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The electric vehicles may be more energy efficient once they are ready for driving. But actually building all its parts not only consumes way more energy compar

The electric vehicles may be more energy efficient once they are ready for driving. But actually building all its parts not only consumes way more energy compared to combustion cars. It also needs rare earth metals which are mined by workers living the life of slaves.

epups 4y ago
Right... As opposed to oil, which is mostly sourced from free democracies right?
- dragontamer 4y ago
  I've been running my car on E85 all year, US sourced ethanol. But yes, US gasoline is also sourced from the US primarily. (Texas and Alaska). With a terminal at Brent / Arkansas.
  - benj111 4y ago
    And what's the oil input required to produce that ethanol?
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      Oil? None. Natural Gas? A bit, for corn-based ethanol (the Nitrogen fertilizers used to make modern corn fields requires a surprisingly large amount of energy, of which is primarily given through Natural Gas IIRC). Various calculations I've seen however, suggests that Ethanol uses less greenhouse gasses than say Electric vehicles (since most of our power grid is still coal / natural gas based). Aside from that one guy who keeps making anti-ethanol research papers for the last 15 years. The bulk of energy going into corn is the sun, all natural solar energy. A bit of it is hacked together with Nitrogen fertilizers that must be accounted for, but still better than other methodologies. The other major greenhouse gas issue is the greenhouse gas costs of converting forested land into farmland, and this seems to be the biggest area of debate. ------------ Bonus points: Switchgrass based ethanol uses no fertilizers, meaning its 100% green. Since Switchgrass grows naturally in the US Fields (unlike Corn, which is a domesticated crop), Switchgrass is arguably better for the environment (or at least, more "natural"). The lack of fertilizers needed for it to grow is proof to how its a plant designed for our geography. So Switchgrass solves the fertilizer and land-conversion issues.
      - elcritch 4y ago
        Making Ethanol from corn production seems terrible though IMHO. It increases the cost of food stuffs even outside the US from what I've read since most of its highly subsidized which unbalances prices. Switchgrass could be better.. Maybe even better would be some kinda kelp/saltwater plant since it'd not consume freshwater which is ever more a valuable commodity.
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        And of course the only reason ethonal is even remotely competitive is that is was essentially forced into production and subsidies. Its not actually a viable solution if you wanted to transition 10s of millions of vehicles onto it. You would have to include both methanol and ethanol. I would actually have been a fan of that solution if it was the 90s, but its time has come and gone. Also, you realize you are still producing harmful emissions when driving that car threw a city right? Cobalt can easily be mined in North America, there is no reason it has to come from Cobalt. If that is the issue, the solution is not to drive around with ethanol.
      - benj111 4y ago
        'a bit'? Fertilizer production is energy intensive, plus a huge amount of land is given over to producing a relatively small proportion of the fuel mix. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/02/us-biofuel-mandate-likely-increased-carbon-emissions-inflated-crop-prices-20-30/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/02/us-biofuel-manda... If youre going to compare switch grass, why don't you compare that against the best scenario for EVs. No cobalt, lithium extracted from sea water, powered from a clean grid? The switch grass is still going to require fertilising, maybe not as much, but if you're removing nutrients you have to replace them.
xbmcuser 4y ago
- dragontamer 4y ago
  ICE cars are made from steel. BEVs are made from Lithium and literally require acid poured through mountains to collect, along with child labor in the Congo to collect cobalt. Iron / steel is mostly recycled today and incredibly cheap and efficient. A steel engine very well would have less of an environmental impact than Li-ion production. ------ The pro-battery crowd needs to start recycling batteries and improving the environmental impact of that technology.
  - martindbp 4y ago
    And to run one ICE car for its lifetime takes 30000 gallons of gas pumped from the ground, refined and shipped across the planet by hostile nations such as Russia and Saudi Arabia or through local fracking. There are cobalt-free batteries, and you don't need to use child labor (even if this is the case now, which I doubt). Lithium is super abundant.
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      > 30000 gallons of gas ICE cars travel at 30mpg, so you're assuming that ICE cars travel 900,000 miles? > refined and shipped across the planet by hostile nations such as Russia and Saudi Arabia or through local fracking. And where do you think the Nickle that your Li-ion batteries use comes from? (Hint Russia). The core manufacturing capabilities of Li-ion batteries are almost entirely foreign. Nickle from Russia, Cobalt from Congo, LFP from China. If you're trying to make a US-centered argument, the thing about local fracking is that it is US-centered and therefore subject to US laws and regulations. > There are cobalt-free batteries, and you don't need to use child labor (even if this is the case now, which I doubt). Lithium is super abundant. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/02/09/lithium-mining-and-the-hidden-environmental-costs-of-evs/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/02/09/lithium-mining-and-th... > Because lithium’s concentration in ore at Thacker Pass runs as low as two-tenths of one percent, producing one ton of the stuff for use by society entails strip mining and processing as much as 500 tons of earth. Over a single year, producing 60,000 tons of lithium at the site could mean digging up as much as 20 to 30 million tons of earth, more than the annual amount of earth dug up to produce all coal output of all but seven or eight U.S. states. Are you sure that the oil slurpped up through a straw is really more environmentaly damaging than hundreds-of-tons of mining activity per bit of Lithium?
theluketaylor 4y ago
Newer chemistries like LFP do not use rare earth metals and have far higher cycle times. It is true that building an EV in the first place does embody more carbon, but the payback time is not that long (under 15,000 miles with a clean enough grid and under 50,000 even on the dirtiest grids). As the grid and supply chain decarbonizes that embedded carbon of manufacturing will also drop. An EV gets cleaner as the grid you drive it on decarbonizes. An ICE vehicle will emit for its whole lifespan and will get worse fuel economy and emit more particulates, SO2 and NOX as it ages. Anyone who claims EVs will save the planet is deluding themselves, but electrified transport needs to be one of many, many steps we take to decarbonize.
- dragontamer 4y ago
  100,000 EVs contain the same number of batteries as 500,000 PHEVs, which contains the same number of batteries as 2,000,000 hybrids. Run the math. The 2-million hybrids will save the world faster than 100,000 EVs. Let's say ICE is 30MPG, Hybrid is like 40MPG to 60MPG. Even at the low end 40MPG, 2 million hybrids is the same number of emission savings as 350,000 EVs. -------- Pure ICE technologies are also more important. Going from 20mpg to 25 mpg will have a bigger impact due to the huge number of ICE cars being made. ------- There are 289 million vehicles to replace in the USA. The sad truth is that 1 million EVs/year changes nothing. We need faster production and faster replacement. And there is no entity who can make 1 million EVs/year.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Tesla makes 1.5 million EVs/year at current run rate, and is targeting 2 million/year by end of year. You need not replace every vehicle right away, just enough to replace the largest consumers of fossil fuels. > Run the math. There are no spherical cows. https://insideevs.com/news/602725/tesla-3-million-cars-prduced-2-million-run-rate-2022/ https://insideevs.com/news/602725/tesla-3-million-cars-prduc...
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      > Tesla makes 1.5 million EVs/year at current run rate, and is targeting 2 million/year by end of year. 289 million vehicles. At that rate, it will take over 100 years to replace all ICE vehicles. > You need not replace every vehicle right away, just enough to replace the largest consumers of fossil fuels. You mean semi-trucks and busses? How many years has Tesla-semi been in development hell now? Electric semi-trucks will eventually come. But at this point, I'm thinking its going to be Fuel Cell electricity through Hydrogen rather than batteries.
panick21_ 4y ago
So this is some very inaccurate statement, so lets clear up a few thing for those people that are not informed. > It also needs rare earth metals which are mined by workers living the life of slaves. First off, 'rare metal' is a specific group of metals that don't have much use in batteries. Batteries are made from Nickel, Manganese, Cobalt, Aluminum, Cooper, Lithium and Graphite. Non of these are 'Rare Earth' Metals. Of course EV do use Rare Earth Metals but so do ICE cars, the difference is not actually that large. EV Motors have some more Rare Earth then would be found in ICE cars but its hardly a difference worth talking about much. What you are referring to is like Cobalt mining. Cobalt mining is mostly done in the Congo and so of course has issues with working conditions and child labor. For the most part, about 80% of Cobalt is actually mined in traditional strip mining and workers there are very comparable to workers in all other types of industrial mining. Most large EV companies pretty much exclusively buy from the large mining operations. The bad conditions, specially for children, come in in about the rest of the 20%, what is usually called artisanal mining operations. These are often private mines and the workers are not slave, they 'own' the mines but of course they are still poor and live in bad conditions and children working there is of course bad. But even there, its not universally the case, there are large efforts done to try to track those mines and reward those that have good conditions and block the others. Th The problem is, there is a huge intensive for those mined materials to find a way into the supply chain. And since all these materials get refined in China its hard to verify. But what people don't tell you, is that oil manufacturing also uses a large quantity of cobalt. So the idea that somehow EV are uniquely bad makes no sense if you look at it that way. In addition, pretty much every manufacture is pushing out cobalt even from high nickel batteries. And of course LFP batteries that will make up over 50% of the market in the next decade don't use cobalt. Neither do next generation batteries like Sodium. > But actually building all its parts not only consumes way more energy compared to combustion cars. While this is true now, this is mostly because of the less mature supply chain. Its not inherently the case. If you started fresh building up a ICE supply chain it would suffer from many of the same problems. A Tesla made in Texas for example will have almost everything in one building and will likely be far more efficient then many ICE vehicles. But it just takes time for the industry as a whole to optimize the whole supply-chain end to end. So its really not a good argument against EV. This will automatically solve itself as you scale. And even if it uses 20% more CO2 during manufacture, over the lifetime its still dramatically less CO2. And arguably just as important, the emissions that ICE cars blow into cities is horribly for the health of people and specially children.

epups 4y ago

Right... As opposed to oil, which is mostly sourced from free democracies right?

dragontamer 4y ago
I've been running my car on E85 all year, US sourced ethanol. But yes, US gasoline is also sourced from the US primarily. (Texas and Alaska). With a terminal at Brent / Arkansas.
- benj111 4y ago
  And what's the oil input required to produce that ethanol?
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    Oil? None. Natural Gas? A bit, for corn-based ethanol (the Nitrogen fertilizers used to make modern corn fields requires a surprisingly large amount of energy, of which is primarily given through Natural Gas IIRC). Various calculations I've seen however, suggests that Ethanol uses less greenhouse gasses than say Electric vehicles (since most of our power grid is still coal / natural gas based). Aside from that one guy who keeps making anti-ethanol research papers for the last 15 years. The bulk of energy going into corn is the sun, all natural solar energy. A bit of it is hacked together with Nitrogen fertilizers that must be accounted for, but still better than other methodologies. The other major greenhouse gas issue is the greenhouse gas costs of converting forested land into farmland, and this seems to be the biggest area of debate. ------------ Bonus points: Switchgrass based ethanol uses no fertilizers, meaning its 100% green. Since Switchgrass grows naturally in the US Fields (unlike Corn, which is a domesticated crop), Switchgrass is arguably better for the environment (or at least, more "natural"). The lack of fertilizers needed for it to grow is proof to how its a plant designed for our geography. So Switchgrass solves the fertilizer and land-conversion issues.
    - elcritch 4y ago
      Making Ethanol from corn production seems terrible though IMHO. It increases the cost of food stuffs even outside the US from what I've read since most of its highly subsidized which unbalances prices. Switchgrass could be better.. Maybe even better would be some kinda kelp/saltwater plant since it'd not consume freshwater which is ever more a valuable commodity.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      And of course the only reason ethonal is even remotely competitive is that is was essentially forced into production and subsidies. Its not actually a viable solution if you wanted to transition 10s of millions of vehicles onto it. You would have to include both methanol and ethanol. I would actually have been a fan of that solution if it was the 90s, but its time has come and gone. Also, you realize you are still producing harmful emissions when driving that car threw a city right? Cobalt can easily be mined in North America, there is no reason it has to come from Cobalt. If that is the issue, the solution is not to drive around with ethanol.
    - benj111 4y ago
      'a bit'? Fertilizer production is energy intensive, plus a huge amount of land is given over to producing a relatively small proportion of the fuel mix. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/02/us-biofuel-mandate-likely-increased-carbon-emissions-inflated-crop-prices-20-30/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/02/us-biofuel-manda... If youre going to compare switch grass, why don't you compare that against the best scenario for EVs. No cobalt, lithium extracted from sea water, powered from a clean grid? The switch grass is still going to require fertilising, maybe not as much, but if you're removing nutrients you have to replace them.

xbmcuser 4y ago

dragontamer 4y ago
ICE cars are made from steel. BEVs are made from Lithium and literally require acid poured through mountains to collect, along with child labor in the Congo to collect cobalt. Iron / steel is mostly recycled today and incredibly cheap and efficient. A steel engine very well would have less of an environmental impact than Li-ion production. ------ The pro-battery crowd needs to start recycling batteries and improving the environmental impact of that technology.
- martindbp 4y ago
  And to run one ICE car for its lifetime takes 30000 gallons of gas pumped from the ground, refined and shipped across the planet by hostile nations such as Russia and Saudi Arabia or through local fracking. There are cobalt-free batteries, and you don't need to use child labor (even if this is the case now, which I doubt). Lithium is super abundant.
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    > 30000 gallons of gas ICE cars travel at 30mpg, so you're assuming that ICE cars travel 900,000 miles? > refined and shipped across the planet by hostile nations such as Russia and Saudi Arabia or through local fracking. And where do you think the Nickle that your Li-ion batteries use comes from? (Hint Russia). The core manufacturing capabilities of Li-ion batteries are almost entirely foreign. Nickle from Russia, Cobalt from Congo, LFP from China. If you're trying to make a US-centered argument, the thing about local fracking is that it is US-centered and therefore subject to US laws and regulations. > There are cobalt-free batteries, and you don't need to use child labor (even if this is the case now, which I doubt). Lithium is super abundant. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/02/09/lithium-mining-and-the-hidden-environmental-costs-of-evs/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/02/09/lithium-mining-and-th... > Because lithium’s concentration in ore at Thacker Pass runs as low as two-tenths of one percent, producing one ton of the stuff for use by society entails strip mining and processing as much as 500 tons of earth. Over a single year, producing 60,000 tons of lithium at the site could mean digging up as much as 20 to 30 million tons of earth, more than the annual amount of earth dug up to produce all coal output of all but seven or eight U.S. states. Are you sure that the oil slurpped up through a straw is really more environmentaly damaging than hundreds-of-tons of mining activity per bit of Lithium?

theluketaylor 4y ago

Newer chemistries like LFP do not use rare earth metals and have far higher cycle times. It is true that building an EV in the first place does embody more carbon, but the payback time is not that long (under 15,000 miles with a clean enough grid and under 50,000 even on the dirtiest grids). As the grid and supply chain decarbonizes that embedded carbon of manufacturing will also drop. An EV gets cleaner as the grid you drive it on decarbonizes. An ICE vehicle will emit for its whole lifespan and will get worse fuel economy and emit more particulates, SO2 and NOX as it ages. Anyone who claims EVs will save the planet is deluding themselves, but electrified transport needs to be one of many, many steps we take to decarbonize.

dragontamer 4y ago
100,000 EVs contain the same number of batteries as 500,000 PHEVs, which contains the same number of batteries as 2,000,000 hybrids. Run the math. The 2-million hybrids will save the world faster than 100,000 EVs. Let's say ICE is 30MPG, Hybrid is like 40MPG to 60MPG. Even at the low end 40MPG, 2 million hybrids is the same number of emission savings as 350,000 EVs. -------- Pure ICE technologies are also more important. Going from 20mpg to 25 mpg will have a bigger impact due to the huge number of ICE cars being made. ------- There are 289 million vehicles to replace in the USA. The sad truth is that 1 million EVs/year changes nothing. We need faster production and faster replacement. And there is no entity who can make 1 million EVs/year.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Tesla makes 1.5 million EVs/year at current run rate, and is targeting 2 million/year by end of year. You need not replace every vehicle right away, just enough to replace the largest consumers of fossil fuels. > Run the math. There are no spherical cows. https://insideevs.com/news/602725/tesla-3-million-cars-prduced-2-million-run-rate-2022/ https://insideevs.com/news/602725/tesla-3-million-cars-prduc...
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    > Tesla makes 1.5 million EVs/year at current run rate, and is targeting 2 million/year by end of year. 289 million vehicles. At that rate, it will take over 100 years to replace all ICE vehicles. > You need not replace every vehicle right away, just enough to replace the largest consumers of fossil fuels. You mean semi-trucks and busses? How many years has Tesla-semi been in development hell now? Electric semi-trucks will eventually come. But at this point, I'm thinking its going to be Fuel Cell electricity through Hydrogen rather than batteries.

panick21_ 4y ago

So this is some very inaccurate statement, so lets clear up a few thing for those people that are not informed. > It also needs rare earth metals which are mined by workers living the life of slaves. First off, 'rare metal' is a specific group of metals that don't have much use in batteries. Batteries are made from Nickel, Manganese, Cobalt, Aluminum, Cooper, Lithium and Graphite. Non of these are 'Rare Earth' Metals. Of course EV do use Rare Earth Metals but so do ICE cars, the difference is not actually that large. EV Motors have some more Rare Earth then would be found in ICE cars but its hardly a difference worth talking about much. What you are referring to is like Cobalt mining. Cobalt mining is mostly done in the Congo and so of course has issues with working conditions and child labor. For the most part, about 80% of Cobalt is actually mined in traditional strip mining and workers there are very comparable to workers in all other types of industrial mining. Most large EV companies pretty much exclusively buy from the large mining operations. The bad conditions, specially for children, come in in about the rest of the 20%, what is usually called artisanal mining operations. These are often private mines and the workers are not slave, they 'own' the mines but of course they are still poor and live in bad conditions and children working there is of course bad. But even there, its not universally the case, there are large efforts done to try to track those mines and reward those that have good conditions and block the others. Th The problem is, there is a huge intensive for those mined materials to find a way into the supply chain. And since all these materials get refined in China its hard to verify. But what people don't tell you, is that oil manufacturing also uses a large quantity of cobalt. So the idea that somehow EV are uniquely bad makes no sense if you look at it that way. In addition, pretty much every manufacture is pushing out cobalt even from high nickel batteries. And of course LFP batteries that will make up over 50% of the market in the next decade don't use cobalt. Neither do next generation batteries like Sodium. > But actually building all its parts not only consumes way more energy compared to combustion cars. While this is true now, this is mostly because of the less mature supply chain. Its not inherently the case. If you started fresh building up a ICE supply chain it would suffer from many of the same problems. A Tesla made in Texas for example will have almost everything in one building and will likely be far more efficient then many ICE vehicles. But it just takes time for the industry as a whole to optimize the whole supply-chain end to end. So its really not a good argument against EV. This will automatically solve itself as you scale. And even if it uses 20% more CO2 during manufacture, over the lifetime its still dramatically less CO2. And arguably just as important, the emissions that ICE cars blow into cities is horribly for the health of people and specially children.