The principle of lower emissions in EVs is certainly commendable, the notion of sustainability on account of battery use, however, is still up for debate. There are two primary environmental costs relating to an electric car – the manufacturing of batteries and the energy source to power these batteries. To understand the advantage an EV has over the Internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle, we must analyse each step of production and not just look at the final product. The manufacturing process begins with building the chassis using a combination of aluminium and steel; emissions from smelting these remain the same in both ICE and EV. However, the environmental impact of battery production begins to change when we consider the manufacturing process of the battery in the latter type.
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The Environmental Impact of Battery Production
In India, batteries contain some combination of lithium, cobalt, and nickel. Currently, India does not have
enough lithium reserves to produce batteries and it thereby relies on importing lithium-ion batteries from
China.
Mining these materials, however, has a high environmental cost, a factor that inevitably makes the EV manufacturing process more energy intensive than that of an ICE vehicle. The environmental impact of battery production comes from the toxic fumes released during the mining process and the water-intensive nature of the activity. In 2016,
hundreds of protestors threw dead fish plucked from the waters of the Liqui river onto the streets of Tagong, Tibet, publicly denouncing the Ganzizhou Ronga Lithium mine’s unethical practice of polluting the local ecosystem through toxic chemical leaks. Similarly,
the production of lithium was halted in China’s Yichun city after an investigation into the water quality of the Jin river, the main source of residential water, revealed the presence of toxic pollutants.
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The additional environmental cost of transporting these batteries results in a higher carbon footprint than ICE vehicles. A
2021 study comparing EV and ICE emissions found that 46% of EV carbon emissions come from the production process while for an ICE vehicle, they ‘only’ account for 26%. Almost 4 tonnes of CO2 are released during the production process of a single electric car and, in order to break even, the vehicle must be used for at least 8 years to offset the initial emissions by 0.5 tonnes of prevented emissions annually.
