Lithium isn't 'renewable'.

And just 'subsidizing' things isn't a replacement for actually playing your energy grid and energy production.

Oil is 100% non-renewable. A single, relatively efficient ICE vehicle will use over 45,000 lbs of gasoline over its lifetime (excluding all the oil to extract, refine, and transport that gasoline).

The entire oil supply chain has no chance of ever becoming sustainable.

So is lithium

I can't tell if you actually believe your logic is sound or you're just trolling.

A bit of both. I'm trying to say that it's not so cut and dry. Making lithium batteries and thr mining of lithium is a messy business. It's not a panacea. We need to be honest and realistic about the costs of doing that business, and often we arent.

75% of all aluminum every smelted is still in use today: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling#:~:text=....

We need to get lithium to that level before we make any more big, environmentally hazardous mines.

A chokehold on new mining of a crucial ore for renewables sounds like a terrible overall idea.

The lifecycle of the lithium that will come from this hypothetical mine is probably 20 years from now until the first time the material will be recycled.

The highly profitable recycling logistics will have been fully worked out a decade before it’s needed for a new mine’s output.

This is reducto ad absurdum. I'm not proposing that.

I'm proposing we put equal effort into both. My expectation is that we don't currently.

[delayed]

Then why hasn't it been keeping up? It seems that lithium recycling is way behind exploration and mining. Why? It's highly profitable as you say, are there technology limitations?

There isn't enough material yet for a large robust recycling industry, and collection of small batteries is still an issue.

While the 5% number may be presently accurate, it is mainly for tiny Lithium batteries. Those from vehicles are of very large + high value, and will likely end up well above 95% recycling rate whenever it is time for them to be scrapped.

This also ignores the large number of those batteries that will be re-used in grid storage after being removed from a car, and eventually recycled.

>Since I'm being down voted, I'm adding a reference:

>5% of lithium batteries are currently recycled

Whether something is currently recycled and whether it can be recycled are two different questions. For a long time, copper wasn't recycled very often. Then the price went up, and now it's very valuable trash.

Lithium is absolutely renewable. It may not be renewed, but it is renewable.

Agreed.

Let's put more effort into getting that 5% up to 100%, that's where the real effort and headlines should focus.

75% of all aluminum ever produced is still in use today: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling#:~:text=....

We need to get lithium to that level

As the value goes up, companies that sort trash and recycling will be incentivized to separate the electronics, and claim the value as an extra revenue stream.

Not true: we might learn to pull carbon from the atmosphere and turn it into gasoline so that instead of using solar and wind energy to charge electric cars, we use to make gasoline for ICE cars.

Making gasoline for cars from renewable energy isn't going to happen. The end to end efficiency of that process (Hydrolysis, CO2 capture, Fischer Tropf) would likely measure in the single digit percentages. Charging a car battery (especially from local solar) can be over 90% efficient.

When you include the very low tank to wheels efficiency of an ICE vehicle, the overall efficiency is even worse.

> Hydrolysis

Self-correction: I meant electrolysis, not hydrolysis

That isn't really "renewing", though. If part of the process involves the substance being dispersed in the environment and then extracted again, that's different from capturing waste as it's produced. Furthermore, you're not necessarily capturing the same carbon dioxide that you released, but when you recycle a battery, it's the same lithium. And getting the lithium from a battery should take less energy than mining it, while capturing and reducing carbon dioxide definitely requires more energy than pumping oil from the ground.

So I don't think this analogy holds up.

I'm having trouble seeing how it'd be feasible to do all that while expending less energy than you can get out of the resulting gasoline.

But we demonstrably get more energy out of the useful life of a solar panel than we have to put in to manufacture it.

Producing synthetic fuels for internal combustion engines doesn't really makes sense for cars: electric cars are good enough.

But it might be necessary for 'green' planes, if the energy density of electric batteries does not improve enough.

Electric cars are better. Less moving parts/maintenance, quicker, 3x as efficient, can be charged nearly anywhere with existing infrastructure and no ongoing supply chain requirement (fuel delivery).

Energy density is steadily increasing. Hydrogen will be a short-term solution for medium/long haul flights, but will eventually be replaced by batteries.

Why would you ever want to use hydrogen? It's essentially a terrible battery with terrible fuel density (if you take into account the weight and volume of the tanks required to contain it).

Either go with an electric battery, or go with a hydrocarbon like kerosene or methane or so.

You are basically ignore the laws of physics. There will never be a airplane with decent range running on conventional batteries. Even now, battery powered airplanes are just powered gliders or ultra-lights, not something that will send real passengers.

What do you mean by 'conventional batteries'? You need to add some assumption so that you can say powering a plane with them is physically impossible.

I made the original comment contemporary batteries ain't good for electric planes. And I would not bet on batteries becoming good enough anytime soon.

But I don't think physics prohibits anything here?

Anything that works like existing rechargeable batteries. Those would be considered conventional batteries. There is basically no path to a high enough energy density for airplanes for those types of batteries.

Things that involve metal-air reactions are basically fuel cells and don't count. If you go down that route, you'll quickly find yourself working with some kind of chemical fuel. They will suddenly look a lot like existing airplanes in terms of basic concept.

> Anything that works like existing rechargeable batteries. Those would be considered conventional batteries.

Ok, that definition works.

I would have gone with 'whatever people (in the future or now) use for powering their phones, laptops and electric cars' is by definition 'conventional' at that point in time.

> I'm having trouble seeing how it'd be feasible to do all that while expending less energy than you can get out of the resulting gasoline.

Use biological solar panels AKA plants.

[delayed]

Yeah, I meant figuring out how to do it so efficiently that it becomes preferable to batteries for powering cars. We talk like it is certain that battery-powered cars will win out, but I haven't seen a proof that that is how it must turns out if we learn to create nanomachines that use solar energy to suck carbon from air.

Unfortunately, physics says battery-powered cars have won.

Using solar to power a process to make a fuel before burning a fuel that at best (way less in reality) uses 2x more energy than just powering an electric motor directly is not sensical.

And the battery makes the car 1.3 times the weight of a gas-powered car. Making the battery requires much more energy than making a gas tank. The charging infrastructure might prove more expensive than a network of gas stations. Long trips are punctuated by idle periods needed for the battery to charge, so the car's "utilization rate" is lower than a gas-powered car. All I am saying is that it is not 1.00 certain which technology will retain the lowest total cost of ownership as both technologies improve, although yeah battery tech is the likely winner.

> Lithium isn't 'renewable'

Neither are photons [1] nor individual gusts of wind. Lithium has a theoretically closeable cycle in batteries in a way fossil fuels do not.

[1] If you want to be pedantic, the useful energy in a particular photon.

Exactly. Batteries are being recycled at scale today with 98-95% material recovery rates, depending on the company.

We are still early in the development cycle of recycling technology, which means we'll be closer to 99.x% in a decade when the first large wave of EV batteries (from the last decade) could start getting close to End of Life.

Batteries can be recycled at high rates of recovery, but most non-EV lithium batteries aren’t being recycled (basically because they aren’t sent to battery recycling centers given their small sizes). The anti-EV crowd then uses that statistic to deride EVS.

But the value of nickel in say a NiMH battery makes it feasible to reclaim/“recycle”

Most small batteries are sent to landfills, whether they have lithium or nickel. EV batteries and nickel car batteries are easier to recycle because there is an auto shop involved to collect and send the battery to a recycler. If you replace your NiMH 12V battery yourself (rather than having it done in the shop), you might be tempted to just throw it away in your garbage can also (even though you shouldn’t) simply because you have no idea how to get it to a recycler. You are unlikely to change the big battery in your Tesla on your own, so that isn’t a problem.

Battery recycling is really just a logistics problem.

> Battery recycling is really just a logistics problem

It’s also one of scale. We don’t yet have enough EV batteries being retired to merit the recycling infrastructure. China is just reaching the point where it does.

Most EV batteries that age out of car use can be repurposed for home/solar, so this is true. But they will eventually need to be recycled.

In Canada at least, when you buy a car / ev battery depending on the chemistry you get a coupon that you redeem for a significant amount of money when you take your old replaced battery back to the place you bought the new battery. The vendor will take back any brand/regardless of where you got the old battery from.

There are people who "throw away" the coupon by not returning the old battery, but hey that's on them.

It is incredibly profitable to recycle an EV battery, so I’m not sure why the coupon is needed. The owner should get cash or a discount on their new battery.

My reaction was not pro-fossil fuel but rather that I think the use of 'renewable' as a statement of general positivity is idiotic.

Sure there is a theoretical closable cycle in batteries, but guess what, the same can be said for fossil fuels. Just use energy to turn air and water back into fuel, boom cycle closed.

What matters is not if something is 'renewable' but if its a strategically correct thing to do in regards to climate and energy security.

Calling lithium 'renwable' is ridiculous. Its literally just a fixed resource on our plant like iron or copper or whatever.

> Sure there is a theoretical closable cycle in batteries, but guess what, the same can be said for fossil fuels.

On geological time scales involving massive deposition of organic material.

In contrast, lithium can be recovered from batteries with an industrial shredder and chemical processing.

Fossil fuels are non-renewable in a trivial sense but are grossly different in a practical sense; treating them as equivalent is a borderline specious argument.

Besides brushing off the difference in difficulty between refreshing our petroleum stock on the planet and recycling lithium, I think the point of the original use of "renewables" is the push toward renewable energy for all possible things, such as transport, and the part lithium currently plays in that plan.

>Lithium isn't 'renewable'.

Sure, if you want to be painfully pedantic. If you want to have a real conversation, lithium batteries are absolutely "renewable" in the sense they can be recycled, and some studies have shown that they actually perform better after being recycled.

https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/recycled-lithium-...

> ^^Spot on, which is why "subsidizing" renewables is vital to our country's future.

That seems like a silly conclusion. It might still be vital for your country's future to subsidise renewables, but it doesn't follow from the observation.

If China wants to spend taxpayer money to give foreigners cheaper renewables (or cheaper anything), that's nice of them, but doesn't mean anyone should imitate them.

If you have insufficient local workers for a task, and you are the US, you can always open the floodgates of (skilled) migration.

Also you don't need to subsidize renewables. That's a sore game of trying to pick winners and introducing extra bureaucracy. Instead you can hit the same policy goals simpler by taxing fossil fuels (or carbon emissions). Distribute the proceeds amongst all voters, if you want it to be revenue neutral.

With a tax, someone can react by just driving less (eg by moving closer to work) and benefiting from that choice. With a subsidy, you'd actively have to go and buy eg a subsidised electric car to benefit.

You may say China is subsidizing their lithium industry. Actually, by exporting cheap lithium, they're effectively subsidizing all the other countries' economy, regardless of whether they like it or not.

When standard oil used dumping tactics it was with the expectation that they would be able to clean up the market later, and they at least, were right.