Batteries & buffoons
IN a bit of interesting news from my old world this week, Walter Mertl, the chief financial officer of German automobile giant BMW, told Reuters that most of the company’s sales growth was coming from electric vehicles (EVs), describing 2023 as a “tipping point” away from internal combustion engines (ICEs). EVs only accounted for about 15 percent of BMW’s total vehicle sales last year, but sales growth in that segment is now faster than for ICE vehicles, a trend that Mertl attributed to tougher environmental regulations and rapidly shifting consumer preferences.
BMW, of course, is significantly behind the curve when it comes to EV development, and its overall market share is dwarfed by the likes of China’s BYD (the world’s biggest EV seller), Elon Musk’s Wanker Wagons, Toyota and Volkswagen. It has always been that way with BMW. Even in the ancient days when I was still there, the company was good at being first in experimenting with things — we were working with EV and hydrogen prototypes back in the 1990s — but too conservative for its own good in rolling out large-scale innovations for the consumer market.
It is a sign, I believe: if even the boring Bavarians are seeing their EV segment growing faster than ICEs, there is no longer any doubt that it’s a worldwide trend, and the era of the gas-fueled car is definitely in its twilight. The state of the art being what it is, I’m not at all sure that’s a good thing.
To be clear, it is obviously much better to have vehicles that do not produce harmful emissions than ones that do. Transport is the third-biggest source of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions after energy use by industry and by residential and commercial buildings, and road vehicles account for the biggest part of transport GHG emissions — about 11.9 percent of total global emissions, or about 5.9 billion metric tons of CO2-equivalent a year. Reducing that as much as possible should be prioritized, and EVs are one obvious solution.
Not current battery-based EV technology, however, which is an uncomfortable point that almost everyone is trying very hard to ignore. The battery supply chain, from mining to processing to manufacturing, is extremely environmentally hostile. Most analyses of battery supply chain GHG emissions, from mining through use in vehicles and energy storage systems to recycling — or, in most cases, mere disposal, as recycling technology is still in its infancy — show that there is little to no net positive effect on overall emissions. In other words, vehicle GHG emissions are not actually being eliminated; they are just being shifted to other sectors.
It is not that boosters of batteryelectric power are ignorant of the problems; the challenges are recognized and discussed intensely. The problem is every solution that is suggested is done so in the context that chemical battery technology is a given; there may be refinements in the technology, but this is as good as it gets.
Thus, for example, when there are discussions about the constraints on necessary raw materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel, the answer is always “find more sources of the supply,” and never the suggestion that “maybe we should consider a solution that doesn’t require so much of these things.” There was a roundtable on the issue of battery production at the just-concluded World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, that illustrated the disconnection from the reality of the sector. In the session, Chinese battery manufacturer CATL, the world’s largest, touted its efficient recycling technology, and forecast that it would eliminate the need for virgin raw materials by 2042. This is utterly laughable because with demand for batteries constantly accelerating — absolutely no one believes it will slow or plateau by 2042, or ever — no amount of recycling is going to come close to filling the supply gap. That is just simple mathematics.
And there are other issues as well, for which no one has been able to offer useful solutions yet. EV charging requires a substantial amount of generated electricity, particularly for fast chargers, which are vital to making EV adoption convenient enough for consumers to consider. Using renewable energy, the usual comeback to that challenge, is not sufficient unless the system being used is equipped with — you guessed it — some kind of battery storage.
Plus, there is a significant safety issue in that lithium-ion batteries are delicate — most other things with that much-stored energy inside them are called “bombs” — and have a way of bursting into particularly hardto-extinguish flames if mishandled or damaged in some way. I’m not sure that the problem is not being overstated a bit because, after all, people do not post YouTube videos of EVs operating normally, but it still happens, more than should just be accepted as an operational risk.
Battery-electric power is a step in the right direction, and it is better to make use of it than not. But it should be considered an intermediate step, in much the same way that natural gas is considered a transitory step away from dirtier coal or oil power generation. Better, but not completely satisfactory. Until the green carpet types can embrace the perspective that batteries are, at best, an inadequate solution and we need to keep working to find something better, the outcomes are likely to be disappointing.
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Over the past few days, we have been assaulted by a number of boastful news reports from the Philippines’ bloated retinue of visitors to the WEF, led by House Speaker Happy Romualdez. The schtick this time was the same as it ever is: the Philippines is open for business, it’s the best investment destination in Asia, blah blah blah. The one new wrinkle this time around was a pitch for foreign investors to put their money into the Philippines by way of the new Maharlika Investment Fund, as if anyone is going to be attracted
by a brand-new fund put together in a weird way, with no obvious application as of yet, and no clear explanation of how it may pay off for a would-be investor.
Or, for that matter, why any outside investor would want to invest in the Philippines now, after Romualdez and his colleagues in the all-brain-stem-and-no-cortex club have spent the past couple of weeks noisily carrying on about amending the Constitution to make it more attractive to foreign investors. Maybe they will, and maybe they won’t. But if I were a prospective investor, I’d be inclined to wait and see which way things are going to go before getting out my checkbook.
The Philippines’ VIPs who make the trip to the WEF every year are like those cats who live in Bonifacio Global City (BGC).
They feel validated because they get some friendly attention from the diners and maybe get a few table scraps thrown their way. But no one goes to eat or have coffee in BGC just to see the cats.