The Real Carbon Footprint Of Electric Cars: Part 2

Generating Electricity

The carbon footprint of generating the electricity needed to fuel an electric vehicle (EV) is significantly greater than what the government and media are touting. As more electric cars are built, this becomes a critical aspect of fueling them.

Natural Gas (Methane)

Natural gas generates 37% of the USA’s electricity. Those advocating the climate change theory state that natural gas is not very harmful to the atmosphere.

For instance, many public transportation buses are labeled, ‘Powered by Natural Gas.’ Turns out that natural gas is not environmentally friendly because it is 97% methane gas.

Locating open pockets of methane gas requires drilling downward from land or ocean floors. The left part of Figure 4 is a photo of a land-drilling rig. Teams of engineers, geophysicists, and land people work to find promising underground areas that could contain pockets of methane gas.

Once promising areas were found, important geological information was recorded as drilling proceeded. When drilling discovered methane gas, new wells were drilled throughout the entire area to increase gas production.

The upper-right of Figure 1 is an offshore drilling rig. As a geologist for several seafloor mining drilling projects, my involvement and duties were the same as surface mining projects.

Drilling for methane gas taught me that discovering and then using this gas to generate electricity is a complex operation that takes years to complete. Generating sources of “green” energy will also take years.

Likely, generating this type of electricity will also take years. This means that the number of EVs needed to reach Net Zero by 2050 will not happen.

Once the natural gas is discovered, it is then transported to a plant (Figure 2). This plant ignites the gas, which is in a closed chamber that also has a large turbine in it. The heat acts to turn the turbine, which generates electricity (see here).

Oil is used minimally for electricity generation, accounting for less than 1% of the total mix.

Coal

Coal generates 17% of the nation’s electricity. Those advocating climate change theory state that coal is extremely harmful to many physical and biological environments.

Converting 17% of electricity to “green” electricity has a very large carbon footprint. Imagine ripping up miles of coal seams as shown in the lower-right portion of Figure 1. Mining and restoration of coal-strip mines has the largest carbon footprint of all methods to generate electricity.

Nuclear

Nuclear makes up 19% of our electricity and remains a significant contributor. In 1986, the construction of new nuclear power plants was prohibited. Furthermore, the building of new plants was shut down.

“Most of the nuclear power reactors in the United States were constructed between 1970 and 1990, but construction slowed significantly after the accident at Three Mile Island near Middletown, Pennsylvania, on March 28, 1979. From 1979 through 1988, 67 nuclear reactor construction projects were canceled, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.”(Source here).

Building new nuclear power plants is safe. The first new USA plant will soon open. It has been seven years since one opened. Plans are underway to build more new plants.

Renewables

Combined, renewables (including hydro, wind, solar, and biomass) account for around 26% of electricity generation. Most of this is from hydro dams. The US government does not allow for the construction of any new hydro dams.

Wind and solar combined contribute about 14% of the country’s electricity. It has taken a great number of years for these sources to capture 14% of the electric market. Biomass contributes a smaller portion but is included in the overall renewable energy mix.

There is no way that these sources will capture 100% or even 50% in the next 50 years.

Distributing Electricity

The United States power grid is old and needs updating. Currently, there are no plans to update this system or any significant amount of money allocated to research what needs to be done.

Before converting from gasoline cars to millions of EVs, it will be necessary to update our entire power system. Deciding which areas or cities should first be updated is a big problem.

After all, we certainly can’t update the entire grid at once because there are not enough power lines, engineers, money, or materials to do this.

Now onto a few of the details of how to locally or regionally update our power grid:

• Lease or purchase new land strips to build huge electric towers or use the existing land strips. This will require digging up significant areas adjacent to the existing huge power lines.
• Tear up roads and highways to lay down underground power lines.
• Configure local electric systems to ensure homes and businesses near the major power-line construction get power.

“Almost two-thirds of energy is lost in the generation and transmission of electricity” (See here). To bring the electricity level back to 100% during transmission, it is necessary to build reconcentration facilities.

Enough.

The magnitude of updating the power grid to fuel the millions of new EVs will create a very large carbon footprint.

Building Electric Cars

The significant carbon footprint of building an EV (Figure 3) is rarely mentioned by the media, government agencies, or manufacturers of the car.

There are currently 290 million gasoline cars and four million fully electric cars in the USA (or 1.3%). To accomplish the above goal, we would need to build 143 million electric cars by 2030, or 24 million per year. Building 143 million electric cars will leave an enormous carbon footprint.

There are so many steps involved in building an EV that it would be necessary to write another lengthy article to explain them. Here are a relatively few of the things needed to build an electric car.

Tires

Tires are made from petroleum products. Once the oil-derived synthetic rubber is formed it is sent to a manufacturing plant (Figure 4). So, each of the 143 million cars will need 572 million tires.

They also have to be stronger and thicker to support the weight of the much-heavier EV thanks to its enormous battery.

Steel Frames

A large part of electric car frames are made of steel. I worked in a steel plant (Figure 5) before entering college to help pay off my upcoming college loans.

Again, if you haven’t worked in a steel mill it is impossible to understand how much energy, equipment, and mined rocks rich in iron are involved in building the steel frames.

Batteries

Lithium batteries are the key component of an electric car. On average each car will need ten lithium batteries. Figure 5 shows lithium batteries as the light gray rectangular blocks positioned on the floor of the car (see Figure 6).

Mining Lithium has immense environmental problems (see here and here) and a huge carbon footprint. Disposing of these batteries also has numerous problems and environmental consequences (see here).

Part of the process to get pure lithium involves using 20 tons of water. This will give you one ton of pure lithium. Where is the polluted water dumped? Depleting the local freshwater systems may occur.

Installing Charging Stations

Install Citywide Electric Stations
Figure 7 (below) is a photo of an EV charging station. This photo gives the appearance that charging stations are environmentally safe. That is incorrect.

For instance, there are 170,000 gasoline stations in the USA. Installing several charging stations in each of these gasoline stations would be necessary to dig up the underground gasoline tanks, some of which have leaked petrol into the soil and properly dispose of the tanks and the polluted soil.

Next, you need to restructure the area’s electric system to provide enough electricity to fuel all the new charging stations. This requires tearing up local roads, installing miles of large electric cables, and running smaller electric cables to all of charging station complexes.

Figure 8 (below) is a photo of New York City and its surrounding suburbs. Converting all this area’s taxis, buses, and cars to electric would require building thousands of new charging stations. Another possibility is to have all gas stations install several electric chargers.

In both cases accomplishing this goal would be nearly impossible because it would require finding enough open land to build new charging stations, ripping up roads, and redoing the electric systems.

New York City has a population of 8.8 million. Making these changes would have a huge carbon footprint as it would in other major cities.

Install An Electric Charging Station In Your Home

Installing an electric charging station in your home may be necessary to avoid long waiting times at a local charging station or conform to government laws that force you to install one station.

Installing Charging Stations Nationwide

Installing enough charging stations needed to accommodate the increasing number of EVs can be accomplished in two ways.

First, gradually close all gasoline stations and replace them with charging stations. The second way is to keep all the current gasoline stations and convert half to electric. Both ways will still have an enormous carbon footprint.

The value of either footprint must be added to the total footprint of electric cars because installing charging stations wouldn’t be needed if we remained a country of all gasoline cars.

When adding the carbon footprint of installing charging stations to the other carbon footprint factors, it turns out that the carbon footprint of electric cars is greater than that of gasoline cars.

Summary

The real carbon footprint of electric cars is far greater than is 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.

See Parts 1 and 3 here and here, respectively.