Enh. I try to avoid controversial topics, and have been cutting back internet use over the past months dramatically, but I was pinged by name, and I have done quite a bit of research in this realm. So... braindump incoming. I'm not going to reply to everything, only things that haven't been suitably covered and are in my areas of expertise.
In general, anyone talking about lithium can safely be assumed to not know what they're talking about, and is
almost always just parroting some talking points they've heard from your bog standard conservative talk radio. If you're into battery tech, things like cobalt are far more concerning from a "social" perspective, because you've got the Democratic Republic of Congo's "artisanal" miners providing an awful lot of the world's supply. Translated to normal English, "child and borderline slave labor, working in hand-dug mines with no safety gear, in a third world country with all the worst of what you expect from that."
You can certainly build lithium ion batteries without cobalt, and the amount of cobalt in the good chemistries has been dropping, but in general, cobalt is required for a flagship li-ion cell. Without it, energy and power density are both lower. And that's a problem for traction battery packs.
A lot of the heavy metals are currently byproducts of copper mining, right now.
If you want good summary sheets on materials, USGS provides annual overviews of the assorted mining products.
Nickel:
https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/nickel/mcs-2019-nicke.pdfCobalt (you can see why DRC matters here):
https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/cobalt/mcs-2019-cobal.pdfLithium:
https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/lithium/mcs-2019-lithi.pdfI've gotten into a 'lively discussion' with a family member about the environmental benefits of driving an EV vs an ICE vehicle. This debate centered on the environmental and social impacts of the lithium and other heavy metals used in the EV batteries vs similar impacts from gasoline and other engine fluids
If you're coming from the carbon emission perspective, batteries are a good bit better (especially if charged from PV), but I suspect this isn't a particularly compelling argument in the discussion you're having.
Being the one considering an EV to replace one of our current ICE vehicles, I mentioned how I didn't like burning hundreds of gallons of gasoline per year, particularly when I could recharge with photo voltaics. To which the response was something along the lines of: Do you have any idea how detrimental lithium mining is? Not only does it destroy the land and the poor people who mine it, but the mining companies bring in sex slaves to 'entertain' the miners."
In general, lithium extraction is brine-based, so... other than the evaporation pools, I'm not sure what they're talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Extraction has some details, and Australia is the current leader in production:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_lithium_productionOther heavy metal mining varies in impact, but if you're talking about poor people mining, cobalt is a much more concerning resource than lithium.
These batteries are quickly switching over to a Nickel dominant tech where Ni comprises up to 50% of the mass and from what I understand this % will continue to grow.
50% of the cathode material weight, perhaps. Not 50% of the cell weight.
What car is going TO nickle? I know the first Prius used NiMETHy, but everything I hear of that's newer is based on lithium ion technology. On top of that, despite newer electric car companies being looked at as having all this high tech stuff, they're using standard 18160 cells, simply put into huge packs.
They're not moving to a nickel based battery chemistry (NiMH, NiCd), but they're moving to more nickel in the active cathode material. The early lithium ion cells were LiCoO2 - lithium cobalt oxide. High power, high capacity, short lived, scary to deal with. Spinel LiMN (lithium manganese) was a good non-cobalt, non-nickel chemistry, but the energy and power density have been significantly exceeded by the newer chemistries. Most newer development is NCA (nickel, cobalt, aluminum in various blends) or NMC (nickel, manganese, cobalt). They work better, last longer, and are generally what's in use in any reasonably modern EV.
With the exception of Tesla, very few car packs are using cylindrical cells. Tesla built around the 18650s for a long while, but has moved their newer packs to 21700 format cells (slightly longer, slightly wider, for a significant increase in internal capacity, while not increasing the case weight much). Most other companies are using larger prismatic cells. There's no particularly right or wrong way to do it, though containing a cell runaway with small cylindrical cells is fairly easy, and doing it with a large prismatic cell is ~impossible. I prefer cylindrical cells, but the prismatic ones seem to be working fine (and that's what's in our Volt).
From an ICE car, I would hope you take used oil to be recycled (for DIY people like me). The used oil can fairly easily be used directly in a waste oil heater or with very little cleaning, can be used to fuel diesel engines. Van Hool busses actually directly take crank case oil and add it to the fuel. A large feeder tank continuously adds new oil to the crank case while old oil is pushed into the fuel.
Lubricating oil is a drop in the bucket of oil product consumption for an ICE.
I would argue that "assuming" that electricity all comes from a household solar panel is sort of unfair as a comparison. Yes, I understand that newer plants are all natural gas and old coal plants are either being shut down or being converted to natural gas. It's not for environmental reasons....it's because with widespread fracking (really looking for oil), there's a lot of natural gas that can be captured. So natural gas is now cheaper to burn than coal is. So over time, sure, electricity becomes cleaner with the addition of natural gas in place of oil. Solar and wind help, but do not impact the mix as much as cheap natural gas does.
Solar and wind require very rapid load following to be able to operate on the grid at large scale. Natural gas turbines can do this far more effectively than coal plants, which is another part of the reason coal is going away. It's more expensive, it's generally not useful for load following (you can make a base load plant load follow, but it's genuinely hard on the plant and it shortens the lifespan massively), and power companies are moving away from coal.
It's also relevant to the discussion I was having with said family member, who's position was that even if you could eliminate all of the ~6,000 gallons of gasoline an ICE car would burn and power your EV entirely from solar the enviornmental impact of the lithium mining would still be far worse.
Find out what they think lithium mining is, because they don't seem to be well informed on it.
There is certainly an impact from it, but nothing I've seen of lithium mining makes me particularly concerned. If they were talking about cobalt, then, yes, they'd have a point. But the fossil fuel industry props up an awful lot of places that don't exactly make for shining beacons of human rights.
There used to be a great website called Energy Bulleting(now resilience.org) that had energy experts in numerous fields(DATA!) that did Energy Return On Investment(EROI) studies and life-cycle studies on modern contrivances. Used vs New personal speed couches were often studied. They found the energy/resources required to build ANY new vehicle, EV or otherwise, was much greater than simply using and maintaining an old beater car till the end of its useful life. Put another way, buying a new vehicle would use more energy than it would ever save over the entire life of the vehicle vs. buying used.
If you're looking purely at energy (which is what EROEI studies tend to), they have a point, but that doesn't take into account the nature of the energy used. An EV, running off mostly PV (~5 year EROEI these days, last I looked), is going to be far lower impact emissions than an ICE. I agree that repairing older vehicles is often the right thing to do (and drove for a lot of my life by repairing cast-off stuff I either intercepted on the way to the junkyard or pulled from the junkyard, literally), but the nature of energy matters just as much, if not more so, than the EROEI numbers.
... though a bicycle still comes out far ahead.
Perhaps you can buy a used EV? Using household PV doesn't seem quite fair for analysis, because if you are grid-tied you will definitely use some grid power OR your lead acid battery bank is huuuge if you are not(which has its own negative externalities). Then you start getting into conversion waste and entropy starts taking its toll.
Lead acid is still far better for stationary storage than lithium. The embodied energy is an order of magnitude less, and lead acid is within a small rounding error of 100% recycled. But, yes, unless it's off grid (which requires overpaneling by a good bit), grid tied PV still relies heavily on grid services.
Hmmm, so what's better then:
Keeping the 'junker' I have running by putting money into it, more than it is worth - assuming that it would otherwise go for scrap
vs
Buying a 3 year old EV
Keep the current car running and bicycle/ebike more? :)
The whole point of getting the EV is to reduce our impact. It feels like 'the right thing to do'. But if it is actually climatically better to keep the diesel, well, it is a LOT cheaper to do that... at least, until it blows up. At that point I'm sure my dear father can find me something else that is old but runs...
It depends very heavily on how much you drive. And driving, EV, ICE... is still pretty awful, planet-wise.
Elon has said that the lithium ion batteries should actually be called Nickel Cobalt Graphite batteries because so little lithium is actually used.
Elon needs to learn the fine art of shutting his mouth on a regular basis. They're called lithium ion batteries because lithium ions are the electron transport mechanism that makes the whole cell work. The nature of the cathode varies wildly across the range of lithium cells, but they're all using the lithium ion transport mechanism.
It's easy enough to find the general cathode chemistry if you want for a particular class of cell, but I don't see the point in raising huge amounts of confusion over the different chemistries outside those who are interested.
I haven't really done much research on this topic. I do know these arguments have been going on for for over a decade now. I recall some coworkers discussing whether a Hummer was more environmentally friendly than a Prius (circa 2007). Seems pretty silly to even consider.
That paper pulled some pretty sketchy levers to make the point. The car wasn't scrap because it needed a new battery pack at 100k miles (or, often, just a few cells).
But if you look at the embodied energy in producing EVs, yes, it's massive.
It's a big reason why I'm a fan of the PHEV class vehicles. The 16kWh pack in our Volt (1st gen) uses less than 20% the cell capacity of a long range Tesla, while offsetting almost as much fuel use as a long range BEV would. And you can build 5 of those for the cells that go into a single long range BEV.
But this is an unpopular opinion, I expect to get shouted off the internet (again) for it, and... try not to pick that one, I won't take the bait. There is no battery fairy, though.
forummm hasn't posted in over a year. I wonder what happened?
Figured out life was more important than the internet, probably.
