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#51 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Lithium used for batteries » 2024-03-18 07:05:34

About Oil

If I learned from my former peakoiler friends is that we need to project things exponentially.

Well... They said that for the argument about peak oil problem. They lack the will to apply the same for the alternatives as they destroyed their doom scenario.

The other aspect is the EROEI I said before. They over-hyped the factor with too pessimistic values, but even in the industry that it's considered. And you did a similar argument with copper.

Exhaustion of our best resources force us to exploit worse resources, that require more energy to exploit, which reduces the EROEI.

The problem is that for a source of energy, you can't feed the extraction industry with your own energy if the energy returned is even less than the energy extracted.
Because of that, a lot of reserves turn unexpoitable, at least if they are used as a energy source (still, if our civilization feeds on renewable or nuclear, that reserves could be exploited).

That's the reason because they projected a peak so soon. Still, even for them, the final end of the consumption could extend a long into the future, but with a total energy shrinking.
The official organisms did similar projections, just a lot more relaxed. The peak oil is not so soon. But currently they have accelerated the projection, not because it's something bad with oil reserves, but because renewables and EV projections eat part of the oil consumption, so the peak is sooner.

Coal is a different beast, being a lot more abundant. The high cost of coal is usually related to the environmental cost of use, and, in some cases, the cost of transport if it needs to be imported.
Still, again, the peak coal could be a lot sooner than previously expected just because renewables are growing enough fast to feeds the energy growth and more.
It's a peak based on demand instead of offer as it was in the older projections.

About Hydrogen.

Let's be clear here. I'm not against hydrogen or nuclear energy. I'm against loose time waiting for "ideal solutions". If hydrogen economy become competitive, I will cheer that.
While I expect a great future for batteries, I'm not a "one solution for all" guy. It's just I don't like how it's attacked that without a good basis.

For example, I know the nightmare that would be try to make air travel using batteries. You need at least 1kwh/kg just to start to build a minor very efficient airplain to move short distances with similar time travels than a railroad.
It can be useful if we reach that goal, as it has advantages, it will occur, but it's a different market than the long air travel.

The requirements to make long air travel are so high, that if some day is electric, the "battery" will be more similar to a fuel cell than a chemical battery as we know today, no matter how you name it.
It that regard, I don't have any problems with hydrogen powered airplanes, e-fuels or whatever. As they are based of non-fossil fuels, they are compatible with a circular economy model.

About that ultraefficient hydrogen production, I already knew about it. It's just, the jump in efficiency is so high that I have that in my "locker" of "tech to review over time".

That values are clearly NOT the current values by a great margin. So it could be a significant leap for hydrogen competitiveness OR maybe just another step that it can't go directly to market because requires further development.
Pretty much like a lot I read about ultrahigh density batteries and such.

Some are scams, but must are real... just they hide the problems (to be solved) in the presentation, so they aren't market ready or even if they are, they have hidden problems don't announced, like scalability problems, too expensive, or even something so side thing as a patent problem.

Anyway... That only helps hydrogen model in ONE aspect. They are a lot more to solve.

But just be positive and just think that it works in every aspect (hydrogen stations price drop, hydrogen becomes a lot more cheap, fuel cells become also a lot cheaper...).
So, what.

Hydrogen cars will do a come back. With new competitive prices they will compete against EVs. Some people will continue with EVs, as they feed them with their own electricity making them a lot cheaper.

Others than need constant refuelling/recharging in the fuel/recharge station do the math, and more and more people will choose hydrogen.
So far, so good. What's the problem?

If hydrogen economy works, JUST MAKE IT WORKS! When the price become competitive, people will adopt them if it's better than the alternative.
If EV industry were unable to reduce copper consumption, they will rise the prices sooner or later. And in the same scenario, if hydrogen works, they will easily replace one for another.
But if EV industry is able to replace, or there is no problem with the resource, the model is valid so, what's the point in waiting for a "better model"?

At the end, your argument is based in "the EV and Renewable model is exhausting our resources".

But I insist. YOU AREN'T EXHAUSTING NOTHING.

You are moving the resources from the mine to the products. And the objective is to maintain that resources as long as possible inside our production chain.
But even if we failed and ended all in landfills like you said (very exaggerated IMHO)... well... MINE THE LANDFILL.

#52 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Lithium used for batteries » 2024-03-17 13:05:08

kbd512 wrote:

I don't care about how these numbers make you feel.  A bridge doesn't care about how you "feel" about its ability to support a load placed upon it.  Your structure is either strong and stiff enough to support all loads it's subjected to, or it collapses.  That's how real engineering works.

As I can understand that you are accusing me that support my argument over emotions or believes, not real data.

I'm gonna do a very different of reply here. It's about my own experience. No reply needed.

I'm in my late forties. To search data about the energy sector it's now just a hobbie. I was very interested about the energy in the past so I guess is partially a kind of habit already.

Two decades ago I came in contact with a community that debated a lot about the Peak Oil and the consequences of it.

This was the position that days in the community. Oil reserves are first discovered, later exploited. All our current society depends on first place from fossil fuels.
The number of discoveries where decreasing and we were exploiting mainly already discovered ones. The reason about the lack of new discoveries is that the fields doesn't exists (just minor ones that doesn't add enough).

We were exhausting the fields, so the peak oil were easy to predict. Around 2010-2015. After all, it was expected a fast decrease of oil.
Not only that. As the best oil fields were closed, only the worst and more expensive to exploit will be used, making an accelerated and fast decrease of energy. In the end, the civilization
would collapse and end at a low energy sustainable with pretty much no high tech.

Olduvai4.jpg

By then, I agreed with the reasoning. The data seemed right.

Of course, the alternatives were examined and discarded. The renewables where laughable by then. There were arguments against nuclear because the exhaustion of uranium as well.
Hydrogen economy was dismissed as a ultimate stupid way to loose energy.

Anyway... A doom prediction that I believed.

Why the world weren't in panic?

Here the community was more divided, most accusing the people in power to suppressing information.
Still, looking for old IEA predictions and other, they said that it would take more time to reach the peak oil and the problem weren't imminent, and by then other energy sources could take the place.
For that, they pointed to "other unconventional oil".
The community laugh.

And you know what?

Fracking happened. "Unconventional oil". And the prediction failed.

Well... Of course that was dismissed as an just unpredictable mistake, but change nothing but a small delay in the predictions.

As an active member, I used to debate, and not only inside the community, knowing the poison effect of a closed community about believe their own lies, but in general forums were it was easier to
have more productive exchanges.

Well. There I soon notice that this is a very old debate, just with minor changes. Malthus vs godwin about the limits of population.

Malthus did a bunch of predictions based on limits, and reached the conclusion that population couldn't reach certain point and concluded a lot of things from that.
Godwin from the economic perspective of the debate, dismissed that limits and concluded that "new solutions will be invented" and with a reasoning based on how the market works, concluded that the problem won't exists.

You know what?. "Green revolution" happened, and Godwin was in the right... at least at that time. Malthus predictions were wrong.

From my original position about the peakoil community, I could feel that the same was happened here. A general expression of the community "we can't grow infinite in a finite planet".
Well... Of course I still think is true... But the Malthus vs Godwin and my recent experience was telling me that these kind of predictions require to be taken with a pinch of salt.
The community (and myself) before the failed prediction used to laugh about the magical thinking behind the regular answers in regular forums with a lot of people with "godwin" mentality.

But after the failed prediction, I felt that we needed to review things with care.

Ok. The original Malthus vs Godwin debate was mixed with politics and both positions were too extreme, being both unable to understand the other position.

In my participation in the forums, sometimes just as an observer between people in both sides, I usually saw the incapacity or maybe lack of will of understand the other side.

Economy people normally tends to ignore the numbers and the physical world behind that, while the people that make linear-like malthusians projections tends to refuse to see the truth behind the economic argument, that it has win a lot of bets in the past.

As someone that challenge my own opinions, I play the role of devil's advocate in the forums or even against myself.

First... I know, BELIEVE ME, I have totally clear that ECONOMY works under the physical world. It can't bend physical rules.

In that sense, we can't find reserves if that doesn't exists. Also I understand that, while the classic argument "the prices went up, so we invest in search new reserves, so the prices
go down" is limited to other variables, like the energy invested in extraction and process.

Still, the malthusians tends to dismiss that argument too quickly and easily.

Well... Returning to my experience, as I said, as someone who challenge myself I started to check the numbers that the community used to defend that position.
I was more interested in the renewable or nuclear energy arguments. My reason was that I accepted as truth the argument that the the peak oil, even if it was more in the future that we expected,
even the international agencies expected to occur this century. 2010 or 2050 could have a great influence in my life, but not for our civilization.

Well.. I hear a lot of reasonable arguments about how the renewables will never be nothing. Of course, lack of materials was already one, but the most sounded by then, in the 200x was that renewables take more energy than produce in their life.
For that, the community was focused in EROEI. The energy produced divided by the energy used to create it.
Some studies where linked, besides other extra-official calculations and that. Well... there was a range of values. From "lacking", like 3 or 4 up to less than one, that means that it generated less than returned, so a very expensive toy.

I debated that, if the value was enough higher than 1, let's say 4, you just need to create an extra generation to compensate that. Still, the argument was dismissed with "we need more than 10" without further calculations. (I strongly disagree even by then)

Well... The thing is... prices has gone down until now. It stills does.
As the embedded energy must be included in the price, that should means that EROEI is growing up. PV insiders argued in the same way. Certain new techniques reduces the cost and energy need.
Less energy input,
What said the peak oil people? Nothing. They just insisted in the EROEI numbers, as the studies used were coming old because nobody inside the industry is seriously worried about EROEI anymore. It's just focused on money return, and the numbers are OK.

Other argument was the lack of silver. Doing the same linear projections that I read here, just in PV, they concluded that the PV industry will never go beyond a small bunch of Gw, because silver will exhaust (well, the market would abandon PV when prices rise enough).

You know what?
https://iea-pvps.org/snapshot-reports/snapshot-2023/

Of course, again wrong. What happened? Just the industry figured how to reduce the silver used.

Now is argued that the trend can't continue indefinitely. Silver will exhaust sooner or later. That reduction can't be infinite up to doesn't have silver at all, isn't it?

Or maybe not.
https://globalenergyprize.org/en/2022/0 … ar-energy/

So... With time, I just didn't play the devil's advocate but accept that the economy argument is right.

It's not that economy laws can violate physical laws. That's absurd.

It's just these things have too many variables. Assuming that we can't find solutions or ways to circumvent the limits is just unfounded.

So, I guess after this you can understand why I think this projection will be again wrong.

One I hear that "this is gonna stop because we lack X" I have a strong feel of "deja vú".

If you ask me how we will do, of course, I don't know. If I have to bet on my current knowledge, I would said that we will reduce the usage of copper in renewables by a lot using aluminum were is possible and economical, when copper raise the prices to certain level,
and nobody expect prices to go down again.

But that assume that we won't have better alternatives (who knows about carbon nanotube cables), or something mixed.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio … nd_outlook

Or copper mining ends better and expected. I don't count with this, but... a completely IRSU space colony could extract metals nearly free.

Or the way that they solve the problem could be completely unexpected and currently unable to predict. How knows.

But I know something. The linear projections are as old as Malthus. And usually ends in the wrong. I lived enough to see it by myself in just two decades.

#53 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Lithium used for batteries » 2024-03-15 10:07:29

Calliban wrote:

But even as a minor contributor to electricity production, intermittent renewables have not reduced installed fossil fuelled generating capacity at all.  Why is that?  Because wind and solar power are not reliable.

No. It's not.

It's because solar and wind deployment started to accelerate almost just two decades ago, and the total renewable was too small to hit over the growth of total consumption.
Because world population is still growing and developed countries are still growing energy per capita. It has a top, as children per woman has already peaked and developed countries has stabilized their energy per capita time ago. But that scenario is at least half century, probable one, to reach a worldwide peak of consumption.

In other words... We need time to escalate production every year to start to add quantities enough big to grow faster than the global demand. That point will mark the moment in that fossil fuels will decrease every year.

But as renewable grows exponential, it can go from insignificant to minor player, to major player in few years. We are in the minor player stage, while just ten years ago where in the "insignificant" category.

https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy

That time when fossil fuels won't need to grow more will come very soon.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/15/busi … index.html

You can find a variety of forecasts, but most expect coal to peak at less than one decade. From this year up to 2032 in worse case scenario (of serious studies, not propaganda), just because the assume different scenarios like the renewable growth or the economic growth that change the numbers.

Not even one considers than renewable doesn't reduce fossil fuel consumption. And intermittency only has serious consideration when networks has beyond certain levels of renewable. Definitely is not a problem for a network with 10 or 20% renewable.
There are multiple strategies to that scenarios, but we aren't there yet, so as an argument about why now.

But take notice that:
- Renewable impacts more over coal (electricity production competition)
- EV impacts over oil (fuel competition)
- Stationary storage will impact over natural gas (electricity on demand competition)

Different technologies, different stage of development, different effects. That's the reason because we shouldn't expect natural gas to slow down in short term, while oil it's quickly entering in the doubt phase as BEV are growing faster than previous predictions.

That doesn't mean that coal, oil and natural gas is only used in the sectors where there is this competition. It's just that sectors (electricity, mobility and electricity power management) has a significant consumption of these resources so the removal of that will push further reductions. Besides that other sectors has their own battles. Just they are less known and more specific.

There is no need to repeat ourselves. It's enough short term to just wait some years to see. Of course we will need to wait at least other two or three years to confirm the new trend, but... close enough I guess.


Calliban wrote:

  To function in a grid that requires continuous balance between supply and demand, they must be backed up by fossil fuelled generating capacity that can be brought online when windspeed drops or the sun is obscured.
This means that the capital and operating costs of intermittent renewable electricity sources are in addition to those of the fossil fuelled electricity system. 

Or storage.
Or management on the demand side.


Calliban wrote:

The only thing that the RE can do, is to save a modest amount of fuel consumed in the fossil power station.

Not necessary modest in the electricity mix. And with electrification, at the whole consumption.

Calliban wrote:

  That saves some cost, but it means investing in two sets of generating infrastructure, to do the job that one did in the past.  It also requires additional investments in transmission infrastructure and frequency control, due to the dispersed nature of renewables and their rapid variability.

That's true, up to certain point. It require some investment but...

Calliban wrote:

These costs greatly outweigh the money saved by modestly reducing fuel consumption.

That's depend of the cost of renewable and difference between renewable and fossil fuels, that bets bigger over time. That's the reason why now renewables are being installed a lot more, besides it depends on the mix and percentages among other things. The savings are significant and growing with the new prices. And there are other considerations, as geopolitics.

About that...


Calliban wrote:

This is why every country that has invested heavily in intermittent renewables has seen rapidly increasing electricity costs.  And even places where intermittent RE has made the greatest inroads, like Germany, Denmark and UK, it contributes no more than 30% of electricity consumed, and has barely scratched the surface of the other 80% of delivered energy end uses.  The Germans now claim that 17% of their total energy consumption is met by renewables and 42% electricity.  But even this modest achievement is misleading.  The Germans dump huge amounts of excess energy onto the the European electrical grid in times of plenty and become Europe's biggest electricity importer when wind and solar fall short.  They count this dumped electricity in their production figures.  When the war with Russia cut off Germany's access to cheap natural gas, their manufacturing sector folded like a house of cards.  RE has proven capable of substituting a small proportion of the 20% of energy that is consumed as electricity.  But its inroads elsewhere have been pitiful.

Europe electricity market works as a marginal market where the most expensive technology it produces, pushes the prices up.
When the conflict raised, the marginal market model did that natural gas raised the prices way beyond the real costs to pay the gas.
A marginal cost market overreacts under a fuel problem, while on the other side, stimulate faster replacement of the problematic source.
There is discussion about the convenience or not of that model.

Anyway, what it exposed the problem was that we need to remove natural gas as fast as possible. As I said before, that role should be provided by batteries (at least in the electricity market. In industry sometimes is electrification, other is hydrogen if it's for some roles in industry).

At the end, the conclusion in Europe is just the opposite of you said. We need to reduce the dependence from fossil fuels even faster than previous considered if we want to reduce our exposure to volatile fossil fuel prices.
The high prices came from natural gas, not from the renewables.


Calliban wrote:

In space heating, one unit of electricity can provide 3 or more units of heat, i.e. using a heat pump.  This is an example of how electricity might reduce our delivered energy consumption.  But to do this, we need a much more expensive heating system.

More expensive infrastructure, cheaper energy. Long term investment.

Calliban wrote:

  In most cases, if we want electricity to do what FF do now, it will take at least 1kWh of electricity to substitute 1kWh of fossil fuel.  If you need high heat 100°C>, you must use a resistance heater, induction heater or a synthesised fuel like hydrogen.

Hydrogen? Definitely not. Electric heating yes. The use of hydrogen would be used for things like reduction (for steel as an example) or just as a source material, as it's already used, like in the fertilizer field.

Calliban wrote:

  An electric car replaces the mechanical work done by an engine with the work of an electric motor.  But the work energy required remains the same and the EV has huge embodied energy in its manufacture, equivelent to several years of fuel consumption in a standard car.  Imagine if all of that mining and ore processing had to be done with renewable electricity.

And that has being replied before. The numbers are under discussion, but it doesn't matter, as from a long term perspective, all of this enter into the circular economy and next time mining would be a lot lower than the first time.
With fossil fuel, you are just spending time in a dead end way of doing things, doomed to be abandoned after the lacking of fossil fuels and doomed if they aren't replaced on time.
And that's the reason because we are doing this now, and not when the fossil fuel reach prohibitive prices.

Calliban wrote:

  Could we even afford the EV?  Imagine the cost of having to provide the high heat needed to make concrete (1500°C), will hydrogen derived from renewable electricity?  Electricity is 20% of world delivered energy consumption today.  To meet all energy needs using RE, that proportion needs to triple or quadruple.

Not hydrogen. But just 1:1 electricity-heat.
And even with that, the total primary energy per capita will be lower than nowadays. So... Yeah. That's the plan.
A lot more electricity, a lot less thermal energy (fossil fuels = 0... that's the goal, but still biofuels and biomass in small scale).

Calliban wrote:

To produce 4x as much electricity as we use today using an equal mix of wind and solar, will require global copper production to triple.

Under a linear projection of consumption, which will be only true if the copper reserves works well and prices don't rise up like crazy.
If that's not the case, or if investors considered that a significant risk in the time of the investment, they will push for adoption of a different level of usage, so linear projections of copper usage won't apply.

Calliban wrote:

  If we replace ICE cars with EVs, then copper production must be about 7x what we have today.  These are just maintenance levels of copper production.  For a rapid energy transition, production must increase even more.  How realistic is that, in a world where copper ore grades are declining and the energy needed to produce each kg of copper is increasing?  We can repeat this example for each of the resources involved.

You are insisting in a linear projection of consumption, where a car or renewable has the same amount of copper per car or per power unit of generation.

Ah.... I feel I repeating the same again and again. I think I'm gonna stop here, because it's the same over and over.

Just, as I said, in just some years, we will be able to see a clear peak on some fossil fuel sources, like coal.

Then, will you recognize at least than renewables reduces the consumption?

You should... but I guess you won't.

#54 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Lithium used for batteries » 2024-03-14 15:21:24

kbd512 wrote:

Spaniard,

Nobody here said getting Aluminum was a problem.  This is another straw man argument.  I said getting Copper and Lithium was a problem.

But you did a linear projection like no copper could be replaced what it's wrong.

kbd512 wrote:

Q: Where does the energy to make Aluminum come from?
A: Coal and gas.  All of it.  None of it comes from renewable energy.

Aluminum is down throw ELECTRICITY (well... almost).

And electricity come from a mix, so your argument is FALSE.

Not only false, but even if you claim that the renewables are a low fraction of the mix, while globally is true, it's not a fixed thing. Renewable are growing a lot faster than other energy sources for electricity.

kbd512 wrote:

A: If the Aluminum ever solidifies after the plant starts operations, then that smelter is a write-off.  It will not be economical to restart operations because a lot of the equipment will be ruined.  You're not going to run that on intermittent power.  You're going to run it on coal and gas, which is exactly what we are doing right now.

Sorry but no. You don't need coal for that. You need HEAT.

And heat can be easily stored in a time scale of hours, even maybe week assuming a slightly lose.
Not only that but you are arguing that engineers can't design a plant that can stop safely. What a joke.
Of course you need to design a plant that work on some way if you want to take advantage of cheaper energy.
And yes... Even if it's designed for allowing stopping and starting from time to time, I DON'T expect this kind of plants stops every night. They will integrate opportunistic energy (like heat storage), production regulation (faster or slower) and the rest of the storage will be provided by external services, whatever they were.
It doesn't need to be batteries. Batteries are economical in some scenarios, like hour storage and frequency control. I don't expect to be the technology to store days. And things like seasons, HERE is were industry demand will work best.
Of course, very electric intensive on winter can stop, in numbers make sense. But it's not the same to stop once in a while that EVERY day.

kbd512 wrote:

Q: If you're going to run an Aluminum smelter off of renewable / intermittent energy, what does that imply?
A: It implies a huge amount of electrical energy storage to keep the Aluminum liquid.

As I said, thermal storage. Something like having another metal with a higher melting point that it has no problem to go through intermittent solid-liquid phase change and use that as a constant source of heat as a thermal buffer.
Maybe Iron? I don't know about this. But I can say that you lack imagination to don't be able to see a possible solution.

kbd512 wrote:

Q: How are we going to get to this scenario where we stop burning coal when the plan involves burning as much coal, just to make Aluminum, as the entire rest of the world consumes?
A: That's what I'd love to know!

Pretty much because aluminum is mainly processed with electricity, so, what's the problem about running aluminum plants with renewable electricity? There is none.
Of course there are a lot of machines like in the mining phase that STILL run on fossil fuels. It's a gradual thing. I said before.

But I don't see anything that can't be replaced by an electricity alternative. Some are more easy of replacement than another. Other requires a lot of work yet.
For example we practically just made first pilot plant of non-coal steel. IT will take time before the firsts real plants start to run significant quantities and even more to make competitive steel.
But everything starts the same way. Some things are faster than others.


kbd512 wrote:

That's exactly how it works, Spaniard!

No. It's not. You are clearly doing bad numbers and claiming that the people that does the numbers are in the wrong.

kbd512 wrote:

Look at a silly energy consumption chart already.  Nothing has ever been replaced.

Of course it does. It's just if EVERYTHING is growing at the same time, the total numbers can still growing. It doesn't mean that in you lack renewables the consumption were the same. That's just FALSE.

Until now, the renewable were a fraction so small of the consumption that it has no impact in the global consumption.

kbd512 wrote:

Guess what?  WE'RE STILL BURNING DUNG FOR ENERGY!  Nothing has actually changed.  We have coal, oil, gas, hydro, wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal... and we're burning more dung today than we ever did in the past.  It's a smaller percentage of the energy mix, but it never went away.  Everything is additive over time.  Nothing is being replaced.  The demand just keeps going up.  What you want to attempt will make sure demand for energy goes way up, up, and away!

We are just starting!
And population is still growing!

What do you expect? I doesn't matter if renewable accounts 7% and total energy grows 7%. In that scenario fossil fuels don't decrease.

But... what will happen when renewables grow faster than the consumption? Of course fossil fuels will decrease.
We aren't in that point already, but renewable growing is exponential, and the share is growing, so it's matter of time, not a fixed thing as you expose.

vK3ZOE8bzXANomg709vQD5JjKeb1Rv8siVNEpnguOsY.jpg

Look at the share.

#55 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Lithium used for batteries » 2024-03-14 12:50:58

Calliban wrote:

In other words, to produce existing global electricity demand from an equal mix of PV and wind, ignoring transmission and storage, we would need to increase copper production by 50%, aluminium production by 14% and increase steel production by 6.6%.  All of this would somehow have to be done using renewable electricity if we are to actually reduce GHG emissions.  These figures are for existing primary electricity demand.  If we want things like energy storage to balance supply with demand, electric cars, electric trains and trucks and electric heat pump based heating, the required quantities increase substantially.  I have already shown that replacing the existing car fleet with EVs, without anything else, requires a 40% increase in copper production.

Of course we will need a lot more.

And?

You can multiple even by 4 the consumption. It's what will happen probably as a lot of primary energy shift from thermal into electricity.

Of course, with the scale, the numbers are not linear. Because it's very probable that copper will turn less competitive than aluminum in that context, so we will mine less than the linear projections, and more aluminum (it's a guess, but a reasonable one).

Aluminum is not even close to have a problem with reserves.

We will stop to spend energy and resources in some areas, like fossil fuel, and expend on another, in this case electrification.
Deploy renewables consume resources. Stop using fossil fuels save them. It's a trade off.

The difference is as we approach high levels of deployment, more and more circular economy gains weight. The numbers under the first deployment stage are different from a second time.
Also it's not a sudden transition from fossil fuels to renewables, but a gradual one, when some resources less weight and others gains in exchange.
And yes... Metals gain weight in a renewable scenario. A lot.

You are thinking in the extra energy invested in more mining, but you also must account the mining we won't do (like coal) as the emissions associated with that, including the direct consumption of that resource.
Replace coal for renewable SAVE a lot of GHG, no matter you add more emissions in the mining stage.

If you only adds the new consumption but doesn't remove the old one, of course you will obtain that the transition has no sense.

But that's not how it works.

#56 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Lithium used for batteries » 2024-03-14 07:07:44

Again mixing countries and worldwide.

Let's take that 1 kg of aluminum cost 70 kwh.

Let's say that you use 100 kg (probably too much) to make a 60 kwh car. So 7 Mwh spent in aluminum

I gonna be conservative and I'm gonna say that we will retire the car after 500 cycles (it can support a lot more)
Did you notice that the car uses across it's life 60x500 = 30 Mwh of electricity just for moving?

The cost of fabrication is not the biggest part! It's just a fraction. Of course you need to add more, to the lithium and other elements, but there is a significant margin for that.

And if you compare that energy, with the energy used by a internal combustion car through, let's say, 200.000 km of life, let's be generous and said 5 liters per 100 km, that's 10.000 liters of gasoline, 342 GJ or 95 Mwh.

Of course to run an electricity based civilization we will need to multiply our electricity consumption. In exchange, we will reduce the rest of the primary energy by a lot.

And after the end of life of the car, that aluminum enter the circular economy.

Besides, you insist in linear projections. If you were done that to the PV industry 20 years ago you will be conclude that the industry had been collapsed years ago.

Why? Because the PV industry reduced the silver consumption per panel.
Even if the total has increased, and that's the reason I expect the industry will finally migrate from silver to copper, the thing is that the consumption hasn't been linear.

You are doing the same mistake here.

#57 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Lithium used for batteries » 2024-03-14 03:53:07

Ah. I also add that, of course, in the future, we will use a lot more aluminum than copper as you have guessed previously (I guess because it's a common argument against copper exhaustion)

How energy expensive is aluminum?

https://www.aluminium.fr/en/stake/energy/

13.5 MWh / t

So 13.5 kwh per kg. The previous numbers are not very different changing copper by aluminum.

The energy is not the most important criteria why we use copper today instead of aluminum. Copper is just has advantages in other aspects, so change will require new developments to mitigate the disadvantages of this material in certain usages.

The most important aspect is the greater oxidation of aluminum and sensibility to temperature changes vs cooper.
Solutions? How knows. New alloys? Better coatings? Sealed products?

I don't know about these things, but I know it's foolish to expect no changes and project linear numbers of consumption. It has no sense as exhaustion raises the prices, and higher prices stimulates solutions and changes.

It will be the same for PV panels, for example. They use around 20 grams of silver per kwh (although this number is changing quickly, the total power change even faster, so the consumption raise quickly).

For silver market is a great stress, so I expect that they will remove silver sooner than later. But panels with copper instead of silver has being developed already. It's just the price of silver is not important BY NOW, so there is no enough pressure to manufacturers to risk about fundamental changes in the panels that could bring new unknown problems. Until the price don't raise enough, they won't take the risk of that change.

With copper vs aluminum in things like wiring you can expect more or less the same evolution. First copper should raises significantly above aluminum alternative so it compensate the costs of the new problems. Then, as the market shift, there is a flux of money that helps in get better aluminum wiring and integration in products.

And to expect that humankind won't find solutions is the classical bet against humankind ingenuity and too much conservative considerations about the nonexistence solutions.

By the way, we have a MAYBE potential technology in the wiring area. Carbon nanotubes. Pretty much a lab curiosity by now. CN wiring already exists but it's not economical by far, so for now it's out of consideration.
Still, it's worth mentioning as the problem of CN is not the source material, but mainly manufacture. A breakthrough in this area could add a new contender to the wiring materials.

As I said... I don't bet against humankind ingenuity and non-existent solutions.

#58 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Lithium used for batteries » 2024-03-14 01:49:08

kbd512 wrote:

8,000,000,000,000kg of Copper * 12,000Wh/kg = 96,000,000,000,000,000Wh

96,000,000,000,000,000Wh = 96,000TWh

US annual electricity consumption: 4,000TWh

And again, your calculations has no sense. You don't explain where that copper amount come, but if it's about electric cars (as every electric car NOW has around 80 kg per car, 10 billion cars are
800,000,000,000kg

You missed a zero, so it's ten times lower.

AND, why compare the energy consumption of a construction over multiple years worldwide with the consumption of ONE year of ONE country?

Lets check against worldwide electricity.

25,500 twh worldwide 2022 * 30 year time frame

= 765,000 twh against 9,600 twh. Around 1,25%

That doesn't seems like a lot, considering that current PRIMARY energy consumption of the transport sector is around 25% of our total energy. Of course, passenger cars are just a fraction of that, but still.
We will need to raise electricity a lot more to feed that cars than the electricity used for mining materials. But of course, as a side effect, a lot of fossil fuel consumption will be reduced. While electricity will grow significantly, primary energy consumption will be reduced.

And by the way. I find a source that said that the consumption per ton is

https://www.ceecthefuture.org/resources … le&id=3701

24 GJ per ton, or 6,7 kwh per kg after conversion

Anyway. Not a great difference and we can add energy under the reasonable assumption that copper mining energy will rise over time, so I have no problem accepting your value. Even higher could be acceptable

Still, there is a great difference in numbers.

And of course, that electricity will come from renewables. The mix is changing already and it will continue to change. Yeah... 30 year timeframe is probably too optimistic for a COMPLETE replacement besides political claims, and I don't expect to be 100% by 2050-2060.
Still, a lot of less fossil fuel consumption, and even more oil reduction which is the most problematic resource in terms of exhaustion of the fossil fuels resources. Coal and natural gas are more abundant.

#59 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Lithium used for batteries » 2024-03-13 12:19:24

kbd512 wrote:

Demand is already dropping in California, of all possible places, but demand isn't actually dropping, because "we have beliefs and feelings and stuff".  You can't force something into existence that fundamentally doesn't work.  Personal fantasies over techno-gadgets are fine, but not where economics is involved.  As the article states, all major automotive manufacturers, to include Tesla, are selling EVs at a net loss.  You can do that for awhile, but not forever.

They are a lot of press like that in the past.

As soon as a couple months of bad data shows less numbers, they create a "news".

This is not even a year-to-year data.
Sell at loss... I hear that bogus claim for near a decade already. Pretty much from the beginning. It's obvious that it's a false claim or they would broke already.

Like this

https://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/10/tesla-b … -sold.html

Pretty much the same claim over and over and over. And at least on that days, Tesla burned cash as crazy. It's not that they sell each car at loss, but they invest so much money into expansion that they went into loses year after year.
So the value of the company raises a lot, even if their net income were negative.

After so many times reading the same claim and showing the same result the next year, as you can understand, I'm a bit skeptic about it.

#60 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Lithium used for batteries » 2024-03-13 11:44:58

I'm not gonna spend more time in a endless loop of monologues.

I will just reply this as an example.

kbd512 wrote:

160Wh/kg CATL's battery
400Wh/kg <- Panasonic / Tesla Lithium-ion

64Wh/kg <- 100kWh CATL battery pack energy density
160Wh/kg <- 100kWh Tesla battery pack energy density

625kg <- 100kWh Tesla battery pack weight
1,562.5kg <- 100kWh CATL battery pack weight

I don't know if you read bad data websites or just you have invented the numbers by yourself.
That numbers aren't right.

First, the 400 wh/kg I guess could come from Musk claim that they will reach that density in the near future. I don't have notice that their current cells went so far, but in any case, any cell that reach that density are NMC, NCA or maybe a solid/semisolid state battery, not a LFP battery as I said, so that's force the argument

Now some real data:

https://www.batterydesign.net/tesla-lfp-model-3/

Energy density = 125Wh/kg

I assume this is the pack.

Well. Just take another model. The previous is probably an worse case.

https://www.batterydesign.net/2022-tesla-model-y-4680/

Pack = 161Wh/kg
Cell = 244Wh/kg

Here a different source. Just for the cell

https://www.batemo.com/products/batemo- … data-popup

Cell = 250 wh/kg

As they are multiple generations, type of batteries, different measurements... this becomes very complex to have precise values until you fix a reasonable comparison.
Still, it's just interesting to see

For example, this is the data from the same source than before about the sodium-ion car.
https://www.batterydesign.net/sehol-e10x-sodium-ion/

Pack = 120Wh/kg
Cell = 145 Wh/kg

If you force the sources, you can obtain the double density for cell. Still, the density of the pack is clearly NOT as you said.
AND... this cell has lower performance than CATL sodium battery announce.

There is NO data of CATL sodium ion packs, because they are NO CATL sodium-ion packs yet up to my knowledge.

Still, if we project the 120 wh/kg of the pack to a 100 kwh battery we obtain 833 kg.

So... Again a bogus claim.

--- EDIT ---

I also adds another link about "EV increase fossil fuel consumption"

https://about.bnef.com/blog/electric-ca … -slash-it/

Well... Bloomberg disagree with you.

#61 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Lithium used for batteries » 2024-03-13 06:35:57

kbd512 wrote:

Spaniard,

Do only 5 billion people get to have a car?

The projection is based in current reserves which seems too conservative. That number is probably underestimated, and even with that, it's more than enough to supply the market for three decades, that it's more than enough to develop any other battery solution if it were needed.

Also that projection is based on certain proportion of lithium per kwh that could change in the future. The number are not rigid. That's not how the market works.

How about home energy storage?

How about laptops, cell phones, watches, flashlights, etc?

How about replacing all the diesel trucks engines with batteries?

How about the periodic table?

Do you know that theses products uses a lot more scarce elements than lithium?
https://library.ucsd.edu/news-events/wp … 68x542.png

Of course the solution is always the same. Reduce the consumption with better strategies, recycle the elements so the same material can be used again and again or just replace the element for other better suited in the new scenario when the old is not right anymore.

That's the reason because we are trying to make fossil fuels obsolete in first place. Climate and avoid future scarcity.

kbd512 wrote:

Sea water has Lithium?  Great.  Why didn't we go after that first?  Why create all the toxic lakes everywhere when there's Lithium in sea water?  Is it because the energy cost of extracting Lithium from sea water is so great when the concentration is measured in 0.2 parts per million?  Do you think we'll need stupendous amounts of energy to extract useful quantities of it from sea water?

That's the reason because we need develop first the best ways to extract with the minimum energy and make the recycling industry to reach very high values. Now is not convenient because the recycling industry is just in the starting stage and we have cheaper sources.

So the real lifespan of that lithium will be a lot longer that just looking at the first usage of the material. So a high extraction cost could be compensated by a very long lifespan of the raw material (not the same that the product as the raw material is recycled a lot of times).

In any case, as I said, we can expect the reserves to increase in the near future. Only after sometime, the estimations will turn more precise and we could estimate of the Bell curve applied to the discovery and extraction of reserves, much like in fossil fuels. In lithium we are just at the start of the curve with unreliable data.


kbd512 wrote:

If all sea water has its Lithium extracted and all known terrestrial sources depleted, then we can come nowhere close to powering civilization off of Lithium-ion batteries.

Did you notice that in sea water i said BILLIONS?

That's three order of magnitude (x1000) greater than (current) land reserves. That's a good reason to doubt about the reliability of our current data of land lithium reserves. Too much disparity between them. Sea water is easy to estimate, as lithium is dissolved, you just need pretty much multiply the lithium in a small sample to the size of the sea water. And the error margin is not too big. On land things are a lot more complicated.

But anyway, even in the most conservative estimations, the quantity is more than enough to serve the market for a long time, enough to develop other alternatives. That's the reason because nobody inside this market is specially worried about these numbers and focused on short term circumstances like the deployment of resource extraction, which can be lacking in a faster growth than expected scenario.

kbd512 wrote:

Sodium's energy density per unit weight is presently nowhere near that of Lithium.  That is a fact.  It's about half as much in all actual working batteries.

Let's put real numbers here.

CATL battery manufacturer is currently manufacture sodium ion of first generation with announced values of 160 wh/kg. That's the manufacturer data. And they said that they are working in a 200 wh/kg second generation.
That's pretty close values of low-end/old LFP lithium-ion. Not half.

They are worse in the volumetric density, but that's not a big problem in a long term scenario. That's because other this could be changed, like make the vehicles bigger (not heavier). Just, it's not convenient now. It required to develop new vehicle platforms if you intend to use sodium-ion for long travel vehicles, so for now it's just better to wait to see what happens with battery evolution and lithium reserves.

In any case, sodium-ion seems more than enough for city-type vehicles and we will probably see this kind of vehicles in the coming years. And probably sooner in recent developed countries, as old ones have people with old behaviors and will generate more resistance to the changes.

kbd512 wrote:

Do you figure it'll take another 40 years of development work to get Sodium-ion up to where Lithium-ion is today after 40+ years of development time?  Be realistic about this.  Sodium-ion is far behind Lithium-ion in terms of gravimetric and volumetric energy density.

They are making NOW the first sodium-ion generation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxKtCquWx5c

Notice that this announce was from two years ago. The production is happening now.

kbd512 wrote:

These are not rhetorical questions, Spaniard.  Some who is still advocating for this all-electric future silliness needs to think about how their lives will be impacted when the resource they think is unlimited is depleted before their eyes in less than 2 generations of battery operated cars, or semi-trucks, or farming and mining equipment.

You are clearly based on biased that, so you obtain wrong conclusions.

People a lot more informed than us is working on this. The numbers you are saying are wrong. And the resources of fossil fuel are clearly a lot more problematic that these other numbers about EVs.

The workers in this field is not worried about lithium. There is more than enough lithium for the coming decades, and electric vehicles don't require lithium but batteries, whatever elements it uses. They are plenty of alternatives.
They are some worries regardless of the speed of deployment which can spark new peak prices (short term, but still a problem for the industry), but that's a completely different thing.

It's matter of money. The more expensive the elements are, the more investment will be in the battery market what will turn into better reduction, recycling or new battery alternatives.

That's how EVERYTHING works in the market, including that whole list of technologies that you mentioned before. Including electronics.

If humanity were unable to find substitutes for current electronics, as an example, this technological civilization would be doomed anyway, regardless of electric cars and everything around that.
Not to mention a long term space program.

We need to move forward finding substitutes when they are needed. That's the main reason I personally doesn't understand why are you here. That kind of fixed mentality, basically luddite, is incompatible with a long space program.

A long space program requires a long term civilization, and a long term civilization require a circular economy with "100%" material recycling.

Understand that 100% is not necessary done with just direct recycling which is impossible, but with a recuperation for disperse sources in a long term endless loop. Because disperse are more expensive, to make numbers works we need that the direct recycling reach as highest numbers as possible, so disperse materials will need only to replace a small fraction of the total.

We know that the model works because nature has done before. The question is not if it works. It does. The question is if humankind will be able to replicate the model in a high developed civilization fashion (the old one based integrated on nature also works... just it's not desirable)

And that model clearly pushes for a change in our energy model among other things. Electrification is a step in the right direction as it's compatible with a circular economy. Fossil fuels don't.

kbd512 wrote:

Stop trying to sell me on the idea of how much Lithium there could be if every last kilo was mined.  The Andes Mountains are one giant very low grade Copper deposit.  Are we going to level the entire Andes Mountain range in this mad quest to make everything electric?

I'm not an expert of copper, besides you are doing a inflexible mentality.
Maybe better technologies of extraction will make it profitable. Maybe batteries (like sodium) will replace copper with aluminum in cells. Maybe they are other resources there that have more sense to extract. Maybe the recycling will be a more economic solution.
How knows whats the right path? We will try everyone and the right ones will triumph. Probably multiple does as they are compatible.

The madness is to don't develop (not even try) a solution and walk a path we know for sure is a dead end. That's fossil fuels.

kbd512 wrote:

Most Sodium metal is presently made in the US, in tiny quantities, and there are no facilities to make it elsewhere.

Yeah. It does happens when there is NO demand. TODAY.
Last lithium related infrastructure is very recent in construction, as the high demand for lithium is also very recent. The same could be said for sodium.
Just wait and see. If sodium-ion demand soar (and I see strong indications that this will happen in coming years) the facilities will be constructed in year timescale.
It's not like the raw source, sodium chloride, pretty much sea salt, is lacking.

kbd512 wrote:

  Furthermore, there are no electric vehicles using Sodium-ion batteries, because they are nowhere near ready for mass production.
  That might happen in another 20 years, which is how long it took for Lithium-ion to catch on.

You are clearly using bad data.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIaHEPeBvLU

If there is a reason for sodium-ion to have modest demand is that lithium is plenty, so there is no need for sodium. If the price of lithium goes up strongly again, sodium-ion manufacture will rise quickly if there isn't unknown problems.

Definitely, if there is no hidden problems, sodium-ion seems a better solution of stationary storage energy than lithium. Volumetric density is clearly not a problem for stationary storage. And if that market explodes, that will also push for better sodium-ion batteries how could be enough to make it a viable candidate for high performance vehicles when now is lacking.

kbd512 wrote:

Start selling me on how we're going to recycle Lithium into new batteries with near-100% efficiency, into perpetuity, because we have to, in order to keep using it.

Well. I did already X-D

Because it's a non negotiable long term goal. Circular economy is required to achieve a long term civilization.
Other way, you will exhaust the resources and crumble. It's pure math.

Materials, except on nuclear reaction or atmospheric looses, are always there. Exhaust is just a name for "reduced accessibility", as every atom is still there. Just in a open loop model, like fossil fuels, they are more and more difficult to regain the original state more convenient for our civilization.

That's what a circular economy concept is. To reach a level of energy requirement enough low to be able to close the circle of 100% reusing materials and support our own energy infrastructure and everything else running. Other way we will lack energy to recycling 100% and the accessibility will go down, which will turn in less access to materials over time until crumble.

And while we think in short term because humankind variables changes too fast, on a civilization scale, long term space projects like terraformation require a complete different mindset.

As we don't know the future speed of humankind, the most we can do is to estimate requirements and goals we need to reach, and just do whatever small step is in our current reach.

And one clear criteria is circular economy. Without that, any other plan is doomed to fail. It's not necessary we reach a perfect circular economy in a specific timeframe, but we should avoid to reach a resource trap that force us to go some steps backward before try it again.
Worse case scenario our civilization can crumble, and next time we won't have easy accessible fossil fuels, neither high volume of concentrated scarce materials, so the only path we could take would be extract very disperse sources, concentrate and maintain in the high recycling loop growing in the accessibility to materials over time.
It's just... this alternative plan seems terrible slow. That's the argument because some people think this is the only chance humanity can develop that kind of sustainable high energy civilization.

I don't think that way, but I understand that it's a lot more difficult than this first chance humankind has.


kbd512 wrote:

This "plan", that functionally doesn't exist, is like a little kid with a box of crayolas drawing a picture of a rocket ship, and then claiming that's the blueprint for building a rocket that can go to another planet.  We have a bunch of people who have been deluded into thinking something insane, like leveling the entire Andes Mountain range to extract the Copper, is a feasible economic endeavor that's going to bring about the electric revolution.

Show me some specifics.  Put some numbers to your idea.  Stop throwing out meaningless factoids about how much of metal X vs metal Y is in the Earth's crust.  You haven't told me anything I don't already know.  Tell me how much energy is involved in extracting Lithium from sea water.  Tell me about what happens to energy consumption for extraction as you reduce the Lithium concentration in sea water.

Again, this is NOT rhetoric!  This should be an adult conversation about the limits of consumption.

So... you are worried that lithium with a limited usage and a long lifespan per product will deplete but you aren't worried about fossil fuel depletion where we currently are a LOT more dependent from fossil fuels, it's used daily based (a disruption generate a great short term problem) and there is no possible recycling of that.

You are clearly using two different ways of thinking for both resources.

We are doing the same that when we went to Moon.
We make a goal (push for circular economy compatible solutions) and make one step at a time to walk the path of the goal.

And the goal is not EV itself, but change every technology to be compatible with a circular economy model.

As I'm sure you know, there are also people that insist in try to make internal combustion vehicles circular economy compatible via alternative fuels. If you are convinced that it's the solution, you can try it. Nobody is gonna stop you trying that.
It's just most people see EV a better solution than e-fuels or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. The market is there for you to try and prove others they are wrong.

For me, it's pretty much the same, if we reach sustainability through one path or another. I just know that the true path to a dead end is to maintain the current model.
And from my current knowledge, EV seems like the best solution until now. Well... It's happening. Just in the beginning but it does. Past year 2023, 9.5 million BEV where sold. And the market is growing.

Your alternative is to remain in the same path over endless excuses and bad data, to retain in the fossil fuel industry.
That "plan" will only work until the total fossil fuel production shrinks, that it's just some decades far away from IAE estimations even in the business as usual estimations and later, going down the curve trying to develop what we can do now, in a worse scenario.

Do you understand why now most of the planet disagree with your opinions and consider that the madness is not the electric vehicles but to maintain the old model at all cost?

Probably not.

I recommend you to search the data by yourself. It's clear that you read too much FUD from anti-EV and anti-renewable.

Anyway, what we can think or write doesn't mean nothing. It wont' change the path we are doing. EV is growing because it's working.
If that problems you claim unsolvable turn true, EV will met its end sooner than later.
But I won't put my bets on that. I prefer on bet that humankind will develop a circular economy, and BEV vehicles seems like the right technology to that goal today in that specific market.

Of course, to reach a circular economy we need to change A LOT of things. We are doing steps in a lot of other fields too. Just there is a lot of noise around the EVs.

#62 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Lithium used for batteries » 2024-03-12 02:34:38

kbd512 wrote:

Ignoring mining costs entirely, there's enough known Lithium reserves (89 million metric tons) to make a grand total of 267 million Tesla Model S vehicles with the 100kWh battery.  After that, there is no more known Lithium to make Lithium-anything batteries, for any other purpose (cell phones, laptops, cordless power tools, grid-scale energy storage, electric VTOL aircraft nonsense, etc).

That's a completely wrong statement.

A battery has 160g per kwh. Lithium is very light, and most weight per battery come from other elements. So 100 kwh is around 16 kg

So 89 million tons or 89 billion kg are 5 billion 100kwh batteries.

Besides that, lithium reserves have gone up recently. That's because reserves are not the quantity exist in the underground (because we don't know them for sure), but the concept of known or estimated quantities exploitable under (again) estimation of economic exploitable resource.

With changes in technology making a lot cheaper to exploit previous unexploitable reserves or known previous undiscovered and underestimated deposits reserves can go up, as it has been the case. The reserves haven't going down with the usage, but the opposite.

Of course, as the technology matures, we can't expect that trend to continue, much like in fossil fuels, but we don't know the real value until we have working on this for a time and the estimations become more and more accurate.

We know that the reserves in sea water are in the range of billion tons. Around 200 billion tons. They are normally discarded as they are considered uneconomically reserves, but that depends on factors like technology, price and level of recycling of lithium.
It's not the same to use that reserves to deploy new batteries than just replace a fraction of non recycled lithium in a previous recycled battery where good recycling values can go up over 95% of recycled lithium.

Anyway, for non-dense batteries, like backup systems, sodium-ion seems a very fine replacement (still pending from real data, as the first sodium-ion batteries are deploying to the market just now). Probably the winner technology on long term on that market.
It's energy density per weight is very close to lithium batteries. It's in the energy density per volume where it's clearly behind, but it's not a huge difference so I expect some vehicles to use sodium-ion in the future.

#63 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Why the Green Energy Transition Won’t Happen » 2023-09-19 00:56:39

kbd512 wrote:

Since the year 2000, the world has spent somewhere between 5 and 10 trillion dollars on wind and solar.  Burning wood for energy (10% of the total, globally) still supplies more than 3 times more energy than all the wind and solar combined (3% of the total, globally).

When is everyone going to wake up and smell the coffee?

This madness is not working!

We need dramatically different approaches to reduce reliance on hydrocarbon fuels.

There is no transition, much less a rapid transition.

Burning wood in America is still 50% of the total wind and solar energy output here in America.

If you want an actual transition, it's not going to come from "hopes and dreams".  The engineering required to make an actual timely transition will never be amenable to ideology.  If the materials and money math doesn't add up, then it's not a solution that will produce a transition in a timely manner.

Mix old and new energy doesn't help to view the right picture if you don't understand the kind of curve is happening.

In 2000, solar was almost prohibitive. On 2010 was non competitive without subsidies. On 2020s solar is the cheapest source of electricity in a lot of places of the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

The installation of renewable is exponential. That's the reason because old numbers seems negligible, while current numbers are really significant, and it will become even more important in the future.

Don't use median numbers with an exponential. It doesn't work that way.

The same is applicable to the consumption of raw materials. It's not the same the production/materials of 2000s technology than 2020s techonology.
In general, there is no pressure to reduce consumption if it doesn't generate too much cost impact until the price of the raw material raises.

The best example of that is silver in PV. The silver in PV has being shrinking constantly, so the cost impact in the PV has being contained while the price of the silver has gone up by a lot.
The market is big, and there was people who tried to build PV panels without silver at all. And they work to certain extend. But the market didn't buy it because not even a small  risk of raising failure make it non interesting with current prices and usage of silver.

But... what would be happen if silver will raise a lot more and/or PV with silver reach a physical limit to reduce the quantity? That kind of PV without silver would be a lot more attractive and it would be adopted.
There is a high chance that this will be happen in the future.

That's the reason because just multiply current raw usage per watt of current or past technology by the power need to power the entire civilization is a very wrong way to "predict" the failure of green energy. It won't work that way.

As soon as some raw material become expensive, the people involved start to investigate new ways to do the same things without the same bottlenecks.

Cobalt become expensive for electric vehicle batteries... They push LFP battery technology.
There is risk of lithium bottleneck... They research sodium-ion technology.

Etc. etc.

The technology of hundreds of megawatts and hundreds of terawatts would be very different in the implementation, even if it's the same idea in the core.

To believe that the green energy researchers and developers won't be able to adapt the technology to the resources available is a blind assumption of technology failure.

It's paradoxical that a forum participant about space exploration and mars colonization use technology pessimism as an argument.

#64 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Thermal Energy Storage » 2023-09-07 05:11:49

I think that multiple source is better than one unique energy source.

If the mission is just go and return, certainly a closed nuclear reactor, with minimal maintenance is probably the most practical. But if a minimal IRSU is gonna be developed, a nuclear reactor is too complex. Only some replacements, specially fuel, can be considered. The rest would be imported.

Solar thermal with parabolic mirrors should be easy enough to manufacture on Mars. The low temperature of the cold side of the thermodynamic extraction should be do it even more efficient than on Earth. Not very high temperature needed, even if the concentration allows it. I guess regular salt storage could be enough.

For long term storage, CO2 liquefaction could work well for cheap and easy manufacture.

The nuclear reactor should be enough for essential energy needs, while regular solar allows to boots to exceeded energy production.
Something like.

Essential.

Life support. CO2-O2 purification + Thermal regulation on "save energy" mode + basic systems (essential communication, greenhouse, etc.) + Minimal H2O extraction... etc.

Secondary

Vehicle recharge. Fuel generation. Thermal up to comfort level. H2O in regular use (not rationed like essential mode).

Extra

Generation excess. Safety margins. Extra storage in energy, fuel, water, etc.

It's only needed that nuclear cover the essential. Everything else could be covered using IRSU.

#65 Re: Terraformation » Artificial Magnetosphere - Electromagnetic Induction » 2022-01-04 03:19:05

In short term, space deflectors could be the least expensive solution, but in long term, it requires constant maintainance, so it should be best to find some ground solution.

I guess restarting the core is just beyond our capabilities not only now but on millennia scale, and the resources invested is just so crazy that it makes undesirable. But maybe we could do the trick if we could magnetized bit chucks of the crush with ferromagnetic deposits in a very specific alignment so the combination of the fields could approximate to a core-like planetary magnetic field.

#66 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Prometheus Fuels Lower Cost Than Fossil Fuels » 2021-10-28 03:45:38

Sounds like marketing. "Reverse combustion". Generate fuel from water and CO2 is very old tecnology. The thermodynamic process is well known. On other side, there is a real processes more or less efficient, far from perfect ideal conditions, where someone could make an improvement.
But even in unrealistic ideal conditions, fuel can't be cheaper than the energy used to generate the fuel, and the energy used in the generation must be as big as the fuel.

And if the electricity from the sources are more expensive than the energy contained in the fuel, something is not right in the calculation.

My suspicious is that they are assuming a lot lower costs on energy generation than today values. Of course, is a possible scenario... in coming decades. But nothing new. Not real costs for today. And there is a lot of other projects that can do the same.

So, I think it's just marketing.

#67 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Book: Dedicated topic: Beyond Oil and Gas - Methanol economy » 2021-09-15 08:46:41

tahanson43206 wrote:

This post is dedicated exclusively to the topic of making methanol from water and carbon dioxide in air.  This topic is NOT about electric vehicles or batteries or anything else.

But it's related to the topic.

Methanol and synth fuels use hydrogen-electricity for the synthesis. It's the most difficult part to reduce the prices, and it's linked to electricity.

Most projections about synth fuels to become cheaper is because they expect renewable or nuclear energy to become cheaper.
But at the same time, this scenario means that electricity should be cheaper too.

Fuel synthesis always require a less efficient route than a battery route. Create chemicals and burn them is less efficient than electric storage. So, no matters how cheap methanol turns, electricity storage will always be cheaper.

It's relevant because you can't compare today prices of electric cars with future methanol cars, because optimistic projections for methanol means optimistic projections for electric cars too. It will remain uncompetitive no matter how much electricity prices drop.

That's a good argument why it's very difficult for methanol/synth fuels on a future scenario to have a big fraction of the vehicle market. It could be interesting for other markets where batteries are not suitable because lacks of enough energy density like airplanes or maybe long range ships.

#68 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Book: Dedicated topic: Beyond Oil and Gas - Methanol economy » 2021-09-15 02:04:06

tahanson43206 wrote:

The fuel will be more expensive than fossil fuels, but in my opinion, that is a temporary situation.

In just a few years it will become a social faux pas to extract fossil fuel in order to use it for something so crude as burning it.

The technology needed to make synthetic fuel exists.  The challenge is to find ways to make it in sufficient quantity, and at a competitive price, so that it makes more sense to use ** real ** hydrocarbons as lubricants and for other useful products.

(th)

Market tends to choose best suited solution. fuel from electricity will be always more expensive that using electricity directly using batteries.

Of course, there is niches where price is not important, like rich people doesn't care about that, or maybe there is some aspect that is more important in that context. For example, police cars dedicated to persecution, it could be better not to be restricted by short range.

But I don't see good reasons for most people to use the expensive alternative when they can buy an electric car with a lot more cheap recharge.

Yes... Electric cars are more expensive... now. But it is a scale thing. If massive production, the price of batteries will be more cheap than the accumulated price of fuel-recharge difference across the vehicle life. Now, is around the same value. In next years, the difference will be obvious.

Besides... there is some bottlenecks in production. Well... It's expected that it will take time to scale the infrastructure. Battery factories, mining, mineral processing, adapt car manufacturing, etc. etc.

But the sells of electricity cars are exponential. Even if the numbers are low, with exponential numbers it will take less time that most think.

#69 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Book: Dedicated topic: Beyond Oil and Gas - Methanol economy » 2021-09-15 01:49:22

kbd512 wrote:

At a global scale, batteries don't work to power anything beyond laptops and cell phones.  Simple physics doesn't care about the feelings of our magical thinkers

But physics doesn't forbid anything of that. Biases does.

I see electric cars working perfectly now, and I didn't see "Mr Physics" appearing screaming to forbid it.

kbd512 wrote:

Every solar panel and wind turbine on the planet was made using fossil fuels.  That is a fact, whether anyone likes it or not.

What did you expect? You live in a world that works mostly on fossil fuels, so every industry, including renewable, using a lot of fossil fuels in the process.
But also uses electricity in a lot of steps of the process... And electricity has partially renewable based.
So, over the same argument, fossil fuels also use renewable energy embedded.

That's a sophism in a broader sense and doesn't means nothing. The thing is that the process to build renewable doesn't require fossil fuels. It uses because our current model uses.
It could need carbon materials and energy for sure. But that doesn't need fossil fuels per se.

In fact, most steps could be changed into electricity based alternatives that are more efficient with cheap electricity. Obviously, that isn't right if the electricity is fuel based from start, so the electricity generation is more wasteful than use the fuel directly in the industry.

But with renewable becoming more and more cheap, and fossil fuels becoming more and more expensive, there is a time where using renewable electricity in a electricity based industry is better and using fossil fuels in a burning fuel based industry.
Things like produce cement or steel will use a lot more electricity and a lot less fuel in next decades, because of the change of the energy mix of this future.

And the rhetoric of "renewable use fossil fuel" will turn false one step at a time.

As an argument about "because that renewable can't work" is flawed.

#70 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Are Fusion-Reactors Possible? » 2021-06-02 05:18:48

In physical terms, it is proved.

In technological terms, a fusion reactor that generate more energy that needed to function for long periods, it's yet to reach that goal, but there is progress on that research.

In economical terms, maybe it works, maybe not. It is soon to know that. But it will be harder that just meet the technological goal. At first sight, nuclear reactors seems they will be very expensive. Even if the fuel is cheap, the amortization and maintenance costs could make the economical goal unfeasible.

Like in most economic situations, the key to reach cheap energy could be the scale of deployment.

It's not the same deploy one of a kind reactor that fifty standard reactors.

But standardization could take time. So... more wait.

#71 Re: Terraformation » Is terraforming Mars impossible? Maybe not... » 2020-07-01 09:12:44

It's three orders of magnitude higher, but send volatiles from Jupiter are around 100-200 MJ per kilogram.

This is a backup plan if there is no enough volatiles on Mars to terraforming. The energy is a lot less if use near Mars objects but they are scarce and it needs to be moved through rockets

A Ganymede-Mars system could send volatiles using a rail launcher. No rocket equation is used here so just kinetic energy of a transfer orbit depending of planet positions. The decomposition of elements is not necessary. The kinetic energy is far above the requirement, so the impact or friction would be more than enough to do that.

Solar energy income is on the Petawatt scale so ignoring the economic problems of doing so enormous task (we can assume that we could develop a exponential robot workforce on space so the limit are resources and energy, not time)... Petawatt its the reasonable amount of power that we can use on Mars without generate other side problems.


I guess the best plan is use the most efficient way to reach minimal deployment of a semiterraformed Mars (life tolerant, liquid compatible) and use later the "unlimited resources" plan and import as much as needed to reach a complete Earth-biocompatible planet, with no water restrictions, nitrogen and oxygen.

#72 Re: Terraformation » Comet Harvesting: Water for Mars » 2020-04-21 04:12:41

I think that it would be easier to launch volatile "pellets" from a giant planet moon.
Ganymede for example.

It has no atmosphere, so they can put the ice on route easily with a cannon or a enormous rail-gun. With some small rocket "attached" (could use gravity drag, so no need to this attach to be spend in the collision), a multi ton rock with minor corrections could be easily targeted to Mars.

Launch as much as need... There is more than enough volatiles on that moons.

#73 Re: Terraformation » Can seawater on Earth be shipped to flood designated places on Mars? » 2020-04-07 05:50:51

Earth means a huge deep gravity well... a lot of delta-v.

There is plenty of places to get water... farther but with less energy cost.

And the gravity well means that without some megainfrastructure like space elevators or something like that, or a new kind of propulsion technology, you need to use chemical rockets to go beyond the well...

Total waste of resources.

A lot better to use rail launchers or tethers on outer moons or Ceres and use powerful engines only for minor corrections (or maybe even lasers to eject some material from the "asteroid pellets")
Consider that any terraforming project, even minimal means a LOT of mass.

#74 Re: Interplanetary transportation » Elon Musk: "It's game over for all the other heavy lift rockets" » 2020-03-09 11:37:24

Mark Friedenbach wrote:

You are only considering passively cooled designs. Starship will be using plain stainless steel with active cooling.

I think that the active cooling has been discarted from the first version of the Rocket.

#75 Re: Interplanetary transportation » Launch Loop for Moon or Asteroids » 2020-02-19 07:44:08

Terraformer wrote:

If you have cables that won't break under such strain.

It would seem to be far easier to just build a Lunar space elevator... the stress is far lower. It could be built of basalt.

I guess you didn't understand my idea, because the tensions are far lower than a space elevator.

I checked the numbers. Use 1g means too big tower, but 3g make a very reasonable idea.

I will explain again.

First, the principle is just like a gigant carousel, like a double sling , with seats attached to the top. Use two opposite launchs are just arbitrary to make it a central point of gravity. Another configurations are possible.

Using a gravity spin calculator

https://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/

I will use 1400 m/s as tangentian velocity as a orbital speed reference.
3g of "gravity" - because greater accelerations means less cable and lower tower (and the tower is high in any case)

It gets ~66,6215 km of radius.

This is for zero gravity.

Ok... This will be built on the Moon, so on the parallel plane, the launch objects needs to separate that 66.62 km from the tower to reach the 1400 m/s of tangential speed.

Because we are on the Moon, the cables won't be parallel to the surface. In fact, it will be in a triangle represented by the two perpendicular vectors. Pseudoacceleration (3g) and Moon gravity (~0,166g)
So... 66,62115*0,166/3~=3,6864 ...

The cable will be a total length of: sqrt(66,62115^2 + 3,6864^2) ~= 66.73 km

A tower 4km high could work.

It's very high. Higher that any tower in Earth (0.8298 today) but it would be just a structure AND Moon low gravity helps a lot.

So, we just attach opposite cargos to the both cables, we make it spin faster and faster while the cables extends up to 66.73 km (it will never touch the surface because at that speed, only will be at 4-3,6864 distance), with a increasing perception of acceleration (centripetal acceleration) and, just release.

1400 m/s. Enough to put in a orbital position. Although it would be better to have some propulsion and use the first orbit to raise the perihelium. It would be very, very low and a collision is possible in the next encounter with the lower altitude.

The weigth that the cables must endure are just the weight of cargo at 3g plus the weight of the cable.
Less than 70 km cable. Not too much.

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