Today's video is going to be very interesting. I'm curious how long it will take for my truck
to become green. Not exactly that kind of green – more environmentally green. Are electric
trucks actually better for the environment than gasoline powered trucks? I mean, yeah,
as I drive up the mountain right now I'm not producing any emissions. There's no tail pipe for
exhaust but my battery had to be mined somewhere, and manufactured. And I had to plug into the grid
to charge up and the grid might not be that clean. Those fossil fuels are being burned somewhere. And
finally, what happens at the end of my truck's life with the battery pack and recycling? Can
lithium batteries even be recycled? I am pretty hungry right now though so this video is sponsored
by Huel. More on them later. I'm going to meet you farther up the mountain. Let's get started.
[Intro]
I'm going to be comparing my electric Rivian to the most popular truck in the world – the
Ford F-150, the gas powered version, so we can see which truck is actually more green.
All of this information is pretty easy to find online. Rivian themselves has not released an
environmental impact report yet. They are waiting until after their first year of production which
is reasonable. But there is enough information on vehicle manufacturing and battery production that
we can extrapolate and get a decent prediction of how many carbon emissions this is producing.
-[Biker #1] How do you like that thing? Yeah it's sick.
-[Biker #2] Oh, you're JerryRigEverything! Cool man!
-And of course all of my sources will be linked down in the video description.
Let's start with manufacturing, as in resource extraction, production,
assembly, and delivery of the vehicles before they even drive their first mile. There are a
lot of different estimates on the CO2 emissions during production, anywhere from 2 all the way to
17 tons. But a recent study done just last year from the Argonne National Laboratory seemed to
be most in-depth saying that a regular pickup truck takes about 6.5 tons of CO2 to produce,
factoring in all of the mining for the metals, along with the body panels and
drivetrain...everything that goes into production. 6.5 tons. But you'll notice once you add a battery
to the vehicle, the CO2 emissions over double. For a truck with a 120 kilowatt hour battery pack,
we're looking at 16 tons of CO2 released during the mining and production of that vehicle. You
could build two regular trucks for the CO2 emissions of one electric truck. Big yikes.
Today's numbers say that gas powered trucks are way more environmentally friendly to produce than
electric trucks. That's the end of the story I guess. Gas wins. Thanks a ton for watching.
Unless, of course, we start to factor in the emissions that occur while driving. To calculate
that is pretty easy, pretty well regulated across the nation. We're going to be using
the two-wheel drive Ford F-150 with a miles per gallon of about 25 which is really good,
almost better than some cars. We're going to give the gas powered truck
the most benefit of the doubt that we could possibly give it. If you remember,
gas powered cars are about 30% efficient, meaning that if you put $10 of gas into your gas tank,
$7 gets evaporated and burned away as heat, while only $3 of gas goes towards pushing your vehicle
forward. Gas engines aren't very efficient. If we look at the 25 miles per gallon of the Ford F-150,
we can see that it has an average emissions of 6.7 tons of CO2 every single year. If we
estimate that they are driving about 15,000 miles a year which is the national average
here in the United States. We won't factor in the emissions of all the semi trucks bringing
gasoline to the millions of gas stations, we're just focusing on the vehicles themselves.
Now for the Rivian. And this is where things get interesting since there aren't any tailpipe
emissions coming out of the truck while it's driving. But while it's charging is a different
story. Emissions have to be emitted somewhere. I live in Utah, and our grid is slightly more clean
than the national average but it's not entirely renewable just yet. I do have solar panels on
my house so the energy going into my truck is 100% clean, but we aren't going to factor
that in just yet. We'll pretend as if I'm pulling from the grid cuz not everyone has solar panels.
To get the breakdown of Utah's electrical grid we move over to the EPA's website which can tell
us exactly what percentage of our energy comes from different sources. Here in Utah we have 18%
natural gas, 18% coal, 45% hydro, and 10% wind, with just 1% being solar. So using that breakdown
and FuelEcomony.gov we can see that my Rivian emits 142 grams of CO2 by charging every single
mile. And if we use the same 15,000 miles driven per year as we did with the gas powered Ford
F-150, we can see that my Rivian emits 2.3 metric tons of CO2 just by charging from a non-cleaned
grid. Electric vehicles aren't quite as clean as we might be led to believe. There's still a lot of
carbon coming from the grid but still only half as much if I were driving a gas powered truck. Having
a large power plant burning fossil fuels is more efficient than having a small power plant under
the hood of a truck. For example, it takes about as much energy to heat up your oven and bake 12
cupcakes as it does for an industrial bakery to bake 200 cupcakes. Bigger plants are more
efficient and I'm just kind of hungry. But due to the more efficient location of where I'm burning
my fossil fuels, at some point there will be a crossover where the electric truck becomes greener
than the gas powered truck, even with the massive amount of carbon emitted during its production.
And if my math is correct, that will be right around the two year mark when both
vehicles are hitting right around that 30,000 miles if I'm charging from Utah's
mix of grid energy. Obviously I have solar panels on my house so the energy going into
this truck is green and it will break even with its carbon emissions much sooner around
25,000 miles. Remember these numbers are just estimates. Neither Ford nor Rivian
have said exactly how much carbon is being produced when they manufacture stuff and
the efficiency of manufacturing is improving at a rate that will make this video obsolete
in 5 years – especially with all the new battery production facilities like the Gigafactory opening
up in Texas. As things get more efficient, the CO2 emitted per battery goes down.
As I mentioned earlier, Utah's one of the “cleaner” grids in the United States. If
we were to use the average cleanliness of power generated my Rivian would be emitting 3.3 tons
of CO2 every year just by charging, and would take about 4 years to break even when compared
to a gas powered truck. But a 4 year old truck is still basically brand new with plenty of life
ahead of it. If we look at the CO2 emitted over the entire lifetime of our two trucks,
assuming lifetime is about 200,000 miles. Even charging from a non-clean grid and accounting
for manufacturing, the electric truck will produce half as many emissions as the gas powered truck.
So are electric trucks perfectly clean? No they are not, but they are still more
clean than the alternative as long as they are driven for about 3 or 4 years
so they can pay off their carbon debt of being manufactured in the first place.
So we've discussed manufacturing, we've discussed driving, but what
about end of life? What about recycling emissions? A very interesting subject,
but first I need a little nourishment. Huge thanks to Huel for sponsoring this video. My truck might
not have as many outlets as the lightning but we still have enough juice to boil water.
Huel provides 100 nutritionally complete meals with 27 plant based vitamins and minerals, with
a whopping 24 grams of protein. All of that just by adding hot water and it's ready in minutes.
One meal I haven't tried yet is the mac and cheese and I definitely want to get my hands on that one.
Today for lunch we are having a bit of the chicken and mushroom and Cajun pasta. These
are made with natural ingredients with real herbs and spices. The cajun pasta has a bit
of a zing to it so you have to be ready for that, but it's very good and very filling.
Along with the plant based chicken and mushroom...10 out of 10. The hot and savory meals
are my favorite but you don't have to take my word for it. Huel has sold over 200 million meals in
over 100 different countries. You can try it out for yourself, I have a link in the description.
Meals start at less than $4 with free shipping. And thanks to Huel for sponsoring this video.
Where were we? End of life. Now obviously trucks are mostly metal and metal can be infinitely
recycled. You just crunch it up, melt it down, reuse it in a new truck. The bodies of both
vehicles are going to be the same. Also fun little side fact, the lead acid batteries that run the 12
volt system in basically every car on the road are one of the most recycled commodities in the United
States. At 99% they have a near perfect recycling rate. And of course the stats for how long a
vehicle normally lasts are kind of all over the place. It really depends on how long you drive.
But a good rule of thumb is around 200,000 miles if you take extraordinarily good care of your
vehicle. That 200,000 mark is usually the point you can get to before needing an engine swap or a
transmission replacement – you know, the really large repairs. So we'll use those same numbers
for both vehicles and Tesla says, since they've been around the longest they have the most data,
that even after 200,000 miles worth of driving, their battery health or battery capacity is still
at 90% percent. Which means that the batteries have the potential to outlast the vehicle itself.
We'll still leave it at 200,000 though since that's about when vehicles start to get tired.
Tesla has also said that with their millions of electric cars on the road they have never thrown
a battery in a landfill. When the car reaches its end of life or needs a battery replacement,
Tesla has the ability to recycle it and retrieve 92% of the materials inside those battery cells
which is a pretty big deal. Last year alone they retrieved 1500 tons worth of nickel, 300 tons
worth of copper, and 200 tons worth of cobalt that they can then reuse and put into new batteries.
And I don't know the exact carbon footprint of that manufacturing process,
but since they are grabbing materials that don't have to be mined, I assume
it's similar to the aluminum. Apple says they use recycled aluminum because it has 140th
the carbon footprint of getting new aluminum from the ground. And if the carbon footprint
of using recycled materials is lower than the initial carbon footprint of our vehicle,
remember how big it was at the beginning, is also lower. Since mining new materials is where
most of that initial footprint comes from. And part of the issue with talking about recycling
though is that since lithium batteries last for so long, we haven't needed large scale recycling.
After the end of life of a battery inside of a vehicle, it can go onto be grid storage or
work at a supercharging station. There's even a stadium in Amsterdam run off of 150 Nissan Leaf
batteries as its backup power, and people are buying the battery packs out of wrecked
Teslas to use in their own home storage or in their own electric vehicle conversions like
I did with my Hummer project. When it does come time to recycle the batteries though,
and that time will eventually come, we can do all that right here in the United States. This
year a factory is opening up in Georgia that can recycle 30,000 tons worth of batteries.
And Redwood Materials in Nevada is currently recycling enough materials every year to build
60,000 new Evs. And another facility's opening in Arizona and another on in New York. There's
a lot of money reclaiming the materials inside of battery backs and there's a lot of people
jumping on that train. Either way, with such a long lifespan and 92% of the material is
able to be recovered at the moment, and with how valuable these are, no one in their right
mind is throwing these batteries into a landfill. Either way, it's been super fun to research this
and see the process, you know, electric vehicles might not be as green as we initially thought,
but there does come a point where they are greener than their gas powered counterparts. Now if we
really want a solution to emissions, the answer isn't vehicles though. It's kind of dumb to have a
7,000 pound machine transporting a 200 pound person. The real solution would be bullet trains.
And it would be nice if we had a whole lot of them. But that's a story for a different day.
Feel free to share this video. I've seen a lot of interesting theories flying around
lately and it's nice to have some solid data we can learn from. Hit that subscribe
button if you haven't already. Come hang out with me on Instagram and Twitter.
And let me know what your thoughts are on electric vehicles and everything we talked
about today down in the comments. Thanks a ton for watching and I'll see you around.