Last week, I sat in a gallery that had been erected on one side of the road, for spectators to witness motorcars zipping through on the other side. It was in Zurich, the venue of Formula E, a motorcar race. The only difference? These cars were all battery-powered. The cars shot past me at around 250 km or so, making (I was told) a lot less noise than conventional Formula races were wont to. Thirty-nine laps later, Lucas di Grassi came first, driving an e-Audi.
Quite a colourful racer, this Brazilian winner of the Zurich ePrix. He has driven over Arctic ice and was recently fined €10,000 for wearing an unapproved underwear!
Multinational power company ABB sponsors these e-vehicle championships to highlight, well, e-vehicles. Electric mobility is the future, and these championships help bring the fact into public consciousness.
But as the cars sped one after the other through my field of vision, one thought raced through my mind: how many batteries would need to be disposed of?
The uncomfortable question
Today, there are two million cars in the world (There are millions of electric two-wheelers too). The International Energy Agency estimates that there will be 140 million e-cars by 2030. Another projection puts it at 200 million. Between now and 2030, some 11 million tonnes of spent lithium-ion batteries could come up for disposal.
A few companies have emerged on the scene to make business out of providing a solution to this problem, a couple of which are owned by Indians — Li-Cycle of Canada, founded by Ajay Kochar; and Aceleron in the UK, recognised by the Forbes magazine as a promising start-up, by Amrit Chandan. There is also a Belgian company called Umicore. Several more dot the scene but even collectively, they address only a small part of the problem — a problem that is only set to grow.
Cost vs effort
Disposing of batteries is work because you can’t just toss them into dumps. There is value to be extracted, so the answer may lie in recycling. But even recycling leaves a lot of waste. Also, vehicle battery recycling is still an emerging science and what is possible technically may not make economic sense.
The value of material extracted from recycling should be higher than the cost of recycling itself, but often, that is not the case. The Guardian quotes Francisco Carranza of Nissan as saying that while the cost of recycling a battery is falling towards €1 a kilo, the value of material reclaimed comes to only a third of it.
While many materials can be reclaimed, there are some technical difficulties in recovering lithium, which is not safe to have in the dumps.
Boy, we really have created another problem in solving one!
The alternative
Today, the world is spending a lot of financial and intellectual resources on e-vehicles, touting it as a sort of a panacea to climate change problems. But, as we are discovering, things are not as simple as they seem.
For this reason, I believe the financial and intellectual resources ought to be diverted from the low-hanging fruit called electric vehicles, to something like hydrogen. You can burn hydrogen in engine chambers to produce power, but a far more efficient way of doing it is to use the gas with oxygen to produce power than can drive an electric motor. Such a device is called ‘fuel cell’.
Fuel cell powered cars exist even today, and a good example is the Toyota Mirai. The engines of such cars can be completely recycled — they contain only metals and a membrane. If you look at it from the point of view of the environment, fuel cells win, hands down, over e-vehicles.
The world is running after electric cars and buses because e-vehicles are ahead of hydrogen in the race. Sooner or later, the more sensible is bound to catch up — just as electric vehicles are edging out petrol and diesel cars. It is a pity that companies and governments are not spending enough resources on hydrogen.
It is clear, however, that hydrogen-mobility will get ahead of e-mobility. Electric vehicles may be the tomorrow, but hydrogen is the day after and beyond.
Keep this knowledge up your sleeve and work on it where you can. You will be a winner when the day-after-tomorrow becomes ‘today’. A fuel cell grand prix in Zurich, after all, is not too impossible.