Isn’t Lithium a far rarer natural resource than Petroleum? Therefore, how are Electric Cars more viable?
Samian’s Twelfth Account asked:
I know that Electric Cars would be ultimately more cost-efficient and economically beneficial than the cars that run on gasoline now, but these car batteries would use up great amounts of Lithium-ion, wouldn’t they?
I know that Electric Cars would be ultimately more cost-efficient and economically beneficial than the cars that run on gasoline now, but these car batteries would use up great amounts of Lithium-ion, wouldn’t they?
And isn’t Lithium a non-renewable resource?
Where would we import this Lithium from? Is there enough to go around?
Lithium batteries don’t run on lithium, they run on stored electrical energy from the grid. That’s why you need to charge them often.
Of course it is less abundant than oil, but an electric car doesn’t exactly burn 500 gallons a year of Lithium. You put it in the battery once and it’s there forever.
And anyway, it’s not like you have to make the battery out of lithium, there are several other metals that you can use.
You only need a relatively small amount of lithium to make a battery, then it lasts for ~10 years. You’re constantly burning more and more gasoline in a gas car. And you can recycle the lithium once the battery is dead.
Further, lithium isn’t even a rare metal. It’s more common than lead in the Earth’s crust. There is enough lithium available to make trillions of EV batteries. And much lithium is available in the USA in places like Nevada.
Not only that, but who knows how long EV batteries will use lithium? Over the past decade we’ve already gone from lead acid to nickel metal hydride to lithium. Some companies are working on ultracapacitors to replace chemical batteries altogether. In a decade or two lithium battery technology may be old news.
I have a beef with electric cars.
It takes more gas to make a single electric car than it would a regular car. Aside from that, the electric car uses up other resources that we need! So, we basically will have the same problems with global warming, and the economy, that we do now!
Oh jeez, will this ever end?
I **** overpopulation!
I think we should just bicycle every where.
As an electrical engineer, I love electric cars but I don’t think it’s the right answer. It may become part of the answer in the long run but I am against the mass promotion of electric or fuel cell vehicles.
Think of it this way, the concept of using electric vehicles is to generate energy centrally from clean sources and to store the energy chemically for use in vehicles for transportation. The concept of using a hydrogen fuel cell car is to generate energy centrally from clean sources and to store the energy chemically for use in vehicles for transportation. The current concept of gasoline cars is to refine chemically stored energy collected by nature over millions of years and to use this chemically stored energy in vehicles for transportation. The only difference is that we are just finding the fossil fuels instead of making them.
It’s a bit counter-intuitive for most people but hydrocarbon fuels such as gasoline and diesel are no different than hydrogen and batteries except that gasoline and diesel have much higher volumetric energy densities and we already have the infrastructure and vehicles to use them. Also, just as we can make hydrogen from H2O, we can make gasoline from CO2 and H2O. Sandia National Labs has done this, they were researching more efficient ways to produce hydrogen from H2O and concluded that it made more sense to continue the process and synthesize liquid hydrocarbon fuels for use in existing infrastructure and vehicles.
There’s already 1 billion gas and diesel powered vehicles out there. If we wanted to benefit the environment, we would be simply changing how we make gasoline and diesel such that they become sustainable and perhaps even carbon negative. Promoting electric and fuel cell vehicles are just a matter of increasing consumerism so that manufacturers can sustain a growth rate that’s higher than what’s justified by population growth and end of life replacement alone. Indeed an artificially inflated economic growth rate has been sustained via designed obsolescence such as model years, and tail fins. There’s probably more of an economic boost from electric and hydrogen vehicles but this is at the cost of increased consumerism and hence increased environmental impact.
Hopefully there will be more electric vehicles in the future but there’s no need to switch en masse to them. We already have a very good battery called gasoline and diesel, we just need to produce them from clean energy sources instead of drilling for them.