Posted on 03/13/2022 11:17:23 AM PDT by Libloather
**SNIP**
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.
**SNIP**
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.
**SNIP**
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 ...
I would like to hear someone’s opinion about hydrogen powered cars as well as their efficiency. At the same time what would be the cheapest way to produce hydrogen. When using hydrogen what would be more efficient, using a piston type engine to burn it or using a fuel cell for converting hydrogen to electricity first and then using it to feed electric motors. No doubt that some members of FR are smart enough to come up with a reasonable answer.
I don’t care. I care about the meat of the article.
I have ZERO problem with folks wanting an EV.
My problem is tax rebates from the taxpayer. My problem is millions and millions of dollars in taxpayer money for charging stations that the private sector should be putting and paying for. If they’re so popular let the gas stations put them in.
But it seems to me that the EV crowd wants the government charging stations vmbevause they’ll be FREE. EFF that. No one pays for my gas. No one should pay for anyone else’s electricity.
Consider how much of the “recycling” we dutifully separate from our trash actually gets recycled. Aluminum and steel cans most maybe. Glass and paper some maybe. Plastics not so much. Imagine literally millions of EV batteries containing a toxic soup of chemicals…I have my doubts few if any will get recycled. Lithium ion batteries also have a tendency to catch fire. Imagine thousands of Li-ion batteries stockpiled awaiting recycling … a disaster waiting to happen
Those stations will either have credit card readers or some other way of charging the user.
You say that and I have no reason to think/say you’re wrong, but neither one of us knows that.
Go to any comment section, from any article concerning EVs and the proud EV owners shout from the rooftops that the charging station outside here or there is FREE. And in fact, many are.
And, who’s to say that the taxpayer help won’t be extended into not charging anyone for any of those charges.
I’ll start laughing when a bunch of EV owners show up at once, even with the super-duper fast chargers and they’re way on down the line and have to wait over an hour for a charger to open up.
You and I do share the hopes of that coming laugh. It is also the fast chargers that cause the fires and shorten battery life.
“Six years ago, Ryan Melsert was part of a small team of engineers sitting in a construction trailer in the middle of the desert in Nevada plotting the details of Tesla’s new battery production facility, the Gigafactory. “We were told to essentially design and build the largest factory in the world, to make the lowest-cost batteries in the world, and to do so without consuming any energy,” he says. “It was a really ambitious goal. And we were literally just staring at a patch of dirt.”
“As the factory’s first production lines started to come online, making powders and slurries and battery cells and packs, Melsert recognized a challenge for the industry. The Gigafactory did what it set out to do. But making batteries generates waste, like trimmings and defective batteries, and it was hard to find any facilities to recycle that waste, or even just process it so that it would no longer be hazardous.
“We started buying tractor trailers and parking them onsite, and filling these tractor trailers with all different types of waste material, just hoping that at some point somebody would find a way to be able to process it and recycle it and do it in a sustainable and cost-efficient manner,” he says. “But over those first few years, there weren’t many companies who came forward and were able to do it.”
“The same challenge exists for used batteries that come from electric cars and from consumer electronics, from smartphones to laptops. The amount of lithium-ion battery waste is quickly growing. But traditional recyclers aren’t equipped to handle it well. It can be dangerous: This summer, for example, a fire broke out at a warehouse storing an estimated 100 tons of lithium-ion batteries, burning for nearly a week and forcing thousands of people to evacuate the area.
Even when batteries don’t burn, the recycling process can release plumes of toxic pollution. And the traditional process is inefficient, so it creates a lot of waste. It’s also so expensive that recyclers often have to be paid to do the work, rather than being able to buy the waste themselves and profit. Moving around huge EV batteries, which weigh hundreds of pounds, can cost more than the value of the materials recovered in traditional recycling. Melsert decided to leave Tesla and start American Battery Technology Company (ABTC) to work on the problem......more at link
https://www.fastcompany.com/90693082/why-this-former-tesla-engineer-now-works-on-battery-recycling
“Is the information in the article accurate?”
‘Accurate’ in the form of a 6th grader looking up some random stuff and not making sense of it.
The ‘accuracy’ ranges from stating the bloomin’ obvious, to stating vaguely correct but missing lots of relevant factors, to the downright stupid.
“Batteries, they do not make electricity ... to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.”
Duh. The vehicle itself does not produce emissions; the _source_ of the energy may OR MAY NOT (solar, wind, hydro, nuke) produce emissions.
Contrast this with every single ICE vehicle which, by definition, directly emits stuff you don’t want to breathe in.
“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.”
Uh, no. Like way stupid wrong.
“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.”
Well, pretty obvious that “single-use” doesn’t apply here, right? Duh?
Most common types - are not relevant to EVs. Those are not the standard packaging used for EVs.
Gee, gasoline/etc aren’t exactly pleasant to ingest.
And oh by the way: Tesla is removing cobalt - the most controversial metal in rechargeable batteries - from battery production.
“Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium.”
Well, between “internal materials” and packaging types, those are pretty significantly different.
“The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year”
‘Two’? You just listed three.
“most are not recycled; they end up in landfills.”
Those tossed in the trash aren’t the ones used in EVs. Can you PLEASE FREAKING STAY ON TOPIC PLEASE?!?
“If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash”
Right, because 2000 pound sealed packs, mounted deep in a vehicle’s frame, are “small”.
“All batteries are self-discharging.”
And then goes on to pontificate on something completely irrelevant.
“In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles.”
Those don’t have anything to do with EVs.
“Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.”
That has what to do with the topic? Nothing.
“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.”
My 6th grader writes like that.
OH LOOK, FINALLY TALKING ABOUT ELECTRIC CARS.
“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.”
Ok. Gasoline cars have a 10-50 gallon tank which is built to store a large quantity of flammable toxic gasoline. Your point?
“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.”
If you’d been PAYING ATTENTION, you’d know that the “lithium brine” process is being eliminated, cobalt is being eliminated, nickel is recyclable, copper is a massively used commodity (if you’re gonna complain about its use in EVs, there’s a whole lot more to complain about first).
“Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo.”
Cobalt is being eliminated from EV production.
Cobalt is being eliminated from EV production.
Cobalt is being eliminated from EV production.
Cobalt is being eliminated from EV production.
Cobalt is being eliminated from EV production.
“...They claim this is the ultimate in being ‘green,’ but it is not. ...”
Yes. Well known “open secret” is EVs aren’t perfectly green like some snowflakes think they are. DUH. If we go thru the same kind of “OMG scary chemicals” list with fossil fuels, you’re not gonna look so superior.
““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.”
OMG that was a painful stupid read. Seriously, looks like a 6th grader wrote it. It’s an extremely sloppy hit piece, obviously written by someone trying to bash something they don’t understand but your progressive mommy told you was told was wrong.
You want to write a piece critical of EVs? Sure, I’ll help you write it - and teach you a whole lot more about the subject in the process. A fair contrast would conclude that EVs are at best marginally cleaner than ICE vehicles, but with ICE being near the end of its lifespan, and EVs just getting started with major technical developments coming fast & frequent, the two can exist together well with a long-term transition to the latter as - just like with gasoline - assorted technical & logistic problems get solved.
No I don’t think “EVs will save the world”. I _do_ think they’re an impressive technical development, and from personal experience find them a desirable category of vehicles.
The “who pays for it” is a legislative problem, not technical/environmental. Complain to your legislator.
EV batteries are big enough - and valuable enough - that nobody is going to just throw them out. As the quantity of unusable EV batteries grows large enough, the economy of scale will kick in making purchase & recycling of EV batteries viable.
Much of the EV technology stack has gone thru this process. Other industries do the same: something impractical becomes profitable on a large enough scale.
I think a lot of the ev plan is wishful.
Not saying it can’t happen, but will our power grid be made robust enough for them?
The ChiComs are building lots of coal power plants for this.
Contrast this with every single ICE vehicle which, by definition, directly emits stuff you don’t want to breathe in.
So, obviously you wrap yourself up in a Tesla EV woo ie everybight dreaming of a world where everything is electric.
But….to your above point , as long as the pollution or stuff that is emitted happens miles and miles away, from a coal fired power plant, all is good. Your EV-conscience is clear. You’re not a polluter. Everyone else is a polluter.
Thanks, Professor. You saved the day.
Read later.
Wasn’t all that long ago we didn’t have a gas station on every other corner. People actually had to plan trips to ensure they could reach the next gas station. Roads didn’t go everywhere they do now. Rest stops had picnic tables and charcoal grills because there wasn’t a cheap restaurant everywhere, families actually had to cook roadside.
The EV charging network is growing. Wasn’t long ago that, between short-range batteries and rare chargers, you couldn’t drive cross-country; now pretty much everywhere is in range with a bit of planning at https://www.tesla.com/trips . Electric companies would love a reason to upgrade power networks and sourcing. There’s lots of room on the grid now, and nothing stopping it from being improved. Home solar is (yes) actually starting to come in range of reasonable for augmenting personal use & transport. If the Left really wants to get us off fossil fuels, they can’t say no to large-scale development of renewables and nuclear.
Weird how many here think the electrical grid is a static entity.
Do you actually want an objective meaningful conversation? or just bash a designated straw man?
Yes, EVs are largely powered by fossil fuels ... burned far away from most people, and on an industrial scale with seriously large emissions control systems far more effective than a few cubic inches on every car. Ain’t perfect, yes, but way better.
Strange how some people like to point fingers and shout variants of “if you’re not perfect then you’re just as evil as everything else! and that makes evil good!”
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