Volt Rush’ Review: Electric Cars, Money and Mines

How the push for green vehicles runs into battery-production blues

By Mark P. Mills. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He reviews the book Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson. Excerpts:

"the cost of automotive lithium batteries dwarfs the costs for silicon and steel combined. If EV aspirations are fulfilled, the next automotive supply-chain disruption—and there’s always going to be a next time—will center on battery materials."

"The world is going to build a lot of EVs, and to help make that possible, companies in Europe and the U.S. are furiously building dozens of gigafactories—Elon Musk’s term for massive EV battery factories. The upshot is that every $2 billion gigafactory will, over a decade of operation, purchase some $20 billion of battery minerals and materials. One might reasonably wonder: Purchase from where? And who benefits?"

"The battery-money gusher is not flowing into, but out of, Europe and the U.S., with the largest share going to Chinese refineries and upstream from there to mines—some in China, and most in places as far ranging as the Congo, Chile and Indonesia, with many owned by China."

"China, we note, has a larger market share in energy minerals than Saudi Arabia has in oil."

"The chapter “Dirty Nickel” begins with a statement from the ever-quotable Mr. Musk: “Please mine more nickel.” It then features one of Mr. Sanderson’s many environmental stories: In 2020, an accident at Russia’s Norilsk nickel mine—a key supplier to a Swedish battery factory—led to two million gallons of diesel fuel being spilled into the Siberian ecosystem."

"Mr. Sanderson describes an investigation into a China-owned nickel mine in Papua New Guinea that documented wanton, destructive disposal of massive amounts of mine waste, none of which “stopped [the mine] from operating and delivering nickel to China.” It bears noting that adding more nickel in the battery chemistry is one way to reduce the use of cobalt, shifting hypertrophied demands from one mineral to another. Meanwhile, even though the share of cobalt in the battery supply chain is shrinking, absolute demand is still soaring."

"building green machines (EVs, windmills, solar) requires an unprecedented 400% to 8,000% increase in the global supply of a dozen minerals, including nickel, copper, cobalt, lithium and rare earths. The world will need hundreds of new mines, each taking a decade or two to build. Just trying to meet that kind of growth will stress environmental ecosystems and fragile governments, and trigger unprecedented mineral-price inflation."

"a Chinese lithium refinery uses about two tons of coal to produce a ton of refined lithium. Numerous studies, including from VW and Volvo, reveal that emissions from the energy used to acquire and process lithium along with other battery materials means that an EV’s carbon footprint is bigger than a gasoline car until you’ve drive at least 50,000 miles."