Comment by ggreer
2 hours ago
Lithium battery energy density is much lower than petroleum, so the difference between a fully charged 100kWh battery (which weighs over half a ton) and an empty one is less than 3 gallons of diesel. Most of the energy expended in a battery fire is from the electrolyte reacting with the cathode material.
Over/under-charged batteries are a safety hazard because they can generate hydrogen gas which can initiate a fire, but the energy released from the fire will be pretty much the same.
The energy released during a fire is higher than what is accessible by discharging the battery. Here's one paper describing ratios from 1.25 to 5 depending on access to oxygen during the combustion.
https://cea.hal.science/cea-05234204v1/document
Lithium fires are brutal, they're extremely fast and the toxic gases are just as dangerous as the fire itself:
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/about-20-bodies-f...
If we're going to count industrial accidents, then oil kills way more people. There are deaths from disasters involving wells, refineries, pipelines, tankers, and gas stations. But because they've been happening for over a century, we accept them as a fact of life. Even correcting for the much smaller install base of EVs and lower number of vehicle miles traveled, fossil fuels are far more deadly.