Hacker News Reader

Comment by skyfaller | Hacker News Reader

Good news, 40% of all shipping is fossil fuels, so if we abandon fossil fuels, the shipping problem gets significantly smaller: https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-c...

View on HN

You've got a really interesting point here... my son and I got stopped for 15 minutes yesterday by an absolutely monster train. So we started researching on our phones and realized that it was coal headed for the coast, headed for China. I know the Chinese need energy, the train needs the shipping business, and the coal people want a market for their coal, but if the world were able to transition to other forms of energy, it would definitely shift the shipping too

Could be met coal for steelmaking.

Much of that isn't fuel but rather chemical feedstock. There is a plausible path to significantly reduce fossil fuel use for transportation and energy. But finding another economically viable way to manufacture fertilizers, asphalt, and plastics is a much harder problem.

I think we can/should greatly reduce use of plastics by eliminating single-use plastic wherever possible. This mostly requires political will / habit changes. Although creating circular systems for e.g. food containers has its challenges, it's not moon shot difficult, we have these systems on small scales and we just need more people to use them.

I agree that fertilizer is a very difficult problem, it's possibly the hardest problem related to fossil fuels. Low-Tech Mag has covered this to some degree, and I'm in awe of the scale of the issue, as well as the dire effects of not figuring it out (people starving). https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/03/urban-fish-ponds-l... To some degree, I figure we'll just have to accept fertilizer as the last legitimate use of fossil fuels until we completely rebuild our farms / food production and sewage systems to be circular.

>reduce use of plastics by eliminating single-use plastic wherever possible

In favor of what? Paper or bamboo fiber? Europe has no trees, where will they get it from? How do you suppose it will be transported?

How about in favour of people getting their fruit and veg not wrapped in superfluous anything. You're really asking the wrong question here. And yes, most of our copious quantities of fruit and veg comes without wrapping.

There's plenty of natural fibre based alternatives for a significant portion of plastic usage, otherwise reusable glass, ceramic, metal and wooden containers can fill a need, and be locally produced.

Trees can be farmed, and I would like to see pollarding and coppicing used for paper manufacture

Europe has no trees? Are you joking? This is ChatGPT-level hallucination stated with ChatGPT-level confidence. On a side note, a few European firms manufacture single-use plates and cutlery from agricultural waste (wheat bran). Really good products, and even edible and, frankly, quite tasty (not that you'd want to take more than a nibble as they're 100% fibre).

If we had the energy generation capacity it isn't that hard to replace most chemical feed stocks. The problem has always been that fossil fuel as a reagent is significantly cheaper than the equivalent energy cost to synthesize replacement reagents from other sources. Fertilizer for example can be produced from atmospheric air, the problem is fertilizer already uses 1% of global electricity production, and not using fossil fuels to do it will increase that energy requirement 10 fold, so 10% of global energy production. Another reason we probably should of invested more heavily in nuclear in the past so we could be in a much better place today.

>if we abandon fossil fuels

In favor of what? Surely shipping demand does not fall by 40%. The resources required for renewable replacements are distributed and processed all over the globe.

So 39.87%? In favor of supplies for renewables that are significantly lower volume & frequency?

The number 39.87 is what you might get replacing coal with wind turbines, based on Googled stats for avg turbine weight (165 tons), avg lifetime (20 years) avg achieved efficiency (42%) avg capacity (1.5MW) coal weight per MW (1100 lbs) ... If my calculations are right this means turbines are 300x more efficient per pound of resources than coal, which directly translates into 300x less shipping for those resources.

> renewables that are significantly lower volume & frequency

What is the volume difference of LNG versus nickel ore or copper ore (which are less than 1% nickel or copper, and are mostly rock), which is extracted with diesel-powered mining equipment before being shipped halfway around the globe to be smelted - at great energy cost, which is only sometimes renewable - and then shipped halfway around the globe again to begin manufacturing?

Energy of smelting, as you point out, can be renewable, if we want, and it increasingly is, which makes it irrelevant here, no?

A quarter of the world’s copper is mined at a mine I can see from my window, and it is concentrated, smelted, and refined on site. I don’t know for certain, but have some doubt about your claim that much rock is being shipped around the world just to get smelted, can you source that? It doesn’t seem like a very cost effective idea.

It seems like you’re trying to suggest we can’t do any better by citing today’s inefficiencies. But we know for a fact we can do better, that there is a lot of room for improvement, so why the resistance? Does mining with Diesel engines today mean we have to keep doing that? If we are shipping rock around, which I doubt, does that mean we have to keep doing it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com