The World Does Not Have Enough Lithium and Cobalt to Replace All Batteries Every 10 Years

Influential elites are either in denial about the horrifying costs and consequences of Net Zero – witness last Wednesday’s substantial vote against fracking British gas in the House of Commons – or busy scooping up the almost unlimited amounts of money currently on offer for promoting pseudoscience, climate scares, and investing in impractical green technologies.

Until the lights start to go out, and heating fails, those elites are unlikely to pay much attention to a recent 1,000 page alternative energy investigation, undertaken for a Finnish Government agency by Associate Professor Simon Michaux.

Referring to the UK's 2050 Net-Zero target, Michaux states there is “simply not enough time, nor enough resources to do this by 2050”

One Example Where Net-Zero Cannot be Achieved

Michaux notes, “in theory”, there are enough global reserves of nickel and lithium, if they are exclusively used to produce batteries for electric vehicles. But there is not enough already-discovered cobalt, and more will need to be discovered.

It gets much worse.

EV battery packs have a useful working life of only 8 to 10 years, so about 150 million replacement EVs will need to be produced each year.
It make no economic sense to spend $20,000 to replace a battery pack in an 8-y-old EV that had an original cost of, say $35,000 to $45,000

“This is unlikely to be practical, which suggests the whole EV battery solution needs to be re-thought, and a new solution needs to be developed that is not so mineral intensive,” he says.

All of these problems occur in finding a mass of lithium-ion batteries weighting 286.6 million metric ton.

But a “power buffer” of another 2.5 billion mt of grid-scale battery systems is required to provide a four-week back-up for weather-dependent, variable, intermittent, wind and solar electricity.

Of course, such mineral quantities are not available from global mineral reserves.

Michaux states: "It is not clear how such an extremely expensive wind/solar buffer could be delivered with any alternative system.
Remember, the utility-grade, buffer battery systems would last about 15 years!!

THIS IS A HUGE COST THAT SHOULD BE ADDED TO THE COST OF WIND AND SOLAR

THOSE BUFFER BATTERIES WOULD ALSO COUNTERACT THE UP/DOWN OUTPUT OF WIND AND SOLAR, AND WOULD PROVIDE ELECTRICITY WHEN MOTHER NATURE’s WIND AND SOLAR ARE INSUFFICIENT 

Any electricity charged into the battery would have about an 18 to 20 percent loss coming out of the battery, on an A to Z basis

Michaux sounds a clear warning message.

Current expectations are global industrial businesses will replace a complex industrial energy ecosystem that took more than a century to build.

It was built with the support of the highest calorifically dense source of energy the world has ever known (oil), in cheap abundant quantities, with easily available credit and seemingly unlimited mineral resources.

The replacement, he notes, needs to be done, while: 1) energy costs are near historic highs, 2) the world's financial systems saturated in debt, and 3) not enough minerals.

All of it has to be done within a few decades to "save the planet".

Based on his copious calculations, the author opines, that humongous task likely will not go as Net-Zero folks are dreaming about

Gloom/Doom 96-y-old Crackpot Pontificating 

Last Sunday, Sir David Attenborough concluded six episodes of pseudo-scientific, green-agitprop Frozen Planet II, by demanding the world embrace Net Zero, “no matter how challenging it may be”.

Net Zero is a political, centralized command/control project, the full horror of which is yet to be inflicted on the general population.

Lifestyle Adjustments 

Michaux is quite clear what it entails: “What may be required is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds, i.e., lifestyle changes, rationing, eating bugs, while freezing in the dark.
This implies a very different social contract, and a radically different system of governance to what is in place today.”

China as an Example

Of course, a radically different system of government is available in the People’s Republic of China, but here the position on Net Zero is a tad more nuanced.

Having lifted about a billion people out of starving poverty in the last 40 years, and become the workshop for an increasingly complacent Western world – almost all powered by fossil fuel ,and hydro, and nuclear power – the Holy Grail of the Net-Zero Quest does not seem so pressing.

Speaking to the Communist Party Congress earlier this week, President Xi Jinping sounded a note of caution and said: “prudence” would govern China’s efforts to peak and eventually zero-out CO2 emissions.

All of this would be in line with the principle of “getting the new before discarding the old”.

Meanwhile, China’s coal production is reported to have reached record levels, while the Chinese Congress was told oil and gas exploration/development will be expanded, as part of measures to ensure “energy security”.

Fossil Fuels Provide 85% of all World Energy

Michaux points out, nearly 85% of world energy comes from fossil fuel. By his calculations, the annual global production of non-fossil electricity will need to quadruple to 37,670.6 TWh/y.

In a recent report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), Professor Michael Kelly estimates, the UK electricity grid would have to expand by 2.7 times.

This will involve adding capacity at eight times the rate it has been added over the last 30 years.

If calculations are made for the need to rewire homes, streets, local substations and power lines to carry the new capacity, the extra cost will be nearly £1 trillion.

In another recent GWPF paper, the energy writer John Constable warned, the European Green Deal seems all but certain to break Europe’s economic and socio-political power, “rendering it a trivial and incapable backwater, reliant on – and subservient to – superior powers”.
The US, a superior power, with ample natural resources, is using NATO to weaken, not Russia, but Europe, which lacks natural resources.

History provides us with many examples of weak, or weakened, tribes being overrun by stronger tribes. In the animal kingdom it is known as natural evolution.

A 96-year old gloom and doom crackpot intones, “we have to pay any price to satisfy the new Net-Zero cult of the green god.”

Better cost estimates and more rational views have been available for decades.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

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