Elon Musk’s Tesla automobile created a market for Electric Vehicles – but even before Tesla was founded in 2003, the auto industry had started building hybrid vehicles with the goal of reducing emissions and increasing fuel economy by adding batteries to assist the internal combustion engine in propelling the vehicle. This stage of development is what Almonty CEO Lewis Black refers to as the “flip phone” stage, since hybrid vehicles are considered by the powers-that-be as a transitionary phase and that hybrids will ultimately be replaced by fully electric vehicles.  

In other words, as a rough comparison of technological progression, one might consider fossil fuel-powered vehicles to be like the old land line phones, with the progression to hybrid vehicles would be like cellular flip phones, and finally, electric vehicles would be the latest development, the smart phones most of us carry around today.  

For a mild digression, the first electric vehicle of any kind was the 1864 Hague Tramway Network in Holland. The next electric vehicle on record was built in Brooklyn in 1896 by the Riker Electric Vehicle Company. This peculiar one-person tricycle boasted one horsepower with a 40-volt battery under the driver’s seat.  

One of the more interesting early electrics was a Belgian electric vehicle dubbed La Jamais Contente (“The Never Contented”) that sported a light-alloy torpedo-shaped body forged from aluminum, tungsten, and magnesium. That funky wheeled electric torpedo set a land speed record in 1899 by breaking the 100 kph barrier. That’s 62 mph, which is impressive for a vehicle built in 1899.  

But in 1897, New York City cabs were running on batteries – they were fast enough to earn the first speeding ticket ever issued by the police. Then in 1902, the Woods Motor Vehicle Company built an electric with a top speed of 14 mph and an 18-mile range on a single charge. A new one of those cost $2,000. That would be equal to over $65,000 in 2021.  

Then there was the “Elcar,” manufactured from 1915 until 1931 by the Elkhart Carriage Company of Elkhart, Indiana, with a range of 60 miles. That one cost $4000 ($108,637 today). It was recommended for "in-town use only" because of numerous safety flaws. 

The driving element of this transition is a governmental move worldwide to force the replacement of fossil fuel vehicles with electrically driven platforms in the interest of reducing CO2 emissions, and regardless of whether we agree with that reasoning or not, automakers all over the planet are beginning to cave under pressure from governmental authorities who believe the world will end because of human-induced climate change.  

For just one example, BMW’s head of production revealed  Bavarian Motor Works will cease production of internal combustion engines at its main plant in Munich by 2024, according to Reuters. While Toyota has resisted a full-blown move to electric vehicles, other automakers are bound to follow BMW’s lead, and are thus feverishly engaged in the research and development of “sustainable” electric vehicle technology.   

But Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda believes Japan wouldn’t have enough electricity in the summer if all vehicles in Japan were EV. He went on to say that the infrastructure needed to support the transition to EVs would cost Japan as much as $358 billion. And in India, Toyota executives oppose that country’s 2030 target of all Electric Vehicle proliferation. 

Of course, EV technology without batteries is impossible, and battery construction requires raw materials in ever larger quantities as electric vehicles become more prevalent worldwide. 

In an interview with Lewis Black, CEO of Almonty Industries, we discussed his ideas of bringing raw material mining to the U.S. to mitigate supply chain shortages related to EV battery construction for the thousands of electric vehicles automakers plan to manufacture in the coming years. 

EV battery construction obviously requires copper, nickel, and lithium, but cobalt and tungsten are also a major part of the big picture. The problem is that the U.S. Government at the time of this writing is pro-electric vehicle but anti-mining, but you simply can’t have it both ways; those obstacles will need to be overcome if the supposedly inevitable move to electric vehicles is to continue. For example, most recently, the Biden administration moved to shut down one copper mine due to that mine’s proximity to a pristine wilderness area in Minnesota.  

Almonty currently has mines in Korea, Portugal, and Spain. But finding places to mine raw minerals is a continual issue – Lewis reflected on how one mine Almonty operated years ago in Peru was in a remote location and the supply convoys were always subject to being hijacked by bandits as they traveled to and from the mines. 

 Another obstacle is the disposal of used-up batteries, which has already become a problem with hybrid vehicle power packs. Cobalt is purported to be a promising element for EV batteries, but Black warned that cobalt is a cancer-causing element that is dreadfully problematic when it makes its way into landfills in high concentration, an obvious environmental concern. 

During the interview, we spoke of how the concurrent expansion of “green” energy, such as windmills and solar, can’t provide sufficient power for existing needs, let alone handle all the additional power required to charge electric vehicles. The transition to electric vehicles would seem to be more workable if we simply left existing powerplants in place while developing electric vehicles – such a strategy would be far less problematic than trying to fix everything at once. 

A Tesla Model S battery has as much lithium as 10,000 smart phone batteries. And an electric car requires six times as many critical raw materials as a non-hybrid ICE-driven vehicle. Some of the extra raw materials include nickel, copper, graphite, and cobalt just for the batteries, which aren’t typically recycled when their service life is over – Volkswagen is working on developing a recycling process, but time will tell whether that process will be cost-effective.  Volkswagen is just starting to ramp up production of electric cars based on its MEB platform, but the automaker is already thinking of how to recycle battery packs once those vehicles have reached the end of their lifecycles. 

Volkswagen recently opened an EV battery recycling plant in Salzgitter, Germany, with plans to open similar recycling plants globally. The Salzgitter recycling plant can reportedly recover up to 95% of lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese from used-up EV battery packs, according to one VW press release. Current recycling simply involves melting batteries in a furnace, a process that recovers only about 60% of the reusable rare metals.  

At the Salzgitter plant, the used battery packs are disassembled, reusable cells are set aside, and the remaining non-usable cells are shredded, producing a “sludge” of metals and any liquid electrolyte, which is then drained away so the remaining metal particles can be sorted out. Volkswagen reports that the Salzgitter plant is set to handle some 3,600 battery packs a year, with plans to establish other such facilities worldwide. 

As for the "green energy" aspect of the power grid, a 1,000 by 1,000-meter solar park contains some 11 tons of silver. And an average wind turbine contains around nine times as many of these raw metals as a gas-fired power plant of comparable capacity. Furthermore, wind turbines aren’t oil-free. Power-generating wind turbines require petroleum-based lubricants for their gearboxes – from 10 to 60 gallons per, and that oil must be changed periodically on each one. And when old wind turbines die, the blades must be buried in special landfills, each of which obviously consumes a lot of acreage.   

One way or another, all these changes simply aren’t going to be reversed, and if the move to electric vehicles and “green” energy is to continue, Almonty Industries and its peers will need to access more areas where the raw materials are located, including parts of the United States, to provide a workable supply chain for sufficient raw materials for the transition away from fossil fuels. Most specifically, the U.S. areas are Nevada and parts of California, from what Lewis Black stated in the interview.