"A single Tesla battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials"
How much do you think it costs to process 500,000 pounds of anything? Here's a similar claim:
THE CLAIM
“Total fuel consumption for mining ore for construction of electric car batteries is approximately 21 billion gallons annually. The 21 billion gallons of fuel burned can only produce enough ore to build 250,000 electric car batteries.”
THE SOURCES
David Checkel, professor at University of Alberta U.S. Department of Energy Tesla
THE ANSWER
No detailed analysis has been done to conclusively determine the accuracy of the claim, but an electric vehicle expert VERIFY talked to said the math doesn’t add up.
WHAT WE FOUND
There is no single data source that tracks this information.
David Checkel, a professor at the University of Alberta and an electric car expert, did some back-of-the-napkin math to dispute the claim. Checkel calculated that if each gallon of fuel costs $3, then 21 billion gallons would cost $63 billion annually. If $63 billion was the price tag for 250,000 batteries, then the cost of raw materials for each battery would be more than $250,000.
Checkel says that number would be “ridiculously high” when compared to the cost of purchasing an electric vehicle. The MSRP of the Tesla Model 3, which the U.S. Department of Energy says was the best-selling plug-in electric vehicle in the U.S. in 2018 and 2019, is $41,990.
A detailed analysis would be needed to conclusively prove this as false, so we’re rating this claim as misleading.
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