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Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

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Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#51

Post by ecshafer »

dumbfounder wrote: post #30

Can batteries be created to make the process of reclaiming the lithium orders of magnitude easier? A completely different topic: Politics tends to focus on forcing consumer vehicles to go electric, is this really the right move? Most cars are not driven a lot in a day. But cars that are used for work (fleet, uber/deliveries) are used much more, so the benefit to them being electric is far greater. Trucks too most lik…

The reality is that electric vehicles are a fools errand. The real winning strategy is one that overall reduces dependency on vehicles, and moves more to walking, biking, and mass transit. This would mean actually making hard decisions and having policy changes though. You lower the CO2 produced by orders of magnitude compared to even electric vehicles.

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#52

Post by BadBadJellyBean »

dwheeler wrote: post #14

Even if we have more electric vehicles, that doesn't decarbonize anything unless the source of the energy doesn't generate carbon dioxide. In many places you're just moving the source of carbon dioxide (often with a total increase). I think that part is often overlooked.

AFAIK powering a BEV from electricity generated by fossile fuel has a higher efficiency than an internal combustion engine. Especially if you factor in the refining steps for car fuel.

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#53

Post by syntaxing »

dwheeler wrote: post #14

Even if we have more electric vehicles, that doesn't decarbonize anything unless the source of the energy doesn't generate carbon dioxide. In many places you're just moving the source of carbon dioxide (often with a total increase). I think that part is often overlooked.

Let’s put aside the fact that a state of the art gasoline engine is about 20% efficient and an EV is about 50% efficient if you include power delivery deficiencies if we use non renewable fuel sources. What you’re stating is an infrastructure problem, not a specific EV problem. Genuinely would love to see literature how a EV increases the total carbon increase compared to a ICE vehicle.

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#54

Post by rootusrootus »

samwillis wrote: post #31

Something that I think needs to be considered more is the now dominant thought that Electric Vehicles = Lithium BEVs. We should not be putting all eggs in that one basket. Obviously they are the most widely developed, and hydrogen fuel cell technology isn't anywhere near the point where it is ready. But we shouldn't stop developing it. Then there's the fascinating "aluminium air" battery [0] concept which could work…

> hydrogen fuel cell technology isn't anywhere near the point where it is ready. But we shouldn't stop developing it.

Scientific development on the technology should continue, but the focus on FCEVs as a use case is misplaced. The idea has been worked on for decades, but we're just about as far away from practical hydrogen infrastructure as we've ever been. It's still only available in any meaningful way in two metro areas in California. There are far more practical solutions to fast EV fueling than hydrogen.

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#56

Post by kkfx »

IMVHO

> How much lithium does the world have? We don’t really know for sure.

That's the simple main point. The rest are speculation. Oh, sure "not being sure" is not a reason not to try, but is a reason to have some backups. SO far we lack them. And that's the main issue.

The secondary issue is recycling of metals, so far we have many experimental procedures, more or less doable at a not-just-lab scale, but nothing usable on scale.

The corollary issue is that we do not have just cars, we also have airplanes and ships. So far some eVTOL have popped up but also prove they are not much more than very-short-range cars replacers for certain use cases. We also have some battery-electrical ship (and modern sub), but nothing really usable on large scale.

Long story short: the road is very long and looking for alternatives is a MUST. A company can fail, it's perfectly normal, a society should NOT FAIL by all means and when happen it hurt much.

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#57

Post by qudat »

trabant00 wrote: post #29
bertil wrote: post #10

This article and the IEA sources that they rely on assumes that an EV is a car. That’s not a good assumption: electric bicycles and trikes like the Aptera are much better direction for the vast majority of individual transport. At that size, you can rely on smaller batteries and solar panels for many journeys (it isn’t fully sufficient for an Aptera but an e-bicycle with a small roof can ride as long as the Sun shine…

> Using three tons vehicles for long-distance journeys or for the transport of goods isn’t efficient: trains (and last-mile delivery on cargo bikes) are a lot more economical That sounds intuitive to me but the fact that train tickets are so expensive on long distances (more than twice than if you travel alone in a car) makes me think it's not the case.

> That sounds intuitive to me but the fact that train tickets are so expensive on long distances (more than twice than if you travel alone in a car) makes me think it's not the case.

Have you factored in all the costs associated with owning a vehicle (e.g. cost of purchase, maintenance, etc)?

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#58

Post by tuatoru »

Manuel_D wrote: post #20
rootusrootus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is an interview with Siddharth Kara that suggests all lithium batteries contain cobalt and thusly depend on child slave labor That is demonstrably not true. AFAIK the majority of EVs use LFP batteries that have no cobalt. The current RWD Model 3 in the US also uses LFP. That's the direction most EVs will probably head over the next few years.

Lithium iron phosphate are not widely used in EVs. They gave poorer energy density, so lithium ion is preferred. I think electric golf carts use LiFePo batteries, to keep costs low and because range is less of an issue.

LFP batteries have not been widely used outside China till now because CATL[1] owns the important patents. The patents expire this year.

The energy density discrepancy is not as bad at a system (whole vehicle) level as it appears at cell level, for various reasons. And there are lots of use cases where LFP has more than enough energy, provided the price is right.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CATL

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#59

Post by ZeroGravitas »

bertil wrote: post #10

This article and the IEA sources that they rely on assumes that an EV is a car. That’s not a good assumption: electric bicycles and trikes like the Aptera are much better direction for the vast majority of individual transport. At that size, you can rely on smaller batteries and solar panels for many journeys (it isn’t fully sufficient for an Aptera but an e-bicycle with a small roof can ride as long as the Sun shine…

Related, recent Electrek video discussing the next moves for countries that have phased out ICE for EV, such as Norway:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F6Bz-0EKA0

Re: Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?

#60

Post by 404mm »

Isn’t this article quite pointless considering everyone is aware of the current Lithium resource limitations and new technologies targeted to replace lithium are already emerging? For example the Sodium Ion batteries hit the news recently.

Similar to oil, we can all speculate what is the remaining capacity we haven’t extracted but eventually it all comes down to - can we get it cheaper somewhere else and preferably using own resources instead of paying 3rd party (country)?

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