While electric vehicles are structurally simpler than traditional gasoline-powered vehicles, building a high-quality electric vehicle is not easy. In fact, the simple logic of replacing gasoline with electricity cannot withstand rigorous environmental calculations, especially regarding the questionable energy and environmental friendliness of electric vehicles. How to ensure the charging of electric vehicles using efficient, low-carbon energy systems remains a challenge for scientists and companies across various fields.
Exaggerated environmental protection
As we all know, carbon emissions have become a core issue in reversing global warming. The logic behind this is to first set a total carbon emission allowance and then allocate it to various economies. The total amount of carbon emissions can, to some extent, directly reflect the level and scale of industrialization of a country or region.
Against this backdrop, the automotive industry is undoubtedly a crucial link, and carbon emission limits are forcing automakers to shift towards new energy vehicles. In fact, since 2005, many countries have been promoting the reduction of heavily polluting vehicles, including those fueled by gasoline, liquefied petroleum gas, and diesel. This is because, compared to other policies that completely ban fossil fuels, banning the sale of vehicles fueled by other fuels is relatively simple and straightforward.
Consequently, the phasing out of traditional gasoline-powered vehicles has accelerated, while the development of new energy vehicles has entered a period of rapid growth with policy support. According to a research report by Tianfeng Securities, since 2017, the penetration rate of new energy passenger vehicles has gradually increased to 4.35%, while the proportion of pure gasoline-powered vehicles has steadily declined. From January 2017 to October 2019, the sales share of pure gasoline-powered passenger vehicles decreased from 98.8% to 93.8%.
People pinned their hopes on new energy vehicles, hoping to achieve "zero emissions" by consuming oil, but this has proven to be unrealistic. Analyzing the product from a life-cycle perspective (LCA), traditional electric vehicles are no less toxic to humans, have acidification potential, aerosol potential, and photochemical pollution than gasoline vehicles, and their energy-saving and emission-reduction effects have not met expectations.
From the perspective of automobile production, most studies indicate that the carbon emissions from producing electric vehicles are actually higher than those from producing gasoline-powered vehicles. This is because the production of batteries requires batteries, resulting in 15% to 70% more carbon emissions during the manufacturing process compared to gasoline-powered vehicles. However, if batteries are excluded, the emissions from producing gasoline-powered and electric vehicles are roughly equivalent.
So, considering the carbon emissions required to produce a gasoline-powered car, let's assume that producing a gasoline-powered car requires 10 tons of carbon emissions. Producing a 30kWh electric vehicle battery requires 1-5 tons of carbon emissions, and producing a 100kWh battery requires 6-17.5 tons of carbon emissions. Taking the highest value, that is, producing a gasoline-powered car requires 10 tons of carbon emissions, producing a 30kWh electric vehicle requires 15.3 tons, and producing a 100kWh electric vehicle requires 27.5 tons of carbon emissions.
From a vehicle usage perspective, according to US carbon emission data, a gasoline-powered pickup truck emits approximately 6.24 tons of carbon dioxide annually, while the US average is 5.2 tons per year. Electric vehicles are more complex, depending on the source of their electricity. Like China, the US relies on coal-fired power plants, and electric vehicles emit an average of 2.02 tons of carbon dioxide annually.
In reality, although the proportion of thermal power in my country is declining, it remains the primary type of power generation. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, thermal power generation, primarily coal-fired, accounts for 71.19% of the country's total electricity generation. Hydropower follows at 16.37%, then wind power and nuclear power. Finally, solar power accounts for only 1.92%. It's worth noting that so-called green electricity typically refers to electricity generated from renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. This type of electricity truly qualifies as new energy. However, it's clear that currently, the proportion of clean energy electricity used is not high.
In other words, for a 30kWh electric vehicle, it only takes 1.67 years for it to become more environmentally friendly than a gasoline vehicle. However, if we change the calculation to a 100kWh electric vehicle, it would take 5.5 years. This is without considering battery degradation and recycling issues.
From gasoline-powered cars to electric cars, from car production to car use, environmental protection remains just a concept.
The challenges of battery recycling
In fact, in addition to the "emissions" issue, battery recycling is also a problem that new energy vehicles need to solve.
Considering the average effective lifespan of 4-6 years and the service life of 5-8 years for power batteries, combined with the rapid popularization of electric vehicles starting in 2014, we already saw the first peak of battery retirement at the end of 2021. In ten to fifteen years, millions of electric vehicles will reach the end of their lifespan. While lead-acid batteries in traditional cars can be widely recycled, recycling lithium-ion batteries in new energy electric vehicles is not an easy task.
As is well known, used batteries are a highly polluting type of waste. Especially bulky power batteries, which contain large amounts of heavy metals, electrolytes, solvents, and various organic additives, containing a variety of highly toxic pollutants. Improper disposal can severely pollute soil and water sources and produce toxic gas emissions. Therefore, simple landfilling or incineration is unsuitable for disposing of retired power batteries. Thus, to achieve the reuse of lithium batteries, "disassembly and recycling" and "secondary utilization" become inevitable choices.
Dismantling and recycling, or the process of breaking down and recovering valuable metal elements, includes two main processing methods: pyrometallurgical recycling and hydrometallurgical recycling. Pyrometallurgical recycling is more common—recyclers first mechanically pulverize the battery, then burn it, leaving behind a pile of charred plastic, metal, and glue. Finally, several methods, including further combustion, are used to extract the metals. Hydrometallurgical recycling, on the other hand, involves immersing the battery materials in an acid bath to create a metal-loaded solution.
Of course, both pyrometallurgical and wet recycling methods have their advantages and disadvantages. For example, pyrometallurgical recycling can be carried out safely without the recycler knowing the battery's design or composition, or even whether the battery is fully discharged, but it consumes a lot of energy. Wet recycling can extract materials that are not easily obtained through combustion, but it may involve chemicals that are harmful to health. However, regardless of the method, it is inevitable that both will generate a large amount of waste and emit greenhouse gases.
From a circular economy perspective, cascade utilization is much easier than pyrometallurgical or hydrometallurgical processes. Cascade utilization refers to the process of reusing power batteries in suitable applications after they have reached their designed lifespan through repair, modification, or remanufacturing. Retired power batteries, after undergoing relevant testing to determine their performance, can be used sequentially in low-power electric vehicles, grid energy storage, and home energy storage. Once the battery performance deteriorates further and falls below the minimum utilization standard, they are then recycled.
However, the overall development of the lithium battery cascade utilization route is currently quite slow. On the one hand, cascade utilization requires thorough evaluation and testing of retired power batteries to determine their performance. Only after testing and screening can retired batteries be reassembled according to different uses, the voltage and current of the reassembled battery pack be stabilized, and finally, they can be repackaged and put into use. However, the current battery life prediction model based on capacity decay mechanism analysis is not perfect enough, let alone the subsequent steps.
On the other hand, from an economic perspective, the reverse logistics system involved in tiered utilization is quite complex, with numerous intermediate links. During the tiered utilization process, battery manufacturers, recyclers, and researchers need to solve many problems, making tiered utilization far more troublesome than direct dismantling and recycling, and less convenient than direct recycling. Moreover, the complex process significantly increases the cost of tiered-utilization batteries, even leading to a situation where the price of reconstituted batteries is lower than that of new batteries—old batteries are more expensive than new batteries.
Electric cars aren't that cheap?
In the past, the electric vehicle revolution aimed to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, decrease emissions, and mitigate the impact of transportation on climate change. Consequently, when it came to individual consumers, electric vehicles were also expected to offer the benefit of saving on fuel costs.
In October 2021, Anderson Financial Group released a report comparing the costs of gasoline-powered and electric vehicles, concluding that electric vehicles may be more expensive than gasoline-powered ones. In compiling the report, Anderson used data primarily from electric vehicles charged at commercial charging stations. The results showed that in some cases, using public charging stations can cost up to three times more than charging at home. Anderson also added hidden costs, such as the time spent charging.
According to State Grid Electric Vehicles' projections, by 2040, my country will have 300 million electric vehicles, accounting for 50% to 60% of total sales. Annual electricity consumption will increase by 2.68 trillion kilowatt-hours, accounting for 17% of total social electricity consumption; daily charging power will reach 587 million kilowatts, representing 31% of the 1.881 billion kilowatts of new energy installed capacity projected for 2040. It's worth noting that my country's total power generation in 2020 was only 7.42 trillion kilowatt-hours.
Faced with the surge in electric vehicles, simply increasing grid capacity while neglecting the interaction between vehicle batteries and the grid is clearly an unhealthy development strategy. This is because electric vehicle charging is decentralized and random. Therefore, the charging characteristics of electric vehicles will further exacerbate the peak-valley difference in regional power grids, increase the difficulty of grid regulation, and simply increasing capacity and upgrading lines will double the total social power investment, increasing electricity costs for end users.
Clearly, the production, use, recycling, and consumption of electric vehicles are all different from people's ideals, and being environmentally friendly is not a minor issue; automobile manufacturing is a systemic problem.
Electric vehicles do promise a brighter future of environmental protection and emission reduction, but to enable consumers to drive more environmentally friendly cars and to build automakers' true "core environmental competitiveness," it's crucial to incorporate environmental protection principles into every aspect of car manufacturing and use—being environmentally friendly, achieving clean energy substitution, minimizing pollution emissions, and maintaining high-efficiency production. This means that, without major changes to the car manufacturing process itself, environmental protection must be pursued in every detail of the car factory from a holistic perspective.
Undeniably, the shift from gasoline-powered cars to electric vehicles is an inevitable trend in energy upgrading. As Elon Musk explained in a TED talk: transporting fossil fuels like natural gas to power plants can achieve a 60% overall combustion efficiency, but in internal combustion engines powered by natural gas, the highest overall combustion efficiency to date is only 20%. Even considering the energy loss during transmission, the electric vehicle + power plant model has a clear advantage over direct combustion in internal combustion engines. This doesn't even take into account the energy consumed in refining gasoline, diesel, and natural gas from petroleum.
Furthermore, sustainable energy sources such as wind, hydro, and solar power have been significantly improving their energy utilization efficiency; in other words, their share of total electricity generation will continue to increase. However, the gradual transformation of electricity production methods will still take time, and the electric vehicle industry still needs much development before truly achieving environmental protection goals.
