>For example cobalt is used for getting rid of sulfur in pretty large quantities as part of the oil refining process.

I don't know why this piece of misleading information is recently circulating so much.

By far the most common usage (63%, in 2020, and having grown from 20% in 2006)[1] of cobalt is for lithium battery electrodes (and that is despite the fact that EVs make up a miniscule percentage of cars on the road).

Cobalt is used as a catalyst in the petroleum industry, however its depletion rate is of the order of kg per millions of litres of fuel.

>Tesla recycles all their discarded cells. Why wouldn't they?

I'd like a source for that. The best I can find is that "Tesla say that 100% of their cells can be recycled".

That is true (as it is of any lithium-ion cell), but not in a way that makes any economic or practical sense.

[1] https://www.globalenergymetals.com/cobalt/cobalt-demand/

It's not nothing; so it isn't misinformation. Also there are many other rare earths used for cars of course. The point here is that ICE proponents get all green and hippy like when it comes to EVs but are not willing to talk rare earth sourcing when it comes to ICE engines, fuel production, etc. It's called selective bias. The reality is that ICE vehicles contain a wide variety of materials. Ice vehicle recycling is mostly focused on extracting steel and aluminium however.

Cobalt specifically is also becoming less relevant for EVs in any case because more recent batteries use less of it; or none at all in some cases. Like for example the solid state batteries discussed in the article.

Regarding recycling, Tesla is working with third parties as well as working on in house expertise:

https://electrek.co/2019/04/16/tesla-battery-recycling-syste...

You need economies of scale for battery recycling to become more significant. One minor challenge here is that batteries seem to last a lot longer than people expected a few years ago. Supply of used up batteries is simply not there yet. Mostly the industry is still focused on recycling batteries from laptops, phones, etc. So, not an urgent issue for Tesla to be working on yet. But there are of course plenty of startups in this space as it is such an obvious thing to start doing in the next decade. J.B. Straubel, the Tesla co-founder, just got a nice investment of 700$ million for one of those companies. So, very practical and lucrative apparently.

>It's not nothing; so it isn't misinformation.

I could nitpick over your definition of "a very large amount of cobalt is used in petroleum refining", but the fact that an EV owner creates orders of magnitude more demand for cobalt than an ICE car owner speaks for itself.

>Ice vehicle recycling is mostly focused on extracting steel and aluminium however.

What other rare earths are present in an ICE car's engine? They are almost entirely comprised of alu and steel, which is why recycling them is so easy. Platinum is also very widely extracted from old catalytic converters.

Obviously modern cars also include a huge amount of (almost entirely un-necessary) electronics, but if you want to start talking about that, then we'll also have to include all of the other (almost entirely un-necessary) electronics we own.

Nice article on Tesla and battery recycling. Exactly which part supports your previous assertion that "Tesla recycles all of its batteries"?

>You need economies of scale for battery recycling to become more significant.

I get a feeling we'll be hearing this line for a long time.

"kg per millions of litres of fuel" we consume lots of fuel, if 1kg per million liter that's between 5 and 6 thousands metric tons of cobalt per year. number two cobalt producer is russia with 6 thousand metric ton per year (first is DR Congo with 100 thousand metric ton).

Also rare earth are present in fossil fuel cars (Catalytic converter amongst other pieces):

https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/13757/what-r...

But nobody ever talked about these before EV were a thing.

Apparently, a typical EV battery contains 0.13kg cobalt per kwh. That's 13kg cobalt in a 100kwh battery.

Over ten years, I might drive 100,000 miles, using 12,500 litres of petrol. That's 13g cobalt, in the form of sulphur-removing catalyst.

Very obviously, widespread adoption of EVs is going to cause a tremendous increase in the demand for cobalt.

You don't do EV advocacy a favour when you try to distract from these things.

I did the computation because I just learned about this cobalt use for fossil cars (thanks to HN !) and wanted to check if it was significant or not.

On your comment:

- Cobalt (and CO2 and other chemicals) from fossil car is lost as pollution, cobalt from car batteries will be recycled (cheaper than mining) - even if recycling losses will likely be near in magnitude to fossil losses in the case of Cobalt.

- Typical EV batteries are not 100 kWh

- Tesla Model 3 SR+ MIC have 0 cobalt since use LFP chemistry. Tesla said it will use LFP for all entry level cars in the near future, and no longer use cobalt

- You didn't address the point about rare earth media coverage for fossil cars vs EV

My take on the last one: given that the company currently owning 75% of the BEV market in the USA doesn't pay mass media for advertisement at all, given that fossil car maker spend lots and lots of money for advertisement (in the 10% of car value range), mass media has massive incentives to paint EV in a negative way and it what's they're doing since the beginning.

Sure, cobalt can be recycled from EV batteries (it's one of the few things that is currently economical to extract, and even then, only if the batteries are essentially incinerated first). At around 98% recovery, that means you'd lose about as much cobalt as an ICE-driving person would consume over that same period. However, it doesn't help the fact that every EV currently needs around 10kg of the stuff in the first place, so that all has to come from somewhere.

>Typical EV batteries are not 100 kWh

For these order-of-magnitude calculations, it doesn't matter if we're talking about a 100kwh battery or a 75kwh battery.

>Tesla Model 3 SR+ MIC have 0 cobalt since use LFP chemistry.

LFP might have some nice properties, but it has around 2/3rds the energy density, and poor temperature performance. I'm sure you'll tell me "it'll get better", but then it looks to me like we're going to continue buying many generations of EVs with the promise that "the next one will fix everything!".

>You didn't address the point about rare earth media coverage for fossil cars vs EV

Why is that an issue? ICE cars don't use much in the way of rare earths, and certainly not until de-sulphurisation became a thing (which is predominately for diesel, anyway), and catalytic converters became mandated.

Once we're done talking about cobalt, we can move on to all the rare earths in an EV's traction motor...

"It happens relatively rarely. Nowhere near enough for this to be a concern."

You are too dismissive. Not every fire is created equal and putting out battery fires is much harder than putting out gas/diesel fires.

Also, EVs sometimes go up in flames when at rest, which, short of deliberate arson, is not a failure mode in ICE cars. ICE cars will generally catch fire underway, far enough from other cars, thus limiting the damage to one car. (A deadly exception might happen in a tunnel.)

You might have seen this video from China.

https://www.scmp.com/video/china/3136069/electric-bus-bursts...

If something like that happened in a car park full of EVs, for example, underneath a shopping mall, the consequences would be pretty bad.

Catching fire at rest is a risk for ICE cars: https://www.autosafety.org/bmw-recalls-1-million-vehicles-fi...

Yup, had an ICE car that was part of a recall for risk of fire when parked. The letter I received suggested not parking inside a garage until the repairs had been completed.

An airport parking facility burned to the ground in Norway a couple of years ago because an ICE car went up in flames while parked.

According to the evaluation report[1], the fire started after the car was started, while stationary. So I think it's unfair to call it "while parked".

However the report also mentions in section 4.1 a study which concluded there's no noticeable difference in the chance of catching fire and the severity of the fire between ICE vehicles and electric vehicles.

And in 4.2 they say that in this fire there was not any noticeable difference between the two types of cars. No any evidence was found to suggest that any of the EVs experienced thermal runaway.

[1]: https://dibk.no/globalassets/02.-om-oss/rapporter-og-publika...

And ignited the impossible to extinguish electric car batteries in its vicinity

Extinguishing EV fire is not hard, you just just need a lot of water. The problem is that it will re-ignite after a while. So you can't just leave it after that, you need to move the wreck to a safe location and have some firefighters wait until if reignites, drown it in water and repeat.. The alternative is to drop the car in a container of water, but has it's own drawbacks.

It really depends on what kind of risks we willing to accept. Since people sleep well in homes with pipelines of explosive gas

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2021/07/20/plano-home-explos...

I don't think EV fires are going to stop their adoption.

It is not the frequency of EV fires that is a concern, but the difficulty and danger associated with putting them out. From this article, an ICE fire requires 300 gallons of water to extinguish - and for electric vehicle fire, 28,000 gallons and 7 hours. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/federal-regulators-wa...