Comments on: Synthesizing a barrel of oil requires about 5.7 MWh of electricity at 30% conversion efficiency

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 21:23:40 +0000

Atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is highly correlated with global temperature and without which life-giving plants turn brown and suffocate to death, is at its lowest point in 600 million years, and the best and brightest among us want to vacuum this precious and increasingly scarce commodity out of where it’s needed most.

They want to freeze us all. They want to turn the Earth into a colossal planetary icicle. They want us all chilly and our lips to turn blue and our nipples hard enough to cut glass.

Leonard Nimoy was so right.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 14:53:33 +0000

Regarding the cost of solar: this natural resources investment firm says that the declining costs of solar and wind have been largely driven by falling costs for the embedded energy in these products, not by production efficiencies.

https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/high-energy-cost-hurts-wind-and-solar?utm_campaign=Weekly%20Blog%20Notification&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=229711081&utm_content=229711081&utm_source=hs_email

Also, there are labor costs associated with the on-site physical installation of solar panels and wind turbines, and these are unlikely to follow the same kind of cost-volume relationships as the components built in factories.

By: Longarch

Longarch — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 01:12:21 +0000

If anyone here was playing PC games back around 1998 or 1999, you might recall “Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri,” which featured “synthetic fossil fuels.” At the time, I thought it to be a pipe dream. Now, I hope that nuclear plant operators will use similar tech to turn landfill plastic into usable oil.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 23:27:41 +0000

What are the capital costs of the oil synthesizers? If the plan is to take advantage of the times when solar-generated electricity is cheapest…about 6 hours a day…the capital equipment used for the synthesis will be idle during those times. But the financing costs on the equipment run on for 24 hours a day.

By: Altitude Zero

Altitude Zero — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 19:38:05 +0000

We’ll see, but I’m not holding my breath, TBH…

By: bruce

bruce — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 18:34:57 +0000

Terraform Industries is pretty impressive.

The green energy hoaxes are openly corrupt and fake.

I hope Terraform Industries succeeds.

By: Gavin Longmuir

Gavin Longmuir — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 14:44:38 +0000

The limiting factor in the deployment of Replaceables (not Renewables, since things like windmills, solar panels, and batteries have useful working lives in the order of only 10-20 years) will turn out to be:
(1) the supply of poor African children to work in dangerous cobalt mines, or
(2) the supply of Uighur slaves to work in Chinese solar panel manufacturing plants, or
(3) the eventually limited ability of Western Lefties to continue to ignore the massive human & environmental costs of their foolishness about essential energy supply.

By: bob sykes

bob sykes — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 14:21:09 +0000

Swanson’s Law is misstated. It is actually the doubling of the manufacturing capacity itself, not the cumulative production over time, the produces the 20% reduction in unit costs.

The talk about wasted energy implies it can be recovered. It cannot. The so-called waste is due to the Second Law of thermodynamics, which prohibits perfectly efficiency processes.

The best source of the economics of renewables is the blog Manhattan Contrarian:

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com

He has extensive analyses of the economics of renewables, and they are daunting. The main problem is the batteries needed to even out the intermittent production of electricity by solar and wind. On average, they produce useful power only 10% of the time. The very best coastal sites produce wind power only 40% of the time, and solar is limited to about 25% even in deserts.

A complete renewable electrical system that replaces all fossil fuels would be at least 3 times the present capacity of the system. The initial cost is several multiples of the GDP. The systems have useful lives on the order of 10 years or so. EV batteries are warranted for 8 years or 100,000 miles. So the annualized cost is something like 50% of GDP forever.

We’ve had economies based on renewables before. That was the Middle Ages, and the economies were based on slave muscle power. Slavery did not disappear until the slaves were replaced by the Industrial Revolution.

Renewables will cause de-industrialization, de-agriculturalization, and massive depopulation. At least 90% decline in total world popualtion.

By the way, that scenario is the goal that has been promoted by Paul Erhlich and other radical environmentalists for the last 50 years.