“Carbon Bombs” – Mapping key fossil fuel projects
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
The study is linked at around the middle of the article.
It has a few supporting articles at the bottom under "More on this story", for example one headlined "Climate chaos certain if oil and gas mega-projects go ahead, warns IEA chief"
High energy prices mean rampant inflation and social unrest. With crude and natural gas prices skyrocketing, developing nations will again turn to coal as an energy source. Developed nations will return (see Germany) to coal as a heating source.
Green energy will be thrown to the wayside for the sake of social stability give the tumult we've observed to this point.
For the short run, there is unfortunately no viable alternative without enduring 5-10 years of pain. Over the long run, I hope we get more nuclear reactors online.
[1]: https://www.irena.org/newsroom/pressreleases/2021/Jun/Majori...
Solar power is not cheaper than combined-cycle natural gas at midnight. The article that you cited does not contain the words "battery" or "storage", and one really needs to compare the all-in levelized cost of energy (and storage) over the life of the project. It does mention hydrogen, but does not go into the efficiency calculations.
This type of analysis is pretty difficult though. A modern grid with both solar and wind power is pretty resilient and calculating the amount of storage needed depends on the things like if it has long distance transmission lines (increasing reliance by increasing the geography).
I think this is why a lot of places end up having a gas peaker plant. In terms of running costs it's not great, and the climate impact is bad (although I guess hydrogen helps is that is available anywhere yet). But it's cheap to build ($85M gets you 55MW[2]). These days batteries are cost competitive with that though[3]:
> a 250MW, four-hour (1,000MWh) battery system in New South Wales would be a cheaper option for meeting peak demand than a 250MW new-build OCGT from both levelised cost of energy (LCOE) and levelised cost of capacity (LCOC) perspectives.[3]
[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... (scroll down for storage)
[2] https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/04/08/peabody-peaker-natural-...
[3] https://www.energy-storage.news/battery-storage-30-cheaper-t...
There are 280 million vehicles in the US. If fifty million of those were electric vehicles, then ten years later we'd have enough already-produced batteries to power the entire United States overnight.
There were 300,000 EVs sold in the US in 2020. There were 600,000 in 2021.
This doesn't help right now, but over time, it's becoming clear there will be a flood of cheap batteries available for grid storage.
As a nice side effect, as the market for these used batteries takes off, this might help to assuage fears about expensive battery pack replacements, fueling more EV adoption.
In this dimension, EVs that charge during the midday solar peak and overnight from wind will make an important contribution to rolling out reneweables, cheaper energy and ditching oil and gas.
I'll quote a brief section:
> In general, batteries will be retired from use in an EV when the range and performance is no longer acceptable to the driver. The remaining capacity of the battery at the time of retirement will vary depending on consumer preference, but it is generally assumed to be between 70- 80%.
> Given the large capacity and high performance of modern vehicle batteries, retired batteries could still offer significant value in lower-power, secondary applications, such as storing energy from solar panels to be used in off-grid or peak demand-shaving applications.37
> A growing body of research has examined the environmental impacts and technical and economic feasibility of repurposing batteries for use in second-life applications.38–42 Since repurposed batteries are a relatively new phenomenon, data about their performance is uncertain, particularly because of the uneven degradation of battery cells over time. However, it is estimated that battery lifespan can be extended by 10 years or longer depending on the application.38,43,44
[1] https://calepa.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2021/12/Fin...
All it takes is for a car scrap dealer to realise that for every EV battery he grabs out and hooks up to the grid he'll earn $200/year. Before long, every scrap dealer will be doing it to every car.
However, I suspect that small players will be barred from the electricity markets via mountains of bureaucracy and certification, so that might not happen.
If people simply hook up an unknown number of batteries of unknown capacities in unknown spaces, how can you rely on the resulting power grid? How can you plan extensions?
Not to mention high capacity batteries are huge fire risks, especially worn out high capacity batteries. Can you imagine how much water you'd need to put out a 200 car battery lithium fire? Iw would be truly irresponsible to let scrapyards build makeshift power storage stations like this.
At scale, everything becomes more predictable, because individual failures no longer have much impact.
Battery operators also will configure their systems to make money, so they will in fact have a big incentive to buy power when it's cheap and sell when expensive, so they will form a strong stabilising force. (unlike say solar, where operators don't track the price and just inject whatever power they produce, even if the spot price of electricity might occasionally go negative, and when it is negative, there is unconstrained overproduction)
There are some important differences. For one, those are using bespoke new batteries, not used car batteries. For another, the battery storage is not concentrated, so much lower risk of fires spreading from battery to battery (which you've ignored).
For a third, if a battery fails, it's most likely going to be the house whose battery has failed that loses power if the grid was at its limit, it won't be a whole neighborhood, nor some industrial plant.
Finally, I would be quite surprised if there is any significant power grid where any industrial consumer would be at a risk of losing power even if all community batteries were to be unplugged from the network (ignoring the effects of a sudden surge, like in the oven example, of course).
Sure, those are rich people too. In fact, so are the handful of Oil tycoons down in Texas. Since we're in super-serious mode, I don't "worry" about rich people. I tolerate their privilege just like everyone else.
When rich EV owners were given the entire first level of my companies parking garage and I had to park my cheap hybrid on the roof because it didn't have a Tesla charger I was a bit annoyed but I tolerated the fact that they were getting free energy (fuel) and a clean car while my car collected pollen.
When rich EV owners were given preferential access to highways despite having better fuel efficiency than ICE cars I was a bit annoyed but I tolerated the fact that they get to work faster and cheaper while sitting in a nicer car than mine.
When rich EV owners were given subsidies on their cars with no salary cap I tolerated the fact that my $20k hybrid had no subsidies and that I paid every cent on my own despite the car not being as fancy.
So yeah, forgive me that I take a mildly humorous approach to giving any more free stuff to EV owners when it almost exclusively benefits the rich.
For the record, I'd love to be an EV owner - I own a hybrid afterall. I can't though, market forces keep rent really high and I can't buy a house when the sale price of the house is actually $100-$300k above the listing price. If I can't afford a simple house to charge a car at, then I certainly won't look at a $60k+ car as an investment.
Edit:
Just to address your "total cost of ownership of a Toyota Camry" line: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g36278968/best-selling...
These were the top sellers of 2021. Not a single car in the $20k range. Many cars that are affordable to the every day person have limited mileage or are slow, and with rent and home prices climbing it makes it difficult for the people who could fit into those cars financially to do so when they're being pushed farther and farther out of the city.
Will any state be willing to rely on used car batteries as a critical component of their power grid?
What I think is more feasible is us finding a way to store energy outside the means of a typical lithium battery. I could very well be idealistic in this sense though.
It's also not something that you can just try out. I'm sure it will "work" in some sense at small scales - you can probably buy a few worn batteries off a used car and connect them to the grid and perhaps make a profit.
But the problem is that this can't be relied on by a whole country as a solution to ensuring power generation. This type of storage is by definition "best-effort" : you don't know at what rate you'll be able to increase storage capacity (how many car batteries will be retired and with how much remaining capacity?), you don't know how much capacity you actually have (what is the actual remaining capacity of these batteries, and what is the risk each will malfunction in some way in the next charge/discharge cycle?).
Not to mention, the risk of fires while amassing worn-out lithium batteries in close proximity to each other is gigantic, and there is no simple way of putting out a lithium battery fire. It could even be that this alone is enough to make such an operation unprofitable when accounting for insurance costs, even if it were allowed to run and connect to the grid.
I'm not going to spend days or weeks researching and coming up with a decent statistical model for something I don't even believe makes sense on intre the face of it for a comment thread.
I'd also note that something being infeasible from first principles explicitly implies that there's no need for calculations or experiments. For example, if someone comes up with a machine whose claimed performance makes it a perpetuum mobile, I don't need to calculate anything: I know from first principles (conservation of energy) that they are wrong or lying. Of course, this is nowhere near as cut and dry, but I did give my reasoning for why this doesn't seem to me to make any sense.
[1]: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
> Macro trends are what matter.
No, it's not all that matters to everyone that can't afford to pay these skyrocketing prices because there's no way to keep up with demand other than reverting to coal. The OP is about social unrest and burning coal now not long-term trends. There is no long term if everything collapses before that. Germany is already burning more coal right now because alternatives cannot in fact keep up. Your head seems stuck in the US, apparently ignorant of news from Europe (take a look at electricity prices here and what's coming online.) There's literally not enough physical natural gas, and we'll outbid everyone else into starvation for what there is and fill the gaps with coal. Green cannot compete in this environment, even where it's most heavily invested in. No way does it have a chance elsewhere.
Unless there's some significant strategic coal reserves that I'm unaware of, you'll be dealing with the issue that a lot of the coal extraction infrastructure has been decommissioned over the past decades due to market implosion. There's a lot more to extract and coal from a mine than putting a pick in the wall.
> and we'll outbid everyone else into starvation for what there is... Green cannot compete in this environment, even where it's most heavily invested in.
If you're saying that developed countries will outbid developing ones for natural gas, that seems to indicate that green technologies are no longer merely an investment decision for developing nations... They're the only option that protects their survival. If you're facing a market where you'll be consistently outbid, what choice do you have but to exit that market?
Poland has huge infrastructure for coal extraction though by the way. Germany itself has only been down since 2018. Then there's players like Greece (75% o their demand is satisfied by their own coal) who can be trivially outbid. There was Ukraine too, but, you know...
This isn't true, at least in the US: we have abundant offshore wind locations, nearly all of which are underutilized. NY alone is working on a 9,000MW offshore wind installation that'll be capable of powering 2.4 million homes (i.e., over 25% of the state.) Other regions where this holds: the entire Eastern seaboard (wind), the southeast (wind + solar), the entire Pacific seaboard (mostly solar, some wind), the gulf coast (wind + solar), and the Midwest (wind).
Besides, we're already paying the transmission cost in most places: it turns out that most people don't want to live near coal- or oil-fired power plants, which means that they need to be built away from population centers. The same goes for public fears around nuclear power.
I don't think regulators are idiots. They're paying institutional costs that aren't part of the renewable calculations, including inertia that makes changing the power grid inherently expensive. That, combined with the storage problem, are the actual reasons for slower-than-economical uptake.
BEVs are far from being ready to be a part of the goods distribution market, even by land - power/weight is still far too low. Electrical trains are useful, but building up new rail infrastructure has been neglected and takes a long time. Even if BEVs were viable, battery production is limited, and electrifying the transportation industry would directly compete with increasing renewables on the power grid and the need to expand storage capacity to do so. The price of batteries would sky-rocket and cause inflation this way.
Secondly, oil and other fossil fuels are used for their chemical properties in a large amount of industries - plastics and fertilizer being the most obvious. The cost of oil going up significantly directly impacts all of these industries. Some uses could be replaced with cheap power generation (e.g. H2 production through electrolysis instead of natural gas breakdown), but that requires a massive expansion of the power grid.
So even if we were able to keep power from the grid cheap through renewables, fossil fuel prices exploding would still rapidly increase inflation, probably to unacceptable levels.
Of course, that still doesn't mean we should drill more. The right answer, given the unprecedented threat of global warming, is neither to increase oil supply nor to hope that increasing renewable will be enough. The right answer is to decrease demand - stop producing many unnecessary goods and burying them in plastic then shipping them halfway across the world. Ration the existing oil supply to the highest impact industries, and let other industries replace it.
Don't allow industry to keep using expensive oil while shunting the price off on consumers.
With the solar in particular it's one cluster munition away from massive degradation.
It works the same with money: when you barely have what’s necessary to live, you don’t have the reserve to invest/save strategically to improve your situation, and you don’t necessarily have the peace of mind required to think about it.
Unfortunately, everything is interlinked. Carbon is certainly an issue, but we've clearly put the cart before the horse.
Even in Germany, coal is more expensive than wind and mostly more expensive than PV: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/cost-o...
In that study you see there is overlap between coal and PV systems and batteries.
For wind all those assumptions are wrong and thus won't work. You do not get a daily discharge where you can sell all the energy, you don't get a significant price change each day where you can utilize the price difference, and the capacity needed is a few orders of magnitude greater. Green hydrogen is one of the bigger bets people are hoping on, and right now it only cost several times more than nuclear. Except rather than using nuclear countries are burning fossil fuels because that is cheaper, and thus coal.
(And inter-season storage is too high a threshold: not many people are living in the artic/antarctic circles away from grids connecting them to places that still get some sun even in winter).
We need a PWh+ of storage, and we need it in the next decade, and we are nowhere near on schedule.
I wonder how much their power would cost if they were forced (for no reason at all) to store all that excess nuclear power and use it themselves rather than sell it to willing buyers. It would make nuclear look really uneconomic. Even more so than it already is.
So grid storage batteries, hydro and gas turbine (in order of fastest to slowest).
The best solution to keep both short and long term in mind is to regulate prices on basic goods to prevent the worse social impacts, while allowing commodities to explode in price. This should greatly encoyrage all industries that can get rid of fossil fuels from their supply chains to do so, but also reduce overall consumption of unnecessary items and thus of fossil fuels. If the plastic toy you were importing from China suddenly costs 50$ instead of 5$, perhaps you simply won't buy it, so it won't get produced and wrapped in even more plastic and shipped halfway across the world.
Power companies aren’t building Wind/PV because it’s green they are building it because it’s cheap. Yes, higher inflation means higher interest rates, but it also means higher payments from customers over time.
They still need a transportation grid for repair and replacement parts, but that need is worlds away from the need of a coal plant supplied with continuous burnable fuel, or a natural gas plant at the end of a pipe. Renewables are a more flexible technology for a world of more change.
I honestly think the US will end up in a civil war if it ends up being necessary to force action on climate change.
As an aside, I own a pickup. I honestly don't give a shit if gas goes to $20. We already drive it as little as possible.
However, there's no reason that would have to happen. It would cost about a dollar per gallon of gasoline-equivalent for existing prototype atmospheric carbon capture technologies to start drawing down CO2.
That's much cheaper than societal collapse. Heck, it is less than Putin's war is costing US consumers.
The excuses need to end, and action needs to start ramping up.
[0] https://www.climate-transparency.org/countries/africa/saudi-...
But this one study is about projected growth, so old wells are really not the point.
Many people spend their lives estimating embedded emissions and, more importantly, the time it will take for any emission-reducing technology (e.g. electric cars) to amortise away the CO2e emissions required to produce it.
For instance, it's been estimated that a Tesla Model 3 "needs to be driven for 13,500 miles (21,725 km) before it does less harm to the environment than a Toyota Corolla" [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_emissions [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lifeti...
Huh, that’s a factor of 5-10 less miles than I was expecting. Good to know.
As a matter of fact, electric cars would be more efficient than ICE cars even with a very high-carbon electricity mix, because thermal power plants are much more efficient than ICE engines (due to size + available cooling source), and the power transmission/battery/electric engines are optimized enough that they don't gobble all the efficiency gains.
Electric cars are better CO2-wise, no question. But it will not reduce emissions enough. People who can afford not having a car should do so, and public authorities should develop public transportation. Of course, people who can't do so will be better off with an electric car, but environmentalists are worried that a push to full-electric will undermine needed efforts to reshape society towards a less energy-hungry world.
It turns out, when you burn a bunch of rocks, You release as gas all the stuff in those rocks.