The EV ticking timebomb

By Roxy Costello-Ross

The appeal of electric vehicles (EVs) has increased dramatically as people become more educated on the negative environmental effects caused by fossil fuelled cars, but are they really any better? As we take a closer look, it becomes clear that EVs also have a substantial carbon footprint. Can the effects of mining lithium, cobalt and other metals for rechargeable batteries be justified for the benefits of electric cars?

Making these vehicles uses an incredible amount of energy, scientific studies have shown that manufacturing electric cars generates more carbon emissions than building traditional ones; factories end up using vast amounts of energy and can often produce large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions in the process. The Union of Concerned Scientists has calculated that manufacturing a mid-sized EV with an 84-mile range results in around 15% more emissions than an equivalent gasoline vehicle and that for larger, longer-range EVs travelling more than 250 miles per charge, manufacturing emissions can be as much as 68% higher.

Electric cars can only be as green as the energy that you charge them with. This means that, while we still use non-renewable sources for electricity in the UK, electric cars will have already contributed to carbon emissions before they are ever driven. In 2025, however, all of the UK’s coal power plants will have been closed – a significant step in the right direction for more sustainable fuel. This being said, the Government is supposedly keen to replace these coal-powered plants with fracking or nuclear plants, neither of which are green alternatives. While electricity itself is a clean fuel, the generation of electricity in plants run with fossil fuels means that there will always be an environmental impact of buying and using electric cars. If we can make our energy

from renewable sources, however, EVs seem as if they would be the obvious choice compared to petrol and diesel cars. In New Zealand in 2017, 82% of energy for electricity generation came from renewable sources, but one should not assume that electric cars in New Zealand are wholly sustainable overall or have a close-to-zero carbon footprint. To make a true comparison, we need to consider the life cycle analysis of the cars, that is all the emissions of carbon dioxide during vehicle manufacturing, use, and recycling.

During the manufacturing stage, emissions from the lithium-ion batteries alone were estimated to be 3.2 tonnes. The emissions from manufacturing an electric car are higher than fossil-fuelled cars if the vehicle life is assumed to be 150,000 kilometres, but for complete life cycle emissions, a study in China found that EV emissions are 18% lower than traditional cars. It was also found in several studies that over all phases of a life cycle, fossil-fuel cars generally emit more carbon dioxide.

Lithium-ion batteries are a major power source in many electronic devices, including electric cars, which has contributed to a 58% increase in lithium mining worldwide in the past decade. While there seems to be very little risk of lithium being mined out in the near future, there is a huge environmental downside to its extraction. While the demand for lithium increases exponentially, the price inflates, doubling between 2016 and 2018, and according to consultancy Cairn Energy Research Advisors, the lithium-ion industry is expected to grow from 100-gigawatt hours (GWh) of annual production in 2017, to almost 800 GWh in 2027. Lithium mining also requires extensive amounts of water, approximately 500,000 gallons per tonne of lithium, affecting ecosystems specifically in the Atacama Salt Flat in Chile – the world’s largest lithium extraction site. Already being one of the driest places on earth, mining activities consumed 65% of the region's water, causing many problems for local farmers. There is also the potential for toxic chemicals to leak into the water supply, which occurred in Tibet in 2016, killing countless fish, cows, and yaks that had been exposed to the contaminated water.

Research is however ongoing for a low-energy and environmentally friendly way to recycle these batteries. Currently, recycling lithium-ion batteries is complicated and inefficient. In some cases, batteries are shredded and separated into their components so that some materials may be reused. Many batteries still function after they are removed from vehicles and can be converted for use with solar PV systems.

While electric vehicles do have some impact on the environment, they are still a good option for reducing your carbon footprint but as with every new invention, it might be years from now until we realise the true impact of electric cars and by then, the world will have produced hundreds of millions of them and we could be back where we are with fossil fulled engines.