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Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

nature.com

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Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#81

Post by toyg »

bluGill wrote: post #60
tompccs wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another point the article missed: although batteries have a lifetime of 15-20 years (which they claim makes recycling infeasible), most people currently replace their cars far more frequently than that. Which means that either the cars will be scrapped and the battery materials recycled (if they really are all that valuable), or the global production of cars per capita will slow as people keep their cars for the life…

Most cars today are scraped because the body wears out, not because the engine fails. Of course if you are reading this you probably trade in your car much sooner, and send it on down the line to poorer and poorer people, eventually the car ends up in Mexico/Central America (US/Canada), or Africa (Europe), where they keep it running until it is ~20 years old and the body fails. You probably are more ware of engine fa…

> where they keep it running until it is ~20 years old

I've seen lots of cars in Morocco that were more like ~30... maybe the dry air helps reducing wear, I don't know. My 10-year-old Corsa in England was starting to rust pretty bad, it wouldn't have lasted another decade for sure.

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#82

Post by jcadam »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #59
Jweb_Guru wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that we haven't run out of oil yet doesn't really change anything about the fact that oil-based industry is not sustainable. I don't see why this isn't a similar situation.

Is anything truly sustainable when we live on a planet of finite resources?

In the long run, nothing is sustainable.

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#83

Post by Reason077 »

xigma wrote: post #66
Reason077 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "there's the questionable idea that electric motors will replace combustion engines because we're "running out of oil"" Right. Electric motors will replace combustion engines because they're cheaper to operate, offer better performance, require less maintenance, don't emit toxic pollutants, contribute less CO2 emissions, they're much quieter, and they offer a better driving experience. Sooner or later they'll be ch…

Some questionable assumptions there: - cheaper to operate An enormous amount of electricity would be required to actually replace all combustion engines in just regular cars, plus a lot of investment into infrastructure to charge all these cars. Higher demand, higher prices. - offer better performance Are the best-selling cars today those with the best performance? No, they're the ones offering acceptable performance…

> "An enormous amount of electricity would be required to actually replace all combustion engines in just regular cars"

Not as much as you might think. In the UK, for example, electrifying all ground transport would add only on the order of 25-30% to current grid demand. That's similar to the amount that grid demand has declined in the past decade due to energy efficiency, despite population growth.

Ofgem, the UK's energy market regulator, recently confirmed that there is enough grid capacity available for widespread adoption of electric vehicles, provided a significant portion of charging happens at off-peak times.

> "plus a lot of investment into infrastructure to charge all these cars."

Yes, but this is actually pretty cheap compared to the massive infrastructure requirement for H2 or synthetic fuels. With electricity, the production and distribution infrastructure already exists.

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#84

Post by tombert »

I know that the popsci media can overblow this, but wasn't there some optimistic results for super-capacitors that wouldn't rely on any of these rare-earth metals? I'm seriously asking, since looking this up tends to bring up links to crap-sites like IFLS and whatnot, so I don't know if the hype is warranted.

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#85

Post by l_camacho84 »

tyu100 wrote: post #56
l_camacho84 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia is not utilising only 14% of their resources, they have only 14% of the known world resources. More than 50% is based on Congo were the work is performed in miserable conditions. We are all happy that we still don’t reach peak oil, but if we don’t change the way we think about progress and economic growth, in a world with finite resources will have severe consequences.

There is tons of cobalt in the world (pun intended). In Canada alone there are at least a dozen junior miners with prospects looking for capital (there's even a town called Cobalt in Ontario from a previous mining era). It's just not economic to mine at current prices. This is a non-issue and I'm disappointed Nature published this dumb article.

The question is not how many resources we have, the question is how hard they are to extract. The more resources we extract from earth the more difficult they become to extract, that is, we need to apply more resources/pollution/energy/technology to extract the same ton of cobalt that we used in the past. This turn this problem in an exponential one, I don’t know when we will need to face it but I understand the concern of Nature (pun intended).

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#86

Post by lawlessone »

pjc50 wrote: post #51
nickik wrote: post #42

The problem with Rare Earth is that the West collectively acts like 3 year old who are to dumb to solve incredibly simple problems. Rare earth contained lots of Thorium and that has to be handled as nuclear waste and that means you have 1000s of tons of nuclear waste on your hands. This is of course completely idiotic because Thorium not really a big problem as it is not radioactive. The few Rare Earth mines that do…

Thorium is radioactive, just not very much. It's toxic in the way a lot of heavy metals are. https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp147.pdf

can't we use thorium to make thorium reactors to charge or shiny new electric cars?

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#87

Post by agumonkey »

simias wrote: post #25
agumonkey wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like over confidence in any resource access, that's probably what oil digger thought 100 years ago.

Doesn't this example go against your point? I've been hearing that we were nearing the end of the oil supply since I've been a kid but the date keeps being pushed back. As the demand for oil grows the price goes up and new methods to extract more oil from the ground become profitable. Now current projections seem to target the 2050s at the earliest.

my point is going too deep into one idea because we'll find more of it.

oil is flowing longer than expected .. and that's not something we're enjoying a lot right now

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#88

Post by yellow_postit »

officialjunk wrote: post #69
nickik wrote: post #42

The problem with Rare Earth is that the West collectively acts like 3 year old who are to dumb to solve incredibly simple problems. Rare earth contained lots of Thorium and that has to be handled as nuclear waste and that means you have 1000s of tons of nuclear waste on your hands. This is of course completely idiotic because Thorium not really a big problem as it is not radioactive. The few Rare Earth mines that do…

Seems possible to me the US may want to deplete others’ mines while saving their mines to become the last ones remaining.

That would require a level of long term policy and conspiracy that I think the US government incapable of. More likely to be arguably poor policy with unplanned for market consequences.

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#89

Post by woah »

nickik wrote: post #72
pjc50 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thorium is radioactive, just not very much. It's toxic in the way a lot of heavy metals are. https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp147.pdf

Yeah is radioactive but you can build a bed out of it and sleep on it so its not radioactive in any practical sense. And of course Toxic is not a problem because most of the metals a rare earth mine would deal with would be toxic. You can actually find heavily concentrated earth in the US that would basically count as nuclear waste because nuclear policy is so insane.

Where is this earth located?

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#90

Post by vanderZwan »

nickik wrote: post #72
pjc50 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thorium is radioactive, just not very much. It's toxic in the way a lot of heavy metals are. https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp147.pdf

Yeah is radioactive but you can build a bed out of it and sleep on it so its not radioactive in any practical sense. And of course Toxic is not a problem because most of the metals a rare earth mine would deal with would be toxic. You can actually find heavily concentrated earth in the US that would basically count as nuclear waste because nuclear policy is so insane.

> Yeah is radioactive but you can build a bed out of it and sleep on it so its not radioactive in any practical sense.

Eh, you're technically correct in the sense that you can also make a bed out of asbestos and sleep on it and be fine, as long as it doesn't become airborne. Sure, you won't get thorium in your system as quickly but it's still a material that you probably don't want in your household or in the environment in general if you don't need it.

I do agree that in the general sense fears of radioactivity are exaggerated, and even then only selectively: those scanners we installed at all airports in the last decade will also cause more incidences of cancer, but you hardly ever hear anyone about that.

What should be feared more is the mining industry not giving a shit about human health, the environment or, for the lack of a better term, "the commons".

If the waste of the mining industry ends up in the groundwater we do have a big problem. And in practice this is not an "if", it's a "when", or even "how long will it take before they are found out this time and still get away with it".

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