Unlike coal, lithium does not get burned or used up. At least in principle, it can be recycled.
For folks who don’t live in Maine it’s a no-brainer: sure, go for it! Bring the USA more domestically produced lithium.
But… mining fucks up entire ecosystems and pollutes water etc… and even if companies can “promise” the operation will be clean, come to implementation they likely walk back on that and the damage is done.
At the very least, all the demolition and vehicles, fuel, explosives, chemicals.
Shits going to leak into the rivers one way or the other. In addition, they would likely use up a ton of local water supply.
It’s a no-brainer. Maine is not in the middle of some desert.
It is just a lot more expensive then.
Which is why most mining is done in remote, or poor areas, with laughable regulations, where no one dares complain for the jobs.
Because it's worse than lithium and contributes to a global catastrophe that threatens billions of lives.
1. Mine lithium 2. Drill oil 3. Do nothing
You have to store energy somehow, even if the entire world shifted to walking everywhere. Goods still need to traverse the world and thus far there hasn't been anything else with a high enough energy density to get close.
The argument being made is that if mining lithium becomes more popular, its likely to lead to advancements that do limit its ecological impact and provide a more sustainable method for storing energy...
Mine somewhere else.
Non-lithium approaches to storing energy.
Coal releases the most CO2 per unit energy. It's almost pure carbon after all. But to compare with a gasoline car you have to consider:
(1) Large power plants are anywhere from 1.5X to 3X more thermally efficient than a small piston engine. How much better depends on whether the power plant is an old school boiler and turbine or a newer supercritical steam or combined cycle plant.
(2) Gasoline is the highly refined and quality controlled end product of a long supply chain. Oil must be drilled, sometimes cracked (for heavy oil), shipped (often more than once), refined (this uses a lot of power), doped with small amounts of manufactured additives, then shipped at least one and sometimes two or three more times to a gas station. Every step of that supply chain uses even more energy, and this must be subtracted to get the overall end-to-end efficiency of a car engine. This makes car engine efficiency from oil well to tailpipe really suck. Coal meanwhile is often shipped only once or twice and requires minimal processing, usually just pulverization and then flue gas scrubbers at the exhaust end.
(3) ICE cars require a lot more maintenance and fluids that have to be changed, etc., and all that has to also be considered in their energy footprint.
EVs are superior in every single way except range and recharge time: complexity of the vehicle, reliability, acceleration and driving experience, urban pollution, overall emissions, and end to end efficiency. They remain superior even in the worst case of a 100% coal fired power grid, and very few regions get their power from only coal. The range and recharge time gap is already small enough to make EVs practical for 90%+ of driving scenarios and the gap is closing. The oil age is over.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of shitty cars on the road. A power plant's engine is going to usually be well tuned and maintained because small increases in efficiency can be worth a ton of money when you are generating tens of gigawatt hours per day of power. How often does a typical driver of a middle-aged car take it in to be tuned with the objective of maximizing energy efficiency?
I bet the average gap across all cars on the road and including transmission loss is at least 2X.
Also it's tough to argue against the second point. Look into how much power is used in the oil to gasoline supply chain, especially if the oil is coming from heavy oil that requires an additional cracking ("upgrading") step or fracked wells that require a lot of energy to drill and hydraulically fracture. I recall reading an analysis years ago arguing that the Canadian tar sands are almost an indirect natural gas to oil conversion operation rather than a net producer of energy. A huge amount of gas is burned to get that stuff out of the ground and into a form that refineries can handle. You could instead just burn that gas in a combined cycle power plant and run EVs with it and emit a lot less carbon.
Thing is when you are buying any oil product you are really not buying energy. It's ridiculously expensive compared to energy from any other source. You are buying conveniently stored energy and paying a huge markup for it.
Of course some of those losses would also apply to EVs but still, “wasting” 3/4 the energy of a highly refined, carbon intensive product is a pretty low bar.
Page 53 onward: https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/5764...
While I'm also in favor of EVs, I can see two other ways in which EVs are not superior: weight (every article about EVs I read seems to mention that they're heavier than the corresponding ICE vehicles; on the other hand, the weight distribution seems to be yet another way in which most EVs are superior, with their low center of gravity), and price. The price seems to be the main barrier to EV adoption IMO, and is probably the reason they are so rare where I live (it's a major metropolitan area, and yet so far I have seen a non-rail EV only once).
The cost is higher up front but lower overall. The comparison is also only fair if you compare similar cost/luxury classes of car. It's not fair to compare a Tesla Model S to a Honda Civic. Instead you'd compare a Model S cost to a mid-high end BMW, Mercedes, Audi, etc. You'd compare a Honda Civic to a Nissan Leaf or a Chevy Bolt.
So I agree that you have to compare similar levels/trims, but many times the lower trims don't exist in the EV market.
Interesting. I live near a (relatively!) affluent suburb of Cincinnati and I see at least one or two Teslas a week, depending on how much I'm driving. Our next door neighbors have an electric BMW (i3). And I'm not a car guy, so there could be a lot more than that I'm missing.
Next car I buy will probably be a Tesla? Though it might be a few years.
Of course, this doesn't disprove your point that price is an issue in adoption.
If you live on an area with electrified rail transit (which is where we ought to be going) but effectively no EVs that's surprising. Where is this?
Today, the price of EVs has dropped to within comfortable reach of middle to upper middle class people, who are most of the people who buy new cars anyways (the lower middle and working class are much more likely to buy used).
The bigger issue is cultural - with some areas (US coastal states and cosmopolitan cities, cosmopolitan parts of Europe, etc) being far further along in the cultural adoption of EVs.
This is changing though. On a recent trip to Michigan I saw a significant rise in EVs (I'm more well off areas) vs the not distant past and I suspect this is because Detroit automakers finally have solid EV offerings.
EVs, like smartphones, are now aspirational goods.
Railway lines in poorer or second-world (ex-USSR) countries were sometimes electrified since it ensured the most flexible and reliable fuel supply: you could run trains not only from oil, but also coal, gas, nuclear or hydroelectric power. Compared to diesel, the locomotives are cheaper, faster, quieter, and more powerful, and the operating costs for trains and track are lower. The ride quality is better, and it still felt "modern" to make the upgrade in the mid-20th century.
Sort by percentage electrified length on [1] and you have Ethiopia, Armenia, Montenegro, Georgia, Bulgaria, India, Poland, Azerbaijan, North Korea, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Morocco, Ukraine, South Africa, North Macedonia etc all with a significant proportion of their rail networks electrified.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...
Rio de Janeiro. Off the top of my head, we have Supervia (commuter rail, overhead catenary), Metrô Rio (subway, third rail), Corcovado train (touristic train, AC overhead catenary), Santa Teresa tram (tram, overhead catenary), and VLT Rio (tram, APS third rail). I know there are some EVs (I've seen it in the news a couple of years ago, there were something like five EVs in the whole city), but I've only seen one personally once (I believe it was a BMW i3).
The bigger issue here is IMO still price - and all EVs are AFAIK imported, which makes them even more expensive.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/may/09/electric-ca...
I would also imagine there is immense heating from the road surfaces. Not to mention the fumes, chemicals used in the processing, and all the transportation.
For example, where is the energy coming from to charge those batteries? Even if we say wind or solar, those devices end up in landfills. Maybe we should look at making these devices recyclable as an integral part of the strategy.
Yet here we are talking about a lithium mine, which is not clean.
The problem is that in open conversation like this a simple statement like 'Yet here we are talking about a lithium mine, which is not clean' is insufficiently contextualized to know where the commenter is coming from. Are they just trying to be transparent and realistic? Are they someone that has no dynamic range in their understanding of ecological harm? Are they long in petroleum and want to throw interference up at any point where electrification of transport comes up? Are they just being a contrarian troll?
Not to suggest OP was doing this, but it seems a bit weird to start your mouth watering at the notion of "I can't wait to strip 11 million tons of rock out of the side of this mountain, melt it down and refine it, so that we can start being clean with it by recycling."
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/10/tesla-jb-straubel-redwood-ma...