Working in the gas energy sector my company has a weird relationship with oil politics.
On one hand gas/oil bad which should make us favor Republicans, but on the other hand... renewables and restrictions on Coal have really helped my company out. Gas turbines are really the only practical sources of peak demand with renewables. Yes I know in 30-years or so, we will be out of business unless there is a break through with Hydrogen. (New gas turbines are designed with the potential to run hydrogen)
I work maintenance on gas power plants, and we are struggling to hire enough technicians to work our outages. This October we are at 120% demand (jobs to personnel). Next spring will be our busiest year ever.
Anyway, if anyone knows young kids who want to go into blue collar technical work... there are high paying jobs!
Combustion is a heck of a technology. The *source* of some of the hydrocarbons we're burning can be troublesome, but darn if it wouldn't be wild to engineer some yeast to eat biomass and fart out ethanol, or whatever.
The energy per mass and per volume just can't yet be beat (and because you don't need to bring your oxidizer or equivalent with you, I'm skeptical that batteries of any type will ever match it).
Batteries will never match it, but electric motors are so vastly more efficient than combustion engines that they fortunately don't have to come anywhere close for ground transport.
Air, we've discussed before. Closed-cycle synthetic fuel or CCS, all the way.
"Yes I know in 30-years or so, we will be out of business unless there is a break through with Hydrogen."
Not sure it'll be quite that fast, but in any case I wouldn't be so sure hydrogen breakthroughs are a good thing for O&G on that time scale or longer. Better CCS would be, for sure, but more efficient hydrogen usage and storage don't favor blue over green or vice versa. The biggest potential for not-yet-realized breakthroughs are lower capex for electrolysis and more efficient CCU to make synthetic fuels (jet, diesel, marine, aka the harder-to-decarbonize transportation sectors). There are already places in the world where solar power is closing in on 2 cents/kWh. That works out to somewhere on the order of $3 of electricity to make the hydrogen energy equivalent of a gallon of gas, but capex is still very high as well and in most places the energy costs are much higher than that.
I am curious, too, how decarbonization of some sectors (say, passenger vehicle electrification) will affect the price of oil, if it will significantly change relative demand for different fractions.
To me, this is all a reminder that we should not be picking and choosing the "winning" technologies as a matter of law and policy and silver bullets--we should be identifying the outcome we actually care about (say, net grams of CO2 per lifecycle passenger-mile, or whatever) and we'll find out what technology or combination of technologies achieves it.
Maybe, maybe not, but I'm still confused about lots of details and regularly disagree with others about this in all kinds of ways!
I *do* see lots of places starting to invest in co-firing hydrogen and natural gas, and in blue hydrogen production, but I see that as more of a stop-gap for the next decade or so as other tech matures.
The nice thing about hydrogen mix is it significantly reduces emissions while eliminating a lot of the hydrogen storage and transportation issues (if pipes are updated). Maybe its a dead end technology, maybe not. Hard to predict technology.
Agreed, and I'll be thrilled as long as some sufficient subset of relevant technologies scales well enough to push us to full decarbonization within my lifetime.
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.
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:
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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)
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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)
"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 would imagine we're talking about something analogous to a hybrid, where I can optimize the hell out of the combustion because the battery smooths the power curve when needed?
How many left wing voters would stay home or vote for a third party if Biden becomes out and proud about encouraging oil drilling? In a normal cycle, I would worry that environmental activists are the kind of feckless idealists who would happily throw away their votes. This year, Trump’s authoritarian tendencies should unite the left. Soccer moms who think Trump is icky but need cheap gas for their SUVs are a bigger constituency than neo-pastoralists who would heighten the contradictions to destroy the economy.
I am a liberal. Of freaking course I will vote for Biden even if he’s 100% for “drill baby drill,” because the alternative is horrific. I will crawl over broken glass to vote for Biden and against Agent Orange.
At the same time, climate change is, to use a Bidenism, a big f**king deal, and it scares me. British Columbia is on fire, this past summer we had unprecedented heat waves over large parts of the US, I have an 8-year-old and I don’t want him to grow up in a world damaged by climate change.
I want us to work hard on reducing CO2 emissions, not cater to soccer moms who are upset about paying more to fill up their goddamn 18 MPG SUVs.
Are those ideas in conflict? We can work hard at reducing CO2 emissions, but we're still going to need a lot of petroleum into the foreseeable future. It seems to me that while we work hard at the former we simultaneously need to strategically supply ourselves so that our fate is in our own hands and not subject to the whims of the worst actors on the planet. That means we have to get passed the idea that any oil removed from the ground is bad and should be opposed. Canceling leases that we can legally get out of in Alaska and other public lands is good. Thinking we're not going to continue the shale projects and pipelines in the lower 48 seems foolish.
We need a both/and strategy: both expand renewable energy sources AND reduce the overall amount of energy we use.
Please don't misunderstand me. I never said "any oil removed from the ground is bad and should be opposed," and I'm not some kind of pastoral anti-modernist who thinks we should wind back the clock to the 1500s. I love modern technology and recognize the enormous improvements in quality of life made possible by fossil fuels!
Just, the typical middle-class American lifestyle is horrendously energy intensive, and could be made much more eco-friendly without destroying people's quality of life.
Here is what I would do, if I could (I realize this would be super unpopular, which is why I will never run for public office):
- a lot fewer sprawling, car-dependent suburbs; a lot more walkable, public transit-friendly, mixed-use neighborhoods where you can get around (go to/from work, school, child's daycare, run errands other than heavy-duty shopping, entertainment, meeting with friends, going to the doctor) on foot, by bicycle, or by public transit. Cars exist, but are used occasionally, mainly for weekly grocery shopping and weekend trips out of the city.
-The cars that do exist are smaller and more fuel-efficient, except when needed (like, if your job requires you to haul a pickup truck's worth of tools/equipment with you).
-A lot less meat consumption - meat is much worse in terms of CO2 emissions than plant-based foods.
-Go easy on air conditioning! When you go inside a building on a hot summer day, the sensation should be "this is a pleasant respite from the heat outside," not "OMG it's freaking freezing in here, where's my sweater?"
I'm sure I could think of others, but that would be a great start. (Also impossible, I know, but one can dream.)
Matt recently commented on Twitter that he lives does most of what you recommend (not sure about the meat consumption or AC), but his CO2 consumption is still wildly higher than most Indians. Americans are already consuming less CO2 and probably will over time, but all of that will be dwarfed as billions of poor people become wealthier and consume more. That has to be solved with technology.
I mean, you're absolutely right about how even Matt Y's relatively low-CO2 lifestyle (by American standards) is still super high-CO2 relative to rural India and such.
On the other hand, we live in a democracy, not an eco-dictatorship, and hence we must consider people like David Abbott here, who are like "IDGAF about polar bears, I'm not giving up my cheap electricity and gasoline and you can't make me."
It's the tragedy of the human condition!
You're right that we need technological fixes, just, we don't have anything that will scale up quickly enough, so we should simultaneously push for technological advances *and* try to reduce our energy use in relatively painless ways as much as the David Abbotts of the US electorate will allow.
I think what you're missing is that opposition to (essentially) living a poorer lifestyle is not just 'the David Abbotts of the US electorate'. It is most humans in all countries everywhere, all over the globe. Preaching a voluntary kind of asceticism is just not realistic on a multi-billion person scale. Either way we find a technological deus ex machina magic solution or we're screwed. But 'IDGAF about polar bears, I'm not giving up my cheap electricity and gasoline and you can't make me' describes literally over 90% of the human race
I disagree with David on a great many things, but in this case he is correct; the entire course of human history and certainly the entire course of "economic development" and human flourishing have been the story of how we've commanded ever more energy to do the things we need.
The various technological paradigms which have enabled us to do so have *never* come in time to avoid environmental and social costs spilling over from the last paradigm, but never before has anyone ever asked us to simply stop using the last paradigm before the new one decisively outcompetes it.
If you look back far enough, the first major paradigm shift was from wood and charcoal to peat and coal; this came too late to prevent forest cover in Britain from dipping below 5% and China below 13%. Germany and France weren't much better, likely no higher than 15%. The use of coal and steam prevented this crisis from getting worse and created the conditions for the ongoing reforestation we see today in the developed world and China.
The transition from coal and animal power to oil and natural gas saved the day in a similar manner, from the grave health burdens imposed by widespread use of coal and from the unsustainable sanitation issues presented by horses in urban centers, but again, not in time to prevent serious damage to humanity and the natural environment which has largely since been rolled back.
If we take these transitions as the model, and we should and indeed must because no one is ever going to listen to you, then we will first cause a significant degree of anthropocentric climate change before successfully transitioning away from an energy paradigm which requires it; in so doing, we will make energy sufficiently abundant to start reversing the damage we've caused without ruinous cost to people's standard of living.
"Conservation" is simply *not* going to happen, and the people who are immiserated by that fact need to better understand the history behind all this and stop panicking about it.
I do think there's another element you're missing, which is that all the choices individual people make still don't add up to very much.
Even if every person ate less meat, had a more efficient car that they used less, and used less AC, you'd still have all the emissions from industry, trucking, other agriculture, etc. that aren't impacted.
Specific stats on this seem hard to come by from IPCC data, but a quick search suggests that in Canada, residential consumption of electricity (and that's all electricity, not just heat and AC) accounts for just 4% of the country's GHG emissions.
Trying to reduce our energy use in painless ways is of course a good idea -- although I'd argue what you're suggesting isn't truly painless -- but in any case it really won't get us very far.
"could be made much more eco-friendly without destroying people's quality of life"
"Here is what I would do, if I could (I realize this would be super unpopular, which is why I will never run for public office)"
This seems like the real contradiction to me. Different people have different definitions of "quality of life". To you it's not a downgrade to live in a more dense walkable neighborhood where you rarely drive - in fact it's probably an upgrade. But to many, being forced to downsize their house and house/yard and share transportation with a lot of other people will be a downgrade in quality of life.
Also I think the other problem with trying to sell this proposition is that people can look to Europe, where people already do live this lower carbon lifestyle, and... if anything the calls that "we must change our lifestyles to save the climate" are even louder than in the US. Basically, even if David Abbott were happy to live like a European, I don't think he would trust that climate activists who succeed at getting America to be like Europe will stop there.
The point is not to SUBSIDIZE our space- and energy-maximizing ways. Car-centric and expansive suburban design has been favored by policies, so we should stop doing that and favor denser, less car-dependent design. (Which is more affordable in the long run if done right.) People can make choices, but a lot of families might not have to afford two cars or buy an expensive detached house.
You are correct, and I probably didn't phrase my original comment correctly.
What I should have said, there is a difference between "discomfort/inconvenience" on one hand and "deprivation/suffering" on the other. Would switching to a denser lifestyle and giving up their backyard be a downgrade/uncomfortable/inconvenient for some Americans? Sure. Would it constitute suffering or "destruction" of one's quality of life? I would argue no. I'm not telling people to live in a shack with an outhouse and a water well to reduce their eco impact.
In any case, I do recognize that many Americans wouldn't like it, which I was trying to get at with my "would be super unpopular" comment.
I don't have good answers here. The whole clash of short-term self-interest and long-term wellbeing is depressing.
"I realize this would be super unpopular." Yeah, climate is personally my number 1 issue, but I realize that the only way we seemingly can make any progress on climate in most cases is electing Democrats (as we saw with the IRA passing, or with state-level governmental actions in places like Washington or Minnesota)--which means at all costs Democrats need to be popular! And that means rigorously balancing on climate-related issues--thinking carefully about what's actually worth pursuing to reduce carbon/methane emissions given the potential reactionary blowback (and the result of Dems being voted out). That's why the tech positive outlook of Biden's approach--subsidies for green tech like your electric car or heat pump, subsidies for green industries, more jobs jobs jobs--is the best way forward.
Just tax carbon and lean into housing libertarianism/YIMBYism. Let people decide where they want to economize on carbon. If someone wants to live in a studio apartment and e-bike everywhere so they can afford multiple international flights per year, so be it. If someone wants to keep their house at 70F by never flying, so be it.
I think this line of discussion leads back to a carbon tax, with market forces driving consumers and businesses to find the optimal carbon reduction solutions - preferable to regulatory micromanagement that inevitably gets squeezed through the political sausage factory.
I simply can't see it, from a historical perspective. Our entire history, prehistory too, has been about commanding increasing amounts of energy to do useful work, more easily and more swiftly, for more people.
That's it.
Fuck "reduce, reuse, recycle." We need to fight our way into the next energy paradigm and ensure that everyone on the globe can leave their 2,000 sq. ft. house at 68 in the winter and 73 in the summer at trivial cost financially and environmentally by the time we die.
I _really_ hate feeling too hot inside in winter or too cold inside in summer. It's uncomfortable AND wasteful.
I will say at a large office/shopping area this is tricky because we don't all agree, at my home office thankfully it is set to "nice when the A/C is blowing air, a touch uncomfortable when not, but that's what a fan is for"
As an HVAC engineer, one thing a lot of people don't realize is that cold temps in commercial buildings often *aren't* because of the setpoints being turned too low.
Basically, every room needs a minimum supply of outdoor air at all times for air quality. This outdoor air is generally cooled in the summer to remove the humidity. This can cause the room temperature to fall below the cooling setpoint, and keep dropping until the heat comes on (yes, in the middle of the summer) - which will feel cold for most people.
The thing though is that for a lot of complicated reasons relating to obsolete control technology, this minimum airflow has traditionally been set way higher than it needs to be. One piece of low hanging fruit is to reduce these minimum airflow setpoints, which can save tons of energy while also increasing comfort.
"Basically, every room needs a minimum supply of outdoor air at all times for air quality"
"obsolete control technology, this minimum airflow has traditionally been set way higher than it needs to be."
I get that these are probably too high from a tech standpoint, but of course from an infectious disease standpoint having good flow is nice - would you reduce the setpoint but increase filtration?
I mean, what is it we expect people facing expensive gasoline to do? Living in a walkable or transit-served neighborhood is already so in demand that it stretches the means of the professional class. EV transition is going as fast as manufacturing allows for. Maybe smaller cars? Seems like fixing the perverse incentives in CAFE would be a better place to start there than squeezing consumers. Less air travel? That’s more about institutional capacity to build and operate railways. Average consumer facing high gas prices is not in a position to solve these problems. They are however in a position to support Republicans who will make them worse in the guise of protecting/restoring a way of life.
"Average consumer facing high gas prices is not in a position to solve these problems."
Absolutely! I'm not trying to beat up on the average American for not moving to a walkable neighborhood when such neighborhoods are unavailable/unaffordable.
Just, this is a choice that we, Americans, made collectively as a society over *multiple decades.* We could have, should have built more walkable neighborhoods. Anyway, walkable neighborhoods are like trees: "The best time to plant a tree/build a walkable neighborhood, was 20 years ago; the second best time is now."
FWIW, the massive heat wave we are seeing this year (and maybe for the next couple years) is likely more related to the volcano that erupted last year in Tonga than to climate change in general:
That’s an interesting thread but it quite explicitly claims that the biggest factors are man-made greenhouse gases and El Niño, and that the eruption _may_ be adding to it. It’s nowhere near as strong a claim as your comment implies.
I'm not claiming that global temperatures aren't getting higher without the effects of this eruption, because they are (caused by climate change and El Nino). I'm claiming that the few incredible extremes we have seen this are also related to the eruption, and not just climate change.
I'm not making a claim about anything climate related, I am just pointing out that the _thread_ was explicit about _not_ claiming that recent weather is more related to the eruption than climate change. I have no idea if or to what extent the eruption drove the heatwave (seems likely that a massive eruption would have near term weather impacts!), I do know what that thread argues though.
Cooling happens when ash is spewed into the atmosphere and then reflects sunlight back into space. This was an underwater eruption, so didn't get that effect.
"Most of these particles fall out of the atmosphere within rain a few hours or days after an eruption. But the smallest particles of dust get into the stratosphere and are able to travel vast distances, often worldwide. These tiny particles are so light that they can stay in the stratosphere for months, blocking sunlight and causing cooling over large areas of the Earth."
I am a pragmatist. I think that cold kills more people than heat, that most of the human harms from climate change can be mitigated through sea walls and air conditioning, and I don’t particularly care about polar bears.
I also know voters aren’t willing to sacrifice to achieve the kinds of quick reductions y’all liberals want.
I’m happy to invest 1% of gdp in developing and subsidizing clean energy technologies, but that’s it. Most people care more about their power and gas bills today than the weather after they die.
So? I'm not proposing trying to make the Earth extra cold. We can provide adequate heat to people in cold climates AND strive to reduce our overall energy use/switch to less CO2-intensive energy.
"most of the human harms from climate change can be mitigated through sea walls and air conditioning"
If temperatures get too high, we're going to get crop failures, because most of our staple crops are adapted to current temperatures. Likewise, a lot of the world's population depends on their food for irrigation from mountain glaciers (e.g. in the Himalayas), and as temperature rises, those glaciers go bye-bye.
How are you going to mitigate massive food shortages in poor countries and all the knock-on effects (social unrest, possibly war, massive flows of desperate refugees, etc.) with "sea walls and air conditioning"?
Here are a few other fun effects of climate change that can't be mitigated with sea walls and AC:
-more wildfires; a major insurance company just told me and my husband that they will no longer insure our house, because we're considered too high a fire risk (we're in SoCal)
-more tropical diseases spreading north (e.g., mosquito-borne diseases)
-evergreen trees being devastated by pine borers that survive and multiply much better in warm climates (and if you DGAF about forests as such, consider where lumber and paper come from)
I'm sure I can think of more, but I have to go back to work now.
Edited to add: I have great respect for this commentariat, which consists mostly of thoughtful, reasonable people, and any exceptions are swiftly ejected *cough*spiky*cough*.
And here I am, gently suggesting slightly lower energy use in exchange for lower CO2 emissions, and multiple people have told me (accurately, no doubt) that it will never work, forget it, Jake, it's human nature.
Cold fusion better get ready for prime time *fast,* is all I have to say.
Basically, you're asking me to lower my standard of living in exchange for improving some future person's standard. But I reject the premise for a few reasons, including (1) I don't know that future person so what do I owe them, (2) I don't know for sure that climate change will negatively impact them, and (3) technology will hopefully make it all a moot point anyway (it essentially will have to at this point), in which case my sacrifice is meaningless.
That being said, I, for example, drive a hybrid car. Not because I especially care about the environment (I do on some level of course), or even saving on gas, but because it was the best option in the lineup I was looking at. Make climate-conscious choices competitive and people will get on board without issue. We haven't lowered our emissions in the US to levels last seen a century ago just because everyone started caring about it.
Your 8 year old son can move plenty of places that will have great weather if the earth gets several degrees warmer: Maine, vermont, upstate ny, michigan. Alaska would still be too cold, but western canada isn’t that hard to emigrate to
Yes, but how many of those voters are in swing states? I feel like your mostly likely to lose voters in CA, NY etc and gain voters in Ohio, Florida, AZ so a win in presidential politics.
I mean on net. Yes all big cities are blue. But being blue isn't enough here (black, union and even some Bernie voters probably like this). And for all Madison has a hippie vibe it is ultimately in the Midwest and having spent time at schools in Berkeley and Madison it's no Berkeley. So yah you'll lose some votes there but will it be a net loss?
As I said, I suspect it does, but all three of the Blue Wall have major areas with lots of high-propensity voters who are very, very left-leaning on this particular issue, so it's not without costs.
You're right that it will hurt more *statewide* in places like CA or MA, but it's not terribly clear-cut that it helps in the blue-tinted swing states that we generally win.
I can't speak for Ann Arbor or Philly, but the People's Republic of Madison is more pragmatic than you give it credit for. Big vibes of "vote now, vote every election, vote like your life depends on it".
But Philly is mainly black and they are more into pocket book issues than climate. I also think energy abundance pencils out electorally, but it would be great having data. The best I can come up with is this, but it doesn’t ask about expanding drilling. It just tells us 68% of voters don’t want to phase out fossil fuels.
Yes, but my point is that Greater Philly has about as many serious environmentalist voters in absolute terms as the other two, and that number in all three cases is well in excess of the margin of victory in those states.
Luckily there's some serious overlap between those folks and the pro-choice demographic that's been highly energized so as I said I suspect it pencils out. It's just not completely obvious that it does so.
Pittsburgh proper is tiny compared to Philadelphia proper, which is the whole county.
The entirety of Allegheny County does occasionally, in off-year elections, have a sufficient turnout differential that its raw vote totals are larger than Philadelphia County's, as in 2022's gubernatorial race. But almost never in presidential election years, and Allegheny County makes up a much larger fraction of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area (1.3 million of 2.5 million) than Philadelphia County does of the Delaware Valley (1.6 million of 4.8 million) even if we limit our consideration to the portions thereof in PA.
Long-ass way of saying "no, absolutely not." Not at the city, county, or metropolitan level.
I'm not sure the loud and proud for drilling is necessary. The pocket book swing voters aren't dogmatic, they aren't in favor of drilling for the sake of drilling. What they do care about is gas prices, inflation, and predictability. I think saying we're going to manage AMERICAN OIL for the American people works better. We're going to make sure that while we make this transition the price at the pump stays reasonable, that means dictators don't dictate our prices, oil companies don't get windfall profits, and we invest in the infrastructure necessary for American oil to supply our needs while we continue to make the smartest use of it.
At the furthest edge the leave it all in the ground folks will always be mad. But people who care about climate change can be kept happy by emphasizing the change taking place, while Joe from Scranton doesn't have to go to the gas pump and see his car drinking one of his six packs.
It’s a speech on American Energy Abundance. The first energy transformation is the boost that Biden has given to domestic oil and gas, SPR, etc. Take all the credit back from Obama. Be shameless. The second energy transformation needs more explanation bc we are switching fuels. Explain the realistic scale and timeline for this part (i.e. gas car sale bans do not end gasoline pumps). Celebrate the IRA. Explain why the 1st does not interfere with the 2nd.
Close with a comment about how other countries underperforming USA on the 2nd transformation will buy our oil. No idea if that is true, but it sounds like it could be true.
Some enviros may be pissy, but most will get it. As is it, Extinction Rebellion folks already dismiss the IRA as a half measure.
I think he was right to do the latter. It's one thing to brag about high levels of production; it's another to open the door to long-term production in the Arctic.
But in the end, I don't think pounding his chest about high levels of oil production is a political winner for Biden and he should only keep it in reserve as a response to Republican criticisms rather than "bragging" about it. Americans care about the price of gas (and heating oil), and telling them it's never been better for oil production when they can see that gas prices remain really high, certainly compared to the Trump years, is not going to win them over (https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=emm_epm0_pte_nus_dpg&f=m). Instead, they'll just think you're out of touch.
Republicans are pounding their chests saying oil prices are high because Biden is decimating the American oil industry. This makes intuitive sense to a lot of people--prices go up because we can't drill for oil here anymore--but it's a fantasy. Biden needs to be able to forcibly respond--highest level of production ever, energy independence, two-pronged approach on energy (both roll out green tech (jobs! savings for your family!) and support continued oil drilling allowing for a smooth transition). I don't think he can "keep it in reserve as a response to Republican criticisms"--those criticisms are happening *right now*, creating a damaging out-of-touch reputation for Biden *right now*, and need to be countered right now--forcibly and repeatedly through November 2024.
It's an interesting conjecture, Dave, but given the Republicans want to get rid of the IRA I wonder if environmentalists would consider it's still worth voting for Democrats. Alas this is an empirical question and I wonder if the research would ever be done.
Interesting to read this after reading yesterday that the "Biden Administration to Bar Drilling on Millions of Acres in Alaska drilling in Alaska" including canceling leases signed by Trump. It's very possible that those leases were a bad idea and blocking further exploration there is good. But the messaging contrast between what is advocated in this article and that NYT article is strong.
the unspoken truth here is that literally since the Obama administration all the big O&G companies, while still wanting to push for these leases as a sort of moral victory, also quietly understand them to be rather long shot opportunities that are not worth the investment they would take to significantly expand production. Mostly what gets done is incrementally expanding drilling in places where drilling has been done (and production declining) for decades.
Production from the Arctic is a fraction of what it was in the 1980s (when Alaska alone produced 3% of world supply) and on the whole the entire Arctic production is a fraction of what Alaska produced then (and 90% of that is Russian production).
I could understand the impulse to take an easy win with environmentalists and ban drilling/production where its unlikely to happen anyway. However, its probably going to reinforce the normie perspective that Democrats care more about the environment than they do your pocketbook.
Instead they could trumpet that they're for more oil production, including ANWR and talk about how much more oil we're producing now. If nobody takes them up on ANWR because it wasn't economically feasible, they would make environmentalists mad about the messaging, but it would probably win them more votes with the swing voters they need without actually being bad for the environment.
I think the only reason Biden / Obama and others even consider these incremental Arctic drilling leases is that their main concern is keeping some minimal footprint and jobs in that region sustainable. Basically I see this as a jobs program more than anything else...because once these companies leave...they aint gonna go back. It's cheaper to just keep the lights on.
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.
That's the thing that drives me nuts on both sides of the equation...
We need oil for shit that is soooo much more valuable than torching it in a car that it's not even funny, and most of those use cases cannot be replaced with any existing or emergent technology.
So pretending that we won't always be drilling it is delusional. But acting like we should continue using it as a combustion fuel in everything once the technology exists not to is also delusional. We need to align the incentives structure for various uses to conserve it for shit we cannot yet replace as technologies mature. In most cases the technologies in question maturing will do most of the work, as they did in power generation, for example, but there may be instances where we have no choice but to enact a tax.
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.
I imagine they're both quite niche pursuits, though I'd not care to wager which side is larger or more rabid about it.
The EV transition is going to look like every other technological paradigm shift: slow, then fast.
We're on the cusp of fast.
And once we've proven that it can be done here it'll set people to taking all the foundational infrastructure transition problems seriously, and get the public thinking it can be done without hurting them.
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 think at this point the auto manufacturers are quite aware that fucking Electrify America is worthless, VW should have been expelled from the country and fined the entire value of its assets here, and they need to form their own consortium to take this problem seriously. They're obviously going to adopt Tesla's standard as their own, they just need to start building their own charging stations along those lines and make sure they're ready for 800V architecture on the charger side as well.
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.
That depends on your definition of slow, of course, but I would suggest that roughly 30 years, one generation, to change the entire nature of personal ground transport is actually pretty damned quick. The great majority of those who owned a horse in 1920 were alive to own a car in 1940. The number of horses and mules halved in those 20 years, then halved again in the next ten and again in the next five.
There are more *now* than there were in 1955 as they've become an affectation for moderately wealthy people, and that's exactly what I expect ICEVs to be in 2123.
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.
Would not the "announcement" also be a good time to very publicly approve some "controviertial pipeline project, like the WV-new England gas pipeline, reneging on which was: another Schumer F---up?
I largely agree with you in the short term. However, the idea that we can achieve decarbonization just by funding research and some fleet standards is implausible.
The policy you are suggesting sends private enterprise the clear signal that: oil products will stay cheap in the long term. That means the only places where non-carbon products will replace carbon ones are the places where oil is luckily the more expensive option *intrinsically* and we are running out of the low hanging fruit. Oil is a fucking great fuel source so it would be crazy if it turned out just not to make sense to dig up that shit in the ground that's super useful and energy dense.
Ultimately, unless you apply so much subsidy you've effectively implemented a shit carbon tax I don't see how you can hope to hit carbon goals w/o a carbon tax.
Though I also don't understand why it would be so hard to get a deal on a carbon tax if you offer to do it revenue nuetral and cut whatever taxes buisness/GOP hate in exchange. I get the distrust of environmentalists and environmentalism. I felt it so strongly growing up I demanded my biology teacher offer my extra credit to write a letter to my congresspeople opposing saving the rain forest (just bc I felt like I was being fed a story w/o counterpoints). But if you think your getting something just as good who cares? Your still exchanging a tax w/ negative externality for one with a non-negative one.
Is your claim that it will become cheaper to use almost only carbon free energy to power the grid? Yes, innovation can bring down the price of solar panels and wind below oil power but even the people working on energy storage don't predict it will be so cheap that storage plus wind/solar will be cheaper. That means we keep using gas to make up difference whenever renewable generation falls below demand and without expensive long distance transmission it's highly correlated so they'll be lots of gas usage.
And that's just for electric generation. Transit is another sector where carbon sources will be cheaper into the foreseeable future. Commuter vehicles may shift to electric for the performance benefits and if we are very lucky batteries get cheap enough to make EVs cheaper than gas for virtually all cars. But it's not very plausible for airplanes ships and long distance trucking.
It's possible in all these areas it's just more costly and all the people exploring the tech now because they predict future higher oil prices will stop if we make it clear it's not happening. And on top of this you have all sorts of miscellaneous uses.
"Is your claim that it will become cheaper to use almost only carbon free energy to power the grid?"
It will have to be, otherwise, decarbonization on a meaningful scale will be nearly impossible. Any solution that expects people to pay *more* for electricity for the sake of the climate would be too politically unpopular to work.
We're not there yet, but with prices of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries all falling, things are at least trending in the right direction.
But no one is asking them to pay more **overall** they get to take home more money in their paycheck because it's revenue nuetral so they pay less in income tax. Sure, some ppl will pay slightly more if they use lots of electricity and others slightly less but that's true of any and all tax changes and can be phased in.
I don't think anyone projects us to reach a point where it's literally cheaper to use little enough carbon to hit meaningful CO2 targets. Sure solar and wind are quite cheap but the limiting factor isn't the price of solar or wind it's the cost to store/transport that energy when there isn't wind/solar. And even the most optimistic predictions about battery tech and the availability of pumped hydro render that super expensive (it's an absurd amount of power storage we need)
If we want serious decarbonization to happen, technology has to reach the point that market forces make it happen on its own - without depending on governments to support the cleaner options directly.
Government intervention in favor of clean energy tech is important in the early days to produce the economies of scale necessary to get the costs down, but in the long term, it has to be economically sustainable on its own; otherwise, the moment the political winds change and the incentives stop, people will just go right back to doing things the dirty way again. Not to mention that the world has over 100 different governments who can barely agree on anything. But the human desire to avoid overpaying for stuff (including energy) is universal.
What is the particular problem with long distance trucking? There is already a private-sector infrastructure that caters to the demands of truckers, and it's an example of a mode of transportation (a significant fraction of which) that begins and ends their trips at a logistics node.
Yes, ofc we can't do it all on our own. But China lmay come onboard if the other industrialized countries do it for real (not being a democracy they weigh citizen consumption less and it creates a potential excuse for leadership who know they can't maintain rate of growth). At the ultimate extreme, if the EU and US actually pass real carbon taxes we can threaten China with sanctions to sign on but we have to first do it ourselves (so far the EU just talks like they care more but haven't done much different than we have).
Now if it cost us something to do that, sure it would be a big risk but the government needs money one way or another and replacing a tax on something we want companies to do (make money, pay wages etc) with one that takes in the same amount of money but taxes something that, even aside from global warming, we'd prefer less of (particulate emissions, various other harms) isn't a cost it's a benefit.
I think the most important thing is to make sure that as developing countries become richer and greater energy users, as we all want them to do, that they do so by using carbon-free sources of energy. India is hugely expanding their use of solar power. I don't know how many new fossil fuel power plants they're building (though they're considering stopping any new coal plants) but it's important that we do everything we can to help them tilt toward carbon-free with each new plant.
In terms of real politics that means passing out own carbon tax. We'll never convince voters to pay other countries to decarbonize if we won't even pass relatively costless laws for ourselves and no developing country is going to take a request to do what we haven't seriously.
Not necessarily - if renewables/nuclear/w/e get cheap enough because we've managed it at scale it might become cost effective for those countries to build them as well.
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.
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.
As regards China, at least, this is overly pessimistic. China is also building a significant amount of nuclear generating capacity, still more hydro than it's already built out, and windmills and PV farms are popping up like toadstools.
The reality is that, like basically everything else that passes for "economic policy" under the risk-averse idiots running the show right now, continued investment in thermal power is a jobs program, nothing else.
They are desperately afraid of the employment dislocations which would result in already poor Shaanxi, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia if they scaled back mining operations, and their power sector EPC firms are even more structurally important to employment stability nationwide.
But the result is them overbuilding grid capacity by a factor of perhaps 2 or more. And since the operating costs for everything other than coal are lower than for coal, that's the part of the grid that will get mothballed when it becomes apparent they don't need it and all the miners are retired or dead of old age in 20 years.
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.
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.
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.”
I think a decent number of people (myself included) are literally worried about his health. It also seems likely that the lack of public presence is downstream, not upstream from the health question. Luckily he’s probably running against a 78 year old obese man, so it’s not a bigger issue.
Worst case is if its marginal or not clear. If he's clearly gone then there is a process to step in. But if he just has "bad days" or "it gets worse at night" then we're in a very dangerous place should "something" happen at one of those moments.
I think that the messaging is tricky here. Biden is trying to both tout the clean energy aspects of his policy and not give Republicans an opening around high energy prices. This isn't just placating lefty environmental groups. Climate policy will probably be one of the Biden Administration's biggest legacies. That spending is intended to win over at least some cross-pressured voters by investing in industry. They're clearly interested in making a big deal out of it.
Dealing with the SPR and production to deal with short term energy price spikes makes sense, but it muddies this message to any voters sophisticated enough to have a strong opinion about emissions. Why are we doing this climate spending and boosting oil production? Matt makes a coherent case for it, but I don't think there's as much upside to leading with it as Matt thinks. I think most of the truly economy-focused voters are mostly just gonna look at gas price fluctuations.
Richard Nixon infamously pumped up the economy leading into the 1972 elections. The voters punished him for that brazen cynical act by only giving him a 49 state victory.
I strongly encourage -- nay, demand! -- that next summer Biden turn the taps on the SPR wide open, flood the market, and cause gas prices to fall by half. Republicans will shriek and the bien pensants at the New York Times and the Washington Post will repair to their fainting couches, but the Biden team will laugh all the way to a second term.
And, indeed, if we (rightly!) see Trump's return to the White House as an existential threat to our democracy, who could argue with using such completely legal tactics to prevent that disaster?
Sure, but I don't think there's any electoral upside in making a big to-do about it. If this prevents a spike in gas prices, that'll help without the cheerleading, which will only muddy their message.
The message should be that, in the short-medium term, the administration is doing what it can to keep gas prices from getting out of hand. But, it is also layout out the groundwork for a long-term future where nobody has worry about the price of gas ever again.
That's it. The fact that "not needing to worry about the price of gas ever again" (meaning that the cars are all electric) is also better for the climate need not even be mentioned.
I'll also add that any energy permitting grand bargain will probably need some bipartisan support and go through Secret Congress. Leading with oil production stats and the SPR (which Matt pointed out is vulnerable to political games) might make that harder by raising the partisan valence of the issue.
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.
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 political problem with this message is probably more the money giving elements of Biden's coalition. Both large donors and small are motivated by the oil companies are evil message, and I assume they are trying to build their war chest right now. But, assuming Trump starts winning primaries that should take care of itself.
And, I think selling it as promoting energy abundance, energy independence and price stability would be a good general election message.
Working in the gas energy sector my company has a weird relationship with oil politics.
On one hand gas/oil bad which should make us favor Republicans, but on the other hand... renewables and restrictions on Coal have really helped my company out. Gas turbines are really the only practical sources of peak demand with renewables. Yes I know in 30-years or so, we will be out of business unless there is a break through with Hydrogen. (New gas turbines are designed with the potential to run hydrogen)
I work maintenance on gas power plants, and we are struggling to hire enough technicians to work our outages. This October we are at 120% demand (jobs to personnel). Next spring will be our busiest year ever.
Anyway, if anyone knows young kids who want to go into blue collar technical work... there are high paying jobs!
Combustion is a heck of a technology. The *source* of some of the hydrocarbons we're burning can be troublesome, but darn if it wouldn't be wild to engineer some yeast to eat biomass and fart out ethanol, or whatever.
The energy per mass and per volume just can't yet be beat (and because you don't need to bring your oxidizer or equivalent with you, I'm skeptical that batteries of any type will ever match it).
Biogas. We have units that burn it. The big thing these days is syngas which is synthetic. We also burn hydrogen/gas mixes.
Are we doing coal gasification here in the US?
I am not sure.
Batteries will never match it, but electric motors are so vastly more efficient than combustion engines that they fortunately don't have to come anywhere close for ground transport.
Air, we've discussed before. Closed-cycle synthetic fuel or CCS, all the way.
"Yes I know in 30-years or so, we will be out of business unless there is a break through with Hydrogen."
Not sure it'll be quite that fast, but in any case I wouldn't be so sure hydrogen breakthroughs are a good thing for O&G on that time scale or longer. Better CCS would be, for sure, but more efficient hydrogen usage and storage don't favor blue over green or vice versa. The biggest potential for not-yet-realized breakthroughs are lower capex for electrolysis and more efficient CCU to make synthetic fuels (jet, diesel, marine, aka the harder-to-decarbonize transportation sectors). There are already places in the world where solar power is closing in on 2 cents/kWh. That works out to somewhere on the order of $3 of electricity to make the hydrogen energy equivalent of a gallon of gas, but capex is still very high as well and in most places the energy costs are much higher than that.
I am curious, too, how decarbonization of some sectors (say, passenger vehicle electrification) will affect the price of oil, if it will significantly change relative demand for different fractions.
To me, this is all a reminder that we should not be picking and choosing the "winning" technologies as a matter of law and policy and silver bullets--we should be identifying the outcome we actually care about (say, net grams of CO2 per lifecycle passenger-mile, or whatever) and we'll find out what technology or combination of technologies achieves it.
You are smarter than I am!
Maybe, maybe not, but I'm still confused about lots of details and regularly disagree with others about this in all kinds of ways!
I *do* see lots of places starting to invest in co-firing hydrogen and natural gas, and in blue hydrogen production, but I see that as more of a stop-gap for the next decade or so as other tech matures.
The nice thing about hydrogen mix is it significantly reduces emissions while eliminating a lot of the hydrogen storage and transportation issues (if pipes are updated). Maybe its a dead end technology, maybe not. Hard to predict technology.
My company is invested in/building the first solar powered hydrogen electrolysis paired with turbine generation plant project. https://www.siemens-energy.com/mea/en/company/megaprojects/dewa-green-hydrogen-project.html
Agreed, and I'll be thrilled as long as some sufficient subset of relevant technologies scales well enough to push us to full decarbonization within my lifetime.
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/
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:
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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)
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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)
"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 would imagine we're talking about something analogous to a hybrid, where I can optimize the hell out of the combustion because the battery smooths the power curve when needed?
How many left wing voters would stay home or vote for a third party if Biden becomes out and proud about encouraging oil drilling? In a normal cycle, I would worry that environmental activists are the kind of feckless idealists who would happily throw away their votes. This year, Trump’s authoritarian tendencies should unite the left. Soccer moms who think Trump is icky but need cheap gas for their SUVs are a bigger constituency than neo-pastoralists who would heighten the contradictions to destroy the economy.
See, this makes me terribly sad.
I am a liberal. Of freaking course I will vote for Biden even if he’s 100% for “drill baby drill,” because the alternative is horrific. I will crawl over broken glass to vote for Biden and against Agent Orange.
At the same time, climate change is, to use a Bidenism, a big f**king deal, and it scares me. British Columbia is on fire, this past summer we had unprecedented heat waves over large parts of the US, I have an 8-year-old and I don’t want him to grow up in a world damaged by climate change.
I want us to work hard on reducing CO2 emissions, not cater to soccer moms who are upset about paying more to fill up their goddamn 18 MPG SUVs.
Are those ideas in conflict? We can work hard at reducing CO2 emissions, but we're still going to need a lot of petroleum into the foreseeable future. It seems to me that while we work hard at the former we simultaneously need to strategically supply ourselves so that our fate is in our own hands and not subject to the whims of the worst actors on the planet. That means we have to get passed the idea that any oil removed from the ground is bad and should be opposed. Canceling leases that we can legally get out of in Alaska and other public lands is good. Thinking we're not going to continue the shale projects and pipelines in the lower 48 seems foolish.
We need a both/and strategy: both expand renewable energy sources AND reduce the overall amount of energy we use.
Please don't misunderstand me. I never said "any oil removed from the ground is bad and should be opposed," and I'm not some kind of pastoral anti-modernist who thinks we should wind back the clock to the 1500s. I love modern technology and recognize the enormous improvements in quality of life made possible by fossil fuels!
Just, the typical middle-class American lifestyle is horrendously energy intensive, and could be made much more eco-friendly without destroying people's quality of life.
Here is what I would do, if I could (I realize this would be super unpopular, which is why I will never run for public office):
- a lot fewer sprawling, car-dependent suburbs; a lot more walkable, public transit-friendly, mixed-use neighborhoods where you can get around (go to/from work, school, child's daycare, run errands other than heavy-duty shopping, entertainment, meeting with friends, going to the doctor) on foot, by bicycle, or by public transit. Cars exist, but are used occasionally, mainly for weekly grocery shopping and weekend trips out of the city.
-The cars that do exist are smaller and more fuel-efficient, except when needed (like, if your job requires you to haul a pickup truck's worth of tools/equipment with you).
-A lot less meat consumption - meat is much worse in terms of CO2 emissions than plant-based foods.
-Go easy on air conditioning! When you go inside a building on a hot summer day, the sensation should be "this is a pleasant respite from the heat outside," not "OMG it's freaking freezing in here, where's my sweater?"
I'm sure I could think of others, but that would be a great start. (Also impossible, I know, but one can dream.)
Matt recently commented on Twitter that he lives does most of what you recommend (not sure about the meat consumption or AC), but his CO2 consumption is still wildly higher than most Indians. Americans are already consuming less CO2 and probably will over time, but all of that will be dwarfed as billions of poor people become wealthier and consume more. That has to be solved with technology.
I mean, you're absolutely right about how even Matt Y's relatively low-CO2 lifestyle (by American standards) is still super high-CO2 relative to rural India and such.
On the other hand, we live in a democracy, not an eco-dictatorship, and hence we must consider people like David Abbott here, who are like "IDGAF about polar bears, I'm not giving up my cheap electricity and gasoline and you can't make me."
It's the tragedy of the human condition!
You're right that we need technological fixes, just, we don't have anything that will scale up quickly enough, so we should simultaneously push for technological advances *and* try to reduce our energy use in relatively painless ways as much as the David Abbotts of the US electorate will allow.
I think what you're missing is that opposition to (essentially) living a poorer lifestyle is not just 'the David Abbotts of the US electorate'. It is most humans in all countries everywhere, all over the globe. Preaching a voluntary kind of asceticism is just not realistic on a multi-billion person scale. Either way we find a technological deus ex machina magic solution or we're screwed. But 'IDGAF about polar bears, I'm not giving up my cheap electricity and gasoline and you can't make me' describes literally over 90% of the human race
I disagree with David on a great many things, but in this case he is correct; the entire course of human history and certainly the entire course of "economic development" and human flourishing have been the story of how we've commanded ever more energy to do the things we need.
The various technological paradigms which have enabled us to do so have *never* come in time to avoid environmental and social costs spilling over from the last paradigm, but never before has anyone ever asked us to simply stop using the last paradigm before the new one decisively outcompetes it.
If you look back far enough, the first major paradigm shift was from wood and charcoal to peat and coal; this came too late to prevent forest cover in Britain from dipping below 5% and China below 13%. Germany and France weren't much better, likely no higher than 15%. The use of coal and steam prevented this crisis from getting worse and created the conditions for the ongoing reforestation we see today in the developed world and China.
The transition from coal and animal power to oil and natural gas saved the day in a similar manner, from the grave health burdens imposed by widespread use of coal and from the unsustainable sanitation issues presented by horses in urban centers, but again, not in time to prevent serious damage to humanity and the natural environment which has largely since been rolled back.
If we take these transitions as the model, and we should and indeed must because no one is ever going to listen to you, then we will first cause a significant degree of anthropocentric climate change before successfully transitioning away from an energy paradigm which requires it; in so doing, we will make energy sufficiently abundant to start reversing the damage we've caused without ruinous cost to people's standard of living.
"Conservation" is simply *not* going to happen, and the people who are immiserated by that fact need to better understand the history behind all this and stop panicking about it.
I do think there's another element you're missing, which is that all the choices individual people make still don't add up to very much.
Even if every person ate less meat, had a more efficient car that they used less, and used less AC, you'd still have all the emissions from industry, trucking, other agriculture, etc. that aren't impacted.
Specific stats on this seem hard to come by from IPCC data, but a quick search suggests that in Canada, residential consumption of electricity (and that's all electricity, not just heat and AC) accounts for just 4% of the country's GHG emissions.
Trying to reduce our energy use in painless ways is of course a good idea -- although I'd argue what you're suggesting isn't truly painless -- but in any case it really won't get us very far.
"could be made much more eco-friendly without destroying people's quality of life"
"Here is what I would do, if I could (I realize this would be super unpopular, which is why I will never run for public office)"
This seems like the real contradiction to me. Different people have different definitions of "quality of life". To you it's not a downgrade to live in a more dense walkable neighborhood where you rarely drive - in fact it's probably an upgrade. But to many, being forced to downsize their house and house/yard and share transportation with a lot of other people will be a downgrade in quality of life.
Also I think the other problem with trying to sell this proposition is that people can look to Europe, where people already do live this lower carbon lifestyle, and... if anything the calls that "we must change our lifestyles to save the climate" are even louder than in the US. Basically, even if David Abbott were happy to live like a European, I don't think he would trust that climate activists who succeed at getting America to be like Europe will stop there.
The point is not to SUBSIDIZE our space- and energy-maximizing ways. Car-centric and expansive suburban design has been favored by policies, so we should stop doing that and favor denser, less car-dependent design. (Which is more affordable in the long run if done right.) People can make choices, but a lot of families might not have to afford two cars or buy an expensive detached house.
You are correct, and I probably didn't phrase my original comment correctly.
What I should have said, there is a difference between "discomfort/inconvenience" on one hand and "deprivation/suffering" on the other. Would switching to a denser lifestyle and giving up their backyard be a downgrade/uncomfortable/inconvenient for some Americans? Sure. Would it constitute suffering or "destruction" of one's quality of life? I would argue no. I'm not telling people to live in a shack with an outhouse and a water well to reduce their eco impact.
In any case, I do recognize that many Americans wouldn't like it, which I was trying to get at with my "would be super unpopular" comment.
I don't have good answers here. The whole clash of short-term self-interest and long-term wellbeing is depressing.
"I realize this would be super unpopular." Yeah, climate is personally my number 1 issue, but I realize that the only way we seemingly can make any progress on climate in most cases is electing Democrats (as we saw with the IRA passing, or with state-level governmental actions in places like Washington or Minnesota)--which means at all costs Democrats need to be popular! And that means rigorously balancing on climate-related issues--thinking carefully about what's actually worth pursuing to reduce carbon/methane emissions given the potential reactionary blowback (and the result of Dems being voted out). That's why the tech positive outlook of Biden's approach--subsidies for green tech like your electric car or heat pump, subsidies for green industries, more jobs jobs jobs--is the best way forward.
Just tax carbon and lean into housing libertarianism/YIMBYism. Let people decide where they want to economize on carbon. If someone wants to live in a studio apartment and e-bike everywhere so they can afford multiple international flights per year, so be it. If someone wants to keep their house at 70F by never flying, so be it.
I agree with you on the merits, but unfortunately, CO2 tax is politically toxic, even in supposedly "green" states like Washington.
I think this line of discussion leads back to a carbon tax, with market forces driving consumers and businesses to find the optimal carbon reduction solutions - preferable to regulatory micromanagement that inevitably gets squeezed through the political sausage factory.
I simply can't see it, from a historical perspective. Our entire history, prehistory too, has been about commanding increasing amounts of energy to do useful work, more easily and more swiftly, for more people.
That's it.
Fuck "reduce, reuse, recycle." We need to fight our way into the next energy paradigm and ensure that everyone on the globe can leave their 2,000 sq. ft. house at 68 in the winter and 73 in the summer at trivial cost financially and environmentally by the time we die.
There's nothing more to it.
I _really_ hate feeling too hot inside in winter or too cold inside in summer. It's uncomfortable AND wasteful.
I will say at a large office/shopping area this is tricky because we don't all agree, at my home office thankfully it is set to "nice when the A/C is blowing air, a touch uncomfortable when not, but that's what a fan is for"
As an HVAC engineer, one thing a lot of people don't realize is that cold temps in commercial buildings often *aren't* because of the setpoints being turned too low.
Basically, every room needs a minimum supply of outdoor air at all times for air quality. This outdoor air is generally cooled in the summer to remove the humidity. This can cause the room temperature to fall below the cooling setpoint, and keep dropping until the heat comes on (yes, in the middle of the summer) - which will feel cold for most people.
The thing though is that for a lot of complicated reasons relating to obsolete control technology, this minimum airflow has traditionally been set way higher than it needs to be. One piece of low hanging fruit is to reduce these minimum airflow setpoints, which can save tons of energy while also increasing comfort.
Interesting! Thank you.
One question:
"Basically, every room needs a minimum supply of outdoor air at all times for air quality"
"obsolete control technology, this minimum airflow has traditionally been set way higher than it needs to be."
I get that these are probably too high from a tech standpoint, but of course from an infectious disease standpoint having good flow is nice - would you reduce the setpoint but increase filtration?
I mean, what is it we expect people facing expensive gasoline to do? Living in a walkable or transit-served neighborhood is already so in demand that it stretches the means of the professional class. EV transition is going as fast as manufacturing allows for. Maybe smaller cars? Seems like fixing the perverse incentives in CAFE would be a better place to start there than squeezing consumers. Less air travel? That’s more about institutional capacity to build and operate railways. Average consumer facing high gas prices is not in a position to solve these problems. They are however in a position to support Republicans who will make them worse in the guise of protecting/restoring a way of life.
"Average consumer facing high gas prices is not in a position to solve these problems."
Absolutely! I'm not trying to beat up on the average American for not moving to a walkable neighborhood when such neighborhoods are unavailable/unaffordable.
Just, this is a choice that we, Americans, made collectively as a society over *multiple decades.* We could have, should have built more walkable neighborhoods. Anyway, walkable neighborhoods are like trees: "The best time to plant a tree/build a walkable neighborhood, was 20 years ago; the second best time is now."
FWIW, the massive heat wave we are seeing this year (and maybe for the next couple years) is likely more related to the volcano that erupted last year in Tonga than to climate change in general:
https://twitter.com/RARohde/status/1685971656198545408?s=20
That’s an interesting thread but it quite explicitly claims that the biggest factors are man-made greenhouse gases and El Niño, and that the eruption _may_ be adding to it. It’s nowhere near as strong a claim as your comment implies.
I'm not claiming that global temperatures aren't getting higher without the effects of this eruption, because they are (caused by climate change and El Nino). I'm claiming that the few incredible extremes we have seen this are also related to the eruption, and not just climate change.
I'm not making a claim about anything climate related, I am just pointing out that the _thread_ was explicit about _not_ claiming that recent weather is more related to the eruption than climate change. I have no idea if or to what extent the eruption drove the heatwave (seems likely that a massive eruption would have near term weather impacts!), I do know what that thread argues though.
"...the _thread_ was explicit about _not_ claiming that recent weather is more related to the eruption than climate change"
Someone's really gotta punch up that prose. That's no way to earn click throughs.
Cooling happens when ash is spewed into the atmosphere and then reflects sunlight back into space. This was an underwater eruption, so didn't get that effect.
Cooling happens when *sulfur* gets spewed into the atmosphere and reflects sunlight. Ash doesn't stay in the atmosphere long enough to do anything.
<insert meme: why can't it be both>
"Most of these particles fall out of the atmosphere within rain a few hours or days after an eruption. But the smallest particles of dust get into the stratosphere and are able to travel vast distances, often worldwide. These tiny particles are so light that they can stay in the stratosphere for months, blocking sunlight and causing cooling over large areas of the Earth."
I've not read anything about sulfur regulations, but less sulfur in the atmosphere means less sunlight is reflected.
I am a pragmatist. I think that cold kills more people than heat, that most of the human harms from climate change can be mitigated through sea walls and air conditioning, and I don’t particularly care about polar bears.
I also know voters aren’t willing to sacrifice to achieve the kinds of quick reductions y’all liberals want.
I’m happy to invest 1% of gdp in developing and subsidizing clean energy technologies, but that’s it. Most people care more about their power and gas bills today than the weather after they die.
"cold kills more people than heat"
So? I'm not proposing trying to make the Earth extra cold. We can provide adequate heat to people in cold climates AND strive to reduce our overall energy use/switch to less CO2-intensive energy.
"most of the human harms from climate change can be mitigated through sea walls and air conditioning"
If temperatures get too high, we're going to get crop failures, because most of our staple crops are adapted to current temperatures. Likewise, a lot of the world's population depends on their food for irrigation from mountain glaciers (e.g. in the Himalayas), and as temperature rises, those glaciers go bye-bye.
How are you going to mitigate massive food shortages in poor countries and all the knock-on effects (social unrest, possibly war, massive flows of desperate refugees, etc.) with "sea walls and air conditioning"?
Here are a few other fun effects of climate change that can't be mitigated with sea walls and AC:
-more wildfires; a major insurance company just told me and my husband that they will no longer insure our house, because we're considered too high a fire risk (we're in SoCal)
-more tropical diseases spreading north (e.g., mosquito-borne diseases)
-evergreen trees being devastated by pine borers that survive and multiply much better in warm climates (and if you DGAF about forests as such, consider where lumber and paper come from)
I'm sure I can think of more, but I have to go back to work now.
the growing season is constructed by cold throughout canada and siberia and much of the upper midwest. higher temps mean greater ag yields
Edited to add: I have great respect for this commentariat, which consists mostly of thoughtful, reasonable people, and any exceptions are swiftly ejected *cough*spiky*cough*.
And here I am, gently suggesting slightly lower energy use in exchange for lower CO2 emissions, and multiple people have told me (accurately, no doubt) that it will never work, forget it, Jake, it's human nature.
Cold fusion better get ready for prime time *fast,* is all I have to say.
Basically, you're asking me to lower my standard of living in exchange for improving some future person's standard. But I reject the premise for a few reasons, including (1) I don't know that future person so what do I owe them, (2) I don't know for sure that climate change will negatively impact them, and (3) technology will hopefully make it all a moot point anyway (it essentially will have to at this point), in which case my sacrifice is meaningless.
That being said, I, for example, drive a hybrid car. Not because I especially care about the environment (I do on some level of course), or even saving on gas, but because it was the best option in the lineup I was looking at. Make climate-conscious choices competitive and people will get on board without issue. We haven't lowered our emissions in the US to levels last seen a century ago just because everyone started caring about it.
"Basically, you're asking me to lower my standard of living in exchange for improving some future person's standard."
In my case, "some future person" includes my eight-year-old son, whom I love above anyone else in the world, so... kinda... yeah?
I don't know what else to say. That's all I've got. Yes, of course people value their present well-being over some random future person.
Come on, cold fusion researchers, get on it!
Your 8 year old son can move plenty of places that will have great weather if the earth gets several degrees warmer: Maine, vermont, upstate ny, michigan. Alaska would still be too cold, but western canada isn’t that hard to emigrate to
Switching from conventional farming to regenerative farming will absorb that extra C02
Yes, but how many of those voters are in swing states? I feel like your mostly likely to lose voters in CA, NY etc and gain voters in Ohio, Florida, AZ so a win in presidential politics.
I'd be with you except for three words: Madison, Ann Arbor, Philadelphia.
Those are sapphire blue oases with a lot of the sorts of people we're discussing.
But it might still pencil out; I personally suspect it does.
I mean on net. Yes all big cities are blue. But being blue isn't enough here (black, union and even some Bernie voters probably like this). And for all Madison has a hippie vibe it is ultimately in the Midwest and having spent time at schools in Berkeley and Madison it's no Berkeley. So yah you'll lose some votes there but will it be a net loss?
As I said, I suspect it does, but all three of the Blue Wall have major areas with lots of high-propensity voters who are very, very left-leaning on this particular issue, so it's not without costs.
You're right that it will hurt more *statewide* in places like CA or MA, but it's not terribly clear-cut that it helps in the blue-tinted swing states that we generally win.
Energy abundance is a major win in GA. Also, isn’t fracking a thing in PA?
Absolutely, in places which are so ruby red that I don't think there's too much juice to squeeze from talking it up.
Partisan water-on-the-brain means Biden isn't even getting much credit for IRA investments in the NW where battery and EV plants are getting built.
I can't speak for Ann Arbor or Philly, but the People's Republic of Madison is more pragmatic than you give it credit for. Big vibes of "vote now, vote every election, vote like your life depends on it".
I think you're looking for Eugene!
Fair enough. My experiences in Ann Arbor when there for work and Philly have definitely left me with a bit of worry about the youngin's.
But Philly is mainly black and they are more into pocket book issues than climate. I also think energy abundance pencils out electorally, but it would be great having data. The best I can come up with is this, but it doesn’t ask about expanding drilling. It just tells us 68% of voters don’t want to phase out fossil fuels.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/09/what-the-data-says-about-americans-views-of-climate-change/
Yes, but my point is that Greater Philly has about as many serious environmentalist voters in absolute terms as the other two, and that number in all three cases is well in excess of the margin of victory in those states.
Luckily there's some serious overlap between those folks and the pro-choice demographic that's been highly energized so as I said I suspect it pencils out. It's just not completely obvious that it does so.
Isn't Pittsburgh more important for presidential elections in PA than Philly?
Pittsburgh proper is tiny compared to Philadelphia proper, which is the whole county.
The entirety of Allegheny County does occasionally, in off-year elections, have a sufficient turnout differential that its raw vote totals are larger than Philadelphia County's, as in 2022's gubernatorial race. But almost never in presidential election years, and Allegheny County makes up a much larger fraction of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area (1.3 million of 2.5 million) than Philadelphia County does of the Delaware Valley (1.6 million of 4.8 million) even if we limit our consideration to the portions thereof in PA.
Long-ass way of saying "no, absolutely not." Not at the city, county, or metropolitan level.
PA has a lot of oil and gas production, it's hard to say if Biden touting energy production would be a net good or bad for him
I'm not sure the loud and proud for drilling is necessary. The pocket book swing voters aren't dogmatic, they aren't in favor of drilling for the sake of drilling. What they do care about is gas prices, inflation, and predictability. I think saying we're going to manage AMERICAN OIL for the American people works better. We're going to make sure that while we make this transition the price at the pump stays reasonable, that means dictators don't dictate our prices, oil companies don't get windfall profits, and we invest in the infrastructure necessary for American oil to supply our needs while we continue to make the smartest use of it.
At the furthest edge the leave it all in the ground folks will always be mad. But people who care about climate change can be kept happy by emphasizing the change taking place, while Joe from Scranton doesn't have to go to the gas pump and see his car drinking one of his six packs.
"we're going to manage AMERICAN OIL for the American people"
As political mendacity, that ain't bad.
It’s a speech on American Energy Abundance. The first energy transformation is the boost that Biden has given to domestic oil and gas, SPR, etc. Take all the credit back from Obama. Be shameless. The second energy transformation needs more explanation bc we are switching fuels. Explain the realistic scale and timeline for this part (i.e. gas car sale bans do not end gasoline pumps). Celebrate the IRA. Explain why the 1st does not interfere with the 2nd.
Close with a comment about how other countries underperforming USA on the 2nd transformation will buy our oil. No idea if that is true, but it sounds like it could be true.
Some enviros may be pissy, but most will get it. As is it, Extinction Rebellion folks already dismiss the IRA as a half measure.
I think it's hard for Biden to tell a consistent story here. He can say oil production is historically high, but he also blocked the Willow project and just canceled 10m acres of oil drilling leases in the ANWR (https://apnews.com/article/alaska-arctic-refuge-oil-gas-leases-interior-318dcc3f2d5b104a800bf3ba48e764b7).
I think he was right to do the latter. It's one thing to brag about high levels of production; it's another to open the door to long-term production in the Arctic.
But in the end, I don't think pounding his chest about high levels of oil production is a political winner for Biden and he should only keep it in reserve as a response to Republican criticisms rather than "bragging" about it. Americans care about the price of gas (and heating oil), and telling them it's never been better for oil production when they can see that gas prices remain really high, certainly compared to the Trump years, is not going to win them over (https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=emm_epm0_pte_nus_dpg&f=m). Instead, they'll just think you're out of touch.
Republicans are pounding their chests saying oil prices are high because Biden is decimating the American oil industry. This makes intuitive sense to a lot of people--prices go up because we can't drill for oil here anymore--but it's a fantasy. Biden needs to be able to forcibly respond--highest level of production ever, energy independence, two-pronged approach on energy (both roll out green tech (jobs! savings for your family!) and support continued oil drilling allowing for a smooth transition). I don't think he can "keep it in reserve as a response to Republican criticisms"--those criticisms are happening *right now*, creating a damaging out-of-touch reputation for Biden *right now*, and need to be countered right now--forcibly and repeatedly through November 2024.
The arctic is the first place we should produce oil. Very few human beings are able to access that land. There aren’t even hiking trails.
I thought Biden approved the Willow project, not blocked it.
It's an interesting conjecture, Dave, but given the Republicans want to get rid of the IRA I wonder if environmentalists would consider it's still worth voting for Democrats. Alas this is an empirical question and I wonder if the research would ever be done.
Interesting to read this after reading yesterday that the "Biden Administration to Bar Drilling on Millions of Acres in Alaska drilling in Alaska" including canceling leases signed by Trump. It's very possible that those leases were a bad idea and blocking further exploration there is good. But the messaging contrast between what is advocated in this article and that NYT article is strong.
the unspoken truth here is that literally since the Obama administration all the big O&G companies, while still wanting to push for these leases as a sort of moral victory, also quietly understand them to be rather long shot opportunities that are not worth the investment they would take to significantly expand production. Mostly what gets done is incrementally expanding drilling in places where drilling has been done (and production declining) for decades.
Production from the Arctic is a fraction of what it was in the 1980s (when Alaska alone produced 3% of world supply) and on the whole the entire Arctic production is a fraction of what Alaska produced then (and 90% of that is Russian production).
I could understand the impulse to take an easy win with environmentalists and ban drilling/production where its unlikely to happen anyway. However, its probably going to reinforce the normie perspective that Democrats care more about the environment than they do your pocketbook.
Instead they could trumpet that they're for more oil production, including ANWR and talk about how much more oil we're producing now. If nobody takes them up on ANWR because it wasn't economically feasible, they would make environmentalists mad about the messaging, but it would probably win them more votes with the swing voters they need without actually being bad for the environment.
I think the only reason Biden / Obama and others even consider these incremental Arctic drilling leases is that their main concern is keeping some minimal footprint and jobs in that region sustainable. Basically I see this as a jobs program more than anything else...because once these companies leave...they aint gonna go back. It's cheaper to just keep the lights on.
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.
That's the thing that drives me nuts on both sides of the equation...
We need oil for shit that is soooo much more valuable than torching it in a car that it's not even funny, and most of those use cases cannot be replaced with any existing or emergent technology.
So pretending that we won't always be drilling it is delusional. But acting like we should continue using it as a combustion fuel in everything once the technology exists not to is also delusional. We need to align the incentives structure for various uses to conserve it for shit we cannot yet replace as technologies mature. In most cases the technologies in question maturing will do most of the work, as they did in power generation, for example, but there may be instances where we have no choice but to enact a tax.
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.
I imagine they're both quite niche pursuits, though I'd not care to wager which side is larger or more rabid about it.
The EV transition is going to look like every other technological paradigm shift: slow, then fast.
We're on the cusp of fast.
And once we've proven that it can be done here it'll set people to taking all the foundational infrastructure transition problems seriously, and get the public thinking it can be done without hurting them.
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 think at this point the auto manufacturers are quite aware that fucking Electrify America is worthless, VW should have been expelled from the country and fined the entire value of its assets here, and they need to form their own consortium to take this problem seriously. They're obviously going to adopt Tesla's standard as their own, they just need to start building their own charging stations along those lines and make sure they're ready for 800V architecture on the charger side as well.
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.
That depends on your definition of slow, of course, but I would suggest that roughly 30 years, one generation, to change the entire nature of personal ground transport is actually pretty damned quick. The great majority of those who owned a horse in 1920 were alive to own a car in 1940. The number of horses and mules halved in those 20 years, then halved again in the next ten and again in the next five.
There are more *now* than there were in 1955 as they've become an affectation for moderately wealthy people, and that's exactly what I expect ICEVs to be in 2123.
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.
Also metals, especially as we transition to a more electricity-powered society. Unfortunately Biden keeps blocking new mines.
Would not the "announcement" also be a good time to very publicly approve some "controviertial pipeline project, like the WV-new England gas pipeline, reneging on which was: another Schumer F---up?
I largely agree with you in the short term. However, the idea that we can achieve decarbonization just by funding research and some fleet standards is implausible.
The policy you are suggesting sends private enterprise the clear signal that: oil products will stay cheap in the long term. That means the only places where non-carbon products will replace carbon ones are the places where oil is luckily the more expensive option *intrinsically* and we are running out of the low hanging fruit. Oil is a fucking great fuel source so it would be crazy if it turned out just not to make sense to dig up that shit in the ground that's super useful and energy dense.
Ultimately, unless you apply so much subsidy you've effectively implemented a shit carbon tax I don't see how you can hope to hit carbon goals w/o a carbon tax.
Though I also don't understand why it would be so hard to get a deal on a carbon tax if you offer to do it revenue nuetral and cut whatever taxes buisness/GOP hate in exchange. I get the distrust of environmentalists and environmentalism. I felt it so strongly growing up I demanded my biology teacher offer my extra credit to write a letter to my congresspeople opposing saving the rain forest (just bc I felt like I was being fed a story w/o counterpoints). But if you think your getting something just as good who cares? Your still exchanging a tax w/ negative externality for one with a non-negative one.
"the idea that we can achieve decarbonization just by funding research and some fleet standards is implausible."
No, we'll use market forces as well. Carbon-free power plants are on track to deliver 84% of new power plant capacity in 2023. (https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/chart-clean-energy-to-make-up-84-of-new-us-power-capacity-in-2023#:~:text=Renewables%20are%20still%20a%20relatively,mantle%20from%20fossil%20gas%20plants.) In future years, that can only go up and as we retire ageing fossil fuel plants, then power generation will be more and more dominated by carbon-free sources. Then if fleet standards like those in California work and become more widespread, ICE vehicles will over time disappear. That still leaves other things (meat production, aviation, etc) but we're on track to take out huge chunks of fossil fuel usage.
Is your claim that it will become cheaper to use almost only carbon free energy to power the grid? Yes, innovation can bring down the price of solar panels and wind below oil power but even the people working on energy storage don't predict it will be so cheap that storage plus wind/solar will be cheaper. That means we keep using gas to make up difference whenever renewable generation falls below demand and without expensive long distance transmission it's highly correlated so they'll be lots of gas usage.
And that's just for electric generation. Transit is another sector where carbon sources will be cheaper into the foreseeable future. Commuter vehicles may shift to electric for the performance benefits and if we are very lucky batteries get cheap enough to make EVs cheaper than gas for virtually all cars. But it's not very plausible for airplanes ships and long distance trucking.
It's possible in all these areas it's just more costly and all the people exploring the tech now because they predict future higher oil prices will stop if we make it clear it's not happening. And on top of this you have all sorts of miscellaneous uses.
"Is your claim that it will become cheaper to use almost only carbon free energy to power the grid?"
It will have to be, otherwise, decarbonization on a meaningful scale will be nearly impossible. Any solution that expects people to pay *more* for electricity for the sake of the climate would be too politically unpopular to work.
We're not there yet, but with prices of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries all falling, things are at least trending in the right direction.
But no one is asking them to pay more **overall** they get to take home more money in their paycheck because it's revenue nuetral so they pay less in income tax. Sure, some ppl will pay slightly more if they use lots of electricity and others slightly less but that's true of any and all tax changes and can be phased in.
I don't think anyone projects us to reach a point where it's literally cheaper to use little enough carbon to hit meaningful CO2 targets. Sure solar and wind are quite cheap but the limiting factor isn't the price of solar or wind it's the cost to store/transport that energy when there isn't wind/solar. And even the most optimistic predictions about battery tech and the availability of pumped hydro render that super expensive (it's an absurd amount of power storage we need)
If we want serious decarbonization to happen, technology has to reach the point that market forces make it happen on its own - without depending on governments to support the cleaner options directly.
Government intervention in favor of clean energy tech is important in the early days to produce the economies of scale necessary to get the costs down, but in the long term, it has to be economically sustainable on its own; otherwise, the moment the political winds change and the incentives stop, people will just go right back to doing things the dirty way again. Not to mention that the world has over 100 different governments who can barely agree on anything. But the human desire to avoid overpaying for stuff (including energy) is universal.
What is the particular problem with long distance trucking? There is already a private-sector infrastructure that caters to the demands of truckers, and it's an example of a mode of transportation (a significant fraction of which) that begins and ends their trips at a logistics node.
In the short-term I'd say it's because range on batteries isn't great and truckers don't want to waste time mid-trip charging up.
In the long-term I agree with your comment.
We can’t do anything about decarbonization because our emissions are not globally significant — most new carbon is coming from China.
Yes, ofc we can't do it all on our own. But China lmay come onboard if the other industrialized countries do it for real (not being a democracy they weigh citizen consumption less and it creates a potential excuse for leadership who know they can't maintain rate of growth). At the ultimate extreme, if the EU and US actually pass real carbon taxes we can threaten China with sanctions to sign on but we have to first do it ourselves (so far the EU just talks like they care more but haven't done much different than we have).
Now if it cost us something to do that, sure it would be a big risk but the government needs money one way or another and replacing a tax on something we want companies to do (make money, pay wages etc) with one that takes in the same amount of money but taxes something that, even aside from global warming, we'd prefer less of (particulate emissions, various other harms) isn't a cost it's a benefit.
I think the most important thing is to make sure that as developing countries become richer and greater energy users, as we all want them to do, that they do so by using carbon-free sources of energy. India is hugely expanding their use of solar power. I don't know how many new fossil fuel power plants they're building (though they're considering stopping any new coal plants) but it's important that we do everything we can to help them tilt toward carbon-free with each new plant.
In terms of real politics that means passing out own carbon tax. We'll never convince voters to pay other countries to decarbonize if we won't even pass relatively costless laws for ourselves and no developing country is going to take a request to do what we haven't seriously.
Not necessarily - if renewables/nuclear/w/e get cheap enough because we've managed it at scale it might become cost effective for those countries to build them as well.
And the price _is_ dropping.
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.
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.
As regards China, at least, this is overly pessimistic. China is also building a significant amount of nuclear generating capacity, still more hydro than it's already built out, and windmills and PV farms are popping up like toadstools.
The reality is that, like basically everything else that passes for "economic policy" under the risk-averse idiots running the show right now, continued investment in thermal power is a jobs program, nothing else.
They are desperately afraid of the employment dislocations which would result in already poor Shaanxi, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia if they scaled back mining operations, and their power sector EPC firms are even more structurally important to employment stability nationwide.
But the result is them overbuilding grid capacity by a factor of perhaps 2 or more. And since the operating costs for everything other than coal are lower than for coal, that's the part of the grid that will get mothballed when it becomes apparent they don't need it and all the miners are retired or dead of old age in 20 years.
No need to panic just yet.
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.
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.
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.”
I think a decent number of people (myself included) are literally worried about his health. It also seems likely that the lack of public presence is downstream, not upstream from the health question. Luckily he’s probably running against a 78 year old obese man, so it’s not a bigger issue.
I think the issue isn't that he dies, but that he becomes non compos mentis.
Worst case is if its marginal or not clear. If he's clearly gone then there is a process to step in. But if he just has "bad days" or "it gets worse at night" then we're in a very dangerous place should "something" happen at one of those moments.
I think that the messaging is tricky here. Biden is trying to both tout the clean energy aspects of his policy and not give Republicans an opening around high energy prices. This isn't just placating lefty environmental groups. Climate policy will probably be one of the Biden Administration's biggest legacies. That spending is intended to win over at least some cross-pressured voters by investing in industry. They're clearly interested in making a big deal out of it.
Dealing with the SPR and production to deal with short term energy price spikes makes sense, but it muddies this message to any voters sophisticated enough to have a strong opinion about emissions. Why are we doing this climate spending and boosting oil production? Matt makes a coherent case for it, but I don't think there's as much upside to leading with it as Matt thinks. I think most of the truly economy-focused voters are mostly just gonna look at gas price fluctuations.
I think the best message is lower gas prices.
Richard Nixon infamously pumped up the economy leading into the 1972 elections. The voters punished him for that brazen cynical act by only giving him a 49 state victory.
I strongly encourage -- nay, demand! -- that next summer Biden turn the taps on the SPR wide open, flood the market, and cause gas prices to fall by half. Republicans will shriek and the bien pensants at the New York Times and the Washington Post will repair to their fainting couches, but the Biden team will laugh all the way to a second term.
And, indeed, if we (rightly!) see Trump's return to the White House as an existential threat to our democracy, who could argue with using such completely legal tactics to prevent that disaster?
Sure, but I don't think there's any electoral upside in making a big to-do about it. If this prevents a spike in gas prices, that'll help without the cheerleading, which will only muddy their message.
I think lower prices will speak for themselves.
But if Biden wants to brag about it, that's OK too.
The message should be that, in the short-medium term, the administration is doing what it can to keep gas prices from getting out of hand. But, it is also layout out the groundwork for a long-term future where nobody has worry about the price of gas ever again.
That's it. The fact that "not needing to worry about the price of gas ever again" (meaning that the cars are all electric) is also better for the climate need not even be mentioned.
I'll also add that any energy permitting grand bargain will probably need some bipartisan support and go through Secret Congress. Leading with oil production stats and the SPR (which Matt pointed out is vulnerable to political games) might make that harder by raising the partisan valence of the issue.
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.
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.
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 political problem with this message is probably more the money giving elements of Biden's coalition. Both large donors and small are motivated by the oil companies are evil message, and I assume they are trying to build their war chest right now. But, assuming Trump starts winning primaries that should take care of itself.
And, I think selling it as promoting energy abundance, energy independence and price stability would be a good general election message.