• A Facebook publication calls into question the fuel consumption that would be necessary for the extraction of lithium, used in the batteries of electric cars.

  • It is based on the photo of a machine that would consume 450 liters of fuel in 12 hours of work.

    The latter is actually used for the extraction of lignite, and runs on electricity.

  • But this does not call into question the environmental impact of building electric cars.

Are electric cars only made to ease your conscience?

This is what Internet users have been claiming for several weeks.

If these vehicles do not consume diesel or gasoline to drive, their manufacture would require, according to some, a significant consumption of fuel.

For “proof”: a photograph of the machine used to draw lithium, necessary for the operation of these cars.

“This machine must move 500 tonnes of earth/mineral to be refined to create a lithium car battery.

Consumes 450 liters of fuel in 12 hours of work”, begins this publication which has gone viral.

But beware, the photograph attached to the text is misleading.

20 Minutes

explains why.

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Lithium has been used for energy storage in electric car batteries, as well as in cell phones and computers for many years.

Its extraction actually has a significant impact on the environment.

As the widely shared social media post claims, tapping lithium can require the extraction of large amounts of rock and the use of very large volumes of water.

But the photograph on which the publication is based does not show a lithium digger, but lignite, a type of coal.

By an image search on Google, it is possible to find an image of the machine in question.

It is actually a Bagger 288, one of the largest land vehicles in the world.

It is used in the Garzweiler mine, in western Germany, and does not run on fuel, but on electricity.

Regarding the environmental impact of the production of electric car batteries, precise data exist.

The NGO International Council for Clean Transport explains that "the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production of a typical NMC111 lithium-ion graphite battery range between 65 and 100 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per kWh of battery capacity. battery ".

It depends on the origin of the electricity produced to design the battery: the European network is relatively clean, while in the United States or China, it is strongly linked to coal.

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Building a battery electric vehicle is about 1.5 times more carbon intensive than building a comparable conventional vehicle, the NGO concluded.

The difference is then made in the long term.

Last June, Olivier Vidal, research director at the CNRS at the Institute of Earth Sciences in Grenoble, explained to

20 Minutes

that to manufacture an electric vehicle, "you currently need twice as much energy as to produce a thermal vehicle, mainly because of the battery.

But the additional manufacturing cost is recovered from 80,000 kilometres”.

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