Sustainable Energy, USA and worldwide

I know that, but it pisses me off that I see far little discussion on how to mitigate the impact of such disruptiveness on underdeveloped countries, whose economies are likely to stagnate or even regress from the death of the fossil fuel industry before they could afford the material cost of not only acquiring but maintaining renewable energy infrastructure and/or before too much human capital flight sets in that leaves such countries with little to no native technical professionals that could help with running and upkeep of the aforementioned infrastructure.

Similarly, although I understand the environmentalists' fears of supporting R&D into either making fossil fuels sustainable or recapturing carbon emissions being turned into an excuse for essentially depriving R&D into sustainable energy from much needed funding and greenlighting further expansion of the fossil fuel industry under the pretense that the problem has been already "solved", that doesn't justify crippling all such research on principle and dismissing the very concept out of a hand as a pipe dream at best. We already made considerable progress on the plastic industry front (which is mostly reliant on petrochemicals) by developing petrochemical-based biodegradable plastics, after all.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 1st 2022 at 4:53:40 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

There seems to me to be a problem with this story concept, and I'm trying to figure out a polite way to describe it.

Also, one thing to talk about regarding trying to prolong the use of fossil fuels is the fundamental problem that they are a finite resource. And at our current rate of consumption, we'll exhaust our known deposits of oil and natural gas in a few decades.

Nach jeder Ebbe kommt die Flut.

I'm grateful for your concern. The forewarning is enough for me to give you the benefit of the doubt; if you're having too much trouble figuring out a "polite" way to say it, just put it frankly.

On your second point, I should note that a lot of the known oil and gas reserves haven't been tapped to begin with, or have not been even properly mapped and thus the quantity of what they hold is unknown, whether due to their geographical remoteness, inhospitability of the region they are in, or the country itself being too politically unstable for foreign companies to risk offering their expertise to strike contracts for extraction and processing. And to compound that further. Hell, even Saudi Arabia is estimated to have undiscovered reserves that could be over twice as large as its proven ones, and just a few months ago Aramco announced the discovery of a few of these.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 1st 2022 at 5:33:36 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

If your user information is correct, you're from Saudi Arabia, and I suspect that when you talk about countries whose economies could be adversely affected by the phasing out of fossil fuels, you're thinking at least in part of your own homeland. And I don't think you're wrong to worry about this. If we're going to talk about phasing out fossil fuels, we need to discuss how to mitigate any possible human cost of the shift.

But I don't think that imagining a scenario in which we discover technology that takes away all of the problems of fossil fuels is a realistic scenario.

There's a lot of caveats this story needs, including that fossil fuels are still in widespread use by 2050, that there's actually been meaningful research done into mitigating the pollution caused by fossil fuels instead of petrochemical executives blowing all their profits on big paychecks and stock buybacks, that such research can produce usable technology, that such technology is economical to use, that something happens to block any sort of improvement or further implementation of all forms of renewable energy, and that in a 2050 where fossil fuels are still in widespread use that the biosphere of earth isn't FUBAR. And there's no guarantee that further development of fossil fuels will actually enrich countries as a whole, rather than just a select few.

I think you're right to be concerned, but I don't think you're addressing your concerns in the best way. I think you would be better served by turning your mind and your imagination to what could be done to help countries whose economies are being disrupted.

Nach jeder Ebbe kommt die Flut.

I should point out that the Gulf states are well aware of the pending obsolescence of oil and are heavily diversifying their internal economies while getting as much value out of their resources as possible. They will be fine. I'm more concerned about impoverished petrostates like Russia and Venezuela.

Honestly, which scenario is more realistic: that renewables take over most energy production or that scientists magically invent a way to extract and burn fossil fuels without pollution?

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 1st 2022 at 11:25:24 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Let's not forget that oil will still likely have some use as plastic and other derivates are made from petroleum.

As for the economical impact it would have on developing countries, that's a ship that has already sailed with the way technology keeps advancing exponentially. You'd basically need to sign off the developed world to help out with the industrialising or it will not happen without developing countries abandoning the guidelines of the World Bank en masse to get money to industrialise.

Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, we should find the absolutes that tie us.

The other side of the issue is that oil economies without a strong domestic industrial base almost inevitably turn into rentier economies. When you base your economic growth on unearned hydrocarbon wealth that needs a lot of foreign investment to exploit, the tap that said investment flows through (be it government institutions or private-sector brokers) will attract elite corruption and end up siloing wealth and power around those who control the industry, worsening your country's socioeconomic inequality in the long run.

The Gulf monarchies might appear to avert this with their strong welfare states for citizens, but a huge part of their economies rely on foreign migrant workers from South/Southeast Asia and Africa who work under slavery conditions and hardly enjoy the same benefits — though the Saudi government, to its credit, seems aware enough of the issue to invest in renewables, while the UAE has cultivated a large services industry that employs professional expats (and also making itself an attractive base for offshore wealth).

I guess the bottom line is: if your country is big enough to have exploitable hydrocarbon deposits, then it's probably also big enough for solar, wind or hydro. These alternatives aren't free of environmental impacts, nor will they be free from corruption and graft unless you actively work on it. And a lot of non-energy uses for natural hydrocarbons (like petroleum for plastics, or coal for steelmaking) will likely persist far into the future. But the sooner you start making the transition, the easier it'll be to divest yourself from the "resource curse".

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

There’s another side to this coin though. While the natural resources of gas and oil are on the way out, the natural resources used to support environmentally friendly technologies are on the ascendence. Bolivia, Argentina and Chile have the three largest lithium reserves in the world. Lithium is pretty key to the battery technology that many environmentally friendly technologies use.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is by far the leading exporter of a cobalt, another ministerial that plays a big role in environmentally friendly technologies.

There are plenty of countries in the Developing World that rather than loosing out on their natural resources due to the move to renewables are going to see massive gains from their natural resources (assuming no neo-colonialists swoop in and steal them…).

If you want a “Global South catches up with the Global North due to natural resources” story, then it makes more sense to go with those countries finding and utilising deposits of resources that are on the upswing than them finding a way to keep around resources that are on the downswing.

Countries have made the jump before. Vast deposits of gold and silver took a massive downswing when countries shifted away from precious metal based money, strong breeds of horses aren’t as valuable as they used to be, vast forests of shipbuilding timber underwent a similar devaluation, but countries adapted and moved to new resources.

Edited by Silasw on Jun 2nd 2022 at 11:28:43 AM

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Though the catch is that those countries are still at risk of repeating the resource curse by becoming overly dependent on industrialised countries with the know-how to exploit said resources. Most Congolese cobalt has to be shipped to China for processing, for instance, and a lot of the mining operations in the country itself are already majority owned by foreign firms from China and other countries.

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

And Congolese cobalt mines often have problems with safety, fair compensation, and child labor.

Nach jeder Ebbe kommt die Flut.

A few notes about cobalt:

1. There are alternative battery chemistries that do not use cobalt, albeit at the cost of reduced energy density, and it is also possible to minimize the ratio of cobalt in batteries that do use it.
2. Cobalt plays a major role in oil refining, so it is not exclusively related to sustainable energy.
3. There are international organizations that are making an effort to ethically source Congolese cobalt by ensuring that the global supply chain does not use any materials from "artisanal" mines, which are the major cause of accusations of child labor and other abuses. One can discuss how successful they are at this and/or whether they are operating in good faith, but it's not an ignored problem.

Regardless, it is true that moving to a fully sustainable energy future will require an enormous scaling up of mining and refining operations for the minerals needed to build the batteries, solar cells, and so on. These will have short- and medium-term environmental and social consequences that must not be overlooked.

The good news is that 99+ percent of the materials involved can be recycled, so eventually we should enter a very nearly closed lifecycle for these products, ending the need for large-scale resource extraction. Once we hit a certain peak, end-of-life batteries will simply become new batteries.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 2nd 2022 at 8:55:18 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Yeah, for example, there's a lot of these in Canada that are effectively impossible to tap without enormous expenditure and potential devastation of the local environment. Same for why a lot of Canada's mineral resources are currently inaccessible.

There's a hell of a lot under the Canadian Shield, but all the stuff that's easily accessible is already being mined. But the whole area is full of national parks, First Nations territory, protected waterways, protected animals and plants, extremely thick layers of ancient rock and so on and so on. Anywhere with a large enough number of a type of flower called the trillium can't be exploited, for example.

The requirements to get down there are so high that the provinces and the federal government would almost certainly go full renewable first because it would be significantly cheaper and way more politically viable.

Not Three Laws compliant.

You all raise good points, even if some of them aren't fully convincing to me. Just to give one example (because I'm really short on time to thoroughly reply to everything):

I seriously doubt this, considering the sheer amount of graft that riddles Saudi government projects and how it seems to me - as someone who actually lives in the country - that they're trying to ape the UAE without actually understanding what made their attempt successful. The recent "liberalization" push in the last few years was supposed to attract foreign investment, and yet it flopped because foreign investors realized the liberal facade is a sham and without true substance; just look at the government's vaunted Neom project.

Also, I doubt you have heard of all the hundreds if not thousands of people that the government has evicted from the older districts of Jeddah so that they can bulldoze all the old buildings to make way for some of the new projects... which have yet to be started despite several years having passed by since some of those districts' destruction (I suspect that in some cases some of the elite pushed for the razings because the old buildings were an eyesore in front of the private hotels they own).

Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 2nd 2022 at 7:17:36 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Okay, but those are internal problems with governance and have little to do with the particular source of income of Saudi Arabia. You are projecting local issues into global ones. Your country has shit leadership, oil or no oil, but the ability of oil income to be funneled towards the enrichment of a select few enables the corruption.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Hit the point of sourcing all materials by recycling? Doubtful. We haven’t hit that even with aluminum (not a perfect analogy given its large-scale use, but still). By the time we will have enough batteries in circulation, we will probably already be moving to new batteries with new materials.

Edited by Smeagol17 on Jun 2nd 2022 at 9:17:22 PM

While possible, it's by no means certain that this is the case, and there is a lot of investment in recycling because it provides one critical advantage: you don't have to dig up the materials. They're all right in front of you, ready to go.

Aluminum in general circulation is a lot different than car battery materials because you don't just throw your old 60 kWh battery pack in the trash for the city trucks to pick up. Automobiles at end-of-life are extremely valuable and they will be purchased by those who want to gain access to those materials. There is a limited number of points of interface: junkyards, body shops, service centers, etc.

The only situations in which an EV battery is likely to be destroyed beyond recyclability are fires and... well, fires, and those are very uncommon. So there will be some loss, but that can be replaced with much smaller mining operations.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 2nd 2022 at 2:24:53 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Recycling can only eliminate resource demand in a flat-demand environment. If I get rid of my phone and get a new one then that’s flat demand, my old phone battery goes into the resource network as my new one exits it.

But if I need a new phone and there’s a net increase in the demand for phone batteries (because more people are buying phones than exiting the phone market) then we have to mine more battery material.

The same goes for E Vs. Every replacement EV can be using recycled materials, but every net increase in EV ownership means more mining.

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Yes, even after replacing all ICE cars with electric ones, demand for the batteries will continue to rise, especially if the economy will benefit developing countries. If half of African population will own a car, or at least an electric scooter… Not to mention countless other new uses for large batteries even in the developed countries that will arise if the economy of scale brings the costs down.

Edited by Smeagol17 on Jun 2nd 2022 at 10:24:17 PM

Oh, sure, the time horizon for a completely closed battery life cycle is pretty far out, but as long as the majority of end-of-life batteries are recycled, we can significantly reduce the demand for resource extraction.

There are other factors that can reduce the number of cars being manufactured, autonomy being the most significant. This is more of a topic for the self-driving thread, but if most people don't own cars and instead use robo-taxis, which is feasible because they have much lower operating costs than human-driven taxis, the total number of cars made will go down because each one gets much higher utilization.

Greater adoption of mass transit will help, if we can make that happen, but those vehicles will also need batteries, so it's more of a sideways movement than a direct reduction in transport demand.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 2nd 2022 at 4:15:41 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I will defend the use of mass transport over personal use because it's simply more effective when it comes to pollution and use of oil. Sure, this means changing some chips in people's minds but that's not an impossible fight if you can give a better service.

Anyway, the other thing that can help with the demand dilemma is to enforce a longer shell life in certain products.

Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, we should find the absolutes that tie us.

1. Mass transit also needs to switch to battery-electric power. This means that we will need batteries for those even if we can wave a magic wand and make people stop driving cars. We also won't stop needing trucks and other commercial vehicles.
2. The useful life of a combustion engine vehicle is usually limited by the engine and transmission, which eventually become too expensive to repair. A battery-electric vehicle is primarily limited by the lifetime of the battery pack, and the most recent chemistries and designs can last for up to a million miles, far longer than the average internal combustion engine.
3. While the scrap value of an internal combustion vehicle is generally limited to bulk metals, the scrap value of an electric vehicle includes all of the battery components that can be recycled. This will be an increasingly important and valuable industry.
4. While private owners may care about resale value and frequently buy new vehicles, if a majority of auto transport moves to self-driving robo-taxis, this problem eliminates itself and most vehicles will be driven to the end of their useful lives before being replaced, also reducing resource extraction.
5. If a majority of vehicles are in fleet use, recycling rates will be substantially higher than if most are in private use, since fleet owners will want to get the maximum value from those vehicles and will have contracts with recyclers.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 2nd 2022 at 6:37:55 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Self-driving taxis still have the problem of using a disproportionate amount of energy to get people around. And I think there's a still a question as to whether or not self-driving cars can really work, especially on the scale some people are talking about.

Nach jeder Ebbe kommt die Flut.

While I can accept that mass transportation also needs batteries in the long run, I don't think self-driving taxis are a good idea.

I can compromise on self-driving trains or buses since those can have a set route that both the machine and the public knows about, but trying to go from that to private transportation requires a lot of contigencies so that the system is not abused or fails in ways that it's not easy to fix.

Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, we should find the absolutes that tie us.

[citation needed]

Compared to what? EVs in general use less energy for propulsion than internal combustion vehicles because they are more efficient at converting it into useful work. Well-to-wheel, ICVs are less than 30 percent efficient while BEVs can be up to 90 percent efficient.

If you are comparing private passenger vehicles to buses and trains for general transportation, okay, but they occupy different paradigms. I live in a suburban neighborhood. There is no bus or train that I can reasonably use, and people still take taxis even in dense urban environments. Even if nothing changes and we simply swap private IC cars for private EV cars, and IC taxis for EV taxis, there is a substantial net reduction in energy consumption.

Further, if most private passenger vehicles are taxis, then we will need a lot fewer of them overall because each one will be utilized more of the time. Most cars spend most of their time parked, but taxis can be utilized for 20+ hours a day if drivers operate them in shifts. The same number of vehicle-miles divided by a larger number of miles-per-vehicle gives you a much smaller number of vehicles and therefore less resource consumption to build them.

You're right that it is not a certainty that self-driving will be viable, but there are a lot of companies (not just Tesla) betting that it will, and a lot of money going into development. If we're placing bets, I wouldn't be eager to take the nay side. I consider it 99%+ probable that we will have fully (meaning SAE Level 4+) autonomous vehicles in wide operation by 2030. ^note I'm hedging this bet. I consider it 90%+ probable that Tesla will solve FSD well enough for SAE Level 4 by the end of 2023, but there's an Aesop about putting all your eggs in one basket.

Of course, market penetration is the next problem. Even if we had full autonomy today, it would take decades to replace all the existing cars, but the same applies to electric vehicles. So it's less a question of if it will happen and more questions of how quickly they can be deployed and how many people will stubbornly hold out before realizing the economic benefits.

Edit: As noted above, self-driving also applies to commercial vehicles and mass-transit, so it's not like there's some hard barrier between those technologies. It's not like autonomy will only be useful to passenger vehicles.

I disagree with the idea that it's too complex a problem to solve for general passenger vehicles, though.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 2nd 2022 at 7:11:21 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Just a simple example.

If I have to program a vehicle so that it will stop if one or two vehicles around it suddenly stop, it would make it vulnerable for robbers to coordinate a stop to assault whoever is inside without the passenger being able to do anything about it.

The advantage that the bus would have in this situation is that because its route is set, then you can have security on its route so that no one tries to pull this stunt; robo-taxis however wouldn't have this advantage and it would make the service useless in all but the most guarded areas of a city.

Edited by raziel365 on Jun 2nd 2022 at 4:15:07 AM

Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, we should find the absolutes that tie us.