We May Not Have Enough Minerals to Even Meet Electric Car Demand
jalopnik.com
jalopnik.com
It really seems like the lowest hanging fruit, but there is not enough profit-motive or politcal incentive to really push it forward?
I would love to bike to work and take a shower on arrival--daily exercise that I need anyways, avoids stress & danger of driving, feels great to do. It's also a lot better for the environment than electric cars, and saves me a lot of time.
It could help with congestion, pollution, obesity, healthcare costs, and possibly improve social morale.
I really think it is an issue where no business or politician has enough incentive/ability to capture profit, so it doesn't ever get much traction, but the public benefit is quite large.
From what I understand Holland's bike infrastructure is seen as a gold-standard among transportation economists on how to reduce congestion and pollution--no?
1) someone has to pay for it
2) it gets in the way of my car
That's it.
Seriously. It's no more complicated than that. I have watched bike lanes make their way into major cities and those are literally the only stumbling blocks. But really it's just #2.
I don't know why people are downvoting this. I know the people who fought for 6 years to get one cycle track in Baltimore. Residents are still fighting it because it made them drive less fast and park differently.
I mean, there's pages and pages to write, but basically it boils down to that. The bicycle existed before the car, will probably exist after it, but at least when cars and fuel was cheap, people preferred cars. So the infrastructure was and is built around cars. And car manufacturing, repairs, etc., are probably a trillion-dollar industry, so they are not really interested in anything that rocks the boat, and influence the political process to try and ensure this.
So on one hand you have a public that says, basically, "my car from my cold, dead hands", and on the other hand you have a giant industry which employs a significant number of Americans saying "we want to sell you those cars". It's sort of surprising there is any other transportation infrastructure at all.
It's not surprising the places you find the most alternative modes of transportation are where fewer people own cars. (E.g. NYC in particular, which I believe has the lowest rate of car ownership in the US.) There's a chicken-and-egg problem at work to get anything else funded.
Expecting the political process to lead us to a solution is, IMO, a mistake. The political process in the US lags behind public opinion by design, it does not lead (and often screws up when it tries). Public opinion needs to change first, then funding will change, and then infrastructure will change.
I lived without a car for years, and I cycled 15 miles a day for commuting/chores. I developed pretty painful patellar tendonitis, and I went to physical therapy, which helped significantly (but didn't cure the issue).
I'm lucky if I can commute 3 days a week on my bike. I love it so much, I even do it when I'm in pain. But it's not possible to do it every day for me, without serious pain.
However, I'm currently converting my bike into an e-bike :) That will make it significantly easier on my poor old man joints.
About your pattellar tendonitis: I developed that when I was trying for an ambitious marathon goal. It took 1.5 years to go away -- in my experience nothing helped except the time. You might want to try getting off the bike for several months and picking up something else, like swimming.
I had a lot of issues with knee pain but after going to a higher cadence with a better saddle position I haven't had issues for many years even commuting 15mi a day each way every day. This said we're all different so n=1 and all that, good luck!
Lack of larger transportation possibilities. Yes, there are specialized transport bikes, but they still can't pack an IKEA haul and are almost as expensive as a small or used car.
Infrastructure built for cars (i.e. everything far apart).
Increased accident risk.
Not everyone being able or willing to drive.
Bikes get stolen which is super annoying.
If I already have a car for all the aforementioned reasons, a bike is an additional expense.
Don't get me wrong, I commute by bike every day there's no ice on the streets, but few others go so far, even here in Germany where the biking experience is already much better than in the US (but still a long way to go from the Netherlands).
Bike paths can be plowed in winter just like roads. It's not actually a big deal to bike when it is snowing outside. Our grandparents fought in horrific conditions. We are afraid to do almost anything without a sticker and stamp of approval.
If we are going to talk about saving the world, but no one will even think we can put on a jacket and pedal on a bicycle path, maybe we should stop and self-reflect.
Maybe we are a generation of spoiled babies. We cry and whine about global warming, pollution, inequality, injustice, but we're not really willing to break a sweat. We just say whatever is politically correct and get on with it. At some point it is worth mentioning that it's all kind of an insult to the opportunity we have been given.
Well that article sure disproved its own thesis quickly. If we can't even be bothered to purify cheap nickel, then we are definitely not facing a shortage.
It's like any other nonrenewable resource; there's going to be an extraction cost that increases over time as the easily recovered deposits are used up.
But unlike oil, which can only be used once and is then gone forever, nickel and other metals get brought out of the earth and into circulation, and can then be used over and over. So the price of both recycled and virgin nickel will increase until demand is met.
I'm curious when it starts to become advantageous to mine old landfills for all the stuff we used to throw away and not recycle...
Potential supplies in the US, Canada, and Australia are substantial. Not a fundamental problem for the next century. Also, much cobalt is already recycled.
[1] https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/cobalt/mcs...
Nickel is trading at very low prices historically and most producers are losing money at current prices.
This would imply that the current supply of nickel is more than sufficient for the worlds needs and that some producers need to shut down. (Why they don’t is fascinating on its own)
Most of the worlds nickel production is low quality ferro nickel used in the production of stainless steel.
Despite this we are not seeing larger premiums for high quality nickel products which would indicate that there is more demand for high quality nickel.
High quality/ high cost nickel producers know that their only chance to survive the over supply of cheap nickel in the world is if we see the same over exuberance as which we have seen with cobalt trading in recent months.
The only problem is that nickel is a much larger market than cobalt and as such is not as susceptible to small market changes, and as the article points out nickel does not face the same geopolitical supply risk as cobalt does in the Congo.
We are unlikely to see a shortage of Nickel.
You can't assume the lack of innovation when our whole economic system is built to encourage innovation where most needed.
The previous energy crisis - Peak Whale Oil - was resolved that way. We didn't end up discovering a new source or species of whales. Instead, we found that this 300M year old black gunk that comes out of the ground could be refined into all the products that we used whale blubber for, plus several others. And there was much more of it available, and it took a lot less labor.
I liked very muche Collapse by Jared Diamond. He discusses some cases of this type, starting from the iconic history of Easter Island.
I'd guess that for just about all rocks we're much closer to the easy end than we are with oil, with no real worry of running out.
Metals are different; they're not really consumed, just tied up in manufactured products during the life of that product. After the product's lifespan, they can be reused. Different calculation entirely.
https://www.geek.com/tech/musk-shares-first-image-of-boring-...
People are really underestimating the impact of lower cost tunneling.
Ground level power supply systems also exist[2], but would require you to tear up the entire road network in order to implement them, are expensive, and apparently prone to water clogging (which could perhaps be mitigated) without mentioning the fact that they would probably require either an autonomous or guided vehicle in order to reliably maintain contact with the rail.
So, not really, the limitations are mostly about cost and political capital.
[1]https://www.siemens.com/global/en/home/products/mobility/roa...
[2]http://www.alstom.com/products-services/product-catalogue/ra...
Gaps in the wire for intersections and underpasses could be handled by having small battery packs in the cars. This also helps with the last-mile -- only large arterial roads need to be electrified and cars could drive the short distance on city streets on battery power.
One solution for in-road charging would be wireless inductive chargers like:
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/qualcomms-inductive-charg...
Though as you say, the real problems are price and politics. In the SF Bay Area, Caltrain has taken decades to get funding for electrification and has faced a lot of resistance from some communities for the construction and visual blight of overhead electrification. And that's just for one set of tracks, electrifying all of the freeways would be much worse.
Like I said, it is technologically possible, but for most intents and purposes seems like a wonky solution, at least for personal vehicles, mass transportation and freight are completely different scenarios.
As for the other points, you are right, there are fairly straight forward solutions.
Inductive charging is definitely a good option, which has already been explored by transport companies[1]. It again seems to be that politics and money are the main barrier for implementation.
Trams and busses and trains have been running off overhead lines for a long time, so it clearly works.
The main issues are that it doesn't obviously scale up (i.e. it works fine for a few trams, but not necessarily for thousands of cars filled with 1-2 occupants each) and it would be very expensive to roll out widely. Especially for last mile transport, where it basically becomes infeasible. There's just too much road.
Essentially, it is a viable alternative, but only where public transport is the major form of transportation. If people are still driving thousands of cars rather than taking the bus then it's impractical.
1. It's expensive, and that cost doesn't work out when you have petroleum available as a fuel and can just carry your own energy supply around easily in a small tank under the passenger compartment. It probably still doesn't work out when you have coal, or coal-derived diesel, or vegetable-derived diesel, or "good enough" batteries, available, because those systems are simpler and don't have the funding problems (most of the cost is shifted to the user of the vehicle, which prevents the politically crippling cost of a public system).
2. When you finally designed a system, and standardized the vehicle heights and worked out all the other issues, I suspect you'd have reinvented electric trains. (Or some sort of essentially train-like system, or a system that's not advantageous enough over trains to warrant building it.)
Basically it's an idea that's pinched between existing technologies that are good enough in their current forms, and has an extremely high implementation cost. The risk-factored ROI just doesn't appear to be there.
Of course, I'd prefer a future with electric trams in every street and fewer cars, all electric, all small and light to save in materials and energy.
1. "Lithium Ion" describes a family of batteries, with varying chemical compositions. As an example, the battery in the Nissan Leaf uses no cobalt in its cathode:
https://qnovo.com/inside-the-battery-of-a-nissan-leaf/
"It uses a different material for the cathode called lithium-manganese-oxide with nickel oxide (LiMn2O4 with LiNiO2) that is inherently safer than the lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode material"
2. There are other battery chemistries outside of the Lithium Ion family, in varying states of maturity, that could (in time) become competitive with Lithium Ion in the electric car market. To give one example:
Eventually we'll run out, but making it harder to find just makes it more expensive. (well, that and the political problems caused by wealthy middle eastern nations running out of their liquid gold)
I suppose they could fix it just by saying "at the current price" at the end.
1) we use those big lines full of electricity hanging adjacent to the road to power vehicles,
2) we stop using cars
Dude.
I don't think that the concept of asteroid mining is totally ridiculous, but I think it needs to be uncrewed, slow, with low delta-v. So even if you had a target asteroid and a robotic mining system all ready to go today, the products wouldn't reach terrestrial markets before a couple more decades passed.