Expect financial fallout when the fossil fuel bubble bursts | Hacker News Reader

Expect financial fallout when the fossil fuel bubble bursts

thehill.com

11 pointsthelastgallon23 comments

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Fossil fuels aren't yet in danger of being replaced. Their power density and EROI is hard to replicate.

https://electrek.co/2024/03/19/byd-nev-share-50-next-3-month...

https://electrek.co/2024/03/11/byds-new-lower-cost-ev-platfo...

https://electrek.co/2024/03/02/1-in-5-new-car-sales-globally...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... | https://archive.today/8Dy4D

https://www.ft.com/content/b255d7b9-88f6-4481-a3a6-87542d2b7... | https://archive.today/eC5Pp

Battery tech is going to double in two years… every year since 1992 (and possibly before).

Still hasn’t happened yet.

https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Battery-cost-dec...

https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-...

Price != density

Super important for things like vehicles (especially airplanes).

Air travel is ~6% of global petroleum demand, they will switch to a non fossil liquid fuel. Vehicles are already solved for, as is utility scale energy storage, using existing battery cells and their density. Marine transport will use either ammonia or methanol, both produced through clean energy based processes. ~40% of the tonnage of ships traveling the world’s oceans and rivers is moving energy around [1] [2], which should decline as renewables, transmission, and battery storage scales up globally.

There is no "silver bullet," but many solutions all converging (rapidly and effectively, from a preponderance of all available information) on deprecating fossil fuels for energy.

[1] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2022/01/12/almost-40-...

[2] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2019_en...

Hmmm. I don’t think you understand how airplanes work. They have to take off and land. With petroleum, they consume the fuel and get lighter as they do so, thus extending their range. Plus, the energy density of petroleum is ridiculous. I don’t see this realistically changing any time soon.

With batteries, they don’t get lighter and have to land heavy. It’s something you don’t want to do because modern airframes aren’t really built for it to reduce weight so they can fly longer.

As for sustainable solutions… I’m not sure that’s something we necessarily want. I’m all for sustainable solutions, but we actually probably want certain pollutants to help cool the earth (like a volcano) and less of others that cause greenhouse effects. So, if that’s what you mean by sustainable solutions, then that’s something we agree on.

> Air travel is ~6% of global petroleum demand, they will switch to a non fossil liquid fuel.

"SAF is a biofuel used to power aircraft that has similar properties to conventional jet fuel but with a smaller carbon footprint. Depending on the feedstock and technologies used to produce it, SAF can reduce life cycle GHG emissions dramatically compared to conventional jet fuel. Some emerging SAF pathways even have a net-negative GHG footprint."

"An estimated 1 billion dry tons of biomass can be collected sustainably each year in the United States, enough to produce 50–60 billion gallons of low-carbon biofuels."

https://www.energy.gov/eere/bioenergy/sustainable-aviation-f...

"The global fuel consumption by commercial airlines increased each year since 2009 and reached an all-time high of 95 billion gallons in 2019. However, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the fuel consumption dropped to only 52 billion gallons in 2020. As of 2021, commercial airlines increased their fuel consumption, which is forecasted to rise to 74 and 86 billion gallons in 2022 and 2023, respectively."

https://www.statista.com/statistics/655057/fuel-consumption-...

>> In 2023 sustainable aviation fuel production was 600 million liters, representing 0.2% of global jet fuel use. https://www.iata.org/en/iata-repository/pressroom/fact-sheet...

Look at the chart on the last page, top-left. That's how SAF production needs to scale to meet an aviation transition.

Work is hard. We've made it this far, might as well keep going. There is always going to be a cohort of humans interested in solving what seems impossible, no?

Not suggesting that we shouldn't!

Merely suggesting that the predicate of this opinion piece (that the future will be radically and suddenly unlike the past) is unreasonable.

The world will continue to decarbonize, but no economy is waking up tomorrow and saying "Surprise, market! We decarbonized overnight and banned fossil fuels."

Well no, this is not how countries will decarbonise. What will happen is some net fossil-fuel exporters will become net importers. Like for example the UK with natural gas. These changes somehow will still come as surprises, their impact will get misattributed, sudden (and unreasonable) things will happen. More I cannot predict.

Yeah, cars do not have particularly high requirements in terms of energy density. In a pinch people have been able to substitute petrol with fuel as low density as wood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator

But that's just the driving around use case, others are very far out of reach.

I doubt we'll ever find as great a fuel source among the various replacements. An energy-dense liquid fuel that burns off as you use it is incredible attractive for transport purposes and there isn't a good replacement for that.

You can pretty easily replace it with synthetic liquid fuel, made with clean energy. That’s likely what will happen in the medium term (~10 years) with aviation and marine, because of density as you said.

> Their power density and EROI is hard to replicate.

The market is really good at replacing superior solutions if the inferior solution is cheaper.

We have been talking about peak oil since at the 90s. The energy density, the infrastructure, the governments, corporations, etc. that are involved in the production and sale of oil is just too great. The fossil fuel bubble is not in danger of bursting anytime soon.

Past a tipping point that could make earth uninhabitable is going to create a financial crisis as bad as the 2008 great recession, to paraphrase.

If the end of the world is only as bad as the 2008 financial crisis I'd say we lucked out.

Personal Vehicles are just a fraction of all the uses of oil.

These talking points seem a little disingenuous to me. They keep talking about a "climate Minsky moment" as if it will happen without warning or prompting, which doesn't seem true to me.

The risk of a "climate Minsky moment" seems directly tied to government regulation, to me. I.e. it will be triggered by governments failing to act on the climate proactively, and then having to impose harsh restrictions to make up for the lack of earlier action. Is the theory that savvy investors aren't pricing climate change into their long term investment strategies?

I'm not saying government regulation is a bad thing, but it strikes me as very dishonest to act like there are mysterious market forces behind this. There aren't. Current regulations just aren't sufficient, and instead of fixing that, we're getting vague warnings about calamitous market forces.

>> Carney, when he was head of the Bank of England, first warned of a “climate Minsky Moment” in a speech to the directors of Lloyd’s of London in 2015, and he has repeatedly done so since.

So, he's been wrong about a sudden shift for 10 years and counting?

The piece's argument seems to be:

   1. Climate change impacts are worsening
   2. Decarbonization is needed to avoid
   3. Ergo, decarbonization will accelerate

Based on the last 20 years of government climate action, I'm not sure a sudden decarbonization is in the cards for any advanced economy.

Annual CO2 emissions are predicted to start going down in 2024.

https://climateanalytics.org/comment/will-2024-be-the-year-e...

Tldr: a fluffy opinion piece by biased authors

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