Critical metals for electromobility: Global demand scenarios for passenger vehicles, 2015-2050

Electrification of future transport sector is important to reduce direct greenhouse gas emissions and the burden on fossil fuels. The modern clean energy technologies, such as electric vehicles (EVs), contain a number of hitech electronics and other components that depend on a wide range of metals for their functioning. A transition to large-scale deployment of such technologies might be constrained by the limited availability of these metals in future. This study is aimed at resource criticality assessment for passenger EVs, where three main scenarios are modelled considering future demand of EVs in five geographic regions by 2050. The focus metals are aluminium (Al), cobalt (Co), copper (Cu), iron (Fe), lithium (Li), manganese (Mn), nickel (Ni), and the two rare earth elements (REEs): neodymium (Nd) and dysprosium (Dy). The scenario results show an increase in total number of EVs from 1.13 billion in 2011 to 2.6 billion in the baseline scenario, 2.55 billion in the moderate scenario, and 2.25 billion in the stringent scenario by 2050. The geological reserves of cobalt, lithium and nickel seem to face higher pressure resulting from increasing demand of these metals by EVs' batteries. Whereas, the geopolitical supply risk factor becomes important in case of REEs due to existing market concentration. Recycling and technology substitution at various levels seem to reduce the vulnerability of EVs to increasing geological and geopolitical supply risk of metals.