This is great news but I wish people would start talking about total energy and not just electric generation. They’re still using a ton of gas and oil for heating and transportation. It would be good to be honest about this.
To these ends, BioCCS is going to have to happen whether we like it or not because pumping and cracking CO2 from air is just too expensive. Ferrous ocean seeding and mega seaweed blooms (like the area from Mexico to Africa now) is going to have to happen if we want to get this under control. Harvest that and either sink it to the bottom of deep trenches or burn it in a sealed chamber and pump the gasses/ash deep underground. Concurrently and in parallel, we can and should switch to scalable renewables / non-FF like fission, solar and wind if/when/until fusion becomes a reality. All-in-all, rapid negative GHGs must be the goal because the ESAS/methane gun hypothesis maybe a Sword of Damocles over our heads that could really put us in a bad spot if it fell. We must get the Arctic sea ice in summer restored or the heating of Arctic Ocean will introduce so much additional energy into a viscous feedback loop that will disrupt weather and climate for the foreseeable future.
Here are some other sucky truths that are necessary:
- FF-based jumbo jets, trains and large cruise/cargo ships will need to find alternative means of locomotion.
- Animal protein production should be curtailed almost entirely.
- Concrete (actually the clinker in Portland cement) and other industrial processes that pollute the air with enormous quantities of CO2, methane and/or other GHGs must capture their emissions and have them sequestered properly.
I could see all the other stuff happening in my lifetime, but not this. There is simply no way that we will find a way to create animal proteins in enough quantities in a way that's safe and as nutritious that people will trust to eat. Perhaps some future society might have it, but definitely not ours in the foreseeable future.
The unsustainable part of modern life is not the fuel used, it's the sheer number of miles the average person travels, and the miles travelled by the items they purchase (and the number of those items). The modes of tranport you described are incredibly efficient, used properly. Just to pick one example, modern passenger jets get 80mpg+ per person. If you really have to fly a long way (for example, to a climate conference!) it's better to fly than to drive, unless you give a few other people a ride. You'll also need some fast way to ship your replacement protein, unless you are lucky enough to live in certain parts of the world.
The Greater Seattle Area has had whole areas without power for days or weeks within recent memory. It's not just an issue for old or rural areas.
Putting all of your eggs into the electricity basket can get people killed. We should work on addressing these problems (or accepting energy diversity) sooner rather than later.
Diversity is valuable but we should install district heating systems and hydrogen pipelines and whatnot, not fracked gas plants.
Trouble is, CO2 concentrations of 1500 ppm turn us into idiots, and from what I’ve seen we could reach that from just known reserves of coal and oil.
Worse, if we don’t switch to renewables, exponential growth of energy demand means we burn all the known reserves in my lifetime.
Wikipedia’s article on world energy consumption indicates I’ve overestimated the growth rate, and the real doubling period is 36 years — without decarbonisation, 2056 would be 520 ppm, 2092 would be 740 ppm.
I’d been assuming the growth rate was more like double every 15, presumably because I’d mixed up “energy” and “money”. Oops.
Another consideration against any kind of fuel pipeline: safety. They're pressure vessels containing vast amounts of energy in the fuel only missing an oxidizer. PG&E certainly can't be trusted to get natural gas pipelines right: remember them blowing-up a neighborhood near SF? (2010 San Bruno; 8 killed, 58 injured)
Electricity and pipelines ultimately transfer energy from one place to another, so getting the fuel source, generator and points of consumption as close together as possible is a good idea from a cost-only perspective. There are other considerations, but renewables and nuclear near consumption is better than putting generation in remote areas... better still than remote gas-fired plants in say New Mexico fueled from gas pipelines from say Canada.
Hey rockets use hydrogen, lets use it for everything. Rockets are some of the most expensive machines built by man and the hydrogen fuel lines and tanks - if they even use hydrogen - are measured in meters, not miles.
There are many methods to generate methane. Some of them, IIRC, can even use waste heat from other processes. We don’t have to ransack the tectonic plates for every cubic meter of natural gas.
Which of course also begs the question of "well why not just use ammonia as the fuel?", but ammonia is highly toxic and thus unsuitable for use in consumer vehicles. But this also should raise some really huge warning signs when considering making a pipeline to transfer ammonia - if you don't trust the oil companies not to leak natural gas, why would you trust them not to leak ammonia?
And all of that still leaves out the fact that hydrogen fuel cell cars really don't 'work' in the way that people expect them to. Range, fill speed, performance - all suffer to the point that battery-electric cars are competitive today, and battery tech will still get better. My go-to article series on this issue is here [0], and they do a better job explaining than I could. Hydrogen might work as a substitute fuel for airliners, but even then it'd likely be easier to synthesize kerosene from scratch.
0: https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11470/why-fuel-cell-ca...
> In reality,
> You cannot fill up like you do with gasoline or diesel. It is actually pretty ridiculous how hard it is to fill up a HFC powered car
> You won't even go 100 miles on current tech hydrogen tanks that are still safe to carry around in a car
> Fuel cells wear out crazy fast and are hard to regenerate
> Hydrogen as a fuel is incredibly hard to make and distribute with acceptably low losses
Not a single one of these claims have survived to this year unscathed, and some have been hilariously debunked.
The first two points are debunked by an existing vehicle you can actually buy. Here's a review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euUiIjXA-zc
It's pretty well demonstrated that a HFC car can be refueled like a gasoline or diesel car, and can go 350 miles on a single tank.
The third point is easily debunked by real world testing. Ballard has tested it's fuel cells in HFC buses out to 35000 hours of operation: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2020/01/20200128-ballard.ht...
Fuel cells are showing to be incredibly reliable, totally at odds with your source's claims.
And the last point is at best only partially holding up, but it's looking this one will be fully and loudly debunked pretty soon. As of right now, huge progress is being made on this subject: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/01/28/green-hydrogen-costs-...
> “Based on real cost data from the industry, the analysis shows that a number of hydrogen solutions can become competitive until 2030 already.” says Bernd Heid, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company. “Out of 35 use cases analysed, at-scale hydrogen can be the lowest cost low-carbon solution in 22 use cases – such as in the steel industry and heating for existing buildings. And it can beat fossil-based solutions at scale in 9 use cases – for example in heavy-duty transport and trains.”
So your source's claims are flat out wrong on the broadest scope. You should stop citing it, and in fact it's laughably wrong these days.
Fuel cell wear has also taken great leaps forward, as you've said.
And so it looks like that (5 year old???) post is now rather out of date. Tech moving faster than expected!
But the last claim, about hydrogen being hard to make and distribute with low losses? Your link has nothing to do with it. "We're reducing production costs by 60% over the next decade, says the industry hype group" is nice and all, but it doesn't address distribution and storage. And in fact the use cases they're listing largely avoid those concerns by (afaict) colocating the production with the consumers.
Here is a better article regarding hydrogen's future cost: https://web.archive.org/web/20190823013233/https://www.bloom...
> Renewable hydrogen costs may fall to as low as $1.40 a kilogram by 2030 from the current range of $2.50 to $6.80, BNEF said in the report. That could slide further to 80 cents by 2050, equivalent to a natural gas price of $6 per million British thermal units. Gas in New York closed at $2.17 per million Btu on Wednesday. It last traded above $6 in 2014.
You can always bury your lines if you want them protected from the elements.
If you need to move methane a long way I believe you use a large diameter pipe rather than high pressure. You can’t do the same with high tension power lines (forest fires anyone?). And when the pressure drops? You burn some of the methane to boost the pressure.
I looked at doing this recently in the Seattle area. There just isn't enough sunlight to get a payback within the life of a roof (25 years or so).
In addition, electricity in the area is mostly from hydro, so it's both clean and cheap.
You have a point about the longevity of roofing materials though. You might want to use longer lived/higher quality roofing materials next time your have your roof renovated, and combine with solar then. Almost anything but asphalt shingles should do: epdm rubber, metal, tiles, slate, ...
Have you been to Seattle? They don’t have Alaska levels of Seasonal Affective Disorder, but it’s pretty bad. Mountains on both sides shave a little time off sunrise and sunset, and partially cloudy is every day. People basically ignore astronomical events because they won’t be able to see them anyway, although we did luck out on the last solar and lunar eclipses.
They have a special term for “overcast with a few moments of sun”: they’re called, “sun breaks”. Sun breaks. A break from clouds that lasts moments. Just a break, then back to work.
The only time the sun comes out reliably in the winter is when the wind shifts to the north and an arctic blast comes through. If it looks sunny outside, put on your heavy coat.
Tesla has a pretty detailed solar power estimator that uses historical daily sunlight levels at a fine-grained level. When I used it, the time to pay off my costs was close to 25 years, and that involved a lot of assumptions about future energy prices.
It seems like the parent comment was suggesting that natural gas was a necessity. I whole heartedly disagree. For winter months in extreme latitudes, other forms of renewables (hydro, geothermal, wind, biomass) should be sufficient.
Given that you only need to store energy for about a day[0] and that the batteries last at least three years when you use them like this, world battery production is already 1% of the storage requirements for worldwide 100% renewable.
One forecast I’ve seen estimates that battery production will go up by a factor of four by by 2028.
[0] longer periods with no wind and no sun are dealt with more cost-efficiently with long distance power lines than with storage.