The race to grab all the UK’s lithium before it’s too late

We're still finding new ways to scale oil production 100 years after demand exploded. Lithium demand is new. If we can't get enough Lithium, it's almost certainly for logistics reasons rather than because it's a fundamentally intractable problem.

Sodium chloride is a base material for many things. But I can't think of anything that would be economically competitive to handle the quantity of brine that a desalination plant might produce.

Furthermore refining old battery material into new feedstock is far less energy intensive than getting it out of the ground in the first place.

New EVs are a net benefit over new ICE cars for almost all usage patterns. Only for extremely low yearly mileage over the whole lifespan of the car can an ICE car come out ahead, even if you consider the current electricity mix and ignore any future growth of renewables on the grid.

The upfront cost is negative green; but however, knowing that these vehicles last long, the time-integrated cost is net positive for green.

While true in terms that we generate most electricity from fossil fuels so electric cars still pollute the environment but I find it really hard to believe an electric car in any fashion can pollute more than a gasoline/diesel. A regular car is at most 15% efficient at the vehicle level. Even less factoring carbon footprint end to end from oil extraction until you fill the car. An electric car on the other hand by itself is easily over 70% efficient. Burning gas would somehow need to be 5-7X times cleaner than coal factories.

Do you know some sources for the net footprint of electrical cars? Including the lithium problem and the power source.

I'd really like to run some formula in Python and see the footprint of petrol vs electric cars in terms of CO2, lithium, obsolescence time, other gases, maintenance etc.. (possibly with some parameters such as the composition of the power sources of the grid in your place).

Until I see that I feel I am being scammed by everyone since I don't have a good grasp on the data.

Not that long.

For a fairly typical UK car, it's about 25,000 km (15,000 miles).

You can see the calculation and play with the assumptions here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/carbon_electric_car/

The average UK car does about 20k miles in its first year.

Where did you get the numbers for coal? I have a hard time imagining how a building sized power plant/modern grid is less efficient than a tiny gasoline generator, unless perhaps it's a REALLY old coal plant, which I supposed might exist in the UK if they exist anywhere.

A video I watched recently comes to a very different conclusion on almost every point you raised: that buying a new electric car is better for the environment within ~5 years of use, taking into account the 'new car' footprint.

I'm not an expert, so I won't claim to know who's correct. But the linked video provides lots of numbers, and you didn't, so I lean in favour of that conclusion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2IKCdnzl5k

> Electric cars also do not care how the power is sourced, and if it's coal then can actually add more carbon to the environment than a petrol car.

Erm, no. You're absolutely correct about the embodied carbon in the car's production, but an EV consuming pure coal power[0] is less polluting than an (edit) ICE car. And most areas are far from pure coal power. According to the EPA if I bought an EV it would have 1/5th the tailpipe emissions of a gasoline car.

The "EV's are just coal power plants on wheels" is literally oil industry propaganda, FYI.

Edit: I also find the argument about production to be correct, but misguided. A sibling commenter plugged a calculator that they made for lifetime emissions and break even points. Using their assumptions about CO2 cost for the vehicles productions and my car's current mileage (30mpg) and local CO2 production (127g/kWh), the break even point for an EV is ~10,000 miles. This is a bit less than what most Americans drive per year. Given that a lot of people constantly trade up their cars anyways, you'd rather they trade-up to an EV than a ICE vehicle, on the balance.

0 - The EPA has a calculator for tailpipe emissions. Even putting a model Y right next to the largest coal powerplant in the US yielded significantly lower tailpipe emissions than gas; 130g/mi vs 410g/mi. https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?year=2021&vehicleId=...

If you are trading in a driveable car, it doesn't get discarded but sold on the used cars market. In general, the alternative to buying an electric vehicle usually is buying a non-electric vehicle. So it should be evaluated on that base.

> If you're trading in a car that's less than 5 years old, then it takes a long time to offset the "new car" footprint.

Then again, your old car is resold not destroyed and it will probably be bought on the second hand market by someone replacing a more polluting car.

I'd check your napkin ;)

5% of the world electricity usage divided by wholesale electricity cost, divided by world lithium production in grams ->

(5% * 2.5e+16 Wh X $30/1e+6 Wh) / 8.2e+10 g = $0.45 per gram (or 15kWh per gram of lithium)

The takeaway is that energy is currently unreasonably cheap.

Most recent estimates are that under typical electrical grid power sources, it takes 8,000 miles to pay off the manufacturing CO2 debt for an EV, not 30,000 miles. I believe that larger figure is if you’re grid were 100% powered by coal.

We don't really need all of that for cars either. We could build 5 or 6 Chevy Volts with the same battery capacity as a single Tesla, and each of those Volts (with daily charging) would still almost never need to burn gas. (I'm the second owner of my Chevy Volt, with 60,000k miles on it, it has a real-world car-recorded all-lifetime average of 181 MPG).

We're building every EV car to handle every possible EV-only road trip because we can and because it's cool, not because it's actually necessary. We could still eliminate 90%+ of all road emissions instantly with just PHEV's using much smaller batteries, if some sort of lithium shortage made such a thing necessary.

I used gold as a random example.

Highest grade copper mines 3-4%

Zinc mines and other base metals sit at 2-3%

You don't need 10kg of gold, but you do need about 5g of platinum group metals for the catalytic converter. Not sure how many tonnes of rock that is, and how it compares to electric car batteries, but it's not nothing.