The research presented in this blog post was conducted by Swati Narasimhan, the post written by Ms. Narasimhan in collaboration with Dr. Bustamante and Mr. Axelrod.
Understanding future mineral demand for the building blocks of the clean energy transition—including the minerals used in lithium-ion batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines—is critical in today’s policy debates. As lawmakers, regulators, and industries press for price supports and other preferential policies to back new mines, processing facilities, and recycling innovations, demand projections provide an essential data-driven foundation. However, all too often the only information before decisionmakers is too highly aggregated—such as at the global scale, or cumulative over decades—and flattens the nuanced realities about what factors drive need and how they could change in the future. National policymakers need to understand not just the reality of today’s global market for these minerals, but also how rapidly shifting conditions of technological innovation, interconnected policy commitments, and societal preferences, norms, and institutions, can shape more accurate future need assessments.
This begs the question: do today’s models of energy transition mineral demand paint a clear and useful picture of our nation’s future needs? What assumptions about the U.S.’s future are baked into these projections? And how confident can decision-makers be in projected demand figures they are presented with?
What Does the Available Science on U.S. Battery Demand Say?
To begin exploring these questions, we conducted a broad search of recent scientific studies, compiling results from numerical models of future demand for five minerals essential to lithium-ion batteries: lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and graphite. Most projections we found came from academic journal papers, but our search also included reports published by non-profit organizations, governments, research agencies, consultant groups, and a few private companies. We focused our search on studies scoped to the United States. Additionally, we focused on studies published in 2020 or later as representative of the most updated projections. Finally, because future demand for battery minerals will be primarily driven by the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) in the next few decades, our initial search focused on studies of demand from EV batteries as a subset of all battery or mineral demand.
What We Found: Results Vary Significantly, Depending on Future Ambition and Innovation
Despite the well-understood need for the five battery minerals covered by our research, we found that U.S. demand projections for several of these minerals were severely lacking. For example, despite graphite typically accounting for about 45% of the weight of lithium-ion batteries, we found only two published studies (Dunn et al. 2021 and Shafique et al. 2022) matching this scope for a combined total of four scenario projections on U.S. EV battery demand for graphite. Similarly, studies focused on nickel were surprisingly limited, with only three recent studies (Islam et al. 2021, Shafique et al. 2022, and OnLocation 2023) for a total of 13 scenario projections. Lithium and cobalt were the most widely studied. In total, we found five unique studies on lithium matching this scope (Islam et al. 2021, Dunn et al. 2021, Shafique et al. 2022, Riofrancos et al. 2023 and OnLocation 2023), reporting a total of 37 potential scenario projections for future demand over time, and four studies on cobalt (Islam et al. 2021, Dunn et al. 2021, and OnLocation 2023), for a total of 36 potential scenarios of future demand over time.
Just over half of the scenarios for both lithium and cobalt account for the effect of recycling to various degrees. At the same time, these scenarios also looked at other demand mitigating factors, such as substitution for other technology types and efficiency improvements at the same time. Looking at the aggregated EV battery mineral demand projections for the U.S., we observed significant spread between various studies’ findings. Due to their greater representation in the literature, we demonstrate that through our findings on lithium and cobalt, summarized in Figure 1.
