r/science • u/Sort_of_Frightening • Sep 10 '23

Chemistry Lithium discovery in U.S. volcano could be biggest deposit ever found

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/lithium-discovery-in-us-volcano-could-be-biggest-deposit-ever-found/4018032.article
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u/spambearpig Sep 10 '23

Hope so. Lots of promising battery tech on the horizon. Might take a while to filter down to en-masse usage across the auto industry. Lithium is very tried and tested and granted, it did catch fire and spew acid in some of those tests but it’s the devil we know. But I’ll be damned pleased when they crack it up a notch with battery tech.

I’m holding out hope for synthetic liquid fuels and fuel cell electric motor cars. So we use renewables to drive the chemistry of making a petrol-like liquid fuel (kerosine or similar maybe) from mostly just air and water, we fill the car at a pump station with something like 50-100L and we can drive 500-1000 miles on electric power from a fuel cell before filling up at the pumps. Your ‘battery’ is now a tank of liquid so the car is so so much lighter and you get all the performance benefits of electric motors plus the car farts water vapour out the back. That for me, is the golden recipie for cars. Then I can have a sub 1000kg, rear wheel drive sports car with 300bhp and a load of mod-cons, good mileage and more luggage space than the equivalent petrol car. My god it’d be beautiful. No more charging wires, expiring batteries to dispose of and we can use the infastrucutre we already have to transport and administer liquid fuel.

One day maybe!

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u/RichardPeterJohnson Sep 10 '23

Your mixing of SI and U.S. Customary UoMs is activating my fake OCD.

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u/mdwstoned Sep 10 '23

Your abbreviations are triggering my anxiety

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u/vapescaped Sep 10 '23

At the heart of it, any fuel or storage device will contain a lot of energy(shocker). Fuel or battery, they will all burn.

Batteries are recycled, which gives it a leg up over fuel, which is gone once you use it.

Cost wise, it is far more expensive to transport liquid fuel than it is to transport electricity. Also, we already need to expand and update our electrical grid anyway, we are energy guzzlers regardless of if we use electric vehicles. It is also less safe to transport, and does contribute to increases traffic and wear and tear on the roads.

I'm definitely with ya that we are a solid decade behind the curve on battery technology.

A friend just drove cross country in his rivian. He said with the right charger he could charge at a rate of 400 miles of range per hour. I find that really impressive.

Only bringing up counterpoints. There is still a large "fuel crowd", and yea, the stigma does need to be addressed. I feel it's akin to the carburetor crowd. When fuel injection came out, a lot of people hated it. But once they understood it, popularity soared.

I will claim some of what I feel are hard truths, feel free to disagree or dispute:

The very nature of a combustion engine, or even hydrogen fuel cell, will always be less efficient than a motor and battery. Electricity is cheaper to produce and transport than any fuel in terms of energy, and electric motors are far more efficient than any alternatives(hydrogen fuel cells reach 60%, not counting production, and electric motors are 75%, combustion being 30-35%)

Electric vehicles have far fewer moving parts and require less maintenance. That doesn't mean they are more reliable, yet, because they are packed with the latest technology, but it took almost a century to get gas vehicles as reliable as they are today, and modern gas vehicles are loaded with tech that does act up regularly.

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u/RexManning1 Sep 10 '23

I was a proponent of HFC tech for vehicles at the turn of the century and it just didn’t pan out. I have an EV (about to order a second one) and ESS for my home so I’m all about the battery technology. I think personal storage utilization is something that can save a lot of money over time and help decentralize some of the utility in some countries like the U.S where it’s privatized in a lot of places.

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u/spambearpig Sep 10 '23

The HFC problem is all chemistry at the core. Pumping hydrogen around is a wacky idea so how to make our hydrogen safe and stable enough? Many things have been tried for decades but what we really want is to have our hydrogen hanging off a chain of carbon atoms in a liquid form. And getting that done in a way that competes with digging it up as liquid fossils has proven to be extremely difficult. If they can make an energy efficient enough way to do this at scale, it’ll take off. Materials science at the most cutting edge, exploring catalysts in quantum mechanics models. It’s what my Dad does not specifically for the auto industry but in academia.

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u/RexManning1 Sep 10 '23

I agree with you. I was hoping they would find a way to stabilize the fuel cell, but it never happened. Now we just have to complete the move to get away from the rare metals.

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u/spambearpig Sep 10 '23

I think the day will come. It might take 30 years but in a world where renewable energy is becoming prolific I can see that this model has big benefits. So when the chemistry catches up if it really is a better way, I believe we will end up, adopting it sooner or later. That’s if we don’t invent, magical sci-fi crystals that contain limitless power or something crazy like that.

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u/RexManning1 Sep 10 '23

I’m sure. Everything will eventually happen. Whether it’s during my lifetime or not is another story. For now, I will keep using LiPO batteries for my home and cars until there is better technology. Even though they use rare earth metals, it’s still a much better solution than non-renewables.

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u/tinyLEDs Sep 10 '23

My understanding isnt making the fuel work, but more like setting up infrastructure that can support consumers.

Everywhere is already set up for electricity and petroleum fuels. Hydrogen would need a massive new network.

See my comment above. HFC will be "a thing", but only where a corridor of support can be established. It works for trucking, butnot in consumer vehicles.

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u/blastermaster555 Sep 10 '23

Like having a turbine engine in a car, it's a cool concept, but is beaten out by better technologies.

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u/Volodux Sep 10 '23

Synthetic fuel is viable for some applications, but burning fuel is extremely innefficient. If you power process by fossil fuels, you burn more then you get (but yes, you "turn coal to fuel).

Power by renewablea? One liter of gasoline takes at least (calculating with 100% eff.) 13kWh to make, and gives you 15-20km? Or you can use it to charge EV directly with maybe 10kWh (roughly 40 to 60km range).

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u/spambearpig Sep 10 '23

Liquid fuel method has many advantages. It’s very hard to store electricty, especially from renewables. But you can put the liquid in a tank and leave it there. It’s very inefficient to transport electricty over long distances, but you can ship a tanker full of liquid fuel, and that turns out far less energy inefficient. So if in some areas you had more solar power than you knew what to do with, why not make liquid synthetic fuel? The bottom line efficiency at the point of using the fuel is not the whole sum at all.

The more we expand, renewable energy, the more that we will have way too much sometimes and too little other times. We will also be able to generate much more power than we need via renewables if we put our minds to it.

So if we managed to generate enormous amounts of solar in the Sahara desert, for example, a world that turns it into synthetic fuel doesn’t produce hundreds of millions of batteries that later needs to be disposed off and they didn’t have to mine all those raw materials to do so.

So your point is not wrong, but it does not make this decision simple.

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u/Volodux Sep 10 '23

Yes, those are special applications. Liquid fuel has it uses and it makes sense to develop it.

But if batteries get cheaper, it makes more sense (imagine 100kWh battery in each home) as batteries are more efficient. Fuell cella are also interesting, but I consider them as batteries.

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u/Ad_Honorem1 Sep 11 '23

There are a lot more energy storage options than just batteries and fuel. I personally think, at least for stationary energy storage, mechanical storage options like flywheels and gravity based systems are the way to go.

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u/RexManning1 Sep 10 '23

I don’t think there will ever be more solar than we know what to do with.

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u/Oerthling Sep 10 '23

E-fuels won't be a thing. Far too inefficient.

It's a fig leave for legacy car manufacturers and fossil fuel industry.

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u/BluesFan43 Sep 10 '23

Years ago at a conference, the speaker was from one of the National Labs. He advocated sulfuric acid for fuel cells.

It was the second most produced chemical, has loads of hydrogen available, is easily transported, and could be safely adapted to filling stations.

So yeah, this is the answer.

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u/spambearpig Sep 10 '23

Sulfuric acid? So what sort of reaction did they have in mind? Cause it doesn’t burn and if you steal hydrogen off it you end up with a tank full of charged hydrogen sulfate ions? How did that work?