Tag Archives: Cobalt Mining

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Turns Out Electric Car Batteries Aren’t Made From Unicorn Farts

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Can it be that current battery technology is hard on the environment? UN highlights urgent need to tackle impact of likely electric car battery production boom.

I’m not sure why the article is accompanied by a photo of a stripping-shovel in a Brazilian coal mine; I guess it is supposed to represent ecological devastation.

So it turns out that the materials needed for your electric car’s battery have some problems.

For example, two-thirds of all cobalt production happens in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). According the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), about 20 per cent of cobalt supplied from the DRC comes from artisanal mines, where human rights abuses have been reported, and up to 40,000 children work in extremely dangerous conditions in the mines for meagre income.

And in Chile, lithium mining uses nearly 65% of the water in the country’s Salar de Atamaca region, one of the driest desert areas in the world, to pump out brines from drilled wells. This has forced local quinoa farmers and llama herders to migrate and abandon ancestral settlements. It has also contributed to environment degradation, landscape damage and soil contamination, groundwater depletion and pollution.

But the good folks driving electric cars can feel secure in knowing that when they drive their vehicle, they foisted all those problems on people far away; people that they don’t need to worry about. Or something. (Hat tip to Not a Lot of People Know That.)

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Problems with Lithium Batteries?

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It can’t be. The media keeps telling my how great they are. EDITORIAL: Battery car burdens appear worse with each new report.

This is both the story of political corruption, and the devastating impact of lithium mining.

First, the perception of corruption. (I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.)

In 2018, [Colorado Governor John] Hickenlooper forced battery cars on Colorado with an executive order to adopt California’s emissions mandate. He signed it two months after boarding a luxury jet owned by the brother of battery car magnate Elon Musk to attend a Musk family celebration. The trip initiated one of several ethics investigations of the former governor.

Then there is problems with lithium mining.

A separate review published Nov. 6 in the science journal Nature raises extraordinary concerns about child labor, battery disposal dangers, and mining practices that make fracking seem relatively harmless.

“The processing of large amounts of raw materials can result in considerable environmental impacts,” the report says. “Production from brine, for example, entails drilling a hole in the salt flat, and pumping of the mineral-rich solution to the surface. … this mining activity depletes water tables. In Chile’s Salar de Atacama … 65% of the region’s water is consumed by mining.”

Cobalt mining has problems of child labor. Nickel mining contaminates fresh water and marine ecosystems in various places around the world, including Canada and Russia.

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The Battery In Your Electric Car Depends on Child Labor

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And the battery in your phone too. Smartphones Need Cobalt—but It’s Mined by Children. What Should Manufacturers Do?

A rush is on for cobalt, a relatively rare metal that powers technologies like Tesla vehicles and iPhones. About 65% of the global supply comes from one of the world’s poorest countries, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, where an entrenched culture of corruption and violence makes mining operations and oversight difficult. But most disturbing is that Congolese children are involved in mining cobalt, as detailed in an exclusive Fortune report published Thursday.

So what is Social Justice Warrior to do? Give up on electric cars? Or maybe we should wait for better battery technology.

This is the reason I don’t understand why EVERYONE is so excited about Tesla batteries for their home solar panels. (But then they love everything Tesla, and don’t know squat about cobalt.) For your phone, or your car, you want a lightweight battery. For your home, your business, or anyplace that doesn’t MOVE you don’t need expensive, small light mobile batteries. You need cheap, long lasting batteries, that aren’t huge. Most people seriously into solar power are happy with good, old-fashioned lead-acid batteries for stationary applications. If you want to be really clever, you could consider Nickel-Iron batteries. And if you have a steady tremendous heat source available, there are liquid sulfur batteries. (The liquid sulfur needs to remain at 300 °C or better, though it isn’t clear to me how much these are actually used anywhere.)

Anyway the linked article at top is a bit of a summary. The main article (linked in the quote or here) has more detail on the state of child labor in the Congo, and why the locals don’t want that child labor to stop – poor families depend on that labor and the money it produces.

Amnesty blasted Western tech giants for blithely ignoring the problems surrounding child labor and corruption—in large part because consumers had rushed to buy tech devices, without asking questions about the industry’s darker side. “Millions of people enjoy the benefits of new technologies, but rarely ask how they are made,” the organization said at the time.

In the meantime, it would be nice if people at least tried to make their batteries last longer, and tried to ensure they were recycled properly at the end of their life. Instead we are spending even more time, playing more games on our phones – consuming that batteries even faster.