Assault and Batteries
The largest deposit of Lithium, currently 55% of the world’s known reserves, resides in Salar de Atacama, Chile. Disputes on water and water rights have the mining of these deposits completely stopped. The mining was disabled by a moratorium set by the Chilean Supreme Court.
The largest reserves of cobalt are located in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Much of the reserves are controlled by China and the Chinese Communist Party. The Congo has twice as much cobalt as the rest of the world combined. Child labor, as shown in the linked video, is absolutely unscrupulous and performed in insidious environments.
Early in February of 2022, I wrote about the federal cancellation of permits and mining leases for copper in the Maturi Deposit in a geological area known as the Duluth complex in northern Minnesota. With the federal government’s obsession to replace energy sources away from fossil fuels with renewable sources, as well as the demand for electric cars and the requirement that these will consume up to 10 times the amount of copper, one would think mining would be a rigid cornerstone in the government’s conversion scheme. Duplicitously, however, progressive politicians and fanatical environmentalists also loathe mining.
Indonesia and Australia have the largest reserves of nickel, accounting for more than 50% of the world’s supply, yet the mining industry is already talking about the need to begin a recycling program for this metal.
Understanding the location and quantity of minerals required for the production of batteries is of the utmost importance. This illustrates whether or not availability exists and in the case of some, supplies will become short, politically unavailable, or nonexistent. While major electric vehicle companies like Tesla continue to put emphasis on the global shortages of nickel, copper, and other electric-vehicle (EV) battery materials, the eco-politicians continue to call for the discontinuation of all vehicles with internal combustion engines by the year 2035.
Not including steel and plastics, the average Tesla battery requires 25 pounds of lithium, 30 pounds of cobalt, 44 pounds of manganese, 60 pounds of nickel, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum. Not including overburden, mining would excavate and then process 500,000 pounds of mineral-bearing earth to produce one single EV battery.
Naturally, the EV battery is simply a storage device that must be constantly recharged, using mostly fossil fuels because renewable energies, with their unreliability, cannot sustain requirements. If that is the amount of earth dug up and refined minerals for EV batteries, you can imagine the gargantuan volumes one must have to create batteries to assume the electrical load when nature fails to produce sufficient values of solar and wind for renewable energies.
It is extremely hypocritical that the environmental elite persistently talks about the future depletion of gas and oil reserves, but never the exhaustion of required minerals for renewable energy mechanisms. All of this proves that either they are stupid, ill-advised, or acknowledge among themselves that anthropogenic climate change is merely a political stratagem for perpetual political power.
The oft-used adage, “the devil is in the details”, is persistently neglected by those who market climate change or their fairytales in fixing the condition. The belief is that at some point, the vast majority of people will simply acquiesce to authoritarian, single-party nations and states.
I link a related article from the Mining Technology magazine entitled, “Mining industry wary about future of battery minerals, survey finds”