Potential metal requirement of active materials in lithium-ion battery cells of electric vehicles and its impact on reserves: Focus on Europe

Bálint Simon, Saskia Ziemann and Marcel Weil

Resources, Conservation & Recycling, 2015, vol. 104, issue PA, 300-310

Abstract: Shifting of motorized mobility toward electric propulsion has become an inevitable development direction in vehicle technology in the last few years. It raises some important questions from environmentally consciousness point of view. One of these aspects is the demand and availability of raw materials. Recent papers and studies on raw material availability are relating to a narrow topic, for example, focusing only on lithium in global consideration, or take into consideration an average metal content of batteries. Present paper makes a step toward expanding information on net metal demand of battery cell active materials and metal reserves focusing on Europe, as one of the world largest economy doing large effort to become world leader in electric mobility. Five potential cell chemistries were identified based on research trends and future expectations of researcher, car and battery manufacturers. Furthermore, a potential share of battery- and electric vehicle types in hypothetical car fleet was proposed, as well. Lithium, cobalt, manganese and nickel requirement and European reserves were examined. Present study pointed out that the potential share of electric mobility in road traffic of the European Union had a detectable, but insignificant impact on global metal production and reserves. In the case of a hypothetical European production of future traction battery cells, shortage in European lithium and nickel reserves might be expectable at around 2025. Demand on cobalt and manganese are found to be far below the available European reserves.

Keywords: Lithium-ion battery cell; Electric vehicle; Lithium; Transition metals; Reserves (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921344915300458
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:recore:v:104:y:2015:i:pa:p:300-310

DOI: 10.1016/j.resconrec.2015.07.011

Access Statistics for this article

Resources, Conservation & Recycling is currently edited by Ming Xu

More articles in Resources, Conservation & Recycling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kai Meng ().