USA lacks workers in those fields. So the problem is really "how to discover new twchnical expertise labor" to extract those lithium. It is same thing with solar and now silicon chips in USA.
^^Spot on, which is why "subsidizing" renewables is vital to our country's future. All the folks losing their minds are being short-sighted. While I agree in principle that the organizations should be paying their employees more, there's also the reality that China HEAVILY subsidizes their renewables AND has a lower base pay rate. Only one way to compete with that.
> ^^Spot on, which is why "subsidizing" renewables is vital to our country's future.
That seems like a silly conclusion. It might still be vital for your country's future to subsidise renewables, but it doesn't follow from the observation.
If China wants to spend taxpayer money to give foreigners cheaper renewables (or cheaper anything), that's nice of them, but doesn't mean anyone should imitate them.
If you have insufficient local workers for a task, and you are the US, you can always open the floodgates of (skilled) migration.
Also you don't need to subsidize renewables. That's a sore game of trying to pick winners and introducing extra bureaucracy. Instead you can hit the same policy goals simpler by taxing fossil fuels (or carbon emissions). Distribute the proceeds amongst all voters, if you want it to be revenue neutral.
With a tax, someone can react by just driving less (eg by moving closer to work) and benefiting from that choice. With a subsidy, you'd actively have to go and buy eg a subsidised electric car to benefit.
You may say China is subsidizing their lithium industry. Actually, by exporting cheap lithium, they're effectively subsidizing all the other countries' economy, regardless of whether they like it or not.
When standard oil used dumping tactics it was with the expectation that they would be able to clean up the market later, and they at least, were right.
Oil is 100% non-renewable. A single, relatively efficient ICE vehicle will use over 45,000 lbs of gasoline over its lifetime (excluding all the oil to extract, refine, and transport that gasoline).
The entire oil supply chain has no chance of ever becoming sustainable.
Not true: we might learn to pull carbon from the atmosphere and turn it into gasoline so that instead of using solar and wind energy to charge electric cars, we use to make gasoline for ICE cars.
Making gasoline for cars from renewable energy isn't going to happen. The end to end efficiency of that process (Hydrolysis, CO2 capture, Fischer Tropf) would likely measure in the single digit percentages. Charging a car battery (especially from local solar) can be over 90% efficient.
When you include the very low tank to wheels efficiency of an ICE vehicle, the overall efficiency is even worse.
Yeah, I meant figuring out how to do it so efficiently that it becomes preferable to batteries for powering cars. We talk like it is certain that battery-powered cars will win out, but I haven't seen a proof that that is how it must turns out if we learn to create nanomachines that use solar energy to suck carbon from air.
That isn't really "renewing", though. If part of the process involves the substance being dispersed in the environment and then extracted again, that's different from capturing waste as it's produced. Furthermore, you're not necessarily capturing the same carbon dioxide that you released, but when you recycle a battery, it's the same lithium. And getting the lithium from a battery should take less energy than mining it, while capturing and reducing carbon dioxide definitely requires more energy than pumping oil from the ground.
While the 5% number may be presently accurate, it is mainly for tiny Lithium batteries. Those from vehicles are of very large + high value, and will likely end up well above 95% recycling rate whenever it is time for them to be scrapped.
This also ignores the large number of those batteries that will be re-used in grid storage after being removed from a car, and eventually recycled.
>Since I'm being down voted, I'm adding a reference:
>5% of lithium batteries are currently recycled
Whether something is currently recycled and whether it can be recycled are two different questions. For a long time, copper wasn't recycled very often. Then the price went up, and now it's very valuable trash.
Lithium is absolutely renewable. It may not be renewed, but it is renewable.
A bit of both. I'm trying to say that it's not so cut and dry. Making lithium batteries and thr mining of lithium is a messy business. It's not a panacea. We need to be honest and realistic about the costs of doing that business, and often we arent.
Exactly. Batteries are being recycled at scale today with 98-95% material recovery rates, depending on the company.
We are still early in the development cycle of recycling technology, which means we'll be closer to 99.x% in a decade when the first large wave of EV batteries (from the last decade) could start getting close to End of Life.
Batteries can be recycled at high rates of recovery, but most non-EV lithium batteries aren’t being recycled (basically because they aren’t sent to battery recycling centers given their small sizes). The anti-EV crowd then uses that statistic to deride EVS.
My reaction was not pro-fossil fuel but rather that I think the use of 'renewable' as a statement of general positivity is idiotic.
Sure there is a theoretical closable cycle in batteries, but guess what, the same can be said for fossil fuels. Just use energy to turn air and water back into fuel, boom cycle closed.
What matters is not if something is 'renewable' but if its a strategically correct thing to do in regards to climate and energy security.
Calling lithium 'renwable' is ridiculous. Its literally just a fixed resource on our plant like iron or copper or whatever.
> Sure there is a theoretical closable cycle in batteries, but guess what, the same can be said for fossil fuels.
On geological time scales involving massive deposition of organic material.
In contrast, lithium can be recovered from batteries with an industrial shredder and chemical processing.
Fossil fuels are non-renewable in a trivial sense but are grossly different in a practical sense; treating them as equivalent is a borderline specious argument.
Besides brushing off the difference in difficulty between refreshing our petroleum stock on the planet and recycling lithium, I think the point of the original use of "renewables" is the push toward renewable energy for all possible things, such as transport, and the part lithium currently plays in that plan.
Sure, if you want to be painfully pedantic. If you want to have a real conversation, lithium batteries are absolutely "renewable" in the sense they can be recycled, and some studies have shown that they actually perform better after being recycled.
Not really, we actually train many of the world's mining and petroleum experts. Many of the people around the world that do this stuff were trained at the various "A&M" or "...School of Mines".
The issue is that much of the work ends up being overseas or all over the world. If you go to any mine site in the world, I guarantee you will find American trained Mining/Geophysics/etc engineers
Source - I went to the Colorado School of Mines and most of my friends and acquaintances from school work in those 2 industries.
Sure .. alongside Scots, Russians, South Africans, Australians, Norwegians, and all the other non US mining engineers.
The Canadian TSX is the global centre for listed public mining, Anglo-Australian mining companies dominate there.
No one is going to deny the Colorado School of mines their little corner of the pie but they haven't hit "much of" in a clear majority sense by a long shot.
Agreed. I was never trying to say it's the whole pie. I'm replying to a parent comment that implies the US has a big deficit in this kind of skill and training, which isn't accurate.
The expertise China has built up is only around 20 years old, so it’s not like we couldn’t develop it in 20 years. Doing so in a free market way that isn’t undercut by Chinese suppliers, however, would be tricky (so some non free market mechanism is needed).