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Lithium is the non-renewable mineral that makes renewable energy possible – will it become the next oil?

The shift to renewables is chugging along at a record-breaking pace. In 2018, they made up 26.2% of total energy production, and that's expected to rise dramatically over the next several decades.

At the core of the renewable fuel and climate discussion is an equally important discussion about the future of sustainable transportation.

Internal combustion engine or ICE cars may have reached their peak of efficiency, and even when efficient, they still let out harmful gasses into the environment.

Leading the charge for alternative means to power cars are electric vehicles, powered by batteries. Batteries have become central to our daily lives, not just in our cars, but also in our laptops, our phones, practically everything at this point.

All these batteries require something that isn't exactly commonplace or easily sourced though: lithium.

Lithium-ion batteries, or even just lithium-based batteries in general, are drastically more efficient and sustainable than any other battery technique when you factor in cost to the calculation.

They also have significant energy density compared to cost-effective alternatives, which makes them perfect for all our devices, and for our electric cars.

But sourcing the massive amount of lithium needed to keep up all this battery production is actually quite environmentally damaging. In fact, if the infrastructure of sourcing and mining these minerals goes unchecked, it will be verging on an environmental disaster.

How and where lithium is mined


More than 50% of the entire world's lithium reserves are found in the 'lithium triangle' in South America. This area covers Argentina, Bolivia and Chile and it's one of the driest places on earth – which is an issue.

In order to extract lithium minerals from the ground, miners will start by drilling a hole in the ground and pumping in brine into the hole and then leave the brine to rest on the surface.

As the brine rests, the liquid evaporates leaving behind a dense collection of minerals. It takes roughly 12-18 months for everything to evaporate off before the minerals can be collected in a certain region. As you can guess, this takes a ton of water.

The process takes 500,000 gallons per metric ton of lithium produced. For perspective, in Chile, lithium mining consumed 65% of the entire region's water.

This mining process also has the ability to leach other toxic materials into the surrounding water sources through groundwater or acid rain.

The process tends to be a little more refined in North America and more developed countries, but even still, researchers noticed changes in wildlife up to 150 miles (240km) away from the mining sources.

All of this signals that electric cars and battery production as a whole isn't the green haven it promises to be, at least at the onset of finding all the lithium.

Lithium mining at the end of the day is still a mining process, which means it disrupts the environment around it and causes environmental harm that can be far-reaching.

Alternatives and the future


Even with all of this said, lithium is a fairly abundant naturally occurring mineral. There's theoretically plenty of supply to last us for many hundreds of years, leaving room for environmental optimisation in the process.

There are also methods of producing lithium through very energy intensive processes involving sea-water.

The demand for lithium and lithium production continues to skyrocket, as does the price per metric ton. In 2014, the price was roughly $6,500. In 2016, it had climbed to $9,000. Today, the price per metric ton is as high as $17,000.

Lithium production and geography also might play a troubling role in the future of the lithium industry. Most of the world's lithium is located underground land owned by non-wealthy countries.

This has lead and may lead to more unethical mining practices, little care for the environment, and intense political brawls to gain control of this potential future wealth.

This geographic locality of the mineral also allows for the potential of an organisation similar to oil's OPEC to gain control of the production and distribution of the mineral.

In many ways, the way we see the lithium industry, now reaching the end of its phase of infancy, is similar to the beginning of the oil boom.

Can we recycle lithium batteries?


Recycling of lithium batteries is also a fairly new and not widely used process. Batteries, in general, are fairly hard to cost-effectively recycle, so in large part it isn't done.

As lithium cathodes degrade as they are used, it's hard to get an accurate chemical picture of what's taking place in that battery for recycling purposes.

This means that in small-scale battery scenarios, like smartphone or other electronic batteries, it just doesn't make sense to recycle the battery for the potential minuscule chemical payoff.

Modern battery manufacturers also keep their battery technology under lock and key due to the competitiveness of the industry.

This ultimately means that no recycling company can have a good idea of how to recycle a given battery without extensive testing on the batteries themselves. Better yet, due to technology's constant innovation cycles.

At the end of the day, the future of lithium battery production seems bright, but the future of the environment as a result of lithium mining seems a little uncertain.

It's all too common for the consumers of technology that use lithium batteries, simply due to who can afford them, to be unaware of the environmental disaster that the creation of these products are causing on other sides of the world, perhaps in areas where there are no media.

With the rapid growth of technology and battery development, lithium seems poised to be the next oil. Curious how the shift from non-renewable energies like fossil fuels has lead us to a potential renewable energy system – that is completely dependent upon non-renewable environmentally harmful resources.

This article was written by Trevor English and is reproduced with kind permission from InterestingEngineering.com. Find the link to the original article here.

Will lithium be the next oil?

The government’s Climate Action Plan envisages a large role for electric transport, and John Hayes — a senior lecturer at University College Cork and an expert in the area — guides us through its origins and whether the technology can replace our petrol engines.

The dark side of energy addiction


Electric cars once played a substantial role in transporting the public, with about as many electric cars as petrol cars being sold in the United States in 1900.

The petrol car of the time was seen as dirty, dangerous, and unreliable, while the electric car was perceived as quiet and safe, albeit with limited range.

This was all to change with the low-cost production of the petrol Model T by Henry Ford in 1907, and later with the replacement of the manual engine crank by the electric starter in 1912. Diesel engines featured in the 1920s and grew in popularity for heavy vehicles, and much later for cars in Europe.

Thus, over a number of decades, the world of transportation had changed completely – long distance, reliable, low-cost driving was available to the masses.

At the same time, the world was electrifying, with the ac grids, created by Nicola Tesla, rapidly expanding around the world.

Access to incredible amounts of energy and the energy-consuming technologies to propel, warm, cook, clean, communicate and entertain, fundamentally changed the way that many humans lived around the planet. Economies could grow and humanity could propagate like never before.

All this access to energy also came with a dark side in the forms of energy addiction, wars, pollution and environmental damage. Pollution bedevilled our cities. Carbon emissions and, even worse, methane emissions expanded globally and contributed to global warming.

The renaissance takes many forms: battery, hybrid and fuel cell


A lot has changed in the last 40 years and will continue to change.

I was part of the engineering team in Los Angeles that brought the General Motors EV1 to market in 1996. This was to be the first production electric car of the modern era, and it pioneered a path for others to follow.

Prior to this, Professor John Goodenough had invented the lithium-ion battery in 1979. These batteries initially powered laptop computers but, with time, have powered the massive global expansion of mobile phones and smart devices, fundamentally changing how we communicate, learn and entertain.

John Hayes with Professor John Goodenough, who invented the lithium-ion battery in 1979.

The lithium-ion battery was very successfully adopted for cars in the 2000s in an effort led by the transformative and extraordinary Elon Musk of Tesla Motors.

In October 2019, Professor John Goodenough was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino, for the invention of the Li-ion battery.

The continuing electrification of the vehicle is inevitable due to the high efficiency, the reduced emissions, and the use of clean energy.

The electric car can take several forms so that we are not overly dependent on any one technology. There are four different types of electric vehicles: battery, such as the Nissan Leaf; hybrid, such as the Toyota Prius; plug-in hybrid, such as the Mitsubishi Outlander; and fuel cell, such as the Toyota Mirai.

All of these vehicle types feature batteries and electric motors, which can independently propel the vehicle using electricity. A fifth type of vehicle is the mild hybrid, which uses conventional petrol or diesel engines for propulsion, but increases the use of electrics to decrease fuel consumption and emissions.

All of these technologies, except for the fuel cell vehicle, are available today in Ireland.

Hybrid and hydrogen vehicles are options for today and tomorrow


Petrol and diesel hybrid vehicles consume fossil fuels but use electric technology to require less fuel to propel the vehicle, than would a conventional petrol or diesel vehicle.

While hybrid vehicles emit more carbon dioxide while driving than the equivalent battery vehicle emits due to the generation of electricity, battery vehicles result in greater emissions during manufacturing.

Thus, given the Irish grid today and international vehicle manufacturing, hybrid and battery vehicles have similar carbon footprints, and both are lower than the equivalent diesel or petrol vehicle.

This situation will change with time. Wind energy has been the success story in Ireland over the past two decades, with renewables now providing more than 30 per cent of our electricity.

The future of energy generation in Ireland will be even greener. Electrical connections to the UK and France will provide access to the excess renewable and nuclear energies elsewhere.

The fuel cell vehicle is powered by hydrogen, a fuel which can store great amounts of energy on board and allow for rapid refuelling. The hydrogen can be produced using fossil fuels, but more importantly, it can also be produced by renewable electrical power.

Fuel cell vehicles have the lightweight energy storage required for heavy vehicles. Unlike the battery vehicles, which can be fuelled with a home charger, fuel cell vehicles require an infrastructure similar to the petrol station of today.

China, a heavyweight today in battery electric vehicles, is now also heavily investing in fuel cell vehicles in order to have clean long-distance transport.

Electric car will be evolutionary, and not revolutionary


It is also important to ask what can go wrong with this vision. The diesel emissions scandal has been a hard lesson in shaping the public’s purchases.

From 2008, diesel engines were incentivised in order to reduce carbon emissions, while the harmful toxic emissions of these engines in urban environments were obviously not a major consideration... until the exposure in 2015 of the wide-spread cheating by Volkswagen.

This second coming of the electric car will be evolutionary, and not revolutionary. The capital costs will be enormous as the electric grid is transformed and the fleet of vehicles is turned over.

Norway is often discussed as a model country for electric vehicle sales, largely due to its subsidies and incentives.

Norway sits on significant fossil fuel reserves and a sovereign wealth fund of more than $1 trillion. A total of 98 per cent of Norway’s electricity is already green and bountiful, based on a massive dam network, with Norwegians consuming several times the electricity of the Irish.

Ireland, on the other hand, gets 30 per cent of its electricity from renewables, will see the Corrib gas field go dry in several years, and has a government debt of €200 billion. It would be great to have Norway’s resources!

The battery is the strength of electric vehicles, but also the weakness. The technology has developed amazingly, with 60 kWh of battery storage available on the latest models with more than 400km of range.

However, sourcing of critical materials, such as lithium and cobalt, together with the energy and carbon intensities of production, raise questions as to the sustainability of the batteries themselves.

Advances in the technology appear marginal when considered from a high-tech perspective, but are actually impressive when considered from a power or energy perspective.

Improvements will continue in reducing size and cost, and significant gains can be made in terms of reducing the carbon footprint and improving battery recyclability and reuse.

We will learn over the next decade of the 2020s which of the solutions are viable and sustainable as economies of scale and supply chains develop. Car sharing and autonomous vehicles will also feature.

All going well, as the current young generation of teenagers enter the 2030s, they will have environmentally friendly, sustainable transportation options which their parents never dreamt of.

Author: John Hayes is a senior lecturer at University College Cork and previously worked in the automotive industry. He is the lead author on 'Electric Powertrain: Energy Systems, Power Electronics and Drives for Hybrid, Electric and Fuel Cell Vehicles' by Hayes and Goodarzi, and published by John Wiley & Sons in January 2018.

The second coming of the electric car

Drive specialist maxon and Swiss car racer Sébastien Buemi team up to share their passion for precision, efficiency, and emobility.

Racer Sébastien Buemi knows what precision and efficiency are. After all, the former F1 driver has already won 13 races in the new Formula E and was the world champion in 2016.

Fully electric race series


Being fast is not enough to be a frontrunner in this fully electric race series, a driver must also be efficient with the available energy, or the battery will be empty before he reaches the finish line.

That's why Sébastien Buemi is a perfect match for maxon, whose high-end electric motors can be found not just in Mars rovers, but also in the Ad-Blue injection systems used in Formula 1 race cars.

maxon has decided to collaborate with Sébastien Buemi, and the parties signed the contract on September 9.

To celebrate the occasion, Buemi visited maxon in Obwalden to get to tour the company and meet the maxon team. Buemi was impressed with the cleanrooms and the tiny drives with a diameter of only four millimetres.

Swiss collaboration


When the Formula E starts into its sixth season on November 22, the Swiss collaboration will be represented by the maxon logo on Buemi's racing suit. Buemi will also act as an ambassador for maxon.

He says: “I'm proud of working with a Swiss high-tech company and being part of the maxon family.”

The joy is mutual. Eugen Elmiger says: “Sébastien and the Formula E in general are a great match for maxon. After all, we are increasingly becoming a systems provider, and the e-mobility market is particularly interesting in this regard.”

The Swiss specialist for quality drives


maxon is a developer and manufacturer of brushed and brushless DC motors. as well as gearheads, encoders, controllers, and entire mechatronic systems.

maxon drives are used wherever the requirements are particularly high: in NASA's Mars rovers, in surgical power tools, in humanoid robots, and in precision industrial applications, for example.

To maintain its leadership in this demanding market, the company invests a considerable share of its annual revenue in research and development.

Worldwide, maxon has more than 3,000 employees at nine production sites and is represented by sales companies in more than 30 countries.

Swiss racer Sébastien Buemi is now a member of the maxon family

Roadbridge Ltd is rolling out electric vehicles and smart chargers across many of its larger construction sites nationwide.

CarCharger EV Limited has provided www.EasyGo.ie networked chargers into the Roadbridge head office at Limerick and at multiple large construction sites around Ireland.

The installed smart EV chargers have the ability to instantly respond and use less power if the grid becomes overloaded.

Installed smart chargers into staff homes


To be-future-proofed, Roadbridge has also installed smart chargers into the homes of staff driving company electric vehicles which are wi-fi enabled to allow drivers to charge at off peak electricity rates overnight.

With Roadbridge drivers signed up to EasyGo.ie, they are able to access a country wide network of public chargers including those at Aldi, Centra, Lidl and SuperValu as well as those on the ESB network with single account access.

CarCharger is delighted that Roadbridge took the time to consider becoming future-proofed when installing EV charging infrastructure.

This is the latest step undertaken by Roadbridge as part of the #drivinggreenconstruction initiative.

Roadbridge go E-Car smart

Electric Vehicles and Ireland's 2030 Targets

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