How green is your electric vehicle?
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Energy Sector Analysis
To make electric vehicles environmentally and economically sustainable, the industry will need to take a fresh look at how lithium-ion battery packs are made and recycled.
How green is your electric vehicle? By Prachi Patel Feature Editors Tim Ellis and John Howes
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he market for electric vehicles (EVs) is revving up. More than 773,000 electric vehicles were sold last year, nearly half of them in China alone. Forty-one million EVs could be on the roads worldwide by 2040, according to a new report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (NEF). They would displace 13 million barrels of crude oil per day. But nothing comes free. Depending on the electricity source that is used to charge it, an EV can still produce global warming pollutants, albeit far fewer than an equivalent gas-gulping car, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. And manufacturing an EV actually results in higher emissions, mainly because of the giant battery that powers it. Every stage of a battery’s life cycle requires energy and produces waste. Falling EV battery prices—they hover around $200/kWh today—do not include these hidden costs. By the middle of the next decade, more than 95 GWh worth of used batteries will be extracted from hybrid and electric vehicles, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Many could get a second life storing wind and solar energy on the grid. But once they cannot hold enough charge even for that, most may end up in the landfill. By some estimates, less than five percent of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are recycled today because of a lack of incentives and recycling infrastructure. In the quest for faster, longer-range vehicles, manufacturers have focused on battery performance. But for EVs to be truly green, Li-ion batteries that power them need a circular economy modeled after that of lead-acid batteries, more than 90% of which are recycled. That means not only concerted efforts on recycling, but also developing new material chemistries and manufacturing processes with reuse in mind. “If we’re introducing electrified vehicles with the objective of reducing greenhouse gas generation then we don’t want to introduce new concerns and shift the problem,” said Renata Arsenault, an energy-storage and materials researcher at Ford. A circular economy balances economic development with resource protection. The goal is to keep valuable or harmful materials out of landfills, efficiently use and recover useful elements, and ideally reuse all of a battery’s components. This makes environmental and fiscal sense. Li batteries contain cathodes made of lithium metal oxides or phosphates, in which the metal can be various combinations of cobalt, nickel, manganese, and iron. Anodes are typically made of graphite. Mining for these materials is concentrated in certain geographical regions—75% of Li comes from Argentina, Bolivia,
and Chile, 65% of cobalt comes from the Congo region, 65% of graphite from China, and much of the world’s nickel is in the Philippines and Russia. Mines can have poor environme
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