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“Of all races in an advanced stage of civilization, the American is the least accessible to long views… Always and everywhere in a hurry to get rich, he does not give a thought to remote consequences; he sees only present advantages… He does not remember, he does not feel, he lives in a materialist dream.”
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I am not sure there is any point in being desperate. I saw a chart that suggested that the US uses more FF energy than the entire estimated energy gain in all biomass from photosysnthesis in the US. In other words, if every square inch of US soil was planted with corn that you still wouldn't replace FF. There are no free lunches; and this is brutally true in energy. Ethanol from biomass is also BS.
All of this, PO, Climate change, the ethanol BS; indicates that humanity has to shift its mindset and it is not going to. If getting desperate is what counts it will happen when gas is $10+/gallon and sea levels have risen a foot and continuing to rise so a world wide moratorium closes all coal fired power stations.
Then people will be desperate!
If we had enough lead for all those electric car batteries, electric cars would be the way to go. An electric car with a fifty mile range for commuting, shopping, etc, and a van to take out of the garage once a month if you needed to drive a long ways without stopping someplace like work to charge your batteries for a few hours.
There is plenty of lead for run-arounds for everyone.
Advanced lead-acid like that from Firefly would use a lot less anyway, and in a light, specially designed vehicle give you plenty of range for most commutes and going shopping:
http://www.fireflyenergy.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5...
Background & History - fireflyenergy.com
The Japanese have always been doubtful about plug-ins, and have said why not go straight to all-electric.
Unfortunately car companies have emphasised the resource-constrained lithium and nickel metal hydride batteries, when if you want to make plug-ins zinc-air would do a better job and is not resource constrained.
"The Japanese have always been doubtful about plug-ins, and have said why not go straight to all-electric."
As best I can tell, that's partly due to Japan's small size & short travel distances, and partly just competitive FUD.
I'd be curious to see a better analysis of lithium supply limits. It appears to be plentiful in theory, though current suppliers are somewhat limited.
There are real resource limits for lithium, Nick, and to a lesser extent Nickel for NiMiH batteries.
Here is a discussion complete with references and sources on my blog:
http://energy-futures.blogspot.com/2008/02/resource-constraints-for-batt...
Unfortunately, lead for advanced lead acid batteries also seems to be in short supply, at least anytime soon:
http://energy-futures.blogspot.com/2008/02/resource-constraints-for-lead...
Zinc air seems the best option, or perhaps Sodium Nickel Chloride to some extent.
I suspect that if one were to rank order the number of trips - from shortest to longest, clustered in 5 or 10 mile increments - the average person (or the total motoring public in aggregate - it doesn't really make much difference which way you look at it) takes in a given time period (a year, say), you will very likely find that they take far more short trips than long trips.
Therefore, I think we need to just approach the whole problem differently. Instead of coming up with an EV that will work for both long and short trips, we need to be thinking in terms of providing people with small, inexpensive EVs that will just work for those short trips. Not everyone can walk or bike everywhere around their locality, all the time, and not everyone will be well served by mass transit for a long time to come, so we do need to at least be weaning them off of the habit of hopping into an SUV for a quick trip down to the post office or grocery store. For longer trips, unless someone is making such trips very often, it is going to have to make more sense for them to just rent a vehicle with the capacity to go long distances when they need it.
Now here's the thing. If we are talking about most people having small, inexpensive EVs with limited speed (maybe a little higher than the 25-35 mph that NEVs are limited to now, but certainly not much more than 55 mph) and limited range (maybe 25 miles or so), then that is less of a challenge than is coming up with EVs for everyone that can go several hundred miles at highway speeds. We just might be able to come up with enough materials for enough batteries for that.
As for the long-distance cars, I don't think that electric is the way to go with those at all. Probably some form of fueled, combustion-based engine is the better solution. Whether the fuel should be ethanol or biodiesel or methanol or methane or hydrogen is something we can debate, and probably will endlessly. But if you are only talking about a small fraction of the total vehicle population now on the road (with further decreases as more intercity passenger rail comes on line), then each of these options looks a lot better than they do when talking about using them for the entire motor car population.
First of all, we need to rebuild neighborhoods to make them walkable. We can do this by building village centers in suburban areas where necessities and important wants could be made available within walking distance to all.
We should make it a societal goal to reduce automobile use by 80% by 2050.
Car sharing is an interesting concept. EVs could be part of the pool for short trips. Longer trips could be made by flex-fuel hybrids or by bus (Reducing the use of automobiles could shift resources to making bus transit more available and timely).
I have reviewed the Meridian Lithium report before - it's an interesting preliminary study, though it jumps to some conclusions on the USGS study. IIRC, it's evaluation of the Reserve Base makes a bad assumption on how "existing economically viable techniques" are affected by price changes - if price changes, economic viability changes, and he doesn't address that. He notes that li-ion battery prices need to fall, but he doesn't address the fact that lithium cost is only about .25% of battery cost, so increased lithium prices wouldn't be a serious problem. More importantly, the author has done some questionable things in the past, and I'd like a confirmation from another reputable source.
Oil has been the object of intensive exploration for many decades, and OPEC members have an incentive to overstate them. It's easy to assume that other commodities have been explored for in the same way, but that's rarely the case - usually, they receive only the exploration needed to ensure production within the window of time necessary to find new reserves and exploit them. In fact, sometimes commodity reserves are taxed - that's a big incentive to keep them down.
Lithium is a pretty abundant element, and TOD posts have suggested that it has gotten little serious prospecting (perhaps due to very low prices until recently), that it's pretty abundant, and that it's available from many similar salt-flats elsewhere which have received little attention - I'd like to see some good analysis here beyond this one source. At this point I don't think we can say anything stronger than "questions have been raised about the adequacy of lithium supplies".
On lead, I couldn't find the discussion of lead on the Stockhouse site you link to (the link is cut off, and I couldn't find it searching the site). There doesn't seem to be a question of insufficient resources. I don't see any quantitative discussion of the suggestion that production can't be ramped up quickly enough - that seems unlikely to me. Commodity production increases are difficult in time frames of 1-2 years, but in timeframes of 5-10 years production can be increased at high % rates. I think you need to present more information to make your case that limits to lead production are a serious problem.
It seems that the Meridian report has serious inaccuracies, and is too gloomy by half.
It aint' easy for an average guy like me to sort out what is happening, without engineering training.
I like to put ideas out there though, with the intention of having them shot down if there are holes in them.
Here is a very thorough discussion of the issue of lithium availability:
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2008/02/mitsubishi-unvi.html#m...
It's a shame that some of the posts are personal, including a couple of mine, but some seem to find it a personal affront to suggest anything contrary to their own ideas.
I am hoping that one of the more technically qualified people there will write this up, so that we have an easy reference point.
I would still be more comfortable if we had rather more emphasis on zinc, with it's vastly larger resource base.
If lithium is in good supply, lead resources are of less interest anyway, so it seems concerns are misplaced.
It was an interesting excercise though!
That is a good discussion over at fraserdomain.
I took a closer look at the MIR report, and found that indeed, the data didn't support the conclusions. Definitely biased.
I sometimes post info about which I'm unsure, to get feedback. It's very helpful to say that's what you're doing, or to signal your level of certainty with phrases like "it seems that", or "this source suggests that". You'll alarm people less.
SailDog - I have finally heard an accurate evaluation of "What we are likely to do in response to Peak Oil and global warming". For me, as well as a growing number of people, it's clear that until we are left with no alternative to happy motoring, infotainment and addictive consumerism the prospect of people retiring their cars and taking effective actions to solve global warming and Peak Oil are just more wishful thinking.
George Bush told us years ago in his state of the Union that "America is addicted to oil".
If we are addicts then it is reasonable to assume that:
a. not all of us will decide to wake up to our addiction in time
b. each of us will have reach our personal bottom before we make the change
c. the biggest enemy for an addict is denial
d. Only one out of 3 addicts are able to free themselves from their addiction before it kills them.
Therfore I would have to conclude that for America to make the shift to a sustainable lifestyle there will need to be a massive dieoff of most of us.