Europe e-mobility transition could increase cumulative demand for cobalt from 2021 to 2050 to nearly twice the world’s known reserves, but a new 32-country analysis shows it can be changed. Advanced lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, combined with longer battery lifetimes and a shift to smaller cars, could make a 100% Europe electrification materially feasible. This study also exposes an often-overlooked trade-off: Reusing retired EV batteries in energy storage systems cuts carbon emissions but delays those critical metals recycling.
As Europe moves to phase out new combustion-engine cars, a question looms behind the climate ambition: Will there be enough lithium, cobalt, manganese, and nickel to power the shift to electric mobility? Writing in Engineering, researchers from Peking University, University of Southern Denmark, China University of Geosciences (Beijing), and the University of Tokyo, among others, offer one of the most detailed answers yet: Advanced LFP technology is one of the most promising ways to ease the material pressure.
The research team, led by Professor Gang Liu of Peking University, built a national-level dynamic “product–component” material flow model covering 32 countries, the 28 EU members plus Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, and Turkey. Unlike many earlier models, it tracks vehicles, battery packs, and battery metals simultaneously and accounts for the lifetime differences between the vehicles (10-16 years) and embedded battery packs (4-14 years). Retired packs may also spend extra years in stationary storage before recycling. That is why this latest model can identify where the real bottlenecks lie in Europe’s pathways to e-mobility.
“Vehicles and their batteries simply don’t age in step, and battery chemistry keeps changing, yet most material forecasts gloss over both,” says Dr. Wu Chen of the University of Southern Denmark. “Capturing those dynamics is what lets us see which strategies actually move the needle.”
The findings show that, under a business-as-usual pathway, annual demand for the four metals in 2050 would be 27-28 times the 2020 level, equivalent to roughly 641%, 649%, 5%, and 100% of 2020 global mine production for lithium, cobalt, manganese, and nickel, respectively. Cumulative cobalt demand from 2021 to 2050 would reach about 194% of current global reserves, and roughly 101% even assuming high recycling, making a cobalt-heavy fully electric fleet effectively impossible to supply. Manganese far less constrained at about 1% of current global reserves.
Among the strategies tested, advanced LFP battery technology development substantially ease primary material demand pressure. Cumulative primary demand falls to 65%, 16%, 12%, and 36% of the baseline of the four metals, and from around 2038, demand for cobalt, manganese and nickel drops below the potential supply from retired batteries. Combined with longer battery lifetimes and a shift to smaller cars, cumulative primary demand equals just 13%, 6%, 0.03%, and 3% of current global reserves.
Even so, there is no single silver bullet. Reusing healthy retired batteries in stationary storage lowers their life-cycle carbon footprint, but delays recycling and thus raises primary demand. Such trade-offs are why material, energy, and climate strategies have to be planned together. “The product–component model we developed can also be applied well beyond cars, to buildings and energy infrastructure too,” says corresponding author Gang Liu of Peking University.
The paper “Battery Material Demand and End-of-Life Management for Europe’s E-Mobility Transition,” is authored by Wu Chen, Juan Tan, Rui Zhang, Jakob K. Rasmussen, Jakob L. Karlsson, Xin Ouyang, Qiance Liu, Burak Sen, Jakob K. Keiding, Gang Liu. Full text of the open access paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2026.05.017. For more information about Engineering, visit the website at https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/engineering.