I wonder if some of the more scarce materials needed for EVs will turn out to be like the peak oil concern in the 80s… once a material becomes important enough human ingenuity seems to find ways.
- In the scale of human history, we haven't used oil at industrial scales that long; roughly 170 years our of, say ~12000 years since the Neolithic Revolution [1]. In those 12000 years, there's times we have have "made it" past resource shortage, but there's also times it has all come burning down. We don't always find ways past problems.
- It's a rather romanticized characterization to call "human ingenuity" what saved us from "peak oil". Yes, there was a lot of ingenuity and tech involved, but there were also some nasty politics, disastrous wars and terrible environmental impact from new extraction sites/techniques. Economic pressure doesn't only make us smarter, it also makes us more ruthless.
- Overall, is this what we want? Perhaps the peak oil predictions of the 80s would've been a better outcome; we'd live in a world with less "stuff", yeah, but also perhaps fewer problems? Thinking about the current transition to EVs: do we want to replace all gas cars with them, or is the better outcome that cars be expensive, and we opt for more efficient modes of transportation like public transit or walking? Our economic system means human ingenuity and ruthlessness finds a way to scale production, since profit incentives align with that. Perhaps though the better ingenuity would be not to find "more", but use what we've got in a better way.
[1] I chose the Neolithic Revolution since that's arguably when our mindset shifted from "following resources" and adapting to what we find, to settling down and producing what we need instead. Thus I'd assume this is where the concern of how we manage our resources became more akin what we find ourselves in now. We weren't going anywhere— we had to figure out how to keep the land from decertifying, our water from running out, etc.
Peak tin is a conspiracy theory, and everyone who worries about the Sea Peoples is a warmongering racist.
If the climate and seismic disasters which appear to have displaced the Sea Peoples hadn’t happened, isn’t it plausible that peak tin wouldn’t have happened? There was plenty of tin on Iberia and the British Isles.
Scarcity of tin didn’t cause the Bronze Age collapse.
Take a household spending frivolously, and then buried in an earthquake. It would be odd to use their example when arguing for responsible fiscal practise: that wasn’t the cause of their demise. Peak tin didn’t happen because a separate factor did in civilisation before it became a problem.
The decline in the supply of tin is thought to be an important part of the "domino effect" that led to the collapse. These were great civilizations that are thought could've managed issues related of mass immigration and/or invasion, but with weakened economies this wasn't so much the case.
> Ironically, the interconnectedness that had strengthened these Bronze Age kingdoms may have hastened their downfall. Once trade routes for tin and copper were disrupted and cities began to fall, Cline says it had a domino effect that resulted in a widespread “system collapse.” [1]
But you're right, scarcity of tin alone couldn't have caused such widespread system failure, and it itself was caused by other factors. Overall though, the wider point I was trying to make is that things can go wrong, and we can't always figure out how to solve them.
[1]: https://www.history.com/news/bronze-age-collapse-causes
He throws together everything, calls it "systems collapse", and ends up with something that's untestably complex. It's more a throwing up of hands in defeat than it is a useful explanation.
In contrast, Robert Drews' theory is much simpler, and therefore more testable. Even if it's too simple, that's a good thing! His theory is that there was a realization that infantry, properly organized and even with bronze weapons, beat chariotry, and as this realization spread the existing civilizations became indefensible and collapsed. Only two survived (Egypt and Assyria) because they managed to adapt in time with their own infantry.
(For some reason, Cline ignores this theory, not even mentioning it to refute it. I find this peculiar.)
We could easily be looking at a huge amount of war and suffering in the near future as global peak oil hits and there are no new horizons being developed. Fringe quacks, like the US Energy Information Administration or Shell [1], have models that say in the worst case we could be hitting the peak right as early as this year if we are unlucky.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OilProductionTightTotalHu...
On a small scale, each well to each region, it seems to be quite accurate.
On a global scale however, it doesn’t seem to account for the changes in technology or the geopolitical pressures caused by oil shortages.
So, I used to be worried about it, but now I’m not. The main reason for my optimism here is that solar power seems to be following the best possible curve for replacing oil in energy production, while Elon Musk‘s personal fantasy about going to Mars happens to have a pre-requisite of the development of industrial scale CO2-to-methane conversion, and methane can be converted into longer chains for the other stuff oil is useful for e.g. plastics.
However, there will still be global and national political concerns as the transition to renewables radically changes the economies of the world – Russia OPEC, all the oil rig workers (and coal miners because it isn’t just oil), and so on.
To take a more specific example, cited in the international energy report as "the pessimistic take" in 1998, the "end of cheap oil" and the start of the decline in production of conventional oil before 2010 has been correctly predicted by peak oil theorists (at that point the price of oil was $15/barrel and still going down) :
https://www.resilience.org/stories/1998-02-28/end-cheap-oil/
They might have underestimated the possibility of tight oil providing a temporary relief valve though, not even mentioning it in their discussion of unconventional oil (tar sands and kerogen). (They do mention technical evolution, though maybe not revolution ?)
But then, even though the tight oil industry has produced oil, it seems to be more of a kind of fraud, a bubble bolstered by easy Wall Street money, now starting to pop (?), even though collectively supposedly it is still deep in the red, with only a few quarters in the green during more than a decade. And this despite the fact that it has been selling its oil when the global price was much higher than $15/barrel ! And so, one might wonder whether it has not been a net waste of oil too, as building and operating all that machinery is certainly not energy free. (Not to mention the costs of environmental cleanup.) Has the US failed badly at capitalism here ?!?
Yes, they were. There is some uncertainty because of more or less accurate estimates, fields that turned out to have more gas or oil than expected and marginal technology improvements. Also, oil producing countries love to play with supply, which results in fluctuations that obscure the larger trend if you don’t pay attention. But all of this changes the time scale, not the trends. Oil fields inevitably reach their maximum and decline one after the other. As oil and gas are not created over the time scales we need, there also has to be a global maximum. After that, decline can be longer or shorter, and well managed or not, but it is unavoidable.
To draw an extreme analogy: We could say that Hong Kong has vast amounts of open real estate because someone could buy sea floor and dredge it up to the surface somehow with modern technology - in theory, yes that is so. In practice, it is not so. Hong Kong has not much free real estate, even though more can be made available at very high prices.
There is always going to be oil available at some price - probably huge amounts in theory. It isn't going to be useful and nearly no-one will be able to use it. Certainly not to sustain what we would currently call a comfortable existence.
Russia has had great success in their oil discovery and field management with abiotic derived techniques.
The peak oil supply curve may be a lot more deep on the right tail than is assumed. The peak may simply have been the draw down of the initial surplus, but known fields refill with time, and new fields can be discovered with search techniques based on abiotic theory.
Western corporations have bet a lot of money on a peak oil transition driven crisis. It may never come.
This is bullshit, though. Our best model for the Earth core has it made of iron, with an outer core of liquid iron and nickel. Lighter elements would not make sense from a simple physics perspective. Plus, we don’t really have any mechanism for stuff to get out of the core to the crust through the mantle. So I guess you mean mantle, but then that’s silicates. Again, that’s denser than carbon. We do know a couple of ways for matter to go from the upper mantle to the crust, but that matter is silicates.
From a physical and thermodynamic all perspective, the only mechanisms that makes sense to get hydrocarbons underground imply that they come from the surface and get submerged.
> The peak oil supply curve may be a lot more deep on the right tail than is assumed.
That is an argument that can be made, but…
> The peak may simply have been the draw down of the initial surplus, but known fields refill with time, and new fields can be discovered with search techniques based on abiotic theory.
This is simply not happening.
> Western corporations have bet a lot of money on a peak oil transition driven crisis. It may never come.
Because it makes sense. They employ some of the best geologists and geophysicists, have access to more data than anyone else, and have more computing power than most other research entities to run their models on. They also hedge their bets because there are trillions of dollars at stake, so you’d think they’d be all over anything vaguely plausible.
No, not really. The big shift was shale gas; the rest was mostly incremental. And again, starting from zero production a couple of century ago and going to zero at some point in the future (because gas and oil are finite resources) pretty much implies a maximum at some point in between. The concept of peak production is as inescapable as gravity. It can be delayed, but it is bound to happen. And when we realise that it is declining, then it’s too late to put alternatives in place.
This seems like a good counterargument, however on thinking it over I don't think it's valid. For most of those 12,000 years we didn't have any way to share knowledge except verbal and basic stick figure paintings. The amount of time that we've had the scientific method is even shorter, and the amount of time since the industrial revolution tinier again.
Based on that chain of thought, I don't think it's valid to draw historical comparisons beyond the last 500 years or so. Perhaps not even the last 100 years.
Faced with a truly civilization threatening resource shortage in the next decade or century, we could literally move asteroids to solve it. With that in mind, can you really claim it's valid to compare ourselves to neolithic hunter gatherers and say we face the same kind of existential risks over resources?
I'm not really presenting it as a counterargument, just a thought, because at the end of the day we're talking about predicting wether we can find future solutions to future problems.
> Based on that chain of thought, I don't think it's valid to draw historical comparisons beyond the last 500 years or so. Perhaps not even the last 100 years.
If I were presenting this as a rigorous counterargument, I'd go beyond what you allude; it's not 500, or 100 years of history that we can draw on to predict what will happen in the future. It's 0. We haven't had problems like the ones that will come, we don't know what the theoretical solutions could be, and we don't know wether we'd be able to implement any of those theoretical solutions.
We could get lucky and metaphorically "draw heads" from now until eternity, and pointing out that in the past we've sometimes "drawn tails" can't disprove it, you're right.
All I'm saying is we've failed plenty in the past, so it's worth considering that perhaps we could fail in the future too. We are more capable, though the problems are bigger. We could get lucky, but we could also get unlucky. We don't know.
> Faced with a truly civilization threatening resource shortage in the next decade or century, we could literally move asteroids to solve it. With that in mind, can you really claim it's valid to compare ourselves to neolithic hunter gatherers and say we face the same kind of existential risks over resources?
Here I need to point out two things:
- Until it's done, having the capacity to mine asteroids will only be theoretical.
- Yes— even if we manage to move asteroids. I think it'll be valid comparison for as long as we exist.
We are living beings in an environment. We can use energy in clever ways to gain the resources we need to survive and perhaps grow in that environment. The demand for resources and the supply we can access might grow as our population, complexity, and capabilities grow, but we'll forever be grappling this core mechanic of survival: we need to make sure we don't run out of X, else we risk all this we've built to come crashing down.
One thing I brought fourth on my third point in that original comment is that perhaps the solution to this timeless question isn't always in the supply of resources. Perhaps we shouldn't always figure out how to get more of X, and instead figure out how we can need less of it. But I'm going now beyond what you just asked me in your comment, sorry.
I don't think this follows, especially with your previous statement that:
> Economic pressure doesn't only make us smarter, it also makes us more ruthless.
It seems like the increased economic pressure of competing for less stuff would force people to be vastly more ruthless than they were in the 80s, which presumably would result in more problems.
Cobalt/Nickel chemistries will be for luxury cars, long range vehicles, tractor trailers, until the sulfur chemistries take over in probably 5-8 years (although I hope a lot sooner).
So this is kind of good news, but really isn't the meat of the BEV revolution.
I would expect that customer to disclose shipping product in a March investor event.
The 350 mile LFP car is probably already in production in a Shanghai factory if you can still stomach giving him money...
I was referring to their roadmap chemistries that they are next targeting for mass production, that will likely underlie what I call the "third phase" of BEVs. The first was the earlier prototypes and Model S/X era of Tesla. The Model 3 heralded the second phase, where most carmakers actually started trying at BEV products. Third phase is where the ICE cannot compete pricewise and BEVs are the clear choice when buying a new car.
200-210 wh/kg should do 400 mile cars if they have to . the 160 wh/kg sodium ion though, that should be a 200-300 mile car, eventually drop to $40/kwh... that will be the city car revolution, a technology for several billion BEVs.
Exciting times. Of course the US government is hopelessly behind.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/12/exxon-clima...
I believe this will trigger a "reverse economies of scale" where gas will get more expensive and less profitable from the drop in demand making large refining facilities and the like less profitable. Which will cause closures, and further inefficiencies, and a downward spiral.
What I most hope is that the tar sands and fracking oil becomes fundamentally noncompetitive, and what is left is the remaining conventional extraction reserves.
I also hope it starves every petro-authoritarian state. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, etc.
But that's still a decade away, a lot can happen.
My personal opinion will be that shortages on battery related materials will be solved by going to hydrogen cars. Replace a finite resource with a practically infinite one.
Fuel cells often use platinum (anode) and nickel (cathode).
Ultimately, you will realize that the leap from batteries to fuel cells is not that difficult. It’s smaller than the leap from ICE to batteries after all. So if there is an alternative way of making an EV that uses much less resources, it will be adopted.
The comparison is to batteries. We don’t burn the cobalt or lithium either.
And like hydrogen, with lots of infrastructure costs, shipping biological feedstocks and fertilizers around also causes emissions and lowers energy returns.
I would not bet on hydrogen for air travel, unless you mean lighter than air craft then maybe with careful design. For planes there's enough existing bio-based options that are simply liquids and much easier to handle. Batteries probably make more sense than liquid fuel in a car if you're assuming the liquid fuel comes from renewables.
If that's the case you might as well use the starting energy (electricity) and use it directly rather than converting to liquids and then back again.
In the latter, it is because the energy is well over an order of magnitude too low. It's pretty much impossible for something that resembles a conventional battery to work. Not even the theoretical limits of conventional batteries will make for a worthwhile plane. So battery planes will pretty much always been short-ranged aircraft that can't replace jetliners.
As a result, the future of air travel is guaranteed to either be some kind of e-fuels/synfuels, or hydrogen itself. There are no credible alternatives unless you're imagine nuclear powered planes.
Do you consider power beamed by laser from space to not be credible, even into the unlimited future?
These are highly implausible ideas. On the order of aerial battery swapping. You can imagine such things, but they won’t happen in any sort of practical way. Far less than just figuring out a greener fuel.
Why is this implausible? Mere assertion of incredulity is not sufficient, especially at long time horizons.
You are confusion implausible with impossible. Sure, it is not “impossible.” It is just absurdly unlikely. I mean seriously, you will need lasers on the order of hundreds of MWs in power, beaming to tens of thousands of planes flying at any given time. It doesn’t take much effort to realize the sheer cost and unreliability of such an idea.
And your appeal to “long time horizon” is just an excuse to not think through the issue. At long time horizons, other ideas become viable, and ones that are much more practical.
You are the one who is writing checks his thinking can't cash.
Sorry, but you are one fantasizing here. Everyone can imagine what this is. You're the one who actually thinks this is possible for a real aircraft. Again, the alternative is simply figuring out a greener fuel. So no matter how much you insist that over a long enough time horizon that this is possible, it will be quickly displaced by far more plausible ideas first. As a result, it's highly unlikely to happen on any time frame.
Yes, a green fuel is another possibility. I'm not ruling that out. Perhaps you could also refrain from ruling out a possibility when you don't have a good argument?
In fact, the only reason you are even giving your idea credence is because it is so far from reality that you can handwave the details. There are no serious studies nor experimental vehicles to criticize. Just a vague idea of how it might work on paper, with no hard challenges since you are free to imagine whatever technology you want. No one has even built any mechanism of beaming MWs of power via lasers before, but you are allowed to imagine such a system anyways. And apparently, a global network of such systems with built-in redundancies, all already working in your mind. The whole idea reminds me of the space elevator, which was another grand concept that works on paper, but was only seen as plausible until people started doing real calculations on it.
Meanwhile, in the real world, real engineers have to overcome real world problems that are encountered in the development of real systems. These things only look hard because you have to see the gory details of real technologies. But in reality, they're far simpler than the crazy ideas you sometimes hear about. Which is why the greener fuel idea is far more plausible. It is far simpler, but only looks more complex because people have to solve the real world problems of it.
Your objection to ME handwaving is obtuse. I am not the one claiming it is impossible. I don't have to show all possible ways it might be done don't work. Don't resort to the usual crank attempt of defending your initial claim by insisting I disprove it. You are obligated to explain in detail why the idea can't work. I don't think you can, your huffing and puffing notwithstanding.
I think you could become more persuasive if you retreated to a time limited claim, say the next 30 years. The best argument would not be complexity, but rather the cost of the orbital lasers.
You can pretty much pick an arbitrary timeframe on this. If you want 30 years, I'll give 30 years. It won't happen in that timeframe.
We have planes that run on energy beaming down from space. Solar impulse 2 worked. Month-long endurance solar drones have existed for a year or two. Payload sucks, and wingspan is long, but that doesn't change the fact they work.
We have battery powered planes. The tech is superior to ICE in every way but carrying enough energy to fly long distance (which is the deal breaker).
Solar alone is insufficient due to energy density and efficiency, but a few kw per m^2 would work. A 2kW/m^2 monochromatic light would solve both of these. Existing PV tech is about 80-90% efficient at its bandgap. Epoxy some standard quarter cells into the top of an airbus, shine a 1000nm laser a few times as bright as the sun on it and your "complex" receiver is done.
Nothing needs inventing to make it work. The batteries can provide a safe abort in anything except a transpacific route.
Will it beat syn fuel economically? Almost certainly not. But there are no completely out there engineering challenges involved. Just a similar level of engineering to any new airframe.
I saw you palm that card.
Given that even under absurdly generous assumptions you need around five square kilometers, or about 2 ISS' worth, of solar panel area per beam, this omission is not surprising.
By turning around and crying that I didn't say something unrelated you're being completely disingenuous.
Only an idiot or someone acting in bad faith or both would say "Aha! You need a beam with n megawatts to receive a beam with n megawatts!" Of course you do. That same solar array exists in the syn fuel scenario too (except 3-10x bigger and on the ground). Raising it as if you found a gotchya is not just disingenuous but also incredibly stupid.
Seems farfetched compared to replacing the liquid fuels, and I'll stick by that, fully acknowledging that the liquid fuels don't (presently) have a perfectly closed carbon cycle. Don't focus on it being perfect in two decades when vastly better is available today...
Of course that gets a lot better when fertilizer is made from renewable hydrogen instead of natural gas and the transportation is electric from renewables instead of gas cars, and if we used electric/solar heating for the thermal inputs it seems like the CO2 losses can get an awful lot better.
Hydrogen is theoretically closed cycle (though displacing fossil fuel electricity on the grid is obviously superior most of the time), but only if you redesign and rebuild the entire fleet of commercial airplanes. I think as long as coal plants are operational a lot of these details are almost besides the point, and as soon as fossil fuel plants are all offline the solution will be obvious from the experience we gained in getting there.
I maintain that swapping equivalent liquid fuels into the existing fleet is most likely to actually happen at scale.
The aircraft would have limited backup power (those batteries for climbing to altitude, say, or an APU), and presumably there would be extra backup laser sources in orbit. One could even have multiple lower power lasers targeting each aircraft for redundancy (this would also cause a beam that hit the ground to have lower power, as the beams would diverge from one another.)
The economics could well kill it, but it would be really nice to have unlimited range due to not needing to burn fuel.
My money is on a biofuel/synfuel hybrid in the short term. Pyrolised/digested bagasse or some form of grass with electrolysed hydrogen used to modify hydrocarbons and increase energy yield.
The carbon in existing waste streams in the US would be more than enough to satisfy existing US jet fuel demand.
Biofuels use a lot of fossil fuel derived fertilizer and require a lot of energy to distill into jet fuel. It might be a stop gap solution, but not a long-term one especially since people could eat the crops grown where biofuel crops are grown.