Michaux sans batteries

  1. A quick recap
  2. Michaux Sans Batteries
  3. The batteries that ate the world!
  4. Metal production will take too long
  5. Total metals required and years to produce it all
  6. Doubling rates
  7. Conclusion?

A quick recap

On the first page we learned that Simon Michaux cherry-picks to create a straw-man I call “The Batteries that ate the world.” Here we’re going to work through some of his graphs and find out what happens if we replace those batteries with something else?

Michaux Sans Batteries

Here are some graphs from his 1000 page PDF and youtube presentation right here. Just look at the right hand column! You can see that in some cases his monster batteries require several orders of magnitude more material than the whole energy transition combined! EG: 4.3 BILLION tons of copper! 8.8 billion tonnes of graphite! That should indicate the kind of crazy straw-man we are dealing with. Also, right away we see that we’ve got to choose batteries that do not use copper, manganese, nickel, lithium, cobalt, and vanadium. That would be sodium.

The batteries that ate the world!

Metal production will take too long

Once Michaux has smuggled in the unnecessary 4 weeks of metal batteries that ate the world – boy doesn’t he love to labour the point about how long – at today’s mining rates – it would take to deliver all these metal batteries? He doesn’t allow for doubling rates. (More on doubling rates in my footnotes.)

Total metals required and years to produce it all

Anyway, the graphic above shows the column “Total metal required to produce one generation” of the energy transition. But remember – it includes the 4 weeks grid batteries. We know the grid batteries figures from the last column of the previous graphic. So all I had to do was subtract them from the Total metal required figures – and we get the following.

See why I call them the batteries that ate the world? Look at the last column. That’s all we need once we remove Michaux’s ridiculous 4 weeks batteries. It’s still enormous. The IEA says that the energy transition will require 6 times more mining. But the good news is the resource is there.

Now, how long will it take to produce all the resource we need ‘at current rates’?

Now, at first glance it looks like there is trouble ahead. 213 years to extract enough lithium for all the EV’s we need! How are we going to do it? But we’ve got to remember historical doubling rates.

The phrase “at current rates” is very misleading if we do not also comment on growth trajectories. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution there has never really been a long period of “at current rates”. Things either grow as demand kicks in, or decline as new technology replaces them.

Doubling rates

As the population keeps growing and technologies improve, resource extraction has increased and then been decreased as other tech replaced them. Whaling increased as people needed whale oil for lighting lamps – and then we invented the light bulb. Whaling decreased.

Oil consumption famously doubled every decade during the 20th century. In about a century it went from the original oil well to shipping 4 cubic kilometres of the stuff around the planet each year. If there’s money to be made and the legislation allows or even encourages it, industries grow and double – sometimes predictably.

What we are beginning to see is Big Oil being replaced by Big Battery. As Janus Australia shows, electric trucking is now in demand. They’ve made it vastly cheaper than diesel trucking. At a certain mileage existing diesel trucks must be overhauled anyway – and Janus wants to give them the chance to be converted into an electric Semi. The conversion pays for itself in a year – and after that it’s all savings for the driver. Truck drivers now want EV’s. There’s BIG money to be made meeting this demand.

So how fast is the lithium industry growing? Experts believe it will grow from 500,000 tons in 2021 to 3 million tons in 2030. That’s 2.5 doublings in 9 years – showing lithium production will double about every 4 years. The first doubling of lithium supply at half the cost will probably come from the new liquid filtration systems that will replace pond evaporation. Extrapolate out these doublings a few times and you soon meet the desired production rates. Another way to look at it. Globally 10% of all new cars are EV’s. This figure is slowly rising, and should be just under half by 2030. As long as lithium keeps doubling along with this EV rate – it should all work out. But the real promise comes from all the new battery chemistries. As I show on my new materials page – batteries are changing so fast I don’t even know if the world will be using lithium in a few decades! One of the new chemistries may have been commercialised by then.

But wait, there’s more!

Now that we’ve killed the weird model of the batteries that ate the world‘ let’s see how abundant the global reserves are according to Michaux’s own paper. Let’s take his global resources, and divide them by how much metal he said we need – without the grid batteries. This now means Michaux’s own paper shows we have 4.27 times the copper we need. I emphasise copper – as that’s a big one. I don’t really care about his estimates of lithium – as he’s using old data and there are already 89 million tons discovered according to the USGS. And of course I don’t really care about nickel or cobalt – as I have already shown that they can easily be substituted by LFP or sodium batteries.

Conclusion?

Michaux’s own data shows that if we just model something other than his ‘Batteries that ate the world’, there are enough minerals and metals for the Energy Transition. But it gets worse for Michaux. As I said above, it’s not just the batteries but the entire Energy Transition suite of technologies that can be built without fancy metals or rare earths. That means we can save rare-earths for where we really do need them, electronics. But the major kit like batteries and car engines and wind turbine generators? Fortunately, we have been blessed with some very smart, very motivated people out there. Some brands might make the wrong choice and go bankrupt. Others will fill in the gaps. It’s already happening, bit by bit. When one realises we can even live without lithium or copper – his whole argument becomes absurd! (See Materials)