Most reports I read suggest that in typical use and with current and foreseeable technologies, an EV will need a new battery every 5 + years, at a significant cost to the owner (and the environment), perhaps £5000+.
Additionally I don't know if anyone has searched battery factories on line, but but the reports of environmental damage, caused both by the battery factories themselves, and the associated supply and disposal industries do not make for pleasant reading.
Batteries last far longer than 5 years as others have said, there are loads of stats out there now on Tesla cars, have a look online. Current projections are 10-15+ years and over 200k-300k miles which is above the average life of a car.
There isn't as much data floating about for Nissan but the 'following' is far smaller even those the sales are an order of magnitude higher.
Also have a look at the battery factories, they are often offset by huge investment in renewables to power them (particularly in the West). Oil refineries, not so much.
Prices of replacements packs are high currently, mainly because EV's are still niche, there are huge opportunities for 3rd party and re-manufactured packs like there are with car parts now. These markets have yet to even get off the ground.
There's an issue with Lithium as a whole because a majority(?) comes from the DRC, which has few controls/a stable political/domestic system to implement it. That can be worked around by supply chain management and audit which is what larger companies normally do.
I think you are getting mixed up with cobalt, lithium is available in quite a few places. The latest chemistry are basically targeted at removing cobalt from the battery, Panasonic claim to now be producing cobalt free cells (which are to be used in Tesla vehicles). The rest of the industry is lagging behind though on this and are still using using it in 'significant' proportions, LG's latest cells reportedly has 0.18kg/kwh.
Forget that side. The oil extraction is the energy source comparison between the two drivelines.
This, well refining and transport are the biggest issues.
The processing can be a bit messy, and obviously the biggest issues are the emissions once they're consumed. There are also environmental issues in less strict regimes, and issues with roads the companies build to get to pads. Often they can inadvertently open up areas that weren't previously accessible to other industries (usually illegal forestry and cattle), which is a major source of deforestation (A fair few companies now fly all the equipment to the site if there's a chance of this, but again, depends on the regulatory regime).
It takes a significant amount of energy to refine crude oil, some products like oil extracted from tar sands is huge. There are energy figures banded about by various people that it takes 5-6kwh per gallon (US) of petrol to extract, refine and transport before its used. That would give an EV a 20 miles mile advantage over an ICE far before a drop of fuel is burnt or electricity generated.
I am a little sceptical on that figure as the industry isn't transparent on its energy usage (#conspiracy), it could be more or less and a few assumptions have to be made. On the EV side there are losses from transmitting electricity over large distances and charging losses that need to be taken into account. But the myth that EV's a dirtier than ICE has been pretty widely debunked for a long time now and I think we can all agree moving the pollution out of city centres is only a good thing for human health.
