Electrifying heavy-duty vehicles could reduce environmental inequalities

Extracting oil usually involves drilling a hole and getting a material you can mostly (I think about 80%) turn into useful products, though hydrofracking involves handling a lot of water and oil from some places in Saudi Arabia contains a lot of sulfur that has to be removed.

On the other hand, many minerals are found in concentrations of less than 10%, often much less

https://www.sgs.com/-/media/sgscorp/documents/corporate/broc...

The real advantages of the minerals are: (i) a car consumes about its own weight in fuel every year so in its lifetime it consumes maybe 10x it's weight in fuel, (ii) the use (as opposed to production) of that fuel has environmentally unacceptable effects, (iii) the minerals ultimately will be incorporated in a "circular economy".

Note that the automobile industry is a lot more circular than many (say food packaging) in that your local junkyard sells whatever parts it can (I know a guy who just bought a used Ford truck with doors rusted out who just bought two doors from a junkyard) and will send what is left to get crushed when metal prices are high. If you smack your car up at 110,000 miles likely you will get some body panels from this source.

Battery recycling is not a big industry now but it will be. Mining will still be more important than recycling as long as the world is in transition to electric cars. I was quite amused to find that the techniques planned for battery recycling are very similar to both established and in development techniques for recycling spent nuclear fuel.