Saudi Arabia, the world’s second-largest oil producer behind the United States, is going all in on electric vehicles and battery production.
While many Republican leaders continue to yell “drill, baby, drill” and bad-mouth EVs, the Saudis want 30% of the cars in the capital city of Riyadh to be electric by, 2030, Bloomberg reports.
“The world’s oil capital wants to go electric and get clean,” writes Bloomberg’s Anjani Trivedi. “To do so, it’s getting its hands on minerals critical for batteries and taking a stake in the electric vehicle-supply chain. That should put countries and companies prone to announcing ambitious plans but then doing little to make them a reality on high alert.”
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Trivedi also warns: “It’s almost too late for the U.S. and parts of Europe to catch up. Other places in the Middle East are also looking to make the transition away from their economic reliance on oil toward greener technology. Abu Dhabi recently drew in a lithium firm to build facilities at the Khalifa Industrial Zone to extract the metal and recover valuable by-products from lithium-mica and phosphate minerals.”
Read more at this Bloomberg link.
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