Just curious, in the current climate, if we lost all oil/petrolium/diesel/gas, do we have the systems in place to mine, refine, design, build renewable vehicles and power systems?
E.g. Do we have EV mining equipment to mine the oar to refine in an electric refinery, to get the materials to build in electric factories to make electric cars/trains/planes/shipping freighters?
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the plastics and rubber tires would need to be made of something else, as well
as they are made from petroleum also
If by “we” you mean the US, then no, not really. You have a particular shortage of nickel, lithium and rare earths, which would make domestic manufacture and production of EVs very difficult.
It would create enormous wealth disparity even faster than it has been so far. We don’t have the electric infrastructure to support that or the funds to rush it either. Developments are happening in large scale but you’re talking an order of magnitude or more. That kind of investment takes time.
First off most electricity comes from fossil fuel sources. So while we do have EV mining equipment, in the last few years most manufacturers have started offering electric engines in their construction and mining equipment, we do not have enough electricity to power them. When you get to refineries there are of course various different processes for different products. Most of them use fossil fuel for heating the ore to melt it, these can be rebuilt to electric melting ovens. However then coal is added to bind to the oxygen in the liquid ore to turn it into metal. Without coal we can not make these metals using the current process. There are some work into replacements though. There are startups selling biocoal which are non-fossil coal like substances which could be used for things like ore refining. In addition there are some early work on using hydrogen or ammonia instead of coal to bind the oxygen. But we do not know how best to do this so we are not anywhere near ready to make full scale refineries using hydrogen. In addition to this most hydrogen and ammonia is today made from natural gas.
If we had started these research projects 30-50 years ago and if we had made fossil fuel expensive back then we might have had a completely different infrastructure which could have relied on renewable energies and nuclear energies to do things like making cars. Most likely we would have ended up with more trains, trams and subways then cars and airplanes though. These use far less energy both when traveling and to manufacture.
I heard some time ago that if you wanted to replace all cars in Britain with Electrics you would have to use all of the worlds lithium production for 9 months.
That is one of the reasons I don’t think electric is the way forward, at least not for cars.
don’t quote me on the exact number of months but the gist is that we don’t have the lithium to replace all of the cars in the world with EV
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