Electric vehicles (EVs) have firmed their place as the transportation of the future. Compared to their internal combustion engine counterparts, batteries are economical, cleaner, and far more efficient. With the rate at which EVs are saturating the market, there could be as many as 120 million of them in the world by 2030. However, with this sudden rise in volume also arises a complication that has garnered little attention given its striking repercussions on the future of electric transportation—the production of EV batteries is, unlike its consumption, environmentally unsustainable. But, what exactly are the problems associated with batteries and what consequences does the popularization of EVs have on this industry? What can be done about it?
Production Pickles
Lithium-ion is the battery technology responsible for powering nearly all electronics and appliances since the 1990s, and as the name would suggest, it requires compounds made of lithium (nicknamed ‘white oil’). At the relatively low volumes at which lithium was originally produced for such devices, its extraction posed negligible consequences—smartphone batteries, for example, require only a couple grams of lithium. But EV batteries range from 5–12 kg of lithium metal apiece, and with the monumental demand surge for EVs that is headed our way, lithium production might as well be labelled an environmental nightmare.
Among the various methods of extraction, by far the most prolific are the vast brine ponds found across the arid Atacama salt flats in South America, followed in second by quarries in Australia. Together, the two regions account for over 80 per cent of global production and a further 80 per cent of total reserves, as well as accounting for a host of ecological problems.
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