NHM Report - Academic spreading Project Fear?

[bigdog3]

Surely this information can't be correct. Is it a hoax or are these academics just badly informed?

5th June 2019
A letter authored by Natural History Museum Head of Earth Sciences Prof Richard Herrington and fellow expert members of SoS MinErals (an interdisciplinary programme of NERC-EPSRC-Newton-FAPESP funded research) has today been delivered to the Committee on Climate Change. The letter explains that to meet UK electric car targets for 2050 we would need to produce just under two times the current total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production.

A 20% increase in UK-generated electricity would be required to charge the current 252.5 billion miles to be driven by UK cars.

Last month, the Committee on Climate Change published a report ‘Net Zero: The UK’s Contribution to Stopping Global Warming’ which concluded that ‘net zero is necessary, feasible and cost effective.’ As a major scientific research institution and authority on the natural world, the Natural History Museum supports the pressing need for a major reduction in carbon emissions to address further catastrophic consequences of climate change. Using its scientific expertise and vast collection of geological specimens, the Museum is collaborating with leading researchers to identify resource and environmental implications of the transition to green energy technologies including electric cars.

A letter which outlines these challenges was delivered to Baroness Brown, who chairs the Adaption Sub-Committee of the Committee on Climate Change.

Prof Richard Herrington says: “The urgent need to cut CO2 emissions to secure the future of our planet is clear, but there are huge implications for our natural resources not only to produce green technologies like electric cars but keep them charged.

“Over the next few decades, global supply of raw materials must drastically change to accommodate not just the UK’s transformation to a low carbon economy, but the whole world’s. Our role as scientists is to provide the evidence for how best to move towards a zero-carbon economy – society needs to understand that there is a raw material cost of going green and that both new research and investment is urgently needed for us to evaluate new ways to source these. This may include potentially considering sources much closer to where the metals are to be used."

The challenges set out in the letter are:
The metal resource needed to make all cars and vans electric by 2050 and all sales to be purely battery electric by 2035. To replace all UK-based vehicles today with electric vehicles (not including the LGV and HGV fleets), assuming they use the most resource-frugal next-generation NMC 811 batteries, would take 207,900 tonnes cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE), at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium, in addition to 2,362,500 tonnes copper. This represents, just under two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production during 2018. Even ensuring the annual supply of electric vehicles only, from 2035 as pledged, will require the UK to annually import the equivalent of the entire annual cobalt needs of European industry.

The worldwide impact: If this analysis is extrapolated to the currently projected estimate of two billion cars worldwide, based on 2018 figures, annual production would have to increase for neodymium and dysprosium by 70%, copper output would need to more than double and cobalt output would need to increase at least three and a half times for the entire period from now until 2050 to satisfy the demand.

Energy cost of metal production: This choice of vehicle comes with an energy cost too. Energy costs for cobalt production are estimated at 7000-8000 kWh for every tonne of metal produced and for copper 9000 kWh/t. The rare-earth energy costs are at least 3350 kWh/t, so for the target of all 31.5 million cars that requires 22.5 TWh of power to produce the new metals for the UK fleet, amounting to 6% of the UK’s current annual electrical usage. Extrapolated to 2 billion cars worldwide, the energy demand for extracting and processing the metals is almost 4 times the total annual UK electrical output.

Energy cost of charging electric cars: There are serious implications for the electrical power generation in the UK needed to recharge these vehicles. Using figures published for current EVs (Nissan Leaf, Renault Zoe), driving 252.5 billion miles uses at least 63 TWh of power. This will demand a 20% increase in UK generated electricity.

Challenges of using ‘green energy’ to power electric cars: If wind farms are chosen to generate the power for the projected two billion cars at UK average usage, this requires the equivalent of a further years’ worth of total global copper supply and 10 years’ worth of global neodymium and dysprosium production to build the windfarms.

Solar power is also problematic – it is also resource hungry; all the photovoltaic systems currently on the market are reliant on one or more raw materials classed as “critical” or “near critical” by the EU and/ or US Department of Energy (high purity silicon, indium, tellurium, gallium) because of their natural scarcity or their recovery as minor-by-products of other commodities. With a capacity factor of only ~10%, the UK would require ~72GW of photovoltaic input to fuel the EV fleet; over five times the current installed capacity. If CdTe-type photovoltaic power is used, that would consume over thirty years of current annual tellurium supply.

Both these wind turbine and solar generation options for the added electrical power generation capacity have substantial demands for steel, aluminium, cement* and glass.

The co-signatories, like Prof Herrington are part of SoS MinErals, an interdisciplinary programme of NERC-EPSRC-Newton-FAPESP funded research focusing on the science needed to sustain the security of supply of strategic minerals in a changing environment. This programme falls under NERC's sustainable use of natural resources (SUNR) strategic theme. They are:
Professor Adrian Boyce, Professor of Applied Geology at The Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre
Paul Lusty, Team Leader for Ore Deposits and Commodities at British Geological Survey
Dr Bramley Murton, Associate Head of Marine Geosciences at the National Oceanography Centre
Dr Jonathan Naden, Science Coordination Team Lead of NERC SoS MinErals Programme, British Geological Society
Professor Stephen Roberts, Professor of Geology, School of Ocean and Earth Science, University of Southampton
Associate Professor Dan Smith, Applied and Environmental Geology, University of Leicester
Professor Frances Wall, Professor of Applied Mineralogy at Camborne School of Mines, University of Exeter
June 2019

* Major source of CO2 emissions

[rxe]

One would assume that the academics are well informed and can add up.

It does make sense though. Current cars are made of stuff that is produced in vast quantities and has been since about the 1920. Want a million tons of steel? No problem. It's also very recyclable, and the process are in place to do so (tip old car into blast furnace, new steel comes out).

The proposal on the table is to switch (at enormous scale) to a bunch of technologies and materials that have far less industrial heritage behind them. If you want 200,000 tonnes of Cobalt delivered, tough, you can't have it. The entire worlds supply is being consumed already making stuff and it is expensive. Recycling the current uses is really hard - small amounts in massively complex structures such as mobile phone PCBs.

So - are we doomed. No. We're quite cunning and we will either find new sources of materials, get far better at recycling the ones we do have or modifty the technologies so that they don't need the exotic materials. Probably all three.

What they are pointing is out is that simply building "gigafactories" is not the answer. Doesn't matter if Elon has massive manufacturing capability if he can't get the raw materials. If this plan is to succeed, then there needs to be a radical change in the technologies we are planning to use.

[Daaaveee]

Looks like they are making some rather strange comparisons. They talk about replacing 2 billion cars worldwide and that requiring 4 years of the UKs energy output to extract and process the metals... I don't think the UK is going to be producing 2 billion cars in that short of a time period so it doesn't seem that relevant?

Do they provide any alternatives or should we just carry on burning fossil fuels? Or is the alternative to stop driving? I mean reducing our car usage definitely needs to happen but that's not going to be easy either.

Edited by Daaaveee on Tuesday 20th August 11:41

[SWoll]

That was my take also, lots of numbers being thrown around but no real sense to the comparisons being made between yearly/2035/2050, UK/Worldwide etc.

No axe to grind either way but just wish things were a lot more clear and didn't seem quite so disingenuous in order to generate a headline.

[rxe]

They’re simply putting it in terms that make sense.

You could have a complex formula about uptake of EVs on current technology and the point at which it consumes more than our fraction of the worlds supply - which would be error prone and incomprehensible. Or you can say “if we’re going to have everyone driving EVs, at the current utilisation, and the latest current technology, then for the UK alone, you’re going to have to mark out a year’s global supply of a particular material. It doesn’t take a great extrapolation to realise that France will also need a years supply, so will Germany, and the USA will probably need 10 years supply. And all this out of a supply that is fully used making stuff today.

I suspect their intention is this:

- To make it clear that a simplistic “everyone will be in EVs by 2050 or whatever” is a bit daft.

- There needs to be some technical breakthrough that allows us to make magnets, and batteries of cheap abundant stuff (investment needed).

- The end solution will be far more pluralistic than some people think. In the absence of some technological break through, does it make any sense at all to switch low uses of cars (or anything else) to electricity? The correct answer may be to focus on “bang for the buck” and utilisation of scarce resource. Is a battery pack better used in a truck, doing 1000 miles a day, or in somebody’s car doing 10 miles a day?

[Dave Hedgehog]

There’s to many of us, 80% have to go

interesting after all this we only need a 20% increase in power generation

bauxite mining and processing into aluminium is also pretty terrible but they all pretty minor compared to the impact of extracting fossil fuels

What ever is driving us about in 2050 will be unrecognisable in just about every respect to what we use now. Tech is changing so quickly. Look at phones and TVs, my phone has more processing power than most laptops and my tv is 2mm thick yet has a. 65” display. This was the stuff of fantasy 20 years ago.

Edited by Dave Hedgehog on Tuesday 20th August 13:12

[bigdog3]

Dave Hedgehog said:

There’s to too many of us, 80% have to go

Too many even without the exploding population in rapidly developing (and emitting) Africa and Asia.

Dave Hedgehog said:

interesting after all this we only need a 20% increase in power generation

Because cars are only a relatively small energy user and emissions generator, but they're an easy target.

[kambites]

bigdog3 said:

Because cars are only a relatively small energy user and emissions generator, but they're an easy target.

Globally, transport accounts for about 16% of man-made CO2 emissions, of which about 60% is from cars, which makes them about 10% of the global total. In the UK, about 33% of CO2 emissions are from transport, of which cars again make up about 60%; so about 20% of the UK total.

Of course that's only measuring tailpipe emissions, it doesn't include the energy used to extract and refine the fuels, or the energy used to produce cars themselves.

[Frimley111R]

Interesting but nothing that wasn't obvious before tbh. By 2050 I am sure we'll have worked out what other ways we can generate electricity or store it using cheaper materials. There are a great many ideas in the background. This article really assumes little/no change in the market place in terms of efficiencies and new tech.

[bigdog3]

kambites said:

Globally, transport accounts for about 16% of man-made CO2 emissions, of which about 60% is from cars, which makes them about 10% of the global total. In the UK, about 33% of CO2 emissions are from transport, of which cars again make up about 60%; so about 20% of the UK total.

This reference indicates that Light-Duty Vehicles including vans, pick-ups, cars and motorcycles contribute 9% to global anthropogenic CO2. Some light-duty commercial vehicles run very high mileage (>500 miles/day)

https://theicct.org/blogs/staff/a-world-of-thought...

[bigdog3]

Frimley111R said:

Interesting but nothing that wasn't obvious before tbh. By 2050 I am sure we'll have worked out what other ways we can generate electricity or store it using cheaper materials. There are a great many ideas in the background. This article really assumes little/no change in the market place in terms of efficiencies and new tech.

Typically power stations take 20 years to build. We've got 10 years to invent and develop this new technology.

[kambites]

bigdog3 said:

This reference indicates that Light-Duty Vehicles including vans, pick-ups, cars and motorcycles contribute 9% to global anthropogenic CO2. Some light-duty commercial vehicles run very high mileage (>500 miles/day)

That appears to be form 2014. The figures I was looking at were 2018, although I have no idea whether "cars" included light goods vehicles; I don't think it specified.

[kambites]

bigdog3 said:

Typically power stations take 20 years to build. We've got 10 years to invent and develop this new technology.

We are, we're paying the Chinese to build us two nuclear power stations and then charge us twice the market rate to us them.

[300bhp/ton]

bigdog3 said:

Surely this information can't be correct. Is it a hoax or are these academics just badly informed?

5th June 2019
A letter authored by Natural History Museum Head of Earth Sciences Prof Richard Herrington and fellow expert members of SoS MinErals (an interdisciplinary programme of NERC-EPSRC-Newton-FAPESP funded research) has today been delivered to the Committee on Climate Change. The letter explains that to meet UK electric car targets for 2050 we would need to produce just under two times the current total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production.

A 20% increase in UK-generated electricity would be required to charge the current 252.5 billion miles to be driven by UK cars.

Last month, the Committee on Climate Change published a report ‘Net Zero: The UK’s Contribution to Stopping Global Warming’ which concluded that ‘net zero is necessary, feasible and cost effective.’ As a major scientific research institution and authority on the natural world, the Natural History Museum supports the pressing need for a major reduction in carbon emissions to address further catastrophic consequences of climate change. Using its scientific expertise and vast collection of geological specimens, the Museum is collaborating with leading researchers to identify resource and environmental implications of the transition to green energy technologies including electric cars.

A letter which outlines these challenges was delivered to Baroness Brown, who chairs the Adaption Sub-Committee of the Committee on Climate Change.

Prof Richard Herrington says: “The urgent need to cut CO2 emissions to secure the future of our planet is clear, but there are huge implications for our natural resources not only to produce green technologies like electric cars but keep them charged.

“Over the next few decades, global supply of raw materials must drastically change to accommodate not just the UK’s transformation to a low carbon economy, but the whole world’s. Our role as scientists is to provide the evidence for how best to move towards a zero-carbon economy – society needs to understand that there is a raw material cost of going green and that both new research and investment is urgently needed for us to evaluate new ways to source these. This may include potentially considering sources much closer to where the metals are to be used."

The challenges set out in the letter are:
The metal resource needed to make all cars and vans electric by 2050 and all sales to be purely battery electric by 2035. To replace all UK-based vehicles today with electric vehicles (not including the LGV and HGV fleets), assuming they use the most resource-frugal next-generation NMC 811 batteries, would take 207,900 tonnes cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE), at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium, in addition to 2,362,500 tonnes copper. This represents, just under two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production during 2018. Even ensuring the annual supply of electric vehicles only, from 2035 as pledged, will require the UK to annually import the equivalent of the entire annual cobalt needs of European industry.

The worldwide impact: If this analysis is extrapolated to the currently projected estimate of two billion cars worldwide, based on 2018 figures, annual production would have to increase for neodymium and dysprosium by 70%, copper output would need to more than double and cobalt output would need to increase at least three and a half times for the entire period from now until 2050 to satisfy the demand.

Energy cost of metal production: This choice of vehicle comes with an energy cost too. Energy costs for cobalt production are estimated at 7000-8000 kWh for every tonne of metal produced and for copper 9000 kWh/t. The rare-earth energy costs are at least 3350 kWh/t, so for the target of all 31.5 million cars that requires 22.5 TWh of power to produce the new metals for the UK fleet, amounting to 6% of the UK’s current annual electrical usage. Extrapolated to 2 billion cars worldwide, the energy demand for extracting and processing the metals is almost 4 times the total annual UK electrical output.

Energy cost of charging electric cars: There are serious implications for the electrical power generation in the UK needed to recharge these vehicles. Using figures published for current EVs (Nissan Leaf, Renault Zoe), driving 252.5 billion miles uses at least 63 TWh of power. This will demand a 20% increase in UK generated electricity.

Challenges of using ‘green energy’ to power electric cars: If wind farms are chosen to generate the power for the projected two billion cars at UK average usage, this requires the equivalent of a further years’ worth of total global copper supply and 10 years’ worth of global neodymium and dysprosium production to build the windfarms.

Solar power is also problematic – it is also resource hungry; all the photovoltaic systems currently on the market are reliant on one or more raw materials classed as “critical” or “near critical” by the EU and/ or US Department of Energy (high purity silicon, indium, tellurium, gallium) because of their natural scarcity or their recovery as minor-by-products of other commodities. With a capacity factor of only ~10%, the UK would require ~72GW of photovoltaic input to fuel the EV fleet; over five times the current installed capacity. If CdTe-type photovoltaic power is used, that would consume over thirty years of current annual tellurium supply.

Both these wind turbine and solar generation options for the added electrical power generation capacity have substantial demands for steel, aluminium, cement* and glass.

The co-signatories, like Prof Herrington are part of SoS MinErals, an interdisciplinary programme of NERC-EPSRC-Newton-FAPESP funded research focusing on the science needed to sustain the security of supply of strategic minerals in a changing environment. This programme falls under NERC's sustainable use of natural resources (SUNR) strategic theme. They are:
Professor Adrian Boyce, Professor of Applied Geology at The Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre
Paul Lusty, Team Leader for Ore Deposits and Commodities at British Geological Survey
Dr Bramley Murton, Associate Head of Marine Geosciences at the National Oceanography Centre
Dr Jonathan Naden, Science Coordination Team Lead of NERC SoS MinErals Programme, British Geological Society
Professor Stephen Roberts, Professor of Geology, School of Ocean and Earth Science, University of Southampton
Associate Professor Dan Smith, Applied and Environmental Geology, University of Leicester
Professor Frances Wall, Professor of Applied Mineralogy at Camborne School of Mines, University of Exeter
June 2019

* Major source of CO2 emissions

On what basis do you dispute the facts and figures?

[bigdog3]

kambites said:

bigdog3 said:

This reference indicates that Light-Duty Vehicles including vans, pick-ups, cars and motorcycles contribute 9% to global anthropogenic CO2. Some light-duty commercial vehicles run very high mileage (>500 miles/day)

That appears to be form 2014. The figures I was looking at were 2018, although I have no idea whether "cars" included light goods vehicles; I don't think it specified.

Getting reliable data is difficult. My interpretation is that cars contribute no more than 5% to global anthropogenic CO2 and possibly less

Do you have your 2018 data reference please?

[kambites]

bigdog3 said:

Do you have your 2018 data reference please?

Err, it was on google somewhere! I've no idea of its accuracy but most pages seemed to roughly agree so it seemed reasonable.

Where does your 5% figure come from?

Ultimately I guess what matters to me, is my own household's direct footprint, of which roughly a third is fueling our cars. I'm happy that it will make a big enough difference to our household emissions that when we come to replace our family car, it would be a point in favour of an EV. There's also enough other points in favour of EVs that it's highly likely we'll go down that route. It's certainly the easiest way to achieve the biggest drop in CO2 emissions for us.

Edited by kambites on Tuesday 20th August 15:12

[bigdog3]

300bhp/ton said:

On what basis do you dispute the facts and figures?

Rhetorically it goes against the creed

[rxe]

Frimley111R said:

Interesting but nothing that wasn't obvious before tbh. By 2050 I am sure we'll have worked out what other ways we can generate electricity or store it using cheaper materials. There are a great many ideas in the background. This article really assumes little/no change in the market place in terms of efficiencies and new tech.

Market level change takes a long time. There are countless cool battery innovations in labs at the moment - but none are coming to market because getting over the "can I build it at scale, will it last, is it dangerous" hump is really hard.

A lot of people will point to computers and suggest that the pace of innovation is really fast - and it is in consumer terms. The underlying innovation is lithography, and what it is allowing designers to do is pack more components on a die because they can be made ever smaller. We're actually reaching the limits of that right now, with 7 nm separation. When I bought my first computer (an 80386), the size was 1500 nm. It's taken us 60 years to come from the invention of the transistor to the pinnacle of that technology - and as of now, we're pretty much out of road, hence the interest in quantum processing.

TL:DR - doing hard stuff with energy storage and generation won't happen as fast as we think. That's what these people are pointing out: just building more of what we build today is unsustainable.