The politics of NiMH

[xyster]

Ouch!

THE SUPPLY OF lithium, which is a key ingredient in lap-top batteries, could dry up if it is seen as a alternative fuel for cars, a key boffin has warned. Lithium batteries are being touted as a way forward for electric cars, but according to William Tahil, director of research for Meridian International Research this could result in the world's lithium supply drying up really fast.

In his newly released white paper entitled, "The Trouble with Lithium", he points out that the vast majority of world's supply of lithium carbonate, is only found in China, Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia. He estimates total world lithium metal reserves at just 6,200,000 metric tons.

In chat with EV World, Tahil said that while lithium salts production could double in the next few years, the industry can't produce enough lithium to build the hundreds of millions of large-format batteries needed to power the electric cars and plug-in hybrids of the future.

He said the motor industry should have another look at sodium nickel chloride and zinc-air, both of which offer comparable or greater energy density than lithium without the attendant safety or resource depletion issues. This is because there is a lot more Zinc in the ground than lithium. Laptops and handhelds will make short shrift of the available Lithium anyhow


http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2007/01/30/lithium-supply-will-dry-up-boffin-warns

A) 1 billion large batteries each with 1kg of elemental lithium has a lithium mass of one million metric tons.

B) USGS claims there is 13 million tons of lithium in the world, not including 760,000 tons in the US.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/lithium/lithimcs07.pdf

C) These figures don't seem to take into account ocean content. Lithium is present in the oceans at a concentration of 0.17ppm.
http://www.site.uottawa.ca:4321/astronomy/index.html#lithium

D)The mass of the oceans is about 1 X 10^21 kilograms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean
Without comparing the molecular weight of water to lithium since these calculations are not terribly precise anyway, that should be roughly 1x10^14 kilograms of lithium in the oceans, or 100 trillion kilos, which is 100 billion metric tons of lithium in the ocean. Assuming I did that right....

Of course, accessing it affordably and without causing irreparable harm to the biosphere is a different matter.

E)I've never seen any other claims that "sodium nickel chloride and zinc-air ... offer comparable or greater energy density than lithium". Care to offer another source for that? Besides, nickel is already more expensive than lithium.

Sounds to me like the quoted individual might be shilling for some industry.

 

[safe]

Doing The Math

This person "did his homework" and actually figured out what would happen given the known reserves of the various options of metal for batteries. (note, we can't assume that it's practical to get materials in any other way than how they are now doing it without accepting a large price increase)

http://ergobalance.blogspot.com/2006/10/electric-vehicles-and-world-lithium.html

For example, if we take the current number of cars at 500 million (I think the total number of road vehicles in the world is around 700 million - that's cars, lorries, buses, everything, but let's just stick to cars), we would need about 150 kg (per car) x 500 x 10*6 = .15 tonnes x 500 x 10*6 = 75 million tonnes of lead. I believe there is certainly 1.5 billion tonnes of lead in known deposits, so there is plenty to go round.

Lithium ion batteries (the current favourite) are costed in energy terms at 2 kg of lithium per kwh of battery (specific energy). The PHEV is rated at 9 kwh and so each car would need 18 kg of lithium. Hence, 500 million PHEV's would require:

18 kg x 500 x 10*6 = 9 x 10*9 kg = 9 million tonnes of lithium.

The entire world reserve of lithium ( accounted in the form of lithium oxide, Li2O) is 10.74 million tonnes, which contains (worked at an abundance of 92.5% lithium-7 and the rest lithium-6):

2 x [(7 x .925) + (6 x .075)] x 10.74 x 10*6/2 x [(7 x .925) + (6 x .075)] + 16 = 4.98 x 10*6 tonnes; call it 5 million tonnes of lithium.

Obviously there is not enough!

We could argue naively that there is sufficient to propel 278 million cars (i.e. around half the world's fleet) adapted into PHEV's, but this would conflict with the interests of nuclear fusion (if they ever get it off the ground) which could only run for about 300 years, and so it would be a question of lithium to make electricity or to store it inside cars to get any actual mileage from it! Since, as I have argued before, nuclear fusion will not come to our aid before oil and gas run out, we can forget about this point, but I make it to stress that the same (limited) resources are often impacted upon competitively by different kinds of technology and it is as well to be aware of the fact.

If we wanted fully electrically powered cars, with a power demand of 36 kwh (over the 9 kwh reckoned for a PHEV), then we would need to reduce that figure by a factor of four (36/9) leaving us with just under 70 million cars in the world. These figures are an absolute maximum, as of course, there are many other uses for lithium batteries, eg. heart pacemakers, pocket calculators, computers and cameras etc. etc.

Undoubtedly, advances in battery technology will improve the situation, and there is talk of "aluminium" batteries, but these are well at the research stage and may come to nothing in any practical sense. An alternative kind of battery is the nickel metal hydride (NiMH) type, which needs around 7 kg of nickel per kwh = 7 x 9 = 63 kg of nickel per 9 kwh PHEV. So, if we work the math again over 500 million cars, we get:

500 x 10*6 x 63 = 3.15 x 10*10 kg = 31.5 million tonnes of nickel. Since the world reserves of nickel are reckoned to be 62 million tonnes, that would be in principle O.K.

However, a bottleneck to implementing a new technology is the production rate of raw materials, and I note that 5 million tonnes of nickel is produced each year. If half that quantity were turned over to battery production for PHEV's, you could produce:

2.5 x 10*6 x 1000 kg/63 kg = 40 million vehicles per year, and thus the full fleet of 500 million PHEV adapted cars could be got up and running in 12.5 years! They are wonderful things, numbers and statistics, and behind them lie the practicalities of the matter at hand, which appear to point to a greatly reduced car fleet within the foreseeable future, whatever means we try to implement to keep them on the road... in some form or another, fuel powered, hybrid or fully electric, or some combination of different kinds of vehicle. If we were to reduce the number of cars by 90% (i.e to a world fleet of 50 million), as I have suggested previously, via living in localised communities "pods", we would have sufficient bioethanol and other renewable fuels, electrification and other means to survive the choppy slide down from peak oil production. It is the social paradigm that matters most, which must accommodate whatever technology becomes or remains accessible; our thinking must adapt because maintaining the status quo of energy use is impossible.

 

[NickF23]

An email I wrote last year to the world nickel institute


"> Hi there
>
> I recently stumbled across you website and wondered if you'd be able to
> give
> your opinion on an claim I've heard put across on several occasions.
> The claim goes:
>
> " Electric cars using nickel based batteries could never be produced in
> large
> quantities as there is insufficient world nickel supply"
>
> This claim is usually put forward as one of reasons why the large auto
> companies
> never made more than the limited number of vehicles mandated by the
> California
> ZEV legislation in the 1990's.
>
> I would be very curious to know if their is any substance to it.
>
>
> Yours Sincerely
>
> Nick Flynn



and the reply

> Hello Nick. Your question was forwarded to me for reply. Since all you
> > are asking for is an opinion, I will give you an opinion. Of course,
there
> > is a "certain truth" to statements such as you quote, but it is a long
way
> > from being an absolute truth. I feel that the main reason for the lack
of
> > switch to ZEV's is that they are not generally economical, i.e. not
> > competitive with the standard gasoline-based engine, both on a as-built
> > cost basis, and perhaps even on an operating cost basis, sincce battery
> > weight is a big issue, and not on a performance basis. The technology
is
> > not there yet, and therefore the infrastructure is not there to support
it
> > either.
> > But using a "back of the envelope" calculation, let's check the nickel
> > availability theory. Each year about 16 million vehicles are built.
There
> > are all sorts of NiMH batteries technologies, and as battery technology
> > develops, the batteries change, but let's say there is 25 kgs of nickel
in
> > the batteries of a ZEV. That is 400,000 tonnes of nickel for all of
them.
> > The annual production of nickel in 2005 was about 1.27 million tonnes,
so
> > that would be a large chunk of the current annual production that would
> > have to be diverted. And certainly today, the infrastructure is not
there
> > to produce that quantity of nickel chemicals (rather than Ni metal) for
the
> > batteries. But neither can the battery producers make that amount of
> > batteries today, in fact they cannot produce enough to satisfy the demand
> > for hybrid vehicles, which use NiMH batteries. The known commercial
> > Reserves of nickel (USGS estimates) are 62 million tonnes while the
Reserve
> > Base is 160 million tonnes. So producing 400,000 tonnes per year of
nickel
> > (or 800,000 tonnes if our estimates were low by half) is possible in the
> > long term, although not currently possible.
> > Nickel in batteries is recyclable, so at the end of life, most of the
> > nickel is recoverable. NiMH and Ni-Cd batteries today are being handled
to
> > recover their content of metals (including cobalt, and Cd in the case of
> > Ni-Cd's). So that would greatly assist the demand for nickel in the
future.
> > I hope that this is useful.
> > Gary
> >

 

[NickF23]

I don't think raw material costs are that significant anyway. I think the recent rise in nimh batteries was also do with the value and expected value of the US dollar. I didnt' notice any price rises in the UK. At a guess I think the biggest factor is mass production, for example the cheapest nimh in $/KWH cells are AA despite being an inefficient way to produce a large pack. If there was a large market for ev's I think batteries would be very cheap. So the best thing we can do to protect our future battery cost is to go forth and multiply 8)

 

[safe]

I don't think raw material costs are that significant anyway.

Right now there are a handful of people experimenting with batteries. If the future is going to involve the replacement of oil with the battery then it's important that the solution doesn't have a raw material roadblock. Lithium makes a better battery, but it's also a more rare material than Nickel. So if we make the hypothical argument about what the future would look like then it's pretty clear that Lithium will hit an instant roadblock because the current estimated world supply is both too small and also primarily located in a part of the world that the rest of the world does not have reliable access to. The preferred solution needs to have a raw material that is easily available from many sources. Lead obviously works because it's plentiful, but it makes a lousy battery. Nickel exists in large enough amounts, but it would use up about half of all the Nickel available, so that's still creating a situation that is limiting.

So the "ideal battery" needs to be made of materials that are not rare...

(because we don't want to have to deal with these folks! )

 

[xyster]

I don't think raw material costs are that significant anyway.

Right now there are a handful of people experimenting with batteries. If the future is going to involve the replacement of oil with the battery then it's important that the solution doesn't have a raw material roadblock. Lithium makes a better battery, but it's also a more rare material than Nickel. So if we make the hypothical argument about what the future would look like then it's pretty clear that Lithium will hit an instant roadblock because the current estimated world supply is both too small and also primarily located in a part of the world that the rest of the world does not have reliable access to

Refrain from birthing a bovine, Safe. Those figures bandied about clearly don't take into account the ocean's voluminous 0.17ppm lithium reserves. Osmosis desalination technologies well into development now can probably be adapted to strain and collect lithium from the oceans as necessary, and probably with less environmental effect than mining. Translation: no reason to have a cow over lithium, man. It'll be around whether or not we are.

 

[TylerDurden]

The more interesting mineral issues are the ones used in motors and magnets. Copper is already sky-high and the magnet minerals are climbing.

 

[flip_normal]

"The meek may inherit the Earth, but they won't get the mineral rights." -- John D. Rockefeller

 

[xyster]

"The meek may inherit the Earth, but they won't get the mineral rights." -- John D. Rockefeller

Hmmm....makes sense he'd say that since most homeowners (at least in the US) don't own the mineral rights to their own land. On a whim and without a care, the holder of the mineral rights can come and tear up the homeowner's property even though most homeowners have no idea they don't really own their land. I wonder who we have to thank for that.

 

[jdh2550]

Wow, things certainly took off like a rocket around here.

Some observations:

Although the "boffin" (William Tahil) quoted by safe has an impressive title he's not very current with Lithium (anyone who still quotes "the attendant safety issues of Lithium" isn't talking about the LiFePO4 formulation). So, I'd like to understand the background and agenda of Mr Tahil.

Safe raised "big conspiracy" and said there wasn't one - no one else had really raised that issue. Safe then goes on to actually describe a conspiracy (talking about a false embargo to create higher prices).

One of the essential benefits of BEVs is that they are powered by ELECTRICITY. You don't need a special variant to switch between energy storage devices. All these stats about 500M, 700M or 900M cars or 16M new ones produced a year when used to compare against the availability of ONE particular source are therefore kind of pointless. In other words perhaps no one battery technology need hold more than say 25% of the road transportation market. This is a common tactic used to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt - "heck, lets give up before we've even started - because there's not enough lithium in the world and we don't want to be beholden to the Chileans...". Or "we simply have to wait for new technology XYZ because it's so much better than ABC".

Furthermore, in my future vision I still imagine there will be a percentage of internal combustion engine vehicles. They are the best long range, high speed transport we have. I believe what we're trying to do is use less oil - not use no oil (which would be close to impossible).

So, lets stop searching for silver bullets (after all silver is too rare to waste on building a weapon of single destruction).

Oh yeah, and as far as ethanol is concerned - I think that speaks more to the power of the "big agriculture" lobbyists than any form of common sense thinking of trying to solve a problem...

(I'm enjoying the debate and learning a lot - thanks!)

 

[safe]

In other words perhaps no one battery technology need hold more than say 25% of the road transportation market. This is a common tactic used to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt - "heck, lets give up before we've even started - because there's not enough lithium in the world and we don't want to be beholden to the Chileans...". Or "we simply have to wait for new technology XYZ because it's so much better than ABC".

The original debate was "Lithium vs Nickel" and it was news to me that Lithium was such a rare metal. So I actually changed my mind in the middle of the debate in that at first I was ignorant of the fact that Lithium is scarce... upon learning of the scarcity of Lithium it wouldn't stop me from building an electric bike using it as a battery, but it does force me to realize that Lithium might not be worth a big political "push" to get behind. Any new battery solution needs to be free of political ties to places like Bolivia.

I'm also not buying into the wild speculation that you can somehow extract Lithium out of sea water. Until someone points out that it can be done economically it's effectively not a valid thing to suggest. It's like saying:

"Oh, pure water is in infiinite supply... all you need to do is pull it out of sea water"

...in theory that sounds great, but when you look at the costs to do it the picture changes a lot. In some cases it's worth paying 10 times as much to get pure water because you have no choice, but in the parallel to the Lithium and Bolivia situation, we will naturally accept the "status quo" and get the easy stuff to mine first... even if it means sending money to people who will quickly try to undermine our energy security.

If we go for a big push into Lithium, then we become "married" to Bolivia for the forseeable future...

My point echoes what you are saying in that we know that there is twice as much Nickel available (and enormous amounts of lead) so we need to keep the other options open because you never know when these supplies get cut off for various reasons... diversifying is a good idea... (at least until some future breakthrough allows us a battery with no political "gotchas" attached to it)