Dangerous and irresponsible
We must not stop using oil, says oil executive, and what possible reason could an oil executive have to tell us to keep using oil while the planet heats up like an oven that heats up to infinity?
Cutting oil and gas production would be “dangerous and irresponsible”, the boss of energy giant Shell has told the BBC. Wael Sawan insisted that the world still “desperately needs oil and gas” as moves to renewable energy were not happening fast enough to replace it.
But the world also desperately needs not to keep heating up.
Mr Sawan angered climate scientists who said Shell’s plan to continue current oil production until 2030 was wrong. Professor Emily Shuckburgh, a climate scientist at the University of Cambridge, said firms such as Shell should focus on accelerating the green transition “rather than trying to suggest the most vulnerable in society are in any way best served by prolonging our use of oil and gas”.
Mr Sawan told the BBC: “I respectfully disagree.” He added: “What would be dangerous and irresponsible is cutting oil and gas production so that the cost of living, as we saw last year, starts to shoot up again.”
In other words we’re screwed either way.
“Must not stop” is incorrect.
“Cannot stop” is more like it. It’s entirely true that oil underpins everything in the modern world. It’s also entirely true that it’s killing us.
But oil will go away, all on its own. Just in time to make the collapse ever worse.
Petroleum enough to last the next 100 years or so at current rates of consumption. Coal for maybe the next 1,000 years. In the mean-time, and on an ever-increasing scale, resource wars galore. All is implied in the Second Law of Thermodynamics as formulated by the 19th C French physicist Sadi Carnot, who was also very interested in steam engines.
But with no fossil carbon for the making of synthetic rubber, road tar, the ubiquitous plastics, the reduction of iron ore etc, it will be back to horse-drawn vehicles with wooden wheels being driven over cobbled roads; with the drivers of same cursing this profligate generation all the way.
The present private owners of the fossil-carbon are only interested in converting it all asap into $$$$ for stuffing into their own private bank accounts. And as the rest of the world cooks, and drowns under rising seas, they will be relaxing poolside in the balmy ambience of Iceland, Greenland, or maybe Patagonia; recovering from the ordeals of travelling overland per boot, or over the open ocean in rowing boats.
I suspect the scientists weren’t particularly surprised at the response. May as well be angry at the scorpion for stinging the frog; oil dude is going to oil.
Excuse me while I put a couple of Inigo Montoya’s lines on loop…
(I was going to specify one, but it occurs to me he’s got a few that would be fitting :-/ )
“ubiquitous plastics” Omar #2
Benji Jones “Finally, a solution to plastic pollution that’s not just recycling” Jun 7, 2023
[https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/2023/6/7/23743640/plastic-pollution-un-treaty-oceans-waste]
The second round of negotiations among world leaders, scientists, and advocates concluded last week in Paris with a plan to produce an initial draft of the deal on a global, legally binding treaty under the United Nations to end plastic waste. To develop a draft of the plastic treaty before November, when they’ll meet again, in Nairobi, Kenya, for round three. The idea is to discuss the terms of the treaty in detail then, using the text (which they call a “zero draft”) as a starting point.
[https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/after-rough-start-un-plastic-treaty-talks-end-with-mandate-first-draft-2023-06-02/]
The ubiquity is a challenge.
I really hope the treaty does set mandatory limits, as well as banning or phasing out certain types of plastic, mixes, and additives. let’s hope for a CFC like breakthrough.
I have a friend who spent his entire career in the plastics industry. He had customers from all over the world coming to him because he could achieve things others could not. In his ‘retirement’ he started a plastics recycling factory. He told me that the issue was that the industry approach had always been one of engineering. identify a problem, then come up with a formulation that suited the problem. The result is custom formulations that can’t be co-recycled, or recycled at all, or that because of the layers of materials are prohibitively difficult to recycle at scale. He rather glumly accepts now that this has been a horrible mistake. We argued a few years ago about how to fix this. I was advocating banning certain plastics and products, alongside mandatory manufacturer/importer funded recovery and recycling plans. He maintained that the ‘market’ could and should be left to fix it. Last year he agreed with me that the mandatory Government led approach was the only choice.
Fortunately our Government has embarked on that path. It will not be without its issues. A number of the ‘eco’ alternatives are very much stop gaps or green washing. There needs to be industry wide adoption of new products in order to achieve scale of either re-use, or appropriate disposal through say composting. At the moment businesses haven’t got their collective heads around the issue and Government/Local Government are struggling with how to provide sensible and safe putrescible composting in districts with sparse populations.
The more the world heads down this path the easier it will be to find appropriate and economic solutions. Hopefully the treaty will include making solutions available for FRAND rates where patented.
Here’s what NZ has done/is doing… https://environment.govt.nz/what-government-is-doing/areas-of-work/waste/plastic-phase-out/
Most of the world’s coal appears to have been laid down in the Carboniferous and Permian periods in the Geological Time Scale, across a period of around 110 million years. But at current rates of consumption, it will take only around a thousand years for humanity to go through the lot of it, like a drunken sailor with his family fortune in his pocket, and out on the town looking for a good time.
And after that, the Deluge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAwhD9rKxog
Some things are just *hard* to do with anything other than petroleum.
Particularly running airplanes & road vehicles.
Meanwhile we *can* shift away on the things that aren’t so hard.
***Replace fossil with nuclear for electricity generation.***
Electrify what we can.
Eg: heat buildings using heat pumps.
Shift road and air traffic to electric rail starting with wherever it is relatively easy.
For industrial process heat, we can use current types of nuclear if the needed temperature isn’t higher than about 300 C. For higher temperatures we need to build designs that don’t use water as the primary coolant.
As for renewables.
Hydroelectric & geothermal are good where they are available. The part time availability of (most of?) the other renewables greatly limits their usefulness.
For data on what works to reduce CO2 emissions for electricity see
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
Click on a region to see what they have been using to generate electricity. The green (low CO2) regions use some mix of hydro, geothermal and nuclear for most of their electricity. The regions that try to use a lot of wind and solar end up burning a lot of methane when those are putting out much.
Of other note, while most of you lot scoff at asteroid mining, this is one thing that definitely can’t be solved with asteroid mining. Oil and coal are probably a lot rarer than say lithium or gold throughout the solar system.
Coal is for making steel, oil for plastics and agrochemicals, helium for medical applications and welding. Yet we burn the former two for fuel and put helium in disposable balloons for children’s parties. So wasteful…
Jim Baerg, look at South Australia. All coal power stations have been closed, and we still have a few running on gas, but the majority of electricity is provided by wind and solar. Drive around Adelaide suburbs and you’ll see vast swathes of solar panels on roofs of houses, factories, and even shopping centre car parks. In rural areas, farmers are either making money or saving money by adding solar panels to grazing land. Battery storage is helping, and batteries are getting bigger and better.
Adding nuclear to our power mix would be folly. Nuclear power plants are not quick responders to demand changes, needing to be “always on”, whereas gas can fill the generation gaps almost instantly. Under developing projects, methane gas will soon be replaced with hydrogen, not just to provide back up generation, but to also replace coal in the steel-making process.
What effects might the banning of certain types of plastic have on healthcare? It might not just be transportation that is taken back to the horse and buggy era.
@Jim Baerg
I agree with just about everything you say except road vehicles. That’s a solved problem. If there’s still anyone whose “needs” can’t be met with an EV it’s not because we don’t have the technology but simply because the infrastructure hasn’t caught up. There are still areas where fast charging isn’t available (there are very few areas where some sort of charging isn’t) and on street charging is still rare but that’s essentially an inconvenience not an insurmountable hurdle. I get that some people won’t put up with any inconvenience however small but in the end I don’t really care.
EV’s use electricity that is source independent, in other words, the batteries themselves are not affected by whether their power comes from Coal, Gas, Hydroelectric, Nuclear fission or fusion, Solar, Wind, waves, or any other option. The batteries currently require cobalt, which is expensive, but engineers are working on other battery combos constantly, to replace cobalt (and if you object to cobalt on the grounds that it is mined by what amounts to exploitive slave labor, you better not be using a computer or cell phone to read this blog.) Cobalt is also recoverable when batteries reach end of life.
But even if people were to switch to hybrids, we would be cutting down on emissions from idling (the reason I bought a hybrid myself,) and if they use PHEV’s they can charge overnight; and reduce the demand for gas and oil, while not being as dependent on fast charging stations. I think that there is a wide variety of options for those who want to reduce their carbon footprint.
David Brindley #11
All of Ontario’s coal power stations were shut down by replacing them with nuclear. Yes, sometimes when demand peaks above what is available from nuclear & hydro Ontario burns some gas, but I suspect over a year or so it’s a smaller fraction of energy use than regions that don’t use nuclear.
I said the part time availability of wind & solar *limits* their usefulness. In the large fraction of the world where air conditioning is a bigger energy use than space heating, that tends to make electricity demand peak just when the most sunshine is available, so that makes solar a good supplement to a steady power source like nuclear or geothermal. There might be a situation where wind peaks when demand peaks, but none come to my mind.
Something (like nuclear) that is always on is useful because while electricity demand varies there is a minimum demand (the baseload) & you build enough steady generators to cover that. If you do that you need less generation that can ramp up and down like gas than if you have a lot of weather dependent generation like wind. People who complain about the lack of ‘flexibility’ of nuclear while ignoring the much greater problems of flexibility for weather dependent renewables seem to have a giant blind spot.
I rather like this idea for nuclear that can economically ramp up and down by storing the heat in a molten salt. I hope it works out.
https://www.terrapower.com/our-work/natriumpower/
Francis Boyle #13
The low energy density of batteries still has me doubful about all electric vehicles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
Lithium-air batteries *might* get close to the energy density of petroleum.
Making a liquid fuel from CO2 extracted from seawater and hydrogen produced using some non-fossil energy source *might* be doable for a non-exorbitant cost.
To avoid having the perfect be the enemy of the good I rather favor Plug in Hybrids, so petroleum is used only for long distances.
I saw something about an experiment in using overhead wires to power transport trucks, which presumably have a modest battery to take them over roads that don’t have such wires. I hope it works out well.
@Jim Baerg #13
Hi Jim, right now it’s 9:40am in the middle of winter (current temp <10C) and SA is generating 95% of its power from renewables with Carbon intensity of 34g. Ontario is generating just 28% from renewables with carbon intensity 140g.* My own solar panels are ticking over nicely, not enough to earn credit by feeding into the grid, but sufficient to run my household appliances. As I'm retired, most of my power use is during the day.
The salt/sand battery you refer to doesn't require nuclear generation, it can be used to store heat generated by any method, from nuclear to burning cow dung. It does sound like it has possibilities and the Finns are quite keen.
* I'll look at this again in 12 hours and see if there is much difference due to day/night swapping.
PS I'm not anti nuclear per se, but we are building renewable generation and battery storage far faster than a nuclear power plant can be built. At one stage we had the world's biggest (194Mwh) Li battery, built by Tesla. Pre Twitter Musk promised it would be completed in under 100 days or it would be free. Tesla were paid as it took a mere 63 days to complete.