Heat Treat Today publishes eight print magazines a year, and included in each is a letter from the publisher, Doug Glenn. This letter first appeared in August 2024 Automotive Heat Treat print edition.
Feel free to contact Doug at doug@heattreattoday.com if you have a question or comment.
In a thought-provoking RealClear Energy (“The Many Problems With Batteries” at RealClearEnergy.org) post on May 30, by Iddo K. Wernick, Ph.D., senior research associate at The Rockefeller University’s Program for the Human Environment and 2013 and 2014 candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Dr. Wernick raises some challenging questions about the belief that battery technology will develop quickly enough, if at all, to achieve net zero by 2050. The complete elimination of combustion, including internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, is, in fact, the stated goal of the U.S. Department of Energy — see the Letter from the Publisher in the Heat Treat Today May 2024 Sustainability print issue.
In this issue of Heat Treat Today, we’re talking about heat treatments that are common for the automotive industry, an industry abuzz with talk of EVs and, by necessity, the use of EV batteries. Some of the basic facts and questions raised by Dr. Wernick bear repeating here.
- “Batteries provide the essential lynchpin in plans to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions . . . . The dramatic global expansion of in-battery energy storage over the coming decades is deemed necessary to facilitate the growth of wind and solar power and electrified transportation.” In other words, if batteries don’t advance significantly, net zero by 2050 is not going to happen.
- Dr. Wernick next points out that “batteries store energy less efficiently than hydrocarbon fuels and release that energy far more slowly than fuels do during combustion.” In fact, the energy density of relatively seldom-used and less efficient “biomass fuels like straw and animal dung is twenty times greater than . . . today’s best lithium-ion batteries, and gasoline has an energy density over 50 times greater.” In other words, with all the technical advances in battery storage over the past decades, batteries are still 50 times less effective and efficient than ICE vehicles.
- And while energy densities are substantially lower than carbon-based combustion fuels, a more serious obstacle will be mining (yes, energy-intense, pollution-creating mining) enough minerals to produce these batteries. According to a report issued by the Internation Energy Agency, “supplying the many critical minerals necessary for [the] enormous increases in battery manufacturing” will require “a projected five to 30 times increase in demand for the different battery metals by 2050.” Given the green movement’s propensity to shun any type of mining anywhere, it would appear that battery manufacturers are in the same situation that Moses was in when the Egyptians demanded more bricks but didn’t provide more straw.
- China’s dominance in critical battery minerals and battery manufacturing is also mentioned as problematic.
- He also covers the inherent bulkiness of batteries: “The inherent bulkiness of battery energy storage quickly shows itself in real world applications. Using current technologies, half of the power produced by the battery pack of an electric vehicle goes to moving the batteries themselves, a basic problem for a mobile power source.” (My emphasis added.)
- Some reasonable solutions are offered by Dr. Wernick such as, “incremental changes to the energy system that might reduce emissions more effectively and have greater potential for implementation. Consider the fact that increasing power production from natural gas and nuclear energy could reduce carbon emissions more effectively than building and maintaining the elaborate physical infrastructure necessary for solar and wind and batteries. Or the fact that hybrid electric vehicles require much smaller battery packs, leverage consumer familiarity, and may offer more promise for reducing aggregate vehicular emissions than do fully electric vehicles in the long run.”
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Heat Treat Today
Our current world leaders and influencers appear to be somewhat unrealistic and myopic on net zero by 2050. They seem to be ignorant that technologies and materials development are both slow moving and market-driven beasts which cannot be rushed. I don’t know too many people who are opposed to EVs simply because they are electric, but I do know oodles of thinking people who understand that making a quantum leap from ICE vehicles to EVs is something best “driven” (pardon the pun) by the market, and that it takes time.
Contact Doug Glenn at doug@heattreattoday.com.
