Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

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This looks like fantastic work. I hadn't come across it before. Thank you for sharing it on HN.

The authors simulate a network of ~6 million real-world assets used for extracting/processing/using fossil fuels, interconnected by ~16 million ground/maritime transportation flows. The simulations match actual fossil fuel flows at every location. The data and code have been open-sourced.

The authors use the simulation to ask questions such as, "what happens if demand for fossil fuels declines gradually, say, due to a transition to green energy technologies, causing the least profitable fossil-fuel assets to shut down?"

The answer to that particular question is counterintuitive: A gradual reduction in demand for fossil fuels can lead to sudden large shortages and supply-chain backlogs in many parts of the world.

Think of it this way: if enough "seemingly unimportant" assets go offline, all their connections (flows) go offline too, and the remainder of the network's assets and connections (flows) suddenly lack the capacity to get fossil fuel to all the places it needs to go.

I've added the paper to my reading list; I want to read it more carefully.

Fascinating. I wonder if that conclusion holds if, instead of assets being shut down due to lack of demand, links are chopped off by war & geopolitical instability. This is another likely consequence of climate change and we're seeing it already with MidEast instability + Russia/Ukraine war.

The lesson perhaps is that regions and individuals should do their best to disconnect their energy usage from the global fossil-fuel supply chain while it still exists, and develop new energy networks that are entirely in-region. I wonder if California's push to "go green" isn't really to benefit the planet, but to benefit California when the system collapses. It's just an easier sell to say "We're saving the planet" rather than "The planet is fucked, we're doing our best to ensure we survive when everybody else dies."

Edit: Looks like the paper covers this, and counter-intuitively, most supply-shocks do not have far-reaching impacts to the global supply. There are a few exceptions of strongly-connected nodes: most crude oil ones seem to be in Southeast Asia (affecting Japan/Taiwan/Australia) as well as Port Said, Egypt (Suez Canal), while the biggest natural gas impacts come from facilities in the Midwest (primarily affecting the U.S. East Coast). Their data does not include Russia, so it can't model things like the Russia/Ukraine war.

> Looks like the paper covers this, and counter-intuitively, most supply-shocks do not have far-reaching impacts to the global supply.

Thanks. Yes, I find that counterintuitive too. But note that in the publicly released data and model, the authors make highly simplifying assumptions about the limits of supply sources and edge capacities -- see lines 202-208 of the paper. In the real world, sources have limits at which you just can't get more flow at any cost, and edges have limits at which you can't transport more flow at any cost. I wonder how the responses to supply shocks would look if subject to hard limits on supply sources and edge capacities.

Does the field of economics use simulations like this at scale?

It seems valuable to simulate all international trade, asset markets, supply and demand, employment, etc. to make predictions. It could also lead to better ideas to prevent or quell recessions by focusing attention on the correct levers.

Yes and this is exactly what the fed and governmental agencies attempt to model. Modeling such systems is very naive, but so is some cult-like belief in some first principles taught in Econ 101.

I have to wonder about the real-world applicability of any such simulation, under the assumption that the systems in question are chaotic, and so extremely sensitive to initial conditions.

Do we end up needing to simulate the whole world? Because, ultimately these systems are in fact one, and not separate at all.

Just wondering... do they actually understand that (for instance) coal hasn't been replaced by solar and wind but by solar + wind + natural gas peaking plants and pressure-points related to natural gas are actually under more stress? Or that the regulatory changes in the pipeline business actually make the swings in natural gas shipment more volatile?

not a response to the question but... actually replacing an usage usually change this usage, but the effect on demand when thoses are primary ressources is'nt linked to this change. coal for exemple is a good source of synthetic fuel (fischer-tropsch process) and 1/6 of actual chinese fuel source or the wood demand exploded with coal usage, for mining it, before surface mining. just to point out that there is mostly no such thing as "energy transitionning" in the humain history, it's a cumulative process.

I expect there will be lots of surprising second order effects. Asphalt roads become uneconomical once oil refining stops producing enough bitumen waste. We're in for a wild ride.

I'm not sure about that. Refining right now doesn't just refine (separate into different components). It also changes longer molecules into shorter ones, a process called "cracking". They do this because we want more gasoline than the fraction that naturally occurs in petroleum. This (massively oversimplifying) gives more gasoline and less asphalt.

Well, if we use less gasoline, but we still want asphalt, the answer is to stop cracking, or at least to not crack as much. And the refineries would be happy to do so, since cracking is expensive.

I mean, you could get to a point where, if you just take the natural fractions in petroleum, there still isn't enough asphalt, but that's not going to happen for a while. (If ever. I suspect - but I do not know - that petrochemicals don't primarily want the tar/bitumen/asphalt fraction.)

We're talking about a hypothetical future where total gasoline consumption is trending down. In that world, bitumen is no longer a waste product, and starts having to carry the price of extraction and pipeline cost. That would make new highways much more expensive.

The likelihood and timeframe of that future is a separate issue, and I'm not holding my breath. Even if Europe really does ban new ICEs in the the 2030s, there's a long tail to to it.

Financing will cliffdive I would guess, since I would also guess that investing in oil is a 10-year payoff or similar scale. In ten years solar/wind/EV might be half the cost of gas turbine / ICE.

We should probably increase the national supply and use that to smooth the kinks.

And it pains me a diehard environmentalist, but we should probably subsidize the shale/fracking oil industry in North Dakota and other places to ease the transition as well.

Wouldn’t this just cause a perpetual yo-yo effect of the oil prices?

If there is a sudden large shortage wouldn’t that cause prices to spike? Could that be what we’re seeing today ?

Just pull up a 20 year price chart on crude oil or natural gas.

Couple this with data from Import Yeti on the largest importers of ship-based containers during peak and average times.

Use that to determine that shipping costs across will go up and will affect the margins of retail during peak import seasons (like holiday prepping) and how that will affect their revenue predictions and ultimately stock value...

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