When we think of electric vehicles, it is often the cars that are in focus. But electric buses are also on the way, and they are now starting to catch up with cars. This is shown by figures from the analysis company BloombergNEF. At the end of 2022, 49 percent of all new buses sold in the world were electric buses. That is far more than the 13 percent of total car sales, where the buyers have chosen either an electric car or a hybrid car. Even so, it is still the cars of which there are the most when you look at the total number. A total of 27 million electric and hybrid cars have eventually rolled out onto the world’s roads. By comparison, there are still only 814,000 electric buses. Most of the electric buses are found in China, where most buses today are electric, according to Volin Mckerracher, who heads transport analysis at BloombergNEF. Electric cars are starting to have a climate effect It is fundamentally good news that electric cars and electric buses are on the way. They are far better for the climate and also the air quality, especially in the cities. There are now so many electric vehicles that it has now begun to be seen in the overall oil consumption. Every day in 2022, electric vehicles saved a total of 1.7 million barrels of oil, but this should be seen in relation to the fact that the world today uses around 100 million barrels, figures from the International Energy Agency show. At the same time, electric vehicles have become far more than just cars and buses. In Denmark, electric bicycles have gradually become popular. But elsewhere in the world they have more taste for electric scooters and scooters. They accounted for as much as 39 percent of electric vehicles sold in the world last year, and there are now more than ten times more electric two-wheeled vehicles in the world than electric and hybrid cars. It is particularly in India and South Asia that scooters are the most common way of getting around. The new and widespread use of electric scooters has also meant that investments in battery exchange stations are now well under way, because it is much easier to change the battery on a scooter than a car. But there are also things about electric vehicles that are less positive. Among other things, they use large amounts of lithium and other substances. Those ingredients are often extracted in countries where production causes problems. For example in Bolivia, where the extraction of lithium causes local water shortages and in the DR Congo where children perform life-threatening work in the cobalt mines. But it must be seen in relation to the fact that fossil-fuel cars also require a lot of mining and oil drilling, which have major consequences for the environment. A mountain of used batteries presents a recycling challenge A challenge that is growing bigger all around is how to reuse the many millions of batteries. Until now, it hasn’t been a big problem, as electric cars are only now starting to break through on a large scale, and most new electric cars will drive around the world’s roads for many years before being thrown away. But eventually the amount of waste from the spent batteries will grow massively. It is estimated that in 2040 there will be a mountain of used batteries weighing over eight million tonnes. That corresponds to 1.3 times the weight of the Cheops pyramid in Egypt, writes National Geographic. Some lithium-ion batteries are already reused, but it often happens in a rather primitive way, where the battery is split up and the remains are melted in an ovs. In this way, you can recover some of the most expensive metals, such as copper, nickel and especially cobalt. But lithium burns and disappears through the pipe. At the same time, the process is very polluting. But it may well be technically possible to recover lithium as well, but it requires an expensive additional process which until now has not been beneficial, partly because the amount of batteries has been relatively small. As the number of electric cars increases and the total amount of batteries increases, the interest in developing new and better methods for reusing the batteries is also increasing. In the US alone, there are five major start-up companies on the way, which want to reuse materials from used batteries. The new businesses are financed, among other things, via 335 million dollars in public support, which the US government has earmarked for the reuse of batteries.
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Every other bus in the world runs on electricity
