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We May Not Have Enough Minerals to Even Meet Electric Car Demand

posted by martyb on Thursday November 02 2017, @12:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the getting-a-charge-out-of-minerals-speculation dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Will there be enough to build all the electric vehicles?

Global demand for cobalt and nickel, two of the essential elements in electric car batteries, has never been higher. But where do all those metals come from? And do we even have enough for our electrified future? The answers to those questions are getting increasingly complex.

Reuters and Bloomberg both have stories out today on the metals and, as Reuters reports, while demand for nickel keeps increasing, half the world's nickel supply is too low in quality to use for car batteries.

All of which is going to have seismic effect on the world's suppliers. In short: There will be winners and losers, and the winners will be the ones with the highest-grade stuff—not unlike, I suppose, the illicit drugs market.

Do you feel fearful, uncertain, and doubtful about the future of electric cars?

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  • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:45PM (3 children)

    by Freeman (732) on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:45PM (#591143) Journal

    1800 miles may not seem like a lot, until you start thinking about drilling or extracting anything at that depth. It's approximately 1800 miles from San Antonio, Texas to New York City. That would be a feat of engineering to dig a tunnel at a reasonable depth to connect the two. When you talk about drilling "straight down" for that same distance, you also have to deal with crazy amounts of pressure and heat. The deepest hole drilled was only about 7 miles down and 9 inches around. We'd need some super "Unobtainium" kind of material / advancement / Hollywood style leap in drilling "science" to get to those kinds of depths.

    --
    Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
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  • (Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:55PM (1 child)

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:55PM (#591151) Journal

    Perhaps I should have used some irony tags...

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by deimtee on Friday November 03 2017, @02:09PM

      by deimtee (3272) on Friday November 03 2017, @02:09PM (#591670) Journal

      We've got plenty of irony. It's nickely, cobalty and lithiumy we need to find.

      --
      200 million years is actually quite a long time.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:57PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:57PM (#591336) Journal

    We'd need some super "Unobtainium" kind of material / advancement / Hollywood style leap in drilling "science" to get to those kinds of depths.

    Of course you need Unobtainium. Here's how to do it. [imdb.com] ;-)

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.