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Comment by Mikeb85 | Hacker News Reader

Yes but batteries contain toxic materials and rare earth minerals, require lots of energy to make, lots of energy to recycle, etc...

So energy to mine the materials, energy to assemble the battery, energy to recycle the battery after it's useful lifespan (5-10 years)... None of these are ever counted in people's calculations. I tried to find data on energy required to produce the batteries and they still didn't count the mining cost.

I'd wager that hydrogen is more energy efficient over the entire lifespan of a vehicle.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/14/electr...

Lithium mining is expensive and you need to move a lot of dirt to get a little lithium...

100 billion tons of waste and never mind the waste aspect, it takes a lot of energy to move a ton of dirt.

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Li-ion batteries don't contain rare earths.

Recycling li-ion is currently a booming business because it requires much less energy than processing raw ores - see Redwood Materials for more info.

Everyone takes these calculations into account because batteries come under intense scrutiny from people with ulterior motives.

I can't wrap my head around how much lithium or other rare earth metals will need to be mined to transition entirely to solar, wind, and electric cars. What countries are these mined in? What percentage of the US grid is from wind or solar? Like 10%?

Here is a nice infographic of one years mining output for perspective

https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/202...

No lithium or "rare earths" (which are not anyway at all rare) are needed for a transition to solar and wind for power.

Electric cars use lithium, just now, and a bit of rare-earths. (They are used in wiper and window motors.) Cars are their own thing, which we would be better off with less of.

Obviously before you have built out wind and solar, you don't have much yet. It is a vacuous observation. Instead, look at the rate of deployment, which follows a classic exponential curve.

> What percentage of the US grid is from wind or solar?

That question needs to be qualified with a date and time. It's a moving target. Generally: number go up.

26% of electricity generated in Texas in 2021 was from wind. Installed wind and solar capacity has grown quite a bit since 2021.

what does the li in li-ion stand for

I don't know if you have glanced at a Periodic Table recently, but Lithium is on the far left hand side and far distant from anything marked "rare earth" much less the "rare earth metals" (which are primarily just right hand of the center-line). As element number 3 on the periodic table it's also per some basic interesting Big Bang statistics the third most common element in the universe. Admittedly most of the universe's Lithium at this point has settled into various compounds which are regularly called "salts" (a short, common name, because they are so common), though household table salt is usually Lithium's "big brother" on the periodic table Sodium, but Lithium itself is still just about as common as dirt on this planet even if don't tend to sprinkle it haphazardly on our foods.

I was misremembering how the term "rare earth metal" is used, my apologies.

Most of the mining waste you refer to is related to COAL. They produce roughly 5 billion tons a year of coal for which many times of that is waste rocks.

5 billion tons of coal gets mostly burned up.

Meanwhile 50 THOUSAND tons of lithium is produced per year. For which maybe millions tons of waste gets created.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium

Hmmm, 500,000 litres of water per ton of lithium. Electrolysis required to create lithium metal. Plus the required dirt being moved, water being moved, energy for electrolysis, etc...

Sounds very energy efficient...

I know you are a sarcastic troll.

But still, that 5 billion tons of coal gets mined, transported and then burned to produce energy once.

A kg of coal contains about 8kWh of energy which it can release once. This is the best kind of coal. Also you only get about 40% of it as electricity.

A kg of lithium will store about 1.1kWh energy in a battery .. thousands of times before it needs to be RECYCLED.

Your efficiency is off by many orders of magnitude.

Who's comparing coal to batteries? We're talking the lifetime energy cost of producing batteries from the ground to the recycling depot.

Coal production is terrible and I'll never support it.

You compared them to coal. You put out 100 Billion tons of waste number. Biggest share of that is from mining coal.

So why are you attributing the coal mining waste to lithium then?

If you actually look at the numbers the benefits of mining for lithium FAR outweigh its downsides.

That just compared coal 'to produce energy once' to batteries which have no inherent energy. These are different things.

Coal is an existing form of energy reserve which has stable long-term storage and can be consumed once. Batteries are not native energy, though batteries can be manufactured and then charged to temporarily time-shift energy.

Sure, same goes for hydrogen. I don't think there are any hydrogen deposits that can be readily used.

But important distinction nonetheless.

Yes, I also see hydrogen as a energy storage medium. Compressed air and pumped hydro and hydraulic accumulators have similar functions.

Sometimes the media conflates energy production, storage, and transport. This leads to confusing arguments.

More context here: https://twitter.com/visaskn/status/1616813002547773444

> So energy to mine the materials, energy to assemble the battery, energy to recycle the battery after it's useful lifespan (5-10 years)... None of these are ever counted in people's calculations. I tried to find data on energy required to produce the batteries and they still didn't count the mining cost.

This is a standard component of LCA databases and puts the ESOI in the 50-100 range for the first generation of batteries. Subsequent generations are higher.

Electrolysers also require mining, as do fuel cells, as does any source of heat for reverse gas shift or similar.

Your fud about rare earths is also a lie for any chemistry proposed for grid storage. None of them involve rare earths in any measurable quantity (nanoscale films on semiconductors for controllers and such are insignificant)

Hydrogen (or rather hydrogen derived molecules) are a viable method of seasonal storage, but that doesn't mean most of the hype doesn't exist to greenwash gas or that your talking points aren't propaganda.

Hydrogen cars are worse than BEVs and much worse than transit or active transport.

> This is a standard component of LCA databases and puts the ESOI in the 50-100 range for the first generation of batteries. Subsequent generations are higher.

Yes that's the number I found WITHOUT accounting for mining the materials... Just manufacturing the battery.

> Electrolysers also require mining, as do fuel cells, as does any source of heat for reverse gas shift or similar.

Yes but there's far less of those materials required than the sheer amount of battery cells being produced for automobiles.

> Hydrogen (or rather hydrogen derived molecules) are a viable method of seasonal storage, but that doesn't mean most of the hype doesn't exist to greenwash gas or that your talking points aren't propaganda.

Greenwash gas? The whole point of hydrogen is to create it using renewable sources of energy... The whole problem with renewables is storing the energy since they don't produce reliable baseline energy. Hydrogen accomplishes that.

> Yes that's the number I found WITHOUT accounting for mining the materials... Just manufacturing the battery.

Are you sure you are reading the study right 'manufacturing' in standard LCA methodology also includes embodied enery/carbon of the ingredients?

You can also fermi analyse it. The absolute cheapest form of energy is lignite burnt at the mine front which is about $5/MWh. Before shortage induced price hikes, the 100 or so grams of lithium in a 1kWh battery was worth $1-2. The battery can store around 5MWh in its lifetime. This puts a fairly hard upper bound of 4-8% of the cycled energy. Phosphorus and iron are less scarce, copper might be significant. Any cost that isn't the cheapest possible energy pushes the lower bound down.

Green hydrogen is fine in niches where it's suited, but most of the hydrogen-for-everything schemes rely heavily on fossil fuel derived hydrogen whenyou look under the hood and ignore the amount of methane, CO2, and H2 that will escape at various stages. H2 is not a greenhouse gas on its own, but it makes methane much worse.

> Yes but there's far less of those materials required than the sheer amount of battery cells being produced for automobiles.

And if you look at the quantities required to replace the role of BEVs rather than as an adjunct, it's worse.

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