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DAVID BLACKMON: The One Simple Reason Electric Vehicles Are Doomed To Fail

December 31, 2023/in Elections, Energy, Environment, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Daily Caller

In a story that seems to be becoming increasingly common as time goes on, The Western Journal reported this week about a Canadian EV owner experiencing some massive sticker shock over the cost of replacing the damaged battery in his electric vehicle.

Now, those of us who have always driven internal combustion engine (ICE) cars have at one time or another been faced with big repair bills for some of those vehicles. I can remember spending $4,000 on a new radiator for a 10-year-old Infiniti QX 50 with 220,000 miles on it that I just couldn’t bear to part with several years back. I did finally retire that wonderful vehicle when faced with the prospect of a $6,000 tag for a rebuilt transmission.

So, all cars will eventually cost you or your insurance company big money to repair — no one is saying that’s unique to EVs. But where EVs are concerned, it’s the magnitude of the price for replacing a damaged or worn-out battery that is often quite eye-popping.

I wrote a story in September about a fellow in the U.S. deciding to junk his paid-off EV when he got an estimate of $30k to replace his battery. We now see frequent reports that auto insurance companies are charging higher rates for EVs than for comparable ICE cars due in large part to this extravagant battery replacement cost.

If you think that $30,000 is extravagant, well, get ready, because it apparently isn’t even close to the worst-case scenario. Per the Western Journal, a Canadian man, Kyle Hsu, paid roughly $55,000 Canadian ($41,583 US) in 2022 to buy a brand new Hyundai IONIQ 5. But, less than a year later, Mr. Hsu was involved in what seemed to be a minor accident resulting in superficial damage to his beautiful EV.

Unfortunately for Hsu, it turned out that the battery protector cover on his car’s undercarriage was warped, a problem that could in certain instances cause the battery to explode. This meant that he would have to replace his car’s battery pack in addition to fixing its structural damage. Hsu says he was shocked when the estimate to replace the battery came in at $61,000 Canadian, or about $46,000 in US dollars. That’s almost $6,000 more than he paid for the car when he purchased it brand new.

Even worse, because the damage was caused by an accident, the bill was not covered by the car’s warranty, leaving Hsu with the alternative of filing a claim with his insurance carrier. But the resulting insurance implications were enormous, with Mr. Hsu facing a rate increase of up to 50% if he filed the claim. His only other choice would be to foot the repair bill himself and now have over $87,000 US dollars invested in a $41,000 car.

This is insane. This is not sustainable. The EV industry simply cannot have stories like this one popping up with increasing frequency and hope to sustain growing demand for its products.

When you combine horror stories like this one with:

range anxiety that pops up any time the weather isn’t perfect;
the lack of charging infrastructure;
the unreliability of the infrastructure that does exist;
the non-recyclability of the battery materials;
the increasing restrictions on charging due to the massive load EVs place on the grid;
and all the other significant issues EV makers have yet to address,

You see an industry that is almost doomed to failure before it really gets up and running.

I frequently remind readers that EVs have been around since the 1880s. They are not a new idea in any sense of that word. If they were really the answer to displacing ICE cars at societal scale, it seems likely they would have already done so. What we see popping up with increasing frequency now in the form of stories like this one are simply manifestations of the reasons why that has not already happened.

EVs today are what they have always been: A niche product, a luxury item suitable to fill discreet purposes for the upper 5% or so elites in any society. The technology simply is not there yet to make them anything more than that.

AUTHOR

DAVID BLACKMON

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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The secret story behind the Green New Deal: Metals Needed for Carbon Neutrality in Short Supply

October 24, 2019/in Energy, Environment, News, Policy, Politics/by Institute for Energy Research

Solar panels, wind turbines, and electric car batteries are made from some of the most hard-to-get metals on earth— dysprosium, neodymium, manganese, cobalt, and lithium. According to UK scientists, the current annual global production of cobalt needs to double by 2050 to produce the electric vehicles required to just satisfy British climate targets. Another study found that if countries were to meet the Paris accord and keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, demand for cobalt and lithium would exceed the current supply by 2022 and 2023, respectively.

China leads the world in rare earth metal production (a group of 17 chemical elements), supplying 90 percent of the export market. The United States purchases 80 percent of its rare earth metals from China, despite having the resources to produce its own supply. These metals could be extracted profitably in the United States, but are not because of our restrictive and redundant environmental regulations.

Current Production, Reserves, and Prices for Major Metals

According to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, global production of rare earth metals in 2018 totalled 167 thousand metric tons, with China producing 72 percent of the world’s production. China also controls 38 percent of the world’s reserves, which total 117 million metric tons. China’s reserves are the largest at 44 million metric tons, followed by the United States and Brazil, each with 22 million metric tons, and Russia with 17 million metric tons.

Global production of graphite totals 896 thousand metric tons, with China supplying 71 percent. Graphite reserves total 307 million metric tons with China and Brazil each controlling 24 percent.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo produced the most cobalt in 2018 at 112 thousand metric tons—a 71 percent share of the 158 thousand metric tons produced. Cobalt reserves total 6.6 million metric tons, with the DR Congo controlling 52 percent. However, there are ongoing problems with environmental and child labor issues in the DR Congo; labor abuses linked to cobalt mining have been widely documented by human rights groups and by media organizations across the world.

Australia and Chile lead the world in lithium production with 27 million metric tons and 16 million metric tons, respectively, produced in 2018 from a total of 62 million metric tons. World reserves of lithium total almost 14 million metric tons with Chile controlling 58 percent.

Lithium prices set a record high in 2018 at $14,656 per metric ton—21 percent higher than in 2017. Cobalt prices totaled $72,923 per metric ton in 2018—30 percent higher than in 2017.

U.S. Dependence on Foreign Metals

China leads the world in producing and exporting minerals and metals, supplying many that are critical to U.S. manufacturing, technology and energy production, and national defense. Many critical metals are on U.S. federally-owned lands, including manganese, cobalt, nickel, graphite, aluminum, and several of the rare earth metals. The United States is 100 percent import-reliant for 18 minerals—14 of them are considered “critical” by the Department of Defense or the Department of the Interior.

The United States has a duplicative and inefficient system of regulatory permits and oversight that governs domestic mining. Generally, the U.S. mining industry is faced with a regulatory system that forces them to wait seven to 10 years to obtain a mining permit, compared to Canada and Australia where the process takes two to three years, which limits our nation’s ability to capitalize on our mineral wealth. The United States needs to retool our permitting process so that minerals from U.S. public lands can fuel our advanced energy, infrastructure, and manufacturing technologies, which would increase U.S. manufacturing and its position in the global economy and reduce our dependence on foreign imports.

Conclusion

The United States needs to develop its critical metals and remove its reliance on foreign imports, particularly from the Chinese, who are leaders in rare earth metals and graphite production. These metals are used in many technologies and in national defense systems. To become self-reliant the United States needs to modify its regulatory permitting system and oversight. The sooner we can remove our dependence on these critical metals from foreign interests as we did for oil and natural gas, the better our nation with be economically and militarily. Otherwise, we risk dependency on other international actors for minerals at much higher rates than the United States was ever dependent upon OPEC.

Further reading on the global supply of rare earth metals is available here.

Further reading on the environmental impacts of rare earth metal production in China is available here.