How Green Are Electric Vehicles? In Short: Very Green. But Plug-in Cars Still Have Environmental Effects.

April 05, 2021

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by Hiroko Tabuchi and Brad Plumer (New York Times) Here’s a guide to the main issues and how they might be addressed. -- ... But a lot depends on how much coal is being burned to charge up those plug-in vehicles. And electric grids still need to get much, much cleaner before electric vehicles are truly emissions free.

One way to compare the climate impacts of different vehicle models is with this interactive online tool by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who tried to incorporate all the relevant factors: the emissions involved in manufacturing the cars and in producing gasoline and diesel fuel, how much gasoline conventional cars burn, and where the electricity to charge electric vehicles comes from.

If you assume electric vehicles are drawing their power from the average grid in the United States, which typically includes a mix of fossil fuel and renewable power plants, then they’re almost always much greener than conventional cars. Even though electric vehicles are more emissions-intensive to make because of their batteries, their electric motors are more efficient than traditional internal combustion engines that burn fossil fuels.

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Like many other batteries, the lithium-ion cells that power most electric vehicles rely on raw materials — like cobalt, lithium and rare earth elements — that have been linked to grave environmental and human rights concerns. Cobalt has been especially problematic.

Mining cobalt produces hazardous tailings and slags that can leach into the environment, and studies have found high exposure in nearby communities, especially among children, to cobalt and other metals. Extracting the metals from their ores also requires a process called smelting, which can emit sulfur oxide and other harmful air pollution.

And as much as 70 percent of the world’s cobalt supply is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a substantial proportion in unregulated “artisanal” mines where workers — including many children — dig the metal from the earth using only hand tools at great risk to their health and safety, human rights groups warn.

The world’s lithium is either mined in Australia or from salt flats in the Andean regions of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, operations that use large amounts of groundwater to pump out the brines, drawing down the water available to Indigenous farmers and herders. The water required for producing batteries has meant that manufacturing electric vehicles is about 50 percent more water intensive than traditional internal combustion engines. Deposits of rare earths, concentrated in China, often contain radioactive substances that can emit radioactive water and dust.

Focusing first on cobalt, automakers and other manufacturers have committed to eliminating “artisanal” cobalt from their supply chains, and have also said they will develop batteries that decrease, or do away with, cobalt altogether. But that technology is still in development, and the prevalence of these mines means these commitments “aren’t realistic,” said Mickaël Daudin of Pact, a nonprofit organization that works with mining communities in Africa.

Instead, Mr. Daudin said, manufacturers need to work with these mines to lessen their environmental footprint and make sure miners are working in safe conditions. If companies acted responsibly, the rise of electric vehicles would be a great opportunity for countries like Congo, he said. But if they don’t, “they will put the environment, and many, many miners’ lives at risk.”

Recycling could be better

As earlier generations of electric vehicles start to reach the end of their lives, preventing a pileup of spent batteries looms as a challenge.

Most of today’s electric vehicles use lithium-ion batteries, which can store more energy in the same space than older, more commonly-used lead-acid battery technology. But while 99 percent of lead-acid batteries are recycled in the United States, estimated recycling rates for lithium-ion batteries are about 5 percent.

Experts point out that spent batteries contain valuable metals and other materials that can be recovered and reused. Depending on the process used, battery recycling can also use large amounts of water, or emit air pollutants.

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Reusing lithium-ion batteries requires extensive testing and upgrades to make sure they perform reliably. READ MORE includes AUDIO

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Spotlight: Lithium

"The fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion.... In the absence of that, I don't think it's possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car."
– Elon Musk

Schlumberger New Energy launched NeoLith Energy, a lithium extraction (DLE) pilot plant in Clayton Valley, Nevada.
AES recommends Lithium Valley, a report by New Energy Nexus.
“Calendar Aging”, noun. Definition: a process in which battery electrolytes attack lithium-metal anodes and create negative electrodes which drain 3% of a lithium battery charge.
New microscopy techniques offer insight into solid-state batteries.

ETHANOL, ELECTRIC VEHICLES FACE BIG CHALLENGES (NewsDakota; includes AUDIO)

Does Your ‘Zero-Emissions’ Vehicle Really Offer the Lowest Emissions? (ACT News)

Batteries are vital in the U.S. (Politico's Morning Energy)

INDIA: Electric vehicles face practical, technical hurdles (E&E News)

Electric cars: What will happen to all the dead batteries? (Yahoo! Finance)

Tires are big emitters. EVs could worsen their pollution (E&E News)

Carbon Policy and the Emissions Implications of Electric Vehicles (National Bureau of Economic Research)

Carbon price could hike coal use for EVs — study (E&E News)

Future of EV Batteries from CA’s Salton Sea and the Shores of Lake MI (Our Daily Planet)

Rural America Gets Bad Vibrations From Big Wind -- Turbines are popular so long as no one has to see their giant blades or hear the awful noise they make. (Wall Street Journal)

The Green Lithium 'Gold Rush' (Energy Today)

Endangered Flower at Crossroads of U.S.’s Lithium Future (Our Daily Planet)

Lack of EV stations threatens electric dreams of Uber, Lyft (E&E News)

What is bioleaching, and how can it make cars greener? The raw materials needed to power electric vehicles are in short supply. Why not recycle what’s already out there? (Fast Company)

Report counters previous research on EVs and climate (E&E News)

California's electric car revolution, designed to save the planet, also unleashes a toll on it (Los Angeles Times/Yahoo!)

A global comparison of life-cycle GHG emissions from passenger cars (International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT)

EV Batteries: The Next Victim of High Commodity Prices? Batteries have gotten a lot cheaper due to economies of scale, but rising commodity prices could upend that trend (Wall Street Journal)

Electric cars have much lower life cycle emissions, new study confirms -- In the US, life cycle emissions for EVs are already 60-68% lower than gasoline. (Ars Technica)

California’s electric car revolution, designed to save the planet, also unleashes a toll on it (Los Angeles Times)

Deep-Sea Mining Becomes Battleground Between Conservation and Clean Energy (Our Daily Planet)

Recycling – Batteries unbound: Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a solvent that results in a more environmentally friendly process to recover valuable materials from used lithium-ion batteries (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Taliban grabs mineral riches coveted by energy developers (E&E News)

Hunt for the ‘Blood Diamond of Batteries’ Impedes Green Energy Push (New York Times)

Lithium under a California lake could help U.S. gain energy autonomy: The ingredient crucial to electric car batteries is found in the brine of an aquifer under the Salton Sea, a once-busy recreation spot that fell into decay because of toxic runoff. (NBC News; includes VIDEO)

Excerpt from Politico's Morning Energy: Batteries are vital in the U.S. ... Bringing renewable supply chains to the U.S. was a common talking point for the administration Monday. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said during a virtual event hosted by the Labor Energy Partnership that "the simple fact is when we manufacture products in America, we know that those products are made with a certain guarantee of worker safety, worker classifications, certainly making sure that we're not violating any human rights."

Those guarantees however "go out the window" when the U.S. bows "to the altar of low costs," Granholm said Monday.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered a similar message Monday when he said the U.S. would not compromise on human rights or national security in pursuing a partnership with China on climate. "Climate is not a trading card. It is our future,” he said. READ MORE

Excerpt from National Bureau of Economic Research: Will a carbon tax improve the welfare consequences of policies to promote electric vehicles? This paper examines when a complementarity could exist between carbon pricing and high electric vehicle adoption. We analyze electricity generation in recent years to show that in several regions, carbon pricing interacts with electric vehicle adoption. Under moderate carbon prices like those in effect today, additional electric vehicles will be more likely to be charged with coal-fired generation than without carbon pricing. We confirm this finding using a detailed dynamic model that includes the transportation and power sectors. At much higher carbon prices, the effect reverses. READ MORE

Excerpt from E&E News: Federal researchers last year, for instance, published a peer-reviewed study concluding that in certain coal-heavy pockets of the U.S., like the Midwest and Southeast, EVs could produce three times more pollution than gas cars — although they "almost always" emitted less CO2 (Energywire, July 8, 2020).

The ICCT didn’t delve into the varying emissions picture of the U.S. grid, basing their results instead on national averages for the grids’ emission intensity — or, in the case of the European Union, the continentwide average. The report also wasn’t peer-reviewed, although it did receive a review from life-cycle analysis experts at the International Energy Agency and the International Transport Forum, according to Bieker. READ MORE

Excerpt from Los Angeles Times/Yahoo!: The urgency with which his company (Gerard Barron, CEO of the Metals Company) and a handful of others are moving to start scraping the seabed for these materials alarms oceanographers and advocates, who warn they are literally in uncharted waters. Much is unknown about life on the deep sea floor, and vacuuming swaths of it clean threatens to have unintended and far-reaching consequences.

The drama playing out in the deep sea is just one act in a fast unfolding, ethically challenging and economically complex debate that stretches around the world, from the cobalt mines of Congo to the corridors of the Biden White House to fragile desert habitats throughout the West where vast deposits of lithium lay beneath the ground.

The state of California is inexorably intertwined in this drama. Not just because extraction companies are aggressively surveying the state’s landscapes for opportunities to mine and process the materials. But because California is leading the drive toward electric cars.

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“The ocean is the place on the planet where we know least about what species exist and how they function,” Douglas McCauley, a marine science professor at UC Santa Barbara, said of plans to scrape the sea floor. "This is like opening a Pandora’s box.... We’re concerned this won’t do much good for climate change, but it will do irreversible harm to the ocean.”

The sprint to supply automakers with heavy duty lithium batteries is propelled by climate-conscious countries like the United States that aspire to abandon gas-powered cars and SUVs. They are racing to secure the materials needed to go electric, and the Biden administration is under pressure to fast-track mammoth extraction projects that threaten to unleash their own environmental fallout.

In far-flung patches of the ocean floor, at Native American ancestral sites, and on some of the most pristine federal lands, extraction and mining companies are branding themselves stewards of sustainability, warning the planet will suffer if digging and scraping are delayed. All the prospecting is giving pause to some of the environmental groups championing climate action, as they assess whether the sacrifice needed to curb warming is being shared fairly.

“Front-line communities affected by mining are asking the rest of us: What sacrifice are you making?” said John Hadder, executive director of Great Basin Resource Watch, a Nevada group fighting a proposed massive lithium mine at Thacker Pass, near the Oregon border. “You are asking us to have our community and environment permanently disrupted. All you are doing is maybe driving a different car.”

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The state’s crusade — including a ban on sales of new combustion engine cars and SUVs by 2035 — has analysts projecting a surge in demand for the cobalt, lithium, manganese, nickel and other materials used to build electric car batteries. Need for these materials could soar by 600% globally over the next two decades, according to the International Energy Agency.

Electric cars account for 1.7 million vehicle sales annually worldwide, and that number could soar to 8.5 million by 2025, Bloomberg New Energy Finance projects. The transformation is happening quickest in Europe and China — where more than 20% of cars sold will be electric by 2025. California aims to hit similar numbers by then, even as the rest of the U.S. moves more slowly.

The success of electric cars is a point of pride for not just California, but the Biden administration, which is trying to meet the commitments in the Paris climate accord. But it is also a point of panic. The administration warns the transition threatens to leave the nation vulnerable to the whims of countries that control supply chains. President Biden in June ordered the Departments of Energy and the Interior to help industry bolster mining and processing of battery materials.

China controls most of the market for the raw-material refining needed for the batteries and dominates component manufacturing; industry analysts warn the monopolization presents not only an economic risk, but also a national security one.

The cost of finding new sources for raw materials and loosening China’s grip on the supply chains is large. That much is clear in Thacker Pass, a windswept pocket of northern Nevada where the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe has for centuries hunted sage grouse, collected plants for medicine, and gathered for ceremonies. It is also the largest reserve of lithium in the United States.

A million batteries, a massive mine

A mining permit pushed through in the last week of the Trump administration allows the Canadian company Lithium Americas Corp. to produce enough lithium carbonate annually to supply nearly a million electric car batteries. The mine pit alone would disrupt more than 1,100 acres, and the whole operation — on land leased from the federal government — would cover roughly six times that. Up to 5,800 tons of sulfuric acid would be used daily to leach lithium from the earth dug out of a 300-foot deep mine pit.

Tribal members and some ranchers are fighting the plans, alarmed by details in the environmental impact assessment: The operation would generate hundreds of millions of cubic yards of mining waste and lower the water table in this high desert region by churning through 3,200 gallons per minute. Arsenic contamination of the water under the mine pit could endure 300 years.

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The tradeoffs for the jobs mining brought to Nevada's Humboldt County, they said, were cancer clusters, water and air contamination and broken promises to clean up the land. READ MORE

Excerpt from ICCT: Only battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) powered by renewable electricity can achieve the kind of deep reductions in GHG emissions from transportation that comport with the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global warming well below 2 °C. READ MORE

Excerpt from Wall Street Journal: Prices of battery materials have skyrocketed this year as EV demand jumps. Prices of lithium carbonate, used in cathodes, have doubled year-to-date, according to research firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Prices for cobalt hydroxide, which boosts energy density and battery life, have risen more than 40%.

The pandemic has brought disruption, but the real problem is more fundamental, especially in lithium. “The oversupply that crashed prices from mid-2018 to mid-2020 caused multiple projects to be put on care and maintenance with other newer projects stalled,” says Scott Yarham, who leads battery-metals pricing at S&P Global Platts.

Benchmark Mineral Intelligence expects most battery raw-material markets to remain tight this decade. And it forecasts that the lithium market will fall into deficit in 2022. Most supply-chain contracts are “cost pass through,” which means EV manufacturers have to bear cost increases, says Caspar Rawles, head of price and data assessments at Benchmark. But battery makers still face margin pressure. Auto makers will push back when they can by playing different battery suppliers off one another.

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While most mining isn’t done at home, China dominates the processing of chemical materials that go into batteries. It accounts for 65% of the production of anode materials and electrolytes and 42% of cathode materials, according to Goldman Sachs. READ MORE