‘Electric vehicles are the future’ – This is what we all have been hearing for the past few years. With rising concerns over the ill-effects of burning fossil fuels on the environment and stricter vehicle emission limits, automobile manufacturers around the world have been striving to electrify their fleet and gradually doing away with internal combustion engines (ICE). Electric vehicles have been long touted as a greener alternative to conventional vehicles that run on petrol, diesel or CNG. It is a well-established fact that vehicles with ICE emit toxic pollutants like carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, and sulphur dioxide from their tailpipe that contribute to air pollution and global warming. On the other hand, electric engines are quiet, less polluting, and cheaper to run. With no burning of any kind of fuel, electric vehicles have zero tailpipe emissions and experts have been arguing that increasing their adoption can help reduce carbon footprint. But, are electric vehicles really that green or they still harm the planet in some or the other way?
Electric car engines usually draw power from lithium-ion battery packs that are also used in laptops, mobile phones, and other electronic gadgets. They have high energy per unit mass and volume as compared to other types of batteries and also have high power-to-weight ratio along with good high-temperature performance. This is the reason that lithium, often referred to as ‘white gold’, has become a crucial raw material in the electric automobile industry. The metal isn’t produced in labs and has to be extracted from hard-rock ores and salt brine. It means that the mineral, which is currently high in demand, is a non-renewable natural resource of energy or is present in limited quantity. Now, lithium extraction too comes at a cost. The process harms the soil and can contaminate air and water resources in the region. Besides these factors, lithium extraction also requires a lot of water and can lead to water shortage in the mining area. For instance, local farmers in the Salar de Atacama salt flat in Chile had to source water from elsewhere as mining activities used 65% of the area’s water.
Even if we somehow manage to make lithium extraction clean and safe, recharging the batteries made with it will still pose an obstacle in making electric vehicles truly green. When it comes to India, about 75% of the total power is generated by burning coal, which is again a fossil fuel. Other countries including South Africa, China, Japan, and the US are also heavily dependent on coal for power generation even as they try to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and achieve the ambitious goal of 100% clean energy in the coming years. Hence, to make electric vehicles green, we must first adopt cleaner methods to generate power.
Now, if we dig deeper into the functioning of electric motors, we will be faced with yet another problem – reliance on rare earth metals like neodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. These metals are used to make permanent magnets that power motors of electric vehicles. Such permanent magnets are lightweight, generate powerful magnetic fields, and have more heat resistance, making them suitable for electric cars. However, rare-earth metals are difficult to extract, expensive, and not found in many regions. In addition, with the growing demand of electric vehicles, it is predicted that the demand for rare-earth metals will exceed its supply by 2025. Due to this, automakers like Tata, Tesla, Toyota, and Mercedes have already started cutting the use of rare-earth metals in their vehicles and have aimed to bring their reliance on the material to zero in the future.
Today, we all have become more environmentally conscious and the shift to greener modes of transport is also being encouraged and incentivized by governments and auto manufacturers. Electric vehicles indeed have a number of advantages over conventional vehicles, but there is still a lot be done to make not only the cars but the whole industry greener.
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