cleantechnica.com
We will need lithium for a while as it appears the only viable EV battery technology for the next decade, when a lot of the transition will take place. There appears to be no shortage of the stuff in America and new extraction techniques should see the price of lithium carbonate drop. There are all kinds of other future possibilities and niches for the industry. Some of the American technologies I just posted about could be a direct threat to Chinese dominance in 5 years or so.
It should be limited to only necessary uses. The damage to environments costs more than the value it provides. Tap the brakes, slow down development using lithium batteries and pour funding into research and development of better alternatives.
There are new refining methods that are more cost effective and have a higher extraction rate. Like it or not they have fastened onto lithium battery technology, though I expect the traditional Li-ion battery to be extinct soon enough. There is nothing else close to industrial deployment and the extensive validation process these things must go through for EV use. It protects investors more than consumers IMO!
The one difference is that lithium is recyclable, at least on human timescales.
If I can invite you to speculate, I’d like to hear what alternatives you think might be of interest in the next decades.
There is a recent report that shook up the investing world about quantumscape solid state battery validation tests. It looks like they can go a half a million km with less then 10% degradation, that sounds sustainable. They have had production issues in the past and missed goals and they are far from alone in the solid-state battery market. There are also new efficient and clean lithium extraction methods already developed and being industrialized with licensing agreements. Better living through chemistry...
I wonder how solid-state batteries deal with arctic conditions.
In the middle of Canada and American Midwest block heaters for ICE cars are required for a few months of the winter and every apartment with parking and most workplaces have them and they operate at a bit over a kilowatt. I imagine battery heaters will replace block heaters in cold climate EVs. These guys claim it works at low enough temps from the article, which might help explain some of the hype around them.
Aluminum graphene and aluminum ion batteries are being researched and aluminum graphene has gone into preliminary production in Australia. Then there is this as one example...
innovations.unm.edu
Looking into those Quatumscape batteries they seem to tick all the engineering boxes, wide temperature operation, enough energy density, inflammability and scalable? for mass production, and they have had their share of delays and bugs in production. However, the promise of the technology solves many problems for EVs and is worth the trouble, until another technology supplants them. I believe solid state silicon lithium batteries might be a thing and the energy density would be much higher. Betting on the battery market over the next decade will be risky to say the least and it is hard to pick winners over any length of time as the market shakes out.
This will need to put into the mix I would suspect, it varies in quality, from pure to some methane and CO2, it is not sustainable for the long term, but it might Jumpstart green steel and other hydrogen industrial users.This isn't going to help power passenger Electric Vehicles but provides some answers to the overall challenges confronting us as we proceed to a zero carbon future. Basically, the decision favors production of hydrogen using photovoltaics and geo energy while nuclear and fossil fuel sources are cut out of the picture. I think maybe they got this one right.
Why the hydrogen tax credit has become a lightning rod for controversy
The Treasury still hasn't released guidance for how the IRA hydrogen tax credit will be implemented. Why energy and climate folks are anxiously awaiting word.www.cnbc.com
CLIMATE POLICY
Why the hydrogen tax credit has become a lightning rod for controversy
One way of making hydrogen is with a process called electrolysis, when electricity is passed through a substance to force a chemical change — in this case, splitting H2O into hydrogen and oxygen. To make hydrogen with electrolysis, hydrogen producers may use electricity from the larger energy grid. The electricity on the grid comes from many sources, some clean, like a solar farm, and some dirty, like from a coal-fired plant. On the electric grid, all that electricity gets mixed together.
- The Treasury is tasked with adjudicating how the hydrogen production tax credit included in the IRA will be implemented. It has said guidance on the tax credit will come by the end of the year and energy and climate communities are anxiously awaiting word.
- At the heart of the issue is how the electricity that is used to make the hydrogen will be accounted for.
- The divide between the two sides represents a larger and more ideological fault line about how the United States should built its clean economy: One side says the best foundation is one built with a focus on emissions reductions from the outset and the other says the best foundation is the one that gets built and scaled quickly
So the debate over the 45V tax credit has become acutely focused on accounting for how the electricity hydrogen producers use from the grid is accounted for. If the energy used to make hydrogen is not actually clean, then hydrogen is not really a climate solution.
Some hydrogen industry stakeholders want the Treasury to implement strict electricity accounting standards to maximize the likelihood that the tax credits only go to hydrogen that is produced with the least possible amount of emissions.
en.wikipedia.org
Trying to keep it on topic and on policy and out of the climate change thread where concerns are raised about climate change and its impacts.
You should see BYD on the roads of Europe soon, if the EU doesn't tariff them and with their energy squeeze, they seem reluctant to protect European car makers. VW might be in a competitive position with Quantumscape batteries soon though.
FT projections I posted earlier show almost 100% EV sales by 2030 in the EU and non-EU countries of Europe. As for hydrogen there was a large deposit of natural hydrogen recently discovered in France and it is useful for making green steel.