Hacker News Reader

Comment by ff317 | Hacker News Reader

I think we'll never stop extracting oil in the foreseeable future, we'll just be doing a lot less of it. There will always be corner cases where diesel or other oil derivatives (or NG) are the /only/ reasonable option for fuel.

Think generators for an antarctic station that can only use solar in certain months and wind isn't enough (or reliable enough)). Even if efficient electric commercial aviation at scale ever happens, you can bet military jets will still need jet fuel. I'm sure there's many others. Methane for rocket launches?

On top of fuel, there's also the use of some fraction of oil in industrial chemical processes to make lubricants and plastics. There may be other chemical processes that can do it without oil, but they may be too costly (in terms of other extractive processes for ingredients, or in terms of yield, not just energy).

View on HN

The US military uses about 5% of the oil used in the US.

That's a lot, but if we only used oil in the US for the military, we'd still be using 95% less oil, and we'd also still be producing enough oil to have an economy of scale.

In any case, realistically speaking, we aren't coming for oil tomorrow. Instead, we need to come for coal immediately. If it takes us decades each time we cut our oil consumption in half, that's one thing... but the coal, that needs to stop sooner.

someone needs to tell China, India, Indonesia, Turkey and Zimbabwe

> China, India, Indonesia, Turkey and Zimbabwe were the only countries that both added new coal plants and announced new projects. China accounted for 92% of all new coal project announcements.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/coal-burning-capacity-cli...

Electricity is probably going to be an order of magnitude (or more) cheaper in 20 years, at least for bulk purchase in most fixed locations (not Antarctic winter.) The assumption that oil extraction is worthwhile is based on it being the cheapest way to get a unit of power. But if power is 1/10th what it costs now it is economical to do some process that has absurdly bad efficiency (10:1, even 100:1) to translate power into fuel that works in jets. That might just be making conventional jet fuel. But I doubt we will be extracting it from the ground.

I don't see any way electricity could fall anywhere near that much in 20 years. For that to happen, we either need a revolutionary decrease in the price of nuclear power, a radical improvement in the price of dependable renewable energy (probably involving a lot of batteries) or some hard AI takeoff that makes EVERYTHING cheaper.

Keep in mind that most countries are trying to electrify most parts of the economy, so we not only need to decarbonize the current electrical supply, but possibly 2-3 times that, if we are to replace NG for heating, steel and chemical industries, fertilizers and so on.

Keep in mind that even if the technology for producing windmills and batteries go down a lot, we still need a lot of new mining capacity to even have enough raw materials to produce those items. That alone could take 10-15 years to build out.

It's actually very likely.

As long as you only consume it while the Sun is shinning, at the place of generation. This set of restrictions is allowing enough for a surprisingly large set of industrial applications (anything where energy costs are larger than capital ones).

In fact, we are not far from that. Solar is already a few times cheaper than the grid energy on those conditions.

My post was that electricity prices would come back by a factor of 10 or more. While that was qualified by "not Antarctic winter", it did not say that it would be only while the sun was shining, either.

That was what I objected to.

And if the average price falls by 90%, there number of industrial application where it would make sense to consume only part of the day, drops by a lot.

How do you see electricity getting 10x cheaper in 20 years? It sounds like people saying fission electricity would be too cheap to meter, and yet its some of the most expensive electricity we have in the US.

tbf, I think that most new technology has been the most expensive and impractical thing ever around its inception.

Yeah, just seeing the axle grease requirements and inventory on an aircraft carrier is a wakeup call. Our military is 110% reliant on oil to even function at all. The economic scale of consumer oil consumption and the petro-dollar are a key military concern to enable warfighting ability. When that sinks in, Iraq and Afghanistan make a lot more sense.

The US has plenty of oil and didnt need to go to those places to get more of it. We destroyed Iraqs oil pipelines and infrastructure in that war and a lot of it still is in need of investment in reconstruction today. Likewise Afghan oil production is a recent thing like in the last 10 years, and today the taliban government sells those mineral and oil extraction rights to chinese companies. If the goal was to get at those resources for American companies, we clearly failed. It seems China’s belt and road imperialism works better than our bomb the civilians and overthrow the government for a puppet method.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com