EV are the worst polluters over time?

Such would be very useful and informative ...

 

data .... it can't compete if your synaptic pathways have been volitionally carboned-up.


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The worse case metric used in the study that lead to the OP head line.
@bwilson4web posted a link over here, Electric vehicles emit more CO2 than diesel ones, German study shows | PriusChat
Best case metric gave the electric the advantage.

The conclusion of the summary favored neither BEV nor diesel though. It reached methane ICE as the lowest cost reduction of carbon emissions, even when using fossil fuels, and a fleet of such cars could allow the storage of peak wind and solar energy electric with methane production from it.

Note that the study was focused on Germany. So conclusions may not apply elsewhere.

 

I like the idea that pollution can be taken care of at the power plant instead of everyone having to take their car in for an individual pollution test. Get the government out of my tailpipe.

 

equally, if not more important - there is a significant ratio of plugin drivers that supplement their homes with solar, as we do;

https://www.solarunitedneighbors.org/news/survey-examines-solars-strong-connection-electric-vehicles/

It's one of many reasons why the op's link is disingenuous. Unfortunately, these reports of ridiculousness often take a decade or more to go away - & then, some people are still duped - even after that much time passes.
.

 

Unfortunately, it's the world we live in.

 

I am not seeing all that many Bummer H1's on the road, yet Prii (of all generations) are ubiquitous. Also, H1 led to H2 and H3, which were even worse abominations than H1, which was a purpose built military vehicle. Gen 1 Prius led to gen 2, gen 3 and now gen 4 Prii, which are amazing cars with amazing track record.

Someone take that idiot to task!

 

As was mentioned above, BEVs are better than ICE cars because they hold the POTENTIAL to improve our emissions without replacing the whole fleet. As electric sources get cleaner, the BEV fleet necessarily gets cleaner. It's that simple and I am not sure why it's so difficult to understand. Why is this not mentioned more in such arguments? By adopting a BEV culture we are setting up for cleaner environment, but if we stubbornly stick with ICE we are in a dead end situation (just a matter of time). ICE technology has reached its pinnacle and there is not much left on the table in terms of improvement of emissions or efficiency. This argument can and should be refined to the point where a child could understand it and put out there into the cultural lore.

 

Most English articles are going to be summaries of the original German. Like FOX, they will omit facts that don't match their editorial opinions. My recommendation is those are "Cliff Notes" and the original should be read.

The original, German language paper: https://www.cesifo-group.de/DocDL/sd-2019-08-sinn-karl-buchal-motoren-2019-04-25.pdf

1. The continuation of the energy transition and its pre-programmed Crisis in the transport sector
2. The structure of German electricity production
3. The CO2 emissions of alternative engines

3.1 The diesel engine
3.2 The battery electric motor
3.3 fuel cells or batteries?​

4. Two possible scenarios for the electrification of the traffic
5. The problem of volatility and the need of parallel structures
6. Excessive current spikes and the role of the hydrogen
7. Concluding remarks​

The paper is too large for the 1 MB limited Google translate. But we can examine the appropriate sections to see how the authors approached the problem.

One early problem in the opening abstract is:

. . . There are two advantages to using hydrogen-methane technology. For one thing, it is the only way to save the long term excessive current peaks of wind and solar power, which is required when the Market shares of this form of renewable electricity. On the other hand even from the standpoint, it offers the possibility of considerable CO2 savings, even if this methane comes from fossil sources.​

So tell me how many diesels are running on "hydrogen-methane"?

Bob Wilson

 

Had to drive the better ½ down to the mother-in-law's house last weekend. San Diego County. Sure glad it was all on PV electrons.
But sheesh!

It's looking nasty out there for fossil fuel burners. .... it's a shame electric cars are dirtier than an ice. But now that I know burning fuel is cleaner - well - I guess it's worth it

.

 

That slogan works for other issues.

We can essentially run the reformation process used to make hydrogen from fossil fuels in reverse.
Carbon dioxide and water, plus some energy input, and you have hydrocarbons. Audi has two pilot plants doing this; one makes methane, and the other a synthetic light, sweet petroleum(the call it blue crude). The energy input is excess renewable electricity.

That is likely what the German researchers are referring to with the "hydrogen-methane" phrase. Plenty of commercial vehicles already use natural gas as fuel, and both gasoline a diesel engines can be converted to run on it.

From the translations you posted, it sounds like the paper's conclusion for a cost effective way for Germany to reduce carbon emissions from the transportation fleet would be to switch the fleet over methane. Even with natural gas, there will be a reduction, and they can switch to synthetic methane has more renewable electricity production comes to the market.

I suspect gas will be $4 a gallon here next week.

 

You will hear detractors say "Fix the grid, THEN we can have electric cars." But the truth is you can buy now, and once we fix the grid, those cars get fixed, too.

 

No, this is not a chicken/egg problem at all. BEVs work perfectly fine with the current grid. As the grid improves BEVs will improve with it and Bummers of the world will still be spewing pollution.

 

Don't forget. The same clean or dirty grid also runs the refinery, albeit they use some of their own fuel as well. Still, no one bitches about dirty power used for the refinery. A bit of irony? Or is the dirt simply considered a worthy cause to create fossil fuel.
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It's probably a mistake to try to claim eco-superiority for BEV. as advocate Chelsea Sexton used to say (not sure what she thinks today). We are talking about a value judgement/preference for BEV for performance reasons and for some more ethical fuel choice. I would say Europeans always thought gasoline was wimpy power compared to diesel power, so I think EU will like the extra power of the electric engine, presumably they do not care too much if it is hybrid or BEV as long as it responds with big power upon hitting the "gas" pedal.

 

Ok, here is the 'smoking gun' from the translated paper:

Work summarizes, appreciate Romare and Dahllöf (2017) that per kWh battery capacity between 145 kg and 195 kg of CO2 equivalents be ejected.​

So let's put this perspective:

• "100–265 W·h/kg" - Wikipedia claim
  • 1 kw @100Wh/kg -> 10 kg :: 145 kg - 195 kg CO{2}
  • 1 kw @265Wh/kg -> 3.8 kg :: 145 kg - 195 kg CO{2}

The primary problem is the paper claims CO{2} output that is 14.5 - 51.3 times the weight of the LiON battery. So they cited:

The Life Cycle Energy Consumption and Greenhouse Gas Emissions ...https://www.ivl.se/...5922281715bdaebede9559/.../C243+The+life+cycle+energy+con...​

I'm seeing some suspicious references in this paper and it even claims there are a wide range of numbers:

	University/Institute	Researchers	Active in the area (based on assessed reports)
1	Argonne National Laboratory USA	Dunn Gaines Kelly James Gallagher	2000 -
2	Chalmers University of Technology Sweden	Nordelöf Tillman Ljunggren Söderman Rydh Kushnir	2005 -
3	Karlsruhe Institute for Technology Germany	Peters Baumann Zimmermann Braun Weil	2016 -
4	Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTU Trondheim Norway	Majeau-Bettez Ellingsen Singh Kumar Srivastava Valöen Hammer Strömman	2011 -
5	Swerea IVF Sweden	Zackrisson Avellán Orlenius	2010 -
6	United States Environmental Protection Agency US-EPA USA	Amarakoon Smith Segal	2013
7	University of California	Ambrose Kendall	2016

Ok, it is unfair to call BS until reading the papers. However, I would point out a lot of these papers are snapshots in time. My experience is:

• Internet reports - shortest time between observations and report BUT risks credibility (including this post)
• Magazine articles - typically a 3-9 month delay between observations and report with improved credibility
• Formal papers - typically a 12-18 month delay between observations and report with the best, but not perfect, credibility

I am bothered by seeing more than an order of magnitude more CO{2} than the mass of the battery. Furthermore, this graph of the cost per kWh:


Bob Wilson

 

BTW, this is what Tesla reports:
https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/tesla-impact-report-2019.pdf

Unlike our Fremont Factory which was purchased and renovated, Tesla
designed and built from the ground up our Gigafactory 1, a battery and
motor manufacturing facility in Sparks, Nevada, allowing us to design
and implement sustainable solutions throughout the site from the
beginning. Gigafactory 1 began mass production of lithium-ion battery
cells in January 2017 and started manufacturing Model 3 battery packs
and drive units in mid-2018. At 15M sq ft, Gigafactory 1 will be the
world's largest building by footprint when completed and will eventually
be powered by 100% renewable energy sources. Tesla built Gigafactory
1 with an efficient lighting design utilizing high-efficiency LED light
fixtures combined with an optimized layout that reduces the facility’s
overall electrical load. Gigafactory 1’s current lighting power density is
0.45 watts per sq ft, which is 65% less than the American Society of
Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE)
lighting design allowance of 1.3 watts per sq ft for a manufacturing
facility. In the course of 30 days, the facility’s lighting system can save
144 MWhs of energy – enough energy for a Model S to drive 480K
miles. Designed to be a net-zero energy factory upon completion,
the facility will have the largest rooftop solar array in the world, with
roughly 200K solar panels. Solar installation is already underway,
in addition to a microgrid R&D facility.​

pp. 16 has an interesting graph that if we use the 2017 production numbers we could back-in to the cost per kWh.

Bob Wilson

 

Source: New study claiming electric cars are dirtier than diesel debunked - Electrek

However, the Ifo Institute for Economic Research came out earlier this month with a new study again using the same argument that dirty electricity is making electric cars worse for the environment than diesel:

“Considering Germany’s current energy mix and the amount of energy used in battery production, the CO2 emissions of battery-electric vehicles are, in the best case, slightly higher than those of a diesel engine, and are otherwise much higher.”​

The professors behind the study were instead pushing for hydrogen-methane vehicles.

Notably, Germany currently uses more coal power than most of Europe, and is one of the dirtier grids in Europe, but is cleaning up more quickly than most. By 2030 – when many electric cars sold today will still be in service – Germany plans to produce 2/3 of their energy by renewables.

The problem is that the IFO’s study makes many of the same mistakes as other studies used electric vehicle detractors in the past.
. . .​

Do we need to waste time any longer on this terribly flawed 'paper'?

Bob Wilson

 

A general understanding of lithium supply that may have some errors.

Most starts as brines under saline lake beds. Dried to mixed salts by solar evaporation.

Purified to lithium carbonate, presently involving fossil energy. Several process improvements are being examined. A company that felt like it could probably switch over to renewable power for these steps.

Big bags of lithium carbonate are made into batteries. At least Tesla plans to solarize this process as stated @37.

The whole shebang could be done with CO2 emissions only from transporting lithium carbonate, and as that carbonate has to get blown off as CO2 (I think). There may not be another energy-storage technology that could be made so close to CO2 neutral today.

 

The process for making methane might be treated carbon negative in some models.
If all the electricity used comes from renewable, carbon free sources.