Is battery technology ready for widespread use in electric cars?

of a million. Clearly there are a lot more drivers  using alternative lower emission cars.

out and about. So definitely noticing more and more  electric cars on the streets. Amina: I've even seen them in car parks, so like, multi-story car parks they've  got a few aisles dedicated towards it so it's definitely on the rise. Laura: That's interesting. so I  live in quite a rural location and I can think of one electric charging station near me and I know one person  that owns a Tesla - which I call a milk float!

I think there's a taxi company near me that runs  electric cars but it's a bit of a challenge in rural areas where you can do an awful lot of  miles and range isn't quite there yet. That's what worries me about electric cars a little  bit: if we're doing quite a long drive over a few mountain passes what if we get stuck? How are we  meant to charge it up? Aneeqa: Yeah, I mean even in cities! In rural areas obviously that's a disaster but I  also think that's an issue that people need to be

thinking about in cities because where are you  putting all these chargers? Like, if you're living in an apartment, if you're in a street that has  no parking like terraced houses is... that's really common in Manchester if you have, like, a detached  house with a car parking space I think it's pretty straightforward to, you know, install these charging  points but if you're on these streets where you

just can't have wires all over the road to plug in  your cars. I think people need to be looking at

that as well well. Amina: I suppose hybrids are best for  that then you get the best of both worlds when you can do the electric you do the electric and when  not you've got back up yeah it makes you wonder though if there's been that four-fold increase  in electric car ownership or alternative fueled car ownership in the last five years is that a  trend that's going to continue sort of roughly doubling every year or is it going to increase  dramatically and suddenly 90 of the nation will

be driving electric cars i think unless there's  there's going to be a government incentive involved in it i don't think it's going to  increase that much like rapidly i think it is on the upward trend and i think it probably  will keep going that way but like a massive overnight increase i don't think it will happen  unless the government gets involved in it and gives people incentives to go electric i think  i'll also have to to to meet the regulation

and the legislation that's coming through but also  i think there's a supply issue so the transistor shortage that we've got has kind of impacted the  car market because cars are so advanced they need mini computers in there to actually do all  the controls and displays so will will we even be able to meet the demand actually  i think is is the other problem right now and develop that infrastructure in time because i  don't know about you but the roads near my house

are atrocious so if they can't even fix the roads  after so many years will they be putting all of these kind of infrastructure necessities for  electric cars in place in what 19 years is it like 20 30 they want to stop selling combustible  cars so that means that they need to have that infrastructure in place quite rapidly and it seems  quite a big project to have charging ports on every street corner basically i've known you for  10 years and in 10 years your road has gradually

just gotten worse and not better so you know  they don't fix the roads and when they do they fix about a two meter stretch and even that is not  fixed properly so i'm waiting with bated breath to see what they they do with the electric  car infrastructure that they need to develop so has that stopped you from driving anika i  don't have a license to be fair so i've never driven just because i've never had the need to  drive i don't think i can blame the state of

my roads on that i think that's just more me being  me but i think they're good in a way electric cars because they stop the emissions of the co2 and  of the nox in our cities so at least in cities where they're very densely populated and people  are using traditional fuel burning cars that can at least improve the air quality for the people  living in the cities which i think is only a good thing you can argue whether it's displacing it  to other places where the the power stations are

and things like that or the fuel that they need to  extract the the resources for the cars themselves you know are we just offsetting it somewhere else  and putting our problems in for somewhere else is another question but at least for major cities i  think that's a good thing but i also think they need to be investing a lot more and having better  public transport and things like that that people can use more accessible for everyone definitely  and affordable yeah i'd agree with that i'll tell

you something that surprised me when i was doing  some research for this episode i started to wonder when electric cars were first on the uk market  they've only really become trendy in the last few years i think antonia's stats pointed that out and  it sounds like tesla introduced their 87 000 pound car back in 2008 which sounds astronomical to me  even now back then it would have been even more expensive and then nissan leaf came not long after  that and it was a lot more affordable and that

paved the way for other electric cars but it's  actually it's not new technology i did not know this no one's really pinned down exactly when the  electric car was first produced but it seems to

have come from a london-based inventor in 1884.  what 1884. it's a long long time ago right and we think of it as a modern technology it's only  just becoming trendy but there was actually a bit of a boom for it in 1900s i think about a third  of the cars in the usa were electric wow so why didn't you pick with electric cars back then why  did we go to petrol diesel oh apparently they were mostly in cities and they only had a range of in  miles sort of in the teens so 15-ish miles and a

top speed of about 15 miles an hour as well and i  can cycle faster than that and further than that and i'm not a pro cyclist either so like the  average cyclist can outstrip a car and obviously road infrastructure was expanding and then henry  ford came on the scene and figured out a way to manufacture combustion cars more effectively  and people wanted to get around so the more powerful combustion engine then just became the  thing sounds like electric vehicles have always

been there in some capacity for example the  milk float that i mentioned um it's not just teslas have they always been electric i think  so the ones on my streets definitely were yeah no i never what thing is they can creep around  quietly early in the morning cannot wake people up that distinctive kind of like sound you know  you know that like from the hum kind of thing whoosh nothing there you go having just spent the  last few minutes talking about trends in electric

car use and ownership is increasing and all the  infrastructure we may need to facilitate that but really not new they're really old it'll  probably tie in with how publicity goes and how the promotion of a certain thing goes like  in the past it's not had that promotion so even though that technology has been there and it's  been accessible it's not had that promotion so therefore it's not been pushed it just goes  back to bringing the awareness for everyone

i think was more a drive upon drive  to to travel further which was why they they fell out of favor because people wanted  to go their own places they didn't want to stay on public transport around that time that must have  been when there were electrified trams as well and that could have been good to get  around the city but then cars became so fashionable you could have their own mobility  independence like amino said it's kind of got that

advertising push but i think we are traveling  more as well the world is getting smaller because we are able to travel further that's very true  i guess it's not just about how the technology develops is how society develops as well and  what society wants out of the things around them but right now we're pushing oh um zero carbon  so right now we're saying oh well you know going with electric cars it produces less co2  gases and therefore it's it's more environmentally

friendly and that's the side of the coin that  we're being shown but that's not entirely true because the whole process of lithium extraction  is is completely not environmentally friendly and then you also have the issue of once you are  done with your lithium batteries what to do with them we don't have a sustainable way of recycling  our lithium it is a finite source and they're essentially just sort of ticking time bombs to  be honest because we don't really know how to

extract the lithium out of the minute in  a correct manner there's talks of using nuclear decommissioning robotics to help with the  decommissioning of the lithium batteries because they are they're explosives and i don't know how  many people know about that everyone knows about electric cars coming onto the market and then  being more environmentally friendly but i i don't think there's enough promotion around the other  side of of this conversation the whole life cycle

of the lithium batteries it's not discussed and  it's a very big topic i remember hearing stories about if people were charging their mobile phone  which obviously uses a lithium-ion battery as well and they were of doing it near the bed or it  kind of got tangled up in the covers of bed sheets being set on fire i will not be charging my bed  and charging my bed charging my phone on my bed from now on i regularly do i'm quite worried you  could try and charge a bed yeah something else

yeah apparently you shouldn't even do it like on  on carpet and stuff you should do it like on hard surfaces hard and unflammable ones i guess yeah  but i mean the amount of times that i've left mine somewhere i shouldn't when it was charging and  it's been fine and you wonder how much of a risk it is and how much technology's improved since  those stories because i thought i must have read that was about five years ago but i read that's  also how they recycle the lithium is that they

either burn it or like they don't burn the lithium  but they burn the batteries to try and extract the lithium or use that really harsh chemicals it's  very energy intensive to to actually produce the lithium it's not environmentally friendly so  the vast majority of lithium that's produced they use um the the salt plains to produce it  and it's really cost effective like it's really cheap for them to use it they use the salt flat it  takes about 12 to 18 months to actually be able to

extract the lithium from those places because  they'll just move it from pool to pool to pool but it uses about five hundred thousand gallons  to produce one tonne of lithium it's not five thousand gallons of water five thousand gallons  of water to be able to produce one ton of lithium the tesla batteries they kind of say on average  it's about 12 kilograms of lithium per battery so if you think of it that way it's depriving places  of water that they need to be able to get on with

their day-to-day things to be able to grow their  crops to be able to have that source of income it's depriving those areas of their sort of means  so it's not exactly fair to say okay well you've got lithium so we're going to extract the lithium  from you and whatever you're doing with your life put that on pause also there's really toxic  chemicals which are being released into the water system then by all of this there's been  research in america which has said where the

lithium extraction plants are up to 150 kilometers  away they can still detect the the chemicals from the the plant so it it has a widespread effect  on the local area um there's lithium extraction just in america or is it elsewhere around the  globe it's elsewhere so um there are three main areas where it happens so i know it happens in  chile i think peru as well maybe i know it's just generally like the atacama desert so are  they places where the lithium is just easiest

to get to you know a little bit like there was  the whole controversy around fracking a few years ago that we could find all this difficult to get  to gas in the uk that we could use for fuel and everyone was against that because it didn't  seem really feasible it was a bit dangerous are there other lithium deposits that we could get  to but they might be too difficult we have some in cornwall not a lot i think the main reason why  there's a lot of focus on these three countries

or that area is because they have an abundance  of lithium whereas there are other places where there are deposits of lithium they're very hard  to extract but um it's not abundant and therefore the infrastructure that needs to go into place  to be able to uh extract it it's not economical and this is the other thing these countries  perhaps don't have that much regulation in place congo was also another one i think where there's  lithium extractions and they use child labor there

so there's not there's not like a proper  regulation in place where um it can be done in a controlled manner whereas if it's somewhere  in europe there will be stringent rules and regulations around it so the extraction process  will be a lot more expensive in these parts i think that's also a bit of a cultural discussion  isn't it developed countries with the developed safety measures and labor laws and all that  have had the privilege to develop unconstrained

with fossil fuels and so they just have been  technologically developing that way and so they've had to find these safety measures whereas in these  countries they are going to be a bit more manual um because they've not got that infrastructure yet  so as the developed countries are decarbonizing faster they're shifting a burden onto probably  less developed countries that have all the resources and they're offshoring their carbon  emissions and also the responsibility so mining

happening in chile in democratic republic congo  they are not in the same level of economic wealth so when you talk about offshoring carbon  emissions you mean that like the uk calculates the carbon emissions from our nation based on what  we do on our own island and anything else that we buy in so a resource from elsewhere we don't  tend to count that in the nation's own emissions i think it gets quite difficult really if you if  you're able to track the actual demand and where

it came from you know having that transparent  supply chain it would be great but at the moment i don't think we're there yet so we kind of have  to look territorially what are our missions within the land certain things that are more global like  aviation they have their own sort of category of emissions and they they're they're a fake country  like bitcoin mining is also like its own little nation in terms of the league table of carbon  emissions or greenhouse gas emissions if we're

having all of these really quite urgent really  near-term targets that we have to meet then the demand for these kind of resources is just going  to keep increasing as the demand for electric cars for example increases so one fact i read which  was really shocking from the international energy agency they said that the demand for lithium would  increase 42 times by 2040 compared to 2020 and i think yeah we mentioned chile but they're also  i think scoping out portugal and the western us

i think for for lithium mining as well there's  going to be a lot of pushback from the existing communities in chile but also those communities  in in portugal and the us as well similar to fracking when we had that pushed here will those  communities want that as a person who is involved with the nuclear industry i find it completely  bizarre how they are able to promote something without going through its whole life cycle so with  the nuclear plant we have to from the very get-go

we have our safety reports for pre-commissioning  and pre-construction and all the way through down to decommissioning we know where our waste is  going to go how it's going to be dealt with the whole lot from from the initial investment  everything is planned out and if everything is not planned out you don't get the thumbs up and you  can't you can't go whereas it almost seems as if the governments have started to back electric  cars without actually going through the whole

process and saying okay well where is the lithium  coming from is it sustainable what are we going to do with these lithium batteries once they are out  of use how are we going to recycle it it doesn't seem like the whole thing has been thought through  it's like okay yes this is something that's good it's zero carbon we can match on to this let's  promote this and then afterwards let's just sort

of like as an afterthought all of this seems to be  coming through which to me it's a bizarre concept it's it's really good that the nuclear industry  has done that and also for for a young industry relatively to other things it's done really  well and i think maybe that's something that that needs to be picked up on is developing  that fuller picture i know that there are some companies that are looking into how they're going  to extract the lithium afterwards you can have

different ways of using the lithium so it's not  just lithium as a metal but it could be a lithium compound but what they find is companies are so  secretive about what they put in their batteries and how they make it that if you just had a lot of  lithium batteries they could be a mixed chemistry when i say battery chemistry you know there's  the cathode and anode in redox cycles just points out that anonymous are chemists in the  scheme so uh we tend to be a bit faster than

some of our chemistry terms thank you thanks so  so also electrolyte let's just throw that word out there electrolyte they also exist sometimes  they contain lithium like a hexafluorophosphate which is difficult to recycle because how do  you get all the bits pound you've got fluoro the the fluorine phosphate all really explosive  dangerous stuff so like amino says if there was a better plan on if we were going to make a really  energy efficient battery well energy dense

battery but you also need to think what are the  consequences afterwards i know there's a lot of government investment into battery technologies  the faraday fund which is just over 300 million pounds to be invested in figuring out i guess  how to make batteries more efficient and how to recycle them efficiently as well and maybe  use other resources i have a statistic from a website called spectrum.triplee.org that says  that battery recycling isn't actually all that

profitable and there are about 180 kilotons of  lithium-ion batteries available for recycling in 2019 but just over half were recycled and  most of those plants are in china and south korea so it's not even something we're doing  a lot in europe at the minute it sounds like which i think is what you were saying before  isn't it there's a lot of investment into it there's also the difference between  putting it through the recycling

process and how much you actually recover  of the minerals you want out of it so if you take like the lithium manganese oxide mix that's  very cheap because it's not using cobalt except you can't actually recover the lithium from it  because of the way they've built it whereas with lithium cobalt you can but then the difficulty  comes with the where you sourcing your cobalt it's one of those it's one of those problems  that you just kind of do we have to solve this

problem do we have to go down the battery  route is is the question there's so much complexity there's so much like commercially  sensitive as well that can we even get companies to sort of open up that information or  do we have to extend the producers responsibility yeah i think i quite like it if i could just send  my battery back to the place that i got it from and they could deal with it rather than me  sitting there i pretty much have loads of

old mobile phones piling up in this house because  i'm not entirely sure the best place to take them to recycle them and uh to do it responsibly and  protect whatever data may be on there because i haven't wiped the memory correctly i think that  is the concept i think car companies are going to build their own recycling plant of some sort and  how they go about it and stuff i i don't think it's identified but vw they produce not only  their own engines but audis and skodas and you

know whatever falls under their umbrella all of  them are supposed to go to their recycling plant so i think the concept is that the producers will  take responsibility for them but i don't know how actually like how practical that actually is  and how much they will actually be able to do and also that still doesn't  address the sourcing issue i think it's tough for the people living in  those areas in the like salt flats and things

like that whether it's chili bolivia argentina i  think in some ways they all come together which i think they do have like a collective i think  it's like pluri national observatory of andean andean i don't know how to say that salt flats and  they're kind of like environmental and indigenous activists who are working in in those lithium  producing countries they are also suffering from climate change they're suffering probably even  worse than you know we are over here i think they

have a lot of lithium but they have a lot of you  know other other scientific value cultural things other environmental values as well there and if  they came together and just said no and managed to stop people from extracting then we'd have no  choice than to recycle and maybe that's what's needed and i know it's not easy for people just  to say no i'm sure they're already saying no but big powerful corporations obviously have power  over you know these people so i don't think

it's that easy but maybe if these communities  are able to stand up and maybe other people from outside this community stand up with them to kind  of keep away the big extractors maybe that would force the other companies to start recycling more  yeah i guess we saw in the uk some of that um back in sort of the 80s when the coal miners went on  strike so the call for electricity production um and there were sort of rolling brown outs  across the uk that had to be dealt with and i

whole mining communities are built up around  those mines right and they suddenly didn't exist anymore because they didn't have a job and there  was nothing else for them to go into work-wise and that created a bit of a weird blip in  the uk's history and you'd think we would want to avoid repeating that for the nations  right at the start we were talking about the rise of the electric cars and how there are more  cars on the road than they used to be in general

and how people seem so reliant on their car rather  than alternative means of transport so if we're thinking about reducing our reliance on lithium  extraction and these resources in general can we imagine a world where maybe public transport  actually works for us and we don't have to spend three hours switching about five different trains  just to do what would take two hours in the car i guess we all need to live in in very highly  populated cities for that to be the most

easy way to get around places because that's where  typically the best public transport is i've found like in rural areas often the the transport isn't  that great and it's really difficult to get to remote places whereas if people are sharing  cars or you know living in places that it's more well connected there's more stops on the bus  or there's more you know places that the trains go to then that's possible but for remote rural  areas is that really possible i don't know but i

think that's the only way that we could reduce  the cars on the road right if we live in areas that are well serviced by public transport i think  a couple of years ago we were talking about how there's a huge global um urbanization that people  are leaving rural places and going into cities but you know in some countries where they have this  hyper urbanization they're not using public transport because they're the newer rich and they  all want their cars they want that independence

kind of like back in the late 1800s when there  was an electric car option but it was slow and it wasn't easy to charge and now we get back  to here again so maybe it's you know that cultural shift as well if you are moving to cities you  also think about how to changing their dance that's a bit of a theme for some of the  podcast episodes we've done so far that none of what we're talking about is ever black  and white it always gets really complicated and

it's not just the science and the engineering  it also gets tied up in politics and social considerations as well and economics i feel like  that means we've deviated so far off topic from our technical discussion that that might be quite  a good place to draw the conversation to a close so having started off with a very factual  discussion about how many cars are on the road how electric cars have increased in ownership in  recent years and how it's not even new technology

and some of the resources required to make that  rise in i want to say rise of machines making obscure references in this podcast that's what  we do best i mean it is the rise of the machine really once they all become self-driving as well  very irobot another obscure movie reference that's not that obscure or maybe it is for for you know  it being how many years ago now i don't don't say antonio how many years ago it was it's uh it  feels like yesterday it was yes who have not been

awake for the last few decades yeah i think we'll  leave it there thanks for listening and find us on twitter if you want to carry on this very random  conversation the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they  do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it  would really help us out if you could rate us leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was  sponsored by no one but if you're interested in

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