[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by Leondros

I'd like to see some peer reviewed sources on this. Please don't quote that T&E report, there were so many holes poked through that.

Unfortunately right now, the inputs for batteries are just as bad as O&G. Lets look at lithium production for example:

1) Lithium is energy intensive to produce and many areas do not the the electrical grid to support mining currently. They rely on coal to power their operations.

Lithium extraction has several different methods depending on the source and the energy use and mix is different depending on where it's extracted. Australia accounts for over 50% of the global lithium supply and it's produced from hard rock, not brine pits and it's energy mix is very rapidly becoming less reliant on coal. On the other hand brine pits use very little electricity as they use the sun to evaporate the water in order to concentrate the brine. Refining is often done in China which does use coal based power. It's difficult to compare energy intensity with O&G as fossil fuels are consumed to produce energy and Lithium stores energy and is recycled. There's no studies comparing directly because they're apples vs oranges. However, again, total life cycle emissions for an electric vehicle produced and driven with a dirty grid are still lower than a comparable ICE vehicle.

2) Most mining requires open pits which takes huge land acreage which impacts ecosystems.

Again, hard to do apples to apples here, but we're talking about extracting minerals for energy carrying energy for a very long time vs O&G which are consumed and instantly gone once used. If you took all the current lithium, rate earths, cobalt, and copper and times it by 12, it's still only 3% of the coal mined in one year. The amount of land used for fossil fuel extraction is massive.

3) From a social perspective a lot of mining is being conducted in places like the Congo which has been utilizing child slavery. Many of these mines have terrible human rights records.

Cobalt is really the only battery mineral from Congo, but if course all industries should be held to ethical standards. This example is silly for this dev debate of course because it's an issue with oil and gas to a much bigger extent currently than battery mineral supply

I discussed above, but yes some Lithium extraction uses water but I think you have things mixed up. Lithium extracted from aquifers doesn't deplete aquifers because the water is pumped back after Lithium extraction. Where water use in brine is an issue is I'm South America where they extract lithium from naturally occuring dry sea needs they pump local water resources on to in order to extract the lithium. These are often in areas where there's already water scarcity. And while that's an issue, I could also paint all oil and gas production then as using lots of water because of the oil sands use of the Athabasca. It's very complex and requires deeper investigation. I'm not sure you're speaking from a position of knowledge here

As compared to what? It's less energy intensive and releases less toxins than any oil and gas extraction nevermind the original mineral extraction. I'm not sure what your point is here. Outside of wiping humans of the earth everything we do is going to have some impact. It's minimizing the impact that's important

These are just the ones off the top of my head. I hope the technology can improve and I agree that the recycling rates are exciting and I hope that they can continue to become more efficient at reusing inputs. But to say the impact is not as bad as the O&G industry ignores the fact that the world runs on O&G. If lithium and other renewable energy intensive metals and minerals extraction are going to completely replace O&G, that footprint will dwarf O&G. The main reason most O&G is happening subsurface, not in open pits.