Old electric cars are a raw material of the future • Hacker News Board

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#101

Post by p1mrx » Sat, May 15, 2021, 10:58 PM UTC

alisonkisk wrote: post #63

yomly wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. And elemental conversion is a big deal - usually involving nuclear fission or fusion. Batteries do become depleted but the lithium never disappears, I guess simply put a reverse potential is no longer able to reverse the battery equation back to the energy storing state. Presumably because there is some third reservoir state that a potential cannot reverse (without delving into…

> Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. It certainly can, E=mc^2. But it's an incredible amount of energy for how much matter you get.

E=mc^2 doesn't really say that matter can be converted to energy, just that energy has mass.

For example, a fission/fusion reaction doesn't make matter go away, but the amount of energy released is large enough to be measured as a loss of mass. When you discharge a battery, it also loses mass, but the amount is too small to notice.

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#102

Post by kragen » Sat, May 15, 2021, 11:04 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #75

pfdietz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lithium ion batteries don't contain lithium metal. The lithium is always in the +1 oxidation state.

To me oxidized metal is a metal, but then that's why I'm not an expert in that field by any stretch of the imagination.

You said, "the physical structure of the lithium metal". There is no such physical structure of a bunch of ions floating around in an electrolyte and intercalating themselves into electrodes.

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#103

Post by andrepd » Sat, May 15, 2021, 11:05 PM UTC

gilbetron wrote: post #36

crazygringo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only pose a significant pollution problem if capitalism is somehow prevented from profiting from it. This is fundamentally false. The entire issue of environmental pollution exists because , or when, reuse isn't profitable. If new raw materials are cheaper than reusing, then capitalism will absolutely result in dumping old materials and increasing pollution. Why would you think otherwise?

You are agreeing with the OP, you know. "somehow prevented" = we put dumb regulations in the way or the entire process of lithium extraction can't be made profitable.

On the contrary. There is a lack of regulations that properly price externalities and make the people profiting from them pay for the shit they pollute.

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#104

Post by kragen » Sat, May 15, 2021, 11:05 PM UTC

saltcured wrote: post #89

alisonkisk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Processing ore is easier, because you can run tons of ore through an industrial process, and not have to dismantle microscopic pieces of each battery

Note, I am neither a battery nor recycling expert here, but am somewhat interested in dragging unstated arguments to the surface! I think proponents of this economic view of recycling often argue that you could mechanically shred/grind such post-consumer products into a big mess and think of it as a new type of high-density ore. It might take different refining stages, but they seem to have faith that industrial proc…

That's what the article says is being done on an industrial scale by pyrometallurgy. Search for "black mass" in the article.

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#105

Post by kragen » Sat, May 15, 2021, 11:19 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #42

jillesvangurp wrote: post #34

Lithium is a valuable resource. EV batteries have lots of it. Therefore EV batteries are valuable even after they stop working. Lithium is valuable because extracting it from naturally occurring salt deposits is a lot of work. These salt deposits are mostly not Lithium. We are talking trace amounts here. To extract it, you have to process vast amounts of brine. Boil of the water, separate it from other materials, etc…

The vast majority of current lithium supply comes from hard rock mining, not brines. Brines were about half of lithium supply ten years ago but as the industry took off the amount of hard rock mining in Australia has radically expanded (by 500%). An EV battery pack does not contain a spectacularly high concentration of lithium. A state-of-the-art battery pack might by 2% lithium. That's higher than subsurface brines,…

Your comment has some nuggets of truth in it.

Ten year ago brines were about all of lithium supply, but now they're about half. The byproducts of lithium extraction from brine are profitable, but not enough to make a big difference to the bottom line of the mining operation.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-lithium.pd... from https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/lithium-statistics-and-inf... says that it's about half and half brines and hard-rock mining at this point. Even the expansion in Australia, which is indeed huge, only brings Australia to less than half of the world's lithium supply (40 kilotonnes out of 82 kilotonnes in 02020). All mining outside Australia is from subsurface brines except for one mine in China.

2% is "miraculously high" if subsurface brines are your reference point, because they're usually around 0.05% and almost never as high as 0.2%. It's an orders-of-magnitude difference.

Lithium costs on the order of US$10k per tonne. Potash is about US$800, boron around US$400, and magnesium around US$2000. All of these are mostly extracted from brines.

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#106

Post by robocat » Sat, May 15, 2021, 11:54 PM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #62

niblettc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually is that many vehicles don't have a steel chassis. The Model Y for instance has an aluminum chassis to save weight. There even other materials such as Carbon Fiber used in some high end vehicle.

The rear underbody of the Y is aluminum but it still has a steel chassis. Aluminum can never fully replace steel because it lacks the strength and rigidity. Regardless, aluminum is expensive to extract and refine, requiring a tremendous amount of energy. In terms of cost, on average aluminum is more expensive than steel.

> Aluminum can never fully replace steel because it lacks the strength and rigidity.

Huh? The main reason is because Aluminium is expensive. The BWW i3 uses an Aluminium frame exactly because it reduces weight. https://www.marklines.com/en/report_all/Munro003_201710

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#107

Post by kragen » Sun, May 16, 2021, 1:45 AM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #103

gilbetron wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are agreeing with the OP, you know. "somehow prevented" = we put dumb regulations in the way or the entire process of lithium extraction can't be made profitable.

On the contrary. There is a lack of regulations that properly price externalities and make the people profiting from them pay for the shit they pollute.

While this is true in general, in this case recycling the waste is more profitable than discarding it, even without regulations. Of course, you could still produce more pollution during the recycling process, a point touched on in the article.

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#108

Post by cptskippy » Sun, May 16, 2021, 2:02 AM UTC

robocat wrote: post #106

cptskippy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rear underbody of the Y is aluminum but it still has a steel chassis. Aluminum can never fully replace steel because it lacks the strength and rigidity. Regardless, aluminum is expensive to extract and refine, requiring a tremendous amount of energy. In terms of cost, on average aluminum is more expensive than steel.

> Aluminum can never fully replace steel because it lacks the strength and rigidity. Huh? The main reason is because Aluminium is expensive. The BWW i3 uses an Aluminium frame exactly because it reduces weight. https://www.marklines.com/en/report_all/Munro003_201710

None of what you said contradicts what you quoted. Steel is a stronger material than aluminum, the trade offs are that it's harder to form and weights more.

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#109

Post by kragen » Sun, May 16, 2021, 2:19 AM UTC

jahnu wrote: post #14

kragen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually your sandwich is made from poop. The poop fertilized plants, the plants were harvested, some of them were turned into bread, others fed a pig, and that's what you're eating. Some of the poop decayed and was released as gases into the air, which were then recaptured by the plants, by bacteria in the roots of soybeans, and by Haber-Bosch factories (confusingly also called plants) which made synthetic fertilize…

Only a tiny amount of it though. It's almost all made from air.

The air is made from poop.

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#110

Post by coryrc » Sun, May 16, 2021, 4:07 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #100

coryrc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we extract ore from a given area, it's mixed with just a few different compounds. So you tailor various acids and processes to economically filter out just want you need. How do you plan to do this when you have every compound we've ever created with overlapping solubilities and you want pure output?

> When we extract ore from a given area, it's mixed with just a few different compounds. This is pretty far from the truth. Rock is less chemically complex than living plants, animals, and fungi, it's true; but there's a long distance from "less than hundreds of millions" to "just a few". The article explains how it's done in the case of lithium-ion batteries. It is true that to the extent that you can reduce the adm…

My comment was in reply to mining trash dumps.

Batteries obviously have a small (-ish) set of possible compounds and it should be economically feasible to recycle used batteries once there is sufficient volume that needs to be recycled. (I guess we're still at least a decade away but that remains to be seen... if it's sufficiently efficient, it could be cheaper to recycle than reuse older batteries).