Scantlings

Some of you are much better at internet research than I am.

I am looking for reputable studies that compare the environmental impact of mining for rare earth elements necessary for EV batteries compared to fracking, shale oil and tar sands oil extraction.
I'm curious to see how they stack up, which is worse, or are they equally as bad?

I'm having difficulty finding studies that aren't from blatantly biased sources so any help would be appreciated.

Beau to the Green Phone please, Beau to the Green Phone........

I'm interested in this as well. We're starting to see a lot of EV infrastructure being added into commercial and high-rise residential buildings and a lot of developers trying to guess how much to plan for 10-15 years out. I'm also seeing statements from some car manufacturers that by some date in the not too distant future they will only sell EVs, and that means infrastructure is needed.

While the vehicles themselves are low or no emission, the power is still generated, mostly by fossil fuel power plants and transmission losses on the electrical grid are substantial. Ideally you would generate power onsite, but that isn't always possible, or economical. Charging these batteries at night does take advantage of lower demand on the electrical grid overall, so that does help somewhat.

I'd love to see a well done study that takes all of this into account.

I'm planning on pulling a 220V line to an accessible location before I finally fix the drywall in the basement room with the electrical panel, just to avoid cutting it up in a few years when it makes sense to add an EV to the fleet. I'd also like to add solar to our house, but would need to cut down the majestic oak tree in our front yard that I know shades 95% of our roof and lowers our utility bills in the summer.

Not sure there are any unbiased studies on relative environmental costs of the two.

I did see a report a couple of weeks ago that EV carbon footprint is absolutely a function of power source. If from a coal plant, EV and ICE are virtually equal. If natural gas, it is significantly lower for EV’s with another significant drop for nuclear. If renewable sources of power, EVs are a lot better than ICE. On the other hand, there is a distinct urban benefit from EVs as their adoption removes the exhaust from a crowded city center in spite of the very substantial reduction in emissions per mile achieved since emission controls were instituted.

Love our Honda S-2000 and Macan S but there is a really good chance the replacement for our people hauler minivan will be an EV SUV of some kind. It’s nice to see the market choices expanding.

I suspect my next vehicle purchase will be an EV sometime in the future.

I will be retiring soon so my 76 mile round trip commute will be over for good. I wI'll most likely buy an EV for local daily use and save the FR-S for weekends or road trips.

The quick response is: It’s complicated.

A few things to consider:

1) Environmentally friendly electricity generation won’t appear until there is big electricity demand. EVs will certainly drive demand. Supply will follow. We’re about to see this in China where EVs are selling fast and power is generated by burning coal. Yuck. The Chinese aren’t idiots, they will shift fuels a soon as demand appears, probably to nukes. To do so before there is demand isn’t reasonable for humans, although the engineers amongst us don’t understand that.

2) The VAST MAJORITY of vehicles of all types spend most of their time moving very very slowly and traveling very very small distances. Yet, we’re forever talking about long range and fast speeds. Our egos demand performance on range and speed, but we don’t really use either of these. The next time you’re in your car, check the average speed. If it’s above 40 MPH you have a long distance freeway commute in light traffic - you’ve very unusual. The vast majority of cars operate with an average speed in the 20 MPH range. Therefore, the performance above 70 MPH is irrelevant. Similarly, the vast majority of trips are less than 40 miles, despite our terror of running out of juice for the once a year 400 mile trip. Simply put, we remember our peaks (distance, speed, etc...) we ignore our averages. So, we’re irrationally biased to buy a product to service our peaks and we pay through the nose for it in either cost or pollution.

Interestingly, I’ve notice the same bias in sailors. They report/remember peak wind speeds and report that as average, and they do the same thing with boat speed.

As the true cost (monetary and environmental) of transportation becomes more obvious we’ll stop deluding ourselves and focus on our true use of cars. We do not drive around a race track very often, we don’t travel more than 100 miles in a day very often, we don’t need to go 0-60 in under 3 seconds, etc... The sooner we stop deluding ourselves the sooner we’ll buy EVs because they do all that slow speed short haul stuff much much much better than ICEs.

But, being irrational humans, we’ll have to be forced to face reality. We’ll ignor the data as long as possible and cling to our desire to focus on peak speeds, peak distances, etc....

Here’s a fun quiz: spend a month or two writing down every single trip you take in a car. Distance, Average Speed, etc.... It will astound you. Of course, you can get a bit of software to do it for you, but reading the results will convince you that most folks trepidation about EVs is based on a HIGHLY BIASED view of their true use of their vehicle.

Anyone who really reads the numbers will buy a slow short range EV to own and rent a high performance vehicle for the track or a fun weekend, and a long range vehicle for taking trips. It’s currently painfully obvious that for the three or four multi-hundred mile trips any of us make each year we should just rent a car for the event. If you need to haul something, rent a truck. But, we’re rather incapable of accepting the data. So we continue to drive something like an F-150 to work by ourselves, just to be ready for the 4 times a year that someone needs to haul something. (But, let’s be honest, it’s because what we drive is a statement about “who we are”.)

Oddly, this is why many folks are shifting to bikes and ignoring cars altogether. One of the major streets in San Francisco just did what multiple streets in Amsterdam have done - banish cars. The result, thousands of bikes took over. Eventually, we humans will stop buying products with our egos and buy them based on facts; at least that’s my hope. It’ll be much better for our waistlines and the planet. But, I’m a dreamer.

It will be interesting to see how the new Honda small ev goes, they have deliberately put in a smaller battery with a 150 mile range, so it is targeted at city drivers.

I suspect it will go well for the average city, suburban driver.

Interestingly, we live in the country and go to town once or twice a week. Our average speed for the 17 mile trip to the city is around 50 mph, so the whole thing is easy on our car.

We are hanging on to our 2013 CRV until we see how the electric VW van works out, then we would probably just use the CRV for towing and long trips...

I just figured out a route that I can use to walk to MAYAN without having to risk being run down. That solves three problems, how to get off my ass and exercise more, how to reduce our carbon footprint, and how to catch up on all the reading I've got piled up (audio books).

Sorry I was a bit grumpy in the post above, last night was frustrating.

an interesting data point. We're currently working on a 640 unit apartment/condo building that will be in DC and it has ZERO onsite parking spots. Seems a bit nuts to us, but then we live and work in the suburbs.

You would also have to look at recylcing costs to do what Rich asks. WAY above my pay grade!!

Mini is also selling a city EV with a range of around 100 miles for 30k. The Hyundai Ionic is similar.

Although my commute is less than 7 miles, there are days when I have to travel 200 miles to court and back.
the wife commutes 35 miles each way, so a 100 mile range car would drive her nuts.
My 2012 BMW is worth less than 5k, and its a convertible, so it could serve as my long range car.

Slick470 wrote:an interesting data point. We're currently working on a 640 unit apartment/condo building that will be in DC and it has ZERO onsite parking spots. Seems a bit nuts to us, but then we live and work in the suburbs.

Hence my daughter has an interesting job as a transportation analyst with the DC Metro. Take the bus!

I have been reading up on the mini ev. Despite the low range it has style, is supposed to be fun to drive, and with tax incentives is a bit of a bargain. It or a used leaf would be our best choice for an EV.

Another random thought. With IC cars there is no substitute for fossil fuels. Ideas like adding ethanol just make the economics and enivronmental impacts worse. It is true that in some areas that use fuel to generate electricity EV vs ICE is a wash, but in the future than can change. Solar, hydro, wind etc can be added to the mix and those same EV vehicles start to make sense while the IC car is just stuck.

Regarding Larry's comment about the "operational" footprint, I'm well aware of the studies showing that EV's are as dirty as ICE cars if the power comes from dirty sources.
There are plenty of minimal-bias studies out there for that.

I'm asking strictly about mining rare earths vs. petroleum extraction.

Joel is right, recycling needs to be taken into account but I think the lithium and colbalt recycling process is immature at this point.
I do expect the recycling process to grow and improve as hybrids and EVs start aging and wearing out their batteries. Lead acid batteries are 97% recycled because the process is mature. Rare earths being much more expensive than lead, should(?) make the recycling process more economically viable.

Regarding Beau's comment that we're always focusing on peak speed and range, I agree that some 90-ish% of public driving is short distances at low speeds but the reason for focusing on peaks is to eliminate the need for multiple vehicles to fill individual use cases. My personal experience is that my 1974 VW E-Beetle that I converted was barely adequate to drive 34 round-trip miles at 60 mph for my daily commute. That vehicle is absolutely not adequate for my current use case. At a minimum, I need a Nissan Leaf to make the round trip in winter, when I lose 30% of my battery capacity. My current commute is 48 miles round-trip and this is not at all unusual in my area.

Ok, so at this moment there is not an unbiased, in-depth study that compares the environmental impact of producing batteries vs. petroleum extraction.
The reason why I asked the question, is because petro-heads are constantly (and erroneously) flinging the arguement in my face that mining to produce batteries is MORE harmful than petroleum extraction. Since there is no available study, they can't possibly know this with any degree of certainty.

One thing I love about EV's is that fuel (energy) transmission from source to delivery point is less impactful. Instead of tankers and pipelines, it's transmission wires.
If a pipeline ruptures, the energy spills onto the ground and pollutes the area. If a powerline snaps, delivery is interrupted but there is no pollution or spillage. (Yes, transmission towers make an environmental impact, I know.)

The other thing I appreciate, is the decentralization of energy delivery infrastructure. Charging stations can be virtually anywhere, including your home. Again, less impactful because there are no tanks in the ground that could leak.

What I DISLIKE about EV's is that the rare earths required to make the batteries are often held in unfriendly nations with questionable values. After finally becoming (mostly) energy independent, do we want to become dependent all over again but relying on China and the Republic of Congo to supply us with cobalt? Will they become the new Saudi Arabia? We've spent 50 years doing questionable shit due to the geopolitical leverage that energy producing nations have had over us. I'm not eager to go back to that.

Yeah, I have my military trucks but they are just winter hobbies and historical curiosities. I love my solar panels, my battery and I think that EV's will make the country cleaner, more secure and more independent.

Ajax,

A few comments mixed in below in your really interesting post.

Ajax wrote:Regarding Larry's comment about the "operational" footprint, I'm well aware of the studies showing that EV's are as dirty as ICE cars if the power comes from dirty sources.
There are plenty of minimal-bias studies out there for that.

I'm asking strictly about mining rare earths vs. petroleum extraction.

This ^^ and the comment below that mining rare earth metals is more destructive than petroleum is simply hogwash. Mining metals is a lot like gold mining. There is the energy used etc... However, there is not Exxon tanker stuck puking oil in Alaska, no blow out in the Gulf of Mexico, no burning refineries forcing mass evacuation (which happened 4 times in Richmond CA in one decade) etc.. etc.... etc... The people who make this claim are simply desperate for some sort of defense.

Ajax wrote:Joel is right, recycling needs to be taken into account but I think the lithium and colbalt recycling process is immature at this point.
I do expect the recycling process to grow and improve as hybrids and EVs start aging and wearing out their batteries. Lead acid batteries are 97% recycled because the process is mature. Rare earths being much more expensive than lead, should(?) make the recycling process more economically viable.

There are numerous ways to recycle rare earth metals. But, there aren't enough batteries in circulation now to make it worth doing. Toyota Prius batteries are lasting between 3 and 4 times as long as forecast, so they aren't being recycled except in small quantities. Tesla is having the same experience. When there is a supply, the ability to recycle these batteries will be there. It is definitely worth it economically and will be enforced by various laws.

Ajax wrote:Regarding Beau's comment that we're always focusing on peak speed and range, I agree that some 90-ish% of public driving is short distances at low speeds but the reason for focusing on peaks is to eliminate the need for multiple vehicles to fill individual use cases. My personal experience is that my 1974 VW E-Beetle that I converted was barely adequate to drive 34 round-trip miles at 60 mph for my daily commute. That vehicle is absolutely not adequate for my current use case. At a minimum, I need a Nissan Leaf to make the round trip in winter, when I lose 30% of my battery capacity. My current commute is 48 miles round-trip and this is not at all unusual in my area.

It's pretty important to plow through the details here. Yes, folks who live in rural or spread-suburban areas can't live on 100-mile range comfortably, but this is now a small percentage of the population. However, the ICE folks conveniently ignore the simple fact that those same rural and spread-suburban folks are precisely the ones who can easily re-charge at home. It's the urban drivers who have trouble finding enough re-charge stations as many live in massive multi-unit buildings. Now the fancy buildings in SF come with chargers and the doorman, who parks your car for you, will return it fully charged. The same thing is beginning to happen in NYCity. But, the real issue here is that younger folks, and even many of us old ones, simply don't use a car in the city at all. After over a year of commuting 80 miles each way twice or three times per week from Santa Cruz to San Francisco, I can tell you that the Tesla S and X do the job just fine precisely because as I park the car at home it takes 10 seconds to plug it in.

Ajax wrote:Ok, so at this moment there is not an unbiased, in-depth study that compares the environmental impact of producing batteries vs. petroleum extraction.
The reason why I asked the question, is because petro-heads are constantly (and erroneously) flinging the arguement in my face that mining to produce batteries is MORE harmful than petroleum extraction. Since there is no available study, they can't possibly know this with any degree of certainty.

Again, the "extraction" is much messier with oil than with metals. But, more importantly, the mess caused by thinks like blown rig in the Gulf of Mexico makes it painfully obvious that the folks making this claim are simply ignoring reality. They are ignoring the downstream consequences of major disasters just as the nuclear industry and tried to ignore them. Clearly the total damage done by petroleum extraction failures is vastly more than any metal mining.

Ajax wrote:One thing I love about EV's is that fuel (energy) transmission from source to delivery point is less impactful. Instead of tankers and pipelines, it's transmission wires.
If a pipeline ruptures, the energy spills onto the ground and pollutes the area. If a powerline snaps, delivery is interrupted but there is no pollution or spillage. (Yes, transmission towers make an environmental impact, I know.)

The other thing I appreciate, is the decentralization of energy delivery infrastructure. Charging stations can be virtually anywhere, including your home. Again, less impactful because there are no tanks in the ground that could leak.

It's pretty clear that widely distributed energy generation is building fast. Solar, wind, etc... are scattered all over the place. This is putting the energy generation near consumption. The exact opposite is true of Petroleum, and your folks who argue that EVs are worse than ICEs environmentally probably have no idea how much high pollution bunker fuel is burned to move their oil across oceans for thousands of miles. I've watched people's eyes when having this conversation, it hadn't occurred to them. Just as the damage from pipeline leaks, oil rig explosions, and tanker dumps hadn't occurred to them.

Ajax wrote:What I DISLIKE about EV's is that the rare earths required to make the batteries are often held in unfriendly nations with questionable values. After finally becoming (mostly) energy independent, do we want to become dependent all over again but relying on China and the Republic of Congo to supply us with cobalt? Will they become the new Saudi Arabia? We've spent 50 years doing questionable shit due to the geopolitical leverage that energy producing nations have had over us. I'm not eager to go back to that.

Unlike oil, we haven't crawled through every corner of the planet looking for these various metals. It seems absurd to me to believe that the Congo and China are the only places on earth with these metals are available for mining. That's like saying Iron only exists in two places on Earth - it's not credible. Again, just like with recycling, the demand hasn't grown to a level that supports exploration and extraction. Now that the demand is becoming obvious, there are a LOT of folks working on finding and extracting these metals.

I also have serious doubts that those arguing that rare earth metals are vital to batteries are making the typical mistake of assuming that the core technology won't advance. This has clearly been wrong in many other areas. EG: consider the power saving that LEDs provided to home lighting. When my friend Henry got the first laser diode to emit light he never dreamed of the downstream effects on power consumption. Similarly, those comparing an extremely mature industry, like petroleum extraction and ICEs with a relatively new industry like batteries and EVs, is probably going to fail to estimate the rate of progress of the new technology.

Ajax wrote:Yeah, I have my military trucks but they are just winter hobbies and historical curiosities. I love my solar panels, my battery and I think that EV's will make the country cleaner, more secure and more independent.

Yup, and I have a Ford Expedition to tow my Moore-24 and MAYAN trailer. But I also have a boat that is constantly trying to recycle itself and I need to go down there now and apply more varnish.

Larry sent me a pretty good article from Yale about mineral extraction.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wr ... rth-mining

There is a cost. Very interesting.

I think anytime you consider mining in general you have to consider what to do with the stuff you dig out that is "extra" the tailings from may types of mines are laced with toxic substances. Then there is the byproducts of purifying the material you want to keep into something usable. For example, there are towns in Colorado that are uninhabitable due to previous mining activity.

A couple of additional comments, energy storage technology is already moving beyond Lithium, for example to Silicon based batteries and graphene capacitors, so technology will probably bypass the rare earth problem.

The ICE supporters also ignore the massive social and economic problems caused by dependence on the Middle East, IMHO the sooner we leave these countries to stew in their own mess the better off we will be.

deleted - weird double post bug

Ajax - interesting article. But, the Exxon Valdex grounding all by itself ($6B Clean-up) was more than what I think is the estimated for the total Chinese clean-up in the article ($5.5B). Then there's the BP platform mess ($65B clean up) in the Gulf of Mexico. No, I think that rare earth extraction in total is probably less than 1/200th of what Petroleum is.

But, that's not surprising. Transporting thousands of pounds metals is simply far less dangerous and expensive to clean up than transporting billions of gallons of something that burns, floats on water, and sticks to everything it touches. There's really no comparison, even when the operations are both a full maturity.

I appreciate your thoughts.

I felt that it was important to be honest with myself and research the issue rather than just assuming that digging up metals in massive quantities was necessarily less than extracting petroleum products in mass quantities.

I hope Olaf is right that the technology leaps ahead to bypass the rare earth issue.

Regarding "who" has large reserves of rare earths, I did recently read an article that says Japan has an enormous reserve underwater, off of some of their islands.
It's just a matter of how to get at it...and hopefully not poison the oceans while extracting it.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/12/japan-r ... cific.html

This is a copper mine in Arizona or New Mexico. I took the picture in 2009 on a flight to JFK-to-LAX. I forget, and can't find a reference to, which particular mine it is. Considering the picture was taken from jet cruising altitude, you can see this is a monstrous hole in the ground. But it's finite. It doesn't affect much outside a radius of maybe 10 miles.

I showed the picture to my late friend and sailing companion who was a mining engineer. She told me that a new copper mine should plan for 7 years from the first shovelful of soil until the first ore is taken from the mine. Serious capital investment! (When I was at PepsiCo, a planner told me Pizza Hut was a capital intensive business. Maybe compared to bottling sugar water. Not compared to mining, or as I learned later, telecom.)

When ore is refined as stated there is waste to be disposed of. In Tacoma there was a smelter for refining copper on the waterfront. One of the byproducts of smelting copper ore is arsenic. It spewed out of the giant stack that dominated the skyline and its plume spread arsenic and heavy metals downwind over the city or over the sound and Vashon Island depending on the direction of the wind. It was dumped into Puget Sound when the slag from the melting pots was emptied. The dumping of the slag eventually built a spit of land parallel to the shoreline. Tacoma Yacht Club is located on the end of that spit and behind the spit is moorage for the club boats. The EPA declared the the smelter an EPA Super fund Site and the buildings and stack were torn down and the pieces trucked to a hazardous waste site in Oregon. The land was leveled, some dirt was trucked away and everything was covered with plastic capped with clean dirt. The yards in the immediate vicinity were remediated and remediation was offered to people living further downwind. Now, years later, there is nice development and a great park on the factory site and the yacht club property is capped.

So while a mine site looks and I guess is fairly benign the environmental effects can and do occur hundreds of miles away, and remediation costs the taxpayers billing of dolls countrywide. Hopefully the firms mining and refining the materials for the batteries are sticking by the EPA guidelines. But then Trump...

Even with Trump relaxing our environmental regulations, we're still more environmentally sensitive than many other nations that are mining these minerals.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we should necessarily relax.

Interesting to note that there were multiple electric vehicle commercials during the Super Bowl last night.

Also keep in mind that Trump relaxing standards, doesn't necessarily change things right away. Many manufacturers of equipment, cars, light bulbs and the like have already done the engineering and production changes necessary to manufacture stuff to the higher energy standards. Plus you have state and local jurisdictions that are driving energy efficiency standards that are more stringent than what the fed requires anyway.

Trump bashing LED light bulbs, low flow toilets, and faucet aerators, won't actually make them to go away or stop California, DC, Virginia, Maryland, etc from requiring them. What it will probably do, is allow manufacturers of incandescent light bulbs keep producing them for a bit longer.

Charlie wrote:Interesting to note that there were multiple electric vehicle commercials during the Super Bowl last night.

There is a demand for them, despite what many opponents are saying. It's not all smug assholes, either.

I'm with Ajax here, there is clearly a demand. EG: our tile guy who is hanging out here many days after he said the bathroom project would be done has become the target of my questions. He drives his pickup truck less than 40 miles a day. He says it hasn't been on the freeway for a distance of over 20 miles in years, "not safe at speed" and "just an old work truck". When asked, he said he would buy any truck that ran on electricity as soon as he could. His diesel pick-up gets 8-10 MPG and "stinks like a semi".

Similar conversations with the UPS delivery guy I know makes it pretty darn clear that an Electric Sprinter Van will be a massive hit with the urban and suburban delivery companies. But, the surprise finding was the fish delivery guys. Who pointed out that they have to run the AC on the load full time during a typical 14 hour day for their trucks. (Two shifts) They are forever stopping and starting and really REALLY want a hybrid system with enough batteries to run the AC while they are stopped and enough charging capacity to move the truck and re-charge the batteries between stops. They can measure their costs is lost fish refused by the restaurants, which is a hell of a lot more money than the fuel bill. As a result, they run the engine at idle all the time to keep the cooling working (trucks are too small to have a separate engine for the fridge). The resulting milage for a large van delivering fish is 3.5 MPG. They HATE that.

I think to revive the HUMMER brand as an electric vehicle is both a good and a terrible idea at the same time.

Terrible:
- The red-necks who want a macho truck will not like a silent non-x-military vehicle.
- The tree-huggers will not get anywhere near this x-military vehicle brand, or the POS that use to carry it from GM.

Good:
- GM needs to do SOMETHING and do it fast so it can try to learn how.
- It's much easier to built a big electric pickup than a cheap electric car.

I think they would have been better off solving their electric vehicle learning curve issue and their customer perception problem by starting with something branded "Suburban" or "Tahoe", but GM has always exhibited nearly zero marketing sensibility.

BeauV wrote:I think to revive the HUMMER brand as an electric vehicle is both a good and a terrible idea at the same time.

Terrible:
- The red-necks who want a macho truck will not like a silent non-x-military vehicle.
- The tree-huggers will not get anywhere near this x-military vehicle brand, or the POS that use to carry it from GM.

Good:
- GM needs to do SOMETHING and do it fast so it can try to learn how.
- It's much easier to built a big electric pickup than a cheap electric car.

I think they would have been better off solving their electric vehicle learning curve issue and their customer perception problem by starting with something branded "Suburban" or "Tahoe", but GM has always exhibited nearly zero marketing sensibility.

I am in full agreement with your marketing sentiments. Ford did the same thing by defiling the Mustang badge with their bloated, EV cross-over. It's like they're actively trying to discourage sales by generating hate. They should have given the crossover its own badge and name. Sure, it could have been "horse related" to demonstrate some lineage to the Mustang but co-opting the name just generated outrage among the petro-heads.