Electric vehicles are clean and all (if they're not being powered by your local coal-burning plant), but… after the battery is toast, where does it go? With all those EVs, where are we supposed to put 222,522,300 dead 18650 cells from all 2023's Tesla Model X cars alone? There are other EVs out there…

The better question is: Can we recycle the batteries and if not, can we keep mining the resources to produce new ones for the foreseeable future? Or will we run out of resources like we will with oil?

@Lensflare > "will we run out of resources like we will with oil?"

I'm confident our elected officials have thoroughly thought this out.

Source: "The Great Reset" by Glenn Beck.

EV doesn't solve the whole grid, right? Even with a coal plant, central combustion is more efficient than little car engines doing it.

@Lensflare short answer: not really

It's why I havent bought one either. I am actually very carefully betting on hydrogen. Which - all of a sudden - has massive deposits in the planet all along!

Hydrogen is where it is at. The EV is just to pay for that.

In the long term yes, thats a problem. In the short term its probably single use vapes.

For EV batteries, there are alternatives like capacitors. Those can be made out of carbon (no need for mining rare resources and easy to dispose of). However, capacitors can't really power a car for long. Imagine if you had to recharge them every hour or so.
Capacitors can be recharged in miliseconds. One would just have to drive over a powered lane with the proper connectors, maybe even without stopping.
Like an automated toll booth, but every 50Km or so.
That sounds like *a lot* of infrastructure to build, and it is. But there are precedents for projects this big, like transcontinental power lines, country spanning data service... and roads.
But it will only ever be built of there is enough demand.

It's like when we were about to run out of IPv4 addresses, and had to change to IPv6. We would never get to the point when IPv6 even becomes necessary if it wasn't for the great internet expansion that ran on IPv4 in the turn of the century.

So, yeah. Disposable* batteries for now.

@JsonBoa and ionistors aren't the solution, are they?

Of course it's you. Do you just stop reading after problems, so you can play "protesting and knowing the solution"?

@c3r38r170 I don't know the solution to this…

EVs are a short term ‘solution’ to the pollution problem. by 2030 we will have moved on to hydrogen and that will be that! It is not possible to charge millions of cars every day. The electricity infrastructure can not cope. There will never be enough charge stations and who the fuck wants to wait?

@helloworld it almost feels like every person owning a car is not that sustainable…

Hydrogen indeed sounds like the best long term solution. When we manage to make fusion power possible, we could deploy it globally in a few decades. With that much energy, we could be producing hydrogen from water quite easily and practically indefinitely.
If we fail to make fusion power, the future looks grim.

@Lensflare I think oil will not run out. I looked into Oil Seeps in the oceans. Apparently the Earth dumps millions of gallons of oil into the oceans every year. This is completely unrelated to our drilling. There are even organisms adapted to eating crude. But what is wild is when an oil well goes dry, you can come back 10 years later and it is full of oil again. It is often not the same quality as the original. So there may be an aging component to it as well. This perplexes me as crude long carbon chains are very similar to pine trees long carbon chains. I know this because people were doing ice core sampling in Yellowstone and they kept finding their samples were contaminated with petroleum. They found the trees weep petroleum type carbon chains. So how the hell is it replenishing underwater? There is a process occurring under ground that is quite baffling.

@Lensflare look up borohydride for holding hydrogen for car fuels. They found you can store hydrogen for fuel cells in cars. Then you go to gas station and exchange your soapy water for the soapy water with hydrogen in it. Supposedly safer than the gas. The energy density is also very high.

@Demolishun > "I think oil will not run out"

Exon and others will take that challenge. :)

Read recently that they will/could start commercially mining ocean floors for nodules rich in nickle, copper, cobalt, and other metals used in battery production. Large enough deposits (trillions of these nodules) along with expansion of nuclear power, we'd be sustainable for hundreds of years.

We'll never see that. Liberals/socialist will claim the mining disrupts salmon spawning in Alaska

and/or the Exon types will claim they can only process one nodule a year (at 1 billion $$ a nodule) then collude with the government to only allow one company (them) to mine. Then Exon screws everything up and disrupts salmon spawning in Alaska.

@Lensflare I don't have the slightest idea as to how fusion power works other than muh four hydrogen become one helium, but Thunderf00t says fusion will never be viable