Section 3: The Rare Metals Reality Check
Introduction
The electric vehicle (EV) argument often arrives as a mining argument. The car is “just as bad,” or worse, because of rare earths and precious metals. Most of that sentence is a mix-up.
Most EV batteries do not use rare earth elements. Lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, graphite, and copper are the battery materials. Rare earths show up in some motors, in the magnets, and they are a different list. Lithium is not a rare earth.
Cobalt is also not a “conflict mineral” under the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act, Section 1502. That statute names four:
Tin, from cassiterite
Tantalum, from coltan
Tungsten, from wolframite
Gold
The legal label is not a clean bill of health. A large share of the world’s cobalt still comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and artisanal mines there have documented child labor and dangerous conditions. Not being on the Dodd-Frank list does not make that acceptable. It does mean the slogan “conflict mineral” is being used for a metal the statute does not cover.
This section compares the metal story of the EV with the metal story of the gasoline car, including the last fifty years of refining and catalytic converters.
Myth: EVs Are Bad Because of the Mining
Mining lithium, nickel, and cobalt has a real impact. So does pretending gasoline is metal-free.
The minerals in a battery are not burned. At the end of the pack’s life they can be recovered. The catalysts in a refinery are a different account: some are recovered, some are consumed, and the fuel itself is gone after the mile.
Gasoline Refining Uses These Metals Too
A refinery is a chemical plant. It uses catalysts.
Cobalt is used in catalysts that remove sulfur from fuel. Argonne National Laboratory has documented critical-material use in petroleum refining, including cobalt. [1]
Platinum and palladium go into the catalytic converter on every gasoline car still sold. Rhodium does too. These are recycled. They are not used once and lost. [2]
Some rare earths, including lanthanum, are used in refining catalysts. [1]
A figure cited from that refining literature is about 1 pound of cobalt consumed per 80,000 gallons of gasoline. The United States used about 137 billion gallons of gasoline in 2025. On that ratio, U.S. gasoline would account for on the order of 1.7 million pounds of cobalt a year. That is a scaling of the Argonne-type refining figure, not a weigh-station receipt. Treat it as the size of the hidden use, not as a single audited tonnage. [3]
An older nickel-manganese-cobalt battery could carry on the order of 10 pounds of cobalt, and that cobalt stayed in the car for the life of the pack. Many 2025 and 2026 cars, including a lot of standard-range Teslas and the new Chevrolet Bolt, use lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and no cobalt at all. The “every EV is a cobalt hog” line describes a chemistry that is already losing share.
Mining Ethics
The labor problem in Congolese cobalt is real. Automakers have answered with audits, not with a solved supply chain.
The Responsible Minerals Initiative and the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance set labor and environmental standards and send auditors. Tesla, General Motors, Ford, and BMW have used those frameworks and published supplier lists. Tesla has also moved volume to cobalt-free packs. Audits reduce the chance of a dirty ton hiding in the chain. They do not erase the artisanal pits that still operate outside the audited mines.
That is the honest status. Better than no standard. Not a moral blank check.
Platinum and Palladium
A catalytic converter holds a few grams of platinum, palladium, and rhodium. A few grams times a national fleet is a serious metal demand, and EVs do not carry converters.
The old line that these metals are not recycled is wrong. They are recycled because they are valuable. That is why converters are stolen. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that in 2025 about 50,000 kilograms of palladium and about 8,600 kilograms of platinum were recovered from U.S. auto catalysts, part of about 140,000 kilograms of palladium and platinum recovered from scrap worldwide. [2]
Recycling does not make the gasoline car metal-free. Every new gasoline car still needs a new converter, and the fuel stream still needs refining catalysts, year after year. The EV pays its metal bill once, in the pack and the motor, and then stops.
Fifty Years of Fuel
The battery is mined once. The gasoline car asks for fuel, and for the catalysts behind that fuel, every year it runs. Multiply a year of refining catalysts and converter metals by fifty years and the cumulative tonnage is the point of the comparison. An EV pack can then be reused or recycled. A gallon of gasoline cannot.
Modern recyclers report recovery of the target metals in the mid-90 percent range once a pack is in the plant. Collection is the hard part, not the chemistry. Redwood Materials, in Nevada, now routes most of the EV packs it receives into a second life as stationary storage before any of them are shredded. A pack that is no longer right for a car can still sit on a grid for years. [4]
Abundance, Stated Carefully
These materials are not about to run out. They are also not what the slogans say.
Lithium is not the fifth most abundant element in the crust. Oxygen, silicon, aluminum, and iron occupy that neighborhood. Lithium is more common in the crust than lead or tin, and it is mined from brines and hard rock in many countries. Seawater lithium is a research topic, not a supply.
Nickel is common in the Earth’s core. Miners do not dig in the core. Crustal nickel is a real industry, dominated now by Indonesia, not a metal found in every backyard.
Graphite for anodes is mined and also made from other carbon. It is not scarce.
Cobalt is the tight one. Use of it in new cars is falling because LFP and low-cobalt nickel packs took the volume.
The constraint is refining capacity and the willingness to do the mining under rules, not a geological empty cupboard.
Less Mining Later, Not None
LFP packs drop cobalt and nickel.
Recycling and second-life storage cut the need for new ore, once enough packs exist to feed the plants. A forecast that 60 percent of battery minerals could be recycled by 2040 is a forecast. It depends on collection.
Less gasoline means less refining-catalyst demand. That decline follows the cars, not a press release.
The EV does not end mining. It ends the kind of mining that has to be repeated for every mile.
Nickel, and the Indonesia Story
Channel 7 in Australia ran a Spotlight episode, “The Great EV Con,” on Chinese-backed nickel operations in Indonesia. The pictures were the argument. The tons are the check. [5]
Indonesia is no longer a side supplier. By 2026 it accounted for more than 60 percent of world nickel mine output, and some industry counts put the share closer to 65 or 70 percent. High-pressure acid leach plants there now turn laterite ore into mixed hydroxide precipitate, which is battery feedstock, not just stainless-steel feed. The old split — half of Indonesian nickel for batteries, half for appliances, and most EV nickel from Canada, Australia, and Russia — does not describe this market.
Stainless steel still takes a large share of nickel, as nickel pig iron and ferronickel. An EV is no longer innocent of Indonesian nickel. A kitchen appliance is not the only place it goes. The environmental and labor record of those Indonesian operations is a fair subject. Pretending the metal is mostly in a refrigerator is not.
Conclusion
Gasoline refining and catalytic converters have been a metals business for decades. The converter metals are recycled. The fuel is not.
An EV puts most of its material demand up front, then stops buying fuel.
Cobalt in new cars is falling. LFP uses none. Congolese artisanal cobalt remains a labor problem where it is still mined.
Lithium and nickel are available. They are not “the fifth most abundant” in the sense those lines claimed. Indonesia now dominates nickel, including battery nickel.
No machine is clean in the way a slogan wants. The EV is still the one that does not burn a new barrel to go the next mile. That is the rare-metals reality check.
Footnotes
[1] Argonne National Laboratory, critical-material use in petroleum refining, prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy. Cobalt and rare-earth catalysts in refining are documented there. The 1 pound of cobalt per 80,000 gallons figure is the scaling ratio used in this chapter from that literature. DOE PDF
[2] U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries, platinum-group metals, 2026. About 50,000 kilograms of palladium and 8,600 kilograms of platinum were recovered from U.S. automobile catalytic converters in 2025. About 140,000 kilograms of palladium and platinum were recovered from scrap worldwide.
[3] U.S. Energy Information Administration. Americans used about 136.7 billion gallons of gasoline in 2025. EIA
[4] Redwood Materials, Nevada. The company reports that most EV packs it receives are reused as stationary storage before recycling. Process recovery of the target metals at modern recyclers is commonly stated in the mid-90 percent range once the pack is in the plant.
[5] Channel 7 Australia, Spotlight, “The Great EV Con.” Indonesia’s share of world nickel mine output was above 60 percent by 2026, with high-pressure acid leach plants supplying battery feedstock. 7NEWS
