I'm all for electric vehicles, but there are a few things that have bothered me about its mass adoption.
Right now, electrics comprise a tiny part of the automobile market share. Yet Tesla is already running into supply issues, particularly with lithium as there are only 3 companies in the world that do industrial-scale lithium mining, that too in a handful of mines around the world.
Secondly, I suppose we're currently in the honeymoon period for electrics. But what will happen 5-8 years down the line, when all the early mainstream adopters of electrics will have to replace their batteries? Is it feasible to recycle all those batteries?
An EV essentially is a car with a very expensive fuel tank (the battery), made out of specific materials and properties. While it is efficient in energy use and can make use of fungible electricity, lithium is rare, limited to specific areas of concentration, and can (as any material) only be partially recycled.
There's lithium elsewhere on Earth, or more precisely, in seawater, but processing seawater for minerals (uranium is another which might be extracted) is expensive in the sense of requiring a lot of energy (arguably the ultimate definition of cost is energy requirements).
At US rates of auto ownership scaled to the world and future populations, known lithium reserves would quickly be exhausted -- a few decades, if that. With recycling, yes, some of that would be re-used, but even at 90% material recoverability (and references I have suggest 30% is far more common), you'll lose ~50% of your original material in 7 generations. (The formula: remaining material = (portion recoverable)^generations. So: 0.47 ~= 0.9^7.)
Other options include other forms of energy storage (including possibly synfuels), other battery components, or we all just start walking a lot more.
The saudi oil minister said that if everyone in the world had as many cars as the US, then they wouldn't have enough oil. So that's a very aggressive yardstick you're setting for EVs.
It would be much more sensible to electrify the cars/busses/trucks/delivery vans that are driven a lot, that are driven in stop-start traffic, and that are driven in heavily populated areas first. That gives you much more bang-per-buck in terms of pollution and CO2 reductions.
There are a lot of things which fail to scale to an Earth-of-Americas. And some pretty good reasons to think that's generally not possible.
Pointing out which specific subcases remain impossible doesn't disprove the larger case.
There's a good question as to how scalable EV's are generally. Present scale is minuscule. A small feaction of a percent in the US, and that actually fell in 2015. I'm not sure what 2016 and future trends (based on pre-orders) look like.
I'm really looking forward seeing big cities adopting EV for buses and cabs. In London the black cabs are noticeably more smelly than regular cars, and buses are... well buses.
I've kept a modest watch on battery technologies, and there are some interesting developments, though most are fairly modest.
You've got the fundamental problem that battery energy storage densities by weight are ~1/100 - 1/50 that of liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Synthetic analogs of petrol, kerosene, and diesel would be quite useful (though expensive). All but irreplaceable for some uses (heavier-than-air flight, marine propulsion).
Among batteries, you have:
1. Liquid / molton salt batteries. Some of these have highly abundant substrates. The problem is the 300-600C+ temperatures they operate at. Especially in vehicle applications.
2. Metal-air batteries. Iron and aluminium particularly. Here the oxidation is supplied from air. You're consuming the (anode?) in use, and it's got to be replaced, but that can include recycling. Abundant but problematic.
3. Fuel cells. A reaction, typically of hydrogen and oxygen, producing electron flows. The problem is the reaction chamber, which usually requires scarce catalysts (e.g., platinum) which are a) expensive and b) rarer than lithium.
4. Advanced allotropes. Carbon or silicon or other materials which are abundant but offer unique properties in new molecular forms. While this is well outside my area of expertise, it's an un(der) explored area which might pack some suprises.
5. Biocells. Life does some amazing things with enzymes and other agents, including maintaining an exceptionally high voltage potential across cell membranes (see Nick Lane's book, recently mentioned here via Bill Gates). Humans utilising biological mechanisms to provide electricity might offer another out, though this again is highly speculative.
The advantage of my #s 4 & 5 is that they could rely on highly abundant elements arranged in complex molecules to perform desired functions. Experience suggests that such molecules are difficult to come up with, degrade quickly, and have narrow operating bands in which they're viable. But at least the abundance constraint is removed.
Sodium batteries have been around since the 1960s.[1] They're a high-temperature battery, 90°C and upwards. Ford built some experimental vans with sodium-sulfur batteries in 1991. Two of them caught fire. That technology was abandoned for mobile applications.
There's still interest in this for stationary energy storage on power-grid scale. But not for mobile. Sodium catches fire if exposed to air.
Sodium-ion batteries aren't necessarily the dead end you might think.
Faradion has been working on portable batteries w/ decent energy density (~150 Wh/kg), excellent charge-discharge performance (93% capacity after 1000 cycles) and competitive costs: http://www.faradion.co.uk/about/news/2015/05/489/
Sodium batteries run at very high temperature and are finicky. They have been used for decades on submarines where they can be managed by trained personnel and where a large heat sink is available. I would be wary of consumer sodium based batteries.
I think that's sodium-sulfur batteries. There is work being done on sodium ion batteries. And also aluminum ion batteries. In thoery these are both similar to lithium ion batteries. In practice figuring out how to produce high quality ion batteries is not easy.
another one is potassium, and giving that the future is metal-air batteries, potassium works great there (its oxide seems to behave better for recharging in that scheme than lithium's)
Wrt. possible short-term lithium supply issues, i can see how Musk would just build a new mine operation if necessary, like a Giga-ship to mine it from seawater :)
> arguably the ultimate definition of cost is energy requirements
No, it's not. The ultimate causes for costs are human labor and taxes (including similar concepts like rent or license fees) – everything else derives from that.
You're not paying the Sun for its energy output, but the workers that mine the materials, process them, and build solar panels.
Solar flux is a given, and isn't modifiable by human activity. But the flux reaching Earth is limited, and in the sense of that which you give up -- opportunity costs -- there's only so much of it available. Stored solar flux -- as biofuels, wind, hydro, or fossil fuels -- represents an exergic potential (value) with an eMergic cost.
Economic prices fail to consider that emergic cost entirely, but in a very real sense it's an account balance being depleted. Environmental sinks also have costs associated with clearing and negative impacts.
Howard and Eugene Odum, ecologists, coined the term emergy and discuss it. There's a fair literature concerning it in ecology, though little or none in economics. I believe economics is in error here.
Again, very much not mainstrem econ. You'll find treatment in ecological, biophysical, and thermoeconomics however: Georgescu-Roegen, Daly, Hall, and Costanza, among others.
processing seawater for minerals (uranium is another which might be extracted) is expensive in the sense of requiring a lot of energy (arguably the ultimate definition of cost is energy requirements).
But it has to be done only once when the battery is produced, right?
Yes. But there's a constant flux of lithium require (flow) for an economy based on battery storage -- or at least so long as lithium is your battery substrate.
How much is determined by the storage per vehicle, vehicles per capita, lifetime of the battery pack, and recovery rate of recycling.
If you go to an inventory of mineral or element prevalence in the Earth's crust, you'll come up with a list of elements and what percentage (usually by mass) they constitute of the Earth's crust.
Strategic minerals: iron, copper, zinc, silver, gold, tin, lead, mercury, gallium, etc., etc., all have specific rates of occurrence. We mine them from ores in which they're more concentrated, because that's easier (again: less energy requirement), but those ores are scarce. Ultimately the question becomes how much energy is required to access minerals vs. how much energy do they make available. If the first exceeds the second, they're a losing proposition no matter the technology applied to extraction.
Ore concentrations are formed by various mechanisms -- and I understand them only partially, this isn't my field, though I'm studying it now. Iron, for example was largely concentrated into ores billions of years ago, during the first big flourishing of life on Earth, in the Great Rusting. Biological activity, mostly algae, concentrated what had previously been unoxidised molecular iron (sourced from cosmic material that coalesced on Earth).
Other mineral ores seem to also have biological origins in concentration, some various chemical transformations, some geological activity (coal, oil, and natural gas most notably), some are pretty directly remnants of late meteor or asteroid impacts -- especially gold and heavy elements which would otherwise have sunk to the Earth's mantle and core.
But what will happen 5-8 years down the line, when all the early mainstream adopters of electrics will have to replace their batteries? Is it feasible to recycle all those batteries?
Furthermore, lots of research is going into electric battery recycling. I've worked on EV-battery-related grant applications that also demonstrate promise. I can't say more about them, but I'm optimistic.
At the moment, lithium commodity prices remain oddly low if most people expect reserves to run out (if you (in the plural you sense) expect reserves to run out, there's a fortune to be made!). See also http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Is-There-Enough-....
> Right now, electrics comprise a tiny part of the automobile market share. Yet Tesla is already running into supply issues, particularly with lithium as there are only 3 companies in the world that do industrial-scale lithium mining, that too in a handful of mines around the world.
Why would any consumer have to care at all about this? If it really becomes a problem the price of EVs will go up and then people won't buy them. You're letting details you needn't worry about influence your possible purchase now? That makes no sense. Do you worry about how Ford is going to source their parts when they run into supply chain issues (which they do)? Do you worry about any other company's supply chain issues? You are repeating anti-EV FUD.
> I suppose we're currently in the honeymoon period for electrics. But what will happen 5-8 years down the line, when all the early mainstream adopters of electrics will have to replace their batteries? Is it feasible to recycle all those batteries?
A) All manufacturers have buyback/replacement programs in place that they have to uphold with the customer. Again, you needn't worry about the details as a consumer beyond that.
B) If you really insist on worrying about the details, look at some actual historic data instead of FUD; the price of EV batteries has been dropping dramatically over the last 10 years. All real signs (the fact that manufacturers keep opening new plants and increasing capacity, and that there is no real shortage of Lithium in the world despite the "3 companies" baloney) point to them continuing to drop.
The only REAL reason to consider not buying an EV right now is the dramatic pace at which they are improving. But to me that just points to leasing instead of buying one.
Consumers should absolutely consider whether we are on a sustainable growth curve. How common will electric charging stations be if it turns out that EVs can't rise above 10% of the total car market? If hydrogen-powered cars all of a sudden became the norm, EV drivers will be much less well-served than if EV sales continue to scale (as most EV purchasers probably assume they will).
> How common will electric charging stations be if it turns out that EVs can't rise above 10% of the total car market?
One of the beauties of EVs is you don't need charging stations. I leased a Nissan LEAF 2 years ago, and it almost only gets charged at home.
You can't really know whether EVs are going to take over or not, it depends on too many factors. If our government gets bamboozled with Hydrogen the way they did with Ethanol, then yeah Hydrogen cars could become more popular than EVs.
But I would argue that even in that world, EVs are the better choice. They are lower maintenance and like I said, you don't need refueling stations. Your car refuels while it's parked in your garage.
Is that going to be the same when say 15%-20% of the nation plugs in a car every evening - its going to the surge when people go to make a cup of tea when the adverts are on during coronation street look tame.
Car charging is a steady, predictable usage of electricity. People don't all arrive home at the exact same time.
Additionally, being giant batteries, electric cars have the means to charge when most advantageous to the national grid. Most electric cars already have an option to wait to charge until off peak rates happen. (Off peak rates being cheaper because low overall demand.)
But electric cars may be useful to the grid as giant surge protectors for things just like that cup of tea electric kettle break. Under some of the "smart grid" proposals, the electric companies would be able to not feed electricity to a vehicle in those brief moments of high demand on the grid, prioritizing immediate needs like people's kettles. Furthermore, "smart grid" ideas could even use electric cars as battery backup options, "leasing" already stored energy back from the car and paying it back later, as changes in demand happen.
Even if some of those "smart grid" ideas don't get nationalized, you could still theoretically take advantage of some of those kinds of things in your own home.
So if anything, electric cars may be surge stabilizers rather than surge causers.
Street parking solutions are being proposed. Many streets already have power to the street (street lamps and similar street furniture) and chargers become the new parking meter. Also, there's experiments in street-installed inductive chargers (like the wireless chargers you can buy for many phones these days) and even companies exploring the logical extreme of street-level inductive chargers the "power road" (where the car can draw an inductive charge even while driving), which seems unlikely to be pragmatic but still interesting to experiment with.
And then the 240V charger in the garage, in case you want to actually charge your car faster than eight hours. (IIRC, its 72-hours to charge a Tesla on 110V)
You do not need to own a charging station. My Leaf charges to 100% overnight just fine and it plugs into a standard 110 wall outlet in my house.
You also don't need a garage, as they charge just fine outdoors (been charging mine in my driveway for 1.5 years), but that's just arguing semantics at this point.
And that's actually the point of switching cars to electricity: we have many sustainable ways of making electricity, and zero ways of sustainably making gasoline. Get cars running on electricity, then continue building out the infrastructure.
This is untrue, actually. You can depolymerise virtually anything carbon-based into oil. It's currently more expensive than digging it out of the ground, but we'll never run out of oil.
What's more, assuming the carbon in the feed stock originally came from the atmosphere, burning the resulting product is carbon-neutral.
Something to think about, given the unbeatable energy density of gasoline (barring nigh-magical battery technology).
This is where we should be heading IMHO. Synthetic petroleum fuels that are carbon-neutral. This lets us keep using the existing infrastructure for transporting and retail sale of fuel, lets people keep using their current cars to maximize that value. Saves the absolutely massive investment that would be necessary to upgrade electical generation and delivery infrastructure to power a large fleet of EVs.
No, it absolutely is not. Of all the ideas of how to power transportation in the future this is one of the worst.
First, the idea that it is carbon neutral is absurdly wrong. If you're pulling the carbon out of anywhere but the atmosphere (and you are), then it's no more carbon neutral than pumping oil out of the ground and burning that.
Second, it's hugely inefficient. If you're manufacturing fully synthetic petroleum, then that synthetic petroleum is acting like an energy storage medium, a liquid battery, rather than as a true fuel (a source where you're getting more energy out than you put in.)
Any kind of battery source which has to be physically moved around via other sources of transportation is hugely inefficient compared to EVs with actual batteries where the energy merely has to be sent down transmission lines and the like. The losses involved in moving electricity around are far, far less than moving synthetic petroleum or hydrogen or any other "pseudo battery".
Lastly, internal combustion engines are extremely inefficient themselves, especially compared with electric motors. They require tremendous upkeep and have energy losses that are three times that of EVs. So even if you could make the claim (which you can't) that your synthetic petroleum energy storage medium is 100% as efficient as moving power around, the ICE is going to result in needing to use up 3x as much energy to move your vehicle from Point A to Point B compared to an EV.
Synthetic petroleum is a really, really bad idea and should not be pursued.
I agree fully, synfuels are a hugely naive idea.
However, I've been pondering the use of direct-ethanol fuel cells in the place of 'range extenders' that are currently on some EVs. Advantages are legion: ethanol has a ready (and in possibly sustainable) supply chain, ethanol is a liquid with comparable-if-low vapor pressure as gasoline, i.e. readily handled, ethanol is not hugely poisonous like methanol, has quite decent energy density, etc. Fuel cell conversion is acceptably efficient (compared to ICE anyway), so not that much fuel would be needed; most consumers would prefer to charge at home anyway, for cost reasons. The fuel cell would be used to back-up the battery, therefore it wouldn't have to be really large - it only needs to provide the mean load, not the peak load. And you'd never have 'range anxiety' again...
1) Erm. There's only really two places you can get carbon - the ground, or the atmosphere. Any biofuel eventually comes from plants or algae, which get their carbon from the atmosphere. I don't really know where else you had in mind.
2) That doesn't make it inefficient. The whole point is that it's acting as storage rather than fuel. That's what makes it carbon-neutral - the carbon comes out of the atmosphere, then goes back (instead of out of the ground and into the atmosphere).
3) Not sure I buy that. Electricity distribution is hardly lossless (and what powers the power station?). Our best grid-scale storage solutions run about 75% efficient, while car-scale batteries leak charge much faster than a gasoline tank leaks gasoline. And both a gasoline car and an EV have to carry around heavy energy storage - the difference is the gasoline tank gets lighter as it empties.
4) To be fair, you have to compare the efficiency of the ICE to the combined efficiency of the motor, power station, and all intermediate storage (every time the power moves from one battery to another, you lose some, while gasoline can be stored and dispensed fairly losslessly). Transmission costs also have to compared like-for-like - grid scale distribution runs about 95% efficient, while oil tankers are 97-98% (though you have to factor in last-mile, and trucks are ten times as thirsty). I don't think the calculation is as clear-cut as you're making out.
It's also worth querying what exactly "efficiency" means. If the source is sustainable (and biofuel is), raw energy wastage is less important than gross environmental impact and safety. It's not clear to me that mining nuclear materials and dealing with the waste, or mining rare earth metals to carpet the land in solar panels, are necessarily better or more sustainable solutions that carpeting the land in fast-growing, high-energy crops and fuelling all of society that way. Perhaps it is a bad solution - it depends on how the numbers fall exactly on things like land use, (and possibly your values regarding safety decisions). If it's already been thoroughly analysed and found wanting, then I'd love to read that. But at the moment you've not really made an argument commensurate with the strength of your opinion.
Various processes to make synthetic gasoline were patented more than hundred years ago, and at some times (ww2-1950ies) it has been successfully done at scale.
We don't do it because currently oil is so obscenely abundant and cheap, that it's not economically worthwhile to seriously consider alternatives to just pumping some more oil out of the ground.
> If it really becomes a problem the price of EVs will go up and then people won't buy them.
Taxpayers, for instance, have reason to worry about this, because things are driven ahead by subsidies. We don't necessarily have a market that would work the way you assume because of external pressures.
Supply issues are normal when demand rises suddenly. They aren't necessarily indicative of the long-term productive capacity of the Earth.
Websites go back and forth on this, but truly scientific analyses of "will we run out of X" are few and far between. But there's just no point in looking for a new quarry if the demand isn't there. You think it will be, but technology is capricious -- someone could invent a new gizmo that renders your investment worthless, so market forces generally don't support dragging a bunch of resources around until there's no other option.
There are ten pounds of lithium in a car battery. It's about as common as copper. That's hardly the end of the world.
> particularly with lithium as there are only 3 companies in the world that do industrial-scale lithium mining, that too in a handful of mines around the world.
It appears that there are more than 3 lithium mining companies[1]. Care to provide your source to prove otherwise?
Mineral extraction of non-renewable resources is a funny thing - when demand moves up, eventually supplies will drop, and prices rise. Then people either find a way to extract energy from a different mineral, or build better technology to remove it from rock, and prices go back down. The drop in oil and gas prices over the last few years being a perfect example of this, as it is due to new drilling techniques.
When the current lull in oil prices ends, electricity will take its place. And we will start the same cycle for batteries that we have lived through over the past 100 years with oil -- either technology will bring out more lithium, or research will move us to use a different fuel source.
Batteries are following the same price curve of solar panels, and are about to get stupid cheap.
EDIT: If Tesla is able to drive down battery costs to below $100/kWh, I assure you, EVs won't be the biggest success story; you'll be able to turn every wind and solar generator into dispatchable generation cheaper than coal, nuclear, and natural gas. We'll be off fossil fuels in ~10-15 years.
Nitpick: the unit you mean is kWh, not kW, which is a different, though related, unit of merit for batteries. (kWh measures capacity; kW measures output.)
I think there's a bit of confusion about Pack prices vs Cell prices. The $145 is cell only, which is one of the reasons it is so much lower. There don't seem to be consistent pack-pack price comparisons.
I agree there is a disparity between the Bolt's cell-only cost vs Tesla's cost all-in on a pack. Regardless, the cost is below $200/kWh, and it appears that the cost decreases will continue.
Right now, electrics comprise a tiny part of the automobile market share. Yet Tesla is already running into supply issues, particularly with lithium as there are only 3 companies in the world that do industrial-scale lithium mining, that too in a handful of mines around the world.
Secondly, I suppose we're currently in the honeymoon period for electrics. But what will happen 5-8 years down the line, when all the early mainstream adopters of electrics will have to replace their batteries? Is it feasible to recycle all those batteries?