Most of my work as a physicist has been in the research and development of technologies that can be manufactured in Developing Nations with minimal up-front investment. I was led into this field by one of my Academic Advisors, Ashok Gadgil, at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. Professor Gadgil is the kind of physicist who measures his research success not in papers published, or funding gathered, but in the lives saved by the developments of him and his students. I am one of his students, for better or worse, and I write that with some hesitation, for fear that a man of my ill-temper, poor-reputation and devilish looks will reflect poorly on my teacher. The last time I visited Professor Gadgil, he gave me a hug. So I think the reality is that Professor Gadgil doesn’t worry so much of ill-temper, poor-reputation and devilish looks, but rather he cares about the childen who live in poverty, and now have the chance to have health, learning and ambition, regardless the poverty. Professor Gadgil gave a few lines of instruction to me, and I knew what he needed. And then some of the best physicists East of the Mississippi showed me how to use the tools of Nature to do physics. They didn’t teach physics to me, or if they did, I didn’t learn much of it. But I wasn’t in the program for that anyway. I was there to learn how to do physics. And they taught me how to do that; how to have a happy family (I failed at that), how to slow down and enjoy the research (I failed at that one too). They taught me how how structure a covariant tensor to manage differentials that would otherwise be unsolvable. (I sorta got that one) and they taught me how to throw certain problems away because they are intractable.
The subject of this paper is a problem that is arguably intractable.
And yet, the benefit of this work as a starting point, is undeniable. The battery industry may or may not have a future in grid-scale energy storage. But the undeniable reality is that the battery industry controls the single most critical component of the contemporary electric vehicle. Franz Kafka wrote something like “the hardest bones, with the richest marrow, can only be conquered by the united crushing of all the teeth, of all the dogs.” Ultimately, we do need to inventory the benefits and damages from the production of these batteries. And with time, some “united crushing” we will improve the model, and we will improve the production itself of these batteries, and with time, we won’t even need to ask these questions … for example some grid=scale batteries that are produced with Rare Earth Elements, Lithium, Cobalt, Titanium and other materials that are ethically sourced from Employee-Owned, Employee-Equity companies from within the countries they are sourced, including countries in West Africa and South America.
Ideally, this paper is that starting point. There has been lots of work on this topic, but in this work I apply a Thermodynamics-sourced assessment of normally difficult-to-measure effects like air pollution, wealth concentration, and other economic and public health costs and benefits. Yes, this is an approximation, it is flawed, but it is a place to start, hone the metal, create a tool with a working edge that is effective and a pleasure to use.
If we hope to compare a battery-operated EV with a diesel-electric train engine, for instance, we will need some common baselines with mass moved, average distances between refueling/recharging and the performance envelope with regard to things like acceleration, power output and torque. And we will have to settle with some less-than-perfect baselines of impact to cultural and environmental health. For instance, it can be difficult to really decide how much damage is done to an indigenous tribe versus benefits to public health. But given the current luxury-status of the most common electric vehicles, there should be enough marginal benefit in protecting cultures while simultaneously providing the economic benefits of local ownership, that the increase in costs for employee-owned components would be comparable to — for instance — premium Bang & Olufsen speakers in a Tesla-brand vehicle. Smaller EVs meant for a non-luxury market would have comparably smaller costs to ethically-sourced battery components. This is a demonstration of the imperfection of the measurement with some key criteria, but other measurement is simple enough, we have plenty of tailpipe measurement from combustion vehicles that can be quantitatively compared to water and soil pollution from REE, lithium and cobalt extraction, for instance.
Typical air pollution measurement is based on the six EPA Criteria Pollutants, which do not include CO2. However, we can use Particulate Matter, NOx, and CO as reasonable measures of an engine’s combustion efficiency. Water and soil pollution is often graded in severity on a linear scale, which can be useful for both battery production and hydrocarbon extraction and refining. The opportunity for improved public health — for better or worse — can be compared to economic measures like GDP per capita, average salary, employment and savings statistics.
Finally, this work restricts itself to technologies currently in existence for powering vehicles and manufacturing vehicle components. These include things like electric passenger vehicles, diesel-electric train locomotives, electric over-the-road trucks for long haul and intercity, passenger busses, electric motorcycles, human and cargo transport over snow, ice and water, gasoline-electric passenger vehicles, and of course, human-powered and animal-powered vehicles like bicycles, and horse-wagons, among others.
Comparing batteries to conventional and existing methods of energy storage (like the diesel fuel in a diesel-electric locomotive) is critical because we can’t hope to critique and improve an industry without an accurate assessment of alternatives to cover any down-time or development-time in the battery industry necessary to improve manufacturing processes and affiliated economic development in the commonly ethnic tribes in Africa, South America and Central Asia who supply the Asian, European and U.S. battery industry with the resources it needs; like Rare Earth Elements, cobalt and lithium.
The proposed thermodynamic model doesn’t easily and clearly apply to the non-combustion electric vehicle motors, but the entropic signature of petroleum extraction, refining, distribution, combustion and exhaust can approximately compare to the entropic signature of battery components extraction, refining, manufacturing and use in the vehicle. And we can compare vehicles lifespans, cost to purchase, repair and operate, which are critical metrics to ensure equitable social justice across a wide range of income classes and workers.
The readily-available data on air pollution from conventional combustion vehicles is easy to obtain, the U.S. EPA maintains a nationwide database of attainment to air quality standards. And as petroleum has been commercially extracted and refined for over 80 years, we have a reasonable gauge of the pollution to soils and groundwaters from a range of operations, from well-run to poorly-run. But as a new industry, this data is much harder to obtain for the extraction and refining of REEs, lithium and cobalt.
This is the breadth of measurement that we have accepted with this study. Please view the published work in the Journal of Environmental Manufacturing Practices and Standards. Thank you.