PlatinumZealot wrote: ↑06 Jan 2022, 15:13You havent been reading research papers I see. Ispano is correct on a number of things there.mzso wrote: ↑06 Jan 2022, 14:00What do you mean by that? You don't burn batteries so all the precious material will remain there. And as battery usage increases it will only be cheaper to recycle old worn out batteries.
This is a tad contradictory. Ethanol is bio-fuel. It's the only way we produce it. Albeit very costly.
Hydrogen is not really a fuel in the traditional sense. There's none just lying around to be used, and it's not even bio-produced by anone. You need to synthesize it. It's a very problematic power storage medium. Inefficient to produce store and use, compared to batteries.
ICE has little room for improvement at this point IMO, and that at great cost. Besides it can't match the potential of even fuel-cell EVs. By far the most significant improvement it had in practice in recent times was hybridization.
Lead researchers consider green-fuels to be the next stage for mobility because of the challenges and limitations with battery technology. Mining of the raw materials posion the environment just as much as oil if not more. Some mines are not ethicaly operated. Current batteries are extremely expensive to recycle. The Lithium is limited and in a few countries and will be another strained Geo-political resource in due time. Battery obseletion is an issue too, among other issues.
This has been discussed at length on here already but basically no major automaker is putting their eggs into one basket.
Jump to fifty seconds in the video below where a Professor in engineer does a way better explanation than I can do.
https://www.wusa9.com/video/entertainme ... wsource=cl
"Green fuels" are poison too, you just shift the environmental burden.
Take ethanol for instance, parts of the world are cutting down rainforest to grow it, here in the States we replaced MTBE in gasoline with at minimum, 10% of ethanol. This has lead to soil nutrient depletion (which requires fertilizers (not green)) and is leading to aquifer collapse as corn is a water intensive crop. Furthermore, nutrient runoff is causing water ways and a large portion of the Gulf of Mexico to go hypoxic, basically killing all living life.
Seaweed, to produce at any meaningful scale also becomes an industrialized process and requires fertilizations, create a monoculture. If not done in the ocean, it requires A LOT of water. At this point, it also requires more petroleum to manufacture than it produces in biofuel.
< geologist who worked on groundwater and surfacewater hydrology projects.
I love the IC, but I'm in the there is technically nothing that is "carbon zero" or "sustainable" at the scales at which we consume. It's a lot of green washing.