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Comment by lucian1900 | Hacker News Reader

lucian1900

This is not necessarily good. There is not enough lithium on earth to replace all UK cars with electric ones. Worse still, the lithium that does exist would require violence to extract profitably, as we've recently seen with the US-backed fascist coup in Bolivia.

We need to seriously consider biofuels instead. Biodiesel in modern engines in particular is very efficient.

https://medium.com/@Grossmanite/the-green-new-deal-is-specie...

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Worldwide mineral reserves of Lithium: 16 million tons

Worldwide lithium dissolved in seawater: 230 billion tons

80g lithium/kWh battery * 100kWh batteries/car * 32 million cars in the UK = 260 kT

80g lithium/kWh battery * 100kWh batteries/car * 1 billion cars in the world = 8 million tons

So? There's about $544 billion dollars worth of gold dissolved in seawater, but it's completely impractical to extract it.

Known land reserves alone are twice what we need for every car on the planet.

The ocean reserves are for illustration because the person I was replying to claimed there wasn’t enough on the entire planet for the U.K. alone.

What is the process like for getting lithium out of sea water? Is is a clean process or do we need to poison the oceans further to do this?

Perhaps it could be extracted from the concentrated waste water created by desalination plants?

Sodium-ion batteries aren't as good as lithium-ion, but not all vehicles need top performance. There's more than enough sodium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery

The main issue with changing energy source is a change in engine. Biodiesel requires little change, so it should be an excellent stop-gap as the industry hopefully hammers down on efficient, ethical and environmental energy storage.

That could easily be hydrogen, or even biofuel itself – the ultimate goal is to reduce the carbon cost of storing the energy. While lithium-ion has zero continuous cost, its initial cost is rather high, and if the battery is less efficient or prone to breakage more often its continuous cost (of repair and replacement) may well be worse.

Hydrogen cars still use electric motors and have batteries. They just use the hydrogen to generate electricity to charge the batteries, which then drive the motors:

https://afdc.energy.gov/files/vehicles/hydrogen-high-res.jpg

Hydrogen can also be used in internal combustion engines with most of the benefits of reduced emissions (NOx not withstanding) with minimal modification. If there was a source, distribution and storage infrastructure for hydrogen we could start using it tomorrow.

Personally I don't see much hope in that direction. Hydrogen combines high pressures with corrosive nature (see hydrogen embrittlement) and high flammability. Unless someone comes up with a really good storage matrix for it.

They are not banning used cars only new cars. And there is no shortage of lithium.

I wonder how long until enough petrol stations have closed that fueling petrol or diesel cars becomes difficult? If hydrogen cars become commonplace, then the conventional petrol station will likely survive, but if new sales are all battery electric vehicles, many petrol stations will probably go out of business.

There is probably no need to replace all UK cars either.

My thoughts exactly. We will still need cars of course, but don't necessarily need to replace them one-to-one. I hope alternative transport will fulfill most needs in a way that will reduce car ownership in the first place.

This is my hope, too. Already I can cycle almost anywhere in my city but it's harder for those who are less confident on the roads (or those who can't bounce when an accident does occur or can't face down some dangerous driver).

There are now ambitious plans for cycling, and micro-mobility, infrastructure in UK cities but they need our central government(s) to stop being so car-centric (still!) and make the proper investments.

I would like conversions to become more common and thus significantly reduce the price. As city-centre diesel bans come in, and the road tax increases, then converting an existing vehicle would be great. It would make a nice little industry spread out through the UK.

An example would be my VW T5 '08 campervan conversion. As it's converted to a camper it has more than twice the resale value of the van alone. Unfortunately the DIY conversion kit is currently in excess of UKP 10k. Add other costs and it's not, yet, worth tackling.

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