Batteries And The Environment

 

Batteries And The Environment

 

Nicholas Tesla said it best when he called it an Energy Storage System. That's an important distinction.

Batteries do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. To say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid. Forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered.

Einstein's formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The question is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.

There are two types of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. They ALL contain toxic, heavy metals.

Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of the two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries to be recycled.

If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them. All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, we think of it as dead; but, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity as the chemicals inside decompose as pressure builds inside the battery's metal casing until it eventually cracks. The toxic metals left inside the battery ooze out and as does every other battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.

In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use batteries properly.

For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what is commonly referred to as environmentally destructive embedded costs. Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. Take a can of baked beans as an example. The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. Additionally, a farmer likely uses nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas. Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it's back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car to go to the grocery store to purchase the can of beans.

A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.

It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium must be processed as well as 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. Approximately 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust is displaced to acquire the chemicals for just one battery."

Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who will eventually die from handling this toxic materials. Sadly, most people are unaware that the diseased kids are a part of the cost of producing the batteries that power an electric car.

California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being 'green,' but it’s not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster and here is why. The main problem with producing solar arrays is again, the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To produce silicon pure enough, requires using hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. Additionally, they will also use gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-di-selenide, and cadmium-telluride, which are ALL highly toxic materials. Silicone dust is a hazard to the workers, and solar-panels cannot be recycled. They all end up in landfills which will further pollute the earth over time.

Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, and migratory insects.

There may be a place for these technologies, but look beyond the MYTH of zero emissions. It is very likely that EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent. "Going Green" may sound like the Utopian ideal and are easily espoused, catchy buzzwords, but when the hidden and embedded costs is realistically understood, we will find that “Going Green” is extremely destructive to the Earth's environment.