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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Nothing new there, the use of at least a pocket calculator is an unknown adventure for all the “Green “Energeticers””.
“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:”
Your estimates are an optimistic lower-bound because there is often a requirement to strip overburden to get access to the actual ore. When the ore is in veins or pipe-like intrusions, and is mined with an open pit, the pit has to be widened as it goes deeper to stabilize the walls. Thus, a geometrically increasing volume of rock has to be blasted and removed. The tonnage removed is directly related to the amount of energy expended to obtain the ore. A problem that is usually overlooked is that as the waste rock is broken and removed, it has to be dumped somewhere outside the pit. The volume of the broken rock is greater than the original solid rock. So, a not insignificant amount of land has to be dedicated to the ‘mountain’ of waste rock.
Clyde Spencer,
Nice photo. I like reality and landscapes.
Bingham Pit? Just a wild guess. Been a long time.
Bill,
Yes, it is Bingham Canyon. What the picture fails to convey, and I was so impressed with when I visited in person, was that I observed the dump trucks, with wheels that are 8 or 10 feet in diameter, appear as small specks on the top of the waste-rock piles, noted primarily by the dust cloud they raise when dumping their loads.
Beyond that, when the mining is done, the crushed rock has to be carted back from wherever it was stored and used to fill in the hole.
Mark,
Holes of this size are rarely back-filled. The energy cost would be so high that companies couldn’t supply the commodity (copper in this case), at costs that consumers could afford, and it would take years to move, and the temporary storage areas wouldn’t look the same as originally anyway.
even weaker is the generating capacity to power all these electric cars needed to start building massive dependable generating plants yesterday
Not just the generating capacity, but the entire electrical grid has to be upgraded in order to move that electricity from plant to home.
Christ Ronald, if you are going to constantly quote the science and the facts this will never get done. We have to lie and cover up the facts if we are going to achieve our utopian (or is it dystopian) dream (or nightmare) and all the mining environmentalists will be losing their minds over over all that environement destroyedd by mining. what about the social impact on the indigenous populations that usually live near these mines? Have you no empathy for them? The green new deal is looking more and more like the brown new deal. You can’t make EV’s with dirty old technology. Oh and where is all this electricity coming from??? Yeah tell it to California and Texas.
Don’t forget all the plastics that come from petroleum refining needed for wire insulation and holding all the small batteries together.
And the miles of external copper wiring needed to connect charging outlets that have to go just about everywhere.
Another threat:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/single-biggest-threat-electric-vehicle-000100397.html
We do need a museum of bad ideas to explain to each new generation why what sounds like a good idea is a path to epic failure. This where I predict you will find EV, solar panels, and wind turbines in 2040.
The best I can determine the reason to have solar panels or an EV is to tell people you have solar or EV. At least so far I have not found anyone that refutes this.
Being unique is a certain status symbol. This status goes away if they become commonplace.
First summer job in college was at a UAW union factory in ’68. Lot of Detroit muscle in the parking lot. But there was one VW bug. The owner could not shut up about the good milage. Then someone started adding gas to his tank as a joke. Everyone was in on it. Then they stopped and started siphoning gas out. The owner finally took the VW back to the dealer.
The dealer thought he was crazy. He did sound crazy.
Along those lines, a cute coed had a VW bug. I offered to change the antifreeze. She was very grateful.
The point is that there are ‘smart’ clueless people.
I did not plan my retirement and really enjoying it. That said I have noticed there is a huge deviation between what people plan and what they do.
Farther down the delusional scale is politicians who plan for me to do something that is a bad idea. The only thing that will happen if the manufacture of ICE is banned, is business will boom for those who know how to keep things running.
The engine in my boat is 45 years old. The engine in my car is almost 30 years old. The diesel engine in the 22 years. Engines last longer than politicians.
Kit
It has been said that “Life is what happens while you are making plans.”
There are other considerations as well. EV’s cost more and as the cost of materials skyrockets no one short of upper-middle class will be able to afford one. Meanwhile, the owners are paying no gasoline taxes to maintain roads and infrastructure. This will either have to be taken in in a yearly “EV” tax or added to the overhead on electric bills, meaning everyone pays whether they own an EV or not.
Obviously there has to be huge infrastructure changes to recharge such vehicles, and it isn’t just adding charge-up stations but power lines and power plants. Who pays for all of this?
Their entire plan is built around the typical “and a miracle occurs here” deign philosophy – they are counting on battery breakthroughs and motor breakthroughs. They are hopeful that mining so much material will be done without increasing CO2 emissions – no plan just hope.
And meanwhile, they are making it harder and harder to actually mine these materials in the U.S. so all this will be done to third world countries desperate for money. All in the name of a hopeless effort to control climate based on erroneous ideas about CO2.
That is a feature, not a bug. Policy makers (aka Philosopher Kings) have deemed travel by the unenlightened as unnecessary and even a hostile act to The Climate® so pricing out individual transportation is their compromise to just denying purchase / ownership permits.
Assuming, arguendo, that climate change is an emergency, the use of minerals for EV is just one part of the materials requirements. The “environmentally friendly” wind and solar power installations and their storage batteries will demand much, more. Then there are the back-up power plants to overcome the intermittency problems and the power transmission system and back-up (gas?) turbines to demand during supply interruptions. The costs, environmental damage and economic disruptions required would be enormous.
All this, rather than using natural gas to transition to nuclear technologies and (perhaps) development of geothermal. I am hopeful that a few disruptions in California, Australia, Germany and other countries will prompt a dramatic change in direction.
There have been electric trains for donkeys’ years, and they have one common feature – they don’t use battery power. They use grid power supplied along the length of the railway line. This has advantages (no range limit, lighter trains, no re-charging delays) and disadvantages (more infrastructure, dangerous power lines). But it surely shows that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, otherwise there would be battery trains. Well, it seems there are now a number of battery trains on the drawing board. Here’s one: https://insideevs.com/news/397585/alstom-first-battery-electric-trains/. What’s that thing sticking up at the back of the train, touching the overhead wires?
Granted this is about rarity going forward. But what’s the actual difference, the marginal substistution? Surely the power plant in the ICE vehicle also has a tailing pile in it’s history. And as a percent of overall material weight?
It’s about specialty materials and rare earths, both for the EVs and the wind and solar to power them, none of which currently exist in major quantities
Whatever cost is today as you try to ramp ev production their will be a demand crunch and the raw materials will sky rocket
Most people only buy EVs now if they
Are subsidized due to cost
Govt mandates are going to push that through the roof
Australian governments now require EV to display a blue sticker on front and rear registration plates so that traffic authorities are alerted to the danger of exothermic reaction lithium ion battery inferno potential.
Well you are massively underestimating the ore required.
You are basing your grades based on existing deposits, which are much better quality than the additional sources which would be required to meet the anticipated demand, which is gigantic if we electrifitise everything. For the entire history of mining we have mined high grades first.
The additional sources would also need the prices to skyrocket to cover the cost of mining lower grade ores.
As a side note was reading the 2020 BP Energy Forecast recently. The very first charts displayed in the executive summary show why fossil fuels are going nowhere.
Chart one showed CO2 taxes required to change behaviours – maybe we are going to have dictactorships to get those sorts of policies enacted. The little people riot at US$25/t, can’t see them being happy with US$250/t in the developed world. And a totally ludicrous US$175/t in the DEVELOPING WORLD. I’ve seen how inventive people in the developing world are at improving their lot – I would think the entire deforestation of Africa could be on the cards if “official” energy carries that sort of tax.
Chart Two showed energy break-up, but also total energy demand. In 2050 under business as usual the total global energy demand is about 25% higher than 2018 levels. Under Net Zero and Rapid scenarios, total energy demand in 2050 is the same as in 2018. So in this scenario, what are we planning on giving up to achieve this?
Interesting but a bit dubious in parts. Markets apply pressure, and if cobalt gets expensive they will build EVs with LFP batteries and Induction motors that don’t use any. The banning of suck-squeeze-bang-blow is silly and probably self defeating but not for fear of material shortages
As a general rule, a newly introduced technology performs less than optimally. Eventually, the bugs get worked out and the best performing materials are used. When certain critical resources become scarce and expensive, substitutions are made. Generally, these substitutions are tradeoffs between cost and performance. Thus, performance, or longevity, suffer. The technology tends to decline in performance until a new technology is invented to replace it/