Advanced BioFuels USA

by Brad Plumer (New York Times)  GM’s decision this week to phase out gasoline vehicles is the latest in a major shift that will mean drastic new demands on electric utilities. Here are four things that will need to happen.

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Generate More Juice

If every American switched over to an electric passenger vehicle, analysts have estimated, the United States could end up using roughly 25 percent more electricity than it does today. To handle that, utilities will likely need to build a lot of new power plants and upgrade their transmission networks.

“There’s no question that utilities can do this, but it’s not going to be trivial,” said Chris Nelder, who leads the vehicle-grid integration team at the Rocky Mountain Institute. “It takes time and money.” In a recent study, his team found that many utilities and vehicle fleet managers planning to go electric have yet to fully grapple with all the challenges involved.

For instance, Mr. Nelder said, if a transit agency wants to buy 100 new electric buses and charge them overnight, it will suddenly need large amounts of power feeding into the bus depot, potentially requiring new substations and other equipment that could mean million-dollar investments.

“That’s not something utilities can just do next week,” he said. “It takes a lot of careful advanced planning.”

There’s good news, too. In 2018, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute looked at what a shift to electric vehicles would mean for the power grid in every state. While Americans would likely pay more for electricity as utilities made necessary upgrades, that would be offset by fuel savings from not having to buy gasoline anymore.

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For many utilities, the biggest challenge will be dealing with not just how much electricity new vehicles are using, but when they’re actually using it.

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If millions of Californians with electric cars came home in the evening and immediately started charging all at once, it would put a major strain on the grid — and this in a state that has recently been suffering from blackouts.

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Electric vehicles would be even cleaner if utilities switched away from coal and natural gas and leaned more heavily on low-emissions sources like solar, wind or nuclear power.   READ MORE

Geopolitics in a post fossil-fuel world (Future Tense with Antony Funnell/ABC Radio; includes AUDIO)

Japan’s surging electricity prices are a warning for Asian countries (Quartz)

Like fracking under Obama, mining poised to grow during Biden years (S&P Global Platts)

Toyota CEO Agrees With Elon Musk: We Don’t Have Enough Electricity to Electrify All the Cars (PJ Media)

Excerpt from Future Tense:  Experts warn of new inequalities and shifting power dynamics. They also warn of a fall in available energy levels as nations transition to renewables. READ MORE

Excerpt from S&P Global Platts:  For Biden, mined battery metals will likely be needed to accomplish signature climate policies, such as mass deployment of electric vehicles.

Federal mineral mining financing has already been freed up by the outgoing Trump administration, the prospects of green stimulus appear poised to ratchet up demand for mined materials, and environmental permitting for mining looks unlikely to change.

With that setup, the Biden administration could take a leaf out of Obama’s book, presiding over the blossoming of a policy-critical sector in part by simply not restricting it.

Biden already signaled Jan. 25 that mining will be key to his “Build Back Better” initiative when an executive order mandating government agencies to “buy American” included a call to maximize purchases of materials mined in the U.S.

History as a guide?

Mining executives worried about more restrictive regulation or strident environmental reviews under Biden could look at the Obama administration’s approach to hydraulic fracking and natural gas production for some hints at a possible future.

“Draconian interventions were not in the Obama administration’s interest,” said Kevin Book, an energy policy analyst with Washington, D.C.-based ClearView Energy Partners LLC. “They regulated prudently in a limited rather than a maximal fashion. … Barack Obama didn’t come to Washington to be the oil president; he came to actually bring an energy transformation into force, and he got transformed by oil and gas. The ability to get where he wanted to go on green energy — it didn’t exist.”

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Biden has pledged to curtail emissions from the fossil fuels sector, but he has said little about how he would regulate mining.

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As demand for electric vehicles accelerates, so too will the need for minerals common in manufacturing lithium-ion battery packs, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper and graphite. In cases such as lithium and cobalt, supply of these raw materials has been concentrated among a few suppliers outside of the U.S., including China. Investment in new production could be necessary for the U.S. to overtake China as a top battery supplier, according to BloombergNEF.

Historically, mining in the U.S. has faced political opposition from environmental activists, much like the oil and gas space. Concerns over potential water pollution from mining and the impacts to sacred Native lands have been flashpoints in developing major mine projects on federal lands.

To date, federal policymakers in the Democratic Party focused on hard-rock mining have primarily spent their energy on opposing individual mining projects and overhauling the nation’s mining laws, which have not been updated since 1872.

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The Biden administration may make federal money available to mining companies involved in supplying raw materials for the energy transition. The U.S. Energy Department under Trump recently expanded two Obama-era clean energy financing programs to permit mining companies and firms in the midstream of battery supply, such as cathode and anode manufacturers, to apply for government loans.

Faced with difficult cost hurdles, U.S. miners of battery metals are increasingly turning to the government for financial support to help them through the lengthy mine development process.

Benchmark Mineral Intelligence Managing Director Simon Moores expects that U.S. mining for “strategic raw materials and critical minerals” could blossom under Biden — much as fracking did under Obama — despite an expectation of “really stringent environmental assessments.”

“You’ve got rare earths, that’s a well-run story in D.C., [and] the key raw materials that go into lithium-ion batteries. Lithium, cobalt, graphite, manganese … You’ve got to have a domestic supply base and build domestic knowledge of these critical minerals and materials,” Moores said.

If Biden maintained the DOE financing program, for example, it would allow Biden to provide “instant and available loan money … to get the supply chain up and running,” Moores said.

One of the groups urging the Biden administration to make more funding and tax incentives available for the battery supply chain is the Zero Emission Transportation Association, an industry coalition formed in November 2020 of electric vehicle manufacturers, utilities, midstream manufacturers, and mining companies such as Albemarle Corp., Piedmont Lithium Ltd. and Lithium Americas Corp. The group advocates for policies intended to steer the U.S. toward 100% of auto sales as electric vehicles by 2030. READ MORE