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Study shows hundreds of new mines would have to open to find metals needed to meet Canada’s and other countries’ targets for more electric vehicles
The world will have to open 388 new mines within the next decade to meet government objectives for electric vehicle purchases, an unlikely scenario given how difficult and time-consuming it is to site such operations, warns a new study.
The Fraser Institute report, released Thursday, raises a daunting question: are mining rules too stringent, particularly in Canada and other rich countries, to electrify much of our energy needs and get vehicles with traditional combustion-fuel engines off the road?
Author Ken Green, a senior fellow at the institute, thinks so. “You can’t wave your hands around. Without the metals you can’t make the vehicle parts,” he said in an interview from Nevada, pointing out that batteries and other components of electric vehicles require six times more metals than conventional vehicles do, such as nickel, lithium, cobalt and tellurium. “The timelines of EV deployment and metals production are widely out of sync.”
An environmental group was critical of the study, arguing it failed to appreciate the need for federal and provincial governments to push on electrification, given what’s at stake: the destruction of life due to greenhouse gases and global warming.
For the rest of this column: https://www.thesudburystar.com/news/local-news/tearing-up-the-earth-for-evs-and-a-fossil-fuel-future-2