu/insightsintofuturemobility
It is just wonderful news for the mining industry. This EV rubbish will sustain us for decades to come.
One need only look at the fiasco of the electricity shortage in Texas due to frozen wind turbines to understand that lefties don’t have the first clue about energy production. How does Texas fail to take advantage of their abundant natural gas to supply their electric grid? But I digress.
The shortage of materials required to make batteries for electric vehicles is another example of lefties failing to understand the fatal flaws in their strategy. When we look at lefty strategies we see failure after failure and still these bozos are setting our policies. It is time to send them back to academia where they can theorize forever but let realistic, practical business types run the show.
Electric vehicles are not at all environmentally friendly, they are another disaster.
https://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=Big%20Picture%20Guy
I have observed that when engineers are tasked with designing an efficient product, they usually do a pretty good job. On the other hand, when politicians get involved and have input on the design constraints, it turns out to be a disaster.
I’m reminded of the old joke about a camel being an animal designed by a committee.