2023-11-04 08:45:00
The Facebook post in question, below, shows a massive excavator truck and claims that such machines must “move around 250 tons of dirt to extract the materials needed to produce ONE Tesla battery.” This is a rumor that’s been circulating for a while and has gained a lot of traction on social media, so it’s worth seeing what all the fuss is about.
Facts
The origin of this idea is clearly a report published in 2020 by Manhattan Institute (MI), an American conservative think tank. There we find (see p. 7) a calculation which arrives at an average of “500,000 pounds [de matériaux extraits et de sol déplacé] by battery” of an electric car. Roughly speaking, the author of the document started from the quantities of various metals that go into making a battery, as well as the average concentrations of each metal in ores, and made a simple rule of three. For example, if a battery requires 15 kg of cobalt and the ore (before concentration and purification) of cobalt typically contains 0.1%, then that is 15,000 kg of rock to move/process.
The document adds it all up, then multiplies by about 5.6 to account for “overburden,” or the thickness of worthless soil that separates the target ore from the surface. Total for the five critical battery metals and minerals (lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper and graphite): 250 tonnes.
From what I have seen, the Manhattan Institute cites credible sources to support this. But there are still some small (and big) problems with this calculation.
First, there are clearly minerals that are double or even triple counted. This is because copper, cobalt and nickel are often found (and even very often in the case of cobalt and nickel) in the same rocks. “Cobalt is mainly mined as a by-product of copper or nickel mining,” indicates Natural Resources Canada on its website. There are many mines that produce at least two, if not all three metals at once, such as mines Nunavik Nickel (nickel and copper) and Raglan (nickel, copper and cobalt) in northern Quebec or projects such as the one that Go Metals is working on (nickel, copper and cobalt) north of Havre-Saint-Pierre.
By making its calculations as if each metal was alone in its rock, the MI clearly exaggerated the quantities of rocks involved. It’s hard to say exactly how much — were the overburden and ores counted triplicate, double, or less? — because the deposits and contents vary from one mine to another and the metals from which electric car batteries are made can be associated with other metals (copper, for example, is often extracted from mines gold and/or silver). But, as nickel, cobalt and copper account for 168 of the famous 250 tonnes (67%) mentioned in the report, it is clear that this has darkened the picture for the trouble.
In addition, the quantities of soil to be cleared before arriving at the deposit (5.6 times the quantity of ore, according to the MI report) seem clearly too high in the eyes of Georges Beaudoin, geology researcher at Laval University and specialist in metal prospecting. “There are not many mines that have a spoil/ore ratio greater than 5. [Dans ces cas]it generally becomes more economical to mine underground,” he wrote to me in an email exchange.
Another factor which also exaggerated the final result: the concentrations that the Manhattan Institute used to make its calculations on lithium. This metal mainly comes from groundwater very rich in minerals, which is then separated from the water. The document states that “lithium brines typically contain less than 0.1% lithium”, but other very solid sources which rather report 5 to 10 times more. The concentrations for the other metals seem fair, however.
And then, in the case of lithium, there is no overburden to remove since the brines are pumped out of the earth, but the Manhattan Institute still included the brines in its calculations of volumes excavated – which , casually, accounts for 70 tonnes out of the total of 250.
(Let us also briefly mention a small calculation or typing error: the MI report says that to obtain 45 kg of copper from ores containing 0.6%, it is necessary to process 12.5 tonnes of ore while the rule of three gives more like 7.5 tonnes. Counting the overburden ratio (5.6 times), that removes another thirty tonnes from the total of 250.)
Environmental and social impacts
None of this means that the exploitation of lithium, cobalt and others does not have significant environmental and/or social impacts. The evaporation of lithium brines is a very slow process, which mining companies compensate for by building basins which occupy immense areas, especially in Chile. Likewise, the extraction of cobalt in Congo — which supplies two-thirds of world production — is carried out at a price of revolting human dramas. All this is undeniable and well documented.
But on the question of whether each electric vehicle battery involves carrying 250 tons of soil/water, the answer is that this is clearly an exaggeration. In this regard, moreover, let us mention that a CIRAIG analysis (International Reference Center for Life Cycle Analysis and Sustainable Transition) found that an electric vehicle consumes around 20-25% more mineral resources than a gasoline car — so yes, it’s more, but not by huge margins, and CIRAIG’s other environmental indicators leaned heavily in favor of electric models.
Finally, it must be added that the Manhattan Institute report is already partly outdated. The automotive industry is in fact in the process of adopting a new battery technology, called “lithium-iron-phosphate” (LFP), which does not use nickel or cobalt. Tesla announced last year that around half of its new vehicles were equipped with it, Ford prepares to build a $3.5 billion factory in Michigan to manufacture this type of battery, and everything indicates that This is the direction that will take other car manufacturers.
Verdict
Exaggerated. The manufacture of electric car batteries requires large quantities of metals which gasoline cars do not need, of course, but the calculation which gave rise to the figure of “250 tonnes per battery” was distorted in several ways, which artificially inflated the result, and by a lot.
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