Lithium used for batteries

Spaniard · 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.

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.

kbd512 · 2024-03-17 16:49:50

Spaniard,

Petroleum Limitations
Coal, oil, and gas will eventually run out. I don't know when exactly, and neither does anyone else, but no part of the Earth or any other planet is infinite. That is objectively true. From the petroleum engineers I've spoken to about this, their "best guess" is somewhere between 100 and 300 years from now at current consumption rates. Oil companies routinely L-I-E about their "proven reserves", because if you assert more than 25 years, it typically "gets nationalized". Regardless of who guesses correctly about the end of oil and gas, nothing lasts forever. You will never get any disagreement from me on that point.

It is NOT objectively true that we cannot synthesize more oil and gas, even coal, if we need to use it. I don't think this is the best solution, but I know that it will work. We've proven over and over again that we can do it, we simply don't want to, because it costs more money than extracting it from a well or a mine. Rather than providing the bulk of the energy, which is what it does for us right now, it should be one of many options that provides a minor percentage of the energy total, but by that I mean all energy sources should supply some minor fraction of the total, with no over-reliance on or over-investment into any particular technology, be it oil / gas / coal, solar, wind, nuclear, or hydro. People who only see one possible solution are myopic in their view of the world. They don't use cars, so they think nobody else should, either, or they only use cars and never walk, so they don't think consideration should be given to pedestrian traffic. That's very narrow-minded and silly.

Hydrogen Economy
Hysata has a water electrolyzer that uses capillary action to achieve 95%+ electrical efficiency at electrolyzing water. Other companies are now starting to replicate what they did using their own tech. This "reverse fuel cell" requires 41.5kWh to produce 1kg of Hydrogen. 1.135kWh of electricity is required to compress H2 to 700 bar. The total loss from storage is 7.875%. That is negligible. Lithium-ion batteries lose that much energy when charged, discharged, and the power run through a power inverter. The waste heat from H2 compression can provide hot water. Humans use lots and lots of hot water. In short, if it's practical to do using Lithium-ion batteries, then it's even more practical to do using Hydrogen. For catalysts, these fuel cells and reverse fuel cells are transitioning away from precious metals to very common materials like Iron and Carbon.

The combination of 10kW/kg+ Wright Electric or Emrax electric aircraft motors, 5.4kW/kg Toyota Mirai fuel cells, CNTRP 700 bar H2 storage tanks, and Hysata water electrolyzers means we can provide more power than jet aircraft, at a lower total weight. We don't have to invoke superconductors or liquid Hydrogen, or anything else. That existing commercial technology already beats gas turbine engines and kerosense, in terms of weight. After you've already proven that you can beat anything except a rocket engine in the power-to-weight department, there's not much left to prove.

Electro-Chemical Batteries, Photovoltaics, Wind Turbines
After 20 years of hoping that some revolutionary new battery technology was "just 5 years away", I gave up on this fantasy. As it pertains to electro-chemistry, we either lack the ability to identify materials with very high gravimetric energy density, we don't know how to build such batteries, or materials with the right properties simply don't exist. The metals and energy consumption of these devices is more than an order of magnitude higher than all the existing power generation and delivery infrastructure built over the past century. It's an absurdity that continues to make promises it can't keep.

If I thought we were in trouble with the consumption rates that we were already committed to, then these technologies took consumption to insane new levels. Asserting that the energy input doesn't matter is like asserting that burning through all remaining coal, oil, and gas doesn't matter, because that's what we're really talking about doing.

Nuclear Power
In theory, nuclear fission and fusion should be able to provide energy forever, but in practice we seem to have a very hard time with this. I don't know how much of it is ideology vs money vs technological limitations, but I know enough to understand that this industry is not making much progress at a global scale.

Future Energy Production and Delivery Mechanisms
Well, what does that leave us with?

I think solar thermal, geothermal, and nuclear thermal power plants (where and when they can be built), are the most obvious way forward. Fuel cells can already beat gas turbines and jet fuel on delivered power density, per unit weight, and sometimes on per-unit volume as well. The losses from H2 and 700 bar storage, using existing technology, are no worse than the losses from charged / discharged batteries and photovoltaics before the power ever touches the feeder wire into the electric grid.

Both Lithium-ion batteries and H2 are dispatchable / on-demand power. Human civilization, as it is presently constructed, requires that on-demand power is always available. We would have to build an entirely different society, from scratch, to run it some other way. For all kinds of reasons, that is unlikely to happen.

A polished Aluminum-plated surface can reflect and thermalize (convert into heat energy) 90% to 95% of all the photonic power striking it from the Sun. No special materials are required. Silver can do better still, but we should remember that all commercial photovoltaics are still around 25% efficient, give or take a few percentage points. The metal requirement to provide a given amount of input power using solar thermal is more than an order of magnitude lower than for photovoltaics and batteries. That is not something any amount of potential efficiency improvement can overcome.

Similarly, as Calliban has already pointed out, wind turbines made from natural materials can also convert wind energy directly into heat using water brakes or hydraulic pumping power. Energy converted into heat and stored as hot water for consumption is not lost, it's actually the most efficient way to use the power. It's real efficiency vs pseudo efficiency. Real efficiency says if you're going to build a wind turbine to generate electricity to ultimately heat an electric steam kettle, then you were probably better off directly producing heat and pouring it into your tea cup.

All this stuff leads back to power plants with central electric generators, but the power to spin the generator is heat or hydraulic energy, particularly hot supercritical CO2, a substance with the density of liquid water at very high temperatures, which reduces the size of the turbo on the turboelectric generator by 1 order of magnitude, as compared to steam.

Conclusions
Any plan that involves consuming 10X to 1,000X more material, when the rate of energy and materials consumption is the most pressing and immediately evident problem, is a very bad plan. It's tantamount to planning to fail. That is not what we should be doing.

Whatever technologies of the future we ultimately develop, they need to consume less material and energy, not more. This is not possible with existing photovoltaics, wind turbines, and electro-chemical batteries. That was merely one idea that has run its course and hasn't produced enough to keep up with the rate of increase of demand for energy. It's time for new and potentially better ideas.

Terraformer · 2024-03-17 17:25:06

Hmm... what does the Hyasta electrolyser mean for ammonia production? Significantly easier to store than hydrogen, so viable as a ship fuel and long term energy storage to cover the occasional week long gap in wind during the winter?

Certainly puts nitrogen fertiliser in the category of things we will still have in the future so don't worry too much about it. And of course there are other teams working on other methods for electrochemical ammonia and nitric acid production.

For storing hydrogen, those deep underwater bags proposed for compressed air storage might be an option. There's plenty of places on the earth that can provide 200+ bar pressure.

kbd512 · 2024-03-17 21:20:16

Terraformer,

Hysata, not "Hyasta" is an Australian company. The "magic" of Hysata's reverse fuel cell was eliminating air bubbles near the reaction sites by using a capillary action, similar to a plant or the human vascular system. That boosted the electrical efficiency from 70% to 80% to over 95%. That one minor detail had a disproportionate impact on overall efficiency.

Although their fuel cell produces H2 with remarkable efficiency, we have other boffins working on overturning Haber-Bosch. Lithium is the key to an efficient and fully reversible reaction for producing Ammonia. That's why we can't waste Lithium on batteries that get dumped into landfills. Haber-Bosch is a good bit more important to humanity than having battery operated cars.

The End of Haber Bosch

Spaniard · 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.

Calliban · 2024-03-18 08:57:25

I should be all over this thread, but I struggle to be bothered with it. We went through all of this greentech ideological nonsense with Louis. Hundreds of hours spent debating whether this or that green technology would save the world. Discussions would go round in endless circles, because he was emotionally attached to certain technologies and ideals and could not accept the results of analysis that showed it to be bogus. I suspect something similar is happening in this thread. It gets wearisome after a while and I don't have as much time as I used to.

Terraformer · 2024-03-18 09:12:41

Spaniard,

Why is technology that is moving into production now something we shouldn't stake our future on, yet hypothetical battery and mining technology are a valid reason to just assume we'll make batteries work?

And are you seriously claiming that unconventional oil is no more expensive than conventional wells? The price of oil is far higher in real terms than it was pre 70s. That efficiency improvements in cars have enabled people to keep driving doesn't negate this; you can only improve efficiency up to a theoretical maximum of 100%.

We've already reached peak conventional oil. The people who claim that prices go up as you have to switch to lower grade mines have not been proven wrong, they just didn't realise we could access the lower grades at costs that were still viable. Its not at all clear at what point the economy can no longer support the costs of extraction -- $8/kg copper is viable, but will $20/kg copper be? For certain applications I am sure. For everything that you want to do with it? Eh...

tahanson43206 · 2024-03-18 09:16:22

For Spaniard re recent posts, and all 89

Thank you for contributing to the forum since 2008, when you were (possibly?) still in college?

It is good to see you taking on such a robust contributor as Calliban.

However, it appears that Calliban is immune to the arguments you have raised so far.

It might help to tightly focus the discussion on any errors that Calliban is making. We all make errors, so I assume that Calliban is not immune.

However, we need a member who is able to operate at Calliban's level to identify any errors there may be, and then tightly focus on helping Calliban to overcome any mental blocks that may be interfering with his thought process.

Calliban has contributed 3330 posts since 2019. There must be an error somewhere in that body of work.

However, if you ** do ** find an error, the next challenge would be to convince Calliban. I expect you will find that exceedingly difficult.

(th)

Terraformer · 2024-03-18 09:20:56

th,

Calliban isn't the one making errors here...

Spaniard · 2024-03-18 10:02:19

Terraformer wrote:

Spaniard,
Why is technology that is moving into production now something we shouldn't stake our future on, yet hypothetical battery and mining technology are a valid reason to just assume we'll make batteries work?
And are you seriously claiming that unconventional oil is no more expensive than conventional wells? The price of oil is far higher in real terms than it was pre 70s. That efficiency improvements in cars have enabled people to keep driving doesn't negate this; you can only improve efficiency up to a theoretical maximum of 100%.
We've already reached peak conventional oil. The people who claim that prices go up as you have to switch to lower grade mines have not been proven wrong, they just didn't realise we could access the lower grades at costs that were still viable. Its not at all clear at what point the economy can no longer support the costs of extraction -- $8/kg copper is viable, but will $20/kg copper be? For certain applications I am sure. For everything that you want to do with it? Eh...

Numbers are more complicated than that, or otherwise we will be already pass the peak oil.

It doesn't matter "conventional oil" or "unconventional oil". It's oil, regardless of the origin, so the prediction ONLY focused on the worse grade of the source are lacking.
It's a bunch of variables, some doing the things worse, others doing the things better, happening all at the same time, and it's because that that it's so easy to do wrong numbers.
It's not "$8/kg copper". It's not fixed over time. With some technology, extraction costs are a number and with other technology are another.
It's not fixed even the energy cost of the extraction. Of course, the lesser the grade, the more energy you need to invest in extraction WITH THE SAME TECHNOLOGY.
Of course, I'm not claiming an ever reducing energy for extraction, which it's impossible. Just... Let's be prudent about the numbers, because this mistake was already done in the past.

At the same time, if the costs of the energy used in the mine go down, you can make it cheaper for the same money even with the same extraction technology.

Until now, renewable cost has being going down, regardless the raising costs of raw materials. One person how knew about a copper mine in Chile? if I remember ok, told me that recently they moved from fuel generators to solar energy. They made a custom solar plant near the mine and wired the mine from there. Of course they still have the generators, but that way they save a lot of fuel.

That's the kind of things that make the computations very complex and non-linear.

Anyway, it's not the aspect of saving in the extraction what I think will most probably occur in the case of copper, as copper is a very mature industry. It's not the same with lithium which the new levels of extraction are very recent.

I said that about copper just because it's possible and predictions have a significant margin of error.

But I think is just most probable that we reduce the copper consumption using aluminum, with a very interesting look over CNT cables or composites, as the market already exists. It's just current prices as completely out of consideration. But it's not about the source, but about the manufacture process, so a breakthrough that change that market is completely possible.

Also I remain open to ideas just out of consideration. I have being surprised more than once in the past.

The thing is, this is not a open usage model, but a circular economy model. If you consider a certain world population which we expect to peak, and a top consumption per capita that it has already peaked in USA and Europe, so it's a reasonable point, the materials needs remain flat instead of exponential.
And once you reach the high level of recycling, the demand of new raw materials just drops.
For an ideal 100% recycling, the demand is zero.
As an ideal scenario, we can't expect to be true, but just near levels could allows us to just add the remaining quantities from very disperse sources, as the needs are very low.

That's the circular economy goal.

As it, the total material need for the transition is fixed. It's not X per year, now and forever, until we exhaust the resources and then we collapse.
If we reach the goal, we win. We can sustain our civilization "forever".

And that X you are accounting (plus ALL around our society that require similar transformation) is doing linear projections, so a great margin of error here.

So my point is "perfect is enemy of good".

While current renewable model (including current state of resource extraction) is not good enough to be projected to a far future as is, it's good enough to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels and other resources.

Here has being pointed about copper and other resources. But I insist, the materials hasn't being consumed. They had being moved from the mine, to the products. Most of the lithium and copper is easier to be extracted from a used product than from the mine it came, so in that regard we are saving mining costs to the future, instead of making it worse.

The reason because the percentage of our copper is just one third recycled instead of a lot more is just than the copper with recycle today was the copper mined some decades ago where we were less people and used less copper per capita. In other words, we are still growing, so no matters if we recycle 100%, the percentage won't so high numbers if our consumption still grow.

BUT... that will only grow as we change from a fossil fuel civilization to an electricity civilization and our world developed to western standards and the population peaks.

While this happen, we must work in all of this, including reducing the usage of these elements. It's not like it were a natural law that said "PV require X copper per kwh". That's just a current state of technology.

Spaniard · 2024-03-18 11:20:05

tahanson43206 wrote:

For Spaniard re recent posts, and all 89
Thank you for contributing to the forum since 2008, when you were (possibly?) still in college?

At the end of 199x.

It doesn't matter. I read this kind of debate for a long time (more about oil, but very alike), and I can say almost never anyone change from their position no matter how absurd could be (not the case, but I hear things so absurd like the oil wells always refill and it is all a conspiracy and things like that).

Still, I think it has value as other people hear the different opinions, and sometimes, people reflect over their position even if they don't admit it or needs time to do it.

It takes me a lot of effort to write here so I guess I will "leave" (turn into a simple reader) sooner than later, as you can see, my English level is bad (and I guess it will ever be), and It takes me effort and time to do simple responses.

Anyway, I wanted to just leave some ideas that are less sound in Internet than in formal circles, like circular economy.

I'm completely sure you have know about it, but if you don't think carefully about the concept, you will soon conclude that our civilization is doomed because no matter you do, it will all end as soon as you exhaust the resources. And finite resources can't long with a fixed demand over an "infinite" time period.

But after observe the nature, you will soon see that the concept is flawed. Life has done fine over billions of years without exhaust anything.

So I insist. We need to change the concept of exhaustion for "resource accessibility". And old material is as valid source as the new mine.
When you understand that, a lot more about the renewable and current model has a lot more sense than with the kind of view of other people here.

I think it's the most important piece here. Even if I were in the wrong about the renewables will reduce their usage in raw materials and the model reach a point were material costs raise the price of renewable stopping that path of development, then we can just extract the resources from the renewables and try another idea later.

The second more important error is just dismiss the money numbers. Every cost, it's translated to the price. Subsides are generally just "we extract less money from here than from there" and subsides about renewables and EV are being reduced and removed over time, as it was always considered just a stating boost help, not a way to make it long term viable.

So, if renewable energy are competitive in money and EV are also competitive, it's because they work. And if hydrogen is too expensive, it's that the model is still lacking.
That didn't say anything about the future, of course. Raw materials could raise the prices by a lot and turn them uncompetitive again. Still, it's not the trend we show in the market.

So, instead of losing time searching for arguments against renewable, just spend effort to make it profitable whatever you think it can work. And if you thing NOTHING can work, I suggest you search an alternative way of life or just enjoy the life if you think that problems will come after you died. Otherwise you are just "a pain in the ass", instead of helping or offering alternatives just loosing your time explaining why the things won't work (while later it works).

It's not that it's not useful to find possible problems and bottlenecks to scale model. Of course it does. And that's a known problem for everyone it works inside. And that's the reason people is searching for solutions.
It's just there is no hard reason to think it's a unsolvable problem, as similar things has occurred in the past and the problem was solved or mitigated.

Calliban · 2024-03-18 17:40:27

We have been living under the peak oil dynamic for 50 years. US onshore conventional peaked in 1971 and was followed by the arab oil embargo in 1973. Ever since that time, the world has had to get by with more expensive oil. We have been locked in a tug of war, with depletion on one side and increased global reach and new technology on the other. New technology and globalisation have indeed unlocked new sources of oil. But they have been unable to replicate the cheap oil that the world economy had access to before 1973. In the 1980s, new technology opened up offshore drilling. It allowed access to a resource that hadn't existed before. But accessing that resource was inevitably a more complex operation, requiring a lot more capital.

Oil prices have trended upwards in inflation adjusted terms since 1973. They have also experienced periods of extreme volatility. This has suppressed economic growth and oil consumption growth in western countries. Until 1973, oil consumption was growing at about 5% per year. It is no coincidence that the period between 1945 and 1973, was a golden age of growth for OECD countries. It was a time of very cheap energy. Since then, things have gone a bit awry. The exponential growth in oil production ceased in 1973 and gave way to linear, incremental growth.

Terraformer was correct earlier that demand for commodities is limited by affordability. The relationship between energy consumption and economic prosperity is a virtual straight line. It takes a certain amount of energy to generate wealth, because wealth is invariably the result of energy acting on matter and rearrangeing it into desirable products. But this linear relationship also places a limit of affordability on energy. If it takes x units to make y units of wealth, there is clearly a limit to how much an economy can afford to pay. If that limit falls below production cost, then the energy source cannot be economically developed. But as time has moved forward, the energy cost of each unit of energy has gradually increased and EROI has gradually diminished. This is slowly strangling the life out of industrial economies.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-03-18 17:47:32)

kbd512 · 2024-03-18 18:58:51

Spaniard,

If hydrogen economy works, JUST MAKE IT WORKS! When the price become competitive, people will adopt them if it's better than the alternative.

JUST MAKE BATTERIES WORK without government mandates and tax incentives. Internal combustion engine vehicles didn't have to be mandated into existence by any governments. There were no tax incentives to buy them. Peter doesn't need to pay for Paul's fancy new Tesla EV when Paul makes three times more money than Peter. When the price of EVs becomes competitive with gasoline or diesel powered cars, people will adopt them if it's better than gasoline and diesel.

That logic falls apart immediately, based upon what we're presently doing. People are starting to see this on their own regadless of the marketing job behind EVs. It's a half-baked idea that still doesn't work well enough to be practical, never mind the most economical option. You pay more than twice as much for the same transportation device, and maybe you can make it worthwhile if you own it long enough. If the electric grid is still primarily powered by coal and gas, and in point of fact it is, then there's no environmental benefit to doing this, either. It's like Corn-based Ethanol. We don't need to wait another 20 years to figure that out. Most of the existing electric grids and most of the new-build energy supply is coal and gas, not nuclear, not wind turbines, not solar panels.

BEVs are something you build after you have a stable 24/7/365 electric grid with excess generating capacity.

I measure real progress and accomplishment by whether or not we're increasing or decreasing our reliance on coal, oil, and gas. Thus far, it's only increasing. If it never decreases over the next 20 to 40 years, then this was a colossal waste of resources and a miserable failure to boot.

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.

This is not about Copper, if for no other reason than there's not enough and never will be to electrify everything when so much metal is required that known reserves are laughably insufficient. It's the combination of all the new energy-intensive specialty metals and all the new energy consumption, which is predominantly coal and gas, no good way to recycle any of it without requiring more energy than it took to dig it out of the ground to begin with, and nothing but platitudes about the future or from the people who think it's such a great idea.

Do you understand the concept of "opportunity cost"?

I'm not a believer in zero-sum game theory, nor limited pie theory, but if you spent 10 years making a supersonic flying farming tractor, only to discover that practical tractors work best when driven slowly over the soil in the field to be tilled, that'd be a fairly significant waste of time and resources, wouldn't it?

It's not like you can get the time or money back.

If you spend time and money on non-solutions, you don't magically get more time and money to actually solve your problems. The value of money may be arbitrarily defined, but the value of labor and the energy required to create something new is certainly not arbitrary at all.

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"?

If the oil and gas industry is able to replace, or there is no problem with the resource, the model is valid, so what's the point to buying an EV?

This is another basic logic failure.

But I insist. YOU AREN'T EXHAUSTING NOTHING.

I insist that you are exhausting something. That would be the coal, oil, gas, metal, time, and money to make unworkably expensive, complex, and short-lived vehicles.

Almost none of the special metals used to make cell phones have ever been recycled one lousy time. Something like 95% of all cell phones, tablets, and laptops are sitting in a drawer somewhere or tossed in a landfill. You can only do that for so long before it becomes a problem.

There is no decline in hydrocarbon energy consumption at all. That's what we're actually exhausting. Thus far, production of these green energy machines has not kept pace with the increase in demand for energy, either. If you take away the coal, oil, and gas, then production of green energy machine production drops to zero. China doesn't make our green energy machines with sunshine and rainbows.

But even if we failed and ended all in landfills like you said (very exaggerated IMHO)... well... MINE THE LANDFILL.

If that's what we're reduced to, then we failed before we started, because that's where nearly all of the waste from these green energy machines is going- your local landfill. Nobody is "mining the landfill", because the energy cost of doing that exceeds the energy cost of mining virgin metal. Mining a landfill is merely another indicator that we've already failed. The notion that you can become more energy efficient by consuming orders of magnitude more materials, and therefore energy consumption, is not congruent with known physical principles.

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.

The objective should be to figure out how to make machines that last as long as practical, to obtain maximum benefits from creating them and using them, so we don't have to keep going back to the mine for more and more metals.

Sustainability, or what you call "circular economy", is a key part of any long-term viable economy. Nothing about what we're doing right now is remotely sustainable.

When battery operated vehicles were first proposed, I thought they were going to be the simplest and most maintainable motor vehicles imaginable, something you could work on with hand tools, a volt meter, and enough sense not to touch energized circuits. The batteries would be something that could be taken apart and individually serviced, the electrolyte replaced or topped up, the anode and cathode cleaned or reconditioned as needed, and then after no more work than what I did to service 12V Lead-acid batteries, and certainly less than an internal combustion engine, I can drive off in a car that's as good as new. You take your car to a garage for front-end alignments, brake jobs, and tire rotations, but that's about it.

No EV remotely similar to that was created by our automotive engineers.

Spaniard · 2024-03-19 01:39:41

Calliban wrote:

New technology and globalisation have indeed unlocked new sources of oil.

Don't dismissed it like it was a minor thing.
It's funny that for enforce your argument, you have posted a oil bell curve BEFORE THE FRACKING. Well. Fracking has been doing by USA mainly, so to understand that you need to zoom in USA after date.

Past-and-projected-US-crude-oil-production-by-location.png

Oil production curve was shattered by fracking. That's already in the past.

As I said, I'm not claiming a magical technology that allows to exploit ever shrinking fields or whatever. I'm saying that the predictions done assuming that technology has no effect are being wrong a lot in the past, assuming things like energy invested can only go up, because technology has a minor effect.

The original argument of peakoilers against that is that in a exponential curve, even make the reserves an order of magnitude greater, it doesn't change the timeline too much, as exponential growth eat that difference in a small period of time.

But that argument only works well against a open consumption model that can't recycle the fuels, because they are the source of energy, and an ever growing planet that it won't be the case, as the children per woman has already go down enough to stop the population growth (with exception of Africa, although we expect the same dynamic with their development).

In a flat consumption model of a world that doesn't grow and a circular economy that recycles the materials, an order of magnitude could be the difference between a non viable and a viable technology.

Spaniard · 2024-03-19 02:44:34

kbd512 wrote:

Spaniard,
If hydrogen economy works, JUST MAKE IT WORKS! When the price become competitive, people will adopt them if it's better than the alternative.
JUST MAKE BATTERIES WORK without government mandates and tax incentives.

Now we are moving the argument.
The problem is the tax incentives.

Tax incentives has a limited effect, and more or less all industries had a lot of help. Most of the current income blamed onto renewables is not because tax incentives but the model about pay for CO2 emissions.

You can claim as much as you like that renewables don't reduce CO2 emissions. They do. Everyone inside the industry that does the calculations know that, although of course non-official fossil fuel industry said a different thing. It's called propaganda.

Of course hydrogen economy has EVEN MORE incentives (in relative terms for the production) by the same reasons. The less developed is an alternative, the more incentives they have. It's a starting boost impulse, and it's a good idea to break the chicken-egg problem.

Still, you can find a lot of debate and number wars about who received more incentives and "shadow money", like the huge expend in geopolitical wars to ensure the oil market is not disrupted by local conflicts for example. Wars are not exactly cheap.

I said before and I will repeat now. The reason because CO2 emissions has being growing is because we have too little renewables. Expand the infrastructure to build renewables takes time, you know. And when the renewables added are less than the total growth of energy worldwide.

But renewable have the fastest growth (in percentage) of all energy sources, so it's matter of time that the growth of renewables will be faster than the growth of total energy, so in the end it will make fossil fuels peak.

I said before and you can find plenty of links, that there is a lot of predictions of very soon coal peak worldwide. And that's not because coal has a problem with reserves. It's the opposite. Coal is the fossil fuel with greatest known reserves of all fossil fuels.

kbd512 wrote:

Internal combustion engine vehicles didn't have to be mandated into existence by any governments. There were no tax incentives to buy them. Peter doesn't need to pay for Paul's fancy new Tesla EV when Paul makes three times more money than Peter. When the price of EVs becomes competitive with gasoline or diesel powered cars, people will adopt them if it's better than gasoline and diesel.

So... you propose the government don't intervene the market at all.

Will you say the same for hydrogen and nuclear?

Because nuclear is nothing without government support.

Or even oil without armies behind to ensure most important export countries.

I see here a lot of bias of one kind of solution against another.

Tax incentives are limited in the market effect. If the difference between both models were huge, like in the case of hydrogen, it won't work.
Of course, you could subside ALL hydrogen and make it work... until you run out of money. Not the case with renewables and EVs because THEY ARE WORKING, you liked or not.

This is not about Copper, if for no other reason than there's not enough and never will be to electrify everything when so much metal is required that known reserves are laughably insufficient. It's the combination of all the new energy-intensive specialty metals and all the new energy consumption, which is predominantly coal and gas, no good way to recycle any of it without requiring more energy than it took to dig it out of the ground to begin with, and nothing but platitudes about the future or from the people who think it's such a great idea.

All your argument around "renewable not working" is about lacking of materials.
Man... Study about copper recycling. You clearly are insisting in false arguments.

https://copperalliance.org/resource/copper-recycling/

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c08227

Do you understand the concept of "opportunity cost"?

I know... Do you?

Because you said things like...

If that's what we're reduced to, then we failed before we started, because that's where nearly all of the waste from these green energy machines is going- your local landfill. Nobody is "mining the landfill"

News for you.

We mining our landfills when it's profitable.

Try to search copper wiring of old cars in a landfill. Good luck if you find something.

Copper wiring is one of the things more easy to scrap. So easy that there are cases of cooper wiring theft in non permanent residences breaking walls if it's necessary.
No... for real. Check the news (I can assure you it's a real problem).

Batteries are a little more complex, because they need careful management. Some chemical formulas can burn if bad managed, so regular scrapping is out of consideration.
I have no precise data about how regular landfills treat batteries now when they receive them. I guess in some places they are only storage them until special facilities are build. In others, I guess they are burn, because that way they have a controlled fire instead of left allow and accumulate then with the risk of future greater fires if one start there.

But again... news for you. Facilities are starting to be built now.

https://theicct.org/us-ev-battery-recyc … es-sept23/

An example.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-release … 86245.html

Ascend Elements recovers up to 98% of the critical battery metals in used electric vehicle batteries and gigafactory manufacturing scrap. By recycling used lithium-ion batteries and scrap with its patented Hydro-to-Cathode™ process, Ascend Elements can reduce the carbon footprint of new electric vehicle battery cathode materials by up to 90%.

I admitted your landfill argument, because now it most the thing that happens. Why?

Because we lacked economy of scale. These facilities are able to process a lot of batteries per day. You don't want to build a facility like that and receive just dozens.
It's what it happens when you start. But the concept of circular economy is turning into reality very soon. We are on it just now.
In my country has started to operate a facility of this kind. The number of batteries was low, but growing fast, so now it has sense.
In other parts of Europe that are ahead of us they already had some facilities running for some years.

When I replied your "opportunity cost" argument, it's precisely because of this.
To mine minerals you have to move a lot of mass. Do you really thing that extract the minerals from a final product, were all is well packed, it takes more energy?
Seriously?

Of course there are some exceptions and that's the reason because the levels are not 99'99% but more like 90-98%. The dopping materials are spread on alloys or something like that, where extraction is complex. But, lithium and copper?
Easy peasy!

Over 95% recycling if they are sent to the right facilities.
The other 5% is not lost, but generally in a downgraded form that it's works worse than current reserves. How knows in the future, but for now it can be disposed.

In the end, I though we will ended like this.

With fixed positions assuming a different reality. I don't expect someone with a bias to change their position, but at least I can ask non-bias readers to check the different positions between me and you.

For example, check if it's real that renewables save energy. We will see soon, when coal will peak. A new argument will be created to dismiss that, of course, although it will be more difficult to believe.

One I expect in the future is "primary energy is shrinking because renewable is cannibalizating our energy mix".
It's the expected evolution from "the renewables doesn't remove fossil fuel consumption". When it will do, it will turn bad for them.

In fact, it will be the opposite. As more and more electricity take place of old fossil fuel, because electricity model is more efficient, of course we will require less to do the same, at least in the easier markets we replace (that it's logically the most profitable and where we are working first), like road transportation, house heating, or just electricity generation.

I was in this debate enough long to even predict their future arguments.

The other critical argument is about the recycling infrastructure. I think it's most to be expected to be big enough to recycle most of our consumption. The reason is simple. It's profitable because it takes less energy to recycle than dump the old product.
At least for metals.

Terraformer · 2024-03-19 03:01:44

Oil production curve was shattered by fracking. That's already in the past.

Oh cool. Good to hear that fracking returned us to the 1950 cheap oil era. Human ingenuity has overcome the tendency of lower grade ores and sources to cost more to mine, something the dour pessimists of peak oil never let themselves imagine could happen.

Spaniard · 2024-03-19 04:04:01

Terraformer wrote:

Oil production curve was shattered by fracking. That's already in the past.
Oh cool. Good to hear that fracking returned us to the 1950 cheap oil era. Human ingenuity has overcome the tendency of lower grade ores and sources to cost more to mine, something the dour pessimists of peak oil never let themselves imagine could happen.

It doesn't make backwards so far, but it was better than current oil replacement fields to continue the bell curve. Otherwise it wouldn't happen that bump in the curve, so the predictions failed.

But now the new actor that it's starting damaging the oil demand is EV shifting. Hybrid also helps, specially plugin-hybrids, as they can run in electric mode for short distances that are most of the daily usages.

That's the reason because now we are speaking that the new curve will be driven by lack of demand instead of lack of supply.

Last edited by Spaniard (2024-03-19 06:35:06)

kbd512 · 2024-03-19 11:37:12

Spaniard,

No, we're not "moving the argument". Wind turbines, photovoltaics, and batteries are being artificially propped-up by government "wealth redistribution" to wealthy people who don't need subsidies, in order for them to buy battery operated vehicles, home solar systems, and the like. If this form of your argument applies to fuel cells, then it also applies to batteries. The CO2 taxes are a circuitous attempt to pay for batteries.

If renewables reduced CO2 emissions, then at some point those emissions would go down, or at least wouldn't go up at a faster rate. Newsflash. They're not going down at all. The year-over-year rate of increase is not even slowing down. We have more renewables deployed today than we ever did in the past, but CO2 emissions keep going up.

Global CO2 emissions over time:

When reality doesn't suit the narrative, change the argument or claim that reality isn't real. We have more green energy now than at any point in time since the Industrial Revolution, especially in industrialized countries that previously polluted more, but CO2 emissions keep going up. Nothing to see here, folks.

Stanford University Report on Global CO2 Emissions:
Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels reached record high in 2023

The researchers estimate that the world's emissions of carbon dioxide will exceed 40 billion tons in 2023, including nearly 37 billion tons from fossil fuels. Overall emissions are up 1.1% compared to 2022 levels and 1.5% compared to pre-pandemic levels, continuing a 10-year plateau.

Duh. We're now burning stuff like it's going out of style to make these green energy machines. Solar actually provides power 11% to 13$ of the time. Wind generated power is 25% to 33%. There's no increase in storage to speak of, but when that inevitably has to happen to achieve anything, that is when metals shortages will become unavoidable reality, or this plan will fail.

Everyone inside the industry that does the calculations know that, although of course non-official fossil fuel industry said a different thing. It's called propaganda.

You think the oil and gas industry is the only industry capable of producing propaganda?

I'll take "Bridges for Sale in Brooklyn" for $1,000, Alex.

I said before and I will repeat now. The reason because CO2 emissions has being growing is because we have too little renewables. Expand the infrastructure to build renewables takes time, you know. And when the renewables added are less than the total growth of energy worldwide.

The reason CO2 emissions are growing is that we keep finding more and more ways to expend more and more energy. Batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars that weigh twice as much as gasoline powered cars, computer data centers in every city in the world, every has a smart phone.

When we're forced to do short term, medium term, and long term energy storage in a big way, for that other 60% to 70% of the time when renewables produce nothing, energy use of all kinds will skyrocket.

So... you propose the government don't intervene the market at all.

If the government is picking winners and losers, then I want the decision makers to understand and accept as gospel, the power laws regarding energy density and what that means to all the energy and materials wrapped up in the systems providing or consuming energy.

Will you say the same for hydrogen and nuclear?

Let's make some large city, somewhere in the world, run off of wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries for a year, without government subsidy, using only the money the residents living there can afford. No hydrocarbon fuel backups and no nuclear power. If they don't murder the people who subjected them to that asinine experiment and don't leave the city, then I'll consider that a success. I'll be delighted to be proven wrong, but I already know that I'm not.

Because nuclear is nothing without government support.

Wind turbines and solar panels are monuments to government subsidy and hydrocarbon fuel energy.

I see here a lot of bias of one kind of solution against another.

I see the same thing.

Tax incentives are limited in the market effect.

The CEO of Berkshire Hathaway disagrees with you. He's one of the richest men on the planet. I'm guessing you're probably not. You get more of what you incentivize. Shocking, but true.

Of course, you could subside ALL hydrogen and make it work... until you run out of money. Not the case with renewables and EVs because THEY ARE WORKING, you liked or not.

MY DEFINITION OF "WORKING", IS CO2 EMISSIONS GO DOWN, NOT UP. COSTS GO DOWN, NOT UP. SHOW ME ON THE CO2 EMISSIONS GRAPH ILLUSTRATED ABOVE WHERE THAT IS HAPPENING.

All your argument around "renewable not working" is about lacking of materials.

False.

I know... Do you?

From our conversation thus far, you seem to think EVs and renewables are "working", by your own definition of "working", that clearly does not consider CO2 emissions, materials availability, hydrocarbon fuel energy consumption to obtain the materials required, nor total cost.

You claim renewables and EVs are reducing CO2 emissions. The graph shown above plainly illustrates the exact opposite.

Copper wiring is one of the things more easy to scrap. So easy that there are cases of cooper wiring theft in non permanent residences breaking walls if it's necessary.

Copper recycling is not going to provide enough material when energy storage becomes mandatory.

Do you understand the difference between repurposing something that already exists, and having a demand so high that all the Copper metal presently available in the world is insufficient?

For example, if you need to triple the amount of electricity distributed to the residents in your city, do you think recycling the electric power transformers is going to provide enough metal to make the new power transformers capable of supplying three times as much electricity, or are you going to need more metal- metal that is not currently part of your existing power transformers which were "recycled" from your electric grid?

If I applied a modicum of logic, because I wasn't trying to be argumentative, I would just flat-out tell you or anyone else that more metal was required, and that we'd have to get it from somewhere, which was not solely limited to what we could recycle.

Ascend Elements recovers up to 98% of the critical battery metals in used electric vehicle batteries and gigafactory manufacturing scrap. By recycling used lithium-ion batteries and scrap with its patented Hydro-to-Cathode™ process, Ascend Elements can reduce the carbon footprint of new electric vehicle battery cathode materials by up to 90%.

Recycling the metals from the old EVs is a great start. They claim they can recycle the batteries from about 70,000 BEVs per year. The US sends 12 to 15 million cars to the junkyard every year. They're going to have to expand capacity by 214 times if all or most cars on the road in the US are BEVs, or build 214 new facilities of the same capacity.

I have no precise data about how regular landfills treat batteries now when they receive them.

Nobody does. That's the problem. I don't think it's impossible, I'm just mortified by how much more metals consumption and energy is required to make this scheme work, because well over 90% of the energy to make metal comes from burning hydrocarbon fuels, regardless of what you attempt to claim to the contrary. That's why CO2 emissions keep rising. If BEVs never existed, but we came up with some use case for the metal, that required a similar amount of metal, I would question it for the same reasons. It's consuming 10X more materials, because batteries have such absurdly low energy densities.

But the concept of circular economy is turning into reality very soon. We are on it just now.

When that doesn't work out the way you think it should, just remember that I've already told you why, you simply didn't want to accept the answer.

With fixed positions assuming a different reality. I don't expect someone with a bias to change their position, but at least I can ask non-bias readers to check the different positions between me and you.

Are you also capable of bias? Are your assumptions also capable of being proven wrong?

If you use an energy source that's 1,000X more dilute than hydrocarbon fuels, and batteries 50X less energy dense than hydrocarbon fuels, then you're going to need a lot more material to convert and use that energy. That's why you can stand out in the Sun all day, bathed in solar radiation, and survive. If you're exposed to 1 second of radiation from the core of an operating nuclear reactor, you'll be dead shortly thereafter.

When you use highly concentrated energy, regardless of what form that takes, converting and consuming it requires a lot less input materials and therefore energy. That is not an assumption on my part, it's an engineering fact, every bit as ironclad as the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

For example, check if it's real that renewables save energy. We will see soon, when coal will peak. A new argument will be created to dismiss that, of course, although it will be more difficult to believe.

Yes, unfortunately when there are no more hydrocarbon fuels available to convert into mass-inefficient energy generating and storage machines, we will see very quickly that growth drops to zero and the ability to merely sustain a population's present quality of life is greatly diminished, even if we now have fantastically more energy efficient machines.

In fact, it will be the opposite. As more and more electricity take place of old fossil fuel, because electricity model is more efficient, of course we will require less to do the same, at least in the easier markets we replace (that it's logically the most profitable and where we are working first), like road transportation, house heating, or just electricity generation.

All historical data disagrees with you on this point. No amount of energy efficiency can make up for a problem related to power laws, unless the energy generating or consuming machines in question are over 100% efficient.

At best, the increase in efficiency from using electricity is 50%. That's a big number, and it is meaningful, but it cannot overcome the problem of drawing your energy from sources that are 100X to 1,000X more dilute than what you were previously using. That's an unsolvable math problem. The answer is that you're either using a lot less energy, because far less is available to use, or you're consuming a lot more materials and input energy to transform the energy you do get into something usable with your selected technology set.

Tell you what, though. Let's see what happens over the next 10 years, and then revisit this topic at that time, if we're still here. If what you thought should happen, doesn't actually happen, then maybe it's because your assumptions are wrong.

Here are my assumptions:

1. Unless population goes down, then energy use inevitably goes up, unless everyone gets poorer or all technological progress stagnates, because poor people cannot afford to pay for expensive energy sources. This is empirically true, regardless of what anyone thinks about it. Taxes and inflation work the same way. Prices never go down over time, only relative to some point in time. If they ever truly go down or "reset", it's because something important was lost, such as the entire industrialized economy, which typically implies mass poverty and mass death, neither of which are desirable outcomes.

2. If there's a point to BEVs, then it's only when the electricity doesn't come from burning something to keep the grid from crashing when the Sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. That implies an explosion in dispatchable storage, because if 1% of the cars in the US were BEVs and they all plugged into superchargers at the same time, they'd exceed the grid capacity of the entire US. That means more energy generation, more power distribution, more metal, and a lot more money.

3. If we're not going to do short / mid / long term electrical or thermal energy storage in a big way, then we're going to burn something, so CO2 emissions won't go down, because even gas turbines don't instantly start supplying power the way batteries do. A grid dominated by wind and solar is a very intermittent and "peaky" grid that does not cooperate or play nice with all the electronics connected to that grid. That implies a massive increase in battery energy storage, a massive increase in battery metals consumption, and a massive increase in the input energy to make all those batteries. Here in Houston, they recently touted that Houston was powered by 100% renewable wind energy. That was an outright lie, though. Leftists have no reservations about outright lying when it suits their agenda or talking points. The gas turbines located downtown have never been shut off at any point in time, and they do in fact supply power to the City of Houston. I've walked by them numerous times, which is how I know that they're running. You can hear and smell them running. The reason they're always running is that whenever electric power generation falls off a cliff, as it is wont to do with wind, the grid would crash if the gas turbines weren't supplying energy. The rest of the time the city either finds a buyer for the power generated by their gas turbines or it dumps the power into the ground instead of onto the grid. It's insufferably stupid and silly. Reality hasn't changed, merely some peoples' perception of it.

4. The poor energy density of batteries is a very real problem, because it drives all related forms of consumption, especially energy consumption. If your battery pack is 1kWh/kg, as opposed to 200kWh/kg, then 5X less material and likely (not an absolute, but highly probable) 5X less energy input is required to manufacture equivalent storage. This is where Hydrogen shines. It's over 5kWh/kg at 700 bar. That's 26X greater than 200Wh/kg Lithium-ion battery packs. Actual Tesla battery packs are only 160Wh/kg, so 33X more energy dense. Even at 70% efficiency, I get 3,191Wh/kg. My storage device does not "self-discharge", nor does it lose capacity over time. The tank itself can survive 25,000+ charge/discharge cycles. The CNTRP tanks are tenatively rated at 50,000 cycles, but after 1,000,000 fully reversing stress cycles, NASA gave up on breaking CNT. There are no batteries that can do that. A Telsa battery to store 24MWh of energy weighs 150,000kg. The H2 plus H2 storage tank mass is 7,521kg. That means I can store 480MWh of power for the same 150t of material mass as Lithium-ion batteries.

What does that mean to a "circular economy"?

That means people who use circular reasoning will be stuck in their circle, while those of us who recognize the futility of their endeavor, will pass on our H2 tanks to our children. Your batteries might last 8.2 years with 1 complete charge / discharge cycle per day. CFRP tanks will last 68.5 years. CNTRP tanks will last 137 years.

That's the difference between my "linear thinking" and your "circular thinking". Over the next 137 years, you have to completely rebuild your storage system 16 times if you insist on using batteries. I only have to build an energy storage solution once. I can only shrug when I think about how much time and energy will be sunk into recycling batteries 16 times. Linear thinkers like to solve problems and then move on to solving the next most pressing problem, which is why we use straightforward math and workable solutions. We don't demand more performance, energy, and/or materials than are reasonably available. We don't stubbornly insist something is working when the prima facie evidence (CO2 emissions in this case) shows that it's not. We don't search for exceptions to the rule to assert that something is working the way we think it should. We use generalizations, we use context, and we use quantifiable analyses to evaluate assertions, rather than vague generalities about future improvements to technology solving present problems, because we know that all the major gains tend to be very front-loaded for any new technology, and then smaller incremental gains in efficiency or cost reductions are gradually made over time.

There is no amount of electrical efficiency that can overcome a mass advantage that great. When you start scaling up to global scale, mass / weight of materials, and the kinds of material required, actually matter. H2 storage is mostly plastic and Carbon Fiber.

5. The reason we don't recycle more metal than we presently do, is because it's not terribly profitable when compared to new production. It makes a lot of sense for other reasons, though, such as not running out or chasing after very low-grade ores. Aluminum, Copper, and Iron (steel) are the most recycled metals on the planet. Everything else is a very distant second. 50% of all mining energy consumption and all mining tailing waste is from Copper production. All other metals account for the rest, even though Iron is the most produced metal, accounting for a much greater tonnage of metal than all other metals combined. We've already discussed why Aluminum is a poor substitute for Copper, and it ties back to energy input. If our energy generating and consuming systems require 10X to 1,000X more metal, then our energy consumption will be dominated by mining. Energy available for all other uses will then have to compete with mining, because only through a massive increase in production can we supply the quantities of metals being demanded by renewables.

I don't want to turn large swaths of Earth into a Copper mine or Aluminum smelter to pursue an ideological goal. People who think this is acceptable really should visit these sites.

Anyway, basic physics will eventually win. It always does.

Calliban · 2024-03-20 01:59:21

This article by natural resource investors Goehring & Rozencwajg, explains why EVs are a considerably less energy efficient solution than what they are replacing - ICEs.
https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/the-norwegian-illusion

This is due to the extremely high energy expenditure required to manufacture the battery and the need to charge an EV with electricity, rather than a fuel. The distinction is that it takes 2 units of natural gas to make 1 unit of electric power. Even though the EV electric motors are more efficient than an ICE, the energy losses in generation, transmission and charging, mean that overall efficiency is about the same. But the EV becomes less efficient when the additional energy needed to manufacture the battery (not to mention extra weight) is accounted for. EVs do provide a real advantage of removing pollution from street level. But from an energy efficiency standing, we would be better off with ICEs running on compressed natural gas.

It should surprise no one that a growing renewable energy contribution is resulting in increased CO2 emissions overall. Wind and solar power generating systems require 10-100x more refined materials per unit energy produced. Those refined materials are things like steel, concrete, aluminium, glass and copper. All very energy intensive to produce and largely produced in China, using coal based energy. Making and installing this infrastructure represents an energy cost that will take several years to break even. When the RE system does start generating, it doesn't replace a gas turbine or coal burning plant, because of the intermittency problem. What it will do is reduce the fuel consumed in the powerplant, by up to 1/3rd for a 100% matched capacity. That reduces CO2 emissions at point of use. But it will take a long time for the reduction in CO2 output from the GT to compensate for the CO2 emitted during the building of all this stuff. If we are building a lot of new RE infrastructure, we would therefore not expect to see CO2 emissions drop against the baseline.

I will come back to the points made about peak oil & shale later.

Spaniard wrote:

You can claim as much as you like that renewables don't reduce CO2 emissions. They do. Everyone inside the industry that does the calculations know that, although of course non-official fossil fuel industry said a different thing. It's called propaganda.

They do marginally reduce CO2 emissions at the point of use. They displace output from dispatchable electricity sources like GTs and hence, reduce the amount of fuel that is burned. No one is arguing that that isn't the case. But they don't replace the GT. It still has to be there, built, manned and maintained, ready for when the wind turbine or solar plant stops generating. When you add up the residual emissions from the backup GT and the emboddied energy of the GT and renewable energy system, you end up with more emissions overall than the GT would have contributed as the sole means of power generation. The problem is compounded by the fact that wind and solar powerplants consume a lot more refined materials than an equivelent fossil or nuclear plant. China is able to produce those materials cheaply. But the energy used is dominated by coal.

When we talk about the CO2 emissions of a renewable energy source connected to the grid, we need to consider the emboddied energy of all the infrastructure involved and the fuel used by the backup plant, because that plant is an integral part of the energy system.

Spaniard wrote:

Of course hydrogen economy has EVEN MORE incentives (in relative terms for the production) by the same reasons. The less developed is an alternative, the more incentives they have. It's a starting boost impulse, and it's a good idea to break the chicken-egg problem.

Hydrogen as a synthetic fuel deserves seperate consideration in another thread. We are already diverging from the topic which is 'Lithium used for batteries'.

But on the topic of grid energy storage generally. Any energy store is effectively a power station, that sucks in excess electricity as 'fuel' when there is too much and spits out electricity as product when there isn't enough. Whatever that energy store happens to be, it will incur losses in operation, reducing the energy efficiency of the system overall. It also has its own emboddied energy and material costs that are on top of those that exist for the RE powerplants. So substituting storage for backup plants gives us a different problem.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-03-20 03:22:38)

Terraformer · 2024-03-20 04:16:13

Talking about the material consumption... leaving aside the energy use, how does the labour use compare? "100,000 green jobs" is not something to be proud of, each of those jobs represents an energy price increase. How many people need to be employed in rebuilding the energy infrastructure every decade or so?

As far as spinning reserve for grids is concerned, I'm not too worried. Flywheels don't require any scarce materials, at least not in large quantities. The british national grid has a few projects in the pipeline to use them for grid stabilisation (of course, ideally they'd be colocated with the intermittent sources so the frequency response comes where the power enters the system...). Expensive, but we only need a few minutes of storage before other cheaper sources can come online, and flywheels last for a looong time. Between those projects and the liquid/compressed air schemes, I think we'll have a grid that at least fails gracefully. Rolling blackouts with a few hours warning instead of crashing...

Regarding longer duration storage, one thing that is glossed over in discussions is how frequently they will be cycled. Flywheels could easily be cycled thousands of times a year, because they buffer very short term fluctuations; the sort of 50hr storage we'll need to run the grid on wind might be cycled only a hundred times a year at best. So it needs to be very cheap in order to pay for itself over a reasonable timescale. AFAIK only underwater CAES approaches that sort of cost; hydrogen is still about twice as expensive, and suffers terribly from low roundtrip efficiency (though this was before the Hysata electrolyser was unveiled). Energy Storage Cost and Performance Database -- Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. People will try to argue batteries are still somehow better, but they're arguing with the Department of Energy when they do so, not just with me.

Last edited by Terraformer (2024-03-20 05:35:00)

Spaniard · 2024-03-20 11:59:54

kbd512 wrote:

Spaniard,
No, we're not "moving the argument". Wind turbines, photovoltaics, and batteries are being artificially propped-up by government "wealth redistribution" to wealthy people who don't need subsidies, in order for them to buy battery operated vehicles, home solar systems, and the like. If this form of your argument applies to fuel cells, then it also applies to batteries. The CO2 taxes are a circuitous attempt to pay for batteries.
If renewables reduced CO2 emissions, then at some point those emissions would go down, or at least wouldn't go up at a faster rate. Newsflash. They're not going down at all. The year-over-year rate of increase is not even slowing down. We have more renewables deployed today than we ever did in the past, but CO2 emissions keep going up.
Global CO2 emissions over time:
https://ourworldindata.org/images/publi … -image.png
When reality doesn't suit the narrative, change the argument or claim that reality isn't real. We have more green energy now than at any point in time since the Industrial Revolution, especially in industrialized countries that previously polluted more, but CO2 emissions keep going up. Nothing to see here, folks.

You are blinding yourself showing so much data.
How do you expect to see the effect clearly in a phenomenon that happens pretty much the last years in a image that have data from 1750?

Let's me show you WITH THE SAME SOURCE AND THE SAME TOOL, two different images.

Window with the data from 1960-1980

Window with the data from 2002-2022 (2022 is the last year the web have data)

I don't know you, but I see there the growth of the emissions are slowing.

And if you go through deep in the data, the emissions in the firsts years of 200x the data are mainly drive by shift from coal to gas. The renewable were too small there to make any impact that days.

But because the renewables are growing exponentially, if you project the data to the future, you will see that emissions will peak soon.

Of course depends on more variables. The global growth is an important one. If suddenly the world started to grow very quickly, renewables would need more time to reach a point where they add more than the growing needs of energy, so emissions would continue to grow until reach that point.

It's so important that if economy regresses, it also drops emissions like it happened with the COVID, where a anomaly bump in the data happened. Not that I want that, of course.

The researchers estimate that the world's emissions of carbon dioxide will exceed 40 billion tons in 2023, including nearly 37 billion tons from fossil fuels. Overall emissions are up 1.1% compared to 2022 levels and 1.5% compared to pre-pandemic levels, continuing a 10-year plateau.
Duh. We're now burning stuff like it's going out of style to make these green energy machines. Solar actually provides power 11% to 13$ of the time. Wind generated power is 25% to 33%. There's no increase in storage to speak of, but when that inevitably has to happen to achieve anything, that is when metals shortages will become unavoidable reality, or this plan will fail.

Man. Reread the own text you have quoted

"continuing a 10-year plateau"

Why do you thing the emissions will plateau (and that's a conservative projection), instead of increase, if we continue to increase the global economy?

Because two things. One... we will go, step by step, from thermal to electricity, and some things are just done with less energy than before.
Two. More and more electricity will come to renewables.
Even that text accepts that we will add energy without growing emissions (per year).

And as I said before... that's depends on the global growth. And of course, the speed of renewable deployment. But there is no reason to be pessimistic in this last one condition at least in short term, if no serious economic war USA+Europe vs China arises.

It's also curious you don't show the images your own post

s20_coal_oil_gas_cement_usa_withforecast_0.png.webp?itok=gBwlqUXM

s20_total_usa_withforecast_0.png.webp?itok=9sXtF6mG

I see a clear down trend on coal usage and emissions.
Yep. USA, not worldwide, as not every country invest the same in renewables. Richer countries with more developed electricity networks have less problems integrating a certain percentage of renewables without further upgradings in network or storage.
Partially also because coal to gas transition. That's also true. A mix of variables.

But if the prices in renewable and upcoming storage continues going down as expected, we will see even easier integration in the future, making a lot easier to spread to other places.

The reason CO2 emissions are growing is that we keep finding more and more ways to expend more and more energy. Batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars that weigh twice as much as gasoline powered cars, computer data centers in every city in the world, every has a smart phone.

Please, check again the previous images.

While it's still a minor part, I think USA is not bad a bad reference in adopting EV and very recently renewables, even if they are behind Europe.
And as you can check in the data, the emissions already peaked.

When we're forced to do short term, medium term, and long term energy storage in a big way, for that other 60% to 70% of the time when renewables produce nothing, energy use of all kinds will skyrocket.

We haven't speaking about storage yet. But a full deployment of a 100% renewable network it will use a mix of strategies that reduces the cost a lot.
Intelligent demand (can go down and go up depending on the cost), continental integration, overproduction (cheap renewables allows certain levels of curtailment by less price that insist in enormous storage), mix of storage oriented to efficiency (like batteries, but with a fixed power/energy ration with less efficient more cheaper storage cost like power to fuel solutions, including hydrogen, oriented to create reserves for worst case scenarios), etc.

The integration of all this things at the same time (and some others), allows to develop a model with a reasonable cost.

If you multiply the energy needed under a fixed place just by some storage technology alone you will reach unreasonable values.

Wind turbines and solar panels are monuments to government subsidy and hydrocarbon fuel energy.

Until it doesn't.

You are asking a baby to do the work of an adult. We are living in a world were most of the energy come from fossil fuels, so of course, the energy used to build the renewables comes mostly from fossil fuel.

If the machines used to install the renewables uses gasoil, the transport energy will come from fossil fuels. If it were use batteries (or green hydrogen as you like it more), then it will come from electricity, which it will be a mix.
If the electricity is run mainly on coal and or gas, they it will still come from fossil fuels (although not oil, which could be important for accessibility), but if it comes from renewables, then it doesn't.

It's a chicken-egg problem, that it's solved with a progressive shift towards renewable energy. The more renewable percentage we have, more false is the argument.

The CEO of Berkshire Hathaway disagrees with you. He's one of the richest men on the planet. I'm guessing you're probably not.

I'm not. But Elon Musk is.

And?

Of course a CEO is just the voice of his business.
Tell me where a business put their money and I will say you what we will hear from its CEO.

Of course, you could subside ALL hydrogen and make it work... until you run out of money. Not the case with renewables and EVs because THEY ARE WORKING, you liked or not.
MY DEFINITION OF "WORKING", IS CO2 EMISSIONS GO DOWN, NOT UP. COSTS GO DOWN, NOT UP. SHOW ME ON THE CO2 EMISSIONS GRAPH ILLUSTRATED ABOVE WHERE THAT IS HAPPENING.

Well... You post a link with the previous image from USA with emissions going down before, so...

From our conversation thus far, you seem to think EVs and renewables are "working", by your own definition of "working", that clearly does not consider CO2 emissions, materials availability, hydrocarbon fuel energy consumption to obtain the materials required, nor total cost.

My definition of "working" is, "I can buy it and the price is good for me". The projections I do myself, it's already posted. I don't think the materials used are a fixed thing neither the reserves are also something so fixed, so my position is that the projections you do are wrong.

You claim renewables and EVs are reducing CO2 emissions. The graph shown above plainly illustrates the exact opposite.

We clearly are seeing different things, because I see a slow down in emissions, and besides that the impact of renewables are in the projected future, not now. Not when renewable only accounts for a minor percentage.

But you can see all kind of projections, and the conclusion is always the same. More renewables, less emissions.

https://totalenergies.com/sites/g/files … 023_EN.pdf

Note that in this report, coal peak before 2030 in every scenario (like I said), while total emissions depends a lot in each scenario.

While the first, with more emissions is projected as "Current Course and Speed", my opinion is that we are gonna accelerate, and the real scenario will more more similar to something between "Momentum" and "Rupture" scenarios, based on price still going down for renewable and EVs.

Copper recycling is not going to provide enough material when energy storage becomes mandatory.
Do you understand the difference between repurposing something that already exists, and having a demand so high that all the Copper metal presently available in the world is insufficient?

The recycling argument is not used against the need per unit, but against the "we are wasting our reserves" and, also push the argument "we need a fixed amount to do the transition".

Still, it has a significant impact in consumption with mixed with the other argument.

Under price pressure, technology and market will push for substitution. Notice that raising price (long term) require bad projections in the extraction market. But let's assume is the case.
So the price rise, and over a pain threshold, manufactures quickly push for changes. (It can come before, but in worse case scenario they will react later).
For example, replace copper wiring with aluminum wiring and solve and mitigate the problems that came with the change.

Let's say that this allow the EV to use half of the amount.

Well... When you scrap the old cars, you can build almost two cars for each old car scraped.

For example, if you need to triple the amount of electricity distributed to the residents in your city, do you think recycling the electric power transformers is going to provide enough metal to make the new power transformers capable of supplying three times as much electricity, or are you going to need more metal- metal that is not currently part of your existing power transformers which were "recycled" from your electric grid?

That's depend on the power per resource ratio which you believed constant and I don't.

Recycling the metals from the old EVs is a great start. They claim they can recycle the batteries from about 70,000 BEVs per year. The US sends 12 to 15 million cars to the junkyard every year. They're going to have to expand capacity by 214 times if all or most cars on the road in the US are BEVs, or build 214 new facilities of the same capacity.

A mix of both, I guess. Pretty sure we are already in the way, because like I said before, as the resources are valuable, that's a clear business.

The cars takes time to be retired, so while they are more than 2 millions EVs in USA but deployed on a exponential curve, as most are recent, so I guess current number of batteries retired still remains around a hundred thousand at most, although growing quickly.

Nobody does. That's the problem. I don't think it's impossible, I'm just mortified by how much more metals consumption and energy is required to make this scheme work, because well over 90% of the energy to make metal comes from burning hydrocarbon fuels, regardless of what you attempt to claim to the contrary. That's why CO2 emissions keep rising.

You are insisting in that argument where we clearly disagree.

CO2 emissions are growing because the world still grows (using still fossil fuels), and renewables are still too small. But because they grow faster than the world growth, the distance is narrowing.

If BEVs never existed, but we came up with some use case for the metal, that required a similar amount of metal, I would question it for the same reasons. It's consuming 10X more materials, because batteries have such absurdly low energy densities

Again "consuming". But no.

If you use an energy source that's 1,000X more dilute than hydrocarbon fuels, and batteries 50X less energy dense than hydrocarbon fuels, then you're going to need a lot more material to convert and use that energy. That's why you can stand out in the Sun all day, bathed in solar radiation, and survive. If you're exposed to 1 second of radiation from the core of an operating nuclear reactor, you'll be dead shortly thereafter.
When you use highly concentrated energy, regardless of what form that takes, converting and consuming it requires a lot less input materials and therefore energy. That is not an assumption on my part, it's an engineering fact, every bit as ironclad as the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

If energy density where the most critical factor in every scenario, we would use nuclear cars, not ICE or electric cars.

They reason why use batteries on cars is a good idea, it's because it's very efficient from source to the actual movement. Current hydrogen model has a lot more loses, and e-fuels even greater.
That's the reason because refueling a ICE car is a lot more expensive that recharge a electric car in a garage.

And that's the reason because hydrogen is SO expensive. If you don't change that, then they will never be competitive in this sector.

For example, check if it's real that renewables save energy. We will see soon, when coal will peak. A new argument will be created to dismiss that, of course, although it will be more difficult to believe.
Yes, unfortunately when there are no more hydrocarbon fuels available to convert into mass-inefficient energy generating and storage machines, we will see very quickly that growth drops to zero and the ability to merely sustain a population's present quality of life is greatly diminished, even if we now have fantastically more energy efficient machines.

Oh! The "cannibalization" argument!
Here it is! So soon! X-D

Emissions goes up -> renewables don't work!
Emissions goes down -> renewables eat our fossil fuels!

Whatever it happens, you will criticize renewables.
But the thing is that fossil fuel will peak still having reserves at prices we could pay. Just... higher than the alternative.

All historical data disagrees with you on this point. No amount of energy efficiency can make up for a problem related to power laws, unless the energy generating or consuming machines in question are over 100% efficient.

Historical data is based in high growth and slow efficiency gains.

I'm talking about going from thermal to electricity in a possible slow growth scenario. It's not ensured but it's possible.
Although the graphs will depend a lot if they adjust the data to account the difference between both sources or not. With the right weight the reduction won't be shown.
But if you account twh of the thermal energy of the burning fuel vs twh electricity produced by renewable, it can host a significant reduction. After all, you need 2 to 3 thermal units of coal to generate 1 twh electricity that accounts as that in the renewable side (if you account it as that).

Of course that affects on sectors where fossil fuels are used to generate electricity or transportation where EVs has a higher efficiency chain, or when it's low heat, where heat pumps are used. That's where we will start the electrification because it's easier and more efficient. High temperature is just 1:1, so there I don't expect big gains. The only gains could come from side changes (some materials instead another), so when we reach that stage, I don't expect reduce energy, but I expect transition (electricity instead of fuel) because by then, renewable electricity could be cheaper than fossil fuels used as a thermal source. We need lower prices of renewable for that, of course.

Tell you what, though. Let's see what happens over the next 10 years, and then revisit this topic at that time, if we're still here. If what you thought should happen, doesn't actually happen, then maybe it's because your assumptions are wrong.

I don't know if I could remember a appointment for so long X-D, but... Sure!

My bet is... If the growth is slow (5% or less) and there is no big disruption of renewable installation (USA+Europa vs China) coal will peak. Oil probably too. Gas it will depend of the storage evolution. Probably we will need more time to start a significant deployment of cheap storage. Next years I expect evolution in pilot plant and some installations heavy subsidized in experimental phase. The reduction cost will push the next decade exponential growth into significant reductions of natural gas.

Total emissions will probably peak some years after the coal & oil peak (3-5 years). That's when natural gas growth won't be enough to emit more than coal and oil reductions.

1. Unless population goes down, then energy use inevitably goes up, unless everyone gets poorer or all technological progress stagnates, because poor people cannot afford to pay for expensive energy sources. This is empirically true, regardless of what anyone thinks about

I disagree about being "empirically true". But also depends on the scenario or accounting method, so it's easy to claim victory. I though the worries were about emissions, not about the total energy.
I can bet for emissions. I won't do for total energy.

it. Taxes and inflation work the same way. Prices never go down over time, only relative to some point in time. If they ever truly go down or "reset", it's because something important was lost, such as the entire industrialized economy, which typically implies mass poverty and mass death, neither of which are desirable outcomes.

Pretty negative, but also a tricky bet, as you can blame renewables for a thing that could came from fossil fuels.
Still... I think negative scenarios could came more easily from geopolitical conflicts than lack of resources.

Of course, if a nuclear war arises, all our projections are trash.
But even just economic cold wars can create a huge disruption in the positive projections. Unavoidable, but unpredictable.

2. If there's a point to BEVs, then it's only when the electricity doesn't come from burning something to keep the grid from crashing when the Sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. That implies an explosion in dispatchable storage, because if 1% of the cars in the US were BEVs and they all plugged into superchargers at the same time, they'd exceed the grid capacity of the entire US. That means more energy generation, more power distribution, more metal, and a lot more money.

I expected different prices that it will push more people to change their habits. I think in USA there is plenty of people with the possibility to adopt home charging or in community garages.
I accept that the other model cost more. I never say anything against that. But because that kind of adoption, in case of happening, it will be later in time, we will have more possibilities.
The "extra" dispatchable battery is pretty much a second battery of almost the same size, when there is no free charge. I expect the network to have more storage than that because the high volumes of renewable energy generation.

I'm thinking in some days of energy storage. Not that you need that from start, when you still have a mix of technologies. With just a few hours of storage the reduction of natural gas consumption will be large. For remove natural gas completely, we will need forms of storage that decouples power and energy (batteries only have a good amortization under the profile of hours of storage).

Others like air to liquid or similar are fine for multiple days, while power to gas including hydrogen to generate a reserve for emergencies.

3. If we're not going to do short / mid / long term electrical or thermal energy storage in a big way, then we're going to burn something, so CO2 emissions won't go down, because even gas turbines don't instantly start supplying power the way batteries do. A grid dominated by wind and solar is a very intermittent and "peaky" grid that does not cooperate or play nice with all the electronics connected to that grid.

Ok. I already post my bet.
Cheap batteries for some hours. 30$/Mwh per cycle (not current cost, but future costs over cheap batteries like sodium-ion)
Air-liquid and similar for some days. 50-70$ mwh per cycle
Synthetic fuel/hydrogen. 120$/Mwh (include energy)

Take something like you store cheap energy (future costs, slightly cheaper than today) 20$/Mwh

So direct consumption is 25-40$ depending on solar & wind mix (includes minor curtailment)
Stored energy: Batteries+energy 30+35 -> 60 Mwh
Stored energy: Air+energy 50-70+35 -> 85-105 Mwh
Fuel reserves: 120 Mwh (no need to add)

I expect something like that. Of course, inflation adjusted.

The needs doesn't go further because I consider that intelligent demand also exists, so not all is provided by the supply side. Also integrated storage in the demand. For example, a industry that have their own heat storage to demand some energy when it's more cheap (that it's when the supply is direct).

40% of the time direct consumption+ 30% battery (daily balance) + 25% secondary storage (weather balance) + 5% reserves (peaks demand - little production for too long . Out of average)

Too precise, so I expect a significant margin of error, but that's how I imagined.

If you ask me explain this data, I don't think this is the best thread for that, but I can do it (it's not so long)

--- IT SEEMS THE SITE DOESN'T ALLOW BIGGER POSTS ---

Edit: It seems it's not that. For some reason I get Internal error with that part. I swear there is no offensive words or something like that. I don't know what's the problem, but I get a "Internal error" posting the second part.

Last edited by Spaniard (2024-03-20 12:13:56)

Spaniard · 2024-03-20 12:20:33

That implies a massive increase in battery energy storage, a massive increase in battery metals consumption, and a massive increase in the input energy to make all those batteries. Here in Houston, they recently touted that Houston was powered by 100% renewable wind energy. That was an outright lie, though. Leftists have no reservations about outright lying when it suits their agenda or talking points.

Based in what I said before.
Sodium-ion. Pretty much no copper or lithium.
Liquid air. Also nothing special. The big storage are the big tanks.
The same for fuel reserves. Except perhaps the fuel cells. Burning is also possible but here are needed more numbers to see if it's really worth it.

The gas turbines located downtown have never been shut off at any point in time, and they do in fact supply power to the City of Houston. I've walked by them numerous times, which is how I know that they're running. You can hear and smell them running. The reason they're always running is that whenever electric power generation falls off a cliff, as it is wont to do with wind, the grid would crash if the gas turbines weren't supplying energy.

That's another reason because batteries helps a lot. They can going up and down near instantaneously.
Even before we try to replace natural gas for helping in fill the holes, batteries will be added sooner to be a better services in this fast response to grid.

4. The poor energy density of batteries is a very real problem, because it drives all related forms of consumption, especially energy consumption. If your battery pack is 1kWh/kg, as opposed to 200kWh/kg, then 5X less material and likely (not an absolute, but highly probable) 5X less energy input is required to manufacture equivalent storage. This is where Hydrogen shines. It's over 5kWh/kg at 700 bar. That's 26X greater than 200Wh/kg Lithium-ion battery packs. Actual Tesla battery packs are only 160Wh/kg, so 33X more energy dense. Even at 70% efficiency, I get 3,191Wh/kg. My storage device does not "self-discharge", nor does it lose capacity over time. The tank itself can survive 25,000+ charge/discharge cycles. The CNTRP tanks are tenatively rated at 50,000 cycles, but after 1,000,000 fully reversing stress cycles, NASA gave up on breaking CNT. There are no batteries that can do that. A Telsa battery to store 24MWh of energy weighs 150,000kg. The H2 plus H2 storage tank mass is 7,521kg. That means I can store 480MWh of power for the same 150t of material mass as Lithium-ion batteries.

The reason why I don't consider hydrogen as a primary storage system is because their low roundtrip efficiency.
Yeah... I know your claim about that ultraefficient generation. Let's wait for confirmation in a real environment (at least a pilot plant).
The cost of the infrastructure is also important. It doesn't matter if it's 95% efficient if the amortization cost is 1000$ per mwh cycled.

That's include the infrastructure to generate (hydrolyzer) and to consume (fuel cell). I project improvements, but nothing radical as a reasonable projection.

If you can get a lot better values, of course the numbers change, and there is no reason to put hydrogen in the last position with that cost. Still, big claims require big proof. Battery costs is based in curve projections into the future using current data and past experience. I don't have the same for hydrogen to be so positive about this medium of storage.
The reason I don't put all on batteries are because battery has a fixed ratio energy:power. That has implications that limit the scale to usage with a daily cycle.

What does that mean to a "circular economy"?

It means you aren't consuming what you are suggesting, but only the small fraction that we won't recycle, that I hope we will raise as close as 100% as possible.

As the raw consumption is the biggest claim against current renewable development, pretty much destroy the argument about we are doing something wrong.

That means people who use circular reasoning will be stuck in their circle, while those of us who recognize the futility of their endeavor, will pass on our H2 tanks to our children. Your batteries might last 8.2 years with 1 complete charge / discharge cycle per day. CFRP tanks will last 68.5 years. CNTRP tanks will last 137 years.
That's the difference between my "linear thinking" and your "circular thinking". Over the next 137 years, you have to completely rebuild your storage system 16 times if you insist on using batteries. I only have to build an energy storage solution once. I can only shrug when I think about how much time and energy will be sunk into recycling batteries 16 times. Linear thinkers like to solve problems and then move on to solving the next most pressing problem, which is why we use straightforward math and workable solutions. We don't demand more performance, energy, and/or materials than are reasonably available. We don't stubbornly insist something is working when the prima facie evidence (CO2 emissions in this case) shows that it's not. We don't search for exceptions to the rule to assert that something is working the way we think it should. We use generalizations, we use context, and we use quantifiable analyses to evaluate assertions, rather than vague generalities about future improvements to technology solving present problems, because we know that all the major gains tend to be very front-loaded for any new technology, and then smaller incremental gains in efficiency or cost reductions are gradually made over time.
There is no amount of electrical efficiency that can overcome a mass advantage that great. When you start scaling up to global scale, mass / weight of materials, and the kinds of material required, actually matter. H2 storage is mostly plastic and Carbon Fiber.
5. The reason we don't recycle more metal than we presently do, is because it's not terribly profitable when compared to new production. It makes a lot of sense for other reasons, though, such as not running out or chasing after very low-grade ores. Aluminum, Copper, and Iron (steel) are the most recycled metals on the planet. Everything else is a very distant second. 50% of all mining energy consumption and all mining tailing waste is from Copper production. All other metals account for the rest, even though Iron is the most produced metal, accounting for a much greater tonnage of metal than all other metals combined. We've already discussed why Aluminum is a poor substitute for Copper, and it ties back to energy input. If our energy generating and consuming systems require 10X to 1,000X more metal, then our energy consumption will be dominated by mining. Energy available for all other uses will then have to compete with mining, because only through a massive increase in production can we supply the quantities of metals being demanded by renewables.
I don't want to turn large swaths of Earth into a Copper mine or Aluminum smelter to pursue an ideological goal. People who think this is acceptable really should visit these sites.
Anyway, basic physics will eventually win. It always does.

You claim to have the numbers on your side, but you are not.
Who cares how many times the batteries will need to be rebuild if it matches the projected cost? Besides, how do you know how much cycles will able to support a 2040 battery? Or if it's just sodium-ion based with the similar storage characteristics or even better than current LFP, how much critical material they will have?

All of this is about save time to make things better whatever path we take.

Instead to spend so much time explaining why the renewables are a bad idea, if you are sure that hydrogen is the solution, you should spend your time searching for solutions for hydrogen overcosts.

The number of Toyota Mirai sold are pretty low, because people don't have hydrogen stations... because they are expensive. And hydrogen is a lot more expensive too than current electricity.

Solve that, selling cheap hydrogen. The market will adopt the technology instead of today where the distance between hydrogen and batteries only grows. Then claim that hydrogen will fill the long transportation sector by less cost than batteries.

It's not like I oppose hydrogen. It's that battery numbers are a lot better under current technology and future projections based on current data.

If some breakthroughs occur on hydrogen and efficiency gets a leap and numbers start to gain over batteries I will cheer that.
So... REDUCE THE PRICE.

We need to end the fossil fuel era and develop a circular economy as soon as possible. I don't care if it's with batteries, hydrogen, e-fuels, or whatever.

Terraformer · 2024-03-20 13:03:53

I don't see a future for large amounts of grid battery storage. If we build in two days worth of compressed air, why would we not use that to buffer hourly fluctuations too? Why spend money on a more expensive system thats redundant? So the place for batteries is frequency control, which means they're competing against flywheels on response speed and cost. Maybe they can beat them there, but flywheels are pretty quick and can last a very high number of cycles without needing to be rebuilt.

The place for batteries is mobile equipment. They can't win against hydrogen when it comes to aircraft, they're nowhere near energy dense enough. Trains are straightforward to electrify, we've done this for like a century and a half now, though maybe they have a niche role on branch lines. Heavy equipment... well, they're certainly good at the heavy part. Maybe they can play a role there, or maybe the advantages of ammonia or hydrogen will be too great for them to succeed. Shipping, I can definitely see an ammonia powered shipping future, the shipping industry is no stranger to hazards so I can't imagine they'll be put off by the need to be careful around the fuel if it turns out to be the cheapest replacement for oil.

Which leaves cars. The one place batteries could stand a chance, and the least necessary by far of all the areas I mentioned. So I'm not really that worried about whether or not we can have enough lithium; driving is not some god we must devote our civilisation to. We got by before the Ford era and we'll get by after it.

The more worrisome part of running out of cheap fuels is stuff like cement and metal production. Those will get more expensive I'm sure. At the same time, we're also pretty profligate in using them. We can live without steel and glass towers too.

Spaniard · 2024-03-20 14:28:01

Terraformer wrote:

I don't see a future for large amounts of grid battery storage. If we build in two days worth of compressed air, why would we not use that to buffer hourly fluctuations too? Why spend money on a more expensive system thats redundant?

Different energy roundtrips. The difference between you put on charge and you get on discharge.

Batteries has the highest energy return. The most efficient, so if the cost is low enough, I expect to be the most preferred form of storage, until their scale problems arise.
The big problem of batteries is that because it has a energy/power fixed ratio, if you have too many batteries, you can't do a cycle per day, which means that they get lower cycles per year.
No matters which price you obtain per cycle, you want to amortize that battery in a reasonable time. If that time are 10 years, that's 3650 cycles which are more or less on similar values to the lifespan of the battery. But if that value drops, you will need a greater number of cycles to amortize OR a lower prices to make a sooner amortization.

That doesn't happen with other forms of storage where energy and power are decoupled, like liquid-air.
Liquid-air has lower round-trip than batteries but still better than hydrogen (at least under current values). But that efficiency is tricky as it depends of the cold and heat recovery storage, which has a discharge ratio that depends on the scale of the installation.

Instead, I don't think that the right values for batteries are cover the whole day storage, because that would reduce the hours usage per installation in liquid-air too much.

Still, if the total energy stored grow too much, a cost that raises is the storage itself. In this case, fuel storage has the lower storage cost, while it's the most inefficient in terms of roundtrip of all solutions.

I don't say that EVERY storage method needs to cover ALL the energy needs.

I expect the emergency power to use some tricks to reduce the infrastructure power costs.
For example, generation will probably running most of the time only in one way mode (electricity to fuel) to send the generated fuel to other industries, not the electricity network. That raises the hours of operation regardless the low need as emergency generation.

That's the reasoning behind of that. Depends on the time of operation, cost of storage, cost of generation, cost of production or efficiency gains weight in one way or another.

It also depends on the energy, cost and scale. If we can produce a lot of energy very cheap, roundtrip efficiency are not so important.
The difference should pay the extra cost of extra generation power. The cheaper is the energy compare with the storage cost, the less important is the roundtrip efficiency.

So there is a lot of "ifs" in this calculation.

kbd512 · 2024-03-20 16:16:05

Spaniard,

I don't know (about) you, but I see there the growth of the emissions are slowing.

Thank you, sir. You actually read the same study I read.

Energy Density
Natural Gas: 53.6MJ/kg = 14,885Wh/kg
Anthracite Coal: 26-33MJ/kg = 7,222Wh/kg - 9,166Wh/kg
Other Forms of Coal: <25MJ/kg

One of the graphs you posted shows why our CO2 emissions haven't literally exploded. We're burning a lot more natural gas than coal these days, which provides 2X as much energy for the same tonnage of CO2 emissions. That's why emissions have superficially appeared to level off. We're not using LESS hydrocarbon fuel, we're using a hydrocarbon fuel with 2X as much energy density as coal. Despite getting 2X as much energy from natural gas per ton of emissions, CO2 emission from natural gas are rising to the same level as coal previously was.

That's not an indicator that "renewables are working". It's an indicator that we're consuming 2X as much energy as we were previously, and our CO2 emissions from natural gas are rapidly rising to the same level as coal.

It's also curious you don't show the images your own post

s20_coal_oil_gas_cement_usa_withforecast_0.png.webp?itok=gBwlqUXM

I figured that if you read and understood that study, then you'd also understand that when you see natural gas CO2 emissions rising to almost the same level as coal, that you'd know enough about the energy density of natural gas vs coal to clearly understand that the quantity of gas burned was such that we consumed 2X as much energy, so our emissions look about the same as they did when we were burning coal.

I see a clear down trend on coal usage and emissions.

I see a clear upward trend on natural gas usage and emissions.

You must have not read that graph you questioned me on very carefully.

If you see a CO2 emissions trend line for natural gas rising to almost the same level as coal, that only means we're consuming twice as much energy as we previously were when we were burning coal, not that emissions are leveling off or trending downwards.

I see a clear down trend on coal usage and emissions.
Yep. USA, not worldwide, as not every country invest the same in renewables. Richer countries with more developed electricity networks have less problems integrating a certain percentage of renewables without further upgradings in network or storage.

s20_total_usa_withforecast_0.png.webp?itok=9sXtF6mG

The US burns more natural gas than any other nation on the planet. Sorry, but not only does that graph not show a downward trend, it shows a dramatic increase in energy consumption, all while more and more "renewable energy" is brought onto the grid.

I'm sorry that the data doesn't show what you think it shows or want it to show, but it simply doesn't.

Partially also because coal to gas transition. That's also true. A mix of variables.

Not "partially because coal to gas transition", almost exclusively because of consuming more gas than coal, and the natural gas CO2 emissions chart you posted shows that very clearly.

But if the prices in renewable and upcoming storage continues going down as expected, we will see even easier integration in the future, making a lot easier to spread to other places.

All prices for all goods and services are going up, not down. If you can't admit to this, then I don't know what to say.

And as you can check in the data, the emissions already peaked.

We can revisit that assertion in another year, and we will show more consumption, along with increased emissions, unless natural gas and coal and oil suddenly become unavailable due to market forces, such as another Great Depression or World War III.

You are asking a baby to do the work of an adult. We are living in a world were most of the energy come from fossil fuels, so of course, the energy used to build the renewables comes mostly from fossil fuel.

The only reason the "renewable babies" are being created, is because we're consuming more and more hydrocarbon fuel energy to do it. Switching energy sources to natural gas, with 2X the energy density of coal per unit weight, won't be able to mask the rise in emissions.

Well... You post a link with the previous image from USA with emissions going down before, so...

USA emissions are not going down. We're consuming 2X as much energy as we received from coal. We're turning natural gas into gasoline now because there's not enough oil.

We clearly are seeing different things, because I see a slow down in emissions, and besides that the impact of renewables are in the projected future, not now. Not when renewable only accounts for a minor percentage.

Understanding the difference in energy density, per unit weight of natural gas and coal, tends to have that effect.

Under price pressure, technology and market will push for substitution. Notice that raising price (long term) require bad projections in the extraction market. But let's assume is the case.

You substitute Copper by consuming 2X to 3X the amount of energy required to mine Copper, by smelting Aluminum instead. When the energy required to do that using renewables simply doesn't exist before you mine the metals required to create said renewables, you're going to consume an even crazier amount of coal and gas to do it, and emissions WILL go up!

Well... When you scrap the old cars, you can build almost two cars for each old car scraped.

Umm... What?

Since recycling is never 100% efficient, if you recycle all the metals from an old car, you still need more metal to make a new car. You do not magically get the metal to make 2 new cars by scrapping an older model.

That's depend on the power per resource ratio which you believed constant and I don't.

All electrical engieneers worthy of their title are going to disagree with you on your assumption. If your city requires 3X as much power, then it's going to require about 3X as much metal to make all the electric generators, transformers, and power distribution lines. Much of this stuff already is steel and Aluminum, so this is simply not going to work out the way you think it should.

You are insisting in that argument where we clearly disagree.

The graphs you posted don't agree with your assertions the way you think they do. They actually suggest we're consuming twice as much energy. The fact that the energy source we're consuming so much of, has half the emissions of coal for equal energy, doesn't mean emissions are going down. It's a happy accident that natural gas provides twice as much energy for the same CO2 emissions.

If energy density where the most critical factor in every scenario, we would use nuclear cars, not ICE or electric cars.

Nobody claimed it was the only consideration worthy of merit. Other considerations matter as well, such as the fact that a nuclear reactor with sufficient shielding to not immediately kill the occupants of said car, also weighs a lot more than the average car.

And that's the reason because hydrogen is SO expensive. If you don't change that, then they will never be competitive in this sector.

Agreed. H2 is expensive right now, because it comes from cracking natural gas or Haber-Bosch.

Emissions goes up -> renewables don't work!
Emissions goes down -> renewables eat our fossil fuels!
Whatever it happens, you will criticize renewables.

I criticize things that aren't working. Your assertions ignore energy density and its direct effect on emissions. All I've seen happen over the past 20 years is natural gas replace coal, and now natural gas CO2 emissions have risen to almost the same amount as coal, which only proves that we're consuming twice as much energy as we were when we burned more coal, not that our CO2 emissions are trending downwards or leveling off. If we run short of natural gas, we'll go back to burning coal, just as the Germans are doing now.

I'm talking about going from thermal to electricity in a possible slow growth scenario. It's not ensured but it's possible.

I also want renewables to generate electricity, but I want emissions to actually go down, not to simply consume another hydrocarbon fuel with twice as much energy density as coal, but we end up burning so much more that our CO2 emissions become the same as they were with coal.

I don't know if I could remember a appointment for so long X-D, but... Sure!

We could both be dead by then, the way things are going, but presuming the positive, let's see if we start consuming less hydrocarbon fuels over the next 10 years. If we don't, and especially if natural gas CO2 emissions eclipse coal CO2 emissions, then we're only playing a shell game and only fooling ourselves.

I can bet for emissions. I won't do for total energy.

I'll be very happy to be wrong, but thus far I'm not wrong.

Pretty negative, but also a tricky bet, as you can blame renewables for a thing that could came from fossil fuels.

The goal should be to arrive at a working solution at a price affordable to the poorest amongst us, not to spend unlimited money on something we find ideologically or aesthetically pleasing.

Of course, if a nuclear war arises, all our projections are trash.

True.

Edit: It seems it's not that. For some reason I get Internal error with that part. I swear there is no offensive words or something like that. I don't know what's the problem, but I get a "Internal error" posting the second part.

It's not anything you did. It's a problem with the server. We're working on fixing that.

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