5 ms·

The article is quick to point out the huge role of oil in the modern energy mix. It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat. The so cal

The article is quick to point out the huge role of oil in the modern energy mix. It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat. The so called "Primary energy fallacy". Other than that, it's a great read.

tmellon2 5mo ago
[flagged]
nerdsniper 5mo ago
To me (as someone who has worked on oil rigs, oil pipelines, oil refineries, and chemical plants), crude oil seems far more valuable as a material than as an energy source. It feels like a damned shame that we're still combusting so much of it for heat rather than reserving it for physical materials. I understand the ways that economics are very important, and that the economics still currently favor burning a large fraction of the crude oil. But I also know that the right kinds of investments and a bit of luck can often change those economics, and that would be nice to see.
- whatever1 5mo ago
  We can always make polymers and HydroCarbons in general from other sources if we have energy abundance. We literally can just capture the CO2 we emitted from burning fossil and make it plastics. Of course this does not make sense in a world where we do not have enough energy to even keep datacenters open. Edit: To clarify, I do not propose burning fossils to capture CO2 and make plastics. I am a Thermo Laws believer.
  - sonofhans 5mo ago
    That sounds like a hack from late-game Factorio: pollute enough that you can just pull iron filings right out of the air. Everyone wins! Except the meatbags who need to breathe the air …
    - whatever1 5mo ago
      Assuming the damn rain does not throw your iron down to the ground before it reaches its destination. But then again you have rivers as a plan B.
  - adrianN 5mo ago
    The problem with carbon capture from air is the low carbon concentration. Try to do the math for how much air you need to process to get even one barrel of oil worth of hydrocarbons from a DAC process.
    - aethr 5mo ago
      The answer to this problem as it's currently being pursued is renewable carbon feedstocks. Growing things like canola on marginal land, harvesting it and turning it into biofuels and LCLFs (low carbon liquid fuels) using renewable solar/wind energy. It's not a solved problem, though. Truly renewable carbon feedstocks have to source their carbon from the air, not the soil, which has to be continually measured. Land selection for carbon feedstock projects has to ensure it doesn't induce land-use change in other locations due to displacing other things like food production, etc. Otherwise the emissions and environmental harm from those downstream effects have to be included in the carbon positive/negative calculations for the project.
      - pfdietz 5mo ago
        Remarkable amounts of carbon are available in waste streams, even if you exclude from the count plastics and other petrochemicals. Paper, cardboard, wood, natural fibers, carbon in sewage and waste food, and especially farm waste (parts of plants not otherwise consumed). Some of the latter is needed for soil conditioning, but most of that is from decay of roots, not stuff left at the surface. All this can be extended by addition of hydrogen. Naively, if you process a carbohydrate into hydrocarbons, about half the carbon is lost as CO2. Adding hydrogen allows the oxygen to be carried off as water rather than CO2 (or, the CO2 to be converted to hydrocarbons and water in a second step.) Hydrogen currently comes from natural gas but that will have to change anyway, with the hydrogen being produced by (for example) electrolysis of water.
  - ok_computer 5mo ago
    Methane >> carbon dioxide as a polyethylene/linear polymers feed stock. Double bonded oxygens are hella higher affinity than four loose hydrogens. Also as pointed out, even in a concentrated combustion effluent stack CO2 is low concentration at atmospheric pressure. I don’t know about methane as an aromatic/hybridized ring building block. Anything is possible with chemical synthesis but is it energy feasible. There’s always plant hydrocarbon feed stocks but I think using arable land to make plastics is dumb and also carbon intensive. (I do wear cotton clothing tho because you need to make trade offs).
    - whatever1 5mo ago
      Siemens has a collaboration with Porsche are piloting already eFuel production. Cost is super high (think like $10/liter). But thermodynamically feasible. https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/press-releases/lighthouse-project-southern-tip-chile-production-starts-worlds-first-industrial-scale.html#:~:text=A%20lighthouse%20project%20at%20the,facility%20for%20carbon%2Dneutral%20fuel https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/press-releases...
- marcosdumay 5mo ago
  There is way more carbon in the ground as rocks than as oil. If you have plenty of energy, the difference is quite manageable. Besides, as somebody already pointed out, there is that CO2 on the air that we actually want to get rid of. It's nothing compared to the rocks, and a little harder to get, but getting it first would improve things a lot.
  - ok_computer 5mo ago
    The carbon isn’t valuable elementally as much as it is structurally and molecularly. I mean that as aromatic rings and other ready made building blocks that conveniently can be fractionally separated with pressure and temperature conditions in a column as a gross generalization. All of this is energy intensive but much less so than building up from three atom molecules with strong bonds. And much much less energy intensive than separating a trace % molecule from the atmosphere at low atmospheric pressure and translating that to complex molecules. There needs to be more appreciation for the laws of thermodynamics when discussing technology. Everything is not a 1-dimensional reduced abstraction.
    - idiotsecant 5mo ago
      [flagged]
  - tesseract 5mo ago
    > there is that CO2 on the air that we actually want to get rid of For this reason I have long been slightly baffled that development of compostable/biodegradable bio-based plastics is such a priority in materials research. Sure, it's interesting in the very long run, but for the foreseeable future, converting atmospheric CO2 (via plants as an initial step) into a long lived, inert material that can just be buried after an initial use seems like a benefit.
    - sophacles 5mo ago
      Biodegradable is only one type of degradation. Some of those compounds break down over time, or with exposure to uv or random stuff in the ground, into nasty compounds that you certainly don't want entering the water cycle or food cycle. An additional attribute of biodegradable therefore is: keeps (non CO2 pollution down). In addition, things that biodegrade don't immediately just turn into CO2. Things like biomass (that is everything alive and dead that isn't decomposed) use a lot of that carbon. A significant fraction of the carbon in rotting stuff doesn't end up in the atmosphere for decades or longer. The carbon cycle isn't just "CO2 becomes plants which become CO2"... there's a lot more steps in between (for example, next time you eat... you are a direct next step!). Some of those steps take a very, very long time.
throw0101c 5mo ago
> It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat. I've heard the statistic that 40% of the total oil pumped out of the ground just to transporting oil. We use almost half just to move it to and fro before even using it. Is this accurate?
- testing22321 5mo ago
  It must be way higher if you really got into it i.e. A friend that works on rigs is flown to and from rigs from anywhere on earth every month, then choppers out to the rig and back. Same for everyone that works on the rigs.
  - matkoniecz 5mo ago
    And? Given how much typical oil rig produces this would not be a serious part of its production.
  - victorbjorklund 5mo ago
    The helicopter fuel is a drop in the oil ocean. You can just check this but checking how much oil that rig produces per month. How many flights the helicopter does every month and the amount of oil needed for it. It’s gonna be a drop in the bucket. Otherwise it would not be profitable to drill for oil.
- foota 5mo ago
  This doesn't math out to me just based on what I know of energy consumption numbers.
- matkoniecz 5mo ago
  Sounds really dubious to me. Tankers and pipelines are really efficient. I would not believe it at all without source. Maybe someone got confused by "transportation" altogether being major consumer?
- jml7c5 5mo ago
  I suspect this is confusion between the statistic that 40% of global shipping traffic is transportation of fossil fuels. https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-consists-of-fossil-fuels https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-c...
KolibriFly 5mo ago
Primary energy comparisons can make fossil fuels look more "irreplaceable" than they are, because so much of the input energy is lost as heat before it becomes useful work
dredmorbius 5mo ago
Most of any fuel used for motive power ends up as waste heat simply due to the inherent (in)efficiencies of the Carnot cycle: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle>. Where liquid hydrocarbons (not necessarily petroleum, but also biofuels and synfuels) have clear wins are: - Overall energy density. By both mass and volume, little short of nuclear power exceeds this. Battery storage is roughly 1/10th the density of liquid hydrocarbons by mass. - Handling ease. Liquid hydrocarbons, particularly kerosene (jet aviation fuel), diesel, and fuel oil are quite mild-mannered. Even the rather more rambunctious petrol is safe enough for ordinary civilians to dispense, store, and handle, for the most part. Liquid hydrocarbons can be stored at ambient conditions in simple containers, are largely non-toxic, and can be piped or flowed readily between locations. - Storage stability. There are very few energy options which are as stable in storage for days to years or more. - Ease of utilisation. Electric motors are arguably simpler, but other options, including direct (as in on-board) nuclear are not. Again, untrained civilians can use small to large internal combustion engines readily. In particular, there are usage modes, most notably air, marine, and mobile / remote-location applications, where liquid fuels are quite difficult to substitute for. Ground-based and inland-waterway transport can be electrified, but long-distance freight and passenger travel whether by sea or air not so much. Efficiency considerations pale next to the handling and utilisation characteristics. I'm not defending fossil fuels, and again the arguments apply equally to liquid hydrocarbons of any origin. But given the properties, prevalence, and low cost (however illusory that may be) of petroleum-derived hydrocarbon fuels, they're not trivially substituted for in all applications.
tuatoru 5mo ago
It also fails to point out the temporal fallacy, that energy that is available only at certain times, and not reliably so, is a substitute for energy that can be reliably and safely stored for decades and used when needed, not when generated.

tmellon2 5mo ago

[flagged]

nerdsniper 5mo ago

To me (as someone who has worked on oil rigs, oil pipelines, oil refineries, and chemical plants), crude oil seems far more valuable as a material than as an energy source. It feels like a damned shame that we're still combusting so much of it for heat rather than reserving it for physical materials. I understand the ways that economics are very important, and that the economics still currently favor burning a large fraction of the crude oil. But I also know that the right kinds of investments and a bit of luck can often change those economics, and that would be nice to see.

whatever1 5mo ago
We can always make polymers and HydroCarbons in general from other sources if we have energy abundance. We literally can just capture the CO2 we emitted from burning fossil and make it plastics. Of course this does not make sense in a world where we do not have enough energy to even keep datacenters open. Edit: To clarify, I do not propose burning fossils to capture CO2 and make plastics. I am a Thermo Laws believer.
- sonofhans 5mo ago
  That sounds like a hack from late-game Factorio: pollute enough that you can just pull iron filings right out of the air. Everyone wins! Except the meatbags who need to breathe the air …
  - whatever1 5mo ago
    Assuming the damn rain does not throw your iron down to the ground before it reaches its destination. But then again you have rivers as a plan B.
- adrianN 5mo ago
  The problem with carbon capture from air is the low carbon concentration. Try to do the math for how much air you need to process to get even one barrel of oil worth of hydrocarbons from a DAC process.
  - aethr 5mo ago
    The answer to this problem as it's currently being pursued is renewable carbon feedstocks. Growing things like canola on marginal land, harvesting it and turning it into biofuels and LCLFs (low carbon liquid fuels) using renewable solar/wind energy. It's not a solved problem, though. Truly renewable carbon feedstocks have to source their carbon from the air, not the soil, which has to be continually measured. Land selection for carbon feedstock projects has to ensure it doesn't induce land-use change in other locations due to displacing other things like food production, etc. Otherwise the emissions and environmental harm from those downstream effects have to be included in the carbon positive/negative calculations for the project.
    - pfdietz 5mo ago
      Remarkable amounts of carbon are available in waste streams, even if you exclude from the count plastics and other petrochemicals. Paper, cardboard, wood, natural fibers, carbon in sewage and waste food, and especially farm waste (parts of plants not otherwise consumed). Some of the latter is needed for soil conditioning, but most of that is from decay of roots, not stuff left at the surface. All this can be extended by addition of hydrogen. Naively, if you process a carbohydrate into hydrocarbons, about half the carbon is lost as CO2. Adding hydrogen allows the oxygen to be carried off as water rather than CO2 (or, the CO2 to be converted to hydrocarbons and water in a second step.) Hydrogen currently comes from natural gas but that will have to change anyway, with the hydrogen being produced by (for example) electrolysis of water.
- ok_computer 5mo ago
  Methane >> carbon dioxide as a polyethylene/linear polymers feed stock. Double bonded oxygens are hella higher affinity than four loose hydrogens. Also as pointed out, even in a concentrated combustion effluent stack CO2 is low concentration at atmospheric pressure. I don’t know about methane as an aromatic/hybridized ring building block. Anything is possible with chemical synthesis but is it energy feasible. There’s always plant hydrocarbon feed stocks but I think using arable land to make plastics is dumb and also carbon intensive. (I do wear cotton clothing tho because you need to make trade offs).
  - whatever1 5mo ago
    Siemens has a collaboration with Porsche are piloting already eFuel production. Cost is super high (think like $10/liter). But thermodynamically feasible. https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/press-releases/lighthouse-project-southern-tip-chile-production-starts-worlds-first-industrial-scale.html#:~:text=A%20lighthouse%20project%20at%20the,facility%20for%20carbon%2Dneutral%20fuel https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/press-releases...
marcosdumay 5mo ago
There is way more carbon in the ground as rocks than as oil. If you have plenty of energy, the difference is quite manageable. Besides, as somebody already pointed out, there is that CO2 on the air that we actually want to get rid of. It's nothing compared to the rocks, and a little harder to get, but getting it first would improve things a lot.
- ok_computer 5mo ago
  The carbon isn’t valuable elementally as much as it is structurally and molecularly. I mean that as aromatic rings and other ready made building blocks that conveniently can be fractionally separated with pressure and temperature conditions in a column as a gross generalization. All of this is energy intensive but much less so than building up from three atom molecules with strong bonds. And much much less energy intensive than separating a trace % molecule from the atmosphere at low atmospheric pressure and translating that to complex molecules. There needs to be more appreciation for the laws of thermodynamics when discussing technology. Everything is not a 1-dimensional reduced abstraction.
  - idiotsecant 5mo ago
    [flagged]
- tesseract 5mo ago
  > there is that CO2 on the air that we actually want to get rid of For this reason I have long been slightly baffled that development of compostable/biodegradable bio-based plastics is such a priority in materials research. Sure, it's interesting in the very long run, but for the foreseeable future, converting atmospheric CO2 (via plants as an initial step) into a long lived, inert material that can just be buried after an initial use seems like a benefit.
  - sophacles 5mo ago
    Biodegradable is only one type of degradation. Some of those compounds break down over time, or with exposure to uv or random stuff in the ground, into nasty compounds that you certainly don't want entering the water cycle or food cycle. An additional attribute of biodegradable therefore is: keeps (non CO2 pollution down). In addition, things that biodegrade don't immediately just turn into CO2. Things like biomass (that is everything alive and dead that isn't decomposed) use a lot of that carbon. A significant fraction of the carbon in rotting stuff doesn't end up in the atmosphere for decades or longer. The carbon cycle isn't just "CO2 becomes plants which become CO2"... there's a lot more steps in between (for example, next time you eat... you are a direct next step!). Some of those steps take a very, very long time.

throw0101c 5mo ago

> It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat. I've heard the statistic that 40% of the total oil pumped out of the ground just to transporting oil. We use almost half just to move it to and fro before even using it. Is this accurate?

testing22321 5mo ago
It must be way higher if you really got into it i.e. A friend that works on rigs is flown to and from rigs from anywhere on earth every month, then choppers out to the rig and back. Same for everyone that works on the rigs.
- matkoniecz 5mo ago
  And? Given how much typical oil rig produces this would not be a serious part of its production.
- victorbjorklund 5mo ago
  The helicopter fuel is a drop in the oil ocean. You can just check this but checking how much oil that rig produces per month. How many flights the helicopter does every month and the amount of oil needed for it. It’s gonna be a drop in the bucket. Otherwise it would not be profitable to drill for oil.
foota 5mo ago
This doesn't math out to me just based on what I know of energy consumption numbers.
matkoniecz 5mo ago
Sounds really dubious to me. Tankers and pipelines are really efficient. I would not believe it at all without source. Maybe someone got confused by "transportation" altogether being major consumer?
jml7c5 5mo ago
I suspect this is confusion between the statistic that 40% of global shipping traffic is transportation of fossil fuels. https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-consists-of-fossil-fuels https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-c...

KolibriFly 5mo ago

Primary energy comparisons can make fossil fuels look more "irreplaceable" than they are, because so much of the input energy is lost as heat before it becomes useful work

dredmorbius 5mo ago

Most of any fuel used for motive power ends up as waste heat simply due to the inherent (in)efficiencies of the Carnot cycle: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle>. Where liquid hydrocarbons (not necessarily petroleum, but also biofuels and synfuels) have clear wins are: - Overall energy density. By both mass and volume, little short of nuclear power exceeds this. Battery storage is roughly 1/10th the density of liquid hydrocarbons by mass. - Handling ease. Liquid hydrocarbons, particularly kerosene (jet aviation fuel), diesel, and fuel oil are quite mild-mannered. Even the rather more rambunctious petrol is safe enough for ordinary civilians to dispense, store, and handle, for the most part. Liquid hydrocarbons can be stored at ambient conditions in simple containers, are largely non-toxic, and can be piped or flowed readily between locations. - Storage stability. There are very few energy options which are as stable in storage for days to years or more. - Ease of utilisation. Electric motors are arguably simpler, but other options, including direct (as in on-board) nuclear are not. Again, untrained civilians can use small to large internal combustion engines readily. In particular, there are usage modes, most notably air, marine, and mobile / remote-location applications, where liquid fuels are quite difficult to substitute for. Ground-based and inland-waterway transport can be electrified, but long-distance freight and passenger travel whether by sea or air not so much. Efficiency considerations pale next to the handling and utilisation characteristics. I'm not defending fossil fuels, and again the arguments apply equally to liquid hydrocarbons of any origin. But given the properties, prevalence, and low cost (however illusory that may be) of petroleum-derived hydrocarbon fuels, they're not trivially substituted for in all applications.

tuatoru 5mo ago

It also fails to point out the temporal fallacy, that energy that is available only at certain times, and not reliably so, is a substitute for energy that can be reliably and safely stored for decades and used when needed, not when generated.