It’s not easy going greenhttps://aheadoftheherd.com/Newsletter/2019/Its-not-easy-going-green.htm As Kermit the Frog used to say, “It’s not easy being green.”. Or to paraphrase the affable muppet slightly, it’s not easy going green.
The modernization and electrification of our global transportation system will require a change hitherto unprecedented in the history of civilization. Not even the shift from horse and buggy to the crank-start Ford Model T can compete with what it will take to electrify the billion-plus cars on the planet’s roads.
For an idea of how far we have to go in meeting the challenge of an electrified global transportation system, we can start by looking at the United Kingdom.
The UK government has set a target of replacing all of the island nation’s 31.5 million cars by 2050. A team of scientists led by the Natural History Museum’s head of earth sciences, Professor Richard Herrington, took the government to task and calculated how much raw materials that number of EVs would require.
The researchers found that to build 31.5 million EVs would take a jaw-dropping 207,900 tonnes of cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate, at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium, and 2,362,500 tonnes of copper.
As reported in AutoExpress, that is almost twice the annual global supply of cobalt, nearly the total amount of neodymium produced each year and three quarters of the world’s lithium plus 2.362Mt of copper.
At AOTH we believe it's time for the world's players, and wannabes, to step up to the plate and lock up supply of critical minerals needed for batteries and magnets so necessary to move forward with the electrification of the global transportation system.
ttfn
nopoo