6 mo. ago • 95%

US can’t meet EV copper demand, study finds

www.eenews.net US can’t meet EV copper demand, study finds

"Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now," the study said.

48 comments

Its almost like the answer isn't some whimsical butler just for you, but fucking public transportation. Build fucking trains.

64
- Agreed. I love trains and it frustrates me to see them bungling the implementation. When they try, they always seem to make the same mistakes trying to bring it to my area.
  
  To see meaningful ridership out here, the train needs to go fast enough to negate the penalty you get at the other end when you have to go from the station to your destination. They wanted to run them at ~55-70mph here, with a few stops between major cities, to parallel a freeway that is 65-75mph. Drive 1 hour (1:10 with parking) or spend 2 hours going to the station, riding a slow train, then going from the station to where you are going? I hate cars, but as someone who only gets a handful of hours to myself after sleep, work, and chores, I'm going to save my time and pick the car. If they ever build the train, as it is planned right now, it'll just be another commuter train that's only really used at rush hour when the roads are jammed rather than an all day all week car replacement solution that I can ride to Sunday night dinner at a friends house as easily as a 6am meeting.
  
  /un-requested rant
  
  23
  
  @njordomir @Sanctus The safe money is it will also run too infrequently to be a good replacement. Adding 'time waiting for train' to the picture for trips outside of 6~9am or 3~7pm and officials wonder why services aren't well used.
  
  9
- Trams are the future!
  
  1
Maybe build ebikes instead of EVs? Then you'd need about 1/50th to 1/100th the copper.

29
- Yes, and also build trains instead of EVs
  
  3
  
  Trains don't even need batteries
  
  1
- Don't forget tramlines.
  
  1
Metal Theft sector booming. Meth stocks are up.

15
They'll start mining landfill for metals and probably plastic soon enough. Air it out, wash it, get the metal and plastic, don't worry about that other in the air/water, that's a future poor person's problem.

12
- metals, sure. The problem with plastics is that plastic is not plastic, it's a plethora of different chemical structures. Very difficult to recycle some of them, even if sorted.
  
  7
  
  "Recycling the plastic" in my tip-mine dystopia fantasy would be what they called burning plastic to fire the smelt to get the metals out. They're gonna burn rubbish for metal and market it as a good thing, someone will get paid a lot of money to think of a word like reclamation.
  
  1
So it's time to a coup d'etat on Chile AGAIN!

10
- Or more child slavery, maybe? Sorry, that is for batteries.
  
  7
  
  for god "Capital"
  
  5
No one uses pennies anymore… Just sayin’.

8
- If I'm reading this chart correctly, each penny is only 2.5% copper.
  
  7
This can be improved if all vehicles moved to a full 48v architecture. Substantially less copper that way.

4
- @NotMyOldRedditName @Hypx I'm not against it, but I didn't think most of the copper in a modern car / EV was in the LV supply wiring, so such a change would be more in the range of a 10% reduction?
  
  3
  
  It's somewhere between 100 and 150lbs saved per car.
  
  There's a lot of copper in the wiring harness and it's most of the weight. It's also a reduction in the plastic around the wires, the other weight contributor.
  
  Edit: For EVs anyway, my bad. Probably less copper in non evs, but still a lot.
  
  3
Deploy the crackheads!

3
It's almost like... TRAMS ARE THE FUCKING SOLUTION

1
Time to sanction Chinese copper producers

1
Permanently Deleted

1
Use Aluminum! There's nothing about copper that at this point aluminum couldn't really do.

-3
- Tell me you don't know metallurgy without telling me...
  
  11
  
  Give me an example where you think you got the upper hand on aluminum knowledge. LOL. Yeah it's harder to work with. But it's lighter and metallurgy has very little to do with the reasons why it's not used. I'll wait here while you go scrambling through Google's shitty results.
  
  0
- Aluminum coil transformers produce more waste heat and are more susceptible to vibration than copper coil.
  
  Ev motors are big coils.
  
  It’s gotta be copper.
  
  6
  
  As an example:
  
  By weight (mass) aluminum is about twice as good a conductor as copper. This is important when they are hanging high-voltage wires from towers
  
  Not my words. You're wrong. The problem is 1) enamel coating research. 2) the strength of the material. Aluminum that is formable into wire is just darn soft and can easily fracture from bending. 3) I would say is the issue with not being able to solder to it. It has to be crimped connections which may fail due to corrosion. But all these are fixable problems. Aluminum is a conductor that is on par with copper for usability, and it is way more abundant.
  
  1
- Either way they'd have to rip out new ore, probably burning carbon to dig it up. Then smelt it, using more carbon, then transport the metal and turn it into an EV. Seems like developing more effecient forms of transportation would be a lot more green than selling everyone a new "green" electric vehicle.
  
  4
  
  Agreed. Fuck cars. But if you just gotta have that big monster truck, go with aluminum core motors. Less mass means more acceleration. There's less inertia.
  
  1
- aluminum is only 61% as conductive as copper, but it weighs 2x less. it is used in overhead high voltage cable.
  
  1

You've viewed 48 comments.