Electric Vehicle is a lie (Ep. 3)
Do we have the right transportation strategy to save our planet?
Why Electric Vehicles are currently so popular?
EV is old history: the first electric car was manufactured by Robert Anderson in 1830. But the invention of the “internal-combustion engine” by Daimler put a nail on the EV that was doomed by its autonomy.
Car market has boomed since then, powered by petrol engines. Since 2010, car production has oscillated between 80 and 100m units per year (a vast majority being still powered by petrol engines or hybrid engines). The current installed base is estimated at ~1.4Bn cars across the world.
Transportation represents ~20% of Greenhouse emissions, and passenger cars represent 8% of worldwide emissions. We surely need to reduce these emissions in a way or another. The current trend is coming back to Electric Vehicles, the only alternative — Hydrogen cars — not being mature enough. Following Tesla example, (almost) all leading car manufacturers are starting their transition toward this type of car. On 8th October 2022, European Commission decided that new fossil fuel cars will be banned from 2035. This is an additional signal to push EV adoption.
EVs present some clear advantages on the ecological front: They are not directly burning fossil fuel, which is a good starting point in term of greenhouse emissions as well as air pollution in dense areas. If coupled with low carbon electricity production, the end-to-end “energy” cycle is indeed low carboned.
But EVs come with a hidden dimension: their manufacturing needs huge amount of metal and metalloid components. The key question is: can we afford to replace all petrol cars by EVs? Do we need to adjust this plan? or event change it completely?
How big is the effort?
For the sake of simplicity, I will focus our efforts on the manufacturing difference between petrol cars and EVs, i.e. the power part and in particular the battery.
Caveat: this exercise relies on estimates. The full calculation is probably wrong, but the order of magnitude remains correct (I think) and is still very instructive.
Most of current EV batteries are extremely heavy. Let’s estimate the amount of various components that are required for EV manufacturing with a concrete example: a standard Tesla Model 3 ( that weighs 1800 kg) with a battery of 540 kg.
I based the calculation on components considered as regular for EV, based on necessary energy to store and power to deliver, i.e. NMC (LiNixMnyCozO2) for the positive anode and Li4Ti5O12 for the negative anode. I will save you the detailed estimates of the final recipe (but happy to share for the ones that want to challenge me) but EV battery is composed of
- 40% Oxygen
- 31% Titan
- 13% Nickel
- 7% Lithium
- 5% Cobalt
- 4% Manganese.
60% of the 540kg battery is composed of metal, some being very rare! And to serve the entire car market (I kept the low value of 80m cars p.a.), the industry would require per annum:
- 13 Mt (million tons) of titan (9900% of current world production)
- 2.2 Mt of Cobalt (1600% of current worldwide production)
- 5.6 Mt of Nickel (232% ww production)
- 3.0 Mt of Lithium (3800% ww production)
- 1.7 Mt of Manganese
Some metals will be missing soon
OK, you could argue EV is a new application; mining industry will adapt its production to match the needs. But the next question is “can the earth support such transition?”
Lithium seems to be very abundant across the world. with 17 Mt of proven resources and estimated resources at 80 Mt, there is some margin to feed the green transportation needs.
But others are scarce. Take for example Cobalt which economically available reserves are at 7 Mt, 50% located in poor DRC, with political instabilities that do not favour long term investments.
Cobalt WW reserve could cover only 3 years of EV production, i.e. 240m cars; far below the 1.4Bn vehicles we intended to replace at the beginning of our conversation. It would be impossible to equip all cars across the world… with current standards at least.
All car manufacturers are rushing to secure supplies: Elon Musk very political visit to Indonesia in 2021, with the objective to secure nickel supply is not a surprise in this context. VW was trying to secure 10 years contracts on Cobalt as well…
Added to that, all new green industries are rushing for the same metals. Our objective is to have a full green energy transportation, so we need to build lots of wind turbines and solar panels that are requiring the same components… Otherwise, your car would run on electricity, that is produced by a coal plant… so long for the greenhouse emission reduction.
Impact on environment would be dramatic
There is a common misconception on mining. Metallic components do not exist on the earth crust as pure metal. They can be found under oxides and are mixed with rocks. The average concentration of a specific metal in a mine is between 0.1% and 1%.
This means that supplying the battery industry with the 26 Mt of metal per annum for the EV market, bulldozers shall excavate approx. 5 Bn t (5 billion tons) of Earth crust and crush it to powder — and guess what ? the mining machines are not powered by solar panels — before dissolving this powder in chemical products to extract the metal (such as sulfuric acid, lime…).
Those processes require tons of water that can be scare close to the mining site. This is especially true for lithium. In North Argentina, Salar de Olaroz site consumes 41 t of water to extract 1 t of Lithium.
How do we solve the green transportation paradigm?
We shall think differently. So far, most car manufacturers are replicating the same vehicle size that petrol cars, which leads to a Tesla Model 3 weighting 1.8 tons. Quite a heavy car to transport 1 or 2 persons (most of the time)!
Instead, why don’t we break the past rules by
- swapping a car for a bike in our daily life,
- adopting smaller, lighter cars when living in suburbs (that would be sufficient for daily commuting) with a double advantage on battery impact: reducing its necessary power to move a lighter car and reducing the autonomy,
- renting larger cars during holidays (or taking the train !!!), those ones powered by hydrogen (let’s dream a bit)
- …
This would be really “accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy” (this is Telsa motto). But it would mean also selling cheaper cars and abandoning the idea of huge electric pick-ups…
Are you ready for this? Car manufacturers will follow you only if you give a clear signal!
“… is a lie” is a series of scientifically rooted provocative thoughts on our civilisation. This this article will be followed by:
Economic growth is a lie
