Economics of Electric Vehicles Mean Oil's Days as a Transport Fuel Are Numbered
forbes.com
forbes.com
Hmm, not sure about that "much easier to transport" part. A cube 3 meters on a side can contain enough gasoline to power the average car for its entire lifespan. The gasoline is a liquid, it is relatively easy to move it between containers. Any technology that is capable of moving macroscopic amounts of matter is capable of moving gasoline. You can haul it on a bicycle, you can haul it on an airplane. To transport electricity you need to make sure there are power lines and batteries arranged in a certain way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_automobiles
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/325733/why-can-f...
That results in nice small, but not too small, numbers for most current cars, around 50 pico hectares for a Humvee in the city to around 4 pico hectares for a Prius on the highway.
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-enough-lithium-in-the-world-t...
Even if we can't get Cobalt to 0% (and there is plenty of research into other battery composites happening right now), the problems with Cobalt seem less to do with scarcity and a lot more to do with geopolitics (Cobalt is primarily sourced today as byproduct extracts of mines for minerals such as nickel in countries like Columbia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo). There's even indications that cobalt could be recycled from existing battery composites (as we do today already for lithium), but no economic incentive to do such because it isn't scarce enough to try.
It looks like electrical equipment of that scale tends to confined to substations, power plants, and other controlled areas.
When it comes to robustness, you often see power after a hurricane supplied by gasoline powered generators, with the gasoline supplied by any means necessary. (When the last hurricane hit here, gasoline was available for quite a long time before the grid was repaired.)
This is something often overlooked when comparing fossil to electric fuels, on any average car you can "charge" enough fuel for 600miles in 10min whereas on an electric you need to charge for 75min to be able to make 350miles and that's if you have a supercharge station available.
A cube 3 meters on a side can also contain almost 160,000 meters squared of solar cell wafers, given a common wafer thickness of around 170 micrometers.
Assuming around ten square meters per car, that could keep nearly 16,000 cars on the road for decades.
edit - to take this further, a standard shipping container could contain enough wafers for nearly 20,000 cars and in 2012, according to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, there were 254,639,386 registered vehicles in the US.
So that comes to under 14,000 shipping containers full of wafers, which could fit in one single ship delivery, for all of the vehicles in the USA.
> So that comes to under 14,000 shipping containers full of wafers, which could fit in one single ship delivery, for all of the vehicles in the USA.
Taking the thickness of 170 micrometers and extrapolating this measure of a solar waffer to the needs of US cars is just ... unreal. The OP came up with a serious relation. How many containers would be needed when you measue the thickness of handable solar cells, like 3mm?
edit - Also, 170 micrometers is positively beefy compared to what is coming down the line. 1 micrometer thick flexible cells have already been developed - https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2016/06/20/New-flexible-sol... -
Transportation of (flammable) liquids require either vehicles (and hence roads or rails if you go inland) down to the last mile. Electricity requires a wire, which is far less costly to build.
Also if you consider the logistics of bringing energy to different places of a building, wires are much easier to lay down than pipes.
Have you tried?
The marginal cost of driving an existing truck 10 mile down an existing road is negligible. Getting electricity to a place that is even half a mile from the nearest place that currently has electricity can be incredibly expensive and time consuming. Even just applying for the right permits and getting the go ahead from the local power company to start pricing out the job can take months.
Compare like with like please.
Of course non-existent wire vs existing road is not competitive.
If both exist, electricity wins. If neither exists, electricity wins. And electricity has that added advantage that you can buy an equipment that will produce it in place without consuming additional resources.
The only case where fuel is competitive is when roads exist, electricity distribution doesn't, and diesel generators are installed.
Are you sure? I'm not. Especially not when we're talking the sort of electrical infrastructure that can support charging multiple electric cars and trucks (although there's no point in having an electric car if there aren't any roads).
Obviously electricity is the right long term answer and where we should be going, but I doubt it is the cheapest immediate solution in many parts of the world.
Wires never blow a tire, head gasket, or transmission - and in fact they cannot even crash into and kill people on the highway. They're just long pieces of copper or steel tied to a tower. How convenient!
If you instead compare the fixed costs, as you seem wont to do, you'll find that HV (500 kV) transmission lines and towers capable of carrying several gigawatts [1] continuously have substantially lower initial and lifetime costs per Joule-kilometre than oil pipelines, rail, trucks, tankers, or anything else that has to move oil. [2]
[1] https://www.power-technology.com/features/featurethe-worlds-...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/04/26/pick-your...
I understand this to mean “cheaper to transport at scale”. You need to truck gasoline to a gas station every time. Once cables are laid, electricity transport is practically free.
I guess that's a valid point, but mailing DVDs still lost out to streaming, same as trucking and piping gas will lose to wiring.
Given we need to transport electricity for a bunch of other things, this delta is small.
It's big relative to the electric fleet size when the fleet is small, but it's tiny when the electric fleet is a substantial fraction of the car fleet.
If these figures are even in the rough ballpark of being correct, then it is all over bar the shouting.
>"More than a third (36%) of the crude oil produced today goes to fuel vehicles susceptible to electrification"
Kicker once price parity is archived gasoline powered cars will be more expensive to operate even if the cost of gasoline was zero.
This seems to be the crux of the argument. It certainly doesn't make sense to me. Obviously oil would find it hard to compete with electricity if it was free, but amortizing the cost of renewable power plants means that is unlikely any time soon.
There are also some places where prices go slightly negative because the producers' tax credit schemes give them revenue in excess of the negative price.
It just says that if you have a solar panel, you don't need to spend additional money to make it produce electricity. Unlike, say, a diesel generator. It is purely capital spending, zero marginal cost.
Another way of counting would be to say that _not_ producing costs you money as you are losing capital over the panels' lifetime.
The battery Ford F150 is two years out.. At that point, most consumer vehicles can potentially be electric, but the electrics will not be lower in initial cost yet. Bloomberg sees that happening in 2024.
Conversion may happen faster in China. Already, there are heavy incentives to go electric in Beijing. As in, you can get a car license much more easily.
[1] https://about.bnef.com/electric-vehicle-outlook/
[2] https://thinkprogress.org/electric-vehicles-cheaper-gasoline...
Nowadays, electricity grids try to incentivize consumers to use electricity at night more, as they try to smoothen the consumption baseline. With solar and wind, you have huge spikes of production and some gaps as well. Expect electricity to be very expensive at some time and very cheap (even free or negative price) at some other time. In such a context, storage capacity becomes very quickly a good investment.
Hydrogen fuel cells likely won't be cost effective for cars, but may disrupt diesel in long haul ships and may be competitive against fast charging for the wilder long haul trucking routes.
> Tesla: "our lithium ion cells contain no heavy metals, nor any toxic materials. In fact, our cells and Energy Storage System, by law, could be disposed of by putting them in a landfill. However, we have no intention of landfilling our ESS." They go on to say a recycling plan is being implemented. Cool.
From an RoHS POV, sure, no heavy metals. But "no toxic materials" and "ready for landfill" blows my mind. Am I naive?
I'll assume Tesla is one of the Good Guys, but I predict worse players in the industry will take advantage of loose disposal regulations if there is short term benefit.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/mythbusters-part-3-recycling-our-...
Recycling efforts are almost always for show. If a cell or module has at least 30% of its original capacity remaining, people will reuse it for stationary storage or weight-insensitive vehicles. Shredding and recovering cathode materials from lithium cells is about as economically nonsensical as recovering silicon from cell phones.
There is such a massive worldwide shortage of batteries right now that worrying about dumping them in landfills is beyond pointless. You may as well worry that we're throwing away too many gold bars.
None of the big battery manufacturers (LG Chem and Panasonic are too other huge manufacturers to compare to Tesla for instance) are doing much at all different from Tesla.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Environmen...
https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2015/12/cobalt-requirements-for-...
I know the article was about cars, but fossil fuel will always have a place as aviation fuel. The only thing I can currently see ending that trend is widespread use of vacuum tunnel trains.
AFAIK, it’s not really fossil fuels that are needed for planes and rockets, but high energy density liquid fuels, and these can surely be created renewably once we have a renewable energy infrastructure.
Or have I missed something?
And small electric planes are in fact beginning to show up. It is my understanding that going electric enables more efficient designs, and with those one or two decades of further battery tech development might actually get us large planes too.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-04/first-electric-plane-...
Maybe I’m overly optimistic?
Eg here is how to create methane https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140106094557.h...
> it’s not really fossil fuels that are needed for planes and rockets, but high energy density liquid fuels
The energy density of liquid hydrogen is really low, so that idea won't work. You want hydrocarbons of some sort, because they have the required energy density, so you could probably switch planes to run on some sort of biodiesel instead of fossil fuel.
That is a huge barrier of entrance. At the same price, one can buy a BMW or Audi. We need an economic model to let the EV industry boom
Last but not least: electricity. If you don’t have a garage, EV does not make sense. No easy overnight charging, I don’t want to park mile or tho away my car for few hours just for charging. And taxes! Most of petrol/diesel price in Germany are taxes, electricity is taxed much lower. Can government loose this stream of income that easy? Or electricity will be taxed same way in the future?
Governments need to make EV ownership more appealing (in my country you can drive in bus lanes, so avoid rush hour traffic), increase incentive payments, or charge higher taxes on new ICE vehicles.
As supply increases I expect those prices will fall.
The auto industry realizes this is going to happen, and much of it is scrambling like crazy to be ready when it happens.
There is going to be a really interesting tipping point in the very near future where the simplicity of electric drive trains is going to outcompete the very complicated supply chains of ICE engine parts. I've got a feeling VW is correct.
Edit: well crap thanks mobile. Wrong thread.
If countries start slapping carbon taxes on oil, you can quickly see where that goes.
BTW it's not just obtaining the oil but refining it. Oil refineries use a ton of power usually from electricity, gas, or by burning some of the oil itself. Heavier oil like tar sands and shale takes more energy to refine, as does high sulfur oil.
Tar sands is so bad I've heard it described as being almost more a way of very indirectly converting other sources of energy into oil than a source of energy.
Your comment about Tar Sands reminds me of a quote I read a long time ago about the price of coal being linked strongly to the price of diesel. Not to mention fracking boom is just a way to turn free central bank loans into Nat Gas.
One evidence of this is just the sheer number of cars on the road these days. Human population is increasing, and an abundance of cheap ICE cars means everyone is driving to work at least in suburban areas. In the past, busses and bikes were selected because cars weren't economical for certain individuals.
Now nearly everyone at our office drives a car by themselves to work. No more car pooling, biking, ubering, bus, train, walking, etc.
Of course just 30 miles east you have NYC where probably less than 5% of people drive to work or own a car, period. But on a geographical basis, most of this population center is designed for cars and it is very common for a 1 hour trip (60 miles) to take 2.5 hours during rush hour(s).
If oil prices fall too low, Persian Gulf and Russian borders become unstable and from there its any ones guess, how things would take shape.
Energy is heavily interlinked with geo-politics and if Persian Gulf is out of the game even for few months - millions of people will starve to death. The only silver lining is that North America is self-sufficient in ONG for the coming years, and that is not the case for much or Europe, Asia and Africa.
Tractors have way more complex transmissions(HST, Power Shuttle, etc) that all goes away with a VFD electric drivetrain. Large traction motors already exist(all cargo trains these days are diesel-electric). The lower operating costs and lower maintenance help as well.
If I could have bought our Kubota in an electric drivetrain I would have done it in a second
The caloric value of a hydrocarbon is approximately the minimum price it can be sold for. Almost any other use will give higher returns to justify paying a higher price. Though hopefully it doesn't just mean more plastic everything, that would be disappointing.
Currently their economy can probably remain stable until as low as $70/barrel for long periods of time although growth would be difficult. If their diversification efforts succeed in the next decade they will be less reliant and will be able to sustain much lower prices.
Every last drop in the Persian Gulf is economical for the foreseeable future. Fuel is the least profitable and they are already switching to petrochemicals. Oil is not going away this century.
No, it is going to go away. That is because most governments are scared to death of global climate change and are passing laws to do away with fossil fuel consumption. It's not happening all at once, but basically as fast as the technology comes into place to replace fossil fuels.
Not all governments are in on some grand conspiracy. Many governments would greatly benefit. But to make the switch now would mean severe damage to their economy and wellbeing. Even medicine relies heavily on petrochemicals inside and outside of the hospital.
Even if a country chooses to sacrifice itself to benefit the common good, it might not be enough to affect actual environmental change.
Now all we need is an electric car that fits the economic footprint of a gas car and provides decent range. I'll take a performance model, please.
If we can’t solve the end of life issues with lithium batteries, we need to look at them as a technology adjacent to petroleum when it pertains to environmental impact. A true step forward would be an innovation of power storage itself, rather than the mechanisms around it. Build a better gas tank.
I can find much more about humanitarian concerns for the non-lithium metals in the batteries.
The Role of Sub- and Supercritical CO2 as “Processing Solvent” for the Recycling and Sample Preparation of Lithium Ion Battery Electrolytes - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314243271_The_Role_...
Graphite Recycling from Spent Lithium‐Ion Batteries - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/cssc.2016010...
https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/battery-council-inter...
I look forward to the future here- it doesn't seem like an unsolvable problem for the engineers at ${battery recycler} to go from lead-acid to NiMH or LiFePo4 or LiPo or whatever it is.
Awesome username, by the way.
Nissan actually drew up a plan for a PowerWall competitor before Tesla even announced theirs, but has never produced one. Nissan has claimed to actually be waiting for the point in time where Leaf and other Nissan batteries are recyclable (and also that it has so far been pleasantly surprising how long the batteries are lasting in "first use" life).
Does producing lithium batteries produce much pollution in the atmosphere or in lakes, rivers, and oceans, or is it more in the toxic pile category?
Lithium itself isn't toxic and doesn't produce toxic piles, though. (Solid piles, certainly, but non-toxic, certainly not like lead.)
"EVs changes the impact on the environment". Yes, by lowering it by an order of magnitude. It does not emit CO2 (and far less overall even including CO2 emission during production, which personally I think is fraudulent reasoning) it emits far less particles, no gases.
Its recycling indusrty is new because, guess what, there are far less discarded EV than regular ones nowadays, but batteries are notorious for being recyclable in a lot of ways. And with the increasing demands for renewable energy, the demand for intermittence smoothing will rise a lot. I can see old batteries that can only run at 40% capacity being reused to make powerwalls.
Once electricity prices start collapsing and battery capacity issues are resolved, I'll start believing the story.