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[DonTom]

See here.


"[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9)]This machine is required to move 500 tons of earth/ ore which will be refined into one lithium car battery. It burns 900-1000 gallons of fuel in a 12 hour shift."[/color]
[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9)][/size][/color]
[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9)][/size]-Don-  Reno, NV[/color]

[T.S. Zarathustra]

Cannot open the link.
But it is known that there is considerably more pollution involved in building EV than ICE. And in some locations the majority of electricity generation is done by burning heavily Co2 producing coal (West Virginia as an example).
With the latest advances in ICE technology EV might pollute more over a lifetime than similar sized ICE.
But large low mpg SUV will pollute much more than the average EV for the foreseeable future.
The least polluting method of transport is smaller more efficient vehicles that stay on the road for longer.

[Fran K]

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pedro-martinez-vidal-7a3b33bb_this-machine-is-required-to-move-500-tons-activity-6961102828392103936-uRKj

It opens for me.

I am not sure this article really deserves a lot of discussion.  They combine overburden with ore and likely are cherry picking a spot with thick overburden.

An average Tesla?  I thought they used different cells in different models.  Do you really believe the lithium is actually that low compared to the other elements?  Sure it is atomic number 3.


Quote from post 2 "The least polluting method of transport is smaller more efficient vehicles that stay on the road for longer."  This may be the real "not so green" issue.  If the electric vehicles become more expensive to replace the battery or whatever component needs service than the vehicle is worth in a time frame where the ice comparable can be kept in service it probably isn't so green after all.

[BigPoppa]

Interesting article and in line with others I’ve read over the past few weeks.

Personally, my reason(s) for going electric (motorcycle and cars) really has nothing to do with the environment. I went electric for the following:
* Performance and the ease with which you can access that performance. i.e. no need to worry about what gear you’re in or what RPM range you’re in.
* Lower routine maintenance. The jury is out on long term maintenance but routine maintenance is a lot lower.
* Refueling costs are currently lower, especially since in my case, 240v charging at work is free.

I guess I should be more concerned with my environmental impact but as articles like the one in this post imply, environmental impact is a complicated topic…too complicated for me to spend what few brain cells I have left trying to figure out. 

[Richard230]

Well, many government regulators seem to believe that electric vehicles are the solution to global warming. 

[TheRan]

It all depends on how much energy the battery can output over its lifetime. If it can be charged by renewable energy then it just needs to be capable of putting out more energy than is required to make it. I would assume someone has probably already done this calculation.

[hellomoto222]

These arguments always ignore the immense environmental cost of drilling and refining oil like vehicle production can be evaluated in a vaccuum. Re CO2 it is highly dependent on where the lithium battery is produced (Tesla NV is pretty clean, battery factories in China not so much) and battery technology is getting better all the time. Environmental impact of EVs also depends on where the electricity you charge your vehicle comes from. EVs are clean and getting cleaner. The anti-EV talking points came from the traditional auto industry before they decided to invest in EVs and still make the rounds on conservative social media.

[Sklith]

Making EVs is too harmful to our planet, we should extract carbon locked away over 60 millions years ago and dump it in our atmosphere instead.

[flynnstig82r]

An electric car that gets driven at least 70-90k miles is more sustainable than a gas car, but that's like saying that being hit in the kneecap with a ball peen hammer is better than with a sledge hammer. It's true, but we're still not having a good time! For EM's (electric motorcycles), that number is probably lower because motorcycle fuel efficiency is not tremendously higher than a gas car and EM battery sizes are 3-4x lower than electric cars. However, the majority of American EM's are probably not ridden enough miles to hit the break-even point compared to gas motorcycles.

The rub is that you have to drive the vehicle a lot to hit the break-even point, but high VMT (vehicle miles traveled) is inherently unsustainable, especially in a car. Even an electric car has emissions associated with it from generation and transmission of the electricity, it puts brake dust in the air, tears up the roads, carries the potential for crashes, and creates pressure against restoring our cities' land use patterns to focus on human beings and not motor vehicles. EV owners are less likely than gas car owners to complete a trip by walking, riding a bike, or using public transportation because they feel that they are already doing their part for sustainability by owning and using an EV.

I am not aware of any similar studies for EM's (research on them is very scarce), but the impacts of EM trips should be massively smaller, especially considering the lack of noise pollution in populated areas compared to gas bikes.

All in all, the picture is complicated and shows that EVs are not a slam-dunk for sustainability as they've been portrayed. I'm not anti-EV, but I no longer believe that everyone just needs to drive electric cars and everything will be fine, and I definitely do not believe that we should still be subsidizing the purchase price of expensive vehicles that are largely bought by people who work from home and will likely never be driven enough miles to break even with a gas vehicle. Just like the oil and gas industry 100 years ago, subsidies that were designed to support a nascent industry are now fueling the profits of an industry that is already powerful and politically connected.

I understand this is probably not a popular opinion around here, but there's my 0.02.

[TheRan]

You need to consider the entire life time of the vehicle (or even just the battery), not just what the first owner will achieve. Short of the vehicle being involved in an accident and written off it should be able to be driven for hundreds of thousands of miles, up there with the longer lasting gas vehicles. And when the battery does degrade to a point that it's no longer suitable for travel it can still be utilised as stationary storage. Meanwhile many gas vehicles have catastrophic engine failures or just components failing that are too costly or time consuming to fix and so they're scrapped. I don't have any numbers but I would put money on the percentage of EVs sitting in scrap yard being much lower and that most of them are there due to crashes or things like floods or fires.

[TheRan]

Why are they in there though? It's unlikely to be the battery, unless it's faulty, probably not the motor either. If they vehicle can't be repaired then the good parts should be removed and reused, not just scrapped as a whole. My point is that the service life of the battery (the most pollutant part) both in a vehicle and beyond should be really long, and perhaps long enough to offset the cost of its production. If they're ending up in landfills then that's not a fault of EVs, it's the people.

[Fran K]

Why are they in there though? It's unlikely to be the battery, unless it's faulty, probably not the motor either. If they vehicle can't be repaired then the good parts should be removed and reused, not just scrapped as a whole. My point is that the service life of the battery (the most pollutant part) both in a vehicle and beyond should be really long, and perhaps long enough to offset the cost of its production. If they're ending up in landfills then that's not a fault of EVs, it's the people.

I don't believe a few statements are correct.

A)
Both you and I use the electric motorcyce essentially for recreation most of the time.  In a world where our college teams take airplane trips to play opponents where they played in the Yankee conference when I was growing up and must have taken busses this whole thing is kind of a diversion imo.

B)  Battery replacement is a rather common tale posted about by members on here.  Hopefully the new ones are better than the old ones, replacement needs deal with proprietary stuff.  It took effort to make my charger communicate with the new battery. Making it communicate with the bike in my case must have gone smoothly.  It is my understanding that there are lots of cells in parrallel (and in series as well) the current, in order for the battery to last the current flowing through must go evenly?  When current goes more through one cell that self amplifies.  It won't be any good in a power wall.  What do you think the dendrites clogging the whole thing up slowly vs what I describe ratio is.

C) The whole trend is to buy with terms and conditions and  proprietary stuff,  What is the shelf life so to speak of these.  Unless there is significant crashing (which may be the case in motorcycles) I doubt that the needed component supply will meet the demand.  Which one do you want the bent one the busted one or the rusted ond and how much will you pay?  You must have heard that.

D)  The issue of you stored it empty too bad for you.  Think car jacked recovered later or some other scenario that was not expected.

E)  Corrosive stuff is applied to road surfaces in much of the country.  Did you see the you tube video of a battery pack parked near ocean air? Between the top of the battery and underside of the passenger area.   My last few cage type vehicles rusted out, this 2012 has outer body rust presently.