Comment by epistasis
5 months ago
> environmental standpoint if we think about that these Lithium--Ion batteries will have to be replaced and recycled every
I am very interested in this question, but those who raise it never have answers about the negative impacts of mining lithium.
For example, the amount of lithium needed for an EV is an order of magnitude less than the amount of steel needed. What is so bad about lithium mining that it's 10x worse than iron mining, pound for pound?
Nobody has ever answered my request for environmental concerns with a concrete environmental lithium mining concern, such as acidification that can sometimes happen with iron mining.
I've researched and researched, found nothing, which leaves me thinking that the worst case scenario for lithium is no worse than the worst case for iron.
Meanwhile, we have such immense documented harms from fossil fuel extraction that nobody ever questions again, or with the same intensity that's reserved for supposedly toxic lithium batteries.
The apparent benefit is massive, so any delay seems to cause massive harm to the environment.
I think we need to flip the question: where is the proof that coal/oil/iron is better for the environment than mining and recycling batteries? (BTW, it's at least 20 years now for grid batteries, with lifetime going up all the time...)
Any analysis of EVs vs ICE cars I've seen put EVs at 1.5-2x the carbon footprint to produce, but win out in the long run. My default assumption has always been it comes from the battery pack - I'm not sure what else could cause such a difference.
And the cross over point is surprisingly fast:
https://youtu.be/6RhtiPefVzM?si=ITsJsHAKjYtMNZEc
People don't realize the massive amount of emissions from using their car because they don't see the massive amount of material they put into their car every time they fuel up.
A 20 gallon tank produces 400 pounds of CO2 for every fill up.
Even manually filling a tank by lifting a series of five gallon containers would seriously reorient the average person's conception of their fuel usage.
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My understanding (bowing to ChatGPT) is that you can get 1 pound of iron from <2 pounds of iron ore. But to get 1 pound of lithium, you need around 500 pounds of lithium ore.
So if an electric car requires 2000 pounds of iron and 50 pounds of lithium, that works out to 4000 pounds of iron ore that needs to be mined and refined, vs 25,000 pounds of lithium ore.
Interesting, but tailings never seem to enter much into environmental analyses that I have seen, unless you count coal ash as "tailings" which would be a pretty broad interpretation of the idea.
Lithium is also extracted via brine, as opposed to hard rock. Most of the environmental reporting has been on the brine approaches, which currently are in high elevations of South American mountains, and the problem appears to be mostly the use of land and taking that land out of the ecosystem for economic use as drying pools. But the same problem occurs with mining, too!
>So if an electric car requires 2000 pounds of iron and 50 pounds of lithium, that works out to 4000 pounds of iron ore that needs to be mined and refined, vs 25,000 pounds of lithium ore.
means recycling of lithium batteries will be a thriving business. (i.e. big difference from recycling of say tires or plastic bottles, more like, pretty successful, recycling of aluminum, and even better than it)
Li-ion batteries are older than you think. First volume production of NMC cells happened 1991. LFP in 1997. Google was founded 1998.
No one made fortune in Li-ion recycling in all those years. Li-ion cells remained disposable.
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You shouldn't post AI slop here. Until a few years ago, no lithium was mined from ore. Now roughly half of it is, mostly spodumene, LiAl(SiO3)2, which you can easily calculate (with units(1)) is 3.7% lithium, 18 times higher than the 0.2% you're claiming. 50 pounds of lithium thus comes, on average, from 25 pounds of brine-derived lithium and 670 pounds of spodumene.
While the rest of what you say is right, you will not find anywhere on Earth a mine with compact spodumene.
Spodumene is dispersed among other minerals into rocks and it only forms a few percent at most of those rocks, if not only fractions of a percent.
The rocks must be crushed and spodumene must be separated from the other much more abundant minerals, by flotation or similar mineral concentration techniques, before going further to chemical processing.
So your 670 pounds must be multiplied by a factor like 100, varying from mine to mine.
Some multiplication factor must also be used for the iron ore, which is also mixed with undesirable silicates, but iron oxide may reach up to a few tens of percent of the rock, so the multiplication factor is much smaller.
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That's why hybrids are great, hedges your bets between iron and lithium
Non-plugin hybrids typically do not use lithium batteries.
Is this still the case? Haven't most of the manufacturers switched over from NiMH?
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Terrible cars tho. Nobody likes their hybrids compared to pure EV.
I used to drive a Toyota Yaris Hybrid and I really liked it, I moved to a different country and couldn't take the car with me and now I drive a scooter, but if I'll ever buy a car again, it'll most likely be a hybrid, I really like the range.
I like my Honda just fine. Granted, I've never owned an EV, but considering I travel a lot and gas stations are plentiful and fast, it's a better fit for me than an EV would be.
I do think a plug-in hybrid would be better for when I'm not traveling, but I bought this car specifically for travel.
Terrible in what sense? I had no complaints with my Prius C.
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