Title.
I feel like the only way electric cars can be truly “environment friendly” is if the carbon produced is captured at the plants.
Not sure if it’s at all possible, though.
In: Engineering
[Yes, though it’s complicated](https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-efficient-carbon-capture-and-storage#:~:text=Most%20carbon%20capture%20technologies%20aim,smokestacks%20from%20reaching%20the%20atmosphere). Basically just like with carbon capture from the atmosphere there’s issues when you want to capture all of it because it’s not -just- co2, plenty of oxygen, nitrogen and nitrogen byproducts, and water vapor to sort through.
No consumption is environmentally friendly, but electric cars produce far less pollution than a traditional car, even powered by coal. [Like the other point, this is just physics, and is because a steam turbine is so much more efficient than Internal Combustion.](https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/01/electric-vehicles-use-half-the-energy-of-gas-powered-vehicles/) Because the tech exists, we should probably just implement the efficiency gains rather than question if it can ever be *perfect* while our climate gets worse.
Yes you can do it. There are a group of chemicals called amines that *love* carbon dioxide. So the idea is that you pump the exhaust from the power station through a column containing an amine spray. The amines absorb the carbon dioxide and the cleaned gas goes up the stack.
Then, the amine is sent to a machine called a regenerator where it is heated, the carbon dioxide escapes from the amine which can then be reused to trap more carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide itself then has to be compressed or liquified for disposal. As people have said above, this can be done in geological storage such as depleted oil fields.
The problems are many. Amines are nasty chemicals (not least that they stink), they will corrode many metals and there will always be a small amount of leakage – in the environment, not only do they smell bad, but they react with the air to produce a number of toxic compounds.
Heating and cooling the amines, compressing and liquifying carbon dioxide all use energy which reduces the efficiency of the power plant itself.
And finally, we are producing so much carbon dioxide that there just isn’t enough possible storage in the world.
Yes, you can capture it. There are several useful applications for captured carbon though not necessarily economical. One area of research I’ve kept an eye on over the years is artificial photosynthesis where catalysts and solar energy split water to form oxygen and hydrogen and the hydrogen then used with another catalyst and CO2 (or other carbon-molecule needing reduction) to form a carbohydrate. The carbohydrate could be ethanol which could be used as fuel as an example allowing for the chemical storage of solar energy to be used on demand later similar to a battery.
A lot of the replies I see here which speak negatively about carbon capture/utilisation/storage (CCUS) are letting perfect be the enemy of good.
For power generation, yes, it’s better to use sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide. But while those that already exist are working out their lifespans, it’s good to mitigate their emissions in some way. There are also many other industries that emit carbon dioxide where we can’t yet switch to non-emitting sources, such as concrete.
CCUS will not be a magic bullet for climate change. But it’s something we can develop rapidly which will help mitigate things, and that’s still good. And because the emitters terms to be large, regulated facilities, we can introduce governmental policies to encourage change rather than relying purely on economic ones.
It’s not economically feasible to tear everything old down right away. So let’s make the polluting things better until we can change them.
Others have better answered your title question, but I want to address this:
>I feel like the only way electric cars can be truly “environment friendly” is if the carbon produced is captured at the plants.
No passenger vehicle is truly environmentally friendly in and of itself. They, however, are much friendlier to the environment relative to an ICE vehicle. Beyond that basic comparison, you’re trimming away at the margins. It’s like haggling with a car salesman over a $100 coupon after the car you want to buy was discounted from $100,000 down to $20,000.
Where one places the bar for qualifying as “environmentally friendly” is subjective. There are some out there who argue that the most environmentally friendly thing we can do as a species is stop reproducing, since more people means more carbon emissions. Some folks recognize the role humanity has to play as active participants in correcting the course toward climate catastrophe, and so instead focus on minimizing per-person carbon footprint–these folks would argue against anything except urban multi-family housing with no personally owned passenger vehicles and all-vegan diets. Others think that simply “not littering” is adequate to be considered environmentally friendly. Others still think that burning fossil fuels is *good* for the planet’s climate because plants need the carbon dioxide that fossil fuel combustion produces. Me, personally, I think the four subsets of people I just described are nihilist, unrealistic, naive, and flat wrong (respectively).
The most environmentally friendly thing people can do as individuals *for transportation* is to live within walking distance of every place they need to go to in their day-to-day lives, while taking public transportation (preferably an electric train, but after that buses/airplanes) to go to places farther away which are less frequently visited. The whole of humanity cannot live this way–there are simply too many of us, with too few megacities in existence to support it. We need people to live outside of urban centers, and with that style of living comes the need for non-walking transportation in your day-to-day life. And it is unrealistic to expect people to all live along non-urban routes and corridors where public transportation can meet their daily needs.
So if people need passenger cars, then how can they own them in the most environmentally friendly way? That’s really the question that electric vehicles answer. They use far less energy to travel a given distance than is used by ICE vehicles. That energy used can be generated in a variety of ways–some of which, sure, are *more* environmentally friendly than others. But that doesn’t change that even an EV driving on 100% coal-fired electricity is still eventually better for the environment than almost any ICE vehicle. There is no contest to it at all: when it comes to efficiently using energy to travel a certain distance, EVs have ICE vehicles blown way out of the water. Consider giving [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2IKCdnzl5k) a watch to get a better handle on how an EV is more environmentally friendly than an ICE vehicle.
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