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In the process of moving the mobility towards electrically powered vehicles all of Europe is going to need a lot more capacity. So all the disscussions about the hence and forth between France and Germany are quite moot.

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I think the more likely outcome is that personal and commercial travel will just be illegal for people outside of political leadership. The mineral resources to replace all vehicles with EVs don’t exist. Sort of Holodomor repeated as farce.

The mineral resources to replace all vehicles with EVs, in fact, do exist.

USGS states there are 7M tons of Cobalt reserves in the world. An EV battery needs about 15lbs of Cobalt. That means, in a fantasy scenario of perfect recovery of all known Cobalt, we have 930M batteries which last, maybe 100K miles. That means we get to replace, in a fantasy scenario, 2/3 of the world’s vehicles once. Then that number declines with recycling efficiency, which appears to optimistically be about 75% recovery.

So no, and state-imposed poverty (lots of examples) seems much more likely than a successful extraterrestrial mining industry (no examples).

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