Energywise - well that’s the point. High heat at low cost is nuclear power’s best application. Nobody has ever made efuels with nuclear power. The economics should be very good.
Stick to fossil fuel analysis - your ruminant meat comments are absurd. ... carbon production from animals is part of the carbon cycle - fossil fuels release carbon sequestered eons ago.- not to mention grass fed ruminants are carbon neutral or even negative with proper husbandry see White Oak Farms and Savory regenerative techniques https://savory.global/effective-livestock-grazing-regenerative-agriculture-future/
For this Rio Tinto executive, I will repeat what Elon Musk said about Bill Gates and his claim that BEVs will never be used for long distance heavy trucking. Musk: "He doesn't know what he is talking about". And he invited Bill Gates to drive a fully loaded 81,000lb Tesla Truck 500miles on one charge. With a cab weight similar to a diesel truck.
I will claim that almost ANY mining equipment can be made battery electric, and will perform better at lower cost. Note I'm not believing replacing Light Vehicles with BEVs, but heavy trucks, heavy mining equipment, should be no problem. If I can find the time I will work the numbers for Mr. Rio Tinto executive and show him how wrong he is.
Note that the motor driving the Tesla semi-truck you can pick up and carry away, with more power than a big Kenworth diesel. And Tesla's semi has 3X the power of a big diesel truck. Leaves them in the dust climbing a hill or accelerating. And hardly uses its brakes, including going downhill. With 500mile battery pack weighs the same as the Diesel truck. Can actually pull a couple thousand lbs more in the trailer. With 30m to 70% recharge.
And how many mining trucks full do we need to make every battery? There is certainly a use case for some of this, but imagining we are going to switch all mining trucks to batteries is... optimistic. And to do it at the same time as cars and “grid scale storage” (hard to say that with a straight face)?
Drop in synth fuels are the only chance to solve this issue without wasting all of the investments. Mining trucks are only one tiny example of the middle distillate world- Jet A and ship propulsion have no path to electrification so let’s focus on something that works for everything.
That's just what I'm saying. We are not talking about low value leisure cars that go an avg of 30 miles/day. 98% of the time they are parked. We are talking very high value industrial equipment that run >50% of the time. The Tesla semi-truck saves $70k/yr in fuel costs. Add oil changes, brake & engine maintenance and consequent down time, you can probably add another $20k/yr in added costs. For a far superior truck in every way, i.e. goes uphills 3X faster, accelerates 3X faster, can't jackknife, no need for proper downshifting on a hill which can prevent a dangerous rollover, has deceleration & downhill energy recovery, much more stable vehicle with almost all the weight close to the ground, and much more cab space. To gain all that, with some inconvenience for charging time is just a No-brainer for most diesel engine applications.
You take that fact to ANY diesel engine application. It's all about avg vs peak load, or crest factor, and time available for charging. The higher the crest factor, the more suitable for battery operation. Almost any mining application the diesel engine will be running at a higher crest factor than a diesel semi-truck. Add to that there is lot's of opportunity for fast charge, i.e. lunch & coffee breaks. And mining trucks for instance have a higher risk of rollover, which a heavy battery at the bottom of the chassis, reduces.
For jet aircraft, at least in longer routes, fuel weight is a big issue, that is not going to work with batteries. With high power/weight jet engines, and a lower crest factor, I can't see long distance battery electric planes but hybrid are looking likely. Ships have the same issue, long travel times are not suitable for charging. For those hybrids are the future with nuclear generators in larger ships.
Light vehicles, are not a priority use of batteries, unless you are talking hybrids. Utility storage is a bad use of batteries. The economics, the material resources, the priority is strongly for industrial locomotion: mining equipment, trains, heavy construction equipment, heavy trucking, buses, LRTs, short distance shipping, like ferries. In terms of material resources, that is far less than what is needed to replace all light vehicles, and utility storage for wind & solar is >4X more batteries than that.
And increasing diesel fuel costs, oil shortages, supply constraints are going to make the battery-electric even more valuable for industrial applications. At the very least to add some fuel supply diversity and resilience. That is a very evident right now.
At least in a rational universe, that's what will happen, and unfortunately we don't live there.
A quick look at the specs on the Cat 798 Mine Haulage trucks and I would estimate a battery electric equivalent of 4 Tesla Semi-Truck drives would replace the Cat diesel-electric drive. That would be 4100hp drive vs the Cat @ 3100hp. I would bet avg fuel consumption is < 4 Semi-trucks due to the amount of intermittent usage of the big trucks, waiting to be loaded, waiting to unload and maintenance. Heavy usage climbing out of the pit, low energy travel to the mill crushing plant and back to the pit, and wasted energy going back down into the pit, they use dynamic braking and dump all that energy into a load resister.
At ~ 4 X 5MT for the battery, which is a structural battery, or 20MT, is not a significant mass for a 205MT truck chassis, 623MT loaded. So you could expect at least 8hrs operation on a battery charge I would bet. So I would estimate upwards of $250k/yr on fuel savings. Not sure how much that truck costs but probably ~$3-5M each. So fuel cost savings would be very significant. Maintenance savings on top of that. And it is always good to be less dependent on diesel fuel, the way the Great Reset Cult is refusing to fund & license new refineries.
Consider that $250k of fuel is over 250MT of fuel/yr vs 20MT of battery every 5yrs. Fuel is mined mass, just as batteries are, fuel requires lot of minerals for mining, refining, distributing. Not as material dense as batteries but not that much less. Battery packs are ~25% the higher value minerals, nickel, lithium, manganese & cobalt. The rest is mainly steel and polymers. And for most nations fuel must be imported, so that is a loss of precious foreign exchange. And fuel is going to become more expensive and often in short supply due to the efforts of the Malthusian Davos cult. And of course all the hype about climate change and rapidly rising carbon taxes ($170/tonne of CO2 in Canada 2030).
Perhaps a better way to look at this is not the hours per day usage one would get but the number of hauls a truck could make in a 24 hour day. The bulk of the work done is lifting up to 450 tonnes of rock from the bottom of the pit to the top where at some point it will be unloaded at a crushing/processing facility. It returns to the bottom of the pit empty and so the amount of regenerated energy is a small fraction of the total work done.
Taking a 450 tonne load, and a 100 m deep pit the work done is 2.25 x 10^8 J. A Tesla truck battery is 1MW.hr (?) so four of them have an energy capacity of 1.44 x 10^10J. This would allow in excess of 10 return trips with a healthy reserve.
The figures look good but, perhaps, may be marginal if a pit is working 24 hours a day (almost certainly going to be the case with the demand for critical metals and elements for net zero!). One would need to factor in the recharge time for 4Mw hr of batteries and perhaps double up in terms of number of battery electric compared to diesel electric trucks. Or develop a battery swap system.
Thanks for the discussion as it has been enlightening and opened up a whole new point of view.
One point I should add. Spiraling up out of that 100m deep pit with the 3100hp diesel drive will take at least a 1/2hr just on its power limitations. With 4100hp all electric drive (and easy to increase that since you don't need to use an expensive, bigger fuel guzzling diesel engine, increasing inefficiency of operation) you will certainly shave at least 10m off of each trip with increased power climbing and acceleration and likely downhill traveling as well, with the superiority of regenerative braking over dynamic or physical braking. And also diesel filling time must be subtracted. So each shift you will likely save 2hrs of total travel time. Since a 70% recharge is in 30m. That's 4 recharges could be done in the amount of travel time you save.
Similar with the Tesla semi-truck, it has 3X the motor power, 3X the acceleration of the diesel, 3X faster uphill travel, faster downhill travel with regen rather than engine braking, subtract diesel filling time to the semi, and you are likely to save more than enough travel time to cover the extra charging time. Now you see why Tesla decided to forgo battery swaps for fast charge stations instead.
Good analysis. I bet avg load is significantly less than that the rated 370T for the Cat 798. And some mines they actually mine up the slope of a mountainside (i.e. coal mountain top removal) so they are dumping the full 620MT gross weight potential energy going downhill.
And with underground mines they are loading from a bin in a headframe, often waiting for enough skips of ore or waste to fill the Truck. A good place to plug in the charger.
Charge time Tesla lists @ 70% in 30m, which would be a lunch break, and I suspect that a charge would last at least 8hrs. Battery mass is not that significant, you could easily double it if charging on an 8hr cycle was a problem.
Tesla at first planned on battery swaps. Truck would drive over an apparatus that would auto unbolt the battery, drop it down, swap it out, lift it back up and bolt it back up, all robotic. But they must have calculated that it just ain't worth it. The 30m recharge is easy to fit into a Trucking schedule. Battery swaps I could see for rail locomotives or Ferries. Locomotive would just be a flatbed with a cab in front and a shipping container sized battery on top. At a charging point have a bridge crane that swaps out battery packs.
As a good example of the economics of converting big Industrial Diesel powered machines to battery electric, It would be an interesting pet project to use published Tesla semi-truck specs to do an analysis of converting these two big Mine Haulage trucks to battery electric drive. i.e. the Komatsu 980E-5 a 3500hp, 363MT machine and the Cat 798 AC 2610hp, 372MT machine.
Also I would like to do an analysis of converting a typical diesel powered locomotive on a typical freight rail line to battery electric drive.
Those would be two good examples of the economics of converting heavy industrial equipment to battery electric drive. An interesting project to tackle in my spare time. It's mainly about the relative portion of cost that is fuel/O&M, especially fuel, vs capital cost, levelized. If the cost is mainly capital converting to battery electric drive likely is not advantageous, noting that the Komatsu is already electric drive, it just uses a diesel generator for supply, but curiously doesn't use a battery in a series hybrid configuration. As is the case of diesel locomotives.
I suspect that the availability of large size Li-ion battery packs, as Tesla has designed for their Semi-Truck at a cost of ~$150-200/kwh, have just not been sufficient for engineers to incorporate them in their current product line. That will change. Wasting batteries on low utilization light vehicles and solar/wind buffering is not a wise use of limited resources, IMHO.
Got it- so you are basically saying that we should prioritize the batteries for these types of heavy diesel applications and not bother with cars. Not sure I completely agree, but it makes sense. No question that electric traction drive is an absolute boss, but it is just the energy source (battery vs genset) that is going to be the energy density limiter.
Flying planes with batteries though- I just think we are a loooooong way from that. There are some small electric trainers now, but the range for anything that can carry 100 people is just going to be crazy small. Keep in mind minimum reserves of 45 minutes for weather or service diversions and you end up with a small plane that can fly for 15-30min. This area is probably better to just keep optimizing the jet turbine engine efficiency- as they have made staggering improvements over the last 50 years.
great explanation!
So with Synfuels, how much energy is involved in converting gasoline into heavier fuels?
Energywise - well that’s the point. High heat at low cost is nuclear power’s best application. Nobody has ever made efuels with nuclear power. The economics should be very good.
You can’t convert gasoline to diesel. Synfuels are about converting some hydrogen and carbon source into hydrocarbons. Google. YouTube
Stick to fossil fuel analysis - your ruminant meat comments are absurd. ... carbon production from animals is part of the carbon cycle - fossil fuels release carbon sequestered eons ago.- not to mention grass fed ruminants are carbon neutral or even negative with proper husbandry see White Oak Farms and Savory regenerative techniques https://savory.global/effective-livestock-grazing-regenerative-agriculture-future/
For this Rio Tinto executive, I will repeat what Elon Musk said about Bill Gates and his claim that BEVs will never be used for long distance heavy trucking. Musk: "He doesn't know what he is talking about". And he invited Bill Gates to drive a fully loaded 81,000lb Tesla Truck 500miles on one charge. With a cab weight similar to a diesel truck.
I will claim that almost ANY mining equipment can be made battery electric, and will perform better at lower cost. Note I'm not believing replacing Light Vehicles with BEVs, but heavy trucks, heavy mining equipment, should be no problem. If I can find the time I will work the numbers for Mr. Rio Tinto executive and show him how wrong he is.
Note that the motor driving the Tesla semi-truck you can pick up and carry away, with more power than a big Kenworth diesel. And Tesla's semi has 3X the power of a big diesel truck. Leaves them in the dust climbing a hill or accelerating. And hardly uses its brakes, including going downhill. With 500mile battery pack weighs the same as the Diesel truck. Can actually pull a couple thousand lbs more in the trailer. With 30m to 70% recharge.
you are confusing the motor with the battery
And how many mining trucks full do we need to make every battery? There is certainly a use case for some of this, but imagining we are going to switch all mining trucks to batteries is... optimistic. And to do it at the same time as cars and “grid scale storage” (hard to say that with a straight face)?
Drop in synth fuels are the only chance to solve this issue without wasting all of the investments. Mining trucks are only one tiny example of the middle distillate world- Jet A and ship propulsion have no path to electrification so let’s focus on something that works for everything.
That's just what I'm saying. We are not talking about low value leisure cars that go an avg of 30 miles/day. 98% of the time they are parked. We are talking very high value industrial equipment that run >50% of the time. The Tesla semi-truck saves $70k/yr in fuel costs. Add oil changes, brake & engine maintenance and consequent down time, you can probably add another $20k/yr in added costs. For a far superior truck in every way, i.e. goes uphills 3X faster, accelerates 3X faster, can't jackknife, no need for proper downshifting on a hill which can prevent a dangerous rollover, has deceleration & downhill energy recovery, much more stable vehicle with almost all the weight close to the ground, and much more cab space. To gain all that, with some inconvenience for charging time is just a No-brainer for most diesel engine applications.
You take that fact to ANY diesel engine application. It's all about avg vs peak load, or crest factor, and time available for charging. The higher the crest factor, the more suitable for battery operation. Almost any mining application the diesel engine will be running at a higher crest factor than a diesel semi-truck. Add to that there is lot's of opportunity for fast charge, i.e. lunch & coffee breaks. And mining trucks for instance have a higher risk of rollover, which a heavy battery at the bottom of the chassis, reduces.
For jet aircraft, at least in longer routes, fuel weight is a big issue, that is not going to work with batteries. With high power/weight jet engines, and a lower crest factor, I can't see long distance battery electric planes but hybrid are looking likely. Ships have the same issue, long travel times are not suitable for charging. For those hybrids are the future with nuclear generators in larger ships.
Light vehicles, are not a priority use of batteries, unless you are talking hybrids. Utility storage is a bad use of batteries. The economics, the material resources, the priority is strongly for industrial locomotion: mining equipment, trains, heavy construction equipment, heavy trucking, buses, LRTs, short distance shipping, like ferries. In terms of material resources, that is far less than what is needed to replace all light vehicles, and utility storage for wind & solar is >4X more batteries than that.
And increasing diesel fuel costs, oil shortages, supply constraints are going to make the battery-electric even more valuable for industrial applications. At the very least to add some fuel supply diversity and resilience. That is a very evident right now.
At least in a rational universe, that's what will happen, and unfortunately we don't live there.
Got it. Would you like to turn this into an essay we could publish? DM me
A quick look at the specs on the Cat 798 Mine Haulage trucks and I would estimate a battery electric equivalent of 4 Tesla Semi-Truck drives would replace the Cat diesel-electric drive. That would be 4100hp drive vs the Cat @ 3100hp. I would bet avg fuel consumption is < 4 Semi-trucks due to the amount of intermittent usage of the big trucks, waiting to be loaded, waiting to unload and maintenance. Heavy usage climbing out of the pit, low energy travel to the mill crushing plant and back to the pit, and wasted energy going back down into the pit, they use dynamic braking and dump all that energy into a load resister.
At ~ 4 X 5MT for the battery, which is a structural battery, or 20MT, is not a significant mass for a 205MT truck chassis, 623MT loaded. So you could expect at least 8hrs operation on a battery charge I would bet. So I would estimate upwards of $250k/yr on fuel savings. Not sure how much that truck costs but probably ~$3-5M each. So fuel cost savings would be very significant. Maintenance savings on top of that. And it is always good to be less dependent on diesel fuel, the way the Great Reset Cult is refusing to fund & license new refineries.
I seriously disagree with this assessment - mining the minerals for this endeavor is a dead end. You're ignoring the mining.
Consider that $250k of fuel is over 250MT of fuel/yr vs 20MT of battery every 5yrs. Fuel is mined mass, just as batteries are, fuel requires lot of minerals for mining, refining, distributing. Not as material dense as batteries but not that much less. Battery packs are ~25% the higher value minerals, nickel, lithium, manganese & cobalt. The rest is mainly steel and polymers. And for most nations fuel must be imported, so that is a loss of precious foreign exchange. And fuel is going to become more expensive and often in short supply due to the efforts of the Malthusian Davos cult. And of course all the hype about climate change and rapidly rising carbon taxes ($170/tonne of CO2 in Canada 2030).
Perhaps a better way to look at this is not the hours per day usage one would get but the number of hauls a truck could make in a 24 hour day. The bulk of the work done is lifting up to 450 tonnes of rock from the bottom of the pit to the top where at some point it will be unloaded at a crushing/processing facility. It returns to the bottom of the pit empty and so the amount of regenerated energy is a small fraction of the total work done.
Taking a 450 tonne load, and a 100 m deep pit the work done is 2.25 x 10^8 J. A Tesla truck battery is 1MW.hr (?) so four of them have an energy capacity of 1.44 x 10^10J. This would allow in excess of 10 return trips with a healthy reserve.
The figures look good but, perhaps, may be marginal if a pit is working 24 hours a day (almost certainly going to be the case with the demand for critical metals and elements for net zero!). One would need to factor in the recharge time for 4Mw hr of batteries and perhaps double up in terms of number of battery electric compared to diesel electric trucks. Or develop a battery swap system.
Thanks for the discussion as it has been enlightening and opened up a whole new point of view.
One point I should add. Spiraling up out of that 100m deep pit with the 3100hp diesel drive will take at least a 1/2hr just on its power limitations. With 4100hp all electric drive (and easy to increase that since you don't need to use an expensive, bigger fuel guzzling diesel engine, increasing inefficiency of operation) you will certainly shave at least 10m off of each trip with increased power climbing and acceleration and likely downhill traveling as well, with the superiority of regenerative braking over dynamic or physical braking. And also diesel filling time must be subtracted. So each shift you will likely save 2hrs of total travel time. Since a 70% recharge is in 30m. That's 4 recharges could be done in the amount of travel time you save.
Similar with the Tesla semi-truck, it has 3X the motor power, 3X the acceleration of the diesel, 3X faster uphill travel, faster downhill travel with regen rather than engine braking, subtract diesel filling time to the semi, and you are likely to save more than enough travel time to cover the extra charging time. Now you see why Tesla decided to forgo battery swaps for fast charge stations instead.
Good analysis. I bet avg load is significantly less than that the rated 370T for the Cat 798. And some mines they actually mine up the slope of a mountainside (i.e. coal mountain top removal) so they are dumping the full 620MT gross weight potential energy going downhill.
And with underground mines they are loading from a bin in a headframe, often waiting for enough skips of ore or waste to fill the Truck. A good place to plug in the charger.
Charge time Tesla lists @ 70% in 30m, which would be a lunch break, and I suspect that a charge would last at least 8hrs. Battery mass is not that significant, you could easily double it if charging on an 8hr cycle was a problem.
Tesla at first planned on battery swaps. Truck would drive over an apparatus that would auto unbolt the battery, drop it down, swap it out, lift it back up and bolt it back up, all robotic. But they must have calculated that it just ain't worth it. The 30m recharge is easy to fit into a Trucking schedule. Battery swaps I could see for rail locomotives or Ferries. Locomotive would just be a flatbed with a cab in front and a shipping container sized battery on top. At a charging point have a bridge crane that swaps out battery packs.
As a good example of the economics of converting big Industrial Diesel powered machines to battery electric, It would be an interesting pet project to use published Tesla semi-truck specs to do an analysis of converting these two big Mine Haulage trucks to battery electric drive. i.e. the Komatsu 980E-5 a 3500hp, 363MT machine and the Cat 798 AC 2610hp, 372MT machine.
Also I would like to do an analysis of converting a typical diesel powered locomotive on a typical freight rail line to battery electric drive.
Those would be two good examples of the economics of converting heavy industrial equipment to battery electric drive. An interesting project to tackle in my spare time. It's mainly about the relative portion of cost that is fuel/O&M, especially fuel, vs capital cost, levelized. If the cost is mainly capital converting to battery electric drive likely is not advantageous, noting that the Komatsu is already electric drive, it just uses a diesel generator for supply, but curiously doesn't use a battery in a series hybrid configuration. As is the case of diesel locomotives.
I suspect that the availability of large size Li-ion battery packs, as Tesla has designed for their Semi-Truck at a cost of ~$150-200/kwh, have just not been sufficient for engineers to incorporate them in their current product line. That will change. Wasting batteries on low utilization light vehicles and solar/wind buffering is not a wise use of limited resources, IMHO.
Got it- so you are basically saying that we should prioritize the batteries for these types of heavy diesel applications and not bother with cars. Not sure I completely agree, but it makes sense. No question that electric traction drive is an absolute boss, but it is just the energy source (battery vs genset) that is going to be the energy density limiter.
Flying planes with batteries though- I just think we are a loooooong way from that. There are some small electric trainers now, but the range for anything that can carry 100 people is just going to be crazy small. Keep in mind minimum reserves of 45 minutes for weather or service diversions and you end up with a small plane that can fly for 15-30min. This area is probably better to just keep optimizing the jet turbine engine efficiency- as they have made staggering improvements over the last 50 years.
more co2 in atmoshpere is a good thing