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It’s a dead end for electric vehicles
Can we switch to electric cars? The simple answer is no – and the complicated answer is also no.
On paper, switching from OVs (oil-fuelled vehicles) to electric cars and vehicles, collectively called EVs does look promising for an imagined future where “renewable electricity will dominate”. The ever looming threat of “peak oil” has become an almost respectable theme for the elected – and self-elected – political and corporate guardians of consumer society. Their answer now: EVs.
Nowhere is this more evident than in China. The Chinese government`s twelfth Five Year Plan (2011-2015) aims to increase the country’s production capacity of “new-energy” vehicles to one million, with a target of a whopping 5 million in new energy vehicle sales by 2020. Pure-electric cars, along with plug-in hybrid cars will account for 50 percent of the targeted output, with 100 billion yuan (USD 15.7 billion) in government funds being pumped into the sector over the next 10 years. With tons of government funds, not to mention heavy R&D investments from leading automakers in EVs – what could go wrong?
The oil limit – and others
There are a number of reasons why the switch from OVs to EVs will not and cannot happen in reality. This is not primarily a technology issue but sweeps across a range of economic and resource-related concerns, constraints and limits. The fact of the matter is, the metals and materials essential to the manufacturing of the motors and batteries of EVs are, like oil, in limited supply. Replacing a resource problem with less urgent resource problem is hardly a solution.
That’s not to say that the impetus for the switch – the imminent and permanent decline in oil global production – does not necessitate immediate action of some kind. In 2010, the world produced an average of 87 million barrels of crude oil per day. That works out to about 4.6 barrels or 190 US gallons per year for each of the planet’s 6.9 billion inhabitants in 2010. Consumers in wealthy nations such a Norway, Qatar, the US and Japan consumed as much as 25 barrels per capita; in the impoverished, oil-producing countries of Nigeria and Chad, as well as the oil-importing countries Malawi or Burkino Faso, oil consumption averaged less than 1.5 barrels per capita per year.
But more importantly, for EV production we need materials that are in even more limited supplies – lithium, nickel, aluminium, iron. There exists a classic “step down” hierarchy that in large part is fixed by factors as hard to change and to talk around as the average crustal abundance of metals and minerals. Lithium is even rarer than the REMs (rare earth metals). The REMs are rarer than nickel, which is much rarer than aluminium, which itself is rarer than iron. The planet was made that way. There is no alternative.
For every tonne of global oil production, we produce 5 kg of aluminium, less than 2 kg of copper, a half kilo of lead, and so on down the scale, to lithium. Nonetheless, lithium is the Holy Grail for EV boomers, who uphold this light metal as relatively eco-friendly or nontoxic, but this does nothing to change its rarity.
It may sound comforting to hear that the world’s oceans contain an estimated 230 billion tonnes of lithium – dissolved in about 1,450 billion cu km of water (amounting to about 140 kgs of lithium in every cubic km of seawater) but little consideration is put into how much of this is actually mineable and extractible. These reserves are mainly located in Bolivia, Argentina, Portugal and Russia and their exact extent is certainly a subject of controversy. The US Geological Survey in 2007 estimated these reserves may amount to as little as 13.75 million tonnes. The most optimistic estimates, even assuming a large increase in lithium prices, only extend this to about 29 million tonnes.
At some point, EV proponents will have to answer the question: Can we replace oil with metals? It’s not hard to calculate the exact weight of lithium (for lithium-ion or lithium iron carbonate batteries) needed to produce each EV. Alternately, if the EV is operated on nickel-metal hydride batteries, we can also calculate the resource requirement. Where REMs are used in the high-density magnets for their motors, depending on model and technology, we can calculate the amounts of REMs needed.
What is worrying is not the amount of metals and minerals needed per vehicle, but perhaps the number of vehicles themselves. Factor in China’s seemingly insatiable appetite for motor vehicles, and the outcome doesn’t look great.
The Chinese car boom
Car manufacturing has radically shifted east since year 2000, more intensely since 2005. China now produces more cars each year than both the European Union (ranked second) or the US (ranked third). India’s car output is far behind China’s but is growing at least as fast – at double-digit annual percentage rates. Outside China and India, but among the emerging economies, car production is growing at double-digit rates in several other “newcomer car countries”, including Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Malaysia, Iran, Thailand and others. French automaker Renault’s CEO, Carlos Ghosn speaks of attaining production rates of one million EVs per year by sometime around 2016. But the quantum leap needed to match the world’s current output of OVs, about 75 million per year, and then replace the existing stock of around 950–975 million OVs, growing at about 55 million a year (after scrapping approximately 20 million a year) is the stuff of fantasy.
Save oil, save resources
Increasing the use of metals and minerals in a vain attempt to conserve oil will rapidly trigger an
explosion of non-oil metal and mineral commodity prices. Letting world OV car fleets continue to climb, as if there was no oil limit, will obviously trigger a huge increase in oil prices – and soon. Under any scenario, supply and demand imbalances will eliminate all apparent short-term advantages that could or might be obtained from spending large chunks of public money to boost EV production and utilisation. The net result will simply exacerbate the situation. What we find with the “Electric Vehicle Paradox” is that any energy policy or business model which dramatically increases metal consumption in an effort to save oil – must fail and will fail.
The only transport technology that can survive in a resource-constrained world is quantifiable and able to be set by completely transparent criteria. Unsurprisingly it already exists, and only needs recycling: energy-efficient transport measured by full resource and-energy lifecycle intensity per unit of transport utility delivered (for example, million passenger-kilometres per year). Just as unsurprisingly, the earliest-type of EVs, that is several EVs plugged or bolted together and used for urban and suburban electric railway transport, have a great fixed-bed and metallic track record, both above ground and underground. The above ground version are called trams. The underground version are called subway or metro trains. Heard of them?
Op-Ed by Andrew McKillop
Andrew McKillop is a former energy policy and programming expert at the European Commission, Brussels. He writes on the environment and energy sectors, specifically the impact and interface of oil, renewable energy, and the sustainable economy.
