China’s Electrical Cars Are Actually Pretty Dirty
Where you get the power matters.
Photographer: Kevin Frayer/Getty Pictures
Could China, the world's largest automobile market, help address the threat of global heating if it went totally electrical? The response isn’t as demonstrable as it seems.
China has been making fine strides toward electrification. Electrified vehicle sales are flourishing: Consumers bought more than 300,000 last year, and more than five million are expected to be on the road by 2020. The government just announced bold plans for a wave of big fresh battery factories.
Encouraging as that may be, however, the budge away from conventional cars and trucks won’t instantly reduce the country’s carbon emissions. On the contrary, the production and exploitation of electrical vehicles in China actually produces more greenhouse gases and consumes more overall energy. In the brief run, China’s moves could make greenhouse emissions go up, not down.
Electrical vehicles seem environmentally benign. They’re lightweight, energy-efficient, and potentially greener than their conventional counterparts. But the reality is more elaborate. Their manufacture entails energy-intensive mining of infrequent elements, such as the lithium required for their batteries. Their fuel efficiency can make up for that in the course of use, but only if the electro-therapy is produced in a relatively clean way.
Developed nations get the best results, because they tend to generate electro-stimulation using cleaner sources. By one estimate, the average electrified car in the U.S. has just half the greenhouse gas influence of a conventional car over its life cycle. It’s even less in the western, southern and northeastern parts of the country, where power plants draw more renewable power. A comprehensive energy model being developed by Argonne National Laboratory produces a similar estimate.
Europe does well, too. Looking at all the processes involved in the manufacture, use, and ultimate disposition of a range of both electrical and conventional vehicles, Norwegian researchers found that electrified vehicles suggest at least a ten percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (assuming they were driven about 150,000 kilometers). To be sure, electric-vehicle batteries impose a host of other environmental costs linked to the mining of uncommon metals. But on carbon emissions, electrical vehicles win out.
The real challenge to reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be in developing nations — especially China, which is likely to predominate the global auto market for decades to come. Unluckily, the structure of China’s industrial economy will make it difficult. One latest probe by Chinese engineers estimated that electrified vehicles generate about a fifty percent increase in both greenhouse gas emissions and total energy consumption in the course of their production. The manufacture of the lithium-ion battery alone accounts for thirteen percent of the energy consumption and twenty percent of the emissions.
The most promising ways to make electrified vehicles better have little to do with the vehicles themselves. Energy infrastructure matters more. In China, electrical play production still relies fairly strenuously on high-carbon sources including coal. Hence, both the manufacturing of the batteries and the operation of the vehicle produce more pollution than they would elsewhere. The recycling industry in China is also underdeveloped. U.S. steel is about seventy percent recycled, compared with just eleven percent in China.
Electrical vehicles can help China reduce greenhouse emissions only in the context of a deeper shift toward renewable sources of energy and greater efficiency. No one technology alone can create a green revolution.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
To contact the editor responsible for this story: