The greening of planes, trains, and automobiles
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It will never be better to accelerate warming. The reality is "we" (aka humans) are doing the most harm to ourselves. Sure we might take other species with us but others will adapt and migrate to fill the voids we create. We are not going to destroy all life on the planet through dumping too much carbon into the atmosphere even if we destroy ourselves while doing it. To claim we need to accelerate climate change to "limit overall long term damage" is completely nonsensical.
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Just a reminder that 2/3 of global energy is rejected (lost/wasted) so due partly to their efficiency EVs are a win over ICE even when powered by dirty electricity.
It’s critically important we move to more efficient use of energy, not just cleaner sources.
It’s critically important we move to more efficient use of energy, not just cleaner sources.
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It would be great to reduce the need for individual cars of any sort. More walkable spaces, please. I live in one and I love it.
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Why don’t we retitle the article, “How Present Oil & Gas Companies Intend to Stay Relevant “? Using Nye Industries as an example, the 19th century whale oil hunting and processing giant, is almost nonexistent today in the lubricants field. Looking at the environmental damage they caused, it’s not a bad outcome for today’s replacements.
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That's called a review.
I found it interesting, and I certainly didn't know everything in it! The Flettner rotor, although tangential to the main issue, was an entirely new concept to me.
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So to summarize the article, it's all good as long as we can produce, transport and store hydrogen easily and cheaply. Bit of a snag with that..
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For shipping, there is also an existing concept of sailing slower. Big ports can have huge waiting bottlenecks where the ship just sits at anchor waiting in a queue to be unloaded.
One port is already trialing smarter queueing, where they intentionally tell the incoming cargo ships to slow down a few knots, thus arriving from halfway over the world right at their guaranteed reserved immediate unloading spot.
Slowing down just a few knots seems pretty marginal, but the fuel savings are real – even if the traditional 'cube law' is pretty much an oversimplification and companies already try to find optimum speeds, even a knot shaved off can still bring not insignificant fuel savings.
One port is already trialing smarter queueing, where they intentionally tell the incoming cargo ships to slow down a few knots, thus arriving from halfway over the world right at their guaranteed reserved immediate unloading spot.
Slowing down just a few knots seems pretty marginal, but the fuel savings are real – even if the traditional 'cube law' is pretty much an oversimplification and companies already try to find optimum speeds, even a knot shaved off can still bring not insignificant fuel savings.
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Photon_plumber
Ars Tribunus Militum
The plastics (chemical) industry is closely related to the petroleum and gas industry. I read this Piece today about how the plastics industry wants to handle recycling. It’s a bunch of hand waving, stalling and misdirection. They want to continue forward, business as usual. It’s a lucrative market after all. All this talk of synthetic fuels is no different. An industry that currently feels threatened from a clean path forward through renewables wants to keep its foot in the door, and find other uses for its products. The very manner of retrieving and processing those products won’t change much.
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Photon_plumber
Ars Tribunus Militum
Your forgot the last snag, doing it cleanly, without the present damage the industry engages in.
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I believe Ars called it wrong on trucking. Trucking revolves around cost. Due to inefficiencies both at production and when you burn it, hydrogen takes several times more electricity per mile than batteries which are 95% efficient. Hydrogen from reformed natural gas is a shortcut — the energy is already in — but environmentally it is worse than driving the truck on coal, so isn’t a better solution than diesel which will have to go. For this reason alone, any trucking that can use batteries will use batteries. With autonomous drivers it is hard to imagine a case where the time saved by more rapid fill ups or cost saved by saving a 10 thousand pounds will be repaid some other way.
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It is not either /or. It is both. It’s going to take decades if not centuries to install subways in just the urban areas to the degree that cities like Houston are as livable without a car as New York City. So the car-less society is not a solution that will get us there soon enough. We can expect to need several generations of cars before then. Let’s be sure to solve the existential problem too.
For the time being there are also e-bikes, which mostly require alternative paint on the roads and if we are lucky some concrete barriers. Far easier.
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Given the energy densities of batteries that are coming out of companies like CATL now, I would be surprised if hydrogen has any role to play in trucking. Similar to cars it'll fall by the wayside as batteries just get better, lighter, cheaper and quicker to recharge, plus I imagine that while it presents some challenges, fitting trucking rest stops with high voltage rapid charges is easier than building hydrogen refuelling stations.
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Your "summarisation" of TFA is really off.
In almost all achievable 2050 net zero scenarios, the green hydrogen from renewable electricity is immediately converted to easily storable and transportable F‑T synfuels, methanol or ammonia. Only a small part would ever be used and stored directly as hydrogen gas, and that mostly just for other industrial processes like steel making.
Both electrolysis & the F‑T process can easily run intermittently even on industrial scales (in case of F‑T, intermittency may even help production), so producing green hydrogen and transforming it into synfuels only when renewables peak is doable, even with all its inefficiencies. Sure, 100% batteries would have been better, but some fields still need other fuel or feedstock than electricity.
Any planes, ships and long haulage trucks (just those that couldn't use batteries – especially with shorter driven distances and long resting periods mandated for trucking safety here and batteries getting better) would use various synfuels derived from hydrogen nad CO2 from capture & industry (concrete manufacturing and others).
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To be fair, when you are done with your single-use plastics and they go to the landfill or wherever unfortunate place they end up, the plastic locks the carbon away for 1000 years,* not at all like what happens with single use fossil fuels. The plastics industry is correct that they can probably legitimately just keep on doing what they’ve been doing. The same goes for petrochemicals for pharmaceuticals, paints, road surfaces, etc. Mass destruction isn’t inherent to their operation in the way fossil fuels are. For these products, the problem area is human behavior and the waste disposal process. That is, the dinosaurs aren’t the problem. Burning dinosaurs are the problem.
*At least until bacteria get good at degrading the stuff.
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Wrong. Fuel is money. Especially in shipping, where you are burning insane amounts of cash 24/7 with usually pretty thin profit margins (outside of COVID). The shipping company saves money both on fuel (a lot of money) and on not having the ship waiting uselessly for a week in port doing nothing.
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Musings of a threatened industry? Looking at the ridiculous amounts of money being invested in electrical energy storage, and how far its come in a short 10-12 years where anyone actually gave a damn about making advancements, I just don’t see any need for any petrochemical derived fuels at the current trajectory of innovations. New battery designs and chemistries (and that includes solid state) will quickly surpass that area.
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I don’t work for FedEx or any other shipping company or drive a truck. But I do use their services for anything from FedEx envelopes to 1800 lb crated equipment shippings. I don’t get billed for a shipment until it’s delivered. No delivery, no invoice, no money coming in to the shipping company. Excess fuel costs have always been passed on to the customer. We will always get those fuel surcharges when gas prices spiked.
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It won’t. It’s true of all businesses, small and large. Get it out fast, get it billed, get paid. Cash flow is king. Small business owner here.
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Kindly cash flow my arse. You don't get paid til it's unloaded, so if there is any delay in being unloaded at port, your cash flow is bloody molasses during the wait.
A: a journey takes 35 days at speed A, 5 days are spent in port waiting to be paid on average, cash arrives on day 40.
B: a journey takes 39 days at speed B, 1 day is spent in port waiting to be paid, cash arrives on day 40 as well, but you saved on fuel.
The cash flow is exactly the same in both.
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You'd have to topple civilization without accelerating global warming if you want to limit long term damage - faster acceleration of global warming means that even fewer species will have time to adapt, and the effects will linger on for decades (if not hundreds or thousands of years). In the meantime, vote for better politicians that will treat global warming like the crisis it is -- sadly it's mostly a crisis for today's children, most of the politicians who are most in a position to make a change today aren't going to live to see the worst effects of climate change.
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Well except for the portion that gets degraded into microplastics, disrupting the hormone systems of all of the animals on the planet.
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The car-emission problem is not a problem of fuel source, it's a problem of simply reducing the number of car trips.
Moving to less car-centric infrastructure, focusing on walking, bikes, and transit, could cut urban car emissions by a vast margin, all while making people happier, healthier, and our cities more pleasant places to be.
Cars are the enemy of the green transition.
Moving to less car-centric infrastructure, focusing on walking, bikes, and transit, could cut urban car emissions by a vast margin, all while making people happier, healthier, and our cities more pleasant places to be.
Cars are the enemy of the green transition.
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Synthetic fuels are in no way "Green Fuels"
They are somewhat cleaner than extractive methods of making the same fuels but, inevitably, you still get the energy back out of them by burning. And the burning of a synthetic fuel is still as dirty and polluting as the burning of the same fuel made by any other process.
They sell it hard on the idea of carbon neutrality, carefully ignoring that they are still producing all of the other byproducts of their use.
They are somewhat cleaner than extractive methods of making the same fuels but, inevitably, you still get the energy back out of them by burning. And the burning of a synthetic fuel is still as dirty and polluting as the burning of the same fuel made by any other process.
They sell it hard on the idea of carbon neutrality, carefully ignoring that they are still producing all of the other byproducts of their use.
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Making society (and the whole ecosystem, essentially) collapse even faster than the present rate, which is already too fast for evolution to deal with causing mass extinctions? Yeah, right, suicide cult. Don't we already have enough of those?
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"Green fuels" are more like "greener fuels." Using them does in fact help with minimizing climate change inputs, if done at a much larger scale than we currently see. But yes, they still have other impacts as well.
Note that California can (and has in the past) legitimately mandate and support transport electrification (and electrification of other sectors) for good, solid, old fashioned health-based pollution reduction reasons; climate change benefits were a side note for a long time, and with the present Supreme Court in the US could again be a "co-benefit" rather than the primary focus. That, unfortunately, makes the transition take longer because there are many places that don't presently need the other pollution control benefits (though with the climate changing they might in the near future).
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Don’t waste time. The battery revolution is upon us. Improvements are hitting every five minutes.
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I skipped over the ground transportation "chapters" and went straight to aviation, which is what I know. Only to land on this gem:
“You need to reconfigure the entire way we think about airplane design,” says Singh.
Really? Is that all? Completely reinvent an entire engineering discipline? In fact, more than one, when you account for configuration and performance, along with structures. If that's "all" that's needed, "just make it so, Number One."
Hydrogen storage is too bulky and too heavy for aircraft in all but the shortest-haul routes. Batteries the same. A hybrid sustainable fuels for cruise + battery electric for climb is feasible, but very complex and cuts hugely into payload, and moving payload is the reason the airplane exists in the first place.
Second only to space boosters, airplane performance and utility is incredibly sensitive to weight. Weight is the enemy. While, yes, there are still advancements to be made in aviation, the current crop of high-bypass turbofans and the soon-coming open-fan versions are at about optimal for use, balancing cost, complexity, and weight. The next big advancement is in aerodynamics, getting away from the traditional "tube and wing" overall configuration.
Sustainable hydrocarbon fuels are the right way forward, but ALL the processes currently known are not only more expensive than traditional jet fuels, they're a LOT more expensive than traditional jet fuels, and haven't yet scaled well to volume production. These factors were barely even mentioned in the article, if mentioned at all. Break through the cost and scalability problems and you'll have something.
This article was weak tea, or at least the aviation section was. If one can posit completely reinventing entire engineering disciplines at the wave of a hand, you're not being serious and not helping solve the problem.
“You need to reconfigure the entire way we think about airplane design,” says Singh.
Really? Is that all? Completely reinvent an entire engineering discipline? In fact, more than one, when you account for configuration and performance, along with structures. If that's "all" that's needed, "just make it so, Number One."
Hydrogen storage is too bulky and too heavy for aircraft in all but the shortest-haul routes. Batteries the same. A hybrid sustainable fuels for cruise + battery electric for climb is feasible, but very complex and cuts hugely into payload, and moving payload is the reason the airplane exists in the first place.
Second only to space boosters, airplane performance and utility is incredibly sensitive to weight. Weight is the enemy. While, yes, there are still advancements to be made in aviation, the current crop of high-bypass turbofans and the soon-coming open-fan versions are at about optimal for use, balancing cost, complexity, and weight. The next big advancement is in aerodynamics, getting away from the traditional "tube and wing" overall configuration.
Sustainable hydrocarbon fuels are the right way forward, but ALL the processes currently known are not only more expensive than traditional jet fuels, they're a LOT more expensive than traditional jet fuels, and haven't yet scaled well to volume production. These factors were barely even mentioned in the article, if mentioned at all. Break through the cost and scalability problems and you'll have something.
This article was weak tea, or at least the aviation section was. If one can posit completely reinventing entire engineering disciplines at the wave of a hand, you're not being serious and not helping solve the problem.
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Regarding microplastics. I was thinking of one of those artificial plastic lawns for both the look and water savings. Then I read recent studies that like all others plastic goods, those artificial lawns are (obviously) breaking down just like other plastics. Back to a southwest garden with succulents.
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