Electric vehicles (EVs) are often associated with a significant mineral challenge. At the heart of each EV is a 900-pound battery, filled with minerals sourced from all over the globe.
To build these batteries, millions of tons of lithium, cobalt, bauxite, and other essential minerals must be mined, processed, shipped, and refined.
This global supply chain can sometimes involve environmental damage and human rights violations.
Despite these concerns, the issue of mining doesn’t necessarily make fossil fuel-powered vehicles appear more appealing.
Nobody wants to drive an EV that’s powered by cobalt mined in exploitative conditions, often referred to as “blood diamonds” of the mineral world.
But does the mining of these critical minerals negate the environmental and climate benefits of EVs compared to traditional gasoline vehicles?
I investigated the shifting supply chains of the clean-energy economy. What I found is that, no matter how you look at it, the demand for minerals required for EV batteries is a tiny fraction of the fossil fuels currently extracted to power our world.
However, not all impacts are measured in raw tons. For EVs to truly deliver on their promise of cleaner energy, they need to avoid replicating the errors made during the first Industrial Revolution.
Mining companies and manufacturers have the opportunity to adopt cleaner practices and improve recycling processes to lessen the environmental and social impact of mining.
Here’s a comparison of electric and gasoline vehicles:
The Cost of Battery Materials
While all vehicles rely on common materials like steel, aluminum, copper, plastic, rubber, and glass, EVs differ primarily in the battery packs they require.
A typical EV with a 200-mile range is equipped with a lithium-ion battery pack, which makes up nearly a third of the vehicle’s weight.
This includes materials such as the casing, structural components, and a liquid electrolyte used to charge and discharge the battery.
Transport and Environment, a nonprofit organization advocating for cleaner transportation, estimates that approximately 353 pounds of essential minerals or metals, such as cobalt, nickel, manganese, graphite, aluminum, and copper, are crucial to an EV’s battery.
MIT reports that, excluding steel and aluminum, an electric vehicle needs six times more minerals than a conventional vehicle.
The demand for these materials will increase drastically in the years to come. Global EV sales are expected to overtake those of gasoline-powered vehicles within the next decade, surpassing initial projections.
Leading automakers like General Motors, Volkswagen, Volvo, Hyundai, and Honda are already committing to an electrified future.
With governments from California to the European Union enforcing bans on new fossil-fuel vehicles by 2035, it’s likely that electric cars will dominate the market long before the middle of this century.
This will necessitate expanding existing mines and opening new ones.
“The volume is large and it’s going to get very large,” says Gerbrand Ceder, a materials science professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
As gigafactories spring up around the world to produce batteries, the clean-energy mineral supply chain will face significant strain.
Mining minerals is never without its complications. Cobalt from Congo, lithium and graphite from China, nickel from Indonesia and Russia, and battery supply chains that run through Xinjiang—an area notorious for forced labor—are just some of the issues.
The Washington Post explored these challenges in their “Clean Cars, Hidden Toll” series. Countries like Guinea, home to vast bauxite reserves for aluminum, face local unrest due to mining activities. South Africa’s manganese miners also face serious health risks.
These social and environmental concerns are real, but when compared to the oil, gas, and coal industries, they remain relatively small in scale.
Oil Extraction Outpaces Mining
To properly compare EVs with conventional vehicles, we first need to examine the amount of raw material extracted to make and fuel them.
Mineral extraction for the clean-energy sector is measured in millions of tons annually, but fossil fuel extraction dwarfs this scale.
In 2020, the global clean-energy infrastructure wind turbines, solar panels, EVs, and more demanded around 7 million tons of minerals, with roughly half of that allocated for batteries and electric vehicles, according to the International Energy Agency.
In contrast, the oil, gas, and coal industries extracted the equivalent of 15 billion metric tons of fossil fuels in 2019.
This volume of extraction is needed year after year to continue supplying energy, whereas clean-energy technology can use the same materials for decades or, if recycled, indefinitely.
Even in a scenario where EVs and clean energy technologies become the dominant force globally, the IEA estimates that the need for critical minerals will be about 500 times less in terms of volume than today’s fossil fuel extraction.
While material extraction is a useful indicator, it doesn’t perfectly correlate with environmental harm. The local environmental consequences tend to scale with the amount of material extracted.
For example, extracting one ton of copper requires moving around 100 tons of ore.
Nevertheless, Sam Calisch from the nonprofit Rewiring America estimates that the clean-energy economy only requires five times less material extraction than the fossil fuel industry. “This is still massive,” says Calisch.
The Climate Impact of Clean-Energy Minerals
Even with the challenges posed by mineral mining, EVs have a much lower emissions rate compared to gasoline vehicles.
On average, an EV emits less than a third of the emissions per mile of a traditional gas-powered car, especially when recharged using America’s electricity grid. But what happens if we factor in emissions from mining metals, manufacturing, and disposing of EVs?
Noah Horesh, a researcher at Colorado State University who studies life-cycle emissions, found that fossil fuel vehicles generate roughly twice the emissions of an EV, even when considering the emissions from mining the added minerals and metals.
This difference will only grow as the power sector decarbonizes, and battery manufacturing becomes more efficient. Those using clean electricity to charge their EVs, or driving smaller vehicles, may already notice a significant difference today.
Furthermore, air pollution, a leading cause of death worldwide, will decrease as the use of fossil fuels decreases.
Studies in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Environmental Research estimate that fossil fuel-related air pollution leads to between 4 million and 8 million excess deaths annually.
A Cleaner Future for EVs?
Unlike the oil industry, cleaning up the mineral supply chain for EVs is still a realistic goal. The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act incentivizes automakers to source minerals from domestic supply chains or countries with close trade ties to the U.S.
Meanwhile, automakers, mining companies, and governments are pushing for greater transparency in supply chains. New technologies are also helping reduce the negative environmental impacts.
Progress is being made, but the journey is far from complete.
The advocacy group Lead the Charge, which monitors supply chains of leading automakers, reports that many companies are making strides toward eliminating emissions, environmental damage, and human rights violations. However, the industry as a whole still has a long way to go.
Some positive changes are already apparent. Researchers and battery manufacturers are working to replace nickel and cobalt with more abundant, nontoxic, and cheaper metals such as manganese and iron.
“There are only a few metals at the intersection of what we can use and what we produce a lot of,” says Ceder. “But we’re seeing significant progress in that area.”
In recent years, manufacturers have reduced their reliance on cobalt in EV batteries by six times, with some batteries now completely free of cobalt or nickel. In fact, half of the vehicles Tesla sold in the first quarter of last year used batteries without cobalt or nickel.
Recycling offers another avenue for improvement. Currently, only about 5 percent of lithium-ion batteries are recycled in the U.S., but within a few decades, experts predict that most EV batteries will be repurposed for grid energy storage or recycled, potentially cutting mineral demand by about a third.
This could follow the model of lead-acid car batteries, which are recycled at a rate of 99 percent, creating a nearly closed loop for lead reuse.
“There is no free lunch,” says Sergey Paltsev, a senior research scientist at MIT. “But it’s much less harmful than if we stay with fossil fuels. That’s the conclusion.”