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The billionaire-funded group is an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion, and as the name suggests, they have just one aim; to see the UK stop using oil entirely. Although, tellingly, the one thing the group seem determine to avoid disrupting is the flow of oil from Britain’s handful of remaining oil refineries… something which would serve to emphasise just how dependent a complex industrial economy like the UK is upon a steady flow of oil and oil products.

For the most part, opposition to Just Stop Oil has focussed on the disruptive nature of their protests, which involve either blocking roads or disrupting the sporting events enjoyed by people who are largely powerless to do anything about energy policy. Although perhaps the hope is that if they piss-off enough ordinary people, they will go out and vote for politicians who want to ban oil. But even in the unlikely event that people respond in this way, the bigger problem is not that the political class doesn’t listen, but that the political class has already consumed rather too much of the Just Stop Oil Kool-Aid. Indeed, the man being touted as Britain’s next Prime Minister has pledged to make a rapid transition to the utopian net zero, including a pledge to end any further oil and gas extraction in the North Sea.

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Exxon CEO Warns Overemphasis On Renewables Could Backfire

June 9, 2023

Exxon CEO Warns Overemphasis On Renewables Could Backfire

Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE:XOM) CEO Darren Woods has urged companies to stop focusing on certain energy sources, such as renewable energy, to save the climate, warning that it would be a “huge mistake to be picking winners and losers and focusing on specific technologies”.

Instead, “we need to look more broadly and let the markets figure out which solutions deliver the most emissions reductions at the lowest cost,” Woods told Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norway’s Wealth Fund,one of the largest mutual funds in the world, on his podcast.

An attempt to move away from oil and gas immediately, with unchanged global demand, could be disastrous for clean energy, Woods suggested, adding that if we produce less LNG, for example, something else–like coal–would have to step in to fill the demand gap.

According to Woods, Europe should follow the U.S. approach to climate policy, arguing that the continent risks driving companies away by regulating too hard. Woods told Bloomberg that one of the most important things the Americans (and ExxonMobil) are doing is developing technologies to capture and store carbon.

Back in April, Woods caused quite a stir when he touted the company’s burgeoning Low Carbon business, saying it has the potential to outperform its legacy oil and gas business and generate hundreds of billions in revenues. According to Woods, the business has the potential to generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue after the initial 10-year ramp-up.

“This business is going to look quite a bit different from the base business of Exxon Mobil. It is going to have a much more stable, or less cyclical, profile,” Dan Ammann, president of Exxon’s two-year-old Low Carbon Business Solutions unit, has vowed.

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Does Renewable Energy Have a Higher EROI Than Fossil Fuels?

May 31, 2023

DOES RENEWABLE ENERGY HAVE A HIGHER EROI THAN FOSSIL FUELS?

There is new momentum behind the idea that renewable energy has a higher energy return on investment (EROI) than fossil fuels.

That contrasts with decades of consensus that the EROI of oil, for example, ranges from 18 to 35 while the range for solar is from 6 to 12.

Nafeez Ahmed wrote in a recent post that

“While the EROI values of wind and solar are “at or above 10”, the average EROI estimate for oil is about 4.2. Murphy et. al’s research concludes that many EROI analyses incorrectly compare fossil fuels with renewables by measuring them at the wrong areas. By consistently measuring them both at their ‘point of use’, they are able to develop a far more consistent approach.”

Similarly, Ugo Bardi wrote a post in January whose title was ” Setting the record straight on the EROI from renewables. It is much better than that of fossil fuels.”

Both Ahmed and Bardi used a 2022 paper, Energy Return on Investment of Major Energy Carriers: Review and Harmonization as their source.

Net Energy and EROI Essentials

Net energy is the difference between the total energy output minus the total energy input over the life cycle of an energy source or technology (Figure 1).

EROI is the ratio of the total energy output divided by the total energy input over the life cycle of an energy source.

That means that the net energy for a 10 megajoule (MJ) energy input and a 20 MJ output is 10 MJ and the EROI is 2 (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Net energy and EROI for a hypothetical energy source or technology. Source: Modified from Hagens (2010).Table 1 shows a range of energy inputs and outputs and their corresponding EROI and net energy values. The important observation is that EROI is non-linear while net energy is linear.

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MIT Study: Nuclear Power Shutdown Could Lead To Increased Deaths

April 23, 2023

MIT Study: Nuclear Power Shutdown Could Lead To Increased Deaths

A new MIT study indicates that retiring U.S. nuclear power plants could lead to an increase in burning fossil fuels to fill the energy gap, resulting in over 5,000 premature deaths due to increased air pollution.
Nearly 20 percent of current electricity in the U.S. comes from nuclear power, with a fleet of 92 reactors scattered around the country.
If more renewable energy sources become available to supply the grid by 2030, air pollution could be curtailed, but there may still be a slight increase in pollution-related deaths.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology new study shows that if U.S. nuclear power plants are retired, the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas to fill the energy gap could cause more than 5,000 premature deaths.

The MIT team took on the questions in the text following in a new study appearing in Nature Energy.

Nearly 20 percent of today’s electricity in the United States comes from nuclear power. The U.S. has the largest nuclear fleet in the world, with 92 reactors scattered around the country. Many of these power plants have run for more than half a century and are approaching the end of their expected lifetimes.

Policymakers are debating whether to retire the aging reactors or reinforce their structures to continue producing nuclear energy, which many consider a low-carbon alternative to climate-warming coal, oil, and natural gas.

Now, MIT researchers say there’s another factor to consider in weighing the future of nuclear power: air quality. In addition to being a low carbon-emitting source, nuclear power is relatively clean in terms of the air pollution it generates. Without nuclear power, how would the pattern of air pollution shift, and who would feel its effects?

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A realistic ‘energy transition’ is to get better at using less of it

February 22, 2023

A realistic ‘energy transition’ is to get better at using less of it

Image via Shutterstock.

In 2022, I authored two articles expressing doubts about society’s transition from fossil fuels to renewable solar and wind power. In this final article in the series, I’ll explain why my conclusions are based on experience as well as analysis.

My gloomy assessment of the prospects for renewable energy is not motivated by love of fossil fuels. In fact, I’ve spent the past two decades writing books and articles and giving hundreds of talks arguing that our collective adoption of coal, oil, and gas was the biggest mistake in human history. However, I don’t think, as some spokespeople for environmental organizations sometimes seem to do, that any criticism of alternative energy sources is a form of climate denialism.

At the other extreme, I disagree with the few hard-core environmentalists who believe that renewables are a complete dead end. After humanity’s fossil-fueled fever has eventually broken, we will return to renewable energy, one way or another. We’ve relied on renewable energy for untold millennia in terms of food, firewood, wind, and flowing water. It certainly would be preferable if we could partially transition to forms of renewable energy that would enable us to maintain some of the best of what we’ve accomplished over the past few energy-intensive decades—including scientific knowledge and creative works produced in a growing host of media, from sound recording to motion pictures to digital art. Unfortunately, that will be impossible without functioning electricity grids, which are challenging to maintain even in the best of times. If we could use hydro, solar, wind, and geothermal energy to power slimmed-down grids, that would greatly ease the transition away from fossil fuels.

In short, I have no reason to dislike renewable energy. In fact, I love it. And I live with it.

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The great energy descent – Part 1: Can renewables replace fossil fuels?

January 31, 2023

The great energy descent – Part 1: Can renewables replace fossil fuels?

In summary, fossil fuels, as finite resources, will peak and decline in the next decades. However, they are extremely difficult to replace, so it’s unlikely that alternatives can replace them at the scale required. You can check the short version of the post.

This is part 1 of 3 different EA forum posts talking about energy depletion as an important topic that will shape the future:

1 – Decline of fossil fuels and why alternative energy sources will probably not scale up

2 – Consequences: The role of investment, impact on economic growth and systemic risks. Plus, what that means for EA causes.

3 – What we can do, what we can’t do, and why few people really anticipate this problem

Note: The original post was too long, so I divided it in 3 to avoid that (energy limits, consequences, what to do). The scope here is very broad, so the posts will only contain the overall reasoning and main arguments. If you are doubtful about a specific point, I wrote detailed sections that I added to an Additional Document (it’s 140 pages, so I think I have covered the main counterarguments here). You can engage in comments in this Doc. For instance, you can read “Have other EAs addressed this topic?” in this section.

A quick introduction on energy

It’s often hard to see the importance of energy, so here’s a quick intro on it. Energy, simply put, defines the capacity to do work in a system (see here for more details). We need it to do basically anything. As Richard Heinberg puts it in his book Power: “if you want to understand any ecosystem or human society, a good rule of thumb is to follow the energy.”…

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Sunshine Might Be Free But Solar Power is Not Cheap

January 28, 2023

Sunshine Might Be Free But Solar Power is Not Cheap

Mississippi residents are consistently told that renewable energy sources, like solar panels, are now the lowest-cost ways to generate electricity, but these claims are based on creative accounting gimmicks that only examine a small portion of the expenses incurred to integrate solar onto the grid while excluding many others.

When these hidden expenses are accounted for, it becomes obvious that solar is much more expensive than Mississippi’s existing coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants and that adding more solar will increase electricity prices for the families and businesses that rely upon it. One of the most common ways of estimating the cost of generating electricity from different types of power plants is a metric called the Levelized Cost of Energy, or LCOE.

The LCOE is an estimate of the long-term average cost of producing electricity from a power plant. These values are estimated by taking the costs of the plant, such as the money needed to build and operate it, fuel costs, and the cost to borrow money, and dividing them by the amount of electricity generated by the plant (generally megawatt hours) over its useful lifetime.

In other words, LCOE estimates are essentially like calculating the cost of your car on a per-mile-driven basis after accounting for expenses like initial capital investment, loan and insurance payments, fuel costs, and maintenance.

We can estimate the LCOE of new solar facilities in Mississippi by using overnight capital cost estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) Electricity Market Module and other state-specific factors. We can then compare the cost of solar to the real-world cost data for the coal and natural gas generators at the Victor J. Daniel Jr. Generating Plant, and the Grand Gulf nuclear power plant using the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Form 1 database.

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These Are North America’s Biggest Sources Of Electricity By State And Province

January 14, 2023

These Are North America’s Biggest Sources Of Electricity By State And Province

On a national scale, the United States and Canada rely on a very different makeup of sources to generate their electricity.

The U.S. primarily uses natural gas, coal, and nuclear power, while Canada relies on both hydro and nuclear. That said, when zooming in on the province or state level, individual primary electricity sources can differ greatly.

In the infographic below, Visual Capitalist’s Selin Oğuz takes a look at the electricity generation in the states and provinces of these two countries using data from the Nuclear Energy Institute (2021) and the Canada Energy Regulator (2019).

Natural Gas

Natural gas is widely used for electricity generation in the United States. Known as a “cleaner” fossil fuel, its abundance, coupled with an established national distribution network and relatively low cost, makes it the leading electricity source in the country.

In 2021, 38% of the 4120 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity generated in the U.S. came from natural gas. Not surprisingly, more than 40% of American states have natural gas as their biggest electricity source.

Here are some states that have the largest shares of natural gas-sourced electricity.

In Canada, natural gas is only the third-biggest electricity source (behind hydro and nuclear), accounting for 11% of the 632 TWh of electricity produced in 2019. Alberta is the only province with natural gas as its main source of electricity.

Nuclear

Nuclear power is a carbon-free energy source that makes up a considerable share of the energy generated in both the U.S. and Canada.

19% of America’s and 15% of Canada’s electricity comes from nuclear power. While the percentages are close to one another, it’s good to note that the United States generates 6 to 7 times more electricity than Canada each year, yielding a lot more nuclear power than Canada in terms of gigawatt hours (GWh) per year.

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Europe Is Being Deindustrialized With a Purpose

January 13, 2023

Europe Is Being Deindustrialized With a Purpose

The sun is shining, birds are singing and natural gas demand destruction goes on unabated in the EU. One might ask here: why have TTF gas prices fallen below 70 Eur/MWh (1) actually to even lower levels than in Asia? Mainstream media tries to spin the story that this is largely due to mild weather, energy saving and a rise in US LNG deliveries — and this is where thinking usually stops. According to Irina Slav writing for oilprice.com though:

The first red flags appeared last year: much of the gas consumption decline in Germany that was praised by politicians actually came from demand destruction among industrial users because of prohibitive prices. In other words, gas demand in much of Europe last year fell because it was destroyed and not so much because everyone suddenly became conscientious with their gas use. But demand destruction is not good for the economy. It means shutdowns of factories and layoffs.

In other words: Europe is deindustrializing as expected, and simply shed 20% of it’s gas consumption as a result. Mission accomplished.

Low demand begets low prices. Should the price of Natural Gas fall further still though, it would quickly deter LNG ships to pursue more lucrative business opportunities — i.e.: deliver their gas to Asia instead, where they can sell it for a higher price. That would (will?) leave the EU with even less gas supply. Norwegians alone will surly not able to fill in the gap, especially so that their ‘production’ is actually on a high plateau and about to peak soon (then decline).

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Renewables Are Slowly Approaching Diminishing Returns

January 10, 2023

Renewables Are Slowly Approaching Diminishing Returns

Once a source of hope for maintaining our modern lifestyle, renewables are close to hit diminishing returns (i.e.: providing less and less benefit to society with every addition of a new solar panel or wind turbine). For the record: fossil fuels have long passed the same point, where drilling another well or opening a new mine eats up exponentially more resources and energy than the previous one — not to mention kicking CO2 levels even higher. The question is: can we continue high tech civilization now based on renewables, or are we about to hit the same limitations as with every other technology we have used in the past?

Providing data to substantiate claims of hitting diminishing returns is not easy. It goes well beyond “simple” return on investment calculations — it takes a holistic approach, a real cradle to grave assessment if you like. So far I haven’t came across such study (Simon Michaux’s work comes closest), so if you are an independent researcher or student looking for a PhD topic, feel free to elaborate on the subject— just please let me know what you have found.

Until then — as usual — treat the following as thought experiment, and see if it makes sense to you. As always, use your critical thinking skills and don’t take anything I (let alone uneducated people in the mainstream media) say at face value. With that aside let’s see what may be the ominous signs of society hitting diminishing returns when it comes to deploying ‘renewables’ at scale.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Energy requirements and carbon emissions for a low-carbon energy transition

January 1, 2023

Energy requirements and carbon emissions for a low-carbon energy transition

Abstract

Achieving the Paris Agreement will require massive deployment of low-carbon energy. However, constructing, operating, and maintaining a low-carbon energy system will itself require energy, with much of it derived from fossil fuels. This raises the concern that the transition may consume much of the energy available to society, and be a source of considerable emissions. Here we calculate the energy requirements and emissions associated with the global energy system in fourteen mitigation pathways compatible with 1.5 °C of warming. We find that the initial push for a transition is likely to cause a 10–34% decline in net energy available to society. Moreover, we find that the carbon emissions associated with the transition to a low-carbon energy system are substantial, ranging from 70 to 395 GtCO₂ (with a cross-scenario average of 195 GtCO₂). The share of carbon emissions for the energy system will increase from 10% today to 27% in 2050, and in some cases may take up all remaining emissions available to society under 1.5 °C pathways.

Introduction

The IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C concludes that we can still meet the 1.5 °C target and that by doing so, we would reduce climate impacts and limit the risk of exceeding the tipping points of the climate system¹. The report provides a range of low-carbon energy pathways compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5 °C. However, at present, there is no estimate of how much energy would be needed to build and maintain a low-carbon energy system, or what amount of greenhouse gas emissions would be associated with such a transition^2,3,4. This is an important gap in knowledge, as previous research suggests that rapid growth of low-carbon infrastructure could use a substantial amount of the global energy supply^5,6. Moreover, since the global energy supply is currently derived mostly from fossil fuels, the transition itself may become a source of significant emissions^7,8.

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2022 — A Year-End Contemplation

December 30, 2022

2022 — A Year-End Contemplation

Another year has passed (almost), yet the world didn’t collapse. We have got close to nuclear annihilation — probably closer than we’ve ever had — yet we are still here. The long decline of our High-Tech civilization in general, and the Western empire in particular works on different timescales than mere years though. The fall of a civilization does produce some serious humps on the road (some admittedly brutal and terrible), but for most people living through it, it is rather like a long trendline pointing downwards throughout many decades. Let’s review why we always end up in this process, and how it might continue to unfold in our case.

In order to have a better understanding what we are facing in the new year, we have to pull out our ultra-wide angle lens and see how 2022 fits into the large scheme of things. True, we are living through remarkable times, one of great flux and high unpredictability. This time though, it is quite a bit different from previous cases of decline and fall. We are at a turning point in human civilization, one which could only be understood from a truly historic and systems perspective.

Our modern, planetary civilization is complex system with innumerable positive as well as negative feedback loops. There are a multitude of factors, processes and groups of influential people competing with one another, producing a dynamic equilibrium. In a relatively stable world with abundant resources such systems of human beings produce remarkable results, growth and prosperity. Factors, serving as a basis for this growth and which we have took for granted, however, have started to shift under the immense pressure of our industrial activities. The climate has kept deteriorating from its ten millennia long mean in an accelerating way. Resources, we thought were inexhaustible have started to become ever harder to get. Sand. Fresh water. Fossil fuels. Metal ores. All of them.

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The Simple Story of Civilization

December 20, 2022

The Simple Story of Civilization

The stories we fashion about ourselves are heavily influenced by our short life spans during an age of unprecedented complexity. We humans, it would seem, are unfathomably complicated creatures who defy simple “just-so” characterizations. Animals, or humans tens of thousands of years ago are fair game for simple stories, but not so for transcendent modern humans.

Two major problems I have with this attitude are that 1) we are animals, and 2) we have exactly the same hardware (albeit with slightly smaller brains) as we had 100,000 years ago.

So allow me to pull back from our present age of baffling complexity to outline a simple story covering the broad sweep of the human saga. The result may be a little startling, and, for a number of readers, sure to be rejected by cultural antibodies as “not applicable” (see also my views of our civilization as a cult).

Story Timeline

In order to make comprehensible the vast tract of human time on this planet—itself 5,000 times shorter than the age of the universe—I will compare the 2.5–3 million year presence of humans (genus Homo) on Earth to a 75 year human lifespan: a span that we can grasp intuitively. On this scale, we get the following analogous periods:

First 70 years: various species of humans evolve and coexist (sustainably) on the planet;
Last 5 years: the age of Homo Sapiens (about 200,000 yr; mostly sustainably);
Last 15 weeks: the age of civilization (agriculture; then cities) (10,000 yr);
Last 4 days: the age of science (400 yr);
Last 36 hours: the age of fossil fuels (150 yr of increasingly significant use);
Last 12 hours: the age of rapid global ecological devastation (50 yr).

On this lifetime scale, agriculture is a recent, unexpected hobby we picked up, and one that is still pretty new to us in the scheme of things…

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The economy is moving from a tailwind pushing it along to a headwind holding it back

December 16, 2022

The economy is moving from a tailwind pushing it along to a headwind holding it back

The problem is hitting limits in the extraction of fossil fuels

We know that historically, many economies around the world have collapsed. We also know that there is a physics reason why this happens. Growing economies require a growing supply of energy to keep up with a growing population. At some point, the energy supply and other resource needs cannot grow rapidly enough to keep up with population growth. When this happens, economies tend to collapse.

In their book Secular Cycles, researchers Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov found that economies tend go through four distinct phases in each cycle, with each stage lasting for quite a few years:

Growth
Stagflation
Crisis
Inter-cycle

Based on my own analysis, the world economy was in the Growth Stage for much of the time between the Industrial Revolution and 1973. In late 1973, oil prices spiked, and the world was put on notice that the energy supply could not continue rising as rapidly as in the past. Between 1973 and 2018, the world economy was in the Stagflation Stage. Based on current data, the world economy seems to have entered the Crisis Stage about 2018. This is the reason for saying that headwinds are beginning to hold the economy back in the title of this article .

When the Crisis Stage occurs, there are fewer goods and services per capita to go around, so some participants in the world economy must come out behind. Conflict of all kinds becomes more likely. Political leaders, if they happen to discover the predicament the world economy is in, have little interest in making the predicament known to voters, since doing so would likely lead them to lose the next election.

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Finite Feeding Frenzy

December 6, 2022

Finite Feeding Frenzy

Image by ariesjay castillo from Pixabay

You may be aware that our food industry is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, to the point that it takes about 10 kcal of energy input to deliver 1 kcal of consumed food. The enormous energy multiplier is due to extensively mechanized plowing, harvesting, processing, and delivery of food; fossil-fueled fertilization (via methane feedstock); refrigeration and preparation; then of course food waste. In olden times, when all agricultural energy came from muscle power that needed to be fed, the system would collapse (i.e., starve and fail) if energy inputs exceeded energy ingested.

Some have phrased our current practice as “eating fossil fuels,” and in fact a 2006 book by Dale Allen Pfeiffer had this title. So what? More power to us—literally.

The problem, people, is that fossil fuels are finite. We have already consumed a fair fraction (roughly half?) of the accessible allotment. And before concluding that we therefore have a century or so before needing to worry about the consequences, realize that the inflection point happens around the halfway mark, wherein decreasing ease of access tends to result in ever-decreasing output rates in the second-half of the resource. We see this behavior in individual oil fields and in regional (country-scale) aggregations. The low-hanging fruit is taken first, sensibly, so that what’s left is more stubborn.

Because human population has been substantially boosted by fossil fuel input, we have put ourselves into a vulnerable position. What happens when fossil fuels begin to give out on us?

It’s been a while since I did any, you know, math for this blog, as I seem to be living my own worst nightmare and turning into an armchair philosopher (oh the shame). In this post, I return to something closer to math..

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