Oil needed for electric vehicles mining
The fleet of electric vehicles is expected to grow to 200 million units by 2030 according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). It usually thought that a transition from combustion engines to battery electric vehicles will be a transition from fuels to metals. But the reality is that fuels are needed to extract and process these metals, as well as for generating the electricity. Ignoring the latter, we can estimate how much fuel will be needed just to extract the metals necessary for manufacturing an electric car. According to the IEA, an electric vehicle needs almost more than 6 times the amount of minerals compared to a conventional car, omitting steel and aluminum. If we look into more detail about the mining for these minerals, we will realize that there are significant amounts of diesel needed.
A conventional car usually requires 22.3 kg of Copper, 11.2 kg of Manganese, and 0.1 kg of Zinc per unit. In comparison, an electric vehicle requires 53.2 kg of Copper, 24.5 kg of Manganese and the same amount of Zinc. Nevertheless, electric vehicles require other set of metals and minerals that conventional cars don’t: Lithium, Nickel, Cobalt, Graphite, Rare earths, amongst others. But these metals, like many others, can’t be just found in their pure state in nature. They need to be processed from sediments in the soil, and thus require massive amounts of energy. As a general rule, minerals are extracted from mineral ores, where they are present in the form of compounds which contain both the metal sought and a range of other chemical elements.
As an example, in most cases copper ores contain between 0.6 and 1 per cent of copper. This means that per each tonne of ore there are maximum between 6 and 10 kg. Consequently, the copper necessary for an electric vehicle requires extracting and processing almost 9 tons of ore. And the heavy machines that can handle these volumes work on diesel. But diesel isn’t found as a raw material in nature: in the United States, refineries create on average 41 to 45 liters of diesel per each 159-liter barrel of oil. According to Memary, R., Giurco, D., Mudd, G., & Mason, L. (2012), each ton of ore requires 0.002 tons of diesel. 1 liter of diesel weights typically 0.84 kilograms. These equals 21 liters of diesel, or half a barrel of oil. For 200 million vehicles, it would be required 100 million barrels of oil. This might seem a huge amount, but it’s equivalent to roughly one day of global oil production (89.8 million barrels per day in 2021). The diesel used per vehicle for the extraction of the copper ore is just 1% of what the typical passenger car in the United States utilizes per year.
But there is huge divergence between how many tons of mineral ore you need per ton of mineral pure. For example, Lithium ores usually have a 1% concentration of Li2O, which in turn is 46% Lithium based on mass. Therefore, each ton of ore contains just 4.6 kilograms of Lithium. Nickel ranges from 1% to 4% concentration in the ore. Manganese, a very abundant metal, has various concentrations, but it is sought in rich grades with a minimum concentrate of 30%. Zinc varies between 10% and 30%. Cobalt ores grade may be as low as 0.02%. Table below summarizes the average concentrates for each of the minerals required for electric vehicles.
Not only is the concentrate different, but so the mining process and the nature of the mining. It may come from open pit mining, or underground. It may be in more accesible or remote regions, or come with harder materials. This will impact how many ores are needed per vehicle, and how much work is needed to extract and process these ores. We can go to the literature to find the average tons of diesel per ton of ore.
The resulting figure leads that for extraction of the minerals needed for EV manufacturing, it would be needed 1,646.29 million barrels of oil. This equals more than 18 days of daily global output for 2021. For comparison, the API estimates that each car on the United States consumes 23.2 barrels of oil (bear in mind per barrel of oil only 21 liters of gasoline/diesel are created) per year. With 275.9 million registered vehicles, this amount equals 6,400.8 million barrels of oil. Roughly speaking, driving a gasoline-powered car entails 5.3 times more oil than an electric vehicle considering just mining of the metals and minerals needed for ev manufacturing. While the savings in terms of oil are more than 80%, we are omitting from this analysis manufacturing and electricity, which are also hydrocarbon intensive.
