Marguerite McCaughan
speaker
104 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 3 Jul
Marguerite McCaughan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Teo Lombardo is an analyst and modeller focused on battery technologies at the International Energy Agency.
Teo mentions that lithium ion batteries play a particularly important role here.
Lithium, nickel, cobalt, along with manganese and graphite are called critical materials.
They are natural substances needed to make modern technologies work, but getting them is neither easy nor predictable.
Only a few countries produce or process a lot of them, so if that supply stops, many others can be affected.
Most electric vehicle batteries cannot be made without these materials.
If supply is disrupted or prices rise, the batteries become harder or more expensive to produce.
Europe in particular depends a lot on other countries for these critical materials.
The European Union is trying to reduce this dependency by, for example, setting targets for recovering critical materials from old devices and legal means such as defining lithium-ion batteries as hazardous waste.
This should help keep more material from battery recycling inside Europe for processing.
But this raises a crucial question.
Are there enough critical materials to meet the demand for new batteries?
Here's to you again.
So the main constraint is not the availability of materials, but this raises another question.
What is the environmental cost of extracting and transporting the materials used in batteries?
While scaling up technologies like electric vehicles and renewables increases demand for critical materials, the resultant drop in fossil fuel use is much greater, making it a net gain.
Having understood the role of critical materials in EV batteries, I turned to exploring what battery circularity looks like in practice.
That distinction matters.
Circularity is not just recycling.
It starts earlier, with design, data collection and safety.
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