I have been personally pushing the battery-electric vehicle (EV) as a solution to the US' dependence -and perhaps even the world's depoendence- on a rapidly diminishing liquid fuel supply. However, one of the arguments that I have heard against battery-electric cars is that the earth simply lacks enough raw materials to support this type of transportation fleet.
This argument has some validity as electric cars would probably use a fair amount of copper and the estimated crustal abundance of copper is only
60mg/kg. Copper is a very good conductor of both heat and electricity. As such, it is one of the most common materials found in electrical equipment today.
However, copper is not the only suitable element for this type of use. Aluminum is also quite good. In fact, much of the wiring that we find in over head power lines is an alloy of aluminum and steel. Granted, aluminum conducts neither heat nor electricity as readily as copper, but an aluminum wire's lesser electrical conductivity properties can be overcome in most cases by simply increasing the wire's diameter. Better yet, the estimated crustal abundance of aluminum is a whopping
8,230mg/kg.
As mentioned above, one of the more common materials to alloy with aluminum is steel, which is an alloy of iron and carbon. Again, iron is in great abundance compared to copper at
5,630mg/kg.Some electronics do not work well with aluminum circuitry, but most can be made to work very well with aluminum in place of copper. Nearly all high tension lines are are an aluminum-steel alloy, House wiring cane be made from aluminum. Automobile circuitry can be made from aluminum. AC motors can use aluminum windings. (An AC motor has no rotor windings. A DC motor would probably not work so well with aluminum rotor windings). Transformers are often built with aluminum windings. The list goes on and on.
The argument that the earth does not contain enough copper to exclusively wire the entire world is probably correct. Fortunately, using copper exclusively is not necessary.
Brian Jackson: Weird, old, and rare car preservatinist.
61 Corvair Van, Turbo Charged 62 Corvair Rampside, Retired SCCA Improved Touring 74 Rx2 Road Race Car, 75 Rx4 Sedan, 79 Triumph Spitfire, and a couple of boring practical cars.