Electric Vehicles with Lithium Batteries is Not the Solution

Current electric vehicles are not as environmentally friendly as advertised.  Most modern electric vehicles use what is essentially a souped up compound handphone battery.  That means lots of lithium in all those batteries. 

The battery of a Tesla Model S, for example, has about 12 kilogrammes of lithium in it.  The grid storage needed to help balance renewable energy would need a lot more lithium given the size of the battery required.  Because manufacturers are secretive about the technology of their batteries, effective recycling is virtually impossible.  Most of all that lithium ion batteries end up in landfills, where then seeps into the environment as they break down, poisoning the water table and contaminating the land. 

Lithium cathodes themselves degrade over time.  That is why they cannot be placed into new batteries.  Lithium is a rare earth metal, which means it is reactive.  As such, there have been a number of fires at recycling plants where lithium-ion batteries have been stored improperly, or disguised as lead-acid batteries, and put through a crusher.  Not only have these batteries burned at recycling plants, but auto makers are seeing battery-related fires leading to vehicle recalls and safety probes.  Teslas have this unhealthy tendency to explode on impact to the battery, spewing out toxic gas and acid which cannot be put out by water.  Chevy Bolts spontaneously combusted the back seats where the batteries were. 

The mining of lithium is even more environmentally damaging than drilling for oil.  The land is effectively strip mined and rendered useless for everything else.  Lithium extraction uses a lot of water, approximately 2 million litres per metric tonne of lithium.  Miners drill holes in salt flats and pump salty, mineral-rich brine to the surface.  After several months the water evaporates, leaving a mixture of manganese, potassium, borax, and lithium salts, which is then filtered and placed into another evaporation pool.  After from 12 and 18 months of this process, the mixture is filtered sufficiently that lithium carbonate can be extracted. 

There is the potential leak of toxic chemicals, such as hydrochloric acid, from the evaporation pools into the water supply.  In Australia and North America, lithium is mined from rock using chemicals to extract it into a useful form.  Lithium mining has proven negative environmental impact in water sources, streams, the sea and land for hundreds of kilometres around.  Lithium extraction also harms the soil and causes air contamination.  For example, in Argentina’s Salar de Hombre Muerto, lithium mining contaminated streams used by humans and livestock and for crop irrigation, leading to a significant spike in cancers and other disease.  In Chile’s Atacama salt flats, one of the most beautiful places in the world, mountains of discarded salt and canals filled with contaminated water with an unnatural blue hue.  It is estimated that between 2021 and 2030, with this global push towards electric vehicles, about 12.85 million tonnes of EV lithium ion batteries will go offline worldwide, and over 10 million tonnes of lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese will be mined for new batteries. 

This is not a green solution.  A green solution is electric vehicles using graphene batteries.  Graphene is a near superconductor at room temperature and pressure, powering a vehicle that will have consistently superior performance as the technology matures.  Graphene is made from carbon, which comes from trees.  At Quantum Age, we grow those trees, reforesting hundreds of square kilometres, and harvest them sustainably for the carbon fibre bodies of our vehicles, and the graphene for our patented batteries.  We are that solution; we are the future – a quantum leap in technology.