The Dangerous Delusion of a Global Transition To “Just Electricity”

Irrespective of any climate issues, fossil fuel is not an infinitely available resource.
Ultimately we will have to learn to live without it, especially as an energy source.
The good news is that as far as energy goes, we have a better source of energy, at least as far as electricity generations goes. Nuclear power has thousands of years of cheap fertile material available.

Renewable energy is of course a complete and utter waste of time and money.

The point I want to make, is that transition to a nuclear-electric society is not going to be some arbitrary ideological choice, but it is going to be driven by sheer necessity.

To further analyse the situation, rather than just throwing up one’s hands and saying ‘it cant be done’ is needful to see the size of the problem facing us.

1. The very first things to say that in terms of the things we use energy in it’s raw form, for – heating creating and moving – the transition to electricity is perfectly feasible except for ‘free transport’ – that is. transport that cannot be connected to as grid. Cars, boats and aircraft. More on that later. For now, let’s just accept that that is a category that doesn’t transition easily.
2. Carbon as a reducing agent. The chemical use of raw carbon based fuel as a reducing agent is extremely important in the manufacture of metals, and things like concrete. This is, whilst nothing like as high a use of carbon based fuels as raw energy, still significant. Fortunately it is not strictly necessary to use fossil fuels for this. Although there is a cost and complexity penalty, electrolysis can produce e.g. hydrogen. And hydrogen is a perfectly good reducing agent.
3. Fossil fuel as a chemical feedstock.This seems to be what this article is all about, but to my mind it is a complete straw man. I am old enough to remember the world before plastic. It was just fine. We used different materials – at that time coal was the primary fossil fuel, and coal and wood based chemistry was what we used to make doorknobs, not oil. Almost any sort of carbon material – even carbon dioxide – can be used to make complex polymers to replace or indeed synthesise the plastics we use today. And the key to this is that carbon used in plastic is not irrevocably turned to carbon dioxide, It is and can be recyclable. And very little fossil fuel is used as a chemical feedstock compared to its use as a primary energy source. It will last far longer as a feedstock than it will as an energy source, and if e.g. a nylon washer goes up from 0.0c to 0.1c per unit, it is not a civilisation destroying event.

What I am trying to say, is that whilst a post fossil world obviously wont be the same, it need not be worse. In many ways in fact it will be better. Nuclear electricity is clean. Uranium is cheap. The reason nuclear power is currently hugely more expensive than e.g. coal is a political reason, not a technological one. And could be changed by legislative action. Whereas e.g. the lack of suitable storage to complement so called renewable energy, is absolutely a technological problem. In that the storage does not exist and cannot be built with any technology we are currently aware of..

You cannot build a technological society on what you hope will work. Only in what at least can work, and additionally, what can work reasonably cheaply, in terms of human man hour and energy input.

And that brings us back to the really thorny problem of a post fossil world, portable energy.

Imagine fighting a war without tanks, aircraft or ships. The enemy who has fuel left, wins.

In some cases, there is a fairly trivial solution. Ships, for example are large enough and heavy enough to carry a fully shielded nuclear reactor that is pretty much fuelled for life.And, given that as fuelled for life reactor has no opportunity cost for sailing fas, could cruise at far higher speeds than today’s container ships. Trains already are largely electric, and in the case of overland transport, could easily replace aircraft with only a small time penalty. Trains and nuclear ships wouldn’t be as fast, but how fast do you need transport to actually be? No one is prepared to fly a supersonic airliner, because it costs to much. If London to New York took 5 days instead of 5 hours, it wouldn’t stop people who really wanted to go. Those that wanted face to face would use zoom.

It would be different, because the cost balance between alternatives would move away from one solution to another, but the actual needs would still be met.

Where we run into really intractable problems, is smaller off grid transport. For sure a certain amount of battery cars and trucks could get people and goods to and from the nearest train station, but what about e.g. a combine harvester, or a tractor drawn plough or other cultivating implement? Could those really be battery powered?

The fact remains that hydrocarbon fuel in an oxygen rich atmosphere, is almost the perfect portable energy source. It’s energy dense enough for aircraft, it’s safe enough for ordinary consumer handling, and a network for its distribution already exists.

Fortunately you can synthesise it. Given access to extremely cheap plentiful nuclear power, it is perfectly possible to make something of the order of diesel or kerosene, or gasoline. Out of pretty much any carbon bearing feedstock – biomass, atmospheric CO2, animal waste – anything. Plus a bit of hydrogen that exists everywhere as water. It wouldn’t be cheap, perhaps 3-5 times the price of the electricity it was made from, for equivalent energy content, but if that’s they only way you are going to get the corn harvest in, well corn and wheat based foods will simply be luxury items. The balance of costs will shift what is cheap, from one product to another.

When I was young a computer running Unix was a years salary, now I can buy one for less than the minimum wage hourly rate. But fuel was very cheap compared to now.

I think my real purpose here is to emphasise that staying with fossil fuel, no matter how attractive it is, will increasingly not be an option, but not for reasons of climate change. It will be a simple matter of economics. The second point is that the more the market and the less the government directs the transition, the faster and smoother it will be, and the better will be the final outcome.

We have a real task to keep government out of technology, and use it solely to remove unnecessary restrictions. And then let the market drive technological change.

A case in point, apparently Bill Gates wants to power his data centres with small nuclear reactors, having realised that renewable energy doesn’t work and is far too expensive. It doesn’t need a government subsidy to make this happen, but a government decree could absolutely stop it.

So please, stop and think before you vote to stay with fossil fuel. That may be as much wishful thinking as those who vote to build windmills… For sure, as with Covid, there is an unfortunate mix of truth and politics, but it is not impossible to disentangle them. We will inevitably have to wean ourselves off it, and pretending that we won’t, or that a bunch of mediaeval windmills are the answer, are equally deluded.