Response to "10 Energy Facts" anti EV-renewable article

[Dardedar]

This fellow read an article by someone and got all excited about these Ten Facts he just learned this week. Let's unpack a few of them and see how they hold up (I've also posted them under his article at Medium).
From: "If You Don’t Know These 10 Facts, You’re Energy Blind"
https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/don ... 9fe8cc7997

ONE
Claim: "A 200mw wind farm requires 19 square miles of turbines."

Except, about 98.8% of that space can still be used for farming and other things.
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“The direct land use is a measure of the area of such things as the concrete tower pad, the power substations and new access roads. In the United States, the direct land use for wind turbines comes in at three-quarters of an acre per megawatt of rated capacity. That is, a 2-megawatt wind turbine would require 1.5 acres of land.
https://sciencing.com/much-land-needed- ... 04634.html

100 2MW turbines is a 200MW wind farm.
100 x 1.5 acres =150 acres.
A square mile has 640 acres.
19 square miles has 12,160 acres.
1.2% of that is needed for the footprint of the turbines.
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American Farmers Are Turning To Wind Energy
"Wind energy is offering hope for American farmers amid tough times. In an article by Time Magazine, the plight of American farmers is brought into focus...
There is a new type of crop that is helping farmers. “I would say the absence of financial stress has been a real game-changer for me,” Tom Cunningham tells USA Today. He has three wind turbines on his land and they make up for the crop export issues he has been facing. Farmers who living in the area known as Tornado Alley have a new commodity to sell that harnesses that region’s powerful wind.
Wind turbine leases are 30–40 years long and are giving the landowners yearly income that is helping them survive the economic dips brought by drought, floods, tariffs, and the fluctuating prices of the crops and livestock they produce. USA Today shares that many of the landowners whose fields host the turbines can earn $3,000 to $7,000 annually for an area about the size of a two-car garage that each turbine takes up."
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/20/am ... nd-energy/

TWO
Claim: "Wind, solar power, and nuclear have huge land and material footprints compared to fossil fuels."

Wow. A friend addressed that this way the other day:
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Area of Permian Basin oil field: 58 thousand square miles. (1 sq mile is 640 acres or 259 hectares)
Area of Alberta tar sands: 54 thousand square miles.
Area of US public land leased to oil extraction: 64 thousand square miles.
The list goes on....
*
Amount of global toxic coal fly ash (second largest waste stream after mine tailings): 1 billion tons per year.
-First order petroleum impacts: CO2, CH4, NOx, SOx...
-Second order petroleum impacts: smog, acid rain, ocean acidification, climate warming
-Third order impacts: sea level rise, coral bleaching, permafrost melting, extended fire season, phytoplankton depletion, habitat disruption, species extinction, prolonged drought, extreme weather events.
-Fourth order impacts: depleted environment, population disruption, respiratory illness, viral infection, cancer,…

There are 26 million acres of public land under lease for domestic oil extraction and another 75 million acres of private land leases... plus offshore oil. That does not include refineries, superfund waste sites, pipelines, shipping depots, trucking, rail cars, and so forth. Oil and nuclear USE 11% of global energy to power their industry.
25 million acres of federal land leased for oil extraction, methane venting, 2 million abandoned oil wells, hundreds of significant oil leaks/spills every year, 50 million tons per year of US toxic coal fly ash in dumps over water tables, 145 thousand well head jack pumps running 50 HP motors 24/7/365." --LB

Bill McKibben further explains why harvesting renewables isn't anything like constantly mining more FF to transport, process, burn and clean up afterward.
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“...it’s worth remembering that a transition to renewable energy would, by some estimates, reduce the total global mining burden by as much as eighty per cent, because so much of what we dig up today is burned (and then we have to go dig up some more). You dig up lithium once, and put it to use for decades in a solar panel or battery. In fact, a switch to renewable energy will reduce the load on all kinds of systems. At the moment, roughly forty per cent of the cargo carried by ocean-going ships is coal, gas, oil, and wood pellets—a never-ending stream of vessels crammed full of stuff to burn. You need a ship to carry a wind turbine blade, too, if it’s coming from across the sea, but you only need it once. A solar panel or a windmill, once erected, stands for a quarter of a century or longer.” --Bill Mckibben
https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/in ... ing-things?

THREE
Claim: "batteries only last a decade (roughly), so the extraction above would have to occur again, and that would nearly exhaust our Nickel and lithium"

This fails to understand that the materials are profitably recycled and reused. Because unlike FF, they're not burned.
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1) Recycling lithium ion batteries is not just profitable, but lucrative.
Recycled lithium batteries market to hit $6 billion by 2030
https://www.mining.com/recycled-lithium ... 30-report/?

2) Recycled batteries are as good as or better than newly mined materials batteries.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/10/20/ne ... batteries/?

3) "Toyota to recycle hybrid and EV batteries for renewable energy"
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Automo ... energy-use

4) "General Motors Launches Dedicated Battery Recycling Site"
https://gmauthority.com/blog/2021/08/ge ... ling-site/

5) "Northvolt claims first EV battery cell with 100% recycled nickel, manganese, cobalt"
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/11 ... ese-cobalt

6) Tesla recycling all batteries. “None of our scrapped lithium-ion batteries go to landfilling, and 100% are recycled.”
https://www.tesla.com/support/sustainability-recycling?

7) "FORD, REDWOOD MATERIALS TEAMING UP ON CLOSED-LOOP BATTERY RECYCLING, U.S. SUPPLY CHAIN"
https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedi ... cling.html

FOUR
Claim: "making just one battery for each vehicle in the global transport fleet (excluding Class 8 HCV trucks) requires 48.2% of 2018 global nickel reserves and 43.8% of global lithium reserves"

Nope. This one location can provide lithium for 1/3 of the world.
“…the known lithium resource in the Salton Sea can meet more than one-third of today’s global lithium demand. Global electric vehicle market growth is projected to rise from 1.7 million vehicles in 2020 to 26 million vehicles in 2030 and 54 million by 2040 at least.”
https://www.greencarcongress.com/2020/1 ... chain.html

15 million tonnes of lithium is enough for: 1.25 billion Teslas. One location.
And the ocean has 5,000x as much lithium as that.
Scientists have cost-effectively harvested lithium from seawater
The ocean contains about 5,000 times more lithium than on land.
https://electrek.co/2021/06/04/scientis ... -seawater/?
We can’t run out of lithium.
We can make the batteries now without cobalt (the latest Tesla battery doesn't have it, as promised).
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"Much progress has been made to eliminate cobalt from lithium ion batteries. The newer lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries that Tesla is transitioning to for all its standard-range models are completely free of both cobalt and nickel (another nasty), are safer, and outlast, NMC batteries. They already hold a 25% market share. They have a few drawbacks, but are still in their early days and will only get better over time."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_i ... te_battery?