re: Why do you believe that we should be driving electric vehicles?

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Agreed, but don’t post maps about infrastructure and make claims that you can go coast to coast.

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But the maps show you that a coast to coast trip is very much feasible.

And if you care about efficiency you aren’t driving anything coast to coast anyway.

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I think you have no concept of the scale of what you’re proposing. There’s over 275 million autos in the US today. It takes approximately 40 kWh to fully charge one EV. Where the biggest issue will be is in major cities like LA where there’s just shy of 5.5 million vehicles. The burden placed on the grid, which is already stretched banjo tight a good deal of the time will be too much.

Now the problem can be resolved by a massive expansion of the power grid. But that’s going to require new power stations. And wind nor solar will get you the added capacity required. It’s going to take coal, natural gas, or nuclear power plants. By the time you’ve built the power plants to charge the hundreds of millions of EVs, what have you really accomplished if your goal is reduction in CO2?

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I distinctly remembered posting a lot of numbers in response to this exact same premise a while back. I found it.. lo and behold, it was in response to your math.

Without going through all of the math again, it comes down to this: if everyone in the country switched to electric vehicles, we would need to add ~130,000 MW of generating capacity nationwide (by your math). In the past 20 years, we have added 260,000 MW of natural gas generating capacity and another 170,000 MW in renewable generating capacity nationwide. Adding the generating capacity is really not that problematic.

The whole argument of “well we burn natural gas to make electricity” is the sign of someone who either has no idea what they are talking about or is being intentionally obtuse. Combined cycle natural gas turbines are much more fuel-efficient that internal combustion engines. And on top of that, they burn much cleaner. You’re better off arguing that CO2 isn’t hurting anything, or arguing about the supply chain of EV production. Because there really is no argument around the efficiency of utility-scale power generation vs. internal combustion engines.

All of that being said, grid infrastructure is a legitimate concern - not only in terms of transmission and distribution, but also the infrastructure inside of homes. If America switched to 100% EV’s overnight, we would be in a bind. Still.. it’s not overnight. If 100% of new vehicles sold were EV’s tomorrow, it would take 20-25 years to turn over the entire fleet. It would take over a decade for most vehicles on the road to be EV’s.

TL;DR: The electrical infrastructure problems facing EV adoption are overstated. And for the record, I don’t own an EV nor do I have any intentions of buying one any time soon.

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I know you want to believe brine extraction will be the answer but I assure you it won’t. Takes too much just water and you don’t get enough material for it to be economically viable on a mass scale. It’s going to take strip mining on a huge scale for not only lithium but other minerals required to manufacture these batteries. The impact on the environment from battery production, recycling, and eventually disposal will dwarf the impact of oil extraction.

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The hard rock vs brine is a far more complex argument than you are making it and relies a lot on how one approaches the green issue. To me the environmental issues are a secondary if not tertiary issue, not that I don't care about the environment but I am not silly enough to expect a relatively new mass technology to be greener than a 100 year old industry that has has environmental pressure on it for 50 years. In the end EVs will be better for the environment. My mane concern is a better product and even at this early stage EVs are a better product in all but 3 areas, "fueling time", range and price. Price is the closest to being solved but is a non-issue to me since I don't drive economy cars. The other two will be solved which is belief not inevitable fact.


Now to lithium. Brining is scalable, it is already being done en masse. It does however carry a higher cost per ton of concentrate. One of the reasons is it has a higher margin than hard rock concentrates. Why would this be if they are a commodity? Because depending on the cathode one is building the lithium carbonate from brining requires less manipulation of the concentrate. It cost less in the actual battery. Now, this illustrates the importance of cathode type in whether you want lithium carbonate from brining or lithium hydroxide from hard rock. While you can get both from either it requires and extra step though easier to get lithium carbonate from hard rock. If one moves to an NCM 811 cathode the lithium hydroxide from hard rock mining is a better concentrate from an economic POV.

In the end, I think lithium based cathodes are just a bridge battery tech since there are so many promising alternates being developed, just as battery EVs may just be a bridge to fuel cell-based vehicles.

In any event, I think electric vehicles are the future and I do NOT want to see the US cede its competitive advantage to China since vehicles are one of the main economic drivers. I understand some people are stuck between their own industry and the national economy as a whole and I respect that. Betting on O&G to be primarily an energy industry will likely end in tears for the US but fortunately, the large O&G companies see this and are reacting.

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6 hours is my limit for driving.

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A 6 hours trip by interstate is about 410-430 miles.

You can most likely do that in the exact same amount of time in an EV vs ICE.

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then later this year or next the cybertruck with over 500 mile range will make that without needing to stop once for a charge while ICE will need to stop for gas before that mileage. 

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That thing might be uglier than a Pontiac Aztek

I think the lucid air that is debuting soon also has a 500+ miles range.

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Just how do you think they make that wonderful thing called electricity?

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Well I’ll say that you are trading car pollution for power plant pollution. I supervise an gas system in Oklahoma and this no new drilling crap would have to go away. My system has a huge power burn and with the amount of gas being put into our system is not enough to sustain huge burns for long hours.

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My truck would be full gas along with extra in cans as as it always is during storms in case I I have to leave the area to find food, water, or more fuel for my portable generator.

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you act like the EV wouldnt be fully charged nor would its owner have extra gas in cans for a portable generator.... so yea still pretty much doing the same thing. If I can store gas I can generate electricity I can power an EV.

could also keep a 1-2 weeks worth of base food and water which eliminates any benefit of you keeping gas to go explore for food and water.

yea you might be better off with a power outage >1 week, if we still had to drive as much as usual... but that is also a pretty rare situation for the vast majority of vehicle owners. ....if we are getting this deep in moving goalpost territory of 'being inconvenient' to discredit an EV then that goes to show how reasonable EVs are nowadays.