Could we dredge the Netherlands without fossil fuels? (2018)
solar.lowtechmagazine.com
solar.lowtechmagazine.com
Why do many environmental activists seem to want to go back to a shitty past rather than move forward to bright future.
The historical aspects of this article are a good read though. Very interesting technology.
But The Netherlands abolish prison slave labour in 2021 so that is no longer possible.
"People from minority groups are relatively more often suspected of crimes that are more likely to end in a prison sentence. There is also a higher average number of charges against people from minority groups. On the socio-economic scale, people with an immigration background are more likely to be in vulnerable positions with lower education levels.
"The origin of a suspect influences the outcomes of the criminal proceedings against them. 'This may indicate conscious or unconscious discrimination, which goes against the principle of the rule of law, in which everyone has an equal chance of fair treatment,' the researchers said."
https://nos.nl/artikel/2621324-percentage-asielmigranten-ver...
It's very useful to have a disenfranchised underclass of immigrants to keep your own working class in check. Bonus points if you convince the latter that the source of all evil is the former.
101 capitalism, and it has worked with you.
Id look into that statement some more if I were you: There’s much difficulty building houses and starting industry because the net is congested.
As always: if it’s as easy as a random commenter suggests, it’s probably not that easy.
i think his point was that if you are in a remote location with solar and or wind power, the power is free because you can't do anything else with it (without transmission lines)
Oil and gas pipelines are centrally approved by FERC, so there is no such difficulty. It doesn't have to be so difficult to build transmission, and it would unlock a lot of wind and solar development.
Some temporary dredging barge getting a high-voltage hookup, which is only running during sunlight hours, and whose operations can be vetoed by the grid operator at very little notice? Not a problem.
So do care about the environment but many "green" activists do not care at all for the environment: for those it's just another version of communism. They want to crush the notion of the individual: they cannot understand the notion of a free, happy, individual.
They're rather have unhappy people united in communism, living miserably like under the USSR, than having a more advanced, richer, country if more advanced and richer means people are free.
Many don't care a yota about the environment: it's just an excuse to try to remove freedom from others.
They don't. That's fossil fuel propoganda that you've fallen for and are now spreading.
In reality fossil fuel is crap and we don't need it.
Pair this with their decade+ timeline and you have a mix that means that it's a long term goal. Us as voters have made long term goals unfeasible, we mostly run after what was in the news yesterday.
And who was complicit in creating that state of affairs?
Why did this technology not trickle down from the nation state to the enterprise and eventually the everyman the way that the material technologies of electronics and aerospace, the other high technologies of the time, did?
Financial institutions? Because the issue is getting a loan for say 8 billion that you might start repaying 10 to 15 years from now assuming it all pans out.
As much as you want to blame people for this, I don't think that's really the biggest reason. Most projects don't even get off the ground as the political will to back it is missing.
> Why did this technology not trickle down from the nation state to the enterprise and eventually the everyman
Uh, the cold war, nuclear proliferation etcetera. And I would argue that makes a lot of sense, even today.
Sometime in the last third of the 20th century the bankers and industry looked around, they looked at the heavy industry that normally ran on decade long investment and reinvestment cycles and they looked at the state and federal regulators who had just been empowered to fairly unilaterally take action with net effects on the same order as most industries profit margins and they were like "nah we good, quarter to quarter is how it's gonna be now".
That's why nothing big gets built in boring but necessary industries, nuclear or otherwise.
>Most projects don't even get off the ground as the political will to back it is missing.
The fact that you need "political will" to plug generation capacity into the grid is the problem.
>Uh, the cold war, nuclear proliferation etcetera. And I would argue that makes a lot of sense, even today.
Disagree. The economic potential is too great. If there was a market there they'd find a way to make it safe enough.
Then nuclear doesn't advance for decades and not enough is built (btw killing the really-existing-50-years-ago right in our laps green energy solution).
Then they say nuclear is shitty tech that has no hope and has proven to be slow and expensive, and therefore it's a waste to put in effort into it. (Guess what state solar was in before we put effort into it + didn't make it effectively illegal?)
The anti-nuke environmentalists, with the help of oil, bear the biggest blame for global warming. Fuck amory lovins, fuck ed lyman.
I'm a broken record, but I'll say for the 100th time. How is everyone so damn certain nuclear is the one technology that doesn't improve with innovation, iteration, and scale? And don't tell me learning curves have proven it doesn't without looking up the preconditions for learning curves to apply.
I still consider nuclear worse than solar, and I see it only as transitional tech until we can go fully green, but coal is so much worse, that nuclear should have been considered the better alternative.
By now, I think nuclear's window of opportunity has closed, because solar is just so ridiculously cheap right now. But if anyone wants to do it safely, I'm not against it.
I agree, which is why I was advocating for clean electricity to do the dredging.
The end of this article advocates for going back hand labor, which is what I was pushing back on as an unpractical return to a shitty past.
Hence, solar and wind power generating electricity, which are clean and green technologies but are not "low tech" do not fit his particular niche interest.
Though the article was from 2018. I think he may have evolved slightly as solar PV begins to feel more like a bit of lumber or a steel girder or anything else you can pick up at a hardware store and so passes his somewhat fuzzy and arbitrary definition of low tech.
Fossil fuels have amazing energy density, fantastic refueling characteristics, and a highly developed production and delivery infrastructure. Electricity only has the last one, and even then you have to take marks off for lack of widespread DC in most places on Earth where you can fill a Jerry can with 93 octane.
I know that I can only afford to drive an EV because of a stack of dependencies that work out Just So for myself. I would love for the world to move en masse away from fossil fuels and hydrocarbons in general, but that’s not gonna happen by telling the people who deploy these systems in the real world that the energy source their entire systems are built around is inferior and unnecessary.
is a coarse short hand for saying they have negative externalities which are horrendous and that only really become unquestionable as the boiling frog dies.
This is not an ideological stance, more a thermodynamic one-
( my background includes a decade and more in exploration geophysics for resource mapping and extraction at multiple large country / continental scale measuring and modelling gravity, tides, magnetics, radiometrics, atmospheric temperature and density (not so much actual gas mix, although yes, isotopes) )
> Fossil fuels have amazing energy density, fantastic refueling characteristics,
which cannot be denied. They also increase the insulation factor of the atmosphere in a slow steady fashion that traps energy that would be radiated to space were it not for human fossil fuel usage .
> and a highly developed production and delivery infrastructure.
So do drug cartels.
We are in that time when it's humanities best interest to reduce fossil fuel usage as much as possible, as fast as possible, and look to means of extracting some of the excess CO2 from the atmosphere that has been added by humans.
The second half of that sentence is what makes it clearly an ideological assertion.
Or maybe they are solutions oriented around the problem that the world is going to boil, instead of solution oriented around the problem of producing consumer goods at enormous volumes and shipping them across the ocean?
They derive 39% of total Dutch energy use from oil, 36% from natural gas, and 7% from coal.
That's, what, 82% of Dutch energy usage from fossil fuel sources.
~ https://www.iea.org/countries/the-netherlands/oil
Unless you're asking about Dutch state and citizen investment in Oil and Gas companies and markets?
For Netherlands, it seems like the proportion is quite high, with approx 4-5 tonnes of their 13 tonnes per capita footprint comes from embodied carbon of imported goods.
If that had been burned domestically, the energy mix would be over 90% fossil fuels (e.g something like: 82 * (1 + 13/9) / (100 + 82 * (13/9)) )
> However, people who live in the Netherlands also buy products and services from abroad. The greenhouse gases released as a result of producing those products and services can be attributed to Dutch economic consumption. Similarly, greenhouse gas emissions released as a result of the production of products and services that are exported can be attributed to economic consumption abroad.
> In the period 2008-2021, the balance of these emissions – imports minus exports – was positive. This means that more greenhouse gases are emitted abroad as a result of Dutch economic consumption than vice versa. The emissions balance decreased from 5.3 tons to 2.0 tons of CO2 equivalent per capita between 2008 and 2017. As the Dutch economy picked up once again, the balance rose to 4.2 tons per capita by 2021.
https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/dossier/greenhouse-gas-emissions/wh...
Somewhat above the European average
https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/fichier/6478761/IA74_Va...
Besides, the page linked is actually powered entirely by solar panels, although intentionally not battery backed in this instance.
In many cases they can't be all that far from land, could one set up a way to run wires?
I also wonder about the possibility for some kind of permanent installation in select places, where small amounts of sediment are continually removed (as opposed to large amounts of sediment occasionally removed). Being permanent means you can hook it up to the grid.
Of course running them over some dirt is easier than through possibly moving water, but still.
It’s definitely possible, I don’t have an in depth knowledge of ships connected to shore power with cables, but if the distance isn’t too great, it seems possible.
Raising voltage lowers the ampacity to allow for smaller conductors.
6MW at 7200V is only ~500A, 6MW at 13.8kV is only 250A.
There are massive electric powered hydraulic mining machines that operate connected to power cables.
I like it, very similar to how mules used to pull barges thru canals except with electrical cables and a rail pantograph running on distribution lines next to the canal instead of mules and ropes.
Since 2018 when the article was written the cost of batteries has dropped about 50% https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline. And will probably do another 50%+ with sodium ion batteries that use common and abundant materials.
A human working at a normal kind of rate probably does about 2 kWh worth of work in a day or similar to a $200 battery which can be recharged for <$1. Batteries would be way cheaper than human labour already and similar to the cost of diesel.
Any numbers for that?
There are probably a few practical ways it could be done economically. One simple way that comes to mind is to use battery ships that connect to the main ship via cables. Those could move back and forth between charging spots and act as a mobile power supply. The question then becomes how much battery can be fitted on these ships and the practicalities of connecting ships with cables. 1mwh is about ~4 tonnes at current energy densities. Small barges commonly carry hundreds of tonnes of freight.
Another obvious one is using small nuclear reactors. Not a popular solution with environmentalists but doable technically.
Bio fuels are an alternative to fossil fuels. In the same way hydrogen or derived fuels are a valid alternative. More expensive than fossil fuels, but it would work.
And if you apply system thinking here, a valid question is whether using more but smaller ships could work. People are getting hung up on electrifying the same huge ship. The only reason that huge ship is economical is the economies of scale you get with large engines and relatively expensive fossil fuels.
As the article notes, dredging is something that used to be done manually and assisted by wind power. So, it can be done. It's just a lot more labor intensive that way. But we have ways to make these more autonomous now. So, an army of smaller battery operated dredge robots might replace a big dredging ship. They'd be moving back and forth between charge points and where the action is.
It all boils down to cost, economics, and practicalities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-1Af96gYVI
"The insane plan to dam the North Sea."
Metric to look at is EROI - Energy Return on Investment. How much energy do you put into growing these crops to get a unit of energy out?
Corn ethanol in the US is stupid because it's a 1.6:1 return at best, often a 1:1. To get a unit of energy out of corn ethanol, you need to put almost a unit in. And that's economic inputs, we know the sunshine is free. Sugarcane is a bit better, but you can only grow it in the tropics.
For reference, solar tends to be something like 4:1 - 10:1, wind is 10:1 +/- onshore or offshore, fracked oil tends to be down around 5:1-8:1, and a saudi well is (or at least used to be) 40:1.
As a resource reaches depletion, there are two forces acting on EROI: 1) the increased cost of each unit of energy input, and 2) the reduced yield from that energy input.
The EROI curve bends negative faster than you think by looking at history.
First there are significant quantities of oils grown used in cooking and discarded, in an often environmentally damaging way.
Reclaiming and burning these adds value to a waste product.
What is the EROI on batteries surely under 1.
These oils can provide energy storage and transmission in applications where electricity is ill suited, jet engines (coconut oil is especially suitable for this) and shipping come to mind.
What is a "significant quantity"? Significant in terms of volume relative to a single restaurateur? Or significant in terms of megajoules as a percentage of say, the shipping industry? (Or we can be generous and just narrow it down to the dredging industry).
Put another way, what is the recoverable megajoules of all of the Netherlands discarded cooking oil in a year as a percent of megajoules needed for all the dredging the Netherlands does in a year? My gut tells me it trends towards negligible.
All for recycling, but biofuel refiners already specializing in this do at most 5-20% recycled biooil : traditional oil blends. Don't know why they don't sell "pure" recycled biofuels, but it's probably a mix of availability and performance needs. Should always question yourself: "if it's so simple, why haven't the people already doing this commercially figured it out yet?" You'll truly understand the space if you can produce a good answer to that (and you'll have a business model if you can enunciate why their constraints or limits are wrong).
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> What is the EROI on batteries surely under 1.
EROI is used for energy sources. Batteries are an energy store. You can still do a similar "how much energy can I get out of this vs. embodied energy to create it" analysis, but energy out is measured over all the cycles in the useful lifetime of the device. It's a slightly different concept, and that metric is called Energy Stored on Energy Invested (ESOI). Lithium ion are about a 10:1 - 30:1.
Not for long! Or rather, the range of the tropics are moving, so that won't be the thing holding us back if that's the route we wanna take.