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Genuine question: Are EVs and battery powered tech actually sustainable? Lithium is a finite resource which needs to be extracted from the earth via mining (o

• jeffbee 5y ago
  Compare it to the amount of mining that has been done to extract oil and gas and you’ll find it to be quite small.
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• connicpu 5y ago
  It sounds like there's enough lithium in all identified lithium resources to produce the batteries for 10.6 billion[1] Nissan Leafs. Enough for every human to have 1 low range car if the population plateaus around there, but that would still require perfect recycling and would leave no lithium to put batteries in anything else. Unless we start mining lithium from asteroids or something. [1]: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/
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  • philipkglass 5y ago
    Notice that the same page says that the Earth's crust contains 20 parts per million of lithium. That's more abundant than tin or lead, to name two rarer elements that are currently mined in much larger quantities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... Here's the USGS lithium report from 2010 that this Stanford web page got lithium reserve and resource numbers from: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium/production/mineral-pubs/lithium/mcs-2010-lithi.pdf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium... Here's the corresponding USGS lithium report from this year: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-lithium.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-lithium.pd... See the tables "World Mine Production and Reserves" in these reports and following paragraphs. From the 2010 report to the current report, world lithium resources went up from 25.5 million tons to 89 million tons even as extraction rates rose from 18,000 tons per year to 100,000 tons per year. That alone brings us up to 37 billion Nissan Leafs. How can resources go up even as we're using lithium faster? It's because reserves and resources are determined by a combination of economics and technology. The Earth's crust contains 20 ppm of lithium now and 12 years ago (or a million years ago, for that matter). The geology doesn't change but the effort put into identifying potential sources of lithium and means of extracting and purifying lithium does change. Geologically speaking, the Earth has a lot of lithium. For as long as the USGS has been keeping records -- only a few decades, admittedly -- world lithium reserves have been increasing faster than they have been depleted, because the industrial demand that causes reserve depletion also spurs additional research to identify potential lithium sources and extraction processes. This Economist article is about such new processes.
    • NeoVeles 5y ago
      There are four stages of identifying and use of a resource. Theoretical quantity - That would be the 20ppm as you said. Based on knowledge and estimates. Identified reserves - How much of this stuff do we actually know about and is in a suffciently enough pooled location. This would be less than the 20ppm - how much less is a different question. Technically available - How much of the known resource could we actually extract? It is ok if we know about it but if it is 10KM below a lake, could we get to it? The most important stage after those three - Economic availability. Can we actually afford it and have people pay for it? The argument from absurdity I use on this one is that there is effectively near infinite clean energy in the form of hydrogen in the sun. No one owns it - now go get it! The technical and economic scale ruins the argument a fair bit. I'm not even arguing against lithium here, it seems to be more output restricted than resource limited. The two elements in batteries I worry about is Cobalt and Nickle - they could become the weakness. That said it does look like some folks are working on some neat alternatives in that space.
  • api 5y ago
    All identified reserves… meaning lithium found and quantified and deemed extractible. Problem is that until recently lithium was not a hugely in demand element. As a result not a lot was invested in finding the stuff. Now that it is important large investments will be made and a lot more is likely to be found. It’s a light element and is very abundant in the solar system. So this means that after not really trying very hard we have already found enough to give every human an EV. That is encouraging. If we try a bit harder and find say 50% more we are good for a really long time. Oil is an example of something we have tried really really hard to find. We’ve found a ton more than we thought we would.
• truted2 5y ago
  Think about the timescale that lithium has been a valuable resource. When the first oil wells were being drilled in Pennsylvania for lamp oil no one could fathom how oil exploration, extraction and processing techniques would evolve to mechanize an entire planet.
• scythe 5y ago
  >Surely there’s not enough lithium for everything to be powered by battery. There's a lot of misleading information out there on the Internet. Actually, searching led me to one of my old comments, which is still true ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15883035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15883035 ). The old link about ocean extraction died, so here's another one: https://electrek.co/2021/06/04/scientists-have-cost-effectively-harvested-lithium-from-seawater/ https://electrek.co/2021/06/04/scientists-have-cost-effectiv... The bottom line is that both the raw quantity and the prospective capital expenditures on lithium are way, way smaller than what we were looking at in terms of oil extraction. We're not running out of lithium, and we're not destroying the environment to get it. I suspect oil industry PR could be behind all of this run-out-of-lithium hokum, which inevitably comprises articles based on "[presently] economically viable" resources and does not consider the actual availability of lithium in Earth's crusts and waters, which is much higher if you include low-grade ores that are not presently viable. It's obvious who benefits from this widespread misconception. The simple fact is that if the price of lithium were to jump by a factor of 10, it still wouldn't affect the price of a Tesla that much. Now, when we talk about grid-storage batteries, we might want really huge amounts of storage, and then sodium-sulfur / zinc-bromide / etc becomes relevant. But currently, grid-storage batteries are LiFePO4 simply because they're really cheap. That seems like a pretty good problem to have.
• Melio 5y ago
  We don't consume it we use it. This makes a huge difference to oil. You burn oil away. You can recycle lithium (which is currently not happening) and reuse it. You can also use the accumulator in a less efficient way until you even need to recycle. Like stationary scenarios if it's already useless for EVs.
  • deutschewelle 5y ago
    The problem isn't oil itself but rather the byproducts, namely CO2 that is the cause of global warming and there just isn't enough of an impact from switching from modern ICE to EVs, rather the biggest source of CO2 emissions are the countries people in the West are outsourcing to make cheap goods. It appears the CO2 emission standards can be achieved overnight simply by boycotting of all goods produce in countries where there is zero qualms about CO2 emissions, namely coal based power plants, which Western allied nations are more than happy to sell and point the finger at the said country they are exploiting. But imagine telling virtue signaling West coast individual who believes he/she has superior moral values while happily consuming products produced in Authoritarian states under the threat of violence and exploitation of children that they need to trade their comfort for a greater collective. If a society can't even come to agreements over wearing masks, there's zero chance such society can cut back on our reliance on the Petrodollar because doing so would put them on the same level of discomfort as other developing nations. Leave it to third world countries to fix it while happily consuming and fueling the product of CO2 emissions and reminding them what a shthole country they live in. This is my observation as a German looking into the West's mindset, its riddled with hypocrisy and self-contradictory ethic system aimed at distracting its citizens from the truth that their comforts are at the cost to this planet and rest of humanity. We enjoy what we have because others could not have it and there is zero chance individualistic societies can reverse its mindless competition for vanity consumption.
    • cottager2 5y ago
      As a German citizen, you should be aware that your country just veto’s sanctions on Russia so that they could keep the flow of natural gas coming. Your ex-Chancellor decommissioned your nuclear power plants so that you would buy more Russian gas, and he now is on the board of Gazprom and heads the company behind Nordstream 2. Also, petroleum cars are one of your biggest industries. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
• whoomp12342 5y ago
  there is lots of alternative battery tech in research right now for the very reason you propose
• CyberRage 5y ago
  For the most part yes. It is true that many batteries today use rare earth metals like Nickel or Cobalt but there are plenty of good alternatives that don't. Companies start using chemistries like LFP which relies mostly on iron, which is low cost and abundant. There are development when it comes to Sodium-ion based batteries which should be very scalable and cheap. There are magnesium-based chemistries that hold a lot of potential as well. As for recycling, it should prove financial for some batteries as the materials can cover the recycling cost.
  • pfdietz 5y ago
    Neither nickel nor cobalt are rare earth metals.
  • s0rce 5y ago
    As far as I know only certain Nickel metal hydride batteries use rare earth metals. Unless you just meant "rare" as in uncommon. Nickel isn't particularly rare and can be recycled from batteries.
    • CyberRage 5y ago
      Nickel is quite rare in the sense that the volume available for us on earth isn't as robust as something like iron or lithium, which are extremely abundant. Also Nickel is highly concentrated in set regions which also causes problems. Nickel & Cobalt are the most expensive metals in NCA/NMC batteries which are very common today.
      • pfdietz 5y ago
        Nickel is 4x as abundant in the Earth's crust as lithium. Peridotite, a mantle-derived ultramafic rock that's widely available around the world, can be 0.1-0.3% nickel. This rock has been considered for CO2 sequestration, as it has large amounts of olivine, which is one of the most easily weathered silicates for mineral carbonation. One concern of mineral carbonation is all the nickel that could be released.
• another 5y ago
  David Roberts and Canary have some worthwhile articles on this question https://www.canarymedia.com/minerals-and-clean-energy-a-series https://www.canarymedia.com/minerals-and-clean-energy-a-seri... looking at lithium along with other relevant minerals.
• gameswithgo 5y ago
  probably nothing is sustainable at current world population.
• UnpossibleJim 5y ago
  They are working on an Iron Silicon battery technology: https://www.mdpi.com/490344 https://www.mdpi.com/490344 It doesn't quite stack up, but it's promising and the raw materials are two of the most abundant. So there's that.
• ajross 5y ago
  > Lithium is a finite resource which needs to be extracted Yes, but once concentrated it is extremely recyclable. It doesn't flow, or corrode, or leave the battery. So when the cell's life is over the lithium is still there, "extractable" with vastly higher efficiencies than seen by raw production. > Surely there’s not enough lithium for everything to be powered by battery. There is for everything we'd want to put a battery in today. It's not an uncommon element at all, it's just a hard one to concentrate because (owing to the fact that it's very soluble) geology has done a poor job of concentrating it for us. There is more lithium in the earth's crust than there is lead or tungsten or tin, yet those metals are minable from "veins" where with lithium we have to get it out of the oceans (or out of salt deposits that are ancient dried oceans).
• hosh 5y ago
  Lithium in lithium batteries are recyclable, and because of microstrutures formed during the use of the batteries actually make better material for new batteries. There's a company already recycling lithium batteries, though they have to fight against the perception that recycled lithium is not as good as newly mined lithium. There are also emerging technologies for extracting lithium from brine as a byproduct of geothermal power plants. American Public Media had produced a podcast series ("This is How We Survive") that included several episodes about this technology, and some of the patent drama that had gone with trying to control the tech.
• cptskippy 5y ago
  Napkin math but... A Tesla Model 3 with the smallest pack size is 54kWh which is the equivalent of just under 1100 MacBook Air batteries. In 2017 the global demand for laptops was 161,600,000 units. Tesla shipped over 900,000 vehicles in 2021 which is the equivalent of 990,000,000 Macbook Airs. So if laptop demand remained static, in the span of 5 years our annual demand for lithium still saw a six fold increase. I'm willing to bet it's closer to 10x or 20x increase in demand for lithium. Did we have that much production capacity open up in the same time frame?
  • CyberRage 5y ago
    Lithium-ion batteries is just one, albeit very popular, option. You have batteries that do not use lithium at all. The battery market is going to see several different technologies for different use cases.
    • cptskippy 5y ago
      That's true however there aren't currently any other viable batteries chemistries with the density offered by lithium based chemistries.
      • CyberRage 5y ago
        Well considering CATL is launching commercial sodium-ion batteries. I would tend to think otherwise. There's also other interesting investments in air breathing cathode batteries.
• jillesvangurp 5y ago
  Lithium is not expended and recyclable. As long as EVs are a growth market, we'll need to mine more of it of course but at some point, the vast majority will come from recycled batteries. The reason recycling lithium is so attractive is that 1) it is valuable because it is expensive to extract from the typically very low concentrations that exist in natural deposits. and 2) expended lithium batteries have orders of magnitude higher concentrations of it than exist in nature. You'd be a fool to dump it in a landfill. For reference, lead, which is far less valuable is also typically recycled from the batteries in scrapped cars. Depleted lead batteries are valuable enough that they are not dumped in landfills. The current price is about 74$/kg, up lately by about 7x from 10$. A 73kwh Tesla battery would contain about 63 kilos of lithium. That's about 5000$ or more than a lot of second hand cars. Even at 10$, we're still talking well over 700$. A depleted lead battery would be closer to 5$. Those are recycled as well. Regardless, there's a lot of lithium out there in nature. More than enough. There is no shortage just scaling challenges. Technical improvements like described in the article make it cheaper and less energy intensive to extract lithium. As you note, there's huge demand for EVs and that will keep prices for lithium high for some time to come. Companies working on extraction and recycling technology, have a lot of growth opportunities. They are super hot from an investor perspective and there are multiple very well funded companies working in this space already. Long term, that makes lithium super sustainable. Short term, it just means we'll expend a lot of energy (increasingly of the renewable type) and water to get it. But compare that to extracting oil and turning it into petrol. That too is expensive and 100% of it is expended. Recycling burned gasoline/diesel is not a thing. That's not sustainable at all.
• ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "Lithium is a finite resource which needs to be extracted from the earth via mining" That description fits every material apart from wood and dirt.