Wow each time I read substacks like these I learn so much about where and how things work and made. Schools have truly failed to educate on reality now its all about feelings and very little about reality.
Nov 15, 2022·edited Nov 15, 2022Liked by B.F. Randall ⚛ ⛏ ⚡
Thanks! I’ve read much about energy policy but these are things I did not know. There is much to digest here. Nearly everything in society these days seems ruled by insanity — politicians/bureaucrats/oligarchs — people who don’t actually care/know about the larger effects of the “solutions” they advocate. Propaganda teaches the voting masses things that have little bearing on truth or reality.
You’re spot on! For the first 33 years of US oil production, gasoline was an unwanted byproduct. At am that time, the US was mainly interested in kerosene to replace whale oil for lighting. It took the invention of the automobile to find a use for that wasted gasoline.
The more we push EVs, the more it’ll encourage internal combustion and generators in other parts of the world.
That’s what happens when we have politicians who are deadly serious about transforming a system that that are equally unserious in understanding.
Yes very good insights. This baffles me too; I learnt about crude distillates in highschool organic Chem. Even with EVs potentially phasing out demand for petrol you still need the asphalt for roads, oil derivates to make synthetic rubber for tires. All of which are refined crude oil products that produce petrol as a byproduct of the refinery process. How do the experts not get this? I will point out that there are a number of blind spots in the analysis. Firstly, a few concepts: energy return on energy invested (EROEI), end of life nuclear waste, biophysical/ecological constraints to continued economic growth on a finite planet, the climate impacts of continued burning of fossil hydrocarbons as a fuel source, global debt constraints to continued financing of the fossil fuel industry. I could go on... Anyway, the two main points I'll address is what you raised as a potential solution being nuclear fission to generate electricity to synthesise diesel equivalents from organic feed stocks such as grains. What's critical to understand is how much net energy we are able to generate to maintain our lifestyle and keep the economy running. For example, if we used a barrel of oil to mine and extract a barrel of oil there is no net gain in energy so we might as well not even mine and explore. Furthermore, for the economy to continue growing we need not only net energy but a certain amount of net energy to maintain our level of activity as well extra for the growing economy. Because fossil hydrocarbons are such dense forms of chemical energy we are blind to how much work they generate. After growing the industrial economy for well over 100 years the level of energy required to supplant and replace oil is far beyond what we can viably grow as grains crops. So in this thought experiment lets say with nuclear being adopted en mass so now electricity is no longer the limiting input. It now becomes how much biomass/feed stocks we can generate. Remember the Earth is a finite planet with only so much arable land that needs to be used grow all our food as well as fuel stocks. This now becomes the limiting factor. This is a law of nature that economics has attempted to solve but there will always be resource constraints and scarcity. Even if we hypothetically solved for both of these then we would hit another limit: land, metals, water, waste sinks etc. Then there is the issue of nuclear waste. We need to think long term like in the centuries. If we were to go down the path of nuclear en mass then just like we've become trapped and completely reliant on fossil hydrocarbons we would find ourselves not being able to move away from nuclear. The problem though, some time in that future civilisation will run out of nuclear materials and yet they will still have this stock pile of nuclear waste that needs to be contained and cooled for several years to decades before it is safe to store under ground. In summary, As humans we tend to think in short term time as our frame of reference is a human lifetime which is understandable but also why we are in the situation we are now. We need to be thinking in time frames of centuries to millennia otherwise we'd just be dooming future generations to a scenario where there is no easy solution. Just like the first humans that were alive during the industrial revolution I doubt any of them thought about the consequences upon our generation 2-300 years later.
Wow each time I read substacks like these I learn so much about where and how things work and made. Schools have truly failed to educate on reality now its all about feelings and very little about reality.
Thanks! I’ve read much about energy policy but these are things I did not know. There is much to digest here. Nearly everything in society these days seems ruled by insanity — politicians/bureaucrats/oligarchs — people who don’t actually care/know about the larger effects of the “solutions” they advocate. Propaganda teaches the voting masses things that have little bearing on truth or reality.
You’re spot on! For the first 33 years of US oil production, gasoline was an unwanted byproduct. At am that time, the US was mainly interested in kerosene to replace whale oil for lighting. It took the invention of the automobile to find a use for that wasted gasoline.
The more we push EVs, the more it’ll encourage internal combustion and generators in other parts of the world.
That’s what happens when we have politicians who are deadly serious about transforming a system that that are equally unserious in understanding.
Yes very good insights. This baffles me too; I learnt about crude distillates in highschool organic Chem. Even with EVs potentially phasing out demand for petrol you still need the asphalt for roads, oil derivates to make synthetic rubber for tires. All of which are refined crude oil products that produce petrol as a byproduct of the refinery process. How do the experts not get this? I will point out that there are a number of blind spots in the analysis. Firstly, a few concepts: energy return on energy invested (EROEI), end of life nuclear waste, biophysical/ecological constraints to continued economic growth on a finite planet, the climate impacts of continued burning of fossil hydrocarbons as a fuel source, global debt constraints to continued financing of the fossil fuel industry. I could go on... Anyway, the two main points I'll address is what you raised as a potential solution being nuclear fission to generate electricity to synthesise diesel equivalents from organic feed stocks such as grains. What's critical to understand is how much net energy we are able to generate to maintain our lifestyle and keep the economy running. For example, if we used a barrel of oil to mine and extract a barrel of oil there is no net gain in energy so we might as well not even mine and explore. Furthermore, for the economy to continue growing we need not only net energy but a certain amount of net energy to maintain our level of activity as well extra for the growing economy. Because fossil hydrocarbons are such dense forms of chemical energy we are blind to how much work they generate. After growing the industrial economy for well over 100 years the level of energy required to supplant and replace oil is far beyond what we can viably grow as grains crops. So in this thought experiment lets say with nuclear being adopted en mass so now electricity is no longer the limiting input. It now becomes how much biomass/feed stocks we can generate. Remember the Earth is a finite planet with only so much arable land that needs to be used grow all our food as well as fuel stocks. This now becomes the limiting factor. This is a law of nature that economics has attempted to solve but there will always be resource constraints and scarcity. Even if we hypothetically solved for both of these then we would hit another limit: land, metals, water, waste sinks etc. Then there is the issue of nuclear waste. We need to think long term like in the centuries. If we were to go down the path of nuclear en mass then just like we've become trapped and completely reliant on fossil hydrocarbons we would find ourselves not being able to move away from nuclear. The problem though, some time in that future civilisation will run out of nuclear materials and yet they will still have this stock pile of nuclear waste that needs to be contained and cooled for several years to decades before it is safe to store under ground. In summary, As humans we tend to think in short term time as our frame of reference is a human lifetime which is understandable but also why we are in the situation we are now. We need to be thinking in time frames of centuries to millennia otherwise we'd just be dooming future generations to a scenario where there is no easy solution. Just like the first humans that were alive during the industrial revolution I doubt any of them thought about the consequences upon our generation 2-300 years later.