I was having a conversation with a friend about electric cars and it proved that neither of us know what we’re talking about. I’m also now having a difficult time sourcing information for the pros and cons of the future of lithium batteries in cars. Would anyone be able to ELI5?
In: Engineering
Aight, so the long and short of it is that, when you buy a battery electric vehicle (regardless of the type of battery chemistry), you have an initial “debt” of emissions in comparison to internal combustion engines (i.e. it’ll have a higher amount of carbon emissions associated with it right off the factory floor) because mining isn’t exactly great for the environment, but you work off that debt over years of usage because of the increased efficiency of the battery-electric powertrain and charging infrastructure, meaning the energy you are using has less GHG emissions associated with it.
The actual metric is *excruciatingly* hard to pin down as the automotive supply chain is hilariously complicated (e.g. Japanese cars are made in the US, but American cars are made in *Mexico*, because economics) and trying to figure out the true scale of it can make your brain do a big sad, but very roughly speaking a battery electric vehicle will work off the initial emissions “debt” in anywhere from 3-8 years, depending mainly on whatever your electricity provider uses to make power, and how/when/where your battery pack’s materials were sourced and manufactured (of note, this assumes you’re putting on around 10-12k miles per year).
***However***, the jury is still out when it comes to getting rid of the cars at the end of their lifecycle, which is still a bit of an open question as we haven’t had battery electric vehicles at large enough scales for a long enough time to know precisely how difficult it is to deal with the battery when the car is scrapped. However, it stands to reason that EVs will still be generally “better” assuming the battery/car manufacturers are in a position to recycle their own batteries and use the material to make more batteries.
From a pure usage standpoint, though; BEVs will not kill ICEs entirely. Spark ignited engines are probably on their way out, but diesels and turbine engines will stick around because batteries will basically never have the energy density to make sense for heavy-duty ICE applications (the only way around this would require you to rewrite the laws of thermodynamics; good luck with that).
Source: PhD in Mechanical Engineering, specializing in propulsion (primarily diesel).
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