The emerging competition between the fast EV charging standard CHAdeMO and the Society of Automotive Engineers’ new “combo charger” technology took another twist last month when Tesla Motors said that the version of its new Model S released in Japan will include an adapter that makes it compatible with the CHAdeMO charging system.  Tesla, which uses its own proprietary “Supercharger” technology for fast direct-current (DC) charging, has also produced an adapter to go with the SAE’s enhanced J1772 specification.  Tesla thus becomes the latest automaker to attempt to straddle the divide between charging protocols in this fast-evolving sector.

The SAE’s new system, officially called the “J1772 SAE Electric Vehicle and Plug in Hybrid Electric Vehicle Conductive Charge Coupler,” augments the original J1772 technology to enable charging with AC Level 1 and 2 charging infrastructure, or with fast DC systems.  Finalized last October, it is expected to become the de facto worldwide standard – except in Japan, where the major Japanese automakers including Nissan, Toyota, and Mitsubishi have all already adopted CHAdeMO, which first became available in 2010.

Tesla’s decision to produce a CHAdeMO-compatible sedan when it already has an in-house fast charging system highlights the period of market confusion and standards competition the plug-in EV industry finds itself in.  “This is exactly not what plug-in vehicles need,” commented Danny King, on Autobloggreen.  The name-calling has already begun: Japanese officials scoff at the SAE spec as “the plug without the cars,” while GM executive Shad Balch effectively called for an embargo of CHAdeMO chargers during a public hearing in California last May.

The major U.S. and German automakers have all lined up behind the combo charger, and new models compatible with the technology are expected later this year.  Given the hype over slower-than-expected sales of EVs, both in the United States and abroad, it’s unfortunate that the industry would allow itself to be sidetracked over what is, at bottom, an argument over the plug.  It will likely take 3 to 5 years for this standards confusion to work itself out.  The only bright side is that motorists, unlike smartphone users, rarely transport their vehicles to other continents.

Despite international outcry and an investigation by the World Trade Organization, China still controls at least 95% of the world market for rare earth elements – a group of 17 chemically related elements that are used in a variety of high tech applications including electric vehicles, wind turbine blades, smartphone displays, and missile guidance systems.  At the end of 2012, China actually said it would further restrict exports, in defiance of international trade groups and governments of heavy rare-earth using nations, like the United States and Japan.

Responding to the demand for diverse supplies of these strategic elements, the U.S. Department of Energy is establishing a Critical Materials Institute.  Based in Ames, Iowa, the new institute, one of five Energy Innovation Hubs set up by DOE around the country, will use a DOE grant of $120 million over 5 years to “develop solutions to the domestic shortages of rare earth metals and other materials critical for U.S. energy security,” according to a statement.

One focus will be to “eliminate the need for materials that are subject to supply disruptions.”  Translation: come up with new materials that serve the same purposes as rare earths, but are not controlled by China.

Japanese automakers have scored some early successes in that effort.  According to a roundup by Asahi Shimbun, Honda plans to recycle rare earth components from nickel-metal hydride batteries used in hybrid cars, and Panasonic has instituted a similar recycling program for home electric appliances.  TDK Corp. has developed a magnet with the rare earth element dysprosium painted onto the surface, rather than blended into the magnetic material itself, achieving the same effect.  In possibly the most significant development, in early 2012, Reuters reported that Toyota “has developed a way to make hybrid and electric vehicles without the use of expensive rare earth metals, in which China has a near monopoly.”  No specifics were given.

Around 60% of China’s rare earths supply goes to Japan, much of it to the major Japanese automakers.

Chinese Takeover

The growing likelihood of recycling and substitution programs has lessened the possibility of a global rare earths shortage – which the new DOE institute is being created to avoid – and has driven prices for lanthanum, cerium, terbium, and other rare earth elements off their record highs of 2011-2012.  That in turn has undermined the strategy of Molycorp, the Denver-based mining company that, in 2011, re-opened the Mountain Pass mine on the Nevada-California border, once the world’s largest supplier of rare earths.  Molycorp’s 2010 IPO was among the most successful public offerings of that year, but its stock has plummeted from its early 2012 highs to below $10 a share.  Molycorp investors lost some $600 million in market capitalization in 2012, the company’s CEO Mark Smith departed under a cloud, and the company is now the subject of a federal investigation into its public disclosures.  Bloomberg News reported in late 2012 that the company is now a likely takeover target – possibly by Chinese interests such as industrial giant Baotou Steel Rare Earth.

All of this turmoil makes the mission of the new Critical Materials Institute murkier, but it doesn’t lessen the need for a U.S. reaction to China’s mercantilist policies regarding its rare earth elements export industry.  Proponents of advanced nuclear power also point to another reason to support U.S. efforts to secure a reliable supply of rare earths: many of the elements are found in monazite, an ore that also carries high concentrations of thorium – the radioactive element that could provide a safer, cleaner, and more abundant alternative to uranium for a new generation of nuclear reactors.

The most direct solution to the international rare earths imbroglio, of course, would be to find new supplies that are economical to recover and process.  In June, Japanese geologists reported that they had found a huge, previously undiscovered rare earths deposit.  The only problem with that is that the deposits are under the ocean, about 1200 miles off the coast of Tokyo.

For an international flashpoint, the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea just southwest of Okinawa, are unprepossessing.  A group of small, uninhabited stony islands, they cover only 7 square kilometers total.  These isolated pinnacles “are apparently ready for disintegration by the first disturbing cause, either gales of wind or earthquake,” observed a British ship captain in 1845.

The Senkakus, though, are still there, and they’ve become the focus of an increasingly alarming row between China and Japan.  Traditionally a part of Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture, they’ve been claimed in recent decades by China, which terms them the Diaoyu Islands.  This dispute heated up at the end of 2012 after a Chinese marine surveillance aircraft, ostensibly civilian, flew through Japanese airspace over the Senkakus.  Japan scrambled eight F-15 fighter jets in response.  “Despite our warnings … it is extremely regrettable that an intrusion into our airspace has been committed in this way,” Japan’s top government spokesman, Osamu Fujimura, told reporters, according to the Global Post.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman responded in kind: “The Diaoyu and its affiliated islands have been China’s inherent territory since ancient times.  China requires the Japanese side stop illegal activities in the waters and airspace of the Diaoyu islands.”

As you might guess, what’s really at stake here is not the rocky Senkakus themselves, nor the feral goats that are among the few full-time residents, but what lies below them.  China estimates that one of the world’s largest natural gas deposits, containing some 250 trillion cubic feet (CF), lies untapped in the East China Sea.  (U.S. estimates are much lower, but still considerable.)  The threat of conflict between China and Japan over the waters around the Senkakus reflects a wider semicircle of energy-rich, and disputed, waters that stretch from Okinawa to Bangkok, and which could turn into a regional naval war as China jockeys with Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia in some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.

Mind the Trough

“Energy is clearly what’s driving a lot of Chinese behavior,” Sheila Smith, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told National Geographic in December.

The disputes, which China has refused to submit to international mediation (presumably because the Chinese government knows that its claims to complete sovereignty over the South and East China seas are unlikely to hold up in international courts), present a delicate diplomatic tangle for the Obama administration, which has reaffirmed its support for Japanese territorial rights while attempting to avoid overt confrontation with China.

Complicating matters further is the fact that the richest petroleum deposits lie in the Okinawa Trough, an 8,200-foot (2.5 kilometer) gash in the seafloor that separates the Chinese continental shelf from the Western Pacific.  Only since the mid-2000s has the drilling technology to exploit such ultra-deepwater reserves existed, and it’s almost certain that neither China nor Japan has the deepwater capability to do so.  A foreign partner – most likely a Western oil giant – would be needed to tap the oil and gas fields.

China, which has embarked on a major naval arms buildup in recent years, appears to believe that it can bluff and bluster its way to supremacy in the surrounding seas, but its neighbors are not standing passively by.  Japan’s Coast Guard announced this week it plans to create a fleet of 12 cutters to patrol the waters around the Senkakus, and India, which is partnering with Vietnam to develop deep-sea oilfields in the South China Sea, has declared its readiness to dispatch warships to the area to protect its interests from Chinese incursions.  Most ominously, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has publicly said he will void the country’s constitutional ban on armed self-defense, a legacy of World War II.  Abe may use an upcoming joint review with the United States of defense cooperation plans to eliminate that restriction.

A new energy war in the Pacific is the last thing the world needs, as governments face grave environmental challenges and the need to invest billions of dollars in clean and renewable energy sources, but the chances of that happening have increased in recent weeks.

Sometime in the next few weeks the most significant trial to date of wireless EV charging will begin in London.  Mobile software and chipmaker Qualcomm, which acquired New Zealand-based HaloIPT, a developer of wireless EV charging technology, in November, 2011, will be piloting wireless-enabled vehicles from Renault and racecar designer Delta Motorsport (maker of the E4 coupe EV) in various parts of the British capital.  I interviewed Qualcomm’s London-based senior director for strategic marketing, Joe Barrett, for Pike Research’s just-published research brief, “Wireless Charging Systems for Electric Vehicles.”

Building on its long experience in microchips and software for mobile devices, Qualcomm has developed a customized architecture for its wireless EV charging system based on coils, made of a ferrite material that has very low resistance to magnetic fields, arranged in a double-D shape and embedded in a rectangular charging pad.  This technology, Barrett claims, allows for higher degrees of misalignment between transmitter and receiver than other systems under development.

Qualcomm is also pushing a more ambitious business case for the technology.  The standard line of companies developing wireless EV charging is that it will spread because it’s more convenient: drivers would rather simply pull the car over a charging pad, and have it connect automatically, than have to get out and plug in a charge cord.  That makes sense, as far it goes – many people in this fledgling sector compare it to garage door openers, a simple convenience that fuels a sizable global market – Barrett offers a rationale for the technology that goes beyond convenience alone.

“The growth of EVs has been slow because of two things,” Barrett told me.  “No. 1 is always range anxiety.  But the real reason is cost: an EV is a lot more expensive than a comparable conventional vehicle, by $15,000 to $20,000. That’s a barrier. Wireless charging has the potential to address that.”

Briefly, Barrett’s argument is that EV charging must shift from once a day, usually overnight, to many brief top-offs throughout the day.  That will allow automakers to install smaller, and thus cheaper, batteries.  The battery accounts for most of the price premium for an EV over a conventional car.  Seeding big cities, like London, with many wireless EV charging stations (which can be installed more easily and less expensively than conventional, wired charging facilities) would enable that shift.

Seen in this way, wireless EV charging is no longer simply a timesaving device; it’s a potential enabler for the entire EV market.  That’s an intriguing notion, if still some years away.  New forms of infrastructure can spread very rapidly, given sufficient demand – think of how fast WiFi hotspots sprang up – and big cities have a definite interest in enabling new forms of clean transportation, particular in Europe.  Assuming the London trial is successful, Qualcomm plans to have systems available, most likely as a dealer option, by 2015 at the latest.