Battery Technology

Is really moving fast now. I suppose when you think of it, much of the research was originally started by the need for better batteries for things like early mobile phones and then laptops etc?

The big problem is the mining and toxic pollution problems from new tech stuff

China produces 95% of those rare earth products because no-one else wants the incredible toxic mess it generates to create a final useable product

So when the entire world goes battery mad, just like when the entire world went fossil fuel mad....

we're going to create ANOTHER huge global mess.... just like we did the last time

It goes back in time too.

There was a day when there were tens of thousands of horses trotting round cites belching out their pollution and not enough old men with buckets and shovels growing rhubarb.

There is talk of mining Lithium In Cornwall it will be interesting to see how the waste and by products of production are to be dealt with.

Edited By V8Eng on 13/01/2023 15:08:37

Edited By V8Eng on 13/01/2023 15:18:01

Maybe one day we'll be able to launch all our really toxic stuff into space and nudge it towards the sun

Look for a Hannah Fry documentary in iPlayer:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001f7y1/the-secret-genius-of-modern-life-series-1-4-electric-car

**LINK**

Apparently lithium batteries were developed for early camcorders. A small California startup realised that they enabled high performance electric cars and built a roadster using 100s of them. It cost a bomb and they never managed to get funding to take it beyond a prototype though the car they built had stunning performance. A certain Elon Musk came along and bought the technology and the rest as they is history.

I believe that Tesla are almost unique in EVs in that they use induction motors (hence presumably the name).

Early mobile phones used NiCAD then NiMH batteries.

I've been told that those monster excavators, bulldozers and other massive bits of mobile mining equipment burn about 300,000 miles at 40 mpg worth of diesel to collect the lithium for one Tesla set of batteries.

Clive

A certain Elon Musk came along and bought the technology and the rest as they is history.

Sounds like Mushet

He made the first decent steel railway rails

Everyone has heard of Bessemer, Carnegie etc, but not Mushet

Ah yes, I remember now

Loads of lithium in Cornwall according to the interweb. Rare earth minerals are misnamed, they aren't all that rare at all, they just thought they were when they were first discovered. They are developing sodium batteries now and that isn't rare at all, millions of tons of it under Cheshire.

And they are developing batteries made from wood, using lignum extracted from wood. So there goes the rainforest, again.

Reported a few days back, Sweden has discovered a goldmine of rare earth deposits. Enough to cut China out of the European requirements.

V8Eng -

Unless things have developed since all the reports I have seen on the proposed lithium "mining" in Cornwall is not physically removing rock to extract ores, whose "waste" anyway that is merely the local rock.

It is instead to pump the water out of long-disused, flooded mines to extract the ores dissolved naturally in the water. The water left would be returned to the mine.

We need such schemes - not only to lessen having to import metals from dubious countries but also to support very deprived regions like Cornwall. Although the numbers employed in brine-processing would still be far less than physical rock excavating needs.

Duncan -

Lots of sodium (as its chloride) under Cheshire... a good deal in the sea too, and easily extracted, though I don't know the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two sources of the same chemical.

(Shhhh! Don't tell the Sunday-supplement types that culinary salt is still only NaCl irrespective of source!)

The statistic is untrustworthy because it's in bonkers units:

• 'monster massive bits of mobile mining equipment' is meaningless compared with kilograms
• '300,000 miles at 40 mpg' is daft compared with litres!

However, fairly easy to estimate the real cost in real numbers:

• A Tesla battery contains about 8kg of Lithium
• A metric ton of Lithium metal today costs about $435,000
• A litre of UK Diesel today costs £1.19 wholesale, about $1.45

So a Tesla battery contains $3626 worth of Lithium, which costs the same as 2500 litres of diesel.

The average build cost of an ordinary car is about 42MJ per kilogram. So, a car weighing 3000kg will cost about 57MJ, about 1800 litres of diesel.

Thus an EV costs more to build than an equivalent IC car, shock horror! But the EV has important advantages:

• Lithium isn't destroyed by using the battery: the metal is almost 100% recoverable, and can be recycled almost permanently
• The electricity used to charge the battery can come from renewable sources, unlike irreplaceable oil which is destroyed by burning
• Renewable energy will be much cheaper in future, whilst the cost of oil will skyrocket over the next 30 years, rendering the IC car I drive today unaffordium. (Not believing this won't stop it happening! )
• EVs emit no pollution in crowded towns and cities, and there is plenty of scope for using renewable energy during production, also reducing harmful CO2 in the atmosphere

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 14/01/2023 10:24:26

My attitude to new technology is, any good?, can I make use of it? &so on. If answer is Yes then I'll grab it!

Big but with spark boxes - no infrastructure worth talking about. I live in a side road of mainly terrace houses here in BN1 with not a single lamp post charger. Adjacent road has bigger houses, many converted to flats = many more potential car drivers. Just one charger and space often blocked by an ic engined car. Simple cure, tow and crush!

BN1 and most other areas of Brighton are a nightmare to park an ic engined vehicle. I wont buy an electric car until I can easily charge it. So much easier and cheaper to jump on a bus around town with pass and no parking problems and costs. Carpark prices are horrendous. Bus pass affords no incentive to buy and illegally use an electric scooter. Wonder when officialdom will wake up and sort out the changeover muddle?

I read a while back that a battery pack for a car would have cost over half a million dollars about 20 years ago. Hopefully the cost will continue to fall after the increase in 2022, as new battery technology takes advantage of more plentiful raw materials?

It's an age thing Ady1, as an apprentice, I remember 'Mushet' steels. Needed 'Wimet' cutters and drills to machine.

Regards Ian.

Sodium batteries are not new. I rode in a bus powered by a Sodium-Sulphur battery in 1979. And it was British.
A primary source of a Sodium chemical is seawater.

On Lithium cell recycling, this has some way to go. Due to the construction of the cells there is a lot of work to extract the Li in a usable form. I know one supplier of Lithium primary cells (which have even more metallic Li in them) who sold off unused cells near the end of their shelf life as surplus for pennies because it cost more to get the Li extracted than it was worth. Otherwise they had to pay for disposal of the "expired" cells as hazardous waste.

Robert G8RPI.

Salvaging the metals from a scrapped electric car is not the problem even if recovering the lithium is still very difficult and possibly uneconomical (in which latter case, then what....).

What everyone overlooks is all the non-metallic materials in any car, worsening as the manufacturers find every excuse to add electrical and electronic extras that merely add to the marque's sales cachet.

Materials made mainly from petroleum derivatives, too.

Yes, we might find an efficient way to salvage battery metals, but what of the cases? Or the wiring insulation and PCB foundation materials? The lubricants in the transmission? The tyres, upholstery and trim parts? If anything I think the proportion of recoverable in total materials in modern vehicles is decreasing, not increasing.

This just popped into my feed. I’ve not had chance to watch it yet though.

New Sodium-Ion Battery to begin Mass Production