Felix Leach and Kelly Senecal on Racing Toward Zero: The Untold Story of Driving Green

August 09, 2021

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by Tammy Klein (Transport Energy Strategies) For this video podcast, I spoke with Dr. Felix Leach, Associate Professor of Engineering Science at Oxford University and Dr. Peter Kelly Senecal, Co-Owner and Vice President, Convergent Science on their just-released book, Racing Toward Zero: The Untold Story of Driving Green. Following are a couple of excerpts from our discussion, which you can view or download below, or listen to in ITunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts or TuneIn.

Kelly on the Role of Battery Electric Vehicles:

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" ... But we don’t feel, at least in the near term, maybe to medium term, that they are the silver bullet solution. If we’re really going to decarbonize quickly, which I think is in all of our best interests, we have to take a look at this mix of technologies, and that’s really one of the core themes of the book.”

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Kelly on the Need to Get Past the Silver Bullet Idea in Transportation Energy:
“Driving a hybrid, a full hybrid vehicle in the U.S. in most of the states, is better from a CO2 stand point than a BEV. Now, certainly there are states in the U.S. where a BEV is cleaner. We’re not advocating for ‘We should be banning everything but hybrids.’ Again, it feeds into this eclectic mix, this diversity approach where for different regions different solutions make more sense. If I’m a consumer and I live in Wisconsin, and I do and I am, what choice can I make to help the environment with my next car? It’s going to be buying a hybrid to be perfectly honest. If I live in Washington state? Probably a BEV, so it just depends on where you live.

The idea of getting past this silver bullet idea and embracing, ‘Look, we need to keep improving all of these things.’ We don’t have to pick one or the other. We should be improving all of them, and if there is a batterygate at some point in the future, what we don’t want to do is look back and say, ‘Hmm… That ICE technology. We froze that back in 2021. We should have kept improving that because now we could have something even more efficient and cleaner that we could fall back on.’ We run the risk of not doing that, so it’s very important to kind of take this eclectic approach and push all the technologies forward.”

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Felix on How “Pollution” Is Not A Helpful Word:

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"... I think this lifecycle approach has people receptive to it. I think even with electric vehicles people are focusing on ‘Hang on. We know the electricity doesn’t just come from the plug. Where does it come from up stream?'” READ MORE WATCH VIDEO

Africa should develop its own electric vehicle agenda -- Without careful planning, electrification of transport can result in more, not less, pollution in Africa. (Aljazeera)

Why ESG Investors Are Endangering the Energy Transition (Transport Energy Strategies)

BMW Has Fallen Behind in the Electric Vehicle Race. Can It Catch Up? Unlike its global rivals, the German carmaker has not set a date to phase out gas-powered cars, and investors aren’t pleased. (New York Times)

Can America Really Drive Its Way Out of Climate Change? (New York Times)

Hunt for the ‘Blood Diamond of Batteries’ Impedes Green Energy Push (New York Times)

Excerpt from Aljazeera: Before taking further steps towards transitioning to electrical vehicles, African governments need to answer some important questions: Will they impose stricter regulations on the imports of secondhand internal combustion engines to prevent Western nations, who are phasing these vehicles out, from dumping them on their countries? Will they ensure that the secondhand electric vehicles they import have a long enough lifespan? Do they have the capacity to safely dispose of the lithium-ion batteries electric vehicles run on? Are there regulations in place to ensure the ethical mining of raw materials that are used in the production of electric vehicles?

Africa is the largest market for secondhand vehicles in the world. The United Nations Environment Program asserts that poor countries are being used as dumping grounds for used cars of low quality.

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Moreover, several African countries are encouraging the importation of secondhand electric vehicles through tax incentives, without imposing any criteria as to what condition these vehicles should be at the time of import. As electric batteries degrade with use and gradually become obsolete, import of secondhand electric vehicles near the end of their lifespan could potentially invite a massive waste problem for Africa.

Even in developed countries, barely 5 percent of lithium-ion batteries are being recycled due to technical constraints, economic barriers, logistics, and regulatory gaps. If African governments do not start carefully regulating the import of second-hand vehicles and developing recycling infrastructure for lithium-ion batteries, the proliferation of electric vehicles on the continent will result in more pollution, not less.

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As demand for electric vehicles grow, African countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia and South Africa, will be supplying the raw materials used in their production such as lithium, copper and cobalt. These countries will need to safeguard ethical mining standards as they work to meet this growing demand. Countries such as the DRC are already facing scrutiny for human rights abuses, including child labour, in their mines. They should seek support from movements such as Mining With Principles and Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA), to put in the necessary regulations to enforce sustainable mining practices in the future. READ MORE

Excerpt from Transport Energy Strategies: How are we going to find enough steel, copper, lithium, rare earth elements in the world to supply industries which are set to grow by a factor of ten times?

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Because the Mining industry is persona non grata to most ESG investors. I’ve (Matt Fernley) sat across a table from ESG investors talking about my fund and been shown the door as soon as we mention investing in Mining.

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Oh, we need to recycle goes the refrain. “If we increase investment in recycling then we won’t need to invest in mining”. But the problem is – that’s not true. Take the lithium market for instance. Lithium demand in 2020 was 385Kt of LCE (lithium carbonate equivalent). In 2030E we forecast it to be 2530Ktpa of LCE. By 2030 we will be using on an annual basis more lithium than has ever been extracted up to now. And most of that lithium isn’t and won’t be available for recycling for the next 10-15 years.

Copper demand from Renewables will be 3.7Mtpa by 2030. That’s an incremental growth of c2.5Mtpa from 2020. It’s significant. 9.6 tonnes of copper is needed per MW of offshore wind, 4-5t per MW of onshore wind and solar. And, for the time being, there’s no substitute for copper. No other metal has its conductive properties.

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The magnitude of the build out in demand that we are seeing in these industries can only be supplied by investment in increasing primary production. Recycling isn’t going to cut it until there’s enough material in the system, and that won’t be for many years to come.

And there’s another problem. While it only takes one to two years to build an EV plant or a solar plant, it can take of the order of five to ten years from discovery to production to build a mine; often longer for a world-scale mine. That means that investors focusing only on Downstream industries are doing a huge disservice to those industries. Because lack of investment in new raw materials supply means that supply/demand gaps will develop, and prices for those materials will rise. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the EVs and batteries sector where Downstream investment is outpacing Upstream by more than five times.

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If there is no investment in new mines then prices for key raw materials will rise to such a level that building a new solar or wind plant will be uneconomic, new EVs will either be uneconomic to produce for auto companies or consumers won’t want to buy them because their price will be too high.

Solar Foreshadowing the Future?

We’ve already had a foreshadowing of the impact that higher raw materials prices can make to the Energy Transition in the solar industry. Solar module prices have risen by over 20% this year after solar silicon prices and solar glass prices more than doubled. READ MORE