Range-challenged electric vehicles could face further sales disincentives with a proposal from Britain’s top engineers that battery sizes be reduced by one third. In a just-published report on the supply of critical materials for Net Zero projects, the U.K.-based National Engineering Policy Centre (NEPC) points to an obvious fact – there isn’t anything like the amount of raw materials available to transition to Net Zero and most of the extraction processes required are an ecological disaster. The report sets out in terrifying black and white what is coming down the future political rationing track. The lack of resources to replace cheap and plentiful hydrocarbons is also noted in a new McKinsey report, which states that critical minerals face a supply shortage “as demand soars for raw materials to fuel [the] clean energy drive”. Current mineral supply could be as low as 10% of projected 2050 requirements, McKinsey suggests.
The NEPC brings together 42 engineering operations and is led by the Royal Academy of Engineering. Its report calls for “upstream mobility policies” to reduce transport demand via a shift from cars to buses, bikes and electric scooters operating in tandem with smaller batteries and alternative battery chemistries. The cynical might read this to mean that fanatical politicians such as the Mad Miliband mandate reduced EV range and throw further billions of pounds at yet more unproven technologies while ramping up the war on motorists.
The range of most EVs is not much cop to start with. Neil Winton is a senior contributor with Forbes and has looked in detail at the claimed ranges of EVs. He is not impressed with the figures supplied by manufacturers, writing recently that the Lexus RZ 300s, which retails at $71,350, has a claimed range of “up to“ 297 miles, but the battery only filled to an average of 224 miles. The problem is that range falls off a cliff at high speed, reports Winton. Sustainability Professor Peter Wells explains: “For an electric car, the extra energy required getting from 60 mph to 75 mph is astonishing and virtually doubles energy consumption to move all that air out of the way.”
Cutting battery size by a third or using low energy-density sodium batteries, as suggested by the NEPC, risks producing cars no one wants to buy. The only solution would be rationing using restrictions mandated by law. Of course, many such restrictions are already in force across Europe, where the traditional car industry and its large numbers of well paid jobs are being slowly destroyed.
The penny has been dropping about the obvious shortages of critical Net Zero resources for some time, although the public is mostly kept in the dark by the Net Zero-captured mainstream media. EVs are a particularly significant source of anticipated demand for critical materials, observes the NEPC, and a reduction in battery size could save 46,000 tonnes of lithium. This would stop the excavation of 75,000,000 tonnes of earth, enough to fill Wembley Stadium 19 times.
On the wider front, the NEPC says that developing new extraction infrastructure is slow and often risks worsening environmental and social harms. In the Baotou region of China, described as the rare earth capital of the world, toxic waste has contaminated groundwater. This has ended the local ecosystem’s ability to support agriculture and cattle rearing and necessitated the resettlement of whole villages. “Such pollution impacts can last for decades or centuries,” the report notes.
Over at McKinsey, the green light is being signalled for greens to dig up the planet to save Mother Earth from topping up CO2 plant food in the atmosphere. McKinsey reveals that demand for seven minerals could double in the next five years. These comprise lithium, cobalt, nickel, dysprosium, terbium, neodymium and praseodymium. Each is noted to serve specific functions in “clean” energy applications. Lithium demand could face a 700% surge. Significant shortfalls are forecast across multiple minerals by 2030. Supply of dysprosium – used in magnets for EVs and wind turbines – and terbium – useful in display electronics – could fall 75% below demand. Lithium, ubiquitous in batteries, may see its production targets fall by 40%.
Nowhere do the figures remotely add up. Indeed it is hard to comprehend the level of stupidity involved in those who plan the Net Zero disaster with no idea where the materials will come from or the costs involved. McKinsey writes of a significant scale-up of extraction but the energy transition is said to be in its early stages with “only an estimated 10% of required deployment of low-emission technologies by 2050 achieved in most areas”. In other words, it can only get worse.
There are also concerns about the geographic concentration of critical materials affecting the resilience of supply chains. The Democratic Republic of the Congo produces 75% of cobalt, while China processes 60% of all rare earth elements. Again to use other words, we must hope that greens don’t develop a conscience about child mining labour in the DRC, while the rest of us must desist from making disobliging remarks about the Chinese Communist Party.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Public Announcement: “The Net Zero train arriving at Platform 1 is about to smash into the buffers. We advise passengers to stand well clear and make alternative transport arrangements”.
If this was true
What is this, Andy? Li2CO3 global production?
And if the electric utopia is so clean and green, why not open cast mine for lithium and cobalt in the UK? Lead the world in self sufficiency!..No..
Let’s leave that bit to kids in africa and south America and try not to mention it!
I hope raving hypocrite Miliband burns in hell!
We probably haven’t got those ores in commercially viable quantities, but I don’t know tbh.
In which case if you can’t produce it yourself why expect other countries and peoples to do it for you?
This is colonialism at its peak!
Lithium and cobalt aren’t called rare earth metals because they’re rare, unlike iron, aluminium or coal they do not exist inside a rich ore or a seam, they are very abundant but they do not occur in quantity in any given area they are dispersed throughout earth’s crust so you have to dig up a lot of earth just to get a small amount of these metals
There’s a Lithium mine in Cornwall.
“Cornish Lithium secures £53.6m to open first mine for the metal in Britain”
And that’s why!
What I described is fact, don’t fall for the hype!
Along with His Hypocritical Majesty of Windsor.
The intention is that we won’t have cars. Sorry, I mean we plebs won’t have cars. The ‘green’ elites will then be able to travel in their cars on gloriously traffic-free roads.
In which case I will welcome many more bus lanes and the reduction to single narrow lanes for limousines. However I expect in reality that existing bus lanes will be converted to mostly empty Zil lanes and the buses can contend with electric bikes and horse drawn carts for the rest of the road.
Horses produce methane, so the carts will have to be pulled by people.
Apparently some human farts contain methane also, especially if they eat meat, so cart pulling will be down to vegans and vegetarians.
The average human body produces about 0.35 litres of methane per day through breath and flatus.
Humans contribute 60% of annual methane emissions, contributing to 25% of annual global warming [Source] Professor Google
Clearly we should all…Go self flatulate.
Horses create other, solid, emissions, that were a problem around 1900, a potentially knee deep problem.
Don’t people produce methane as well?
Oh they also produce Co2 don’t they?
The roads will turn into cart tracks as there won’t be any money to repair them with our Zero Economy. You can’t tax businesses that don’t exist or tax people with no jobs or assets.
‘Will turn into’?… already are in places around here!!
Wanna bet?
Be careful what you wish for. One conclusion, of our overlords, would be to reduce the number of EV’s produced and then only allow them to be taxi/rental vehicles. No EV should be left idle once charged and that would be a more efficient use of rare minerals (well unless it is allocated for the use of one of our l overlords or the predatory ruling class).
Have you seen this? Prof. PAUL CHRISTENSEN Electric Vehicle Battery Fires SUBSCRIBE NOW – YouTube
I fully understand the issue though I had not see that video before. The car manufacturers have been handed a poison chalice – this issue is caused by ‘the state’ pushing this whole faux CO2 driven warming nonscience agenda and yet the car manufactures are going to foot the bill (along with insurance companies and the public).
The Zero in Net Zero is the amount of energy that will be available to Humans to continue and develop prosperous economies.
It is about the immiseration and impoverishment of Humanity by fanatics assisted by grifters, fraudsters and the power-hungry and nothing whatsoever to do with the absurdity, “saving” the Planet.
This should be clear to everybody by now.
Yet today an ideologically motivated budget announced more bribes and coercion for the uptake of electric vehicles. When will governments be influenced by reality rather than fantasy that lets them get a little gold star on their lapels from the phony planet savers at the UN?
You have to laugh – in the budget they announced another £400m iirc for fixing potholes, describing it as a positive way to improve people’s environment etc… and in next breath, talk about funding £22bn to complete the pointless and energy wasting task of removing co2 from the atmosphere…
Double energy consumption for EVs to go from 60 to 75mph? Well then, in addition to the 20mph urban zones we shall have a new national speed limit of 50 or 60mph. Killing motoring one cut at a time.
I don’t ever recall a grassroots organisation asking for electric cars. Certainly not some Ponzi Lithium scheme. I remember as a child a vehicle called the Sinclair C5. It was a hybrid of a car, bicycle, motorbike. In some ways quite beautiful in terms of its audacity and humility but it was ridiculed. One good thing about the Brits is that they never seemed to fall for it. Not many electric cars in England compared to other places.
As a youth, I made little aeroplanes out of balsa wood and tissue paper. They were powered with big rubber bands wound up using the propeller.
Maybe our Beloved Uniparty Leaders could invest more tax money to develop this magic technology for cars?
Will Malaysia be able to sell us enough rubber for the rubber bands?
We could develop the technology by using all the electricity solar panels produce whilst we sleep, to drive little electric motors to wind up the rubber bands.
Looks like a better idea than EVs.
Why don’t all these economic clods stop meddling. This article all but references Soviet-esq 5 year plans. Leave things to markets and all will improve naturally.
Markets won’t help, if populated by sheep.
And it sums the whole shit show up in one article
I guess those child slaves in the Congo will just have to dig harder, longer and over a wider area.
I’m sure his Hypocritical Majesty of Windsor will approve.
Hypocritical alleged majesty
There seems to be a giant elephant trumpeting in the corner of the room of this article. It’s all about, apparently, diverting the minerals from cars to buses and trucks, but don’t the green morons also want all diesel banned in boats and aviation fuel in planes, replacing them with electric power? Where is that coming from?? Ok, marine can go back to sails but don’t expect any shipment of food, especially frozen, that way, but what about short haul ferries etc. They won’t work with sails.
“Significant shortfalls are forecast across multiple minerals by 2030”
That date spookily coincides with a certain “agenda 2030” in plain view and obvious to anyone who’s looking, currently running at full steam ahead.
Also, what a timely coincidence for the ’15 minute city’ ULEZ etc agenda being relentlessly rolled (in lockstep?) out by local councils all around the country.
Something tells me this was all known in advance. Nudge nudge. 😉
Conspiracy theorist, moi?
So cut to the chase. It ain’t going to happen, it was a stupid idea in the first place
But how do we stop it bankrupting us before it fails? That is after all the plan.