Oil demand could grow at its fastest rate since the 1970s for the next three years, BofA Global Research has said in a note.
The commodity’s future is limited, though, the analysts said, expecting global oil demand to peak around 2030. The rise of electric vehicles (EVs) drives this change.
evilgenius wrote:Isn't the danger with hydrogen more the one where we do a switchover, even just for long haul trucking, and discover it has breached some sort of critical point that is having an effect upon the atmosphere? Think about it, the hydrogen burning results in water as an output, which binds so much oxygen. It, therefore, makes a difference, to the balance of oxygen, whether you get your hydrogen from electrolysis of water, or from natural gas. All we need to do is set up a system where the economics of it force us to decide in the wrong direction!
eclipse wrote:evilgenius wrote:Isn't the danger with hydrogen more the one where we do a switchover, even just for long haul trucking, and discover it has breached some sort of critical point that is having an effect upon the atmosphere? Think about it, the hydrogen burning results in water as an output, which binds so much oxygen. It, therefore, makes a difference, to the balance of oxygen, whether you get your hydrogen from electrolysis of water, or from natural gas. All we need to do is set up a system where the economics of it force us to decide in the wrong direction!
Why don't you look up how many tons of oxygen are in the atmosphere and how many tons of oxygen per year it would take to replace ALL oil with the WRONG hydrogen before sounding this rather ridiculous alarm? Go on, tell us what tiny, infinitesimal percent of our atmospheric oxygen we'd be locking away as water? Do the math and tell us how much TOTAL oxygen would be locked away as water if we actually burned all the remaining fossil fuels to get all the hydrogen we needed? What percentage of Earth's free oxygen would be locked away in that scenario? Hint: there are 5.5 QUADRILLION TONS of atmosphere, and 1/5th of that is oxygen. That's about 1.1 QUADRILLION TONS of oxygen aka 1,100 TRILLION tons of oxygen aka 1.1 MILLION BILLION tons of oxygen. Bill McKibben in do the math suggested there was 2,795 gigatons fossil fuel reserves. It takes lots of energy to create hydrogen from fossil fuels, so we would need to deduct that. But let's not. Let's pretend - for the sake of argument - that one ton of fossil fuels = 1 ton of oxygen locked away if we convert said fossil fuels to hydrogen and burned it! 1100 000 BILLION tons of oxygen / 2795 BILLION tons of fossil fuels = 393. That means there is 393 TIMES more oxygen than all our fossil fuels. Converting it all - every last bit of conventional coal and oil and gas reserves into hydrogen and burning it would lock away about 1/393th of our breathable oxygen! Call the newspapers it's the end of the world!
But with the big banks like the European Investment Bank declaring "Gas is over" - I doubt dirty hydrogen will get funding. Green hydrogen comes from water, and back to water it will go. There are enormous plans in Australia to use renewable energy to produce green hydrogen, with the final plan decades from now to be something like 8 times our grid capacity to produce vast amounts of exportable energy.
final plan decades from now
eclipse wrote:A stock-market-crash like the Great Depression can actually stimulate huge government investment in energy systems. EG: Look up the Hoover Dam! Huge things can still be built during a Depression. Indeed, sometimes they are the fastest way out of said Depression.
StarvingLion wrote:eclipse wrote:A stock-market-crash like the Great Depression can actually stimulate huge government investment in energy systems. EG: Look up the Hoover Dam! Huge things can still be built during a Depression. Indeed, sometimes they are the fastest way out of said Depression.
We've been in a depression for the past 20 years. Now we're in a permanent collapse. Nothing is fundable period.
StarvingLion wrote:eclipse wrote:A stock-market-crash like the Great Depression can actually stimulate huge government investment in energy systems. EG: Look up the Hoover Dam! Huge things can still be built during a Depression. Indeed, sometimes they are the fastest way out of said Depression.
We've been in a depression for the past 20 years. Now we're in a permanent collapse. Nothing is fundable period.
eclipse wrote:evilgenius wrote:Isn't the danger with hydrogen more the one where we do a switchover, even just for long haul trucking, and discover it has breached some sort of critical point that is having an effect upon the atmosphere? Think about it, the hydrogen burning results in water as an output, which binds so much oxygen. It, therefore, makes a difference, to the balance of oxygen, whether you get your hydrogen from electrolysis of water, or from natural gas. All we need to do is set up a system where the economics of it force us to decide in the wrong direction!
There are 5.5 QUADRILLION TONS of atmosphere, and 1/5th of that is oxygen. That's about 1.1 QUADRILLION TONS of oxygen aka 1,100 TRILLION tons of oxygen aka 1.1 MILLION BILLION tons of oxygen.
That's 1 100 000 BILLION tons. Bill McKibben in Do the Math said there was 2,795 gigatons fossil fuel reserves left. That's 2795 BILLION tons. 1100 000 / 2795 = 393. That means there is 393 TIMES more oxygen than all our fossil fuels. So even if we allowed a direct 1:1 locking away of hydrogen per ton fossil fuel (and it doesn't work like that at all!), we would lose only 1/393th of our oxygen! And that's if we burned away every last bit of coal and oil and gas we have on the reserves right now.
But with the big banks like the European Investment Bank declaring "Gas is over" - I doubt dirty hydrogen will get funding. Green hydrogen comes from water, and back to water it will go. There are enormous plans in Australia to use renewable energy to produce green hydrogen, with the final plan decades from now to be something like 8 times our grid capacity to produce vast amounts of exportable energy.
evilgenius wrote: If we went with hydrogen for 200 years, would that alter the balance, in other words? Does anything add up, like carbon, and take a long time to go away? It seems right to contemplate such things now. It seems like it should be no threat, but we didn't anticipate what carbon dioxide would do either.
Plantagenet wrote:evilgenius wrote: If we went with hydrogen for 200 years, would that alter the balance, in other words? Does anything add up, like carbon, and take a long time to go away? It seems right to contemplate such things now. It seems like it should be no threat, but we didn't anticipate what carbon dioxide would do either.
Thats a very good point.
As far as I can learn, the only emissions emitted from a FCV (fuel cell vehicle) are water vapor and some heat.
epa: hydrogen-fuel-cell-vehicles
Water vapor is technically a greenhouse gas, and so creation of more water vapor might theoretically drive more Greenhouse warming. Indeed some climate models suggest that global warming due to CO2 is putting more water vapor into the air, resulting in a feedback effect that slightly increases global warming.
However, the hydrologic cycle for the entire planet is so huge, that the amount of water coming from FCVs would be really tiny in comparison to the natural hydrologic cycle. This is contrast to CO2, where human generated CO2 has greatly increased the amount of CO2 in the atmophere.
So, yes there might be a very tiny effect. But it would probably be very tiny, and more then offset by reducing lifetime CO2 emissions from ICE and EV vehicles.
Cheers!
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
DesuMaiden wrote:Are electric car's batteries made of renewable or nonrenewable resources? I would like to know what an electric car's battery is made of. That way I can evaluate if electric cars are viable alternative to fossil fuel based transport.
That's all I'm asking. I would really appreciate your help.
Outcast_Searcher wrote:eclipse wrote:evilgenius wrote:Isn't the danger with hydrogen more the one where we do a switchover, even just for long haul trucking, and discover it has breached some sort of critical point that is having an effect upon the atmosphere? Think about it, the hydrogen burning results in water as an output, which binds so much oxygen. It, therefore, makes a difference, to the balance of oxygen, whether you get your hydrogen from electrolysis of water, or from natural gas. All we need to do is set up a system where the economics of it force us to decide in the wrong direction!
Why don't you look up how many tons of oxygen are in the atmosphere and how many tons of oxygen per year it would take to replace ALL oil with the WRONG hydrogen before sounding this rather ridiculous alarm? Go on, tell us what tiny, infinitesimal percent of our atmospheric oxygen we'd be locking away as water? Do the math and tell us how much TOTAL oxygen would be locked away as water if we actually burned all the remaining fossil fuels to get all the hydrogen we needed? What percentage of Earth's free oxygen would be locked away in that scenario? Hint: there are 5.5 QUADRILLION TONS of atmosphere, and 1/5th of that is oxygen. That's about 1.1 QUADRILLION TONS of oxygen aka 1,100 TRILLION tons of oxygen aka 1.1 MILLION BILLION tons of oxygen. Bill McKibben in do the math suggested there was 2,795 gigatons fossil fuel reserves. It takes lots of energy to create hydrogen from fossil fuels, so we would need to deduct that. But let's not. Let's pretend - for the sake of argument - that one ton of fossil fuels = 1 ton of oxygen locked away if we convert said fossil fuels to hydrogen and burned it! 1100 000 BILLION tons of oxygen / 2795 BILLION tons of fossil fuels = 393. That means there is 393 TIMES more oxygen than all our fossil fuels. Converting it all - every last bit of conventional coal and oil and gas reserves into hydrogen and burning it would lock away about 1/393th of our breathable oxygen! Call the newspapers it's the end of the world!
But with the big banks like the European Investment Bank declaring "Gas is over" - I doubt dirty hydrogen will get funding. Green hydrogen comes from water, and back to water it will go. There are enormous plans in Australia to use renewable energy to produce green hydrogen, with the final plan decades from now to be something like 8 times our grid capacity to produce vast amounts of exportable energy.
Hey, his ilk likes to throw out random nonsense with an alarmist tone, and hope some of it sticks.
Math, science, logic, etc. need not apply.
And don't plants use water? And exhale oxygen? So it's not like there aren't natural cycles, etc.
Even if this did end up an issue (NOT that I'm buying it), AGW is in our face and this one is millennia down the road.
evilgenius wrote:I consider this deflection to say only that man is not capable of destabilizing the oxygen balance, by using this bar. Think about the concept, though, and imagine how man can change all of those numbers by innovating one thing or another. Plus, we have demonstrated the very real capacity to observe something going wrong and do nothing about it. We could very well watch the numbers go the wrong way and just keep watching them.
Look, it's not that we will, but that we could. What I am really saying is that we need to think about these sorts of things before we act. Otherwise, it sounds a lot like how they wanted to clear the mountains out of the way to build I-70 by using atomic bombs in the fifties. As long as it remained a statement of pride it was ok. As soon as the idea began to be taken seriously, though...
A new concept for low-cost batteriesAs the world builds out ever larger installations of wind and solar power systems, the need is growing fast for economical, large-scale backup systems to provide power when the sun is down and the air is calm. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are still too expensive for most such applications, and other options such as pumped hydro require specific topography that’s not always available. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a new kind of battery, made entirely from abundant and inexpensive materials, that could help to fill that gap.
The new battery architecture, which uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with a molten salt electrolyte in between, is described today in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway. “I wanted to invent something that was better, much better, than lithium-ion batteries for small-scale stationary storage, and ultimately for automotive [uses],” explains Sadoway, who is the John F. Elliott Professor Emeritus of Materials Chemistry.
The three ingredients they ended up with are cheap and readily available — aluminum, no different from the foil at the supermarket; sulfur, which is often a waste product from processes such as petroleum refining; and widely available salts. “The ingredients are cheap, and the thing is safe — it cannot burn,” Sadoway says. In their experiments, the team showed that the battery cells could endure hundreds of cycles at exceptionally high charging rates, with a projected cost per cell of about one-sixth that of comparable lithium-ion cells. They showed that the charging rate was highly dependent on the working temperature, with 110 degrees Celsius (230 degrees Fahrenheit) showing 25 times faster rates than 25 C (77 F).
Surprisingly, the molten salt the team chose as an electrolyte simply because of its low melting point turned out to have a fortuitous advantage. One of the biggest problems in battery reliability is the formation of dendrites, which are narrow spikes of metal that build up on one electrode and eventually grow across to contact the other electrode, causing a short-circuit and hampering efficiency. But this particular salt, it happens, is very good at preventing that malfunction. “It’s funny,” he says, because the whole focus was on finding a salt with the lowest melting point, but the catenated chloro-aluminates they ended up with turned out to be resistant to the shorting problem.
What’s more, the battery requires no external heat source to maintain its operating temperature. The heat is naturally produced electrochemically by the charging and discharging of the battery. “As you charge, you generate heat, and that keeps the salt from freezing. And then, when you discharge, it also generates heat,” Sadoway says. In a typical installation used for load-leveling at a solar generation facility, for example, “you’d store electricity when the sun is shining, and then you’d draw electricity after dark, and you’d do this every day. And that charge-idle-discharge-idle is enough to generate enough heat to keep the thing at temperature.”
The new technology is already the basis for a new spinoff company called Avanti, which has licensed the patents to the system.
And how does that compare to 100 million barrels of oil ,plus coal being burned every day for a century? A good third of the energy in those heat sources went directly into the atmosphere and continues to this day.eclipse wrote:Yes - but it's CO2 that's driving the extra water vapour feedback.
The whole effect works out to be 4 Hiroshima bombs worth of extra heat trapped per second!
Outcast_Searcher wrote:evilgenius wrote:I consider this deflection to say only that man is not capable of destabilizing the oxygen balance, by using this bar. Think about the concept, though, and imagine how man can change all of those numbers by innovating one thing or another. Plus, we have demonstrated the very real capacity to observe something going wrong and do nothing about it. We could very well watch the numbers go the wrong way and just keep watching them.
Look, it's not that we will, but that we could. What I am really saying is that we need to think about these sorts of things before we act. Otherwise, it sounds a lot like how they wanted to clear the mountains out of the way to build I-70 by using atomic bombs in the fifties. As long as it remained a statement of pride it was ok. As soon as the idea began to be taken seriously, though...
Look, I didn't say it was impossible. I implied that given the numbers:
1). It's highly unlikely.
2). That AGW is in our face and needs to be dealt with ASAP. Vs. spending lots of time and energy worrying about things that aren't close to being proven yet, and given the numbers, look like small order effects.
If plenty of good science and math shows that destabilizing the oxygen balance looks like a serious problem, THEN I'll get much more concerned about it. Just like I did with AGW as the evidence (and my understanding) grew.
I don't see why that's unreasonable, given that we can't possibly BEGIN to seriously address every potential problem we face. Hell, we aren't even very seriously addressing most of the proven and obvious and very serious problems we face.
evilgenius wrote:
Isn't the danger with hydrogen more the one where we do a switchover, even just for long haul trucking, and discover it has breached some sort of critical point that is having an effect upon the atmosphere? Think about it, the hydrogen burning results in water as an output, which binds so much oxygen. It, therefore, makes a difference, to the balance of oxygen, whether you get your hydrogen from electrolysis of water, or from natural gas. All we need to do is set up a system where the economics of it force us to decide in the wrong direction!
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