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Comment by glup | Hacker News Reader

While I understand the perceived geopolitical need for energy independence, I sure hope we don't develop this. With recent reports like the NCA4 (nca2018.globalchange.gov), it's pretty clear things are going to get a whole lot worse with climate change, that will take a very long time to retool our infrastructure even with a strong economic incentive. Cheap and plentiful oil certainly doesn't help.

I also think that flying over this region (Permian basin / western Texas) on a clear day is --- as it is currently, without further extraction --- one of the best ways to understand the sheer scale of energy extraction required to support the American economy and lifestyle. If you haven't seen it, check out the satellite imagery of Pyote, TX on Google Maps or similar.

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Wow, thanks for the suggestion to look at the Google maps imagery of Pyote, TX. I had heard about the Permian basis but never seen it - the drill sites just look endless.

Direct link for anyone curious: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pyote,+TX/@31.5739608,-103...

In 2016 nuclear generated energy accounted for 19.7% of the USA’s total electric energy generation yet comprised nearly 60% of the USA’s emission-free generation.

We need more nuclear.

Sounds great, can we build nuclear in your back yard?

Yes, please do.

I volunteer my backyard as well!

Yes. Where do I sign up?

It is because of irrational fears of nuclear power like yours that global warming will get much worse before it gets better.

lol I can't afford a back yard but if my apartment building had a nuclear generator in the basement I'd be pretty happy about that

It is because of irrational fears of nuclear power like yours that global warming will get much worse before it gets better.

Flying over the oil fields is fascinating (I personally find the South Texas oil fields at night to be even more so), but the other interesting perspective that you get to see is the massive wind farms just a handful of miles away from the oil farms. They're harder to see on Google maps (since the turbines are vertical rather than taking up a lot of horizontal space), but if you're on a flight or driving through the area you can really get a sense of the scale of them. Some of them are even larger than the oil fields, and yet they hardly extract even a fraction of the energy.

For all the faults of Texas's oil fields, the state is also at the forefront of wind energy. But the reality is that we're still nowhere near being able to afford not drilling.

When drilling (taken broadly as exploiting hydrocarbons to the hilt) has the potential for the extinction of the species and wind-farms and renewables generally have the potential to provide sufficient energy for species survival, yeah, we can afford not to drill. Energy density isn't everything. There's also not dying in fire/floods/tornadoes/civil-unrest.

Flying over south Texas oil fields... are you thinking of Texas City or Pasadena? Those aren’t oilfields. They’re refineries.

Nope, I was referring to the massive group of oil fields called the Eagle Ford play that stretches from the Mexico border near Hidalgo, going Northeast all the way up until I-10 east of San Antonio.

See this photo: https://s.hdnux.com/photos/17/05/74/3956516/5/920x920.jpg

> Some of them are even larger than the oil fields, and yet they hardly extract even a fraction of the energy

Total energy extracted over a couple of centuries is dramatically higher with wind. Oil is stored solar energy that eventually runs out; wind is realtime solar energy that never runs out.

It does run out when there's no wind.

In my first visit to Los Angeles, I was amazed to see oil pumps. I had no idea that that was a thing.

LA doesn't talk about it loudly these days, but it was built on oil [0]. There are still oil pools at ground level in LA [1].

[0] https://www.stand.la/history-of-oil-in-los-angeles.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Brea_Tar_Pits

I had heard of the tar pits beforehand, and even visited them while was there.

But hadn't made the inference that there would be still viable oil wells!

If the people dont demand the resources, they wont be developed.

Cheap and plentiful oil helps poor countries dealing with climate change way better than expensive and inflexible renewables. This is the actual dilemma that is worth discussing, not whether rich nations who can afford the way more expensive and much less scaleable renewables. But most of the political elite dont care cause they have found a new political course to use as a way to control many voters.

Renewable power can be less expansive and more reliable for things like small islands and places where importing oil is hard. Not to mention the fact that it's much better to build clean/green infrastructure first.

Of course a micro grid system like I'm talking about might also use some Dino fuels too.

http://microgridnews.com/microgrid-value-propositions/

I dont thinks thats true. Oil isnt great but its much more flexible and accessible that expensive solar or wind. Of course all that is dwarfed by nuclear but thats a whole other story.

"Solar is expensive" is no longer true. Wholesale PV panels are less than $1 per watt now; this is 1/10 the price of 15 years ago. PV electricity is cost-comparable to coal-fired electricity in many places, and is on track to be cheaper than coal everywhere very soon [0]. This happened largely because China has been dramatically increasing their PV manufacturing capacity to the point that almost no other country makes solar panels any more, but still, the fact is that today solar is cheap and getting cheaper.

[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608114/clean-energy-price...

With heavy subsidies and again its unreliable compared to ex coal, nuclear and fossil fuel.

Fossil fuels all have massive hidden subsidies, since the cost doesn't include handling the waste gases and other effluent, which will end up being covered out of general taxations. If your fuel bill included an element to clear up the environmental mess, then coal and oil comes out much more expensive that solar and wind.

All human existence have an effect. If you factor in all the good things that coal and oil provide that solar or wind cannot then you will quickly realize how superior it is despite the obvious problems with co2. Put another world, id rather live in a world with access to oil and gas than one only having wind and solar energy.

All these good things that solar and wind _can't_ provide? This'll be good - do you have a list?

Lets start with plastics and tires or what about Solar Turbines and solar cells who also use oil for some of it's parts. And then there is obviously the production of them which also requires oil/oilbased products.

Then when it comes to weather. Oil works whether sun or wind. Oil is in most of the products around you. Oil is used for all sorts of motoric vehicles especially those that require a lot of muscle.

I am all for replacing those things with electric circuits and infrastructure but let's not claim that fossil fuel is so easily replaced. It's not.

The use of plastics and other oil based products is nothing to do with oil as a fossil fuel, but with oil as a complex hydrocarbon.

I'm not sure anyone is arguing against using oil for plastics, lubrication and medicine productions. Your comment was about energy production, and while I accept that you can burn oil at night and when the wind isn't blowing, the existence of a national grid linking different parts of a country pretty much means that isn't an issue any more. The more we preserve oil for these essential purposes and avoid burning the stuff, the better.

Even if you insist that we need fossil fuel cover for days with no light or wind, that isn't an argument against building wind or solar power stations. It is an argument for keeping some mothballed gas power stations as a backup (not oil or coal though — gas is a lot cleaner and easier to start up at short notice).

In the UK we still burn some coal, but the renewable capacity we have built up has allowed us to turn off all the coal stations for periods during the Summer. And building more nukes will let us close those remaining ones down for good eventually.

The use of oil-based products is important because it's part of the entire logistical/shipping system.

Oil "won" because of its multifaceted abilities and thus could be embedded into the larger market whether nation-states and private businesses and for private usage.

I don't see anyone arguing against wind and solar. I am just saying that they are by no metrics able to cover the energy usage we have not even close. Currently, we are talking around 1% of global energy needs and the places that rely on it heavily need support both from oil, coal and nuclear as we saw this summer where Denmark needed the Germans to fire up their coal to support as there was no wind because of the amazing summer they had.

The point I am really making is that nuclear as a base clean form of energy is where we should be focusing our efforts and then use wind, solar, gas and oil as supporting in various situations. Unfortunately, the current political environment pushed by the environmentalist who claims to be against CO2 emissions yet are against nuclear, makes it an absurd and fruitless discussion.

Focusing all this effort and money on wind and solar when they will not be able to actually support our current or future energy needs is exactly the wrong way to go and is my primary issue with this whole discussion.

At least from the electricity perspective, renewables are both cheaper and more flexible than oil for developing countries. They do not require dependence on a constant stream of imports, because the resource - wind, water, sun - is already there.

They can be built at any scale, from rooftop solar to utility-scale wind power, so they don't require the access to capital involved in building large thermal power plants.

Renewables are not reliable nor are they cheaper or more flexible, not sure why you think that. Poor countries dont drive around teslas or have fance electrical grids. Oil is by far the best choice for them by several factors.

I don't pretend to be an expert. It seems like rooftop solar + a battery would be a far more reliable power supply in reasonably sunny regions, than oil in a place that doesn't have a stable electrical grid.

The alternative to solar is what, generators in every building and delivering fuel? The efficiency of that sort of scheme must be terrible, and you're still relying on regular delivery of fuel.

Am I missing something?

Personal experience tells me that this sort of thing is possible. I stayed a few days a few years ago in a friend of a friend's house that relied solely on solar + batteries for power (apparently the cost of getting it hooked up to the grid made this setup far cheaper). Completely reliable. Power had to be rationed slightly more carefully than in grid connected places, but it wasn't a real impediment in any way. This was in Ontario, Canada. Which isn't one of the sunniest places in the world.

I'm going to put it out there that when two (now three) non-experts discuss the relative costs everyone gets to be wrong about everything, so why bother? Nevertheless...

Firstly, relative costs will be region specific. Secondly, prices are always in a state of flux over the medium term. Thirdly, there are probably tax and subsidy implications. Fourthly, I suspect the rooftop solar is going to be a poor choice compared to utility-scale centralised solar and a grid so your specific arguments may be academic (I certainly hope so, those industrial solar towers look amazing vs. rooftop panels). Fifthly, the failure modes of the two systems are different making a comparison challenging.

For example, how reliable is a solar system in the face of three days of cloud cover? Vandalism? Do these panels actually last 20 years, given that manufacturing techniques are presumably changing and we haven't had 20 years to test them out? What are the actual fire risks posed by house-powering batteries?

Putting together a similar list for generators is easy but I know the answers to a lot of those questions because I'm quite familiar with fossil fuels, as we all are.

Anyone who says either is going to be more suitable for purpose without an opinion sourced from an engineer or a couple of case studies is just making stuff up. You can't first-principles this sort of thing, it is very context sensitive. Even case studies I mistrust, because solar can look very good if the grid is mismanaged by environmentalists to the point people opt-out.

its not making stuff up to say that oil is a much more flexible resource than ex solar or wind. That doesent mean its without consequences but you have to weight those up against non mechanical factors.

That's only true if you can afford an unlimited amount of petroleum products and have the facility to transport and store them. That's often not the case in developing countries.

Compared to solar and wind it certainly is.

First of all, I am a power systems engineer.

Oil and refined petroleum products are not an economical source of power generation, which is why it isn't used anywhere in the developed world except at small scale where lots of fuel storage is required, like the Canadian Arctic. Coal and natural gas are much more appropriate, if they are available.

The biggest advantage to renewables, as I stated in my initial comment, is that they don't have to be transported. Arguments about resource adequacy (not enough sun, not enough water) are largely irrelevant because fossil fuel power is already rationed in developing off grid locations due to the massive cost of transport. Recall that developing countries do not have advanced transportation infrastructure nor a highly developed power grid to transit energy.

Finally, energy security is a major concern for all countries, especially those with limited ability to purchase US$ priced global commodities, and oil is an import in most of the world.

To suggest that, for instance, countries in sub Saharan Africa are better off spending their minimal foreign currency reserves importing diesel and trucking it across the desert on non existent roads rather than using abundant solar energy flies in the face of the facts.

Microgrid engineer here, and I completely agree. Developing nations bypassed expensive comms grids in the 90s and went straight to cell phones. The same thing is happening now with energy. Rather than building out an (even more) expensive electrical grid, they're putting in distributed renewables. Result: Everybody has electricity but there's no grid. It's happening because of economics; not ideology.

not the same at all. The investments into getting phones into peoples hands were market driven, energy infrastructure is not.

A person living 3 days from the road in Nepal deciding to put in a small solar system to charge their phone and provide a bit of light absolutely is market-driven.

Sure but that's not enough to keep them safe from mother nature, provide for heating, cook their food, transport them etc. You are talking about a fraction of what it is to live as a person in a relatively safe environment.

No it doesnt fly in the face of facts, your claims do. Solar is not reliable neither is wind, elecric cars arent anywhere close to being accessible for poor countries. The cost of creating the infrastructure of those things are impossible to create for those countries, even countries like india will not be doing that anytime soon.

Being a power systems engineer does not put you in any better position to discuss this problem than other people as this is not a powersystems problem.

Nobody is talking about electric cars except you.

We're talking about electricity use in the home: for lighting, small electronics, small appliances like a rice cooker or kettle (displacing wood), etc. These are real quality of life improvements: reducing time spent gathering wood, reducing smoke inhalation, reducing cooking time.

There is no "infrastructure" of these things, it's a completely stand alone system that requires little maintenance unlike a rotating machine.

I have been in the Himalaya where solar panels from China are transported on yaks over the border to Nepal where people buy them on put them on their homes for 50 or 100W of electricity, the first they've ever had. How would you propose these people to use oil? They are hundreds of km from a road driveable with a heavy truck, thousands of km from a pipeline.

Off-grid solar power is the MOST reliable form of power generation that exists. It requires no fuel, the amount of resource availability can be predicted with near-certainty without any technology, it has no moving parts, it doesn't require high-voltage equipment or transformers, and it can easily be broken into small pieces for transport on foot or pack animal.

That's why I brought up my profession, because you seem to misunderstand what is actually entailed in providing electricity. I've designed, built and run power plants of all types and I would never say that thermal is more reliable for developing countries than renewables.

We aren't talking about some fraction of the major discussion that's as irrelevant as saying you can use kinetic energy to power your watch.

We are talking about energy in general, not just electricity and we are talking about entire societies needing to be able to support their needs.

And off-grid solar power requires way more than you let on.

To begin with the resources and a manufacturing process that goes into it, the cost, the ability to provide enough energy and so on.

Furthermore and again. Solar is not even close to being able to deliver enough energy for our needs as a society neither on a national level and certainly not on a global level and no amount of off-grid solar power will solve that problem.

Cheap and plentiful oil helps poor countries dealing with climate change way better than expensive and inflexible renewables.

Cheap oil helps everyone, except for the everyone dies part.

There's no doubt that ameliorating climate change has a cost. Most of the plans around paying the cost have been around charging those already suffering the most in a, dare I say it, neoliberal economic regime. Those won't fly as the "yellow vests" demonstrate (literally and metaphorically).

The only way out has to be the rich biting the bullet and paying the costs themselves, because in this world, no one else has the money. I doubt this will happen. The last twenty years has been this not happening. But the alternatives are:

    1 - Mass catastrophe, of extreme to surface-of-venus level
    2 - Rich bite bullet and pay
    3 - World revolution

Of course, 1 is most likely but I thought I'd put this out there.

Human existence have a cost. Why you would be more worried about the wellbeing of future generation than the current one i have no idea. Mass extinction can happen without co2 as we saw with dinosaurs and i would rather have a fighting chance against mother nature than to succumb to her. But each to their own of course.

I believe there are resources on this earth for the survival of human being now and in the future. I'm a bit taken a back at having to even argue this.

Further, global warming isn't hypothetical problem. The measures that experts and world-bodies are calling for to fight the problem aren't speculative but critically necessary - for those future generations that I somehow care about.

I've made the point already that the poor and the more impoverished nations can't pay the cost of global warming - this cost is going to have to come out of taxing the wealthy because there is no other source of resources here.

One might think that those with the greatest money and power would be most concerned with future generations - they're already guaranteed in the present so why not think about the future. Evidence doesn't point that way, unfortunately.

The current trend for present short-sighted policies to continue and even accelerate. Extreme global warming predictions are fortunately more speculative than immediate predictions. Sadly, we may get to discover how accurate those are.

The climate is changing with or without fossile fuel, the poor cant afford not having access to cheap and plentiful energy.

Again id rather use ex fossile fuel which isnt going away to fight mother nature. It also rather use nuclear energy than any of the others as a base energyform but the so called environmentalists are fighting that and are poltically successful. The problem with this discussion is that you somehow have convinced yourself that you are fighting the good fight because you think you listen to what experts are saying, but you arent cause those experts you are listening to arent experts in what you think they are. Not sure why you think anyone said climate change is hypocritical, i certainly didnt. The fact is that we are not even close to finding alternatives to fossil fuel and the one we have are being politically fought.

I think the real problem with this discussion is your dismissal of his points behind "so called environmentalists being politically savy", and the false "we are no where near developing a replacement for oil, so why bother". That and the atrocious spelling, but I expect you're not a native speaker so that could be overlooked.

The long and short of it is if we throw up our hands and say "let's flood every developing country with endless cheap oil, suppressing the critical development of greener energy sources" we are up shits creek even moreso than we are now.

I am not dismissing anything or throwing my hands up. I am simply stating what the reality is. You are welcome to come up with better solutions for the poor countries but before it becomes anything but intentions I at least are not going to be supporting any attempts to keep them from getting access to those resources.

You are right I am not a native speaker however I meant what I said.

Nothing false about us being even close to being able to replace fossil fuels and I would challenge you to provide a single piece of evidence that proves otherwise.

Wind and solar provides around 1% of the world energy needs even with improvements we would not get much further than 5%.

If you don't see the absurdity in environmentalist yelling the sky is falling because of co2 and then turn around to fight nuclear then we just live in two very different worlds.

Neither wind nor sun is close. And to illustrate that point this summer Denmark had a heat wave. Denmark who runs mostly on wind had to buy energy from Germany who then in torn had to use coal because 1) they are closing down their nuclear powerplants and 2) they could provide it with solar.

This is the reality, not the one you read about in the media who are mostly keeping hysteria to a max while completely ignorning the actual reality of energy.

I didn't say we shouldn't do anything, but the solution is NOT wind and solar.

The climate is changing with or without fossile fuel

The denial of fossil-fuel driven global warming is a position that harms humanity in multitude of ways. Shame on you.

There you go again with the strawmen. Read what I wrote instead of what you think I wrote.

If you don't do that there is no need to continue this conversation.

Oil to fight climate change is perhaps the most insane idea I have ever heard, and that’s quite a high bar.

How do you think humans managed to decrease the number of climate related deaths over the years if it wasnt for the ability of oil to help us in so many areas?

Sure, in 1850 when we had no other sources of power that would be a good argument.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we as a species are hurtling towards voluntary extinction because some people are just profiting too much from oil. Encouraging those most likely to face the consequences of global warming to burn more oil isn’t just insane, it’s downright evil.

It's nothing as evil as asking them not to and just let them die which is what you are basically suggesting. Unless you have an actual solution to their situation you have nothing but a misunderstood idea of your own morals.

Do not put words in my mouth. I never said “do nothing and die”. What I said was “stop burning oil”.

And I didn't encourage anything.

I said that unless you have an actual alternative you have nothing of use to poor countries and their current citizens.

The alternative is to skip building out fossil fuel burning infrastructure and instead build renewable infrastructure with storage. And don't give some bullshit argument about cost. 1 - It's often the cheapest form of electricity to generate and 2 - continuing to burn fossil fuels has a cost we must include in future plans.

1 - https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... 2 - https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/07/SR15...

I really don’t get the whole “climate change and renewable energy are just a new form of political control”. What a load of hogwash. Oil and gas have histically been some of the largest contributors to political campaigns in the US. The “polictical elite” are literally oil industry people.

you are missing the point and mixing two different discussions up. energy security is not the debate here.

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