Imagination is great, but there's a blurry line between "imagine a thing and make it happen" and "tell happy stories instead of working".
One belongs in science journals; the other belongs in Astounding Stories. Both have their place, and there's even some overlap, but it's no surprise that grumpiness occurs when the conversation crosses that blurry line too far (in either direction).
"wait, there's a new battery tech that could solve some of the long-standing problems with moving to a clean-energy abundant civilisation, and yesterday they achieved fusion ignition for the first time"
"bah, these are all rubbish and will never make any difference, we're still all doomed"
Is the material that ends up in the cell a significant part of the cost? If steel was free, ICE cars could be dozens of dollars cheaper than they are. I guess material costs are a much bigger factor in batteries, but in many other products is so low that "much bigger" could still be tiny.
The "rare earths" are actually just as common as Si. It just shows we won't be running out of them anytime soon, it's just a matter of finding ways to extract them.
Si is the symbol for silicon, which is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust (after oxygen.) The REEs are certainly not as abundant as that. Si is 270,000 ppm; cerium is 60 ppm.
Not a million times more rare, more like ~10,000 times. Also, Ni is more abundant in the oceanic crust than the continental crust. Lots of Ni in mantle rocks (peridotite is about 0.1% Ni.)
It's interesting comparing the abundance of copper (and even more so, tin) and iron. It was a huge transition in resource availability when the iron age began.
I’m not sure how you’re interpreting that graph, because Si (Silicon) and Na are orders of magnitude more common than the rare earths. You might have missed that it’s a logarithmic scale.
Yes. The electrification movement isn’t any “green” if you take into account the impact of current battery technology.
PS: the impact of battery technology - I’m not only talking about mining but the entire cycle: usable life, reverse logistics, disposal and recycling, dealing w/ water and soil contamination.
Lithium on earth is in salt form. Most coming from dry salt beds in South America. Big US project is to extract it from the Salton sea. Fracking is much worse and contaminates water tables not to mention all the methane releases that cause global warming.
Brine extraction of lithium leaves some waste but largely uses solar power to operate and isn’t particularly invasive. Mining Spodumene is as bad as any other mining, and open pit mining is common. There’s some other techniques that use large amounts of highly concentrated acid. But it’s a really hard case to make that the oil economy is somehow a better environmental story for sure.
You have not only the impact of mining but also the problem of reverse logistics for correct disposal and recycling of those toxic batteries that don’t even last long. Batteries contaminate soil and water in a way that’s much harder to control if it start piling up everywhere. And today’s world can’t even solve the disposal of plastic.
With intelligent charging practices (which often come at the expense of stored energy) and temperature control, modern lithium cells asymptote to ~20% capacity loss and stay there for, well at least since the model S came out, still counting. Or that was the case a couple years ago when I looked into it. The difference in the battery life in a leaf vs a tesla is qualitative not quantitative. The motivation to make phone batteries last longer wasn't there at first until it provided negative press, now intelligent charging is fairly common in phones. Thermal management is harder.
Lithium batteries are a great source of lithium, and bigger of them, like laptop batteries, largely get recycled even now, AFAICT. Lithium + iron chemistries in particular avoid seriously toxic components.
Both lithium and plastics are far less nasty than, say, ash from a coal-burning plant, with its sulfur, mercury, and radioactive stuff. Retiring these is a higher priority thing, IMO, than improving lithium mining cleanliness (though an improvement is always welcome).
A lithium mine is much more devastating to the environment than an oil well or franking. That doesn't mean either of these are really good options despite what either side wants to pretend.
No doubt that mining lithium has negative impacts, but those negative impacts feel localized in a way that can in principle be mitigated and cleaned up, and though bad for local communities, it doesn’t pose existential risk. This is in stark contrast to the fossil fuel cycle which distributes pollution globally into the atmosphere, and will be tremendously difficult to undo.
Untouched National Parks don't bounce back to pre mine status so that's a Yes to "in principle" but a No to "in practice".
Lithium exploration drilling near Litchfield National Park raises sustainability questions [1]
> University of Queensland professor of conservation science James Watson says that mining associated with renewable energy could cover about 50 million square kilometres of the Earth's surface by 2050.
> His prediction is startling.
> "About 10 per cent will be in national parks and protected areas, another 7 or so per cent will be in areas that have been identified as critical biodiversity areas to sustain species and stop extinction, and a further 15 per cent or so will be in our last remaining wilderness on the planet," he said.
I've spent a few decades in mineral exploration, in geophysics and in mapping global mineral and energy resources.
We have some real issues to sort out going forward with respect to resource extraction and the rights of indigenous people and wilderness.
What percentage of national parks will be affected by climate change? I see your point but if we have two bad options and one is absolutely worse than the other, making them look equivalent because they have some environmental impact is not helpful to protecting as much if the environment as possible.
A surprisingly high percentage in National Parks globally (ie. many different jurisdictions) that are also (or adjacent to) indigenous lands with various treaties and contracts.
eg: The US has one ~$64 billion copper resource (leased to Anglo - Australians) in native lands [1] which is an as yet unresolved and sizeable can of worms, and that's barely the start of the list (although it is the largest global pending copper project).
There's a nice GIS directory of such things that we (here in W.Australia) compiled a decade ago (along with automation to run it forward) that's now a bit paywalled [2]
This sort of both-sidesing doesn’t further the conversation at all. Do you really think the person you’re replying to doesn’t know that mining Lithium isn’t without its environmental costs?
The person you’re replying to quite correctly notes that mining Lithium is an improvement over extracting coal, oil, and gas. The term “green” is so nebulous snd ill-defined that it’s not worth talking about.
The best thing humanity can do for the earth is clearly to remove ourselves from it. Anything less than that is compromise. Sure. But sitting here saying “there’s no such thing as ethical consumption” doesn’t really get us anywhere.
Precisely; it’s not big oil propaganda to understand the environmental effects of lithium mining, just as it’s not lithium propaganda to acknowledge the equivalent consequences of the oil industry on the environment.
But if we get to have a way to move at super-human speeds (ie > 5 km/h walking and > 30 km/h running), cheaply and without environmentally detrimental consequences, that’d be great :)
(Fellow cyclists, I know, cycling is an excellent solution for single-person small- and mid-range movement. I’m thinking here of mass transportation and goods transportation, where it’d be hard to use cycle-powered lorries across continents.)
>A lithium mine is much more devastating to the environment than an oil well or franking.
This isn't true at all. Lithium is mined in much smaller quantities and in fewer places. In some cases (Cornwall, e.g.), it can be obtained as a byproduct of geothermal energy. It can also be recycled. By contrast, the Wikipedia list of environmental disasters has an entire section devoted to oil:
