Experts have warned that producing a new generation of electric vehicles— and supplying the electricity to keep their batteries charged— will add up to “huge implications” for the world’s natural resources.
The UK alone would need just under twice the current annual world cobalt production to meet its EV targets for 2050, according to a letter to government climate change advisers co-authored by the head of earth sciences at the UK’s Natural History Museum, Prof Richard Herrington (pictured).
And the letter to the Committee on Climate Change said the world must face up to the “raw material cost of going green”— which will require supplies of some metals to “increase dramatically” to fuel the desire for the “revolution in the way we travel”.
In the UK, petrol and diesel cars make up the biggest share of the UK’s climate pollution, with 31.5 million cars currently on UK roads, covering 252.5 billion miles per year, the letter said.
To replace all these with EVs today— “assuming they use the most resource-frugal next-generation NMC 811 batteries”— the letter said it would require:
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207,900 tonnes of cobalt— just under twice the annual global production;
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264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE)— three quarters the world’s production;
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at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium— nearly the entire world production of neodymium;
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2,362,500 tonnes of copper— more than half the world’s production in 2018.
On a global basis, for the expected 2bn cars on the world’s roads by 2050 to be electric, the letter said experts calculated “annual production of neodymium and dysprosium would have to increase by 70%, copper output would need to more than double and cobalt output would need to increase at least three and a half times for the entire period from now until 2050 to satisfy the demand”.
Switching to EVs for the UK fleet “comes with an energy cost too”, the letter said. “Energy costs for cobalt production are estimated at 7,000-8,000kWh for every tonne of metal produced and for copper 9,000kWh/t. The rare-earth energy costs are at least 3,350kWh/t, so for the target of all 31.5 million cars, that requires 22.5 terawatt hours of power to produce the new metals, amounting to 6% of the UK’s current annual electrical usage.”
There are also challenges of using ‘green energy’ to power electric cars, the letter said. “If wind farms are chosen to generate the power for the projected two billion cars, at UK average usage, this requires the equivalent of a further years’ worth of total global copper supply and 10 years’ worth of global neodymium and dysprosium production to build the wind farms.”
Solar power is also “problematic and resource hungry”, the letter said. “All the photovoltaic systems currently on the market are reliant on one or more raw materials classed as critical or near critical by the EU and/or the US Department of Energy.“
Earlier this year, two of Europe’s leading institutional banks were said to be backing the launch of a raw materials investment facility to support future batteries production in the EU.
