5 ms·

The Modern World Can't Exist Without These Four Things That Require Fossil Fuels

15 points by webmaven 4y ago

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Ammonia is not only easy to make with renewable energy, it basically acts as storage. Note this is without converting it back to electricity. Just storing it and using it as a chemical feedstock. Then you can use the money you'd spend on storage to generate more renewable electricity.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Expect to see tankers of (lightly-compressed) liquified ammonia shuttling from solar farms in the tropics to high temperate latitudes in the winter. The advantage of ammonia as storage is that there will be no upper limit on demand for all the excess you can produce. If you build out 6x solar generating capacity, anytime your local energy storage is topped up, all your electrolysers are producing revenue. You will only need enough local tankage to hold out until the next shipment arrives. If this seems fragile, consider that it is exactly how we use oil today.
onedognight 4y ago
> cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Also "nickel and cobalt" for the car batteries, except those are being phased out. We need to get a lot busier building out electrolysers for hydrogen and ammonia, and tropical solar farms to drive them, whence it can be shipped to upper latitudes in winter.
BoiledCabbage 4y ago
Fascinating article. 25% of fossil fuel use is dedicated to making ammonia, steel, plastics and cement. Modern society can't function without them. Even if we stopped all traditional consumption of fossil fuels for heating and transportation, this categories will still grow significantly in the next decades. Almost every green tech expects cement and/or steel. We need further tech innovation in this space.
- dublin 4y ago
  Ammonia and plastics are the toughest ones to replace by far, as they rely on what the fossil fuels are rather than just on the energy they produce (steel and cement). What the hell is China doing with all that concrete, BTW?? That's a truly staggering amount. Just building those ghost cities we hear about? How is that beneficial for anyone except the crooked oligarchs of the CCP?
  - avmich 4y ago
    Always thought ammonia should be an easy problem to solve, given clean energy, 78% nitrogen in the atmosphere and hydrogen from electrolysis. Surely in practice there are some significant problems?.. Plastics are rather different though.
    - philipkglass 4y ago
      The problem with using electrolytic hydrogen from clean energy to make ammonia is that fossil fuels are cheaper, at least when they don't have to pay for CO2 emissions. But the technology is well proven at industrial scale. In the 20th century some remote hydroelectric dams used electricity to make ammonia for fertilizer before the grid was fully built out and servicing other demands became more profitable. China operates methanol-to-olefins (plastic building block molecules) plants on a large scale, albeit using fossil-derived methanol: https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2018/03/jiangsu-sailboat-accepts-worlds-largest-single-train-coal-to-chemicals-plant-from-honeywell-uop https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2018/03/jiangsu-sailbo... The Sailboat facility in Lianyungang City in Jiangsu Province manufactures propylene to make acrylonitrile for clothing and fabrics, and high-performance polymers used in automotive parts, hard hats and other hard plastic products. The plant also produces ethylene for ethylene vinyl acetate copolymers that are used to make adhesives, foams, medical devices, photovoltaic cells, and other products, and C4 olefins for butadiene, an ingredient in synthetic rubber. Methanol can be produced by hydrogenating carbon dioxide with renewable hydrogen. Carbon Recycling International has commercially produced methanol that way since 2012: https://www.carbonrecycling.is/ https://www.carbonrecycling.is/ Carbon Recycling International is the globally-recognised leader in CO2 to methanol technology, operating at industrial scale since 2012. We enable our partners to produce renewable methanol from carbon dioxide and hydrogen, for more sustainable fuels, chemicals and products. It's similar to producing ammonia with clean hydrogen. It combines carbon dioxide with hydrogen instead of nitrogen with hydrogen.
dublin 4y ago
The article acts like hydrogen from electrolysis is an energy source, but this side of fusion (and fusion has remained 30 years in the future for nearly a century now...), hydrogen is really an energy storage mechanism, not an energy source. The reason the vast majority of the world's hydrogen comes from natural gas (or the very similar coal gas) is due to two simple facts: 1) Natural gas (methane) conveniently has 4 hydrogen atoms and only one carbon atom, so it's by far the best/easiest/cheapest source of hydrogen there is; 2) Water is one of the most stable molecules in the universe - it requires enormous energy to rip apart, so electrolysis takes a LOT of energy, and that energy (in the form of electricity) has to come from somewhere itself: Currently the most cost effective source is, once again, natural gas. Nuclear (fission) electricity would help a lot (for those who are foolish enough to think that CO2 is a pollutant), but the hippie greenies insist on scuttling the highest-capacity, lowest-carbon energy source we know of...
- ncmncm 4y ago
  It is correct to say hydrogen is principally a storage medium, although its use as direct feedstock will always be comparably important. The rest is questionable. You get back the ("enormous") energy used to strip oxygen off of water molecules, yielding hydrogen, when you react the hydrogen again with oxygen. Of course by far the most cost-effective way to generate that ("enormous") energy is with enormously cheap solar panels and wind turbines. (The round-trip efficiency of hydrolysis and combustion is fairly low because the hydrogen recombines to H2, yielding heat during electrolysis, then the hydrogen may need to be liquified for transport, and then the H2 may need to be split again when making H2O. Perhaps surprisingly, low round-trip efficiency doesn't matter very much because solar has become so cheap; you just add more panels to make up the difference.) There is no plausible scenario where fusion or fission provides a substantial fraction of the energy used. Fission is enormously more expensive than renewables for the same output -- beyond order-of-magnitude more expensive. Fusion, if ever made to work, would cost another order of magnitude beyond that. Things >100x as expensive as practical alternatives are rarely seen used. AA batteries and bottled beverages are exceptions. And, of course CO2 is a pollutant. The most dominant one, it has turned out. Taxing release of it, and the revenue used to build out renewables, storage, and transmission lines cannot come soon enough.
credit_guy 4y ago
This article contradicts itself: > Synthesis of ammonia and smelting of steel could both be based on hydrogen rather than on natural gas and coke. We know how to do that—but it will take some time before we could produce hundreds of million tons of green hydrogen derived from the electrolysis of water by using wind or solar electricity (virtually all of today’s hydrogen is derived from natural gas and coal) So, no, the world can absolutely produce these things without fossil fuels, just like it can produce electricity without fossil fuels and it can transition its transportation away from fossil fuels. It's just not that easy, but we will do it.
- dublin 4y ago
  Water is not even remotely an unlimited resource: https://www.businessinsider.com/adam-savage-scientific-fact-blows-my-mind-buckminster-fuller-oceans-water-2015-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/adam-savage-scientific-fact-... We should not go about destroying it, or losing it to space (especially if not using the hydrogen to burn or react to create water again) without understanding the global ecological implications, especially since 97% of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapor, not CO2! Just sayin...
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    Water vapor condenses and falls as rain. It does not linger in the atmo like CO2 does.
  - credit_guy 4y ago
    For hydrogen production, water is for all practical purposes an unlimited source. To get a sense for that it's cute to use a unit of volume of 1 cubic kilometer. The world consumes about 36 billion barrels of oil per year, which comes to about 5.7 cubic kilometers. As a very strange coincidence, we consume about 3800 billion cubic meters of natural gas; if we were to liquefy it, it would come to virtually the same volume like the oil, more precisely 5.9 cubic kilometers. All in all, let's say we consume about 10 cubic kilometers of fossil fuels in liquid form. Water contains about the same amount of hydrogen per unit volume as oil or LNG. So, let's say (in an absurd extreme) that all of the world's crude oil and natural gas use goes towards hydrogen production, and we need to replace that with water, and for some reason that water is gone after 1 use (it's not), then we need to use 10 cubic kilometers of water per year. The world oceans have about 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water.
cjbenedikt 4y ago
"...decarbonization of cement production can only go so far by using waste materials and biomass, and new processes have to developed and be commercialized to make cement CO2-free..." Not only can we make cement CO2 neutral but even CO2 negative! We can capture 100Kg per ton of cement produced.

15 points by webmaven 4y ago

Ammonia is not only easy to make with renewable energy, it basically acts as storage. Note this is without converting it back to electricity. Just storing it and using it as a chemical feedstock. Then you can use the money you'd spend on storage to generate more renewable electricity.

ncmncm 4y ago
Expect to see tankers of (lightly-compressed) liquified ammonia shuttling from solar farms in the tropics to high temperate latitudes in the winter. The advantage of ammonia as storage is that there will be no upper limit on demand for all the excess you can produce. If you build out 6x solar generating capacity, anytime your local energy storage is topped up, all your electrolysers are producing revenue. You will only need enough local tankage to hold out until the next shipment arrives. If this seems fragile, consider that it is exactly how we use oil today.

onedognight 4y ago

> cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia

ncmncm 4y ago
Also "nickel and cobalt" for the car batteries, except those are being phased out. We need to get a lot busier building out electrolysers for hydrogen and ammonia, and tropical solar farms to drive them, whence it can be shipped to upper latitudes in winter.

BoiledCabbage 4y ago

Fascinating article. 25% of fossil fuel use is dedicated to making ammonia, steel, plastics and cement. Modern society can't function without them. Even if we stopped all traditional consumption of fossil fuels for heating and transportation, this categories will still grow significantly in the next decades. Almost every green tech expects cement and/or steel. We need further tech innovation in this space.

dublin 4y ago
Ammonia and plastics are the toughest ones to replace by far, as they rely on what the fossil fuels are rather than just on the energy they produce (steel and cement). What the hell is China doing with all that concrete, BTW?? That's a truly staggering amount. Just building those ghost cities we hear about? How is that beneficial for anyone except the crooked oligarchs of the CCP?
- avmich 4y ago
  Always thought ammonia should be an easy problem to solve, given clean energy, 78% nitrogen in the atmosphere and hydrogen from electrolysis. Surely in practice there are some significant problems?.. Plastics are rather different though.
  - philipkglass 4y ago
    The problem with using electrolytic hydrogen from clean energy to make ammonia is that fossil fuels are cheaper, at least when they don't have to pay for CO2 emissions. But the technology is well proven at industrial scale. In the 20th century some remote hydroelectric dams used electricity to make ammonia for fertilizer before the grid was fully built out and servicing other demands became more profitable. China operates methanol-to-olefins (plastic building block molecules) plants on a large scale, albeit using fossil-derived methanol: https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2018/03/jiangsu-sailboat-accepts-worlds-largest-single-train-coal-to-chemicals-plant-from-honeywell-uop https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2018/03/jiangsu-sailbo... The Sailboat facility in Lianyungang City in Jiangsu Province manufactures propylene to make acrylonitrile for clothing and fabrics, and high-performance polymers used in automotive parts, hard hats and other hard plastic products. The plant also produces ethylene for ethylene vinyl acetate copolymers that are used to make adhesives, foams, medical devices, photovoltaic cells, and other products, and C4 olefins for butadiene, an ingredient in synthetic rubber. Methanol can be produced by hydrogenating carbon dioxide with renewable hydrogen. Carbon Recycling International has commercially produced methanol that way since 2012: https://www.carbonrecycling.is/ https://www.carbonrecycling.is/ Carbon Recycling International is the globally-recognised leader in CO2 to methanol technology, operating at industrial scale since 2012. We enable our partners to produce renewable methanol from carbon dioxide and hydrogen, for more sustainable fuels, chemicals and products. It's similar to producing ammonia with clean hydrogen. It combines carbon dioxide with hydrogen instead of nitrogen with hydrogen.

dublin 4y ago

The article acts like hydrogen from electrolysis is an energy source, but this side of fusion (and fusion has remained 30 years in the future for nearly a century now...), hydrogen is really an energy storage mechanism, not an energy source. The reason the vast majority of the world's hydrogen comes from natural gas (or the very similar coal gas) is due to two simple facts: 1) Natural gas (methane) conveniently has 4 hydrogen atoms and only one carbon atom, so it's by far the best/easiest/cheapest source of hydrogen there is; 2) Water is one of the most stable molecules in the universe - it requires enormous energy to rip apart, so electrolysis takes a LOT of energy, and that energy (in the form of electricity) has to come from somewhere itself: Currently the most cost effective source is, once again, natural gas. Nuclear (fission) electricity would help a lot (for those who are foolish enough to think that CO2 is a pollutant), but the hippie greenies insist on scuttling the highest-capacity, lowest-carbon energy source we know of...

ncmncm 4y ago
It is correct to say hydrogen is principally a storage medium, although its use as direct feedstock will always be comparably important. The rest is questionable. You get back the ("enormous") energy used to strip oxygen off of water molecules, yielding hydrogen, when you react the hydrogen again with oxygen. Of course by far the most cost-effective way to generate that ("enormous") energy is with enormously cheap solar panels and wind turbines. (The round-trip efficiency of hydrolysis and combustion is fairly low because the hydrogen recombines to H2, yielding heat during electrolysis, then the hydrogen may need to be liquified for transport, and then the H2 may need to be split again when making H2O. Perhaps surprisingly, low round-trip efficiency doesn't matter very much because solar has become so cheap; you just add more panels to make up the difference.) There is no plausible scenario where fusion or fission provides a substantial fraction of the energy used. Fission is enormously more expensive than renewables for the same output -- beyond order-of-magnitude more expensive. Fusion, if ever made to work, would cost another order of magnitude beyond that. Things >100x as expensive as practical alternatives are rarely seen used. AA batteries and bottled beverages are exceptions. And, of course CO2 is a pollutant. The most dominant one, it has turned out. Taxing release of it, and the revenue used to build out renewables, storage, and transmission lines cannot come soon enough.

credit_guy 4y ago

This article contradicts itself: > Synthesis of ammonia and smelting of steel could both be based on hydrogen rather than on natural gas and coke. We know how to do that—but it will take some time before we could produce hundreds of million tons of green hydrogen derived from the electrolysis of water by using wind or solar electricity (virtually all of today’s hydrogen is derived from natural gas and coal) So, no, the world can absolutely produce these things without fossil fuels, just like it can produce electricity without fossil fuels and it can transition its transportation away from fossil fuels. It's just not that easy, but we will do it.

dublin 4y ago
Water is not even remotely an unlimited resource: https://www.businessinsider.com/adam-savage-scientific-fact-blows-my-mind-buckminster-fuller-oceans-water-2015-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/adam-savage-scientific-fact-... We should not go about destroying it, or losing it to space (especially if not using the hydrogen to burn or react to create water again) without understanding the global ecological implications, especially since 97% of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapor, not CO2! Just sayin...
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  Water vapor condenses and falls as rain. It does not linger in the atmo like CO2 does.
- credit_guy 4y ago
  For hydrogen production, water is for all practical purposes an unlimited source. To get a sense for that it's cute to use a unit of volume of 1 cubic kilometer. The world consumes about 36 billion barrels of oil per year, which comes to about 5.7 cubic kilometers. As a very strange coincidence, we consume about 3800 billion cubic meters of natural gas; if we were to liquefy it, it would come to virtually the same volume like the oil, more precisely 5.9 cubic kilometers. All in all, let's say we consume about 10 cubic kilometers of fossil fuels in liquid form. Water contains about the same amount of hydrogen per unit volume as oil or LNG. So, let's say (in an absurd extreme) that all of the world's crude oil and natural gas use goes towards hydrogen production, and we need to replace that with water, and for some reason that water is gone after 1 use (it's not), then we need to use 10 cubic kilometers of water per year. The world oceans have about 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water.

cjbenedikt 4y ago

"...decarbonization of cement production can only go so far by using waste materials and biomass, and new processes have to developed and be commercialized to make cement CO2-free..." Not only can we make cement CO2 neutral but even CO2 negative! We can capture 100Kg per ton of cement produced.