I think that long-term, long-distance air travel will be the primary application for e-fuels, yeah - the sheer mass of batteries required pretty much rules them out of contention in that application in their current form. That, and buying special Ferrari- and Porsche-branded drums of fuel for your vintage 296 GTB or…

Lithium can be extracted from seawater, and the ocean contains about 180 billion tonnes of lithium (which is about 2000 times the current estimated land-based lithium resources), in a process that is profitable in its current form and which also hydrogen, chlorine, and brackish water that can be reasonably easily…

The 22 million tonne figure is reserves - that is the portion of resources that are deemed to be economically recoverable. I’m not sure what your basis for doubting that figure is, but I’ll take the word of the USGS on the matter.

Happily, I think that the reason it doesn’t get much press is mostly that it doesn't have the same environmental issues at brine extraction.

Absolutely agreed - there are a lot of options that don't require lithium when energy density isn’t such an important factor.

Most of the known lithium reserves are in Chile and Australia - both of which are strong partners with the U.S. (and from a realpolitik perspective, both of which would probably like to maintain those strong relationships).

Long-term, the expected production costs of e-fuels are expected to drop significantly from their current cost (roughly $200/gal), but the suggestion is that the cost may in the best case scenario get down to around $4/gal (production cost, compared to about $2.5o/gal for current fossil fuel derived gasoline). That…

Utility storage opens up the suite of potential chemistries a huge amount - vanadium-redox and zinc-bromine flow batteries make by far the most sense in those applications . They both have all of the characteristics you want in a stationary storage battery - essentially infinite cycle capacity, no self-discharge,…

Most lithium extraction is currently done in Australia, as it happens, and thankfully the deposits are in hard rock rather than brine, so the issues with brine extraction aren’t there. It’s fundamentally very similar to any other kind of hard-rock mining (dig a big hole and crush up the rocks that you get).

There are a couple of significant issues with hydrogen. The first is storage, and the second is power density of fuel cells (the reaction surface has to be massive to get decent amounts of power out of them).

Exactly - if people want lithium, there are miners who will be quite happy to supply it. McKinsey, that famous bastion of the greenie and the leftie, wrote last year that they believe the world will secure sufficient lithium resources to meet the demand of electric vehicles.

It really depends on the resource extraction process - lithium extracted from brines (as is common in South American deposits) is a fairly resource-intensive process with risks of environmental contamination. Lithium extracted from hard rock (as is common in Australian resources) is much the same as any hard-rock…

“I should not be made to suffer through iterations of Top Gear that can’t hold a candle to the original.”

Identical doesn’t come into the definition as far as I'm aware. How many have to be identical for it to count as mass production? How identical do they have to be?

So many angles. So many hips. It has more facets than the world’s largest cubic zirconia.

That sounds like a pretty enjoyable way of spending time in what could have been a less-than-ideal school location. I think it’s pretty clever of the teacher/whoever spoke to you to negotiate like that too, to be honest - it’s a much better solution for everyone than saying “no more paper planes”, because it puts…

Or dropping from a height, allowing negligible input of kinetic energy.

No amount of damage my pet could do to my car could pain me as much as the trip where they don’t come back with you.

Given how badly it went for them last time, there’s a big opportunity for redemption there, yeah.

I think that the approach this time (largely a hands-off sponsor, much like their approach with the development of the DFV) should work a lot better then the Jaguar years.