Battery myths

[shahryaran]

A friend tagged me on Facebook with the following and I wondered whether it’s
factual at all, in anyone cares to reply:

This is a Tesla model Y battery. It takes up all of the space under the passenger compartment of the car.

To manufacture it you need:
--12 tons of rock for Lithium (can also be
extracted from sea water)
-- 5 tons of cobalt minerals (Most cobalt is made
as a byproduct of the processing of copper
and nickel ores. It is the most difficult material
to obtain for a battery and the most
expensive.)
-- 3 tons nickel ore
-- 12 tons of copper ore

You must move 250 tons of soil to obtain:
-- 26.5 pounds of Lithium
-- 30 pounds of nickel
-- 48.5 pounds of manganese
-- 15 pounds of cobalt

To manufacture the battery also requires:
-- 441 pounds of aluminum, steel and/or plastic
-- 112 pounds of graphite

The Caterpillar 994A is used for the earthmoving to obtain the essential minerals. It consumes 264 gallons of diesel in 12 hours.

Finally you get a “zero emissions” car.

Presently, the bulk of the necessary minerals for manufacturing the batteries come from China or Africa. Much of the labor for getting the minerals in Africa is done by children! If we buy electric cars, it's China who profits most!

BTW, this 2021 Tesla Model Y OEM battery (the cheapest Tesla battery) is currently for sale on the Internet for $4,999 not including shipping or installation. The battery weighs 1,000 pounds (you can imagine the shipping cost). The cost of Tesla batteries is:

Model 3 -- $14,000+ (Car MSRP $38,990)
Model Y -- $5,000–$5,500 (Car MSRP $47,740)
Model S -- $13,000–$20,000 (Car MSRP $74,990)
Model X -- $13,000+ (Car MSRP $79,990)

It takes SEVEN years for an electric car to reach net-zero CO2. The life expectancy of the batteries is 10 years (average). Only in the last three years do you begin to reduce your carbon footprint. Then the batteries have to be replaced and you lose all the gains you made in those three years.

The truth is far better than the fiction we are all being told.

I would still drive an EV because:
It doesn't stink
It doesn't make noise
It's faster

Even if a gas car has overall less emission to make, the car:
Puts toxic exhaust into my lungs
Goes slow
Makes a lot of noise

 

[Mayer]

I would still drive an EV because:
It doesn't stink
It doesn't make noise
It's faster

Even if a gas car has overall less emission to make, the car:
Puts toxic exhaust into my lungs
Goes slow
Makes a lot of noise

Here is my reply to my Facebook friend:

Joe,
I own a Tesla for the raw power (0-60 in 3+ seconds), not because I believe I’m helping to save the planet, although I did install solar panels and Tesla Powerwalls as backup storage for outages and to eliminate drawing from the grid during peak rates (2-6 PM).
So once total investment is recouped (estimated at 6 years), I will be driving for free and powering my home for free (as energy costs rise).
I consider it part of my retirement plan rather than saving planet earth.vs.
There are plenty of reasons so many people are choosing renewable energy and EVs.
I most like the raw power of both, renewables and my EV.
Zoom zoom!

 

[fhteagle]

it’s factual at all, in anyone cares to reply:

A number can be factual, but still intentionally taken out of context so as to be deceptive. I don't have amazing numbers on material requirements, but I can point you to a few places that do. For a relatively optimistic outlook on material needs for energy transition, see Tesla Master Plan r.3, RethinkX, and The Limiting Factor Youtube channel. For a contrarian extremely pessimistic view, there's Simon Michaux's ~1000 page analysis of mineral constraints for the entire energy transition, though I find it has some convenient but not perfectly plausible assumptions behind it. The truth is probably somewhere between the extremes.

But, some context I am aware of: moving hard rocks to get lithium is only one way to do it, but is the preferred way in the largest global supplier, Australia. Lithium from brines as they do in Chile requires moving comparatively little dirt, but consumptively uses massive amounts of water in a parched climate. There are newer technologies for separating lithium from desalination reject water, and especially from the produced brines from geothermal power plants. Munro just toured a pilot plant testing those processes. They're not scaled up to where they need to be to make a dent in global supply needs, but I'm not aware of any real show stopper that would prevent those technologies from working in the future. Deep / enhanced geothermal with methane and mineral scavenging might turn out to be a very very very cost effective way to get electricity, heat, and useful byproducts from one set of boreholes with very low land use and ecological damage. But we'll have to see how it pans out.

What that post missed was how many miles the ores or first stage products are moved to secondary refining, often in China. That's a huge carbon footprint adder to batteries that needs to go away for a pile of reasons.

Cobalt... Well not all batteries use cobalt now, and a decreasing percentage will in the future as LFP / LMFP / M3P, flow batteries, and sodium ion, etc chemistries become commercially mature. But, the fossil fuel industry loves to leave out of the FUD just how much cobalt is consumptively used to de-sulphur crude oil. I've seen wildly varying numbers as to how much this is, from almost as much as NMC batteries to about an order of magnitude lower. I think it's closer to the latter, but again it's once through use, versus batteries that will be highly recyclable (once there are enough dead batteries to support large scale recycling plants). What I can't quite pin down is whether that cobalt makes it to the tailpipe emissions of ICEV's or not. Some say yes, some say no, but if anyone knows for sure I'd love to find out, as that's a pretty significant heavy metal pollutant if so.

Break even point on life cycle emissions is another one with too many variables to give just a single number, and even ANL's GREET model has had to go through a lot of revisions over the years. Cleanest grids in the world are more than an order of magnitude fewer emissions per kWh than the dirtiest grids, so pinning things down to an exact number is sketchy work. When I first started running napkin math numbers on this a decade ago, I certainly would have called 60,000±/- 20,000 miles for a break even point plausible. But we now know way more about how leaky methane infrastructure is, how much extra inputs it takes to refine increasingly sour/heavy crude into liquid fossil fuels, etc. Nowadays, I would be checking carefully for errors or omissions in any analysis that came up with a number outside of about 20,000+/- 15,000 miles as the breakeven point on lifecycle emissions between equivalent capacity BEV vs ICE.

 

[Mayer]

Deep / enhanced geothermal with methane and mineral scavenging might turn out to be a very very very cost effective way to get electricity, heat, and useful byproducts from one set of boreholes with very low land use and ecological damage. But we'll have to see how it pans out.

You buried the lead (pun intended) but great concept here.

 

[Mayer]

Nowadays, I would be checking carefully for errors or omissions in any analysis that came up with a number outside of about 20,000+/- 15,000 miles as the breakeven point on lifecycle emissions between equivalent capacity BEV vs ICE.

Plenty of content in your reply with direction to source material, and the conclusion sounds, sound, although I doubt my Facebook friend cares much about the real issue and likely just wants to pile onto the growing/trending anti-EV rhetoric on Facebook and elsewhere for purely political reasons.
But again, very thoughtful reply.
Thanks!

 

[AAKEE]

A friend tagged me on Facebook

To manufacture it you need:
--12 tons…

These Facebook posts is set up with a specific purpose from the original poster.
- It kind of politic campains to affect.

I didnt even read all the numbers, I have seen similar posts over and over again.

Its too many numbers to easy comment.
I have two separate comments though:

1) A model 3 LR/P weighs ~1933 kg ”serviceweight” in sweden.
A comparable Audi S5 sportback quattro weighs 1976 kg.
(I have one of both so I know they are comparable when it comes to space, 4Wd etc.)
The weight is about comparable and the Audi actually is heavier, and we can assume about the same amount of plastics etc, all metall from the Audi also has to be mined in the same way. They do not mine ICE cars in a nicer way than the metal for the EV’s.

Teslas annual reports finds a Model 3 to only need about 9800 miles begore the increased foot print from manufacturing is paid back. This of an average CO2 electicity.

The six-seven years to packback is not a fact anymore. It also depends very much on how dirty electicity you use. The worse the electricity is, the longer it takes to break even.
Anyway, even if it was 6-7 years it still is a win for the nature. The world also started to recycle the batteries with great success so we can use these dirty minerals over and over again, making the miles needed to break even to decline a lot.

2) I did dig into the data from one of the Facebook posts floating around. It didnt take long time to see that the numbers was salted, at least some of them.
I know the swedish mines are changing over to electric solutions to minimize the foot print. This means that the even the ICE cars will get cleaner steel, aliminium and magnesium etc, when the mining is electrified


We need to check the source for some of the facebook posts these days, and source criticism is not that bad.

 

[chdlmc]

There is a lot of myths* about lithium batteries floating around. Perhaps we can use this thread to kill or bust some of these, one by one?
There also might be statements that we ca not directly sort as facts or myth’s, lets find out.

For staters, which myth’s did you fall for? Try this quiz and see: Battery quiz



*) Myths: Statements that do not have any basis in science and which is not supported by research.

Thank you for all these posts, I have been learning a lot across TMC from your contributions (and other posters as well).

 

[tm3lrawd]

Here is a link to a New York Time article: E.V.s Start With a Bigger Carbon Footprint. But That Doesn’t Last.
This is a quote from the article, “All studies agree that electric vehicles save between 50 to 70 percent CO2 equivalents and that the time needed to recoup the additional emissions caused by battery production is one to two years. The more you drive, the faster you’ll recoup.”

And a link to the Wall Street Journal article: Are Electric Cars Really Better for the Environment

 

[AAKEE]

We could start thinking about how much energy is spent on the gas, before we put it in the fuel tank.
The refinary for making fuels is one of the big consumers of electricity here in sweden. At least it os done with clean electricity, in many places they burn oil to heat and to get the electricity for this.

 

[Mayer]

And a link to the Wall Street Journal article: Are Electric Cars Really Better for the Environment

It was good to include a “conservative news source” as The Times is generally dismissed by those pushing these falsehoods about EVs and climate change as “fake news.”
I’ll take a look at both.

 

[Mayer]

I could not access The Times or Journal without subscription (might choose one) but this article was free:

Electric Vehicle Myths | US EPA

Facts and myths about electric vehicles.

www.epa.gov

Attached is a good graph: