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Fossil fuels aren't even close to going anywhere. Keep in mind it's not just being used for transportation and heating it's being used for more or less everyth

Fossil fuels aren't even close to going anywhere. Keep in mind it's not just being used for transportation and heating it's being used for more or less everything. Your computer, your raincoat, your tires, your trashcan, all the products you buy at amazon, in hospital equipment, your furniture etc. It's hard to find anything that is as flexible as fossil fuel, unfortunately. https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/lets-honest-gas-oil-not-going-anywhere-anytime-soon/40104/ https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/lets-honest-gas-oil-not...

aphextron 8y ago
>Fossil fuels aren't even close to going anywhere. Completely agreed. We will be flying around in kerosene powered airliners, and burning natural gas for electricity for a long, long time to come. But that doesn't mean it won't draw down to a fraction of what it is today. Personal vehicle gasoline consumption, for example, will be almost nonexistent in 20 years.
- leereeves 8y ago
  Even if personal vehicle gasoline consumption fell to zero, it would only reduce overall fossil fuel use by about 25%. (And that's assuming it wasn't simply shifted from gasoline ICEs to natural gas power plants.)
- megaman22 8y ago
  I can't conceive of anything that would reasonably replace diesel for outdoor heavy equipment, either.
  - aphextron 8y ago
    >I can't conceive of anything that would reasonably replace diesel for outdoor heavy equipment, either. Believe it. Heavy equipment is a prime candidate for electrification. Mining companies are already using electric dump trucks in production, and they are incredibly more efficient because of regen braking with the mass differential of unloading at the bottom of a hill [0]. Literally anything that isn't dependent on the energy density of hydrocarbons will be electrified in the next few decades. That leaves basically aircraft and spacecraft as consumers outside the petrochemical and energy industry. [0] http://revolution-green.com/worlds-first-electric-dump-truck-uses-gravity-power-recharge/ http://revolution-green.com/worlds-first-electric-dump-truck...
epistasis 8y ago
"Soon" is a relative term. This will change over the coming decades. Fuels' primary advantage are their density of storage. But as the cheapness of renewables comes to dominate energy production--i.e. the cost of intermittent renewable will soon be cheaper than even just the fossil fuel cost of energy--we'll see price swings based on the variability of renewable production, and the mismatch between the time of supply and demand. With electric cars, every home will have ~2-4 days worth of storage in their garage. Charging the cars will present one area of time-flexible demand, to suck up the variable production. For the seasonal variability of renewable energy, it might make sense to store energy from the more productive season for use in the less productive season. However, synthetic fuels are quite inefficient, round trip, if you're making them from scratch, lets say 50% at best. If the seasonal price swings are greater than 2x, then I think we'll see some synthetic fuels made as long term storage, as long as synthetic fuels can be made cheaply enough. See for example this other front page post for current best-case estimates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17257291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17257291 However, in the long term (50 years?), there's no room for fossil fuels. They will just be too expensive compared to renewable energy to make economic sense. Synthetic fuels, perhaps, but not fossil fuels.
- ThomPete 8y ago
  In the long term solar is hardly interesting either. In fact if green is what you want, nuclear (or if we are lucky Fusion) is the way to go but the environmental organizations are for some reason worried about that. It's not just a matter of the market and political will, there are some fundamental limits on how much energy we can get from solar and wind. They are linear solutions to exponential problems so to speak. I have yet to see any calculation based in realistic metrics (not just wishful thinking) that outphases oil. I hope for it as much as everyone else but I am not prepared to do it at any price.
  - epistasis 8y ago
    > In fact if green is what you want, nuclear (or if we are lucky Fusion) is the way to go but the environmental organizations are for some reason worried about that. > It's not just a matter of the market and political will, That's absolutely untrue, nuclear is waaaaaaay too expensive and old-fashioned to compete in the modern world. Take a few seconds to look at any of the attempts at construction in the Western world. Nuclear is super expensive, and not nearly scalable enough. In the US, Vogtle and VC Summer have been nuclear disasters, but economic disasters. They had a super-supportive regulatory environment and neighbors around the construction sites, but it's just not feasible to build at a reasonable cost. Nuclear is such a terrible idea that there's no way to get private funding for it; it has to have huge amounts of government level backing for it to become even vaguely economic feasible. Look at the UK's attempts to sell their nuclear generation capacity, all of a sudden when they were writing financial documents they had to not lie, and they couldn't get anybody to buy them. And now the UK has the economic disaster of the new Hinkley construction. There's a batch of small-moduler reactor (SMR) startups that may improve the cost and scalability of nuclear, but I'm extremely skeptical. Such SMRs have long been rejected as too costly, it's not at all clear what would make them competitive now. It may happen, but it's further out than the massive scale-back of fossil fuels. > there are some fundamental limits on how much energy we can get from solar and wind. These "fundamental" limits are not in the realm of possibility of limiting our current use. >They are linear solutions to exponential problems so to speak. I'm not sure what part could be exponential. Our energy use is nothing like exponential, and in developed countries it is increasingly decoupled from GDP and other exponential things. Most of our "energy" use is actually wasted energy due to the inherent inefficiency of thermal electricity generation, or, god forbid, the pathetic efficiency of combustion engines in vehicles. We don't yet have applications for energy that could come close to any "fundamental limit" from solar. If we do, then perhaps fusion or something will be useful, but fusion is even more of a pipedream than trying to construct
Arubis 8y ago
> Your computer, your raincoat, your tires, your trashcan, all the products you buy at amazon, in hospital equipment, your furniture etc. All the more reason to stop _literally setting it on fire_ when avoidable.
- ThomPete 8y ago
  Are you going to stop using any of these products?
  - Arubis 8y ago
    Perhaps I've been insufficiently clear. Those products are essential and currently pretty much all of our chemical knowledge is based on fossil fuels. Plastics are a _big deal_ and we don't have a clear replacement for the source material--so let's minimize burning it.
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      I don't understand why people say fossil fuels are particularly required for plastics. Plastics can be made from renewable sources just as much as fuel. I used to have a mug that my employer gave me made of plant-based plastic.
      - ThomPete 8y ago
        Because everything, the whole logistical system is based around that and optimized for that. Think about it as an ecosystem. The flexibility of oil is second to none. The second you start to "pollute" (no pun intended) the ecosystem with other sources you are making it more complex and more expensive as you are suddenly introducing foreign materials that needs to be handled differently. It's not as simple as many would like to believe.
        tinus_hn 8y ago
        Then it’s better to start as soon as possible. Oil is not the future, it’s the past. It’s finite and it’s running out. You can either learn to deal with alternatives or live without.
audunw 8y ago
Isn’t that besides the point? The applications you list are a very small fraction of the oil dig up. And you could get those hydrocarbon from renewable sources. They just happen to be practically free when we’re extracting and burning such massive amounts of fossile oil/gas

aphextron 8y ago

>Fossil fuels aren't even close to going anywhere. Completely agreed. We will be flying around in kerosene powered airliners, and burning natural gas for electricity for a long, long time to come. But that doesn't mean it won't draw down to a fraction of what it is today. Personal vehicle gasoline consumption, for example, will be almost nonexistent in 20 years.

leereeves 8y ago
Even if personal vehicle gasoline consumption fell to zero, it would only reduce overall fossil fuel use by about 25%. (And that's assuming it wasn't simply shifted from gasoline ICEs to natural gas power plants.)
megaman22 8y ago
I can't conceive of anything that would reasonably replace diesel for outdoor heavy equipment, either.
- aphextron 8y ago
  >I can't conceive of anything that would reasonably replace diesel for outdoor heavy equipment, either. Believe it. Heavy equipment is a prime candidate for electrification. Mining companies are already using electric dump trucks in production, and they are incredibly more efficient because of regen braking with the mass differential of unloading at the bottom of a hill [0]. Literally anything that isn't dependent on the energy density of hydrocarbons will be electrified in the next few decades. That leaves basically aircraft and spacecraft as consumers outside the petrochemical and energy industry. [0] http://revolution-green.com/worlds-first-electric-dump-truck-uses-gravity-power-recharge/ http://revolution-green.com/worlds-first-electric-dump-truck...

epistasis 8y ago

"Soon" is a relative term. This will change over the coming decades. Fuels' primary advantage are their density of storage. But as the cheapness of renewables comes to dominate energy production--i.e. the cost of intermittent renewable will soon be cheaper than even just the fossil fuel cost of energy--we'll see price swings based on the variability of renewable production, and the mismatch between the time of supply and demand. With electric cars, every home will have ~2-4 days worth of storage in their garage. Charging the cars will present one area of time-flexible demand, to suck up the variable production. For the seasonal variability of renewable energy, it might make sense to store energy from the more productive season for use in the less productive season. However, synthetic fuels are quite inefficient, round trip, if you're making them from scratch, lets say 50% at best. If the seasonal price swings are greater than 2x, then I think we'll see some synthetic fuels made as long term storage, as long as synthetic fuels can be made cheaply enough. See for example this other front page post for current best-case estimates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17257291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17257291 However, in the long term (50 years?), there's no room for fossil fuels. They will just be too expensive compared to renewable energy to make economic sense. Synthetic fuels, perhaps, but not fossil fuels.

ThomPete 8y ago
In the long term solar is hardly interesting either. In fact if green is what you want, nuclear (or if we are lucky Fusion) is the way to go but the environmental organizations are for some reason worried about that. It's not just a matter of the market and political will, there are some fundamental limits on how much energy we can get from solar and wind. They are linear solutions to exponential problems so to speak. I have yet to see any calculation based in realistic metrics (not just wishful thinking) that outphases oil. I hope for it as much as everyone else but I am not prepared to do it at any price.
- epistasis 8y ago
  > In fact if green is what you want, nuclear (or if we are lucky Fusion) is the way to go but the environmental organizations are for some reason worried about that. > It's not just a matter of the market and political will, That's absolutely untrue, nuclear is waaaaaaay too expensive and old-fashioned to compete in the modern world. Take a few seconds to look at any of the attempts at construction in the Western world. Nuclear is super expensive, and not nearly scalable enough. In the US, Vogtle and VC Summer have been nuclear disasters, but economic disasters. They had a super-supportive regulatory environment and neighbors around the construction sites, but it's just not feasible to build at a reasonable cost. Nuclear is such a terrible idea that there's no way to get private funding for it; it has to have huge amounts of government level backing for it to become even vaguely economic feasible. Look at the UK's attempts to sell their nuclear generation capacity, all of a sudden when they were writing financial documents they had to not lie, and they couldn't get anybody to buy them. And now the UK has the economic disaster of the new Hinkley construction. There's a batch of small-moduler reactor (SMR) startups that may improve the cost and scalability of nuclear, but I'm extremely skeptical. Such SMRs have long been rejected as too costly, it's not at all clear what would make them competitive now. It may happen, but it's further out than the massive scale-back of fossil fuels. > there are some fundamental limits on how much energy we can get from solar and wind. These "fundamental" limits are not in the realm of possibility of limiting our current use. >They are linear solutions to exponential problems so to speak. I'm not sure what part could be exponential. Our energy use is nothing like exponential, and in developed countries it is increasingly decoupled from GDP and other exponential things. Most of our "energy" use is actually wasted energy due to the inherent inefficiency of thermal electricity generation, or, god forbid, the pathetic efficiency of combustion engines in vehicles. We don't yet have applications for energy that could come close to any "fundamental limit" from solar. If we do, then perhaps fusion or something will be useful, but fusion is even more of a pipedream than trying to construct

Arubis 8y ago

> Your computer, your raincoat, your tires, your trashcan, all the products you buy at amazon, in hospital equipment, your furniture etc. All the more reason to stop _literally setting it on fire_ when avoidable.

ThomPete 8y ago
Are you going to stop using any of these products?
- Arubis 8y ago
  Perhaps I've been insufficiently clear. Those products are essential and currently pretty much all of our chemical knowledge is based on fossil fuels. Plastics are a _big deal_ and we don't have a clear replacement for the source material--so let's minimize burning it.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    I don't understand why people say fossil fuels are particularly required for plastics. Plastics can be made from renewable sources just as much as fuel. I used to have a mug that my employer gave me made of plant-based plastic.
    - ThomPete 8y ago
      Because everything, the whole logistical system is based around that and optimized for that. Think about it as an ecosystem. The flexibility of oil is second to none. The second you start to "pollute" (no pun intended) the ecosystem with other sources you are making it more complex and more expensive as you are suddenly introducing foreign materials that needs to be handled differently. It's not as simple as many would like to believe.
      - tinus_hn 8y ago
        Then it’s better to start as soon as possible. Oil is not the future, it’s the past. It’s finite and it’s running out. You can either learn to deal with alternatives or live without.

audunw 8y ago

Isn’t that besides the point? The applications you list are a very small fraction of the oil dig up. And you could get those hydrocarbon from renewable sources. They just happen to be practically free when we’re extracting and burning such massive amounts of fossile oil/gas