Electric Vehicles [EV] V ICE [Internal Combustion Engine]

[Midfielder]

Through I would start this with a Crickey article and given it sits behind a paywall I have copied below.... interesting salt of all things and how advanced the Chinese are in EV

Salt-powered cars could save the world

Manufacturers need to figure out a way to make EVs cheaper if they are going to capture the bottom end of the market and chase cheap fossil-fuel vehicles off the road. That’s where sodium-ion batteries come in.

JASON MURPHY

SEP 13, 2023

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A SODIUM-ION BATTERY-POWERED CAR UNVEILED IN CHINA (IMAGE: JAC MOTORS)

Salt could save the world. A new battery technology is emerging, and it’s cheap. It could be the material that finally makes big batteries inexpensive and powerful.

You find sodium sitting right under lithium in the periodic table because they share similar chemical properties.

(IMAGE: GOOGLE)

The way lithium ions function is essentially the same way sodium ions do. Sodium plays the same role in the battery, with the major downside being that sodium atoms are bigger and heavier.

“Manufacturing-wise, it’s a drop-in technology,” Deakin University’s Alfred Deakin Professor Maria Forsyth told Cosmos magazine in a recent interview.

Using sodium instead of lithium makes a battery less efficient per unit of weight, but much cheaper. Sodium can also make other parts of the battery easier to work with, including anodes and current collectors, making batteries even cheaper.

As gas-guzzlers dominate our roads, the queue to buy an EV in Oz just gets longer

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All these reasons are why a sodium-battery car has been unveiled in China in 2023 (made by JAC Motors, which doesn’t sell into Australia). Major Chinese manufacturer Chery (which does sell into Australia) has leapt on board too, pledging to use a sodium ion battery from mega-battery maker CATL in a new car soon.

While Western manufacturers may make tiny volumes of electric vehicles (EVs) for branding and regulatory reasons, China is pumping out millions. Its cost-conscious consumers have driven down the price and are a big reason for the rising EV penetration in Australia. BYD and MG are both Chinese brands — even the Teslas that Australia gets are all made in China.

The lithium problem

Lithium is tricky. It’s rare. Not as rare as gold, but rare. And it’s not available to every country. We have a lot, but China, not much. That is highly motivating when trade wars loom. Sodium, meanwhile, is everywhere and available to everyone.

Lithium is lightly concentrated in the earth’s crust. To mine a kilogram, you need to dig up an awful lot of ore. The world has 22 million tonnes of lithium which is sufficiently concentrated and close enough to the surface to be viable to dig up.

Let’s do the maths. There are eight kilograms of lithium in a small EV battery. So those 22 million tonnes could make almost 3 billion car batteries. However, there are 63 kilograms of lithium in a Tesla Model S battery, meaning that lithium would make only 350 million such batteries. That’s not enough.

Australia buys a million new cars a year. The world buys 60-75 million new cars each year, and rising. If all cars had Model S batteries we’d have enough lithium for six years. If all cars had small batteries, we’d have enough lithium for 60 years. Either way you can see a case for an alternative to lithium batteries.

The price is high

Lithium’s price has oscillated wildly recently, before settling at 200,000 yuan a tonne of carbonate (a salt form of lithium that is stable). At current exchange rates that is A$41,000 a tonne, or $41 a kilogram of lithium carbonate. Lithium carbonate is about one-fifth of lithium, by weight, so the price of pure lithium is about $200 a kilo.

But recently lithium carbonate prices have been as much as three times higher, as this chart shows.

You can see why a year ago it became vital to expedite lithium alternatives. The falling price of lithium since then is partly due to extra work by lithium miners to find reserves and exploit them. But to some extent it may also be an acknowledgment that alternatives have progressed.

We need more EVs

Australia is late to electric vehicle adoption. Only a few percent of new vehicle sales are EVs. We’ll have internal combustion engines on the road for a very long time. The reason people aren’t buying EVs is they are expensive. The cheapest new EV is about $40,000 compared with about $20,000 for the cheapest new petrol car.

Manufacturers need to figure out a way to make EVs cheaper if they are going to capture the bottom end of the market and chase cheap fossil-fuel vehicles off the road. That’s where sodium-ion batteries come in. They are heavier and less powerful per kilogram than lithium-ion batteries. But they can still play a role in many vehicles where power and speed aren’t so vital.

Lithium is not the only thing in a battery, but using sodium is expected to make batteries 30-40% cheaper. It’s easy to imagine a future with two tiers of EVs. Jaguars and Teslas will have lithium batteries and go like a rocket, eating up hundreds of kilometres before needing a charge. Meanwhile most people drive cheap Chinese EVs with smaller, cheaper, less powerful sodium batteries, an upside of which is they won’t blow up like lithium ones.

Sodium batteries can also do a lot of good work in stationary energy. It’s likely there’ll come a point where using lithium in batteries that don’t move around seems wasteful. Turning our renewables into reliable power depends on dispatchable, cheap storage. Sodium batteries could easily fill that role.

Sodium batteries are a much more realistic prospect than the recently floated plan to turn every farmer’s dam into a little hydro station. The sad reality of using gravity to store electricity is it’s simply not very efficient. You need large vertical distances, and preferably a substance much heavier than water to make it generate significant electricity at small scale.

The future is not in fresh water. It’s in the brine.

There’s still a $20,000 price premium for EVs, and that will last for some time if we’re stuck on lithium. Sodium offers the possibility of a two-tier battery situation in EVs — cheap, heavy EVs with sodium batteries and expensive lithium batteries for the most expensive cars. That’s not so different from the range of power options and fuel types in combustion engine cars, and is likely the answer to fully electrifying our fleet.

 

[Legionista]

9 hours ago, Midfielder said:

It’s easy to imagine a future with two tiers of EVs. Jaguars and Teslas will have lithium batteries and go like a rocket, eating up hundreds of kilometres before needing a charge. Meanwhile most people drive cheap Chinese EVs with smaller, cheaper, less powerful sodium batteries, an upside of which is they won’t blow up like lithium ones.

Straight up.

You’ll buy your little Chinese EV tin can and you’ll like it.

Amazing. 

[Midfielder]

It's about the salt not were it's made

[SBW]

I am going to circle back to what BMW exec said

I think the political requirement to phase out combustion engines is negligent,”

“And where do people charge all the electric cars? There will be no comprehensive infrastructure for electric cars in Europe in 2035. Do you think that in twelve years there will be charging stations in every village in regions like southern Italy?”

Talking about the EU’s e-vehicle legislation planned for 2026, he said that European charging infrastructure was still “far behind expectations . . . there are countries where they are not developing anything at all. You wouldn’t do a review if legislators were certain that everything was in order"

“Europe is becoming open to political blackmail externally because we are dependent on raw material supplies”

“If you want to be a participant in the 80mn worldwide car market, you have to do all technologies, otherwise you are not participating. Some players are doing only electric, but these players are not covering the whole market”

"The base car market segment will either vanish or will not be done by European manufacturers" - talking about Chinese competition.

This would be an unpopular view but he makes many good points around European infrastructure, the threat from low cost Chinese competitors to the European (western) automotive industry, entirely valid points about energy and materials security, and in other comments, affordability. Putting in to words what others, both in automotive leadership positions and governments, mostly aren't prepared to say out loud with attribution.

That is not to deny electrification of the vehicle fleet is happening, and that electrification will be better for many people much of the time for personal transportation, but there are enormous hurdles to transition in the timeframe outlined (rather, mandated), which is what we see BMW as a business more broadly now articulating and a multi-pronged approach.

[sonar]

There is a great YouTube channel called......Just Have a Think.....sets out in laymans terms......a lot of what is written here.

[mack]

Politicians won't go through with any of these "phase out" plans anyway.

The biggest bump for EV cars will be whenever Toyota gives up their nonsense Hydrogen dream and brings out proper EV Corolla & Camry models.

[SBW]

Winters are very brutal for EV in China