Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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What's special about fossil fuel? Is a kilowatt-hour from burning carbon magically able to power an economy better than one from a solar panel, a wind turbine, or a nuclear reactor?

I think you could make that argument (at least structurally) as late as the 2000s when batteries and solar were still un-economical. Today it's very possible to power a modern economy without fossil fuels in almost every sector except long haul trucking, a few industrial processes, and aviation, and those together are a small percentage of overall fossil fuel use. Aviation and trucking are less than 10% of oil use.

Europe doesn't have an energy shortage that's not self-inflicted. Becoming dependent on Russian gas combined with anti-nuclear in Germany probably contribute. German greens are basically an advertising arm of Gazprom. (Just like how America's huge inflation is self-inflicted via dumb tariffs and unnecessary wars. We should pay politicians an extra bonus to do nothing.)

The most likely explanation for Europe's stagnation is a mix of stifling bureaucracy, low birth rates, brain drain (mostly to the US), and policies that are explicitly growth-limiting.

> What's special about fossil fuel?

Is this a real question?

- just bend down to harvest, nature has done all the work over millions of years

- energy dense as fuck

- reliable, it doesn't matter if you have sun, wind, if it's winter or summer

- easy to store and transport

- can be transformed into fertiliser, which allowed us to feed more people, for cheaper and more easily

- literal building block of everything that made what the world is today: plastics, medicine, synthetic fibers, etc.

- allowed us to transform materials which required high temperatures: metal, glas, etc.

We're quite literally a fossil fuel society...

All that is historically true, but most new energy being added to the grid is now renewable. Solar and batteries continue to get cheaper and it's already the cheapest source of new power in sunny places.

I have seen this raised as yet another interesting Fermi paradox idea: maybe our planet is unusual in that it stored up a giant store of easily exploitable energy to bootstrap a technological civilization.

> All that is historically true, but most new energy being added to the grid is now renewable

Cool, "added" is doing a lot of work here. We're still mostly relying on fossils, about ~70% of our mix.

> Solar and batteries continue to get cheaper

Bonus question: how much does it cost to build a solar panel or wind mill when fossils get 2x, 5x, 10x more expensive? When we run our of fossils?

It's impossible to run out of fossil fuels. There are always more places to look. But the cost of extraction may continue to rise if there's not another technical breakthrough on the scale of fracking or horizontal drilling.

> just bend down to harvest

Ah yes, oil extraction, refinement, and transport is a famously simple and low-capital process.

It's a fraction of what it would have cost us to make the oil itself, like not even close

I mean doesn’t this apply to solar too? How much would it have cost us to produce the Sun itself?

This specific point sure, the rest not really. Peetrol is like 50x more energy dense than common batteries for example. Peak sun doesn't coincide with peak demand at all, it's a pain in the ass to store long term, it's unreliable when you need it the most, it's not as easy to transform into fertilizers/plastics/medicine

> What's special about fossil fuel?

It's cheaper than nuclear. If one is discussing vs. renewables, then Europe is comparatively poorly situated to exploit those, especially solar.

I think Europe's larger problem is a smothering blanket of taxation and regulation. Good for standard of living in the short term (or at least was), but not good for growth and long term competitiveness.

Is it cheaper, with externalities priced in?

No, but that's beside the point I was making. Europe can't compete with places that aren't imposing Pigouvian taxes or the equivalent. Even if those are added, in a renewable (which will be mostly solar) powered world Europe will be at a disadvantage relative to places closer to the equator.

You need fossil fuels as feedstock for your chemical industry.

And obviously energy too, until Europe completely electrifies .

So it's quite a big deal when gas goes from being cheap and reliable to expensive and unreliable.

Fracked gas in the US is remarkably high in ethane, the base feedstock for polyethylene. There's so much that it's become almost free (there's a maximum concentration of ethane allowed in pipeline gas, so it has to be separated, and the surplus is almost being given away.) Liquefied ethane is shipped internationally, much like LNG, but it's still cheaper to use it locally.

> Today it's very possible to power a modern economy without fossil fuels

Citation needed, or I don't know what "very possible" actually means. Possible perhaps, but not realistic, and certainly not economical.

It's not economical if one ignores the negative externalities of fossil fuels. But ignoring those doesn't make them go away.

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