This is a valuable comment that is also a pun. Tesla having a patent on a process does not mean that it's necessarily what they're going to do, simply an option they're exploring. Hence, take this article with a grain of salt.
Electrek is a glorified Tesla fanboi (Fredrick Lambert) blog which often skews reality. I'd never put "better source" and Electrek in the same sentence.
Lambert is often very competitive with Tesla and Elon doesn't like him for that reason. He is often very critical of Tesla. He never responds Electrek like he does some other blogs of that type.
He far better sources on Tesla then most people. Certainty most other websites that run with this news. He has broken news on Tesla multiple times.
Electrek has strongly moved in the direction of covering all EV launches and reporting on all of that while giving good press to all the other automakers. Accusing them of being just a Tesla fanblog is simply wrong.
Maybe 5 years ago when Tesla was the only game in town this was more correct, but its not today.
He is clearly a Tesla fan, and usually covers Tesla in favor light. He is far from the fanboy however, and even addressed fanboyism issue specifically:
Tesla still gets majority of coverage, understandably given that they were pretty much the only game in town until a few years ago (Nissan Leaf notwithstanding), but EV vehicles and motorbikes in general are very well presented.
If you’ve read Electrek for awhile, you’ll note that he sensationalizes virtually everything. He also over simplifies or just blatantly takes things out of context. He does this while trying to make Electrek appear as an actual news website when it is literally just a fanboi blog. He misrepresents the news. This is why much of what he has to say should be taken with a grain of salt.
More like a lithium extraction patent. Table salt is involved in the extraction process. This has nothing to do with what the title made me envision: Tesla is diversifying into the food business or something?
Yes, the title reads more like click bait, perhaps because the title
"SELECTIVE EXTRACTION OF LITHIUM FROM CLAY MINERALS" from the patent application would not generate enough clicks.
Apart from the semi-novel concept here, the word "about" is used frequently in the patent. It seems very hard to make something useful with the patent, with the uncertainty this introduces.
Someone needs to read labels and find out what they are actually putting in their mouths. ;)
(Kosher salt is probably the only one on that list that is just NaCl. Table salt has an anticaking ingredient added, thus the catch phrase "when it rains, it pours" (because untreated salt clumps), and usually also has iodine added. Sea salt typically has a mix of other minerals found naturally in sea water and may be as little as 86 percent NaCl.
There is also canning and pickling salt which is also possibly just NaCl. Pink Himalayan mountain salt contains iron, iirc, thus the pink coloring.)
Edited to add winky and parantheses to try to signal "That first line was intended as lighthearded humor". I mostly suck at being funny. Droning on about things I know too much about is more my speed.
Whenever I hear "salt" and "battery" in the same sentence, I think of Sodium Ion batteries. Similar to lithium (neighbours on the periodic table), even cheaper and more abundant, and because sodium is heavier it should be strongly considered for stationary storage.
I guess I'd need to consult that skeptical HN list on new battery tech to understand why it's not widely deployed yet!
The huge investment in lithium-ion has stayed ahead of any materials cost advantage (so lithium-ion has been cheaper for all applications, in addition to being better for applications where density and weight matter).
Nifty. At first I thought you were talking about molten sodium batteries, which have been around for a while but inconveniently have to be kept at high temperatures to keep the sodium liquid and so haven't seen much adoption. But yeah, sodium ion batteries are now a thing and don't have that limitation.
True, but really, it's not that much work. News media needs to get back to true journalism. (Sorry to soapbox, I just hate the state of "news" these days)
I expected that Tesla got a patent on table salt and that some crazy Tesla fan (not every Tesla fan is crazy, but some are, as it happens with fans almost universally) is actually trying to sell it as a good thing.
It's fantastic because the revenue Tesla gets from everyone licensing table salt will be used to massively expand electric car production and shift us away from fossil fuels.
"but Tesla gave away their patents to help humanity."
I remember that marketing trick.
"Change the world"
I remember that one too.
Now I'm a skeptic. I just can't get excited about Tesla claims anymore. My brain has developed defensive mechanisms against their propaganda/PR machine.
Because Tesla has, by far, the tiniest "propaganda/PR machine" in their industry. Do you have any idea how much their competitors spend on PR, advertising and lobbying? Also, how much their suppliers and partners (e.g oil and gas) bring to the table?
> "but Tesla gave away their patents to help humanity." (...) "Change the world" (...)
They did, tho.
They've pretty much forced the worldwide electrification of cars to happen, in spite of the market wanted. That's a huge help for humanity and a big change to the world.
It's funny you should become skeptical over the rare case where pretentious slogans were actually true.
They did give away their patents under the condition that everybody using them cannot sue Tesla. It's a bad deal for every other automaker because they either have far larger and far more specific patent pools or if they don't have patents, Tesla can steal every idea they will ever have.
The whole thing was marketing bs from the very start. Tesla knew that nobody would take them up on the offer and in fact, literally nobody did.
>They did give away their patents under the condition that everybody using them cannot sue Tesla.
Not true: they can still sue Tesla but, then, Tesla reserves the right to sue them too (if they believe the patent is being used as part of an initiative against electrification).
The judge will be the one evaluating the "good faith" argument and Tesla can lose, of course.
There is no difference. You use Tesla's patents and Tesla can use yours. Nobody will take it to court to test this out. Tesla will always come out ahead anyways as Tesla's revenue and production numbers are just too small compared to other automakers. Tesla's patents also don't seem very relevant as there are plenty of other EV models on the market now, so why risk it?
>Tesla's revenue and production numbers are just too small compared to other automakers
Tesla revenues are already 1/3 of GM, and increasing extremely fast (+73% YoY) while other are trying to maintain their market shares and will probably eat their own (profitability) while trying to switch to EV. More importantly, Tesla has over 75% of EV revenues market shares in the US and probably >99% of the profits.
>Tesla's patents also don't seem very relevant as there are plenty of other EV models on the market now, so why risk it?
The relevance of their patents also rises as they continue to increase their technical lead (in cell production, structural packs, energy management systems…). Where does the competition compete, when we look at their latest products (e.g Model S 2021 vs Porsche Taycan, or Model Y vs Fors Mach E)?
Is it just me or is everything that Tesla, SpaceX, <name of musk business>... is doing something that is "game changing" feel like everyone massively over hypes what there doing
Tesla did change the game in automotive, creating a viable market for pure electric cars. SpaceX did change the game for space launch providers, proving that it's a viable and profitable business for startups with reasonable funding. Today we have lots of startups in the market competing for different niches, before SpaceX there were only slow moving giants like Boeing and Northrop Grumman.
Of course the press likes to pump up the hype and will subsequently call everything they do game-changing. But it could be justified in this case. This could be game changing for lithium mining. And that's a game we are all somewhat invested in because of how prevalent lithium batteries have become in the last two decades.
Blue Origin gets little media attention because their list of accomplishments is rather short. The seem to make good engines, but in the time SpaceX has developed the Falcon 1, the Falcon 9 (and launched it 120 times), the Falcon 9 heavy, and a human rated capsule that has made multiple crew launches to the ISS, Blue Origin has managed to develop one demonstrator that reached about 90 meters, and the suborbital New Shepard that is now finally about to have its first commercial launch.
They certainly weren't involved in any game changing activities yet. They might play a significant role in bringing about space tourism, but that's yet to be seen.
"The vehicle climbed for approximately 10 seconds, reaching a height of roughly 85 m (279 ft) before starting to descend, and making a controlled landing back on its landing legs approximately 25 seconds after take-off." [1]
It did two other flights, but nobody seems to know how far up those went.
New Shepard has undergone 15 test flights to around 100km (suborbital), so that's something I guess.
> They might play a significant role in bringing about space tourism, but that's yet to be seen.
I hope so. SpaceX is launching a private spaceflight soon, for which each passenger is paying $55 million.[1] That's not really game changing, though, because Russia has been selling seats for similar prices for years, and it's space tourism only for billionaires. SpaceX is working on big, expensive rockets and talking about Mars.
Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic seem to be our best hope of seeing space tourism for the masses. They both talk about selling short suborbital trips for less than $1 million soon, and if that is popular, efficiency of scale should lead to further price decreases.
SpaceX hopes that Starship will cost $200k per launch and that they'll be able to offer point-to-point transport on earth under an hour for a cost of business class airline ticket. You'll go to space as a side effect.
Given that cost structure, eventually they should be able to offer a trip around the moon for tens of thousands of dollars.
Improving the cost of lithium extraction, if this can be scaled up, is actually a really big deal for electric vehicles. The single largest cost of a modern EV is the battery. Tesla thinks this process reduces the cost of lithium extraction 30%.
Well... no one could make electric cars work. He did.
no one could get rockets to return to earth. He did.
no one could build battery networks that actually contributed to an electric grid in a meaningful way. He did.
So, I don't know. It does indeed seem alike quite a few games have indeed been changed.
Thank you for the negative downvotes! I know that I'm 1000% correct when HN users downvote me without a response. Your little clicks on the down arrow give me confidence, so THANK YOU!
Quite a lot of dismissive comments here but the patent actually sounds very promising. I'm not familiar with the state of the art in the space but according to the patent the conventional approach involves acid leaching lithium rich clay.
Tesla's approach involves exchanging lithium cations from the clay using a sodium chloride brine solution, mechanical agitation, and heat.
The end result is a lithium rich brine that can be processed using conventional approaches and doesn't involve consuming large amounts of acid. Brine is also a lot easier to manage from an environmental perspective than strong mineral acids.
This is unfortunately far from the truth. Every major desalination facility is facing this issue, as the highly concentrated brine will create dead zones and won't disperse on its own due to its high density.
I'm still sceptical of batteries being the future of transportation. I believe Hydrogen is a much safer bet. It seems like battery production and materials is not getting much cheaper and only getting more expensive. The equivalent combustion engine cars versus a battery powered car is a lot cheaper
I'm betting for anything bigger than a family vehicle to end up being hydrogen just cause the recharge times, weight restrictions, and other factors such as costs
Tesla is going to start shipping their Semi next year. I think you’re gonna lose that bet as I’m pretty sure a Semi is a tad bigger than a family vehicle. Granted, they’re developing a new “mega charger” for it, but still. The higher torque allows them to pull the same loads up higher grades faster. Just because they might not (yet) be the best for longhaul trucking doesn’t mean they won’t be amazing for medium to shorter range heavy freight.
Perhaps this is off topic, but I am curious about the future of construction equipment. If all the ICE cars are removed from the picture, including ICE freight trucks, will diesel fuel become vastly more expensive or harder to get? I plan to get some construction equipment within a couple of years. I've never seen electric prototypes for this size equipment, nor hydrogen. Maybe this is already being worked on? I've seen mini-EV-excavators, but never seen an EV in the mid to full sized excavators.
[Edit] Correcting myself, looks like Komatsu/Proterra are working on a bigger EV excavator. [1] I hope this becomes affordable because the noise reduction of electric would surely make my neighbors happy and I would love to not breath diesel exhaust.
Hydrogen has lost and it's not coming back. Every home and business in America has power lines. Making hydrogen work would either involve new pipelines to homes (a MASSIVE undertaking) or replacing gas stations with hydrogen fill-up stations, which again needs either new pipelines or a fleet of new hydrogen carrying trucks. That infrastructure hurdle is huge compared to electric cars -- everyone has a plug at home, and adding chargers to places like gas stations is not some hard thing.
Battery production is definitely getting cheaper per unit capacity? I haven't seen any evidence in the other direction.
The hydrogen storage solution remains inadequate and does not seem to be improving at the same rate. There's also the "unclean hydrogen" problem: at the moment, if you go out and buy it, there's a very good chance it will have been made from natural gas with the CO2 dumped into the atmosphere. At that point you might as well use existing LNG/CNG cars.
Right now a Vauxhall Corsa starts at £17k the exact same car but powered by batteries costs £26k. So will the batteries become cheap enough that the battery powered cars match the same as combustion engine car?
Long answer: on the one side, the price for combustion engined cars is going to raise, emission limits are harder to hit. Electric cars are going to get cheaper on several levels. First, batteries are getting cheaper all the time. Then, the production of electric cars is in the process of ramping up, with volume comes cost savings. Even just optimizing how batteries are being built has lots of cost saving potential. Then, the Corsa is an interesting example. It is a platform both for electric and combustion engined cars. That is not as efficient as a pure electric platform, so more cost savings here.
Finally, most car manufacturers are in the process of transitioning to electric, which costs a whole lot of money. They are trying to get these costs back by pricing them into the price of the electric cars. This is going to go down over time too.
Routine maintenance on EVs does tend to be less, but non-routine damage tends to be much more expensive. That leads to insurance being 40% higher than comparably priced ICE cars. Essentially the median cost is a little lower but the mean cost is much higher.
More than 95% of the hydrogen produced comes from coal and gas[0]. If we manage to switch to hydrolysis, we'll have to generate at least twice the energy we'd need for Li-Ion batteries to due energy loss in weel-to-wheels measurements[1].
Also, there's no lack of materials for battery (NB: Tesla only uses LFP cells in China now, and achieve similar specs as their NMC chemistry used in the US).[2]
There's no shortage of materials in sight and it's far cheaper than hydrogen. Hydrogen has very few use cases were it's more efficient than batteries (industry, agriculture and aviation, mostly)[3].
Just because hydrogen is mostly produced from carbon sources right now doesn’t mean it would be with significant scaling of hydrogen as a fuel source, it could be easily produced from electrolysis of water from renewable sources if the investment was there, but you still have the energy costs to produce it
We’re talking about a situation where big investments in lithium batteries have lead to a possible massive increase in the cost of lithium production, and you’re assuming we wouldn’t see similar enhancements in hydrogen production - electrolysis is one route but some of the catalytic pathways are showing some outrageous experimental efficiencies. Dream a little, that’s the subthread I started and the thread you’re necessitated to respond to if you want to have a productive discussion
It seems like we are set for much slower price decline, only halfling the battery price every ten years or so. But honestly that's fine, today's EVs have batteries that are large enough for most people in most places. Better charging infrastructure, and maybe faster charge times are what's missing most.
Hydrogen fuel cells are a fine technology, but it has no momentum. It has a chance to win long-distance trucking, but I doubt it will be the future of personal transportation.
> Hydrogen fuel cells are a fine technology, but it has no momentum. It has a chance to win long-distance trucking, but I doubt it will be the future of personal transportation.
Yeah I'm betting on anything bigger than van will become hydrogen, anything that needs long distance or perhaps remote environments will be hydrogen based. Smaller city based vehicles likely to be battery based
That is a extreme minority of cases. And btw, if you actually use your batteries in a structural way, its not even clear that hydrogen cars will be so much lighter and longer range.
There are very, very few cases where BEV will not work. BEV is also much, much, cheaper to operate, so even if its not optimal BEV will still be used over FCV.
In those few remote location that you mention (likely a lot less then 1% of the market), gasoline will simply be used. The investment in hydrogen for such a minimal case makes no sense.
No, hydrogen isn't a much safer bet, all Hindenburg jokes aside. Quite the contrary, I think hydrogen already has lost out in the car space and might even so in the truck space.
Battery costs are still falling a lot. With the changes outlined at the Tesla battery day, production costs for battery electric vehicles might be cheaper than combustion engined cars. If you compare a Tesla with a BMW, the Tesla already might be cheaper, it certainly is if you consider the TCO.
Meanwhile, hydrogen cars are much more expensive than battery electric cars, there are only a few models available at all and there are few filling stations - they are really expensive to build. On top of that, distribution of the hydrogen is much more complex than using the power grid for electricity. And you can charge an electric car at basically any outlet, if need requires.
But the largest problem is, that for renewable hydrogen, we need about 3x as much as electricity than using a battery electric vehicle. Not counting anything else, this is 3x the cost.
Because of the distribution problem, my assumption is that hydrogen will be confined to easy to distribute transportation if at all. That's shipping, airlines, maybe trains (though trains really should be made electric)
> If you compare a Tesla with a BMW, the Tesla already might be cheaper, it certainly is if you consider the TCO
Having owned a few BMW's I do not doubt that assertion at all.
Hydrogen has a storage problem. As in the stuff is wickedly hard to keep from 'evaporating'. Electric has a charge time/range problem. I can fill an ICE car in 10 mins and drive 400 miles. The same thing with electric takes an hour. For 'day to day' use electric is like almost there (up front cost being one of the bigger issues). For long range drivers, not yet.
Looking at inner cities, where most cars are, I don't see the opportunity to put enough charger stations in for everybody. Most cars are parked on the street. It works now at comparatively low penetration, but I can't imagine it work close when almost every car needs charging.
If you have to drive to a dedicated spot to do all your charging, all the time, >30 min for charging is /long/. Filling up a car is what, 5 min? And it lasts longer. Don't see this scaling, and people will not like it.
How much power can you realistically get to an European inner-city parking garage without major infrastructure changes? Comparing the timeline for all-electric to the timeline of major construction projects in Germany, I'm not optimistic....
I think we need a "fluid"-refillable e-car. Hydrogen is an option, or maybe build a battery with a replaceable fluid as the energy store. But we might be in a trap: Right now, battery cars are clearly better -- better availability, range, price, choice. And now, charging is not a big problem in most areas, with dedicated spots for charging, it is sometimes easier to park than a gas car! But at some point, these spots will be saturated, and I don't see the capacity ramp up fast up with demand. (Same for green energy production, at least in Germany, without nuclear as an option). Part of that is "not in my neighborhood" initiatives against ugly charging ports running along every street, against construction for more cables, transformer stations etc.
So we could end up with many battery cars and a charging infrastructure which doesn't scale fast enough, and no hydrogen cars, where we could retool the gas infrastructure for filling up and scale quickly.
Hydrogen has the advantage that it is rather cheap and efficient to transport it over large distances. You could do hydrogen production in Africa, for example, and ship it to Europe. Even less danger than oil-tankers. A ship accident is either a big fire, or nothing. No large oil spill. Production could be local to power/far away from people, so social acceptance is better. In-car storage and safe filling up seems to be the problem.
>So we could end up with many battery cars and a charging infrastructure which doesn't scale fast enough, and no hydrogen cars, where we could retool the gas infrastructure for filling up and scale quickly.
Do you really believe it's easier/cheaper to retool the gas infrastructure for hydrogen than adding more chargers? All house have electric plugs (enough to charge overnight) and parking lots and most sidewalks too (cf https://thedriven.io/2020/03/24/siemens-converts-all-lamp-po...). Most EV don't need to be charged more than once a week, too.
Most cars are not parked at houses, and I don't see cities putting up chargers at every parking spot. They don't have the money to do it.
Edit: Where I lived in Germany, most parking lamps are at the house-side of the sidewalk. Can't run charging cables across the sidewalk everywhere. Trip hazard.
If you think there is no money for EV infrastructure, Hydrogen infrastructure investment is about 100x more, maybe that is even an underestimation.
Most people in cities don't use their cars much either. Tesla is already building super chargers in cities. If you only drive in cities and you really only park at spot where there is no charging, and you can't charge at work. You can just go charging at a super charger once a week or so.
To suggest hydrogen is a better option because of this very limited single concern, public parking in cities, is crazy in my opinion. Also the city could let a company do it as long as they get part of the money, and in fact this is already what many companies are doing.
In the USA at least, a very small portion of the population lives in environments without dedicated parking and also own cars. There are cities like New York and Boston where you'll have folks just slumming it on street parking with no dedicated parking spot, but that's such a small portion of the population compared to urbanites with no car, urbanites with dedicated parking, and suburbanites/rural folks with their own garage.
> Looking at inner cities, where most cars are, I don't see the opportunity to put enough charger stations in for everybody. Most cars are parked on the street.
I see a future where autonomous EVs will drive themselves to charging stations, often in the middle of the night. Tesla will get there first.
The lack of smell and explosiveness of hydrogen gas/air mixture is pretty terrifying. Consider an underground garage full of (possibly ageing) cars with hydrogen on board. There might be ways of storing hydrogen more safely than a pressure tube, but I encourage hydrogen enthusiasts to experience what the air/gas mixture smells like and how it burns.
I'm puzzled as to how Tesla managed to get a patent (granted) on this. Maybe it's for a very specific implementation of the extraction process using table salt, but I'd swear this is not a new phenomenon. Nor can phenomenons themselves patented, only specific implementations (which can get practically hairy very quickly, hence the mess the patent system currently is).
Sounds to me like yet another attempt, with enough spin to turn a planet, to again try "prove" how Tesla will be a game changer, by presenting something that's rather mediocre and mundane (at best) on closer inspection.
Simply put, in all these years (ever since his PayPal days) I have not seen a single thing come from Elon Musk that didn't turn out to involve some kind of clever fraud, business trickery, or downright deception on closer inspection. But apparently a substantial part of today's (global) society just loves to be fooled, rather than pay attention and actually understand things. I guess it's similar to what they say about governments .. we all get the ones we (collectively) deserve.
>I have not seen a single thing come from Elon Musk that didn't turn out to involve some kind of clever fraud, business trickery, or downright deception on closer inspection.
> Tesla is once again at the forefront of electric car technology. Tesla’s new patent incorporates new techniques that no one has seen before (or even really imagined). Tesla’s new patent involves using table salt to mine lithium for use in its batteries. Although lithium is already in use, this new technology is supposed to make it easier and cheaper to get the lithium necessary for Tesla’s batteries.
Dose anybody else feel like this was written by a bot? The way that the same information is repeated several times and phrases like "Tesla’s new patent" are reused seem very odd.
There's also the long quote from Electrek, which they claim "sums up the most important parts," but the quote just describes previous methods. The full Electrek article follows that with Tesla's method. That part is shorter, so you'd think a human would have quoted that instead.
It was written very lazily and quickly, by someone who knows that getting an article out first is going to be one of the most important things to driving clicks.
There are certainty people in the industry skeptical of this. No commercial lithium is currently produce from Clay and not with DLE processes. Tesla process will likely require both. While the process Tesla outline is likely possible, if they can do it as cheaply as existing process is questionable.
Other companies work on process along the same line, but generally use ACID instead.
Joe Lowry from Global Lithium Podcast is very skeptical. He is a industry veteran having worked with Tesla in the past as well. If you want to learn about the lithium industry, I would suggest:
You do realize that has been the standard response of the "experts" to industries the Elon starts to enter. And then "experts" find there are details they overlooked because they knew they were right.
Can Elon be wrong? YES. But can the experts be wrong? Happens all the time.
Elon does not have a long history of process/domain breakthroughs though. SpaceX is doing some very innovative things that ULA never had incentive to do. But otherwise, it’s the same rocketry. Tesla largely same, bucking the expert opinion with Autopilot which seems to be going rather horribly. The Boring company has yet to prove his claims there.
You say they never had the incentive to innovate, and then follow up with but otherwise it is the same rocketry. Those statements are contradictory - either there was market incentive for cheaper, reusable rockets, or there wasn't. ULA couldn't even imagine a world where SpaceX was successful at what they've done, which is a different type of rocketry, and as a result, SpaceX isn't doing "the same rocketry."
Tesla bucked expert opinion on electric vehicles and lithium ion batteries and charging speed and vehicle speed and… on and on.
And SpaceX bucked industry opinion hard on many other things as well. People dismissing SpaceX’s rockets as “just the same rockets” have no idea what they’re talking about.
Industry experts dismissed Falcon 1/9, they dismissed Dragon, they dismissed Falcon Heavy, they dismissed landing rockets, they dismissed reusing rockets, they dismissed landing rockets on drone ships, they dismissed Starlink, Raptor, Starship, etc. there’s almost nothing that SpaceX does that wasn’t dismissed at some point by industry experts.
Yes. And often its good to listen to them and ask why the believe what they believe. Often they can be wrong, but we should still listen to them and evaluate.
Tesla tried to get into lithium extraction before and it didn't work.
I think Tesla will eventually get this working, but not sure if its actually gone compete with Western Australian spodumene or Atacama brines.
However I think the process looks pretty promising.
GM, Ford, and every other car company enter the chat.
"It's impossible to make electric vehicles work. There is no charging network, it's too difficult to build, no one likes it". Blah blah blah.
Boing enters the chat "rockets that land on their arse are impossible. it can't be done." blah blah blah blah.
Excuse me if I could care less what old industry experts have to say - time and time and time and time and time again, he has proven them wrong.
"rockets that land on their arse are impossible. it can't be done." No one said that about spacex.... clearly it was possible since it was done in the 90s...
"It's impossible to make electric vehicles work." Really ? What did we drive before ICE engines ? what did humans drive on the moon?
The main source of lithium now is extraction from subsurface brines, mostly in South America (e.g., under salt flats in Bolivia, which is a major producer). Demand is expected to outstrip what these countries can supply as the EV and grid storage markets grow, plus countries with no lithium brines want in on the action, so there are various efforts to find economically competitive approaches to extracting lithium from other sources. Both the story you linked and this new patent are attempts to do that, but harnessing from different sources (seawater and lithium-rich clay, respectively), and using what appear to be unrelated chemical processes.
Just a nit about your first sentence: Australia produces about double what South America does, and most of their lithium comes from processing spodumene. I think a few years your statement would have been correct, but things have been changing very rapidly!
Tesla is going to work on restaurants and also mining now. It’s interesting that they are widening their scope. I wonder how can a company be so confident in their new pursuits?
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[ 27.4 ms ] story [ 3128 ms ] threadI'm saying this as a Tesla owner mind you!
He far better sources on Tesla then most people. Certainty most other websites that run with this news. He has broken news on Tesla multiple times.
Electrek has strongly moved in the direction of covering all EV launches and reporting on all of that while giving good press to all the other automakers. Accusing them of being just a Tesla fanblog is simply wrong.
Maybe 5 years ago when Tesla was the only game in town this was more correct, but its not today.
https://electrek.co/2021/04/05/tesla-toxic-superfans-giving-...
Tesla still gets majority of coverage, understandably given that they were pretty much the only game in town until a few years ago (Nissan Leaf notwithstanding), but EV vehicles and motorbikes in general are very well presented.
Apart from the semi-novel concept here, the word "about" is used frequently in the patent. It seems very hard to make something useful with the patent, with the uncertainty this introduces.
Is that standard procedure ?
(Kosher salt is probably the only one on that list that is just NaCl. Table salt has an anticaking ingredient added, thus the catch phrase "when it rains, it pours" (because untreated salt clumps), and usually also has iodine added. Sea salt typically has a mix of other minerals found naturally in sea water and may be as little as 86 percent NaCl.
There is also canning and pickling salt which is also possibly just NaCl. Pink Himalayan mountain salt contains iron, iirc, thus the pink coloring.)
Edited to add winky and parantheses to try to signal "That first line was intended as lighthearded humor". I mostly suck at being funny. Droning on about things I know too much about is more my speed.
I guess I'd need to consult that skeptical HN list on new battery tech to understand why it's not widely deployed yet!
So which is it?
Would be far from the first time patents were granted this way...
Hi think the author should have said instead “but we first heard about the concept last year from Tesla”
"The concept isn’t new; Tesla CEO Elon Musk first mentioned it at last year’s battery day."
Aren't patents supposed to be public?
https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1120.html
I remember that marketing trick.
"Change the world"
I remember that one too.
Now I'm a skeptic. I just can't get excited about Tesla claims anymore. My brain has developed defensive mechanisms against their propaganda/PR machine.
You mean Elon's tweets?
Because Tesla has, by far, the tiniest "propaganda/PR machine" in their industry. Do you have any idea how much their competitors spend on PR, advertising and lobbying? Also, how much their suppliers and partners (e.g oil and gas) bring to the table?
They did, tho.
They've pretty much forced the worldwide electrification of cars to happen, in spite of the market wanted. That's a huge help for humanity and a big change to the world.
It's funny you should become skeptical over the rare case where pretentious slogans were actually true.
They did give away their patents under the condition that everybody using them cannot sue Tesla. It's a bad deal for every other automaker because they either have far larger and far more specific patent pools or if they don't have patents, Tesla can steal every idea they will ever have.
The whole thing was marketing bs from the very start. Tesla knew that nobody would take them up on the offer and in fact, literally nobody did.
Not true: they can still sue Tesla but, then, Tesla reserves the right to sue them too (if they believe the patent is being used as part of an initiative against electrification).
The judge will be the one evaluating the "good faith" argument and Tesla can lose, of course.
Tesla revenues are already 1/3 of GM, and increasing extremely fast (+73% YoY) while other are trying to maintain their market shares and will probably eat their own (profitability) while trying to switch to EV. More importantly, Tesla has over 75% of EV revenues market shares in the US and probably >99% of the profits.
>Tesla's patents also don't seem very relevant as there are plenty of other EV models on the market now, so why risk it?
The relevance of their patents also rises as they continue to increase their technical lead (in cell production, structural packs, energy management systems…). Where does the competition compete, when we look at their latest products (e.g Model S 2021 vs Porsche Taycan, or Model Y vs Fors Mach E)?
Of course the press likes to pump up the hype and will subsequently call everything they do game-changing. But it could be justified in this case. This could be game changing for lithium mining. And that's a game we are all somewhat invested in because of how prevalent lithium batteries have become in the last two decades.
SpaceX gets all the media attention, but Blue Origin was actually founded before SpaceX.
They certainly weren't involved in any game changing activities yet. They might play a significant role in bringing about space tourism, but that's yet to be seen.
It did two other flights, but nobody seems to know how far up those went.
New Shepard has undergone 15 test flights to around 100km (suborbital), so that's something I guess.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Origin_Goddard
I hope so. SpaceX is launching a private spaceflight soon, for which each passenger is paying $55 million.[1] That's not really game changing, though, because Russia has been selling seats for similar prices for years, and it's space tourism only for billionaires. SpaceX is working on big, expensive rockets and talking about Mars.
Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic seem to be our best hope of seeing space tourism for the masses. They both talk about selling short suborbital trips for less than $1 million soon, and if that is popular, efficiency of scale should lead to further price decreases.
1: https://apnews.com/article/1st-private-space-crew-pay-55m-ea...
SpaceX hopes that Starship will cost $200k per launch and that they'll be able to offer point-to-point transport on earth under an hour for a cost of business class airline ticket. You'll go to space as a side effect.
Given that cost structure, eventually they should be able to offer a trip around the moon for tens of thousands of dollars.
Their new BE-4 seems to be having some problems recently. But Blue Origin are not really public about their failures, compared to SpaceX
So, I don't know. It does indeed seem alike quite a few games have indeed been changed.
Tesla's approach involves exchanging lithium cations from the clay using a sodium chloride brine solution, mechanical agitation, and heat.
The end result is a lithium rich brine that can be processed using conventional approaches and doesn't involve consuming large amounts of acid. Brine is also a lot easier to manage from an environmental perspective than strong mineral acids.
We'll probably upgrade the charger to higher speed (Ionity already support 250+Kw) but what's the point?
As for the weight, do you know a Model 3 weight roughly as much as the BMW Series 3 (closest competitor)? https://carbuzz.com/compare/bmw-3-series-vs-tesla-model-3#ca...
It's cheaper, too: https://insideevs.com/features/517960/tesla-model3-bmw-3seri...
[Edit] Correcting myself, looks like Komatsu/Proterra are working on a bigger EV excavator. [1] I hope this becomes affordable because the noise reduction of electric would surely make my neighbors happy and I would love to not breath diesel exhaust.
[1] - https://www.proterra.com/press-release/komatsu-electric-cons...
See chart at the bottom of the link.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/30/battery-developments-in-the-...
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/batteries-storage/chart-beh...
It looks like cost parity with ICEs will happen around 2023.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a34992832/battery-price-dr...
Hydrogen is likely to be better for some applications though, like long-haul jets.
It might seem that way but they are.
The hydrogen storage solution remains inadequate and does not seem to be improving at the same rate. There's also the "unclean hydrogen" problem: at the moment, if you go out and buy it, there's a very good chance it will have been made from natural gas with the CO2 dumped into the atmosphere. At that point you might as well use existing LNG/CNG cars.
Long answer: on the one side, the price for combustion engined cars is going to raise, emission limits are harder to hit. Electric cars are going to get cheaper on several levels. First, batteries are getting cheaper all the time. Then, the production of electric cars is in the process of ramping up, with volume comes cost savings. Even just optimizing how batteries are being built has lots of cost saving potential. Then, the Corsa is an interesting example. It is a platform both for electric and combustion engined cars. That is not as efficient as a pure electric platform, so more cost savings here.
Finally, most car manufacturers are in the process of transitioning to electric, which costs a whole lot of money. They are trying to get these costs back by pricing them into the price of the electric cars. This is going to go down over time too.
Not to mention the EV version will give you a much better driving experience and not be unhealthy to people, specially in cities.
We are just at the start of the S curve adoption, and most cars sold are not sold for £17k but rather £30-40k. For that cost EV are already better.
Here's a interesting Tesla specific take: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/insurance/tesla-insurance
Personally I prefer predictable slightly high costs vs random potential for exorbitantly high costs.
For all comparisons you should probably price in an estimate for the first three years of running costs, too.
Also, there's no lack of materials for battery (NB: Tesla only uses LFP cells in China now, and achieve similar specs as their NMC chemistry used in the US).[2]
There's no shortage of materials in sight and it's far cheaper than hydrogen. Hydrogen has very few use cases were it's more efficient than batteries (industry, agriculture and aviation, mostly)[3].
[0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production)
[1](https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/08/hydroge...)
[2](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-china-idUSKBN26L26S)
[3](https://twitter.com/MLiebreich/status/1397267000196534283)
Hydrogen fuel cells are a fine technology, but it has no momentum. It has a chance to win long-distance trucking, but I doubt it will be the future of personal transportation.
Yeah I'm betting on anything bigger than van will become hydrogen, anything that needs long distance or perhaps remote environments will be hydrogen based. Smaller city based vehicles likely to be battery based
There are very, very few cases where BEV will not work. BEV is also much, much, cheaper to operate, so even if its not optimal BEV will still be used over FCV.
In those few remote location that you mention (likely a lot less then 1% of the market), gasoline will simply be used. The investment in hydrogen for such a minimal case makes no sense.
Meanwhile, hydrogen cars are much more expensive than battery electric cars, there are only a few models available at all and there are few filling stations - they are really expensive to build. On top of that, distribution of the hydrogen is much more complex than using the power grid for electricity. And you can charge an electric car at basically any outlet, if need requires.
But the largest problem is, that for renewable hydrogen, we need about 3x as much as electricity than using a battery electric vehicle. Not counting anything else, this is 3x the cost.
Having owned a few BMW's I do not doubt that assertion at all.
Hydrogen has a storage problem. As in the stuff is wickedly hard to keep from 'evaporating'. Electric has a charge time/range problem. I can fill an ICE car in 10 mins and drive 400 miles. The same thing with electric takes an hour. For 'day to day' use electric is like almost there (up front cost being one of the bigger issues). For long range drivers, not yet.
If you have to drive to a dedicated spot to do all your charging, all the time, >30 min for charging is /long/. Filling up a car is what, 5 min? And it lasts longer. Don't see this scaling, and people will not like it.
How much power can you realistically get to an European inner-city parking garage without major infrastructure changes? Comparing the timeline for all-electric to the timeline of major construction projects in Germany, I'm not optimistic....
I think we need a "fluid"-refillable e-car. Hydrogen is an option, or maybe build a battery with a replaceable fluid as the energy store. But we might be in a trap: Right now, battery cars are clearly better -- better availability, range, price, choice. And now, charging is not a big problem in most areas, with dedicated spots for charging, it is sometimes easier to park than a gas car! But at some point, these spots will be saturated, and I don't see the capacity ramp up fast up with demand. (Same for green energy production, at least in Germany, without nuclear as an option). Part of that is "not in my neighborhood" initiatives against ugly charging ports running along every street, against construction for more cables, transformer stations etc.
So we could end up with many battery cars and a charging infrastructure which doesn't scale fast enough, and no hydrogen cars, where we could retool the gas infrastructure for filling up and scale quickly.
Hydrogen has the advantage that it is rather cheap and efficient to transport it over large distances. You could do hydrogen production in Africa, for example, and ship it to Europe. Even less danger than oil-tankers. A ship accident is either a big fire, or nothing. No large oil spill. Production could be local to power/far away from people, so social acceptance is better. In-car storage and safe filling up seems to be the problem.
Do you really believe it's easier/cheaper to retool the gas infrastructure for hydrogen than adding more chargers? All house have electric plugs (enough to charge overnight) and parking lots and most sidewalks too (cf https://thedriven.io/2020/03/24/siemens-converts-all-lamp-po...). Most EV don't need to be charged more than once a week, too.
Edit: Where I lived in Germany, most parking lamps are at the house-side of the sidewalk. Can't run charging cables across the sidewalk everywhere. Trip hazard.
Most people in cities don't use their cars much either. Tesla is already building super chargers in cities. If you only drive in cities and you really only park at spot where there is no charging, and you can't charge at work. You can just go charging at a super charger once a week or so.
To suggest hydrogen is a better option because of this very limited single concern, public parking in cities, is crazy in my opinion. Also the city could let a company do it as long as they get part of the money, and in fact this is already what many companies are doing.
And yes, the infrastructure roll out will be extensive and take time, but it can happen slowly over time as electric car adoption expands.
I see a future where autonomous EVs will drive themselves to charging stations, often in the middle of the night. Tesla will get there first.
That's why they have have forced air vents to remove all the car exhausts and gass sensors
Sounds to me like yet another attempt, with enough spin to turn a planet, to again try "prove" how Tesla will be a game changer, by presenting something that's rather mediocre and mundane (at best) on closer inspection.
Simply put, in all these years (ever since his PayPal days) I have not seen a single thing come from Elon Musk that didn't turn out to involve some kind of clever fraud, business trickery, or downright deception on closer inspection. But apparently a substantial part of today's (global) society just loves to be fooled, rather than pay attention and actually understand things. I guess it's similar to what they say about governments .. we all get the ones we (collectively) deserve.
Can you point to a previous implementation of lithium extraction using table salt?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Awarded_global_comme...
Consider actually reading it, this is pointed out in the text.
> by presenting something that's rather mediocre and mundane
0% of global lithium is produced from clay extraction. But I guess its so mediore and mundane that you could easily do it.
> Elon Musk that didn't turn out to involve some kind of clever fraud
Like when they delivered Astronauts to the Spacestation. Everybody know that that is actually filmed in a desert in Nevada.
> But apparently a substantial part of today's (global) society just loves to be fooled
Or you know, maybe you are not as smart as you think you are. I know witch one is more likely.
*which
Dose anybody else feel like this was written by a bot? The way that the same information is repeated several times and phrases like "Tesla’s new patent" are reused seem very odd.
https://www.patreon.com/thelimitingfactor/posts
It will be like a week or so until it will come out.
There is an older video on the topic as well. About Clay mining and potential processes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdvE-UA-xw4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuCK1SJG5gc
And an interview with somebody in the industry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfffip_4C80
There are certainty people in the industry skeptical of this. No commercial lithium is currently produce from Clay and not with DLE processes. Tesla process will likely require both. While the process Tesla outline is likely possible, if they can do it as cheaply as existing process is questionable.
Other companies work on process along the same line, but generally use ACID instead.
Joe Lowry from Global Lithium Podcast is very skeptical. He is a industry veteran having worked with Tesla in the past as well. If you want to learn about the lithium industry, I would suggest:
https://www.globallithium.net/podcast
Can Elon be wrong? YES. But can the experts be wrong? Happens all the time.
I get that Elon is a bullshitter who occasionally delivers which makes him insanely polarizing, but this feels like a bit of a ridiculous statement.
Landing the first stage of the rocket isn’t the same rocketry.
And SpaceX bucked industry opinion hard on many other things as well. People dismissing SpaceX’s rockets as “just the same rockets” have no idea what they’re talking about.
Industry experts dismissed Falcon 1/9, they dismissed Dragon, they dismissed Falcon Heavy, they dismissed landing rockets, they dismissed reusing rockets, they dismissed landing rockets on drone ships, they dismissed Starlink, Raptor, Starship, etc. there’s almost nothing that SpaceX does that wasn’t dismissed at some point by industry experts.
Tesla tried to get into lithium extraction before and it didn't work.
I think Tesla will eventually get this working, but not sure if its actually gone compete with Western Australian spodumene or Atacama brines.
However I think the process looks pretty promising.
Excuse me if I could care less what old industry experts have to say - time and time and time and time and time again, he has proven them wrong.
"It's impossible to make electric vehicles work." Really ? What did we drive before ICE engines ? what did humans drive on the moon?
https://newatlas.com/materials/kaust-lithium-phosphate-llto-...
(HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27444976)
Some of the key points from their battery day are:
- focus on simplifying process from ore to EV in order to maintain cost declines per unit energy while enabling scale up
- key to that is simplifying the lithium extraction process (noted patent for this thread), they spoke about the core of this patent before
- getting enough factories constructed and dealing with expected limitations in raw material
- reducing costs by simplifying manufacturing process / reducing parts
- reduce parts by having bigger batteries (also more energy dense) and single casted sections of the vehicles
- also interesting work on incorporating Si (which increases energy density) while solving the issue of cycle life when increasing Si ratio.
Overall, for anyone even remotely interested in this space and this topic, I think it is an essential watch.
[1] keynote starts at 33 mins https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l6T9xIeZTds
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Press
Apparently Tesla order the largest one ever, to cast parts for the Cyber Truck