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Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

Using solar and wind for fertilizer production seems like an obvious win. The prices are plummeting much more quickly than any other energy source, and the main objection — intermittency - can be worked around in this one application. Estimates say “green” pilot plants are still 3-4x as expensive as using fossil fuels, but presumably falling energy input prices and improvements (plus scale) will get us closer.

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“Can be worked around in this application?” I know folks that do maintenance on the plant that produces ammonia among other things at the BASF plant in Ludwigshafen, Germany. They don’t shut this plant down. Maintenance is mostly done during production. If one stage fails, the products of the predecessor stages are usually burned - makes for a pretty spectacular evening sky.

It’s likely possible to re-engineer those plants to use an intermittent power source, but it’s far from trivial.

And the alternatives are what, exactly? Keep basing our technology on inexpensive access to fossil fuels until war or climate problems make that unworkable? Or hope that nuclear-powered hydrolysis somehow becomes more efficient and feasible at the necessary scale? I'm completely open to the second idea, just not convinced that it's less expensive than dealing with intermittency.

When you say "it's likely possible, but not trivial" what I hear is: it's a matter of calculating the cost of alternatives and then making strategic investments, preferably as soon as possible (because CO2 emissions are cumulative and we don't have an efficient technology for CO2 removal.)

It’s definitely worth working on, don’t get me wrong. But the timelines for these projects are decades, not years. Expecting large scale payoffs anytime soon would be fooling yourself. In Germany, I see a very dangerous trend of expecting that such changes will save us, but the timelines just don’t work out.

So the primary effort should be directed to places where faster results are viable - heating/warm water via heat pumps where possible, insulation efforts, reducing car traffic, replacing existing power generation with non-fossil methods, energy reuse. For example, waste heat from industrial processes and data centers is mostly lost in germany, often due to planning/legal restrictions. (Sorry, source in German https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Green-IT-Abwaerme-aus-Reche...) Datacenter alone use about 3% of germanys electricity and turn it into heat - recapturing even half of that would place use closer to the goal.

I don't see a path to global decarbonization that doesn't include major reductions in fossil fuel production, and I don't see a path to major reductions in fossil fuel production that doesn't produce major price variability in (fossil) fertilizer production inputs. It's good that we aim to reduce our datacenter energy usage, but that may not prevent the avoidable starvation of millions of people.

Reducing car size and mileage would be a good start - I don‘t have numbers at hand for the US, but in Germany, the individual mobility via cars produces about 20% of the entire CO2. Even a speed limit would already cut that by a few percent. Immediately, as in „the day after the law is in force“.

In 2021, cars (trucks not included) used 60 billion tons of fuel in Germany alone and rising https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38... Shutting down the BASF steamcrackers would be equivalent to a reduction of that fuel consumption by 0.5% or so. So, a speed limit would be more effective and faster to implement.

But that’s a holy cow no one touches, neither here, nor in the US.

Note that just because that would cut CO2 does not mean its worth doing. E.g. that speed limit could easily cost more QALYs (e.g. via longer commutes meaning more tired people and less quality time with kids and more spousal arguments) than are saved with it. Particularly if, for example, geoengineering via sunshades or somesuch proves viable this century.

Like civilization died in all the surrounding European states? It’s a bleak wasteland of people trecking for days to reach their workplace, ravaged by wars kicked off because a spouse got tired of waiting for their husband.

I’m sorry for the ridicule, but that’s frankly the worst argument I’ve ever heard rejecting speed limits.

I'm stating that it may not be worth doing. You'd have to actually do the maths to confirm either way.

Disclaimer: as a public transport user I have no dog on this fight.

I can try a back of the envelope I guess...

If I assume a time in a car is around 0.9x as good as average time (which feels about right to me and indeed seems to match actual usage with risk level tolerance from 40 years ago), assume moderately large speed limit reduction enough to increase travel time by 20% and use a figure of 10kg of CO2 per hour (seems about right looking at estimates of modern car gas consumption) and the NICE QALY value of £30k we get around £100 worth of QALY loss per ton of CO2. This is a bit over the largest estimates for a CO2 tax that would cover CO2 emission externalities ($100 per ton) (using the latest estimates for the costs of climate change over the next 100 years).

Given the large error bars in the rough work above, it looks quite plausible that the real calculation could go either way, with a speed limit possibly being net good or net bad.

Can I have something of what you are taking too make such nonsense more bearable? Just imagine what our grandgrandchildren will say when they rediscover such a comment, lol. I mean those having those sunshades then up in the sky...

The Netherlands has such a speed limit on its highways and it's quite effective.

Just to give you an idea of the timelines: The BASF is currently building a small test plant to evaluate steamcracking via (renewable) electricity - it‘s expected to fire up in 2023 and will process about 6 tons of hydrocarbons a day (so roughly 2000 tons per year). https://www.basf.com/global/en/media/news-releases/2022/09/p...

The actual plant with two steamcrackers processes about two million tons. https://www.basf.com/global/en/who-we-are/organization/locat... The plant is gigantic, and the core of the industrial park. A lot of further production depends on the output of the steamcrackers, so when they had to be shut down in 2016 due to a fire in the harbor supplying the plant, 26 other plants needed to be shut down. Restarting them took days. Even if the technology were proven, we‘d be talking about a huge, multi-year engineering effort just to replace the existing plants.

paying 4x as much is an "obvious win"?

If a technology is at the "pilot plant" stage and the major cost input is renewable energy (where costs have dropped precipitously and continue to do so), then 4x doesn't feel like an impossibility. Meanwhile the price of anhydrous ammonia produced using traditional methods nearly tripled between January 2020 and August 2022: the "cost" of relying on continued access to cheap fossil fuel is not low.

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