The planned switch to clean energy vehicles has led to an
extraordinary surge in demand. While a smartphone battery uses no more than 10
grams of refined cobalt, an electric car needs 15kg (33lb)."
"The worldwide rush to bring millions of electric
vehicles on to our roads has handed a big advantage to those giant car-makers
which saw this bonanza coming and invested in developing battery-powered
vehicles, among them General Motors, Renault-Nissan, Tesla, BMW and
Fiat-Chrysler."
"Assuming electric car ownership becomes widespread,
the amount of cobalt used in car batteries (which typically weigh 100s of
kilograms) will utterly dwarf the amount of cobalt used in laptop and mobile
batteries. A surge in demand for electric cars would create tremendous
financial incentives DRC mining companies to increase production."
"This report is the first comprehensive account of how cobalt enters the supply chain of many of the world’s leading brands."
-- From WHAT WE DIE FOR: HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO POWER THE GLOBAL TRADE IN COBALT", Amnesty Intl report, January 2016, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr62/3183/2016/en/
"When too much cobalt is taken into your body,
however, harmful health effects can occur. Workers who breathed air containing
0.038 mg cobalt/m3 (about 100,000 times the concentration normally found in
ambient air) for 6 hours had trouble breathing. Serious effects on the lungs,
including asthma, pneumonia, and wheezing, have been found in people exposed to
0.005 mg cobalt/m3 while working with hard metal, a cobalt-tungsten carbide
alloy. People exposed to 0.007 mg cobalt/m3 at work have also developed
allergies to cobalt that resulted in asthma and skin rashes."
-- TOXICOLOGICAL PROFILE FOR COBALT,
by the U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES,
April 2004, 486 pages long,
"Problems can creep in when these batteries are
disposed of. Scientists, in a new study in ACS’ journal Chemistry of Materials,
are reporting that compounds increasingly used in lithium-ion batteries are
toxic to a type of soil-dwelling bacteria that plays an important environmental
role.
An estimated 20 million electric vehicles are expected to
be on the road by 2020, according to an International Energy Agency report.
Each one of these will likely contain more than 83 pounds of nanoscale cathode
materials, potentially including a class of compounds called lithium nickel
manganese cobalt oxides (NMCs)." -- American Chemical Society, February
2016,
About Tesla e-cars. On average they get $7,500/car subsidy from US
taxpayers, to make expensive e-cars become "affordable". The cheapest Tesla car I think costs about $34k (about P1.7M), already "discounted" with US taxpayers' subsidy.
See also:
No comments:
Post a Comment