Oil Is Hard to Quit, Even in Norway Where Electric Cars Rule
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Their wealth and ability to buy electric cars at home is largely dependent on that massive oil income. They don't refine oil locally and would have to buy back gasoline, so electric cars still make economic sense too.
Norway is a beautiful country that the rest of the world often tries to emulate, but their economy is rooted in a darker side.
[1] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Energy/Oil/P...
Would the world be better off if Norway drilled no oil and ran its energy like everyone else?
But if every person travelled like a Norwegian, oil demand would be down. Extrapolating per capita mechanics of a small country like this doesn't make sense.
> Yes, because the price of oil would go up and there'd be more incentive to reduce oil consumption
That's a pretty over-simplistic analysis of "better off." By that logic, I could make us "better off" by bombing all the oil infrastructure, causing the price to go up even more, meanwhile hundreds of millions or more die because the modern economy and trade links collapse.
That's an extreme example to prove a point: it's pretty important to consider what else would happen.
Fix renewable energy, invest in the R&D, etc.
Climate change is a slow train wreck happening over a century. it’s a bit embarrassing that we’ve done so little.
We burn more coal now than ever before.
https://www.iea.org/news/the-world-s-coal-consumption-is-set...
The one remaining issue is consistency but I'm countries with much hydro that's also a solved problem.
The issue is more the installed base of fossil consumption, like vehicles. Also, for some categories like airplanes there's no viable alternative yet.
Aviation? Please look up the emissions for aviation va coal power.
You mean with Russian gas? Probably not.
It's valuable because of the systems we've created around it. Whale oil sits unmolested in the oceans. Meanwhile American coal is becoming a stranded asset amidst falling demand, production and prices [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Stat...
We rarely burn peat any more too as another example of a 'valuable resource' that is left in situ rather than collected now.
I remember peat still being burnt in Shetland when I was young, and compared to coal or even wood it gave off very little heat.
There is still plenty of peat to be taken 'for free' as a fuel using traditional methods, but very little is burnt now, as it is easier and cheaper to heat your home, with wood, coal or more likely gas or electricity.
Per capita doesn't mean % of GDP though. It means relative to the population.
Norway exports like $50B / yr of petroleum (and another $120B of natural gas). Saudi Arabia exports like $170B / yr of petroleum.
Saudi Arabia population is like 7x larger, so per Capita oil and gas is larger in Norway even if you subtract out all the natural gas.
There, now your GDP is just 50% oil.
[1]: https://www.regjeringen.no/no/tema/okonomi-og-budsjett/norsk...
For sure, it's a huge part of Norway and shouldn't be overlooked, but it's specious to compare it directly to a country like Saudi Arabia.
Perhaps check Siberia per population as a fair reference.
There is a refinery at Mongstad capable of processing 10 mill. tons of crude oil per year. It could have provided all the gasoline used in Norway, but probably not all the diesel.
More relevant is probably that there is a significant hydroelectric production, so there is no need to use petroleum to generate the electricity for the cars.
Though electric cars accounted for 23% of miles driven in Norway in 2022, diesel still accounted for 43% of the distance covered. Heavier trucks, which for technological reasons haven’t seen widespread adoption of electric drive trains, are still predominantly running on diesel, Norwegian Road Federation Director Oyvind Solberg Thorsen said in an interview.
Diesel consumption in Norway is just 10% below its 2015 peak and has yet to show a consistent downtrend, with demand rebounding since 2020, according to data from Statistics Norway. It’s a similar story for aviation."
"just" 10%?!? Would be nice to replicate that in other countries.
> diesel still accounted for 43% of the distance covered
I wonder if this is an artifact of the early push to build EVs with tiny batteries (e.g. <= 100mi of range).
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/08/25/norways-vehicle-fleet-t...
Their point of heavier trucks, trains, and planes not going electric yet is true, they're simply higher up the difficulty curve.
The electric trucks are starting to roll out, from the bottom of the range and working up.
Brutally simple solution with batteries that can be swapped in a few minutes.
https://thedriven.io/2023/04/18/australian-miner-to-trial-wo...
Hydrogen is likely never going to be very popular for road transport. It's way more costly than battery electric to operate and most transport companies deeply care about their margins. Besides that, the infrastructure simply isn't there for hydrogen (never mind green hydrogen). And the battery equivalents are already being used on roads right now in pretty much any weight class. High speed megawatt chargers are already being developed. And with swapping batteries the whole argument against having to wait goes away.
In reality, it's pretty much a guarantee that hydrogen displaces batteries for most cases, and likely all of heavy transport. The mistake critics are making is assuming that this must be expensive. But just like other types of renewable energy, this is actually heading towards nearly zero.
Hydrogen will never be cheaper than the electricity you make it from.
The electrolyzers are expensive and the rest of the equipment for them is already mass produced and as cheap as it’s going to get.
The transportation and production is expensive and inherently difficult.
As for the certainty that they will go hydrogen, the only certainty is that they will not go hydrogen. Here’s from only 2 days ago, news of actual mines explicitly choosing electric over hydrogen for the obvious concerns: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/07/05/australian-mining-compa...
The problem with this logic is that renewable energy is regularly plunging to zero or even negative prices. Renewable leads to massive swings between excess production and massive shortages. Hydrogen is significantly more valuable than the electric used to make it, even if the end goal is just make more electricity. The best way to describe it is that hydrogen is dispatchable energy, but the energy used to make it is non-dispatchable energy. The former is necessary and will always be worth something, but the latter is often totally worthless.
That claim is purely delusional. This is a repeat of anti-photovoltaic arguments, that solar panels could never be cheap. In reality, there are simply no substantial raw material requirements preventing either electrolyzers nor PVs from plunging in cost. History will just repeat itself and the critics will be outed as closedminded fools.
Hydrogen is 10x cheaper to move around that electricity. It will be more practical to build a hydrogen infrastructure than an electrical one: https://www.brinknews.com/could-hydrogen-replace-the-need-fo...
Your article is thoroughly distorting the real story. The situation actually being described is as followed:
> Rio Tinto executive John Mulcahy told the summit that hydrogen was less efficient than batteries for mine trucks under a scenario where a miner had to produce its own hydrogen from solar or wind power.
> “Hydrogen at the moment isn’t our preference, but it doesn’t mean it is dead by any means,” he said.
https://www.afr.com/companies/mining/fortescue-and-rio-say-b...
In short, it doesn't make sense to make hydrogen on the spot when you already have access to that energy and can use it directly. But this is just one scenario, and they haven't ruled out other ones.
This is not a particular relevant situation for the rest of us. Very few people will have direct access to renewables in a remote area. It is ultimately just one possible outcome. And honestly, there's very little chance they are moving away from diesel trucks anytime soon. This is just them speculating about what they will do, not that they are obligated to actually do it.
A pedantic point which makes little difference given how much there is and how much we need. Further, being natural makes it as renewable as natural gas.
> The problem with this logic is that renewable energy is regularly plunging to zero or even negative prices.
Renewable energy does not swing to negative prices. Their excess production causes gas, coal, and nuclear to have to go negative. Remove those from the grid and the negative price magically goes away.
And to reiterate with your point from earlier: "But just like other types of renewable energy, this is actually heading towards nearly zero."
If renewable energy costs are getting that cheap we can simply keep overbuilding them and have no need for hydrogen in the first place. The made for hydrogen is often as an energy storage for when we don't have renewables, well if the renewables are so cheap let's just build them until we don't have times where we're short electricty and then skip all the complexity of making and storing hydrogen.
> Hydrogen is significantly more valuable than the electric used to make it, even if the end goal is just make more electricity.
Black Hydrogen right now is a commodity chemical sold at 1.50 $/kg + transportation. I don't see the use cases often touted taking off. Instead I see wind, solar, hydro, and batteries eating hydrogen's potential market.
> The best way to describe it is that hydrogen is dispatchable energy, but the energy used to make it is non-dispatchable energy.
As a dispatchable energy source that requires lots of equipment and loses >70% of the energy put into the it, it's a pretty bad storage system.
> That claim is purely delusional. This is a repeat of anti-photovoltaic arguments, that solar panels could never be cheap. In reality, there are simply no substantial raw material requirements preventing either electrolyzers nor PVs from plunging in cost.
I never claimed it's about raw materials. Again, the electrolyzers are not the only equipment required, there are lots of valves, and pumps, and shit. And all of those have been mass produced for a long time. So they won't see the cost reductions that come from learning.
Solar panels went down in cost because they provided something other energy sources did not and had people willing to pay a premium to bring the cost down. Electrolyzers don't have that market right now, and by the time they get cheap enough what market will be left for them?
> Hydrogen is 10x cheaper to move around that electricity. It will be more practical to build a hydrogen infrastructure than an electrical one: https://www.brinknews.com/could-hydrogen-replace-the-need-fo...
That is an ludicrus thing to claim, especially when presenting zero evidence to back the claim.
> For economic reasons, it is much better to transport energy over long distances by molecules. When you transport hydrogen over a distance of about a thousand miles by pipeline, the costs are about half a cent per kilowatt-hour. When you do the same with electricity, it is about 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.
I'd like to know how many pipelines there are that transport hydrogen that kind of distance, I'm betting on the very low single digits, if any. It's easy to make claims about the efficiency of things that exist on paper and then compare them to the reality of things actually build.
> Your article is thoroughly distorting the real story. The situation actually being described is as followed:
> > In short, it doesn't make sense to make hydrogen on the spot when you already have access to that energy and can use it directly. But this is just one scenario, and they haven't ruled out other ones.
The very next sentence is: "What we are looking at primarily is the efficiency of the cycle, to go from charging and discharging a battery and powering a truck, versus powering an electrolyser, creating hydrogen, liquefying and compressing it and then converting it back into a fuel cell."
It doesn't matter where it's made, the argument for why they don't want it doesn't change. All of those steps are there even if the hydrogen is made off-site.
> This is not a particular relevant situation for the rest of us. Very few people will have direct access to renewables in a remote area.
They will have even less access to hydrogen distribution/transmission in that case.
As a shortcut to zero emissions, it has major potential. Nor is it "non-renewable" in the same as fossil fuels. It naturally regenerates in the same way geothermal regenerates.
You are being totally dishonest by claiming renewable energy never generates negative prices: https://balkangreenenergynews.com/negative-power-prices-reve...
Everyone already accepts that it is renewable energy causing this. This is a major flaw in your logic, and frankly you are deluding yourself on this point.
Your solution of overbuilding renewable energy is that has been proposed many times before. It is usually called overprovisioning. The problem is that implies truly ridiculous amount of excess renewable that can be dumped into hydrogen production. Rather than eliminating the need for hydrogen, it creates the situation for where nearly free hydrogen will materialize. And since it is cheaper to move around hydrogen than electricity, hydrogen will end up displacing much of the grid instead.
Hydrogen today is simply a byproduct of natural gas production. As a result, hydrogen traditional meant natural gas infrastructure and hydrogen is produced when it is needed. If it was its own separate resource, we will have a dedicated infrastructure for it. This mirrors the path that natural gas itself followed, since it was originally a by-product of oil production.
The critics are simply lying about the potential efficiencies of hydrogen. In reality, it is an electrochemical system and has same theoretical efficiency as batteries. All the critics are doing are conflating practical limits with technological limits. But even this is backfiring, as their understanding of "practical" limits are stuck in the 1990s if not earlier. Large installations can reach significantly higher levels of efficiency, and perhaps even rival batteries and other energy storage ideas: https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/review20/fc330_ghezel-a...
> Develop an energy storage technology based on Reversible Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (RSOFC) system capable of round trip efficiency of 70% and projected energy cost of less than $100/kWh
As I mentioned the part about hydrogen being 10x cheaper to move around than electricity, that claim would extend to all related aspects, such as valves and pumps. Not to mention why you would think "valves and pumps and shit" would be expensive at all. These are minor costs compared to the fundamental technology itself. Also, there was not mass production of electrolyzers in the past. I'm curious as to why you even make this claim at all, since it is a pure assertion that has no evidence behind and does not even pass the "smell test." It comes off as total BS.
In reality, what is happening is the process of mass production of electrolyzers, just like it happened with photovoltaics: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-29/green-hyd...
> China’s capacity to manufacture electrolyzers – the equipment used to make green hydrogen – could grow about 20 times by 2028 as costs of the clean energy source plunge, according to CICC.
It is an obvious repeat of the same scenario as with photovoltaics. History is clearly repeating itself.
What is your counterevidence to that claim them? The person in question, Ad van Wijk, is a professor and has been a long-term researcher in renewable energy. If he is making that claim, it should be taken as credible and not be dismissed on your own opinion.
Even if there was only one hydrogen pipeline of similar length, then wouldn't that be sufficient to demonstrate the claim in question? Not sure how this is an argument at all. Not to mention that thousands of km of pipelines globally: research in this area: https://www.iea.org/reports/hydrogen-supply
Except if the hydrogen is made off-site, it can now utilize excess renewable energy production. In particular, the times when renewable energy is free or negatively priced. That will make the problems they listed go away. Then even admitted to that in the article:
> But Mr Mulcahy said hydrogen might become competitive for mining trucks in the future if it could be purchased at the mine gate, in the same way diesel is purchased from external providers now.
The atoms are so small they migrate directly through the material and cause chemical changes as a result that weaken the tank over time (hydrogen embrittlement). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement
It happens quite fast, a tank will lose most of its capacity over a month. As most tanks will be full most of the time (after all where else are you going to store the hydrogen for your car?) they will lose significant amounts to the atmosphere.
Regardign the methane it's already there and is also expelled by natural resources (e.g. meat industry and marshes for example). So even if we would stop burning fossil, there is no end of it.
I don't think Hydrogen is a bad option for some usecases by the way. I just wish people wouldn't view it as a magic bullet.
A claim backed up by nothing. In fact, no hydrogen tank is allowed to leak that fast by regulation. Something you can easily verify: https://newsletters.inficon.com/AUTOTEST/April2020/LeakTesti...
You can do the math and realize that at 8 * 10⁻³ mbar * L/s, the maximum leakage rate, it will take a tank of 30L and 700 bar about 80 years to leak away:
700 bar * 30 L / (0.008 millibar * L/s) = 83.1830072 years
That's the danger of swallowing random BEV propaganda from some propagandist. Those people are liars and are know for making shit up. In reality, this is not an issue.
Paying 2-3x for hydrogen and depending on infrastructure that simply does not exist yet doesn't even sound like the beginnings of a plan. It doesn't make any economical sense whatsoever. It's a pipe dream financed by companies reluctant to get out of the diesel truck business. By the time energy really gets that cheap, battery electric trucks will have been dominating the roads for decades and there won't be any point in replacing them with less efficient hydrogen trucks. There isn't one now. There won't be one a few decades from now.
You’re mostly repeating BEV propaganda and it is mostly just close-mindedness. The point is that hydrogen trucks are actually economically viable in this setting. Not to mention that BEVs are a >100 year old technology, and the idea that something that old can maintain a permanent cost advantage over all possible alternatives is a completely delusional idea. This even ignores the fact that fuel cells are electrochemical systems and don’t have any fundamental disadvantages compared to li-ion batteries. FCEVs are literally just a cheaper type of EV.
I'm pretty convinced that anything that can't realistically be electrified is likely going to end up being biodiesel.
But instead the rail companies have actually been tearing down existing electrification. There were 3100 miles of electrified rails in the 1930s, but now it is down to a tiny fraction of that.
This has got a lot better more recently as we now have hybrid trains that can run on electricity whenever there are overhead lines, and diesel where there aren't. There is talk of replacing diesel engines with batteries so that they can run on electric (and use regenerative braking) even where there are no overhead lines, charging the batteries from the overhead line when available. https://anonw.com/2023/06/27/what-will-be-the-range-of-a-hit...
There are usually multiple diesel generators on each train, so it's likely that the batteries will only replace some of them - there would still be some diesel power available for emergencies.
Seems they're moving towards partially electrifying, and using battery or hydrogen for the remaining part. They've already started to acquire bimodal trains[3] for the transition.
[1]: https://www.tu.no/artikler/hydrogen-som-drivstoff-for-godsto...
[2]: https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordlandsbanen
[3]: https://www.norsketog.no/nyheter/2020/testkjorer-tronderbane...
But I think that there was/is plan to electrify them as well.
...and the answer is: mostly in the North.
The other option for long haul trucking is hydrogen. In the short term that's probably more realistic than full electric.
We are absolutely making progress towards eliminating emissions for all vehicle types, its just taking longer than most would like.
The first one is flat, it only looks like it's going up and down because the axis doesn't start at 0.
The second on is looking at sales when oil use is realted to fleet mileage. The later is going in the right direction but naturally lags sales.
"Norway’s Vehicle Fleet Transitions To Electric — How Long Will It Take?"
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/08/25/norways-vehicle-fleet-t...
Short version, gasoline use has dipped, and it's about to crash.
Any reduction in petroleum usage is good, removal of urban emissions is better.
Diesel trucks operate mostly on the motorway and they can get a good speed there, creating more efficiency. (unlike American big rigs, Euro-trucks are smaller and more efficient, from what I recall.)
Cars meanwhile drive locally, pollute where you breathe, and with stat/stop traffic are not efficient consumers of fuel.
Today everyone get's a car. Some might be EVs (fueled by coal power) but others are not.
And every year world CO2e emissions go up.
And every day we pretend it's ok because it went up by less that it would have if we had put it up even more. But we need them to come down, not just go up less quickly. And we needed that in 2000. Not "we might manage it in 2030".
I would also look at both the rise of cheap EVs and the size of the ICEs people outside of rich western countries are buying. American SUVs are an outlier caused by heavy subsidies but the cost of buying and operating them is prohibitive in many places, not to mention narrow roads and storage cutting into the appeal. There’s a reason why you see so many cool cars only available outside of the U.S. market and most of them get whole number multiples better mileage than the median American vehicle.
Then we congratulate ourselves.
And I am a doom munger when all I see is hopium.
BTW, I support the environment, but I always have and still believe nuclear would have been the best choice. Then we would have time to transition to other sources keeping nuclear as a backup. So now, we are in a hurry up we will all soon die mode. For this, I blame the anti-nuke crowd, I would not be surprised if the coal and oil industries funded these people.
Climate change is a huge complex problem with 1001 causes and each cause has 1001 possible solutions. But people all pick a single solution. And then insist on it. Renewable people won't support nuclear, nuclear people won't support biomass, biomass people won't support renewables. Ditto reductioneers and public transport enthusiasts and anti-car people. And that is just electricity for car transport, that offers nothing to air travel or construction or agriculture.
So everyone sits on their arse saying "it's not MY fault, I recycled a tin can once!".
Everyone is saying the same thing: I will only support things others don't and unless I get my own way we should do nothing.
So we have, as a species, all agreed to do nothing.
But everyone wants to pretend THEY and THEIR solution would have worked, and THEY are the good guy.
I think people are also looking too much for a magic solution that allows them to keep going as is. Like CO2 capture. If we actually build this in quantities that actually make a dent in emissions, we'll be mining half the world for materials to make the installations and power them and ruin the other half to place them and store the captured carbon. It's just never going to be viable especially until we solve the emissions problem first. But it's the promise of a magic solution that keeps it on the map.