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by Robin_Message
1424 days ago
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My rough and ready sums put 30,000 pounds of petrol through the lifetime of an average ICE car. Meanwhile, I see numbers like this a lot and they always seem to trend high. You're talking 250 tons of ores to make perhaps 250-1000kg of the car; an efficiency of between 0.1 and 0.4 percent over some pretty straightforward, widely available ores. That doesn't really stack up with the numbers you get if you look at the efficiency of commercial ores for those minerals. So I think the mining is comparable between battery and petrol, but as others point out, you can recycle the battery; the petrol had become problematic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If nothing else, you could grind up the batteries and treat them as ore for any single one of the minerals used, and by your numbers you'd be way better off. |
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My calculation shows ~50,000 pounds. 200,000 mile lifetime at 25 MPG = 8000 gallons * 6.30 pounds/gallon fuel density[0] = 50,400
Also keep in mind that gasoline is a refined product.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Density)