The Real Carbon Footprint of Electric Cars: Part 1

Surface and Seafloor Mining

The real carbon footprint of electric cars is far greater than we have been told, even greater than the carbon footprint of gasoline cars.

This is because the current method of calculating their carbon footprint doesn’t consider all the steps needed to build, fuel, and operate an electric car. All these steps have enormous carbon footprints.

As proof, we will review the carbon footprint of surface mining, seafloor mining, generating electricity, distributing electricity, building an electric car, installing electric charging stations, and environmental consequences.

Keep in mind that all the above will be ongoing for many years. For instance, opening new surface mines and maintaining old surface mines will continue for many years.

Surface Mining

To achieve the goal of replacing all gas-powered cars with battery-powered cars, it will be necessary to open hundreds of new surface mines. You may be thinking it’s no problem because we are continuously opening new mines that will harvest many things.

However, to build electric cars we will have to open mines that are rich in specific metals and minerals. The carbon footprint of these mines must be added to the carbon footprint of going electric. This significantly adds to the total carbon footprint of electric cars.

Figure 1 shows a 50-foot-tall mining truck that is hauling rock from an enormous surface mine. I was one of two on-site geologists who aided in the expansion of Idaho’s huge Maybe Canyon Phosphate mine.

This experience taught me that it is difficult to appreciate the size and complex operations of a giant land surface mine unless you have worked in one. The processes involved in operating a land surface mine would shock most people.

Many think that the minerals and metals required to build an EV or a gas-powered car are easily attainable and within reach. They are not.

Here are the tasks needed to obtain permission and then begin operations of a land surface mine such as Utah’s Kennecott Copper Mine (see Figure 2).

1. To begin operating a land surface mine it takes approximately ten years. Why? The mining company must obtain permission from numerous environmental groups, purchase or lease the land, prove to surrounding communities that the mining will not affect their health or daily lives, and lease or build hundreds of diesel-operated machines.
2. Then you need to gather materials taken from another mine to make dynamite. This dynamite explodes the mine’s solid rock areas into large boulders.
3. Depending on the size of a land surface mine, it is necessary to build or lease approximately 100 hauling trucks powered by fossil fuels to transport the boulders out of the mine.
4. Use diesel-powered machines to reduce the size of large boulders into sand-sized particles.
5. Send the sand-sized particles to a processing plant that extracts the minerals and metals.
6. Build a large reservoir capable of holding vast amounts of sand-sized rock that no longer has the metals and minerals needed to build an electric car. (Figure 12).
7. Construct a network of pipelines to transport waste rock to a large reservoir.

Ship the now concentrated minerals and metals via fossil-fueled transportation to various locations that use these minerals and metals to build an electric car.

Figure 2 shows Utah’s Land Surface Kennecott Copper Mine, which is 2.5 miles wide, 0.75 miles deep, and has mined 350 million tons of rock. To give you a perspective of just how large this mine is, the red dot in Figure 2 is the 50-foot-tall mining truck.

Mapping the Geological Setting

The geological setting in and around a surface mine can impact two things. First, it assists geologists in defining the area and depth of rocks rich in the type of substance that they intend to mine. Second, it helps mine engineers estimate the chance that the mining operations will pollute regions adjacent to the mine.

Figure 3 illustrates the geological setting of the proposed Kvanefjeld surface mine located in the southern part of Greenland, which has a pristine coastline. Rocks in this region contain radioactive uranium, mercury, and phosphate.

Environmentalists have stated that these minerals are harmful to our land and oceans. Also, these minerals aren’t necessary to build electric cars. However, the mine rocks have large amounts of rare earth metals needed to build electric cars (see here).

Figure 3 shows the Kvanefjeld mine as solid red, ocean water as blue, major faults as thick white lines, and minor faults as thin white lines. All the geological features provide pathways that allow fresh water, ocean water, and pollutants to intermix.

Additionally, mining in this region generates new micro-fractures. These microfractures act to crush up the rocks into smaller pieces, which facilitates the amount of radioactive uranium, mercury, and phosphate that flow into ocean bays and open oceans.

Radioactive Uranium

Greenland’s mineral and rare earth metals are rich in radioactive uranium.

In the not-so-distant past, Greenland was on the verge of opening a monster land surface mine that contained significant amounts of uranium.

“Greenland may soon start building the world’s fifth-largest uranium mine and second-biggest rare earth operation, which could fuel independence dreams in the island, an ‘autonomous administrative division’ within Denmark since 2009.” (see here )

However, native Greenlanders strongly objected to the mining of radioactive-rich rocks near their hunting grounds and villages. Eventually, a law was passed that allowed the mining to proceed if it had a relatively low concentration of radioactive uranium.

However, it is impossible to know the exact concentration of minerals such as uranium while extracting large amounts of rocks each day.

The companies that own the mine are not going to stop operations in all areas of the mine if one location has higher concentrations of uranium.

The bottom line is that the surface mines in southern and Southwest Greenland may infuse uranium into the environments in the mine region. Maybe not but why take the chance? Is it worth risking? Essentially, we are saying that it is okay to risk polluting Greenland so that the USA does not become more polluted.

Mercury

Two research studies have concluded that the subglacial rock layers located in the southwest and southern portions of Greenland are anomalously hot (see here and here) and contain extremely high concentrations of mercury (see here and here). Environmentalists believe that mercury damages aspects of our physical and biological environments.

Phosphate

The failure of Florida’s Piney Point phosphate mine waste retaining reservoir occurred on April 4, 2021. This failure leaked massive amounts of phosphate into Tampa’s inlets that connect to the Gulf of Mexico (see here, here, and here). It was an environmental disaster that could irreversibly damage all the physical and biological environments in the region.

The real carbon footprint of electric cars is far greater than portrayed by research studies, government entities, and the media.

It’s difficult to understand why we would allow Greenland’s Kvanefjeld Mine, whose rocks are rich in phosphate, to begin operations knowing that phosphate can damage ocean bays and open ocean regions as per the Piney Point mine.

Seafloor Mining

In the last two years, several mining companies have discovered extensive deposits of metals and minerals present on ocean floors needed to build EVs. These companies have asked for and in a few cases received rights to begin mining (see here, here, and here).

Seafloor mines will almost certainly be of the same size as surface mines. Therefore, they would be approximately one mile wide and 0.3 miles deep.

How will the mining operations be monitored and how will the mining companies limit the massive amounts of fluids and particles released from the mine and into the ocean?

The problem is that estimating the magnitude of the environmental consequences or carbon footprint before the mining starts is impossible (see here). This is because seafloor mining at this scale has never been attempted.

Not sure why the potential pollution of large parts of our ocean will justify building electric cars (see here). As is true with surface mines, the carbon footprint of seafloor mines must be added to the carbon footprint of electric cars, not gasoline cars.

Summary

The real carbon footprint of electric cars is far greater than portrayed by research studies, government entities, and the media. This is because they only take into account a few of the steps needed to build an electric car.

When adding all the carbon footprint values of each step together, it turns out that electric cars have a greater carbon footprint than gasoline cars.

Biography

James Edward Kamis is a retired geologist with 47 years of experience, a Bachelor of Science degree in Geology from Northern Illinois University (1973), and a Master of Science degree in Geology from Idaho State University (1976). More than 46 years of research have convinced him that geological forces significantly influence, or in some cases completely control climate and climate-related events as per his Plate Climatology Theory. Kamis’ new book, Geological Impacts on Climate, is available now.

Thomas Richard, CCD editor, contributed to this article.

Top photo: The Chino open-pit copper mine is located just out of Silver City, New Mexico. Photographed June 20, 2003, by Eric Guinther. Source

See Parts 2 and 3 here and here, respectively.