It's Not The Cost Of Disposal, Stupid, It's The Recovery Of Raw Materials By Recycling For Re-use!

Implications: James Carville famously said of political campaign issues, "It's the economy, stupid!" For OEM heavy manufacturing, "It's the raw materials availability, stupid!"

Analysis: Car makers claim that they are worried about 'disposal' costs for the flood of batteries, which will come out of the power trains of hybrids and electric cars.

If they actually believe that then they are simply stupid.

The minor metals needed to make both currently used (lanthanum) nickel metal hydride batteries and currently planned lithium technology batteries, such as lithium-cobalt-ion, for hybrids and all electric cars are critical to the building of the batteries and, in the case of nickel metal hydride batteries, have no substitutes.

The current source of 100% of the world's lanthanum is China; the current global supply of cobalt comes overwhelmingly from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It is true that there are today no economical recycling techniques to recover the nickel, cobalt, rare earth metals, and lithium from currently used or planned batteries, but the limited availability of all of these metals either due to resource nationalism or controlled production in command economies or both makes it simply idiotic to plan a widespread use of any or all of them without a way to recover and recycle these strategic and critical raw materials. 

Based on the Chinese projection of their own domestic demand for rare earth metals in 2013 there will be no rare earth metals available for export either as raw materials or finished goods at that point!

No problem say the clueless purchasing departments of the OEM car makers by then we will be using lithium technology anyway. But it is obvious that if another projection; the one that says there will be 3 million hybrids manufactured outside of China in 2013 is to be true then at least half of them will have to be powered by nickel metal hydride batteries since there are no production plans currently under way for any lithium technology to be manufactured in the millions before the middle of the 21st century's second decade.

The recycling of power train batteries for the recovery of their critical raw materials for re-use is mandatory if hybrids and/or electric cars are to be built in quantity in the west.

This problem cannot be disposed of.