Sunday, June 19, 2011

One Billion Electric Vehicles

X 1,000,000,000


One of the arguments that the anti-EV crowd tries to use against EV's is that there simply is not enough material to build all the batteries needed for a significant number of EV's.  I've never seen any credible numbers to back up that assertion, all estimates show plenty of lithium in the world, and I've never seen any projected restrictions on the various other materials used in battery construction.  A new study has come out that shows we have enough raw material to build one billion 40kWh EV packs.  That means we could replace every car on the road in the world today with an EV, almost twice over.

On the order of 1 billion 40 kWh Li-based EV batteries could be built with the currently estimated reserve base of lithium, according to a recent study by researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley. Lifetime system cost, and other factors, will likely limit scale up more than resource constraints, they found.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2011/06/albertus-20110617.html
Worth noting that the LEAF pack is 24kWh so you could actually produce even more EV's like the LEAF, but I think one billion EV's should carry us for a while.

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