If We Dig Out All Our Fossil Fuels, Here’s How Hot We Can Expect It to Get
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Anyway, I'm a chemical engineer from UT-Austin, so most of my graduating class went into oil. I have a standing $100 bet with two of them that they will not retire in the oil industry.
Finally, I don't understand why more entrepreneurs don't do startups in energy. 87% of the world energy sources will have to change in the next 35 years. To most, that sounds scary. However, to an entrepreneur like me, that sounds like a huge ceiling.
I'm also in oil & gas right now and I suspect that you're going to lose, though not because the industry is going to grow. It's going to shrink strictly based on out-of-the-ground production.
But the oil companies aren't huge, they're gigantic. And they're not going to just roll over and die. If tomorrow someone gets a working LFTR going you can be sure that all the majors are going to spend a LOT of money trying to buy said company and scale it up.
And the oil companies already own tremendous amounts of assets re: liquid fuels so they'd just start plopping reactors down in the middle of their plants and start producing DME (for diesel) or whatever the gas equivalent is out of various feedstocks.
It'd take a decade or two to finally make the transition, but I really think that's where things are going. The oil companies regularly spend billions getting leases on land, drilling, production assets, etc. To spend $10b (or $100b even) on buying a 'safe nuclear' technology to avoid going out of business I suspect wouldn't generate too many waves.
So they'll be sort-of reinvented, but still largely themselves. The majors aren't necessarily oil companies anymore, but energy companies. We're going to see them slowly change or die, but I suspect most will transition successfully just because they have so much money under "management" that it'll be hard to screw up too badly.
LFTR videos are popular on social media, but there are many technologies that could produce superior fission plants to what we have now [1]. And thorium isn't required for molten salt reactors like LFTR in any case [2]. You may be interested in these designs.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor#Current_technol... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
What is the oil industry then? I mean, there are probably a bunch of different definitions. The "oil industry" does a lot of stuff.
1. explores for oil
2. obtains mineral rights to the oil it suspects is in the ground
3. does test drilling to determine if oil is in fact there
4. does production drilling to make it feasible to extract any oil it does find
5. sets up production equipment to extract the oil from the ground
6. establishes a logistics chain to move the crude oil coming out of the ground to a refinery (truck, train, pipeline, etc)
7. builds and maintains many-multi-billion dollar refineries
8. uses said refineries to turn crude oil into a multitude of products like various gasses, butane, naptha, grades of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, greases and lubricants, waxes and various other byproducts
9. establishes supply lines to ship finished products to various markets domestically and internationally
10. trades in the energy markets to ensure that prices across the world properly reflect transport and other costs (arbitrage by virtue of known internal costs)
11. develops new equipment, techniques and strategies to make any of the above mentioned things more efficient, cheaper, easier, etc
So while I agree that 1-5 might end up changing, that's far from the entirety of "the oil industry" and thus I think my statement isn't entirely wrong.
The risk vs. rewards isn't as good as it looks like. First, energy is one of those hightly regulated fields, where outsiders face hell on Earth. Then, energy is normaly a market where huge investiments have tremendous economics of scale and dominate the market. Finally, even research in energy takes big-to-huge initial investiments, where "big" is already way outside of normal people budgets.
Yes, if somebody comes with a way to make anything (production, storage, transmission, even colaboration) cheap on this market, he'll probably get rich. But any product that isn't completely revolutionary will be completely destroyed.
Can you point to some? I'd love to help them in some way.
> You probably won't find a lot of them in the halls of Y-combinator or on Hacker News.
Yep. This business is about 20- and 30-somethings flipping their "social pet belfie" companies for as much as they can get in the next couple of years. Most of them don't care about 10-20 years from now, much less 50-100, and will be dead by the time that sea level rise drowns most of Florida and glacier melt makes Canada unrecognizable.
Altarock, Zeep, Achates, Biofuelbox, yada yada ...
There are like ... a lot. What is your particular interest?
> I'd love to help them in some way.
What type of thing can you contribute? I may or may not be able to provide an intro to something you are interested in. Unfortunately, the ones where I have any direct contribution are (oddly) both stealth-ey and large-ish and off to the races already. That said, depending on what you are into, I'd be happy to put you in contact with them, if there appears to be a fit.
I do statistics and HPC (C/C++/Fortran), and know some good CFD people. If that matters, let's talk off-forum. HN apparently doesn't do that, but I can set up the email if you want.
> Can you point to some?
The "Who's Hiring?" thread for April has several. Just search within the page for "energy": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9303396
I did look into doing an energy startup a few years back. We had a prototype built, tested, and in operations, so it was at the point where most people thought it would be easy to launch it. But the investors who were interested in funding projects stared that they wanted us to do at least $50 million dollar projects before they even wanted to talk to us. Anything below that was small potatoes. Now, maybe we were just talking to the wrong people... we ended up not pursing the projects at the end of it all. But unless you have had exposure to the internal workings of the energy industry, you really don't grasp the massive scale of it all.
Having done one I can tell you why I wouldn't do another.
Yes, the energy business is huge, but in part its huge because there is a lot of infrastructure, path dependency, and economy of scale involved.
It's hard to make a meaningful change against that, especially since the margins are low so there's not a lot of room for a classical "Christiansen" disruptor. Typically the new entrant's cost is higher since it can't take advantage of the highly depreciated existing infrastructure. SO you have to get established in specialized markets which are by definition marginal.
Finally, and again because the markets are so huge, policy (and lobbying) is a huge influence, and startups simply can't play in those arenas.
A good example of all this is coal: new coal plants aren't being built in the US and even the coal minors don't want their kids to go into coal (most don't anyway), yet "attack on coal is an attack on America" is a significant plank on at least one of the major party's platform.
Enough stupidity.
I keep thinking of us as mice munching on grain from an overturned truck. Life is great (and the population explodes) until the grain is gone. Then woe to the mice.
Of course, people point to other great challenges we have overcome as a species. But is this time really different?
Blueprints for how to make a tractor won't help if the blueprints assume gas or diesel fuel, and there's no oil any more...
In fact, they already did it once. Coal-fired steam engines powered civilization once, and could easily do it again. Probably better, using modern techniques such as fluidized beds, pelletizing, etc.
There's this perception that oil will some day "run out" suddenly, like the last sip at the bottom of a milkshake.
It doesn't work that way. If it happens, oil will gradually become more expensive, until the point where it becomes more economic to use coal (or fission, or fusion, or whatever). At that point, the amount of oil remaining becomes moot.
It would be a lot more impressive if that list worked its way up from having nothing but hand-tools that use no energy to basic generating capacity, smaller power tools, larger power tools, actual machinery.
If you don't have a plan like that in place this will lead absolutely nowhere, try making a hydraulic piston without a really good lathe, a supply of oil, a good seal, a pump and so on. The list of pre-requisites for something as simple as a hydraulic piston is very long.
Metal fabrication is just like software building layer upon layer of capabilities.
The whole project should not be undertaken as "what would I design if I wanted to restart civilization tomorrow" but as "what would I design if I were to be transported to 1500 with nothing but this catalogue".
If anything the 'reboot' would simply re-use or salvage that what was left over from the aftermath of whatever did us in in the first place, it's a lot easier to fix an old jeep than to make a new one and it will still outperform a horse when doing tractor duty.
Until that happens there won't be any substantial pressure to get a LFTR program going, which will definitely solve the problem.
It sometimes really gets to me that we're all suffering a lot because a few politicians won't be adults and do their job and fix the energy situation. But there are a lot more campaign contributions from existing big business than theoretical new big businesses.
Your metaphor misleads you. It is inaccurate to characterize humanity as passively consuming a single pre-existing resource that it is utterly incapable of recreating. We are generating knowledge as well, and knowledge really is power, and from that we generate yet more resources of other types.
The question of whether we can outrun our own consumption is an interesting question that is not a guaranteed "yes", but the built-in hopelessness of your metaphor isn't part of the answer. It is inaccurate to the point of being anti-knowledge. The universe is awash in negentropy, and the true, physics-based boundaries of our growth are still inconceivably larger than we are right now.
Whenever I get too pessimistic, I think of the gobs and gobs of money to be made solving this issue (while still maintaining or improving our current standard of living). That said, I think many market optimists (not that I'm calling you one) don't really get EROEI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inves...
Finally, if someone invents a 10x battery at an affordable price, the whole game changes.
If things really go to hell, I'm willing to bet that huge amounts of knowledge -- possibly even the vast majority of human knowledge -- will end up getting lost gradually, either as it becomes too expensive to keep the servers that store it running, or as the drives fail and it becomes an inefficient use of resources to replace them.
What's this?
Oil is just the VHS of energy - it came first and got market acceptance, but its not the best or even the only easily capitalized energy source.
If we lose just a bit of our knowledge, we'll be restricted to biomass.
Petroleum isn't just a fuel source, its a highly portable fuel source.
Clearly advanced battery tech will resolve most of that, but jets/rockets don't sound like they'll be using either batteries or nuclear as a fuel source anytime soon.
At some point the fungi evolved to eat the dead trees. So they can not become coal, oil or gas anymore.
Many people follow an erroneous line of reasoning on this, though it's understandable because there's some subtlety and complexity involved.
We have been exploiting natural resources like crazy, which has depleted and will deplete many reserves over time, but not all reserves. Most importantly, the reserves that get exploited change over time due to capacity, cost effectiveness, and so on. Which means that there are many instances where particular reserves stop being exploited before they've been depleted, usually because they are too small or not high enough quality or too expensive to be competitive on the market.
Take coal, for example. There is still a huge amount of coal in easily mined locations all around the world that is not currently being used. If civilization had to "reboot" they could easily make use of those sources of coal. They aren't being used at present because they aren't competitive, they can't produce the volume of coal at the prices and of the quality that the market demands currently. But there's still tons of coal out there that you can basically just walk up to and dig out of the ground with a shovel. To some degree that same situation exists with a lot of other resources as well (such as iron ore).
Petroleum is perhaps the most likely resource to be depleted in the future, but even in that case there are still lots of smaller reserves that are easy to exploit but are not because they're too small or too expensive.
Realistically the early stages of an industrial revolution in a civilizational reboot wouldn't be significantly constrained, but later stages might be, though at that point they'd have options to work around it (for example, gasification of coal, earlier recycling, migration to non-fossil fuel power sources during early phases, and so on).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_during_the_Copper_Ag...
[2] http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/mining....
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_extraction_techniques
Let's not mince words, the plan is and has been to manipulate the energy market through coercive authority. Calling this "disrupting" is the most cringe-worthy instance of that term I've ever seen in print (and there is a lot of competition).
Maybe even up to this point : http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
That's right. All those taxpayer dollars spent on fossil fuel business subsidies.
I mean, that's definitely what you were talking about, right?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-12/fossil-fue...
However doubling CO2 does not double the amount of radiation it absorbs. CO2 absorbs at certain particular wavelengths and even if you make the atmosphere 100% CO2 it can only absorb all the light at those wavelengths and remain clear at others. In fact replacing everything in the atmosphere, including water vapour with CO2 would probably make the Earth cooler as the biggest green house effect is from water vapour.
There's some discussion here, admittedly from a skeptical source without full citations suggesting far lower warming from increases in CO2.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-effectiveness-of-c...
If you consider this:
"The climate of the Cretaceous is less certain and more widely disputed. Average temperatures were higher than today by about 18 degrees F (10 degrees C)."
http://what-when-how.com/global-warming/mesozoic-era-global-...
Then this seems a bit odd:
"an astonishing 16.2 degrees"
That sounds accurate if they mean Celsius but this is the New York Times, which I believe uses Fahrenheit as a matter of style, and they write: "Scientists predict global disaster at 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over pre-industrial temperatures; there is enough fossil fuel extracted and within reach to raise temperatures 16.2 degrees" which confirms the use of Fahrenheit.
It's frightening to consider the impact it would have if we really did dig up all the fossil fuel, including the stuff that we probably won't be able to reach. It's worth thinking about, since technological breakthroughs now allow us to reach a great deal of fossil fuel that was considered uneconomic 30 years ago and, likewise, 30 years from now we might be able to reach fossil fuel that we now consider unreachable.
Assuming large concentrations of life, allowing the formation of fossil fuels, starts with the Cambrian, or a bit after, we can say that "all our fossil fuels" refers to the deposits that built up over the course of 500 million years. If we dug all of that up and burned all of it, then we should arrive at a temperature that is a bit hotter than anything that ever occurred before. If the Mesozoic saw average temperatures that were 10 degrees Celsius higher than today, then something like 16 degrees Celsius would be a reasonable guess. Or higher.
The Cretaceous isn't when the fossil fuels were formed; that was much earlier, during the Carboniferous. Global temperatures don't actually correlate very well over geologic time scales with the amount of carbon sequestered in fossil fuels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#Flu...
Um, you do know that the Cretaceous is part of the Mesozoic, right? And that our fossil fuels were not formed during any part of the Mesozoic; they were formed during the Carboniferous, which is part of the Paleozoic, right?
> I can not imagine what you mean when you write "Global temperatures don't correlate ... with the amount of carbon sequestered in fossil fuels."
I mean just what I said: global temperatures don't correlate very well with the amount of carbon sequestered in fossil fuels. Even the amount of CO2 in the air, over the last 600 million years or so, does not correlate well with the amount of carbon sequestered in fossil fuels. If that were true, we would expect to see lots of CO2 before the Carboniferous, very little CO2 from then to now, then a lot now. That is not what we see when we look at the record. See, for example, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atm...
> if we dig up an amount of carbon that was buried over 500 million years and we burn it all during a 200 or 300 year time span, then presumably we end up with more carbon in the air, at one time, than ever occurred before
And if you look up the actual levels of CO2 in the atmosphere over the last 600 million years or so, you will see that this is not even close to being true. CO2 levels have been in the thousands of PPM during the period between the Carboniferous and now, even though all that carbon was buried in fossil fuels. The current epoch is one of very low CO2 concentrations in geologic terms, even counting the recent increase due to our burning fossil fuels.
It's going to be an awful long time before our energy utilization shows up in the temperature of the atmosphere.