You know that question niggling away at the back of your mind:
"Just how much do batteries actually cost us ecologically?
And just how green is the electricity we charge them with?"
Yes those ones, where someone musta done the math but lets not...
The needs of a fast-growing battery economy…
We are currently producing the overwhelming majority of our battery needs via freshly-mined minerals/ores — trend increasing. Even if battery recycling were to increase greatly, it would not satisfy the growing demand. We would still need to mine more “ingredients”. For decades to come we would be churning up the Earth to get at what we need.
Even battery recycling is facing serious challenges, as a recent paper published by researchers in materials science and environmental sustainability in the peer-review journal Battery Energy, notes: “Even though the black mass (BM) industry is expected to expand with rapidly increasing sales of electric vehicle (EV) batteries, the most sustainable circular recycling strategies are still far from being marketable.”
Black mass, a variable mixture of recovered materials from end-of-life batteries, is not the largest problem; but rather developing processes for different kinds of black mass (different battery types, have different constituents), and extracting high percentages of metals economically and cleanly.
However, here’s the bottom line: even if recycling becomes much better, we will, for many decades to come, need freshly-mined metallic ingredients in massive quantities.
Revealing the CO2 emissions impact of battery-powered vehicles globally…
In environmental terms, battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) are superior to combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) if they are driven relatively high yearly mileages. But even if we imagine comparing total CO2 emissions of comparable cars — BEVs with ICEVs using fossil fuel — the break-even point at present global energy mixes is way above what most people drive in a single car’s lifetime:
At zero km, only the DIFFERENCE in CO2 emissions between ICEV and BEV is used to start the plot:
the BEV has much greater CO2 emissions in manufacture (values from global energy mixes). Up to a TOTAL travelled distance of around 570,000 km, the ICEV is responsible for less CO2 emissions than that BEV — on global energy mixes. The break-even point for a BEV running on European Union electricity mix would be somewhere around 130,000 km; on US electricity mix, in the region of 200,000 km. Below these break-even points, the ICEV running on fossil fuel produces less CO2 cumulatively across its chain of manufacture and use than the BEV.
Calculation methodology and ancillary values in The Decarbonization Delusion.
https://andrewmoorescientist.com/
aka:
ademonrower