> lithium-ion cell … 30.9 kilograms of emitted carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour generated
This still suggests that you don’t breakeven on carbon until 60 full charge-discharge cycles
All of those emissions can be replaced with electrical replacements, from the machines that extract and move the material to the processing and making the batteries. So as electrical vehicles take over that number will drop to nothing. There are already replacements for a lot of the big machinery that extracts from mines that can run all the time in the US and other places in the world.
It will obviously take an amount of CO2 emissions to transition but the emissions aren't intrinsic to the process but rather the power we are using to make it happen.
A common complaint about Solar panels is they take quite a bit of power to make, which is true but if you also look at any of the solar manufacturing plants around the world they are not surprisingly getting their power from their own solar panels as well. When we study the emissions of these things we need to think more about what can not be easily replaced yet, like steel manufacture.
Oil also has similar externalities in emissions too from all the extraction and moving of barrels of it around the globe, its one of the largest industries in the world for emissions.
Modern lithium typically wears out due to time, not cycle count (when used outside of extremes).
If you have an electric car, and don't use it often, then your numbers will be worse. But if you use it weekly (what is normal for lightly used cars), you need about an year and half to reach the OP's number and become better than the next best alternative.
I'd be surprised if there are any EV drivers consistently doing a charge cycle every day, outside of commercial vehicles where the battery size was picked to not be any bigger than its daily route.
The average American drives around 13500 miles per year[1], so supposing a car with 250 mile range that's 54 charge cycles, just about one charge cycle per week. The vast majority of that will mostly be with under 20% of a cycle per day, plus a handful of outlier days every year with longer trips.
1000 cycles at 54 cycles per year would be 18.5 years, and 3000 cycles would be 55.5 years. I'm no expert on lithium ion battery aging, but that sounds like it's well into the range where age is more of a problem than cycle count for an average driver.
[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/auto-loans/a32880477/average-mi...
More and more I think the whole EV concept is a way to make cars that don't last as long but cost just as much if not more, so that automakers can extract more money from their customers
It's not just the battery, they're increasingly turning into smartphone-like gadgets. And performance on that type of device never seems to get better as it stretches toward the end of its supported life. Even in the best case automakers are saying things like "we'll give it 15 years of android updates." On the one hand, that's not long enough, and on the other at that 15 year mark I half expect the car will take 30 minutes to launch the maps app because "technically gave you an update" doesn't mean "gave any shits about the user experience on 15 year old hardware."
If anything, the battery is the part where there's a possibility of a 3rd party replacement/refurbishment market improving things. Not so easy to replace an EV's infotainment system as it was to swap a single DIN tape deck out for a bluetooth radio.
I have to hope people will turn around from that and buy their next car from someone other than GM.
Sometimes I think of my first new car from 1997, which had a tape deck in the dash and an optional CD-changer in the trunk. I was happy to find an aftermarket adapter that converted the CD-changer cabling into an iPod adapter in the following decade. And of course such iPod integrations are all obsolete now.
Sometimes I wonder if even Car Play or Android Auto will be just as anachronistic. Imagine if there had been popular Blackberry integrations in the heyday of that product line...
Not really how batteries tend to degrade.
Consider how your cellphone battery degrades. It's not that you one day wake up with a phone that doesn't charge at all, instead the charge simply doesn't last as long.
When people talk about the cycle life of batteries, they are talking about the time it takes for battery capacity to go from 100% to 70%. This is also taken from a generally super pessimistic viewpoint (Charging from 0% to 100% == 1 cycle). Pessimistic because lithium ion batteries are somewhat damaged at very low and very high charges.
If you get an EV, keep the charge percentage between 40 and 80 (which is usually more than enough for daily use) the battery can last a LOT longer. And that's just talking about NMC batteries.
LFP lithium batteries have ~5 to 10x the cyclelife of NMC batteries.
I'm currently driving a 2018 tesla model 3 with 120,000 miles. It's got 95% it's original battery capacity. The actual maintenance I've done has been nothing compared to what I've had to do with ICE vehicles. Basically just new tires and windshield wiper fluid.
> More and more I think the whole EV concept is a way to make cars that don't last as long but cost just as much if not more, so that automakers can extract more money from their customers
EVs may have a higher upfront cost, but they aren't making automakers more money. The opposite is true.
Now, if I'm cynical, I believe the place automakers will try and shorten the life of EVs is with the software, not the hardware. I've no clue how much longer my EV will get OTA updates.
But that is the other thing about them only lasting 6k cycles or 10 years, its not like the battery is expected to be dead just lacking a fifth of its capacity. What is happening with batteries out of old EVs today is either cell scavenging and remade into new batteries or just racking the whole battery into grid storage. Per KWH they pretty cheap once they are that degraded but still quite usable in other applications.
The longevity is really important for the ultimate economic viability and I’ve been tracking that to decide when to pull the trigger on a home battery.
A 6000 or 10 year cycle rating means functionally 10 years for a solar deployment because you are only cycling the batteries 1x per day. I was hoping you could get 20 years out of such a system (thus halving the cost). Bummer.
Also, there is a glaring safety defect that violates UL, contained within every Tesla Powerwall 2... so don't get one of those.
Consider an EV with a 75 kWh battery pack. Using their numbers that would be 2318 kg of CO₂ to make that battery. If the battery lasts 1000 full cycles that would be 75000 kWh of energy produced.
Amortizing that 2300 kg of CO₂ over that gives 0.0303 kg CO₂/kWh discharged.
A typical EV gets about 4 miles per kWh, so that's about 0.0076 kg of CO₂/mile driven.
A gallon of gasoline releases 8.8 kg of CO₂ when burned. Given an ICE car that gets 40 miles/gallon that's 0.22 kg CO₂/mile.
That's 29x as much CO₂ per mile as the EV.
Instead of amortizing, and assuming clean electricity, the EV costs 2318 kg CO₂ upfront for its equivalent of a gas tank but has 0 CO₂ operating cost. The ICE has negligible CO₂ cost for its gas tank up front, but costs 0.22 kg CO₂/mile operating cost.
Breakeven for the EV vs the ICE is at 10300 miles. For the average American that's about 9 months worth of driving.
PS: I took a look at non-clean electricity. Electricity from coal or petroleum burning power plants is about 1 kg CO₂/kWh. An EV gets about 4 miles/kWh so that's about 0.25 kg CO₂/mi if you charge your EV with 100% coal or petroleum based electricity. Slightly worse than a 40 mpg ICE car.
The US average is around 0.4 kg CO₂/kWh electricity, which would give 0.11 kg CO₂/mi to operate an EV. That's about 2x the cost of the 40 mpg ICE.
Note that the above is ignoring the CO₂ costs of producing the gasoline. Brief Googling suggests that is somewhere from 1.5-3 kg CO₂/gallon from well to gas pump, which would raise the cost of buring a gallon of gas from 10.3-11.8 kg CO₂/gallon, or by 17-34%.
That would make the EV slightly better than the ICE when powered from coal or petroleum plant electricity, and 2.3-2.7x better when powered by average US electricty, and 34-39x better when powered by clean electricity.
But if all one is trying to determine is whether 30.3 kg/kWh cradle-to-gate cost of batteries is enough to bring EV cars up to anywhere near the CO₂ cost of ICE cars for a typical use case the ICE car uses way more without taking making the gas costs into account so there is no need to go farther.
I've updated the original to include a look at the case of non-clean electricity and to consider the CO₂ cost of producing gasoline.
Very rarely do you see the studies that include factors like CO2 released in extracting, shipping, and refining the oil in the first place. The CO2 released when fighting wars in foreign countries to insure access to said oil. The CO2 released in making the ICE car in the first place and all of those supply chain issues like people always bring up with EVs and renewable power systems.
Similarly the gasoline lifecycle + ICE engine, gas tank, and transmission should be compared to the battery + electric motors + electricity not just the battery vs gasoline.
It would be interesting to see the numbers.
> current Li-ion cell, primary data were used in this study resulting in 50,8 kg CO2eq/kWh in the WCS and 30,9 kg CO2eq/kWh in the BCS.
From the context in the study it's clear they're talking about capacity.
If you assume battery capacity as a limiting factor, EV don't even break even compared to hybrids.
Cars, all cars, are terrible. I say this as a car guy who doesn't give a rats butt about GW. The externality of cars are far more damaging than CO2 emissions.