Crash! First Responders Not Equipped to Fight EV Lithium Battery Fires
With 40 percent of new cars predicted to be electric by 2030, Baltimore County’s volunteer firefighter’s association hopes Tesla can figure out how to stop making portable fireballs.
Investment bank UBS predicts by 2025, 20 percent of all new cars sold globally will be electric. Then by 2030, new sales will jump to 40 percent, and by 2040, every new car sold globally will be electric. The electric car adoption curve appears parabolic, and emergency responders need improved methods to safely and quickly extinguish electric vehicle fires as they’re likely to become more frequent.
Take, for example, a Tesla crash in Towson, Maryland, on Thursday evening. The vehicle immediately caught fire after it smashed into a median. The driver was unharmed, but the fire raged out of control after multiple fire stations didn’t have the proper resources to extinguish the flames.
“The fire escalated to fully involved within about five minutes, officials said. Firefighters initially used portable extinguishers, but a foam unit from the fire department’s hazmat unit was deployed, along with copious amounts of water, to cool the fire as it intensified due to damaged battery-powered cells that contain lithium, which ignites when exposed to oxygen,” local news WBAL said.
Traditional fire extinguishers, such as foam and water, are ineffective at immediately extinguishing lithium-metal fires. A class-D dry powder extinguisher is certified for use in lithium fires, though there was no mention if firefighters that night had that or a lithium fire blanket to isolate the fire.
Instead, a large-capacity water tanker, hazmat unit, and a foam unit were called in and eventually extinguished the blaze two hours later.
Commenting on the fire, one Twitter user said: “What is going to happen if the majority of cars are electric. Every accident/car fire can’t require this level of Emergency Service assets.”
Sounding frustrated, the Baltimore County Volunteer Firefighters Association responded to the user and said: “Let’s hope @elonmusk can work with the fire service and together we can develop a better response.”
Earlier this summer, 20 tons of water were used to extinguish a Tesla fire in Taiwan. For some context, it only takes three tons of water to put out a gasoline car fire. A Texas fire chief told The Independent that a Tesla fire needed 40 times more water to control the blaze in a separate incident.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has encouraged electric car companies to educate and help emergency responders on techniques and new tools to put out lithium-ion battery fires. But in the Baltimore fire, the three firehouses appeared not to be well versed in controlling a lithium fire.
Meanwhile, where’s all that lithium going to come from, and how will environmentally conscious world leaders dispose of it?
See more here: zerohedge.com
Bold emphasis added
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.
Howdy
| #
“how will environmentally conscious world leaders dispose of it?”
1) they are not environmentally conscious.
2) If they were, they wouldn’t allow Lithium cells in the first place.
Reply
Allan Shelton
| #
A Canadian Company has patents for producing safer batteries.
Visit this site… https://www.nanoone.ca/
Reply
Richard Noakes
| #
China’s Electric Car Boom Went Bust
Published on September 25, 2021
Written by Climate Change Dispatch
Visitors to Byton Ltd.’s website are greeted with color-saturated images of shiny electric cars gliding along manicured streets. Those paying a visit to the automaker’s factory in Nanjing, eastern China may be less impressed. (Pictured: deserted EV factories in Nanjing)
The plant is modern and huge, gleaming under the hot summer sun. But there’s total silence. Production has been suspended since the pandemic began and there’s no one around except for a lone security guard.
It’s a similar situation across town at Bordrin Motors. Weeds dot the factory’s perimeter and there’s a court notice pasted to the main gate announcing the electric carmaker’s bankruptcy.
Bordrin and Byton represent the flip side of China’s EV success. While home-grown stars like Nio Inc. and Xpeng Inc. have gone on to raise billions of dollars and are now selling cars in numbers that rival Tesla Inc., scores more have fallen by the wayside, unable to raise the crazy amounts of capital needed to make automobiles at scale.
In many cases, they were lured into existence by provincial governments dangling cash and other incentives to make Beijing’s dream of turning China into an EV powerhouse a reality.
Local authorities helped manufacturers set up factories that promised jobs and development — if they succeeded. But the tide began to turn in November when regulators asked regional governments to review and report back on the scale of their support for the auto industry.
Alarmed by unbridled investment in the sector — and the bankruptcies and zombified factories that came with it — Beijing is applying the brakes.
“We have too many EV firms,” Xiao Yaqing, China’s minister for industry and information technology, told reporters on Sept. 13. Mergers and acquisitions will be encouraged as the market needs to be further concentrated, he said.
The government is also looking at setting production limits for the EV sector, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News this month, with provinces unable to green-light new projects until surplus capacity comes online. Resources will also be channeled into a few select EV hubs.
The moves are a potential warning sign for investors who have poured money into electric carmakers and the technologies that support them over the past year.
There are some 846 registered automobile manufacturers in China, and more than 300 of them churn out new-energy cars, loosely defined as electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids.
The vast majority are names unrecognizable elsewhere. In 2020 alone, the country added new production capacity of around 5 million units, about four times the actual number of EVs sold in China that year. According to regulators, almost half that capacity wasn’t in use.
Bordrin, founded by former Ford executive Huang Ximing in 2016, was targeting annual output of 700,000 cars across three factories. But it ran out of money and folded before making even one. Huang didn’t reply to messages seeking comment sent via WeChat.
China doesn’t have a public dossier of bankruptcies, but since last year, at least a dozen EV makers are known to have gone under or have had to be restructured to avoid insolvency.
“This is kind of the classic capitalist competitive shakeout,” said Gary Dvorchak, a Beijing-based managing director at investment advisory Blueshirt Group LLC. “You get a zillion companies and then you have an oversupply situation. The process of failing is typically a lot slower in China because companies get government support. But eventually, some have to die and the pain inflicted to get those deaths to happen can be high.”
Byton at least still exists. The carmaker, co-founded by former BMW AG and Nissan Motor Co. executives, suspended all domestic operations and furloughed staff in July last year as the pandemic made it tougher to get its business off the ground.
Even before COVID, the company had encountered difficulties meeting announced deadlines on producing and delivering its first model, although its website still accepts reservations for cars.
‘Idle capacity’
Things started to look up this year, when Byton signed a strategic cooperation deal with iPhone maker Foxconn Technology Group in January (aided by the Nanjing Economic and Technological Development Zone) to start mass production of the Byton M-Byte SUV by the first quarter of 2022.
But Foxconn has been withdrawing staff from the Nanjing plant after one of the carmaker’s biggest creditors started taking management control, Bloomberg reported in July, and last week, the Nikkei newspaper said the collaboration had been put on hold due to Byton’s worsening financial situation.
A representative for Byton declined to comment on this story.
Jiangsu province, where Nanjing is located, strove to become an EV hub, luring $32 billion of auto-industry investment in the six years through 2020. Now, it’s home to more than 30 car manufacturers.
But it became the focus of a Beijing-ordered probe earlier this year, which found some local authorities had been doling out tax breaks and land incentives to attract carmakers that were beyond the scope of government guidelines.
This resulted in “salient problems of low production capacity utilization rates and idle capacity,” Jiangsu provincial officials said in a statement in February, without elaborating.
“Local governments had high expectations for the development of new-energy vehicle companies, hoping to tap the opportunities of the sector and drive local economic expansion,” Cui Dongshu, secretary-general of China Passenger Car Association, said in an interview. “Investors also saw huge profit potential. This has resulted in surplus capacity.”
Yinlong New Energy Co.’s Nanjing factory broke ground in 2017 with a total planned investment of 10 billion yuan (US$1.6 billion). Output was set at 30,000 new-energy commercial vehicles, mainly electric buses, and there were EV battery-making plans too.
Production was due to start in 2018 but today the plant is all but abandoned. Trash has piled up along its walls and roads connecting buildings inside are deserted, its entrances barricaded.
The company’s biggest shareholder, Gree Electric Appliances Inc., said there’s still scope for collaboration, either in bolstering the carmaker’s capacity utilization and competitiveness or in pushing its battery technology.
Some of China’s established automakers are watching all of this with a sense of inevitability. Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co., one of the nation’s biggest privately owned carmakers with a range of brands spanning mass-market vehicles to ultra-luxury racing cars made by Lotus — which it controls — sees a natural cycle playing out, and one that will involve some casualties.
“Some people rush to build one, two, three, five factories, even though their first car isn’t yet on the market,” Group Lotus Plc Chief Executive Officer Feng Qingfeng said.
“When everybody thinks it’s easy to make cars, people dive into car making. When they realize the car business isn’t that easy, they stop investing,” he said. “It’s the invisible hand of the market economy commanding order.”
See more here: climatechangedispatch.com
Reply
Richard Noakes
| #
Existing car engines will be able to run on a new “blue fuel” which is made by a simple process (apparently) of splitting water, or H2O into Hydrogen and Oxygen, using Ammonia to do that.
The problem previously was that Ammonia was very expensive and the methods used to make the fuel were not feasible, however, someone has invented a method that uses a similar technology to do that, through a portable “converter” about the size of a small fridge – X-15 one of the experimental jets of the 1950’s and 1960’s was powered by this “blue fuel” and went 6 times faster than the sound barrier on it, so I understand.
I run 2 “big petrol driven cars” and one little one and I await the arrival of this alternative fuel with pleasure, because electric cars all have the same potential problems that electric car builders, back in the early 1900’s had – the batteries cost more than the car to replace and they weigh a lot and they take too long to charge up, if you are going on an extended journey.
Being able to keep my petrol driven cars and not having to obsolete them, plus having to buy an electric car with limited use or potential, does not make much sense to me – a lot like killing Covid with my free salt water “Covid Crusher” cure which has not killed me, or anyone else who uses it, these past 27 years, instead of those vaccines which kill and injure more than they save – backwards thinking!!
Richard
Reply
Herb Rose
| #
Hi Richard,
Your chemistry is bad. You can’t split H2O with ammonia. I think the “blue fuel”you are talking about is hydrazine which is a combination of ammonia and nitric acid. It is a powerful oxidizer (needed in space) and is combined with a hydrocarbon to produce energy (I think they used an alcohol as the field). It is extremely hazardous.
The reason they use hydrogen and oxygen in a fuel cell is because carbon fouls the system up. It would be far easier to use methane and oxygen in a fuels cell if you could prevent the fouling but since no-one has been able to do this they have to use an excess of energy to reverse the process splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen then releasing the saved energy when the elements are recombined to form water.
Herb
Reply
Howdy
| #
Hi Alan,
I can’t find anything in particular about safety on the site. Some of the claims they made are apparently already known.
I found a useful pdf: https://ceramics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/September-2019_Feature.pdf
Lithium-sulfur cells:
https://www.bestmag.co.uk/indnews/oxis-sends-out-solid-state-lithium-sulfur-cells-testing-amid-plans-quasi-solid-state-2022
Unfortunately they all use Lithium. That’s the problem.
The driving force is energy density. Other than catastrophic failure for no apparent reason, safety is seemingly secondary.
Reply
Carbon Bigfoot
| #
Lithium dissociates H2O into hydrogen and oxygen and when the mixture reaches its upper or lower combustion limits it explodes. Water should not be used except for clean-up.
Reply
Charles Higley
| #
Just wait. They will start touting the energy density of capacitors and super capacitors for vehicles. You could pack the energy of a tank of gasoline into a capacitor but, when it fails, it would be like a small nuclear explosion—instant energy release—probably with a mushroom cloud.
Reply
jamesbbkk
| #
No comment in the news article about the constituents of the smoke or of the runoff that went down the storm drains. Reporting job done not too good.
Reply