Posted on July
27, 2017 by Yves Smith
Marshall Auerback recently
introduced us to Jack Lifton, who has written extensively on natural resource
issues of supply and demand, focusing on the underlying drivers of economics
and human nature. As he puts it, “I am not a ‘peakist’ of supply or demand; I
am a peakist on the amount of capital the human race is willing to commit to
achieve a goal.”
Jack has a post coming soon on
how China is managing the prospect of resource constraints, and in the
meantime, sent a short and informative e-mail on the UK’s government’s plan to
ban all diesel and petrol vehicles from the roads by 2040. An overview from the
BBC:
New diesel and petrol cars and
vans will be banned in the UK from 2040 in a bid to tackle air pollution, the
government has announced.
Ministers have also unveiled a
£255m fund to help councils tackle emissions, including the potential for
charging zones for the dirtiest vehicles….
Other points include:
The funding pot will come from
changes to tax on diesel vehicles and reprioritising departmental budgets – the
exact details will be announced later in the year.
Councils could change road
layouts, retrofit public transport, and encourage local people to leave their
cars at home.
A Clean Air Fund would allow
local authorities to bid for additional money to put in more air quality
control measures.
A new Automated and Electric
Vehicles Bill will allow the government to require the installation of charge
points for electric vehicles at motorway service areas and large fuel
retailers.
The Telegraph reports that upgrading the grid to handle the
intended shift to electric and hybrid vehicles would be a “tall order” and the
UK would wind up increasing its electricity imports from 10% to 30%.
But Jack highlights an even
bigger impediment: cobalt production. Via e-mail:
The UK has less than 1% of the
world’s population, so let’s assume that it has 1 fossil fuel powered motor
vehicle of some kind for every 2 citizens (The ratio in the USA is 1:1). So
there would today be 30 million fossil fuel powered privately owned vehicles in
the U.K.
The 200+ mile on a single
charge range of a Tesla using a 60-80 KWh battery requires 19kg of cobalt.
30 million such vehicles would
therefore require 570,000 t of cobalt, which would be immobilized (taken out of
the market) for 5-8 years (the currently projected lifetime of the Li/Co type
of battery used in the Tesla.
This is nearly 5 times todays
annual output of new cobalt production.. So the UK’s less than 1% of the
globe’s people would require by 2040 around 20% of the world’s production of
new cobalt at today’s production rate to completely eliminate fossil fuel
powered cars and replace them with vehicles with a 200+ mile range.
China in the meantime has
mandated 5,000,000 EVs to be on the road in their country by 2020! This would
require 95,000 t of cobalt immobilized in Chinese batteries within 3 years.
This WILL require about 30% of all global new cobalt production between now and
the end of 2020.
China has mandated that 30% of
its motor vehicle production by 2030 be of the EV type. At today’s level of
production this would be 7.5 million vehicles using 142,500 tons of cobalt
ANNUALLY from then on.
All of this of course is
predicated upon all of the EVs being pure long range types.
But even if only half of them,
or less, are of this type the IMMOBILIZATION of the world’s production of
cobalt in operational EVs and the absolute limit of the new production of
Cobalt, which is produced 95%+ ONLY as a byprodcut of the mining of base metals
such as Copper and Nickel, will limit the production of new EVs to a maximum
dictated by only what is produced new each year plus what is EVENTUALLY
recycled.
The conversion of today’s
fleet of 1 billion vehicles totally to pure long range EVs would take ALL of
the world’s known resources of cobalt MOST of which are not today recoverable
economically, and therefore could not occur in much less than 50-100 years and
then ONLY if direct financial profit were not the motive but rather quality of
life. This is against the neoliberal agenda.
Politicians simply do not have
the intellectual resources to comprehend this problem.
I thought that only American
politicians were that short sighted. I see that it is a larger problem.
Unfortunately, the way to
achieve the biggest reduction in energy use quickly is conservation, and not
new technologies, particularly since creating the new infrastructure has its
own energy and resource costs. And contrary to popular opinion, there is a fair
bit of low-hanging fruit on the “reduce use” front. But a good bit of that
requires changing habits and systems, and people are remarkably resistant.
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