Posted on 03/13/2022 11:17:23 AM PDT by Libloather
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The lithium car battery issue is twofold. First, there is clear concern around the level of virgin raw material mining needed for their manufacture. This reliance on metals and minerals as the foundation of this technology presents significant environmental and social issues. However, there are now increased efforts to reduce this through the development of new technologies.
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Most electric vehicles run on lithium-ion batteries. Each cell of a lithium battery generates electricity when its lithium ions move from one side (the anode) through an electrolyte to the other side (the cathode). The lithium in the anode is cheap and ubiquitous, although its extraction is not without its issues, however, the cathode contains valuable metals like nickel, manganese, and cobalt, on which the performance of the battery heavily relies.
It is the mining of these precious metals that has a greater environmental and social impact; for example, in fueling conflict and child labour in metal-rich countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where almost two-thirds of the world’s cobalt mining takes place.
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Although lithium car batteries are recyclable, it is a costly and energy-intensive process. One significant setback is the modular composition of the battery cells within a battery pack. The cells are welded and glued together with such solidity that breaking them down requires a lot of human or machine power and emits greenhouse gasses along the way.
One problem with this process is that when you remove the scarce, expensive metals like cobalt from the battery, the recycling industry is left with a lower value product to resell. Lithium is so cheap to mine so there’s no incentive to recycle the lithium in car batteries. Ironically, removing controversial elements like cobalt from the battery makes the process less worthwhile for companies that recycle lithium car batteries.
(Excerpt) Read more at rts.com ...
The thing these articles miss is that there is a better otion than recycling these.
A Tesla battery at 10 yeas is down to about 70% capacity and the car owner will want to replace it.
But a battery at 70% capacity has many other uses. Pile these the cheap used batteries of 1000 Teslas outside a nuclear power plant. All of a sudden the plant is much more responsive to peaks and throughs of electricity demand.
Lefties don’t think that way. Lithium=young/sexy. That’s how they think. Just like Bill Clinton. Do you think he thanks Hillary for getting him where he is? He’s like coal and ivermectin. On to the next thing and don’t worry what anyone thinks.
Musk’s former consigliere JB Straubel is working on recycling at a new outfit called Redwood Materials in Nevada.
Haven’t heard much detail.
Totally worth it.
Most of the cells are nickel in current battery electric vehicles in the USA.
In the near future most standard non-performance cars will be mostly lead and easier to recycle. Further into the future maybe sodium-ion batteries.
This article doesn’t discuss the work of leading edge companies in this space like Redwood Materials.
Gasoline/Diesel vehicles is the lifeblood of Russian and Muslim armies/terrorist.
Oil is a global fungible product where price is based on global demand and supply not local demand and supply.
The purchase of a gallon of gasoline anywhere in the world supports the price of a barrel of oil everywhere in the world.
Pretty amazing read:
This is an excellent breakdown.
Batteries, they do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.
Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see?”
Einstein’s formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.
There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.
Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.
All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery’s metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.
In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.
But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive production costs.
A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.
It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just - one - battery.”
Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?”
I’d like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being ‘green,’ but it is not. This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.
The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.
Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades.
There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions.
“Going Green” may sound like the Utopian ideal but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth’s environment than meets the eye, for sure.
Obviously copied/pasted. I encourage you to pass it along too.
How do you generate the electricity
That’s a pretty amazingly inane breakdown, as a research project by a 7th grader on batteries. (Einstein formula? Really?)
The trouble is, you are trying to cram an ever increasing amount of energy into those chemical bonds. You ned to get the energy denisty high to make it worthwhile. The more energy you put into the bonds the more unstable (Menaing fire or boom!) they are. Th research is to find the “sweet spot” where you got the highest possible energy and acceptable stability which means safety.
The question is: Will the physics\chemistry limit you in such a way that its never econmically viable with the right safety margin? That is no “sweet spot”. We will see!
Talk about irony, our recycling service has been down 6 months because someone threw a L Ion battery in with their recycling stuff and burned the whole plant down.
Elizabeth Holmes could fix it.
Agreed. We are already way south of the safety sweet spot. When LI-ion batteries fail, it’s usually spectacular.
I am encouraged by the advancement of Solid State construction. One of the interesting discoveries was how detrimental introducing even a small about of carbon dioxide is during the manufacturing process.
EV battery = Toxic and weights 900lbs
Been saying right along. That EV’s are chemical polluters. At least nature can deal with carbon emissions rather quickly.
As expected…….one from the…..EVs Will Save The World ….. Everyone Get An EV They’re The Bestest ……. Crowd.
Is the information in the article accurate?
DC-to-AC inverters aren’t particularly efficient.
That is not what that formula says.
They should be looking for a nitroglycerin battery.
BFL
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