Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Tesla Car Battery Production Produces As Much CO2 As 8 Years Of Driving On Gas


Elon Musk, who seems to have mastered the modern liberal art of sucking the taxpayer for subsidies for his pet projects, like solar roofs and attractive electric cars with explosive batteries, must be a bit embarrassed by this study. Or maybe he has been fully aware of this possibility the whole time....... 
"IVL The Swedish Environment Institute has, on behalf of the Swedish Transport Administration and the Swedish Energy Agency, investigated the climate impact of lithium-ion batteries from a life-cycle perspective. The batteries for electric cars were included in the study. The two authors, Lisbeth Dahllöf and Mia Romare, have done a meta-study, that is, reviewed and compiled existing studies.  -  The report shows that battery manufacturing leads to high emissions. For each kilowatt-hour of storage capacity in the battery, emissions of 150 to 200 kilograms of carbon dioxide are generated in the factory. The researchers have not studied the individual car brand batteries, just how they were produced or what electrical mix they used. But to understand the importance of battery size, two standard electric cars on the market, Nissan Leaf and Tesla Model S, have batteries of approximately 30 kWh and 100 kWh respectively.  -  Even before you buy the car, CO2 emissions equivalent to 5.3 tons and 17.5 tons, respectively, gets produced. The numbers can be difficult to put in context. By way of comparison, a trip for a person returning from Stockholm to New York by air emits more than 600 kilograms of CO2, according to the UN organization ICAO’s calculation model.  -  Mats-Ola Larsson at IVL has calculated how long you need to drive a gasoline or diesel car before it released as much CO2 as the battery manufacturing produced.  -  The result was 2.7 years of CO2 emissions for a battery the same size as a Nissan Leaf and 8.2 years for a Tesla-sized battery." -  Principia Scientific
Another conclusion of the study is that about half the emissions come from producing the raw materials and the other half from the battery factory.