WSJ: Automakers get into mining.
WSJ: Automakers get into mining.
When General Motors began outlining plans in 2020 to fully switch to electric vehicles, it didn’t account for one critical factor: Many of the battery minerals needed to fulfill its plans were still in the ground.
“I remember seeing a report from our raw-materials team at the time saying, ‘There is plenty of lithium out there. There is plenty of nickel’,” said Sham Kunjur, an industrial engineer now in charge of securing the raw materials for GM’s batteries. “We will buy them from the open market.”
GM executives soon came to discover how off the mark those projections were, and now Mr. Kunjur’s 40-person team is scouring the globe for these minerals.
“Why Magical Thinking isn’t Whimsical” or “No Shit, Sherlock” would also have been serviceable titles for this article.
If 3 million cars are sold in the US each year, and each car needed a 100 pounds of lithium for the battery, that’s 300 million pounds of lithium needed each year. That’s a shitload. Before we switch to electric cars, someone should be thinking this through.
Those cars also need a shitload of electricity. The US doesn’t have a lot of surplus generating capacity and we build a new nuclear power plant about every 10 years.
Not paying attention to the basic requirements prior to a big policy shift isn’t a clever way to induce technical advance. It’s a way to insure that the general population will live a life that is needlessly frustrating and expensive.