The completeness of combustion depends upon surface area. The finer the coal is ground, the more likely it will be totally burnt. In the same way that wood burns, but fine sawdust can explode.
No better voice for concern about the lives of disenfranchised Africans, than a white man from the land of Apartheid.
Regardless of how Musk might feel about local sourcing of cobalt, the US is estimated to have 21,000 metric tons of cobalt reserves. The DRC has 3.4 million metric tons. That kind of disparity doesnât bode well for notions of local production, and just like with Apple, good intentions for cobalt donât amount to much when theyâre only worth the paper the agreements are written on. (The Palo Alto producer still uses Congo cobalt even though they said theyâd start enforcing strict supply audits to reduce child mining)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264930/global-cobalt-reserves/ <- cobalt reserves data
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264928/cobalt-mine-production-by-country/ <- annual cobalt production data
https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/cobalt/ <- USGS commodity info on cobalt
And mind you this is just one of the many materials needed to make Li-Ion batteries, many of which come from impoverished developing countries around the world. Itâs fine and good to not think about it, and I wonât say we should stop everything because of it, but the human cost is undeniable. And itâs disingenuous to say weâre saving the world one EV at a time, when all weâre really doing is trading urban smog for the lives of the faceless poor.
Iâm no hypocrite, I wonât say you canât have your EV, because I just as well canât imagine how much less good my life would be without all of my Li-Ion batteries, but while I can live with just looking the other way, I really donât like the idea of extolling them as the worldâs salvation when the human cost is as high as it is.
1 Like
HUGE roll eyes to that statement.
I largely agree with the rest of what you said, but geez⌠that is just ridiculous. (And more than just a little racist.)
One could nitpick this statement and point to some differences in proportions (i.e. less steel, more aluminum), but this is generally true. And one suspects that Tesla is no better than their contemporaries at making their vehicles more easily-serviced and more easily-recycled than their contemporaries either. But thatâs a neutral point.
True, however weâve been mining lithium for decades, so itâs not particularly novel to EV production. The mass of lithium in an EV is surprisingly small if I recall, with the other components - such as the still can - being most of the mass of a battery pack.
The primary use for nickel is alloying steel, something that weâve been doing for centuries. Even during the brief reign of NiMH bartteries for EVâs during the last spurt of CA compliance-mobiles in the late 90s, nickel consumption for EVâs wasnât even a rounding error relative to other mundane usage.
Indeed a significant element in most Li-Ion cell chemistries. But much like the mass of lithium being low in a battery pack, suspect the same goes for cobalt.
True, but thereâs a staggering amount of copper in modern ICE vehicles as well. Much of this is due to the automotive sectorâs inertia using direct-power switching for everything. Such as a typical 4-door sedan that has ~30 wires going to the driverâs door (L/R mirror controls, 4x power window controls, power locks, mirror turn signals, etc) as opposed to a more sane power/comm bus solution.
Most higher-efficiency products are more expensive because there are greater inherent costs associated with their production. Pay an upfront cost on the CAPEX to realize savings on the OPEX, which is where most of the costs pile up in the TCO equation for assets such as automobiles.
The tragedy of so much resource extraction is how little of it we recycle once those parts are end-of-life. Aluminum in particular suffers this tragedy since itâs perhaps 5% the net energy cost to smelt it down and re-use it that it is to mine bauxite and refine it into aluminum.
Iâm sure there are those out there that will seriously argue that if weâd just all switch to EVâs tomorrow the skies would clear, the forests would regrow, and extinct species would spontaneously re-appear. I donât take these folks seriously and itâs unfortunate that theyâre given so much credence.
With ever-larger swaths of our society built on conspicuous consumption and Madison Avenue working tirelessly to instruct on on what signals they send, there will always be wankers that think making a specific purchase sends some powerful signal. For many decades the signal for cars was that of success, opulence, and attracting desirable mates. With EVâs, Mad Ave has fairly easily transitioned to virtue signaling such as the nonsense I alluded to in the previous paragraph.
The ideal for me with EVâs is that ofâŚ
- Greater net efficiency EVâs are ~80% efficient at the wall plug vs ICE being ~25% efficient at the pump
- Fuel source decoupling We can make electricity dozens of ways and distribute it cheaply without shipping physical goods; liquid/gaseous fuels have but a few economical precursors and have to be physically transported
- Pollution Centralization EVâs donât pollute directly, instead pushing that pollution to the power station. A few thousand power stations - typically located outside cities - can manage pollution controls better than hundreds of millions of automobiles
3 Likes
Your post about Coal-slurry fuel is spot on target for a thread titled âcoal powered internal combustionâ since this is about a fuel that could be used for exactly that purpose. All of the posts that follow, about the environmental impacts of manufacturing EVs vs ICE, are staggeringly off-topic. It is a good topic and should be discussed somehwere, but definitely not here.
1 Like
Thank you for noticing.
I find the topic intriguing, simply because it CAN be done. For the general populace, I think if you said âyou can run a piston-powered engine off a slurry (mixtureâbecause you would have to clarify that) of water and coalâ theyâd tell you youâre nuts. I would have before I found out it HAS been done. I mean, I know coal burns, but mixing it with water and putting it inside my car engine? No way!
Buy yes, Timmy, it has been done.
Is it âthe way of the futureâ?
Is it âless emissiveâ?
Probably not.
But that doesnât stop it being intriguingâŚ
Hereâs a (possibly) interesting read on the topic, and it leans towards âscience-yâ, in that itâs something called an âAbstractâ and uses tables with numbers and figures with forward slashes and even electrical diagrams and stuffâŚ
https://www.osti.gov/scitech/servlets/purl/10104699
According to same, test case was a âCooper-Bessemer L Seriesâ engine, so hereâs a vid of one of thoseâŚ
1 Like
Hereâs another science-y paper on emissions, specifically.
https://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/10137691
They planned to fit it in a locomotive.
They donât say which GE locomotive, so hereâs a generic commercial with some GE locomotives in it
This is great, really answers the question of whether you can make coal clean (at least for particulates) by grinding it finer, short answer no. Still needs lots of cleaning up to be as clean as diesel, which is no sweet-smelling rose itself. âClean coalâ really is absurdly wishful thinking by people whose livings depend on coal; trying to make coal attractive is like putting lipstick on a pig. There are much easier ways to make clean fuel.
Nevertheless as you say, the fact that this works at all is amazing. Who would expect soggy coal, or soggy anything, to burn?
1 Like
On topic, the coal industry has always been interested in coal gasification in general and the methanol-to-gasoline process in particular. I gather there are a number of serious proposals out there for refining at the mine-mouth for greater net efficiency than transporting the coal to refining facilities. One wonders if there are inherent costs involved with this process that make it noncompetitive with fracked shale, itself costlier than regular crude oil.
1 Like
Only what Iâve read, and that Adolf attempted it on several combat/troop transports, including Volkswagen Kubelwagens in WWII (when trying to conserve oil/petroleum resources for the Luftwaffe).
The wikipedia entry is entertainingâŚ
http://strangevehicles.greyfalcon.us/HOLZBRENNER%20VOLKSWAGENS.htm
Doesnât South Africa supposedly produce gas from coal? Heard this from a native whoâs in the auto industry over there.
1 Like
Probably.
South Africa has an interesting energy history, given some of the other influences on it. The one thing they have is coal, so most other things are (or were in recent history) made from it.
But âcoal gasâ shouldnât be confused with liquid fuel made from coal, of which there are numerous different types. As a possibly interesting distraction, I heard back-when that most methanol in the USA was made from coal.
Yup, thatâs what I was told.
Seems like they had to become fairly self sufficient due to trade embargoes stemming from anti apartheid sentiments at the time.
2 Likes