Electric Cars and Energy Security: Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire
An EV revolution will exchange strategic oil dependencies for strategic critical mineral and electricity dependencies.
As the tragic events in Ukraine unfold and oil & gas prices keep rising, energy security is once more rising up the policy agenda. Europeans are feeling the pinch especially strongly with extreme energy prices now threatening the post-Covid economic recovery.
The standard response to issues of energy security is that we should build lots of wind and solar farms and electrify everything to reduce our fossil fuel dependence. As this article will show, however, it’s not nearly that simple.
Uneven Distribution of Natural Resources
The current global situation illustrates the risks inherent in a highly uneven geographic distribution of the hydrocarbon resources on which all our lives quite literally depend. Unfortunately, electrifying transportation to reduce our oil dependence will help very little in this respect because the critical minerals required for electric cars are even more unevenly distributed than oil and gas.
