Chemists discover new way to harness energy from ammonia
phys.org
phys.org
Producing ammonia from water is a lot easier than producing it from natural gas the way it's currently done now. The drawback is that it requires a lot more energy. There are 6 steps in the process here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production
If you use water & electricity & air as the feedstock, it's a 2 step process:
1: electrolysize water to produce H2 2: Haber-Bosch 3 H2 + N2 → 2 NH3
(In practice step 1 is multiple steps of purification and adding electrolytes)
In many situations, it's cheaper to convert hydrogen to ammonia, transport the ammonia, then convert back than it is to transport hydrogen.
That's exactly what Korean steelmakers are doing to source green hydrogen: https://www.kedglobal.com/newsView/ked202107160003
It might be a better way to handle energy storage than batteries, honestly, if we didn't make the ammonia from fossil fuels...
To make NH3 without natural gas, you use H2 produced electrically, typically by electrolysing water, venting O2. It also typically needs heat, also supplied electrically, and a catalyst to split the N2 double-bond so the H can worm in. There is a great deal of ongoing research improving catalysts, mostly discovering cheaper ones.
An industrial-scale hydro-powered NH3 synthesis plant is under construction in Norway. We will need hundreds more like it. Norway and Paraguay have a great deal of surplus hydro power, so NH3 synthesis is a good fit.
Small-scale NH3 synthesis using a wind turbine is also a good fit, for local use as fertilizer and farm-equipment fuel. It is a good way to use a wind turbine far from the electric grid. You bank NH3 whenever the wind blows. Tankage for surplus NH3 is cheap, and the neighbors can use as much extra of it as you can make.
No.
That's why I said it was unfortunate that ammonia comes from fossil fuels in the first place.
For some calibration of the qualifications of your peers on this site -- I did my postdoc in chemical engineering studying, in part, ammonia synthesis.
For context, it's possible to 'crack' ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen & feed that to a PEM fuel cell, but this requires extra equipment, high temperatures, and consumes some of the output energy. Solid oxide fuel cells can also run directly on ammonia, but that's b/c they operate at high temperature [650 C].[1] Solid acid fuel cells can turn ammonia into hydrogen at 250 C -- but this is still extra equipment & consumes energy.[2] Ammonia can also be burned in modified gas turbines, which IMO would be a great way to quickly displace natural gas in peaker plants, to enable higher renewables penetration w/o relying on fossil fuels to take up the slack.
Ammonia is a better hydrogen carrier than liquid or compressed hydrogen because storage is easier due to high energy density. The round-trip energy efficiency could also be higher.[3] It's less flammable, but more toxic. For more, see [4]. It sounds like the real enabling technology would be direct fuel cells and direct electrosynthesis (reverse fuel cells) to get higher efficiency.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-021-00797-w
[1] https://www.ammoniaenergy.org/articles/ammonia-for-fuel-cell...
[2] https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2020/11/ammonia-to-gre...
[3] https://www.ammoniaenergy.org/articles/round-trip-efficiency...
> Ammonia can also be burned in modified gas turbines, which IMO would be a great way to quickly displace natural gas in peaker plants, to enable higher renewables penetration w/o relying on fossil fuels to take up the slack.
Nukes can operate as peaker plants. The feedback from the control rods is nearly instantaneous. It's just in some markets they must telegraph their moves and get approval, which can take ~4 hours or more.
I bring up nukes because how are we going to make the ammonia? Nitrogen fixing reactions take loads of power. You could get it from nukes until we figure out higher capacity solar collection, but I don't know of anything else that would work well.
But the physical thermal stress from throttling it significantly shorten its lifespan.
Throttling nukes is not a trivial task; I know one plant (Bruce?) doesn't even bother changing the reactor power, they just inject steam into the bay instead of putto g it through a turbine
New reactor designs promise to throttle, but I don’t know if any have been deployed.
This is a bit more complicated than a gas turbine. With a gas turbine, you just inject more gas as needed to keep the turbine turning at a constant speed. The combustion chamber is a violently small part of the whole.
The heat producing part of a reactor, by contrast, is massive. As a result you have thermal gradients, and these gradients are different at different power. They’re also larger at larger power.
A large thermal gradient isn’t a huge problem by itself (engineers have been accounting for this since the steam engine). The problem is the change of gradient itself. As the gradient changes, the materials inside change shape and this causes large mechanical stresses.
The situation is pretty much the same as when you turn off an ICE car: ever hear those ringing or popping sounds it makes? That is the various hot parts cooling and changing shape abruptly.
The problem for a reactor is made worse because material selection is very difficult: you cant just pick any alloy that has good thermal expansion, or good fatigue characteristics. Every alloy must be from a very narrow set of isotopes (not elements!!) that are compatible with the reactor’s neutron environment (balance, distribution, energy spectrum, etc).
Now commercialize it.
I'd expect some do better than others.
Not in an economical fashion, though. Because the fixed costs dominate the variable costs, the less often the plant operates, the more it needs to charge for electricity when it is running. Gas peaker plants work the opposite way: low capital cost, significant variable cost (price of gas). That's more suited to the role.
>how are we going to make the ammonia?
From surplus renewables at other times of the year. Part of the solution is going to be overbuilding renewables by some factor, maybe 1.5x, compared to the total annual electrical energy demand. Ammonia is basically a way to store that surplus on a seasonal timescale for backup generation, in a more cost-effective way than batteries. Plus, we also need ammonia for fertilizer, and maybe it will be used for transportation (shipping especially).
This is established science and reactor design, it's not new. What I learned from a friend who works in power is there's red tape constrains on doing power variation which is why they don't do it.
1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_density.svg
700 bar tanks aren't light, especially not ones that can resist hydrogen embrittlement.
Most of the rest will continue to rely on gasoline or propane. Eventually it will be cheaper to synthesize this from atmospheric CO2 than to mine it.
Although, Universal Hydrogen[0] has a wild idea: "... the development of a state-of-the-art uncooled liquid hydrogen storage system that will be able to store liquid hydrogen without venting for over two days. This storage life will be achieved through the use of a specially insulated dual- walled aluminium capsule that allows the pressure inside to build up without exhausting the boil-off."
Yikes.
That said, you make a good point. The energy density advantage isn't huge when comparing to liquid H2, although it's more significant vs compressed H2.
I've lost count of how many times everything is "rare earth", including Magnesium. An alkaline earth metal that's nearly as common as iron.
As the Pope said, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
In the graphical abstract, the two ruthenium atoms are in the center, and the ammonia makes a temporary bound on top of them. They are surrounded by two organic molecules.
Further we used to common use ammonia for refrigeration before Freon became a thing - the reason we don't use it for that except in very limited large scale applications, is that it's SUPER POISONOUS and prone to leaking and killing.
So pushing ammonia is another example of solving one problem but creating 5-10 more problems which our society ALREADY KNOWS WILL HAPPEN - because we've been there before and abandoned it for safety, economic and environmental reasons. It's willful ignorance of history and science.
You definitely wouldn't want it in your car though.
It would be interesting to compare the number of people burned to death in gasoline fires to those poisoned by ammonia vapor.
My gut tells me that gasoline is currently responsible for more fatalities, but I don't have any hard facts on that.
Of course the number of ammonia deaths would go up to some degree if it were used in cars, but that would be offset by fewer gasoline deaths.
Industrial production and consumption of ammonia is the basis of the fertilizer industry. There's not many hazardous chemicals we have more experience in handling safely in bulk than this stuff.
In ammonia incidents, the industry with the highest frequency of injured persons was manufacturing of food, textile, and apparel (451 [39%] of 1,153 injured persons). The subsector food manufacturing had the highest number of injured persons and agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting had the second highest frequency of persons injured from ammonia releases.
-- "Top Five Chemicals Resulting in Injuries from Acute Chemical Incidents — Hazardous Substances Emergency Events Surveillance, Nine States, 1999–2008", Ayana R. Anderson, MPH, Division of Toxicology and Human Health Sciences, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6402a6.htm
Agricultural use of ammonia is strongly characterised by use in unconfined and well-ventilated spaces. Relatively few people are involved with its use, and those who are tend to be reasonably familiar with risks and precautions. It remains one of the top five most dangerous chemicals.
Notably absent from that list are hydrocarbon fuels, despite their considerably wider use by an almost completely untrained cohort.
Widespread use as a fuel would likely increase risk and exposure to ammonia, as well as its use within confined spaces in which the likelihood and impacts of accidental exposure would be greatly increased.
Sure, but carbon monoxide is a product of burning fossil fuels, so the fossil fuel cycle has it's poison dangers.
CO has a lower possibly lethal concentration of about 200 ppm (with long exposure), though higher levels will cause more rapid and severe issues, with levels from 800 to 12,800 resulting in death in from 2--3 hours to a few minutes. Auto exhaust concentrations without a catalytic converter are 35,000 ppm.
https://www.abe.iastate.edu/extension-and-outreach/carbon-mo...
In the case of ammonia, it is the fuel itself which is toxic.
LC50 (lethal concentration, 50% mortality) varies by duration of exposure, from 40,300 ppm (10 min) to 2,000 ppm (4 hr). LC50 for 30 minutes exposure ranges from 200--2,000 ppm.
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/idlh/7664417.html
Note that the kill mechanisms differ markedly. CO binds to hemoglobin, preventing oxygen from doing so, and effectively asphyxiating the victim. Treatment with oxygen should promote recovery in most cases. Ammonia is chemically caustic, exothermic when hydrating, and chemically induces necrosis and tissue death, most notably in the lungs if inhaled. Treatment and recovery are far more critical than with CO.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK546677/?report=classic
On top of that, CO is a fractional exhaust product whilst ammonia is the hyperabundant fuel. Any fuel spill or partial combustion presents and immediate and severe inhalation threat.
It's best to avoid both. Ammonia strikes me as the markedly greater risk.
With exposure to organic combustion virtually universal, CO poisoning deaths in the US range about 438/yr (1999--2012), or 1.48/million. From the accompanying map of case intensity, I'd surmise indoor heating is a principle risk case, with cases concentrated in northern and Rocky Mountain states. On balance, that's a fairly low per-person risk, the overall incidence rate is a measure of net exposure.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26032660/
In my earlier comment, CO has nearly exactly twice the incidents as ammonia, though I strongly suspect that this is based on a vastly larger potentially-expose population. Even with very limited exposure to potential poisoning, ammonia represents an absolute risk half that of CO, which has universal exposure.
Anyway, I interpret is as: "This reaction does not produce Nitric Oxide, so it's not necessary pass the exhaust though a catalytic converter like the ones that car have."
Ammonia is harmful or deadly when inhaled, produces a large quantity of NOx in normal combustion (TFA specifically addresses this one point), and is highly corrosive. It's one of the five most harmful chemicals in regular use already, given limited industrial and agricultural applications. As a general-application fuel, particularly in scenarios in which fuel-based power systems cannot readibly be substituted (marine and aviation uses) would greatly increase hazards of such operations.
Synthetic fuels are lossy as all heck in round-trip energy return (on the order of 15--25% recovery as motive or generation output), but offer a very-well-understood, well-behaved, largely safe, and high-energy-density (by both weight and volume) option for very-long-term (100+ million years proved) energy storage. There's very little else that fits that bill.
Fossil fuels are principally nonviable going forward due to net CO2 emissions. Synthetic fuels based on ocean or atmospheric CO2 extraction would be net-neutral. Costs are higher than present fossil fuels, but present fossil fuels are grossly mis-priced based on both pollution and cost-of-formation externalities excluded from present market prices. (The pricing error could be as high as millions of times --- markets can in fact be remarkably inefficient and inaccurate.)
Other externalities including localised polluton (NOx, CO, VOCs, particulates) would remain an issue, but can be reasonably well controlled with extant technologies. If net fuel usage is decreased through electrified transportation and changes in land-use, lifestyle, architectural, and industrial behaviours, use in shipping, aviation, mobile, and remote applications should be within reason.
Ammonia not so much.
The markets are working efficiently, is it prices in the costs that apply. In order for pollution to be taken into account, the cost of that has to be applied. The most efficient and simplest way to do this is with a tax.
Tax fuels based on the carbon content.
Because by natural resource economics, the correct price is $1.
That is, the extraction is priced according to the costs of extracting a resource, not what it took to get it there in the first place.
Pollution externalities are one consideration, but my understanding is that they are dwarfed when the full input costs of formation of natural resources are accounted for. Including the fact that oil is drawn from the ground at roughly 5 million times its rate of formation.[1] This due to accidents in the origins of cost accounting by Alexander Hamilton Church over a century ago.[2]
Howard Hotelling cites himself several times in his somewhat infamous (and by the pricing history, utterly irrelevant) paper on extractive resources. He cites no geological or scientific sources.[3]
I've addressed this previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20812433
________________________________
Notes:
1. https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1....
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton_Church
3. http://libgen.rs/scimag/10.1016%2Fs0092-8240%2805%2980050-3
There is also the "tragedy of the commons" problem. If nobody owns the resource (or it is communally owned), then the race is on to extract as much as possible before someone else does. But if it is owned, then the owners husband it.
The most obvious example of this is cow farming vs ocean fishing. Ocean fish are not owned by anyone, and so the fish are being driven to extinction. But nobody is projecting a shortage of cows.
As for oil, it can be produced synthetically (engine oil is now mostly synthetic). Fuel can also be produced synthetically.
There are other resource law doctrines, but they tend to treat an unconfined in situ resource similarly in many (though not all) cases.
In practice, what's lead to conservatorship over oil has been either cartels (Standard Oil, the As Is agreement, the Seven Sisters, National Producers, OPEC), state management (the Texas Rangers, Texas Railroad Commission (Because Texas), the US Department of Interior, Norway, or again, state producers (often as state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or partnerships), again: Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Brazil, USSR/Russia, and others.
Daniel Yergin's book The Prize has an amazing history of much of this, in particular chapter 13 covering the East Texas oil boom of the late 1920s / 1930s, which lead to production controls in the US. Absent government control and seizure by force of arms of wellhead production, price per barrel fell to $0.02, under the free market.
What happens as the resource grows scarcer is ... not well understood, and depends on surrounding circumstances. The island nation of Nauru gives one version, where an extractive economy for a resource for which there were in fact other alternatives around the world existed. In the 1970s it had the highest per-capita income on Earth. It no longer does.
An NYT story from its heyday: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/03/07/magazine/world-s-richest-...
The story with oil is different in that there is no global alternative that matches its characteristics. The alternatives that do exist were being used previously, and proved insufficient for humanity's appetites. We've grown more gluttonous on what's proved to be a highly limited pantry rather than a cornucopian farmland. After Nauru's phosphate deposits were exhausted, the island's economy collapsed, but the world's did not. With oil and coal deposits declining (barring global warming impacts, which are seem to be matching pace), the $1,000 or so of GDP the US achieves from each barrel of oil consumed will be gain against an ever-rising price of that crucial input. At $30/bbl, the multiplier was 33x costs. At $100/bbl, it is only 3.3x costs. Other nations' productivity per barrel varies from a low of around $400 or so for India to a high of over $3,000 for Switzerland (last I checked, a few years back). That threshold marks a point at which productive economic activity will be very sharply curtailed.
Oil isn't merely a material input, but a motive source that literally makes the world go 'round. It has parlous few alternatives.
It's just cheaper to pump it out of the ground.
The only element that is non-recoverable is Helium.
The initial argument was that oil is under-priced relative to its full cost of formation.
You're now arguing that we can synthesize oil given sufficient energy.
The principle value of fossil fuels has been somewhat less their chemical properties than the stored energy that they represent. This is rather like saying one can satiate one's hunger by eating one's arm. The problem isn't filling the belly, the problem is growing and operating the arm.
If we do find a viable means of creating synthetic hydrocarbon-based fuels (I've suggested this myself fairly frequently: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), what we'll find is that a properly-functioning market will price those according to their true opportunity costs. Those will reflect the energy and capital inputs.
If I understand the research correctly, stored energy will net about 50% of the input. Returned energy from thermal mechanical or generating applications will be about 15--25% of the original input. The cost is a great deal of lost energy, the gain is storage, portability, and availability when needed.
The reason oil is "cheaper" to pump out of the ground is, as I began this thread noting, because economics ignores the full costs. And, as I've said previously, under free-market conditions, prices fall to the marginal cost of extraction only (equivalent to the bus fare to the bank), which in 1930s east Texas hit a low of $0.02/bbl. (At the time, $1/bbl was considered a reasonable price.)
Note that at the time, the geology and chemistry of formation were poorly understood. The age of the Earth itself had only been firmly established as being in the billions of years, rather than the 6,000 of biblical estimation or perhaps a few hundreds of millions by geological and physics estimates (Lord Kelvin concluding the latter, in the absence of knowledge of radioactivity which could explain the sustained inner heat of the Earth and the Sun's own power source).
You might care to avoid bringing the discussion back to previously addressed and dismissed points.
But isn't that relevant to the "true" cost of formation? The cost to synthesize it puts a maximum price on it.
> The principle value of fossil fuels has been somewhat less their chemical properties than the stored energy that they represent.
Long term, it is their ability to store energy in a relatively safe, compact and lightweight form. If our energy production transitions to nuclear, solar, fusion, etc., all those are unsuitable for things like jet aircraft. But using that energy to create jet fuel is quite viable.
I.e. we needn't worry about running out of geologic oil.
> If we do find a viable means of creating synthetic hydrocarbon-based fuels
We already have, haven't we? I'm no chemist, but with all the chemical engineering expertise, I find it hard to believe we cannot product gasoline on an industrial scale given energy, carbon, and hydrogen. There's just no point to doing it right now because it's cheaper to pump it.
I.e. the two things that matter are the extraction cost and the cost to synthesize it.
One reason I hammer the false price basis of present petroleum consumption is that if the true formation costs are accounted for, oil production becomes economically dead. You can't pump out $5 million and sell it for $1 and run a positive balance sheet. That's what so-called rational economic man has been doing since the 1850s (Galecia, the Eastern European one, beat Titusville to the oil industry by about a decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galicia_(Eastern_Europe)#Oil_a...)
If our energy production transitions ...
"If" does some exctremely heavy lifting in that sentence. I've been familiar with this question for most of my life, I've done some (mostly minor) work in the field, and I've been exploring the literature and state of the art fairly heavily for over a decade, including both current and older predictions and observations.
Solar power, and its derivatives (wind, hydroelectric, biomass) is all but certain to be our major energy stream going forward, though hydro and biomass are already nearly fully tapped out. There's good prospects for considerable additional contribution from intensive geothermal (that is, from active geothermal zones, not "enhanced" lower-grade geothermal), though at the cost of formations now considered natural parks. Nuclear fission will probably play a role, but that comes with numerous problems and constraints, including limited natural uranium. Thorium and breeder systems offer the option of centuries to millennia of power, possibly, though again with risks. I'm pretty confident human-controlled energy-positive fusion will never happen.
we needn't worry about running out of geologic oil.
How long do you propose burning a resource accumulated over a period of ~300m years at a rate 5 million times its rate of formation?
I'd linked this paper earlier which details the efficiencies (or lack) in natural kerogenesis --- how petroleum is formed (also coal and natural gas). The process is extremely inefficient. However, it's already happened, and economists, accountants, and policymakers have been eager to ignore and/or deny the costs in time and biomass. I strongly urge you to read it.
"Burning Buried Sunshine', Jeffrey S. Dukes, 2003. https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1.... (PDF)
In the strictest literal sense, yes, there will be petrolueum in the Earth until the last of it is either subducted through tectonic processes or boiled off as the Sun consumes the Earth. Practical exhaustion will have occurred long before then, probably in coming decades, though precise timing dpeends on numerous factors (demand, technological capabilities, voluntary or forced transitions) and can't be precisely specified.
In the practical sense of providing a primary energy source (rather than, say, a material feedstock), petroleum is useful only where it can be extracted for a small fraction of the total energy delivered by that extraction. The term is EROEI -- energy returned on energy invested, coined by Charles A.S. Hall. The days of gushers spouting hundreds of feet into the air seem largely over, as are the days of a single well delivering tens of thousands of barrels a day over a span of nearly 90 years. (See the First Oil Well, Bahrain, as an example, which blew out in 1932: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Oil_Well,_Bahrain ). Current fracked wells are expensive to drill, require constant maintenance, and typically have about a 10 year life or so, with rapid fall-off in production after the first few years.
Early oil wells delivered a 200:1 EROEI --- 200x the energy output to input. Present operations are in the 20:1 to 10:1 range. Much below 10:1 simply becomes infeasible for energy. That's when the oil stops. It's not a matter of economics, it's a matter of thermodynamics.
(Again: I'm omitting pollution and carbon emissions here, they only make the story worse.)
The chemistry for synfuels has long been worked out. The molecules cooperate. The process is a variant of what occurs naturally.
Because among other issues our fouled-up pricing of petroleum, however, the economics haven't been deemed viable. The Google (Alphabet) Project Foghorn venture was shut down when economic viability proved unattainable. And large-scale production, at a scale sufficient to supply a city or state, let alone nations, has not been developed. But yes, given sufficient energy, fuel for applications in which it cannot be viably substituted should be possible.
I've compiled a bibliography of much of the research from the 1940s through the mid-2010s:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/22k71x/us_navy...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/29ihl7/us_doe_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electri...
I'd updated many of those links in a recent HN comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28970111
I'll point out that humanity has had energy crises before. Britain was denuded of wood as it was burned to make glass. This shortage drove the formation of the Jamestown settlement.
But then coal was discovered.
Whales were driven to near extinction in the pursuit of whale oil for lamps. The discovery of petroleum saved the whales.
Fusion would solve the petroleum problem, and recent advances make me optimistic about it.
Foraging and hunting (nomadic, low overall land impact) gave way to farming and forestry (soil depletion, deforestation, salination), gave way to peat (a living resource but extacted at rates greater than those of formation --- peat is something of a proto-coal), coal, oil, and gas.
Critics of limits ... ignore this fact, with stunning brashness and an utter lack of empirical basis or reason. An example from a 1978 lecture by Milton Friedman, to an audience of Standard Oil of Ohio employees (legacy of the benefactor of his alma mater, for what that's worth). After quoting a passage from William Stanley Jevons's 1865 book on the inevitable exhaustion of coal from Britain (production in fact peaked in the early 20th century), in which Jevons notes that the fairly recently-emerged petroleum was itself not only 1) finite but 2) less abundant than coal, Friedman, with a simpy grin and in absolute sincerity says:
We are now talking about how coal will save us from the shortage of oil, and he was talking about how oil could not save us from the shortage of coal.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150717170416/http://0055d26.ne... (PDF)
That is: "we're solving the problem of petroleum scarcity due to a fixed stock by looking to the solution of the previouse scarce, fixed-stock resource, which was identified as a finite and exhaustible resource well over a century before. (Jevons wasn't the first to remark on the finiteness of coal, that discussion traces back to the late 18th century.)
And wherever I've turned to cornucopians ... that's pretty much the tenor of what I've found --- logical absurdities, denial of empirical evidence, namecalling, cheap rhetorical tricks, and for the most part, dogding the question. And that's trying to steelman the arguments and find the strongest and most respected (among the cornucopians) advocates. See: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=cornucopians&r...
You're committing a similar set of fallacies in your own arguments, which are largely non sequitors.
The question is "can we find an abundant, renewable, or at the very least, inexhaustible over any possible course of consumption, store or stream of energy?".
- Britain (and before it, mainland Europe, Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, and the Levant) stripping themselves of forests are cases of overutilising a renewable resource. Coal, as a nonrenewable resource is not a sustainable solution, it's at best a stop-gap. By switching to coal and hugely increasing rates of energyconsumption, Britain made its eventual problem WORSE. (Note that the story of felling forests is literally the oldest written literature of humanity, in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Lebanon was where pharonic Egypt went for wood. There are no longer abundant forests there.)
- Petroleum lifting hunting pressures on whales does not make petroleum a renewable resource. It's completely irrelevant to the fact of petroleum scarcity.
- Fusion is a pipe dream and has been for nearly a century now. Practical fission energy systems were developed within two decades of the theory of sustainable fission reactions. In 1934 the possibility was first discussed, in 1938 the first "atomic pile" running a sustained nuclear fission reaction was created under the stadium of the University of Chicago (there it is again) by Enrico Fermi, and by 1954 nuclear power was operating the USS Nautilus submarine and the Obninsk nuclear power plant in the USSR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power Fusion power was proposed in the 1950s, and despite development as armaments, sustained energy-positive fusion remains out of reach some 70 years later. It is a vastly more difficult problem.
If you're interested in the history of energy and its impacts (for good and bad) on human history, Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History (1995) and Energy and Civilization (2017) are excellent (the former focuses a bit more on the history, the latter on the energy, latter is something of an update, though there's also a more recently released edition under the formal title). Smil writes on numerous resource topics in a non-ideological, technical manner. Bill Gates, not someone I always agree with, is a huge fan. His books are excellent.
They're also bookstops --- long and dense. I'd probably recommend the older title over the newer as the situation's changed little and the structure and presentation of the older is superior in my view. Both are worth reading, as are others by the author.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/...
https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-his...
An older title (1977, revised in 1994) is William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity. That's somewhat more strident, though IMO objective. The author is a former Foreign Service officer (US), awarded a PhD in political science from Yale. The book is based on his dissertation. Though the 1977 edition is slightly dated, it is valuable for making predictions (resources, population, energy, pollution, politics and geopolitics) whose track record can be traced. It is also exquisitely researched and its bibliographic notes are a wealth of references to discussion by both limits and no-limits voices dating from about the 1950s to its publication date. In particular, the book is written as a tightly-reasoned though readable argument and has some of the most concise presentations of the limits-to-growth argument (and various rebuttals) I've read anywhere. The discussion of political challenges, both within and among countries, in addressing limits, is excellent. (I'm re-reading that presently.)
I strongly recommend the book, as well as others by the author.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-s...
https://archive.org/search.php?query=ecology+politics+scarci...
http://libgen.rs/search.php?req=ophuls+ecology+politics+scar...
Consider the inconceivable amount of energy the sun rains down on use every day. Now consider all the energy that misses the Earth. Are energy collecting orbital stations too fantastic to postulate? How about putting them on the moon?
Then there's all the geothermal energy contained within the earth.
There's plenty of reason to be optimistic.
Technology and resources are constrained by laws of nature and specific mechanisms of effect. They're not governed by past lucky breaks, though there's a shape to those (Ophuls discusses this, hint: sigmoid functions feature heavily).
He also specifically addresses space-based solar power. I'll refer you to his comments in Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity for that.
My own first encounter with that notion was in T.A. Heppenheimer's Colonies in Space, which I read with wide-eyed enthusiasm shortly after it was first published. My eyes and enthusiasm have narrowed somewhat in the intervening decades.
I've mentioned geothermal previously. Consider that the Yellowstone supercaldera might be good for a few GW of continuous output, at considerable impact to the National Park associated with it. I'm somewhat in favour of that exchange. It's still only a small fraction of present US electrical consumption, though as a reliable baseload / dispatchable source, it would be a valuable contribution.
Tom "Do the Math" Murphy's series exploring various alternatives remains excellent: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/
The super-abundance of solar power (terrestrial, or with the addition of orbital power) still leaves us with a finite energy budget on Earth, if only through thermal shedding. The terrestrial surplus is far less considerable when increasing standards of living for the ~4 billion global poor, another 2-4 billion projected souls by 2100, storage, and ecosystem requirements are considered. It starts cutting quite thin by the time all of these are considered. I've calcualted that bonus as only 20x, not 7,000x, given numerous known practical limitations, and even that is probably exceeding generous. Some of that expressed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21476882
Looking at human population against incident solar power by unit land is interesting:
There's a reason why commercial ammonia is produced from petroleum rather than being extracted from animal waste.
If you wanted to use animal waste, you'd probably be better off fermenting it into methane (that definitely works, and is actually used as a power source in some specialized situations).
Wastestream energy flows are, by definition, a subset of the net input. Estimates I've seen are for about 1/3 of net energy input being available from waste-streams, though that's usually focused on solid waste. Urine production is based on protein breakdown (urea), which as a nutrient is typically 10-30% of net calories.
Even before digging further, the net total resource would be fairly small. Not entirely insignificant, but given costs of collection and processing ... probably unrewarding.
All energy we use comes from the sun. Every single drop of it. For a billion years plankton and algae were sequestered from the biosphere and converted to the explosive energy "source" we use now to allow for our population and standard of living, this is petroleum, but the energy came from the sun. We are lucky. Even wind, which is fluid current, is caused by convection from energy that originated in the sun. Hydroelectric is water rushing downwards, that was moved upwards by the sun evaporating water. Even fission is energy in elements that was stores there from fusion in the sun.
So where do you get the energy from? The entire earth needs energy from the sun for the biosphere to continue. You aren't going to get the energy you got from it slowly accumulating over a billion years, waiting for us to find it, not without paving the earth in solar panels. Short of sending a dyson swarm to collect solar energy from the vast surface area of the sun that does not radiate onto the earth directly, you're not going to get an energy source that is more environmentally friendly than burning petroleum, because you have to pave the natural landscape just to get a miniscule percentage of what tectonic activity accrued on our behalf for a billion years.
This is what people who talk about carbon neutral and environmentally friendly energy fail to grasp. There is energy out there that isn't oil, but it requires more disruption to natural ecosystems than burning oil, and it is far less energy dense. The best thing that can be done is to use oil to launch solar panels into orbit around the sun and somehow send that energy here, what you're ultimately doing is creating a lens to concentrate solar radiation to earth in a round about way. Bar that, you're talking about eradicating a significant portion of the human population.
All of the iron on earth came from supernovae of red supergiant stars. Gold requires much higher energy and some comes from neutron star collisions. Nucleosynthesis of heavy elements requires more energy, and thus more energetic or more massive stars as they get heavier.
Through cosmic eons, as stars produce these elements and get exploded, smeared, or otherwise diffused into clouds of elemental ions, the heavy elements coalesce into asteroids that are then captured by the gravity of other stellar systems. Early in the solar system's formation, the heavy elements in asteroids served as seeds around which the lighter elements were attracted.
When earth (and other planets) were at their present mass and orbital configuration, there was a period of heavy bombardment, in which asteroids smashed into the surface, depositing nearly all of the heavy elements which humans have access to.
Our nuclear energy comes from supernovae from almost half the age of the universe ago (6 bn years.) The radioactive elements in the earth contribute about half of the heat at the surface, the remainder of which comes from the sun. Geothermal is actually partially nuclear energy.
Cosmochemistry is wild!
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
they don't.
>There is energy out there that isn't oil, but it requires more disruption to natural ecosystems than burning oil, and it is far less energy dense
Again, that's true only when you believe paving the natural landscape with solar panels is the only environment friendly and sustainable source of energy in existence.
If you think it's okay to continue use oil until we achieve the technological capabilities to build a Dyson sphere (assuming Earth's fossil fuel reserves are unlimited), I highly doubt humanity will survive that long.
You say that, but then...
> Again, that's true only when you believe paving the natural landscape with solar panels is the only environment friendly and sustainable source of energy in existence.
There is only one source of energy on this earth.
No matter what you build to produce energy, that energy comes from the sun, which means some surface area on earth must be dedicated to it, which means some natural process and landscape must be severely hindered. Whether it is damming up rivers or paving some desert or clear cutting a windmill farm or whatever it is, to get the energy we need you have to destroy some landscape, and what you have to destroy is a function of how much solar energy lands on a square meter of surface.
The area that must be covered by solar panels to reproduce current power generation would be quite small. Existing pasturage alone suffices. Pasture grass does not need full sun, and benefits from decreased evaporation. Other low-impact sites include reservoirs, residential and industrial roofs, and parking lots, with important secondary benefits in each case.