> The average cost of lithium-ion batteries has plummeted 89% since 2010, and is expected to reach $50 per kWh in the near future. Assuming a battery cost of $100 per kWh, the TCP for a battery-electric containership is already lower than that of an ICE equivalent, for routes less than 1,000km. And when battery prices reach $50 per kWh, which is predicted for the near future, electrified ships will be cost-effective on routes as long as 5,000km.
This was the nugget for me. Big if true, as they say.
Cost of maintenance and expected depletion as a function of vessel lifetime is most relevant, an ICE engine itself lasts for a very long time and marine engines have special maintenance features that allow you to repair and run them simultaneously.
It's also not entirely clear if these figures consider "utility power" which is a major function of any container ship that's going to haul refrigerated or frozen cargo.
The main engine is a major source of electrical power on board, but there are also usually several large electrical generators on board to satisfy the demand of these types of containers.
Lithium batteries do not stop working suddenly what people are usually talking about degradation so the capacity might be 5%-10% less. The improvements in battery tech has improved number of charge cycles as well as how badly the batteries degrade. With the way battery prices are falling if you buy batteries for $100 today after a decade of use the batteries will still have 90-95% capacity and new batteries cost less than $20. Oil and Gas prices are likely to go up in the future or at least remain the same. Solar and wind electricity price are getting cheaper by 5-10% a year. So electric vehicles will also be cheaper to run by a large margin. I think 1-2 punch of battery/electric engines and renewable electricity prices are going to change many things. And a lot of countries and their economies will be caught flat footed.
At 100 hours per cycle, current generation LiFePO4 batteries will last decades. Maintenance would consist of swapping out faulty modules.
Electric motors are far more robust than ICEs. Wear parts consist of bearings and cooling (although this last is much simpler at 90% efficiency than 50%).
The control circuitry is a potential failure point, but it's small enough that you could run two or three redundant versions and maintain the one that is off.
It sounds like you've included the solution for on board power. Keep using the same generators where they too aren't replaced with batteries (or on board solar may be viable) or in extreme edge cases, use one of the existing ships -- they're not all going to he retrofit on day one.
This is how most modern diesel (actually diesel-electric) trains work.
The issue with a big diesel engine like this actually turning the prop or wheels is the size of the transmission required. The engines are massive and the transmission would also be massive to cope with the power and torque. You also eliminate a moving part so much more reliable.
It seems so backwards to me to convert diesel into power and use that to drive an electric motor. It seems so inefficient, but I supposed it wouldn't be a thing if it was inefficient.
Lots of extremely large engines are "combust fuel to turn a generator to turn the actual engine", and have been for decades. Electric motors are great.
Building brushless motors that work when submerged in salt water is almost trivial. The only parts that matter with respect to corrosion is the insulation on the windings and the material the bearings are made from. The rest you can just paint with whatever you'd normally use to avoid corrosion.
> it's not binary. We'll likely start seeing hybrids that follow the cost curve down while scaling up battery capacity.
Do hybrids make any sense at all if you're mostly operating at a constant load, like I imagine container-ships do? It's not like they're stuck in stop and start traffic across the Pacific.
They (well, oil tankers at least) actually do spend a significant time lightering, idling, "in traffic" in canals, ports, some key "merge lanes" like Azores, Singapore straits, etc.
I was wondering about usng solar panels to offset batteries. These ships travel at 43 kph. A 5000 km range ship needs 6.5 GWh of storage for a roughly 100 hour trip, or 33 hours of near-peak solar production (assuming no clouds). So, it would need about 200 megawatts of solar to completely avoid charging while docked. 20 watt/sqft is pretty good these dats, so it would need 10M sq ft of solar panels on its deck. Cargo ship decks max out at about 265K sqft.
So, there's no point in putting a solar array on the deck of one of these things.
I wonder if building nuclear ships that float in international water could sidestep some of the NIMBY-ism for nuclear power. I think some company might have already pursued that approach.
Yeah, put 100kg of high grade uranium or plutonium on a ship with 30 crew and sail it past somalia. Great plan. I mean assuming it gets there and doesn't melt down and contaminate an entire sea because of how well known the shipping industry is for not cutting corners. It'll also definitely not result in nuclear waste getting dumped wherever.
I mean there's at least a chance that the nuclear reactor which costs 10x as much as the proposed electric ship will get stolen wholesale and used for civilian purposes, so that could be an upside.
Many ships already use wind power. I don't think you'd be able to harness the wind, convert it to electricity, and use the electricity more efficiently than a sail.
Instantaneous efficiency is well and good, but a sail only redirects power; it doesn’t capture it. To me, the goal of adding wind power to a cargo ship would be the same as adding solar power: to recharge the batteries asynchronously to demand, to then later use that power when there is demand but no active supply. Wind→electric gives you the ability to “save up” power in a tailwind, and then later “spend” that power against a headwind.
(You’d think pure wind power would do this as well—the engines can in theory work less hard if the sails are full—but wind is too precarious to match the slow ramp-up/ramp-down times of the giant motors used to power boat propellers. Those things are what power plant designers would call “base load” — mostly you don’t even turn them off, you just engage a giant clutch to put the boat into neutral when you don’t want to be moving. The master “transmission” of a boat is essentially a cylindrical steel flywheel; and you don’t want to lose its momentum. This is why boats a good match for bunker-fuel furnaces — or, on subs, nuclear — which are power sources that also ramp up/down slowly.)
1- Do shipping lanes still stick to prevailing winds, or are more direct routes significantly faster?
2- Would becalmed seas or being blown off course by a storm be a big enough risk that ships would still need a full compliment of fuel, or close enough as to make the maintenance costs of both engine and sails, weight and other factors override the benefit?
3- Does the addition of sails increase the risk of rolling or swaying stresses on the ship? I imagine this might require some extensive structural changes or upgrades to ships, with no idea of what the cost would be compared to a different kind of retrofit (i.e. continuing to use propellers but with a different fuel source).
Container ships with cargo must be like 50x the weight per unit of crosss-section compared to large wooden frigates. Way too lazy to do the math but I’m sure you’d need outrageously tall masts and sails to get any significant speed.
They could also redesign container ships to carry fewer containers. If automation can reduce the crew requirements and wind power can reduce the fuel consumption, a larger number of more efficient ships might be more viable than a small number of super transports.
I think you heavily overestimate the amount of crew on these ships. There are typically less than 20 people aboard any freighter. Which means that if you go down an order of magnitude the ships must run completely autonomously (at least part of the time). I think we are pretty much maxed out on automation
> I think we are pretty much maxed out on automation
That would be a very surprising result to me. I don't think we're maxed out on automation until the ships are loaded at the port, travel to their destination, then unloaded at the destination with no human labor.
Unless you're telling me that robots load, unload, pilot and maintain the ships at sea, we aren't anywhere near maximum automation.
I'm telling you that, unless you manage to _reliably_ automate _everything_, you need something like 6 personal to generate a permanent watch (probably more due to vacation/sickness/etc). This is kind of the minimal requirement for having any redundancy for unforeseen situations _at all_. And it is only a factor of 3 below the current crewing levels. Which gives you a factor of 3 more ships.
Unless you are willing to risk loosing the ship due to a 1-in-1000 event which your automation did not take into account, then this is your limit. And ships are expensive, even compared to officer salaries. And those generate most of the crewing costs anyways. So if you have to pay 6 officers, adding 2-3 for the engine to require less dock-time and 12 ratings really doesn't push up your costs that much (especially not compared to the capital cost). But you get a lot of redundancy.
So yeah, I would say most of the economically viable automation has been done
But this has been a surprisingly interesting rabbit hole, thanks for that.
There are different numbers for ships around starting with 50k [0] on the low end and the high end is 100k [1] being operated by between 1.5m [2] and 1.9m [3] personell. At the outer edge this would give 40 people per ship. Whereas reports put the number more at 20-25 [4]. The last one also mentions that there are requirements, by law, which typically require something like 6 people (often with nationality requirements) to be on board.
Well, if the wind is at your back, I think it’d just be more efficient to use sails, since it skips conversion losses. If it’s a headwind, well you’re just adding drag. You can’t put wind turbines on a vehicle and come out ahead of sails.
This presumes there’s any advantage in a ship arriving early. Usually an early ship is just as bad as a late ship — their booked port slot isn’t until hours/days later. So, in a tailwind, you don’t want to actually go faster; you want to keep a constant speed, but just use less power doing so. And direct wind capture via sails is (AFAIK) unpredictable enough that you can’t keep a constant speed when relying on it. (Are there robotic sail-trimmer control systems designed to always take an exact amount of impulse from the wind and discard any excess?)
Sticking a wind turbine on your boat, on the other hand, is basically regenerative braking. You turn the excess speed you don’t want/need at the time, into stored power for later when you do need it, to exactly the degree to leave you with the speed you want. A tailwind is to a boat as “going downhill” is to a car.
If the ship arrives early, can't it just sit a few miles from port and wait in the ocean? The ship must have been provisioned to remain at sea for that time anyway if it was expecting to arrive later.
Multi layer perovskites could make them worth carrying on ships that have to stop (canals and similar).
If your batteries have to do 2400 out of 2500km and then 2100km out of 2500km in two stretches that's a 10% reduction in battery cost (and a cargo increase).
Even at 6% (high but achievable efficiency in the mid term) it's still worth slapping them on if it doesn't interfere with operation too much as they weigh comparatively nothing.
If a ship is already diesel-electric (which many are) then you need to calculate if adding a solar panel saves more fuel costs over its lifetime than its upfront cost.
If it does, then you can add more and keep doing that calculation until the point where the cost exactly matches the savings.
Seems like cargo ships would be less suited to this initally than tanker ships though, since they don't carry items on their flat upper areas.
265k sq ft of solar panels roughly reduces the amount of battery needed by 3% to go any given distance, his math says. It is unlikely this costs less than the 3% of battery reduced.
And of course, you can't readily make the whole upper surface of a container ship into panels, because cranes lift containers off the ship.
I wonder if you could design a keel with semi-permanent "slots" for the battery packs. They're going to weigh an incredible amount, so they'll probably need to be as low as possible, and partial surface contact with the ocean would help with the incredible cooling requirements. Fire starts, pod immediately drops into the ocean?
There's no real way to put out a lithium fire of that size, even if you extinguish it, it may start again days later. Has to go overboard one way or another.
Lithium seems like a bad fit all-around. Plus, just charging all those batteries would put a ton of local strain on the grid. I think this would be an ideal situation for liquid flow batteries. Those seem like only a matter of time, I don't think there is any chemistry /physics reasons preventing their commercial adoption, just engineering.
That's extremely impressive, I've seen videos where people combust lithium cell phone batteries and it's a lot, but roughly how much megawatt hours of capacity go into running a bus by comparison?
The author seemed to assume there is no ecological costs to extracting, processing, and shipping massive amounts of rare earth around the oceans, and, as you point out, that they never suffer mishaps
There are massive ecological costs to extracting, processing and shipping even more massive quantities of dinosaur juice around the oceans, and they suffer "mishaps" quite frequently.
Frankly, we're in much deeper shit if we continue to add carbon to the carbon cycle, and while strip mining the earth for precious metals isn't ideal, we don't have many other choices. Still waiting on at-scale biofuels.
Electrification reduces the amount of mining and extraction and transport so if that's your focus you should be excited for this.
The key difference being that once you extract it, you can first re-use it for decades, then recycle it. Whereas with fossil fuels you need to continually dig up more to replace the ones you burned and vented into the atmosphere then ship it to where it is used.
Moat of the discussion is based on storing enough power to last the whole journey. What about providing floating supply stations where they could charge or exchange batteries?
The ocean is a harsh and very variable place. I have see a video of a ship refueling while underway with a tanker, you could do something similar but you need a way to recharge the electric tanker.
I was curious and did some math based on numbers plucked from the web.
A panamax cargo ship burns ~250 tons of bunker fuel a day and carries ~15k containers. Cruising speed is a little over 1000 km / day.
The energy density of bunker fuel is approx 12500 wh / kg. Lead-acid batteries hold 50 wh / kg while high-end li-ion cells hold 500 wh / kg.
By those numbers it sounds like you'd need approx 6000 tons of high-end lithium cells per day of operation - you can put 40 tons in a shipping container (much more and many ports will refuse to unload), so 150 containers of batteries per day of travel. A 5000km trip is going to use 5% of your cargo space for fuel (where previously it would be closer to 0.1%). That adds up to real money (you could have moved 750 containers at approx $5000 each, so you lost ~3.75 million, but the fuel would have only cost approx 0.3 to 1.5 million USD depending on where you fill up).
For short trips (sub 1000km) I suspect they'd probably use cheaper, less-energy-dense ni-mh batteries as they are safer and cost less than half as much for a comparable charge.
Check the conversion of the energy content to usable energy. More of the Wh of the batteries become motive force than the Wh of the bunker fuel. Your conclusion isn't wrong; the density of the energy storage (be it bunker fuel as chemical energy storage, or batteries as chemical energy storage) matters.
I don’t have paper handy to check but in your bunker->electric conversion are you factoring in the (generally much higher) conversion loss from hydrocarbon to useful energy?
Edit: looks like they’re more efficient than most ICE at around 50%. That at least cuts down the cost spread a fair bit.
On the flip side, the amount of materials, metals, and energy necessary to produce enough batteries to replace current fossil fuel usages, are order of magnitude larger than the current world production and known reserves.
This presentation does ballpark analysis of the problem:
Replacing the entire fossil fuel system is a big job.
But, the fact that this guy mentios the gold standard, criticizes the EU, the WEF, and talks about EROEI means he's mostly a conspiracy theorist.
It's a repeated pattern to say "big numbers mean this is impossible!". Solar PV was impossible, Wind Power was impossible, EVs were impossible, on and on and on.
His numbers aren't wrong as far as I can tell, but he's just repeating the same things that people who think it's a good idea are saying, then adding on the lie that "they never considered this, the fools, they'll doom us all".
About 25 minutes in he reveals that we'll need to double our electricity production.
Except we know that, we also know that it means we'd need half as much primary power, since we wouldn't be wasting so much of it as heat.
Here's a 2018 government report looking at this phenomenon in electrifying the US. This is entirely typical of real work in this area, despite his attempts to imply that clueless beaurocrats are just making things up.
edit: I particularly enjoy his "The ERoEI for renewable energy systems is much lower than fossil fuel energy systems. Renewable energy systems may not be strong enough to replace fossil fuels".
Oh, it's not strong enough. That weak, puny renewable electricity.
Followed up with "energy is becoming more expensive". Wow, no wonder he's so pessimistic.
This seems to be quite a shallow analysis. Evaluating a technology for use at scale requires a whole-system analysis of the core material factors; Resource use, energy use, and labour. Price is insufficient and often irrelevant. Also, when trying to solve urgent problems like climate change, it is a bad idea to rely on projected technological developments and cost reductions that may materialise too late or never.
With the amount of lithium required in batteries for ships, and the issues with recycling them, is green hydrogen/synthetic fuel not a better option overall? Or are these options too expensive?
Green hydrogen has terrible economics. With green hydrogen you take $1 of electricity to get $.50 of hydrogen bond energy and then run it through a fuel cell to get $.25 of propulsion. It is worse when you account for compressing the hydrogen, and much worse if you burn or convert the hydrogen to liquid fuel. With batteries, you take $1 of electricity and get $.90 of propulsion. Hydrogen is not realistic.
I agree, it only make sense if you have so much excess solar that you don’t know what to do with it in peak production.
Even then, you need to factor in the depreciation of the hydrogen facilities.
But is it completely green? I live fairly close to a huge lithium deposit, and while people from western world are enjoying the benefits of EVs, people around here might get their habitat destroyed.
In my book it’s not green if it’s not completely green. And EVs are certainly not.
Yeah, shipping does seem to be one of the main applications where green hydrogen actually makes sense. Battery chemistry should improve to the point where basically no road transport should need anything else over the next 20 years (we're basically already there for most car applications, still some improvement needed for trucking etc., although maybe battery swaps is a better model there anyway). Ships need huge amounts of energy, but have the space to deal with hydrogen's poor volumetric density, unlike aviation, where I think synthetic fuel is a better option.
Ammonia or methane would be a better choice. Hydrogen is a bit awkward for mobile applications, at least while metal hydrides are expensive and made of scarce materials.
Well Boundary Layer Technologies (a Y Combinator portfolio company) is working on that. But it will never be more than a small niche market for high-value, time-sensitive cargoes.
They're aiming for the niche market that's slower than air freight but faster than displacement hull cargo ships. Not sure if that market is really large enough for a viable business, but we'll see.
In a slow-moving ginormous long-distance vehicle the size of a modern container ship wouldn't redox flow batteries be an attractive option, which are already substantially cheaper by requiring less of those costly electrode materials?
I looked at that, the energy density seems too low. 10-20Wh/kg vs 260 for lithium ion batteries. For as the internet told me cargo ships carry 30 days worth of fuel. I think I figured flow batteries could power a cargo ship for a couple of days. Which isn't enough.
Interesting idea though in that you could pump the two chemical solutions into the ship. Sail it to it's destination and then pump the used fluids out and replace them with fresh. And it's not a bomb like lithium ion batteries.
I bet we are nowhere near the engineering limit of flow battery energy density. It is fairly limited in research compared to the various conventional battery technologies. I think a 5x increase in energy density over Vanadium redox (to 100-200 Wh/kg, 75 Wh/kg is achievable by some chemistries already) would put it in striking distance.
Use sodium batteries in large vehicles like semis and cargo ships and in stationary applications such as buildings. Keep lithium for applications where weight is critical such as electric airplanes and cars.
"But since even the most efficient internal combustion ship engines are no more than 50% efficient, a [...]"
But how efficient are the coal, nuclear, or natural gas needed to charge the batteries? At best 60%? Was it mid 20s or mid 30s for PWR nukes? 50% thermal efficiency is insanely good.
And the battery ship? To the 90% battery efficiency, knock a few trips through a transformer (95%) and power converter. So 0.6 * 0.95 * 0.95 * 0.9 -
= 0.48% thermal efficiency
By contrast shipping fuel is a waste product that is going to get made whether or not the ships sail (i.e. largely free to produce energetically).
Talk to me about cleaning ships S emissions and Ill get excited. In the meantime put all those Li ion batteries into hybrid versions of Ford F350 and heavy trucks used by contractors. That will make a much larger dent in CO2 emissions.
To expand on heavy container ship engine design, which is worth a look for its own sake:
> Fuel consumption at maximum power is 0.278 lbs per hp per hour (Brake Specific Fuel Consumption). Fuel consumption at maximum economy is 0.260 lbs/hp/hour. At maximum economy the engine exceeds 50% thermal efficiency. That is, more than 50% of the energy in the fuel in converted to motion. [2]
I think what is making these companies move towards other options is their bottom line - if they don't have to spend on fuel, why should they? (By the way a lot of what I've seen for the generation so far is in stuff like power-generating "sails" which are really interesting, so maybe not even relying on land sources)
This isn't good for their bottom line. The efficiency of batteries is comparable to shipping oil at best, and electricity is rather expensive while shipping oil is almost free.
Shipping oil is filthy, dirty, hard to use. To a good approximation one wants it. To a better approximation no one on land can use it because if its high S content precludes it from being used on land (illegal and you need something that can deal with high Sulphuric acid)
Its a byproduct of the refinery that only shipping can use (they can and do burn straight diesel too). It is really very cheap. [1]
Ban it, if you must. But without market shenanigans itll never be cheaper to use a massive battery.
[1] without looking at the price, I wouldn't be surprised if its currently gone up in price. In Europe right now anyone who can burn it on shore is eyeing it and the EU has suspended many environment regulation. But thats a blip; once Germany's economy collapses the EU's energy needs will be much smaller
Shipping fuel is a filthy byproduct no one really wants. Some of it can be cracked to other products but, in the end, if it ain't burned on ships it will be just burned onshore, probably a third world country, in whatever burner can deal with its acidity or in a big blowtorch to heaven
Considering how dirty the fuel used to power such ships is, this would be a boon indeed (discounting from whatever effects it might have on the cost and availability of resources required to electrify other parts of transportation, of course).
If you want to replace the 80 MW of a big engine [1] you'll need quite some square meters.
Let's assume the solar array operates at some medium yield of 4,5 kWh / (sqm * day) [2].
Assuming you have some big enough battery on board to evenly supply the solar harvest of the sunny hours over 24h this results in a contant power output of: ~ 0,18 kW / sqm
So to replace the 80 MW engine you'd need a solar array of more than 400000 sqm.
If you tow several floating arrays that are 100 m wide and 200 m long, you'd need 20 of those.
Sounds like a challenge at least for the huge vessels.
Ministry for the Future is a book chock full of optimistic can-do idealism. One of the ideas floated is container ships with (on-ship) wind and solar renewables that just move really really slow. Personally I think for many transportation needs that would be find.
And they start chopping up bug ships to make smaller more regional ones. Which jives with the analysis here. But given that bigger boats afaik almost always are more efficient moving through the water (short of hydrofoiled or wing-in-groumd craft), I didnt totally get this notion.
If there is an application for hydrogen, i'd say the container ships are it. The fuel cell gives great efficiency and hydrogen storage has higher kwh/kg than batteries.
How will the hydrogen be generated? It's only green if generated from solar, wind or hydro power. Generating it from natural gas produces more pollution than burning natural gas directly.
Isn't this just FUD? A quick google tells me that ICE cars catch fire much more often than electric vehicles do. Although I have no idea how often container ships catch fire.
> Isn't this just FUD? A quick google tells me that ICE cars catch fire much more often than electric vehicles do. Although I have no idea how often container ships catch fire.
No, the FUD is actually the other way around - fires in ICE models are always found to be electrical faults.
The only exception I can think of is the Ford Kuga from 2019 or so; and even then, it was down to manufacturing/design defect in the turbo, not the engine itself.
Surely this is a distinction without a difference though? Nobody is driving a disembodied engine with nothing attached to it around, what matters is whether or not ICE cars have more faults.
Also, electrical systems are pretty intertwined with any modern ICE engine - you'd have to go back to crank starts to remove that.
> Surely this is a distinction without a difference though?
I don't think so - ICE cars are going to have much less wiring (that can catch fire) than electric vehicles.
IOW, if you think poor wiring in cars is a fire problem now, you can't also claim that cars with more wiring will be a smaller fire problem.
Hence I called it FUD - If cars are mostly catching fire due to electrical problems, putting more electrical components (like wiring) that carries more current (max in an ICE car is maybe 60A for starter cables, and 10A - 15A for everything else), it's pure FUD that increasing the wiring, and increasing the current carried in the electrical system will cause fewer fires.
I just don't see how adding more fire-causing components, and increasing the current is going to result in fewer fires.
the danger of EV is spontaneous fire. It needs only one faulty battery cell to short due to abuse/overcharge and lead to runaway reaction and burning of the whole thing down.
Imagine you are sleeping at your house, parked your EV in garage and it catches fire and burns your whole house down.
That's an electrical fire. ICE engines rarely spontaneously combust when parked in your garage.
In fact, I cannot think of it ever happening. The most recent thing that matches your perception was a Ford model that was know for catching fire when overheating.
Indeed. Energy sometimes escapes its confines. This usually results in fire.
The failure modes of EV batteries are probably quite different to those on ships (ships don't collide with other things nearly as often as cars collide with other things, for one). I'm sure ships have their own issues (e.g. falling into disrepair due to lax regulation requirements at the lowest-priced-ports-of-convenience), but you can't really compare an EV ship with an EV car.
https://www.fleetzero.com/ is proposing to build electric ships and, yes, swap batteries. They build the batteries in the form factor of a shipping container, so existing port infrastructure can be used to perform the swap.
Your first point is a good one, these ships base at locations specifically designed for transferring heavy loads. Adding battery swapping to the to-do list at container ports does not seem unreasonable at all.
To your second point, let it always be remembered that the first electric busses, from the early 20th century, used a battery swap system. It can be done, especially on industrial vehicles. Personally I don’t understand why it isn’t being done today for electrified bus networks.
How do you refuel at sea or even anchored near port? The recent West Coast US delays would be an example of a situation of that, along with the Suez Canal delay.
How do batteries disperse/degrade or get recovered at sea when the inevitable cargo loss or hull loss occurs?
Possibly the answer to both of those is systemic - but it is at least that.
I don't think at-sea refuelling is common for commercial ships, but if needed presumably a electric equivalent of an oiler could be made, with a electric cable instead of a hose used to transfer power from one ship to the other.
For the other issue... probably no perfect solution.
Its not really analogous though: smaller vehicles are dominated by aerodynamic concerns, and otherwise a cargo profile that's totally different (people).
Whereas ships are dominated by the cargo profile: shipping containers.
The article mentions 300MW, which is a large connection to be sure but not unheard of. At that size it would be a scheduled load, like the pumps at a pumped hydro station or the potlines at an aluminium smelter.
I imagine these being charged by a bunch of diesel generators at the port, as it is cheaper than upgrading power infrastructure to supply that much power...
What are you talking about? Most lithium either comes from conventional mining in Australia or from underground salt water in deserts that is evaporated.
The first is no more polluting then any other type of mining.
The second can cause some problems but I would call it polluting.
You’re right, but not the way you think.
10 oil spills from massive tankers don’t even begin to match one lithium mine for one week. It’s insaneX and disastrous, and largely ignored.
