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The World's Astonishing Dependence On Fossil Fuels Hasn't Changed In 40 Years (qz.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Quartz, adding: "Maybe 'dependence' is a poor description of poor people using the ready availability of cheap energy to help lift themselves out of poverty": There are few ways to understand why. First, most of the world's clean-energy sources are used to generate electricity. But electricity forms only 25% of the world's energy consumption. Second, as the rich world moved towards a cleaner energy mix, much of the poor world was just starting to gain access to modern forms of energy. Inevitably, they chose the cheapest option, which was and remains fossil fuels. So yes, we're using much more clean energy than we used to. But the world's energy demand has grown so steeply that we're also using a lot more fossil fuels than in the past.
The headline is false, of course. There is still a dependence, but "unchanged in 40 years" is bullshit.
>they chose the cheapest option
I doubt that. Can anyone provide numbers?
Someone forgot to take his meds again
I recently saw a documentary by the British Coal Board, made in late sixties or so. Their economist went on to explain that the difference between "this" (pictures of Western developed industry manufacturing big things like ships) and "that" (pictures of developing world poor, surviving by making stuff with their bare hands) was ENERGY, and LOTS OF IT.
Then they went on to explain that although nuclear had a lot of promise, it wasn't here yet, for various reasons they did not appear to want to dwell on, and that therefore coal would remain the heart of industry.
I now nobody likes nuclear, and nobody likes consumerism, and we all want a quiet life in the countryside, until we need a hospital and emergency chopper ride, but essentially, there seems to be only one choice, between two kinds of energy:
1. coal, oil, gas, wind, solar
2. nuclear
And the world keeps often choosing option 1.
Which must be to the delight of all those vested interests in the oil and gas (and somewhat lesser extent coal) industries.
A quick look at the graph in The Fine Article shows that indeed "fossil" looks flat; probably because in the late 70s and 80s nuclear was coming on-stream and hydrocarbon usage started to dip. Of course, the oil crisis helped. But then China exploded economically so hey - coal and gas came back up %age-wise. These days of course, "renewables" (why do I hate that term so much? The sun is not magically "renewing itself; it's literally burning to death...), anyway, solar & wind etc. are picking up where nuclear left off. The fact is that the cheapness, convenience and energy-density of hydrocarbons can't be beat in most situations in developing nations.
Some of the African countries are turning to the renewables first, skipping fossil fuels for electricity entirely. So that's gotta be at least one positive.
Unfortunately, that's not really addressing transportation fuel consumption, which is the daddy of fossil fuel use.
Just really frickin hard to argue with the utility and bang for your buck when it comes to hydrocarbon based liquid and gas fuels. They're just freakin awesome.
Electric cars are nice and all, but they do require a supporting grid to recharge from. They're going to help in developed countries for sure. But will that offset the growth in poorer countries that just don't have the infrastructure?
When you figure the balance sheet at the end of the year, if we're still putting a lot of CO2 into the atmo, we got serious problems inbound. I mean, humans will adapt, but it's not going to be pretty.
there are a few (very) interesting speeches on youtube from Vaclav Smil where he explains that energy transitions (wood to fossil fuel, fossil fuel to solar )are a slow process, completely contrary to the speed of innovation. For instance here https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There's no 'law of energy transitions' forbidding fast transitions, but it's very hard and it's worth understanding why it's hard.
if you put a tax on them that is used exclusively to remove the CO2 byproduct from the air. Sure, it would be cheaper just to use electricity but if you really gotta have it, you can pay for it. Now we just need to build a hundred thousand of these machines. This is in line with "there is no free lunch" that insensitive clods love to tout on other issues.
Phasing fossil fuels out is not an impossible task but we need to slow and then halt the tragedy-of-the-commons that is happening every day that we do nothing.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Solar and renewables are growing way faster since 2014 (the article quotes numbers are only up to 2014):
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_1_01
Notice the plummet in 'Petroleum' and 'Coal' usage? It comes down to price, solar is cheap enough now that its worth the capital cost for the long term saving. It's not some patent stopping it growing, it was just price.
This article is out of date, it is using data from 2014 to justify a case in 2017 when never data shows rapid change in the market.
The state exists to protect established businesses from disruption. The era of the benign state, if it existed, is over. (Note that a functional state is a sad necessity of life, but when it's opposed to the nation's people in order to serve an elite, well, see the Declaration of Independence.)
Why has demand increased while global energy efficiency has also increased?
population increased!
Why do people tiptoe around the true cause like it's taboo or something?
Just really frickin hard to argue with the utility and bang for your buck when it comes to hydrocarbon based liquid and gas fuels. They're just freakin awesome.
Tremendous upside, to be sure. Low cost, low up-front capital cost, engines easier to work on with basic tools, massive energy density. But it's not all roses. Michael Bay aside, gasoline is flammable. It's fumes are hazardous, potentially fatal. Leaks end up in groundwater, fouling wells. The air quality surrounding well-tuned modern cars is poor; for poorly-tuned older autos it's downright nasty.
Which is to say I don't begrudge; indeed I understand the use of gasoline and diesel powered autos in developing nations. However, let's not overlook the considerable downsides too.
Did you *read* any of that before you linked to it? Did you pay any attention to WHO was making those ridiculous claims? Don't tell me you read Kevin Steinberger's claims like 40% of Texas energy production is wind and actually *believed* that. Try 3%. Texas DOES produce more wind energy than any other state, but it's a tiny fraction of what we produce. When it's hot, and therefore not windy, we average only about 6 megawatts - the same days we need our air conditioning.
If you click on the About Us page there on the NRDC web site you'll see how they describe themselves:
Even by environmentalist standards, this is a relentless group
Like the National Inquirer, they fail to explicitly state "this is satire and shouldn't be confused with anything real". The Onion is a better source in that respect.
The demand for oil in China has decreased, and now the price of an oil barrel is around US$ 50. Everyone now is talking about "peak demand": oil consumption in OECD countries is almost flat for the last ten years, and the major source of growth comes from China.
Oil consumption is on the highest levels of human history, but with little change for the last decade. Meanwhile, the potential of growth of an important renewable source became scarce for the last couple decades: hydropower. It will take some time for us to actually see a decrease on consumption of oil and coal, as other renewables increase their share on the world energy consumption.
"The human race is in so much trouble that it needs to colonize another planet within 100 years or face extinction." - Dr. Stephen Hawking
*** Don't be dull.***
Tree huggers want us to live in caves. The market says otherwise.
--
roman_mir
go and see your doctor, you are overdue a checkup
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
When you think about just how much energy it takes to simply feed 7+ billion people and then the portable energy density in fossil fuels, there should be no astonishment.
I wish storage we're in any way feasible for a significant portion of our energy needs. Unfortunately, any storage we can come up with is orders of magnitude too small. We use 11 TRILLION btu of energy every year. There's nothing can come anywhere close to storing enough power to make it through those weeks when a couple of large cloud systems cover half the country, drastically reducing solar output.
I'm trying to come up with a good analogy to give you a sense of scale, but it's difficult. I can tell you that all of our current storage can store less than 1% of what we produce, and the clean energy we produce is less than 10% of our energy needs. It's like saying "water can be stored in Dixie cups" and then supposing that we can store the nations water supply in Dixie cups. You can picture the hundreds of paper cups it would take to store water for just one shower - energy storage is like that.
Let's take one proposal as an example, hydro storage. Hydro is handy where you happen to have a just the right geography, such as at Hoover dam. The thing is, you need a LOT of water pumped high to hold a little bit of energy. To match the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline, we would have to lift 13 tons of water (3500 gallons) one kilometer high (3,280 feet). Hoover Dam, holding back 147 square miles of water, can store about 1/3,000 of the needed energy. Unfortunately, we don't have 3,000 locations as good as Hoover dam. Given actual US geography, we'd need the reservoir to be the entire area between the Rocky Mountains on the West and the Appalachians on the East. Our hydro reservoir would completely flood 17 states and portions of 5 other states. We'd have a huge dam across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Building that dam would itself require approximately as much energy as the country produces in a year.
You can do the math for lipo and other types of storage. Sure, you can store a week of energy for a remote hunting cabin,if the cabin doesn't have air conditioning or any tools or anything that requires more power than lighting does. The US has 325 MILLION people, though. Energy storage per person, adequate to supply AC, transportation, etc, will take up about as much space as their living space, and cost at least as much (unless it's stored as hydrocarbons, an incredibly dense form of storage). So you can picture for every residential neighborhood, you'd need an equally-sized neighborhood of energy storage units. Your rent or mortgage is very roughly about equal to what your energy storage bill would be.
We should compare things like micro-hydro power with fossil fuels.
Compare them for what? Subsistence living? Small scale hydro is a Good Thing but for most people it's hardly going to be enough to meaningfully displace fossil fuels except as a very small part of a larger energy portfolio. Solar and wind are far more practical in most circumstances, even for local generation. I couldn't use micro-hydro anywhere close to my house because it's so geographically dependent and it's not an option at all for almost anyone not living in a fairly remote area.
Fossil fuels put the poor at the mercy of global markets, disappearing and becoming more expensive every time there is a war or the wrong kind of financial crisis.
No reasonably foreseeable amount of small scale local power generation is going to change that fact. Even if I put enough renewable energy into my house to power all my needs (including an EV), that still won't affect the impact on of fluctuating energy costs on manufacturing, transport, and agriculture. Modern agriculture is basically the process of turning diesel fuel into food and nearly all our transport systems are tied to fossil fuels currently. What needs to be emphasized is that we need a diverse portfolio of energy sources to mitigate economic disruptions from geopolitics. An important part of this will be local generation (solar roofs, etc) but we'll also need technologies for transport that aren't tied to fossil fuels (EVs) and for fossil fuels to actually have to bear the full cost of the pollution they generate.
And yes you are quite right about one use plastics. That's a much bigger problem than most people realize.
When there is a technology that is superior that doesn't require fossil fuels, this will change. Chop chop scientists!
We'll make great pets
I had a typo. I wrote that Hoover Dam holds 147 square miles of water behind it. That should be 247 square miles.
The dam is 726 feet high. From highest to lowest levels, it can store about 1/3,000 of our energy needs to get through a typical large storm system. Obviously you'd still have to ration energy on days like this:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic...
As wealthy countries have shifted away from fossil fuels, the poorest countries have moved from no energy usage to industrial use of fossil fuels. It's like a..well, a pipeline.
To say nothing has changed in 40 years is completely dishonest. Per capital use of oil has dropped in the US, efficiency rates have nearly doubled, they've removed lead from automotive fuels, sulfur from diesel fuels, and there are now a half dozen choices for alternate fuels when before there were none.
When the price of oil eventually starts going back up those number of choices will only expand. This will happen sooner rather than later because our current low price are not due to an over abundance of oil, but because of the collapse of the global oil cartels influence.
People use coal, gas and oil because they deliver more power for the money than alternatives in many applications. We'll switch when the cost curves cross, the same way we shifted from wood to coal.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Second, as the rich world moved towards a cleaner energy mix, much of the poor world was just starting to gain access to modern forms of energy. Inevitably, they chose the cheapest option, which was and remains fossil fuels.
The 'poor world' in this specific case is the US.
Other than fuel efficient vehicles, which are causing local, state and federal governments to worry they are not receiving enough tax money, I say drill now, drill often.
These headlines are an easy way to be confident that the article is a complete waste of time. Which raises the question about Slashdot...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If greenhouse gas emissions are indeed a global problem, why do developing countries get a pass on emission limits? Because they're poor? Gotta do better than that.
The US could export these reactors to Russia, China even North Korea and end global conflict within 5 years whilst solving the global nuclear waste issue, but oil.
This perhaps sums up the depth of thought you've come up with. An end to global conflict is just 3 patents away if US just exported reactors to a couple countries and only oil $$$ is motivating the refusal to embrace utopia...
What do you even say to that kind of naivety but to laugh and mock it for the drivel it is?
Why has demand increased while global energy efficiency has also increased? population increased!
Good thought but demand per capita has also increased which means the rate of consumption has increased faster than the population growth.
Please do not feed the Trolls. They require attention as a food source.
Unlike using oil for powering cars, you don't destroy the oil when you turn it into plastics. You can heat it, optionally crack and reform the polymer chains to turn it into an entirely new kind of plastic, and turn it into something else.
Not true for all plastics. Not because of technical problems but because it isn't economically profitable to do so. It's cheaper to put them in a landfill and make new plastic out of oil products than it is to go to the expense and trouble of recycling them.
If anyone is actually using incinerators on plastics rather than separating them for recycling, that is, of course, short-sighted idiocy.
A depressing percentage of the plastic products sold cannot be economically recycled. Only plastics of select chemical compositions are accepted for recycling most places.
Those are very much the exception rather than the rule; wood stands up to hot/cold cycles and UV rays far better than plastic, is more comfortable to grip than plastic (especially in extreme temps) and doesn't off-gas a cocktail of cancer-causing and endocrine-disrupting vapors.
Plastic isn't a single chemical. There are all sorts of plastics with all sorts of properties. For particular applications many of them easily outperform wood. Wood can be a fine thing to use too but to pretend that it outperforms plastic as a general proposition without specifying the application is simply willful ignorance or confirmation bias.
Something that makes wind power interesting is that the power of the wind is proportional to the CUBE of wind speed. That is to say, wind speed to the third power.
Half the speed means only 12.5% of the power, minus overhead, so around 8% of the usable power. MANY days and weeks the wind is half of peak, meaning power is 90% less than peak.
80% wind speed is half the power, again minus constant and linear overheads.
You noted the AVERAGE wind during the hot months is 80% speed (50% power). Unfortunately average doesn't tell the story. Yesterday it was 80 degrees in Dallas, today it's 51, average is 57. Weather doesn't closely track the average and people need to drive, cook, and build things every day, not just on days the wind is right.
Regarding temperature and wind, you may have noticed that as air pressure drops, temperature drops. As you fill a tire or spray something from a high pressure can, the air or gas is cold as it comes out. That's an adiabatic change - the same amount of heat energy is spread over a larger volume, which s lower temperature. Meteorological air masses are the same - low pressure correlates with low temperature. The same air masses will warm up of its pressure is increased. Low pressure also correlates with more wind. The doctor just called us, so I gotta run and can't explain that part right now.
Prices need to come down for things like EVs, Wind, Solar, Nuclear, etc. And that is the case.
Interestingly, Elon Musk is driving this more than any single nation, business, or person. Kind of sad, and yet, in the future, he will be regarded as a true hero for this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Look at basic economics which essentially says growth is necessary for good economics. Even a small level of growth say at 1%. It basically points that in order to stay healthy economically speaking we need to burn, consume and destroy more for the sake of economy and it isn't linear growth, it's exponential. Unfortunately at some point we're going to reach the actual limits of growth in real life because they can't go on forever. The risk is at that point, will society collapse?
You didn't show your work so I don't know how you came up with that. I suspect one error, which is strongly encouraged by certainly advocacy groups, is conflating energy and electricity. Be sure you're starting with the 98 quadrillion BTU of ENERGY needed. That's about 290,000,000 megawatt hours. So using your example of 100 MW generators, that's 100,000 tanks if your statement is correct and realistic in the real world. Sounds suspiciously low to me, I may have put a decimal point in the wrong place.
Energy vs electricity is important because we need to power cars (currently powered by gas), home heating (currently using natural gas and oil), industry, etc. Currently our *electricity* usage is a small fraction of our *energy*. If we're going to switch from gasoline, natural gas, fuel oil etc to renewable electric, we're going to need a LOT more electricity, which will require storage.
The technology is more sophisticated than your cube law. At wind speeds above the lowest speed of maximum power, the pitch of the blades is changed and/or other adjustments made to keep the power output constant. If the wind speed increases too much, the blades must be feathered completely and the generator shut down to keep it from tearing itself apart.
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I said "Sounds suspiciously low to me, I may have put a decimal point in the wrong place." Sure enough, I did. It's
28,720,964,877 megawatt hours.
Also, the tank you mentioned goes cold - you can't use that energy over a week. On day seven you could get maybe 1 MW out of it, but not 100 MW. IF you use it right away, within four hours so it doesn't get cold, you could get about 100MW from it. To be generous, let's pretend it's insulated really, really well and you can get 200 MW from it over the course of a week. 50MW is probably more realistic, but let's be generous, just for fun.
We need 28,720,964,877 MW hours divided by 50, so 574419297 MW/h. At 200 MW per very well insulated tank, that's 2,872,096 tanks. We know 200 MW is on the high side, so let's say somewhere between 3-12 million tanks.
Each tank is 4,901 square feet. So we need 29,409,152,250 sq feet of tanks. With magical insulation that takes up no space, no spacing between tanks, no room for maintenance access or piping or anything, that's 1,055 square miles of tanks alone. If we wrap each tank in a few feet of insulation and lay out a square grid of access roads between them, we're looking at about 2,200 square miles.
> If the wind speed increases too much, the blades must be feathered completely and the generator shut down to keep it from tearing itself apart.
Yes, that's certainly true. It must also be built with large enough, strong enough parts to withstand winds at least four times higher than nameplate speed - 64 times as much force being exerted on the structure. That's the *wind power*. The fact that the turbine has to throw away most of the power available from the wind doesn't change the find that the wind is more powerful, to the cube of the wind speed.
So the actual design power (power of the wind it must withstand) is 64 times or more the power it can convert to electricity. In other words, they are almost always running off FAR less power than they are designed to withstand, meaning there is a lot of frictional and inertial overhead from running at "very low" power (compared to what they are designed to withstand). That hurts efficiency further.
Wind power is conceptually awesome, and when the wind is just right is works really well. The cube power law forces practical designs to make some pita tradeoffs.
People in their minds and on social like to imagine that some vast majority of the world cares about use of fossil fuels when it comes to their own use of it. That's just not true, and people are blinded and lulled into false sense as a result.
> Storing an entire weeks worth of energy seems a little silly though honestly.
In the fall, it's not uncommon for a couple of large weather systems to cover over half the US in cloud cover for a few days. In another post on this story I linked to a satellite weather picture from a couple months go. That day the whole continental US was covered in clouds. In *normal* years, there will be one or two four-day periods in which solar electric produces hardly any energy. Some years there may be several, and they can certainly last a week. Consider rather recently two hurricanes hit the gulf back-to-back. After they came shore they dispersed into large cloud systems each covering a significant portion of the country.
I think it's more accurate to say that not all plastic products can be economically recycled.
I did say exactly that. ("A depressing percentage of the plastic products sold cannot be economically recycled") We agree.
It isn't, for example, economical to recycle single-use plastic bags because they contain so little plastic that transporting them is likely to use more oil than you recover from the bags. And polystyrene is mostly air, which has the same problem. But that's really an issue with the way the plastics are used rather than something fundamental to the material.
Yep. I think this is going have to be something that gets regulated at some point. I don't like the idea of doing that but I don't see a feasible alternative. It's kind of a tragedy of the commons situation. It's cheap for us individually to use a disposable plastic fork but expensive for society in the long run thanks to the pollution and wasted energy.
I think the arguments that we're going to be mining trash heaps in the future for plastic are preposterous. There are FAR too many hydrocarbons yet to be mined to make digging up trash heaps economically viable. It's simply likely to remain cheaper to make new plastic from fresh fossil fuels. Even if we somehow run out of oil, gas and coal without rendering the planet uninhabitable in the process, there are bioplastics. I think the difficult bit will be to keep people from making fresh plastic (esp one use) when we do not need to. Perhaps more pressing will be solving the problem of microbeads and similar plastic waste.
The only one I'm aware of that would truly be uneconomical because of the nature of the material is PVC, and even that is improving, I think.
PVC can be recycled for the most part.
The formula for solar power vs cloud cover is P = 990 (1-0.75F^3) watts/m2 where F is the cloud cover percentage. Picking the first location that came up on Weatherspark.com, I see that in January it is overcast or mostly cloudy (over 50% cloud cover) more often than not. https://weatherspark.com/m/116...
*Average* cloud cover in January is about 70%. It's not uncommon to have nearly 100% cloud cover. Solar panels will of course produce *some* power most of those days, but often very little.