David Archibald
Introduction
There was an inspiring story in the magazine Tablet about Palmer Luckey, the founder of the first-person-viewer company bought out by Meta. As recounted in Tablet, Mr Luckey had an epiphany – instead of developing the next iteration in that technology, he should develop the ultimate technology. He did, made billions and went on to found a yet more successful company in defence technology.
So that begs the question: what is the ultimate technology in energy? What technology will our great grandchildren have settled on to keep the lights on, the wheels turning and the grain growing? No matter what we are doing in energy at the moment, we, as a civilisation, should prepare for adopting the ultimate technology. Preparation starting as soon as possible will reduce the pain and suffering in getting to that shining city on a hill.
That choice won’t be between wind and solar, on one hand, and fossil fuels on the other. The fossil fuels will largely be exhausted in three generations so they won’t be part of the solution. And believe it or not, wind and solar won’t be part of the solution either.
The reason for that is that you can’t make wind turbines and solar panels with power produced from wind turbines and solar panels. Those things are artefacts of currently cheap Chinese coal prices. In fact, polysilicon production in China for making solar panels has moved 3,000 km inland to the province of Xinjiang where the coal and the Uigher slave labour are cheapest.
Power in China at US$0.05/kWh makes solar panels which, under the most ideal conditions on the planet – supplying gold mines out the Australian desert, produces power at the price of power from diesel at US$0.20/kWh. So, if you used power from solar panels at US$0.20/kWh to make solar panels, what would the cost of power from that second generation of solar panels be? It is likely to be of the order of US$0.80/kWh and so on to infinity. That ignores the lubricating effect of oil as a high energy-density liquid fuel in keeping industry going.
Wind turbines and solar panels are neither renewable or sustainable. Solar panels only last 15 to 20 years. And then what? They are mostly glass and not worth more than empty beer bottles. Will the metals smeared on them as thinly as possible be worth recovering? Nobody has bothered to do so yet and likely never will. There goes the renewable label. What is worse is that the metals used to make solar panels include cadmium. Cadmium is more poisonous than lead. It is highly toxic when ingested or inhaled, primarily affecting the kidneys, bones, and lungs. Inhalation of cadmium dust or fumes is particularly dangerous and can lead to lung cancer. Cadmium can accumulate in the environment, especially in soil and water. It is taken up by plants, entering the food chain and potentially impacting human health through contaminated food. Cadmium loading is up to 10 grams per square metre of solar panel. To avoid environmental damage, solar panels will have to end up in engineered repositories. There is nothing renewable, sustainable, economical, rational or joyous about solar panels.
It is the same for wind. Wind turbines are engineered to last as long as the power contract they are to service. Why design for a 50 to 100 year life if your contract is for only 15 years? Blade failure is one thing and rotor fires are understandable but the fact that the towers of wind turbines buckle means that they are built on the slimmest of design margins. If we paid 20% more for our wind turbines, would they last five times as long? We are told to think of the children, but our grandchildren won’t inherit these things. What they will inherit is a lot of waste fibreglass to send to landfill.
Let’s cut to the chase. If wind turbines and solar panels are just self-indulgent artefacts of currently cheap Chinese coal power and the fossil fuels will fade due to depletion, what is the choice of energy systems for our great grandchildren? It is a choice of either nuclear energy or horse-drawn carts. Let’s assume that they make the better choice of nuclear power. That may seem to be the better choice but we now live in a world in which some politicians can’t define what a woman is and that inability seems to be no impediment to their re-election. So sensible choices can’t be taken for granted.
Figure 1: The energy transition from fossil fuels to nuclear was predicted 68 years ago
From King Hubbert’s 1956 paper Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels.
It won’t be nuclear power as it is commonly understood, which is U235-burning light water reactors. Apart from safety considerations of having water and zirconium in the same reactor vessel, and the enormous spent fuel legacy, that technology is dreadfully wasteful as it uses only about one percent of the energy contained in uranium as it is dug out of the ground. Why we have light water reactors as the dominant nuclear technology is a consequence of what came first. What came first was nuclear submarines with the launch of the USS Nautilus in 1954. The authorities in the US wanted to develop the nuclear power sector and the fastest way to do that was to repurpose the reactors from the US nuclear submarine fleet. Little has been done to switch to better technology in the last 70 years.
The big two things in nuclear power, which nobody on either side of the argument seems to talk about, are high level waste and delayed fission reactions. Current practice for all current commercial reactors in the US is for the used fuel rods to be put in pools of water for a few years to cool down, in a radioactivity sense, and then be placed in steel casks for decades. Recycling would cost about US$2,000 per kg of used fuel which is higher than the cost of mining and enriching uranium out of the ground.
It is a bad thing that our generation is not bearing the burden of recycling those used fuel rods to recover the energy that is inherent in them. In the US that is currently 90,000 tonnes and rising at 2,000 tonnes per annum. On the other hand, at some point the cost of mining uranium will rise above the cost of recycling and our descendants then will inherit a blessing of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of energy-dense fuel.
The other big thing about nuclear reactors to bear in mind is that at steady state, 7% of the energy is coming from delayed fission reactions. That is from atoms that have absorbed a neutron but have not split immediately. They will split and generate heat. And if that heat can’t be handled, bad things can happen. One of the worst things that could happen is if the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods heats up to1,250°C and then reacts with water to produce hydrogen. The hydrogen accumulates and then explodes. All three of the operating reactors of the Fukushima power plant had hydrogen explosions.
Figure 2: Fukushima reactor explosion timeline
Even worse is if the fuel rods melt together and then that mass melts through the reactor shielding to the concrete floor underneath and then keeps going. The big, hot, sticky, intensely radioactive mass is called corium. Some reactors have a special chamber to catch the corium. It would be better not to have the possibility of a meltdown in the first place.
All these problems – the squandering of 99% of the contained energy of mined uranium, the burden of high-level waste and the danger from delayed fission reactions – are all solved by adopting the best nuclear technology possible which is plutonium breeder reactors.
The Leaving of Oil
Before we discuss that best of all possible worlds, let’s go back to what made it achievable – fossil fuels as the bridge between burning wood and breeding plutonium. Fossil fuels allowed civilisation to develop to a high level and showed us what was possible. Fossil fuels allowed us to light the nuclear match that started the fire that will sustain civilisation at a high level for all of eternity. But, unlike nuclear, fossil fuels aren’t forever and to avoid pain and suffering, we have to leave fossil fuels faster than they leave us.
World oil and condensate production peaked in November 2018 at 84.6 million barrels per day with the United States, Russia and Saudi Arabia each contributing a bit over 11 million barrels per day. Peak world oil production had been predicted for 2005 but the development of the US tight oil industry delayed that by 13 years. In fact, US oil production has continued to rise to 13.2 million barrels per day in late 2024 while non-US production fell by six million barrels per day. But new oil discoveries are only a fraction of what is produced annually. In 2023, oil discoveries amount to 2.6 billion barrels while annual production was 37 billion barrels – 14 times as much. Exhaustion is inevitable. It is just a question of what the decline profile will look like.
Figure 3: US tight oil production by year of well drilled
US oil tight oil production is a treadmill. If drilling stopped overnight, production would halve within 18 months. The rig count for drilling horizontal oil wells in the US is currently in downtrend which means that drilling for tight oil is breakeven at best at the current oil price. The combination of these factors means that the oil price is underwritten by the lack of highly profitable locations to drill. A further factor is that the quality of the remaining locations continues to fall as the best locations have been drilled first, meaning that a higher oil price will be required for them to be drilled.
Figure 4: Texas Railroad Commission District 8 Oil Production January 2021 – July 2024
Texas District 8 is in the core of the Permian Basin in which the most profitable well locations were drilled first. Production peaked in late 2023 and by July 2024 had fallen by 700,000 BOPD. This rapid decline in production in the core of the basin indicates that production has peaked. It also means that a higher oil price is necessary to slow the production decline.
Figure 5: Lea County Gas Oil Ratio relative to production
Oil production from tight oil wells falls once the reservoir pressure declines to the bubble point at which natural gas comes out of solution and starts moving towards the well bore. The more that reservoir pressure declines, the greater the rate of gas production and the faster the pressure decline, leaving oil in the formation and preferentially producing gas.
The fastest part of the decline will come from the US tight oil segment. In the unconstrained extraction of a resource, production declines, and costs go up, once half of the initial resource has been extracted. The increasing gas to oil ratio in the prime oil counties of the Permian Basin suggest that has now happened. So much gas is being produced now in parts of Texas that the natural gas price can be negative locally.
Figure 6: The major US tight oil basins production profile
What of natural gas? Currently it is much cheaper than oil on an energy content basis but when the oil price rises due to declining supply, methane is the next best alternative and will go to the oil price on an energy content basis. This has already happened on the international LNG market.
It is said that natural gas is essential to glue the solar and wind power grids together and that is true. Which in effect means that you are using a hydrocarbon priced at the oil price to provide power. If that power ends up being used in an electric vehicle, then 29% of the energy contained in the natural gas ends up as power to the wheels. Natural gas can be used directly in internal combustion engines in which case 40% of the contained energy ends up as power to the wheels. Iran and Pakistan have a high proportion of their vehicle fleets running on natural gas.
One of the more amusing political phenomena of recent times is the campaign against using natural gas for cooking. The globalists would rather we cooked our insect protein ration on a single plate induction cooktop. The transfer of the contained energy from natural gas to the food being cooked is 90% on a gas stove. Using an electric stove lowers that to 36% – less than half. If you wanted to lower domestic energy consumption, you wouldn’t discourage cooking using natural gas. Unfortunately the same people trying to ban gas stoves, and thus more than doubling energy consumption in the process, are also making rules and regulations on far more important matters.
If the haters amongst us despise natural gas because of the single carbon atom in the methane molecule, what do they think of coal in which the molecules can include thousands of carbon atoms? It doesn’t matter because all the coal that can be economically dug up and burnt will eventually be dug up and burnt. But not for power generation. The last research into coal liquefaction in Australia was conducted by a Japanese group in the Yallourn Valley in the early 1990s. They determined that the brown coals of Victoria were quite amenable to liquefaction by the Bergius process and that the oil price required for commerciality was then US$40 per barrel. US$40 per barrel then is now US$110 per barrel. As oil production tips over into decline, that price will be with us soon enough.
Figure 7: Bergius Process mass balance from Bergius’ 1931 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
Our coal reserves shouldn’t be seen as something destined for power generation. Once the oil price goes through US$110 per barrel, coal will go to the price of oil less the capital and operating costs of the conversion process. In fact there is a role for nuclear in all this. All the Bergius plants operated to date, including the ones recently built in China, generate the hydrogen needed for the hydrogenation step by processing part of the product stream in a steam reformer. The step is 40% of the capital cost of the plant and consumes 20% of the energy in the coal feedstock. In a more perfect world, the requisite hydrogen would by produced by electrolysis using power produced by nuclear reactors. This would also make the plant much easier to operate by decoupling hydrogen production from the process stream.
Figure 8: Bergius Process Using Nuclear Power for Hydrogen generation
Synthetic liquid fuel production using coal as the feedstock and powered by nuclear energy will be the next big thing. Diesel molecules are 13% hydrogen by weight and 87% carbon. In energy content terms, they are 39% hydrogen and 61% carbon. Carbon is in effect the carrier allowing hydrogen gas to be liquified and made into something useful. For all the hydrogen enthusiasts, synthetic fuel production via the Bergius process will be the closest we will come to a hydrogen economy. Hydrogen enthusiasts they should reconcile themselves to this fact.
Figure 9: Diesel’s components by weight and energy contribution
Once the coal runs out, the Bergius plants will have to switch to consuming wood and other biomass as the carbon source. That is why the title of this paper is Conserve to Convert. If we were a sensible species, we would be replacing our coal-fired power stations with nuclear ones. Nuclear will always be with us but when the coal runs out, our standard of living will be dependent, to a large extent, on the cost of carbon from biomass.
Figure 10: Australian per capita carbon consumption by application
Energy Price Equivalence by Source
The fossil fuels no longer in overabundance on world markets are oil and natural gas (as LNG) and are now in price equivalence in energy content terms. To provide a guide to what will happen to the prices of the energy sources that can substitute for oil when they go to price equilibrium with oil, the following table was constructed:
Table 1: Price equivalence of energy sources with oil.
The early history of the oil industry was over-abundance. So much oil was found in Texas early last century that the Texas Railroad Commission was given the role of controlling oil production in the state in 1919. Then the US became a net oil importer in 1950 and the locus of production shifted to the giant oilfields of the Middle East. Control of the oil market shifted to OPEC after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Once again, OPEC’s role was to limit production to keep the price up. The world started consuming more oil than was discovered each year in the 1960s and so from there it was only a matter of time before production peaked and then tipped over into decline.
In 1956, Shell geologist King Hubbert had predicted that US oil production would peak in 1970, which it duly did. There was an expectation that world oil production would peak in 2005. That was also the time a number of LNG receiving terminals were proposed in the US as it was expected that the US would start running short of natural gas too. Then the US shale oil and shale gas phenomenon started. The US has provided all the growth in world oil production over the last 20 years. The US LNG import terminals were repurposed to be LNG export facilities.
World oil production peaked in November 2018. Oil will become scarcer year by year. As the oil price goes up, other energy sources will substitute for it. This has happened before in the US. In the second half of the 20th century, natural gas traded at the No 2 fuel oil price as there was a natural gas shortage, oil was cheap and manufacturers were indifferent to which energy source they used. At the moment there is such an abundance of natural gas in Texas as a byproduct of tight oil production that the wellhead price can be negative in places. The current Henry Hub price is US$2.72 per thousand cubic feet (close to a gigajoule (gj) in energy content). In terms of energy content, six thousand cubic feet of natural gas equates to one barrel of oil. So the Henry Hub price is equivalent to US$16.32 per barrel of oil in energy content terms. This is one fifth the oil price.
Figure 11: Relative energy price equivalence at current commodity prices
Natural gas can substitute for oil in a number of transport applications. Consider that a major use for natural gas now is to provide the glue that holds power grids together in the face of the inherent volatility of solar and wind as power sources.
There are signs that the heart of the sweet spot of tight oil production in the Permian Basin of Texas has tipped over into decline. The other major source of natural gas in the US, the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, has now produced half of its initial resource and so should also tip over into decline concurrently with the Permian Basin. The period of cheap natural gas is about to end and natural gas, being the closest substitute for oil, will go to the oil price in energy equivalent terms. It follows that burning natural gas to keep the power grid stable will, for consumers, have the price effect of burning oil for that purpose.
Next on the substitution list for oil is coal. Oil’s price premium is due to the fact that it is a high energy-density liquid which is easy to store, transport and consume. Turning coal into synthetic liquid fuels isn’t difficult. Germany developed two processes to that end over a century ago – Fischer-Tropsch and the Bergius process. In the former, coal is burnt in pure oxygen to produce a synthesis gas with part of that being steam-reformed to produce hydrogen. The mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen is then catalysed in an oil bath to make liquid hydrocarbons. In the Bergius process, hydrogen is forced into coal molecules at 250 atmospheres and 300°C. The hydrogen is produced by steam reforming the methane portion of the process stream. The South African synthetic fuel industry runs on the Fisher-Tropsch process while the Chinese synthetic liquid fuel industry uses the Bergius process.
Current world oil consumption is nearly equivalent to the world’s coal consumption in energy content terms. So as oil production declines to zero, coal consumption will double, all other things being equal. What will happen is that coal will become too expensive for power generation and will be replaced by nuclear. Beyond Australia’s black coal and lignite reserves, there is a lot of oil shale in the Toolebuc Formation of western Queensland. Current retort technology to produce oil from oil shale has a low yield from the contained kerogen. If, instead, the oil shale could be hydrogenated as per the Bergius process, perhaps twice as much might be produced.
The power price per kWh in the table is the cost of power as if oil was the energy source.
Next is uranium. This is the uranium price which you would pay to have power produced at the oil price equivalent. The prices calculated are well in excess of the current yellowcake price of about US$80/lb. Last decade yellowcake was less than half that price. In energy content terms, the current yellowcake price equates to an oil price of US$15/bbl. Most of the current cost of power from nuclear plants is depreciation – paying off the cost of building the plant. The cost of uranium is usually not mentioned as a factor and it hasn’t been a factor in the cost of running nuclear plants.
For completeness, the cost of hydrogen is included. Power at $0.05 per kWh will produce hydrogen at $7 per kg. In turn, hydrogen at $7 per kg equates to diesel at about $2.20 per litre. Which happens to be what a lot of people in Australia are paying at the pump now. The implication is that if we can keep the cost of power down to $0.05 per kWh, we can run our civilisation at a high level for all of eternity. That is the promise of nuclear.
When we have dug up all the fossil fuels and burnt them, we will still need a source of carbon. About 4% of oil production is used for making plastics, resins, pharmaceuticals and a myriad of other things. Carbon will be needed for smelting iron ore. The last hydrogen-based iron reduction plant, BHP’s Port Hedland hot briquetted iron plant, had an explosion in 2004 which killed one employee and injured two others. Hydrogen is so dangerous to handle that one of the companies making valves for hydrogen tests them by using helium rather than hydrogen. The only source of carbon will be biomass. So the table above includes the value of hardwood chips being put through a Bergius plant to produce synthetic diesel.
Wood is half carbon, 6% hydrogen and 44% oxygen. Under Bergius process conditions, wood decomposes to liberate a lot of carbon dioxide exothermically. What remains would yield three barrels of synthetic fuel per tonne of wood used. The calculated value of hardwood chips via the Bergius process at an oil price of US$100 per barrel is about the current woodchip price.
The Optimum Nuclear Technology
Apart from the considerations of safety and the disposal of high-level waste, the current dominant nuclear technology is also inherently wasteful. To power most of the world’s reactor fleet, uranium is enriched from 0.7% U235 to 3.5% U235 with the balance of 86% discarded. This discarded uranium is 99.8% U238 and 0.2% U235. Which means that 86% of the inherent energy in uranium is thrown away straight up. Current practice in most of the world is also to not reprocess the used fuel rods with the result that a further 13.75% is wasted. That is shown in the following figure:
Figure 12: Uranium light water reactor route
To produce one gigawatt of electric power requires the fission of one tonne of uranium or plutonium. Thorium is fertile, not fissile. It requires irradiation with neutrons to convert to U233 which is fissile. To fission one tonne of uranium in light water reactors, you start with 250 tonnes of uranium as dug out of the ground and concentrate the U235 portion to be made into fuel rods. The rods are operated down to 1.7% fissile material, equal parts U235 and plutonium. By the time the rods are pulled in a commercial reactor, the plutonium in them is 80% Pu239 and 20% Pu240 which makes it useless for nuclear weapons. Weapons grade plutonium has a maximum Pu240 content of 7%. Pu240 has a high rate of spontaneous fission which makes a nuclear weapon detonate too early and produce a fizzle. It also makes the cores of nuclear weapons hot, some as hot as 200°C which cooks the chemical explosives and electronics. To make weapons-grade plutonium requires more frequent reprocessing of the fuel rods.
President Carter banned the reprocessing of spent fuel rods in 1977 as a precaution against nuclear weapons proliferation. He needn’t have bothered. You can’t make nuclear weapons using plutonium you have extracted from spent fuel rods from commercial reactors.
Only one quarter of one percent of the energy inherent in as-mined uranium is used with the rest discarded. Beyond the world’s 17 million tonnes of uranium reserves, there is four times as much thorium which, like U238, is fertile, not fissile. So, in effect, the current dominant nuclear power generation technology of U235-burning light water reactors is only using 0.05% of humanity’s endowment of nuclear fuel. To access the balance requires the adoption of breeder reactors. These produces more fuel than they consume.
What the sequence would be for breeding from thorium is shown in the following figure:
Figure 13: Thorium Process Route
To breed thorium requires operating in the thermal neutron spectrum and has a maximum theoretical breeding margin of 8%. To breed U238 to plutonium requires operating in the fast neutron spectrum and therefore uses sodium as the coolant. It has a maximum breeding margin of 30%. Plutonium breeder reactors have been operating successfully for decades, mostly in Russia.
A thorium breeder reactor at commercial scale has yet to be developed. The neutron economy of a commercial design may be marginal due to things such as the neutron absorption characteristics of construction materials in the trade-off for long reactor life. This may mean that a commercial design would need help from excess neutrons produced by plutonium breeder reactors. This harks back to the fuel used for the first commercial nuclear reactor at the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. That fuel included thorium to breed to U233. In our nuclear future, no neutron should be wasted if it could be used instead to breed thorium to fissile fuel.
That reactor, and nuclear fuel cycle, hasn’t been designed yet. But we can build stepping stones to that ideal future. The best available reactors are the ARC-100 designed by Advanced Reactor Concepts to produce 100 MWe and the PRISM (Power Reactor Innovative Small Module) designed by GE-Hitachi to produce 311 Mwe.
The ARC-100 is a sodium-cooled reactor in the fast neutron spectrum. It is a modest five-times scale up of the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II) which operated at the Argonne National Laboratory in Idaho from 1965 to 1994. As with EBR-II, the ARC-100 is a breeder-reactor power plant with on-site reprocessing of solid metallic fuel. In the event of a cooling pump failure, the EBR-II demonstrated the ability to elf-cool its fuel through natural convection of the sodium coolant during the decay heat period following shutdown. The fuel loading is 24 tonnes at up to 15.5% fissile material. The fuelling interval is 20 years with a plant life of 60 years.
Figure 14: ARC-100 cross section showing the hot and cold sodium pools
The ARC-100 has a capital cost of US$550 million and produces power at US$0.055 per kWh. It can be in production within three years of starting construction. The reactor vessel is 16.8 metres high with a diameter of 7.6 metres. As such it would easily be made in a South Korean factory, shipped down to Australia and then trucked to site.
GE-Hitachi’s PRISM reactor is also derived from the EBR-II, but possibly more flexible in fuel types and with a breeding margin of up to 20%. It can operate as a breeder or a burner depending on fuel choices and operational goals. Electrical output is 311 MWe per module with two modules in a power block for a total of 622 MWe. For a dual reactor configuration, the capital cost is likely to be of the order of US$2,000 million.
We know what is necessary to be done. The next question is can the nuclear transition happen as fast as it needs to happen?
Figure 15: Electricity production by source, France 1960 to 2015
Over a 10 year period starting in the mid-1970s, France was able to increase the nuclear share of its electric power production from by 70%. That was 50 years ago. With the advances in materials and electronics since, we should be able to do it faster.
With the price of coal rising towards the oil price, Australian industry will rapidly lose its competitiveness. And as our competitiveness shrinks, our standard of living will fall. As well as King Hubbert, there was another energy prophet in the 1950s. Hyman Rickover, the father of the US nuclear submarine fleet, in a 1957 address to the Minnesota State Medical Association:
“A reduction of per capita energy consumption has always in the past led to a decline in civilization and a reversion to a more primitive way of life.”
“When a low-energy society comes in contact with a high-energy society, the advantage always lies with the latter.”
“If we start to plan now, we may be able to achieve the requisite level of scientific and engineering knowledge before our fossil fuel reserves give out, but the margin of safety is not large.”
Which begs the question of what China, the major aggressor in the world, is doing in energy. China has boosted its domestic coal production to 4.7 billion tonnes per annum as well as importing another 500 million tonnes per annum. It is the world’s largest importer of oil. It produces synthetic petrol and diesel from Bergius plants in Inner Mongolia. Recently it announced the spending of US$24 billion to build synthetic fuel plants in the far western province of Xinjiang. As well as conducting a big buildout of its nuclear power reactor fleet, China is also building a couple of reactors to make weapons grade plutonium for a quintupling of its nuclear weapon stockpile from 300 warheads to at least 1,500. The purpose of the two new reactors is to make the weapons to coerce us into doing what they tell us to do, or killing us with them. Discussion of the morality of anything we might do in energy should take these facts into consideration.
Figure 16: Reactors for breeding weapons-grade plutonium under construction on Changbiao Island, Fujian Province in 2022
The Four Pillars of Civilisation
Figure 17: Australian per capita carbon consumption by application
Diesel is the first pillar of civilisation; the other three are plastics, cement, and steel.
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 per annum 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.
In the world when fossil fuels have run out, plastics will be produced from the carbon and hydrogen in wood. Some four per cent of world oil production goes into making plastics. Assuming the same ratio holds in the post-fossil fuel world, this will be supplied by wood equivalent to four per cent of the wood used in making diesel. So for Australia this will be produced by an extra 4,000 sq km of plantation forest.
With respect to cement, Australia consumes nine million tonnes per annum. The making of a tonne of cement consumes 200 kg of coal. In the post-fossil fuel world, energy for cement making will come from charcoal produced from plantation eucalypts or power from nuclear reactors. If it is the charcoal route, the yield from wood to charcoal is 35%, so nine million tonnes of cement will be made using charcoal from 5.4 million tonnes of wood produced from 2,160 sq km of plantation eucalypts. The alternate route would involve plasma heating of an air stream up the cement kiln with the stream simply recirculated and reheated.
Smelting of iron ore to liquid iron takes about ten times as much energy as melting scrap steel in an electric arc furnace. Steel production may be two thirds from iron ore and one third from steel scrap to produce lower grades such as reinforcing bar. As such, energy consumption in the latter route is negligible. Australia consumes some 300 kg per capita of steel so let’s assume that includes 200 kg per capita from the blast furnace route. Coke consumption in a blast furnace is 500 kg per tonne of steel produced. To replace that with charcoal produced from wood would require 1.5 tonnes of wood from 0.06 hectares of plantation forestry. At the national level this will require 15,000 square kilometres of plantation forestry.
The blast furnace route is unlikey to work though, due to the fact that charcoal doesn’t have much compressive strength and so can’t support the weight of a big column of iron ore in a blast furnace. Smelting is likely to switch to electric arc furnaces with charcoal used as the reductant but with the energy to drive the smelting provided by the electric current.
David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare
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I knew that this article was going to be an exercise in realism when I saw the chart at the very top showing total world energy consumption flattening out at about 200% of the current value. The current growth rate of about 2% per year is clearly unsustainable, producing over 2.5 times current consumption in 50 years and 7.25 current consumption in a century and on it goes. This, to me, is why the “drill baby drill” crowd is just as deluded as the windmill/solar panel crowd.
The issues discussed in this paper are what out academics and researchers should be thinking about. In addition, the author clearly states he assumes patterns of use of energy (e.g. plastics, cement, steel, diesel) will stay the same. I believe there is an entire other line of research that should go with what this article explores, which is how to live well on less energy per person – what aspects of life can use less energy while providing the same or greater “life” value, however we measure that.
Can you imagine a Canberran academic putting a proposal to study nuclear energy in front of Blackout Bowen!
Anything contain even a tiny amount of common sense would be a total anathema and enema to Blackout Bowen.
But the “drill baby drill crowd” doesn’t say it’s the ultimate answer to future energy needs- the way the renewable crowd does.
The DBD crowd has one other distinction over the WSP crowd, that being a distaste for bureaucracy and regulation both of which are wasteful and contrary to innovation.
Learn to enjoy doing laundry by hand in a washtub, using cold water, and you will be taking a step in the right direction. Perhaps the wash tub should be made of wood.
From Tablet:
Brilliant! A shining example on which to base future energy development. (yes /sarc).
What ever my great-grandchildren do, I hope that this Luckey nutjob has nothing to do with it.
This is a false equivalence. Not only is a litre of diesel less mass (lighter) and more energy dense than a kilo of hydrogen, but it is not a viable vehicle fuel: how would it matter if the fuel was at the same cost if the vehicle, pumps, storage tanks, and taxes cost 50 times more?
As for cheap manufactured fuel, nuclear-to-electrolyzed. hydrogen is a waste of energy, but any energy source can be used to make methane and methanol from most hydrocarbons, including bio and industrial waste. Either fuel is good for portability and energy content where we can’t switch to stored electricity. From methane manufacturers already produce substitutes for diesel and for most lubricants.
Ammonia is another decent manufactured fuel, easily transported, that will be needed as fertilizer and for industrial processing.
Peak cheap oil and “running out” of “fossil fuels” are myths created to maintain a high price, just like the mythical climate crisis. As long as there is fuel in the ground, people will be pumping it out. This may happen long after my grandchildrens’ times, and probably after their great grandchildrens’.
In the unlikely event all that is ever finally done, we’ll be long past finding other sources, there’s large amounts, billions of times more than we’ve available on earth, of ammonia and methane all over the solar system. If you presuppose nuclear energy, and an economy not built on authoritarian serfdom, then its an easy extension of the prediction to suppose those would be accessible.
The solutions to great grandchildrens problems aren’t at all predictable, but might well rest on things that we can already do, but are prohibited by climate crisis mythology and weather god-like superstitions based on unpredictable false scientific claims.
Good article. A simplified qualitative summary with some added thoughts.
All fossil fuels must peak somewhen then decline because they are by definition fossils of which a finite amount must exist. (Abiotic oil does not exist. Abiotic natural gas does, but not in meaningful quantities.)
The much better recovery factors from fracked nat gas shale (20-25%) than fracked oil shale (2-3%) (an inherent viscosity thing) means we have several decades using CCGT at 61% thermal efficiency to sort out the best ‘next gen’—Gen 4 nuclear. As the Voglte 3 & 4 disater shows, building more Gen 3 is a fools errand.
There are a number of viable G4 concepts. What is not known is the best economically. Candidates include small modular reactors (like NuScale), TerraPower (supported by Bill Gates), and molten salt reactors in two flavors—starting from uranium or starting from thorium. (As an aside, I favor both molten salts because the uranium version can consume spent conventional fuel rods, solving a waste problem at very low cost, while thorium is perhaps a cheaper longer term solution. Plus, Oak Ridge already operated a pilot molten salt for several years decades ago.) Then there are advanced ceramic pebble beds like CANDU, and probably others I didn’t cover in essay Going Nuclear in ebook Blowing Smoke.
Wise energy policy would explore them all as much as possible on paper. Then built a couple of the most promising to insure something more than a paper reality. Then go G4 nuclear with the best standardized G4 design as CCGT reaches its lifetime of 40+ years.
Money much better spent than probably wasted on ITER or LIC fusion, where neutron embrittlement and laser shot recovery time (respectively) have no known answers. Again simply put, if you cannot get there from here don’t waste time and money trying.
Rud, good comment about general fossil fuel (relative to each reservoir), but look at figure 6 in the (EXCELLENT) report by David Archibold. Add in another reservoir discovery to continue the production. I am a regular yellow gold geologist but I know a great potential black gold reservoir, Las Molles (underneath the producing Vaca Muerte). Geologists find things.
Ron, I wrote parts of two whole books about this. There are several different statistical ways to estimate the crude oil peak before a slow (not Hubbert catastrophic logistic curve decline—the correct curve is a gamma function).
I went through them all in ebook.Gaia’s Limits and again more briefly in ebook Arts of Truth. They include creaming curves by reserve basin, production declines in known super major/major fields ( because those ~700 comprise about 80% of all crude production), and Archibald’s rapid production declines in oil shales (rapid decline curves times known shales).
Bottom line of all is that about 75% of all crude (including oil shale) to every be discovered has been. Your Las Molles is probably in the other 25%. Significantly over half of that has already been produced. For conventional oil, the actual production peak was about 2008.
per an IEA inventory. Including unconventional (fracked shale) peak is about now. But not a catastrophe—unlike peak oiler claims —thanks to the gamma function shape of the subsequent slow decline.
Thomas Gold calculated that if all the plant material that ever existed turned into oil, we would already be out because of our prodigious use of it. But there is more now than ever. Think about that. How can there be more ‘fossil fuel’, than all the fossils that have ever existed, if ALL of them turned into fuel? And none of them actually did.
Gold’s book is garbage. Contains many falsehoods. He claimed abiotic oil is possible, when it chemically isn’t.
Rud. I agree with you and Mr Archibald. I do think that fossil Hydrocarbon reserves are vastlly underestimated. For example, there are Ordovician shales (collectively “Utica Shales”) with equally high TOC (Total Organic Content) not all that far below the Devonian Marcellus. Shale gas is surely going to be with us in North America for quite a while. And the US has truly vast coal reserves — maybe the largest in the world. As Archibald points out, coal can be converted to “oil” at a high, but not economically crippling, price. It’s been done. South Africa may still be doing it today.
But economics do kinda dictate that resources will be “High-graded”. The cheapest sources will be exploited first. So presumably the cost of fossil energy will tend to slowly creep upward over time. My guess is that even with ten billion or so energy consumers on the planet — which is where we seem to be headed — we (humanity) have a lot of time — a century or more — to move forward in an orderly, thoughtful manner. If we plan for our great, great, ever-so-great grandkids to have the affordable, high energy fuels needed for jet air travel and space travel, we should probably do exactly that.
I, like you, am skeptical of fusion. Seems terribly complex, and the list of things that could possibly go wrong looks to be endless. I’m also skeptical of SMRs. As I see it, a 60 MW Reactor needs to be less than 1/17th the cost of a 1000mw reactor. AND 17 times as safe. AND 17 times as easy to site. And require 1 17th of the staffing. AND produce 1/17th the high level waste. I have my doubts that when it all settles out, SMRs will be any of those things, much less all of them.
I’m also worried about safety. And I think everyone else should be also. I find the thought of ten or twenty thousand nuclear plants worldwide — many of them managed by bean counters, salesmen, and/or just plain crazies — to be kind of chilling,
That said, the Chinese, who have a lot more energy worries than the rest of us, seem to be doing the necessary research. Of particular interest, among many other design prototypes, they have a couple of 105MW pebble bed reactors (HTR-PM) up and, at least at times, delivering power to their grid. The attraction — if the coolant fails, they get very, very warm. But they no not melt down. MAYBE they truly don’t need a containment structure. There are probably drawbacks. I don’t know what they are.
BTW — as things stand now, it sure looks like we’ll end up buying our next generation nuclear plants from China and/or India. They seem to be the ones doing the research these days.
Thanks Rud. One small point where I disagree is on fusion. I agree that fusion is not a short term solution to our energy supply problems. But I do not agree that we should discontinue R&D on it.
Fusion is not physically impossible like getting solar to work at night. It is an engineering problem. The upside of solving it is tremendous.
Only fusion will allow us to build spaceships that can reduce interplanetary transit times to manageable levels and power bases on cold distant places like Mars. The upside is so big that R&D should continue at prudent levels for a long time.
The probability of any long term prediction being correct is near zero
This author may be closer to zero with his anti-fossil fuel biased statement:
“fossil fuels will largely be exhausted in three generations”
(That would be 60 to 90 years.)
Thr author is confusing proven reserves at current low prices with known reserves. And he seems to be ignoring new discoveries in the next century,
At current consumption rates, the world’s coal proven reserves are estimated to last around 132–258 years
At current consumption rates, the world’s proven oil reserves are estimated to last about 50 years
According to current estimates, based on the current rate of consumption, the world has approximately 52 years of natural gas proven reserves left.
In the energy sector, proven reserves have a reasonable certainty of being recovered, while unproven reserves have a decreased level of certainty in being recovered. Recoverable oil reserves are the amount of oil that can reasonably be recovered given current technical and economic conditions.
Energy prices are CURRENTLY low, adjusted for inflation, limiting proven reserves that could be produced at a profit.
At higher energy prices, a larger portion of known reserves will be considered to be proven reserves, and consumers will use less energy too.
WTI crude oil sank $6.34, or 8.4%, to $69.22 last week (down 3% in 2024).
Gasoline dropped 7.0% last week (down 5% in 2024)
Natural Gas sank 14.2% to $2.258 last week (down 10% in 2024).
The Russians claim that there are 500,000 million metric tons of oil in the Antarctic basin. Do you believe them?
There was an article on a project in the UK to mine coal under the North Sea. The reserves there were said to be huge but not all accessible with current technology. I think the project was to convert coal to gas in situ rather than to provide coal. The claim was that if 1% of the know coal quantity could be recovered it could provide 300 years of UK energy needs at reasonable estimated growth. Shortly after that article appeared, the UK banned all coal mining.
David,
An interesting article with a wide scope that can mean that some matters have to be summarised. This might lead to comments that the article is not comprehensive enough and that other preferred energy mixes exist.
The history of global energy production and forecasting is about scientific research pointing to one preferred future while public pressure leads to other less optimum mixes of energy sources.
The public pressure has mostly come from activists with less skill than the scientists. Activists have played with abstracts like emotion and belief far more than scientists who try, or should try, to stick to observation, measurement and data.
Consequently, few nations have felt the benefit of an optimum energy mix. Activists have scared policy makers in many places. Nuclear options have suffered most. The man in the street has a fear of terms like breeder reactor, radioactivity, fission, splitting the atom, etc.
It follows that our future societies stand to benefit from investment in better education and policies to minimise or eliminate the ignorance of activists. Their score sheets to date show no gains of any value and large losses from non-optimum energy mixes.
There also needs to be a decision on whether CO2 is indeed the main control knob for global warming. There is undoubted scientific disagreement that has never been properly resolved. Until it is, there is no hope of optimum energy mixes. Future generations might find it quaint that so many countries think that reduction of hydrocarbon fuel use will affect the global climate beneficially.
I am a scientist who has worked in the nuclear fuel cycle, so my comments might have bias.
Geoff S
The article makes an argument for leaving sequestered carbon in the ground for more beneficial uses than just burning for its energy content. In that circumstance, the artificial demonising of CO2 is not relevant. China and India have considerable economic activity directed at finding and exploiting their sequestered carbon resources. What the rest of the world does is next to irrelevant to atmospheric CO2.
You’ve reprised this comment many times, that somehow we ought to keep oil in the ground for making plastics and other petrochemicals later.
It makes no sense. There aren’t any organic compounds that we can’t synthesise from biomass. While fossil fuels are the least cost source of energy, we should burn them. It makes no sense to use more expensive sources today to marginally reduce the cost of feedstocks far in the future.
Eventually we will have no alternative than to recycle all our carbon if we want plastics and practical transportation fuels. But the good news is that we already have the technology to do that. (When the time comes that it actually makes economic sense). And we’ll be using solar power. (Photosynthetic not photovoltaic).
Stated with no proof and recollection of a gnat – it is a dimwitted comment at best. I was only restating the author’s point.
And if you actually comprehended what I wrote you would see that I made the opposite point. China and India will find and burn sequestered carbon until it is no longer an economic option for them. No matter how the west demonises CO2, it is not going to alter how much natural fuels get burnt to release CO2 into the atmosphere.
RW,
My gnat-like memory is legendary in my household, so it is quite possible that I ought to have rephrased as “This argument has been reprised many times” rather than that you have said it previously. Clumsy of me.
It seems that we were not on the same page, or in the same book.
The author doesn’t argue anything about CO2. Neither was my comment concerned in the least bit about CO2 causing any harm. Go ahead and search the text. CO2 is not mentioned once.
My point was that it is dimwitted, to coin a phrase, to fret that we will run out of oil that we ‘need’ as a feedstock to make plastics and various chemicals. A true take-away from the article is that the technology has long existed to produce anything we need from biomass or coal.
Your brilliant observation that China and India will burn fossil fuels until the energy they produce in that manner is more expensive than the alternatives available to them is ironically precisely what I advocated for every country. I would also wholeheartedly agree that irrelevant countries like Australia will not influence how much CO2 gets restored to the atmosphere.
Too late to edit so a postscript…
Not only is Australia irrelevant to this but also the US, EU, UK, Canada. I wouldn’t want my dear interlocutors in Oz to sense a dig at their national greatness.
And a p.p.s. as well…
Yes, leave it in the ground for better purposes is arguably a restatement of the author’s point, but I see a nuance.
It is not that we perpetually need oil as a feedstock as a technical matter, but rather that it will be economically unviable or at least prohibitively expensive and thus harmful to standards of living to rely on biomass both for the carbon source and for the energy input. The energy source must be cost-effective for synthesis of hydrocarbons from biomass to be economically viable, but we don’t have that in place. So the premise is to conserve to avoid the unpleasant transition period where we would otherwise need to depend on 16th Century technologies. The key point here is “to Convert”. Convert to using nuclear.
I disagree with the author that we need to conserve oil today to avoid this threatened transition period. The market will sort this.
We don’t need to intervene and circumvent market forces. If next-gen nuclear will actually be low-cost energy then it will naturally be adopted as other options become more expensive. We won’t drop off a cliff from abundant fossil fuels to severe shortage.
The Green New Scam and NutZero may simulate that with onerous regulations that cause a temporary collapse in exploration, but sensible policies would reverse that rapidly.
France’s experience demonstrates that a rapid conversion to nuclear is entirely feasible.
I am all for next-gen nuclear and heavily opposed to unsustainable solar and environment-devastating wind. But what matters most is that we stop with the attempts to out-think the market with idiotic government intervention. Just let the market work and the best technology will emerge.
Correct. But my response was to Geoff S who did raise the issue of CO2.
I suggest you spend a bit more time following the comment flow before wading in with risk of making dimwitted comments.
Rich and Rick and any others,
Geoff S is now confused by nuance.
For clarity, would you please quote verbatim any of my words with which you disagree, so I can clarify as necessary. Thank you Geoff S
The surface land use need for biomass feedstock may be greater than the absurd footprint of wind and solar facilities.
Presently, one cubic meter of air at 70 deg F and with 70% RH contains about 14.3 g of H20 and only 0.78 g of CO2. That CO2 is a “control knob” for “global warming” is nonsense and is a fabrication of the IPCC as is the so called “positive H2O feedback”. About 71% of the earth’s surface is covered with liquid H2O. The three main processes for transporting H2O into the atmosphere as gas are evaporation from liquid water sources (i.e., oceans and fresh H2O), the wind, and transpiration and respiration from plants. All the animals including insects exhale H2O. Liquid H2O does not need any help from CO2 to change into a gas and to enter the atmosphere.
Harold. The problem is that while CO2 is “well-mixed” — levels more or less the same everywhere — H2O isn’t. In desert areas (including the poles) at some times of the year, humidity is close to 0 and CO2 probably really is the dominant greenhouse gas. Is CO2 THE climate control knob? I doubt it. Is it one of the knobs? Seems likely.
As I stated above, there is just too little CO2 in the air to heat up the air. One cubic meter of air at 70 deg F has a mass of 1.20 kg. This small amount of CO2 (0.78 g) can heat up a large mass of air by only a very amount if at all.
The average world RH is about 70%. There is always lots of H2O in the air especially in the tropics and sub-tropics, and it does not matter if the H2O “well-mixed” or not. In the tropics at 80 deg. F. and 100% RH, there is 29 g of H20 per cubic meter of air but only 0.75 g of CO2.
As mentioned above, the wind is a major mechanism for sweeping H2O into the air from bodies of water. I live in Burnaby, BC, and we just got swamped by the first “atmospheric river” of the fall and winter seasons blowing in from the north Pacific ocean. It rained for two days.
The Pacific coast of BC is a temperate rain forest.
To learn about the effect of wind on water transport into the air, you should go to “Science of Climate Change” Vol. 4 (1) and read the recent review by Roy Clark. The review is 78 pages, highly technical, and has a very extensive bibliography.
Finally, you should go to: http://www.John-Daly.com. This is the website of the late John Daly’s “Still Waiting for Greenhouse.” From the home page, scroll down to the end and click on “Station Temperature Data”. On the “World Map”, click on NA, scroll down to “Pacific” and finally scroll down and click on “Death Valley”.
The graphic shows plots of the average annual seasonal temperatures and a plot of annual average temperature. The temperature plots are fairly flat. Thus, the increase in CO2 in the desert from 1922 to 2001 did not cause a warming of the air. In 1922 the concentration of CO2 in the air was about 300 ppmv and by 2001 it had increased to about 367 ppmv.
H2O is the major greenhouse gas and CO2 is a minor greenhouse.
We really do not have to worry about CO2. The claim by the IPCC that CO2 is the cause of global warming is a deliberate lie. The purpose of lie and fraud is to provide the UN a justification for the distribution of donner funds from the rich countries, via the UNFCCC and the
UN COP, to the poor countries to help them cope with global warming and climate change. This is what all this rhetoric about GHG’s, global warming, and climate change is really all about: the money.
I would say the evidence doesn’t well support CO2 as being very relevant to atmospheric temperature but consider the ratio for 100 micrograms of d lysergic acid diethylamide to very strongly affect the operation of an adult human.
Wow, that must be the longest article I have ever read. Yes, eventually every country will realize that safe nuclear power is the way to go.
But so-called ‘fossil fuel’ is not going away. Not in three generations, not ever. It is produced in volume inside the earth and is not created from fossils. Plant and animal matter has always decomposed just as it does today – it does not turn into oil, it becomes compost. There is a reason oil fields refill. There is a reason that all the predictions of the demise of ‘fossil’ fuel have failed – it is because it is not of fossil origin. Read Thomas Gold’s ‘Deep Hot Biosphere’ to understand that.
Don’t bother to debate me, debate the late Thomas Gold. (ps: the Russians are getting oil from places the US says can’t contain oil.) Think about that.
Oh please Shotsky! Abiotic rubbish.
Hydrocarbons are abundant throughout the universe. Even the long-chain hydrocarbons we normally attribute to fossil sources are found out there. Why would Earth be unique in only having fossil sources for them, rather than those fossil sources being supplemental to mineral sources?
Abiotic processes exist obviously. Saturn’s moon Titan has hydrocarbon seas that certainly aren’t consistent with a biological origin. It is a question of relative abundance on earth. Most, if not all, of the oil found so far is consistent with the theory that it has a biological origin.
Trillions of dollars have been made from assuming that oil is a fossil fuel. Around 1.5 trillion barrels have been produced to date.
When I said abiotic rubbish I was referring to hypotheses that all oil is abiotic and just happens to be found in areas that coincidentally fit the conditions for biological origin or that ‘depleted’ oil fields replenish over time from their abiotic sources.
Jupiter’s atmosphere is an abundant source of methane and ammonia, once we figure out how to get it out of such an energetic gravity well.
It is possible that the great majority of methane hydrate is abiotic . If it is ever possible to harvest it at scale without destroying most ocean life, it is claimed to be a several hundred year supply for human energy needs. At what rate might it be replaced?
Yes, it is abiotic. It is an ongoing process that will continue for virtually ever. It is simply methane escaping from the interior of the earth, which turns into ‘ice’ at certain pressures and temperatures. It is essentially frozen methane, and it occurs at the bottoms of oceans. Methane that does not exit at ocean boundaries continues to rise in land. Bacteria convert it to oil and coal, and it is always found in abundance in oil and coal reserves. Those reserves are created by the methane and bacteria, not by deposits of sediment. There is no way to justify the amounts of reserves, or justify wells refilling, etc. It is an ongoing process.
It’s a thought-provoking article, and other than the misuse of the phrase ‘begs the question’ (which does not mean ‘raises the question’), and the mysterious (Keebler?) elf-cooled process, it’s nicely written.
However…
It seems to this skeptical reader to be the work of an enthusiast who has convinced himself of some unlikely premises. Chief among these is that oil production has peaked due to a lack of recoverable supply. There have been a couple of years of plandemic followed by a sustained attack on fossil fuels and investment in exploration. No mention of that factor. As we all should know by now, Peak Oil has been a ‘Thing’ since even before Joe Biden was born around the dawn of time.
I’m grateful that there was no nonsense about nuclear fusion. It seems like potentially sound engineering being proposed. I really only doubt the timeline. Synfuels were the supposed immediate future as I graduated in 1984. Four decades later, we still have Jimmy Carter, but synfuels not so much.
The Democrat Party trots out Jimmy and, to a lesser extent, Brandon for viewing along the lines of “Weekend With Bernie.”
Brilliant article. It is possible to debate the detail but the direction is clear.
Fusion remains 30 years in the future. The pieces of the long term fission path are much clearer and first steps well developed.
I hope Dutton gets to read this and can appreciate its significance. Then translate it into digestible sound bites for the press.
Each generation should leave behind more fissile material than what they started with. The molten salt reactors could be quite good – just rinse out the fission products and adjust the actinides level. Any excess produced from breeding could be sent to fueling reactors for marine propulsion.
The history of technology teaches us that the way things will be 100 years hence is always inconceivable. 1624, 1724, 1824, 1924, 2024, so 2124. Since the pace of change quickens each step becomes more unknowable.
On the 1,000 year scale we live in somebody’s dark ages. Our ignorance will be a curiosity.
<p>China’s demonstration HTR-PM enters commercial operation</p> – World Nuclear News (world-nuclear-news.org)
They know how to build them now 🙂
Expect a fairly rapid expansion of the type.
HTMR-100 team aim for pebble bed SMR in South Africa – World Nuclear News (world-nuclear-news.org)
ps… The first link explains how the plant not only produces electricity, but also high temperature steam for other production uses… so could be used in industrial estates.
Worth reading… and it is real.
That’s a nice graph at the top, but Elon Musk claims that solar is better, while Gaia leans toward geothermal.
So that begs the question: what is the ultimate technology in energy.
people use the phrase begs the question but hav no idea what it means.
they think it means raises the question or prompts the question
the original and more formal meaning of “begs the question.” In logic and philosophy, it refers to a specific type of fallacy where the conclusion you’re trying to prove is already assumed in your argument. It’s a form of circular reasoning.
This argument “begs the question” because it assumes the Bible is true in order to prove that the Bible is true
Why “down vote” simple factual statements. Would this get a down vote had it been written by Anthony Watts? 😉
I downvoted because of the fact that “begs the question” meaning “prompts the question” is in common usage worldwide. Language, especially English, is constantly changing.
Mr. Mosher, your reliably pedantic responses begs the question as to your true motives. It also makes one question your mental state. [See, I’m flexible with the English language.]
Language, especially English, is constantly changing.
ok ocean acidification
dont object
“ocean acidification” meaning neutralization” is in common usage worldwide. Language, especially English, is constantly changing.
my freshmen use to write ” for all intensive purposes.’
i corrected them
Do we know what President Trump’s position on nuclear energy is, or any other leaders for that matter? This excellent article makes it very clear that big decisions on the energy future must be made now. Who will take them?
We should all make them in the market place.
Start practicing waiting in line for the coming USSR type stores where you can spend you pennies on bread or butter, but not both, because you will never have enough pennies for both.
but… but… we’ll have clean and green energy- well, at least for a few hours/day
From 2018:
President Trump Signs Bill to Boost Advanced Nuclear in America | Department of Energy
A timespan of 400 to 500 years is at least 15 generations, not 2 or 3.
By the time fossil fuels have been ‘exhausted’ they will be synthesised in bulk using nuclear energy, for the simple reason that liquid fuels are far superior in handling and convenience in particular for transport.
are far superior in handling and convenience in particular for transport.
transport by tanker is only possible because us navy keeps navigation free.
Using nuclear energy and what little feedstock can be grown under solar panels.
“what is the ultimate technology in energy?”
Some UFOologists think UFOs use “zero point energy”. Seems impossible- but the question is about “ultimate technology” not what’s feasible in the next few centuries.
zero point energy is the energy below 0 degrees Kelvin. Just how far can that take one?
That’s not what they mean by zero point energy- it’s the energy in the vacuum.
Someone will come up with something we haven’t thought of yet. The universe is basically one giant energy well and what we think is a lot of energy is just a gnat on a monkey’s butt. The problem with the human species is we always think in terms of our own perceptions and if it is currently oil, solar, wind, fission nuclear and coal that’s how we project the future. It will probably be around converting mass to energy somehow or maybe we will discover something from quantum physics that we can use. Or maybe some archeological dig will finally discover something left behind by aliens and we are in business.
“So that begs the question: what is the ultimate technology in energy?”
Indeed it does. Begging the question is a logical fallacy where the premise on which the conclusion is based, is already assumed to be true. This allows one to make an argument without sufficient evidence.
“The fossil fuels will largely be exhausted in three generations so they won’t be part of the solution.”
Evidence please.
See my response to Mr. Mosher, above.
I prefer “circular argument” over “begs the question” because of the pedantics’ willful ignoring of the changing English language meanings of “begs the question.”
While the changing language is real I can’t get on board with significant parts of it because it is a major dumbing down tool. Some ill defined word or term is used to cover a host of very different processes, states, or things so that the ignorant don’t need to understand much about what is being discussed or are unable to keep different concepts clear. That is a first step of converting them to ignorant group think.
This review helps us all to see the futility and waste of the “Climate Action”/Net Zero/Decarbonization/”Renewables” delusions. The future will still require liquid hydrocarbon fuels for transport and other uses not amenable to direct electrification.
Solar and wind for electricity supply to the grid are myopic and costly distractions from the more important aim of sustained human betterment.
The emissions of CO2 from using natural deposits of hydrocarbon fuels should never have been thought capable of driving any of the climate metrics – long-term warming, precipitation, storms, droughts, heat waves, etc – to a bad outcome.
Even NASA, in January 2009, avoided the language of crisis concerning “greenhouse gases.” Their public-facing communications layer, however, has more recently been misdirected to push the “climate” agenda.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/05/16/wuwt-contest-runner-up-professional-nasa-knew-better-nasa_knew/
Interesting info about Cadmium:
Itai-itai disease – Wikipedia
Nuclear will be a large part of the very long term future — for electricty and for use in producing engineered liquid hydrocarbon fuels for transportation uses and for agricultural uses.
What isn’t knowable is the pathway which will take us from here to there, or how long the transition to a mostly nuclear future will take.
At this point in our history, going with nuclear power is strictly a public policy decision. We buy it for purposes of energy security and reliability, not because it is the cheapest method of producing electricity.
Forcing the early adoption of nuclear power as a means of reducing our dependence on conventional fossil fuels would be a public policy decision made by politicians, not a marketplace decision made by energy consumers.
As far as the oncoming smaller reactors are concerned, I like the 77 MW NuScale design for a number of technical and operational reasons. But what I think personally doesn’t matter.
The 300 MW GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 design will be the first sub-1000 MW commercial reactor design to go live on the North American continent. For the simple reason that the Province of Ontario, operating through its government-owned corporation Ontario Power Generation, will be installing four of these BWRX-300s at its Darlington site.
Ontario’s decision to go with more nuclear is a public policy decision made by politicians. Most of the reactor’s major systems will be produced in Ontario. The political goal is to make Ontario the go-to place for the 300 MW size and smaller-size nuclear power technologies, using government sponsorship and funding to get the nuclear industrial base in Ontario up and running in a reasonably cost efficient mode.
If Ontario’s Darlington project can be brought in on cost and on schedule in the early 1930’s, then sub-1000 MW commercial reactor designs can then become a realistic option for those public policy decision makers who want to think seriously about new-build nuclear.
Wow. A lot of work and good information in this post. Thank you, David.
i have always read that there are thousands of years of methane hydrate energy available. The holdup is mining it for use.
true or false?
True but tricky
There are a lot of entities living on the ocean floor. Early mining/harvesting of some of the relatively easy to do collecting of things like manganese nodules might easily be labeled as something akin to mass genocide. Hopefully something much better can be worked out.