@GhostOnTheHalfShell @blogdiva
bullshit
every ICE vehicle -> EV
and then the game becomes moving the power plants off fossil fuels. which is being done
of course mining resources for EV batteries is a concern
much less of a concern than fossil fuel extraction
especially in regards to climate change
that difference matters
of course it's not perfect
as if anyone concerned with magical impossible perfection is thinking clearly or remotely a serious person
@benroyce @GhostOnTheHalfShell @blogdiva there is also the consideration wrt the effects of vehicle exhaust. Unless the power plants are coal, that's a straight up win for the carbon cycle.
Of course the batteries have rare chemicals and extractive companies still come into play. But they are there for vehicles regardless.
@draNgNon @benroyce @GhostOnTheHalfShell @blogdiva And cobalt is used for refining gasoline as well as in lithium batteries
And not at all in LFP batteries.
And electric motors are more efficient at using energy.
@thefathippy @LukefromDC @draNgNon @benroyce @blogdiva
The general problem with lithium extraction is that it is an ecological extinction event for the mining site and everything downstream of it, as it is for every other input to the global economy. renewables are very complicated bits of technology
The lithium reserves in South America, for instance, lie over the most critically water, distressed regions in South America. The question is who and what is sacrificed
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @thefathippy @draNgNon @benroyce @blogdiva
I would say the South American lithium should not be used. First things first: take lithium OUT of grid storage and other stationary uses where battery weight does not matter! Many home solar experts consider the Edison cell, which uses only nickel and iron to be the premium home storage battery anyway.
They are heavy and bulky but the materials are cheap-and they last seemingly forever. I think these are the second oldest form of rechargable/storage battery after lead acid. The very toxic Ni-Cads descended from them and the more recent Ni-MH cells from Ni-Cads. Edison cells are making a comeback though for solar electrical storage at least in the home, I don't know about for the grid.
They can be discharged to zero and even charged the wrong direction (as can happen to a weak cell in a series of cells during discharge) with no permanent damage at all. So you lose a few cubic feet of basement space, but buy batteries once only and maybe save someone's water supply. Nickel has so many other uses grid and home storage might be within range of the existing nickel mining infrastructure to handle.
When I was off-grid for a while in 2022, we were using plain old lead acid golf cart batteries for storage and they worked fine. When I used lead-acid to run a pirate radio transmitter though, pulling them all the way down in 2 hours meant I only got 50-100 pulls out of them. I really noticed packing 26 or more ampere-hours of lead acid batteries in on my back to run that beast in the woods! Ni-MH would have been a far bigger upgrade over this than lithium would have been over Ni-MH but both were out of my price range at that time so lead it was.
Note that with most battery chemistries you can get most of the metals back by recycling: lead-acid car batteries are recycled to the point that 95% of the lead that goes into one lead-acid battery gets recycled into another lead-acid battery. Thus lead mining to feed these batteries runs at 5% only of the total demand for lead acid batteries. We need to do the same with nickel, lithium, cobalt, etc.
We now have an alternative to lithium for many uses BTW: the first sodium batteries are now on the market. A couple years ago there were lifespan issues with those but results seem good enough for market now. At the moment they run across a big voltage range full to empty, so the controllers for an electric car or similar device would have to be voltage regulating/converting with some associated loss.
At the moment these batteries still depend on poorly distributed processing facilities for sodium, but sodium itself is extremely common, there is a lot more rock salt than lithium out there.
In the near future, sodium batteries could take many thousands of dollars off the price of an EV, make buying a used EV that needs a new battery a reasonalble choice, and allow E-bikers to replace batteries on the cheap at the price of carrying maybe two more pounds per 20 miles of range.
Phones are another case where another chemistry (perhaps nickel metal hydride) would be fully practical. Is a phone that is a half inch thick really the end of the world?
The only really critical uses I can think of for lithium are drones and possibly those E-bikes where every pound counts (certainly not those heavy rental bikes), and possibly electric sports cars where again weight is critical. As of now, drones use the least as they are so small unless their numbers get huge. If Amazon starts using 50 pound drones for deliveries this changes of course and could become a real problem.
The really big fixed wing stuff both hobbyist and military has stayed with internal combustion, as electric gets both heavy and expensive as you scale up. Internal combustion on the other hand is a real problem for quad copters as it does not respond accurately enough to the throttle, so if Amazon delivers by drone they may end up strip mining the Amazon for their batteries. Fuel cells might be the answer for that particular problem.
As things stand now, people are buying and tossing DISPOSABLE VAPES with lithum batteries that could have run mp3 players for half a decade or flown drones for a year used only once and tossed in the trash to be landfilled or incinerated. If I see one tossed on the street, I'll grab it and harvest that battery for better uses.
Hopefully sodium batteries will mature into a replacement for lithium in all uses, until them we are going to have get as good at recycling lithium batteries as we already are at recycling lead-acid batteries.
@LukefromDC @GhostOnTheHalfShell @thefathippy @draNgNon @blogdiva
Yeah I think sodium will change everything
Not as powerful as lithium but ridiculously cheap
