David Archibald
The peak month of world oil production was back in October 2018 and production has declined slightly from then. The first signs that the oil production decline is accelerating are now apparent with the oil price rising a third from its low midyear. With peak oil now in the rear vision mirror, the decades of declining production are now upon us.
This won’t mean that solar power and wind power become more competitive. Solar and wind facilities are manufactured and installed using energy from coal and oil. In a tight energy market in which different sources of energy are semi-substitutable for each other, the coal price and the natural gas price will rise to the oil price in energy-equivalent terms.
The significance of that for solar power is that most solar panels are currently made in China using power from coal-fired power stations at about $0.05/kWh. Under ideal conditions in the Australian desert, solar panels produce power equivalent to the cost of power from diesel at $0.20/kWh. If you used power from solar panels to produce more solar panels, the cost of the power they produced would be about $1.00/kWh. Furthermore, solar panels aren’t recycled – they are once-through to landfill. They are not a renewable energy source in any sense. Solar panels are artefacts of a millenarian/apocalyptic/pagan cult in which the adherents signal their virtue by the display of their panels.
The economics of wind farms are slightly better than solar panels but still well short of what is required to sustain civilisation. Wind turbines are built to a price to satisfy availability requirements over a contract. The fact that some of the turbine towers end up bent means that they are designed with only a little margin above the failure mode. The current fad of installing them out at sea, because voters don’t want them anywhere near them, simply means higher capital and operating costs and much more expensive electricity, plus some dead whales.
It is also not a choice between wind and solar on one side and coal on the other. As the oil price rises through US$110/barrel, coal liquefaction plants become viable to supply the liquid transport fuels we need. At the moment coal consumpion and oil consumption are close to the same level in energy content terms. To fully replace oil production as it declines with coal liquefaction will require a doubling of the coal consumption rate. It follows that the life of our remaining coal reserves will halve.
So deciding between the so-called renewables and coal for power generation is a false choice. Because coal isn’t a long-term option. There are babies being born now who will see the end of coal. There is not much point agonising about coal-fired power stations. The better use for coal is producing liquid fuels for transport applications. There is only one source of energy that can replace coal for power generation and that is nuclear. The sooner we replace coal with nuclear for power generation, the longer our coal reserves will last and the higher the standard of living our children will have.
Figure 1: Figure 30 from King Hubbert’s 1956 paper Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels showing our civilisational switch from fossil fuels to nuclear. In effect, fossil fuels got civilisation started and U235 is the match that allowed humanity to light the nuclear fire that will maintain civilisation at a high level until the end of time.
The cost of making renewable power sources, wind and solar, will go up in tandem with the coal price because they are made with energy from coal. The solar panels and wind turbines we are installing at the moment will be carted off to landfill at the end of their lives and replaced by nuclear power. This is because the cost of nuclear power should remain at about the price it is currently while the prices of all other forms of energy go up with the oil price. And there will be no point in using power from nuclear reactors to provide the energy to make solar panels and wind turbines as the price of the power produced will be at least five times that produced by the nuclear reactors in the first place.
That said, there are three major problems with nuclear power as we currently practice it. Firstly, at a steady power output, seven percent of the energy from a nuclear reactor comes from delayed fission reactions. That will decline within a day to about one percent but it can take months to decline to a level at which the reactor doesn’t need external power for cooling.
To put that into context, the dominant nuclear technology used around the world at the moment is the U235-burning light water reactor. What might cause the reactor to fail would be an accident which stopped the coolant water from circulating. Then it would be a race to restart the coolant circulation before the system was overwhelmed by the heat from the delayed fission reactions. If that race is lost, the cooling water boils off and the reactor core heats and starts melting. The mass of molten steel and fuel rods becomes a substance called corium which can melt through the floor of the reactor chamber. The French nuclear plant builder Areva has, in its current designs, a subfloor below the reactor chamber to catch the corium.
The fuel rods consist of fuel pellets in a zirconium tube. At 1,250°C the zirconium reacts with water to produce hydrogen. The hydrogen accumulates in the top of the reactor chamber until it eventually explodes. All three of the operating reactors at Fukushima in 2011 had a hydrogen explosion.
To mitigate the risk that ultimately comes from the portion of energy produced by delayed fission, reactor designers responded by adding more concrete and steel to contain the potential release of radioactive material from a reactor excursion. This increased the capital cost per MW produced. This in turn prompted a trend to make the reactors much larger, up to the 1,600 MWe level, in order to gain economies of scale. And because the volume of a container goes up faster than its surface area, this meant that the bigger reactors are more difficult to cool and thus are inherently more dangerous than the designs they replaced.
So to make reactors safer again there is now a trend to what are called small modular reactors with power outputs in the range of 100 to 300 MWe. They will be safer because it will be easier for the reactor core to shed heat but if too small the capital cost per MW rises. There is also the problem of staffing. A fleet of small modular reactors might require three times as many staff as one made up of normally sized reactors.
Delayed fission is the biggest problem with nuclear power and it is a problem that almost nobody is aware of.
The second problem with nuclear power is the production of high level waste. A 1,000 MWe reactor will produce three tonnes of high level waste, basically the used fuel rods, per annum. A reactor’s fuel rods are changed out every three years or so. By the time the rods are pulled about half the energy produced is from plutonium created from irradiated U238. The rods are pulled because of radiation damage to the zirconium cladding which could cause the rods to warp and not be able to be extracted. Current practice is to not process the spent fuel rods but to leave them in long term storage where they will be a radiological hazard for millions of years, literally. The cost of reproccessing spent fuel rods equates to a uranium price of about US$250/lb while the current spot price is US$44/lb. Our civilisation is kicking the can down the road on reprocessing, requiring a future generation to bear part of the cost of generating power now. This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs.
The third problem with light water reactors is that they are extremely wasteful with the planet’s uranium endowment. Uranium as it comes out of the ground is 99.3% U238 and 0.7% U235. To be used in light water reactors, the U235 is enriched five-fold to 3.5% and 80% of the U238 is thrown out. Well some of that U238 is used to make depleted uranium antitank projectiles which in battle ends up as uranium oxide spread to the winds. Depleted uranium antitank rounds contain four kilograms of U238 which would have produced the energy equivalent of 19,000 barrels of oil if processed through a plutonium breeder reactor. And to put that number into context, a car being driven 20,000 km per annum at a fuel consumption rate of 10 km to the litre will burn 34 barrels each year. So the energy inherent in a depleted uranium antitank round is equivalent to powering a car for 558 years.
Problems two and three can be solved, and need to be solved, by fully developing the plutonium breeder technology. Plutonium breeder reactors operate by irradiating U238 with high energy (fast) neutrons to produce Pu239. There have been plutonium breeder reactors that operated happily for decades, all in Russia. France also successfully operated a plutonium breeder reactor, at least until it was shut down as part of a political deal with the French green party. The best existing Western design for a plutonium breeder reactor is considered to be the GE-Hitachi PRISM reactor. This is set up to reprocess the fuel onsite using a pyrometallurgical process in a closed fuel cycle.
Figure 2: GE-Hitachi PRISM reactor cross-section
The first problem is also solved because plutonium breeder reactors operate at atmospheric pressure with no water used in the reactor core ready to react with the fuel rods. They are inherently much safer than U235-burning light water reactors which only use one percent of our uranium endowment. Plutonium breeder reactors will utilise all 100 percent of our uranium endowment and thus will give us 100 times the energy of the technology we are currently using.
Plutonium breeder reactors can produce 30 percent more fuel than they consume. They operate in the fast neutron spectrum and thus need to use sodium as the coolant. Reactors breeding thorium to U233 have an eight percent breeding margin and operate in the thermal (low energy) neutron spectrum. Eight percent is not much margin to play with, the necessary technology is still at the conceptual stage and our civilisation is running out of time. On the other hand there is four times as much thorium as uranium in the Earth’s surface. So if the excess neutrons from plutonium breeding could be applied to getting thorium breeding over the line, this would, in effect, increase the life of our uranium endowment four-fold.
If our civilisation is going to have a future worth having, it will be powered by plutonium breeder reactors. The only alternative to nuclear power is to revert to wood and horses which will result in an 18th century standard of living. It will easier to get that nuclear future while we still have some oil and coal to burn. It will be hard to build nuclear reactors if you are using energy from horses, so the sooner we start down the right path, the safer we will be, and the happier we will be.
It seems that Bill Gates’ nuclear effort has come to the same conclusion. Terrapower was started in 2008 to promote the Travelling Wave Reactor, essentially a sausage-shaped lump of fuel that was lit at one end and burnt to the other. This was an idiotic concept and Terrapower eventually switched to a molten salt design. They are now partnered GE-Hitachi and using a sodium-cooled reactor with heat transfer to a molten salt circuit. Power output will be 345 MWe.
Theoretically it would be possible for Mr Gates to make weapons-grade plutonium in his reactor. Weapons grade plutonium has less than 7% Pu240 with the rest being Pu239. To achieve that would require rapid exchange and reprocessing of the fuel rods. Too high a Pu240 content will make a nuclear weapon detonate prematurely in the implosion and produce a fizzle.
We need to make up for a lot of lost time. The first sodium-cooled breeder reactor in the US, Experimental Breeder Reactor-1 at the Idaho National Laboratory, went critical in 1951. It was followed by EBR-2 in 1964 which sold power into the grid.
Right now, coal and oil and natural gas make all the things we need, either by providing the energy to make them or the materials they are made from. When the fossil fuels run out, how will power from nuclear reactors be transformed into the physical things we use? The five pillars of civilisation are diesel, cement, steel, plastics and ammonia.
The production of diesel (and petrol and aviation fuels) will use the Bergius process to hydrogenate biomass. The process will start with power from nuclear reactors applied to the electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen. Power at $0.05 per kWh produces hydrogen at $7.00 per kg. In energy content terms, this translates to a diesel price of $2.59 per litre which is less than most people around the world are paying at the pump.
The following diagram is from Friedrich Bergius’ speech at his Nobel Prize for Chemistry acceptance in 1931:
Figure 3: Mass balance for the Bergius Processs
What this figure shows is that the addition of only another 5% by weight of hydrogen converts a near-useless solid fuel into a liquid with a high energy density and ideal handling properties. Only a little smaller than the diesel molecule is heptane, C7H16, which is the ideal base for a thermobaric bomb.
Coal comes in from the top left and is combined with hydrogen and recycled oil to make it a liquid. The hydrogen is produced by steam reforming of the light ends of the process. If the power from nuclear reactors was cheap enough then that, via electrolysis, could be the source of the hydrogen with a saving in capital costs and operating complexity.
The conversion takes place at 400°C and 200 bars of pressure. The hydrogen content of diesel is 14% by weight. The hydrogen content of coal can range up to 8%. From that level it only takes another 6% hydrogen to make diesel. The last experiment in converting coal to diesel in Australia was conducted by the Japanese Government in the Latrobe Valley in 1991. As as result of that research it was calculated that the oil price necessary for commercialisation was then US$40 per barrel; equivalent to US$110 today. Australians are currently paying A$349 per barrel for diesel at the pump, equating to US$230 per barrel. So we are already paying a high-enough price to start the coal liquefaction industry.
With the appropriate tax structure, making our own diesel from our own coal is commercial now. When the coal runs out the feedstock will switch to wood.
While there is currently a lot of enthusiasm for the concept of using hydrogen directly as a transport fuel, the physics and chemistry of hydrogen preclude its adoption to that end as it combines a low energy density, transmission losses and leakage with a wide explosive range. To understand the limitations of hydrogen there is nothing better than the experience of playing with it as a child:
After my experience playing with hydrogen as a kid, I have zero doubt that parking 40-50Kg of compressed hydrogen next to anything you care about, or inside anything you care about, would be the definition of insanity.
That said, hydrogen will be a big part of our energy future. Just a little bit of hydrogen added to a near useless, low-value carbon source turns it into a precious liquid fuel with a high energy density and optimum handling characteristics. The future will be short of carbon because its availability will depend upon how fast biomass can be grown.
Diesel is a hydrogen fuel with over one third of its contained energy coming from the 23 hydrogen atoms in each diesel molecule:
Figure 4: Diesel by composition and energy contribution
The relative market share of diesel and electric vehicles in the passenger car market will depend upon the cost of growing biomass for the former and cost of power from nuclear reactors for the electric option. Some sectors of the economy including agriculture, aviation and marine can’t be electrified and will be the first call on the output of the Bergius plants via the price mechanism.
It is likely that at some point recycling of all metals will be required instead of sending them to landfill. Then electric vehicle operators will be paying for their batteries twice – in the making of them and secondly for dissolving them in acid to recover the metals at the end of their 10 year life. Electric vehicles are expensive now but the owners are yet to pay for the full cost of ownership. Recycling of all metals will certainly be the end of solar panels.
Under optimum growing conditions in Brazil, eucalypt plantations produce 40 cubic metres/hectare per annum, which becomes 20 tonnes of dried wood. This in turn converts to 10 tonnes of lignin, which would yield 10,000 litres of liquid fuel. Assuming in Australian conditions that the yield per hectare is 25 cubic metres per hectare, one hectare would produce 39 barrels of diesel per annum. To supply Australia’s requirement of one million barrels per day would require close to 10 million hectares of plantation forests — about 8% of Australia’s forested area – so it is quite achievable.
The second pillar of civilisation, cement, is made using 200 kg of coal to produce one tonne of cement. In the post-coal world, energy for cement-making will come from charcoal produced from plantation eucalypts. The yield from wood to charcoal is 35% so Australian annual consumption of nine million tonnes of cement will be made using charcoal from 5.4 million tonnes of wood produced from 200,000 hectares of plantation eucalypts.
To make steel after metallurgical coal runs out will likely use electric arc furnaces to provide the power for the reduction of iron ore in a liquid iron bath. As long as there is free carbon in liquid iron, it will reduce carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide which in turn reduces the iron oxides. The heat necessary to drive these reactions will come from the electric arc. In essence this is similar to how aluminium is smelted now.
Plastics, the fourth pillar, are mostly a combination of carbon and hydrogen. Industrial chemists can make every type of plastic using carbon monoxide and hydrogen as the initial starting materials. It will just be more expensive than if you started with a larger molecule first such as naptha from oil refining.
Ammonia is the fifth pillar of civilisation. Half of the world’s population is alive due to protein that had its origin in the energy contained in coal and natural gas. That energy is used to combine nitrogen from the atmosphere with hydrogen from steam reforming of natural gas to produce ammonia. Which in turn is used to make urea and ammonium nitrate fertilisers. The whole process is easily converted to be powered by nuclear reactors. It is the cost of nuclear power in the post-fossil fuel era which will determine the cost of food.
Lastly, what is happening in China is instructive. China is the second biggest oil consumer on the planet at 14 million barrels per day, of which 4 million barrels is produced domestically. President Xi wants to have a war and a consequence of that is that 90% of oil imports will be cut off. In preparation for that China has built a strategic stockpile of 1,200 million barrels. China has also encouraged adoption of electric vehicles which are now 29% of cars sold in China. Which may explain why Chinese coal consumption in the last couple of years has jumped from 4.0 billion tonnes per annum to 4.5 billion tonnes, despite a lacklustre economy. Switching to electric vehicles would mean that China will be more likely to survive a maritime blockade. Bear in mind that when Japan faced a similar situation in WW2 they sent boys out into the forests to dig up pine roots to provide the fuel for their fighter aircraft.
The Chinese switch to electric vehicles will deplete their coal reserves faster which in turn will mean that the prices for solar panels and wind turbines for the rest of the world will rise faster as a consequence. Chinese polysilicon production, used for making solar panels, has moved 3,000 km in from the coast to the province of Xinjiang where Disney makes movies and China now has its cheapest coal.
David Archibald is the author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia
Nuclear has available solutions to its issues, wind and solar do not.
Reprocessing was essentially banned in the US by Jimmy Carter, on the peculiar notion that encouraging a “once through” fuel cycle would inhibit bomb proliferation. Costs on things that have seen no real development are as artificial a prices in a command economy.
So writing off light water reactors is premature.
Terrorists using plutonium (from recycling or breeders) for bombs is not the proliferation worry they made it out to be. Plutonium is chemically and radiationally messy to handle, and it doesn’t work in the simple gun type bombs like Hiroshima, which would be within terrorist competence.
Good to see someone putting the numbers together for a nuclear future.
“. . . gun type bombs like Hiroshima . . . .”
Interesting! I thought the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bomb designs were switched, i.e., Fat Man was dropped on Hiroshima.. Well, nobody can be right most of the time–least of all me.
Back in Carter’s time, they were saying that plutonium is the most dangerous substance in the Universe. As a heavy metal, plutonium has the usual heavy metal toxicity and is only extremely poisonous in vapor form. It would be in vapor form in a nuclear blast, but poisonous plutonium would probably not be your first concern.
The problem if one was using light water power plant fuel to produce plutonium, too much would be Pu240, which would cause a fizzle in a bomb.
You could use the Chernobyl design–which was specifically designed to produce bomb grade plutonium. Or you could remove the fuel rods before the reactor has a chance to produce a lot of Pu240.
My point is that if one reprocessed power plant fuel, that was run as a power plant, the product would have too much Pu240. Which would not affect it being used in a power reactor, just in a bomb.
There’s also those so-called fast breeder reactors. They make their own fuel.
It’s all down to nuclear engineering. And cost benefit analysis.
Really nuclear weapons are history – they simply don’t achieve what you want in a strategic or tactical context. They are only as dangerous as they can inspire fear, and the reality of a small nuclear device – say 5 kilotons – us that it would be no worse than a truck bomb full of semtex.
And as far as radiation goes, well its really no big deal.
Queen Elizabeth handled a large lump of plutonium in 1956. She was amazed it was warm. It seems to have done her good. She certainly didn’t die prematurely.
As you pointed out above, there is much exaggeration. If you didn’t suffer from radiation within two weeks to a month at Hiroshima or Nagasaki then your chances were as good as anybody else.
They have been vibrant, healthy, populous cities for many decades.
And I don’t buy the Plutonium is also hugely chemically-toxic urban myth either.
Who took the time and trouble to carefully study the biochemistry of pure non-radioactive Plutonium isotopes?
f-block chemistry is also often considered boring by many chemists for good reason.
Some of them have some useful properties optical and magnetic properties such as NMR shift-reagents, imaging etc, but these are not really relevant to biochemistry. The metal ions are generally large, unreactive, and unable to interfere easily with the body’s chemical reactions.
Lower s, p and d block elements like strontium and arsenic are able to act as harmful mimics for calcium and phosphorus. Mercury just loves the sulphur atoms in the cysteines and methionines of your proteins containing those amino acids.
Her mother lived to over 100.
Only need 40 kg of U235 plus 200kg of beryllium tamper!
https://fas.org/publication/feasibility-low-yield-gun-type-terrorist-fission-bomb/
Yeah, you go with that!
To clarify things a little: plutonium production starts when a u238 absorbs a neutron to become np239 which decays to pu239. That decay chain has a half life of 2.5 days or so. In order to avoid contamination of pu with too much pu240 you have to cycle fuel through the reactor pretty quickly, on the order of days, before the pu239 appears from the decay of np239. A power reactor would not be refueled every 2-3 days so wouldn’t make bombs grade plutonium.
The Manhattan project discovered the problem with pu240 only when the first minute quantities of plutonium were received at Los Alamos from the graphite reactor in oak ridge. That’s when the gun-type plutonium design was abandoned and Los Alamos went all in on implosion. By comparison the gun type uranium bomb was very fuel inefficient and used the entire HEU production at oak ridge during the Manhattan Project time frame. Some 140 pounds of it.
The genealogy of the graphite reactors was the Chicago pile (not cooled) , the oak ridge graphite reactor (air cooled), the Hanford reactors (water) cooled, and ultimately Chernobyl (water cooled).
The plutonium production at Savanna River was something entirely different and featured quick replacement of the u fuel.
I’m an Oak Ridge retiree and a volunteer at the museums. Pretty familiar with Manhattan Project facilities. Big fan of molten salt designs, especially the part of this that Oak Ridge will have.
I knew the general facts, but not the details. Plutonium from power reactors is not good for bombs.
Nuclear as a solution means EVs and EV mandates, you do realize?
The US has around 400 years of recoverable coal reserves.
I guess the babies being born now that will see the end of coal will live very long lives.
Also to your point, there are other hydrocarbon reserves, such as oil shales and methane hydrates that could become useful resources.
I’ve heard similar peak oil proclamations like Mr. Archibald’s in the past. He may be right, but there are confounding economic conditions, in addition to the pandemic, that are affecting supply and demand. Personally, I’d give it a few years before I would bet on peak oil having already occurred.
Yeah, I’m wondering if the Russia/Opec agreements to cut production by over 1.2 million barrels per day in 2018, 3.66 million barrels per day in 2010 and 2 million barrels per day this year may have had some small impact on his ‘peak oil’ prediction?
2020 not 2010.
I’m ready right now to bet that we haven’t seen the peak.
Have the Russians even bothered to figure out fracking yet? I’ve heard the only thing they have done systematically is move some crude from those deep reservoirs to easily accessible pools beneath pipelines.
Do they need to?
And that’s recoverable at today’s prices, using today’s technology. Improvements in technology and rising prices of coal both result in total reserves going up.
Yes. I love to see projections of technology, resources, and costs into the far-distant future. His little blip of “fossil fuel” availability extends to 2456CE.. And that was before fracking! LOL
Peak oil is about obtaining the highest price, not reserve availability. Natural gas production enabled the manipulation of oil and coal prices. Permian natural gas, as a by-product of oil, is so cheap that it is flared off rather than sold or used for local electrical production: cheaper to burn than to pipe it out or contain it. Yet natural gas useand distribution is suppressed, just as nuclear energy has been, by oil and coal interests (among others) to maximize profit. Better distribution of natural gas would (and has historically) undercut the price of oil.
Natural gas is CH4, and from it can be refined methanol and equivalents gasoline, kerosene, and most petroleum based lubricants and materials. It is a major component of syngas, and can be pyrolized from any carbohydrate feedstock. It is the cheapest source of hydrogen. Hydrogen, from methane and other hydrocarbons, is part of the history and present, as well as the future.
Others will no doubt critique the treatement of nuclear energy above. But to all but ignore CH4, to equate it with coal and oil, and to disregard its place in secure and clean energy this article is to miss the forest for the trees.
In the process of combustion both natural gas and hydrogen are combined with oxygen at atmospheric pressure or slightly above. However, The net heating value in BTUs per cubic foot of hydrogen at atmospheric pressure is 275. In the case of natural gas in the same conditions the BTUs are 850. Ergo natural gas is not only cheaper than hydrogen, it produces 3 times as much of the real goal, heat, and also more safely.
Didn’t oil peak around 1970 ???
Oh wait it was 1980 ???
Or was it 2005 ???
Hmmm
Now its 2018!!!
http://www.energyinsights.net/cgi-script/csArticles/uploads/85/Global%20Oil%20Production%201965-2007%20and%20predicted%20to%202015.gif/image>
This peak is most likely an artifact of OPEC cutting production, European Domestic Oil policy and Biden Domestic Oil policy
I’m with you. Agreeing on what happened in the past is hard enough.
I’ve seen estimates that 2023 will have the highest oil production on record. We’ll see. Mr. Archibald could be proven wrong in just a few months.
Doesn’t OPEC cut production when it feels the price of oil is too low and needs a helping hand to increase its value ? 🙂
Your knowledge of the situation and recognition of the important role that natural gas plays is more up to date than Mr. Archibald’s understanding.
The coal liquefaction route that he described will not achieve modern specifications without the addition of severe hydrotreating to reduce sulfur in coal from percentage levels down to ppm levels in finished diesel. Oxygen and nitrogen needs to be similarly removed. This increases hydrogen consumption well beyond its final fuel content. In a Mad Max or Nazi world then we wouldn’t worry so much and the Bergius process would be gut genug.
Cleaner liquid fuel products are more readily made via natural gas, either through syngas or methanol as you suggest.
Synthetic gas from pyrolisis of coal, petroluem, any of several different waste streams, or other organic feed stocks is mainly CO, CO2, hydrogen, water, and methane. The CO and hydrogen can be further converted into methane, then either burned with the CH4 on site for fuel or refined into those other materials.
As far as I am aware, liquid fuels equivalent to diesel, kerosene, or gasoline, derived from coal require extra steps in processing from syngas production.
Processing for removal of sulphur and extraction of ammonia likewise take place after pyrolisis. Production of ammonia salts and carbon sequestration (e.g. through production of sodium carbonate) also are available from the synthetic gas stage.
Syngas from coal and waste (city gas, coal gas) for domestic heating and lighting is also hystorically nearly as old as David Rockefeller’s supply of cheap kerosene for the same purpose. It doesn’t need to be as wasteful, dirty, dangerous, and smelly as the Victorians did it in London.
Yeah, you’re probably aware that syngas can build heavier hydrocarbons via Fischer Tropsch processes. (Fischer and Tropsch might be the original Franz and Hans.) Definitely, processes for making syngas today are much cleaner in several respects.
This makes very high quality fuels particularly because nitrogen and sulfur “impurities” are removed both before and after gasification to syngas, and modern automobiles need these to work with pollution control devices, catalytic converters and particle traps.
“Natural gas suppression” – huh?
The issue with natural gas is that it is very low energy- and value- density. $/mmbtu for natural gas is a fraction of $/mmbtu from other fossil fuel sources as a result.
As for suppression: unless you mean NIMBYism blocking pipelines, this is nonsense.
In his last 2 paragraphs, Mr. Archibald makes the assumption that there will be a continued need for a switch to electric vehicles and continued polysilicon production to combat the increase of CO2 in our atmosphere.
However, it is NOT the accumulation of CO2 in our atmosphere that is the cause of our modern (since 1980) warming.. It is the cleansing of our atmosphere of dimming industrial SO2 aerosols due to “Clean Air” and Net Zero activities. These activities need to be halted ASAP (although we may have already passed a tipping point!).
htttps://doi.org/10.30574/wjarr.2023.19.3.1996
The cleaner the air, the hotter it will get.
a win-win!
It’s somewhat ironic that most proposed geoengineering approaches to bring about cooling involves the artificial addition of SO2 into the atmosphere, while at the same time fuel sulfur is being scrubbed.
The listed DOI is correct, but not activated
Here it is again
https://doi.org/10.30574/wjarr.2023.19.3.1996
What exactly is a “reactor chamber”? Explosions in Fukushima were of a hydrogen-air mixture in containment domes. There was no ventilation, as they were afraid of a release of a minute amount of radioactivity,
OK, there is a finite amount of hydrocarbon fuels. At some time in the future oil and coal will simply be too expensive to use in their current applications. This is a subject unrelated to anthropogenic global warming. Not so long ago no one was aware of immense pools of oil beneath the surface of various places on earth. The fat of whales was rendered to light homes. Electrification didn’t arrive in many places on the North American continent until just a few years ago, as some still living can attest. The high-powered and financially secure research institutions should be on top of energy options without squandering their talents on CO2 Net Zero fantasies.
Electrification mostly completed by 1920s, installing the lines was the issue Theres always been off grid places , but most used a local electric supply.
Dont think there was .’many places’ like you suggest
This has the appearance of a useful long range plan that needs to go through further validation tests. The sooner that starts, the better.
There are some useful lessons coming out of weather dependent power generation:
A Governments make bad decisions when picking winners.
B Reducing reliance on fossil fuels is not easy and will take a long time to make a difference.
C Central planning lacks the agility of free markets and ensures mediocrity at best.
Governments can’t even balance a budget.
In the U.S. they can’t even create a budget.
There is enough thorium stored in nuclear waste deposit areas in Nevada to power the USA for a year. Maybe Kirk Sorensen could be persuaded to comment here?
There is enough plutonium stored in UKs Sellafield to power the UK for 10 years.
There are opportunities in Australia to make better use of existing water resources. Efforts to green Australia could make Australia look more like the Amazon with similar forest productivity.
In fact there is some risk that deforestation in the Amazon will make the region more like Australia. Biomass holds moisture and the resulting atmospheric moisture guarantees convective instability. In the present era, the Amazon holds enough moisture to guarantee the most powerful convective towers.
The 2019/20 wild fires in Australia consumed enough biomass to meet all energy requirements in Australia for two years. Managing the liberation of the energy would seem more sensible than having it destroy the built environment.
How is oil made?
From sunlight and carbon dioxide. That makes plants and micro-organisms eat plants and then die and their bodies turn into oil.
You’re going down the abiotic oil rabbit hole.
I’ve been there. Done that.
The chemistry is right. There is abiotic oil in the crust. There must be.
But that doesn’t mean it’s anywhere near the surface. And all our techniques for finding oil are misleading when looking for abiotic oil.
So it doesn’t matter. We’ll never find it,. And if we do, there’s no reason to expect it to be economical to exploit.
I see David has a new book out and is back on the grift.
I guess no one believed his F-35 pobia hard enough to buy limited ability lightweight Gen 4 fighters from SAAB.
Want some spoilers, David?
Peak Oil is not the moment demand drops.
Just because fuels are hydrocarbons does not mean Hydrogen is a key part of fuel energy supply.
Semi random charts and tablets are filler if your core content is flawed.
Throwing in anti China and anti Disney comments – regardless of how factual they actually are – does not counter base flaws in your content.
Good luck with your book. I won’t be reading it.
No. Smaller reactors can cool themselves by convection alone. That is one of the secrets of the small modular reactors – keep it small enough to be able to cool it passively under SCRAM conditions. It represents a huge simplification in both design and certification, and hence cost.
No. You have fallen from the EU=Europe, Hamas=Palestine, Putin=Russia confusion
High level waste is by definition, short lived.
The longest lived nuclear waste on the planet is in fact natural uranium, which has been here since the planet was formed.
Low level waste is no issue. We handle tons every day from hospitals etc. It is simply bottled and buried.
High level waste is stored for about 15-50 years until it is medium level waste and then either reprocessed or bottled and dumped. Or both.
Medium level waste is the bigger problem – Stuff with half lives of a few hundred years that is both quite radioactive and biologically active. From memory Caesium 137 (HL=30.05yr), Carbon 14 (HL=5730 yr), and strontium 90 (HL=28.8yr) are the three that are most worrisome.
But:
C14 is produced naturally by cosmic rays modifying nitrogen nuclei. Ther is a lot in the atmosphere already and our bodies have evolved to handle it.
The other two with ~30 year half lives merely need to be kept safe for about 300 years. Then they are gone. Nada. Decayed out of existence.
Nothing else is remotely as radioactive as those are after 30 years in a fuel pond.
Britain has successfully green fielded its first nuclear reactors after about 40 years.
No, it isn’t. That is a purely economic decision. Here in the UK we have been reprocessing spent fuel rods since the start of the nuclear age and we have tonnes of Uranium 238 (and in fact plutonium) all there to make fresh fuel rods out of.
Trouble is its cheaper to buy new enriched uranium at the moment.
But only by a small amount. It’s the same reason we don’t build fast breeders to use more U238 or thorium. We could, and we have, but they were just more complex and expensive.
But in time, we will.
The problem with hydrogenating biomass to make synthetic hydrocarbon fuel is that there simply isn’t enough biomass. The calculations have been done. It might work for Australia or Finland, but not for the UK
We need carbon in huge quantities and coal is also a limited resource. We might however mine limestone and chalk for it. Or extract it from the oceans. Ther might be enough photosynthetic organisms in there to supply fixed carbon needs.
Apart from that I agree with you. Nearly all the ducks are in place to transition to a nuclear future.
The two real problems are government subsidy and government regulation.
Subsidy keeps us going down the renewable cul-de-sac and regulation hampers nuclear development.
We don’t know which technologies will in the end prove cost effective, and having governments pretending that they do, is massively counter productive. This isn’t the time for Soviet style command economies: It is the time for the free market to be unleashed and let the best solution win.
What we need right now, is for governments to slim down nuclear regulation and make legally binding contracts that they won’t shut down nuclear without full compensation. Then the smart money will invest.
And wean the energy industry off subsidies.
The rest will follow, sure as night follows day.
“Delayed fission?” That isn’t a thing. Fission of a U-235 nucleus produces two nuclei of lighter elements, plus anywhere from 2 to 7 neutrons depending on the branch. Given the huge number of nuclei in a mole of U-235 (235 grams worth), the statistics are very well characterized, and the average number of neutrons is 2.3 per fission. At least 2 neutrons are “prompt”, meaning that they emerge instantly from the fission reaction. They are what make an atomic bomb possible. There are also “delayed” neutrons, which may emerge a few milliseconds to a few minutes after the fission event. They play no role in an atomic weapon, which has ceased to exist about 1 microsecond after the first fission event in the pit. Delayed neutrons are what make a nuclear fission reactor possible, in that the delay allows us to control the reactivity and keep the reaction rate stable. The reactor is never prompt-critical; it is always run “delayed-critical.”
Anyway, once the reactor is shut down, there is no further fission (of any consequence). However, all of those lighter nuclei – the fission products – are radioactive. They vary all over the map in terms of half-life. For example, krypton 80 has a half-life of 32 seconds, xenon 135 has a half-life of 9.14 hours, all the way to iodine 129’s half-life of 15.6 million years. The shorter the half-life, the more intensely radioactive the element is and the faster it disappears. It is the short half-life elements which produce the “afterheat” of a nuclear reactor post-shutdown. It may amount to 7% of the full rated reactor power (thermal) power output, depending on how long the reactor has been running. It reduces steadily as the short half life fission products decay. After the Three Mile Island accident, it took about three months for the afterheat to reduce to the point where the coolant pumps had to be shut down, because the pump power dissipated in the cooling water actually exceeded the thermal power output of the remaining fission products.
“Solar panels are artefacts of a millenarian/apocalyptic/pagan cult in which the adherents signal their virtue by the display of their panels.”
Nice!
“In effect, fossil fuels got civilisation started”
Are you saying civilisation only started in the 19th century ???
What about the
10. The Incan Civilization
9. The Aztec Civilization
8. The Roman Civilization
7. The Persian Civilization
6. The Ancient Greek Civilization
5. The Chinese Civilization
4. The Maya Civilization
3. The Ancient Egyptian Civilization
2. The Indus Valley Civilization
1. The Mesopotamian Civilization
They all ran on wood, straw & shit (euphemism for ‘poo’ ); or is history wrong ???
Perhaps that should have been stated … In effect Fossil fuels got The Modern High Tech Civilization started
Perhaps, but everyone knew what he meant.
You don’t need all this hi-falutin tech stuff. Just legislate a healthy environment human right-
Canberra set to become the first place in Australia to legislate the right to a healthy environment (msn.com)
That means everyone is entitled to “clean air, a safe climate, access to safe water and to healthy and sustainably produced food …. [with] healthy biodiversity and ecosystems”.
How do you sue the environment when it isn’t healthy?
The problem with such requirements is that they don’t specify what qualifies as clean and safe.
Anything can be made cleaner and safer, all you have to do is spend more money.
“The peak month of world oil production was back in October 2018 and production has declined slightly from then.”
It’s back! By popular request to shore up the crumbling wind/solar, hands knees bumpsadaisy ‘alternatives’. Let’s give a big hand for Peak Oil.
Please can we stop confusing demand with rate of production. Demand declined circa 2018 because of slow down of China’s economy, therefore production eased off. The Fake CoVid crisis further reduced demand, further reducing production, and prices have started to go up because of Bidenomics/Greedonomics shutting down US oil production, and an agreement by some OPEC Countries to cut production by 5% and, oh, yes, Israel, Lebanon, Iran on the brink of war maybe.
And finally: Peak Coal was predicted by an economist Mr Jevons in 1865 to occur circa 1900, after which time the British economy would stagnate, then go into decline towards mid-century as coal deposits were depleted.
Well. Apparently not.
Upvoted because you are generally right.
Don’t agree that the last pandemic was as fake crisis.
But otherwise, I entirely agree.
What a waste of a lot of words.
So smaller cars, public transport and walkable cities to stretch the transition period, right?
The significance of that for solar power is that most solar panels are currently made in China using power from coal-fired power stations at about $0.05/kWh.
#1 producer
https://www.longi.com/en/comments/renewable-energy/
I love this silly little insistence on making solar panels wih solar power.
like using nuclear powered shovels to mine uranium.
well in fact in China, Longi, the number 1 producer of solar cells will use only wind hydro and solar
in its operations. by 2028.
I like 2028. Usually the promise is in 20 years.
If Solar panels producing solar panels makes them more expensive each generation, why won’t extracting fossil fuels with fossil fuels make them more expensive? Or does it?
. To understand the limitations of hydrogen there is nothing better than the experience of playing with it as a child:
. To understand the limitations of gasoline there is nothing better than the experience of playing with it as a child: or better yet a smoker
Wow, two substances both burn. And by that steve thinks he’s proven that hydrogen is safe.
Wow, was that an explosion, or just burning? And, whatever, the ICEV didn’t “explode” spontaneously, as EVs appear to do.
Furthermore, solar panels aren’t recycled – they are once-through to landfill.
https://www.solarcycle.us/
In other words, they are toxic waste.
Steven, I watched the solarcycle.us video. A pure commercial. Not a word how it is supposed to work.
What is it with advocates of nuclear and their desire to push the peak oil/coal scam?
Trying to claim that oil production is controlled only by oil availability is ludicrous. Do they have so little faith in the technology that they push that they feel the need to clear all other options from the table?
So we have only 75 years, not 150?
Is it likely that extraction technologies won’t improve in the next three generations?
Piffle.
“a radiological hazard for millions of years, literally.”
now define “hazard” since radioactivity is inversely proportional to half life. maybe we should fear the sun.
Mr. Archibald,
You are confusing a severe lack of investment over the past decade with peak oil production. Some of this lack is due to over-investment in fracking, but that is more than offset by underinvestment overall worldwide.
Secondly, the estimates of Fischer Tropsch syngas economic viability are made with presumptions of $/mmbtu ratios between natural gas and oil not changing.
This is invalid for several reasons:
1) Natural gas production from fracked wells, at least in North Dakota for the 2017 vintage – is increasing overall. This compares with 17% average declines for oil production from similar age cohot wells. Meaning $/mmbtu ratios could well increase even further than the spread increase due to fracking.
2) Fischer Tropsch is a pretty expensive process both due to capital cost and due to operating costs. There are all manner of metallic catalysts needed, for example. More importantly, Fischer Tropsch only produces gasoline, not diesel. The hydrocarbon liquids coming out of fracked wells are very light; this is fine for gasoline production but it is not usable for diesel production. And since fracking now accounts for 40%+ of oil production in the US – this is why diesel vs gasoline spreads have increased in the US even beyond lawfare/regulatory skew.
3) The biggest issue is that nuclear power or mythical fusion power would require EVs or hydrogen fueled vehicles. EVs have the battery material problem while hydrogen has so many problems it isn’t even funny, although hydrogen once in the car works more or less like ICE in theory.