The question revolve around affordability and sustainability. Most of the interest was driven by fears we would be running out of oil, now it is driven by fears that we won’t run out of oil.
Synthetic fuels are potentially valuable because they allow existing capital assets (internal combustion engines and the industry that produces them, fuel distribution infrastructure) to continue to be used.
I am glad to see research into them continue- it's difficult to predict what will scale well economically in five or ten or thirty years.
For any normal industrial process people would be really delighted that they could use iron as a catalyst but the economics of FT are so bad they've scoured the periodic table for something better and not had much improvement.
Won't engines have to be modified and reprogrammed?
For example, our electric grid can’t handle everyone using electric cars. Everything from electricity production to distribution needs to be upgraded. There is a massive cost to that.
I've heard the "grid can't handle all EVs" statement, but have not seen anything backing up the claim.
I believe the grid can in fact handle EVs becoming prevalent. We might need more power generation, which could be new plants, and/or residential solar.
Baring some kind of crazy legislation requiring ICE vehicles to be crushed or permanently parked, we are decades away from a scenario where pure EVs are the dominant vehicle type on the road. There are just too many serviceable ICE vehicles in play to expect them to really go away in the next quarter century or so. That allows plenty of time for anything the current power generation and distribution infrastructure lacks to be adequately addressed.
The US's annual gasoline consumption is 135 bn gallons (2021 figure). At around 20 mpg (random estimate because I have to pick something), that works out to 2.7 trillion miles. At 30 kWh/100mi (figure from google), that works out 800 TWh if every gas vehicle in the US was suddenly switched for an electric one, or about 20% of the US's annual electricty generation of 4222.5 TWh (2018 figure). Also, that's about 5x the global crypto energy usage, vs just America's cars. [Obvious disclaimers: some of those estimates are arbitrary and not perfect, but they're in the right ballpark, and we obviously wouldn't switch to electric cars overnight]
Crypto was bad because it didn't actually accomplish anything with that power usage, but it was a pretty small footnote on the grand scheme of things.
For the first time I can remember, my power company was sending out Texts here in the midwest during that last Arctic blast telling people to use less electricity because the grid was over taxed.
Our National Energy grid is very very fragile.
Converting natural gas furnaces to heat pumps and replacing resistive heating with heat pumps, would not increase the total electricity usage at all. Last I looked 40% of heating in Texas was done through resistive heating, heat pumps would be 3-4x more efficient. There is current power devoted to resistance heating to run heat pumps for every home.
That said, no one isreplacing NatGas with Electric Resistive Heating, that would be crazy, NatGas is still cheaper in most cases for people north of say KY but there are alot of HeatPumps going in
I am unclear why you think replacing a NatGas heater with a HeatPump "would not increase the total electricity usage at all" that is just false, and I am not even sure why you would claim other wise, NatGas is not an Electric Fuel Source so when you change from a non-electric fuel source to an electric fuel source you will use more electricity. Now changing from Resistive Electric to heatPump would actually drop your electrical usage in some cases (above 0degrees anyway)
Around here it is not uncommon to have a HeatPump with a Gas "emergency" heater for when it gets too cold for the heatpump, as Electric Resistive is TERRIBLE and expensive. The problem is when that combo is sold normally it is wiht 80% furnances or they just leave the old furnace in place and just upgrade the AC/Heatpumpt
Overall that seems like a reduction in total emissions, since you're using less natural gas overall to heat the same amount. Yes, it increases power demand, but is also lessens demand on natural gas by a greater amount.
This could be a overall net negative if the power mix is heavily polluting (coal... etc), but largely we're moving away from that over time and it will only get better.
This just isn't the problem at all; it's obviously a problem, but not the constraint here. Fossil fuels let you store energy in a distributed fashion (e.g. cutting and stacking firewood for the winter), which is way better for handling peaks.
If too many people get burnt by oversubscribed grids in the winter, I would expect that the middle- and upper-class response will be propane auxiliary heating systems.
The only thing that using natural gas to burn for a furnace (vs. using it for a heat pump) gets you, is that you need more natural gas generation plants and the infrastructure to handle the additional power on the system. On the other side of the coin, you have all the natural gas infrastructure to each house premise to maintain... which can leak, have issues, etc etc etc.
Anyways in areas where it regularly goes below 0F, the transition will not be smooth (but probably still necessary). Heat pumps that operate efficiently down -20F are just coming out and will be even more expensive than normal heat pumps. Also most residential energy usage in really cold areas are from burning natural gas, so electricity generation is quite low compared to warmer parts of the country.
I do not live in texas.
Indeed seems manageable.
That is an astonishing amount of electricity for something of so little value.
But anyway, to the larger point, I agree the grid impact is overblown, especially since we should be coupling consumer BEVs with home / business / warehouse / commercial solar.
There's always going to be people who will need to drive, but there's a hell of a lot of people who could be perfectly adequately served by strong public transportation.
Never going to happen for 80-90% of the US. It is neither economically feasible, culturally feasible, or practically feasible for most people in the US.
Work places are too spread out, homes are not located near workplaces, and there is no desire from anyone (my self included) to increase density.
I want less density not more, "walkable" cities only work if people actually want to live in a walkable city. Many many many dont
1) where power is generated and used for crypto isn’t the same as needed for electric cars. Locations matter when you’re dealing with the creation of and distribution of electricity
2) moving electricity to all of the locations where it will be used is another problem. That deals with transmission lines, transformers, the last mile, and all of that stuff. That we don’t hear about it doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. It is Andy the lack of awareness and planning concerns me.
An ev drains way more power then a 2kw space heater.
A 2kW space heater used just 12 hours a day uses the same power per day as 4 mile per kWh EV driven 35,000 miles per year. Many space heaters see more than 12h/day of use but 35k miles per year is extremely rare.
EV’s are like microwaves, they use a lot of power when on but the grid cares about average load across millions of them not what’s happening in any one home.
“The battery size for a Tesla Model 3 ranges from 50 kWh to 82 kWh” that would give the largest a range of 20 miles.
Ev-database.org says they use 151Wh/km which is about 240Wh/mile.
Your hypothetical 2kw space heater uses 24kWh a day and is drastically less efficient than a heat pump.
EV zealots are just blind to the issues their silver bullet creates. Just like the "walk-able cities" folks.
Others will use dirt-cheap night time electricity.
And with Vehicle to Grid smart people can sell the extra energy in their car battery during peak hours and use the credits from that to charge their car overnight.
None of this is some kind of magical tech that's hard to use. Gridio (https://www.gridio.io) already exists and works directly with multiple EV brands.
Electric motors are even more efficient, but using them in the form factor of a car is also stupid. With robotics we can now make tiny self-driving vehicles that can do chores for us. Why should I drive a 2-ton car to the store to pick up a gallon of milk, when the store can send a small robot to deliver it to me? Similarly a large empty bus can be replaced with smaller ATV sized EVs that drive me from my house to the main artery and merge to form one train. That reduces the size of the EV engine and battery pack by 10x. Some of the problems to be solved are not merely technological but organizational and cultural.
You can ride a bicycle to the store to pick it up. Just think of the cardiovascular benefits.
And you know what? Think of the energy cost of the robot's manufacture, and the energy the delivery takes.
Cycling is my most common mode of transportation these days. I love it. But I also know it's not going to be practical primary means of transport for a huge slice of the population. And the "danger from cars" ranks pretty low in my list of reasons.
Human food is the most expensive fuel on the planet when you factor in agriculture.
The next time I need to plug it in is maybe on Saturday.
You need to use your electric heater 24/7 to not freeze.
Substation and individual point of charge capacity may not be there for areas without ac, or high density apartments - but that's where distributed charging stations come into play (aka charging stations) (very low volume of gasoline is distributed to home parking, currently). In the worst cases this is readily reduced with storage (liquid or power wall) at distribution centers.
I bet you the electrical grid couldn't handle everyone having an air conditioner in Texas in the 1920s but slowly people installed window and later central ACs and the grid grew.
The situation where everyone suddenly had an electric car is implausible
Cite for that? That's simply not true. In fact of all major infrastructure media in modern society, electrical transmission is by far the cheapest to upgrade. Even discounting industrial electricity and adding on DC charging of the EV, my household usage has gone up 35%.
You really don't think society can absorb a 35% growth in one infrastructure sector? That's just silly. Obviously there are "costs", but there's no justification for "can't handle" or "massive". At all.
Electric car batteries are even seen as part of the solution to move to renewables.
Industries are built when demand is rising, infrastructure always has to change to cover the needs of the population.
EVs will be important sinks for electrical energy in the future, to balance out demand.
Assuming 100% of new cars where EV’s you’re talking 25 years before adoption approaches 98%. Plus on average each EV is only using ~50,000kWh / year or 400 watts average load.
In all likelihood, gasoline transportation costs an order of magnitude more than electricity. And that's not just infrastructure that is already paid for. There is a much larger maintenance cost, an ongoing labor cost, and a much shorter useful life for anything related to fossil fuels.
This statement just doesn't pass even the most lax economic sanity check.
Why don't all the use cases where people don't care about anything other than the bottom dollar and don't run up against the weaknesses of modern batteries already run electric vehicles. I'm thinking like low daily mileage fleet of small vehicles in a warm climate somewhere with high fuel costs. Like why doesn't an EV Fiat Promaster exist and why doesn't every tradesman in Sicily run one? If the numbers penciled out then surely we'd have it, at least in some niche somewhere. We are starting to see mass EV adoption but it's right on the margin and the details on any specific use case make it cheaper or maybe not.
Longer term though, EVs replacing gasoline vehicles for those kind of use-cases is exactly what we're going to see. In the US, the postal service intends to start deploying tens of thousands of EVs over the next few years as they replace older gasoline powered delivery vehicles. The economics do apparently work out and pass the sanity check, just not overnight.
But anyway, your answer is because transportation costs are irrelevant for both gasoline and electricity. So, even tough they are much cheaper for electricity, none makes any difference, and nobody picks a power source based on them.
But some people makes a huge effort to focus on this non-issue and turn it into a showstopper on their discourse. People resorting to this is good evidence that there aren't any large showstoppers for cars electrification.
I don't think there is anyone at all that thinks turning agricultural waste into carbon neutral synthetic fuel for ICE has anything to do with "oil not running out" (which it absolutely is, demand is at all time highs, while production is at 30 year lows and no new major oilfield has opened in the lifespan of most people reading this, just saying).
It is true that no major field has been opened recently which I blame on the (legitimate) push against fossil fuels and the rising cost of capital for projects that won’t pay off until at least year 5-8 of an investment. Furthermore, the shale revolution made smaller fields competitive and distributed production. Major oil fields opening are not a good indicator anymore for the industry’s state of business. For example, the Bakken formation was already open but only saw its peak extraction relatively recently.
Speaking about the US: Crude oil will be around for a long time together with LNG. Whether that is good or not is an interesting question. Either way, the conversation IMHO starts to become very different for the US compared to other significant economies, and global metrics are becoming less useful.
(Just one example: German chemical plants are moving to the US where LNG is cheap and abundant. They are rebuilding entire, enormous industrial processing plants. The US attracts fossil fuel based industries without even opening new major oil fields. Just by what is already there. )
The oil market is a fully globalized commodity and there is no "American picture", there is just the global oil market. This is why OPEC can manipulate elections by changing the rate at which they produce oil, and it is why Biden was able to "leverage" global prices to make the taxpayer billions by selling high and buying low.
The American reserves of oil are insignificant with regards to the next generation of transportation, and wringing out the last drops of oil from shale rock at prices approaching $70/breakeven (and rising fast) is not the savior of ICE.
Plus OPEC will happily drop prices and destroy American oil industry every so often because their breakeven is still dramatically lower.
>Speaking about the US: Crude oil will be around for a long time together with LNG. Whether that is good or not is an interesting question. Either way, the conversation IMHO starts to become very different for the US compared to other significant economies, and global metrics are becoming less useful.
"Being around" and "being affordable enough for your F150 and XL SUV" are very different things.
Oil absolutely will not remain affordable for Americans in 15mpg vehicles, and the next decade will see the death of cheap American oil. We cannot print enough debt to subsidize it forever.
When you consider the BILLIONS of humans who want way way more oil in China, India, and Africa (et al), you start to see how declining global production + quadrupling global demand = the end of cheap oil.
I agree that this is the current state. However, this can quickly change at the whim of the US president and doesn't even need congressional approval. In fact, we have seen increasing request from within the US to decouple from the global market and hence have a "domestic" and a global oil price. I don't know how this would play out if it ever happens. But all the legal groundwork is there and the US president can impose an oil export ban at any time if he wishes to do so.
Examples of requests to do so (without success so far):
* https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/141...
* https://energycommerce.house.gov/sites/democrats.energycomme...
The saddest part is, that the US has great solar and wind potential but the least incentive for a mass transition given the opportunity to decouple from the global commodity market at any time (elections anyone?)
The synthetic stuff is interesting because it may actually be practically infinite thanks to the fusion reactor in the skies. That is because storing the energy from wind and solar in form of chemical energy solves the storage problem of the renewables. If extracting energy from that storage without polluting the environment becomes viable it can be huge.
The problem with those is that Someone needs to front the billions to get them pumping - and with the current state of the world it's not guaranteed that they'll get their money back.
It's better for business to raise the price of existing oil production. C-staff gets their bonuses and stocks go up.
Nope. All this means is that oil is getting more expensive.
Not quite infinite, but renewable: https://edu.rsc.org/news/treasure-from-the-earths-mantle/202...
synthetic hydrocarbons as energy storage is interesting, but all about the economics.
Here is a retrospective: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5502609/
Not really viable for day to day use yet.
No not really but, when it peaked I saw 2.40 eur/litre (9.71$/gallon, now down to 1.80 eur/litre) in places... Of course, much of that is taxes, but hey, this stuff would receive a lot of subsidies.
Fwiw, I once (4 years ago or so?) spoke to someone from an ICE conference (a parallel conference to my breast cancer conference) who explained that ICE's can be made 100% clean (just output CO2 and H2O) and 100% circular (take all that emitted CO2 out of the air again), it's just an economic consideration, technologically we are there (I guess that is true for many if not most environment related technologies, we just never take environmental damage along in the price of products, in a way we make them artificially cheap).
What people are hoping for today is to get CO₂ from the atmosphere and hydrogen from H₂O with electricity from solar, wind or nuclear. (Though w/ nuclear you might use thermochemical hydrogen if you can get the temperature up)
The best use case for that I've seen is that the US Navy would like to synthesize jet fuel on aircraft carriers so they don't have to slow down to take on fuel from a tanker -- delivering fuel to an aircraft carrier has to cost more than it costs at your local gas station.
Also I think there is more interest in synthetic fuel for airplanes than cars. That Mazda could almost as easily have been run on ethanol, methanol or maybe even butanol. Even methane isn't that hard. Diesel engines can be run on Dimethyl Ether. Single-entity fuels are more efficient to make than synthetic fuels based on long-chain hydrocarbons.
Aviation, on the other hand, is a place where innovation goes to die, where airlines struggle to replace obsolete electronics, where the #1 and #2 aircraft in the world were designed in 1967 and 1982, etc. (... it wouldn't even be legal to sell a car based on a 1982 design!)
You can just use the methanol to run cars. CNG/CBG cars have existed for well over a decade.
The FAA got off their butts and approved the unloaded substitute in 2022 and it's starting to roll out.
Airports want it ASAP because the (IIRC) ~20% higher cost is a cheap price to pay to not have to listen to people complain.
“On February 23, 2022, the FAA joined aviation and petroleum industry stakeholders to announce a comprehensive public-private partnership to transition to lead-free aviation fuels for piston-engine aircraft by the end of 2030.”
But with greater adoption and more focus the prices are bound to fall.
And the prices of alternatives will be rising, both electricity and hydrocarbon fuels.
Also EVs seem to not be the answer to everything. If you live in a colder climate, out of grid or you need to drive long distances, it is not clear when on whether EVs will become practical for you.
What is the cost of the environmental damage from traditionals?
What is the real cost of the military used to guarantee the delivery of traditionals?
That is the opportunity cost of that same military expense?
Oil refineries, they have a cost.
What happens to the cost of synthetics as production volume increases?
Etc.
We need to consider the full cost landscape, not simply gallon v gallon.
https://www.aspenfuels.us/knowledge/what-is-alkylate-fuel/wh...