Doha: One can be forgiven for believing that electric vehicles (EVs) are a new phenomenon, but the story starts long before Tesla’s first car hit the streets in 2008. William Morrison, an eccentric chemist from Des Moines, Iowa, toiled away in a secret basement laboratory he called “the cave” for years and in 1890 showed the result of his self-imposed solitude, the first practical self-powered four-wheeled electric carriage. The six-passenger vehicle was capable of a top speed of 14 miles per hour and was little more than an electrified wagon, but his breakthrough helped usher in the first golden age for EVs.
Over the next few years, electric vehicles from different automakers began popping up across the U.S.
New York City even had a fleet of more than 60 electric taxis. By 1900, electric cars were at their heyday, accounting for around a third of all vehicles on the road.
However, their slow speeds, heavy batteries, and Ford’s mass-produced Model T dealt severe blows to the electric car industry. Introduced in 1908, the Model T made petrol-powered cars widely available and affordable. By the 1920s, the U.S. had a better system of roads connecting cities and with the discovery of Texas crude oil, petrol became cheap and readily available for rural Americans.
Despite a number of false dawns in the 20th century, including General Motors’ impressive yet commercially unviable EV1 car in the mid-1990s, public interest in electricity powered cars didn’t return until the early 2000s when concerns over carbon emissions started to intensify and a small Silicon Valley start-up, Tesla Motors, announced they would start producing a luxury electric sports car that could go more than 200 miles on a single charge.
Tesla’s subsequent success and the global push to net-zero carbon emissions has changed the motor industry irrevocably. General Motors has said it aims to stop selling new gasoline-powered cars and light trucks by 2035 and will pivot to battery-powered models. In 2021, Volvo said it would move even faster and introduce an all-electric line-up by 2030.
But as electric cars and trucks go mainstream once more, they have faced a persistent question: How green are they? Broadly speaking, most electric cars sold today tend to produce significantly fewer planet-warming emissions than cars fuelled with petrol. However, a lot depends on how much coal is being burned to charge up plug-in vehicles. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are higher for EVs in “year zero” of owning one due to the emissions associated with manufacturing their batteries but this (excess carbon debt) can be paid off depending on where the break-even point for the EV occurs during its lifetime.
A simple illustration of the carbon debt break-even of an EV compared to a conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle can be presented by considering a Nissan Leaf EV in the UK, one of the highest-efficiency EVs available on the market today, emitting 76 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent (gCO2e/km), some 3x lower than the lifetime emissions of an average conventional car.
While the production of the battery would result in a carbon debt in “year zero” of owning the Nissan Leaf, if charged with the UK’s average electricity carbon intensity over the last two years of ~223 gCO2e/kWh for year zero and gradual improvement towards a 2030 target of 100 gCO2e/kWh, this would be paid back after less than two years of driving.
However, in countries with much higher grid carbon intensities, the payback period is much later. For example, in China, which had an average grid carbon intensity of 541 gCO2e/kWh in 2021, a Nissan Leaf would pay back its excess carbon debt in 7 years.
The good news for EVs is that most countries are now pushing to clean up their electric grids. In the United States, utilities have retired hundreds of coal plants over the last decade and shifted to a mix of lower-emissions natural gas, wind, and solar power. As a result, electric vehicles are getting cleaner.Like many other batteries, the lithium-ion (Li-ion) cells that power most EVs rely on raw materials such as lithium, cobalt and rare earth elements that have been linked to grave environmental and human rights concerns.
Lithium mining in Chile and Argentina has faced criticism as the element is found in salt deserts called salars.
