JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Does it? Lithium is generally pumped from brines, or scraped into piles from salt flats and dried in the air. Cobalt is usually a byproduct of copper and nickel mining so it would be produced even if it had no uses.
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Tesla Gigafactory
- Thread starter domenick
- Start date
Does it? Lithium is generally pumped from brines, or scraped into piles from salt flats and dried in the air. Cobalt is usually a byproduct of copper and nickel mining so it would be produced even if it had no uses.
Please provide a reputable reference for this assertion.
Here is the Mercedes LCA for the B-class electric (Tesla drivetrain, which means cells from Japan, assembled into drivetrain in California, then assembled in Germany):
http://media.daimler.com/Projects/c2c/channel/documents/2582749_final_UZ_B_Kl_ED_engl_15_12.pdf
I checked up some papers I read in the past and I should feel ashamed. I totally messed up on this one. It was some other environmental impact of battery being nearly the same as the generation of electricity to drive EV. The production of battery is far less energy intensive than I said in the past few posts. Sorry guys!
Here's a nice figure from a review paper summarizing results from multiple LCA papers on ICEV, EV, HEV (Hawkins et al., 2012. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, Volume 17, Issue 8, pp 997-1014),
Here's a nice figure from a review paper summarizing results from multiple LCA papers on ICEV, EV, HEV (Hawkins et al., 2012. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, Volume 17, Issue 8, pp 997-1014),
Indeed, this is the best review of LCA studies done to date (academic BEV research is my job...). There is quite some uncertainties in this, system boundaries are always difficult with LCA etc, but this is as far as I'm aware the state of art LCA knowledge for BEVs.
Sorry, but I don't believe that! I have seen, years ago, claim that lithium battery production uses insane amount of energy. Perhaps somebody has made a single cell in a lab using that much energy.
Sorry, I have to resist the urge to throw up when I read that anything written by Hawkins is "state of the art" since he is the author of:
Hawkins, T. R., Singh, B., Majeau-Bettez, G. and Strømman, A. H. (2013), Comparative Environmental Life Cycle Assessment of Conventional and Electric Vehicles. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 17: 53–64. doi: 10.1111/j.1530-9290.2012.00532.x
That paper can be best described as a hit piece with such huge errors that either he is incompetent or he's an industry shill. He did publish a corrigendum that corrected the most egregious error, but that doesn't even come close to fixing all the problems.
(2013), Corrigendum to: Hawkins, T. R., B. Singh, G. Majeau-Bettez, and A. H. Strømman. 2012. Comparative environmental life cycle assessment of conventional and electric vehicles. Journal of Industrial Ecology DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-9290.2012.00532.x. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 17: 158–160. doi: 10.1111/jiec.12011
His paper was used by a slew of anti-EV advocates to attack the electric vehicle movement and Tesla in particular.
Note these parts from his paper:
"Although this study incorporates the cradle-to-gate portion of the battery inventories by Majeau-Bettez and colleagues (2011)..."
"The cradle-to-gate battery production impacts estimated by Majeau-Bettez and colleagues (2011) (22 kg CO2-eq/kg) are substantially higher than the estimates by Notter and colleagues (2010) (6 kg CO2-eq/kg) or Samaras and Meisterling (2008) (9.6 kg CO2-eq/kg). These differences, which mostly stem from differing assumptions concerning manufacturing energy requirements and system boundaries, are indicative of the need for better public primary inventory data from the battery industry. "
So, yes, of course Hawkins used the "substantially higher" Majeau-Bettez battery production estimates and ignores the others. He didn't even use the average of the 3 which would be almost half of his estimate.
At first glance, the chart that Fallenone posted from his meta-analysis paper does seem more in-line with reality, but since his meta-anaylsis includes his own and Majeau-Bettez research, it's still wrong. Very wrong. And he certainly didn't bother to correct the misconceptions of people that used his research to apply to Tesla. If he was truly competent, he would quickly draw the distinctions between his analysis and the very different Tesla/Panasonic production. He didn't and allowed a slew of hit pieces to misapply his research in in a very public way.
As an academic, he shouldn't draw specific distinction for Tesla/Panasonic. Unless he and colleagues are doing a specific case study with T and P and know their actual numbers. This is especially true for the papers you listed here were published in 2013 and 2012, meaning the study was done around 2011-2012 (peer review process and revision take their sweat time). Model S wasn't even there yet. That's one major reason why a lot of papers doing LCA on BEVs were using the Leaf as an example, because it was the most common BEV when those studies were done. The results of LCA for similar products can have high variances based on the detailed information the researchers have and the system boundaries they chose as @Buran pointed out. For example, the battery pack in Leaf sold in Europe may have raw materials mined in South America, shipped to Europe to process, shipped to Asia to produce the cells, shipped to North America to be assembled to packs, then shipped to Europe again for final assembly. I don't know if this more or less reflects reality but it could be the case. Using this assumption will surely yield higher results compared to assumption of locally extracted, processed, produced, assembled, sold.
However, Sanyo production of NCA batteries, including some LCA information was already available. Panasonic bought the Sanyo plants. His research comes up with data that is wildly higher than others and upon reflection, was wildly inaccurate. Further, he didn't bother to highlight the differences when he was asked by the media between his research and Tesla in particular. Plenty of media articles used his erroneous research and we still fight those perceptions today.
I'll have to go dig the references up... certainly, he had a direct chance to clear the air when he was asked about the corrigendum and failed to draw the distinctions.
SCW-Greg
Active Member
Meanwhile, an update on the Gigafactory...
Behind the Scenes: Panasonic and Tesla open up about the Gigafactory [Video]
Behind the Scenes: Panasonic and Tesla open up about the Gigafactory [Video]
brandude87
Member
New article with some new info and some of the best shots of the exterior of the Gigafactory I've seen: Inside the Gigafactory That Will Decide Tesla’s Fate. A few new tidbits from the article I thought were interesting:
- Only 10% of the interior of the existing structure is complete (article states that 90% of the interior space of the current structure is under construction)
- JB states that Tesla will be able to "exceed those targets before [the Gigafactory] expands," referring to reducing battery costs by 30+% and producing 35 GWh of battery cells and 50 GWh of battery packs per year. Does JB really mean that Tesla will now be able to produce the initially anticipated total output (35/50 GWh) of a fully completed Gigafactory in a building only 14% of the size or is he just referring to the 30% cost reduction?
- Solar panels on roof will be "fixed-tilt"
- Confirmed that some sections of the building will contain up to four floors
- Again confirmed that Gigafactory structure is 14% complete and will have a 5.8 million square foot footprint once complete
- Only 10% of the interior of the existing structure is complete (article states that 90% of the interior space of the current structure is under construction)
- JB states that Tesla will be able to "exceed those targets before [the Gigafactory] expands," referring to reducing battery costs by 30+% and producing 35 GWh of battery cells and 50 GWh of battery packs per year. Does JB really mean that Tesla will now be able to produce the initially anticipated total output (35/50 GWh) of a fully completed Gigafactory in a building only 14% of the size or is he just referring to the 30% cost reduction?
- Solar panels on roof will be "fixed-tilt"
- Confirmed that some sections of the building will contain up to four floors
- Again confirmed that Gigafactory structure is 14% complete and will have a 5.8 million square foot footprint once complete
Yep. I wrote about this extensively at the time on PriusChat. The Hawkins study was used as the basis for a large article put together by a journalism consortium called ClimateCentral which was published or used as the basis for articles published in many newspapers around the country.
http://assets.climatecentral.org/pdfs/ClimateFriendlyCarsReport_Final.pdf
The ClimateCentral folks failed to mention any of the large differences in battery manufacturing CO2 found by studies prior to Hawkins (which the Hawkins paper does itself note). They also screwed up in multiple ways on their own which resulted in the Volt (and BEVs) with larger batteries looking worse than they should have and the Prius looking better than it should have.
Here are some links:
Plug in Prius - Most Environmentally Friendly Vehicle in Study
Plug in Prius - Most Environmentally Friendly Vehicle in Study
A post-Hawkins study by the GREET folks found even lower energy and CO2 battery cell production impact than the Notter study and attempted to analyze and understand the differing results from previous studies including Hawkins (2012). Unfortunately, it's behind a paywall but the summary is free:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es302420z
Batteries from the GF should have even lower energy and CO2 overhead since they will be made more efficiently from scratch in one location and because lots of solar and wind generation will be co-installed to offset a large amount of potential utility grid use.
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AdamEKM
Member
It appears from the photos that they have begun to work on new footings in anticipation of new steel going vertical. Not unexpected considering Tesla's new timeline, of 100% Fremont and Gigafactory capacity by the end of 2018. I would expect things to really ramp up at the Gigafactory in the coming months.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Yes, I think at least some of them are left over from when they actually started to put up some column supports, which they then took down for some reason. Never quite understood that one.
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