Electricity to motion is significantly more efficient per input energy than burning fuel->heat-> gaseous expansion->drive a piston->convert to rotation chain.
What am I missing about this?
We also use fossil fuels as feedstocks for fertilizers and plastics, so there are very important power-to-X applications which don't involve inefficient combustion.
Something like Terraform would probably have to exist in order to transition away from fossil fuels.
(Source: I'm CEO at a startup with a very different take on the same problem.)
Question for me is how do you make the business model work. Is it a bet that lower cost to produce or bank that carbon tax on traditional fuels makes it more cost competitive? Or in your case is it that downstream users are looking to clean up their supply chain so will look into a contract for that benefit?
To your point everything can't be electricity or alternatively fuels have different use cases. And it's certainly important to have a diversity of power sources especially as fuel has different attributes then electricity.
"I read internet usage was going up by 2300 percent a year, so I decided to try and find a business that would make sense in that context."
"Cheap and ubiquitous solar power is coming, what products does the world need in that context to move away from extracting fossil fuels?"
Like a lot of things, current technology probably isn't there yet. But philosophically, if you wait for tech to catch up with your vision of the future, you might find yourself behind.
Instead of letting excess capacity go to waste, you use it to create chemical fuel, which can be used either just as storage to be later burned in a peaker plant, or you can use it as fuel in mobile settings (trucks, planes, ships, etc) where energy density is important.
Eg: spinning a jet engine to propel air backwards is very different than spinning a motor that is (through a series of solid objects) directly connect to the ground.
and while a battery is only 1/5th density, the motors on a tesla deliver 3x the range per energy compared to a prius. (not true break even, but impressive that one of the most efficient hybrid ICE cannot compare KWh for KWh to a battery + electric)
Nothing about electric powertrains causes any problems here: it's just hydrocarbon fuel is more energy dense. It's not inconceivable you could build a hybrid electric aircraft if a suitably high power hydrocarbon fuel cell was developed, since removing the combustion stages from a jet engine would simplify the design considerably.
- running all the existing fertilizer and other chemical plants
- gas peakers/backups for resiliency. Gas storage is much cheaper than batteries.
Even if all new construction is electric, we have decades of infrastructure built around gas. Replacing the furnace in every German house with a heat pump just isn't going to happen in 10 years.
They dont have electricity to heat with?
> - running all the existing fertilizer and other chemical plants
This takes hydrogen gas from the nat gas, why not just use the electricity for hydrolysis
I think other commenters have said it well. It's really just a storage mechanism. Waste daytime solar for use at non-peak solar production
My point isn't efficiency, but the size of the installed plant. I fully expect new infrastructure will use more electricity. But we have accumulated trillions of dollars of infrastructure using natural gas over more than a century. There is absolutely no way we are going to replace it all in 10 years.
This would require the additional step of converting methane to jet fuel, but that is also a technology under development.
That said, I personally think, in practice technology like this will only delay getting to net zero, because the existence of this will disincentivize investments in electrification. I recall Sun Tzu's claim that a force completely surrounded will fight fiercely, but if you give a way out, it will look to escape or retreat.
I think you’re misapplying Sun Tzu’s lesson. An attempt to completely and immediately replace the fossil fuel industry will be met with fierce resistance, and thus be more likely to fail. Whereas a more gradual approach (like carbon neutral-ish green hydrogen) gives much of the industry around fossil fuels an opportunity to survive longer, and perhaps gives you a better chance of success.
Is this actually true? Maybe, maybe not. But that would seem to be the implication of Sun Tzu’s strategy.
At $100 to store a kWh of electrical energy, along with approximately ten times the cost to account for structures that can support and move the extra weight (that's AFTER allowing for less energy demanded in total)... shall I leave this as exercise to the reader?
Much of the world by population and gdp is a ship ride away from their major energy suppliers. Japan imports about half their LNG from Australia. Next largest is Qatar.
There are no power lines between Australia and Japan.
A quick google suggests both possibilities that solar and nuclear are each cheaper depending on how big of a picture you're looking. (Capital, construction, storage for solar cause nuclear can run at night, storage for 25000 years for the waste etc).
Still, if moving a lot of (potential) heat energy from point to point is the goal, Uranium still seems to be the move compared to so many tankers of LNG -- just to burn it. Nuclear plants put off a ton of waste heat energy, and it can be at a very high temperature too (if designed and desired).
Then, lack of the long long cable to the nearest socket.