The Future of Fossil Fuels
rhsfinancial.com
rhsfinancial.com
Most of electricity in the world comes from coal. Coal usage must drop to zero as fast as possible just to keep the climate in a barely liveable state, and we're not heading there, frankly.
One very big elephant in the room is why does renewable power looks so cheap at times: it's because production occurs either at fixed times (solar) or random times (wind), so basically renewable power is often produced when it isn't needed therefore worth almost nothing or even less than nothing. That's the main reason why renewable power looks cheap: because as long as we have some other reliable sources to fulfil demand and they really don't amount to much power anyway, their production isn't very useful.
Oil OTOH is what propels 99.8% of everything that sails, flies or drives. Oil is what makes globalisation possible. Oil consumption represents 50% more globally than electricity generation, so there's no believable way to replace the first with the second. So far, we have absolutely no idea on how to replace oil at scale. Most probably globalisation as we know it will end not because of evil trumpian protectionism, but because we won't be able to afford it anymore for lack of oil.
Edit: To directly address grandparent, oil made globalization possible. It no longer is needed in order to continue having global communities, just cheapest for shipping.
People seem to believe that "services" are somehow entirely disconnected from hardware. There aren't; almost all services are about managing actual physical influxes. If we cease trading goods and people with China in any significant amount, then information influx will dry out in proportion.
But we don't have the resources to build up enough batteries and windmills without destroying the climate doing it.
The ecological and climate situation is absolutely cataclysmic. Rich people from rich country are far-removed enough from down-to-earth reality to minimize it most of the time, but the truth is that current trends are not only unsustainable but must be reversed as soon and as fast as possible.
We're falling towards the ground and accelerating, but as long as we haven't hit the ground we still believe everything's fine and someone will pop a parachute out in time. But all we have are handkerchiefs.
I'll remind you that the "climate goals" from the Paris agreement are 1° much too low to actually "save the climate" but at the same time 2° we're far from attaining them!
I'll tell you what "serious environmentalism" is:
Actually you, we, I, everybody should be terrified of the current situation. Planetary collapse is about to occur about any moment now, but the orchestra's still playing on the upper deck. If you haven't trouble finding sleep about climate and mass extinction at night, then you're probably not having a good grasp of what's happening.
It's the heart of winter here and fruit trees are blossoming. There isn't any snow in any ski resorts under 2000m in the Alps; they're hauling snow with helicopters ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEuTKMkgY6A ) because it's not even cold enough at night for "snow guns" to work. I'm out there in t-shirt while it should be freezing. It's been the same temperature in Scandinavia last week as is normal in June. Half of the "non-return" points have been reach 40 years sooner than expected in the worst scenarios. 60% of wild animals worldwide have died. 65% to 80% of insects have disappeared in Europe. 88% of freshwater fish worldwide. Only 20% of land worldwide haven't been negatively impacted by human activities yet.
I think you are confusing weather with climate: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/weather-vs-climate
The current climate evolution is way worse than the worst predictions from recent IPCC reports. We'll reach +2°C before 2050.
Fossil fuels provide base load power that, without storage, we simply cannot rely on most renewables to directly substitute. The only alternative has been, and likely will continue to be, nuclear power, which has its own set of challenges.
If you accept this contention, then the big driver / trigger / marker for the "end of fossil fuels as bulk power sources" is the development and at scale deployment of power storage. And I don't see compelling evidence that is happening anytime soon.
"Closer to home, Los Angeles’ utility commission recently approved a new solar plant that will deliver 300 megawatts of energy at 3.962¢/kWh (by comparison, electric power from natural gas usually costs about 8¢/kWh in the US). Importantly, that price tag includes energy storage as well, meaning the plant will be able to deliver energy to LA residents day and night."
I don't read that as 100% of LA's night time power requirements each night for 4 hours though; rather, that it can continue supplying at a steady rate 4 hours after Sun down. It's not nearly a replacement for base load power.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-09-10/ladwp-v...
For example, the electric hot water heater. It can run when power is cheap, and not when it is expensive. The water will stay hot for a couple days (I know this from experience with power failures).
The same goes for heating/cooling the house. When power is cheap, heat/cool to the edge of the comfort zone. When power is expensive (i.e. base rate) let it drift to the other extreme. Houses have a great deal of thermal mass (again I know this from power outages) and this can be increased by using a pile of rocks as a thermal "battery".
In order to motivate people to use this method, raise the cost of the night rate.
Edit: of course, the more water in the hot water tank, and the more rocks in the hot/cold pile, the better this works. Fortunately, water and rocks are cheap.
You are heading straight to a civil war.
> A lot of power requirements can be time shifted, as a residence is inherently a large battery.
Go tell this to people living through Canadian winter with sub-zero temperature...
Just reduce the daytime rates. Besides, it doesn't make sense to have fixed electric rates 24/7 when the cost to supply it varies dramatically. Look at gasoline pump prices, they very all the time due to supply+demand and nobody is fighting a war over that.
> Go tell this to people living through Canadian winter with sub-zero temperature.
I agree that any solution that doesn't cover 100% of use cases is quite useless and inapplicable for the 98% of the population where it would work.
Besides, I live in Seattle which is next to Canada, and this solution would work fine in the PNW climate, which includes Vancouver B.C.
Electricity is the least popular form of heating in Canada, by far, dwelling are heated with gas furnace. This, and my supply prices are contractually locked for the next 5 years regardless of the actual market price.
> Besides, I live in Seattle which is next to Canada, and this solution would work fine in the PNW climate, which includes Vancouver B.C.
Come on, Seattle/lower mainland look like the tropics compared to the rest of Canada.
Source: google
But sure, continue thinking Canadian weather is the same as Seattle...
> load shifted to night when it is cheaper
Interesting how I never see these solutions when cheap grid solar power is available :-/
This is kinda backwards if the idea is cheap solar power and expensive nighttime base load.
But anyhow, even minute-by-minute pricing can do a lot to adapt the demand to the shifting price of providing it. I never see this mentioned in a discussion on the problems of grid storage, so I bring it up all the time.
The overnight storage requirements work out as adding a few cm thickness of LiIon batteries to every solar panel. Production of batteries is growing fast — eyeballing the images I’d even say exponentially, which is fast enough soon enough even if it isn’t a big enough number now.
There are storage options which fit different criteria. Some are very responsive to changes in demand (supercapacitors, inertial flywheel storage), but have high costs, bad wear characteristics, and low total capacity.
Some are responsive and immensely efficient (high energy-in:energy-out ratios), such as pumped hydro, but suffer from siting and environmental restrictions.
Some are slow and inefficient but scale wonderfully. Thermal energy storage, either for direct heating or for generation, is a case in point. District thermal energy storage has been used for residential & commercial space. Molten salt thermal storage can bank heat for weeks, but suffers Carnot efficiency losses of about 70%. It's cheap, simple, and non-toxic (though will sting if it gets out).
Compressed air energy storage is a lot like pumped-hydro, though it might possibly scale better and be suited to use in exhausted natural gas reservoirs. Here a problem is physics and Boyle's Law: compressed gasses heat, expanding gasses cool. This means either that you're losing a lot of energy to the environent and freezing your regeneration equipment, having to deal with high temperatures in storage (the possibility of triggering explosions in spent-gas reservoirs might be a risk), or have to re-heat expanding gas to prevent freezing in turbines.
Fuel synthesis -- hydrogen, natural gas, or liquid hydrocarbon analogues -- is an option which provides very-long-term storage capacity (proven to 100s of millions of years), but is inefficient (about 15% round-trip), and has proved uneconomic or impractable to date, despite over 50 years of research. I hold out some hopes for this.
Load shifting, and moving to a model of dispatchable demand rather than dispatchable supply might also apply.
Battery storage is another option, and will likely see some use. It's expensive, is limited by chemistry, and most of the options suffer from considerable side effects or risks. Some of the more interesting alternatives I've seen, liquid metal and molten salt batteries, both reasonably well-suited for large, static, grid-scale infrasturcture, have proved highly problematic. See Donald Sadoway's start-up, Ambri, pursuing a liqud-metal design touted loudly a few years earlier: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ambri-is-still-...
LiON is proven, but its light weight makes it favourable for mobile and transport applications. There's a limited amount of lithium that's readily available, and reserving that preferentially for where it's best suited is probably wise.
Among the problematic aspects of batteries: electrolyte scarcity, toxicity (lead-acid, etc.), high-temperature designs (liquid metal / molten salt), reactivity, fire/explosion hazards, and fundamental energy-density limitations, are all constraints.
My read is that all sides of the power equation will change markedly over coming decades: supply, demand, transmission, storage. We've been spoilt in ways we don't yet appreciate.
Years ago it was common to say "renewables can never work, they're too expensive and can at best power something like 4% of the grid". That argument clearly no longer works. Now it's turned to "but storage is too expensive".
I think the reason we haven't seen storage at scale is that we haven't needed it that much. There are very few countries with high enough shares of fluctiating renewables to need storage at scale. The ones that exist can still balance it out by exchanging electricity with their neighbors.
I'm very confident once renewables hit > 50% in a larger number of countries we'll see a development with storage similar to that of solar and wind before: Once there's sufficient demand prices for the tech will go down rapidly.
I think it might be best to feign defeat on finding a clever integrated solution and stubbornly make all the building blocks of power-to-gas profitable independently (through regulation, obviously).
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40072
It's likely that those deployments are matched to the better opportunities, but there are other signals out there, like investment in large fossil fuel generation plants starting to decrease.
Much like the tobacco industry, they have sway.. right up until they don’t.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
Full report by BP:
https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...
In short: it's a great lecture about tight connections between energy consumption and the wealth of nations, with detailed explanation why this happens.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/me...
Almost all of the worlds energy consumption is fossil fuels. So the idea that we are going to do anything to change that fact any time soon is an impossibility unless we want to trigger worldwide economic collapse. Not that facts and data and charts really helps when it comes to the most ardent climate change activists.
Throw in the fact that only about 20% of the world is part of the developed, industrialized world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developed_country
So we have 80% of the world ( about 5.6 billion people ) who are looking to become part of the developed, industrialized world. That means more energy. Which means more fossil fuels. Unless we intend to keep the 5.6 billion down trodden down, I'd say the future of fossil fuels is bright.
Barring some truly revolutionary advance in energy, we'll be mostly powered by fossil fuels for a very long time.
I suppose, if you consider 120 years a very long time. Given the scale of the problem though, it seems obvious that the time to think seriously about replacements now, not in 119 years.
Meanwhile, there are a ton of shiny new luxury ICE vehicles, even in my lower-middle class area. These vehicles will need gasoline for all of the 2020's and into the 2030's. And we still don't even have 2% of new vehicle sales to EV.
The idea that Rhode Islanders are going to be not using IC engines in 2030 is laughable. We've locked in a ton of natural gas electricity production, we have shipping ports without charging for ships, and an airport that uses NO battery EV planes.
We have a LONG way to go before fossil fuels are gone, probably 2050 for 75% of applications, and 2100 for 95% of applications. This makes sense: we've been on fossil fuels for literally hundreds of years...you don't dismantle 100's of years of infrastructure in a decade.
The stranded assets story is pretty bad: states are going to have to step in and remediate giant toxic industrial waste zones. Remember that methane leak from an underground gas storage site? Now magnify that thousands of times for the uncapped fracking, open cut mines.
Then add the methane clathrates releases from Arctic zones....
There is also "the rush to the door" effect. Burn it now to make profit now?
They start off citing a prediction that didn't come true, then they bravely predict the coming end of oil. Next they show that fossil fuels are getting less expensive as a sign that they are failing. A few paragraphs later, make that claim that since renewables are getting cheaper, they will take over. That doesn't make sense in my opinion. Both things get cheaper yet for gas it's a sign it's failing and for renewables it's a sign it's gaining strength. Their graph for this is only 3 years in the past. Seems cherry picked.
I don't trust this person's analytical skills, and thus their prediction. Honestly with the article starting the way it does I would say this is satire.
But yep plenty of ways to make diesel out of renewables.
Actually, you still need to fertilize your crops (not to mention harvest, seed, weed-out, etc.), which which need a hell of a lot of petroleum derivative and/or manure, both of which are on the environmentalist hit-list.
It is currently in the middle (logarithmically not linearly) of replacing fossil fuels while simultaneously saving money.
There's zero reason why you couldn't run the Haber process using electrolyzed hydrogen and electric heat