Comments not related to Oil and/or natural gas production in this thread please. Thank you.
95 thoughts to “Open Thread Non Petroleum, Jan 25, 2024”
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Comments not related to Oil and/or natural gas production in this thread please. Thank you.
Comments are closed.
Looks like China is trying to dodge its economic woes by investing in clean energy.
https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3249883/chinas-energy-storage-capacity-using-new-tech-almost-quadrupled-2023-national-energy-administration
Sectors related to clean energy, including renewables, nuclear power, electricity grids, energy storage, electric vehicles and railways, were the biggest contributors to China’s economic growth in 2023, accounting for around 40 per cent of the expansion in its gross domestic product last year, according to CREA.
Clean energy investment accounted for all of the growth in investment across all of China’s economic sectors last year, as investments in other industries shrank, it found.
Dennis
“I guess we will continue to disagree, steel can be made without fossil fuel energy input, there are lots of sources of carbon. There are different viewpoints on this. Perhaps you are correct, but I think not.”
As ever you simply gloss over the very real concerns that JT raised.
Just where do you proposed to find the other “Sources” of carbon for high strength steels, and it not just wind turbines. What a about rails, for instance. The use of high strength steel will not reduce in your fairyland of renewables. Please provide some details on the alternative carbon sources as I for one would be very interested.
You and a many others are quick to jump upon those of us who raise genuine concerns on the cost of unreliable renewables but none can come back with credible answers, other than building more will reduce the cost, and the fully integrated power grid will avoid somehow black outs. Oh, and it will be cheap.
You have been sniffing the Hopium again. ESG investors have now realised that going green makes no money. So in order to carry on with the renewable circus there is going to be a huge need for OPM to continue with the madness.
Progress depends on good science, and good science is only as good as the critical reviews. Too often there are opinions offered as science and increasingly certain viewpoints are/ have been suppressed in the MSM and Academia. That is NOT good science.
Citing publications like the Guardian,BBC, OilPrice.on, NYT, etc is not a reliable source; more a source of propaganda.
Carnot,
Carbon can be sourced from biochar, coal could be used for carbon inputs without burning it as an energy source.
Where do you think the carbon in fossil fuels came from? There is carbon everywhere on this planet.
Obviously there needs to be carbon for steel, doubtful that will be a problem.
In areas with good solar and wind resources the costs are in fact low. I have cited published reseach showing that the EROI of wind and solar at point of use are as high or higher than fossil fuel.
Several have said they don’t believe the research, you can believe what you wish.
As I said there can be different opinions on this, there continues to be investment in wind and solar and costs continue to fall, my expectation is that fossil fuel prices may rise unless they fall because they can no longer compete. In that case supply of fossil fuel will fall and fossil fuel energy will gradually be replaced by alternatives such as wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, and geothermal energy.
Dennis, indeed you have cited papers that claim EROEI is better from some renewables, and those papers leave out most of the energy inputs as I have highlighted several times. The numbers presented are fairytales, yet the gullible want to believe it.
I wish you would do the work yourself instead of just believing these papers, so you get an idea of the real picture.
Energy and money are linked at the hips because money is a claim on energy use. In our modern civilization everything you buy is composed of embedded energy, that’s all it is, some type of resource or service that can be provided because of energy consumed in making the product and getting it to you the customer. Likewise for the spend on renewables and nuclear, every cent spent is a token of energy spent in providing the electricity.
All the studies you refer to want to dismiss the actual cost and try and work out some magical way of making renewables look much cheaper than the true energy cost of building them. It is just BAU (Business as Usual) by a slightly different means than burning fossil fuels. None of it is sustainable as it all relies totally on fossil fuels, so even if it were possible to replace all existing fossil fuel use with renewables (It isn’t!!), the environment would suffer much more than present, and then what??
We’ll have bought a decade or so, then crash, only with a much more degraded environment…
So is society better off producing one more F-150 or a stack of solar panels / renewables, assuming the same inputs?
rgds
WP
Neither, because neither are sustainable in any way. Producing either is just another nail in the coffin of the ecosphere, which is what supporters of either just don’t get…
Then what, in your opinion, is the correct course of action?
rgds
WP
Hideaway…so you think we should simply rely on fossil fuels all out until the shit hits the wall, as if their is no wall? (that would be good for your investments)
Consider that if humanity suddenly encounters energy shortage,
one of the responses will be to rapidly complete the deforestation of the world.
It will only take a decade or two. Any wood that regrows will be collected for combustion by the time it reaches 8″, or sooner if it is within a days walk of human dwellings.
9 billion people soon.
WP, the correct course of action for humans was too believe the Limits To Growth study and go on a serious course of population reduction and degrowth from fossil fuel use decades ago. Instead we went in the opposite direction using resources of all kinds up faster.
The world’s population of over 8 Billion guarantees a collapse ahead when one of the multitudes of corners we have backed ourselves into gets us from a situation that most could not see coming.
Our current course of pretending to make a difference with renewables, EVs, batteries, etc is just more of the same consumerism that got us into this mess. Will it be climate, or species loss, or endocrine disruptors, or just plain lack of resources that ‘gets’ us, I have no idea, but one or a combination will cause this civilization to collapse. Perhaps it will just be the stress of the lot that causes some leader to press the nuclear button.
What I do know is that when oil supply is in terminal decline, with an accelerating reduction in quantity available, year after year, the collapse of our civilization is certain because of the many feedback loops. Mines, farms, industry all fall to pieces without oil, and no-one is trying to replace the oil used in these areas. Even all the new nuclear and renewables builds totally rely upon oil to happen.
The degrowth now would have to be absurdly fast to possibly cushion us from the collapse when it comes.
I clearly acknowledge that no-one in any authority will do anything to prevent collapse, they will will deny it’s possibility even when it’s well under way.
What we see, is a vague attempt to solve one symptom of overshoot, being climate change and we are only tinkering at the edges of the problem, so it doesn’t ‘cost’ us any part of modernity. After decades of building renewables, all that has happened is the keeling curve has steepened meaning climate change is coming faster, with it’s own set of destructive forces on modern civilization.
Heidi,
I agree with the overall gist of your observations – that we are way, way in overshoot and pretty much fucked no matter how you slice it.
That does not take away the fact that knowledge, both theoretical as well as practical, is cumulative. So with that in mind I think that if we want to have any chance of a decent number of us surviving the upcoming pruning, no matter which flavor it will come in, we need to have as much expertise and knowledge as possible. So if we can use resources to create alternatives like solar etc. it gives us ( at least some of us) a better chance of making it through and past pruning. So it makes no sense to not direct as many resources as possible to that end, rather than (to use my stock example) build more F-150s. We will suck every drop of oil out of the ground, mow down every tree and suck whatever food sources there are out of the environment (that word is a total misnomer obviously). But to – as I think you are suggesting – to just continue with BAU because in the end we’re all dead goes against what we as humans do. We climbed out of trees / caves, and we essentially spend our days being better, faster, more efficient than the day before. That is the whole reason why we can cruise the web for porn and our ape-colleagues can’t. It is that drive to move forward, to improve, that defines us as a species. So even if a good chunk of us get wiped out if we are somewhat careful the accumulated knowledge won’t, or most of it won’t. So yes, I vote for building the proverbial solar panels over F-150s.
Rgds
WP
Hickory …..
“Consider that if humanity suddenly encounters energy shortage,
one of the responses will be to rapidly complete the deforestation of the world.”
Fully agree that’s what’s going to happen, when oil shrinks exponentially. Everything else, coal, gas, renewables, nuclear, and all replacement parts, totally rely upon oil.
The way the world system of civilization has been growing, it needs a constant increase in energy throughput. The increase is not always linear, with lag times built into the system due to a variety of various inputs and outputs of pretty much everything material, plus Govts/CBs increases and decreases of money/debt. It is obviously highly complicated..
The ‘simple’ solution of building more renewables or nuclear for more electricity totally ignores many problems that so many people keep telling you about, but you ignore. Electricity doesn’t solve any resource issues, in fact uses up a lot of resources in the construction.
What’s the point of a lot of electricity if you need a new fridge but no more are being made, nor are replacement parts for your existing one???
What’s the point of having a fridge if there is no food available to put into the fridge, because farmers could not get either diesel, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, nor were their any large trucks to bring what little is available from the countryside into the city??
Do I have to break it down into this simple a level for you to understand it’s an entire system in massive overshoot, and a simple solution to one aspect, climate change or fossil fuel depletion, take your pick, goes nowhere near solving the overall issue??
Perhaps instead of using up the dwindling oil that’s available building lots of renewables and nuclear, we could be making farms more sustainable, getting people out of cities while reducing population in some type of planned way instead of letting nature take it’s natural course at some point in the future. Perhaps making everything more resilient to decreases in energy availability, while deliberately rewilding massive areas of agricultural land while populations decrease would be the thing to do..
None of the above will ever happen until it’s way too late (which it probably already is), because there are so many simple thinkers in the world that consider technology, the one thing that put us into this mess, will somehow solve all problems. It wont because the numbers do not add up at all!!
Take a good long look at the Haru Oni project of making synthetic fuel from renewable wind energy. They haven’t even been able to build the direct carbon capture part yet (and probably never will). After a period of commissioning they declared ‘commercial’ (sic) production.
The output has a process efficiency of 1.77% being energy in from the wind turbine to energy content out of synthetic fuel.
No allowance has been made for the energy used to build the plant, nor any allowance for all the workers at the plant in operating the process, nor any allowance for maintenance. It becomes pretty obvious that it is a net energy user, not producer, over it’s life (possibly 20 years if embrittlement of metals by hydrogen doesn’t close it first with a catastrophic failure along the way). The current ‘commercial’ (sic) rate of production of about 36,000 litres/yr, equals a lifetime production of 720,000 litres.
Despite spending $US75M on building the plant, that covers 3.5ha, with everything matched to size perfectly for optimum results, the expected production was 130,000 litres of synthetic fuel/yr. The numbers don’t add up if they get close to ‘expected’ production let alone what they are actually doing.
BTW they chose Tierra Del Fuego as the location, because wind has a 70% capacity factor there, so it’s probably the single best location in the world to run off renewables, yet the actual result is pitiful…
It’s the classic example of trying to solve the problem of technology creating problems, the massive overuse of fossil fuels for the last 200 hundred years to run machines, using massive amounts of energy, too make our life easier, by expecting to build more machines, to solve the problem.
Haru Oni is the example that proves it isn’t going to work!!
“The myth you slay today may contain a truth you need tomorrow.”
Steel is mostly recycled. Also much of the carbon emissions from steel mills comes from heat generated by burning coal, and that can be replaced by burning hydrogen. You can’t eliminate carbon emission, but you can massively reduce them.
Carnot,
You have some vaild points, but it is very hard not to put you in the category of vested interests. Arguing not for the main citizen. Renewables can be expensive, but some of the upfront costs can be exactly to ensure the longevity for not all of the wind parks or solar installations; but most of it. The second generation of renewables have odds against it due to the (most likely) reduced global industrial capacity, as you point out. But still the geographical build out will be there, the known contribution to the grid are there and the known storage requirements are there before we have to think in degrowth terms. There are possibilities to prolong the electrical grid by concentration of resources, but that would be for the next generation. Still carbon fiber wind blades, “super magnets” and “new steel” requirements would not be an obstacle to have a pretty decent effort to make a second generation of renewables viable. There are replacement options for all of those. It is actually possible to make steel without it all being virgin; I am not saying you don’t have some points about how difficult the energy transition overall would be though.
Kolbeinih
Imagine you could build an electric grid from scratch for a country such as the United States.
How much installed solar would you build in Gw.
How much installed wind would you build.
What storage would you have Gw/h? And type
Any backup? Gas or coal?
How much would each element cost?
Once you reply we can compare our ideal grid.
Charles, maybe we need to first work out what loads the ideal grid needs to cover? Do we need to be able to mine bitcoin? Are all heating needs (housing and water) met using electricity? Are heat pumps mandated for this? Do we need to be able to charge individual’s private EV’s? Or is electrified public transport enough? If you want us to size a hypothetical grid built from scratch, we should be able to specify the loads from scratch too 😀
Cheers, Phil
Phil
Good point.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=60602#:~:text=On%20July%2027%2C%202023%2C%20peak,reached%20741%2C815%20megawatthours%20(MWh).
Have you thought that the peak production is determined in large part to the amounts of storage that is built. You have to decide how much storage is cost effective against excess wind and solar capacity.
Europe has some storage in the form of hydro power mainly in Norway, but it is nothing’s like enough and that is why so much gas and coal are still burnt.
Are you really prepared to destroy the car industry?
Can you really provide public transportation in the US where so many people live in small towns and villages where there is no public transportation.
I think it’s fair to work on the assumption that US demand would be around 600 thousand megawatts.
Smart appliances and smart car charging could even out demand.
Kolbeinih could work out these basic requirements and costs.
Reaffirming what Phil pointed out, civilization could easily function with 1/2 of the current energy use. Collectively we waste a tremendous amount, and because the price is so low we use a huge amount on frivolous and entirely optional consumption.
Charles- “Are you really prepared to destroy the car industry?”
The ICE vehicle industry will inevitably dissipate along with the depletion of oil.
The EV industry will replace some of it, hopefully not too much of it.
The global miles traveled on land and on sea could plummet by 80%, and guess what…
No human mass extinction related to it.
I suggest considering that you learn to enjoy where you live, hang out locally, acoustic music is great, grow some food, read a real book, ferment some grain juice, flirt with the neighbor girl (or boy if that suits you), ride a good bike, work with hand tools, and stuff like that.
The amount that someone smiles is not related to how much energy they consume, I have noticed.
I can imagine people in fifty years marveling that authoritarianism was ushered in by my fella Americans in 2028 because the fed fuel tax was raised 25 cents.
Hickory
You started so well until you went all hippy on us.
I am talking about how doctors, nurses teachers and factory workers get to and from work day in day out. How they get to shops and restaurants and to the hospital.
You should know in many parts of America the only way to get to work is by car.
I have lived in places where there are hundreds of buses running each day crisscrossing each other, so most people can get to wherever with 2 buses.
I have also lived in places where if they had buses the low density of inhabitants would mean the buses would need to be highly subsidised.
When you really understand the issues you would see that replacing coal and gas with renewables is an almost impossible task. Replacing private cars with efficient public transport is easy in large towns and cities although costly.
In less densely populated areas it is prohibitively expensive.
Charles —
Cheap energy is a piss poor form of welfare. It has been tried extensively all over the world, notably in the Soviet Bloc, and has proved worthless. All it does is encourage people to waste energy.
I stayed in a hotel in Czechoslovakia in July once where the heater was on full blast. I asked what to do about it at the desk, and they said “open the window”. Also there was a radio in the room with a on/off/volume knob, but no tuner, but that’s another story.
Modern America reminds me of this ridiculous misalignment of resources. If gas prices were “too high” in America, Americans wouldn’t waste it so flagrantly. American cars are idiotically oversized.
It’s also true that America is about 80% urban by population. Solving the country’s problems means solving the problems of the urban population, whatever AM radio tells you. The lack of public transportation and the ridiculous laws making convenient living impossible can both be fixed. Wasting energy solves nobody’s problems.
Charles,
Inherent in my comment is the notion that there will have be a change in the energy and material consumption/lifestyle that people have lived by in the past 150 years. There is going to be downsizing and readjustments. I think there will be plenty of energy for most essential operations of civilization for quite a long time (especially if we downscale with purpose and due effort).
In regard to ‘going all hippy on us’….thank you for the compliment.
I am big on banjo, fiddle and banjo (and other things like that requiring low energy input but offering up great time with friends).
And some of my best gals were ‘hippys’.
civilization could easily function with 1/2 of the current energy use
I agree, Europe wastes a lot of energy and still uses half per capita of what America uses.
The only area where energy consumption will rise in coming years in computing. We are entering the age ephemeralization, as Buckminster Fuller called it. Our needs are being met by less and less material things.
We’re never going to build an all renewable grid from scratch in any country at all.
Engineers, especially practicing as opposed to cutting edge research and design engineers, typically base their arguments against renewables on assumptions built into their own every workaday world.
Well, I’m not an engineer, but I do have a reasonably decent understanding of the way things work in the real world.
In the real world, things can and often do change rather rapidly and drastically after continuing more or less the same for decades.
Consider LED lights for instance. In real terms, they’re at least ten times cheaper to buy and run than old style incandescents, and twice as cheap as flourescents.
Consider that when they must, new car and truck buyers opt for models that are far more fuel efficient. One of my relatives who used to drive an F350 exclusively bought a forty mpg sub compact a couple of years ago.
When I upgraded my old farmhouse, I put in all double and triple glazed windows, etc.
When family members who gave up farming part time went to work in town, they typically bought houses located close in, thereby cutting their commuting time and expenses by half or more.
I don’t know anybody who has bought a new oil furnace in recent years, Everybody I know is switching to heat pumps when their old oil heat system needs serious repairs……. if not sooner.
I read today , on MSN, I’ll try to find the link again and post it, that the state of Hawaii is “twenty five days from going Amish” because that’s how much oil they have in storage. If something prevents the usual monthly super tanker from showing up…….. they’re up shit creek without a paddle.
Making the seas safe for oil tankers means spending MEGABUCKS on sailors and warships. If we don’t need so many oil tankers……. just maybe we don’t need so many ships and sailors.
I spent my working life mostly in an industry such that wholesale market demand is “inelastic’
meaning that when the crop ( mostly apples in my case) was in short supply, I could sell a thousand bushels for more money, at obviously far lower production costs, than I could get for two thousand bushels when apples were in excess supply.
I’ve been looking, without much luck, for numbers published by reputable economists, showing how much LESS we are collectively paying for oil and gas due to the fact that we have been subsidizing the wind and solar industries.
My personal guesstimate is that COLLECTIVELY we’ve earned a very good return on these subsidies, because when we’re generating ten percent plus of our electricity via wind and solar farms, the prices of coal and gas are obviously DOWN….. but I can’t say with any certainty how much. And lets not forget that this damper on the price of these fossil fuels will last as long as the wind and solar farms so built continue to provide electricity……. twenty years at least.
ONE thing is for damned sure. If the prices of oil and gas go ballistic for any reason from a hot war to eventual peak production with more and more people wanting more and more oil and gas…..
Whatever wind, solar, geothermal or tidal power we have will be ” beyond price” in terms of keeping essential industries ( the water and sewer grids) and essential appliances such as lights and refrigerators in homes up and running at least some of the time.
There’s always a bigger picture, a bigger envelope, to be considered when making policy decisions involving major changes in the way we live and work.
I’m not predicting that a time will come when we can live more or less as we do today using only renewable energy……. and I don’t expect such a time to arrive anytime soon, certainly not within the next forty or fifty years……….. I don’t see any real reason this isn’t possible except for one REALLY tough problem……. suppose the economy does collapse before there’s time enough for the renewable energy industries to grow to the point we don’t NEED fossil fuels any more.
Now consider the possibility that we could reduce our need for coal fired juice to nearly nothing, and our need for gas fired juice by eighty percent………. Getting all the way to one hundred percent renewable would likely cost twice as much as eighty percent.
So……. we could maintain as much gas fired generating capacity as necessary, maybe even a little coal capacity…. sure this would cost quite a bit.
But it also means we could stretch or finite supply of gas out twice or maybe even three or four times times as many years down the road.
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
Meanwhile…
“Renewables are set to provide more than one-third of total electricity generation globally by early 2025, overtaking coal. The share of renewables in electricity generation is forecast to rise from 30% in 2023 to 37% in 2026, with the growth largely supported by the expansion of ever cheaper solar PV.”
https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2024/executive-summary
By 2035 overall energy from renewables will be substantial. The global energy supply will be sufficient for a civilization out 2050, at which point human population will likely be at the start of the big decline.
Yes, it will all be very bumpy when experienced at the surface of the earth.
May you enjoy some moments, cherish the marvel of it all, and please do not linger too long.
Hickory
Do you understand it is thirty percent of a growing pie?
Coal consumption despite the largest installation of wind and solar is now at its highest level ever.
It is easy to build wind turbines and solar panels at first, you can shut down a few gas power stations and it all looks great. As the buildout continues as in Germany you get to a point where you have excess solar so you need very expensive storage.
Electricity costs 400% more in Uk compared to the US so we don’t waste it.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-generation?tab=chart&country=GBR~USA~IND
Americans could certainly use half the oil and electricity they do and join Europeans in energy efficiency.
Anyway by 2035 global warming will be tearing the world apart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m00fDlC5n9k
“Do you understand it is thirty percent of a growing pie?”
Yes indeed…I do.
Imagine just how much more coal they would be burning if not for the soon to be 40% of total provided by renewables.
And secondly, its a good start. At some point energy consumption will peak, even in China, and they will have installed a big base of low carbon energy production facilities.
Sunny regions of the world are foolish to not be following the lead of China on PV installation….hand over fist, while the supplies are available.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/alberta-oilsands-research-emissions-1.7093626
Oil sands emitting up to 60x more methane than what’s officially being disclosed.
Sorry, total carbon emissions, not just methane. (Truthfully haven’t read the paper yet.)
Research published in the journal Science found that air pollution from the vast Athabasca oil sands in Canada exceed industry-reported emissions across the studied facilities by a staggering 1,900% to over 6,300%. This means that damaging reactive pollutants from the oil sands are equivalent to those from all other human-made sources across Canada. Canadian tar sands, also called oil sands, are a massive site of oil extraction in the province of Alberta. They cover an area larger than England, are one of the biggest industrial projects on the planet, and have seen record production levels this year. Further, the Long-delayed Trans Mountain pipeline to start filling with oil next month and will facilitate even more oil sands production.
https://news.sky.com/story/vast-scale-of-methane-leaks-from-fossil-fuel-production-and-landfill-sites-exposed-13023354
Interesting article about the growth of batteries.
https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-too-many-numbers/
The quantity produce in 2023 is larger than what the IEA predicted for 2030 in their 2018 estimate. It’s also higher than the 2025 estimate from 2021.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C96hl9ynaFg 9 minutes
China tells Iran to reign in Houthis.
China working with USA as a team.
There is oil information in here.
Don’t discount the possibilty of China and USA allying together during Peak Oil decline and sharing the oil exports without blowing each other up.
I suspect China’s chief concern is that blocking access to the Suez Canal would stop Chinese exports to Europe.
The 365 day running average temperature anomaly is above 1.5 degrees for the first time, with the worst two El Nino months yet to come.
https://twitter.com/EliotJacobson/status/1750949313067516184
It seems unlikely that this will ever fall below 1.4 again, even with a strong La Nina. Since the late 70s the rise has been pretty steady, there may have been some recent acceleration, now the consensus seems to be moving towards blaming the change in marine shipping regulations, but I think the loss of Antarctic sea ice and slowing of the southern ocean meridional overturning circulation are of about equal importance.
Grim news indeed.
WORLD WILL LOOK BACK AT 2023 AS YEAR HUMANITY EXPOSED ITS INABILITY TO TACKLE CLIMATE CRISIS
“Driven by human-caused global heating and El Niño, the heat refused to relent. In November, there was an even greater anomaly, with two days warmer than 2C above the preindustrial average, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/29/world-will-look-back-at-2023-as-year-humanity-exposed-its-inability-to-tackle-climate-crisis#:~:text=The%20latest%20to%20state%20it,0.35C%20above%20that%20average.
God help us.
We need another flood,
…. oh wait.
1.5C can’t be stopped Georgieporgie, scientists already know this because the CO2 and CH4 currently in the atmosphere are gonna push it even if we was to stop emissions as current levels. You gotta wonder what we can stop at? It is like a slow moving emergency which is why we need all the renewables we can possibly manufacture. But that’s not enough because we also need Fusion, an unlimited energy source. Unfortunately it is being blocked by a massive Soros style funding campaign by big fossil fuel that knows once fusion is active, their fossil fuels basically become obsolete in a few years. Cheers.
Lots of data on methane emissions:
https://methanewatch.kayrros.com/
GREENHOUSE GAS CONCENTRATIONS HIT RECORD HIGH. AGAIN.
“The abundance of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere once again reached a new record last year and there is no end in sight to the rising trend, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).”
https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/greenhouse-gas-concentrations-hit-record-high-again
Insurance costs of combustion up up and up.
Increasingly people and businesses will simply stop being able to afford insurance.
In the US you need insurance to get a property loan for building, renovation or restoration.
This is one way to downsize an economy, less severe than migration however.
UK-
“Climate change to push up home insurance bills 20% next year
Increase in frequency and severity of storms is driving up insurers’ costs”
head of General Insurance at PwC UK said.
My coastal dwelling at the Bothnian bay is currently influenced by both de-glacial rising and rising sea levels, currently de-glacial rising seems dominant but that will likely change. So I might get sea front location in a couple of years… (good for valuation, not sure about insurance…)
On a related note, since wind has notably been picking up there´s been low electricity prices here up north recently from that. Unfortunately I have some high pines on nearby properties, so I pay extra ensurance for falling timber. Still a good deal.
https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/#/nordic/table
I know there are those who think that PV is not feasible. The Chinese don’t agree with that timid approach.
“China installed a record-high solar power capacity last year, with additions in 2023 alone topping the current capacity of the entire U.S. solar fleet.
China added as much as 216.9 gigawatts (GW) of solar power capacity in 2023 – a record high, obliterating its previous record of 87.4 GW of solar power additions 2022, according to data from the National Energy Administration cited by Bloomberg.”
Globally- “Renewable capacity installations globally surged by almost 50% last year as renewable energy capacity hit nearly 510 GW, led by solar PV and a jump in new Chinese installations, the IEA noted.”
“China’s costs for producing solar modules have plummeted by 42% over the past year”
which is an indirect indicator of lower energy and other input costs.
Increasing EROEI certainly, as a result of the efficiencies of mass production. These are not old style ‘artisanal’ produced PV.
Get used to news like this. The industry is young still.
Although the energy produced is intermittent, the production from the 2023 new PV installations in China is equivalent to the annual output of 47 new 1000MW Nuclear Reactors…digest that!
(assumes capacity factor of 20% for PV and 90% for nuclear).
Some years back I read that the Chinese government was dominated by professionally trained men, meaning especially engineers, geologists, etc…… such that for the most part the Chinese have economic PLANS taking all the HARD knowledge available to them into account.
Combine this with the Confucian mindset that still exists right under the surface……. the result is that they’re very realistic long term thinkers.
Somebody said nobody has ever built an aluminum smelter that can run on renewable electricity because an outage REALLY screws up the equipment.
So……… once they have all the wind and solar power they want, maybe they’ll arrange things so that other industries will shut down, if necessary, when the inevitable day comes when there’s not enough renewable juice…. and keep the smelters are kept running a day or a week once in a while with power generated by their remaining gas and coal fired plants.
If the cards fall this way…… they’ll pretty much OWN the aluminum processing industry, because any company depending on fossil fuel juice will be UNABLE to compete with them on the basis of energy costs.
It’s my personal belief that they plan on being the biggest and most powerful player on the world economic stage, and that they have at least a fair to good shot, maybe an excellent shot, at emerging the winner in this ” great game” as English statesmen used to describe geopolitics back when England ruled a near global empire.
I see the question as to whether enough wind and solar capacity being built to run the economy as a “done deal” question, assuming the economy doesn’t collapse preventing it.
They’ll build the capacity……… and one way or another, they’ll solve the intermittency problem, by brute force if necessary.There are ways to distribute electrical energy loads so that any surplus can be stored after one fashion or another to be used later.
And there are ways to modify existing industrial infrastructure to operate intermittently without any really serious problems except loss of production while shut down due to lack of power.
A good comment. One (I think relevant) quibble, Canada (as an example) has a disproportionate number of aluminum smelters to its size, all of them (mostly in Quebec) powered by renewable (hydro) electricity.
To that end, China has been building a ton of pumped hydro in recent years. On the one hand, China is doing incredible technical things with solar panels, with thickness measured in ever smaller numbers of micrometers. On the other hand, sometimes the solution is (relatively) simple, when the sun is shining/wind is blowing, pump water uphill, and when it stops, let it flow back downhill.
Despite the sharp demographic transition they face, it does seem like the new few decades will see China restored to its longstanding position as the leading civilization/economy on earth
Pumped hydro is a great example of brute forcing the the intermittency problem.
They can build reservoirs hundreds of miles, from places with plenty of water and deliver it via pipeline or canal to other places where it’s desperately needed ANYWAY for industrial and agricultural purposes, as well as domestic ( home or family ) needs.
So…… this water can be accumulated in reservoirs built ( at higher elevations of course) for this purpose and released for ONE TIME use downstream , rather than pumped to the usual upper reservoir from the usual lower reservoir on a repeat basis.
Such a reservoir could be filled over a period of days or weeks, and a sufficient amount of water dispensed to produce electricity as necessary to match daily high demand periods. So twenty four hours of delivery to the reservoir using wind and solar juice can generate enough juice to run a city around the clock for a day or two……. or meet peak demand needs for a few hours day after day.
Sure building such reservoirs will require a ton of manpower and materials….. but they have the manpower, and they have money, and they seem to realize that the time to be executing such projects is NOW, before depletion eventually but inevitably forces the price of the necessary materials thru the roof.
The Chinese renewables industries are being and will be built using oil, gas and coal….. but their eventual goal seems to be having enough renewable juice to use it to run their mining, construction, and manufacturing industries, as well as their shipping industries, on renewable juice.
It’s my personal opinion that they have at least a fair chance of doing it over the next couple of generations, assuming the world economy doesn’t crash and burn and prevent it happening.
Most of the advantages of hydro power are a nature given gift for some regions. If you happen to have a lot of precipitation, high elevation ground with natural magazine capacity and also land areas to spare where there is not too much competition for water usage, then you have the optimal area. There are very few of them around. Rocky Mountains would be in the forefront of everyones thoughts for hydro power if it had not been that the average precipitation levels are low there, as an example. That happens to be the case in Australia and in other dry belt areas as well. There the pumped hydro solution is being utilised as much as feasible because the elevation, unpopulated land areas and natural magazine capacity at the elevated level is there. The very big volume of water reservoirs needed for hydro power to make a difference is a testament for the challenges the world have to create enough energy storage capacity at scale.
Probably we would have to rely on a mix of hydro flexibility (which is great), battery flexibility (also great), natural gas (good), coal (good), oil (good) and all other ideas that are potentially good but probably lacking in scalability. Some places 10-20% flexibility is all you get, other places more than 50% of power grid capacity. The demand side would have to adapt if grids are not to experience too much downtime and blackout a lot of places. Some places have flexibility for things to run more like “normal” in a renewable based world. A big question is what personal or industrial consumption are to be prioritised for 24h grid stability.
China water resources are at breaking point.
Desalinating enough water for hundreds of millions of people in areas whereby water is running out will be very difficult.
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/water-scarcity-challenges-china-s-development-model
Probably impossible
I wonder how many thousand mile long pipelines or canals the Chinese can build with domestic labor and domestically manufactured machinery, maybe even running most of that machinery on their own domestically produced wind and solar juice when it’s in excess supply, rather than curtailing it.
I doubt such a canal with pumping stations would cost as much as a modern aircraft carrier and the men and planes needed to operate it.
Sometimes it’s not a question of whether you can afford something, but rather whether you cannot afford to do without it..
Your very life, personal or national, may depend on having that warship…….. or that canal.
I think the real solution isn’t fancy machines and huge pipelines. The solution is better land management. That means catching rain, preventing erosion and evaporation, building and shading soil that holds water and is naturally fertile, avoiding inappropriate crops like thirsty crops in the desert.
One of the main reasons this is more effective is that it has local benefits, and doesn’t have to rely on central governance to make sure it happens everywhere.
+10
Interesting study of gasoline use:
https://coltura.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Gasoline-Superusers-3.0-Full-Report-Coltura-2024.pdf
The 21 million US Gasoline Superusers make up just 0.24% of the world’s population, but
they use 10.4% of the world’s gasoline – nearly as much as all of China.
So…….
Maybe desalinating that much water will be impossible… but maybe not.
If they have reservoirs to store it, within the next few years they’ll have a gazillion kilowatt hours of pv and wind juice to run the process…… besides which the population is very likely going to be shrinking rather than growing over the coming decades.
What the naysayers fail to recognize is that nation states ARE capable of reorganizing their affairs, once the NECESSITY of doing so is obvious, so as to deal with such problems.
National security is an absolutely critical issue that can be conveniently discussed in terms of two complimentary and competing problems.
One is defense against aggression in any and all terms from embargo to outright hot war. This means having a powerful military establishment, meaning in turn paying for it.
The other is security in terms of not NEEDING other countries, especially in respect to importing energy.
Once it’s obvious that importing energy is going to be tough to impossible due to high prices and depletion, plus due to political considerations, the solution will HAVE TO BE to generate energy domestically, to the max practical extent, even if doing so is very expensively.
This is not a question of being able to afford intermittent wind and solar power plus storage but rather a question of being able to afford BEING WITHOUT IT.
If all the smaller countries near the Russian borders, and the people of Western Europe in general were able to get along with relatively little oil and gas, the world market price of oil and gas would decline to the point that Russia wouldn’t be in a position to threaten these countries with aggressive war. They might even have to give up and go home from Ukraine.
And while the religious believers in today’s BAU economy are somehow so fucking STUPID as to believe we can’t get along without Chinese junk, well….. we got along without it just fine until I was a middle aged man myself, and we could start making it all domestically again in pretty short order……. it’s not like we don’t have a few tens of millions people on welfare who couldn’t go to work again in factories.
But even if we were to continue to get our junk from China, China is not for now, and not for the next few years at least, a serious threat in terms of starting WWIII.
Thank you for stating this profound point so clearly-
“This is not a question of being able to afford intermittent wind and solar power plus storage but rather a question of being able to afford BEING WITHOUT IT.”
I’ll add that a similar rationale applies to domestic coal, for countries with no better options.
Global warming concerns be damned.
Unfortunately.
Wrt “superusers” it reflects an abundance of used large vehicles available to low income buyers thanks to decades of policies that encouraged their sales AND policies that kept gas prices as low as possible so chosing those vehicles was economically viable. The idea that expensive large EVs can be made available to low income people is nuts but so were the schedule 179 tax deductions for light trucks for people with income.
Good point. The dogs feed from the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table, as the Cannaite woman said. That is the guiding principle of American transportation planning.
But most poor people don’t travel that far. A second principle is that the poor live as close to town as they can afford to, because without a functioning transportation system, commuting is ruinously expensive for the poor.
State Reserves Committee: underground carbon dioxide storage projects will appear in the Russian Federation within two years
January 29 / 12:59
Novosibirsk The regulatory and methodological base is ready in Russia for the creation of underground carbon dioxide (CO2) storage facilities. This was announced by the General Director of the State Commission for Mineral Reserves, Igor Shpurov.
According to him, the first projects could be approved in the next year or two.
“Projects are appearing, several companies are already ready to come up with projects, we are currently considering them in pilot mode. In a year or two at most [it may reach the real stage]. Maybe even this year projects will appear. Construction is a short period , I think that the maximum construction period is two years,” Shpurov said on the sidelines of the All-Russian scientific conference “Fundamental, global and regional problems of oil and gas geology” in Novosibirsk.
He added that during 2023, work was done to create a legislative and methodological framework for carbon dioxide storage, and there are proposals for monitoring and designing the construction of CO2 storage facilities. “Moreover, we are now harmonizing these approaches with the United Nations,” TASS quotes him as saying.
According to Shpurov, the most important thing in creating underground storage facilities is to select suitable subsoil areas that will meet environmental and seismic requirements.
Earlier, Shpurov shared his assumption that underground reservoirs in the Volga region, Urals and Siberia would allow Russia to become the world’s largest station for the safe storage of climate gases and create reserve capacity for underground storage of oil and gas, as a result of which the country would become less dependent on market conditions.
In 2023, Russia approved the country’s first underground oil storage project as a strategic reserve. According to Shpurov, both companies and government agencies are showing interest in creating such reservoirs, and this issue is being actively discussed. The need for underground storage volumes depends on the market capacity, it depends on the current economic situation, and on logistics capabilities.
You can possibly create underground storage capacity that keeps CO2 underground indefinitely, I suppose.
But the harder part is capturing the CO2 from the ambient air in a thermodynamically feasible manner, and at an affordable price.
Just how much net energy is left over from the combustion of a ton of coal or a barrel of oil
after the act of equivalent carbon dioxide sequestration from the atmosphere is accomplished?
As far as I know, attempts to accomplish the task have had lukewarm success thus far.
Perhaps much wiser to focus efforts to avoid combustion in the first place!
Which is not a message that those with fossil fuel vested interest like to ponder.
The best place to store carbon is in the top 15 cm of topsoil. This also has the added advantage of storing rainwater.
Erosion prevention and land rehabilitation also have the advantage of being locally profitable, in the sense that they make the land more valuable, prevent flash floods etc.
That is the most sensible quotation you have ever made.
Lukewarm success. That would be an understatement. Wishful thinking is more like it. Another fairytale from the carbon capture dreamers.
“How much clean energy is left after burning a ton of coal or a barrel of oil?
after the completion of the act of equivalent absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere? ”
—
I don’t understand these issues. I think that these storage facilities will not significantly affect the amount of CO2. And the efforts of the state will not bring noticeable benefits, the money spent will not affect the actual production of products. In my opinion, it would be better to plant forests. After World War II, Joseph Stalin organized thousands of factories for planting forest strips in the steppe zone of the USSR, as well as along all railways, highways and rivers. After his death, all this was stopped within one year. Unfortunately. These forest strips are clearly visible in photographs from space.
Something I only discovered recently is that the capture efficiency for even highly concentrated CO2 streams is 10 to 60%, and more schemes at the lower end, so most of the CO2 waste still gets into the atmosphere.
Peak oil and gas
This problem Simply does not exist at the moment, oil is still cheaper than bottled water.
There are however vast areas of the world where water which was plentiful 10 years ago is now gone.
Electric cars are making peak oil less important, but nothing can replace water when it’s gone.
Rich countries like Australia cannot do anything to irrigate the thousands of square miles of land which farmers have abandoned. This problem is spreading countries like India and China are seeing land becoming unproductive and farmers leaving farms that have been tended for generations.
Despite clearing millions of acres each year the area of agricultural land has been falling. We are like a snake eating its own tail.
Charles,
Another very poignant comment. Spot on. I regard fresh water as a critical raw material (CRM). Usually dismissed by the the cornucopians who believe in unreliables coming to the rescue.
Carnot thanks
If rainfall patterns continue to change as they have been then we shall see a quarter of the world’s productive land turn into scrub.
Australia has seen a 1.9% decline in rainfall this year compared to 30 year average from 1960.
But the real story is the massive change between Western Australia and the east.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/drought/
It would take all the wind farms and solar farms in the world just to desalinate and irrigate half of the land in Australia which needs irrigation.
Germany is getting seriously worried about the longer dry spells it is having. Spain is far worse.
Every thing I have read about CO2 capture and storage leaves me firmly of the opinion that we will be at least twice as well off to avoid going that route and concentrate on efficiency, conservation, an renewable energy by just about any measure.
Of course there are some limited opportunities to make good use of captured CO2 for industrial purposes, meaning capture and storage might be practical and affordable in these cases.
OFM
There will some limited applications where carbo dioxide capture is viable and even necessary. There will be a requirement for small volumes of carbon dioxide. Such sources could be ethanol fermentation and ammonia production where the carbon dioxide is concentrated and thus easy to recover.
The idea of pre and post combustion carbon capture has never been proven at scale and many CCUS plans have stalled. Storing carbon dioxide in depleted oil resources is fraught with issues and high cost.
The idea of direct air capture (DAC) is a concept dreamt up by lunatics with scant idea of the thermodynamic considerations. This concept was doomed from the off. Capturing 0.04% carbon dioxide from the air means moving massive amounts of air, which means massive structures.
Carnot,
I don’t agree with you for the most part, but in this respect, you’re absolutely DEAD ON.
“The idea of direct air capture (DAC) is a concept dreamt up by lunatics with scant idea of the thermodynamic considerations. This concept was doomed from the off. Capturing 0.04% carbon dioxide from the air means moving massive amounts of air, which means massive structures.”
So far as I can see, the term lunatic also applies just as well for ANY capture of CO2, even concentrated coming from a smokestack, unless there’s an industrial market for it.
Elon can’t be a happy camper today.
Must be this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/business/elon-musk-tesla-pay-package.html?unlocked_article_code=1.R00.blLT.nK94VMha-MCQ&smid=nytcore-android-share
Thanks Paul for making the link accessible to non-subscribers. Musk is a complex character, both light and shadow…
You’re welcome
“I emphasize that every family in the country should have the necessary food supply for two years,” he said…. cited the crowding challenges of climate change, population growth, and the unpredictability of the global food supply chain among the reasons to follow his advice.”
This would be wise policy for any country in the world.
This was quoted from the leader of Tajikistan.
“Energy necessary for the production of oil liquids is growing at an exponential rate, representing 15.5% of the energy production of oil liquids today and projected to reach a proportion equivalent to half of the gross energy output by 2050 (Delannoy et al. 2021).”
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/2025-a-civilizational-tipping-point?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1498475&post_id=140843936&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=z0c8&utm_medium=email
Rgds
WP
WP
This is not new and sadly I doubt if many will follow your links. The LImits to Growth and EROEI will loom large in the not too distant future. Enjoy what you have while you can.
I will repeat what I keep saying. Climate change is not the issue. Population growth and resource depletion is.
Fiddle with unreliables as much as you like but they are not a solution and will only get us to the cliff edge sooner.
Perhaps I am too optimistic, but I think that given the choice between spending resources on relatively frivolous expenditures vs spending those same resources trying to get off the FF bandwagon we’re better off trying the latter. Is there a high probability of success? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try.
Rgds
WP
Thanks for the post and the link to WeekendPeak. This post and link should have been posted on the petroleum link, not the nonpetroleum link. However, the point is well taken. Peak oil is here, and we are in a world of shit.
Maybe I’m repeating myself, but I will keep on hammering on a CRITICAL key point, from the perspective of somebody looking at the forest from a mountain top, as opposed to the pov of somebody down in the lowlands, maybe even in the bottom of a valley between two hills, lol.
There’s just about no hope at all of any politician of any stripe convincing the voters of any country to go to any sort of austerity oriented economy in order to solve problems including runaway warming, or the depletion of our soil and water…. or the inevitable arrival of peak oil .. or shortages of the many various mineral resources that will disrupt the world economy before too long.
Serious action of this sort will not, cannot happen, until the shit is in the fan to the point that the people of a country understand that these issues are critical and that dealing with them cannot be delayed any longer. ONCE this time arrives, THEN with some luck they’ll support leaders willing to do what’s necessary to fix these problems to whatever extent they CAN be fixed.
( This is why I frequently mention broken bricks upside our collective head….. to help get people to the point they really understand that it’s do or die time.)
In the MEANTIME……… there’s at least one thing we can continue to do…… one thing that’s politically feasible…… and economically feasible…… hells bells, even PROFITABLE…… and that’s to stay pedal to the metal building out as much renewable energy infrastructure as possible.
Smaller industries can often grow at incredible rates….. sometimes at hundreds of percent annually for a few years. IIRC, the LED lighting industry grew this fast for a while, once the tech got to the point LED’s were obviously cheaper than the old incandesents. Ditto digital photography, etc.
But big industries can’t usually double in size from one year to the next. There’s not usually enough capital or skilled workers or market for the product. It takes a while for the consumer to adapt even when doing so is a no brainer good deal.
Military historians frequently point out that if it hadn’t been for the fact that we had the BONES of world class military establishment at the time , the Nazi’s might well have won WWII, because we wouldn’t have been able to get onto a hot war footing in time otherwise.
We had to mobilize from close to scratch in terms of manufacturing armaments, but we had the men available to run our war machine.
Now we need to be pedal to the metal world wide to have the men, and the industrial base, to build out the renewable energy and conservation industries, etc, as fast as possible.
Given the obvious baby bust over the larger part of the world, we really do have the opportunity to conserve our limited reserves of oil and gas to the point we can get thru the next few decades ok …… with a little luck of course.
( No, I don’t expect most of us to make it thru this century safely…….. but some of us, possibly a hell of a lot of us have a shot at seeing grandchildren born who can reasonably expect to live more or less modern lives.
But as far as the people go in places where they’re still having four or five or more babies per mother…… there’s next to no hope for them in my personal opinion. )
I don’t see any real problem at all in dealing with peak oil over the next two or three decades in terms of our domestic Yankee economy. If our production starts declining at say five percent a year, we can easily offset this decline by going electric , etc.
My repeated point is that we don’t have to go entirely renewable at any given time. We can offset shortages of just about any critical resource, at least in modern countries, by changing the way we do things. We can substitute more and more wind and solar power for fossil fuel generation, we can get by on half the energy we use currently and still live just about as well, if not as CONVENIENTLY.
We can eat down the food pyramid, less meat and dairy, etc, and be all the healthier for doing so.
We can put the money we currently put into payments on a new car we don’t really need in millions of cases in upgrading our homes to use half to two thirds or maybe even three quarters less energy.
And depending on how the cards fall………… we CAN AND WILL buy and drive electric cars that have only fifty to a hundred miles range……. meaning we can build three or four times as many using the same amount of battery materials as we use to build three hundred mile range cars today.
And never forget……. the population problem is solving itself at an ever increasing rate in the modern world. We’re going to have plenty of manpower to be diverted from industries such as building new highways and apartment complexes, etc, to divert to other jobs such as efficiency, conservation, building out renewables, etc.
Agree.
Our biggest challenge in a scenario with brisk decline in energy is the failure to collectively understand and respond to the situation with good policy. This explains a large part of why China is so far ahead of the US in the non-fossil energy industrial sphere.
The second biggest challenge will be disruptions of global supply chains upon which our industrial base is so reliant. This will likely become much more acute in a world with brisk decline rates in energy for sale/purchase.
Hickory, OFM, it seems you both don’t understand that by building lots of renewables uses up a whole lot more fossil fuels to make it happen. It means the destruction of more of the biosphere. For what end??
The EROEI of utility scale solar and wind is less than 2, but that is before counting any extra transmission lines or ways to overcome the intermittency. Once these are allowed for, the EROEI would be less than 1, meaning they are energy sinks overall.
Technology is what got us into this mess of massive overshoot, degrading environment, overusing every resource like yeast in a bucket of sugary water. The answer is not more of the same (more technology). However no-one wants what is a sustainable future, as it lacks any part of modernity, so what is truely sustainable will always be rejected, by most people in denial about the current course of humanity.
The real problem is that humans have an inbuilt denial of bad outcomes, so always look to the future with relatively bright prospects, despite knowledge that you both have of how bad the future will get.
It’s only if we could break through the denial of enough people that ‘something’ might be possible to do about it. The chance of getting enough people to acknowledge a very bad future with the current course we are on is practically zero, given people such as yourselves believe something will be salvageable.
Once the crash/collapse comes, that will be it for modernity, nothing can be saved because of the highly complex interrelated nature of our system. There wont be investment available to build more EVs, nor grids, nor parts to make highly complex systems like solar, wind or nuclear work. People wont have money to buy anything from technology, they will be too busy trying to find food and keep warm.
If you are talking about what emerges from the rubble in a few decades, none of the currently existing solar or wind will work, the inverters and other fancy electronics will have failed, it all suffers from entropy, rapid entropy in the case of electronics.
I agree there will be mad scrambles to try and make coal work, wherever it can be dug out of the ground, plus every tree within walking distance burned for heat and cooking.
Once oil production starts declining by 5% per year, every year and most likely at an accelerating decline due to lack of supply chains working, factories going bust, processed minerals becoming unobtainium for factories etc. It’s feedback loops within feedbacks loops all due of lack of oil.
What’s going to happen, will be a complete collapse of all modernity and a crash in population on a scale never encountered before and probably not imagined by anyone. All modern structures will be statues of unusable junk, some very toxic like old nuclear plants. If humans on the way down eat every mammal they can catch or shoot, then extinction of the human species is pretty much guaranteed as there will be nothing to hunt for the hunter gatherer of a thousand years time….
“don’t understand that by building lots of renewables uses up a whole lot more fossil fuels to make it happen. It means the destruction of more of the biosphere. For what end??”
I can’t speak for Hickory, but I’m sure he will agree with my reply. Apparently YOU don’t understand that we’re going to burn whatever fossil fuels we can put our paws on NO MATTER WHAT….. if we build lots of renewables or if we don’t. Your position seems to be that building renewables will result in the economy collapsing even faster, and the environment going to hell even sooner, than otherwise. You don’t offer any sort of even remotely workable solution to the population and overshoot problem, as far as I can see.
Now I cannot guarantee that staying hard at building out the renewables industries around the clock and around the calendar will absolutely and definitely save industrial civilization and our current western lifestyle.
But I haven’t seen any other solution offered that has even a snowball’s chance on a redhot stove. We’re not going for FORCED reductions in birth rates. We’re not going to an austerity lifestyle, period, until people in general come to understand that it’s do or die time, and that they have some hope of better times to come, at least for their children and grandchildren, once the tough times are over.
We have admirals and generals in our own armed forces who are all in favor of improving our own national security by doing as much as we can to reduce our own, and our friends and allies, dependence on imported energy and raw materials.
So…… I’m waiting for ANY of you guys who maintain that renewables, efficiency, conservation, etc aren’t worth bothering with, to tell us what YOU think we ought to be doing…….
You’re eloquent in describing an entirely possible world crash and burn economic scenario.
What I’M trying to get across is that if you think anybody anyplace in the world is going to voluntarily go to an austerity based economic system in order to quit burning oil and gas in order to solve our overshoot problem, without hope of a BETTER future, you have your head so far into a dark place you will never get it.
The nature of the human beast is that it has to have something to believe in. Tell people that they’re going to give up their modern lifestyle, or their dream of a modern lifestyle, in order to solve ANY of the critical issues involving overshoot, and they’ll ride you out of town tarred and feathered unless maybe they decide it’s more satisfying to burn you at a stake.
But if they have something to believe in, to help them adjust to tough times and austere living conditions, then there’s some hope, possibly substantial hope, that given time to realize just how bad things are, in terms of depletion, climate, overpopulation, etc, they will be willing to buckle down and DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE.
( Don’t forget that lots of sharp broken bricks upside our collective head will go a hell of a long way to bringing them to this realization. So maybe a nice hot little war that keeps the supertankers in port for a few months would be a GOOD THING for everybody in terms of the big picture. Ditto Russia invading a ANOTHER neighbor requiring the NATO countries to face up to the fact that Putin and his homies can bring the world economy to a screeching halt in a matter of a few days or weeks simply by refusing to export oil and gas. This would be hard on the Russians, for sure…….. but it would be a hell of a lot harder on everybody else, FOR SURE.
Maybe we would be better off if we were to have a super hot summer combined with a really tough drought, so that our Yankee grain crop would come up short by half or more. This would certainly mean very tough times for hundreds of millions of people who can barely afford beans and bread as it is…… but maybe that suffering would be a small price to pay for focusing the attention of the GENERAL PUBLIC on the climate problem. )
The situation we’re facing isn’t all THAT complicated. It’s a given that we’re going to continue burning fossil fuels out the ying yang until we can’t, due to depletion….. whether we’re burning some or a lot to build out renewable infrastructure.
Now I cannot , nor can anyone else, guarantee we can build renewables fast enough, and adapt fast enough to declining fossil fuel supplies, to maintain the modern industrial civilization existing in Yankeedom, Western Europe, parts of Asia, etc.
But the population problem has pretty much solved itself ( but this won’t be obvious for a decade or so) in modern countries. I’s hardhearted, cruel, call it what you like, but the countries that are just about SURE to suffer a crash and burn collapse are the ones where the birth rate is three or four or more per woman. I need not name them.
The people in these places are mostly going to die hard. A hell of a lot of people in other places are going to die hard as well before this century is out. There’s a very real possibility that even in a country such as the USA or Canada that a lot of us or maybe even most of us will die hard over the next few decades,or within the next hundred years or so.
But countries with more or less modern economies, and more or less educated citizens, have a real shot at adapting to changing conditions…… assuming the changes don’t come too fast.
Supply chains can be brought home…… or at least near enough to home. We CAN get by without Chinese electronics or tools or appliances….. if we make a concerted effort to do so.
And in the long term, it doesn’t matter at all what the energy return on energy invested in renewables might be or not be…….. because any energy we invest in renewables will otherwise be pissed away ANYWAY building freeways, flying super jumbo jets, driving three or four ton personal vehicles, etc etc etc.
I’m not prepared to get into a debate about EROI regarding renewables right now, but I’m for damned sure that solar panels installed at competitive prices in places with a good solar resource return a dozen times or more what they COST, in money, compared to electricity purchased at retail rates.
Furthermore the actual constant money cost of both wind and solar electricity is falling and will continue to fall for quite sometime, because the people in these industries are constantly coming up with ways to get the job done cheaper and faster.
With more or less closed borders, population GROWTH is no longer a critical issue in the modern world. The BAU establishment is actually peeing and pooping its diapers about the LACK of population growth, lol.
OFM .. “We’re not going for FORCED reductions in birth rates. We’re not going to an austerity lifestyle, period”
Exactly!! That’s what I keep saying, no-one will accept the reality of the situation, so we go to collapse. it doesn’t matter if we build more renewables or not, none of it it is going to save civilization.
There is only one possible solution, but no-one is interested because it means everyone is worse off, so everyone denies it as acceptable and instead goes for the fantasy of renewables or nuclear. They are just derivatives of fossil fuels.
What you don’t want to understand is that we are so deep into overshoot there is no solution with a nice happy ending. We blew the chance of that decades ago..
The only solution to soften the collapse is unacceptable, I agree, so fast hard collapse it is then, way too fast for any people to adapt. Those in western countries, use to western lifestyles will be far worse off than developing countries with a large percentage of rural populations, you have that backwards. There will be massive die-off in both, but those using least technology will adapt better than those that only know how to farm with technology.
Hideaway- “The EROEI of utility scale solar and wind is less than 2”
Yeh, under a tarp in Ireland or 100 meters below the surface of the ocean.
I hope that you realize that your ‘calulations’ on this matter aren’t worth any more than a thimble of coal ash.
Hickory, such comments of yours show how little you understand.
My method includes all the embedded energy in the system that all suffers from entropy and needs replacing over time. None of the papers you might read include any of that because it comes out at unacceptably low returns.
Australia’s largest solar farm of 720Mw at an average of 5.5 hours per day for 25 years comes in around a 1.65 EROEI, with no allowance for replacing the 400Mwh of batteries after 10-12 years at best. Much lower EROEI when that cost is included, but we wont know exactly how much for another decade. I work in the real world with real numbers.
People want to use false accounting of EROEI to get numbers that satisfy their need to believe in no bad outcome at the end of the fossil fuel era. It’s a denial of reality in it’s finest form..
You describe yourself- “People want to use false accounting of EROEI to get numbers that satisfy their need”
More importantly, understand that the utilities of the world purchase long term facilities to generate electricity based on considerations like cost, reliability, demand and risk. The reason that global PV deployments are growing so fast is that the 30 year pricing of electricity is very good, generally with a cost payback time in the range of 5-8 years, and with a lifecycle energy payback time of less than 2 years (when deployed in sunny areas).
You seem to find that real world scenario threatening, for some reason.
But the proof is in the pudding…not on the back of your envelope.
Trivial, but you might want to get your units right.
MW not Mw.
MWh not Mwh.
Hideaway
I fully agree with what you are saying, but you are talking to people with a conscious bias that simply cannot get a grip with reality. They cannot fathom EROEI or net energy and think that the good ol’ USA can carry on in isolation.
Unreliables are a distraction from the reality of resource depletion and population overshoot. Most on this blog are in thermodynamic denial of reality and are sniffing the Hopium in the vain hope there is a way out. Good luck. Show me a steel making process based on unreliables. Better still how about all those polymers we depened upon.
Come on guys show me I am wrong. Show me the money.
If it that easy where are the projects- I am still looking. I see SFA.
Hickory, look at where renewables are already at high percentages of the grid, like the AEMO that covers the East coast of Australia and one of the largest grids by area in the world.
New solar and wind projects have stalled for the future because there is no money to be made. Any new projects would be just dumping power into the grid when there are already negative prices, so they are simply not being planned for in the future.
When there is no solar and wind, on still nights, the system totally relies upon fossil fuels, yet many of those plants, especially coal are going to close down over the next decade or so. More wind and solar will not solve anything in this situation, it’s a waste of both resources and money.
Batteries are being built by some utilities, but in the megawatt scale, when in the gigawatt scale is what’s needed. Batteries are both capital and resource intensive on the necessary scale. It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to build the necessary batteries.
The one large pumped hydro scheme, Snowy Scheme 2, is being built where we have just had a 20 years drought where runoff was 33% below long term average and most of the area where this “national battery” is being built had extremely low dam levels, due to changing climate.
In other words it’s likely to be a white elephant when the next drought comes along. Of course all the planners and politicians will claim when it’s a disaster that no-one could have predicted it..
You keep thinking in individual, simple solutions when the problem is highly complex. Of course a lot of solar and wind are going to be built, until others catch up to the Australian situation of too much solar and wind, where the problem becomes obvious.
Right now a lot of rooftop panels are being replaced by modern ones. These were all bought with one of the earlier subsidy schemes, for both price and feed in tariff, where people were paid way too much to get solar installed. A lot of these systems from 2009-12 are breaking down. They had 25 year manufacturer warranties, yet people can’t claim on them because of the ‘proof’ you need always in the fine print. So they are lasting 12-15 years. People are getting much better panels instead, higher efficiencies lower price (with a new subsidy!!), and a longer life according to the sales pitch, all with 12-15 year manufacturer warranties, hmmm.. Lower warranties than 12-15 years ago..
I’ve based my numbers on lasting 25 years minimum.
Hickory “The reason that global PV deployments are growing so fast is that the 30 year pricing of electricity is very good, generally with a cost payback time in the range of 5-8 years, and with a lifecycle energy payback time of less than 2 years (when deployed in sunny areas).”
If any of that was close to true, then solar and wind generating entities would be showing wildly profitable accounts and they would be taxed appropriately by governments. Instead they are all relying on grants, subsidies and tax credits to be built in the first place, and as I’ve stated and shown..
Here is the trend, notice it’s DOWN!!
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/11/30/clean-energy-council-notes-decline-in-australian-renewable-energy-investment/
Read the whole story from the pro PV point of view… Everyone is screaming the government needs to do more!! as in subsidies to get to the renewable energy target.
If the rubbish you wrote above were even close ot true, the market would be building solar and wind without any subsidies as it would be throwing off huge profits once built.
Saudi oil has an EROEI of around 30 by my method and is wildly profitable. It is the easiest way to tell the real EROEI of any project.. Money is energy and energy is what allows money to have value. No energy and money is worthless..
“No energy and money is worthless..”
And yet you refuse to acknowledge that to add continuous energy to the system in the form of wind or solar is benificial. To put you in the camp of fossil fuel fuel interests is pretty easy. The issues we discuss here are multifaceted and therefore no clear answers can be given. So it is absolutely possible to have your view irrespectively if it is the right one or not. For my taste, it is too much fear provoking doomerism and too many arguments for high priced fossil fuel dominance.
Hawaii getting off coal:
https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/kapolei-energy-storage-plant-hawaii-coal/
rgds
WP
Current TX fuel mix for power generation:
It is a perfect example of what can be done when you have sufficient flexibility backup for electricity generation, in this case natural gas would be the most important source for that. A more interconnected grid always helps, but there are cost/practical limitations in that area.
It is possible to free up natural gas for use in the industry or export, because the “unreliables” in the form of wind and solar power have become a more reliable integral part of the electricity grid. With more interconnectors and sufficient backup, more renewables can still be added for a long time. Expanded use of electricity in the industry and also in the oil and gas extraction business would also possible due to more renewables. There are limits to the energy system, but a state like Texas along with the other states in “the wind belt” have the potential to get to a very high renewable percentage for generation. 60-80% maybe, talking about average power generation – not only capacity. South Australia would be the benchmark for what could be possible.
A new Open Thread Non-Petroleum has been posted
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-february-2/
A new Open thread reporting on US November Oil Production has been posted.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/another-new-high-for-us-november-oil-production/