It is true that building an EV in the first place does embody more carbon, but the payback time is not that long (under 15,000 miles with a clean enough grid and under 50,000 even on the dirtiest grids). As the grid and supply chain decarbonizes that embedded carbon of manufacturing will also drop.
An EV gets cleaner as the grid you drive it on decarbonizes. An ICE vehicle will emit for its whole lifespan and will get worse fuel economy and emit more particulates, SO2 and NOX as it ages.
Anyone who claims EVs will save the planet is deluding themselves, but electrified transport needs to be one of many, many steps we take to decarbonize.
Technically correct, as lithium isn't a rare earth. Lithium mining isn't free from controversy, however. The "Lithium Triangle" in South America contains most of the world's known lithium reserves. Mining companies in Chile, the world's second-largest lithium producer, have less than a sterling human rights record:
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/lithium-mining-leaving-chiles-i...
Run the math. The 2-million hybrids will save the world faster than 100,000 EVs. Let's say ICE is 30MPG, Hybrid is like 40MPG to 60MPG. Even at the low end 40MPG, 2 million hybrids is the same number of emission savings as 350,000 EVs.
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Pure ICE technologies are also more important. Going from 20mpg to 25 mpg will have a bigger impact due to the huge number of ICE cars being made.
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There are 289 million vehicles to replace in the USA. The sad truth is that 1 million EVs/year changes nothing. We need faster production and faster replacement.
And there is no entity who can make 1 million EVs/year.
You need not replace every vehicle right away, just enough to replace the largest consumers of fossil fuels.
> Run the math.
There are no spherical cows.
https://insideevs.com/news/602725/tesla-3-million-cars-prduc...
289 million vehicles. At that rate, it will take over 100 years to replace all ICE vehicles.
> You need not replace every vehicle right away, just enough to replace the largest consumers of fossil fuels.
You mean semi-trucks and busses? How many years has Tesla-semi been in development hell now?
Electric semi-trucks will eventually come. But at this point, I'm thinking its going to be Fuel Cell electricity through Hydrogen rather than batteries.
Is consuming total US TAM going to happen? Unlikely, but the broad strokes of the transition are apparent; you could even stick this in Excel to reasonably extrapolate. Importantly, EVs don’t need to replace every combustion vehicle, only enough so that petroleum supply infra is no longer economically sustainable. At that point, existing fossil vehicles become stranded and only good for salvage.
When we look at European nations + Japan and even China, their strategy for sustainable green energy is shifting into Hydrogen. The technology offered by fuel cell technologies is the one that I'm frankly more willing to bet on for the future to be frank. Especially with regards to large trucks (ie: semi-trucks and busses).
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As you've noted earlier: its the large vehicles we need to focus on. And the largest vehicles (ex: semi-trucks) are not practical on Li-ion. Not yet anyway.
Of course GM and Ford are both building up EV factories in North America. VW is currently scaling its plant. Hyundai/Kia are opening an EV plant in the US. And so are many others.
> When we look at European nations + Japan and even China, their strategy for sustainable green energy is shifting into Hydrogen.
No its not. That is what some politicians and big oil are talking about. If you are looking what is actually happening, hydrogen is very, very little.
Japan has been obsessed with hydrogen for literally 40 years and have done everything they can to push it other then just straight up paying people per mile of hydrogen driving. And yet in reality Tesla alone outsells all hydrogen vehicles in Japan.
> The technology offered by fuel cell technologies is the one that I'm frankly more willing to bet on for the future to be frank.
So the technology that had huge amount of investment and has produced essentially no practical results is the one you want to hang your hat on? What convinced you, the total failure of mass production or the really bad end-to-end energy efficiency? With so much systematic failure its really hard to pick one convincing factor.
> Especially with regards to large trucks (ie: semi-trucks and busses).
Just a note to a comment above. The Tesla Semi was not in 'development hell'. Its simple the reality that with the same number of chips and batteries making more different vehicle types makes no sense. Semi needs lots of batteries, this is not a technology question, but a supply chain question.
For buses you have many options, traditionally trolley, you have LFP, you have high-nickel and many other already deployed like Lithium Metal Polymer. There are sodium batteries coming and many other things as well. Practically speaking 99% of bus routes in the world can be done with battery electric batteries.
For trucks, the waste majority of routes are well within reach of Lithium batteries and battery electric will be far cheaper then hydrogen for all of those routes. Hydrogen trucks architecture is far more complex, leading to far more cost. Hydrogen will always be more expensive then electricity so it will never beat battery electric on those routes. So why would anybody want a hydrogen truck?
If you have to drive some stuff from San Fransisco to Alasca maybe hydrogen has some use but practically its basically 1% of the market.
Even VW announced they will stop investment in hydrogen trucks and they were pushing that for a long time. Other truck makers like Volvo still talk about hydrogen sometimes but what they are actually deploying and commercializing is guess what, battery trucks. The same goes for Daimler, they talk about hydrogen, but they will first deliver like 4 different battery electric trucks and then maybe a hydrogen truck sometimes toward the end of the decade. Of course most of those late 2020s hydrogen turcks will never actually be deployed, they will just continue to push it back while releasing battery electric trucks.
I just can not understand why people are still in love with hydrogen. It has been a total failure for literally 50 years and is basically systematically out-competed in every field. Its bad in end-to-end efficiency and its bad for vehicle architecture as well.
If you really want to go synthetic chemical, then why not just use methanol or dimethyl ether, you can continue to use ICE. Doesn't cost that much more to make then hydrogen and has many other advantages.
Or hydrogen fuel cell trucks and haulers:
https://thedriven.io/2022/08/04/hyundai-rolls-out-27-heavy-d...
https://thedriven.io/2022/06/21/volvo-unveils-hydrogen-power...
https://www.volvoce.com/global/en/news-and-events/press-rele...
https://www.cummins.com/news/releases/2022/05/11/daimler-tru...
The main fault with your thinking is that you're fully bought into the false dichotomy of it being BEV versus FCEV.
The choice isn't FCEV or BEV, the choice is both FCEV and BEV.
Sure have your FCEV trucks, but lets be real, it will likely be 2% of market share in trucking.
All I see here is that you're overexcited and you desperately want your "team" to "win". It's not very rational.
And the market share will be very low. Sorry I don't have a complex mathematical and simulation model that can predict if it will be 0% or 5%. My best guess is that is likely below 2% but I could be of by 100%.
My point is quite simple, the market will be very small.
You in comparison have not really provided no convincing argument that it will have a high market share.
If you want to assign a 'team' to me then, if you want then I am on team 'lets use energy efficiently' and also on team 'lets not have the government continue to give money to automotive companies to develop hydrogen technology'.
If that were true then you'd be advocating for trains and trams, not trucks, buses, or cars. Trains and trams are more energy efficient than automobiles.
> also on team 'lets not have the government continue to give money to automotive companies to develop hydrogen technology'
But you presumably still want government handouts for BEV and EV charger development.
I am literally doing that. I love trains and public transport. I'm a huge advocate of increase use in local cargo trains. I am even a fan of cargo trams. In the city where I work Zurich they have started using cargo trams for things like garbage and that's amazing.
I'm also a fan of electric trolley lines on highways for trucks rather then pure battery electric.
But we are not debating that right now, we are debating battery trucks verses hydrogen trucks.
> But you presumably still want government handouts for BEV and EV charger development.
Not really actually. I much much prefer that investment going into general urbanism including public personal and cargo transport. Given 75k cars a government handout is insane policy.
What I would support carbon tax and also toll booths for driving into cities.
You literally aren't.
> we are debating battery trucks verses hydrogen trucks
No, you're making your original mistake again. It's not battery trucks versus hydrogen trucks. The choice isn't BEV or FCEV, the choice is both BEV and FCEV.
> No, you're making your original mistake again.
Technology is almost never 100% dominate, when we are debating 'VHS vs betamax' we don't say 'I don't think VHS won over beta-max because some people still use betamax'. Of course FCEV trucks will exists that's not a question really worth talking about, its trivial.
If we are having a quality discussion in terms of technology the debate is about witch of these technology will more fundamentally and systematically transform our society. If we are talking a "VHS vs betamax" the answer is clear and everybody in the world, other then you apparently, understand what we are talking about. And in this case, I have made and argument that battery electric will win the waste majority use cases.
And your response is to quibble with the way I'm formulating thing, even when you clearly know that I don't mean no FCEV truck will exist in the future, rather then making any real argument. Bye.
Uh huh. You've repeatedly claimed FCEVs are a "total failure" even though companies like Hyundai have been running them in Switzerland for a couple of years now:
https://thedriven.io/2020/07/08/hyundai-ships-first-fcev-hea...
It's not quibbling to correctly recognize your false claims as false and your misguided perspective as misguided.
Also, is this true for building a new EV vs building a new ICE car? People just regularly replace their cars and vehicles, and in that sense the transition need not necessitate any more carbon than would've otherwise happened.
good breakdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RhtiPefVzM
But yes, US gasoline is also sourced from the US primarily. (Texas and Alaska). With a terminal at Brent / Arkansas.
Natural Gas? A bit, for corn-based ethanol (the Nitrogen fertilizers used to make modern corn fields requires a surprisingly large amount of energy, of which is primarily given through Natural Gas IIRC). Various calculations I've seen however, suggests that Ethanol uses less greenhouse gasses than say Electric vehicles (since most of our power grid is still coal / natural gas based). Aside from that one guy who keeps making anti-ethanol research papers for the last 15 years.
The bulk of energy going into corn is the sun, all natural solar energy. A bit of it is hacked together with Nitrogen fertilizers that must be accounted for, but still better than other methodologies. The other major greenhouse gas issue is the greenhouse gas costs of converting forested land into farmland, and this seems to be the biggest area of debate.
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Bonus points: Switchgrass based ethanol uses no fertilizers, meaning its 100% green. Since Switchgrass grows naturally in the US Fields (unlike Corn, which is a domesticated crop), Switchgrass is arguably better for the environment (or at least, more "natural"). The lack of fertilizers needed for it to grow is proof to how its a plant designed for our geography.
So Switchgrass solves the fertilizer and land-conversion issues.
I would actually have been a fan of that solution if it was the 90s, but its time has come and gone.
Also, you realize you are still producing harmful emissions when driving that car threw a city right?
Cobalt can easily be mined in North America, there is no reason it has to come from Cobalt. If that is the issue, the solution is not to drive around with ethanol.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/02/us-biofuel-manda...
If youre going to compare switch grass, why don't you compare that against the best scenario for EVs. No cobalt, lithium extracted from sea water, powered from a clean grid? The switch grass is still going to require fertilising, maybe not as much, but if you're removing nutrients you have to replace them.
> It also needs rare earth metals which are mined by workers living the life of slaves.
First off, 'rare metal' is a specific group of metals that don't have much use in batteries. Batteries are made from Nickel, Manganese, Cobalt, Aluminum, Cooper, Lithium and Graphite. Non of these are 'Rare Earth' Metals.
Of course EV do use Rare Earth Metals but so do ICE cars, the difference is not actually that large. EV Motors have some more Rare Earth then would be found in ICE cars but its hardly a difference worth talking about much.
What you are referring to is like Cobalt mining. Cobalt mining is mostly done in the Congo and so of course has issues with working conditions and child labor. For the most part, about 80% of Cobalt is actually mined in traditional strip mining and workers there are very comparable to workers in all other types of industrial mining. Most large EV companies pretty much exclusively buy from the large mining operations.
The bad conditions, specially for children, come in in about the rest of the 20%, what is usually called artisanal mining operations. These are often private mines and the workers are not slave, they 'own' the mines but of course they are still poor and live in bad conditions and children working there is of course bad. But even there, its not universally the case, there are large efforts done to try to track those mines and reward those that have good conditions and block the others. Th
The problem is, there is a huge intensive for those mined materials to find a way into the supply chain. And since all these materials get refined in China its hard to verify.
But what people don't tell you, is that oil manufacturing also uses a large quantity of cobalt. So the idea that somehow EV are uniquely bad makes no sense if you look at it that way.
In addition, pretty much every manufacture is pushing out cobalt even from high nickel batteries. And of course LFP batteries that will make up over 50% of the market in the next decade don't use cobalt. Neither do next generation batteries like Sodium.
> But actually building all its parts not only consumes way more energy compared to combustion cars.
While this is true now, this is mostly because of the less mature supply chain. Its not inherently the case. If you started fresh building up a ICE supply chain it would suffer from many of the same problems.
A Tesla made in Texas for example will have almost everything in one building and will likely be far more efficient then many ICE vehicles.
But it just takes time for the industry as a whole to optimize the whole supply-chain end to end.
So its really not a good argument against EV. This will automatically solve itself as you scale.
And even if it uses 20% more CO2 during manufacture, over the lifetime its still dramatically less CO2. And arguably just as important, the emissions that ICE cars blow into cities is horribly for the health of people and specially children.