Just make a guess. Use a heuristic.
The key driver of coal costs is how much energy you need to put in in terms of coal vs the energy you get out.
I’ll give you 50 years.
How much do think the efficiency improved in this period?
Apoligies if I’m beating a dead horse here. But I see it all the time.
Guy at work: I’ve invested in a company doing roof top wind
Me: it won’t work
Him: how do you know that
Me: physics
Him: you are just leaping to conclusions.
To anyone without a sound understanding of the energy and the maths. I sound like the asshole in this convo, but I’m 100% right.
That’s where our fundamental disagreement lies.
If something is politically impossible then it’s not really a solution right. That said we obviously need to do all we can to move the Overton window to making it possible. Being impossible now though forces my moral compass to look for what is possible.
Let’s grant CC will only sequester a couple percentage of global emissions. Isn’t that a couple percentage of emissions not in the atmosphere? Your calculus suggests that couple percentage doesn’t matter.
We are both starting from the same place. If either of us were lord ruler of the globe we would force fossil fuel production to ramp down in favor of renewables at a significantly faster pace. Where we seem to disagree is how to act absent that ability.
We are having an interesting and good faith discussion. I’d love to keep it like that. I don’t think suggesting I don’t understand energy technology is fair given how our discussion has went. I do this for a living.
Maybe you didn’t mean that and if not my apologies.
1 Like
I have not worked with coal much so don’t have much of a basis to guess but I’m assuming from the tenor it’s very low. 5%
I’m not being obtuse for all the reasons rugby and I have been discussing. I’m disagreeing. That’s not the same thing.
Yeah. Not my intent. Sorry.
I mean the specifics of the type of energy
And yeah. 5% is about right. Or depending on how you count. 20%. We’ve gone from circa 33% efficiency to about 41%
A lot of this is relative.
I.e. I’m not saying roof wind will never work. I’m saying it will never work compete with large grid scale windmills. Because physics
Another example.
Guy saying we could make space solar work. Because there’s more sun up there. And automation. And tech is getting better.
It took me a minute to calculate there was maybe 15 x more sun in space than on earth in a 24 hour period, and we are never putting panels in space for less than 15 times the price.
Hydrogen, direct air capture, suffers from similar issues
2 Likes
What are your thoughts on things like this?
There is lots of work to reduce the energy required to produce hydrogen.
Discussing whether CCS is a valid strategy is totally fine.
You didn’t do that in your response to me. You read an article that very clearly spells out that they don’t want money sunk into large scale CCS projects with “What’s the solution… I honestly have no idea what some of the climate change lobby wants.”
I’m sure you can see the difference.
Anyway, I do look forward to learning more about CCS, I don’t know much about it.
1 Like
That was poorly articulated on my part. My “what do they want” was aimed generally in my mind and not at the article but I didn’t state that clearly enough obviously.
2 Likes
I would avoid anything on hydrogen that isn’t peer reviewed.
I didn’t look at the full thing, but the main issue is not, can hydrogen carry energy and get cheaper at doing all of those things.
It’s, is there a world where it can do those things cheaper than green elec.
There is serious bucks going into hydrogen from gas networks who see it as existential. If they can’t turn their networks into carrying hydrogen or biogas they are out of business. That’s why peer reviewed is better.
Looks like that paper is talking about producing hydrogen from renewables and nuclear, when it’s actually almost entirely produced by fossil fuels. The FF companies, seems to me, push hydrogen because it’s a diversion from other investment and they expect to provide the hydrogen anyway by reforming natural gas.
The technology already exists for most applications, and no one dares talk about conservation since Jimmy Carter got crucified for saying people could wear sweaters. The average American or Canadian uses 3x the energy of a perfectly comfortable average UKian, but there’s no stopping bigger houses, faster cars, and more stuff from Amazon.
1 Like
True. It also doesn’t even need to be sweaters. Just public transport and bullet trains gets you a long way.
Yeah, but people really don’t want to say “sweaters” or anything like “your 4000 square foot house is millstone around our necks”.
1 Like
This deserves a longer response.
Firstly, I don’t grant that CCS can sequester two percentages of global emissions. That is an easy number to throw out. But the scale of that is enormous.
I’ve heard numbers of carbon capture amounting to 1000th of a percent of emissions. I suspect that runs high and assumes and believes published best cases with no leakage, but let’s concede it. That would be only increasing by 2 thousand times? That seems not unreasonable.
But let’s dig a little deeper
The chart below shows the largest CCS in the world right now
What do we see?
It’s almost all oil. It’s enhanced recovery. And is an example of CCS advocates slight of hand (not yours). This stuff is enabling the increasing of emissions.
Where are the facilities that would actually reduce emissions? With storage that is stable and commerical? Do they exist? I know some are being built, slowly, at great expense, with billions of government support.
Which brings me to my second point
Cost of CCS is high, relative to two things.
- It’s higher than not sequestering.
- It’s higher than other abatement methods. Most notably solar and wind.
This means that it only happens with government intervention, AND if that intervention chooses the worse option.
So in the scenario (which won’t happen) of 2% of emissions going to CCS, that’s at the opportunity costs of 10 to 20% of other emissions not being abated. (And from a cost of abatement basis, that ratio is not an exaggeration)
Third. There’s the political aspect.
I want to divide FF companies into two here. There are those which can transition and survive. An energy retailer can make money selling electricity from solar the same as they do selling it from coal.
And there are those where this is an existential threat. Coal mines, the big oil players, gas networks etc.
That second group will never be part of the solution. They are actively working against the solution and have been for 40 years.
By entertaining CCS as part of the solution, we legitimise the FF players Which again, means that we trade that 2% for inaction in other areas, and are net worse off
If you are trying to stop smoking in a middle school. And Marlborough comes in and says they can run an advertisement campaign that will reduce kids smoking by 2% you tell them to fuck off, you don’t say “well it’s better than nothing”
So yeah.
- It won’t scale to 2%
- If it did that’s at a massive opportunity cost.
- If it did, it requires political legitimization of these companies that creates further losses
4 Likes
I’ve worked in two of the projects on your table.
We simply disagree on the probability of technology advance so there isn’t a way to settle this.
I don’t see a world where carbon capture isn’t part of the solution. It’s clearly moving that way given policy and money spent in Canada and the US.
This is another heuristic. It’s one that should be abandoned when it comes to energy stuff.
We know that people have spent billions on green hydrogen and then scaled it back. We know people have spent billions on single nuclear reactors that never operated a single kwh of useful energy.
We also know that governments are bad at picking winners and often throw billions into bad projects more generally. California spent what 20 bil on 25 miles of bullet train?
This is a field, where for lots of reasons, money gets spent on failure.
1 Like
Right or wrong that is another should vs is question.