EV Illusions
MAY 10, 2023
tags: Electric Cars
By Paul Homewood
No one can really say whether widespread adoption of EVs will cut carbon emissions.
A dozen states have joined California and many countries in passing legislation to ban the sale of conventional cars and push everyone into electric vehicles (EVs), many within the decade. Similarly, in a feat of regulatory legerdemain, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed emissions rules that would effectively require automakers to sell mostly EVs. And of course, the ill-named Inflation Reduction Act, a.k.a. the Green New Deal, gushes subsidies across the EV ecosystem.
The rush to subsidize and mandate EVs is animated by a fatal conceit: the assumption that they will radically reduce CO2 emissions. That assumption is embedded orthodoxy not just among green pundits and administrators of the regulatory state but also among EV critics, who take issue with a forced transition mainly on grounds of lost freedoms, costs, and market distortions.
But the truth is, because of the nature of uncertainties in global industrial ecosystems, no one really knows how much widespread adoption of EVs could reduce emissions, or whether they might even increase them. (And no, this has nothing to do with the truth / joke that Teslas are coal-fired when fueled at night in many places.) While grid realities will indeed matter more than most realize, the relevant and surprising emissions wildcard comes from the gargantuan, energy-hungry processes needed to make EV batteries. This is one of those technical issues that tends to attract slogans, simplifications, and illusions of accuracy; a better understanding requires some patience.
EV emissions realities start with physics. To match the energy stored in one pound of oil requires 15 pounds of lithium battery, which in turn entails digging up about 7,000 pounds of rock and dirt to get the minerals needed—lithium, graphite, copper, nickel, aluminum, zinc, neodymium, manganese, and so on. Thus, fabricating a typical, single half-ton EV battery requires mining and processing about 250 tons of materials. (These figures hold roughly true for all lithium chemistries.) For the carbon-counters tracking such things, the global mining and minerals sector uses 40 percent of all industrial energy—dominated by oil, coal, and natural gas—and that’s before we take into consideration the massive expansion that would be required to supply all the battery factories planned for widespread EV adoption.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/05/10/ev-illusions/
