Just to hammer the point home. As the philosophers said:
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco,
This ain't no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey dovey,
I ain't got time for that now...
—Life During Wartime, Byrne/Frantz/Harrison/Weymouth
From Prospect Magazine, October 6:
China holds or processes almost all the materials we need to build batteries and other green technologies. It won’t be easy for the west to catch up
Legend has it that on a Tuesday morning in September 2010, a drunk Chinese fisherman changed the course of commodities history.
His trawler, the Minjinyu 5179, was floating off the coast of the Senkaku Islands, a group of uninhabited rocks in the disputed waters between Taiwan, China and Japan. It was one of several Chinese boats playing a game of geopolitical chicken: fishing in the rich but off-limits waters around the islands, before being chased away by the Japanese coastguard.
But on this morning, as the other boats fled the coastguard, the Minjinyu held fast, ramming the patrol boats. The Japanese detained the Chinese crew and its allegedly drunk captain, kicking off a major geopolitical incident that nearly led to the breakdown of diplomatic relations over the East China Sea.
A small collection of minerals appeared to get caught up in the fray. The term rare earth minerals refers to a set of 17 metallic elements with similar chemical properties: scandium, yttrium and a group of 15 others that sit together on the periodic table. They are a vital part of many high-tech devices—used in everything from smartphones to warheads—and at the time of the fracas in the East China Sea in 2010, China controlled up to 97 per cent of the trade. Over a third of the world’s known reserves were located in the country.
After the incident with the boat, China’s exports of rare earths to Japan dropped by 40 per cent in three months. The Chinese government denied it had retaliated by restricting exports to Japan, and some commodities traders blamed the slump on the financial crisis of the previous years. But the markets panicked. “Everyone thought that supplies were disrupted—and prices went sky high,” says Frances Wall, professor of applied mineralogy at the Camborne School of Mines at the University of Exeter. The outcome, in any case, was that Japan knew it needed to find other rare earth suppliers: “We haven’t put enough effort into risk management,” as the country’s trade minister said at the time.
A few governments and companies took note and began searching for new sources of rare earths in countries not facing brewing geopolitical crises. Japan started backing miners in Australia. Denmark searched for deposits in Greenland. British mining giant Anglo American investigated whether existing copper mines could yield rare earths too. But the attention was short-lived. When prices stabilised, the sense of urgency faded—even as tensions rose between China and its neighbours over Taiwan’s independence.
It was a mistake to move on. Rare earths are now produced more widely but nearly 90 per cent of processing to transform raw materials into useable products remains in China, meaning the supply chain remains almost entirely under the country’s control.
Meanwhile, rare earths have become even more valuable. They are no longer only in demand for use in devices like smartphones but, along with a host of other metals like lithium and cobalt (markets of which China also dominates), are crucial in the fight against climate change.
It is now clear that a successful energy transition will depend on a mining boom—on the extraction, in vast quantities, not only of rare earths, but of all kinds of metals and minerals known collectively as “technology minerals”. Copper is needed for wiring an electrified world. Wind turbines require steel. Electric vehicles use lithium and cobalt. Decarbonising the global economy will see our need for raw materials undergo a profound shift. “We’re changing from a world of fossil fuels to a world of metals,” says Wall.
Renewable energy production is inherently mineral-heavy compared to fossil fuel-based systems. A typical electric vehicle requires six times the amount of minerals needed for a conventional combustion engine car. Compared with a gas-fired power plant, an onshore wind plant needs nine times more minerals per unit of power generation capacity.
To reach net zero emissions by the middle of the century, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that six times more mineral inputs must be used in the energy system by 2040 compared with today. Demand for rare earths could increase three to seven times. Cobalt demand could multiply by between six and 30 times, and lithium demand by more than 40 times. The huge range in these figures, the IEA says, is a result of the precarity of national climate pledges: whether governments follow through on their promises to build more renewable energy infrastructure or not....
....MUCH MORE
Previously:
Battery Metals: "The Mineral Conflict Is Here"
"Hundreds of new mines required to meet 2030 battery metals demand — IEA report"
Europe Forsakes Russian Coal...
....for Colombian, Australian, South African, Kentuckian, Canadian, Indonesian....
Benchmark: "More than 300 new mines required to meet battery demand by 2035"
It's not going to happen on the scale required and the people pitching the substitution of electric vehicles for internal combustion power have known this for twenty years. Anyone with a calculator has known this for twenty years.
As we've pointed out it appears that the ICE vehicles will be forced off the road before there are replacements, in exactly the same way that the European energy crisis was created by making coal, natural gas and in Germany's case nuclear power generation, illegal before you have a replacement ready to go.
From industry data mavens, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, September 6....
And many, many more. If interested, use the 'search blog' box, upper left.
