9 ms·

The Future of Fossil Fuels

38 points by apsec112 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
georgebarnett 7y ago
Based simply on the current “dig up everything we can while it’s still worth something” push from the industry, it’s clear they’re dead in the water with a lot of soon to be stranded assets. Much like the tobacco industry, they have sway.. right up until they don’t.
moh_maya 7y ago
I don't know if fossil fuels, especially natural gas, will be substantially replaced from the energy mix till we figure out massive high density power storage mechanisms at scale. Fossil fuels provide base load power that, without storage, we simply cannot rely on most renewables to directly substitute. The only alternative has been, and likely will continue to be, nuclear power, which has its own set of challenges. If you accept this contention, then the big driver / trigger / marker for the "end of fossil fuels as bulk power sources" is the development and at scale deployment of power storage. And I don't see compelling evidence that is happening anytime soon.
- apsec112 7y ago
  The article says: "Closer to home, Los Angeles’ utility commission recently approved a new solar plant that will deliver 300 megawatts of energy at 3.962¢/kWh (by comparison, electric power from natural gas usually costs about 8¢/kWh in the US). Importantly, that price tag includes energy storage as well, meaning the plant will be able to deliver energy to LA residents day and night."
  - moh_maya 7y ago
    An LA Times article [1] on the solar power plant suggests it can supply 6-7% of LA's annual electricity needs and deliver upto 4 hours of power each night. I don't read that as 100% of LA's night time power requirements each night for 4 hours though; rather, that it can continue supplying at a steady rate 4 hours after Sun down. It's not nearly a replacement for base load power. [1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-09-10/ladwp-votes-on-eland-solar-contract?_amp=true https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-09-10/ladwp-v...
- WalterBright 7y ago
  A way to reduce base load power requirements is to raise the rates for it. A lot of power requirements can be time shifted, as a residence is inherently a large battery. For example, the electric hot water heater. It can run when power is cheap, and not when it is expensive. The water will stay hot for a couple days (I know this from experience with power failures). The same goes for heating/cooling the house. When power is cheap, heat/cool to the edge of the comfort zone. When power is expensive (i.e. base rate) let it drift to the other extreme. Houses have a great deal of thermal mass (again I know this from power outages) and this can be increased by using a pile of rocks as a thermal "battery". In order to motivate people to use this method, raise the cost of the night rate. Edit: of course, the more water in the hot water tank, and the more rocks in the hot/cold pile, the better this works. Fortunately, water and rocks are cheap.
  - alacombe 7y ago
    > A way to reduce base load power requirements is to raise the rates for it. You are heading straight to a civil war. > A lot of power requirements can be time shifted, as a residence is inherently a large battery. Go tell this to people living through Canadian winter with sub-zero temperature...
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      > You are heading straight to a civil war. Just reduce the daytime rates. Besides, it doesn't make sense to have fixed electric rates 24/7 when the cost to supply it varies dramatically. Look at gasoline pump prices, they very all the time due to supply+demand and nobody is fighting a war over that. > Go tell this to people living through Canadian winter with sub-zero temperature. I agree that any solution that doesn't cover 100% of use cases is quite useless and inapplicable for the 98% of the population where it would work. Besides, I live in Seattle which is next to Canada, and this solution would work fine in the PNW climate, which includes Vancouver B.C.
      - alacombe 7y ago
        > it doesn't make sense to have fixed electric rates 24/7 Electricity is the least popular form of heating in Canada, by far, dwelling are heated with gas furnace. This, and my supply prices are contractually locked for the next 5 years regardless of the actual market price. > Besides, I live in Seattle which is next to Canada, and this solution would work fine in the PNW climate, which includes Vancouver B.C. Come on, Seattle/lower mainland look like the tropics compared to the rest of Canada.
- ben_w 7y ago
  What does “high density power storage mechanisms at scale” look like? The overnight storage requirements work out as adding a few cm thickness of LiIon batteries to every solar panel. Production of batteries is growing fast — eyeballing the images I’d even say exponentially, which is fast enough soon enough even if it isn’t a big enough number now.
  - alacombe 7y ago
    Solar production is pretty much nil in northern latitude due to the snow pack. On top of that, my dwelling is constantly in the shade for 3 months, so panels ain't gonna help.
    - ben_w 7y ago
      That’s an irrelevant point, for the same reason it’s irrelevant that a nuclear reactor doesn’t fit in your basement: electricity can be transmitted over large distances by high voltage wires. Conveniently, many of these wires already exist. Rooftop solar helps where it works, but it’s not required in any case.
    - francisofascii 7y ago
      Utility scale solar is typically installed on the ground where snow can easily be shoveled off. Also you can buy snow removal tools that attach to long poles for rooftop removal.
    - fulafel 7y ago
      Not actually the case, as much as you'd think. Have a look at this map that covers Canada: https://energyhub.org/efficiency/ https://energyhub.org/efficiency/
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    A mix of things. There are storage options which fit different criteria. Some are very responsive to changes in demand (supercapacitors, inertial flywheel storage), but have high costs, bad wear characteristics, and low total capacity. Some are responsive and immensely efficient (high energy-in:energy-out ratios), such as pumped hydro, but suffer from siting and environmental restrictions. Some are slow and inefficient but scale wonderfully. Thermal energy storage, either for direct heating or for generation, is a case in point. District thermal energy storage has been used for residential & commercial space. Molten salt thermal storage can bank heat for weeks, but suffers Carnot efficiency losses of about 70%. It's cheap, simple, and non-toxic (though will sting if it gets out). Compressed air energy storage is a lot like pumped-hydro, though it might possibly scale better and be suited to use in exhausted natural gas reservoirs. Here a problem is physics and Boyle's Law: compressed gasses heat, expanding gasses cool. This means either that you're losing a lot of energy to the environent and freezing your regeneration equipment, having to deal with high temperatures in storage (the possibility of triggering explosions in spent-gas reservoirs might be a risk), or have to re-heat expanding gas to prevent freezing in turbines. Fuel synthesis -- hydrogen, natural gas, or liquid hydrocarbon analogues -- is an option which provides very-long-term storage capacity (proven to 100s of millions of years), but is inefficient (about 15% round-trip), and has proved uneconomic or impractable to date, despite over 50 years of research. I hold out some hopes for this. Load shifting, and moving to a model of dispatchable demand rather than dispatchable supply might also apply. Battery storage is another option, and will likely see some use. It's expensive, is limited by chemistry, and most of the options suffer from considerable side effects or risks. Some of the more interesting alternatives I've seen, liquid metal and molten salt batteries, both reasonably well-suited for large, static, grid-scale infrasturcture, have proved highly problematic. See Donald Sadoway's start-up, Ambri, pursuing a liqud-metal design touted loudly a few years earlier: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ambri-is-still-alive-and-chasing-its-liquid-metal-battery-dreams https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ambri-is-still-... LiON is proven, but its light weight makes it favourable for mobile and transport applications. There's a limited amount of lithium that's readily available, and reserving that preferentially for where it's best suited is probably wise. Among the problematic aspects of batteries: electrolyte scarcity, toxicity (lead-acid, etc.), high-temperature designs (liquid metal / molten salt), reactivity, fire/explosion hazards, and fundamental energy-density limitations, are all constraints. My read is that all sides of the power equation will change markedly over coming decades: supply, demand, transmission, storage. We've been spoilt in ways we don't yet appreciate.
- fulafel 7y ago
  If faced with the choice of reducing energy usage or driving global warming to the worst case scenario, are you sure we'll choose the worse option?
- cjbenedikt 7y ago
  Just look to Europe for that. A lot of investments into hydrogen for storage and as a fuel.
- hannob 7y ago
  The challenge of the storage issue has imho been massively overblown. Years ago it was common to say "renewables can never work, they're too expensive and can at best power something like 4% of the grid". That argument clearly no longer works. Now it's turned to "but storage is too expensive". I think the reason we haven't seen storage at scale is that we haven't needed it that much. There are very few countries with high enough shares of fluctiating renewables to need storage at scale. The ones that exist can still balance it out by exchanging electricity with their neighbors. I'm very confident once renewables hit > 50% in a larger number of countries we'll see a development with storage similar to that of solar and wind before: Once there's sufficient demand prices for the tech will go down rapidly.
  - _ph_ 7y ago
    Germany had 46% renewables on average in 2019. Storage becomes only a large concern, if the renewables can achieve more than 100% of the grid load at significant times. Until then, it is more important, that the conventional power plants can be regulated quickly enough - that means gas is much better than coal as complementing renewables.
  - usrusr 7y ago
    There's a massive chicken/egg problem with storage: without storage nobody will build more renewables than can be routinely absorbed by the grid and without that oversupply there's no economical incentive to build storage. I think it might be best to feign defeat on finding a clever integrated solution and stubbornly make all the building blocks of power-to-gas profitable independently (through regulation, obviously).
- maxerickson 7y ago
  Deployment is accelerating: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40072 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40072 It's likely that those deployments are matched to the better opportunities, but there are other signals out there, like investment in large fossil fuel generation plants starting to decrease.
ggm 7y ago
There is no meaningful ETS in Australia. The chart used must come from around 2013. The stranded assets story is pretty bad: states are going to have to step in and remediate giant toxic industrial waste zones. Remember that methane leak from an underground gas storage site? Now magnify that thousands of times for the uncapped fracking, open cut mines. Then add the methane clathrates releases from Arctic zones.... There is also "the rush to the door" effect. Burn it now to make profit now?
- fulafel 7y ago
  I think the methane clathrate risk has been downgraded in the current science? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis#Current_outlook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis#Curre...
  - ggm 7y ago
    Good if true. Fugitive gas from fracking and mining still bad, but this was the scary one
Haga 7y ago
Will be rebuilding reposits by pumping solar won algea into depleted repositories.
fulafel 7y ago
The position of the oil based economies will really be interesting, if/when we decide to disincentivise extracting the remaining fossil fuels from the ground using trade policy, international institutions etc. Will there be a climate denialist bloc vs the rest of the world bloc split, with the latter trying to use embargos etc to stop the oil producers? Or can the oil producers be bribed and coaxed to fall in line.
- alacombe 7y ago
  To run an embargos, you need a decently sized army, to have a decently sized army you need energy, and on soy-boys tears ain't as effective the other side good old diesel ICE (which you can still run on vegetable oil if dinosaurs juice runs out).
  - fulafel 7y ago
    I actually meant to write trade sanctions. But yep plenty of ways to make diesel out of renewables.
    - alacombe 7y ago
      You still need to enforce your trade sanction by force. History has shown that wars are won by the side with the best energy supply. Your solar panels aren't gonna cut it. Actually, you still need to fertilize your crops (not to mention harvest, seed, weed-out, etc.), which which need a hell of a lot of petroleum derivative and/or manure, both of which are on the environmentalist hit-list.
      - fulafel 7y ago
        Trade sanctions don't require use of force if you have most countries on your side, you can just threaten to extend the sanctions to any non compliant trade partners of the sanctioned countries.
      - ben_w 7y ago
        Solar can produce up to about 1500 times humanity’s current total power consumption, including heating and transportation. It is currently in the middle (logarithmically not linearly) of replacing fossil fuels while simultaneously saving money.
H8crilA 7y ago
Leaving it here without a comment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption Full report by BP: https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/energy-economics/statistical-review/bp-stats-review-2019-full-report.pdf https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...
- newman555 7y ago
  and this: https://youtu.be/wGt4XwBbCvA https://youtu.be/wGt4XwBbCvA
  - H8crilA 7y ago
    Thank you, you should have written a small piece of text about this video because it's brilliant. In short: it's a great lecture about tight connections between energy consumption and the wealth of nations, with detailed explanation why this happens.
- dntbnmpls 7y ago
  Thank you. I personally like to link directly to the wikipedia chart to show people that renewables and nuclear account for pretty much a tiny insignificant portion of the world's energy consumption. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/media/File%3ABp_world_energy_consumption_2016.gif https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/me... Almost all of the worlds energy consumption is fossil fuels. So the idea that we are going to do anything to change that fact any time soon is an impossibility unless we want to trigger worldwide economic collapse. Not that facts and data and charts really helps when it comes to the most ardent climate change activists. Throw in the fact that only about 20% of the world is part of the developed, industrialized world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developed_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developed_country So we have 80% of the world ( about 5.6 billion people ) who are looking to become part of the developed, industrialized world. That means more energy. Which means more fossil fuels. Unless we intend to keep the 5.6 billion down trodden down, I'd say the future of fossil fuels is bright. Barring some truly revolutionary advance in energy, we'll be mostly powered by fossil fuels for a very long time.
erpellan 7y ago
The thing is, oil and gas are super useful raw materials for everything from clothes to furniture, fertilisers and pharmaceuticals. Setting it on fire to keep ourselves warm will look like insanity in 100 years time.
wazoox 7y ago
Funnily, people in the comments make the common mistake of talking of electricity generation when talking of energy. But electricity production only amount to about 25 to 30% of our energy consumption. Most of electricity in the world comes from coal. Coal usage must drop to zero as fast as possible just to keep the climate in a barely liveable state, and we're not heading there, frankly. One very big elephant in the room is why does renewable power looks so cheap at times: it's because production occurs either at fixed times (solar) or random times (wind), so basically renewable power is often produced when it isn't needed therefore worth almost nothing or even less than nothing. That's the main reason why renewable power looks cheap: because as long as we have some other reliable sources to fulfil demand and they really don't amount to much power anyway, their production isn't very useful. Oil OTOH is what propels 99.8% of everything that sails, flies or drives. Oil is what makes globalisation possible. Oil consumption represents 50% more globally than electricity generation, so there's no believable way to replace the first with the second. So far, we have absolutely no idea on how to replace oil at scale. Most probably globalisation as we know it will end not because of evil trumpian protectionism, but because we won't be able to afford it anymore for lack of oil.
- Jemm 7y ago
  And globalization needs to go away as quickly as possible.
  - lidHanteyk 7y ago
    Globalization is an inevitable consequence of better connectivity, faster communication, and tighter logistics. Why would it "go away"? Additionally, why is globalization a bad thing when it comes to energy generation and consumption? The fact that it is possible to sell energy across national borders, for example, makes energy markets more efficient and wastes less energy. Edit: To directly address grandparent, oil made globalization possible. It no longer is needed in order to continue having global communities, just cheapest for shipping.
    - wazoox 7y ago
Jemm 7y ago
Damn website uses light grey and white. Makes it unreadable for many of us.
WhompingWindows 7y ago
The author claims fossil fuel will collapse in the 2020s...not here in Providence, RI. Stand in any parking lot or on any road and count the number of EVs, it's less than 1%. There are no charging stations at hospitals, downtown, apartment buildings, condos... Meanwhile, there are a ton of shiny new luxury ICE vehicles, even in my lower-middle class area. These vehicles will need gasoline for all of the 2020's and into the 2030's. And we still don't even have 2% of new vehicle sales to EV. The idea that Rhode Islanders are going to be not using IC engines in 2030 is laughable. We've locked in a ton of natural gas electricity production, we have shipping ports without charging for ships, and an airport that uses NO battery EV planes. We have a LONG way to go before fossil fuels are gone, probably 2050 for 75% of applications, and 2100 for 95% of applications. This makes sense: we've been on fossil fuels for literally hundreds of years...you don't dismantle 100's of years of infrastructure in a decade.
Flozzin 7y ago
Full disclosure. I mostly skimmed the article. They start off citing a prediction that didn't come true, then they bravely predict the coming end of oil. Next they show that fossil fuels are getting less expensive as a sign that they are failing. A few paragraphs later, make that claim that since renewables are getting cheaper, they will take over. That doesn't make sense in my opinion. Both things get cheaper yet for gas it's a sign it's failing and for renewables it's a sign it's gaining strength. Their graph for this is only 3 years in the past. Seems cherry picked. I don't trust this person's analytical skills, and thus their prediction. Honestly with the article starting the way it does I would say this is satire.

38 points by apsec112 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Based simply on the current “dig up everything we can while it’s still worth something” push from the industry, it’s clear they’re dead in the water with a lot of soon to be stranded assets. Much like the tobacco industry, they have sway.. right up until they don’t.

moh_maya 7y ago

I don't know if fossil fuels, especially natural gas, will be substantially replaced from the energy mix till we figure out massive high density power storage mechanisms at scale. Fossil fuels provide base load power that, without storage, we simply cannot rely on most renewables to directly substitute. The only alternative has been, and likely will continue to be, nuclear power, which has its own set of challenges. If you accept this contention, then the big driver / trigger / marker for the "end of fossil fuels as bulk power sources" is the development and at scale deployment of power storage. And I don't see compelling evidence that is happening anytime soon.

apsec112 7y ago
The article says: "Closer to home, Los Angeles’ utility commission recently approved a new solar plant that will deliver 300 megawatts of energy at 3.962¢/kWh (by comparison, electric power from natural gas usually costs about 8¢/kWh in the US). Importantly, that price tag includes energy storage as well, meaning the plant will be able to deliver energy to LA residents day and night."
- moh_maya 7y ago
  An LA Times article [1] on the solar power plant suggests it can supply 6-7% of LA's annual electricity needs and deliver upto 4 hours of power each night. I don't read that as 100% of LA's night time power requirements each night for 4 hours though; rather, that it can continue supplying at a steady rate 4 hours after Sun down. It's not nearly a replacement for base load power. [1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-09-10/ladwp-votes-on-eland-solar-contract?_amp=true https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-09-10/ladwp-v...
WalterBright 7y ago
A way to reduce base load power requirements is to raise the rates for it. A lot of power requirements can be time shifted, as a residence is inherently a large battery. For example, the electric hot water heater. It can run when power is cheap, and not when it is expensive. The water will stay hot for a couple days (I know this from experience with power failures). The same goes for heating/cooling the house. When power is cheap, heat/cool to the edge of the comfort zone. When power is expensive (i.e. base rate) let it drift to the other extreme. Houses have a great deal of thermal mass (again I know this from power outages) and this can be increased by using a pile of rocks as a thermal "battery". In order to motivate people to use this method, raise the cost of the night rate. Edit: of course, the more water in the hot water tank, and the more rocks in the hot/cold pile, the better this works. Fortunately, water and rocks are cheap.
- alacombe 7y ago
  > A way to reduce base load power requirements is to raise the rates for it. You are heading straight to a civil war. > A lot of power requirements can be time shifted, as a residence is inherently a large battery. Go tell this to people living through Canadian winter with sub-zero temperature...
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    > You are heading straight to a civil war. Just reduce the daytime rates. Besides, it doesn't make sense to have fixed electric rates 24/7 when the cost to supply it varies dramatically. Look at gasoline pump prices, they very all the time due to supply+demand and nobody is fighting a war over that. > Go tell this to people living through Canadian winter with sub-zero temperature. I agree that any solution that doesn't cover 100% of use cases is quite useless and inapplicable for the 98% of the population where it would work. Besides, I live in Seattle which is next to Canada, and this solution would work fine in the PNW climate, which includes Vancouver B.C.
    - alacombe 7y ago
      > it doesn't make sense to have fixed electric rates 24/7 Electricity is the least popular form of heating in Canada, by far, dwelling are heated with gas furnace. This, and my supply prices are contractually locked for the next 5 years regardless of the actual market price. > Besides, I live in Seattle which is next to Canada, and this solution would work fine in the PNW climate, which includes Vancouver B.C. Come on, Seattle/lower mainland look like the tropics compared to the rest of Canada.
ben_w 7y ago
What does “high density power storage mechanisms at scale” look like? The overnight storage requirements work out as adding a few cm thickness of LiIon batteries to every solar panel. Production of batteries is growing fast — eyeballing the images I’d even say exponentially, which is fast enough soon enough even if it isn’t a big enough number now.
- alacombe 7y ago
  Solar production is pretty much nil in northern latitude due to the snow pack. On top of that, my dwelling is constantly in the shade for 3 months, so panels ain't gonna help.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    That’s an irrelevant point, for the same reason it’s irrelevant that a nuclear reactor doesn’t fit in your basement: electricity can be transmitted over large distances by high voltage wires. Conveniently, many of these wires already exist. Rooftop solar helps where it works, but it’s not required in any case.
  - francisofascii 7y ago
    Utility scale solar is typically installed on the ground where snow can easily be shoveled off. Also you can buy snow removal tools that attach to long poles for rooftop removal.
  - fulafel 7y ago
    Not actually the case, as much as you'd think. Have a look at this map that covers Canada: https://energyhub.org/efficiency/ https://energyhub.org/efficiency/
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  A mix of things. There are storage options which fit different criteria. Some are very responsive to changes in demand (supercapacitors, inertial flywheel storage), but have high costs, bad wear characteristics, and low total capacity. Some are responsive and immensely efficient (high energy-in:energy-out ratios), such as pumped hydro, but suffer from siting and environmental restrictions. Some are slow and inefficient but scale wonderfully. Thermal energy storage, either for direct heating or for generation, is a case in point. District thermal energy storage has been used for residential & commercial space. Molten salt thermal storage can bank heat for weeks, but suffers Carnot efficiency losses of about 70%. It's cheap, simple, and non-toxic (though will sting if it gets out). Compressed air energy storage is a lot like pumped-hydro, though it might possibly scale better and be suited to use in exhausted natural gas reservoirs. Here a problem is physics and Boyle's Law: compressed gasses heat, expanding gasses cool. This means either that you're losing a lot of energy to the environent and freezing your regeneration equipment, having to deal with high temperatures in storage (the possibility of triggering explosions in spent-gas reservoirs might be a risk), or have to re-heat expanding gas to prevent freezing in turbines. Fuel synthesis -- hydrogen, natural gas, or liquid hydrocarbon analogues -- is an option which provides very-long-term storage capacity (proven to 100s of millions of years), but is inefficient (about 15% round-trip), and has proved uneconomic or impractable to date, despite over 50 years of research. I hold out some hopes for this. Load shifting, and moving to a model of dispatchable demand rather than dispatchable supply might also apply. Battery storage is another option, and will likely see some use. It's expensive, is limited by chemistry, and most of the options suffer from considerable side effects or risks. Some of the more interesting alternatives I've seen, liquid metal and molten salt batteries, both reasonably well-suited for large, static, grid-scale infrasturcture, have proved highly problematic. See Donald Sadoway's start-up, Ambri, pursuing a liqud-metal design touted loudly a few years earlier: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ambri-is-still-alive-and-chasing-its-liquid-metal-battery-dreams https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ambri-is-still-... LiON is proven, but its light weight makes it favourable for mobile and transport applications. There's a limited amount of lithium that's readily available, and reserving that preferentially for where it's best suited is probably wise. Among the problematic aspects of batteries: electrolyte scarcity, toxicity (lead-acid, etc.), high-temperature designs (liquid metal / molten salt), reactivity, fire/explosion hazards, and fundamental energy-density limitations, are all constraints. My read is that all sides of the power equation will change markedly over coming decades: supply, demand, transmission, storage. We've been spoilt in ways we don't yet appreciate.
fulafel 7y ago
If faced with the choice of reducing energy usage or driving global warming to the worst case scenario, are you sure we'll choose the worse option?
cjbenedikt 7y ago
Just look to Europe for that. A lot of investments into hydrogen for storage and as a fuel.
hannob 7y ago
The challenge of the storage issue has imho been massively overblown. Years ago it was common to say "renewables can never work, they're too expensive and can at best power something like 4% of the grid". That argument clearly no longer works. Now it's turned to "but storage is too expensive". I think the reason we haven't seen storage at scale is that we haven't needed it that much. There are very few countries with high enough shares of fluctiating renewables to need storage at scale. The ones that exist can still balance it out by exchanging electricity with their neighbors. I'm very confident once renewables hit > 50% in a larger number of countries we'll see a development with storage similar to that of solar and wind before: Once there's sufficient demand prices for the tech will go down rapidly.
- _ph_ 7y ago
  Germany had 46% renewables on average in 2019. Storage becomes only a large concern, if the renewables can achieve more than 100% of the grid load at significant times. Until then, it is more important, that the conventional power plants can be regulated quickly enough - that means gas is much better than coal as complementing renewables.
- usrusr 7y ago
  There's a massive chicken/egg problem with storage: without storage nobody will build more renewables than can be routinely absorbed by the grid and without that oversupply there's no economical incentive to build storage. I think it might be best to feign defeat on finding a clever integrated solution and stubbornly make all the building blocks of power-to-gas profitable independently (through regulation, obviously).
maxerickson 7y ago
Deployment is accelerating: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40072 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40072 It's likely that those deployments are matched to the better opportunities, but there are other signals out there, like investment in large fossil fuel generation plants starting to decrease.

ggm 7y ago

There is no meaningful ETS in Australia. The chart used must come from around 2013. The stranded assets story is pretty bad: states are going to have to step in and remediate giant toxic industrial waste zones. Remember that methane leak from an underground gas storage site? Now magnify that thousands of times for the uncapped fracking, open cut mines. Then add the methane clathrates releases from Arctic zones.... There is also "the rush to the door" effect. Burn it now to make profit now?

fulafel 7y ago
I think the methane clathrate risk has been downgraded in the current science? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis#Current_outlook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis#Curre...
- ggm 7y ago
  Good if true. Fugitive gas from fracking and mining still bad, but this was the scary one

Haga 7y ago

Will be rebuilding reposits by pumping solar won algea into depleted repositories.

fulafel 7y ago

The position of the oil based economies will really be interesting, if/when we decide to disincentivise extracting the remaining fossil fuels from the ground using trade policy, international institutions etc. Will there be a climate denialist bloc vs the rest of the world bloc split, with the latter trying to use embargos etc to stop the oil producers? Or can the oil producers be bribed and coaxed to fall in line.

alacombe 7y ago
To run an embargos, you need a decently sized army, to have a decently sized army you need energy, and on soy-boys tears ain't as effective the other side good old diesel ICE (which you can still run on vegetable oil if dinosaurs juice runs out).
- fulafel 7y ago
  I actually meant to write trade sanctions. But yep plenty of ways to make diesel out of renewables.
  - alacombe 7y ago
    You still need to enforce your trade sanction by force. History has shown that wars are won by the side with the best energy supply. Your solar panels aren't gonna cut it. Actually, you still need to fertilize your crops (not to mention harvest, seed, weed-out, etc.), which which need a hell of a lot of petroleum derivative and/or manure, both of which are on the environmentalist hit-list.
    - fulafel 7y ago
      Trade sanctions don't require use of force if you have most countries on your side, you can just threaten to extend the sanctions to any non compliant trade partners of the sanctioned countries.
    - ben_w 7y ago
      Solar can produce up to about 1500 times humanity’s current total power consumption, including heating and transportation. It is currently in the middle (logarithmically not linearly) of replacing fossil fuels while simultaneously saving money.

H8crilA 7y ago

Leaving it here without a comment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption Full report by BP: https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/energy-economics/statistical-review/bp-stats-review-2019-full-report.pdf https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...

newman555 7y ago
and this: https://youtu.be/wGt4XwBbCvA https://youtu.be/wGt4XwBbCvA
- H8crilA 7y ago
  Thank you, you should have written a small piece of text about this video because it's brilliant. In short: it's a great lecture about tight connections between energy consumption and the wealth of nations, with detailed explanation why this happens.
dntbnmpls 7y ago
Thank you. I personally like to link directly to the wikipedia chart to show people that renewables and nuclear account for pretty much a tiny insignificant portion of the world's energy consumption. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/media/File%3ABp_world_energy_consumption_2016.gif https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/me... Almost all of the worlds energy consumption is fossil fuels. So the idea that we are going to do anything to change that fact any time soon is an impossibility unless we want to trigger worldwide economic collapse. Not that facts and data and charts really helps when it comes to the most ardent climate change activists. Throw in the fact that only about 20% of the world is part of the developed, industrialized world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developed_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developed_country So we have 80% of the world ( about 5.6 billion people ) who are looking to become part of the developed, industrialized world. That means more energy. Which means more fossil fuels. Unless we intend to keep the 5.6 billion down trodden down, I'd say the future of fossil fuels is bright. Barring some truly revolutionary advance in energy, we'll be mostly powered by fossil fuels for a very long time.

erpellan 7y ago

The thing is, oil and gas are super useful raw materials for everything from clothes to furniture, fertilisers and pharmaceuticals. Setting it on fire to keep ourselves warm will look like insanity in 100 years time.

wazoox 7y ago

Funnily, people in the comments make the common mistake of talking of electricity generation when talking of energy. But electricity production only amount to about 25 to 30% of our energy consumption. Most of electricity in the world comes from coal. Coal usage must drop to zero as fast as possible just to keep the climate in a barely liveable state, and we're not heading there, frankly. One very big elephant in the room is why does renewable power looks so cheap at times: it's because production occurs either at fixed times (solar) or random times (wind), so basically renewable power is often produced when it isn't needed therefore worth almost nothing or even less than nothing. That's the main reason why renewable power looks cheap: because as long as we have some other reliable sources to fulfil demand and they really don't amount to much power anyway, their production isn't very useful. Oil OTOH is what propels 99.8% of everything that sails, flies or drives. Oil is what makes globalisation possible. Oil consumption represents 50% more globally than electricity generation, so there's no believable way to replace the first with the second. So far, we have absolutely no idea on how to replace oil at scale. Most probably globalisation as we know it will end not because of evil trumpian protectionism, but because we won't be able to afford it anymore for lack of oil.

Jemm 7y ago
And globalization needs to go away as quickly as possible.
- lidHanteyk 7y ago
  Globalization is an inevitable consequence of better connectivity, faster communication, and tighter logistics. Why would it "go away"? Additionally, why is globalization a bad thing when it comes to energy generation and consumption? The fact that it is possible to sell energy across national borders, for example, makes energy markets more efficient and wastes less energy. Edit: To directly address grandparent, oil made globalization possible. It no longer is needed in order to continue having global communities, just cheapest for shipping.
  - wazoox 7y ago

Jemm 7y ago

Damn website uses light grey and white. Makes it unreadable for many of us.

WhompingWindows 7y ago

The author claims fossil fuel will collapse in the 2020s...not here in Providence, RI. Stand in any parking lot or on any road and count the number of EVs, it's less than 1%. There are no charging stations at hospitals, downtown, apartment buildings, condos... Meanwhile, there are a ton of shiny new luxury ICE vehicles, even in my lower-middle class area. These vehicles will need gasoline for all of the 2020's and into the 2030's. And we still don't even have 2% of new vehicle sales to EV. The idea that Rhode Islanders are going to be not using IC engines in 2030 is laughable. We've locked in a ton of natural gas electricity production, we have shipping ports without charging for ships, and an airport that uses NO battery EV planes. We have a LONG way to go before fossil fuels are gone, probably 2050 for 75% of applications, and 2100 for 95% of applications. This makes sense: we've been on fossil fuels for literally hundreds of years...you don't dismantle 100's of years of infrastructure in a decade.

Flozzin 7y ago

Full disclosure. I mostly skimmed the article. They start off citing a prediction that didn't come true, then they bravely predict the coming end of oil. Next they show that fossil fuels are getting less expensive as a sign that they are failing. A few paragraphs later, make that claim that since renewables are getting cheaper, they will take over. That doesn't make sense in my opinion. Both things get cheaper yet for gas it's a sign it's failing and for renewables it's a sign it's gaining strength. Their graph for this is only 3 years in the past. Seems cherry picked. I don't trust this person's analytical skills, and thus their prediction. Honestly with the article starting the way it does I would say this is satire.