Critical metal requirement for clean energy transition: A quantitative review on the case of transportation electrification

Abstract

The clean energy transition plays an essential role in achieving climate mitigation targets. As for the transportation sector, battery and fuel cell electric vehicles (EVs) have emerged as a key solution to reduce greenhouse gasses from transportation emissions. However, the rapid uptake of EVs has triggered potential supply risks of critical metals (e.g., lithium, nickel, cobalt, platinum group metals (PGMs), etc.) used in the production of lithium-ion batteries and fuel cells. Material flow analysis (MFA) has been widely applied to assess the demand for critical metals used in transportation electrification on various spatiotemporal scales. This paper presents a quantitative review and analysis of 78 MFA research articles on the critical metal requirement of transportation electrification. We analyzed the characteristics of the selected studies regarding their geographical and temporal scopes, transportation sectors, EV categories, battery technologies, materials, and modeling approaches. Based on the global forecasts in those studies, we compared the annual and cumulative global requirements of the four metals that received the most attention: lithium, nickel, cobalt, and PGMs. Although major uncertainties exist, most studies indicate that the annual demand for these four metals will continue to increase and far exceed their production capacities in 2021. Global reserves of these metals may meet their cumulative demand in the short-term (2020–2030) and medium-term (2020–2050) but are insufficient for the long-term (2020–2100) needs. Then, we summarized the proposed policy implications in these studies. Finally, we discuss the main findings from the four aspects: environmental and social implications of deploying electric vehicles, whether or not to electrify heavy-duty vehicles, opportunities and challenges in recycling, and future research direction.