Oh Shi*

I'm not much for puns, but there you go.

The Felicity Ace, that burned out cargo ship they were towing, sank this morning in heavy seas.

Funny. It's last reported position was 220 nautical miles off the Azores. The Azores belong to Portugal, and have an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) under the UN's law of the sea, that extends outward for 200 nautical miles. 

On this map, the Azores are the only connected circles in the North Atlantic that don't touch the continents. The ship sank somewhere just off the lower left side.

Isn't it convenient that it was just outside that EEZ? In practice, that means that it's no longer anyone's responsibility, and pretty much nothing will ever be done about it: a classic tragedy of the commons. That would include sophisticated assessment of the environmental damage, costs, and hazards.

Warning: I'm being very cynical in this paragraph. There is a ridiculous halo effect around EV cars that extends to potential environmental and disposal hazards. I would not be surprised if it is decades before anyone takes a look at this.

It's unclear how deep the water is where it sank. It is in the mid-Atlantic, so the abyssal plain is 12-18K feet down. However, the Azores are the peaks of mountains along the mid-Atlantic ridge, where the depth can be much shallower.

Keep in mind that EV batteries are mostly metals, over half lithium, with other nasty stuff mixed in depending on the design. Metals are not usually consumed/vaporized when they burn. Instead, they turn into salts, which can be water soluble. On the good side, they also breakdown into pools of slag, so the surface area isn't huge. It's still not even clear what model cars were involved, so no one is quite sure what was in the batteries.

Here's a site that summarizes the problems with combustion of lithium. The good thing is that lithium is not a "heavy metal", so it isn't terribly toxic (it's similar to sodium or potassium). But cobalt and nickel are heavy metals. Not sure if there's cobalt in those batteries, but there often is. It's so bad there's a table of contents to help sort out its issues. Same for nickel. The rest is iron, manganese, and aluminum, which are already fairly common in the ocean, and probably not an issue.

Ballparking. EV batteries usually weigh 1000-2000 pounds, so there's now 2000 to 4000 tons of that at the bottom of the ocean, in chunks like flat-ish anvils.

I'm two degrees of separation from JV through a former student, but she suggested this link last week. The problem of EV battery contamination of the oceans is big enough that they're studying how to deal with it, but it's still a work in progress. Too little too late?

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For you car nuts, the ship carried the last Lamborghini Aventador's ever produced. (Of course, that might be about as credible as some band's "final concert tour").

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Modest update. I did some site specific searches for "felicity ace":

• No hits at CNN.com.
• No hits at nbc.com
• No hits at msnbc.com
• No hits at cnbc.com.
• No hits at cbs.com. 
• No hits at abc.com
• No hist at drudgereport.com (an aggregator)
  
• Single hits reporting the sinking at yahoo.com (an aggregator, but still the biggest site for news, believe it or not) nytimes.com, wsj.com, washingtonpost.com, bloomberg.com, axios.com, reuters.com, and foxnews.com. 

The news sites with listed with no hits have open access to reuters and axios, so if they're not linking to it it's because they don't think it's newsworthy.