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Moving towards a low-carbon economy will imply a considerable increase in the deployment of green technologies, which will in turn increase the demand of certain raw materials. In this paper, the material requirements for 2050 scenarios are assessed in terms of exergy to analyze the impact in natural resources in each scenario and identify which technologies are going to demand more resources.Renewable energy technologies are more mineral intensive than current energy sources.Using the International Energy Agency scenarios, from 2025 to 2050, total raw material demand is going to increase by 30%, being the transport sector the one that experiences the highest increase. Aluminum, iron, copper and potassium are those elements that present a higher share of the material needs for green technologies. Besides, there are five elements that experience at least a six-fold increase in demand in that period: cobalt, lithium, magnesium, titanium and zinc. Comparing those results with Greenpeace's AE[R] scenario, which considers a 100% renewable supply by 2050, this increase is even higher. Therefore, avoiding the dependency on fossil fuels will imply to accept the dependency on raw materials.

SummaryThe changing material composition of cars represents a challenge for future recycling of end-of-life vehicles (ELVs). Particularly, as current recycling targets are based solely on mass, critical metals increasingly used in cars might be lost during recycling processes, due to their small mass compared to bulk metals such as Fe and Al. We investigate a complementary indicator to material value in passenger vehicles based on exergy. The indicator is called thermodynamic rarity and represents the exergy cost (GJ) needed for producing a given material from bare rock to the market. According to our results, the thermodynamic rarity of critical metals used in cars, in most cases, supersedes that of the bulk metals that are the current focus of ELV recycling. While Fe, Al, and Cu account for more than 90% of the car's metal content, they only represent 60% of the total rarity of a car. In contrast, while Mo, Co, Nb, and Ni account for less than 1% of the car's metal content, their contribution to the car's rarity is larger than 7%. Rarity increases with the electrification level due to the greater amount of critical metals used; specifically, due to an increased use of (1) Al alloys are mainly used in the car's body-in-white of electric cars for light-weighting purposes, (2) Cu in car electronics, and (3) Co, Li, Ni, and rare earth metals (La, Nd, and Pr) in Li-ion and NiMH batteries. Keywords:automobile industry critical raw materials end-of-life vehicles (ELV) exergy sustainable mobility thermodynamic rarity Supporting information is linked to this article on the JIE website