Critical Metals – No easy road to greening road transportation

There are three options for greening road transportation, namely full or partial electrification, more efficient fuel combustion and the rollout of fuel cell infrastructure. Every option will lead to the scarcity of some metals and a geopolitical dependency. But a combination of these options would ease the scarcity and criticality of these metals. We think demand and prices will rise substantially for lithium, some rare earth metals and platinum group metals.

Greening road mobility has been on most governments’ minds for a long while e.g. in the form of fuel efficiency standards for vehicles. Now the shift is to move away from combustion engines. Transportation (shipping, aviation and road transport) accounts for more than a quarter of global energy-related carbon emissions. Road travel accounts for roughly three-quarters of the transport emissions.

Lower emissions by vehicles would therefore help these governments to reach their targets of the Paris Climate Agreement. Paris Agreement’s main goal of ‘holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

As ABN AMRO we hope to help to combat climate change and promote the energy transition. We focus on reducing the emissions of our clients active in mobility. Together with our clients active in shipping, road transport and mobility we seek for solutions to decrease the carbon footprint of their activities. This report focuses on road mobility.