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BHP Billiton reckons copper to win from shift to renewables and electric vehicles-18th China(Guangzhou)Int¡¯l Non-Ferrous Metal£¨Copper£©Exhibition
11/3/2016 Copper exhibition -non-ferrous metals expo |
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Lithium plays may be enticing investors at the speculative end of the market amid optimism about electric cars, but global miner BHP Billiton reckons copper will be a prime beneficiary of demand for the vehicles as well as renewable energy, with the impact to become pronounced from the middle of the next decade.
The conventional internal combustion engine used in motor vehicles typically contained about 20 kilograms of copper, the miner said, about half the total used in a hybrid vehicle. But an electric vehicle doubles that again, to about 80kgs.
With the global fleet of electric vehicles likely to expand from about 1 million at present to 140 million by 2035, this would displace about 2 million barrels of oil demand a day by that time, worth about USD 37 billion annually at today''s prices in a USD 1.75 trillion market.
BHP''s vice president of marketing minerals, Vicky Binns wrote in a blog on the company''s website that "However, those same vehicles will consume around 11 million tonnes of copper in their production. Subtracting the copper that would have been used in the internal combustion engines ''displaced'' by EVs, and that figure comes down to around 8.5 million tonnes of genuine new demand ¨C worth around $US38 billion dollars at today''s copper price ... around one-third of total refined copper demand today.¡±
"That sounds impressive and it is. However, it could be even better. It is likely that the copper intensity of EVs will grow over time, rather than stand still at 80kgs per unit. If that intensity rises to 105, which we believe it can, then the value of the demand uplift from the swelling of the EV fleet rises to almost 12 million tonnes, or more than half of the current global market for refined copper."
-18th China(Guangzhou)Int¡¯l
Non-Ferrous
Metal£¨Copper£©Exhibition
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