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> The Ritsumeikan study found "circular economy strategies" could halve resource demand or maintain it at 2015 levels. > Vehicle electrification can be achieve

> The Ritsumeikan study found "circular economy strategies" could halve resource demand or maintain it at 2015 levels. > Vehicle electrification can be achieved without increasing resource use if a set of circular economy strategies is concurrently and ambitiously implemented." So a big dig to get the materials in the first place and then fall off once we get enough of the materials out of the ground and good recycling systems in place. As opposed to continuing to go with oil where we will just constantly need more and more and more to burn.

guappa 2y ago
We still need to make the electricity.
- rho138 2y ago
  Here comes the sun!
- 0xfae 2y ago
  And the grid is getting greener and greener every year. An electric car bought today that is powered by a coal plant today will be powered by solar/hydro/wind more and more each year. A gas car will always run on fossil fuels.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Not necessarily, synthetic fuel is being developed for air transport and could also be used in internal combustion car engines. Not sure anyone is seriously working on it, and I don't know how the economics compare. One advantage would be that we already have the distribution infrastructure in place for liquid motor vehicle fuel. Our electrical infrastructure is going to need significant upgrading at least in places to handle charging if all vehicles are EVs.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    An electric car is also more efficient and grid fossil fuels are better than a small ICE. Still, I’m not really seeing the evidence that the grid is getting all that much greener. There’s a lot of solar capacity installed and yet every year we use more fossil fuels than the year before. It dents the growth a bit but it doesn’t seem to be doing a good job at replacing fossil fuels. We need more gen iv fission, not more renewables, to meaningfully displace fossil fuels. And no, it’s not more expensive than solar even today if you add the cost of batteries which everyone seems to ignore when comparing solar/wind to fission. As for hydro, that resource is fully tapped; all the available capacity is fully in use at a significant environmental cost. Geothermal might be a good one but it requires a massive shift in where cities are located which limits its utility (HVDC remains extremely expensive).
    - matthewdgreen 2y ago
      Battery prices are going down. Solar prices are going down. Wind prices are going down. Nuclear mostly is going sideways. This is also reflected by deployment, where renewables are on an exponential (logistic) curve and nuclear isn’t. Even in China, where nuclear is growing fastest, the curves look like this: https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-behind-photovoltaics-and-wind-in-china/95924 https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-... TL;DR if fast deployment of low carbon sources is what you want, nuclear definitely is not the answer.
      - vlovich123 2y ago
        The point of fission is that all that installed capacity is available 24/7. That isn’t true of wind and solar. So for baseload, fission is the only solution and that’s why China is building them. China fission prices have gone down by the way and it’s likely the world will soon start using their reactors because we let the coal industry kill our nuclear industry.
      - suoduandao3 2y ago
        That discrepancy is not surprising, given iteration times and cost of failure. Nuclear has great potential in space exploration, but it's never going to be economical when there are other options. It's no wonder pronuclear activists clog up any discussion of renewable energy, hoping to get some of that public subsidy money for themselves - they know the reactors can't pay for themselves by selling electricity alone.
  - randerson 2y ago
    And even if an EV is powered by a coal plant, the air pollution is in industrial areas not the residential areas where people live, so there are health benefits regardless of the climate impact.
- kalleboo 2y ago
  The sun gives that to us for free. We need to figure out how to store and transport the electricity.
  - suoduandao3 2y ago
    Batteries might work for storage, they have their own version of moore's law and will continue to get better and cheaper for a while. Now if only there were a way to bundle that energy storage with a means of transportation...
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      You realize the irony of replying on a thread about an article saying we’ve grossly underestimated by 3x the amount of battery materials we’ll need? And that’s just for EVs, not grid batteries. Yes, there’s the far out idea of maybe we can use car batteries to do that role but our grid is not designed for it and there’s all sorts of other problems of that. Fission is a much saner cost effective solution that requires much fewer ancillary changes than renewables would to fully move the grid.
      - suoduandao3 2y ago
        If Fission is so great, go build it. I'm not stopping you. But use your own money or get off the podium.
        vlovich123 2y ago
        That’s such an uninteresting comment. Use your own money to get solar off the podium? Remember that solar received substantial subsidies to bootstrap via rooftop solar. And fission’s biggest problem isn’t necessarily funding but that there’s all sorts of regulations placed on it to stop it from being successful. So you can’t just go out and build your own nuclear plant.
        suoduandao3 2y ago
- vel0city 2y ago
  My EV is charging at the moment. The current energy mix in my state is 24.3% solar, 15.2% wind, 7.4% nuclear. 46.9% of the energy going into my car right now comes from non-carbon sources. What percentage of non-carbon/renewable energy sources are going into my ICE next time I go to the pump? https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix This is all massively up from a decade ago. I wonder what percentage of non-carbon sources I'll have for my EV next decade. Do you think the non-carbon energy sources in my ICE will go down in a decade?
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    does your calculation include the carbon needed to lubricate the wind turbines? how about the carbon in the solar cells, and the carbon that will be needed to dispose of them when they fail? I'd argue the mix of non-carbon energy going into your car is a lot closer to 7.4% -- just the nuclear. Wind and solar both require industrial processes, materials, and maintenance involving not insignificant amounts of oil. also: why are you charging your EV in the middle of the day in Texas, in the summer? ERCOT asks people to conserve energy; this guy charges his car. Maybe save your grid strain for the evening?
    - vel0city 2y ago
      does your calculation include the carbon needed for all the concrete in the nuclear plants? does your calculation include the carbon needed for mining and refining the uranium in the reactor? does your calculation include the carbon needed for all the plant operators to drive their ICE vehicles to the plant every day? does your calculation include the mining needed for long term storage? Play enough games and throw no real numbers around and you can argue everything isn't renewable then. Are you really arguing that the lubrication needed for a turbine makes its overall carbon impact the same as natural gas or oil? Also, good job showing your ignorance of the Texas grid. ERCOT isn't asking people to conserve electricity at the moment buddy. Real-time spot prices are $24.65/MWh. We're nowhere near the committed capacity. There's lots of electricity available. Maybe save your comments for things you actually understand?
    - 2y ago
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  The amount of harvestable energy from sustainable resources is a few orders of magnitude more than what is/was available from all the oil and gas that ever existed on Earth. The amount of energy that hits the Earth from the sun in one week alone is more than all oil and gas reserves on Earth combined. Twice over. We'll be fine.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    Harvesting that efficiently is still a problem and requires comparatively large tracts of land. More importantly time shifting that daytime solar is a huge problem and you can’t handwave it away; this article is talking about how we’ve grossly underestimated the amount of resources needed for vehicle EV while grid batteries would shift that even more. We might get lucky with a totally new battery chemistry, but battery chemistry moves relatively slowly.
klysm 2y ago
Metal recycling is critical for both the metal resources themselves and the carbon reduction. Secondary aluminum production is much less carbon intense than primary. New sorting technologies have been developed which enable fine separation of aluminum alloys. LIBS and XRF backscattering should enable the industry to take a step forward and get low quality Twitch products into higher quality fast and wrought products. The industry has been slow to adopt these technologies because it’s hard! Sorting is difficult work and sensor based sorting opens up massive decision spaces.
- vel0city 2y ago
  It is definitely hard work, and it is even harder to make the economics work when you don't really have much of an easy to acquire steady source of materials. It is hard to scale when there just aren't the incoming materials yet. I think we'll see a lot more growth in the recycling of EV batteries once more of this current generation of EVs are actually sent to recycling. They're just not very old yet, so there's not large flows of recyclable materials coming in quite yet. The first Model 3's came out in 2017. I'd argue EV mass production wasn't really a thing until after that car's release and market acceptance. Not even a decade old yet for those cars, and it took a bit of time for those to really start shipping in volume. Model Y's only came out in 2019 and took time to be delivered in volume. Mach E's started in 2021. Many of the other big legacy auto makers have really only started to ship decent volumes of EVs in the past few years.
  - klysm 2y ago
    > It is hard to scale when there just aren't the incoming materials yet. There are a huge number of businesses already doing this today - there is plenty of incoming materials from just old cars alone. The amount of aluminum in this stream will be increasing in the years to come however. > I think we'll see a lot more growth in the recycling of EV batteries once more of this current generation of EVs are actually sent to recycling. They're just not very old yet, so there's not large flows of recyclable materials coming in quite yet. Battery recycling is very important, and one of the obvious consequences of EVs becoming more prevalent. Several companies are already tackling this at scale though. The carbon impact of _aluminum_ recycling is much more significant than battery recycling. That's what I was referring to in my previous comment. LIBS/XRF backscattering are fairly new technologies that enable fine grained sorting of aluminum alloys which should enable much more secondary aluminum to be used for high grade alloys.

guappa 2y ago

We still need to make the electricity.

rho138 2y ago
Here comes the sun!
0xfae 2y ago
And the grid is getting greener and greener every year. An electric car bought today that is powered by a coal plant today will be powered by solar/hydro/wind more and more each year. A gas car will always run on fossil fuels.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Not necessarily, synthetic fuel is being developed for air transport and could also be used in internal combustion car engines. Not sure anyone is seriously working on it, and I don't know how the economics compare. One advantage would be that we already have the distribution infrastructure in place for liquid motor vehicle fuel. Our electrical infrastructure is going to need significant upgrading at least in places to handle charging if all vehicles are EVs.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  An electric car is also more efficient and grid fossil fuels are better than a small ICE. Still, I’m not really seeing the evidence that the grid is getting all that much greener. There’s a lot of solar capacity installed and yet every year we use more fossil fuels than the year before. It dents the growth a bit but it doesn’t seem to be doing a good job at replacing fossil fuels. We need more gen iv fission, not more renewables, to meaningfully displace fossil fuels. And no, it’s not more expensive than solar even today if you add the cost of batteries which everyone seems to ignore when comparing solar/wind to fission. As for hydro, that resource is fully tapped; all the available capacity is fully in use at a significant environmental cost. Geothermal might be a good one but it requires a massive shift in where cities are located which limits its utility (HVDC remains extremely expensive).
  - matthewdgreen 2y ago
    Battery prices are going down. Solar prices are going down. Wind prices are going down. Nuclear mostly is going sideways. This is also reflected by deployment, where renewables are on an exponential (logistic) curve and nuclear isn’t. Even in China, where nuclear is growing fastest, the curves look like this: https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-behind-photovoltaics-and-wind-in-china/95924 https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-... TL;DR if fast deployment of low carbon sources is what you want, nuclear definitely is not the answer.
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      The point of fission is that all that installed capacity is available 24/7. That isn’t true of wind and solar. So for baseload, fission is the only solution and that’s why China is building them. China fission prices have gone down by the way and it’s likely the world will soon start using their reactors because we let the coal industry kill our nuclear industry.
    - suoduandao3 2y ago
      That discrepancy is not surprising, given iteration times and cost of failure. Nuclear has great potential in space exploration, but it's never going to be economical when there are other options. It's no wonder pronuclear activists clog up any discussion of renewable energy, hoping to get some of that public subsidy money for themselves - they know the reactors can't pay for themselves by selling electricity alone.
- randerson 2y ago
  And even if an EV is powered by a coal plant, the air pollution is in industrial areas not the residential areas where people live, so there are health benefits regardless of the climate impact.
kalleboo 2y ago
The sun gives that to us for free. We need to figure out how to store and transport the electricity.
- suoduandao3 2y ago
  Batteries might work for storage, they have their own version of moore's law and will continue to get better and cheaper for a while. Now if only there were a way to bundle that energy storage with a means of transportation...
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    You realize the irony of replying on a thread about an article saying we’ve grossly underestimated by 3x the amount of battery materials we’ll need? And that’s just for EVs, not grid batteries. Yes, there’s the far out idea of maybe we can use car batteries to do that role but our grid is not designed for it and there’s all sorts of other problems of that. Fission is a much saner cost effective solution that requires much fewer ancillary changes than renewables would to fully move the grid.
    - suoduandao3 2y ago
      If Fission is so great, go build it. I'm not stopping you. But use your own money or get off the podium.
      - vlovich123 2y ago
        That’s such an uninteresting comment. Use your own money to get solar off the podium? Remember that solar received substantial subsidies to bootstrap via rooftop solar. And fission’s biggest problem isn’t necessarily funding but that there’s all sorts of regulations placed on it to stop it from being successful. So you can’t just go out and build your own nuclear plant.
        suoduandao3 2y ago
vel0city 2y ago
My EV is charging at the moment. The current energy mix in my state is 24.3% solar, 15.2% wind, 7.4% nuclear. 46.9% of the energy going into my car right now comes from non-carbon sources. What percentage of non-carbon/renewable energy sources are going into my ICE next time I go to the pump? https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix This is all massively up from a decade ago. I wonder what percentage of non-carbon sources I'll have for my EV next decade. Do you think the non-carbon energy sources in my ICE will go down in a decade?
- dingnuts 2y ago
  does your calculation include the carbon needed to lubricate the wind turbines? how about the carbon in the solar cells, and the carbon that will be needed to dispose of them when they fail? I'd argue the mix of non-carbon energy going into your car is a lot closer to 7.4% -- just the nuclear. Wind and solar both require industrial processes, materials, and maintenance involving not insignificant amounts of oil. also: why are you charging your EV in the middle of the day in Texas, in the summer? ERCOT asks people to conserve energy; this guy charges his car. Maybe save your grid strain for the evening?
  - vel0city 2y ago
    does your calculation include the carbon needed for all the concrete in the nuclear plants? does your calculation include the carbon needed for mining and refining the uranium in the reactor? does your calculation include the carbon needed for all the plant operators to drive their ICE vehicles to the plant every day? does your calculation include the mining needed for long term storage? Play enough games and throw no real numbers around and you can argue everything isn't renewable then. Are you really arguing that the lubrication needed for a turbine makes its overall carbon impact the same as natural gas or oil? Also, good job showing your ignorance of the Texas grid. ERCOT isn't asking people to conserve electricity at the moment buddy. Real-time spot prices are $24.65/MWh. We're nowhere near the committed capacity. There's lots of electricity available. Maybe save your comments for things you actually understand?
  - 2y ago
Workaccount2 2y ago
The amount of harvestable energy from sustainable resources is a few orders of magnitude more than what is/was available from all the oil and gas that ever existed on Earth. The amount of energy that hits the Earth from the sun in one week alone is more than all oil and gas reserves on Earth combined. Twice over. We'll be fine.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  Harvesting that efficiently is still a problem and requires comparatively large tracts of land. More importantly time shifting that daytime solar is a huge problem and you can’t handwave it away; this article is talking about how we’ve grossly underestimated the amount of resources needed for vehicle EV while grid batteries would shift that even more. We might get lucky with a totally new battery chemistry, but battery chemistry moves relatively slowly.

klysm 2y ago

Metal recycling is critical for both the metal resources themselves and the carbon reduction. Secondary aluminum production is much less carbon intense than primary. New sorting technologies have been developed which enable fine separation of aluminum alloys. LIBS and XRF backscattering should enable the industry to take a step forward and get low quality Twitch products into higher quality fast and wrought products. The industry has been slow to adopt these technologies because it’s hard! Sorting is difficult work and sensor based sorting opens up massive decision spaces.

vel0city 2y ago
It is definitely hard work, and it is even harder to make the economics work when you don't really have much of an easy to acquire steady source of materials. It is hard to scale when there just aren't the incoming materials yet. I think we'll see a lot more growth in the recycling of EV batteries once more of this current generation of EVs are actually sent to recycling. They're just not very old yet, so there's not large flows of recyclable materials coming in quite yet. The first Model 3's came out in 2017. I'd argue EV mass production wasn't really a thing until after that car's release and market acceptance. Not even a decade old yet for those cars, and it took a bit of time for those to really start shipping in volume. Model Y's only came out in 2019 and took time to be delivered in volume. Mach E's started in 2021. Many of the other big legacy auto makers have really only started to ship decent volumes of EVs in the past few years.
- klysm 2y ago
  > It is hard to scale when there just aren't the incoming materials yet. There are a huge number of businesses already doing this today - there is plenty of incoming materials from just old cars alone. The amount of aluminum in this stream will be increasing in the years to come however. > I think we'll see a lot more growth in the recycling of EV batteries once more of this current generation of EVs are actually sent to recycling. They're just not very old yet, so there's not large flows of recyclable materials coming in quite yet. Battery recycling is very important, and one of the obvious consequences of EVs becoming more prevalent. Several companies are already tackling this at scale though. The carbon impact of _aluminum_ recycling is much more significant than battery recycling. That's what I was referring to in my previous comment. LIBS/XRF backscattering are fairly new technologies that enable fine grained sorting of aluminum alloys which should enable much more secondary aluminum to be used for high grade alloys.