Trump: Trade turmoil won’t hurt re-election

President says voters will understand ‘spat’ when at the polls

WASHINGTON — As China and the U.S. near a new round of trade talks, President Donald Trump said Friday he doesn’t feel he needs to secure an agreement before next year’s election.

Trump told reporters he wants a complete deal with China and won’t accept one that only addresses some of the differences between the two nations.

“I’m not looking for a partial deal, I’m looking for a complete deal,” Trump said during a news conference with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

For more than a year, the world’s two largest economies have been locked in a high-stakes duel marked by Trump’s escalating penalties on Chinese goods and Beijing’s retaliatory tariffs.

Trump says voters understand the “spat” between the U.S. and China and insists the ongoing trade war won’t hamper his reelection chances, but he conceded that reaching an agreement “would probably be a positive”

Over the next three decades, demand for lithium and cobalt, the building blocks of lithium-ion batteries, are expected to increase 12-fold if nations stick to the Paris agreement on climate change, according to a forecast by the World Bank. Likewise, demand for rare elements like neodymium and manganese, which are used in the magnets that enable wind turbines to generate electricity, is expected to more than double.

In the case of batteries, there are plenty of reserves of lithium worldwide, said Nick Kovics, global director of lithium and battery materials at IHS Markit. The problem is low lithium prices have stunted the development of new production, and within the next six years a shortfall could be coming.

“You need new capacity to come online longer term, and in a low price environment it’s difficult to raise capital. Then you’ve got cobalt and nickel sulfate, they each have their own bottlenecks,” he said. “In other industries, you have time to plan accordingly. But here you have (very fast) growth rates, and it’s all speculative and all these industries raise capital separately but they need to operate in tandem.”

For now, clean energy companies maintain the supply concerns are overstated.

John Smirnow, vice president of market strategy at the trade group Solar Energy Industries Association, said solar developer’s reliance on rare materials is limited to thin film panels, which represent a small fraction of the market.

“More than 95 percent of solar panels are silicon based. They’re just glass, silicon and aluminum, and there’s vast availability for that,” he said.

Likewise, the American Wind Energy Association said “the vast majority of the existing U.S. fleet does not use large amounts of rare earth” materials, which are largely limited to offshore wind turbines that represent a small fraction of the American market.

But both thin-film solar, which can be placed over glass without obscuring views, and offshore wind are expected to be increasingly prevalent in the decades ahead, as the technologies improve and costs come down. And combined with the expected rush on batteries, there are many who worry the world could very well face a run on the materials upon which clean energy technology relies.

That would potentially make the United States reliant on a handful of politically unstable, developing nations for its energy supply, Mark Mills, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank Manhattan Institute testified to the U.S. Senate this week.

“If there were a war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the loss of cobalt to the world would be of far greater consequence to the energy supply than the current attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil fields,” he said. “The kind of global expansion proposed for clean energy is not sustainable and might not even be possible.”

Such a possibility has already prompted action from the Trump administration. President Donald Trump issued an executive order in 2017 requiring federal agencies to develop strategies reducing U.S. susceptibility to disruptions in the mineral supply.

Earlier this year the Department of Energy opened a battery recycling center at the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, to develop American battery recycling technology to allow the capture of 90 percent of minerals like lithium and cobalt. And Murkowski has introduced bipartisan legislation authorizing more research into not only recycling but finding replacements for some rare minerals.

Right now the recycling of lithium-ion batteries is prohibitively expensive in the U.S. But considering how recently electric cars came onto the market, those costs are likely to come down in the years ahead, Kovics said.

“The first electric cars, we’re not going to see those (batteries) hit the recycling stream for another five to ten years,” he said. “The recycling industry is going to mature. Think about lead acid batteries in cars today. Ninety nine percent of that lead is recycled, and almost no virgin lead goes into batteries.”