A few weeks ago, I argued that battery-electric vehicles are greener than fossil fuel or hydrogen where well-to-wheel emissions are concerned. But that is only part of the story, and many argue that, once you take battery production into account, BEVs don’t look so green. That’s not true, though.
This is a common trope in online anti-EV arguments and was particularly fueled last year in the UK by the infamous “Astongate”. This involved a report commissioned by Aston Martin, Bosch, Honda, McLaren and the Renewable Transport Fuel Association called Decarbonising Road Transport: There Is No Silver Bullet. The report argued that you would need to do at least 50,000 miles in a BEV before it broke even with fossil fuel vehicles for CO2 emissions.
The exhaust emissions from fossil fuel vehicles far outweigh the fact that less energy is used in … [+]
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I debunked this report at the time here in Forbes, and as it turned out the document was produced by a puppet PR company called Clarendon Communications owned by Aston Martin’s Director of Global Government & Corporate Affairs, James Michael Stephens, but registered in the name of his wife, a nurse. Forensic work by Michael Liebreich, founder of BloombergNEV and Auke Hoekstra of Eindhoven University detailed the many failings of this “report”. But the right-wing press in the UK had already fallen for it, and you still see many claiming BEVs aren’t as green as ICE as a result, because it confirms their bias against change.
It’s not surprising that there is serious pushback from the fossil fuel industry incumbents. In fact, a detailed report based on old documents has shown that the oil industry has known about the role of its products in climate change since at least 1959, but has chosen to hide this and instead spend money on denial. A report in 2019 from InfluenceMap argued that the five largest publicly traded oil and gas companies invested over $1 billion between 2015 and 2018 alone on “misleading climate-related branding and lobbying”. It’s a very similar situation to how the tobacco industry hid that it knew smoking causes cancer.
We should not be under any illusion that the manufacturing of batteries is insignificant. It does make BEVs generate more emissions than fossil fuel cars during the production stage. The question is how much. This, in turn, varies greatly on where the BEVs were made and where they get their electricity from. The Australian grid, for example, is nearly three times dirtier than the UK electricity emissions average, and China is similarly polluting to Australia.
No matter where your BEV is made or charged, it’s still greener than internal combustion.
ICCT
However, extensive research by the International Council on Clean Transport (ICCT) has shown that no matter where in the world a BEV is made and charged, it’s still much less polluting over its lifetime than internal combustion. The average in Europe is about three times less CO2 over the lifetime of the BEV, and in the United States the figure is still less than half, despite America’s dirtier grid. In China, the BEV produces more like 60% of internal combustion. But that is still a considerable saving in emissions.
With BEVs, as grids get cleaner – which they will – even existing vehicles will fall in energy production emissions, and battery production emissions for new BEVs will too. In contrast, the emissions from internal combustion cars won’t drop that much over the next decade. If you dig further into the ICCT report, you will see that hydrogen fuel cell cars, which are currently mostly powered by hydrogen generated from methane steam reforming, are more polluting than a plug-in hybrid, although FCEVs like BEVs will benefit as more renewable energy sources come online and hydrogen production switches to electrolysis. Assuming this does ever happen. Hydrogen tanks also generate about as much CO2 during production as batteries.
While most hydrogen is made from methane, fuel cell cars are less green than plug-in hybrids.
ICCT
The questionable work practices around cobalt mining in the Congo is another criticism leveled at BEVs, but cobalt is also used in the desulphurization of petroleum, so the oil industry is hardly innocent in this one either. You also rarely see those who come up with this argument posing the same one against the batteries in their phones or laptops. Again, this is clearly an opinion fostered by the oil industry to cast doubts on a competitor. Organizations like the Fair Cobalt Alliance are trying to tackle the true problem – worker exploitation, not the mineral cobalt itself.
Most BEV manufacturers are looking into or already trialing battery recycling, too. Volkswagen opened its first battery recycling plant at the beginning of 2021, and it’s no surprise that the company did this. It’s not just green virtue signalling. The minerals in batteries are valuable, so recycling them has much more potential return than recycling cardboard, and one research project has even demonstrated that the results can be better than batteries made from new materials.
This focus on the lifetime emissions of products may have been weaponized against BEVs, but now the truth is starting to get out, this focus can only be a good thing for the environment. It’s great to see that manufacturers are now looking at the emissions from every stage of their supply chain. For example, BMW’s i Vision Circular showcases the company’s use of recycled materials and points towards the possibility that a large proportion of them can be reused once more at the vehicles’ end-of-life. Volvo has a similar plan with its Concept Recharge.
Rather than looking bad for BEVs, the emphasis on lifetime emissions shows just how green they are, and how much greener still they will be in the future. So next time someone spouts the myth that internal combustion is greener than battery-electric because the batteries are so polluting to make, tell them the truth. They are completely wrong.
