Behind the Green Revolution’s Scene

Every good deed comes at a price. The Green Revolution is no exception. Superseding 1.6 billion combustion cars worldwide with electric ones comes at a gigantic financial and environmental cost. Most of it is not perceived by the population because it occurs outside our backyard. So, let’s delve into the world we don’t see:

Everybody knows that an electric car’s performance and desirability depend on its battery. And that battery is difficult to manufacture, hence the high cost of an EV, and very difficult to recycle at the end of the lifecycle. But the challenges don’t end here. A crucial part of the renewable energy infrastructure is the Energy Storage System because neither wind nor solar are continuous forms of energy and their energy density is many times smaller than that of fossil fuels. Most of these storages are made of the same minerals (copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, etc) with the same technologies, but they are huge compared to car batteries, and for every car battery on roads we need at least same amount of minerals in the Energy Storage System.

Now let’s see how these minerals get from the Mother Earth’s crust into our car batteries:

Though rare-earth elements are relatively plentiful in the Earth’s crust, in practice this is spread thin across trace impurities, so to obtain rare earths at usable purity requires processing enormous amounts of raw ore at great expense, thus the name “rare” earths. The journey becomes with uncovering the ore.

There are no limitations in emissions or environmental destruction when such operations unfold. The earth’s crust is first drilled using huge drilling machines, the holes are charged with Dynamite and blasted.

Then ginormous loaders are transferring the dislocated rocks onto dumper trucks, that can displace 450 tonnes in one go, using 200-350 litres of Diesel per hour, which is the equivalent consumption (emissions) of my Diesel car in 5-6 months. It takes several hours for a truck to get from the bottom of the pit to the dumping point, and there are dozens if not hundreds of trucks in perpetual motion.

Most of the displaced crust, between 3:1 and 10:1, (brown in the chart below) is waste rock (overburden) often containing heavy and radioactive metals

that end up being dumped in the environment forming a pile about the same size as the pit, that will poison the soil, waterways, water tables and the atmosphere for decades if not centuries to come, affecting every form of life in the neighbouring areas.

Further, the ore is unloaded in crusher units powered by even more powerful continuously-working diesel engines. The crusher’s output is further ground into fine particles.

All these processes leave deep scars on our environment. Restoring the environment and habitats would come at a higher price than the value of the minerals extracted. So far, this cost has been overlooked. However, some costs cannot be expressed in monetary value:

Cobalt mining Congo

Toxic Cost of Going Green

Copper and the dark side of the energy transition

It is important to highlight that the mining of the Green Revolution’s minerals is done in many countries of the world.

However, 85% of the refining is processed in China, with two major implications:

1. If China decides to put an embargo on these minerals, the whole Green Revolution will come to a halt for several decades, till the economies readapt. With the Climate Tipping Points around the corner, we cannot afford the risk of wasting this amount of time.
2. The ore must be shipped across the world in order to be refined.

So, once crashed and ground, the ore (the blue section in the chart below)

gets onto freight lorries or trains and transported to the seaside. Here it’s transferred onto large vessels called Bulk Carriers measuring as much as 3 football pits and carrying up to 400,000 tons of ore,

emitting every day as much as 21,800 combustion cars, and the journey from Chile to China, for example, takes on average 25 days. Altogether the daily emissions of equivalent 545,000 cars. Not to mention the collateral impact on environment.

Once their journey is completed, they are again transferred on freight lorries and trains to the refining facilities, where they undergo energy-intensive processes to extract between 1-8% useful substance from the ore volume, or 0.15-1.3% of the total crust excavated.

The balance is dumped in the environment “enriched” with toxic chemicals from the refining processes because international laws have little to no control over what happens in China.

Several minerals, each with a similar journey, are making up an EV Battery weighing ~180 kg. For each such battery, we need to mine ~60,000 kg of earth crust, and ship & refine ~3600 kg.

Once the raw materials arrive at the manufacturer’s facility, they undergo energy-intensive processes to be transformed into car or battery components. Then, they are shipped again to the assembling companies to be turned into cars.

Once assembled they are again transported to the seashore, loaded onto vessels, and shipped ( with approximately the same emissions and environmental impact described earlier) to every car sales representative in the world.

So, even before EVs hit the road they emit and damage the environment beyond the average citizen’s imagination, and beyond repair.

Therefore, we need to find more radical solutions to achieve transportation electrification by using as few rare earth minerals and involving as little international shipment as possible.

With , personal urban and intercity transportation can be fully electrified using only a fifth of the resources while enhancing our transport-related quality of life.