Environment and Emissions

 

Do EVs pollute more than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles?

There are a lot of (not oil interest funded) studies that show that EVs are clearly cleaner than traditional internal combustion engine vehicles. MIT’s CarbonCounter.com site provides one of the clearest pictures of this. The additional good news is that the EVs get cleaner every day since utility companies are accelerating the pace towards renewable energy generation. You can further impact your own EV emissions by signing up for utility companies’ renewable energy programs, buying shares from community solar programs, or installing solar panels on your own property.

• "New Data Show Electric Vehicles Continue to Get Cleaner" (Union of Concerned Scientists) 

• "Electric Cars Are Cleaner Even When Powered by Coal" (Bloomberg) 

• "Electric Vehicles with Lowest C02 Emissions" (Volkswagen Group News) 

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Aren’t electric cars charged with coal power?

Our grid is getting cleaner at an increasing pace, but even with the present U.S. grid mix, EVs emit less CO2 than gasoline and diesel-powered cars. Presently less than 30% of the U.S. grid is coal (Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration) and coal use in the U.S. is declining year after year. "Electricity Data Browser" (U.S. Energy Information Administration) 

EVs also provide you the freedom to choose how you power your driving. You can, for example, sign up for a renewable energy program provided by your utility company or put solar panels on your own roof. Your choice. 
 

Can EV batteries be reused?

Yes, they can. If an EV battery has lost 40% of its original capacity in 15 years of use in a car, it still has a lot of storage capacity so it can be used in stationary storage setups either using an individual battery in residential home storage or combining a number of batteries for grid storage projects. The good news is that this usage is much gentler for the battery since the power levels are lower and it is in a fixed location so we can expect these batteries to last another 15+ years in these storage applications.

• "BMW Is Turning Used i3 Batteries Into Home Energy Storage Units" (GreenTech Media)

• "Second-life EV batteries: The newest value pool in energy storage" (McKinsey & Company)

• "Old PHEV Batteries Get Second Life At EV Bus Charging Station (InsideEVs) 

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Can you recycle EV batteries?

As mentioned above, EV batteries are very valuable in storage use after they are removed from cars so their life span can be decades, but when they are finally retired they can be recycled. Presently our biggest recycling challenges are with smart phone and laptop batteries because they have a much shorter life span and since they are so small in size we can’t use them for any meaningful stationary storage uses. A number of entities are developing recycling programs for lithium ion batteries. One good example of this is the U.S. Department of Energy’s Recell program.

 

What are the environmental impacts of EV battery manufacturing and how do they compare with ICE vehicles manufacturing impacts?

"An electric vehicle’s higher emissions during the manufacturing stage are paid off after only two years compared to driving an average conventional vehicle, a time frame that drops to about one and a half years if the car is charged using renewable energy." (The International Council on Clean Transportation)

• "Electric Cars and Global Warming Emissions" (Union of Concerned Scientists)

• "Don't be fooled by attacks on the lithium battery" (Canada's National Observer)

• "Correcting misinformation about greenhouse gas emissions of electric vehicles: Auke Hoekstra's response to Damien Ernst's calculations" (Innovation Origins)

• "Enough with the 'Actually, Electric Cars Pollute More' Bullshit Already" (Jalopnik)

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What about child labor in the Congo related to extracting minerals for EV batteries?

• There has been a lot of news about so-called “artisanal” cobalt mines in the Republic of Congo and for a good reason. At the same time we have to understand the scale. Over 90% of cobalt comes as a by-product from primarily copper and nickel mining. In addition to that there are some industrial scale primary cobalt mines, so artisanal mining is calculated to be less than 7.5% of the total cobalt production. Manufacturers need to make sure that the cobalt they are using is responsibly sourced. Less than 20% of world cobalt production is used for EV battery production and the amount of cobalt in batteries is decreasing as manufacturers are moving to chemistries that use less cobalt.

• The most common chemistry in non-Tesla EV batteries is Nickel Manganese Cobalt (NMC) which describes the main components of the thin active layer on a cathode. This layer is just a small part of the battery. In the original NMC 111 (also called 333) chemistry these components were used in equal amounts (1:1:1). Presently the most used chemistry is NMC 622 where cobalt is 20% of the active cathode layer and manufacturers are moving to NMC 811 where cobalt is just 10% of the active cathode layer.

• Tesla is using nickel-cobalt-aluminium (NCA) chemistry in their batteries and over the years they have also improved the chemistry so that the Model 3 battery is reported to use only 4.5 kg of cobalt on the cathode active layer coating. A Tesla Model 3 battery weighs 480 kg so the cobalt content is under 1% of the battery weight.

• The US Department of Energy is also actively working to reduce, recycle, and recover critical materials in lithium-ion batteries. "Vehicle Technologies Office's Research Plan to Reduce, Recycle, and Recover Critical  Materials in Lithium-Ion Batteries" (U.S. Department of Energy)

Other sources:

• "Lithium and cobalt - a tale of two commodities" (McKinsey & Company)

• "Responsible Mining of Cobalt" (Cobalt Institute)

• "CNN Wrongly Blames Electric Cars for Unethical Cobalt Mining (Desmog)