Are electric vehicles really that helpful though?

I’m sure that we are all familiar with the fanfare surrounding Electric Vehicles—and how they’ve turned into a saviour for this planet, that is sinking under uncontrollable carbon emissions. Now, it’s important to understand that although this is true to a certain extent, it is not the complete trutfh. Whereas EVs do not emit CO2 while being driven, they might do it in 3 other stages: during manufacturing, energy production and at the end of their life cycle.

The process of manufacturing a car starts with extracting, refining and transporting raw materials, for them to finally get assembled into economical products. This process is uniform across thermal and electrical cars—however, at the end of the manufacturing process, electric cars are the ones generating more carbon emissions, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. This is because EVs store their energy in the form of large batteries— in contrast with the chemical reactions required in a conventional vehicle— which have soaring environmental costs, due to their rare earth element (REE) composition. REEs like lithium, nickel, cobalt or graphite only exist below the earth’s surface and therefore require severe mining activities, that in turn use heavily polluting processes. Furthermore, REEs are available in only a limited number of geographies, but the need of the hour demands mass-production, leading to pollution-high transportation and maintenance costs.

Besides the weight of the REEs, the energy required to manufacture the batteries themselves is also responsible for nearly half of their environmental impact, since most of this energy does not come from low carbon sources. Nevertheless, forecasts show that the electricity generation is improving and there are more renewable sources entering the grid, which would help decrease the ecological footprint of building up these batteries. On the other hand, developing renewable energy systems has its own impact as well, again using energy and REE.

In the conventional car industry, the International Council of Clean Transportation (ICCT) stated that, 99% of lead-acid batteries—the ones that run in fossil fuel powered cars— are recycled in the US. This, however, is not the case for the lithium-ion batteries that have a very specific mix of chemical components and little quantities of lithium, which doesn’t make them an appealing market opportunity. For instance, in the EU market, in 2011, only 5% of lithium was being collected and the rest was either incinerated or dumped in landfills (this specifically doesn’t make electric cars greener at all), as it was not justified by price or regulations to recover it by hydrometallurgical processes.

Therefore, whether or not Electric Vehicles should be glamorized as pollutant-free, does not have a single answer. Of course, the more batteries that are out there, since the electric cars market is growing, the more interesting it gets to try to figure out how to recycle them or recapture rare earth elements. So, the chances are that a strong recycling industry for these batteries will keep developing and allowing electric cars to become greener.

Sources

1. Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave
2. Electric Vehicles and the Effect on the Metal Market | General Kinematics
3. Lithium
4. Are Electric Cars Really Greener? What About Their Batteries?
5. (PDF) Paper No. 11-3891 Life-Cycle Analysis for Lithium-Ion Battery Production and Recycling
6. Economic Times: Why electric cars may not reduce pollution
7. Electric cars are not a magic bullet for air pollution | Letters | The Guardian
8. Electric vehicles and air pollution: the claims and the facts – EPHA
9. Electric Vehicle Myths | US EPA