There can be no doubt that many of the world’s resource supply chains hide shocking human rights abuses. “At least with batteries you have a chance of making it circular.” Any caveats? But that is dwarfed by other materials: there were 2.6bn tonnes of iron ore mined for steel in 2022 and 4.4bn tonnes of oil.įor fossil fuels “the sheer amount of material we need to get out of the ground is bigger and everlasting,” Hoekstra said. That still includes vast amounts of material, including 130,000 tonnes of lithium, according to the US Geological Survey. It’s very, very substantial, but if we put this in comparison, we used in one year 15bn tonnes of fossil fuels.”Īuke Hoekstra, an energy transition researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology, said that about 0.1% of the Earth’s habitable land is used in mining, but less than 0.01% was used for battery minerals. Julia Poliscanova, T&E’s senior director for vehicles and e-mobility, said: “By 2030 we will need around 30m tonnes of critical minerals. Transport & Environment (T&E), a Brussels-based thinktank, found that a petrol car will burn an average of 17,000 litres of oil in its lifetime – about 12.5 tonnes.ĭata suggests that after recycling, battery material waste over an electric car’s life will be about 30kg by 2030. Yet overall, the mineral use for electric cars is much, much lower than petrol and diesel as soon as oil enters the equation. The data company Benchmark Mineral Intelligence forecasts global demand for lithium, the key battery metal, will quadruple to 3m tonnes in 2030, outstripping supply. The International Energy Agency estimated that electric cars use 173kg more minerals such as lithium, nickel and copper than petrol cars (when ignoring steel and aluminium). Mineral demand for heavy batteries will grow rapidly. Photograph: Junior Kannah/AFP/GettyĪ recent headline in the Daily Telegraph newspaper claimed: “Electric cars are made of pollution and human misery.” A Washington Post headline claimed the electric vehicle transition was driven by “blood batteries”. A child walks past a truck carrying rocks extracted from a cobalt mine at a copper quarry and cobalt pit in Lubumbashi, DRC.
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