Matthias Urlichs via tz wrote in <a0882120-4753-40d8-9e02-18afca6533f2@urlichs.de>: |On 03.03.26 23:45, Steffen Nurpmeso via tz wrote: |> grab rare earth like lithium | |Lithium is not a "rare earth". It's not even particularly rare. Even so, |by now we know enough to replace it with sodium for most uses (if we |decide to …) -- no mining required. Please look around my text and citate in context. I said they start a race to grab rare earth like lithium in the few still healthy places, with all the massive infrastructural changes, everywhere), so you extract is not only out of context but entirely misses the point, and that is for example the Club of Rome. It is thus not so that "decisioners" would not know. So the lobby itself says A Looming Lithium Deficit A massive supply gap is looming, and projects cannot keep pace. ... Lithium has shifted from specialty metal to the backbone of electrification. Batteries for cars and the grid are the main growth engines, but supply chains weren’t built for this speed. Most raw lithium still comes from three countries, and most refining happens in one - a setup that’s efficient on paper but fragile in practice. This page explains the market in plain language: the demand surge, where supply really comes from, what delays new projects, and how alternatives like DLE from produced water and geothermal brine can ease bottlenecks with a smaller footprint. https://lithiumharvest.com/knowledge/lithium/the-lithium-mining-market/#text... That does not sound like the circular economy that Chancellor Scholz noted in his good (imho) early speech in the Karlsuniversität Prague. |Getting >70% from compressed air is impressive, but that's stationary. It seems to me that for example the entire electricity grid of Europe is interconnected, so i do not truly understand your point. The actual point is that Germans rely too much on their mineral resources, one day they are out and then there is nothing left. And that for example wind turbines around here are more often than not turned off because of lack of electricity needs (and that in Rhein-Main Gebiet, with millions of people and large industries). What nonsense, what failure, what megalomania. No. |Fuel cells can't go much beyond half that. Continue importing Korean and American fuel cell trucks if you want to. ..But to note that Tesla alone produced ~8.5 million vehicles, says Google; now if i take a battery capacity of 60 as an average (too low thus), and if i realize that hybrid cars, then upgraded to fuel cell, have a say capacity of 3 (it is less), than a sane technology could have produced 60/3*8500000 = 170.000.000 cars with the same amount of batteries, or ~8.5 million super heavy trucks (where the buffer battery needs to be larger). All these batteries came from nowhere and fell from heaven. Granted, electric engines require a lot of that super dirty copper, but it surely will be the feature, and everybody knows. A world wide effort on improving fuell cells would have been a sane thing to do, say 35+ years ago. I shortly was hoping when the German U-Boat series came over with fuell cells, before Y2K. Material Research has seen unbelievable improvements. Etc. Hm, when (one of) the war(s) is over, we could also import Russian Kamaz hydrogen busses and trucks; that would be an option. Cool stuff! (Btw less consume is the very best; i think, dependent upon who you ask, that car production amounts to 50 to 70 percent of all the resources that are wasted during an entire car life; these numbers are quite old, and surely were "coined" onto what German car industry believes is average car use (iirc 15000km per year, and such).) --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)