Not So Green Cars

Suppose you want a car to drive around Amsterdam: choosing an electric vehicle (EV) seems almost natural, provided your budget allows it. Why pollute the environment with a traditional gasoline consuming car, when you could instead opt to drive green, and improve Europe’s air quality while you’re at it. In previous years, owners of an EV in the Netherlands were exempt from motor tax. While these tax benefits are slowly being phased out, they have contributed to increased EV sales in recent years. On the face of it, the choice for an EV is quickly made. Not every place offers the required charging infrastructure, but Amsterdam does. It seems feasible to navigate the relatively short distances between major cities in Western Europe’s urban sprawl by EV. While charging your new Tesla seems relatively straightforward, that’s exactly where the issue lies: the vehicle’s battery.

What makes EVs work, is efficient energy storage in their capacity-rich lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries. A stunning feat of modern engineering technology, at a hefty cost: rising global demand for a steady supply of lithium (Li). Batteries inside smaller electronics such as smartphones typically contain up to 3 grams of Li, while EVs require far greater energy storage, leading some vehicle batteries to contain up to 8 kilograms of Li. Statistics on mining data published by the Canadian government show that 87% of Li mined globally in 2023 was used to produce batteries. Since EVs use much more Li than smartphones, the rising demand for Li is mainly caused by an uptake in EV sales. Rodrigo Dupouy, president of Ensorcia Group for Latin America, a major Lithium extraction and technology company, expects global Li demand to double by 2027. Five countries stand out as being the greatest producers of Li as a raw material. Based on data from the Energy Institute, the percentage of global Li mined in 2024 by country came: 39% from Australia, 23% from Chile, 17% from China, 9% from Zimbabwe, and 7% from Argentina.

Percentage of Lithium mined globally across countries: Chile accounts for 23% of Lithium mined in 2024. ©Figures taken from Our World In Data.

Extraction methods vary by country and terrain, with some methods being more suitable for specific geological conditions. Australia and China are home to hard rock Li reserves: here, Li is mined by crushing and grinding ore. On the salt planes of Chile, Li is mined through brine extraction. A highly water-intensive process whereby Li salts are forced to the surface by pumping underground reservoirs. This extraction process relies on toxic shallow pools of Li-rich brine, where the water gradually evaporates over the course of 18 months. In July of last year, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) published a shocking geoscience study. It revealed that the Salar de Atacama salt flat in Chile has been sinking at a rate of up to 2 centimeters each year, largely due to Li mining operations in the region. This because the water-intensive brine extraction method has depleted local groundwater reserves, causing levels to drop over 10 meters within just 15 years of mining Li. Euronews mentioned in 2022 that it takes 2.2 million liters of water to mine 1 ton of Li using traditional brine extraction methods.

Chile Lithium Pools, Space View. ©"Salar de Atacama, Chile" by europeanspaceagency is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Loss of water is devastating to a country with an already dry climate like Chile. This gives Chilean farmers less water to grow their crops, with an adverse impact on agricultural output. It ruins the livelihoods of families and communities that depend on local trade in the region for their daily nutrition. It makes the country more dependent on import to sustain its own people. Li mining operations are also disrupting the local ecosystem, removing vital resources that local wildlife and migratory birds used to rely on. Leading entire species to slowly disappear from the region: a stark decrease in the numbers of flamingos has been observed in recent years.  At current volumes, Li mining operations in Chile are already unsustainable. Growing global demand for EVs and thus Li, will cause mining operations in the region to intensify. This puts added strain on Chile’s already depleted natural resources.

Decline in flamingo population at Reserva Nacional de Flamencos in Chile. ©Photo from Pixabay.

Chilean regulators are already well aware of these issues, as they imposed sanctions on major lithium mining company, Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile (SQM), back in 2016, for overconsumption of freshwater and brine. To make matters worse, SQM had also tampered with its own environmental monitoring systems. None of the lawsuits launched at SQM appear to have mitigated its continued grave damage to Chile’s environment. Neighboring country Argentina faces many of these same problems: the river Trapiche has dried up after 25 years of water-intensive Li mining on the Salar de Hombre Muerto salt pan. Indigenous communities in the Puna region of Argentina have lost their main source of water. Entire towns have been left dry, forcing people out of their homes, pushing people to take drastic actions such as drinking from a waterway that has been contaminated with arsenic, at levels high enough to cause cancer.

Bolivia has largely avoided this fate. The country is part of an area referred to as ‘the Lithium Triangle’, a region in South America rich in Li deposits. Chile and Argentina also have considerable territories within this region. Despite sitting on the largest Li deposits in the world, Reuters mentions an estimated 23 million metric tons, Bolivia barely mines any of it. Reasons for this refusal to capitalize on a key resource are complicated. One reason is the geochemical composition of Li brine and the soil in Bolivia. As chemical engineer Tam Tran put it after a joint Chonnam National University and Korea Resources Corp (KORES) research project back in 2012, Bolivian Li brine is “bogged down with elements like magnesium or calcium and needs to be evaporated forty or fifty times for desired levels of mineral purity”. It is simply easier and thus cheaper to mine Li in Chile or Argentina. Bolivian lithium requires more complicated chemical engineering extraction methods, which are available but would be more expensive. To complicate matters even further, Bolivia’s Uyuni salt flat has extremely compact soil, making it challenging to drill deeper than 11 meters. Another reason is more legislative and political in nature. Bolivia’s far-left government has fixed Li in the Bolivian constitution as a strategic element. Thereby heavily restricting Li exploitation in the country, placing it under thorough regulation by state-owned company Yacimientos de Litios Bolivianos (YLB), under the control of Bolivia’s Ministry of Energy. Back in November 2019, a deal fell through that would have allowed German raw materials tech developer ACI Systems to jointly develop a massive lithium project together with YLB. After heavy protests by Bolivians of the Potosi region, Bolivia’s president Evo Morales issued a decree revoking the project’s permit. Thus Bolivia’s ecosystem was ‘spared’ by lack of any significant economic activity in its Li mining sector.

The upside to Bolivia’s delay in developing its Li mining facilities can be found in the advancements of chemical engineering over the past two decades. Two groundbreaking electrochemical papers were published in Science magazine last September, offering innovative low-pollution methods to extract Li. Yan Song and their research team developed a solar-powered membrane which filters Li like plants regulate their transpiration. Zhen Li’s team proposes a Li extraction method that functions much like an electrochemical cell. If these methods can be implemented in Bolivia now, the country might maintain its vibrant ecosystem and lively communities. So there is hope that future Li mining can be more environmentally friendly, and leave less of a messy carbon footprint. Making EVs running on Li-ion batteries a viable green solution to daily transportation in Western Europe. However, we cannot sweep decades of ecosystem destruction in Chile and Argentina under the rug: those damages to the ecosystem already happened, and are still ongoing. Industrial processes can take decades to adjust once they are fully operational. It can take years between the publication of a scientific article and the implementation of new technologies at an already established factory. Besides, there might be fewer incentives to employ cutting edge technology at an already operational, fully functional facility that runs close to full capacity. What would be the added value of doing so? Who would pay for the initial investment of building the infrastructure necessary for this advanced chemical engineering technology? Where would the money come from to hire new chemical engineers, well-versed in the newly developed technology? The new technology would have to give a marked increase rate of return (RoR), for it to be able to pay for its own implementation, which is rarely the case.

The issue is that the negative externalities of Li mining in Chile and Argentina are not adequately priced into the market. In their December 2022 article in the journal Advanced Materials, Jingwei Xiang’s team discloses a revealing cost breakdown of your typical EV. Just roughly 24% of the cost for producing a new EV is spent on buying raw materials. This includes other raw materials besides Li. Writing for cross-commodity price reporting agency Fastmarkets, Muthu Krishna states that back in 2023, Li-ion cells used to make up 15% of the base retail price for a Tesla Model 3. Saltanat Berdikeeva’s SaveOnEnergy article on the pricing and comparisons of 2023 Tesla EVs, lists Model 3 as the cheapest new Tesla available at the time, sold for as little as $38,990. Quick mental arithmetic will tell you that less than $6,000 went to the Li-ion cells. Of that amount, even less went to the mining of raw lithium. Krishna writes that just one year later, Li-ion cells made up only 7.5% of the price of a new Model 3 Tesla. While the price for the Tesla EV only rose.

EV retailers such as Tesla enjoy great profit margins at the cost of Chile and Argentina’s local communities and ecosystems, which they bleed dry. Pumping most of the region’s water into a never-ending desire for more lithium, at the expense of the earth’s future. Privileged city districts of affluent Western European neighborhoods get to experience slightly cleaner air, while unique landscapes, such as Chile’s Salar de Atacama salt flat, are ruined beyond repair. Chilean farmers forced to move, entire villages in Argentina dry up, and with people desperate enough for water, they are willing to drink from a volcanic arsenic-contaminated river. While technological advancements are being made, it doesn’t seem like the current global economy incentivizes any innovation that would protect Chile’s ecology. And while more EVs get sold in Amsterdam under the slogan of ‘green energy’, few are aware of its impact across the globe.