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Most of the numbers come from the national transportation survey and bulk of the data is from 2001 and 1995. There is lots of good data here. Local Area Transportation Characteristics for Households (LATCH Survey) | Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Light vehicles (cars, SUVs, Trucks) are driven furthest in rural areas and least in urban areas. If you combine this data with the extensive volt data, you find that the bulk of miles can be covered in a 50 mile epa range phev. Definitely a large number of people can be covered in there daily miles on a 30 mile range phev, and we have many happy Prius prime owners with 25 mile range. Europe which is a larger phev market than the US would serve a high proportion of the population.

The rav4 prime is much more of the sweet spot of the American market. The 42 mile epa electric range is supplemented by heat pump that has it lose fewer miles in moderate cold. The prius prime never sold well, which limits its impact.

The sweet spot of the bev market is around 250 miles epa electric range. That is 50 kwh- 60 kwh if the car is very efficient like a tesla. The weight of the model 3 standard range plus is not 1000 lbs more than the prius prime but less than 300 lbs. Weight is not the important thing though, and my guess is that tesla manufacturing today is about the same as the carbon footprint as the prius prime. Still both toyota and tesla are lowering their carbon footprint. If toyota used that battery pack in a bev prius with the same acceleration and handling it would weigh at least 100 lbs less.

I would not be surprised if the tesla battery in the standard range plus had the same carbon footprint as the one in the rav4 prime despite having 3x the energy. If you assume 100,000 miles and no recycling that battery will cost about 30 g CO2equiv/mile. Toyota of course could choose to produce theirs as efficiently but it takes investment which I am sure they are going to start doing now. Go 200,000 miles and its 15 g/mile. Tesla is going to change this battery to lithium iron phosphate like the ones in the made in china model. The battery pack will be heavier for the same range but .. its more sustainable because it will not use cobalt or nickel, will have a lower carbon footprint when made in the US, and will be cheaper.

Both models are good, so I agree with you. You should be examining the battery pack not by weight but by what is there and how it is used and manufactured. A pack made in japan or china with toyota's chemistry and low volume manufacturing will have a much larger carbon footprint per kwh of energy.

Choices are good. Some want the larger packs. I got the long range pack in my model 3 because that is all that was available when I wanted to buy it. I'm sure my car will go at least 150,000 miles on that battery. Having the experience of driving it I could easily get by with the current standard range plus. Others need or want longer range and here the phev is favored. Solid lithium electrodes may drop the carbon footprint of a pack much more.

 

This is a very interesting article. The Future of Hydrogen – Analysis - IEA I wonder weather the car industry could hook into the already existing industrial production of hydrogen? The article looks at predicting a possible production cost of $1 per kg in the US

 

I come from a different generation than many of you. In school, we were taught that the environment was more than just the air or just the landfills. It was the impact of things like polluting the water by "clean processing" that utilizes toxic materials. Or of strip mining whole mountains down to the point where nothing is left of the original habitats. Green house gasses are a 'johnny come lately' problem, not widely understood or embraced in the 1960s and 70s.

So that's why I look at the waste that would come to pass if it became standard to put a 75 or 85 kWh battery in virtually every car in the developed nations of the earth. It's not just the GHG production. It's the damage that the mines and wells and factories do to our world.

It's a bad sign when a company is finding that it needs to tail down the output of a major percentage of a strategic material like nickel.

Just my opinion.

 

The model 3 and Y are very clean vehicles. I used CO2 because that is the argument against these batteries but the amount is outdated. Its much lower. How about the lithium? The biggest pollution is water use to extract.
Lithium produced for Tesla's batteries is less polluting than 31 cups of coffee: researcher
But yes the cobalt and nickel are more of a problem and more expensive. That is why I was advocating the change to 250 mile range (50 kwh standard plus pack). The current battery is low on cobalt but has a lot of Nickle, but its moving to be cobalt and Nickle free in the less expensive lithium iron phosphate chemistry. That will probably cause less toxic pollution than building an aluminum engine block with iron sleeves and pollution controls. Definitely agree the toxins are more important, but here bevs look even better.

Imagine all the pollution if they were straight hybrids. It would be much higher. Getting that oil and refining it is not a very clean process.

Out of Africa: Where Electric Vehicle Batteries Come From, Part II

I bought my gen III prius for lower gasoline usage but I did understand that battery was not that green ;-) Still on ballance it was better for the environment than the lexus I owned before, but not as good as my current car.

 

I'd rebut some of those points(from post 224) , but it's not worthwhile. But I live in California, where the population has grown too quickly and the water supplies are becoming inadequate. This year we start another drought. Water is a resource that's hard to live without.

So let's look at Austingreen's assertion that a thousand gallons of water are evaporated to recover enough lithium from ponds to make a Tesla battery. The 1000 gallon figure does not include the vast quantities of water that are pumped into the earth to dissolve the lithium and never recovered. That 1000 gallons represents the salty brine is pumped to the surface where it floods large areas that will never be fertile habitat again.

It takes about 26.4 pounds of lithium to make one of the smaller Tesla batteries. If ALL of the 276 million cars in America were replaced with Tesla model 3, it would take a bit over 7.2 billion pounds of lithium and over 7 trillion gallons of water to dissolve the lithium deposits so it can be pumped to the surface. 7 Trillion gallons of salt water evaporating in man made lakes. I don't know how many thousands of square miles of land that will be effectively sterile.

And that's just for the USA, which seems to think it can transform all those cars to BEVs in the next decade.

If you want to call something 'green', you should not stop at simply being cleaner than the competition. You should make it as clean as practical. And that starts with using as few natural resources as possible.

 

Basis of estimate using EPA mileage: (1) $0.11/kWh; (2) $2.49/gal regular, and; (3) $2.73/gal premium.

• $2.75/100 miles for 240 miles - 2019 Tesla Std Rng Plus Model 3
• $3.19/100 miles for 72 miles- 2014 BMW i3-REx in EV mode
• $7.10/100 miles for 78 miles - 2014 BMW i3-REx in gas mode
• $2.75/100 miles for 25 miles - 2017 Toyota Prius Prime, EV
• $4.73/100 miles for 625 miles - 2017 Toyota Prius Prime, gas

So the Tesla and Prime have identical cost in EV mode. But the Tesla will travel 240/25 ~= 9.6 time further before requiring a charging break. The Tesla will fast DC charge at a peak rate of 170 kW while the Prime only goes to 3.5 kW, ~49 times slower.

As for gasoline modes, none of them come even close to the cost of EV modes. For example, the $4.73/100 miles of the Prime in gas is 1.5 times more expensive than the $3.19/100 miles of the 2014 BMW i3-REx in EV mode.

These are 'greenback Yankee dollars' in my wallet. I don't own a lithium mining company nor an oil well and refinery. Of course, your mileage may vary but I like the well defined, repeatable, EPA metrics and the money each vehicle cost to operate.

Bob Wilson

 

That's certainly one way to avoid the subject while trying to make your horse look like a winner. Good work!

 

Definitely agree with this. Too many people have moved to california for some of its resources and not enough infrastructure has been built to support that population (you could desalinate the sea water, have more ccgt natural gas plants and upgrade the grid to have fewer forest fires, etc). But that has nothing to do with lithium, and the lithium brine reserves are in chile, argentina, and bolivia. Apparently a lithum mine is being constructed - fast tracked so I don't know the environmental details - in Nevada by the oregon border (I guess that may use some water california claims but ...) to begin production in 2023 and likely to mine for 40 years. Its a different less water intense process that uses sulfuric acid to get lithium from the clays. It is likely more harmful to the groundwater though.

I don't understand you outrage. Here is the quote from the article I linked.

I eat beef and drink coffee. I am sure more water is used for these. The numbers could be wrong, its just a link. Maybe its 4000 gallons, I don't know, it could be 400 gallons, it depends on the mine. Either way its a small part of the water needed to produce the car. The areas that the salts are evaporated are not fertile areas. This ground water is toxic to animals and not suitable for farming. The water doesn't become more polluted but it evaporates and I am sure eventually makes it way into the rising oceans. I'm sure you could pump seawater to replace the water that evaperates without increasing the cost of the lithium much. That area of south america has plentiful wind, so you could even use solar desalization and wind turbine electricity to desalinate that saltwater and create some land improvements.

I believe my battery has about about 8 kg (18 lbs) of lithium metal in the 2018 long range pack. The standard plus has less but in the lithium iron phosphate chemistry only Tesla and CATL know. The estimate quoted above was for about 1000 gallons for the midrange pack, which has more lithium than the standard plus pack currenlty but it may be around the same in that other chemistry. That would be about 300 billion gallons for the 280 million cars. But it will take a lot more water to build all those cars, its about 40,000 gallons per car on average but a lot of that water is reclaimed. That is about 11 trillion gallons to manufacture all those cars, with the lithium mining representing only a tiny part of that.

Who thinks like that. Certainly not me. Is it from some of those rabid green people at CARB that seem to not understand things take time. Remember this tangent came from me responding to an honest inquiry from you about aren't small batteried phevs better for the environment than cars with big battery packs. I responded that both are good. Its my opinion that the prime is never going to sell many cars. The rav4 prime is IMHO much more targeted to the market. Toyota didn't plan for the batteries so sales will be slow until they get them ramped up. Tesla plans to ramp battery production to 3000 gwh a year in 2030. With a large percentage going to grid storage that will enable them to build around 30 million cars globally then in a rapid ramp from 500,000 last year. I don't think they even believe they can sell that many teslas. Its a lot more than the 2 biggest auto companies, toyota and vw, which had combined sales of just under 22 million in 2019. The idea has to be to drive costs down and sell them to other automakers. That would mean plug-ins (PHEVs and BEVs) might get to 40% global market share then from 4.5% in 2020. But that is percent of new car sales. By then I hope there will be affordable lithium metal anodes with a solid electrolyte (maybe the cathode uses gel) which would need only half the lithium per kwh.

In just the US market the average age of cars are approaching 12 years, with over 25% 16 years old or older. Every car would need to be a bev for the next 25 years to really replace 99% of the cars, or the government would need to take them back. I expect the majority of cars to run solely on gasoline 10 years from now. The interesting part will be how clean transportation will be in 2040, it can't change over night.

Now I'll admit I like how fast battery tech is improving. I have a phone, lap top, 2 tablets, smart watch, wireless speakers, lawn equipment (mower, trimmer, leaf blower that share battery packs), power tools, tooth brush, beard trimmer, etc. All these things are cheaper and/or better than they were 10 years ago. For reference sake in 2010 analysts were talking about lithium battery packs for cars costing $1000/kwh. Now the advanced pack in the tesla 3 standard plus made in china with lithium iron phospate costs about $100/kwh at the pack level. Tesla thinks tech improvements and scale can drop that to better batteries for $50/kwh at the pack level in 2030. I think $65 is more realistic ;-)

By your definition I am not green. So be it. You have a car with a big lithium battery compared to my 2010 gen III prius that I sold when I bought the tesla. Have you minimized your pollution? I think you are helping to make the world's pollution lower a decade from now, but if you look at the short term, should you even own a car?[/quote][/quote]

 

sure !!
It's the same problem there would also be if suddenly there were 5% hydrogen cars running around the landscape. How much platinum would have to be mined? As well as recycling ... as well as mining for hydrogen car's batteries, massive recycling for spent compressed hydrogen fuel tanks? Grid electricity generation to compress hydrogen that hydrogen also needs? How much energy to build expensive storage systems, compressor maintenance, Etc

In other words, not a good straw-man.
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I suspect autocorrect converted ‘straw man’ to something else:



Bob Wilson

 

The platinum loading in a fuel cell can be very low, the rest of what you mentioned is mostly steel (stationary storage, compressors), and the batteries will use around 1/10th of the material of that of a BEV. The carbon used in tanks is relatively minor and not an issue of finding scarce minerals. We burn those "minerals" (oil) for energy today, so the net change would be less needed, not more.

Try again.

 

ah the eternal optimist, can be - should be - oughta be -
Every 10 years since the 1970s the industry of hydrogen cars lobbying lies to the public that in 10 years it should be - oughta be here. Only it never is here. The promise of a bride, but not even a bridesmaid.

if the fed's Mandate a 50-mile minimum range to be qualified as Electric, avoiding penalties, that won't be that small a small battery ... and then considering the cost of the hydrogen stations already built? That's going to be another trillion or two for building out infrastructure. Saying it's easy doesn't make it easy. Saying you have lots of ways to make it so, means you should be in charge .... because all the other people running the show don't see it that way.
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Sound's a lot like breakthrough batteries - lithium-metal, lithium-sulfur, solid-state, etc.

Smaller than a 300 mile battery.

Please backup your WAG with calculations.

I didn't say it was easy. It would have been easier than doing the same for full BEVs, though.

 

it's anyone surprised that energy doesn't just "poof!" appear and submit to our wishes ?

yes, you have to expend some energy in order to mine or grow energy.

yes, you have to expend some energy in order to harness "free"energy from gravity/wind.

yes, there will be pollutants and byproducts.

yes, there will be disposal headaches when the machines used to grow/mine/harness that energy are no longer efficient enough.

in the mean time, imma enjoy it

 

nope - that's a poor deflection to avoid the point. Even if batteries progress no further, they are still working for millions of BEV drivers worldwide - & growing faster than PHEV's ever did. Hydrogen? Not so much. Oh, that's right, that's because Elon Musk is holding it back. One of my favorite deflections.
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Here is a map of the current, gas-free area:

Hydrogen would be in the same sinking ship. FYI, the pipeline started in WW-2 in response to German subs sinking our tankers.

Bob Wilson

 

Even Elon admits the batteries are the problem with wide-scale EV adoption. They are simply too expensive, too heavy, and too dependent on scarce materials.

 

Simple question. Which one of these is different than the other?

ICE + fuel tank + fuel -> 1,000Wh/kg
Fuel cell + tank + fuel -> 1,000Wh/kg
Battery + structure + cooling -> 200Wh/kg

 

That is a rather transparent deception.
Unlike, your stance that batteries themselves are a problem in and of themselves, Elon has stated supply of batteries is a challenge. One which can be solved.

 

Not true. He's also stated, in no uncertain terms, that battery cost and weight are also problems. That's why they claims about the new cells are all about reducing cost and weight.