https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
But China has also electrified a lot of its cars and trucks, and continues to do so rapidly.
Claims like this would need to be quantified further in order to make any real predictions, but I think these sorts of predictions about future electrification may turn out to be shockingly wrong.
For example, many predict we have or will soon hit peak oil. Whereas I would wager it will continue to grow. You didn't mention global oil production, but I want to get specific. 50 years from now I think global oil production will be higher than it is today.
There is a strong desire by many for oil production to decrease and to electrify, but the incentive structure just isnt there. It's too cheap and useful and the energy demand is effectively unlimited. Im not even saying we shouldnt move away from it. Just that we wont.
Currently we're in a situation where OPEC, remembering 2014 and hell bent on diversification, is offloading record quantities of crude into the market, to ensure that American production stays infeasible.
The catch is that making coal liquid requires a lot of energy. If that energy comes from coal itself it is a very dirty process. But if energy comes from renewables or nuclear, it is not an issue.
In fact with renewables and storage leading to cheaper electricity, the price competitiveness of coal-based liquid fuels will only get better.
That's overburden removal followed by near surface bed extraction with machines - no underground mining, underground being the mining domain that sees high injury and death rates.
Regardless, fuel from oil or fuel from coal is still fuel from dead and buried organics, from resurfaced long buried carbon products, and still introducing more CO2 into the atmosphere which is counter productive toward any goal of reducing the insulation factor of the atmosphere.
As in, what can practically be achieved in the real world at large within the next 25 years that can be immediately funded with a forward capital loan to break ground on a plant within 12 to 18 months and start operating within five years?
How does actual atmospheric carbon capture scale out within a useful time frame?
A better question would be why do you think that is what I said or implied?
I'm well aware that in the future we will all be flying jet-ski's and teleporting to Mars, today I'm more interested in near and mid term policy, for one of many examples the recent CSIRO cost and benefits report on nuclear vs renewable strategies in Australia (what did that conclude, and will it swap policy decisions).
Given you've apparently taken the mantle of one who lives in the real world rather than the dull fantasy world I inhabit perhaps you could expand on the existing abilities and plans for carbon storage and fuel from air and contrast the achievable volumes within time frames that matter against the current and projected volumes of carbon emissions.
We're mostly all looking for a path forward in my neighborhood, a little less interested in wishful thinking about distant futures, so any pragmatic detail you can provide about next steps would be constructive.
> I don't think the real world is actually where you're living.
Cheap swipe kragen, I've previously thought you could do better.
Oil-based petrochemical chains are shorter, cleaner, and more energy-efficient. Coal-based chains substitute chemical routes via synthetic gas and methanol, with higher cost and more energy usage.
It makes sense for a country like China that is not rich in oil and has vast coal reserves, but not in the environmental sense, only in the strategical, geopolitical sense.
> There are estimates that liquid fuel produced from coal can compete with oil when oil cost is 80-100 USD/barrel.
Oil is currently at 61-65 USD per barrel, with OPEC ensuring it stays that way because even they know it's only going to fall from there. Even the 61-65 USD price point leaves a bad taste in their mouths.
> In fact with renewables and storage leading to cheaper electricity, the price competitiveness of coal-based liquid fuels will only get better.
No, with renewables and storage offering cheap electricity, oil also gets cheaper!
In fact, I'd argue that CTL is something only countries with extremely abundant domestic reserves of coal can do - China, South Africa and Australia. In fact, nearly every planned CTL plant has been delayed or scrapped in the US as infeasible.
Also fossil reserves have other uses too, I also don't expect oil production going to 0 anytime soon.
Solar: 23,000 TW-years/year, every year until cosmological time passes and the sun's luminosity noticably changes
Fossil: 900 coal + 240 petroleum + 215 natural gas = 1,355 TW-years total, and then it's gone forever
https://www.iea-shc.org/data/sites/1/publications/2015-11-A-...
The only source that could ever beat a genuinely unbounded demand, is if we somehow figure out how to tap the dark energy which is causing the universe to expand.
In the meantime however, photovoltaics would get us all of the way to a Kardashev type three civilisation; humanity is currently 0.73 on that scale, it's an exponential scale with a factor of 1e10 between each integer.
> It doesnt meet current energy demands.
Tomorrow is not today.
It's not that there's is less and less oil, it's just that harder and harder to get it
In Tunisia, the pay-off time for a solar installation is around 4-5 years (granted we still have net-metering, so free storage). You are either ignorant or too poor to not install solar.
My word. I can't speak for Pakistan, but the good folk in Africa know damned well the value of their environment.
For example the objections to Shell's planned seismic oil exploration of the coast of South Africa is vehemently opposed - on largely environmental reasons - by local residents. They have obtained an injunction and are now opposing it in their constitutional court.
No only do they understand ecology, they seem to have a firm grasp of law as well.
Why you would imagine that a billion people don't know that they depend on the environment is something for the mirror.
I guess I was just exaggerating for effect.
> For example the objections to Shell's planned seismic oil exploration of the coast of South Africa is vehemently opposed - on largely environmental reasons - by local residents. They have obtained an injunction and are now opposing it in their constitutional court.
Same thing in central Tunisia, though without courts; people just scared off the multi-nationals into leaving. Shale gas is very dangerous in populated areas and Tunisia has a quite a bit of it. But it's not really worth to extract expect for the people doing the extracting.
Instead of moving your car from oil to solar, you're moving the car from oil to electricity, and then electricity is fungible so you don't care that it was made with a solar array - but the efficiency win was from going to electricity.
To have electricity you would need to invest at once in both generation, transport (the grids are not enough), storage and change in use (replace cars with electric ones). Your return will depend as well on the technology developed and none of the above fields is stable yet.
I am a fan of going electric, even if only for more sovereignty, but it is not as simple as "electricity is more efficient".
In terms of effeciency, you don't replace a billion BTU's of oil with the same amount of electricity, what you want is locomation. Only about 25% of oil's energy ends up spinning the wheels, compared to 85% of energy using an electric powertrain.
Almost all those cars still need to be charged, the weather won't always be good, people don't generally choose to leave their cars parked in direct sun if they can help it, etc. — but as a systematic reduction in impact over the entire power grid, it's non-trivial.
More importantly if 100% of new cars went electric it’d still take 25 years to finish so it’s a rounding error to grid operators outside of a trivial number of substations for fast chargers. As crazy as it sounds when you include training LLM’s are using more electricity than every EV combined.
In this context, solar power, charging at night is the exact opposite of a good idea; if anything, you want the power to leave the cars at night to run everything else.
A solar powered EV goes a lot further per unit energy working with electricity than per unit energy of gasoline. Heat pumps are vastly efficient using electricity than even the most efficient natural gas furnace. It’s actually more efficient to use natural gas to make electricity to then use a heat pump than it is to run natural gas to people’s homes.
So we're more than half way there.
Look what happened in Portugal when it got cloudy.
Like, yes, we're aware. At least in the german south we have the opposite problem right now. We are getting negative electricity prices (you get paid for taking some) more often because we have more electricity than we can use due to solar, at least during the day. Proper power storage is being built at this very moment all over the country.
Aside from dunkelflaute, the wind is statistically stronger when solar power generation is low, so at night and when it's super cloudy. And dunkelflaute is a couple days to weeks per year. (german perspective, don't know enough about the other countries' grids)
Regarding that problem in portugal, you misunderstood something there. The big 2025 power outage wasn't caused by clouds, it was an combination of localized blackouts and a sudden power _surge_ which caused a cascading failure which couldn't be stabilized by the conventional power plants even though on paper they had the capacity. How did you get the idea it had anything to do with "cloudy" weather?
Force them to run on decarbonized fuels like ammonia, hydrogen, synfuels or biofuels (with decarbonized inputs) when even the backup needs to be decarbonized.
A data center with backup generators can easily switch from grid power to generator power. If you're installing those generators for redundancy reasons anyway, why not make some extra bucks by signing a first-load-to-shed contract with the power company?
This is complete bullshit for the vast majority of industrial use cases.
Steel EAFs cannot be run continuously, no matter how much capital efficiency you might hope to gain by doing so. It's inherently a batch process.
Continuous flow process plants like oil refineries are also very energy-intensive, but on the other extreme from things like an EAF, are very tricky to ramp up and down. But most of their energy usage is thermal at relatively moderate temperatures, which is much easier to store than the high-exergy energy needed for things like EAFs, aluminum pots, and data centers.