I am an environmentalist who favors conservation, support of renewables, rather than restricting extraction. The latter methinks does not accomplish much. Whatever the US doesnt extract the Saudis and Russians will to their advantage. Also, though increasing energy prices might decrease use, it is not that elastic and people will drive cars and heat homes, regardless, so imo better to work on reducing demand over limiting supply.
On the conservation end increasing mpgs or home insulation or increasing solar/wind has a dramatic effect that isnt dependent on behavior changes.
I think Matt has been drinking some sort of liberal Kool-Aid these days. Joe Biden has taken a moderate approach because of this strange thing called Reality. If he took the left wing Schumer approach to destroying the oil industry, we would have $9 per gallon gas and you could guarantee Trump 2.0 in 2024.
There is no way he can tout his moderate approach, or his left base will get all pissed off. I don't think he wants to tout his moderate approach, it is a compromise forced upon him by the reality of the world we live in. So instead he lets the oil flow and lets his administration illegally pull some drilling leases that were already signed, sealed, and delivered like they just did in Alaska. Those make news, while the flow of oil continues. Seems like smart politics to me, but it isn't what he wants to tout by any stretch.
Unfortunately, catering to normie moderates appears to be a thing of the past.
The best way for the U.S. to handle energy policy is to emulate Norway.
Norway is way ahead of the U.S. on clean energy and electrification. For example, a quick Google search shows that 98% of Norway's electricity grid is renewables (mostly hydropower) and about 80% of new cars sold in Norway these days are already fully electric. Yet, at the same time, Norway is also a big oil and gas producer, and the oil and gas they deliver to Europe is playing a big role in the short term to allow the rest of the continent to function without needing to depend on Vladamir Putin for energy.
This is interesting: Ben Lefebvre did a good Politico piece in late August about how Republicans keep complaining that Biden has strangled American oil production when in fact, production is higher than ever. Republicans lying is not so new...
So Republicans say Biden is restricting supply (apparently untrue) and Biden doesn’t refute it because to do so would come off as pro-oil to his leftist base. A weird symbiotic relationship.
Key issue: What is the appropriate path of oil prices along the path of taking oil volumes down to zero? Does policy constrain supply or demand?
If we constrain demand for fossil fuels relative to supply, prices will be weak, and exploration will stop. This is a great world for the Saudis (not the Russians) because the Gulf producers are the low-cost producers. It also delays their energy transition, as fossil fuel costs fall. If we constrain supply relative to demand, prices will be firm and exploration will continue. The Saudis will earn even more, but the transition to renewables will be encouraged.
For those wondering, sour crude has a lot of sulfur (>0.5%) and other impurities that have to be removed during refining. Sweet crude doesn't have as much sulfur.
One thing I've always found almost suspiciously consistent is that for the past 30 years, serious estimates of the cost of decarbonization cluster pretty tightly around 3-4% of GDP per year (gross, not net, the benefits of decarbonization are high and separate from this estimate). The longer we wait, the cheaper the technology gets but the bigger the decarbonization problem gets and the more mitigation and adaptation we need. I'm not sure if it's weird how they move in lockstep, or if it's a natural consequence of people continually picking the low-hanging fruit as the tech gets better.
Not sure how literal you were being about this, but the short version is that sour crude contains more sulfur, much of it in the form of hydrogen sufide, H2S. H2S is an acid, and acids are literally sour (see: lemons). The sulfur compounds are also corrosive and need to be removed with additional and/or different equipment at refineries.
Now, you might ask, how could a gas turbine possibly run on coal? The answer is to pulverize the coal till it’s the consistency of toner and then blow the dust into the combustion chamber.
Fuel economy was poor, for the turbine consumed roughly twice as much fuel as an equally powerful diesel engine. This was initially not a problem, because Union Pacific's turbines burned Bunker C heavy fuel oil that was less expensive than diesel. But this highly viscous fuel is difficult to handle, with a room-temperature consistency similar to tar or molasses. ***To solve this problem, a heater was built into the fuel tanks (and later into fuel tenders) to heat the fuel to 200 °F (93 °C) before feeding it into the turbine.***
Voters don't care about strategy. They care about how much gas costs them today. Today, gas is expensive, which means today is a bad day to talk about oil. Biden should keep his trap shut, quietly try to do something to lower gas prices, and let the Republican spat over the CR take up all the attention.
The Biden Admin acts as if different departments are run by outside groups with different interests. So far this year, I’ve reviewed two proposed regs BLM and CEQ that make it harder for renewable buildout.. I wrote DOE media to see if they had reviewed these regs, they never answered.
Also I’m not dubious, but a source for more “oil and gas production from federal land” is not in the piece in the link. As was said above the Admin is busily making new decisions that restrict or don’t allow o&g drilling in almost every state. Biden tried to not allow leasing, but the courts determined that it was illegal to do so; of course campaign promises don’t have to be legal. The Alaska decision yesterday is the first but perhaps not the last to rescind existing leases. Bottom line, I disagree that Biden can campaign on this.. “we’re just cutting off tomorrow’s sources, but we’re really all of the above.”
Note that China produces 52% of global carbon emissions, burns 2 billion tons of coal a year (many times our total), is planning to increase its coal production by 300 million tons in the next five years, and is building 250 gigawatts of new coal-fired generating capacity. India and Indonesia are coming up fast behind.
So basically nothing we or the rest of the developed world does matters dick, as far as the climate is concerned. We’re helpless.
It looks to me that there are six countries (US, India, Russia, Japan, Iran, Germany) that together produce more carbon emissions than China, and I think the entire rest of the world is also comparable to either of these.
All those Chinese wind turbines and solar panels rest on mountains of burning coal. The Chinese government hasn’t the slightest intention of decarbonizing, ever. They’re just willing to make money selling us that stuff.
I work in the Gulf South with pipeline / salt cavern storage. The issue with "cavern homogeneity" the Employ America piece lays out is a real concern.
While salt cavern wells can / do get deinventoried and have products swapped...product contamination is always huge concern and one of the pathways for contamination here is the "brine" utilized to empty / fill the well.
Typically in a salt cavern, you have to keep *something* in the well when it is not full of oil...and that thing is brine (salt saturated water). This keeps well from leaching out (less than saturated water from eating away at salt walls of wells in an unpredictable way). If you are storing sour crude in these wells, it's not unlikely that some sulfur contamination will contaminate your brine source / storage. Since the brine for multiple wells is typically consolidated across multiple wells, you risk contaminating a "sweet" well that is utilizing the same brine as a sour well. To manage two types of wells without risk of contamination, you likely need two segregated brine systems to reduce these odds. My educated prior is it would be easier to swap one of the four "hubs" completely over to sweet crude rather than try to swap a handful of the wells at each site.
Another additional question I had which the Employ America piece does not address. Given the historical nature of the SPR only servicing "sour crude" to refineries utilizing sour crude, it's an open question whether the pipeline connections / pathways exist such that the sweet crude can get to the reserve from all potential customers who might sell to the SPR, etc. If suddenly the hub nearest to your refinery doesn't service "sour" crude anymore, only sweet...you suddenly provide no value to the sour crude folks in the region.
"The McIntosh Power Plant’s CAES unit burns roughly one-third of the natural gas per kilowatt-hour of output compared to a conventional combustion turbine, thus producing only about one-third of the pollutants."
This seems odd, I've have expected the storage to be _less_ efficient than direct output, since you have to compress it (slightly lossy on energy) and then get it back on decompression.
Am I misunderstanding their post?
Or because it can store power slowly, does it gain efficiency by running at "low power mode" for a long time, then briefly doing more at high power? The way a hybrid-electric vehicle gets better gas mileage by being able to run on a more efficient (albeit smaller) engine?
In either case, I always love seeing energy storage solutions I haven't seen yet. Thanks.
You posted this while I was posting mine. Where did you get 40%? I'm surprised it's that low but I expected a <100% number to be sure. That clashes with what I gathered from the article (but matches my expectations)
Update: This paper says the actual storage of that plant is 53%. (Specifically for the McIntosh plant)
But also, natural gas plants have their own efficiency issues:
=====
A simple cycle natural gas power plant efficiency rate tends to be the lower, ranging from 33% to 43%. On the other hand, a combined cycle power plant's efficiency can reach upwards of 60% (from 2023)
=====
So is McIntosh getting 53% of 60%? Or 53% of 100%?
I suspect when they say they're compared to a "conventional combustion turbine" they're factoring in that they use waste heat (like a combined cycle) and so they get to say they are more efficient at 53% than those are at (low end) 33%. Although that still doesn't mean "one-third of the pollutants".
I listened to a lecture series a few years ago that went into different energy storage methods, and they specifically went into the McIntosh plant as the compressed air example.
I thought the compression phase was 80%, and then the expansion was ~50%, for a total cycle of ~40%.
But maybe they have made improvements over the years?
Yeah I found an older paper that claimed 36% final result. Earlier than your lecture, vs the new paper which is higher.
Edit: Incidentally, them using an 80% efficiency compression (20% loss) and comparing that to a 40% simple cycle plant(60% loss) would give a total of "1/3 the pollutants"(for the compression phase) as a quote while still being misleading since that's before expansion/storage losses (and I don't think new plants are simple-cycle)
It would be good to have a vocal leader on the left who had the charisma and rhetorical chops to essentially tell the keep-it-in-the-ground crowd that they live in fantasyland.
Just about everything around you in modern society is based on petroleum products, inside your home, your car, the planes you fly on, the electronics you rely on (Matt’s short list left off biggies like plastics and chemicals). If an influential president could prompt the Thunbergian left to grow up a little bit maybe future presidents wouldn’t have to play this rhetorical shell game.
True enough - and I suspect the crowd wanting to continue burning it in every possible engine is not as big nor is that belief as deeply held as that of the keep-it-buried crowd. It’s more like a reaction to environmental hysterics. Put an EV truck in their driveway that’s just as powerful/fast and they’ll quickly forget their love of combustion...which, as you point out, is what makes incentivizing that direction so important.
As an EV owner, if they can just standardize the damn public charging the fast would come a whole lot faster. It's still amateur hour even in urban and suburban California.
Sadly Biden is at war with Elon and Tesla is the obvious standard. Interesting that the competition is moving faster to adopt it (i.e., Honda just announced today).
I have a CCS charger but it's only leased (because of the charger nonsense). Presumably things will be settled in about 3 years when I turn it in (without CCS becoming obsolete either).
Setting up a competing network using NACS/Tesla would "own" Elon plenty. Tesla made it an open standard unless they're still keeping some key tech piece proprietary.
I'm not sure what fast looks like here but just 1% of the ~300m vehicles in the US are EVs. Sure the % growth from zero and YoY new EV sales rates have been fast but the EV transition for total US carparc will slow and linear.
Roger. We're aligned. I've just heard people talk about EV adoption in software like speed and it's like ... no ... there's still fixed production capacity and 15 year vehicle lifecycles we need to work through.
"most of those use cases cannot be replaced with any existing or emergent technology."
Like what? There are plenty of things we need hydrocarbons for, and it's certainly impractical today to make them at scale any other way due to capex and renewable power availability, but I'm not aware of any that *can't* be made synthetically from CO2, and at least some of them can be made from biomass.
We should fully electrify freight rail. Look at what India did with the Direct Freight Corridor. Build new tracks where possible, and repurpose the older tracks for good passenger rail (In some parts of the country).
The US has one of the few platinum-group deposits in the world: the Sillwater deposit in Montana. We just don't mine it as much as South Africa, Russia, and Canada do theirs.
I am an environmentalist who favors conservation, support of renewables, rather than restricting extraction. The latter methinks does not accomplish much. Whatever the US doesnt extract the Saudis and Russians will to their advantage. Also, though increasing energy prices might decrease use, it is not that elastic and people will drive cars and heat homes, regardless, so imo better to work on reducing demand over limiting supply.
On the conservation end increasing mpgs or home insulation or increasing solar/wind has a dramatic effect that isnt dependent on behavior changes.
I think Matt has been drinking some sort of liberal Kool-Aid these days. Joe Biden has taken a moderate approach because of this strange thing called Reality. If he took the left wing Schumer approach to destroying the oil industry, we would have $9 per gallon gas and you could guarantee Trump 2.0 in 2024.
There is no way he can tout his moderate approach, or his left base will get all pissed off. I don't think he wants to tout his moderate approach, it is a compromise forced upon him by the reality of the world we live in. So instead he lets the oil flow and lets his administration illegally pull some drilling leases that were already signed, sealed, and delivered like they just did in Alaska. Those make news, while the flow of oil continues. Seems like smart politics to me, but it isn't what he wants to tout by any stretch.
Unfortunately, catering to normie moderates appears to be a thing of the past.
The best way for the U.S. to handle energy policy is to emulate Norway.
Norway is way ahead of the U.S. on clean energy and electrification. For example, a quick Google search shows that 98% of Norway's electricity grid is renewables (mostly hydropower) and about 80% of new cars sold in Norway these days are already fully electric. Yet, at the same time, Norway is also a big oil and gas producer, and the oil and gas they deliver to Europe is playing a big role in the short term to allow the rest of the continent to function without needing to depend on Vladamir Putin for energy.
The solution is not that complicated.
But the US can't emulate Norway, because it doesn't have all that cheap hydropower.
The US (and most countries in the world) will have to decarbonize using very different (and more difficult/costly) strategies than Norway.
I'd like to see making Saudi Arabia hurt become more of the solution. I don't know what our leverage is, but trying to be their friend isn't working.
This is interesting: Ben Lefebvre did a good Politico piece in late August about how Republicans keep complaining that Biden has strangled American oil production when in fact, production is higher than ever. Republicans lying is not so new...
So Republicans say Biden is restricting supply (apparently untrue) and Biden doesn’t refute it because to do so would come off as pro-oil to his leftist base. A weird symbiotic relationship.
Matt, great topic but I disagree with your take.
Key issue: What is the appropriate path of oil prices along the path of taking oil volumes down to zero? Does policy constrain supply or demand?
If we constrain demand for fossil fuels relative to supply, prices will be weak, and exploration will stop. This is a great world for the Saudis (not the Russians) because the Gulf producers are the low-cost producers. It also delays their energy transition, as fossil fuel costs fall. If we constrain supply relative to demand, prices will be firm and exploration will continue. The Saudis will earn even more, but the transition to renewables will be encouraged.
For those wondering, sour crude has a lot of sulfur (>0.5%) and other impurities that have to be removed during refining. Sweet crude doesn't have as much sulfur.
One thing I've always found almost suspiciously consistent is that for the past 30 years, serious estimates of the cost of decarbonization cluster pretty tightly around 3-4% of GDP per year (gross, not net, the benefits of decarbonization are high and separate from this estimate). The longer we wait, the cheaper the technology gets but the bigger the decarbonization problem gets and the more mitigation and adaptation we need. I'm not sure if it's weird how they move in lockstep, or if it's a natural consequence of people continually picking the low-hanging fruit as the tech gets better.
Not sure how literal you were being about this, but the short version is that sour crude contains more sulfur, much of it in the form of hydrogen sufide, H2S. H2S is an acid, and acids are literally sour (see: lemons). The sulfur compounds are also corrosive and need to be removed with additional and/or different equipment at refineries.
What if -- and hear me out -- we built cars powered by tiny nuclear reactors? 🤣
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
Someone really greenlit that project. Amazing. Ford was wild back then.
My other favorite was when GM built a gas turbine car powered by coal.
https://www.autoweek.com/car-life/but-wait-theres-more/a1812701/oldsmobile-was-powered-coal-burning-turbine-engine/
Now, you might ask, how could a gas turbine possibly run on coal? The answer is to pulverize the coal till it’s the consistency of toner and then blow the dust into the combustion chamber.
Reminds me of the Union Pacific's GTEL locomotives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_GTELs
Highlight:
Fuel economy was poor, for the turbine consumed roughly twice as much fuel as an equally powerful diesel engine. This was initially not a problem, because Union Pacific's turbines burned Bunker C heavy fuel oil that was less expensive than diesel. But this highly viscous fuel is difficult to handle, with a room-temperature consistency similar to tar or molasses. ***To solve this problem, a heater was built into the fuel tanks (and later into fuel tenders) to heat the fuel to 200 °F (93 °C) before feeding it into the turbine.***
Mr. Fusion? or I guess Mr. Fission in this case.
Voters don't care about strategy. They care about how much gas costs them today. Today, gas is expensive, which means today is a bad day to talk about oil. Biden should keep his trap shut, quietly try to do something to lower gas prices, and let the Republican spat over the CR take up all the attention.
BD, when I read your comment, it was the last one in the stack. And well worth waiting for. Finally, common sense.
The Biden Admin acts as if different departments are run by outside groups with different interests. So far this year, I’ve reviewed two proposed regs BLM and CEQ that make it harder for renewable buildout.. I wrote DOE media to see if they had reviewed these regs, they never answered.
Also I’m not dubious, but a source for more “oil and gas production from federal land” is not in the piece in the link. As was said above the Admin is busily making new decisions that restrict or don’t allow o&g drilling in almost every state. Biden tried to not allow leasing, but the courts determined that it was illegal to do so; of course campaign promises don’t have to be legal. The Alaska decision yesterday is the first but perhaps not the last to rescind existing leases. Bottom line, I disagree that Biden can campaign on this.. “we’re just cutting off tomorrow’s sources, but we’re really all of the above.”
Note that China produces 52% of global carbon emissions, burns 2 billion tons of coal a year (many times our total), is planning to increase its coal production by 300 million tons in the next five years, and is building 250 gigawatts of new coal-fired generating capacity. India and Indonesia are coming up fast behind.
So basically nothing we or the rest of the developed world does matters dick, as far as the climate is concerned. We’re helpless.
Have a nice, warm day.
Where did you get that 52%?
It looks to me that there are six countries (US, India, Russia, Japan, Iran, Germany) that together produce more carbon emissions than China, and I think the entire rest of the world is also comparable to either of these.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/270499/co2-emissions-in-selected-countries/
Ah, sorry; working from memory.
It’s 27%, a tripling over the past 30 years; from 558 million tons to over 3 billion this year. That’s more than the entire developed world, btw.
Ours is 11%, and has dropped considerably over those decades, from a peak of 1.6 billion to somewhat less now.
India is 3rd, with 6.6% and rising quickly. The EU is slightly less than that.
Figures from the BBC, as of 2020.
All those Chinese wind turbines and solar panels rest on mountains of burning coal. The Chinese government hasn’t the slightest intention of decarbonizing, ever. They’re just willing to make money selling us that stuff.
I work in the Gulf South with pipeline / salt cavern storage. The issue with "cavern homogeneity" the Employ America piece lays out is a real concern.
While salt cavern wells can / do get deinventoried and have products swapped...product contamination is always huge concern and one of the pathways for contamination here is the "brine" utilized to empty / fill the well.
Typically in a salt cavern, you have to keep *something* in the well when it is not full of oil...and that thing is brine (salt saturated water). This keeps well from leaching out (less than saturated water from eating away at salt walls of wells in an unpredictable way). If you are storing sour crude in these wells, it's not unlikely that some sulfur contamination will contaminate your brine source / storage. Since the brine for multiple wells is typically consolidated across multiple wells, you risk contaminating a "sweet" well that is utilizing the same brine as a sour well. To manage two types of wells without risk of contamination, you likely need two segregated brine systems to reduce these odds. My educated prior is it would be easier to swap one of the four "hubs" completely over to sweet crude rather than try to swap a handful of the wells at each site.
Another additional question I had which the Employ America piece does not address. Given the historical nature of the SPR only servicing "sour crude" to refineries utilizing sour crude, it's an open question whether the pipeline connections / pathways exist such that the sweet crude can get to the reserve from all potential customers who might sell to the SPR, etc. If suddenly the hub nearest to your refinery doesn't service "sour" crude anymore, only sweet...you suddenly provide no value to the sour crude folks in the region.
One of our customers plants in Alabama uses salt caverns to store compressed air and then release it for stored power. They use the gas turbines to power the compressors. https://www.baldwinemc.com/compressed-air-energy-storage-technology-generating-electricity-out-of-thin-air/
"The McIntosh Power Plant’s CAES unit burns roughly one-third of the natural gas per kilowatt-hour of output compared to a conventional combustion turbine, thus producing only about one-third of the pollutants."
This seems odd, I've have expected the storage to be _less_ efficient than direct output, since you have to compress it (slightly lossy on energy) and then get it back on decompression.
Am I misunderstanding their post?
Or because it can store power slowly, does it gain efficiency by running at "low power mode" for a long time, then briefly doing more at high power? The way a hybrid-electric vehicle gets better gas mileage by being able to run on a more efficient (albeit smaller) engine?
In either case, I always love seeing energy storage solutions I haven't seen yet. Thanks.
I should be all rah-rah for Alabama, but IIRC, that project is
only ~40% efficiency for storage purposes.
You posted this while I was posting mine. Where did you get 40%? I'm surprised it's that low but I expected a <100% number to be sure. That clashes with what I gathered from the article (but matches my expectations)
Update: This paper says the actual storage of that plant is 53%. (Specifically for the McIntosh plant)
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-7264/3/1/8
But also, natural gas plants have their own efficiency issues:
=====
A simple cycle natural gas power plant efficiency rate tends to be the lower, ranging from 33% to 43%. On the other hand, a combined cycle power plant's efficiency can reach upwards of 60% (from 2023)
=====
So is McIntosh getting 53% of 60%? Or 53% of 100%?
I suspect when they say they're compared to a "conventional combustion turbine" they're factoring in that they use waste heat (like a combined cycle) and so they get to say they are more efficient at 53% than those are at (low end) 33%. Although that still doesn't mean "one-third of the pollutants".
I listened to a lecture series a few years ago that went into different energy storage methods, and they specifically went into the McIntosh plant as the compressed air example.
I thought the compression phase was 80%, and then the expansion was ~50%, for a total cycle of ~40%.
But maybe they have made improvements over the years?
Yeah I found an older paper that claimed 36% final result. Earlier than your lecture, vs the new paper which is higher.
Edit: Incidentally, them using an 80% efficiency compression (20% loss) and comparing that to a 40% simple cycle plant(60% loss) would give a total of "1/3 the pollutants"(for the compression phase) as a quote while still being misleading since that's before expansion/storage losses (and I don't think new plants are simple-cycle)
It would be good to have a vocal leader on the left who had the charisma and rhetorical chops to essentially tell the keep-it-in-the-ground crowd that they live in fantasyland.
Just about everything around you in modern society is based on petroleum products, inside your home, your car, the planes you fly on, the electronics you rely on (Matt’s short list left off biggies like plastics and chemicals). If an influential president could prompt the Thunbergian left to grow up a little bit maybe future presidents wouldn’t have to play this rhetorical shell game.
Also metals, especially as we transition to a more electricity-powered society. Unfortunately Biden keeps blocking new mines.
True enough - and I suspect the crowd wanting to continue burning it in every possible engine is not as big nor is that belief as deeply held as that of the keep-it-buried crowd. It’s more like a reaction to environmental hysterics. Put an EV truck in their driveway that’s just as powerful/fast and they’ll quickly forget their love of combustion...which, as you point out, is what makes incentivizing that direction so important.
As an EV owner, if they can just standardize the damn public charging the fast would come a whole lot faster. It's still amateur hour even in urban and suburban California.
Sadly Biden is at war with Elon and Tesla is the obvious standard. Interesting that the competition is moving faster to adopt it (i.e., Honda just announced today).
I have a CCS charger but it's only leased (because of the charger nonsense). Presumably things will be settled in about 3 years when I turn it in (without CCS becoming obsolete either).
Setting up a competing network using NACS/Tesla would "own" Elon plenty. Tesla made it an open standard unless they're still keeping some key tech piece proprietary.
I'm not sure what fast looks like here but just 1% of the ~300m vehicles in the US are EVs. Sure the % growth from zero and YoY new EV sales rates have been fast but the EV transition for total US carparc will slow and linear.
Roger. We're aligned. I've just heard people talk about EV adoption in software like speed and it's like ... no ... there's still fixed production capacity and 15 year vehicle lifecycles we need to work through.
"most of those use cases cannot be replaced with any existing or emergent technology."
Like what? There are plenty of things we need hydrocarbons for, and it's certainly impractical today to make them at scale any other way due to capex and renewable power availability, but I'm not aware of any that *can't* be made synthetically from CO2, and at least some of them can be made from biomass.
We should fully electrify freight rail. Look at what India did with the Direct Freight Corridor. Build new tracks where possible, and repurpose the older tracks for good passenger rail (In some parts of the country).
The US has one of the few platinum-group deposits in the world: the Sillwater deposit in Montana. We just don't mine it as much as South Africa, Russia, and Canada do theirs.
I know :( (Youtful optimism)