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IEO Virutal Seminar: The Market for Rare Minerals and Implications for Phasing Out Fossil Fuels: Where Do We Stand?

September 21, 2022

IEO Virutal Seminar: The Market for Rare Minerals and Implications for Phasing Out Fossil Fuels: Where Do We Stand?

A Natural Gas Shortage Is Looming For The U.S.

September 21, 2022

A Natural Gas Shortage Is Looming For The U.S.

As natural gas demand around the world breaks new records, U.S. shale producers are struggling to keep up with demand.
While natural gas prices in the United States fell after a railway strike was averted last week, it looks likely that prices both at home and abroad will spike this winter.
A hotter-than-expected summer and a lack of alternative energy sources have left U.S. inventories below the seasonal average.

Last week, the media rushed to report that natural gas prices in the United States had fallen sharply after trade unions and railway companies reached a tentative deal that averted a potentially devastating strike.

Indeed, natural gas prices fell by nearly a dollar per million British thermal units, helped by a respectable build in inventories. And yet, inventories remain below the seasonal average, exports are running at record rates, and producers are beginning to struggle to meet demand, both at home and abroad.

Reuters’ John Kemp wrote in a recent column that domestic and international gas consumption had risen to record highs, and shale producers—the ones that account for the bulk of U.S. natural gas output—were having a hard time catching up with this demand.

Meanwhile, although higher on a weekly basis, inventories remained at the second-lowest for this time of the year for the last 12 years, Reuters’ market analyst noted. He also added there were no signs of any improvement in the level of inventories despite the rise in prices.

None of this suggests lower prices for natural gas are coming to either the United States or international markets as the northern hemisphere heads into winter. On the contrary, the latest figures suggest more financial pain for gas consumers. And they confirm, to an extent, forecasts made earlier this year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Net zero is dead – so what now?

September 7, 2022

Net zero is dead – so what now?

There is a deep irony that Europe’s wind turbine factories were among the first to close in the face of our growing energy crisis. Nevertheless, it goes a long way to demonstrating the fundamental flaw in the net zero project – while the harvested energy of the wind may be renewable, the technologies that do the harvesting are not. Indeed, these supposedly “green” technologies depend upon complex global supply chains powered by fossil fuels at every stage of their manufacture, transportation, deployment, maintenance, and decommissioning. But that inconvenient truth was never allowed to get in the way of the technocratic net zero fantasy – aka “the great reset,” “the green new deal,” or “the fourth industrial revolution.”

It wasn’t, you see, just us who were “energy blind.” Indeed, those at the bottom of the income ladder tend to be more aware of the importance of energy – including having enough calories to ward off hunger – than the technocrats and elites at the top of the pyramid, who tend to believe that they are perched up in the clouds solely due to their own efforts, rather than to having burned their way through a mountain of coal and an ocean of oil to generate their theoretical wealth. And so, they sold us this children’s story about how complexity and science don’t really matter, and that so long as we all wish hard enough, we could replace all of the coal, gas and oil with sunlight, wind and pixie dust. And in doing so, nothing would really change, and we would all own nothing but still live happily ever after.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Capitalist Civilization’s Last Shot

August 22, 2022

Our Capitalist Civilization’s Last Shot

…or how proposed solutions only deepen the problem

What hole…? Bah, gotta keep on diggin’… Image credit: Dominik Vanyi via Unsplash

For those of my readers who follow this blog for a while now it has probably become pretty much clear that this global capitalist high-tech industrial civilization is slowly over. What we are experiencing these days is nothing but an opening to a period of long slow decline — taking decades, if not a century to unfold — barring a literal Armageddon unleashed by fundamentalists seeing it as a way to redemption. The underlying dynamics, however, are common to all previously lost societies, no matter how sad it is: all civilizations rise and fall in familiar patterns and ours is by no means an exception. What can our leaders and the political class in general do about it? What are the proposed ways to avert our fate? This is going to be the topic of today’s post.

Bigger, better, greener…?

Renewable energy is what seems to get all the attention in fighting off climate change, and beating those nasty petrol states at the same time. These resources are said to bring electricity prices down (after all, these are the ‘cheapest’ sources of electricity nowadays) and give us the only hope of continuing our comfortable lifestyles in the West.

After half a century of handwaving though, touting how electricity generated by nuclear power will be too cheap to meter, or how power generated by renewables will be so abundant that it will be virtually for free, oil, gas and coal are still powering 85% of the real economy. Just like 50 years ago. As Germany’s year-ahead electricity contracts testify, after having went through a whopping 500% increase over the past year, we are not quite there yet… But will we ever reach this utopia…?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

California went big on rooftop solar. Now that’s a problem for landfills

July 17, 2022

California went big on rooftop solar. Now that’s a problem for landfills

Illustration of solar panels discarded into large piles with the sky behind them. — Solar panels purchased for home use under incentive programs many years ago are nearing the end of their life cycle. Many are already winding up in landfills. (Jim Cooke / Los Angeles Times)

California has been a pioneer in pushing for rooftop solar power, building up the largest solar market in the U.S. More than 20 years and 1.3 million rooftops later, the bill is coming due.

Beginning in 2006, the state, focused on how to incentivize people to take up solar power, showered subsidies on homeowners who installed photovoltaic panels but had no comprehensive plan to dispose of them. Now, panels purchased under those programs are nearing the end of their typical 25-to-30-year life cycle.

Many are already winding up in landfills, where in some cases, they could potentially contaminate groundwater with toxic heavy metals such as lead, selenium and cadmium.

Sam Vanderhoof, a solar industry expert and chief executive of Recycle PV Solar, says that only 1 in 10 panels are actually recycled, according to estimates drawn from International Renewable Energy Agency data on decommissioned panels and from industry leaders.

The looming challenge over how to handle truckloads of waste, some of it contaminated, illustrates how cutting-edge environmental policy can create unforeseen problems down the road.

“The industry is supposed to be green,” Vanderhoof said. “But in reality, it’s all about the money.”

California came early to solar power. Small governmental rebates did little to bring down the price of solar panels or to encourage their adoption until 2006, when the California Public Utilities Commission formed the California Solar Initiative. That granted $3.3 billion in subsidies for installing solar panels on rooftops.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Dozens of reasons why solar power can’t replace fossil fuels

July 7, 2022

Dozens of reasons why solar power can’t replace fossil fuels

Preface. All solar (and wind) do is add to the giant bonfire of burning fossil fuels — which still provide two-thirds of the power for the electric grid. Electricity is just a fraction of how we use energy, over 80% is fossil fueled because electricity can’t replace their use in fertilizer, transportation, half a million products made out of fossil fuels (i.e. plastic) and so on. Without natural gas, the electric grid won’t be able to stay up since there are no other options for storage that scale up. All of this explained at great length in my books.

When you hear things like “solar power provided 100% of California’s power today”, no it didn’t. For a few hours it provided 100% of ELECTRIC power, and the money lost by all the other power providers that had to shut down, the ones that actually assure reliability to the grid since solar and wind are extremely unreliable and seasonal, means that they have to spend less to maintain their facilities, shortening their lifespan, especially coal and nuclear which take many hours to ramp up or down.

***

Solar power contraptions require oil for every single step of their life cycle

Look at all the fossil energy used to make solar panels in this youtube video: How It’s Made Solar Panels

If solar power and concentrated solar power plants can’t produce enough power to replicate themselves entirely over their life cycle, plus produce the energy needed by society, then they are not sustainable. Every single step of their life cycle depends on fossil fuels, from diesel mining trucks, diesel ships to take the ore to facilities that use fossil fuels to crush the rock, coal blast and smelting furnaces, transportation of the myriad parts from all over the globe to the manufacturing facility, and finally delivered to the final site, where workers arrive in gas-burning vehicles over petroleum asphalt roads.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

On Magical Thinking

July 4, 2022

On Magical Thinking

In which the motivation behind the Honest Sorcerer gets revealed

Image credit: Patrick Hendry via Unsplash

My last article on the future of electricity has received quite a few critical comments both from proponents of nuclear as well as solar energy, accusing me with ‘denigrating’ their favored solution. The aim of this is project, the Honest Sorcerer however, was not — and never will be — to focus on a narrow set of magic bullet ‘solutions’, intended to solve a specific issue, while presuming that the rest will be taken care of automatically.

There are a few things, however, which must be understood before we can move on. If you are not on board with the following, no problem, give yourself a break and let them sink in, in their own pace.

This civilization is just as unsustainable as the hundreds of others it now follows into the dustbin of history. High tech modernity exemplified by, but certainly not limited to, the Western states is way past redemption: there are way too many trends working against it. The end of a civilization is a classic example of a predicament becoming fulfilled: it happens no matter what you do and there are no ways to stop it. People can still do a lot to adapt to the situation as it evolves and ease the passing of an old system though; making its death less painful then it otherwise would be, and saving at least some of the cultural achievements from perishing.
It follows that there is no such thing as individuals redeeming their own civilization, especially this one. Unlike its predecessors, this civilization has went global…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Australia’s Energy Crisis Worsens As Gov’t Ask People To Keep Lights Off To Avert Blackouts

June 17, 2022

Australia’s Energy Crisis Worsens As Gov’t Ask People To Keep Lights Off To Avert Blackouts

Australia’s energy minister asked Sydney and the New South Wales (eastern part of the country) residents to turn off lights and energy-intensive appliances in the evening to prevent power blackouts due to an ongoing energy crunch, The Independent reports.

The federal energy minister, Chris Bowen, asked residents in a televised address to turn off energy-intensive devices between “6 to 8 [pm]” to mitigate risks of a spike in power during peak hours. He pointed to several offline coal-fired plants because of maintenance and unexpected issues.

Reuters notes that 65% of eastern Australia’s power is generated by coal, but more than a quarter of that capacity is offline.

Wholesale electricity prices have soared and on Monday exceeded the capped price of A$300 per megawatt-hour. Above A$300, coal power generation plants lost money and forced some operators to shutter power generation units, thus removing energy capacity off the grid and sending prices even higher. The rise of power prices began when coal prices jumped following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Bowen snapped at a journalist when asked if more coal power is the answer the energy crunch.

“The situation in recent days has posed challenges to the entire energy industry, and suspending the market would simplify operations during the significant outages across the energy supply chain,” Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) chief executive Daniel Westerman said in a statement.

“It was understandable generators had held back supply in light of the price caps along with unplanned outages and supply challenges with coal and gas, but having to direct generators to provide supply had made it impossible to maintain normal market operations,” Westerman said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why The Biden Admin Wants Censorship Of Renewable Energy Critics

June 14, 2022

Why The Biden Admin Wants Censorship Of Renewable Energy Critics

National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy calls on Big Tech to censor renewable energy critics in the name of “public health”

Biden Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy last week demanded that Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies crack down on those who are “seeding doubt about the costs associated with [green energy] and whether they work or not” in the name of public health.

In the face of widespread public outrage, the Biden Administration last month backed away from a proposal to create a disinformation board at the Department of Homeland Security.

But now it’s back with new demands to censor its critics, this time using a tactic that has worked in the recent past: by framing them as a threat to public health.

In a talk with Axios, Biden Administration Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy said, “The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation.”

After an Axios reporter asked, “Isn’t misinformation and disinfo around climate a threat to public health itself?” McCarthy responded, “Oh, absolutely… We are talking, really, about risks that no longer need to be tolerated to our communities.”

McCarthy pointed specifically to those who criticized the failure of weather-dependent renewables during the blackouts in Texas in February 2021. But many of those criticisms were factual. Over the last decade in Texas, investors sunk over $53 billion on weather-dependent energy sources, mostly wind turbines, which alongside frozen fossil fuel plants were largely unavailable during the cold snap in February. That was only partly because of the cold and mostly because of low wind speeds.

McCarthy claimed that the critics of renewables are funded by “dark money” fossil fuel companies, which she compared to Big Tobacco…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Advancing interconnected solutions to the food, energy and finance crises

May 18, 2022

The governing body of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) met in Rome on April 8, 2022 in an Extraordinary Session to examine the “impact of the Ukraine-Russia conflict on global food security and related matters under its mandate” and advise on how it should proceed. Meanwhile, just two days earlier, the Civil Society and Indigenous People Mechanism (CSIPM) at U.N. Committee on World Food Security (CFS) called for an Extraordinary Plenary Session of the CFS.

We must consider these developments along with a new initiative from the U.N. and against the background of the FAO’s global food prices index reaching its highest level ever.

In response to the immediate crises provoked by the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, on March 14 the U.N. Secretary General (SG) António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres announced the establishment of the Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy and Finance (GCRG). On April 5, he released the GCRG’s initial recommendations. According to remarks made by the U.N. SG at the U.N. Security Council Meeting, these initial recommendations are for the consideration of the member states, international financial institutions and others. In brief, they are:

On food: To avoid the risk of hunger and famine spreading further, the GRCG urges all countries to keep markets open, resist unjustified and unnecessary export restrictions, and make reserves available to countries at risk of hunger and famine.
On energy: While some countries’ plans to release strategic reserves of fossil fuels in an attempt to reduce their dependence on Russian stocks could help ease the current crisis in the short term, the only medium and long-term solution is accelerated deployment of renewable energy, which is not impacted by market fluctuations. Renewable energy deployment is the best option in most cases and will allow the progressive phaseout of coal and all other fossil fuels.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Power Grid Operators Warn Of Potential Electricity Shortages Amid Transition To Clean Energy

May 9, 2022

Power Grid Operators Warn Of Potential Electricity Shortages Amid Transition To Clean Energy

Power-grid operators across the US warn that power-generating capacity struggles to keep up with demand, a worrying sign ahead of summer where heatwaves could lead to rolling blackouts.

The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, operating in 15 states across the US Central region, said last month that capacity shortages this summer due to soaring summer demand might result in outages. Last Friday, California Independent System Operator, or California ISO, outlined energy shortfalls this summer because of heat and wildfires. Texas over the weekend saw triple-digit temperatures in some portions of the state, though grid stability was maintained despite several power plants being offline for maintenance.

WSJ explains grid instability and increased risk of power shortages this summer comes as fossil fuel power plants are “being retired more quickly than they can be replaced by renewable energy and battery storage.” Power grids are racing to retire conventional power plants fueled by natural gas, coal, and diesel to green forms of energy, such as solar power and wind. There’s also the retirement of aging nuclear power plants.

Things are not working as planned in the green economy as power grids are becoming unstable by the retirement of fossil fuel power plants with unstable renewables. The transition isn’t as smooth as climate change modelers once suggested as grid stability worsens, and millions of Americans could be subjected to blackouts this summer as cooling demand soars during heatwaves as grids won’t have enough power to meet demand.

WSJ’s author reveals their blinkered bias or ignorance about alternative energy by stating the following “wind and solar farms – which are among the cheapest forms of power generation.” Alternative energy would be expensive if it weren’t for the government’s tax credits, grants, and other incentives…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Renewables Can’t Solve Europe’s Energy Crisis

April 6, 2022

Why Renewables Can’t Solve Europe’s Energy Crisis

Europe has been aggressively pursuing a clean energy future and the end of fossil fuels, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the shortcomings of renewables.
The soaring prices of key metals and the length of time it takes to implement renewable energy projects have meant Europe is turning to fossil fuels to solve its energy crisis.
The EU is planning to replace Russian gas with LNG imports, coal, and even fuel oil, with a relatively small amount of the gas to be replaced by wind and solar.

Germany is preparing for gas rationing. France’s power grid operator is asking consumers to use less electricity. In the UK, protests are breaking out over the latest electricity price hike that plunged millions of households into what one local think tank called fuel stress. Europe has a serious energy problem.

The problem dates back years and points to a persistent complacency on the part of European governments that whatever happens, there will always be gas from Russia. After all, even during the Cold War Russia pumped billions of cubic meters of gas to European countries. Now, things are different, and it’s not just because of the war in Ukraine.

Europe has been enthusiastically trying to reduce its dependence on all fossil fuels, not just Russian gas, for a few years now. The EU recently boasted that in 2022 renewable energy sources accounted for 37.5 percent of gross electricity consumption, with wind and hydro constituting two-thirds of the total renewable energy output. Why, then, one wonders, would Germany have to brace for gas rationing and France ask its citizens to consume less electricity? Now that has a bit to do with the war in Ukraine…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This War Marks the End of Cheap Resources

March 10, 2022

This War Marks the End of Cheap Resources

It’s time to bust some myths. Ones, like “we have all the natural resources we want” and “we live in an a world of abundance”. Or if something does become unavailable, then surely a replacement will come online and magically scale up to meet everyone’s needs. In the real world however — as we are about to experience it from a front row seat— a long decline of resources awaits; together with a slump in economic output. While some parts of the world might ‘enjoy’ growth in material wealth and energy use for a couple more years to come, the overall (global) trend of the decades ahead will most probably be marked by negative growth, or to put more simply: de-growth. Is it because of the war in Ukraine? Or sanctions? Only partially. In the grand scheme of things these acts of violence will be considered nothing more than a ‘coup de grâce’ — the final blow to the western economy.

Ofcourse, the statements made above presume accepting some basic facts. Most of these facts however — as you will see—would require a paradigm shift well beyond the scope of our current political reality. Thus, I do not expect any of them to burst into mainstream narrative anytime soon… But who knows, maybe Arthur Schopenhauer will prove to be right:

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

Read the following statements (1) in light of the quote above and guess in which stage our “collective consciousness” is in relation to them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Carbon Neutral Myth: Why the Green Tech Revolution Will Not Solve Climate Change

March 1, 2022

Carbon Neutral Myth: Why the Green Tech Revolution Will Not Solve Climate Change

Back to Reality: We are All Children of Oil

February 28, 2022

Back to Reality: We are All Children of Oil

Colin Campbell, founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), speaks in Pisa in 2006. Officially, the Powers that Be (PTB) ignored the ASPO message, but it could be that they understood it all too well. That would explain many things about the current situation. For two years, we thought that all our problems were caused by a microscopic, peduncled critter. Now, we are back to reality: we are all children of oil, and we cannot survive without it.

A few days ago, I found by chance on my shelves some documents from the 2006 conference of ASPO (the association for the study of peak oil) that I and others organized in Pisa, in Tuscany. The conference had a certain global resonance: it was sponsored by the Tuscan government, hundreds of people from all over the world came to attend, and the international media commented on it. It was part of a wave of interest on peak oil and its consequences. Just as another example, see the leaflet on the right that I also found rummaging among old documents. It announces a meeting to be held in the Tuscan countryside in 2004, titled, “The Party is Over“, and subtitled “How to exit from the petroleum-based economy“Today, it looks as if these things are a hundred years old. How was it that there was an age in which you could express this kind of subversive thoughts in public and be given some space in the media? And how could we delude ourselves into thinking that we could have convinced that nebulous entity called “humanity” that we were running out of our natural resources, crude oil in the first place? Even more subversive, that we should reduce consumption and move to renewable sources before it was too late?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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