" ... Germany will stop the sale of all new petrol and diesel cars from 2030, Scotland from 2032, and France and the UK from 2040.
... Governor Newsom ... issued an Executive Order in 2020 to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles in California by 2035.
A Tesla lithium EV battery weighs more than 1,000 pounds.
... such an EV battery typically contains about:
25 pounds of lithium,
30 pounds of cobalt,
60 pounds of nickel,
110 pounds of graphite,
90 pounds of copper,
Lithium brines typically contain less than 0.1% lithium, so that entails some 25,000 pounds of brines to get the 25 pounds of pure lithium.
Cobalt ore grades average about 0.1%, thus nearly 30,000 pounds of ore to get 30 pounds of cobalt.
Nickel ore grades average about 1%, thus about 6,000 pounds of ore to get 60 pounds of nickel.
Graphite ore is typically 10%, thus about 1,000 pounds per battery to get 100 pounds of graphite.
Copper at about 0.6% in the ore, thus about 25,000 pounds of ore per battery to get 90 pounds of copper.
... acquiring just these five elements to produce the 1,000-pound EV battery requires mining about 90,000 pounds of ore.
... one (also) needs to estimate the overburden, or the materials first dug up to get to the ore.
... overburden ranges from about 3 to 20 tons of earth removed to access each ton of ore.
This means that accessing about 90,000 pounds of ore requires digging and moving between 200,000 and over 1,500,000 pounds of earth—a rough average of more than 500,000 pounds of earth per battery.
According to Cambridge University Emeritus Professor of Technology Michael Kelly, replacing all the United Kingdom’s 32 million light duty vehicles with next-generation EVs would require huge quantities of materials to manufacture 32 million EV batteries:
more than 50 percent of the world’s annual production of copper.
200 percent of its annual cobalt.
75 percent yearly lithium carbonate output; and
nearly 100 percent of its entire annual production of neodymium.
... Combined worldwide car sales in 2019 were more than 65 million vehicles annually.
There are 1.2 billion vehicles on the world’s roads with projections of 2 billion by 2035.
Today, there are less than 8 million EV’s operating on the world’s highways.
If EV projections come to reality by 2035, 5 to 7 percent of the 2 billion vehicles would equate to 125 million EV’s on the world’s roads ...
... looking at the UK study of the materials required for only 32 million EV batteries, there may not be enough materials in the world to finish the EV conversion plans.
... a single digit penetration into the worlds projected 2 billion vehicles would also represent more than 125 BILLION pounds of lithium-ion batteries, just from those 125 million EV’s ... that will need to be disposed of in the decades ahead.