Assessment of critical metal demand for China’s new energy vehicles with driving factor analysis

As a national strategic emerging industry, new energy vehicles, while accelerating the green and low-carbon transformation, the rapid development of its industry also puts forward higher requirements for key metal resources. This paper aims to examine the evolving demand for key metals in China’s new energy vehicle industry and its driving factors, with a view to providing scientific support for the optimal allocation of resources and the management of key metal supply. Taking China's new energy automobile industry as the research object, this study develops a demand assessment framework for key metals based on dynamic material flow analysis, systematically quantifies the demand for key metals in power batteries (lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese) as well as motors and vehicle bodies (iron, aluminum, copper, rare earth elements) from 2012–2022, and employs the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) decomposition method, grounded in the Cobb-Douglas production function, to investigate the driving mechanisms of demand evolution from the perspective of industrial structure, metal consumption intensity, labor input, capital input, and technological progress. The results of the study show that: (1) the demand for key metals in different parts of new energy vehicles has shown explosive growth, with the most significant growth in nickel demand; (2) In terms of driving factors, the demand for metals in power batteries is primarily driven by industrial structure effects and metal consumption intensity, whereas the increase in demand for motors and vehicle bodies is largely dominated by the expansion of industrial scale, reflecting the direct pulling effect of the rising penetration of new energy vehicles on resource consumption. (3) the inhibitory effect of technological advances on the demand for metals is weaker, indicating that material substitution and recycling technologies have not yet formed a scale effect. The results of the study provide a quantitative basis for the optimal allocation of resources in the new energy vehicle industry chain, and have an important reference value for the development of safety and security strategies for key metals.