State backing for electric car raw materials ’embarrassing’, says Cornish boss

State backing for the raw materials that make batteries for electric cars has been “extremely embarrassing”, according to one of the country’s top lithium developers.

Britain is racing to develop a supply chain that will meet demand as the world’s motoring fleet becomes electrified over the coming decades.

Jeremy Wrathall, founder and chief executive of Cornish Lithium, said the UK had the potential to provide “significant amounts of lithium and other battery metals” for the economy.

“The Government has invested £317m in battery research, but about 0.2pc of that is going into raw materials, which frankly is extremely embarrassing,” he said during the Benchmark Week conference on Wednesday.

“Really to have such a de minimis amount invested in raw materials is something that I think has got to change.”

Mr Wrathall said his company had received £500,000 from the State’s Faraday Battery Challenge fund but that more needed to be done by the rest of Government to address the growing threat posed by disruption to raw materials supply and the "consequent damage and job losses" to the automotive industry.

Cornish claims to have found "globally significant" grades of metal underground in Cornwall

Credit: Cornish Lithium

The former City analyst also said that the UK needed to rethink its strategy on how it will generate the materials to build batteries.

Estimates suggest that the UK will be able to produce around 25pc of the materials needed to meet demand for electric vehicles.

“I think the UK has been very focused in the past on importing stuff, and being reliant on imports probably isn’t appropriate anymore with Brexit, Covid-19, and also the Chinese trade war that’s going on with the US and various other countries,” Mr Wrathall said

“We really need to think about whether we want to be importing somebody else’s carbon emissions by importing products from China and elsewhere, which we don’t know where they come from.”

In October, Cornish Lithium smashed its fundraising target. The company had planned to raise £1.5m but attracted more than £4m in just over 24 hours.

The company said it had discovered a a "globally significant" supply of lithium – a crucial component of the batteries used in electric cars – under the hills of Redruth in Cornwall.

Britain is expected to need about 60,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate by then, according to the Faraday Institution, a research group working on batteries at the University of Oxford. Cornish believes that the demand could be met entirely by its project.

On Friday, Britishvolt announced that it was to spend £2.6m to build its first battery gigafactory.

Simon Moores, managing director at Benchmark Minerals Intelligence, said the country was “woefully behind” in building its supply chain for electric vehicles.

Mr Moores said the country needs at least eight gigafactories to meet demand as Prime Minister Boris Johnson looks to curtail the sale of new diesel and petrol cars by 2030.