CURRENT BATTERY TECHNOLOGIES WILL NOT SUPPORT THE PLANNED “GREEN TRANSITION”
“It turns out we don't have enough raw materials to make batteries (for solar, wind and EVs). The answer is not to find more raw materials but to change the technology.” --Simon Michaux
HART HAGAN: Batteries are a big deal because any movement toward decarbonization requires heavy use of batteries because solar and wind are intermittent. Also, the electrification of vehicles requires heavy use of batteries because it's a mobile device.
SIMON MICHAUX: The biggest task to phase out fossil fuels is the transport sector. How do we actually take the internal combustion engine technology--cars, trucks, commercial vehicles, but also rail and maritime shipping and aviation--it's all ICE (internal combustion engines) … How do we take that and turn it into something not ICE?
At the moment, there’s two technologies for conversion of ICE to electric. One is an electric vehicle with a battery. The other is a hydrogen fuel cell powering an electric propulsion device. So both are electric, but they store energy differently.
The other side of the equation is how power is delivered in a non-fossil fuel way. There's a whole series of technologies. The IEA (International Energy Agency) projected that the future primary energy system would be wind and solar. Wind and solar are both highly intermittent.
The primary task turns out to be how to arrange a power storage buffer, to manage the intermittent nature of wind and solar so that it delivers an even power supply. It turns out batteries were the preferred way to do that. There are other technologies, but governments around the world believe batteries are the solution for that.
It turns out we don't have enough raw materials to make those batteries. And the answer is not to find more raw materials but to change the technology that serves as a buffer.
There are solutions, but it requires thinking to be changed.
HART HAGAN: One thing I've heard you say about your work in Europe, is that Europe does very little mining, for ecological reasons. They have environmental controls that say, for the most part, Europe is not going to be trashed by mining. So the materials from mining come from other continents.
SIMON MICHAUX: This is significant. This is actually the whole purpose of the circular economy. They realized in about 2005 that the source of raw materials that held their businesses together was coming from outside Europe and the explicit thing they recognized but would not say out loud, was that China was dominating almost every sector.
From a strategic point of view, they realized that they had really cooked their own duck. So what do we do about this? They started up the circular economy. But the explicit thing was to protect the businesses. It's not about the raw materials themselves.
HART HAGAN: Circular economy means you're getting your materials more locally? There's more recycling going on and that kind of thing?
SIMON MICHAUX: The circular economy won't work in its current form. But I see it as a stepping stone to something else. It's not thermodynamically possible. What they mean is instead of mining raw materials they'll get all the materials from recycling. And so it's a nice idea but you run into trouble very quickly. It's a stepping stone to something else.
HART HAGAN: You're not only an expert in this area, but that's your job right now, to design a circular economy for Finland. So you’re not just sitting in the outside throwing rocks. This is what you do.
SIMON MICHAUX: My division is called Circular Economy Solutions. Lots of people have such a title. Most of us are just doing business as we were before. If you get people to describe what the circular economy is, they tend to glaze over and look stunned. It's a very poorly defined term. I'm in a unique position. Something I give daily thanks to the work that I get to do recently has actually been discussed and presented to some fairly senior people.
One of the comments that come from the Swedish government after the talks to all Baltic governments is this … “Okay, you've made your point. There are others that disagree with you, but you made enough of a point for us to look at this. What do we do about this and could you please design a new circular economy, which means mineral shortages, energy shortages, peak oil, manufacturing shortages and recycling bottlenecks. What will that look like?”
So that’s what I do.