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Recycling a car battery
Photo: Wolfgang Rattay/ REUTERS
Wind turbines, batteries, e-cars - if you want to build the technology to fight the climate crisis, you also need the right raw materials.
A new study by the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium, commissioned by an industry association, now shows that the European Union could face medium-term bottlenecks in the supply of materials such as lithium.
The problems could also be solved with recycling.
"Electric vehicles, batteries, photovoltaic systems, wind turbines and hydrogen technologies all require significantly more metals than their conventional alternatives," according to the authors of the "Metals for Clean Energy" study.
According to the study, the global energy transition is progressing faster than the number of mining projects to extract the necessary metals.
For copper, cobalt, lithium, nickel and so-called rare earths, there could therefore be global supply bottlenecks from 2030.
Lithium, for example, is imported from South America, where it is hoped that production will continue to expand.
In principle, however, the element is not rare and occurs in many regions of the world, including Europe.
But so far it has hardly been promoted here.
According to the study, the EU only has a small window of opportunity to boost its domestic production.
For example, the Australian start-up Vulcan Energy wants to promote lithium in the Upper Rhine Valley.
Other projects are researching extraction from mining wastewater in the Ruhr area.
Recycling also helps to save CO2
According to the study, from 2040 onwards, a large part of Europe's metal requirements could also be covered by recycling.
“Recycling is Europe's biggest way to improve its long-term self-sufficiency and could meet 45 to 65 percent of Europe's base metal needs by 2050,” it says.
With so-called rare earths and lithium there is the potential to achieve quotas of more than 75 percent.
According to the study, the demand for lithium is increasing by far the most.
Global demand for the metal as a transitional commodity by 2050 is expected to be more than 2,000 percent of 2020 total global demand.
But also for rare earths such as dysprosium (up 433 percent) or the heavy metal cobalt (up 403 percent), according to the information, a significantly higher demand can be expected.
Looking at Europe, the researchers calculate that 35 times more lithium, 7 to 26 times more rare earth metals and 3.5 times more cobalt will be needed to generate energy sustainably and make the EU climate-neutral by 2050 .
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Interesting: When recycling metals, between 35 and 95 percent of CO2 emissions are saved on average compared to primary production.
"Without an early supply of new primary metals and better recycling, there is a risk of critical bottlenecks that jeopardize Europe's goal of a more autonomous, clean energy system," said the Catholic University of Leuven.
However, the study is limited by the fact that technological developments and changes in behavior can still influence the situation, but were not taken into account in the study.
The paper was commissioned by the European association Eurometaux, which brings together non-ferrous metal producers and recyclers.
chs/dpa