I was having a conversation with a friend about electric cars and it proved that neither of us know what we’re talking about. I’m also now having a difficult time sourcing information for the pros and cons of the future of lithium batteries in cars. Would anyone be able to ELI5?
In: Engineering
IIRC lithium mining is environmentally friendish, specially compared with open pit mining. Of course, lithium isn’t the only metal batteries and electric cars use (for instance, they use more cooper than gas cars because they obviously need more wiring)
Aight, so the long and short of it is that, when you buy a battery electric vehicle (regardless of the type of battery chemistry), you have an initial “debt” of emissions in comparison to internal combustion engines (i.e. it’ll have a higher amount of carbon emissions associated with it right off the factory floor) because mining isn’t exactly great for the environment, but you work off that debt over years of usage because of the increased efficiency of the battery-electric powertrain and charging infrastructure, meaning the energy you are using has less GHG emissions associated with it.
The actual metric is *excruciatingly* hard to pin down as the automotive supply chain is hilariously complicated (e.g. Japanese cars are made in the US, but American cars are made in *Mexico*, because economics) and trying to figure out the true scale of it can make your brain do a big sad, but very roughly speaking a battery electric vehicle will work off the initial emissions “debt” in anywhere from 3-8 years, depending mainly on whatever your electricity provider uses to make power, and how/when/where your battery pack’s materials were sourced and manufactured (of note, this assumes you’re putting on around 10-12k miles per year).
***However***, the jury is still out when it comes to getting rid of the cars at the end of their lifecycle, which is still a bit of an open question as we haven’t had battery electric vehicles at large enough scales for a long enough time to know precisely how difficult it is to deal with the battery when the car is scrapped. However, it stands to reason that EVs will still be generally “better” assuming the battery/car manufacturers are in a position to recycle their own batteries and use the material to make more batteries.
From a pure usage standpoint, though; BEVs will not kill ICEs entirely. Spark ignited engines are probably on their way out, but diesels and turbine engines will stick around because batteries will basically never have the energy density to make sense for heavy-duty ICE applications (the only way around this would require you to rewrite the laws of thermodynamics; good luck with that).
Source: PhD in Mechanical Engineering, specializing in propulsion (primarily diesel).
Lithium ion batteries makes sense long term vs fossil fuels.
Whilst there may be a higher environmental cost of manufacturing EV’s initially versus ICE vehicles, lithium ion batteries can be recycled at the end of the vehicles lifetime, unlike the fuels used in ICE vehicles which end up in our atmosphere.
Another key point is that recycling lithium from lithium ion batteries is actually economically cheaper than mining lithium from the ground. This means that battery manufacturers will be incentivised to recycle lithium ion batteries in the future, as it will be more profitable than mined lithium. Recycle rates have also proven to be very high (95%+).
All of this battery power needs to be sourced from renewable electricity when recharging to make sense, but long term solar panels plus battery storage is trending to be one of the cheapest forms of electricity provision going forwards, so this is feasible.
As a use case, EV sceptics quite rightly point out that lithium ion battery charging does not make sense for those who don’t have access to home EV charging. This drawback of batteries will mean ICE vehicles will maintain more market share in this demographic for longer, but the advent of autonomous vehicles is now starting to look very likely that we have driverless cars within 10 years. If this is the case, that reduces significantly the potential impact of charge times for EV’s as no access to home charging can be avoided by vehicles autonomously charging away from home. The vast majority of surveyed current EV owners also say they much prefer to charge at home than visit gas stations, and charging on longer trips is an adequate user experience.
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