In case anyone is sceptical about EVs being greener than ICE cars (or who wants evidence to give to sceptics) I love this site to compare the lifetime greenhouse gas emissions and cost of electric vs internal combustion (and hydrogen and hybrid) cars. You can play around with all the assumptions in the "customise" settings, so cool! www.carboncounter.com/#!/explore
I think it's still important to be critical of electric cars, since they're not the only option. Personal transport is inherently less energy efficient than public transportation systems, especially on rail where you have less rolling resistance and no need for batteries.
@@-vaniii-Rail is only efficient where you have the population density to support it. If full autonomy happens, then a car just becomes a different sized bus. The problem with busses today, is they stop too often, making them slow. I think eventually we will have a variety in size, and the service will be faster, and cheaper than private vehicles. For one, they will drop you off at the front door. You won't need to park them. Obviously, when there are many vehicles, you will want to put people together that are coming from, or going to the same place.
@@fjalicsa higher population density should be the goal anyway, it saves money on every kind of infrastructure and makes pathways much shorter. Low density Suburbs are a Desaster on every metric from obesity rates to carbon footprint and should be urbanized ASAP.
Should there not be a distance travelled setting too? Only with ICE vehicles, most of the lifetime emissions seem to be from burning fuel. Whereas in EVs the production emmisions are more (assuming the production cycles are equally "decarbonised") of the lifecycle emissions. So for low-use usecases (assuming I cycle 99% of journeys), it would be interesting to see where the break-even point is.
Lithium is pretty common, but do we really need ANY for grid storage? We developed lithium-ion to make light weight rechargeable batteries for hand drills and then phones.. So when we needed light car batteries, we just went with what we already had. Grid storage doesn't need to be light weight, so we can go with a different chemistry Simple, cheap, heavy minerals can be used in grid storage instead, or something like a redox-flow battery for bulk storage. Or maybe thermal, gravity, flywheel etc storage will prove the most efficient. There is a lot of exciting experimentation still to be done in this field! :) I think Australia has a unique opportunity to develop green mining techniques, because we have the minerals and solar radiation in the one place in vast amounts. I think concentrated solar smelters would be perfect! I would love to see Heliogen style concentrated solar, applied to smelting and refining Australian minerals, it can make 1000+ degrees C from sunlight! And smelting metals is a huge energy burner and carbon maker.
Oh man, you have just listed about 75% of the topics I have on my list for the rest of this year! Great minds think alike hey? I did already cover thermal storage once, so check that out in this link below. For the other topics please check back over the next few months! th-cam.com/video/72wkuIvUISs/w-d-xo.html
Li is very good at grid services and instant response. Given the vast scale of deployment now and in the future the costs are likely to make it the cheapest form of grid battery storage in the 4hr market and likely up to 8hr in future. Redox looks likely to be commercial only over longer storage periods.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Excellent! I look forward to those.. It's a fascinating emerging industry.. I'm hoping Heliogen style concentrated solar will take of in a big way in Oz.. :)
@@tcroft2165 Yes, good point, you need some fast response batteries to smooth out the power supply and gain grid stability; and the battery alternatives haven't proven they can do that yet. But I think other chemistry options will be explored. Lithium is good, but a grid battery can be very bulky and heavy, it just can't be expensive..
@@D_Rogers CSP has been very much the bridesmaid not the bride in solar tech. Its still much more expensive (~3x PV) and has limited deployment. However it might be a good fit for Aus climate. All going to come down to if the better economics of PV+dramatically falling storage costs still undercut it.
I'm glad you addressed the issue of the different standards in a lot of media. Alex's point about addressing these issues now was very good and noname bringing up diesel is fair. My issue is the way the headlines often make it sound like "big E vehicle" is trying to trick us. It's just dishonest.
I agree with you, and I think it's quite common for all green technologies. Do a search for "dirty little secret" in the news tab of Google and you'll see it in headlines on articles about all kinds of green techs, wind turbine blades, wind turbine towers, solar panels... pretty much everything. It's my most hated headline because the articles are always very lazy and skewed.
@@EngineeringwithRosie The stupidity and lies are quite annoying in their blatant obviousness. No, using that same mined material to make an EV or wind turbine instead of an internal combustion engine is not going to retroactively increase the amount of pollution the mining already produced. No, it is not going to magically make the materials impossible to recycle either. And no, the possibility of there being few ICE vehicles and coal plants still in use in 2100 does not mean we need to stop using renewables and build more coal mines or that the oil company owners should be given any more taxpayer money. No environmentalist worth listening to would complain that green tech that causes massively less pollution than fossil fuels should not be used because "it is not zero!". And if they start spewing crap about windmills killing more birds than there exist in the area when the fossil fuels that turbine is replacing cause thousands of human deaths every year, well, they are clearly so full of shit the only way they can be of any benefit to Earth and humanity is using them as fertilizer.
Lithium mining is exponentially better than oil and gas extraction. It doesn’t need to be green, just better than the existing energy sources. This isn’t even a question. 👍
How? It takes 500,000 gallons of water for 1 ton of Lithium, harmful effects are found up to 150 miles from Lithium extraction sites.. you can't even recycle more then 2% of a Lithium battery, so how are they better again?
Total co2 emissions over 20 YEARS?????? Are you going to keep your electric car for 20 years? Do you really think Tesla or other electric car manufacturers will be happy about that? Aren't you going to get one of these attractive leasing options and change your car every 3-5 years? Of course, there is nothing wrong with it because poor people will buy and use your "garbage." One difference between animals and us is that we walk happily to the slaughterhouse Exponentially better? Very puzzle about this expression.
@@stevek5600 Here in France, we have a lithium resource in underground brines, which is large enough to cover the Li needs of the whole country several times over... and it would use NO water to extract that lithium. Where does your number come from? It is actually a rhetorical question as I know where it comes from: 10+ years old data from the early extraction of lithium from salt flats in Chile. Firstly, as Alex Grant said in the video, lithium extraction processes vary greatly from one another, and secondly, the process used in Chile has improved its water consumption greatly over the last 10 years. So, your number, while having been true, isn't anymore... by far! Also, lithium from end-of-life batteries can be and IS recycled with efficiency around 98%... not 2 %.
Lithium must be mined ethically, making sure the countries and landowners are compensated and treated fairly. Too often the resource benefits the mining company leaving a mess for others to cleanup.
This is true for any resource, not just lithium. Conversely, lithium and other materials utilized by battery technology should not immediately be held to a higher standard than we apply to the extraction of other resources. Raise the standard for all resources or leave it alone. The economic consequences of singling out those resources being committed to fight climate change in an effort to maintain a cost disparity with the current fossil-based technologies will be dire in the future. We currently don't even have the will to significantly penalize intentional and unintentional release of fossil methane. How will we get the will to suddenly apply ethics to resource extraction? Don't get me wrong, I am a strong advocate for enforcing ethical behavior when that behavior is not voluntary. I see an economy that is more consumed with how far one can push legal limits rather than consider the ethical grounds of an action. I may have become too cynical but I don't see many actions by corporations that soften my position.
@@mrhickman53 Well the thing is you kinda do have to apply a higher standard to the resources used in the fight against climate change because it won't be possible to truly fight climate change if we don't end the exploitation of the global south. Exploitation is by definition not sustainable, if our green energy is premised on imperialist exploitation then that energy supply isn't actually secure or stable because revolutions and uprisings will inevitably happen whether you like them or not. Not to mention it means jack shit if the mining equipment is electric if we're still cutting down Amazon rain forest and spilling pollutants out into the local environment when mining the resource. The climate crisis isn't solely about global warming, it's also about habitat destruction and the alarmingly high extinction rate, the global climate can still collapse if that keeps going even if carbon emissions reach zero. The green energy transition absolutely has to happen equally everywhere, otherwise it will fail. People living in the global south won't give a shit about the carbon reductions from using lithium battery if the lithium mine killed the local ecosystem and polluted their groundwater. Not taking this into account is exactly why currently the global south is modernizing using mostly fossil fuels.
@@hedgehog3180 So don't do good because one cannot do perfect. That is a recipe for stalemate and ultimate collapse of the environment as we currently enjoy it. Should extraction of minerals be better regulated? Absolutely, but not at the expense of carrying on as usual burning fossil fuels (extracted once and consumed) rather than extracting materials for batteries, magnets and conductors, all which are recyclable. We are in a crisis now, not merely trying to avoid some future crisis. We have not made sufficient headway in reducing emissions to afford the luxury of resting while we develop cleaner methods of extraction. We must both extract and develop better methods. Transportation is cleaner with BEV's today with current extraction practices and electrical energy production than fossil fuels. Improving both permits transportation to become yet cleaner. While every one of your concerns are valid, correcting practices in order to address those concerns should be goals with plans that permit economies to survive while meeting goals for minimising global climate impact.
Great piece, Rosie, but I wish you'd addressed the flipside of "availability": cost. Around minute 5:05 in the video, after hearing of the trillions of tonnes of Li in the oceans, we see a cost curve. The curve suggests that the Li stock in the oceans would cost 8X more to extract than what we currently take from the Atacama. Of course, "trillions in the ocean" sounds great, but is useless if the price point makes batteries uncompetitive. Would love to hear you more on this: how much *low-cost* Li is available (and, corollary, what are the prospects for lowering the cost of the resources further up the cost curve)? Thanks.
Cost does not matter to religious zealots. This issue is not so cut and dry when one goes reading the censored opposition. What bothers me is that toxic pollution is generally ignored in favor of whatever circus show frightens the most people into surrendering their rights.
There’s other things in the ocean that could be gotten concurrent to the lithium like manganese which we actually have a shortage of but are found plentiful in the ocean, also potassium in good amounts. Even small amounts of uranium and even gold although much smaller quantities. We would also get huge amounts of sodium which can be used for other things. After getting all the minerals out you could have pure water left which can be used for drinking water and crops which is another added value.
My mathematics may not be very good, but doesn't .2ppm of lithium suggest that to service demand in 2030, over 10 trillion tonnes of ocean would need to be processed each year? That is 30 billion tonnes per day, every day. Is that even possible? Of course lithium would still be mined from conventional deposits, I am just observing that while there may be a lot of lithium in the oceans, a lot of ocean water would need to be processed.
@@kenhnsy lol "surrendering our rights" to pollute with fossil fuels, give me a damn break. This isn't a question of freedom it's how do we stop a huge environmental disaster
The relationship between cost and co2 is one most people overlook, and I'm glad your guest touched on that because it doesnt get said enough. there are a handful of technologies which have wildly disproportionate co2 emissions per cost due to chemical processes other than hydrocarbon combustion, like concrete production. but cost is usually a good indicator with small error bars, and for back of the envelope doesnt require a phd thesis to analyze every part of the supply chain for the emissions of some process/equipment/consumable.
Of Note: There is some large scale mining equipment that IS electrical driven by an umbilical power cable. It's hardly new technology. Hopefully the extraction project at the Salton Sea (California) will advance rapidly. They will be using geothermal energy for that project
So glad I subscribed. Absolute top-tier science journalism: thorough, balanced, accurate - including language. The summaries at the end of each section are particularly skillful and supports a high comprehension and retention rate. Not only that, stylistically it is very pleasant to watch: over 5 minutes but under 20, minimal use of stock footage.
At least when you mine lithium to make batteries, the batteries can be used to store and supply energy over a certain amount of time. When you extract petroleum to burn as a fuel, it must immediately and continuously be replaced.
Also Lithium is a small part of the Li ion battery so the perception that we will need a mountain of it is skewed by the name of the battery. It's one of the reasons the LFP batteries are so promising since the other two materials used are so cheap and easily mined. The only problem with rare earths is that a large number of mines are needed since their deposits are scattered all around the globe in lower quantities. Then there is the graphite which needs to be mined also, so ensuring raw materials come from responsible mining practices should be advertised when purchasing a new vehicle, just like how the blood diamond controversy lead to transparency of raw material origins in that industry.
Interestingly, an Australian start-up, Hazer Group, has developed the "Hazer Process" which converts bio-methane into green hydrogen and industrial grade graphite which is ideally suited to battery production. arena.gov.au/projects/the-hazer-process-commercial-demonstration-plant/#:~:text=The%20Hazer%20Process%20is%20a,the%20feedstock%20as%20solid%20graphite.
What do so-called "rare earth" elements have to do with EV batteries? None is used in batteries! Some of those elements (mainly samarium and neodymium) are used in small quantities to manufacture magnets, used in some, but not all, EV motors. However, a) as already said, some EV motors don't have magnets (so-called induction motors), and b) newer magnet generations contain no "rare earth" element! BTW, an ICE vehicle also contains "rare earth" elements, although admittedly less. Fun fact "rare earth" elements are neither "earth", but metals, nor "rare" at all. This name is historical, dating back to the 18th century. The scientifically correct name for those metals are "lanthanides", to which is historically associated Scandium and Yttrium, which are not lanthanides.
You are talking about a 1000lb lithium battery with toxic, carcinogenic cobalt, nitrate, phosphate compounds that will almost certainly not recycled. An EV battery also has electronic components that contain heavy metals that are toxic and carcinogenic. They will almost NEVER recycled. An EV is an electrical machine run by electronic devices like a big computer. Even if you ignore the battery, the EV car itself is highly toxic and carcinogenic. Lithium is KNOWN to he evil. Lithium mines have kill all the salt lakes in Chiles killing countless numbers of life forms. In Congo, they call cobalt "BLOOD cobalt". This channel contains disinformation spread by EV companies. It is a shame.
When I worked in heavy industry, one product was a power train for mining trucks. The engine, generator, and traction motors were the same as in certain locomotives. Each motor would be in the hub of a huge wheel. Electric motors can be used briefly at a current beyond the continuous rating. In climbing the haul road from the bottom of a pit, one mine was overheating the motors. To speed the trip, they were given trolley power. The truck could use diesel or batteries but rely on the (2-wire) trolley for the long haul.
One method to extract lithium from seawater is to recover it from the brine sludge generated by desalination plants. This is normally pumped back in the ocean but perhaps lithium and other minerals could be extracted before the sludge is returned to the ocean. Perhaps you could look into this.
That is a fantastic idea and would help to make desalination cheaper. Although I am a bigger supporter of landscape restoration for cleaner water and encouraging methods to use less water in the first place but it's not feasible with our demand for clean water in many places.
"Natural" gas cars are actually quite interesting since biomethane can be produced, indirectly capturing CO2. Here in Switzerland, they put 30% biomethane in the gas. The converted engine can still burn normal fuel, the conversion process is cheap and simple. It could be a great alternative while waiting for EVs to go cheap and green.
Rosie, your pieces (and Dave's Just Have a Think) have absolutely delighted me- you consciously make a clear and pretty successful shot and 'de Greeking" complex technical issues. You did pose a bit of a question, in the opening seconds, about "why does this have to be so hard". The answer to that doesn't lay in hard science, rather in sociology and large crowd behavior study, which I am not any more qualified to speak on that your hard science part. But the why of so many people fighting is fairly simple to see and define here in the "Colonies", "Murica, if you must; Big Auto doesn't want to do this, Big Oil doesn't want to do this, Big Coal doesn't want to do this, Big Utility doesn't want to do this, and the list goes on to the smaller players. Taken on their own, these groups aren't enough to "tip the balance", so through lobbying politicians and buying them off through legal means, TV teasers, public "information projects", and purely lying, they try to gain allies and make them noisier than they deserve to be. Additonally, there is a conservative streak, even in fairly progressive minds, that takes a strong motivation to make a hard turn from one direction to another- especially when they feel they might be publicly"found out " and suffer public ridicule. Ultimately, a watershed change must occur in the way ALL men and women think about their world- a much greater public ethic and honesty will be needed or shady operators on the fringes of lithium or other essential materials will undercut and obviate all our efforts in the name of personal profit. Thank you again for both your work and your ability to reach out and find other experts, more specifically expert than yourself, to help us navigate all this! FR
Great presentation. Would be good to include the magnitudes, today almost half comes from the Atacama salar and half from the spodumene deposit in Australia, and almost all is process in China and Japan; with the transport variable playing a key roll. This is going to change when we go from Hundreds of GW to Hundreds of TW. How?
I did intend to address this, but maybe it wasn't very clear. As demand increases we'll need to move to lower grade resources, which are available in the locations Alex mentioned and were coloured on the maps. Then we talked about how we can make sure that environmental impact is reduced, even as we move to resources that require more energy intensive mining and processing.
Thank you for this discussion. I hadn't realized what went into lithium production. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that in several years, with the ongoing development of solid state batteries, the world will have less need for lithium. But all manufacturing requires resources; it's all a delicate balancing act.
Yes I'm sure that we will develop alternatives for stationary batteries at least. It is crazy to waste expensive lithium where the weight isn't important. Currently li-ion is cheaper than the alternatives, but that will likely change as the competitors develop, and if lithium is in very high demand and prices go up over the next ten years, then the tipping point will come sooner.
Alex mentioned that the ocean has a lot of lithium, but the concentration is low. I am curious if it would economical for a desalinization plant to process the concentrated brine to create a source of lithium.
Today, absolutely not. This tidbit reminds me of "Gold is not rare, we have 20 million tons of it in our oceans", it's true but silly. Desalination just for potable water is expensive as is, the concentration of lithium in its brine low. The problem and opportunity here in a green future however lies in the fact that a massive cost of reverse osmosis desalination is its energy intensity. In a future with endless renewable electricity at close to zero cost, a wealth of options open up. The fact however that there is a number of much more economical alternatives for lithium mining from higher-quality lithium resources, should make ocean mining an incredibly low priority until there are any signs of depletion on land or miraculous breakthroughs in desalination.
You're my favourite informational youtuber. Thank you for making videos! It really helps me put things into perspective and make it really easy to understand.
Hi Rosie, another great video. Beside the mentioned bashing on Lithium there is also a bashing about environmental dangerous processing in lithium production. On that they point out how bad the brine processing is for the local communities. BUT: I found many different statistics about how much of the lithium products is produced were. On serious newspaper here stated, that the Bolivians try to sell lithium from their brine - but they are too expensive to be competitive on the market - that market should be lead by Australian companies. And on top your mentioned recycling is also an interesting topic.
Thanks and I'm so excited you like the editing. I've been working really hard with a new editor to help me getting these videos looking better, so I am glad to hear our hard work is paying off!
I think any 'green' technology, that is not recyclable, is dead on arrival. I also think that the personal automobile, in an urban/suburban location, is itself obsolete. This is especially true if it is expected to protect its occupants while hurtling down the road at over 100 kph. Busses probably have two or three times the efficiency as do personal autos when it comes to kw per passenger mile. It is only in rural areas that the personal auto really makes sense.
Thanks for this comment! I like public transport too, and urban design that allows most people to not need cars. We haven't done a great job of that in Australia unfortunately, so I think personal cars will be here in Aus (and other places with a lot of urban sprawl) for a long time yet. I'm also with you on recyclability being important. I plan to do a couple of videos on lithium battery reuse and recycling. And maybe another video or livestream on wind turbine blade recycling too.
@@EngineeringwithRosie There is a great video from Now You Know suggesting that Disneyland should replace their diesel buses with EVs and how not only would that benefit the company by saving on fuel and giving them good PR, but removing the noise and smells would greatly improve the comfort of visitors. Then they get into how a quiet EV bus could be turned into part of the experience and I really recommend watching it: th-cam.com/video/QIvxgdttkBw/w-d-xo.html
Thanks! You can thank Alex for most of those, many are taken from his (numerous) research articles on these topics. I do spend a lot of time getting the technical graphics right, so I appreciate the positive feedback 😀
What I don't see enough in this conversation is discussion of the fresh water crisis. Many, many, many persons are water-insecure yet live near oceans and seas. Water desalination for drinking and other important human uses is often purported to be too expensive (particularly as the areas that are water-insecure are also mostly areas that are economically poor, though the Arabian peninsula comes to mind as an exception). By locating desalination plants in areas both poor and water-insecure and then locating lithium extraction systems adjacent to the desalination plants so that they can use the already concentrated and processed brine that is the "waste" of the desal process, it seems we could provide a source of income to this communities that would (help?) pay for the desalination plants. The questions I'm not equipped to answer are, 1. Would this actually pay for the entire cost of a desalination plant? In other words, if we thought of this as one plant, not two, with fresh water as a waste product of the preprocessing (which is, of course, more expensive done this way than when pumping seawater into pools where the sun can concentrate the brine, but pure water escapes as vapor and is not captured for use by local communities), could the plant break even? (You wouldn't need it to turn a profit since the fresh water service justifies the profitless operation of such a system) 2. Would it pay for the entire cost of the desal plant if other minerals were also extracted (I'm not sure which minerals or elements could be profitably extracted from desal plant tailings)? 3. Where would this be a reasonable strategy: for instance Ethiopia is poor, water-insecure, and located along the Indian Ocean, but much of its population lives inland on highlands, and it's unlikely we could economically pump desalinated water uphill to them... but maybe I'm wrong about that? Maybe pumping enough water isn't necessarily prohibitively expensive? We have great experience with building oil pipelines, after all. So if desal can be paid for with lithium extraction (and/or extraction of other elements from the brine waste), in how many places would this be economically viable? 4. Considering the number of places this might be a reasonable strategy and the water budget of those locations, how much of the 2030 annual demand would be satisfied solely by extracting lithium from desal plant waste streams? Would desal plants provide enough brine to entirely satisfy the needs of the lithium extraction industry? Supply only a tiny portion of it? Something in between? 5. If this is a viable economic strategy, is it possible that it might only work for the early adopters? Meaning that the economics might work out at current lithium prices, but if lithium operations have a steady stream of essentially free, preprocessed brine, would the lithium price fall and prevent more communities from joining the market later? Thanks for all your work, Rosie. I love what you do.
I still think it is very important to highlight all the impact of old technologies. They are currently using misinformation in the media and when lobbying governments which is delaying the transition to better technologies. So it may be old tech but the full extent of the damage the established industries has caused and is still causing must be highlighted
Yes I agree with you. That's why I wanted to start this interview with a discussion about how EVs are already greener than ICE cars. And I do the same when I talk about recyclable wind turbine blades.
One thing to remember is the role of recycling- already about 1/5 of cobalt is recycled. Hydrometallurgical battery recycling like redwood or Mercedes/promobius will be important zero ish sources of future battery metals. Also green processing like Pilbara mineral mid stream process will reduce energy input. All this will be driven by good EU recycling and CO2 labelling rules
I am happy somebody is asking how much CO2 is being emitted during lithium mining. Nobody asked when govt mandated corn ethanol. And see what looking through “green glasses” caused us.
I realise this video is coming up for its first birthday, however I would have liked to see some comment on recycling lithium ion batteries, as well as replacing lithium and cobalt with sodium and sulphur. On the face of it these two minerals are even more abundant, and easier to purify, and while sodium is heavier than lithium, sulphur is lighter than cobalt. I realise there are technical issues that may make Na/S batteries less efficient or heavier, and may make recycling difficult at present; it would have been good to hear both of these scientists discuss that.
People like abundance. If climate solutions force markets into greater scarcity, people will fight and rebel. (We live in great abundance now, but there are still poor people, because there is still scarcity). I'm glad Rosie understand costs have balance.
the other material we should be concerned with is Neodymium. Up until electric cars the world's usage was extremely small, but with the most efficient motors all based on permanent magnets made from neodymium, it is a concern of mine.
A thought about the comment on there being huge amount of lithium in seawater: Seawater also contains stuff like gold and uranium, and as we will be building lots of water desalination plants and offshore wind farms, floating solar farms and tidal/wave generators to power them, chances are it would also be very easy to start collecting those materials from the non-drinkable water. Has anyone actually made plans or done the math on how much water has to be processed using how much energy to produce anything useful and what would we actually get from such facility? Given the need to overbuild wind and solar so we can power everything and charge batteries for later too even in bad weather, we can pretty safely assume that on good days the overproduction will be more than enough to power any such facility in addition to producing all the pure water we need and electricity sold to other countries.
Hi Rosie! I love your channel! I have a background in sustainable buildings and used to work in community solar so I am super interested in your content!!! I have been mulling on two questions about the transition that we are in at the moment - what might be a sensible approach to drastically reducing or streamlining permitting for mining and refining, some of which includes environmental protection? (everyone is talking about the transition being too slow, if it is go any kind of fast huge new mining expansions are needed much sooner than existing processes seem to allow) - have you heard any good thoughts about sustainability and todays poor? I worry that a reduction in coal production (for example), or food production for climate change reasons can affect pricing across the world, and small increases in price massively disproportionately effect the poor right now. Unfortunately a country own efforts to offset any short or medium term cost increases inside their own country do not help those in other less developed countries. Thanks for your work!
Interesting that you seemed to imply that we should ignore oil, petrol and diesel because they are dying industries and instead focus on making sure that green energy supplies are kept to a higher standard. If oil was being phased out next year I’d possibly agree but I think oil will be with us for the next 100 years so it still needs to clean up it’s act instead of being given a free pass.
@Clive Flint Yes, you're right, I probably overstated that a bit. I know that about 8% of fossil fuels are used for non-combustion purposes, so even once we phase out all burning of fossil fuels there will still be a lot of fugitive emissions left if we ignore emissions there. And if blue hydrogen and/or CCS on fossil fuel power plants becomes a thing the problem will be huge. I have a video coming up in the next month where I talk more about fugitive emissions (specifically from flaring) in fossil fuel extraction. Thanks for the thought-provoking comment!
@Peter Picroc They won't be totally gone, even if the whole world stops burning them in 10-15 years. We use a lot of them as chemical feedstocks for example. Check out the IEA net-zero by 2050 roadmap, they have a good section on what kinds of fossil fuel use they expect to see over the coming decades. You can decide which parts you agree with for yourself, but they do give a lot of information about how the whole net-zero scenario could work out. www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050
Super interesting Rosie, thank you! 👍 In addition to its carbon intensity, it would also be interesting to look at the life cycle of lithium (can we keep what we have mined in a closed loop? If not where is it going at the end of its life? Etc.)
Let's put solar panels on every home, business and covered parking rooftop and switch to electric vehicles making nearly everything we do solar powered while completely decentralizing our power supply and empowering everyone as power generation owners. Solar power is CHEAPER and electric vehicles are soon to be CHEAPER to make and already are considerably CHEAPER to maintain and operate, especially if charged from your own solar power. A 3-5 year ROI (return on investment) for a solar array that will generate power for decades is a no-brainer and the panels can even be made locally too. #EndFossilFuels #SwitchToSolar #SwitchToElectric #GreenNewDeal #EmpowerEveryone
It's not efficient. We will always need a grid (for hospitals and industry, etc), so the grid should be fed by CST plants and wind and geothermal, plus nuclear (SMRs) at latitudes where CST can't be used. This saves millions of panels being made out of toxic elements and having to deal with them at end-of-life. Power Towers use heliostats (mirrors, not solar panels) to harvest heat from the sun (not photons for bumping electrons out of a PV panel) and this process is about 70% efficient, compared to PV panels with efficiencies of 15-22%.
@@PinataOblongata Don't be ridiculous. Solar panel efficiency has little to do with whether all of our consumption and the grid can be solar powered or not. Educate yourself before speaking out against solar power because it makes you seem like but a fossil fuels troll. Most homes and businesses can be 100% net solar with just their existing roof space including solar covered parking and including charging our electric vehicles.
@@sanjuansteve You need to work on your reading comprehension and your own education. Nowhere did I advocate for fossil fuels. Nowhere did I say most RESIDENTIAL houses couldn't be powered by solar, esp with a battery, but like I said, all panels (and batteries) have a carbon footprint to manufacture and present an issue at end-of-life, and there is likely always going to be a need for a grid, so it makes more sense to power the grid with appropriate grid-scale renewable energy and use that. You clearly did not understand the point I was making about efficiency - I did not say PV panels were too inefficient to power a home, I said that grid scale renewable power was MORE efficient than residential PV. This equates to less cost for the consumer, less overall emissions and discarded waste and easier/quicker integration with the current grid tech.
@@PinataOblongata which toxic elements? The majority of solar panels are based on innocent silicon. Things like cadmium an selenium are only used in some specific types of solar panels that have only a very small market share. It is a dishonoust bait and switch to attribute the characteristics of these niche products to all solar panels.
@@PinataOblongata Steve's comment did not say anything about doing away with the grid. Decentral just means that electricity is produced at may locations rather than at a few big powerplants. Grids are extremely useful when switching to decentral renewables. Grids make it possible to even out local weather fluctuations, and reduce the need for storage.
This is a question I've asked alot. What is the ideal co2 level and average temperature of earth? Elevated co2 levels promote plant growth, greenhouse levels can be artificially increased to 700-1800 ppm. Levels between 2500-5000 ppm can cause headaches and levels between 40,000-100,000 can cause death. So reducing co2 levels may actually be just as harmful as Elevated co2 levels. Only time will tell.
The good thing about this is that year’s ago cars had less miles per gallon and manufacturers took more time and energy to produce the cars, petroleum production has a impact also and the transportation of the petroleum and vehicles to customers using shipping and lorries. The new technology will allow greater efficiency in battery technology that’s why better batteries that are already being developed lithium isn’t the only salt and battery’s can be made from salt water you have to have battery cars to develop the battery. Not to mention is not the only technology that is branching off from the change in transportation trams have used electric directly for years not needing a battery we can power lines use hyper loops when developed, Use hydrogen fuel for large transportation until we have solid state batteries or more efficient. Batteries are already more efficient when compared to petroleum when you take all into consideration and your points go to making that point
I see the carbon cost of mining the lithium was counted in the video but I have heard rumors of the rainbow streams by Tibet from irresponsible mining practices in dealing with the heavy metal byproducts of extracting the ore. Is there truth to this and what’s that cost? Also, I have read it takes over 2000 liters of water for half a kilo of lithium. Water is a natural resource too and in certain areas it can be scarce. Plus, does it have to be treated for pollutants? One thing I wish everyone would talk about is do we know what he “right” CO2 level is? Too high and the planet becomes a furnace, too low and the plants and the rest of the world dies too. At one time there were pine trees in the Canadian permafrost (higher CO2) and at another time during the ice age plants almost asphyxiated due to CO2 being within some like 30-50 ppm of not enough. Limestone is basically CO2 sequestered by the planet and natural processes that occurred, coral reefs sequester carbon. There may be a general trend on the planet to sink a certain amount of carbon naturally and that amount of carbon may need to be replaced at whatever amount that is. So if we are so all powerful as to dictate the the climate of the planet by controlling carbon, where do we set the level? If we set it at 800ppm maybe plants will grow in the Sahara? That may slow the heat rejection from the soil and the planet may not warm as much as expected. We may need to temper the rate of that swell as to give the planet a chance to react,for sure. But who’s saying that 2C will end the earth? I have seen winters grow more mellow and have not experienced a summer as hot as in my youth. The hurricanes, El Niño and La Niña seem to be within a normal fluctuation. Forest fires, volcanoes, solar minimus, solar maximus, the moon’s angle to the equator all sway the numbers some how do we tell what is normal? Ice core data is as high as 5000ppm but there was still life. I am not saying we should just go run amuck but we should be not yanking the emergency stop either to blame carbon fr all the evils of global climate change, remember when all fats in our diet was bad? Yup another knee jerk reaction. We should be able to rationally discuss and debate what the data is telling us so we can come up with a plan that is good for the whole planet without plastering a label on someone with a different viewpoint and making them a target for gangster style social media attack. I watched a Ted talk and I am sorry I don’t remember the name of the speaker but he was fantastic. It was about the elephants of South Africa and how rotational grazing could have saved thousands of elephants that were culled because what they were taught in school about how the land supported only a certain number of elephants was wrong. We should take a lesson for that gentleman and really put our thinking caps on before we make super strict edicts about a subject so complicated. We do not fully comprehend all the implications. We cannot even live without external support on the ocean floor for generations or colonize Mars yet. How can we say we understand the global climate fully? If we treat one another with respect, and debate as friends so that our words are kind as they would be to a loved one, we can solve this TOGETHER! Like an astronaut we’ve all heard, one small step for man, one giant step for mankind. And before you roast my pronouns that’s man as in human and humankind,ok? 😉😁
We need to use other batteries or technologies for different scenarios. Li-Ion batteries aren’t the best solution for every problem. Na-Ion, flow batteries, liquid metal batteries and many other energy storage techniques make much more sense for fixed installations. I like the durability of Iron-Nickel batteries.
first of all complements to you for the clrity of the material. It is not only the Lithium but also the other minerls, for example required for the type of battery: cobalt nickel, manganese, fosfor, aluminium, carbon (anode) electrolite. Copper (for the electric cables) etc. and for processing the minerals to be ready to be used in the battery. these chemicals are all required get to a working end product. (simpple example teh the ammount of water a chip Fabricaiton requires huge ammounts of very clean/ pure water several 1000 of liters per chip/ wafer).
I think we're focusing too much in converting our current ways of transport to electric, when there's a much lower hanging fruit we should also address: The need for cars. A lot of people don't drive cars by choice, but because they don't have an option, and they're really expensive. Alternatives like public transport, bikes and electric scooters are much more affordable and emit way less emissions, but they're unfeasible in many places because how cities are designed, how cities disallow mixed zoning, and how corporations demand workers to be present even when it's not really necessary. Some problems are easy to fix: Replacing some car lanes by bus and bike lanes (protected ones). Reduce speeds. Reduce the need for cars. Invest in trains. Etc. I strongly recommend the channels "Not Just Bikes" and "Eco Gecko".
Great video , thanks for the insights. Lastly I saw a video about the bio economy. Some scientist said that our total yearly raw material use is much higher than all plants on earth grow together in one year. What do you think about this?
New theme music? Also I was wonder what you thought about off-shore wind potential in Australia? Bass Straight, West Coast of Tasmania, Eyre Peninsula, South of WA?
Unlike oil Lithium can be recycled and that process needs to be using renewable energy. One time carbon costs extracting something that can be used 1000 times over to reduce our carbon dependence and power our future should not be viewed like coal, oil or gas.
Definitely, and I am sure we will be recycling a lot of it in the near future (that's a topic I have in mind for the channel). With all the growth in the industry though, it will be a while before there is enough retiring batteries to recycle all the lithium we need for new batteries. So I do think it is good to clean up lithium mining (and every other kind of mining) to the maximum extent possible.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Plastics industry has been green washing its recyclabltiy for decades. With tokens efforts by its producers, to avoid regulation requiring it. Now we are drowning in unrecyclable waste plastic. Lithium batteries need regulation to make recycling the more cost effective option. Such as adding a VAT (ie deposit) that only recyclers would get at the end of its life. Pollution is more than just excesses CO2.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Still, the point is that you shouldn't account the whole environmental cost of mining the lithium against the first EV battery it goes into, it should be spread over a number of EVs where that lithium will end up (plus your best guess at recycling cost at that future time, of course). Anyway, it's great to hear that the mining can be improved further! I'm sure it'll work out cheaper for them in the long run too.
Why do people think grid-tied batteries only come in lithium favour? There are bigger and better batteries with zero lithium in them and also work a lot better and last longer and they are cheaper because they use cheaper materials
Iron- air and molten metal. Way to go for stationary storage. With just a tad of lithium batteries on top to handle the fast swings in the grid as these other batteries seem to be kind of sluggish.
Absolutely! I covered thermal batteries already on this channel th-cam.com/video/72wkuIvUISs/w-d-xo.html And I will talk about gravity storage (Energy Vault, Gravitricity etc) in my next livestream. I do have plans to do project visits for videos on pumped hydro and flow batteries, however state borders are currently closed in Australia so I need to wait for that to end.
If extracting from brines underground is useful, how about extracting from the giant salt mines we use to just dig it out and scatter it all over the roads in the northern US?
Rosie, have you seen the peer review paper on the millions of USD washed away of Lithium as a by-product of fracking in the USA - they saying up to 16.5 million was being lost per well
The diesel argument never stood up to scrutiny though. The only good-faith argument that could have been made for diesel is that it was *marginally* better than petrol in terms of CO2. The argument for moving to EVs is much stronger.
I wonder if we could do IX (ion exchange) in the ocean to pull lithium out. Just need the right resin. Lithium sulfur batteries to remove cobalt and increase power density by 5x. What have you heard about lithium recycling? That could upskill and employ displaced coal miners in the future.
There is some information available on the battery industry showing that they have practically decarbonised, however its not clear how much of the embedded carbon come from mining, or even whether this is included or not in the battery industry figures. VW claim carbon neutrality, and Tesla seem to say they are close in their environment reports. Tesla also state the embedded energy in their EVs is the same as a combustion vehicle, so they are certainly no worse than a combustion car. Other factors are that Lithium is not the main material used in Lithium batteries by weight, cobalt, Nickel, Maganese, Aluminium can be used but so can Iron. LFP batteries are likely to make to the majority of EV and grid batteries due to limitations in Nickel supply..not Lithium.
Water vapor as a greenhouse gas is ten times stronger than CO2, extracting lithium from seawater releases vast amounts of water vapor as evaporation is the main process. When expanded to the scale needed for an all EV car in about 10 years plus the expansion of copper production releasing more CO2 for electric motors just about will balance out the operational benefits, if factoring in population growth we might start leaning to the deficit side.
One step forward would be to stop using Li batteries for static applications such as storing energy from wind and solar farms. There are better alternatives such as the ZnBr plating/flow battery and the Sb, Ca liquid metal battery. There are also a range of redox batteries using Fe or V. None of them degrade over time and all are from easily available materials. This would free up Li for mobile applications.
Great video Rosie! I love how you weaved in the interview and asked great questions. One suggestion for a future video would be to include environmental justice issues when it comes to lithium and rare earth mineral mining in places like Bolivia, Congo, Zimbabwe etc especially in indigenous communities. I would be absolutely honored to collaborate on such a video if you’re interested.
well with tesla doing 930k vehicles in 2021 I feel most criticism are campaigns from environmental activists and oil companies promoting fud. Now can it become "greener" yes but everything comes down to production.
Saying that we have enough lithium to meet current and near-term expected demand is not the same as having enough lithium to complete a full transition to a green economy. There is only enough land lithium reserves to convert half of current vehicles to EVs, even though that won't occur overnight. This is not counting all the battery capacity needed for solar and wind power plant generation. Once ocean mining begins, dilution continually increases the cost and energy needed to extract more and more. A detriment to solar and wind energy generation, which already suffers from low EROI. Recycling lithium also lowers EROI. Lower EROI causes degrowth (perpetual economic recession), which is a good and necessary thing to address climate change, but also why governments and voters are the reason the world isn't moving as fast as it needs to towards decarbonization.
Are we going to be able to make an environmentally friendly Lion battery any time soon?... The Li supply and the supply of other scarce (or environmentally dear) metals can become sustainable and decrease in environmental impact in a "cradle to cradle" life cycle. That is: product design, manufacturing, and end-of-life are all based on reduction/reuse/recycling of these materials. Continual design improvements reduce the amount of the targeted materials needed or eliminate them. Life extension of components through reuse (e.g., used car batteries become grid-storage batteries). And, products and components are designed for economic disassembly and materials recovery/recycling to become feedstock for another iteration of the continually improving product cycle(s), (e.g., Redwood Materials model). This approach gradually increases the amount of scarce/environmental-impacting materials in the cradle to cradle system, leading to decreasing dependance on virgin materials. Cradle to cradle design/implementation also drives down product cost over time.
Redwood Materials, a startup created by Tesla cofounder J.B. Straubel to profitably recycle lithium-ion batteries, is partnering with ERI, North America's biggest processor of electronic waste, to gain access to thousands of tons of cells it can turn back into valuable raw materials. They appear to be able to recycle 97% of the battery materials into raw materials for new battery construction. They plan to supply 100gwh of battery materials by 2025.
Yeah Redwood Materials sounds quite promising. But first we need a few decades of intense mining to produce these products (that later will be recycled) in the first place.
@@Simon-dm8zv Certainly not decades of heavy mining. This work will be completed this decade. I expect world production of 20 million cars by 2025. And I am low-balling it compared to ArcInvest and others. Right a 5-10 year pull while oil production drops quickly. There are plenty of lithium reserves. I am more worried about Nickel than anything else.
@@Simon-dm8zv Sorry to pop back in... love the topic. There is another few pieces to it. LFP batteries don't use nickel or cadmium. LFP license restrictions begin to lift in just a few months. Only China can build them now, and that ends in 2022. I think there are a number of manufacturers gearing up to produce batteries with different chemistries. Iron-air, and Aluminum-air technologies look promising for large scale stationary application. This frees up higher power density packs. What do you think the Sodium-Iron battery? 1/3 the cost of lithium, 2/3 the power of lithium. 2x the power per dollar...
Thanks for the tip John, and also Simon for the info you added. I really want to make a video on li-ion battery recycling, maybe I'll see if I can chase down a guest from Redwood.
Rosie, an afterword; oil will not go away even if we outlaw using it for an automotive and or airplane fuel stock. It will not, I guarantee that! Take a very good look the next time you go shopping- groceries, new frock, new auto; all that plastic in the wrappings, fascia, etc? Most of it is based on molecules from crude oil not used in fuel production and most of it has even greater environmental hazard potential than the lighter elements the fuel is drawn from. Back in the '60s and '70s Big Oil, meaning at least five of the seven world spanning oil corps, were spending hundreds of millions of dollars to discover what other parts and fractions of that crude could be turned into a salable product. Those products are over burdening our waste land fills, clogging our storm water drains, littering our oceans and threatening marine life, fresh and salt water, all over the world. They may be even more dangerous in the long run that the aromatics our present piece is talking about. This was part of what my other response today was alluding too. All I can say, is like many of your countrymen and women I have met (I worked as a specialty training assistant for a petrochemical consulting/training outfit- I have got to help train and meet many of the "youngsters" who drive and make your domestic oil and coal industry go), you are near fearless and have all the tools and attitude to make others take you seriously and meaningfully- both OZ and all the places where these pieces go are better for what you do. I grew up around the oil industry, from exploring to drilling to refining and transportation, I have "been there, done that", and I have taken a paycheck from it too, but all my employers knew my politics- and been pretty green my whole life; I detested the "smell of money" when I was a child and still do, yet I have never gotten over the thrill of letting 600 or more carbon fueled horsepower loose to fly. We ALL will need to make changes and adjustments or decarbonization isn't very likely to occur before we have done truly irreparable harm to our ecology and planet. PS; If you want help from these folks, I'll give you a clue; all of those folks named in my Big this that and the other list are total slaves to their bottom lines- give them a way to make a good profit, maybe not the obscene one they are just now, and they might be willing to quit dragging their feet so hard. Most of them survived from being Big Coal in the 19th century! FR
Rosie did not claim oil will go away anytime soon. The most important thing is to stop combusting oil as soon as we can. Petrochemical products only make up less than 10% of a barrel of oil and as long as these products are not burned, no significant emissions are caused.
HI Frederic, yep you're right. I actually have a video coming up about fugitive emissions from fossil fuels (sepcifically about gas flaring, but we talk a little about methane leaks as well) and I'm aware that even we stop burning it we'll still need about 8% of curent levels of fossil fuels (according to IEA estimates) for feedstocks etc. Definitely a problem that needs solving on its own.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Rosie- save me a seat- I will be there! FWIW, I grew up in a "Big Oil" family and have been either on the family fringe or actually employed from the Gulf of Mexico as a roustabout to teaching aid in Thailand at updating and improving engineering skills. Most of my "experience" is the hands on ,OJT variety. Just a note, so you will have a "meter stick" to judge anything I bring! FR
I think the different standards are fair enough as with electrification of transport being pushed (or even forced in some places, despite the increased purchase and even charging costs and all the other inconveniences etc), then people want to make sure the "green" alternative is actually significantly better for the environment than the current status quo.
😂 I assumed they will put the water back in the ocean once they take the lithium out, but perhaps that's a naive assumption! Seriously though, I think we are many decades away from needing to take any lithium out of the oceans and then there is millions of years worth in there so it will take a while to make a dent on that resource.
@@EngineeringwithRosie thanks for replying. If we replace every ICE vehicle on Earth with an EV we will very quickly need to be mining sea water. I believe the answer is not hi-tech but rather simplification. In the 1950s many households did not have a fridge or a car. That is approximately equilibrium we need to strive for which combines a 'modern' life that is reasonably sustainable. Preferably we should accept a 1920s lifestyle which will allow undeveloped nations to also enjoy an improvement in their lives. Few cars, very little international travel, a simple wardrobe, less consumption.
The approach that you take in this video which is common to most videos of this type i too present "electric vehicles" as the solution to all the worlds woes. There is no discussion of the limitations, types of vehicles, lack of desirability to existing and enthusiast motorists etc. As a mechanical engineer specialising in vehicle dynamics and working with both electric vehicles and ICE powered vehicles I recognise that this issue is far more complex than the simplified and idealised versions that are usually resented by the advocates. Ultimately I believe (and this view is shared by many engineers in the electric car industry) that while EVs are part of the solution to transport infrastructure they do not provide the complete answer
Thanks for the comment, and I take your point but I am not sure I agree with it applying to this specific video. After all, this whole video is about whether and how we can solve one of the *problems* associated with having heaps of EVs. I don't think I said very much (anything?) about EVs solving all the world's woes. In other videos, maybe, definitely in conversation (I am enthusiastic about how many problems EVs can help solve). So I'll keep it in mind for the future.
If ICE is banned as it will be then enthusiast motorists will just have to use it. And frankly that catagory is not even single digits in terms of global transport. Even if we accepted that enthusiast motorists don't like EVs.
@@tcroft2165 this is exactly the short term thinking that I am referring to. Why would ICE be banned? It makes no sense. Most of the automotive industry is working flat out on ICE while paying lip service to the politicians and their green lobby groups
@@jamesmccabe5188 Multiple countries already have ICE ban dates set. That number will only grow. (In reality for advanced economies they will be mostly EV/H before their bans such is the speed of movement.) Much of the auto industry is building for the transition now. If you look at new models to be launched 23/4-> most are EV or hybrids.
@@jamesmccabe5188 Agreed, this knee jerk reaction is a bit interesting. Making the high volume emitters like SUVs and crossovers PHEV or BEV would solve a vast majority of the emisions in developed nations, then developing affordable BEV city cars (which will most likely come from China or an automated Tesla factory) with a solid charging solution will solve most of the rest. If someone wants to buy that manual shift ICE sports car to drive through the canyons on a Sunday morning or at a track day then so be it, enthusiast sports cars contribute virtually nothing when perspective is used, less than a rounding error in the whole global warming equation.
As we in the United States would like to forget about the debacle in Afghanistan, the Chinese will help their neighbors so China can develop the huge Afghanistan lithium deposits. (The China lithium Road)
Can we just skip the car entirely and switch over to VTOL’s as there isn’t a great benefit from switching to a new tech that isn’t really a huge set of features +
Well I think there are literally hundreds of VTOL companies trying hard to make that happen! I am not sure I believe that will ever "take off" to the extent that we don't need ground cars, but let's see.
I do think there where very little thoughts on what resources that will be needed if the amount of lithium produced is to be increased by nearly 10 times in just a few years. Projected marked is not the same as production and at the moment there development of new production is lagging a lot. You should dig a little deeper in these subject.
All mining is CO2 intensive. Recycling makes any vehicle type greener. An ICE car is made of recycled iron. But Lithium is new, there isn’t enough mined already to recycle. Once there is enough mined to recycle it will be as green as can be. The Oil Industry needs to make cash. If it can’t sell you fossil fuel at the pump, it will sell you hydrogen made from fossil fuels, 1 ton of Hydrogen produces 9 tons of CO2… but you won’t see this in their ads. Nor will you see the fact that Afghanistan has hundreds of millions of tons Lithium & Copper the EV metals as measured by USGS. But its a threat to Oil… so unlike Iraq, there was a great hurry to exit rather than extract as Lithium demand grew. Unlike oil demand… Before anyone mentions green hydrogen… it won’t scale but is great PR for the Oil industry. Green hydrogen loses half the value of the energy put into make it. All carbon capture tech from the oil industry leaks, and only there for PR.
on desalination devices you can get easily Lithium out of sea water. I guess that's the source Israel uses for their nuclear weapons. As you desalinate your water you access easily salts with relative high content of Lithium. So that's a part of supply from sea water which is very easily accessible as you're in need of sweet water.
Cars seem to be an outmoded concept..... The use of personal vehicles for moving around seems to be replaced by mass transit..... Most drivers appear to be incompetent anyway.....
Thank you for acknowledging that we need to do a lot of mining to decarbonize. "Planet of the Humans" also talked about this problem, unfortunately the film's conclusion was that we must continue with fossil fuels because the alternatives are even worse. This conclusion is totally false, although if we still had 1960's technology it would be true. (Back then it took more energy to make a solar cell than the amount of energy you could ever possibly get back.) Yes, there are environmental costs to decarbonizing, the good news is that it is well worth it because we have much better technology than we had before.
Mining lithium isn't really the problem. I'm sure there will be many companies happily making batteries and selling those. The issue is that batteries in general have a very limited lifespan. People don't tend to care when it's in their phones, because phones are made obsolete every 2 years anyway (Ludicrous nobody talks loudly about that). But take any tool you expect to use for longer: a cordless version is always inferior to a version with a cable because the battery will be dead in a couple years. Then you have to buy said battery again AND throw away the old one. Or your tool is dead weight and garbage as well. Unless you are one of the ultra few people who can actually rebuild something to use a cable. The cars I've had, I've all had for 8 to 12+ years. That would have been several battery packs over the lifetime of each of them. There are significant costs involved with replacing those packs. Some figures talk about 60 to 75% of the cost of a car. That's akin to re-buying what you already paid for several times over ... because why? And that happens to the millions of tons of batteries at the end of their lifespan? I'm not well enough informed about that, i.e. nobody talks about that. What with batteries being fairly hazardous while they are actively being used (ask any fire department about quenching an electric vehicle that's on fire), will they fill up our landfills and be a time bomb there or what?
I've got my doubts. Both ICE and Ev vehicles weight a ton or more and transport a few 100lbs of passenger and groceries (for instance). Let's just say a ton/car. That's not a good start. Imagine public rail running everywhere, made of small pods (300lbs each) moving on electric rail or elevated track. Everyone is using, maintaining, and supplying electricity too one system. We'd eliminate the behemoths we currently ride in. One low mass system that serves everyone efficiently, gaining the labor (and inclusion) of the poor into the economy. We aren't even talking about real efficiencies, just replacing (at least those who can afford a car to begin with) one ICE car with another car.
In case anyone is sceptical about EVs being greener than ICE cars (or who wants evidence to give to sceptics) I love this site to compare the lifetime greenhouse gas emissions and cost of electric vs internal combustion (and hydrogen and hybrid) cars. You can play around with all the assumptions in the "customise" settings, so cool! www.carboncounter.com/#!/explore
I think it's still important to be critical of electric cars, since they're not the only option. Personal transport is inherently less energy efficient than public transportation systems, especially on rail where you have less rolling resistance and no need for batteries.
@@-vaniii-Rail is only efficient where you have the population density to support it. If full autonomy happens, then a car just becomes a different sized bus. The problem with busses today, is they stop too often, making them slow. I think eventually we will have a variety in size, and the service will be faster, and cheaper than private vehicles. For one, they will drop you off at the front door. You won't need to park them. Obviously, when there are many vehicles, you will want to put people together that are coming from, or going to the same place.
@@fjalicsa higher population density should be the goal anyway, it saves money on every kind of infrastructure and makes pathways much shorter. Low density Suburbs are a Desaster on every metric from obesity rates to carbon footprint and should be urbanized ASAP.
Should there not be a distance travelled setting too?
Only with ICE vehicles, most of the lifetime emissions seem to be from burning fuel. Whereas in EVs the production emmisions are more (assuming the production cycles are equally "decarbonised") of the lifecycle emissions.
So for low-use usecases (assuming I cycle 99% of journeys), it would be interesting to see where the break-even point is.
Battery no last forewer, there is no recycling of battery and you compare gas again "perfect forever single battery" analysis is fake
Lithium is pretty common, but do we really need ANY for grid storage?
We developed lithium-ion to make light weight rechargeable batteries for hand drills and then phones..
So when we needed light car batteries, we just went with what we already had.
Grid storage doesn't need to be light weight, so we can go with a different chemistry
Simple, cheap, heavy minerals can be used in grid storage instead, or something like a redox-flow battery for bulk storage.
Or maybe thermal, gravity, flywheel etc storage will prove the most efficient.
There is a lot of exciting experimentation still to be done in this field! :)
I think Australia has a unique opportunity to develop green mining techniques, because we have the minerals and solar radiation in the one place in vast amounts.
I think concentrated solar smelters would be perfect!
I would love to see Heliogen style concentrated solar, applied to smelting and refining Australian minerals, it can make 1000+ degrees C from sunlight!
And smelting metals is a huge energy burner and carbon maker.
Oh man, you have just listed about 75% of the topics I have on my list for the rest of this year! Great minds think alike hey? I did already cover thermal storage once, so check that out in this link below. For the other topics please check back over the next few months!
th-cam.com/video/72wkuIvUISs/w-d-xo.html
Li is very good at grid services and instant response. Given the vast scale of deployment now and in the future the costs are likely to make it the cheapest form of grid battery storage in the 4hr market and likely up to 8hr in future. Redox looks likely to be commercial only over longer storage periods.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Excellent! I look forward to those.. It's a fascinating emerging industry.. I'm hoping Heliogen style concentrated solar will take of in a big way in Oz.. :)
@@tcroft2165 Yes, good point, you need some fast response batteries to smooth out the power supply and gain grid stability; and the battery alternatives haven't proven they can do that yet.
But I think other chemistry options will be explored. Lithium is good, but a grid battery can be very bulky and heavy, it just can't be expensive..
@@D_Rogers CSP has been very much the bridesmaid not the bride in solar tech. Its still much more expensive (~3x PV) and has limited deployment. However it might be a good fit for Aus climate.
All going to come down to if the better economics of PV+dramatically falling storage costs still undercut it.
I'm glad you addressed the issue of the different standards in a lot of media. Alex's point about addressing these issues now was very good and noname bringing up diesel is fair. My issue is the way the headlines often make it sound like "big E vehicle" is trying to trick us. It's just dishonest.
I agree with you, and I think it's quite common for all green technologies. Do a search for "dirty little secret" in the news tab of Google and you'll see it in headlines on articles about all kinds of green techs, wind turbine blades, wind turbine towers, solar panels... pretty much everything. It's my most hated headline because the articles are always very lazy and skewed.
@@EngineeringwithRosie The stupidity and lies are quite annoying in their blatant obviousness. No, using that same mined material to make an EV or wind turbine instead of an internal combustion engine is not going to retroactively increase the amount of pollution the mining already produced. No, it is not going to magically make the materials impossible to recycle either. And no, the possibility of there being few ICE vehicles and coal plants still in use in 2100 does not mean we need to stop using renewables and build more coal mines or that the oil company owners should be given any more taxpayer money.
No environmentalist worth listening to would complain that green tech that causes massively less pollution than fossil fuels should not be used because "it is not zero!". And if they start spewing crap about windmills killing more birds than there exist in the area when the fossil fuels that turbine is replacing cause thousands of human deaths every year, well, they are clearly so full of shit the only way they can be of any benefit to Earth and humanity is using them as fertilizer.
Big E vehicle is still selling something though. Private cars will always be way worse in climate impact vs public transit and cycling.
Thank you for the long form deep dives, I really appreciate your channel🙏
Thanks! I am always trying to make the videos 10-12 minutes (and failing obviously) so it's nice to hear that some people appreciate the extra depth!
Lithium mining is exponentially better than oil and gas extraction. It doesn’t need to be green, just better than the existing energy sources. This isn’t even a question. 👍
How? It takes 500,000 gallons of water for 1 ton of Lithium, harmful effects are found up to 150 miles from Lithium extraction sites.. you can't even recycle more then 2% of a Lithium battery, so how are they better again?
Total co2 emissions over 20 YEARS?????? Are you going to keep your electric car for 20 years? Do you really think Tesla or other electric car manufacturers will be happy about that?
Aren't you going to get one of these attractive leasing options and change your car every 3-5 years? Of course, there is nothing wrong with it because poor people will buy and use your "garbage."
One difference between animals and us is that we walk happily to the slaughterhouse
Exponentially better? Very puzzle about this expression.
@@stevek5600 Here in France, we have a lithium resource in underground brines, which is large enough to cover the Li needs of the whole country several times over... and it would use NO water to extract that lithium.
Where does your number come from? It is actually a rhetorical question as I know where it comes from: 10+ years old data from the early extraction of lithium from salt flats in Chile. Firstly, as Alex Grant said in the video, lithium extraction processes vary greatly from one another, and secondly, the process used in Chile has improved its water consumption greatly over the last 10 years. So, your number, while having been true, isn't anymore... by far!
Also, lithium from end-of-life batteries can be and IS recycled with efficiency around 98%... not 2 %.
Lithium must be mined ethically, making sure the countries and landowners are compensated and treated fairly. Too often the resource benefits the mining company leaving a mess for others to cleanup.
This is true for any resource, not just lithium. Conversely, lithium and other materials utilized by battery technology should not immediately be held to a higher standard than we apply to the extraction of other resources. Raise the standard for all resources or leave it alone. The economic consequences of singling out those resources being committed to fight climate change in an effort to maintain a cost disparity with the current fossil-based technologies will be dire in the future.
We currently don't even have the will to significantly penalize intentional and unintentional release of fossil methane. How will we get the will to suddenly apply ethics to resource extraction? Don't get me wrong, I am a strong advocate for enforcing ethical behavior when that behavior is not voluntary. I see an economy that is more consumed with how far one can push legal limits rather than consider the ethical grounds of an action. I may have become too cynical but I don't see many actions by corporations that soften my position.
@@mrhickman53 Well the thing is you kinda do have to apply a higher standard to the resources used in the fight against climate change because it won't be possible to truly fight climate change if we don't end the exploitation of the global south. Exploitation is by definition not sustainable, if our green energy is premised on imperialist exploitation then that energy supply isn't actually secure or stable because revolutions and uprisings will inevitably happen whether you like them or not. Not to mention it means jack shit if the mining equipment is electric if we're still cutting down Amazon rain forest and spilling pollutants out into the local environment when mining the resource. The climate crisis isn't solely about global warming, it's also about habitat destruction and the alarmingly high extinction rate, the global climate can still collapse if that keeps going even if carbon emissions reach zero.
The green energy transition absolutely has to happen equally everywhere, otherwise it will fail. People living in the global south won't give a shit about the carbon reductions from using lithium battery if the lithium mine killed the local ecosystem and polluted their groundwater. Not taking this into account is exactly why currently the global south is modernizing using mostly fossil fuels.
@@hedgehog3180 So don't do good because one cannot do perfect. That is a recipe for stalemate and ultimate collapse of the environment as we currently enjoy it.
Should extraction of minerals be better regulated? Absolutely, but not at the expense of carrying on as usual burning fossil fuels (extracted once and consumed) rather than extracting materials for batteries, magnets and conductors, all which are recyclable.
We are in a crisis now, not merely trying to avoid some future crisis. We have not made sufficient headway in reducing emissions to afford the luxury of resting while we develop cleaner methods of extraction. We must both extract and develop better methods. Transportation is cleaner with BEV's today with current extraction practices and electrical energy production than fossil fuels. Improving both permits transportation to become yet cleaner.
While every one of your concerns are valid, correcting practices in order to address those concerns should be goals with plans that permit economies to survive while meeting goals for minimising global climate impact.
Great piece, Rosie, but I wish you'd addressed the flipside of "availability": cost. Around minute 5:05 in the video, after hearing of the trillions of tonnes of Li in the oceans, we see a cost curve. The curve suggests that the Li stock in the oceans would cost 8X more to extract than what we currently take from the Atacama. Of course, "trillions in the ocean" sounds great, but is useless if the price point makes batteries uncompetitive.
Would love to hear you more on this: how much *low-cost* Li is available (and, corollary, what are the prospects for lowering the cost of the resources further up the cost curve)?
Thanks.
Cost does not matter to religious zealots. This issue is not so cut and dry when one goes reading the censored opposition. What bothers me is that toxic pollution is generally ignored in favor of whatever circus show frightens the most people into surrendering their rights.
There’s other things in the ocean that could be gotten concurrent to the lithium like manganese which we actually have a shortage of but are found plentiful in the ocean, also potassium in good amounts. Even small amounts of uranium and even gold although much smaller quantities. We would also get huge amounts of sodium which can be used for other things. After getting all the minerals out you could have pure water left which can be used for drinking water and crops which is another added value.
My mathematics may not be very good, but doesn't .2ppm of lithium suggest that to service demand in 2030, over 10 trillion tonnes of ocean would need to be processed each year? That is 30 billion tonnes per day, every day. Is that even possible? Of course lithium would still be mined from conventional deposits, I am just observing that while there may be a lot of lithium in the oceans, a lot of ocean water would need to be processed.
@@kenhnsy lol "surrendering our rights" to pollute with fossil fuels, give me a damn break. This isn't a question of freedom it's how do we stop a huge environmental disaster
The relationship between cost and co2 is one most people overlook, and I'm glad your guest touched on that because it doesnt get said enough.
there are a handful of technologies which have wildly disproportionate co2 emissions per cost due to chemical processes other than hydrocarbon combustion, like concrete production.
but cost is usually a good indicator with small error bars, and for back of the envelope doesnt require a phd thesis to analyze every part of the supply chain for the emissions of some process/equipment/consumable.
Of Note: There is some large scale mining equipment that IS electrical driven by an umbilical power cable. It's hardly new technology.
Hopefully the extraction project at the Salton Sea (California) will advance rapidly. They will be using geothermal energy for that project
So glad I subscribed. Absolute top-tier science journalism: thorough, balanced, accurate - including language. The summaries at the end of each section are particularly skillful and supports a high comprehension and retention rate. Not only that, stylistically it is very pleasant to watch: over 5 minutes but under 20, minimal use of stock footage.
Thanks that's really nice feedback and very useful to me to hear what aspects you like so I know to continue those in future videos.
At least when you mine lithium to make batteries, the batteries can be used to store and supply energy over a certain amount of time. When you extract petroleum to burn as a fuel, it must immediately and continuously be replaced.
Yep, for sure. And these lithium batteries are for sure going to be recycled since they have so many valuable chemicals in them.
I’ve been thinking about this forever but didn’t have time to research it myself. Thank you for this!
Also Lithium is a small part of the Li ion battery so the perception that we will need a mountain of it is skewed by the name of the battery. It's one of the reasons the LFP batteries are so promising since the other two materials used are so cheap and easily mined. The only problem with rare earths is that a large number of mines are needed since their deposits are scattered all around the globe in lower quantities. Then there is the graphite which needs to be mined also, so ensuring raw materials come from responsible mining practices should be advertised when purchasing a new vehicle, just like how the blood diamond controversy lead to transparency of raw material origins in that industry.
Mine trees for Graphite !
Interestingly, an Australian start-up, Hazer Group, has developed the "Hazer Process" which converts bio-methane into green hydrogen and industrial grade graphite which is ideally suited to battery production.
arena.gov.au/projects/the-hazer-process-commercial-demonstration-plant/#:~:text=The%20Hazer%20Process%20is%20a,the%20feedstock%20as%20solid%20graphite.
Good idea!
What do so-called "rare earth" elements have to do with EV batteries? None is used in batteries! Some of those elements (mainly samarium and neodymium) are used in small quantities to manufacture magnets, used in some, but not all, EV motors. However, a) as already said, some EV motors don't have magnets (so-called induction motors), and b) newer magnet generations contain no "rare earth" element!
BTW, an ICE vehicle also contains "rare earth" elements, although admittedly less.
Fun fact "rare earth" elements are neither "earth", but metals, nor "rare" at all. This name is historical, dating back to the 18th century. The scientifically correct name for those metals are "lanthanides", to which is historically associated Scandium and Yttrium, which are not lanthanides.
You are talking about a 1000lb lithium battery with toxic, carcinogenic cobalt, nitrate, phosphate compounds that will almost certainly not recycled. An EV battery also has electronic components that contain heavy metals that are toxic and carcinogenic. They will almost NEVER recycled. An EV is an electrical machine run by electronic devices like a big computer. Even if you ignore the battery, the EV car itself is highly toxic and carcinogenic. Lithium is KNOWN to he evil. Lithium mines have kill all the salt lakes in Chiles killing countless numbers of life forms. In Congo, they call cobalt "BLOOD cobalt". This channel contains disinformation spread by EV companies. It is a shame.
This is half of a real conversation I would expect from educated unbiased people.
When I worked in heavy industry, one product was a power train for mining trucks. The engine, generator, and traction motors were the same as in certain locomotives. Each motor would be in the hub of a huge wheel. Electric motors can be used briefly at a current beyond the continuous rating. In climbing the haul road from the bottom of a pit, one mine was overheating the motors. To speed the trip, they were given trolley power. The truck could use diesel or batteries but rely on the (2-wire) trolley for the long haul.
They were a big deal in apartheid South African coal mines.
One method to extract lithium from seawater is to recover it from the brine sludge generated by desalination plants. This is normally pumped back in the ocean but perhaps lithium and other minerals could be extracted before the sludge is returned to the ocean. Perhaps you could look into this.
That is a fantastic idea and would help to make desalination cheaper.
Although I am a bigger supporter of landscape restoration for cleaner water and encouraging methods to use less water in the first place but it's not feasible with our demand for clean water in many places.
Thanks!
Great video. I came across it after reading about protests against lithium mining in Serbia.
"Natural" gas cars are actually quite interesting since biomethane can be produced, indirectly capturing CO2. Here in Switzerland, they put 30% biomethane in the gas. The converted engine can still burn normal fuel, the conversion process is cheap and simple. It could be a great alternative while waiting for EVs to go cheap and green.
This channel is pure gold
Thanks, that's a nice thing to say 😀 I love your profile picture 🏂🏂
Rosie, your pieces (and Dave's Just Have a Think) have absolutely delighted me- you consciously make a clear and pretty successful shot and 'de Greeking" complex technical issues. You did pose a bit of a question, in the opening seconds, about "why does this have to be so hard". The answer to that doesn't lay in hard science, rather in sociology and large crowd behavior study, which I am not any more qualified to speak on that your hard science part. But the why of so many people fighting is fairly simple to see and define here in the "Colonies", "Murica, if you must; Big Auto doesn't want to do this, Big Oil doesn't want to do this, Big Coal doesn't want to do this, Big Utility doesn't want to do this, and the list goes on to the smaller players. Taken on their own, these groups aren't enough to "tip the balance", so through lobbying politicians and buying them off through legal means, TV teasers, public "information projects", and purely lying, they try to gain allies and make them noisier than they deserve to be. Additonally, there is a conservative streak, even in fairly progressive minds, that takes a strong motivation to make a hard turn from one direction to another- especially when they feel they might be publicly"found out " and suffer public ridicule. Ultimately, a watershed change must occur in the way ALL men and women think about their world- a much greater public ethic and honesty will be needed or shady operators on the fringes of lithium or other essential materials will undercut and obviate all our efforts in the name of personal profit. Thank you again for both your work and your ability to reach out and find other experts, more specifically expert than yourself, to help us navigate all this! FR
Quite accurate. The vested industry does not want change. See my comment here on why Lithium has not done as well as oil…
Great presentation. Would be good to include the magnitudes, today almost half comes from the Atacama salar and half from the spodumene deposit in Australia, and almost all is process in China and Japan; with the transport variable playing a key roll.
This is going to change when we go from Hundreds of GW to Hundreds of TW. How?
I did intend to address this, but maybe it wasn't very clear. As demand increases we'll need to move to lower grade resources, which are available in the locations Alex mentioned and were coloured on the maps. Then we talked about how we can make sure that environmental impact is reduced, even as we move to resources that require more energy intensive mining and processing.
Again, another thought provoking presentation. Thank you.
Thank you guys for helping us see the sun rise every morning without the use of gas lamps.
Thank you for this discussion. I hadn't realized what went into lithium production. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that in several years, with the ongoing development of solid state batteries, the world will have less need for lithium. But all manufacturing requires resources; it's all a delicate balancing act.
Yes I'm sure that we will develop alternatives for stationary batteries at least. It is crazy to waste expensive lithium where the weight isn't important. Currently li-ion is cheaper than the alternatives, but that will likely change as the competitors develop, and if lithium is in very high demand and prices go up over the next ten years, then the tipping point will come sooner.
Alex mentioned that the ocean has a lot of lithium, but the concentration is low. I am curious if it would economical for a desalinization plant to process the concentrated brine to create a source of lithium.
Today, absolutely not. This tidbit reminds me of "Gold is not rare, we have 20 million tons of it in our oceans", it's true but silly. Desalination just for potable water is expensive as is, the concentration of lithium in its brine low. The problem and opportunity here in a green future however lies in the fact that a massive cost of reverse osmosis desalination is its energy intensity. In a future with endless renewable electricity at close to zero cost, a wealth of options open up.
The fact however that there is a number of much more economical alternatives for lithium mining from higher-quality lithium resources, should make ocean mining an incredibly low priority until there are any signs of depletion on land or miraculous breakthroughs in desalination.
You're my favourite informational youtuber. Thank you for making videos! It really helps me put things into perspective and make it really easy to understand.
Wow, thank you!
Hi Rosie, another great video. Beside the mentioned bashing on Lithium there is also a bashing about environmental dangerous processing in lithium production. On that they point out how bad the brine processing is for the local communities. BUT: I found many different statistics about how much of the lithium products is produced were. On serious newspaper here stated, that the Bolivians try to sell lithium from their brine - but they are too expensive to be competitive on the market - that market should be lead by Australian companies.
And on top your mentioned recycling is also an interesting topic.
Great topic and awesome editing. Thank you for educating us all. 😊
Thanks and I'm so excited you like the editing. I've been working really hard with a new editor to help me getting these videos looking better, so I am glad to hear our hard work is paying off!
I think any 'green' technology, that is not recyclable, is dead on arrival.
I also think that the personal automobile, in an urban/suburban location, is itself obsolete. This is especially true if it is expected to protect its occupants while hurtling down the road at over 100 kph. Busses probably have two or three times the efficiency as do personal autos when it comes to kw per passenger mile.
It is only in rural areas that the personal auto really makes sense.
Yes i like busses too especially electric busses. So smooth and quiet.
Thanks for this comment! I like public transport too, and urban design that allows most people to not need cars. We haven't done a great job of that in Australia unfortunately, so I think personal cars will be here in Aus (and other places with a lot of urban sprawl) for a long time yet.
I'm also with you on recyclability being important. I plan to do a couple of videos on lithium battery reuse and recycling. And maybe another video or livestream on wind turbine blade recycling too.
@@EngineeringwithRosie There is a great video from Now You Know suggesting that Disneyland should replace their diesel buses with EVs and how not only would that benefit the company by saving on fuel and giving them good PR, but removing the noise and smells would greatly improve the comfort of visitors.
Then they get into how a quiet EV bus could be turned into part of the experience and I really recommend watching it: th-cam.com/video/QIvxgdttkBw/w-d-xo.html
Tesla is recycling it’s cells. 👍
The US is mostly too spread out for mass transit to work anywhere but cities. But since that is where most people live, that works.
Superb video. I love the visual aids overlaid on the interview.
Thanks! You can thank Alex for most of those, many are taken from his (numerous) research articles on these topics. I do spend a lot of time getting the technical graphics right, so I appreciate the positive feedback 😀
@@EngineeringwithRosie Even the equation at 11.23 is super helpful.
Sodium Ion Batteries by CATL will have great impact on the industry, because all the used materials are very ubundant
What I don't see enough in this conversation is discussion of the fresh water crisis. Many, many, many persons are water-insecure yet live near oceans and seas. Water desalination for drinking and other important human uses is often purported to be too expensive (particularly as the areas that are water-insecure are also mostly areas that are economically poor, though the Arabian peninsula comes to mind as an exception). By locating desalination plants in areas both poor and water-insecure and then locating lithium extraction systems adjacent to the desalination plants so that they can use the already concentrated and processed brine that is the "waste" of the desal process, it seems we could provide a source of income to this communities that would (help?) pay for the desalination plants. The questions I'm not equipped to answer are,
1. Would this actually pay for the entire cost of a desalination plant? In other words, if we thought of this as one plant, not two, with fresh water as a waste product of the preprocessing (which is, of course, more expensive done this way than when pumping seawater into pools where the sun can concentrate the brine, but pure water escapes as vapor and is not captured for use by local communities), could the plant break even? (You wouldn't need it to turn a profit since the fresh water service justifies the profitless operation of such a system)
2. Would it pay for the entire cost of the desal plant if other minerals were also extracted (I'm not sure which minerals or elements could be profitably extracted from desal plant tailings)?
3. Where would this be a reasonable strategy: for instance Ethiopia is poor, water-insecure, and located along the Indian Ocean, but much of its population lives inland on highlands, and it's unlikely we could economically pump desalinated water uphill to them... but maybe I'm wrong about that? Maybe pumping enough water isn't necessarily prohibitively expensive? We have great experience with building oil pipelines, after all. So if desal can be paid for with lithium extraction (and/or extraction of other elements from the brine waste), in how many places would this be economically viable?
4. Considering the number of places this might be a reasonable strategy and the water budget of those locations, how much of the 2030 annual demand would be satisfied solely by extracting lithium from desal plant waste streams? Would desal plants provide enough brine to entirely satisfy the needs of the lithium extraction industry? Supply only a tiny portion of it? Something in between?
5. If this is a viable economic strategy, is it possible that it might only work for the early adopters? Meaning that the economics might work out at current lithium prices, but if lithium operations have a steady stream of essentially free, preprocessed brine, would the lithium price fall and prevent more communities from joining the market later?
Thanks for all your work, Rosie. I love what you do.
I still think it is very important to highlight all the impact of old technologies. They are currently using misinformation in the media and when lobbying governments which is delaying the transition to better technologies. So it may be old tech but the full extent of the damage the established industries has caused and is still causing must be highlighted
Yes I agree with you. That's why I wanted to start this interview with a discussion about how EVs are already greener than ICE cars. And I do the same when I talk about recyclable wind turbine blades.
One thing to remember is the role of recycling- already about 1/5 of cobalt is recycled. Hydrometallurgical battery recycling like redwood or Mercedes/promobius will be important zero ish sources of future battery metals. Also green processing like Pilbara mineral mid stream process will reduce energy input. All this will be driven by good EU recycling and CO2 labelling rules
I am happy somebody is asking how much CO2 is being emitted during lithium mining. Nobody asked when govt mandated corn ethanol. And see what looking through “green glasses” caused us.
I need to look deeper into the corn ethanol topic. I assume you're talking US? If you have any good, recent information you could share let me know.
Excellent questions and answers.
Glad you enjoyed it!
I realise this video is coming up for its first birthday, however I would have liked to see some comment on recycling lithium ion batteries, as well as replacing lithium and cobalt with sodium and sulphur. On the face of it these two minerals are even more abundant, and easier to purify, and while sodium is heavier than lithium, sulphur is lighter than cobalt. I realise there are technical issues that may make Na/S batteries less efficient or heavier, and may make recycling difficult at present; it would have been good to hear both of these scientists discuss that.
Those are good questions for further videos! I am working on more videos related to batteries, including some of those. Thanks for your input 😀
@@EngineeringwithRosie Lovely to hear from you.
How long in years can we use the lithium until it’s gone with these high quality resources?
People like abundance. If climate solutions force markets into greater scarcity, people will fight and rebel. (We live in great abundance now, but there are still poor people, because there is still scarcity). I'm glad Rosie understand costs have balance.
the other material we should be concerned with is Neodymium. Up until electric cars the world's usage was extremely small, but with the most efficient motors all based on permanent magnets made from neodymium, it is a concern of mine.
A thought about the comment on there being huge amount of lithium in seawater: Seawater also contains stuff like gold and uranium, and as we will be building lots of water desalination plants and offshore wind farms, floating solar farms and tidal/wave generators to power them, chances are it would also be very easy to start collecting those materials from the non-drinkable water.
Has anyone actually made plans or done the math on how much water has to be processed using how much energy to produce anything useful and what would we actually get from such facility?
Given the need to overbuild wind and solar so we can power everything and charge batteries for later too even in bad weather, we can pretty safely assume that on good days the overproduction will be more than enough to power any such facility in addition to producing all the pure water we need and electricity sold to other countries.
Lots of people asking about using desal plants to "mine" the oceans. I admit I know very little about this, but I will look into it!
Thankyou very much for the hard work. now I understand better.
Hi Rosie!
I love your channel!
I have a background in sustainable buildings and used to work in community solar so I am super interested in your content!!!
I have been mulling on two questions about the transition that we are in at the moment
- what might be a sensible approach to drastically reducing or streamlining permitting for mining and refining, some of which includes environmental protection? (everyone is talking about the transition being too slow, if it is go any kind of fast huge new mining expansions are needed much sooner than existing processes seem to allow)
- have you heard any good thoughts about sustainability and todays poor? I worry that a reduction in coal production (for example), or food production for climate change reasons can affect pricing across the world, and small increases in price massively disproportionately effect the poor right now. Unfortunately a country own efforts to offset any short or medium term cost increases inside their own country do not help those in other less developed countries.
Thanks for your work!
Interesting that you seemed to imply that we should ignore oil, petrol and diesel because they are dying industries and instead focus on making sure that green energy supplies are kept to a higher standard.
If oil was being phased out next year I’d possibly agree but I think oil will be with us for the next 100 years so it still needs to clean up it’s act instead of being given a free pass.
But fossiles must be gone in ten or fifteen years or we're fucked. Keeping fossiles is not an option.
@Clive Flint Yes, you're right, I probably overstated that a bit. I know that about 8% of fossil fuels are used for non-combustion purposes, so even once we phase out all burning of fossil fuels there will still be a lot of fugitive emissions left if we ignore emissions there. And if blue hydrogen and/or CCS on fossil fuel power plants becomes a thing the problem will be huge. I have a video coming up in the next month where I talk more about fugitive emissions (specifically from flaring) in fossil fuel extraction. Thanks for the thought-provoking comment!
@Peter Picroc They won't be totally gone, even if the whole world stops burning them in 10-15 years. We use a lot of them as chemical feedstocks for example. Check out the IEA net-zero by 2050 roadmap, they have a good section on what kinds of fossil fuel use they expect to see over the coming decades. You can decide which parts you agree with for yourself, but they do give a lot of information about how the whole net-zero scenario could work out. www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050
I learned a few things from this so that's cool :)
Love the little circles in your eyes 👀 😎
Super interesting Rosie, thank you! 👍 In addition to its carbon intensity, it would also be interesting to look at the life cycle of lithium (can we keep what we have mined in a closed loop? If not where is it going at the end of its life? Etc.)
Let's put solar panels on every home, business and covered parking rooftop and switch to electric vehicles making nearly everything we do solar powered while completely decentralizing our power supply and empowering everyone as power generation owners.
Solar power is CHEAPER and electric vehicles are soon to be CHEAPER to make and already are considerably CHEAPER to maintain and operate, especially if charged from your own solar power.
A 3-5 year ROI (return on investment) for a solar array that will generate power for decades is a no-brainer and the panels can even be made locally too.
#EndFossilFuels #SwitchToSolar #SwitchToElectric #GreenNewDeal #EmpowerEveryone
It's not efficient. We will always need a grid (for hospitals and industry, etc), so the grid should be fed by CST plants and wind and geothermal, plus nuclear (SMRs) at latitudes where CST can't be used. This saves millions of panels being made out of toxic elements and having to deal with them at end-of-life. Power Towers use heliostats (mirrors, not solar panels) to harvest heat from the sun (not photons for bumping electrons out of a PV panel) and this process is about 70% efficient, compared to PV panels with efficiencies of 15-22%.
@@PinataOblongata Don't be ridiculous. Solar panel efficiency has little to do with whether all of our consumption and the grid can be solar powered or not. Educate yourself before speaking out against solar power because it makes you seem like but a fossil fuels troll.
Most homes and businesses can be 100% net solar with just their existing roof space including solar covered parking and including charging our electric vehicles.
@@sanjuansteve You need to work on your reading comprehension and your own education. Nowhere did I advocate for fossil fuels. Nowhere did I say most RESIDENTIAL houses couldn't be powered by solar, esp with a battery, but like I said, all panels (and batteries) have a carbon footprint to manufacture and present an issue at end-of-life, and there is likely always going to be a need for a grid, so it makes more sense to power the grid with appropriate grid-scale renewable energy and use that.
You clearly did not understand the point I was making about efficiency - I did not say PV panels were too inefficient to power a home, I said that grid scale renewable power was MORE efficient than residential PV. This equates to less cost for the consumer, less overall emissions and discarded waste and easier/quicker integration with the current grid tech.
@@PinataOblongata which toxic elements? The majority of solar panels are based on innocent silicon. Things like cadmium an selenium are only used in some specific types of solar panels that have only a very small market share. It is a dishonoust bait and switch to attribute the characteristics of these niche products to all solar panels.
@@PinataOblongata Steve's comment did not say anything about doing away with the grid. Decentral just means that electricity is produced at may locations rather than at a few big powerplants. Grids are extremely useful when switching to decentral renewables. Grids make it possible to even out local weather fluctuations, and reduce the need for storage.
This is a question I've asked alot. What is the ideal co2 level and average temperature of earth?
Elevated co2 levels promote plant growth, greenhouse levels can be artificially increased to 700-1800 ppm. Levels between 2500-5000 ppm can cause headaches and levels between 40,000-100,000 can cause death. So reducing co2 levels may actually be just as harmful as Elevated co2 levels. Only time will tell.
The good thing about this is that year’s ago cars had less miles per gallon and manufacturers took more time and energy to produce the cars, petroleum production has a impact also and the transportation of the petroleum and vehicles to customers using shipping and lorries.
The new technology will allow greater efficiency in battery technology that’s why better batteries that are already being developed lithium isn’t the only salt and battery’s can be made from salt water you have to have battery cars to develop the battery.
Not to mention is not the only technology that is branching off from the change in transportation trams have used electric directly for years not needing a battery we can power lines use hyper loops when developed,
Use hydrogen fuel for large transportation until we have solid state batteries or more efficient.
Batteries are already more efficient when compared to petroleum when you take all into consideration and your points go to making that point
I see the carbon cost of mining the lithium was counted in the video but I have heard rumors of the rainbow streams by Tibet from irresponsible mining practices in dealing with the heavy metal byproducts of extracting the ore. Is there truth to this and what’s that cost? Also, I have read it takes over 2000 liters of water for half a kilo of lithium. Water is a natural resource too and in certain areas it can be scarce. Plus, does it have to be treated for pollutants?
One thing I wish everyone would talk about is do we know what he “right” CO2 level is? Too high and the planet becomes a furnace, too low and the plants and the rest of the world dies too. At one time there were pine trees in the Canadian permafrost (higher CO2) and at another time during the ice age plants almost asphyxiated due to CO2 being within some like 30-50 ppm of not enough.
Limestone is basically CO2 sequestered by the planet and natural processes that occurred, coral reefs sequester carbon. There may be a general trend on the planet to sink a certain amount of carbon naturally and that amount of carbon may need to be replaced at whatever amount that is.
So if we are so all powerful as to dictate the the climate of the planet by controlling carbon, where do we set the level? If we set it at 800ppm maybe plants will grow in the Sahara? That may slow the heat rejection from the soil and the planet may not warm as much as expected. We may need to temper the rate of that swell as to give the planet a chance to react,for sure. But who’s saying that 2C will end the earth?
I have seen winters grow more mellow and have not experienced a summer as hot as in my youth. The hurricanes, El Niño and La Niña seem to be within a normal fluctuation. Forest fires, volcanoes, solar minimus, solar maximus, the moon’s angle to the equator all sway the numbers some how do we tell what is normal? Ice core data is as high as 5000ppm but there was still life. I am not saying we should just go run amuck but we should be not yanking the emergency stop either to blame carbon fr all the evils of global climate change, remember when all fats in our diet was bad? Yup another knee jerk reaction. We should be able to rationally discuss and debate what the data is telling us so we can come up with a plan that is good for the whole planet without plastering a label on someone with a different viewpoint and making them a target for gangster style social media attack.
I watched a Ted talk and I am sorry I don’t remember the name of the speaker but he was fantastic. It was about the elephants of South Africa and how rotational grazing could have saved thousands of elephants that were culled because what they were taught in school about how the land supported only a certain number of elephants was wrong. We should take a lesson for that gentleman and really put our thinking caps on before we make super strict edicts about a subject so complicated. We do not fully comprehend all the implications. We cannot even live without external support on the ocean floor for generations or colonize Mars yet. How can we say we understand the global climate fully?
If we treat one another with respect, and debate as friends so that our words are kind as they would be to a loved one, we can solve this TOGETHER!
Like an astronaut we’ve all heard, one small step for man, one giant step for mankind.
And before you roast my pronouns that’s man as in human and humankind,ok? 😉😁
We need to use other batteries or technologies for different scenarios. Li-Ion batteries aren’t the best solution for every problem. Na-Ion, flow batteries, liquid metal batteries and many other energy storage techniques make much more sense for fixed installations. I like the durability of Iron-Nickel batteries.
Sounds like the urgency of the matter requires a more drastic measure, like public transit.
first of all complements to you for the clrity of the material.
It is not only the Lithium but also the other minerls, for example required for the type of battery: cobalt nickel, manganese, fosfor, aluminium, carbon (anode) electrolite.
Copper (for the electric cables) etc.
and for processing the minerals to be ready to be used in the battery. these chemicals are all required get to a working end product.
(simpple example teh the ammount of water a chip Fabricaiton requires huge ammounts of very clean/ pure water several 1000 of liters per chip/ wafer).
Do we get any of the ocean lithium. It seem very dilute.
No one's extracting it yet, because of what you say, it's very dilute.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Lot's of gold in oceans too, 20 000 000 tons but, nobody is extacing it because it's very dilute
I think we're focusing too much in converting our current ways of transport to electric, when there's a much lower hanging fruit we should also address: The need for cars. A lot of people don't drive cars by choice, but because they don't have an option, and they're really expensive. Alternatives like public transport, bikes and electric scooters are much more affordable and emit way less emissions, but they're unfeasible in many places because how cities are designed, how cities disallow mixed zoning, and how corporations demand workers to be present even when it's not really necessary. Some problems are easy to fix: Replacing some car lanes by bus and bike lanes (protected ones). Reduce speeds. Reduce the need for cars. Invest in trains. Etc. I strongly recommend the channels "Not Just Bikes" and "Eco Gecko".
Can lithium be extracted from the brine from sea water desalination plants?
No one has managed to do that economically yet. And my guess is they won't until we run out of higher grade lithium resources.
Great video , thanks for the insights. Lastly I saw a video about the bio economy. Some scientist said that our total yearly raw material use is much higher than all plants on earth grow together in one year. What do you think about this?
New theme music?
Also I was wonder what you thought about off-shore wind potential in Australia? Bass Straight, West Coast of Tasmania, Eyre Peninsula, South of WA?
Please make a video about the process and development of lithium filtration from seawater.Thx.
Not to mention recycling
In case we run out of lithium we got Sudium ion for phones & EV
& liquid metal for energy storage
🕺🕺🕺
Earth is generous
Unlike oil Lithium can be recycled and that process needs to be using renewable energy. One time carbon costs extracting something that can be used 1000 times over to reduce our carbon dependence and power our future should not be viewed like coal, oil or gas.
Definitely, and I am sure we will be recycling a lot of it in the near future (that's a topic I have in mind for the channel). With all the growth in the industry though, it will be a while before there is enough retiring batteries to recycle all the lithium we need for new batteries. So I do think it is good to clean up lithium mining (and every other kind of mining) to the maximum extent possible.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Plastics industry has been green washing its recyclabltiy for decades. With tokens efforts by its producers, to avoid regulation requiring it. Now we are drowning in unrecyclable waste plastic.
Lithium batteries need regulation to make recycling the more cost effective option. Such as adding a VAT (ie deposit) that only recyclers would get at the end of its life.
Pollution is more than just excesses CO2.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Still, the point is that you shouldn't account the whole environmental cost of mining the lithium against the first EV battery it goes into, it should be spread over a number of EVs where that lithium will end up (plus your best guess at recycling cost at that future time, of course). Anyway, it's great to hear that the mining can be improved further! I'm sure it'll work out cheaper for them in the long run too.
Why do people think grid-tied batteries only come in lithium favour? There are bigger and better batteries with zero lithium in them and also work a lot better and last longer and they are cheaper because they use cheaper materials
Iron- air and molten metal. Way to go for stationary storage. With just a tad of lithium batteries on top to handle the fast swings in the grid as these other batteries seem to be kind of sluggish.
Absolutely! I covered thermal batteries already on this channel th-cam.com/video/72wkuIvUISs/w-d-xo.html
And I will talk about gravity storage (Energy Vault, Gravitricity etc) in my next livestream. I do have plans to do project visits for videos on pumped hydro and flow batteries, however state borders are currently closed in Australia so I need to wait for that to end.
If extracting from brines underground is useful, how about extracting from the giant salt mines we use to just dig it out and scatter it all over the roads in the northern US?
Rosie, have you seen the peer review paper on the millions of USD washed away of Lithium as a by-product of fracking in the USA - they saying up to 16.5 million was being lost per well
Ooh, that's interesting. Thanks for the info! No I haven't seen it. If you've got a link please share otherwise I'm sure I can find it.
@@EngineeringwithRosie I will try and find it - it is a few years old
2:12 i mean to be fair we have made the mistake of thinking something is clean when its not. Pretty sure that happened to diesel couple years ago.
That's a good point, I hadn't thought about the diesel issue. I guess a lot of people are thinking "once bitten, twice shy"
The diesel argument never stood up to scrutiny though. The only good-faith argument that could have been made for diesel is that it was *marginally* better than petrol in terms of CO2. The argument for moving to EVs is much stronger.
@@bimblinghill fair point.
What will be done with all to old batteries? Will this leave much dangerous material?
Recycle, the materials in them are very valuable.
I wonder if we could do IX (ion exchange) in the ocean to pull lithium out. Just need the right resin.
Lithium sulfur batteries to remove cobalt and increase power density by 5x.
What have you heard about lithium recycling? That could upskill and employ displaced coal miners in the future.
There is some information available on the battery industry showing that they have practically decarbonised, however its not clear how much of the embedded carbon come from mining, or even whether this is included or not in the battery industry figures. VW claim carbon neutrality, and Tesla seem to say they are close in their environment reports. Tesla also state the embedded energy in their EVs is the same as a combustion vehicle, so they are certainly no worse than a combustion car.
Other factors are that Lithium is not the main material used in Lithium batteries by weight, cobalt, Nickel, Maganese, Aluminium can be used but so can Iron. LFP batteries are likely to make to the majority of EV and grid batteries due to limitations in Nickel supply..not Lithium.
Water vapor as a greenhouse gas is ten times stronger than CO2, extracting lithium from seawater releases vast amounts of water vapor as evaporation is the main process. When expanded to the scale needed for an all EV car in about 10 years plus the expansion of copper production releasing more CO2 for electric motors just about will balance out the operational benefits, if factoring in population growth we might start leaning to the deficit side.
One step forward would be to stop using Li batteries for static applications such as storing energy from wind and solar farms. There are better alternatives such as the ZnBr plating/flow battery and the Sb, Ca liquid metal battery. There are also a range of redox batteries using Fe or V. None of them degrade over time and all are from easily available materials. This would free up Li for mobile applications.
Just stop windmills when electricity is cheap - no need for batteries. There should NOT be any special fixed price for green energy!!!
Great content. Keep it coming
The most interesting and cute engineer on TH-cam.
Great video Rosie! I love how you weaved in the interview and asked great questions. One suggestion for a future video would be to include environmental justice issues when it comes to lithium and rare earth mineral mining in places like Bolivia, Congo, Zimbabwe etc especially in indigenous communities. I would be absolutely honored to collaborate on such a video if you’re interested.
well with tesla doing 930k vehicles in 2021 I feel most criticism are campaigns from environmental activists and oil companies promoting fud. Now can it become "greener" yes but everything comes down to production.
Saying that we have enough lithium to meet current and near-term expected demand is not the same as having enough lithium to complete a full transition to a green economy. There is only enough land lithium reserves to convert half of current vehicles to EVs, even though that won't occur overnight. This is not counting all the battery capacity needed for solar and wind power plant generation. Once ocean mining begins, dilution continually increases the cost and energy needed to extract more and more. A detriment to solar and wind energy generation, which already suffers from low EROI. Recycling lithium also lowers EROI. Lower EROI causes degrowth (perpetual economic recession), which is a good and necessary thing to address climate change, but also why governments and voters are the reason the world isn't moving as fast as it needs to towards decarbonization.
Not to mention just look where they have been doing this already. It's about the water!
Are we going to be able to make an environmentally friendly Lion battery any time soon?... The Li supply and the supply of other scarce (or environmentally dear) metals can become sustainable and decrease in environmental impact in a "cradle to cradle" life cycle. That is: product design, manufacturing, and end-of-life are all based on reduction/reuse/recycling of these materials. Continual design improvements reduce the amount of the targeted materials needed or eliminate them. Life extension of components through reuse (e.g., used car batteries become grid-storage batteries). And, products and components are designed for economic disassembly and materials recovery/recycling to become feedstock for another iteration of the continually improving product cycle(s), (e.g., Redwood Materials model). This approach gradually increases the amount of scarce/environmental-impacting materials in the cradle to cradle system, leading to decreasing dependance on virgin materials. Cradle to cradle design/implementation also drives down product cost over time.
another great video thanks Rosie!
At 2 ppm, the energy cost to extract the lithium in the ocean will vastly outweigh the environmental benefit.
Redwood Materials, a startup created by Tesla cofounder J.B. Straubel to profitably recycle lithium-ion batteries, is partnering with ERI, North America's biggest processor of electronic waste, to gain access to thousands of tons of cells it can turn back into valuable raw materials.
They appear to be able to recycle 97% of the battery materials into raw materials for new battery construction.
They plan to supply 100gwh of battery materials by 2025.
Yeah Redwood Materials sounds quite promising. But first we need a few decades of intense mining to produce these products (that later will be recycled) in the first place.
@@Simon-dm8zv
Certainly not decades of heavy mining. This work will be completed this decade. I expect world production of 20 million cars by 2025. And I am low-balling it compared to ArcInvest and others.
Right a 5-10 year pull while oil production drops quickly.
There are plenty of lithium reserves. I am more worried about Nickel than anything else.
@@JohnBoen Okay that would be great. I hope so! Yeah, I heard Elon talk about nickel shortages too.
@@Simon-dm8zv
Sorry to pop back in... love the topic. There is another few pieces to it.
LFP batteries don't use nickel or cadmium. LFP license restrictions begin to lift in just a few months. Only China can build them now, and that ends in 2022.
I think there are a number of manufacturers gearing up to produce batteries with different chemistries. Iron-air, and Aluminum-air technologies look promising for large scale stationary application. This frees up higher power density packs.
What do you think the Sodium-Iron battery? 1/3 the cost of lithium, 2/3 the power of lithium. 2x the power per dollar...
Thanks for the tip John, and also Simon for the info you added. I really want to make a video on li-ion battery recycling, maybe I'll see if I can chase down a guest from Redwood.
Rosie, an afterword; oil will not go away even if we outlaw using it for an automotive and or airplane fuel stock. It will not, I guarantee that! Take a very good look the next time you go shopping- groceries, new frock, new auto; all that plastic in the wrappings, fascia, etc? Most of it is based on molecules from crude oil not used in fuel production and most of it has even greater environmental hazard potential than the lighter elements the fuel is drawn from. Back in the '60s and '70s Big Oil, meaning at least five of the seven world spanning oil corps, were spending hundreds of millions of dollars to discover what other parts and fractions of that crude could be turned into a salable product. Those products are over burdening our waste land fills, clogging our storm water drains, littering our oceans and threatening marine life, fresh and salt water, all over the world. They may be even more dangerous in the long run that the aromatics our present piece is talking about. This was part of what my other response today was alluding too. All I can say, is like many of your countrymen and women I have met (I worked as a specialty training assistant for a petrochemical consulting/training outfit- I have got to help train and meet many of the "youngsters" who drive and make your domestic oil and coal industry go), you are near fearless and have all the tools and attitude to make others take you seriously and meaningfully- both OZ and all the places where these pieces go are better for what you do. I grew up around the oil industry, from exploring to drilling to refining and transportation, I have "been there, done that", and I have taken a paycheck from it too, but all my employers knew my politics- and been pretty green my whole life; I detested the "smell of money" when I was a child and still do, yet I have never gotten over the thrill of letting 600 or more carbon fueled horsepower loose to fly. We ALL will need to make changes and adjustments or decarbonization isn't very likely to occur before we have done truly irreparable harm to our ecology and planet.
PS; If you want help from these folks, I'll give you a clue; all of those folks named in my Big this that and the other list are total slaves to their bottom lines- give them a way to make a good profit, maybe not the obscene one they are just now, and they might be willing to quit dragging their feet so hard. Most of them survived from being Big Coal in the 19th century! FR
Rosie did not claim oil will go away anytime soon. The most important thing is to stop combusting oil as soon as we can. Petrochemical products only make up less than 10% of a barrel of oil and as long as these products are not burned, no significant emissions are caused.
HI Frederic, yep you're right. I actually have a video coming up about fugitive emissions from fossil fuels (sepcifically about gas flaring, but we talk a little about methane leaks as well) and I'm aware that even we stop burning it we'll still need about 8% of curent levels of fossil fuels (according to IEA estimates) for feedstocks etc. Definitely a problem that needs solving on its own.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Rosie- save me a seat- I will be there! FWIW, I grew up in a "Big Oil" family and have been either on the family fringe or actually employed from the Gulf of Mexico as a roustabout to teaching aid in Thailand at updating and improving engineering skills. Most of my "experience" is the hands on ,OJT variety. Just a note, so you will have a "meter stick" to judge anything I bring! FR
I think the different standards are fair enough as with electrification of transport being pushed (or even forced in some places, despite the increased purchase and even charging costs and all the other inconveniences etc), then people want to make sure the "green" alternative is actually significantly better for the environment than the current status quo.
Can we just look at the impact to the area of these massive mines and explain the 25 million dollar lawsuit awarded.
That’s puts my mind at rest….we process the easy low hanging fruit and then boil off the oceans.
😂 I assumed they will put the water back in the ocean once they take the lithium out, but perhaps that's a naive assumption! Seriously though, I think we are many decades away from needing to take any lithium out of the oceans and then there is millions of years worth in there so it will take a while to make a dent on that resource.
@@EngineeringwithRosie thanks for replying. If we replace every ICE vehicle on Earth with an EV we will very quickly need to be mining sea water. I believe the answer is not hi-tech but rather simplification. In the 1950s many households did not have a fridge or a car. That is approximately equilibrium we need to strive for which combines a 'modern' life that is reasonably sustainable. Preferably we should accept a 1920s lifestyle which will allow undeveloped nations to also enjoy an improvement in their lives. Few cars, very little international travel, a simple wardrobe, less consumption.
The approach that you take in this video which is common to most videos of this type i too present "electric vehicles" as the solution to all the worlds woes. There is no discussion of the limitations, types of vehicles, lack of desirability to existing and enthusiast motorists etc. As a mechanical engineer specialising in vehicle dynamics and working with both electric vehicles and ICE powered vehicles I recognise that this issue is far more complex than the simplified and idealised versions that are usually resented by the advocates. Ultimately I believe (and this view is shared by many engineers in the electric car industry) that while EVs are part of the solution to transport infrastructure they do not provide the complete answer
Thanks for the comment, and I take your point but I am not sure I agree with it applying to this specific video. After all, this whole video is about whether and how we can solve one of the *problems* associated with having heaps of EVs. I don't think I said very much (anything?) about EVs solving all the world's woes. In other videos, maybe, definitely in conversation (I am enthusiastic about how many problems EVs can help solve). So I'll keep it in mind for the future.
If ICE is banned as it will be then enthusiast motorists will just have to use it. And frankly that catagory is not even single digits in terms of global transport. Even if we accepted that enthusiast motorists don't like EVs.
@@tcroft2165 this is exactly the short term thinking that I am referring to. Why would ICE be banned? It makes no sense. Most of the automotive industry is working flat out on ICE while paying lip service to the politicians and their green lobby groups
@@jamesmccabe5188 Multiple countries already have ICE ban dates set. That number will only grow. (In reality for advanced economies they will be mostly EV/H before their bans such is the speed of movement.)
Much of the auto industry is building for the transition now. If you look at new models to be launched 23/4-> most are EV or hybrids.
@@jamesmccabe5188 Agreed, this knee jerk reaction is a bit interesting. Making the high volume emitters like SUVs and crossovers PHEV or BEV would solve a vast majority of the emisions in developed nations, then developing affordable BEV city cars (which will most likely come from China or an automated Tesla factory) with a solid charging solution will solve most of the rest. If someone wants to buy that manual shift ICE sports car to drive through the canyons on a Sunday morning or at a track day then so be it, enthusiast sports cars contribute virtually nothing when perspective is used, less than a rounding error in the whole global warming equation.
As we in the United States would like to forget about the debacle in Afghanistan, the Chinese will help their neighbors so China can develop the huge Afghanistan lithium deposits. (The China lithium Road)
Can we just skip the car entirely and switch over to VTOL’s as there isn’t a great benefit from switching to a new tech that isn’t really a huge set of features +
Well I think there are literally hundreds of VTOL companies trying hard to make that happen! I am not sure I believe that will ever "take off" to the extent that we don't need ground cars, but let's see.
Oh yeah, wind assist for auto bodies, please.
Mining equipment will likely move to h2 also a great way to get extremely high temperatures.
so, just to be clear, we would have to process a million liters of water to get 200ml of lithium. Sounds super feasible.
Super safe! Just looking at a dozer operator on tons of LiCO2 I have to wonder what the dust is doing to them.
I do think there where very little thoughts on what resources that will be needed if the amount of lithium produced is to be increased by nearly 10 times in just a few years. Projected marked is not the same as production and at the moment there development of new production is lagging a lot.
You should dig a little deeper in these subject.
All mining is CO2 intensive. Recycling makes any vehicle type greener. An ICE car is made of recycled iron. But Lithium is new, there isn’t enough mined already to recycle. Once there is enough mined to recycle it will be as green as can be.
The Oil Industry needs to make cash. If it can’t sell you fossil fuel at the pump, it will sell you hydrogen made from fossil fuels, 1 ton of Hydrogen produces 9 tons of CO2… but you won’t see this in their ads. Nor will you see the fact that Afghanistan has hundreds of millions of tons Lithium & Copper the EV metals as measured by USGS. But its a threat to Oil… so unlike Iraq, there was a great hurry to exit rather than extract as Lithium demand grew. Unlike oil demand…
Before anyone mentions green hydrogen… it won’t scale but is great PR for the Oil industry. Green hydrogen loses half the value of the energy put into make it. All carbon capture tech from the oil industry leaks, and only there for PR.
on desalination devices you can get easily Lithium out of sea water. I guess that's the source Israel uses for their nuclear weapons. As you desalinate your water you access easily salts with relative high content of Lithium. So that's a part of supply from sea water which is very easily accessible as you're in need of sweet water.
Cars seem to be an outmoded concept.....
The use of personal vehicles for moving around
seems to be replaced by mass transit.....
Most drivers appear to be incompetent
anyway.....
Thank you for acknowledging that we need to do a lot of mining to decarbonize. "Planet of the Humans" also talked about this problem, unfortunately the film's conclusion was that we must continue with fossil fuels because the alternatives are even worse. This conclusion is totally false, although if we still had 1960's technology it would be true. (Back then it took more energy to make a solar cell than the amount of energy you could ever possibly get back.) Yes, there are environmental costs to decarbonizing, the good news is that it is well worth it because we have much better technology than we had before.
We all need to learn how to make do with 95% less stuff.
Mining lithium isn't really the problem. I'm sure there will be many companies happily making batteries and selling those.
The issue is that batteries in general have a very limited lifespan. People don't tend to care when it's in their phones, because phones are made obsolete every 2 years anyway (Ludicrous nobody talks loudly about that). But take any tool you expect to use for longer: a cordless version is always inferior to a version with a cable because the battery will be dead in a couple years. Then you have to buy said battery again AND throw away the old one. Or your tool is dead weight and garbage as well. Unless you are one of the ultra few people who can actually rebuild something to use a cable.
The cars I've had, I've all had for 8 to 12+ years. That would have been several battery packs over the lifetime of each of them. There are significant costs involved with replacing those packs. Some figures talk about 60 to 75% of the cost of a car. That's akin to re-buying what you already paid for several times over ... because why?
And that happens to the millions of tons of batteries at the end of their lifespan? I'm not well enough informed about that, i.e. nobody talks about that.
What with batteries being fairly hazardous while they are actively being used (ask any fire department about quenching an electric vehicle that's on fire), will they fill up our landfills and be a time bomb there or what?
I've got my doubts. Both ICE and Ev vehicles weight a ton or more and transport a few 100lbs of passenger and groceries (for instance). Let's just say a ton/car. That's not a good start. Imagine public rail running everywhere, made of small pods (300lbs each) moving on electric rail or elevated track. Everyone is using, maintaining, and supplying electricity too one system. We'd eliminate the behemoths we currently ride in. One low mass system that serves everyone efficiently, gaining the labor (and inclusion) of the poor into the economy.
We aren't even talking about real efficiencies, just replacing (at least those who can afford a car to begin with) one ICE car with another car.
Volvo makes electric earth movers
I hope we see lots of them rolling out soon 😀