"one miner warned that when it comes to the transportation sector, domestic resources for lithium may not be sufficient enough to meet some of the most ambitious targets."
"The Biden administration, for instance, aims to cut sales of ICE vehicles to 50% of all new purchases by 2030, to which the source says “Yes, we’ll [eventually] have enough, but not by that time,”"
This article is all over the place. It immediately undermines the title for a few paragraphs and ends with the buried real story, where it seems like the real complaint is that US lithium project permitting takes too long and that Australia is faster. Journalism can go take a long walk off a short pier.
One neat tech is the "capabus" which is a bus with a supercapacitor that has a range of only a few miles but charges wirelessly near-instantly. So instead of catenaries you put chargers around the route at major stops.
That's fine, I guess, but I think plenty of people would get rid of their car if public transit was more ubiquitous, reliable, and convenient. Even people (like myself) who would choose to still have a car in that scenario, we might use the car less often, which would reduce wear and tear on it (thus increasing the length of its useful life). That would also serve to reduce demand for new vehicles.
Since money is fungible, argument for good public transportation is argument against electric car subsidy and vice versa, whether you like it or not. Like, we could scrap electric car subsidy and use money on public transportation instead. And I argue we should: at the moment, electric car subsidy is stupid, people are in line to buy electric cars, there is no need for subsidy.
If desires aren't a factor, they should be. I'm willing to spend money on a car that I can charge at home like a smartphone. It would reduce my fuel costs to zero because I have a lot of solar panels. I'll even install more solar panels if necessary.
The so called free market needs to make it happen. If there's a lithium shortage, then mine more.
The question is whether we're pricing in externalities appropriately. We've had the market do it once with ICE cars and it is painfully obvious that the pricing involved was only a fraction of the true cost to the environment.
Planning to 'just mine more' of whatever and completely replace all of private transportation infrastructure sure sounds like another path to environmental disaster.
That's not to say we should drop EVs or anything like that. But we should at least think twice, especially when there are perfectly good alternatives.
If you could ask a fish what swimming in water is like, they would answer "What's 'water'?" People are so used to in kind subsidies for cars that many don't realize the extent of these supports.
Toll-free highways and roads. Mandated parking minimums. Free on-street parking. Zoning laws banning anything but single family houses cite increased traffic and parking demand "caused" by denser construction (but this exclusionary zoning itself increases demand for driving). If you hit someone with your car, stay at the scene, and are not drunk criminal liability will not attach. Driver's license and insurance requirements are kept low. The US Government finances moving to suburbs with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Federal Reserve buys mortgage backed securities. In many cities the majority of downtown land is roads and parking!
When you have lived your whole life in cities that are designed automobile first and automobile only, and public transit is either non-existent or still underfunded compared with cars, then you will ask for a car based solution. An individual can only choose between choices they know exist, based on the information they have access to.
Have you lived in areas without mandated minimum parking? I have and it is a nightmare I don't care to ever repeat. There are good reasons for such rules.
In a perfect idealized world with excellent public transit, there's no need for mandated minimum parking, I agree! But that perfect world mostly doesn't exist (maybe Manhattan, only some areas).
When there is no parking, but people absolutely must have their car to get to work to be able to survive, it is mayhem. Violent fights over parking with human and property damage, people circling for hours and hours all night trying to park, you can't leave your house to go to important things because you lose your spot, and so on.
The positive way to do it is to solve for public transit first, so that most people are happy to not have to have a car. Then parking becomes a moot point, no rules needed.
If you force people to have a car to exist in society and simultaneously force them to have no place to park, it is a disaster.
Better mass transit often requires reallocating strips of land from car lanes and parking. For example dedicated bus lanes are painted over what used to be on street parking spots. Or a station is constructed in the middle of the road. If we resist removing parking, then we're not going to get improved mass transit.
Should the market set the supply of parking, or should local government officials do it based on dogma? Right now most cities choose option two. Planning officials usually copy and paste traditional rules such as 1.4 parking spots per residential unit, or 1 parking spot per x square feet of store sales floor. These figures are set with the goal that parking is only maxed out a few days per year. This means there's lot of idle blacktop most days. Developers usually build the legal minimum amount of parking because the minimum number of spots is so high. Land used for low productivity use like parking comes at the opportunity cost of more affordable rent. When the price of something is set to $0, demand is without bound. People leave their cars parked on prime real estate instead of moving them to a garage a block away, store second and third vehicles, etc. Local authorities usually only charge for parking as a last resort. Time based limits are usually first implemented. Because 97% of parking is free people will drive around and around, or get there really early in hopes of finding a free spot. A significant proportion of downtown traffic is parking spot cruising.
Parking minimums can first be relaxed on streets well served by transit. When a new building is literally down the block from a station and a 1.4 parking spots per resident is mandated that's not a good use of scarce land. Developers won't build zero spots. Banks financing the project will have their own parking requirements.
Letting parking float at market price has the benefit of parking being easy. A city can set prices with the target of one open spot per block. If demand is low, let the price fall to $0. No more cruising around and around, risking a parking ticket, or trying to understand complex day and hour limits.
There is an good book on this (dry) subject. The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup.
Since when is this a subsidy? The only reason we pay taxes is so the government can provide us with useful infrastructure like this.
I'm not american by the way. Much of what you said simply doesn't apply to me. For example, I'm not sure we have mandated parking minimums. I wish we did.
> When you have lived your whole life in cities that are designed automobile first and automobile only, and public transit is either non-existent or still underfunded compared with cars
My city has plenty of collective transport options. There are so many nice air conditioned buses that they're a nuisance in traffic. We have a train station, an airport.
I still prefer cars. Not because of environmental efficiency but because they're convenient and they allow me to be independent. I don't have to depend on some other transport service's schedule. I don't have to sit around waiting for the bus to arrive. I don't have to be around other people. I don't have to wait until the vehicle makes countless stops in places that have nothing to do with me. I just get in my car and go wherever I need to go.
> An individual can only choose between choices they know exist, based on the information they have access to.
I have the information and I'm perfectly capable of choosing. Even if we had amazing japanese style trains crossing every city in my country I'd still prefer a car for local transportation.
I don't think this really addresses the main concerns people are putting in the comments.
"Mine more" has a definite end-point as eventually you can't just mine more. While it's good to be using solar and getting off of oil/gas powered grids, these also have fairly significant drawbacks (those panels need to be replaced and something needs to be done with the waste, recycling is currently far more expensive than just dumping them, there are chemicals in solar panels you need to consider, and removing them in a way to keep them usable for recycling requires someone not a lay-person).
The reason people are pushing for a change in how we approach transportation and living centers is because the changes aren't mutually exclusive with having a vehicle dedicated to yourself, but it does mean changes to how living centers are designed currently. If self-driving can take off, very likely most people could do without having their own car and would be served very well by a "call on demand" vehicle that is frequently serviced and cleaned in between rides. If a dirty one or one in disrepair shows up, mark it as such and another is there in a few minutes (heck, probably the service could see this before it ever gets to you and route such vehicles for service). This would work for a large number of persons in living centers, and for the few who really need a vehicle for "other" reasons, they can still get a car.
Further, make incentives for more walkable/convenient living centers. Better stocked markets on all corners (sorry bodegas in their current form don't cut it in their current form, but they're the right idea), grocery and health item deliveries, better public transit routes, it can work while accommodating those with a need for their own transportation.
For most healthy persons, not owning a car could easily be a possibility. When I lived in Russia of all places, I didn't own a car for 6 years and as an able bodied person, it was quite doable. Taxi when I needed to get somewhere fast and on-time with some stuff to carry, public transit if it's just me as the transit was there within a few minutes, grocery delivery handled most of my needs, and that which I couldn't order on groceries there were well-stocked markets within a minute or two.
For those who need additional assistance for day to day activities, yes they must be accommodated for and car ownership makes sense there; it's not persons who need additional assistance that are targeted, it's everyone else that really could live very comfortably without having to maintain a car that should be.
If the free market needs to be invoked, then so be it, let the market figure out how to build businesses that deliver groceries/food/household goods, let them figure out public transport services, bike rentals, and so on...though as I see it we already have the systems for this.
The technology and infrastructure is there for most of this vision, now it's about adaptation and adjustment. It's quite doable.
Shorter distances between destinations encourages walking, biking, and mass transit use. Longer distances between destinations encourages automobile use.
To be more precise I am referring to relative distances within a city. Both density and distances are crucial. Compact cities mean shorter public transit lines, faster trip times, and more efficient use of transit worker labor and vehicles (more route loops per hour and passengers reached per hour). Sprawled out cities have a vicious cycle of more miles/kilometers to cover which means longer trips and therefore less attractive service. The same shifts and vehicle miles serve less people.
Singapore is 281.3 mi², Texas (a single US state) by itself is 268,597 mi². The level of public transit that some countries and cities have and people expect are simply not feasible in a lot of places simply due to the sheer size. And even cities within these states are larger than some countries.
You left out size of population, as well as the place having a size large enough to reasonably need transit. You can have 100 people packed in a single room and that is very dense, but if they are alone on a tiny room-sized planet then public transit won’t make sense. Neither will cars. To go anywhere they need to go straight to rockets. But that’s assuming there’s anywhere to go. Size of population and available places to go also matter.
Point is if you want to get hyper asperger’s about it, you can, but it’s not necessary to have done so because there is implicit information here, and besides, your final claim (density is what matters) ended up being incorrect, because holding you to the same standard that you hold others, you didn’t state all the implicit information.
Knowing that Singapore has a large enough population as we do know because it is well known as a large city-state, we can infer the density from that information combined with the small size. But density is not all that matters.
I'd rather other people didn't have their own vehicles too. In my perfect world, 99% of people would be using public transport in order to allow me to drive on mostly empty roads with zero stress.
Good thing we can't just decide things like that, right?
I'd settle for subsidized ebikes and safer bike lanes. Not for everyone obviously, but in my world that would get a lot more people out of their cars.
Good public transit would be great too though.
I'm about to move to a bikable area and I am planning to do an ebike conversion. I am suuuper excited to finally have an electric vehicle, and the actual energy usage is super low! A 0.9 kWh pack will take you 60 miles and costs ten cents to fill up.
People talk about electric cars versus trains but subsidized ebikes are something we can do now and would make a huge difference! Just the idea that I can ebike to the BART station, hop on the train and end up all over the bay, ebike where I need to go and get back all for a few dollars is exciting.
E-Bikes still depend on municipal bike infrastructure which cannot be individually purchased. Re-allocation of on-street parking to protected bike lanes, traffic calming, legalization of denser housing has to happen at the public policy level.
Yes absolutely! I am really pleased to find that the Bay Area governments have done a lot of work there, and I found that they have active plans to continue this build out.
But I guess what I am saying is they are much more energy efficient than electric cars, and the infrastructure requirements are way simpler than trains.
By the way I just found the mode on Google Maps that highlights bike friendly roads and it is cool to explore.
For example they are going to expand the bike path on the Bay Bridge that currently goes from Oakland to Treasure Island so that it connects all the way to San Francisco:
I just thought all that was neat. Anyway you are totally right. I just think this stuff is simpler than trains to implement so it is important to consider, though I fully support trains too! A good plan should include both.
Also I am not saying we should leave this up to individuals. But for example we have seen huge subsidies for electric cars while subsidies for ebikes have been lacking, with some movement finally towards that direction. I'm in favor of government plans that emphasize the green value of ebikes in addition to trains and electric cars.
That's a good point too. They really have the potential to reshape how we view last mile and short urban trips. With proper support from other transport modes (ie: trains supporting them), this could really open things up.
This should be the way. Make really connected public transportation and discourage private vehicle ownership. This is the only way to beat global car emissions and climate change.
My grandparents live in a small village (maybe a few hundred inhabitants, but most of them are old people so don't know how many are still alive) with a regular train connection to the nearby "big city" (27k inhabitants). And that's in the poorest country in the EU.
Park and ride is a popular way to bridge very low density with public transit.
Many rural american towns used to be like this too. Then the passenger rail stations were raised and streetcar tracks torn out in most places after WW2 if not sooner.
It is a tiring comment given that they're not mutually exclusive and that the forms of public transport that are mutually exclusive like railways are horribly expensive to the point that they're almost not viable. Bay area rail costs are like 2-3 billion per mile. The areas where these kinds of public transport solutions are most effective are also where it's the most expensive and most likely to face extreme friction.
they may not be mutually exclusive. Doesn't change the fact that US public transportation and needs to be updated, and more new public transport built.
We have the world's biggest "defense" budget by some margin, but we can't improve our infrastructure?
56% of the world population lives in cities. While not a perfect measure, it's a decent ballpark for the amount of folks who could feasibly use public transport.
And even the biggest cities with the best public transportation systems have a low coverage in terms of area. This is why this is such an ignorant comment.
doesn't mean our public transportation in cities and between cities here in the US can't be improved. In fact, it should be if we are to reduce our dependency on cars, which we have to do if for the environment and our own well being.
I doubt they'd be a suitable replacement for Li-Ion, since their energy density is so much lower. They could be a great replacement for lead-acid batteries (batteries present in ICE cars), and probably some other applications, like when you want a rechargeable battery, but you don't care quite so much about the space required or weight. Unfortunately, when it comes to a phone, laptop, or EV, you really do care a lot about the space and weight.
If we go the way we need to, most battery applications (by total battery storage, not by unit produced) won't need space or weight constraints. Of course a car or phone phone will need to be lithium but there's no reason a Tesla powerwall (currently lithium) couldn't be 0.5x bigger; or certainly grid level electricity storage (currently CA has one second? I think and there is a plan to expand to three days of grid level). Probably even some semis or buses would be ok with a bigger battery
Sodium is easy part, but Sulfur might be a problem. I read article that most of it comes from by product of oil refining. As such if we stop refining as much oil we might need to find new sources. And it is also used in fertilizers and many industrial processes... Add extra demand for batteries and things start to look lot less rosy.
140 wh/kg is comparable to the LFP batteries used in SR model 3s in Tesla, so that implies a 300 mile EV car with no lithium.
Yes it missed the 2022 date, but "planned production" is far better than "hey check out this research paper".
140 wh/kg should enable nearly all modes of day-to-day city and suburban driving. IMO that is a HUGE deal since that is a very large percentage of daily miles driven. I believe it is quite safe, having reduced safety/cooling like LFP which helps close the gap at pack level density with cobalt/nickel chemistries.
But ... we'll see. But 200 wh/kg LFP (which should be 300-400 mile range cars and SUVs) combined with sodium ion for the "lesser" packs should enable a true BEV revolution at least in consumer cars.
That would leave solid state / cobalt-nickel / sulfur for long distance trucking and other applications. Even if solid state makes it to market in the next couple years, I predict it will not be price competitive with Sodium Ion/LFP techs for quite a while after that. There will be plenty of buyers for practically all battery chemistries I would imagine.
We are not running out. The article states current electrification goals are not feasible based on existing raw material production (mining). Bear in mind the overwhelming majority of global industrial infrastructure needs to be replaced.
Recycling is also not clear cut for many of the metals and minerals needed. It’s a big gap to meet and few want to mine.
There is about the same weight of lead in a normal car with a lead acid battery as there is lithium in an EV, but I don't know how we are measuring the total available amount of both for that abundance as the weight of an atom of lead is like 30-35 times that of lithium.
> There is about the same weight of lead in a normal car with a lead acid battery as there is lithium in an EV, but I don't know how we are measuring the total available amount of both for that abundance as the weight of an atom of lead is like 30-35 times that of lithium.
This I never knew!
Is there really only 3Kgs of lithium in a Tesla battery pack?
> Your typical car lead-acid battery has 8-10 kg of lead.
I didn't think so - the full lead-acid battery itself weighs less than 10kg, and it appeared to me that about half of that weight was the solution (water).
Even if true, though, still very surprised that a ~550kg EV battery has less than 10kg of lithium.
> The original 70kWh Model S battery had 63kg of Lithium Carbonate Li2CO3. Often this was stated as the amount of lithium, which isn’t correct. Especially when people tried to compare it to the amount of known lithium available. While it’s typically sold as Lithium Carbonate, that’s not equivalent to the amount of Lithium available.
> There’s about 12kg of Lithium in 63kg of Lithium Carbonate, so that original 70kWh Model S battery had 12kg of Lithium. I don’t know how much it has today, but they’ve been improving the chemistry to use less materials like Cobalt and Lithium.
Probably a better way to say this is “we are currently trying to cover the world in a slightly thicker layer of lithium than we are lead”. Lead’s everywhere! Including in (non-EV) car batteries and until recently some forms of petrol, which are pretty much everywhere.
None. Lithium only starts being psychotropic above a few mg per day (typically hundreds of mg per day for therapeutic, but it is suspected by some to be active well below that).
The intake from the environment would be micrograms/day, if not even less, above natural background. There are water sources with far higher natural concentrations.
EV (currently) demands lithium and ICE uses lead. Why are we not running out of lead?
1.Lead batteries my be old tech, but it means we've had time to have a recycling process that recovers almost all of the lead one the battery.
2. There is a lot more battery in an EV. My pickup has 2 large batteries, but they don't even come close to the size, weight or volume of the battery in a small EV.
None of the researchers I read on renewable tech took that study seriously. From what I recall, I believe it makes some incredible assumptions that are very sketchy. Like assuming the need for massive amounts of grid storage (like four weeks or more), and assuming it’s all a single battery chemistry (that contains cobalt even though most stationary storage has already moved to other chemistries). In the real world, the actual grid storage requirements won’t be anything like that, there are other battery chemistries that might take over some of the market from lithium-based ones (like sodium or sulphur based), lots of storage will be pumped hydro, some will be flow batteries (not just vanadium but zinc-bromide), plenty of copper conductors can be switched to aluminium, energy efficiency measures (like heat pumps) will reduce the amount of energy needed compared to gas heating, etc. etc.
I find it hard to take seriously an article that suggests we'll still be using the same battery chemistry some 28 years from now.
The number of compounding innovations likely to take place between now and then is certainly a lot based on historical precedent, and I think it's bonkers to not factor that in.
If scarcity is really that much of an issue, even a less efficient chemistry could supplant lithium. But a more likely outcome is we'll use something novel that we can't foresee from this moment in time. And the future science journalists will write about how we don't have enough of that either.
You know lithium ion batteries were developed in 1980, and practical versions didn't come out until almost 10 years later, right? Battery tech does not move quickly.
(Battery) tech moves a lot quicker when there's such a big profit incentive from even marginal gains. Cell phones, power tools, EVs, energy storage, are all big money makers that add huge incentives.
That didn't exist anywhere near to that degree in 1980. You're also talking about a tech that was very early in its growth/learning curve. We have had many irons in this fire for a very long time, we have seen continuous incremental improvements, and I expect that to continue. Obviously lithium based chemistries are very well known and studied, and I expect them to hang around a very long time.
But 28 years is an eternity in these circles, and if lithium scarcity becomes a big issue, yes I do expect that we'll invest a lot of research and money into finding workable alternatives.
> plenty of copper conductors can be switched to aluminum
Aluminum is cheaper than copper today. Don't you think, if it would be viable solution to use aluminum instead of copper, it would have already happened?
Guess we are going to have to increase mining of it and find a bunch more sources of it then. Which is literally what humans have done for every raw material out there !
TBH this reads more like a Piedmont Lithium (USofA) problem than it does a Global Resources (world) problem.
Over half of the worlds known lithium reserves (ie roughly measured) are undeveloped in places like Bolivia (with 21 million tonnes out of the known 89 million tonnes) and other not-USofA locations.
I stress known as that is distinct from "all" as it is restricted to those deposits that have been sufficiently exploration drilled to form an estimate.
> Projects get permitted [in Australia] in under a year,” Phillips explained. “Here, it's two, four, six, seven, eight years, which is a problem, especially in a business that's booming so fast.”
is, in my opinion, the crux of this article and interview. Phillips wants to mine more and faster within the US.
People with an interest might like to get a demo | account with:
yeah. like these ugly windmills, also a horrible sight. /s
on a serious note we need to be careful in shaping the world, and a license to mine has to be bound to a plan and a budget for recultivation, for restoration of a habitable and nice landscape.
“ We bought an exhausted, steep-sided clay pit 60 metres deep, with no soil, 15 metres below the water table, and essentially gave it life. Into it we brought a huge diversity of plants that we use every day but often don’t get to see, planted in soil made from ‘waste’ materials, watered by the rain, in giant conservatories and buildings that drew inspiration from nature. Behind this vision a dedicated team was brought together – made up of people who wanted to change something, who wanted to be able to say, ‘I’m glad I did,’ rather than, ‘I wish I had.’”
Quite an expensive project, but interesting to learn from.
We could use cars a bit less. Moving to better mass transit systems, walkable environments, remote working, etc means we might be able to cope with just using less lithium, and then we'd be able to mine less.
Suggesting that we have to mine lithium because the alternative is fossil fuels shows a belief that we should be continuing our current lifestyle and making it a little greener rather than modifying our lifestyle and making it radically greener.
You only need to look at the history of society at times in the past 150 years to see that's not true. People fundamentally reorganised around working in factories, owning cars, women going out to work, television, the adoption of IT, the internet, smart phones, and probably many more things within a few decades as soon as each thing was first introduced. Humans are amazing at adapting to rapid changes when we want to.
i thought my wife and i would always have our own cars. could never imagine making do with 1. but now i can walk to work so we don't need 2. and if we happen to need to go separate ways, i can uber.
make transportation easy, and people will adapt/embrace even if they don't currently like the idea.
Not needing a car is great, but this apply mostly to people living in cities. I would love to walk to work, I would only need to triple my income or downgrade a lot my quality of life by living in a bad small apartment.
It's not so much about giving up something they want but about giving up something that is fundamentally better than the alternatives (except of course for the externalities). It would be like getting people to go back to going to communal laundry facilities or washboards.
Humans are amazing at adapting to things that give them more of something.
What we need as a civilisation is people wanting less of everything, but that's really hard. People take things as given and if you even suggest taking away those things they get irrationally angry and dig down even harder.
Consumer-capitalism is an economic system which depends on consumption from the working- and middle-class. It is not merely a lifestyle which is opted into.
But this always gets framed as changing the hearts and minds of regular people. Well my own prime minister was a bit upset that people were consuming less during the height of the pandemic. They wanted people to get back to “supporting small businesses” ASAP.
In my opinion people are working backwards.
They are taking properties of money and project them onto humans rather than doing the opposite.
Economists say people have infinite wants and needs but really, in practice it boils down to a desire to constantly learn new things. The only reason why people may want an infinitely high amount of money ie. infinite wants is because there is no opportunity cost to holding money, humans really love having infinite free things and hate things that cost them something.
> People take things as given and if you even suggest taking away those things they get irrationally angry and dig down even harder.
What's irrational about it?
Especially in this case. People are being asked to drive less, when driving is currently a necessity in their daily lives. Meanwhile the upper class is flying private jets around.
Being asked to accept less in that situation should make you angry. And it isn't irrational.
> What we need as a civilisation is people wanting less of everything, but that's really hard.
Not very hard; there are several spiritual traditions which emphasize detachment from objects, e.g. Buddhism. But unfortunately, Buddhist countries don't generally do well militarily because of the focus on monasticism/pacifism. India was majority Buddhist in 6-7th century and arguably that made them vulnerable to the Arab invasions. Similar case can be made for Tibbet.
That is a different issue that doesn't have to do with tech itself. But I will also note that our population growth trajectory 100 years ago looked much more pessimistic than the one today.
Now I don't think any of this will be enough to avoid a major catastrophe due to AGW. But it's also clear from experience that, between tech advances and social self-control, the former is far more likely to happen at scale, and thus have any meaningful effect.
American and maybe Canadian society. There is nothing particular to humans that makes them car dependent, urban design, education and other such circumstances make them so. In some countries car dependency is the exception due to good public transit coverage (for commuting or longer distances with high speed rail).
Of course there's no silver bullet that will make everyone abandon their car tomorrow morning, but a lot of car trips can be cut with good urban design (including walkability, cycling, public transit), and for the rest that remain for whatever reason, EVs are a better choice, obviously. However focusing only on EVs and ignoring the rest is only opening another can of worms to replace the current one.
> There is nothing particular to humans that makes them car dependent [...]
Not dependent in the practical sense, but I think we are somewhat genetically wired for something related to long distance travel and/or the means to do so, or at least to move at higher speeds than we can on foot. There's the love for horses in (mostly female) humans, and the way car purchases are made is not at all driven by practical considerations only.
Transformation can make us less dependent on cars and reduce their use. It won't remove the desire to own and fully control means of transportation.
Luckily, the two options are not in any way mutually exclusive.
Lithium for e-bikes, golf-carts, trams and busses, taxis, ferries etc. are needed for the non-car-based city vision too, and the reduction in ICE pollution actually makes cities a nicer place to live.
EV are at least currently more expensive upfront to buy than ICE cars so we'll naturally get less of them.
We'll also probably get a lot more of small EV (especially in cities) than we got small ICE cars.
I really wish people in favor of non car transit would spend less than 100% of their time criticizing people owning/looking for an EV and never say a word on fossil cars that people continue buying.
Their time would be much better spent on promoting mass transit (with electric bus/whatever), walkable and cyclist friendly development and telling people about health, atmospheric pollution and noise issues around fossil cars.
To fight climate change we need both EV and more mass transit/walking/cycling, and less ICE car and buses.
Abstinence has never worked at a societal level for alcohol, drugs, sex, nor environmental issues so far either. Why do we keep thinking that is going to start working any day now? Why do we keep thinking that fighting human nature head-on is the best course of action?
> Why do we keep thinking that fighting human nature head-on is the best course of action?
Assume /u/onion2k was referring to the US, many countries successfully push public transport more than the US. So human nature certainly isn't the blocker here, but the current culture of the US.
Public transportation alone cannot solve the problem in the US. It can't even make a large enough dent to really make a difference. Most of those other countries are like a small US state, but the US is much, much larger. Even a medium sized US state is larger than most of those countries. There is a massive scale difference that needs to be taken into account. Because of that scale difference, it is hard for public transportation in the US to appeal to our innate desire for convenience. That's why public transportation works so well in small countries, that transportation can take most people to most places cost effectively. In other words, it is convenient for them.
Fighting against human nature is the hardest. You know what is next hardest? Fighting culture. Even if culture can be changed, it takes a least one generation or ~30 years and often longer. I'm really not that interested in what the problem is theoretically. I'm interested in effectiveness. Ramping up of mining to build batteries to put a huge dent in CO2 emissions at the expense of localized environmental damage? That's effective. Not perfect or ideal, but it is effective because it is the path of least resistance.
Because of that scale difference, it is hard for public transportation in the US to appeal to our innate desire for convenience.
The absolute size of the land is irrelevant; the only thing that matters is how far people actually travel. If your state is 1000 miles across, but most of the people stay within 5 miles of their home most of the time then public transport is completely viable. People who want to travel further can still own a car, or just rent on when they need to travel a long way.
While good public transport isn't an option everyone will continue to own cars, and while people own cars public transport will be under-utilized and expensive. It's a chicken and egg problem.
Sweden has a lower population density than the US, yet it handles public transportation much better.
> Because of that scale difference, it is hard for public transportation in the US to appeal to our innate desire for convenience.
I don't really understand what you mean by this. Public transportation is extremely convenient. I love driving (I grew up in California), but find public transportation in Sweden much more convenient than having a car.
Honestly I'm having trouble understanding the core of your argument.
I didn't say public transportation is inconvenient. I said it is hard to make it convenient in the US for the majority of the population. And if it is not convenient, it won't be used.
The Sweden statistic is misleading because their population is concentrated in the south, similar to Canada and other nations with large areas of extreme cold. A better measure would be median density or population-weighted density.
> Most of those other countries are like a small US state, but the US is much, much larger. Even a medium sized US state is larger than most of those countries. There is a massive scale difference that needs to be taken into account.
So I was really kind of giving the benefit of the doubt when considering population density.
That said I understand your point. But that doesn't explain why US _cities_ put so little effort into public transportation. Even ignoring the dispersal across the country, the US seems to not care to handle the problem on the local level where it really has no excuse at all.
As to your comparison with population weighted density, here are comparisons between the US and Sweden:
* "While the overall U.S. density stood at 87 people per square mile, population-weighted density shows that people actually lived at an average of 5,369 people per square mile."
* "Population-Weighted Density for Sweden was found to be much higher compared to simple density, 2288.8 people per square kilometre instead of 24.0 for 2015."
So it looks like the population weight density of Sweden would be 2288.8 * 1.609 * 1.609 = 5925.4308328 per square mile which is apparently 10% higher than the US.
Now honestly that doesn't really seem to explain the difference to me. Is 10% such a big difference? Besides if it is, Sweden wasn't always at this value. In the past few decades, people have moved into cities so what I really wonder is how far back do you need to go historically before Sweden was lower than the US current number? As in, at what point recently was Sweden in a worse position? Personally I think the best explanation for the US' current position overall is cultural: they really just don't want to give up their cars.
Anyway thanks for the info. Looks like I'd personally need to put more time and research into this than I have available, but I'll try to keep this info in mind going forward.
Good thing EV work on magic fairy dust with electric chargers appearing out of nowhere. Too bad most EV proponents are oblivious to the fact that electricity is made with the same fairy dust powering the ICE cars.
Batteries power EVs. Those batteries are charged with fossil energy a lot of the time, because renewables are too volatile to power a grid.
The fuel that powers ICEs can be converted from electricity as well. This is an inefficient process, but it would put surplus renewable energy to some use.
> because renewables are too volatile to power a grid.
This isn't why.
Batteries stabilise grids. If every car was an EV, the batteries in the vehicles would be sufficient to stabilise a completely wind/solar grid. Heck, put PV on car bodies and you get 80-90% of their average demand, and that's one of the worst places to put PV.
Also, geothermal is not at all volatile, tidal is regular enough for a smaller storage requirement, hydro doubles as storage, and even with PV and wind larger grids are always less volatile and yes you can go global on paper.
No, the reason why grids aren't already renewable is that it takes time to build new infrastructure, combined with renewables only getting cheap enough to seriously consider that anywhere in the last two decades, and in most places in the last one decade.
Most people don't drive enough miles per day to drain batteries even close to 100%, so that isn't a critical issue. This is why car-mounted PV is being demonstrated, even though for normal-looking cars that PV will only add 10-20 miles range per day on batteries of 100-200 miles — those extra miles are 80-90% of the average vehicle's daily milage.
Also, as batteries can be charged wherever and whenever there is electricity, we can simply install PV enough for the daylight hours to produce the energy desired for both daylight and twilight/nighttime and then just charge daytime and discharge nighttime even though it's probably the other way around wherever you are because currently demand is generally lower relative to supply at night and therefore the electricity is generally cheaper at night.
And the same batteries can easily be given a second life, after degrading too much for car use and before refurbishment/recycling to make them suitable for car use again, as fixed batteries.
And again, this is just presuming only PV, not wind which reduces the variance in supply, and not any of the other things I listed which don't get affected by weather at all.
> And the same batteries can easily be given a second life, after degrading too much for car use and before refurbishment/recycling to make them suitable for car use again, as fixed batteries.
This is the thing people tend to forget. Even if a battery is "useless" for an EV, meaning that it has degraded to 60-70%, it still has 25-50kWh of usable capacity as-is.
And that's enough to run a house for 12-48 hours depending on how power-hungry your appliances are.
We can generate electricity in a dozen different ways. Some of the sources are practically unlimited. Some pollute more than others. But as we transition to less polluting electricity generation methods ALL existing EVs magically become less polluting.
There is only one power source for ICE cars: dead dinosaurs. The source will run out eventually. All ICEs pollute the same amount during their lifetime, usually more the older they get because of wear and tear and lack of maintenance.
Everyone I know with an electric car has photovoltaic on the roof. I will soon get it, for around 150 Euros per month. And even if it wouldn‘t be like that, the fuel would be burned more efficiently in a plant and combined with renewables.
I know California has a reputation for being unlike the rest of America, but I’m fairly sure they don’t use Euros.
As even the best places in Europe are worse for PV than almost everywhere in CA, and yet PV is working adequately even in bits of Europe as rubbish as the UK (which is more like southern Alaska), the meme that PV is “just for California” needs to go the way of the dodo: https://solargis.com/maps-and-gis-data/download/world
I don't know what point you're trying to make here. The efficiency with regard to what?
Joules out per unit of currency in? Joules of electricity out per joules of sunlight in? PV is great at those even in the dark moist British Isles, which are about as bad as southern Alaska.
Nuclear however, is really expensive. Situationally useful, but really expensive — So expensive in fact that it's about the same as using dedicated batteries (rather than hydroelectric or hydrogen or refurbished batteries) to support PV when it's too dark.
The delays are usually due to the time it takes to evaluate whether or not the mining can be done without too much damage, what actions would be taken to mitigate that damage, and how effective that would be.
Sadly there both no economic incentive to do that, and plastics dont really sink like that - or clump up. The 'great pacific garbage patch' is mostly water, with bits of plastic floating around. It takes years for the plastic to eventually migrate down to the deepest part of the oceans. [1]
Bolivia has had instability in their leadership in recent years. So the US can just say that the most reactionary faction/party is the true Bolivian leadership and that the US just wants to help get rid of the usurpers.
It wouldn't be the first time the US gets involved in Bolivia. I happen to recently have stumbled upon a short document on Wikileaks that sported "Bolivia", "cocaine coup", "CIA", and I shit you not, "Unification Church" and "SS veteran Klaus Barbie" all in the same paragraph.
Has that ever worked out in the long term though? Some of the fiercest enemies of the us were forged that way (IRAN, whole south america).
The imbeciles with three letters are a liability in a multipolar world, driving potential allies towards perceived "underdog" opponents.
That whole dirty game did not even work during the cold war.
Most victories were economic prep ups for countries sliding towards the opposition, the whole regime take over propelled a ton of countries towards a opposition that would have otherwise just stayed neutral and independent from ex-colonial powers. Without the colonial powers and the CIA pushing, there would have never been a domino effect to take note off.
It’s more a Department of State problem. You know the whole CIA stuff in the region is quite often used by populist politicians, particularly the left-leaning ones. If the US tried to pull what it did before, it’s effectively diplomatic suicide in the entire region. The US wants to establish some sense of goodwill in the region. Why? Because China.
The US is competing with China in lithium extraction in the region. Despite the US having better tech at lithium extraction, China is doing everything it can to gobble it all up by throwing money around.
Also important to not that until a few decades ago, lithium was not a valuable commodity. So, we've barely started the process of actively looking for it. It's estimated to be a fairly common element in the earth crust.
If you contrast that with fossil fuels where we've had decades of very well funded research to identify new deposits of oil and gas, there are probably loads of unknown deposits of lithium.
Hydrogen production still needs its own Elon Musk.
It's not even slightly viable unless you get the sweet Toyota $15k credit for hydrogen.
In my country there are exactly 0 hydrogen refuelling stations, I'd need to grab my passport to go refuel =) There are 4 L3 quick chargers 5 minutes away. 4 more 10 minutes away. And I can charge where I park.
I've been watching this space for ... 20 years? All that time Hydrogen cars have been right around the corner.
Nowadays it mostly seems to be people who, for some reason, hate battery electric vehicles and are pointing at the "coming soon" hydrogen vehicles as a reason why they still use an ICE.
Even though a hydrogen powered vehicle IS an EV except that ~80% of the battery is replaced with hydrogen tanks and a fuel cell...
(Yes, Toyota has a prototype car that can run on straight-up hydrogen for like 10 miles at a time)
Market forces will take care of this, if needed. If battery price goes up, hydrogen vehicles are favored. What hydrogen vehicles need now is cheaper catalysts for their fuel cells.
Hydrogen-powered vehicles are much, much lighter than battery-driven, so consume less energy in operation. Balanced against that, electrolysing hydrogen has some losses, and braking doesn't regenerate hydrogen you used.
But prices have fallen sharply in recent years, and may continue on down. 2016 is two generations back, in battery years.
Probably future decreases will come from better power density, requiring less physical material for a given capacity, as demand for materials soars. It is remarkable how little lithium there is in a typical Tesla.
Unfortunately, by far the best way to use hydrogen for energy is to use the kind that's already bound to carbon, and unbind it at the point of use, which we're already doing.
Storing it as a comnpressed gas just plain sucks. (Ask NASA and Boeing about that.)
Well that’s because he comes from mining. We have plenty of lithium in the oceans waiting to get harvested.
We also have the technology to harvest lithium from the oceans.
From a mineral resources PoV vacumming up ocean floor nodules and metals extraction from seawater also count as "mining" .. just not in the dwarves underground with pick axes sense.
The issue, for now, with lithium from seawater is the cost of the extraction techniques at scale - the economic feasibility isn't there for now.
> Although multiple groups of researchers have devised ways to harvest lithium from the ocean, none of the methods are currently practical. “It’s technically possible to extract lithium from seawater,”
although:
> Still, the biggest challenge in devising a practical system for extracting lithium from the ocean is the metal’s ultralow concentration in seawater. There are many sources of salt-enriched water with high lithium concentrations, including salty lakes, brine used in geothermal power plants, and brackish water generated from oil and gas production. Some researchers have started to look at those sources as a more practical starting point than ocean water. “If the lithium concentration starts out 10–100 times higher, then electrochemical systems could be economically feasible,” Cui says.
> During Tesla’s last earning call, the CEO encouraged entrepreneurs to get into the lithium processing business – referring to it as “a license to print money”:
>> So it is basically like minting money right now. There’s like software margins in lithium processing right now. So I would really like to encourage, once again, entrepreneurs to enter the lithium refining business. You can’t lose. It’s a license to print money.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] thread"The Biden administration, for instance, aims to cut sales of ICE vehicles to 50% of all new purchases by 2030, to which the source says “Yes, we’ll [eventually] have enough, but not by that time,”"
This article is all over the place. It immediately undermines the title for a few paragraphs and ends with the buried real story, where it seems like the real complaint is that US lithium project permitting takes too long and that Australia is faster. Journalism can go take a long walk off a short pier.
LRTs with overhead catenaries are electric vehicles without batteries. Let's build more of those.
The so called free market needs to make it happen. If there's a lithium shortage, then mine more.
Planning to 'just mine more' of whatever and completely replace all of private transportation infrastructure sure sounds like another path to environmental disaster.
That's not to say we should drop EVs or anything like that. But we should at least think twice, especially when there are perfectly good alternatives.
Toll-free highways and roads. Mandated parking minimums. Free on-street parking. Zoning laws banning anything but single family houses cite increased traffic and parking demand "caused" by denser construction (but this exclusionary zoning itself increases demand for driving). If you hit someone with your car, stay at the scene, and are not drunk criminal liability will not attach. Driver's license and insurance requirements are kept low. The US Government finances moving to suburbs with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Federal Reserve buys mortgage backed securities. In many cities the majority of downtown land is roads and parking!
When you have lived your whole life in cities that are designed automobile first and automobile only, and public transit is either non-existent or still underfunded compared with cars, then you will ask for a car based solution. An individual can only choose between choices they know exist, based on the information they have access to.
Have you lived in areas without mandated minimum parking? I have and it is a nightmare I don't care to ever repeat. There are good reasons for such rules.
In a perfect idealized world with excellent public transit, there's no need for mandated minimum parking, I agree! But that perfect world mostly doesn't exist (maybe Manhattan, only some areas).
When there is no parking, but people absolutely must have their car to get to work to be able to survive, it is mayhem. Violent fights over parking with human and property damage, people circling for hours and hours all night trying to park, you can't leave your house to go to important things because you lose your spot, and so on.
The positive way to do it is to solve for public transit first, so that most people are happy to not have to have a car. Then parking becomes a moot point, no rules needed.
If you force people to have a car to exist in society and simultaneously force them to have no place to park, it is a disaster.
Should the market set the supply of parking, or should local government officials do it based on dogma? Right now most cities choose option two. Planning officials usually copy and paste traditional rules such as 1.4 parking spots per residential unit, or 1 parking spot per x square feet of store sales floor. These figures are set with the goal that parking is only maxed out a few days per year. This means there's lot of idle blacktop most days. Developers usually build the legal minimum amount of parking because the minimum number of spots is so high. Land used for low productivity use like parking comes at the opportunity cost of more affordable rent. When the price of something is set to $0, demand is without bound. People leave their cars parked on prime real estate instead of moving them to a garage a block away, store second and third vehicles, etc. Local authorities usually only charge for parking as a last resort. Time based limits are usually first implemented. Because 97% of parking is free people will drive around and around, or get there really early in hopes of finding a free spot. A significant proportion of downtown traffic is parking spot cruising.
Parking minimums can first be relaxed on streets well served by transit. When a new building is literally down the block from a station and a 1.4 parking spots per resident is mandated that's not a good use of scarce land. Developers won't build zero spots. Banks financing the project will have their own parking requirements.
Letting parking float at market price has the benefit of parking being easy. A city can set prices with the target of one open spot per block. If demand is low, let the price fall to $0. No more cruising around and around, risking a parking ticket, or trying to understand complex day and hour limits.
There is an good book on this (dry) subject. The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup.
> Toll-free highways and roads.
> Free on-street parking.
Since when is this a subsidy? The only reason we pay taxes is so the government can provide us with useful infrastructure like this.
I'm not american by the way. Much of what you said simply doesn't apply to me. For example, I'm not sure we have mandated parking minimums. I wish we did.
> When you have lived your whole life in cities that are designed automobile first and automobile only, and public transit is either non-existent or still underfunded compared with cars
My city has plenty of collective transport options. There are so many nice air conditioned buses that they're a nuisance in traffic. We have a train station, an airport.
I still prefer cars. Not because of environmental efficiency but because they're convenient and they allow me to be independent. I don't have to depend on some other transport service's schedule. I don't have to sit around waiting for the bus to arrive. I don't have to be around other people. I don't have to wait until the vehicle makes countless stops in places that have nothing to do with me. I just get in my car and go wherever I need to go.
> An individual can only choose between choices they know exist, based on the information they have access to.
I have the information and I'm perfectly capable of choosing. Even if we had amazing japanese style trains crossing every city in my country I'd still prefer a car for local transportation.
"Mine more" has a definite end-point as eventually you can't just mine more. While it's good to be using solar and getting off of oil/gas powered grids, these also have fairly significant drawbacks (those panels need to be replaced and something needs to be done with the waste, recycling is currently far more expensive than just dumping them, there are chemicals in solar panels you need to consider, and removing them in a way to keep them usable for recycling requires someone not a lay-person).
The reason people are pushing for a change in how we approach transportation and living centers is because the changes aren't mutually exclusive with having a vehicle dedicated to yourself, but it does mean changes to how living centers are designed currently. If self-driving can take off, very likely most people could do without having their own car and would be served very well by a "call on demand" vehicle that is frequently serviced and cleaned in between rides. If a dirty one or one in disrepair shows up, mark it as such and another is there in a few minutes (heck, probably the service could see this before it ever gets to you and route such vehicles for service). This would work for a large number of persons in living centers, and for the few who really need a vehicle for "other" reasons, they can still get a car.
Further, make incentives for more walkable/convenient living centers. Better stocked markets on all corners (sorry bodegas in their current form don't cut it in their current form, but they're the right idea), grocery and health item deliveries, better public transit routes, it can work while accommodating those with a need for their own transportation.
For most healthy persons, not owning a car could easily be a possibility. When I lived in Russia of all places, I didn't own a car for 6 years and as an able bodied person, it was quite doable. Taxi when I needed to get somewhere fast and on-time with some stuff to carry, public transit if it's just me as the transit was there within a few minutes, grocery delivery handled most of my needs, and that which I couldn't order on groceries there were well-stocked markets within a minute or two.
For those who need additional assistance for day to day activities, yes they must be accommodated for and car ownership makes sense there; it's not persons who need additional assistance that are targeted, it's everyone else that really could live very comfortably without having to maintain a car that should be.
If the free market needs to be invoked, then so be it, let the market figure out how to build businesses that deliver groceries/food/household goods, let them figure out public transport services, bike rentals, and so on...though as I see it we already have the systems for this.
The technology and infrastructure is there for most of this vision, now it's about adaptation and adjustment. It's quite doable.
Point is if you want to get hyper asperger’s about it, you can, but it’s not necessary to have done so because there is implicit information here, and besides, your final claim (density is what matters) ended up being incorrect, because holding you to the same standard that you hold others, you didn’t state all the implicit information.
Knowing that Singapore has a large enough population as we do know because it is well known as a large city-state, we can infer the density from that information combined with the small size. But density is not all that matters.
Good thing we can't just decide things like that, right?
People talk about electric cars versus trains but subsidized ebikes are something we can do now and would make a huge difference! Just the idea that I can ebike to the BART station, hop on the train and end up all over the bay, ebike where I need to go and get back all for a few dollars is exciting.
But I guess what I am saying is they are much more energy efficient than electric cars, and the infrastructure requirements are way simpler than trains.
By the way I just found the mode on Google Maps that highlights bike friendly roads and it is cool to explore.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8149208,-122.2338056,13.13z/...
You can read more about the long term plans to better support bike paths in the Bay Area on the Plan Bay Area 2050.
https://www.planbayarea.org/
For example they are going to expand the bike path on the Bay Bridge that currently goes from Oakland to Treasure Island so that it connects all the way to San Francisco:
https://mtc.ca.gov/planning/transportation/bicycle-pedestria...
I just thought all that was neat. Anyway you are totally right. I just think this stuff is simpler than trains to implement so it is important to consider, though I fully support trains too! A good plan should include both.
Also I am not saying we should leave this up to individuals. But for example we have seen huge subsidies for electric cars while subsidies for ebikes have been lacking, with some movement finally towards that direction. I'm in favor of government plans that emphasize the green value of ebikes in addition to trains and electric cars.
Park and ride is a popular way to bridge very low density with public transit.
always this ignorant in every thread like that. most people dont live in huge city centers where public transportation is abundant.
We have the world's biggest "defense" budget by some margin, but we can't improve our infrastructure?
France has buses that quick charge at every second stop with batteries size of Tesla (70 kwh IIRC).
Minor nitpick: they are still present in EVs as well.
See https://altris.se
Like all those batteries that Tesla and other companies installed for grid stabilization and load shifting?
Yeah, that's where it's going to be used.
Still perfectly suitable for grid storage and even certain vehicles.
Hope we get Sodium Sulphur batteries soon. They'll be like 10x cheaper per kwh than current tech.
140 wh/kg is comparable to the LFP batteries used in SR model 3s in Tesla, so that implies a 300 mile EV car with no lithium.
Yes it missed the 2022 date, but "planned production" is far better than "hey check out this research paper".
140 wh/kg should enable nearly all modes of day-to-day city and suburban driving. IMO that is a HUGE deal since that is a very large percentage of daily miles driven. I believe it is quite safe, having reduced safety/cooling like LFP which helps close the gap at pack level density with cobalt/nickel chemistries.
But ... we'll see. But 200 wh/kg LFP (which should be 300-400 mile range cars and SUVs) combined with sodium ion for the "lesser" packs should enable a true BEV revolution at least in consumer cars.
That would leave solid state / cobalt-nickel / sulfur for long distance trucking and other applications. Even if solid state makes it to market in the next couple years, I predict it will not be price competitive with Sodium Ion/LFP techs for quite a while after that. There will be plenty of buyers for practically all battery chemistries I would imagine.
Recycling is also not clear cut for many of the metals and minerals needed. It’s a big gap to meet and few want to mine.
Don't know much about materials science but is demand for lead expected to equal demand for lithium?
This I never knew!
Is there really only 3Kgs of lithium in a Tesla battery pack?
I didn't think so - the full lead-acid battery itself weighs less than 10kg, and it appeared to me that about half of that weight was the solution (water).
Even if true, though, still very surprised that a ~550kg EV battery has less than 10kg of lithium.
> a single EV has roughly 10 kilograms—or 22 pounds—of lithium in it
https://www2.calrecycle.ca.gov/Publications/Download/1391?op...
> The average battery contains between 16 to 21 pounds of lead
FWIW this might be particularly useful:
https://www.quora.com/Does-Teslas-70-kWh-battery-have-63-kg-...
> The original 70kWh Model S battery had 63kg of Lithium Carbonate Li2CO3. Often this was stated as the amount of lithium, which isn’t correct. Especially when people tried to compare it to the amount of known lithium available. While it’s typically sold as Lithium Carbonate, that’s not equivalent to the amount of Lithium available.
> There’s about 12kg of Lithium in 63kg of Lithium Carbonate, so that original 70kWh Model S battery had 12kg of Lithium. I don’t know how much it has today, but they’ve been improving the chemistry to use less materials like Cobalt and Lithium.
I wonder what would be the unintended consequences of exposing the environment with higher concentration of lithium. (the thicker layer)
Lithium presence in drinking water (from natural sources) has been linked to lower crimes rate, suicides rate, and is acting as a mood stabilizer.
But this is why anyone taking it has to have their lithium levels checked from time to time.
In more recent times, analysis of the water confirmed it was laced with lithium.
http://westkerry.com/blog/?page_id=271
The intake from the environment would be micrograms/day, if not even less, above natural background. There are water sources with far higher natural concentrations.
The number of compounding innovations likely to take place between now and then is certainly a lot based on historical precedent, and I think it's bonkers to not factor that in.
If scarcity is really that much of an issue, even a less efficient chemistry could supplant lithium. But a more likely outcome is we'll use something novel that we can't foresee from this moment in time. And the future science journalists will write about how we don't have enough of that either.
That didn't exist anywhere near to that degree in 1980. You're also talking about a tech that was very early in its growth/learning curve. We have had many irons in this fire for a very long time, we have seen continuous incremental improvements, and I expect that to continue. Obviously lithium based chemistries are very well known and studied, and I expect them to hang around a very long time.
But 28 years is an eternity in these circles, and if lithium scarcity becomes a big issue, yes I do expect that we'll invest a lot of research and money into finding workable alternatives.
Even if we'd need it, batteries are the single worst way to do it with current tech :D
Aluminum is cheaper than copper today. Don't you think, if it would be viable solution to use aluminum instead of copper, it would have already happened?
From about 1917 in Arabia in the classic movie Lawrence of Arabia, a newsman talking to the prince:
"You want your story told, and I desperately want a story to tell."
Gee, there may not be enough plastic for everyone to have their own Hula Hoop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHgAcbpsujI
Over half of the worlds known lithium reserves (ie roughly measured) are undeveloped in places like Bolivia (with 21 million tonnes out of the known 89 million tonnes) and other not-USofA locations.
I stress known as that is distinct from "all" as it is restricted to those deposits that have been sufficiently exploration drilled to form an estimate.
> Projects get permitted [in Australia] in under a year,” Phillips explained. “Here, it's two, four, six, seven, eight years, which is a problem, especially in a business that's booming so fast.”
is, in my opinion, the crux of this article and interview. Phillips wants to mine more and faster within the US.
People with an interest might like to get a demo | account with:
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on a serious note we need to be careful in shaping the world, and a license to mine has to be bound to a plan and a budget for recultivation, for restoration of a habitable and nice landscape.
I sometimes wonder how many tourists visiting it realize that it started as a strip mine.
They never leak 10+ million gallons into the ocean or otherwise ruin the environment =)
Suggesting that we have to mine lithium because the alternative is fossil fuels shows a belief that we should be continuing our current lifestyle and making it a little greener rather than modifying our lifestyle and making it radically greener.
Option B) Fundamentally reorganize human society
--
Option B has a poor track record.
What we need as a civilisation is people wanting less of everything, but that's really hard. People take things as given and if you even suggest taking away those things they get irrationally angry and dig down even harder.
But this always gets framed as changing the hearts and minds of regular people. Well my own prime minister was a bit upset that people were consuming less during the height of the pandemic. They wanted people to get back to “supporting small businesses” ASAP.
Economists say people have infinite wants and needs but really, in practice it boils down to a desire to constantly learn new things. The only reason why people may want an infinitely high amount of money ie. infinite wants is because there is no opportunity cost to holding money, humans really love having infinite free things and hate things that cost them something.
What's irrational about it?
Especially in this case. People are being asked to drive less, when driving is currently a necessity in their daily lives. Meanwhile the upper class is flying private jets around.
Being asked to accept less in that situation should make you angry. And it isn't irrational.
Not very hard; there are several spiritual traditions which emphasize detachment from objects, e.g. Buddhism. But unfortunately, Buddhist countries don't generally do well militarily because of the focus on monasticism/pacifism. India was majority Buddhist in 6-7th century and arguably that made them vulnerable to the Arab invasions. Similar case can be made for Tibbet.
They both have.
billions of light polluters today is much worse than a couple of heavy polluters 100 years ago.
Now I don't think any of this will be enough to avoid a major catastrophe due to AGW. But it's also clear from experience that, between tech advances and social self-control, the former is far more likely to happen at scale, and thus have any meaningful effect.
American and maybe Canadian society. There is nothing particular to humans that makes them car dependent, urban design, education and other such circumstances make them so. In some countries car dependency is the exception due to good public transit coverage (for commuting or longer distances with high speed rail).
Of course there's no silver bullet that will make everyone abandon their car tomorrow morning, but a lot of car trips can be cut with good urban design (including walkability, cycling, public transit), and for the rest that remain for whatever reason, EVs are a better choice, obviously. However focusing only on EVs and ignoring the rest is only opening another can of worms to replace the current one.
Not dependent in the practical sense, but I think we are somewhat genetically wired for something related to long distance travel and/or the means to do so, or at least to move at higher speeds than we can on foot. There's the love for horses in (mostly female) humans, and the way car purchases are made is not at all driven by practical considerations only.
Transformation can make us less dependent on cars and reduce their use. It won't remove the desire to own and fully control means of transportation.
Lithium for e-bikes, golf-carts, trams and busses, taxis, ferries etc. are needed for the non-car-based city vision too, and the reduction in ICE pollution actually makes cities a nicer place to live.
We'll also probably get a lot more of small EV (especially in cities) than we got small ICE cars.
I really wish people in favor of non car transit would spend less than 100% of their time criticizing people owning/looking for an EV and never say a word on fossil cars that people continue buying.
Their time would be much better spent on promoting mass transit (with electric bus/whatever), walkable and cyclist friendly development and telling people about health, atmospheric pollution and noise issues around fossil cars.
To fight climate change we need both EV and more mass transit/walking/cycling, and less ICE car and buses.
And timing is critical so all at the same time.
Assume /u/onion2k was referring to the US, many countries successfully push public transport more than the US. So human nature certainly isn't the blocker here, but the current culture of the US.
But within individual cities, or areas like the Northeast Corridor, the density is comparable to areas of Europe with fantastic public transit.
The issue is car-centric policy and culture, not lack of potential demand.
The absolute size of the land is irrelevant; the only thing that matters is how far people actually travel. If your state is 1000 miles across, but most of the people stay within 5 miles of their home most of the time then public transport is completely viable. People who want to travel further can still own a car, or just rent on when they need to travel a long way.
While good public transport isn't an option everyone will continue to own cars, and while people own cars public transport will be under-utilized and expensive. It's a chicken and egg problem.
> Because of that scale difference, it is hard for public transportation in the US to appeal to our innate desire for convenience.
I don't really understand what you mean by this. Public transportation is extremely convenient. I love driving (I grew up in California), but find public transportation in Sweden much more convenient than having a car.
Honestly I'm having trouble understanding the core of your argument.
> Most of those other countries are like a small US state, but the US is much, much larger. Even a medium sized US state is larger than most of those countries. There is a massive scale difference that needs to be taken into account.
So I was really kind of giving the benefit of the doubt when considering population density.
That said I understand your point. But that doesn't explain why US _cities_ put so little effort into public transportation. Even ignoring the dispersal across the country, the US seems to not care to handle the problem on the local level where it really has no excuse at all.
As to your comparison with population weighted density, here are comparisons between the US and Sweden:
* "While the overall U.S. density stood at 87 people per square mile, population-weighted density shows that people actually lived at an average of 5,369 people per square mile."
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...
* "Population-Weighted Density for Sweden was found to be much higher compared to simple density, 2288.8 people per square kilometre instead of 24.0 for 2015."
http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1081...
So it looks like the population weight density of Sweden would be 2288.8 * 1.609 * 1.609 = 5925.4308328 per square mile which is apparently 10% higher than the US.
Now honestly that doesn't really seem to explain the difference to me. Is 10% such a big difference? Besides if it is, Sweden wasn't always at this value. In the past few decades, people have moved into cities so what I really wonder is how far back do you need to go historically before Sweden was lower than the US current number? As in, at what point recently was Sweden in a worse position? Personally I think the best explanation for the US' current position overall is cultural: they really just don't want to give up their cars.
Anyway thanks for the info. Looks like I'd personally need to put more time and research into this than I have available, but I'll try to keep this info in mind going forward.
The fuel that powers ICEs can be converted from electricity as well. This is an inefficient process, but it would put surplus renewable energy to some use.
This isn't why.
Batteries stabilise grids. If every car was an EV, the batteries in the vehicles would be sufficient to stabilise a completely wind/solar grid. Heck, put PV on car bodies and you get 80-90% of their average demand, and that's one of the worst places to put PV.
Also, geothermal is not at all volatile, tidal is regular enough for a smaller storage requirement, hydro doubles as storage, and even with PV and wind larger grids are always less volatile and yes you can go global on paper.
No, the reason why grids aren't already renewable is that it takes time to build new infrastructure, combined with renewables only getting cheap enough to seriously consider that anywhere in the last two decades, and in most places in the last one decade.
People want their vehicles predictably usable, which is why any idea dependent on using car batteries as actual power smoothing will fail.
Also, as batteries can be charged wherever and whenever there is electricity, we can simply install PV enough for the daylight hours to produce the energy desired for both daylight and twilight/nighttime and then just charge daytime and discharge nighttime even though it's probably the other way around wherever you are because currently demand is generally lower relative to supply at night and therefore the electricity is generally cheaper at night.
And the same batteries can easily be given a second life, after degrading too much for car use and before refurbishment/recycling to make them suitable for car use again, as fixed batteries.
And again, this is just presuming only PV, not wind which reduces the variance in supply, and not any of the other things I listed which don't get affected by weather at all.
This is the thing people tend to forget. Even if a battery is "useless" for an EV, meaning that it has degraded to 60-70%, it still has 25-50kWh of usable capacity as-is.
And that's enough to run a house for 12-48 hours depending on how power-hungry your appliances are.
There is only one power source for ICE cars: dead dinosaurs. The source will run out eventually. All ICEs pollute the same amount during their lifetime, usually more the older they get because of wear and tear and lack of maintenance.
The reason we just pump it out of the ground is it's cheaper.
Unless someone makes huge leaps in the process, that's really not an option.
Synthetic fuels were used in WW2 by the Germans.
Power-to-gas is a thing that is deployed already. CNG cars, as well.
Unfortunately it's at best a half measure.
In california maybe ? In many areas the energy you get form the sun during the year is spotty at best.
As even the best places in Europe are worse for PV than almost everywhere in CA, and yet PV is working adequately even in bits of Europe as rubbish as the UK (which is more like southern Alaska), the meme that PV is “just for California” needs to go the way of the dodo: https://solargis.com/maps-and-gis-data/download/world
Joules out per unit of currency in? Joules of electricity out per joules of sunlight in? PV is great at those even in the dark moist British Isles, which are about as bad as southern Alaska.
Nuclear however, is really expensive. Situationally useful, but really expensive — So expensive in fact that it's about the same as using dedicated batteries (rather than hydroelectric or hydrogen or refurbished batteries) to support PV when it's too dark.
They don't?!
Delay is just beauracratic inefficiency.
Not one that Piedmont Lithium can benefit from, but those are the breaks sometimes.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/27/worlds-d...
The imbeciles with three letters are a liability in a multipolar world, driving potential allies towards perceived "underdog" opponents.
That whole dirty game did not even work during the cold war. Most victories were economic prep ups for countries sliding towards the opposition, the whole regime take over propelled a ton of countries towards a opposition that would have otherwise just stayed neutral and independent from ex-colonial powers. Without the colonial powers and the CIA pushing, there would have never been a domino effect to take note off.
The US is competing with China in lithium extraction in the region. Despite the US having better tech at lithium extraction, China is doing everything it can to gobble it all up by throwing money around.
If you contrast that with fossil fuels where we've had decades of very well funded research to identify new deposits of oil and gas, there are probably loads of unknown deposits of lithium.
It's not even slightly viable unless you get the sweet Toyota $15k credit for hydrogen.
In my country there are exactly 0 hydrogen refuelling stations, I'd need to grab my passport to go refuel =) There are 4 L3 quick chargers 5 minutes away. 4 more 10 minutes away. And I can charge where I park.
Nowadays it mostly seems to be people who, for some reason, hate battery electric vehicles and are pointing at the "coming soon" hydrogen vehicles as a reason why they still use an ICE.
Even though a hydrogen powered vehicle IS an EV except that ~80% of the battery is replaced with hydrogen tanks and a fuel cell...
(Yes, Toyota has a prototype car that can run on straight-up hydrogen for like 10 miles at a time)
[1] https://www.businessnewsaustralia.com/articles/forrest-pens-...
[2] https://www.crikey.com.au/2022/09/05/twiggy-green-hydrogen-r...
Hydrogen-powered vehicles are much, much lighter than battery-driven, so consume less energy in operation. Balanced against that, electrolysing hydrogen has some losses, and braking doesn't regenerate hydrogen you used.
«In 2016, studies found that the cost of a typical EV battery replacement could reach $10,000 or more» (from Autoweek).
Probably future decreases will come from better power density, requiring less physical material for a given capacity, as demand for materials soars. It is remarkable how little lithium there is in a typical Tesla.
A decade later, replacement pack for that car still runs you ~$20k, which makes model S cars disposable when they roll off the subsidized warranty.
What Tesla charges to replace batteries is a whole other matter. They charge what they think they can get.
Storing it as a comnpressed gas just plain sucks. (Ask NASA and Boeing about that.)
The issue, for now, with lithium from seawater is the cost of the extraction techniques at scale - the economic feasibility isn't there for now.
> Although multiple groups of researchers have devised ways to harvest lithium from the ocean, none of the methods are currently practical. “It’s technically possible to extract lithium from seawater,”
although:
> Still, the biggest challenge in devising a practical system for extracting lithium from the ocean is the metal’s ultralow concentration in seawater. There are many sources of salt-enriched water with high lithium concentrations, including salty lakes, brine used in geothermal power plants, and brackish water generated from oil and gas production. Some researchers have started to look at those sources as a more practical starting point than ocean water. “If the lithium concentration starts out 10–100 times higher, then electrochemical systems could be economically feasible,” Cui says.
[0] https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/Can-seawat...
>> So it is basically like minting money right now. There’s like software margins in lithium processing right now. So I would really like to encourage, once again, entrepreneurs to enter the lithium refining business. You can’t lose. It’s a license to print money.
https://electrek.co/2022/09/09/tesla-license-to-print-money-...
https://news.mit.edu/2022/aluminum-sulfur-battery-0824