I don’t see how people are going to absorb the reality of Overshoot I have felt we entered overshoot in the 1980’s but felt we could adjust and live simply and within the carrying capacity of our environment but lately especially after Covid and political instability we don’t have the maturity to adjust to the reality that humanity is over the cliff already like Wile coyote and roadrunner so my advice is be the roadrunner and get to the southern hemisphere maybe New Zealand 🇳🇿 would let you stay
Hope the impact will be that of a meteorite containing loads and loads of rare resources. OK, that jokes awful, but the resources crises we're facing are way badder than any bad taste in humor could be. . .
In the UK for the first 11 days of November we had virtually no wind and heavy cloud. This meant the ccgt stations were taking the load. In the future this energy will have to be supplied by the buffer.
There are no viable replacements for petrochemical fertilizers? What about using kelp as a total general fertilizer. It requires zero inputs, grows about 2’ a day per plant, and sequesters up to 20x more CO2 than an equivalent acre of tropical forest
Absolutely! Important scientists like the UK's Dr David King and Australia's Dr Tim Flannery are now saying that permaculture seaweed and shellfish farms could feed the world! We could hypothetically feed the human race ALL the protein we need without using any fertiliser, land, or fresh water. There are enough coastal waters to feed a world of 10 billion. Out in the open ocean there are no nutrients and kelp usually starves. But we can float barges with wave powered pumps to bring nutrients up from deeper water to feed the kelp. That’s it! All the biomass you could want. It’s a bit expensive to run as airline fuel - but at least it’s a great source of food and fertiliser to grow some land based crops. After all, seaweed grows 30 times faster than any land plant, and it’s carbon negative. A good fraction of it breaks off and sinks to ocean floor where the carbon is sequestered. Links below: eclipsenow.wordpress.com/seaweed/
@@A3Kr0n if the money is right - absolutely! If the money is right and we can pay for these floating seaweed farms then we could do many gigatonnes if we want!
@@eclipsenow5431 We'd need to assume these are away from shipping lanes, popular recreational areas, and high population areas. Most likely people will object to coastal habitats being destroyed for the kelp farm. Not opposed, per se, but there's literally no free lunch for the care and feeding of 8 billion hairless apes.
@@jasourwnjl true.....8 billion is too many......we should have allowed several smaller collapse and die off periods.....now we have gone too far and the collapse will be terrible and total....we should have stopped at 1 billion humans.....but we didnt
Reducing dependence on hydrocarbons means having equally effective substitutes available, and that's not easy for a lot of reasons. As it is our most effective technology capable of making a meaningful dent in hydrocarbon dependence is nuclear power.
I instinctively agree with your general analysis and it is impossible to get away from the limitations of growth with finite resources. The only question is the scale of the problem which will influence how much time we have to transition and what the stable transitioned state will look like. There are a couple of elements of your analysis I am not clear on: 1. Do your calculations take account of the innate inefficiency of converting fossil fuels in to energy? In other words, is the power equivalence you have arrived at determined from usage levels and the current efficiency levels of alternative technologies or from the simple conversion of the amount of oil used in 2018 and the resources needed to replace that amount of oil? I hesitate to raise this somewhat 101 issue but this isn't addressed in the original video. 2. The future increase in efficiencies in current alternative technologies is an element which of course is difficult to calculate but would be useful to include as an unknown variable to obtain a range of timescales for plotting a future course of action. Ultimately, local micro-grids backed up by current national infrastructure have so many positives as to be a no-brainer. Local communities will be much more effective in mediating use when they have an investment in the production and distribution.
Jam-packed full with data, so difficult for this layman to follow. Hopefully new renewable energy streams & storage will be innovated to meet the electrification requirements to replace ever more fossil fuel use going forward. Its something like having only one option to sail a half-finished battleship to war, carrying out the rest of the construction during the voyage, & hoping it will be completed & ready by the time it reaches the battle zone some time later. In this sort of scenario we won't know how successful we have been until we reach the battle zone.
In any transition to renewables and electric transportation conventional vehicles will be required for the transportation involved. That means fossil fuels...gasoline, diesel, biofuels. There are no realistic alternatives when it comes to transportation. Transportation is the bottleneck.to a fossil fuel free future.
Hi Ken, Long distance electric trucking is now a thing. Of course - Aussies invented it. Janus converts any Semi under 10 years old to be a full electric truck. They're able to carry 100 tons where Tesla only carries 40. Australia has vast distances requiring bigger tucks. If you owned a freight company, would you want to buy 3 Teslas and hire 3 drivers to move the same freight? How do they make the battery last so long? They don't! A guy on a forklift just swaps it after 500 km for a fresh fully charged battery. The company plans to charge the batteries over a few hours from solar on the warehouse roof - which is gentler on the battery than a fast-charge, and also gentler on the local grid! The warehouse roof charges enough batteries for 10 trucks. As the warehouses are between major cities, they could buy a paddock and solar farm nearby if they need more batteries. Buy enough solar and enough batteries, and they can even charge extra during the day to prepare for night time battery swaps. It avoids the 2.5 times energy build out to make hydrogen and shipping and trucking hydrogen everywhere. I would be surprised if Toll and other huge freight companies haven't started adopting this in a few years. th-cam.com/video/aizG265NeII/w-d-xo.html www.januselectric.com.au/ www.smh.com.au/business/companies/entrepreneur-big-trucks-big-savings-big-electric-plans-20220811-p5b91o.htmlwww.januselectric.com.au/
@@eclipsenow5431 My point was that the transition to electric transportation (and renewable energy) will require the continued use of fossil fuels in the conventional ICE vehicles until it is completed. Of course there are now EVs in use. Every one of them (including batteries) required CVs. Even the renewable ethanol in biofuels use CVs to plant, fertilize and harvest the corn or sugarcane. Fossil fuels for transportation are not going away any time soon.
@@kentowe2080 Depends what you mean by soon. The vehicle fleet turns over every 16 years - commercial grade trucks much faster. Many European countries have 2035 as the last purchase date for ICE vehicles but by then I doubt any will be sold because it's just going to be so much CHEAPER to buy an electric car or truck and run it from solar on your roof. It's like having an oil refinery on your roof!
@@eclipsenow5431 "Soon" seems to be defined as 2050. The majority of countries will still be using CVs and fossil fuels will be needed. Those countries that have oil resources and do not succumb to climate change hysteria will do well. Those intent on eliminating fossil fuels to zero and net-zero by 2050 will not. The Chinese understand that. Many Western countries do not.
@@kentowe2080 "Climate hysteria"? Oh great - you're one of those. In your own mind you've disproved the basic physics of CO2 that any decent physics lab on the planet can confirm - and you know better than the IPCC which shows climate change to be one of the most studied scientific phenomenon in human history. We WILL eliminate fossil fuels - probably much faster than 2050. I've run Professor Michaux's numbers and WITHOUT his ridiculous strawman of building 4 weeks storage in METAL BATTERIES - under HIS NUMBERS there is 4 times the copper we need and other metals are fine - and the annual production will get us there in reasonable time. (Apart from Lithium which will need to scale up and IS scaling up as we speak.) I mean - is this whole study an effort to undermine renewables to foster fossil fuels on the planet longer? What a RIDICULOUS strawman argument!
What about geothermal, tidal, nuclear and other forms of renewable... your story is missing many chapters in your book. Not that the switch to renewables is simple but it is neccesary and will in time finish the job.
Could a hybrid system of solar wind and battery storage with gas and coal for winter power base load getting you 75% of the way there is better than all fossil fuels
Some W/S/S makes sense. Too much raises costs and lowers reliability. The reasons are rooted in the physics of what they are, dilute and intermittent. They are far too resource intensive and chaotic to be capable of doing the heavy lifting. We need more involvement with engineers and energy infrastructure experts when implementing policies, not those that have no training or experience in any relevant field. Most of us have no idea what this vital resource requires and we should before advocating for this or that way of managing it. "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." Richard Feynman
So what this proves more than any other study is that while we have the high benefit of oil we need to be building molten salt breeder thorium reactors to the tune of ten per week for small modular reactors in a factory ship building factory with 300 megawatt per unit structured to remove xenon gas and remove tellurium as soon possible. If we do not do this now we will have missed the boat and the population will soon plunge to 1/2 current human beings on the planet world wide. This reactor to be cost effective should have a Brayton cycle super critical co2 turbine small enough to be affordable. Now people.
Lots of wrongheaded assumptions for wind turbines and battery chemistries by the IEA. It assumes 70% GB-DFIG, 10% BG-PMSG, 15% DD-PMSG and 5%DD-EESG for onshore in 2040, but there will probably be nobody producing onshore DD in 2040 now that Goldwind and Siemens-Gamesa have abandoned that tech for onshore and Enercon's DD-EESG is rapidly losing market share. I predict 80% GB-DFIG and 20% GB-PMSG is likely for onshore in 2040. The EIA predicts 15% GB-PMSG and 85% DD-PMSG for offshore in 2040, which is totally wrong, since Vestas, Mingyang, Envision and Goldwind are all going with GB-PMSG for offshore, because it is cheaper and requires less metal. I predict that offshore will be 75% GB-PMSG, 25% DD-PMSG in 2040. Another bad assumption is the capacity of turbines in 2040 and the capacity factor. With the way that Chinese turbines are increasing in size, I expect that the average turbine will be 10MW for onshore and 30MW for offshore in 2040, which means less metal and higher capacity factors than Michaux is assuming. The wind industry will probably need half the copper and rare earth metals that Michaux predicts in 2040. As for battery chemistries, the IEA predicts that light duty vehicles (LDVs) will be 3.5% NCA+, NMC 622 5.2%, NMC 811 52.2%, LFP 10.1% and ASSB 29.0% in 2040. The IEA seems to know nothing about where the market is headed. NMC 622 will be gone by 2040, and we will probably have NMC 911 and NM 91 by 2040. However, the biggest change will be the rise of LMFP and sodium ion. I expect the LDV market to be 2% NMCA, 8% NMC, 50% LMFP and 40% sodium ion in 2040. I'm not listing solid state as a separate chemistry since it will use NMCA, NMC and LMFP. As for grid batteries, I expect that they will be 80% sodium ion and 20% LMFP in 2040. With those assumptions, we will need a lot less copper, cobalt, nickel and lithium and rare earths than Michaux assumes.
Don't let the Pied Piper lead you off a cliff. Ask hard questions like why haven't any of your climate doomsday predictions come true? What is your plan for replacing fossil fuels with energy sources of greater or equal density?
There's another elephant in the room. He shows what levels renewables have to replace, and it is post-2005. And yet, Simon showed that our industry did at least a 6 fold increase of every aspect of society, infrastructure (materials), energy, electricity, and millions of tons of toxic chemicals to transform to using fracking and tar sands. And he bases his calculations on this paradox? Take that extra load out of the system. And by the way, plastics are just an industry orgasmic reaction of their worry that we will adopt EV (LOL).
The Australian JANUS truck battery swap system can completely bypass hydrogen and as 10 trucks charge off the warehouse roof, a lot of that 10% transmission loss you calculated.
I am an absolute fan of short haul commercial vehicles and mobile industrial machines with swappable batteries and endpoint green generation. Seems like a perfect fit. Efficient, no additional land use, consumer controlled, easily financed. It all just makes sense so let's hope more get motivated to do it and the FUD lobby from fossil fuels does not get it regulated it out of practicality.
Dunno for JANUS, but in general battery systems need loads of metal resources, which become a constraint once scaled globally. That's what Michaux calculations are all about, systems may run as small local projects, as soon as you want to provide them to all of USA, China, India Europe the lot, one runs short on resources needed. Think for Litium the amount needed yearly tops the actual load mined a 60 times or so. And besides trucks, there's shipping, planes, factories , all need their fossil energy sources replaced, worldwide. We'd need an asteroid worth of resources, every year, to get round. Recycling ? I'm not aware of any economically viable project, without govt subsidies, that does recycling of essential resources on a major basis. Lots of stuff is in micro and nano technologies, or synthesized in alloys, which are extremely complicated to recover, demanding energy by barrels, currently. Just to get a decent recycling system up and running, takes decades, time we don't have anymore, ignoring the issue ever since 1972, Club of Rome report
@@reuireuiop0 we will need new supply chains of different materials, and lot of them for sure. Definitely should have started earlier, or had the foresight to ensure the supply chain was not all in a couple of countries. The issue is looking at global extraction, processing and transportation of materials - electrified transportation (and also most green generation) take massively LESS materials than traditional fuel based technology. For example an electric car takes about the same amount of total materials as a gas car to build, just some different materials (less aluminum, more copper/graphite/lithium/etc). But over the lifetime the maintenance on the EV uses less materials, less lubricants, and the operation uses a few thousand gallons less fuel. So sum total that is a lot less extraction, processing and transportation if we switch to EV transportation. New different materials but less overall. Most "green" generation tech is the same way, it uses a lot less extraction, processing and transportation per GWh of generation. Example a solar/wind farm uses about the same or less materials than a small gas generator plant to build - but also does not need to be fed tonnes of natural gas every day for its entire lifecycle. Which is one of the real reasons the "global elite" are obstructing genuine movement toward electrified transportation and "green" generation. Not just petroleum companies. We will reduce global extraction, processing and transportation of materials massively because the "green" tech is also more efficient tech. So much so that this alone could trigger a reduction in the global economy, just because we are using more efficient solutions massively reducing the amount of industry and transportation required. Hence why there is a push to keep "green" more expensive than fuel, even through it is realistically cheaper - artificially raising the price means it keeps GDP and trade volume numbers up when measured in $$$ even if the actual volume of product is falling. An illusionary way to maintain "economic growth" on the books as we move to more efficient solutions. Of course this will all find its way to harm the working poor and increase the wealth gap even more just like we seem to always do.
@@reuireuiop0 Sorry to bust your bubble - but Simon Michaux lied to you. EUROPEAN WINTERS: His study is based on a 2014 studies about European renewables getting through a cold dark winter. But most of the human race lives much closer to the equator where there is no winter. THEN these studies are 10 years out of date - back when renewables were 10 TIMES more expensive! Overbuilding the grid to cope was economically impossible. So they concluded they needed 4 weeks of storage to get through winter. But today renewables are so cheap we can Overbuild the grid. EG: If winter halves renewables output, then build DOUBLE the renewables! With enough Overbuild and enough HVDC Transmission - most places can get their storage down to 2 days. DUMBEST MOVE: Michaux assumes we're too dumb to check his sources. In fact, his PDF doesn't LET you check his source for rejecting the cheapest grid storage - Pumped-Hydro Electricity Storage (PHES). These dams use excess solar power (the Overbuild) to pump water up about 600 metres to the top reservoir - then let it run back down through the generator at night. Michaux claims there are difficulties finding enough sites. Really? What study is that based on? His 1000 page PDF didn’t say! But here he slips up and admits it. th-cam.com/video/LBw2OVWdWIQ/w-d-xo.html This is a study about PHES in Singapore. Singapore - where the highest hill is only 15 metres! Gee - I wonder why they had a problem finding sites! (Duh!) He uses this study to cast doubt on PHES for the world when most continents have 100 TIMES the PHES sites they could need. Professor Andrew Blakers from the ANU presents the data. th-cam.com/video/_Lk3elu3zf4/w-d-xo.html They have identified the 616,000 best sites around the world. re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/ ABUNDANT MATERIALS: While many brands of renewables and batteries CAN use rare earth’s for certain niche markets, they do not HAVE to - and most are already weaning off them because of price and supply issues (especially with China being problematic.) EG: 95% of Solar brands ALREADY mainly use silicon - which is 27% of the Earth’s crust. Wind is made from iron (5%), aluminium (8%) and fibreglass (renewable glass fibres and renewable polyester resins). Half of Tesla’s batteries are LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate). The USGS reserves from 2022 show we have TEN TIMES the lithium we need for a world of 1.4 billion LPF EV's. SODIUM BATTERIES: Sodium batteries are now a thing. BYD are building a super cheap city-shopping car called the "Seagull", with a mere 250km range but only costing $9000 USD. Sodium is less fire prone, less toxic, and 30% cheaper than lithium. Being cheap and fire safe it’s perfect for grid batteries for a few hours (but PHES is cheaper.) 1 ton of sodium battery could run a large family’s home for 5 days - and the 38.5 quadrillion tons in the ocean is enough to store the world's electricity consumption for 152,173 years! Or to flip it around, a whole year of the world's electricity would take just 0.0006% of the ocean’s salt! Michaux published in August 2021 and said Sodium batteries were still in the lab. But sodium was well past the lab, and was into commercialisation. Indeed, the first ORDERS for sodium batteries had already been placed with Faradion over a year earlier. Michaux was making extraordinary claims about batteries - he should have taken extraordinary care! faradion.co.uk/faradion-receives-first-order-of-sodium-ion-batteries-for-australian-market/ SPEED of deployment: Solar and wind - even including the extra costs of transmission and PHES - are now the cheapest power, period. Their growth is exponential. Solar is doubling every 4 years - wind seems to be doubling about every decade. Australia will be 80-90% renewables by 2030. 10% of all cars sold are EV’s, and huge electric trucks like Janus Australia with their 4 minute-battery swap are creeping into the market. It’s starting, and will only accelerate. We’ll leave all fossil fuels way before they leave us.
@@5353Jumper There's going to be a lot more extraction. The more minerals are extracted, the lower the quality of the ores, as the high quality seams have already been exploited. China controls 90% of the global processing capacity for most of these minerals. Anyone see a problem emerging?
First, the true costs of oil specially, as well as natural gas, and coal should be accounted for; otherwise, it will appear that the alternative energies will falsely appear to be too expensive, specially with additional switchover costs. For oil, the huge costs of oil-wars are not factored in the determination of the true price of oil. Obviously, the United States with others fought two Gulf Wars to protect Western oil interests in the Middle East. The 1st Gulf War lead to 9/11 , as it occured during the US Presendency of the son of the US President who launched the 1st Gulf War. After 9/11/2001, the US started, and rapidly won the 2nd Gulf War, but the conflict dragged on against the insurgency for many years, so that the Presidency of the son was faced with not winning a second term to continue the war against the insurgency, as the competing party candidate called for peace, and many voters in the US seems to support this, specially when the economy was poor. Faced with a poor economy due to the war, which involve war costs as well as higher oil prices due to the war was disrupting oil production of a major oil producing and exporting country, as well as the shocks to the US economy from first the dotcom stock bubble burst, and then the 9/11 destructions, the US President of the son needed to pump up the US economy to get voters to vote for him by pumping up the new housing market to create jobs for new house construction. The US Federal Reserve Bank chairman, who was in the same party as the President, lowered interest rates to near zero to pump up the economy by lowering mortgage rates for home buyers. To find a lot more buyers of new homes, the US banks were allowed to enable poor sub-prime home buyers to buy without credit checks, without needing down payments, and without having to pay interests during the first couple years of mortgages. Both a housing bubble, and a stock market bubble resulted. These offseted the higher oil prices due to war disrupting oil production of a major oil producer. But, when a major storm Katrina damaged many oil drilling plateform in the US Gulf of Mexico, oil prices started to jump even higher. This brought in many oil futures speculators who bought oil futures eventhough the oil specculators did not actually use the oil. The oil futures speculations sent oil prices sky high, which hurt people, specially hurting many of the new sub-prime new house buyers, who are poor people, who had to purchase lower priced houses far away in the suburbs, as houses closer to the cities where they worked are much too high priced. Many sub-prime home buyers could no longer make their mortgage payments due to having to buy a lot of high priced oil to drive long distances to their work places. However, bankers had forseen some of these problems right from the beginning, as this whole thing was to pump up the US economy to enable the President to win a second term to continue the oil-war. Some suggested that the US got into the second Gulf War because the country there has a lot of oil, and not because the 9/11 perpetrators were in that oil country. Thus the bankers packaged these shaky sub-prime mortgages by burying these sub-prime mortgages together with many other none shaky mortgages into Mortgage Backed Stock Securities (called MBS.) Then, these adulterated MBS were falsely rated as AAA, and the records of how much sub-prime mortgages were packaged in with regular mortgage were conviently left out, so that buyer could not audit to find out what amounts of sub-prime mortgages were packaged into the MBS. Eventually potential MBS buyers found out these MBS cannot be accurately valued. Many investment banks involved in this scheme to pump up the economy to contine the oil-war got stuck with unsold MBS. Probably, they thought the US government would bail them out as this was so kind of war effort, but the President did not at first, eventhough they helped to pump up the economy for him to win a second term to continue the oil war. This created a panick on Wall Street resulting in the 2008 Great Recession. The US again lowered interest rates to zero, that created a super bubbles in the stock market, and in the housing market. All of these oil-war precipated economy problems weaken the soundness of the US financial system, which is further exposed to the Covid shock. All in all, the high, if not extremely high, costs of oil war related costs are not factored into the price of oil. If the real costs are accounted for, the higher cost of "hybride" alternative energy cars and such will become economical. Hybride systems will have old school oil, coal, and natural gas energy generation together with robust alternative add-on energy generators like solar panels, wind farms, and batteries, which have generation time gaps, as these alternative generators are intermitten. Systems having both alternative (but intermitten) generators, together with fossil fuel generators costs more, as there are duplication of generators. However, when the true costs of the current fossil fuel systems are added in like oil-war costs, and eventually climate change costs are accounted for, dual hybride system can be as economical.
And how many wars will be fought to source adequate minerals when there are not near enough for everyone and many needed minerals are concentrated in only a few countries? And how high will the prices of those critical minerals go when demand greatly exceeds supply?
@@utubr0 First, unlike oil and other fossil fuels that are burned up upon one use, minerals can potentially be recycled. Lithum on Earth is very abundant, except that highly and cheaply concentrated deposits are limited. The same with rare earth minerals. As sources of easy-and-cheap-to-extract mineral deposits become exhausted, prices will rise to enable less easy, and less cheap deposits to become commercially viable to mine. Increased prices also facilitate recycling unlike oil which cannot be recybled after it is burned upon first use. Too, increasing prices will foster the development of new technologies to better mine, extract, and recycle the minerals. Too, increasing prices may foster the invention of new substitudes which are cheaper and more plentiful, and of using less of the minerals to achieve prior results. As time progresses, totally revolutionary new inventions will come on line like the recent signs of the speeding up of new progresses in both fission and fusion power generation researches.
@@golfscienceguru Sorry, but you have not done the work. You can't recycle what doesn't exist - it has to be built first and sufficient minerals to build the first generation cannot be acquired even if you remove all obstacles including environmental ones, have unlimited money and unlimited labor, and magical technology advances that double the mining and processing rate (which isn't going to happen). And there won't be any magical technology alternatives that don't still have a huge reliance on minerals that are in very limited supply. Just considering the need for copper alone, the known reserves are far less than what would be required. After discovering an economic copper resource, it takes an average of 15 years to START production. Technology advances will help at the margins, but this isn't like cramming more transistors on a chip. Hopefully we'll be able to deploy significantly more fission, but we cannot count on fusion providing significant energy in the next 30 years since it's still early in the experimental phase.
@@golfscienceguru Recycling may not be the magic bullet you think it is. My analogy is as follows: Think of making a cup of coffee, you need coffee, water, milk and sugar (for some). Doesn't take long to mix all these together. But what if after you make your coffee you decided you needed the milk for something else? Suddenly you have a problem. It's not something most people could do in their kitchen, and the time, energy and cost to extract the milk means that a trip to the supermarket for more milk is a far more viable option. Now instead of coffee, apply this to solar panels, turbine blades, some types of batteries etc, none of which we know how to recycle viably. Hoping that some new tech in the future solves this is not a strategy that helps us today.
@@bjmtc This is well put. The issue with recycling in almost all cases is economic and not because we don't have the technological means. We actually can recycle solar panels and turbine blades, but the economic cost is a significant net loss because the means we have of recycling are very costly and do not produce useful outputs that would be far cheaper to source from raw materials. The energy inputs, additional material inputs, labor costs, and particularly the net emissions of these processes all make them untenable. Solar panels and wind turbine blades are highly engineered and very complex devices. The composite materials in the turbine blades and the many thin layers of crystalline silicon or thin films in PV cells are both very difficult to separate in to raw or even usable materials, which means it is very expensive to do so. Until this changes, we can expect pretty much any recycling effort for these waste products to be economically infeasible at scale. Recycling does work in some cases though, and those cases are exactly where the economic cost of sourcing material from a recycling process is less than sourcing it from raw material. Aluminum is the golden example of this. The process to refine new aluminum from raw material is very energy intensive and costly, but there is a lot of easily recoverable aluminum that requires little more than gathering, separating, and then melting to produce usable products. This, as well as several other reasons, is why more than 75% of all aluminum in the material economy is recycled aluminum. In fact, if you pick up an aluminum can of some beverage (soda, beer, etc.), then statistically more than 50% of the aluminum in that can is from recycled aluminum. There is a perpetual market for it, it is easily recoverable, and so many companies can profit by recycling. This simply cannot be done right now with complex composite material products, and until it can then we won't see the same kind of recycling rate for PV cells or turbine blades that we do for aluminum cans. And even IF we did, then we would still need to mine ungodly amounts of NEW material to keep up with growing energy demand that is already far outpacing replacement of fossil fuel energy with clean energy sources. Highly dilute energy sources will never replace highly concentrated energy sources.
Long distance electric trucking is now a thing. Of course - Aussies invented it. Janus converts any Semi under 10 years old to be a full electric truck. They're able to carry 100 tons where Tesla only carries 40. Australia has vast distances requiring bigger tucks. If you owned a freight company, would you want to buy 3 Teslas and hire 3 drivers to move the same freight? How do they make the battery last so long? They don't! A guy on a forklift just swaps it after 500 km for a fresh fully charged battery. The company plans to charge the batteries over a few hours from solar on the warehouse roof - which is gentler on the battery than a fast-charge, and also gentler on the local grid! The warehouse roof charges enough batteries for 10 trucks. As the warehouses are between major cities, they could buy a paddock and solar farm nearby if they need more batteries. Buy enough solar and enough batteries, and they can even charge extra during the day to prepare for night time battery swaps. It avoids the 2.5 times energy build out to make hydrogen and shipping and trucking hydrogen everywhere. I would be surprised if Toll and other huge freight companies haven't started adopting this in a few years. th-cam.com/video/aizG265NeII/w-d-xo.html www.januselectric.com.au/ www.smh.com.au/business/companies/entrepreneur-big-trucks-big-savings-big-electric-plans-20220811-p5b91o.htmlwww.januselectric.com.au/
@@elekkr Why? A freight company like Toll or TNT could set up their own, or it could one day become a govt mandated standard for trucks within the EU like "The Brussel's effect" have pretty much just killed the Apple Lightning adaptor by mandating the USB-C standard. Janus are growing. They've just converted a cement truck! Check out their websites if you're going to make nonsense claims like that.
people are starting to really wake up now to our big problems of overshoot...too late though.....oh well prepare for impact
I don’t see how people are going to absorb the reality of Overshoot I have felt we entered overshoot in the 1980’s but felt we could adjust and live simply and within the carrying capacity of our environment but lately especially after Covid and political instability we don’t have the maturity to adjust to the reality that humanity is over the cliff already like Wile coyote and roadrunner so my advice is be the roadrunner and get to the southern hemisphere maybe New Zealand 🇳🇿 would let you stay
Hope the impact will be that of a meteorite containing loads and loads of rare resources.
OK, that jokes awful, but the resources crises we're facing are way badder than any bad taste in humor could be. . .
It may get a bit colder shortly, if the solar activity trends continue as present and as predicted.
In the UK for the first 11 days of November we had virtually no wind and heavy cloud. This meant the ccgt stations were taking the load. In the future this energy will have to be supplied by the buffer.
There are no viable replacements for petrochemical fertilizers?
What about using kelp as a total general fertilizer. It requires zero inputs, grows about 2’ a day per plant, and sequesters up to 20x more CO2 than an equivalent acre of tropical forest
Absolutely! Important scientists like the UK's Dr David King and Australia's Dr Tim Flannery are now saying that permaculture seaweed and shellfish farms could feed the world! We could hypothetically feed the human race ALL the protein we need without using any fertiliser, land, or fresh water. There are enough coastal waters to feed a world of 10 billion. Out in the open ocean there are no nutrients and kelp usually starves. But we can float barges with wave powered pumps to bring nutrients up from deeper water to feed the kelp. That’s it! All the biomass you could want. It’s a bit expensive to run as airline fuel - but at least it’s a great source of food and fertiliser to grow some land based crops. After all, seaweed grows 30 times faster than any land plant, and it’s carbon negative. A good fraction of it breaks off and sinks to ocean floor where the carbon is sequestered. Links below:
eclipsenow.wordpress.com/seaweed/
Replace 235 million tons of ammonia a year with seaweed?
@@A3Kr0n if the money is right - absolutely! If the money is right and we can pay for these floating seaweed farms then we could do many gigatonnes if we want!
@@eclipsenow5431 We'd need to assume these are away from shipping lanes, popular recreational areas, and high population areas. Most likely people will object to coastal habitats being destroyed for the kelp farm. Not opposed, per se, but there's literally no free lunch for the care and feeding of 8 billion hairless apes.
@@jasourwnjl true.....8 billion is too many......we should have allowed several smaller collapse and die off periods.....now we have gone too far and the collapse will be terrible and total....we should have stopped at 1 billion humans.....but we didnt
Thank so much for your Very Thorough research and well understood graphs Simon 😇
Thanks, I am trying to work through your calculations to understand it myself. Is this report available online, spreadsheets?
Awesome video thanks 😊
Reducing dependence on hydrocarbons means having equally effective substitutes available, and that's not easy for a lot of reasons. As it is our most effective technology capable of making a meaningful dent in hydrocarbon dependence is nuclear power.
I instinctively agree with your general analysis and it is impossible to get away from the limitations of growth with finite resources. The only question is the scale of the problem which will influence how much time we have to transition and what the stable transitioned state will look like. There are a couple of elements of your analysis I am not clear on: 1. Do your calculations take account of the innate inefficiency of converting fossil fuels in to energy? In other words, is the power equivalence you have arrived at determined from usage levels and the current efficiency levels of alternative technologies or from the simple conversion of the amount of oil used in 2018 and the resources needed to replace that amount of oil? I hesitate to raise this somewhat 101 issue but this isn't addressed in the original video. 2. The future increase in efficiencies in current alternative technologies is an element which of course is difficult to calculate but would be useful to include as an unknown variable to obtain a range of timescales for plotting a future course of action. Ultimately, local micro-grids backed up by current national infrastructure have so many positives as to be a no-brainer. Local communities will be much more effective in mediating use when they have an investment in the production and distribution.
Jam-packed full with data, so difficult for this layman to follow. Hopefully new renewable energy streams & storage will be innovated to meet the electrification requirements to replace ever more fossil fuel use going forward.
Its something like having only one option to sail a half-finished battleship to war, carrying out the rest of the construction during the voyage, & hoping it will be completed & ready by the time it reaches the battle zone some time later. In this sort of scenario we won't know how successful we have been until we reach the battle zone.
In any transition to renewables and electric transportation conventional vehicles will be required for the transportation involved. That means fossil fuels...gasoline, diesel, biofuels. There are no realistic alternatives when it comes to transportation. Transportation is the bottleneck.to a fossil fuel free future.
Hi Ken, Long distance electric trucking is now a thing. Of course - Aussies invented it. Janus converts any Semi under 10 years old to be a full electric truck. They're able to carry 100 tons where Tesla only carries 40. Australia has vast distances requiring bigger tucks. If you owned a freight company, would you want to buy 3 Teslas and hire 3 drivers to move the same freight? How do they make the battery last so long? They don't! A guy on a forklift just swaps it after 500 km for a fresh fully charged battery. The company plans to charge the batteries over a few hours from solar on the warehouse roof - which is gentler on the battery than a fast-charge, and also gentler on the local grid! The warehouse roof charges enough batteries for 10 trucks. As the warehouses are between major cities, they could buy a paddock and solar farm nearby if they need more batteries. Buy enough solar and enough batteries, and they can even charge extra during the day to prepare for night time battery swaps. It avoids the 2.5 times energy build out to make hydrogen and shipping and trucking hydrogen everywhere. I would be surprised if Toll and other huge freight companies haven't started adopting this in a few years. th-cam.com/video/aizG265NeII/w-d-xo.html
www.januselectric.com.au/
www.smh.com.au/business/companies/entrepreneur-big-trucks-big-savings-big-electric-plans-20220811-p5b91o.htmlwww.januselectric.com.au/
@@eclipsenow5431 My point was that the transition to electric transportation (and renewable energy) will require the continued use of fossil fuels in the conventional ICE vehicles until it is completed. Of course there are now EVs in use. Every one of them (including batteries) required CVs. Even the renewable ethanol in biofuels use CVs to plant, fertilize and harvest the corn or sugarcane. Fossil fuels for transportation are not going away any time soon.
@@kentowe2080 Depends what you mean by soon. The vehicle fleet turns over every 16 years - commercial grade trucks much faster. Many European countries have 2035 as the last purchase date for ICE vehicles but by then I doubt any will be sold because it's just going to be so much CHEAPER to buy an electric car or truck and run it from solar on your roof. It's like having an oil refinery on your roof!
@@eclipsenow5431 "Soon" seems to be defined as 2050. The majority of countries will still be using CVs and fossil fuels will be needed. Those countries that have oil resources and do not succumb to climate change hysteria will do well. Those intent on eliminating fossil fuels to zero and net-zero by 2050 will not. The Chinese understand that. Many Western countries do not.
@@kentowe2080 "Climate hysteria"? Oh great - you're one of those. In your own mind you've disproved the basic physics of CO2 that any decent physics lab on the planet can confirm - and you know better than the IPCC which shows climate change to be one of the most studied scientific phenomenon in human history. We WILL eliminate fossil fuels - probably much faster than 2050. I've run Professor Michaux's numbers and WITHOUT his ridiculous strawman of building 4 weeks storage in METAL BATTERIES - under HIS NUMBERS there is 4 times the copper we need and other metals are fine - and the annual production will get us there in reasonable time. (Apart from Lithium which will need to scale up and IS scaling up as we speak.) I mean - is this whole study an effort to undermine renewables to foster fossil fuels on the planet longer? What a RIDICULOUS strawman argument!
What about geothermal, tidal, nuclear and other forms of renewable... your story is missing many chapters in your book. Not that the switch to renewables is simple but it is neccesary and will in time finish the job.
20,000 terra watts?! America currently produces not 300
Could a hybrid system of solar wind and battery storage with gas and coal for winter power base load getting you 75% of the way there is better than all fossil fuels
Some W/S/S makes sense. Too much raises costs and lowers reliability. The reasons are rooted in the physics of what they are, dilute and intermittent. They are far too resource intensive and chaotic to be capable of doing the heavy lifting.
We need more involvement with engineers and energy infrastructure experts when implementing policies, not those that have no training or experience in any relevant field. Most of us have no idea what this vital resource requires and we should before advocating for this or that way of managing it.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
Richard Feynman
Organic gardening uses, wait for it, chemicals.
I have doubt like around 36000 twh is just small number our yearly energy need is 170000 twh
So what this proves more than any other study is that while we have the high benefit of oil we need to be building molten salt breeder thorium reactors to the tune of ten per week for small modular reactors in a factory ship building factory with 300 megawatt per unit structured to remove xenon gas and remove tellurium as soon possible. If we do not do this now we will have missed the boat and the population will soon plunge to 1/2 current human beings on the planet world wide. This reactor to be cost effective should have a Brayton cycle super critical co2 turbine small enough to be affordable. Now people.
Lots of wrongheaded assumptions for wind turbines and battery chemistries by the IEA. It assumes 70% GB-DFIG, 10% BG-PMSG, 15% DD-PMSG and 5%DD-EESG for onshore in 2040, but there will probably be nobody producing onshore DD in 2040 now that Goldwind and Siemens-Gamesa have abandoned that tech for onshore and Enercon's DD-EESG is rapidly losing market share. I predict 80% GB-DFIG and 20% GB-PMSG is likely for onshore in 2040. The EIA predicts 15% GB-PMSG and 85% DD-PMSG for offshore in 2040, which is totally wrong, since Vestas, Mingyang, Envision and Goldwind are all going with GB-PMSG for offshore, because it is cheaper and requires less metal. I predict that offshore will be 75% GB-PMSG, 25% DD-PMSG in 2040.
Another bad assumption is the capacity of turbines in 2040 and the capacity factor. With the way that Chinese turbines are increasing in size, I expect that the average turbine will be 10MW for onshore and 30MW for offshore in 2040, which means less metal and higher capacity factors than Michaux is assuming. The wind industry will probably need half the copper and rare earth metals that Michaux predicts in 2040.
As for battery chemistries, the IEA predicts that light duty vehicles (LDVs) will be 3.5% NCA+, NMC 622 5.2%, NMC 811 52.2%, LFP 10.1% and ASSB 29.0% in 2040. The IEA seems to know nothing about where the market is headed. NMC 622 will be gone by 2040, and we will probably have NMC 911 and NM 91 by 2040. However, the biggest change will be the rise of LMFP and sodium ion. I expect the LDV market to be 2% NMCA, 8% NMC, 50% LMFP and 40% sodium ion in 2040. I'm not listing solid state as a separate chemistry since it will use NMCA, NMC and LMFP.
As for grid batteries, I expect that they will be 80% sodium ion and 20% LMFP in 2040. With those assumptions, we will need a lot less copper, cobalt, nickel and lithium and rare earths than Michaux assumes.
Don't let the Pied Piper lead you off a cliff. Ask hard questions like why haven't any of your climate doomsday predictions come true? What is your plan for replacing fossil fuels with energy sources of greater or equal density?
There's another elephant in the room. He shows what levels renewables have to replace, and it is post-2005. And yet, Simon showed that our industry did at least a 6 fold increase of every aspect of society, infrastructure (materials), energy, electricity, and millions of tons of toxic chemicals to transform to using fracking and tar sands. And he bases his calculations on this paradox? Take that extra load out of the system.
And by the way, plastics are just an industry orgasmic reaction of their worry that we will adopt EV (LOL).
The Australian JANUS truck battery swap system can completely bypass hydrogen and as 10 trucks charge off the warehouse roof, a lot of that 10% transmission loss you calculated.
I am an absolute fan of short haul commercial vehicles and mobile industrial machines with swappable batteries and endpoint green generation.
Seems like a perfect fit.
Efficient, no additional land use, consumer controlled, easily financed.
It all just makes sense so let's hope more get motivated to do it and the FUD lobby from fossil fuels does not get it regulated it out of practicality.
Dunno for JANUS, but in general battery systems need loads of metal resources, which become a constraint once scaled globally. That's what Michaux calculations are all about, systems may run as small local projects, as soon as you want to provide them to all of USA, China, India Europe the lot, one runs short on resources needed. Think for Litium the amount needed yearly tops the actual load mined a 60 times or so.
And besides trucks, there's shipping, planes, factories , all need their fossil energy sources replaced, worldwide. We'd need an asteroid worth of resources, every year, to get round.
Recycling ? I'm not aware of any economically viable project, without govt subsidies, that does recycling of essential resources on a major basis. Lots of stuff is in micro and nano technologies, or synthesized in alloys, which are extremely complicated to recover, demanding energy by barrels, currently. Just to get a decent recycling system up and running, takes decades, time we don't have anymore, ignoring the issue ever since 1972, Club of Rome report
@@reuireuiop0 we will need new supply chains of different materials, and lot of them for sure. Definitely should have started earlier, or had the foresight to ensure the supply chain was not all in a couple of countries.
The issue is looking at global extraction, processing and transportation of materials - electrified transportation (and also most green generation) take massively LESS materials than traditional fuel based technology. For example an electric car takes about the same amount of total materials as a gas car to build, just some different materials (less aluminum, more copper/graphite/lithium/etc). But over the lifetime the maintenance on the EV uses less materials, less lubricants, and the operation uses a few thousand gallons less fuel.
So sum total that is a lot less extraction, processing and transportation if we switch to EV transportation. New different materials but less overall.
Most "green" generation tech is the same way, it uses a lot less extraction, processing and transportation per GWh of generation. Example a solar/wind farm uses about the same or less materials than a small gas generator plant to build - but also does not need to be fed tonnes of natural gas every day for its entire lifecycle.
Which is one of the real reasons the "global elite" are obstructing genuine movement toward electrified transportation and "green" generation. Not just petroleum companies. We will reduce global extraction, processing and transportation of materials massively because the "green" tech is also more efficient tech. So much so that this alone could trigger a reduction in the global economy, just because we are using more efficient solutions massively reducing the amount of industry and transportation required.
Hence why there is a push to keep "green" more expensive than fuel, even through it is realistically cheaper - artificially raising the price means it keeps GDP and trade volume numbers up when measured in $$$ even if the actual volume of product is falling. An illusionary way to maintain "economic growth" on the books as we move to more efficient solutions. Of course this will all find its way to harm the working poor and increase the wealth gap even more just like we seem to always do.
@@reuireuiop0 Sorry to bust your bubble - but Simon Michaux lied to you.
EUROPEAN WINTERS: His study is based on a 2014 studies about European renewables getting through a cold dark winter. But most of the human race lives much closer to the equator where there is no winter. THEN these studies are 10 years out of date - back when renewables were 10 TIMES more expensive! Overbuilding the grid to cope was economically impossible. So they concluded they needed 4 weeks of storage to get through winter. But today renewables are so cheap we can Overbuild the grid. EG: If winter halves renewables output, then build DOUBLE the renewables! With enough Overbuild and enough HVDC Transmission - most places can get their storage down to 2 days.
DUMBEST MOVE: Michaux assumes we're too dumb to check his sources. In fact, his PDF doesn't LET you check his source for rejecting the cheapest grid storage - Pumped-Hydro Electricity Storage (PHES). These dams use excess solar power (the Overbuild) to pump water up about 600 metres to the top reservoir - then let it run back down through the generator at night. Michaux claims there are difficulties finding enough sites. Really? What study is that based on? His 1000 page PDF didn’t say! But here he slips up and admits it. th-cam.com/video/LBw2OVWdWIQ/w-d-xo.html This is a study about PHES in Singapore. Singapore - where the highest hill is only 15 metres! Gee - I wonder why they had a problem finding sites! (Duh!) He uses this study to cast doubt on PHES for the world when most continents have 100 TIMES the PHES sites they could need. Professor Andrew Blakers from the ANU presents the data. th-cam.com/video/_Lk3elu3zf4/w-d-xo.html They have identified the 616,000 best sites around the world. re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
ABUNDANT MATERIALS: While many brands of renewables and batteries CAN use rare earth’s for certain niche markets, they do not HAVE to - and most are already weaning off them because of price and supply issues (especially with China being problematic.)
EG: 95% of Solar brands ALREADY mainly use silicon - which is 27% of the Earth’s crust. Wind is made from iron (5%), aluminium (8%) and fibreglass (renewable glass fibres and renewable polyester resins). Half of Tesla’s batteries are LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate). The USGS reserves from 2022 show we have TEN TIMES the lithium we need for a world of 1.4 billion LPF EV's.
SODIUM BATTERIES: Sodium batteries are now a thing. BYD are building a super cheap city-shopping car called the "Seagull", with a mere 250km range but only costing $9000 USD. Sodium is less fire prone, less toxic, and 30% cheaper than lithium. Being cheap and fire safe it’s perfect for grid batteries for a few hours (but PHES is cheaper.) 1 ton of sodium battery could run a large family’s home for 5 days - and the 38.5 quadrillion tons in the ocean is enough to store the world's electricity consumption for 152,173 years! Or to flip it around, a whole year of the world's electricity would take just 0.0006% of the ocean’s salt! Michaux published in August 2021 and said Sodium batteries were still in the lab. But sodium was well past the lab, and was into commercialisation. Indeed, the first ORDERS for sodium batteries had already been placed with Faradion over a year earlier. Michaux was making extraordinary claims about batteries - he should have taken extraordinary care!
faradion.co.uk/faradion-receives-first-order-of-sodium-ion-batteries-for-australian-market/
SPEED of deployment: Solar and wind - even including the extra costs of transmission and PHES - are now the cheapest power, period. Their growth is exponential. Solar is doubling every 4 years - wind seems to be doubling about every decade. Australia will be 80-90% renewables by 2030. 10% of all cars sold are EV’s, and huge electric trucks like Janus Australia with their 4 minute-battery swap are creeping into the market. It’s starting, and will only accelerate. We’ll leave all fossil fuels way before they leave us.
@@5353Jumper There's going to be a lot more extraction. The more minerals are extracted, the lower the quality of the ores, as the high quality seams have already been exploited. China controls 90% of the global processing capacity for most of these minerals. Anyone see a problem emerging?
First, the true costs of oil specially, as well as natural gas, and coal should be accounted for; otherwise, it will appear that the alternative energies will falsely appear to be too expensive, specially with additional switchover costs. For oil, the huge costs of oil-wars are not factored in the determination of the true price of oil. Obviously, the United States with others fought two Gulf Wars to protect Western oil interests in the Middle East. The 1st Gulf War lead to 9/11 , as it occured during the US Presendency of the son of the US President who launched the 1st Gulf War. After 9/11/2001, the US started, and rapidly won the 2nd Gulf War, but the conflict dragged on against the insurgency for many years, so that the Presidency of the son was faced with not winning a second term to continue the war against the insurgency, as the competing party candidate called for peace, and many voters in the US seems to support this, specially when the economy was poor. Faced with a poor economy due to the war, which involve war costs as well as higher oil prices due to the war was disrupting oil production of a major oil producing and exporting country, as well as the shocks to the US economy from first the dotcom stock bubble burst, and then the 9/11 destructions, the US President of the son needed to pump up the US economy to get voters to vote for him by pumping up the new housing market to create jobs for new house construction. The US Federal Reserve Bank chairman, who was in the same party as the President, lowered interest rates to near zero to pump up the economy by lowering mortgage rates for home buyers. To find a lot more buyers of new homes, the US banks were allowed to enable poor sub-prime home buyers to buy without credit checks, without needing down payments, and without having to pay interests during the first couple years of mortgages. Both a housing bubble, and a stock market bubble resulted. These offseted the higher oil prices due to war disrupting oil production of a major oil producer. But, when a major storm Katrina damaged many oil drilling plateform in the US Gulf of Mexico, oil prices started to jump even higher. This brought in many oil futures speculators who bought oil futures eventhough the oil specculators did not actually use the oil. The oil futures speculations sent oil prices sky high, which hurt people, specially hurting many of the new sub-prime new house buyers, who are poor people, who had to purchase lower priced houses far away in the suburbs, as houses closer to the cities where they worked are much too high priced. Many sub-prime home buyers could no longer make their mortgage payments due to having to buy a lot of high priced oil to drive long distances to their work places. However, bankers had forseen some of these problems right from the beginning, as this whole thing was to pump up the US economy to enable the President to win a second term to continue the oil-war. Some suggested that the US got into the second Gulf War because the country there has a lot of oil, and not because the 9/11 perpetrators were in that oil country. Thus the bankers packaged these shaky sub-prime mortgages by burying these sub-prime mortgages together with many other none shaky mortgages into Mortgage Backed Stock Securities (called MBS.) Then, these adulterated MBS were falsely rated as AAA, and the records of how much sub-prime mortgages were packaged in with regular mortgage were conviently left out, so that buyer could not audit to find out what amounts of sub-prime mortgages were packaged into the MBS. Eventually potential MBS buyers found out these MBS cannot be accurately valued. Many investment banks involved in this scheme to pump up the economy to contine the oil-war got stuck with unsold MBS. Probably, they thought the US government would bail them out as this was so kind of war effort, but the President did not at first, eventhough they helped to pump up the economy for him to win a second term to continue the oil war. This created a panick on Wall Street resulting in the 2008 Great Recession. The US again lowered interest rates to zero, that created a super bubbles in the stock market, and in the housing market. All of these oil-war precipated economy problems weaken the soundness of the US financial system, which is further exposed to the Covid shock. All in all, the high, if not extremely high, costs of oil war related costs are not factored into the price of oil. If the real costs are accounted for, the higher cost of "hybride" alternative energy cars and such will become economical. Hybride systems will have old school oil, coal, and natural gas energy generation together with robust alternative add-on energy generators like solar panels, wind farms, and batteries, which have generation time gaps, as these alternative generators are intermitten. Systems having both alternative (but intermitten) generators, together with fossil fuel generators costs more, as there are duplication of generators. However, when the true costs of the current fossil fuel systems are added in like oil-war costs, and eventually climate change costs are accounted for, dual hybride system can be as economical.
And how many wars will be fought to source adequate minerals when there are not near enough for everyone and many needed minerals are concentrated in only a few countries? And how high will the prices of those critical minerals go when demand greatly exceeds supply?
@@utubr0 First, unlike oil and other fossil fuels that are burned up upon one use, minerals can potentially be recycled. Lithum on Earth is very abundant, except that highly and cheaply concentrated deposits are limited. The same with rare earth minerals. As sources of easy-and-cheap-to-extract mineral deposits become exhausted, prices will rise to enable less easy, and less cheap deposits to become commercially viable to mine. Increased prices also facilitate recycling unlike oil which cannot be recybled after it is burned upon first use. Too, increasing prices will foster the development of new technologies to better mine, extract, and recycle the minerals. Too, increasing prices may foster the invention of new substitudes which are cheaper and more plentiful, and of using less of the minerals to achieve prior results. As time progresses, totally revolutionary new inventions will come on line like the recent signs of the speeding up of new progresses in both fission and fusion power generation researches.
@@golfscienceguru Sorry, but you have not done the work. You can't recycle what doesn't exist - it has to be built first and sufficient minerals to build the first generation cannot be acquired even if you remove all obstacles including environmental ones, have unlimited money and unlimited labor, and magical technology advances that double the mining and processing rate (which isn't going to happen). And there won't be any magical technology alternatives that don't still have a huge reliance on minerals that are in very limited supply. Just considering the need for copper alone, the known reserves are far less than what would be required. After discovering an economic copper resource, it takes an average of 15 years to START production. Technology advances will help at the margins, but this isn't like cramming more transistors on a chip. Hopefully we'll be able to deploy significantly more fission, but we cannot count on fusion providing significant energy in the next 30 years since it's still early in the experimental phase.
@@golfscienceguru Recycling may not be the magic bullet you think it is. My analogy is as follows: Think of making a cup of coffee, you need coffee, water, milk and sugar (for some). Doesn't take long to mix all these together. But what if after you make your coffee you decided you needed the milk for something else? Suddenly you have a problem. It's not something most people could do in their kitchen, and the time, energy and cost to extract the milk means that a trip to the supermarket for more milk is a far more viable option. Now instead of coffee, apply this to solar panels, turbine blades, some types of batteries etc, none of which we know how to recycle viably. Hoping that some new tech in the future solves this is not a strategy that helps us today.
@@bjmtc This is well put. The issue with recycling in almost all cases is economic and not because we don't have the technological means. We actually can recycle solar panels and turbine blades, but the economic cost is a significant net loss because the means we have of recycling are very costly and do not produce useful outputs that would be far cheaper to source from raw materials. The energy inputs, additional material inputs, labor costs, and particularly the net emissions of these processes all make them untenable. Solar panels and wind turbine blades are highly engineered and very complex devices. The composite materials in the turbine blades and the many thin layers of crystalline silicon or thin films in PV cells are both very difficult to separate in to raw or even usable materials, which means it is very expensive to do so. Until this changes, we can expect pretty much any recycling effort for these waste products to be economically infeasible at scale.
Recycling does work in some cases though, and those cases are exactly where the economic cost of sourcing material from a recycling process is less than sourcing it from raw material. Aluminum is the golden example of this. The process to refine new aluminum from raw material is very energy intensive and costly, but there is a lot of easily recoverable aluminum that requires little more than gathering, separating, and then melting to produce usable products. This, as well as several other reasons, is why more than 75% of all aluminum in the material economy is recycled aluminum. In fact, if you pick up an aluminum can of some beverage (soda, beer, etc.), then statistically more than 50% of the aluminum in that can is from recycled aluminum. There is a perpetual market for it, it is easily recoverable, and so many companies can profit by recycling. This simply cannot be done right now with complex composite material products, and until it can then we won't see the same kind of recycling rate for PV cells or turbine blades that we do for aluminum cans. And even IF we did, then we would still need to mine ungodly amounts of NEW material to keep up with growing energy demand that is already far outpacing replacement of fossil fuel energy with clean energy sources.
Highly dilute energy sources will never replace highly concentrated energy sources.
Long distance electric trucking is now a thing. Of course - Aussies invented it. Janus converts any Semi under 10 years old to be a full electric truck. They're able to carry 100 tons where Tesla only carries 40. Australia has vast distances requiring bigger tucks. If you owned a freight company, would you want to buy 3 Teslas and hire 3 drivers to move the same freight? How do they make the battery last so long? They don't! A guy on a forklift just swaps it after 500 km for a fresh fully charged battery. The company plans to charge the batteries over a few hours from solar on the warehouse roof - which is gentler on the battery than a fast-charge, and also gentler on the local grid! The warehouse roof charges enough batteries for 10 trucks. As the warehouses are between major cities, they could buy a paddock and solar farm nearby if they need more batteries. Buy enough solar and enough batteries, and they can even charge extra during the day to prepare for night time battery swaps. It avoids the 2.5 times energy build out to make hydrogen and shipping and trucking hydrogen everywhere. I would be surprised if Toll and other huge freight companies haven't started adopting this in a few years. th-cam.com/video/aizG265NeII/w-d-xo.html www.januselectric.com.au/
www.smh.com.au/business/companies/entrepreneur-big-trucks-big-savings-big-electric-plans-20220811-p5b91o.htmlwww.januselectric.com.au/
Yeah we had that scam here it was called "Nikola" that was even more believable this battery swap gimmick is just laughable
@@elekkr Why? A freight company like Toll or TNT could set up their own, or it could one day become a govt mandated standard for trucks within the EU like "The Brussel's effect" have pretty much just killed the Apple Lightning adaptor by mandating the USB-C standard. Janus are growing. They've just converted a cement truck! Check out their websites if you're going to make nonsense claims like that.