Electrification was a central topic at the climate conference in Glasgow. And she is also the guide of the new one Ariadne reports, in which leading research institutes describe “Germany’s path to climate neutrality in 2045”: “By 2030, direct electrification will have the greatest potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the transport sector,” the authors conclude. In any case, many environmental associations are calling for the internal combustion engine to be phased out soon. They closely followed which German car manufacturers signed a declaration on emission-free vehicles in Glasgow (Daimler) and which did not (BMW, Volkswagen). The latter is surprising because VW boss Herbert Diess has pushed electric mobility forward like hardly any other car boss.
In conversation with the Handelsblatt Diess recently explained why the German auto industry cannot get out of the combustion engine as early as 2030: “That is not feasible for the industry. The big challenge is the many battery factories.” The raw materials would have to be procured and new mines opened up, said the CEO: “This is already an incredibly tense program. I don’t think we can get any faster.”
In Europe alone, six gigafactories with a total capacity of 240 gigawatt hours (GWh) are to be built by the end of the decade – exclusively for the brands of the Volkswagen Group. At the moment, however, the global production capacity for all types of battery cells is lagging behind Calculations of the market analyst Bloomberg at a total of only 586 GWh per year. Bloomberg expects the total global capacity to more than quadruple to 2539 GWh in the next four years.
The auto industry in particular is triggering a real battery boom – and a trend reversal in terms of costs. Over the past ten years, the price of energy storage has fallen steadily: from around 1000 euros per kilowatt hour (kWh) to a good 100 euros / 100 kWh. A year ago, Tesla boss Elon Musk assumed that he could cut battery costs by a further third in the future. But the hot raw materials market calls such plans into question.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects the demand for critical raw materials to quadruple worldwide by 2040. But that is only an average, demand for the battery metal cobalt could increase by a factor of 20, and for lithium the factor is even 42. In view of the rapid price increases and delivery difficulties for battery materials, IEA boss Fatih Birol is already talking about the industrialized countries becoming less dependent would exchange oil for that of metals.
Specifically, there is a risk that material bottlenecks could slow down the widespread market ramp-up of e-mobility. Small and compact power generators in particular are threatened with sharp price increases. Tesla, as so often one step ahead, has already drawn the necessary steps: The basic version of the Model 3 is equipped with cheaper iron phosphate cells that contain significantly fewer critical raw materials. Mercedes has also announced its entry into the “new” cell chemistry for 2024, and VW plans to follow suit in 2025. Will this lead to a breakthrough in further falling cell prices?
However, experts warn of the following problems: Because iron phosphate cells contain no cobalt and fewer other valuable metals such as nickel, they are cheaper. However, due to the cheaper metal mix, the energy-intensive cell recycling could hardly be worthwhile. Without the most complete possible recovery of the cell materials, the climate is of little help.
This highly specialized circular economy is still in its infancy – something that has to change rapidly with billions in expenditure. In Europe, the volume of old lithium-ion batteries and battery components to be recycled could amount to around 230 kilotons per year from 2030 and around 1500 kilotons per year from 2040. This is the result of a recently published Fraunhofer study. That means an annual growth of the recycling industry of over 30 percent in the next few years. “In order to be able to cope with such recycling quantities, the recycling capacities, which today in Europe are still in the low double-digit kiloton range per year, have to be significantly expanded,” says study author Christoph Neef from Fraunhofer ISI.