From my PhD Chemist daughter... Rule-of-Thumb
The more energy you cram into chemical bonds the more unruly they become!
Yes! And the more potential for really bad consequences.
The more energy you cram into chemical bonds the more unruly they become!"
As I noted in another thread:
"The simple fact is that energy resents being confined and often fights back against the effort. The atom bomb was based on the principle of releasing energy from its captivity at the sub-atomic level and to catastrophic effect.That’s the beauty of fossil fuels. Mother Nature already has taken the nuclear energy of the sun (delivered to earth in the form of sunlight), captured it and buried it in the earth where it was transformed into a relatively stable and energy-dense form. All at zero cost to whoever digs it up to use as fuel."
It will be difficult if not impossible ever to surpass the economy of fossil fuels for that very reason. Nature already did the heavy lifting.
Petroleum is a kind of “binary” fuel. Is is not enough to have gasoline. You also have to have oxygen, which is not stored with the fuel. This is what makes gasoline and diesel so safe. Batteries, OTOH, are self contained and, if something goes wrong, can go off at a moment’s notice with no additional input.
There ‘might’ be a misprint on the 8th word in your statement. SARC
The amount of energy stored in Lithium batteries while massively inadequate in the energy storage category when compared to gas fueled vehicles still stores about 1/3 the energy of the propellant used in artillery rounds. So an 1800 lb lithium battery when fully charged has the same energy as 600 lb of artillery propellant. Which coincidentally is almost exactly the same amount that’s carried in an M1A which is why videos of tanks hit by ATMs look very similar to EV fires.
That sounds like the Chemist’s version of the First Law of Civil Engineering: “Sh!t flows downhill.”