Oil production and consumption is higher than ever and projected to keep increasing to 2030 (though I do not personally believe this).
The demand growth is driven by the transportation sector, particularly in the developing countries.
Despite the recent successes of electrical cars, auto fuel consumption is still rising, and the absolute growth in conventional auto sales is, incredibly, almost one hundred* times larger than growth in electric car sales (an extra 3.1 million conventional cars were sold worldwide in 2016 cf 2015).
And even though you could argue that we can see the beginning of the end for petrol powered cars, industries such as construction, mining and agriculture - not to mention air travel - are much harder to convert to electricity.
Sooo... I expect we will be reliant on oil for a while to come yet.
*edit: sorry that is probably wrong, according to some sources the electric vehicle market grew by almost 300,000 vehicles per year... although that depends just what is counted as "electric". In any case, electric cars have a huge gap to close just to arrest the climb in conventional vehicle sales.
Locally-generated solar electric power to charge the batteries is also easier in a farm environment, and makes direct financial sense.
The same dismounted tractor batteries, when not in heavy use, e.g. during winter, can work as a "power wall" to supplement the solar power during dusk when days are shorter.
But not before that.
Ahem: that's because of "political issues". You should remain very worried (and vigilant) about the direction of energy policy under the incoming administration.
Here's a recently announced coal plant closure: http://www.cortezjournal.com/article/20161001/News05/1610099...
...
the local job options could be pretty limited in far-western Montrose County once two of its major employers close their doors, eliminating what are currently 55 jobs at the plant and 28 at the mine.
...
According to the EIA, the Nucla plant generated 416,150 MWh in 2015 for an average annual power of 47.5 megawatts: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/527 That's an abysmal productivity per employee (or a fabulous job source, depending on your perspective): 0.86 real annualized megawatts per employee at the plant ; 0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the mining jobs.
A well-sited utility scale solar farm like Desert Sunlight can produce an average annualized power of 147 megawatts with just 15 full time employees, for a ratio of 9.8 megawatts per plant employee.
Replacing old coal plant generation with equal MWh from favorably sited solar requires only ~9% of the number of permanent employees, if Nucla is a typical case for an older coal plant. That's a nightmare number if you're relying on the coal industry for your livelihood, or a great opportunity if you're looking for cost reductions in a competitive electricity market. The fixed O&M costs for solar are already the lowest of any utility scale electricity source; once the capital costs get low enough it has winning costs across the board in any reasonably sunny area. That's for instantaneous cost of generation, anyway, which still has plenty of competitive opportunities in most regions before storage has to be considered.
Every industry loves to brag about "creating jobs" when beseeching governments but that's another way of admitting to "creating costs" (that are then passed on to buyers). The explosion in solar and wind jobs is a temporary effect of rapid expansion; most of that employment is in installation rather than running installed plants, manufacturing equipment from raw materials, or mining the raw materials. There's a lot less work in operating a solar plant than building it and the operational phase is a lot longer. If the American solar industry had already reached steady state (just enough construction to keep new capacity matched with retirements), I believe that the full life cycle labor intensity per MWh would be significantly lower than that of a steady state coal electricity system. And the labor intensity is declining further because a few major trends in PV tech (higher module efficiency, longer module life, longer inverter life), though not explicitly about reducing labor inputs, imply significant further labor reductions.
I can't imagine anywhere people would accept going back into living inside a smog, dying earlier due to respiratory problems, and forgetting that the sky is blue.
The only trend around is on the other direction: people pressing their governments into cleaning coal plants on the less developed countries.
Having said that, I believe there are several billion dollar funds looking to invest in solar and their main problem is a lack of projects to invest in, so solar is doing okay from an ROI perspective at the moment.
You can't make plastic from coal. More and more items are being manufactured from plastic, which comes from oil. There is more to this narrative than what you put in your gas tank.
(The methanol could come from renewable electricity and CO2 extracted from seawater, instead of coal, if renewables get cheap enough. Or you can make methanol from waste wood, corn stover, all kinds of biomass.)
One downside of cheap solar might be a drop in crude prices, resulting in its more frivolous use. I'd hate to see improvements in shipping meant to conserve fuel, and thereby lower carbon emissions, be set aside once fuel becomes cheap again. We need to watch for this and, perhaps, get regs in place to ensure it is burnt as sparingly as possible.
As more light vehicles move over to electric vehicles, we're going to need more clean energy. We should build every kWh of solar and wind generation we can.
> One downside of cheap solar might be a drop in crude prices, resulting in its more frivolous use. I'd hate to see improvements in shipping meant to conserve fuel, and thereby lower carbon emissions, be set aside once fuel become cheap again. We need to watch for this and, perhaps, get regs in place to ensure it is burnt as sparingly as possible.
Well, I mean, that's kinda the whole point of Tesla Motors, you see? Its an electric car, for sure. But its not a Leaf, its not a Bolt, its not an EV1. Its the best damn car you can get. Someone called Katy Perry's stage "The Tesla of tour stages" [3]. That's how you win against oil. We didn't run out of rocks when we left the stone age behind. We found something better.
[1] http://ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Screenshot-2014-0...
[2] https://solarpowerrocks.com/infographics/solar-infographic-s...
[3] https://twitter.com/katyperry/status/444228348319784960 "Omg someone just called my stage the TESLA of tour stages... It was like, the coolest modern compliment ever."
In my world, my parent's new retirement castle is powered by an off-grid solar/diesel system. Solar isn't putting up much of a fight (Canada+winter+mountains = maybe 2hours of direct sunlight on panels).
I'd argue this logic is backwards. Only way solar can cause a drop in oil prices is by reducing it's demand. And if it is reducing the demand of oil, then the total demand of oil can't increase.
Further, only sustainable way to keep oil unused in ground is to get the market price of oil so low that nobody bothers to dig it up. I mean, if the oil price is $500 per barrel, there is simply no international agreement that will stop people and countries drilling oil from every possible site from north to south pole.
There is R&D with deploying wind power to help reduce fuel costs on cargo vessels.
In some ways it makes a lot of sense: You have no loss in converting mechanical energy into electric charge, then back into mechanical energy, and also losses in transmission (as is the case with traditional wind - and there's a big difference in efficiency when you crunch the numbers). On vessels, it's just straight mechanical energy->mechanical energy, and energy density is also very high. It's a crude solution, but also elegant and clean solution[1].
Business needs incentives to move on these kinds of renewable technology opportunities that exist but are not exploited because the fruit hangs too high for the free-market alone to justify the cost for the charity of the environment. My own biased opinion is that one good solution might be a carbon tax, which could align private business incentives with optimal public outcomes.
1: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/science/earth/cargo-ship-d...
The point is transportation is a tricky application for renewables, and the amount of storage needed to make it work is mind-boggling huge, even assuming decades of compounding growth.
According to LLNL [1], the US consumption of energy in transportation is 27.7 quads. A quads is a measure of a lot of kWh. Specifically, 27.7 quads is 8,118,068,643 MWh.
Tesla's gigafactory is slated to produce 35 GWh worth of battery storage production per year at full capacity (slated for 2018) [2].
So, our annual energy consumption in transportation alone is 8,120,000 GWh, and our largest factory will, in two years, produce about 35 GWh per year worth of capacity.
Lets assume some compounding magic and imagine the gigafactory will be only the first of many self-replicating automated tesla factories. Say we grow our capacity at 5% every year... after two decades, in 2038, that puts annual capacity at 92 GWh, with a cumulative installed capacity of 1,250 GWh.
We're trying to hit 8,120,000 GWh. That's not gonna work.
Okay, lets assume instead of 5% growth, we somehow get 50% growth (we need more gigafactories, but lets say we also get better at building batteries, something closer to moore's law). Now after two decades of 50% growth, in 2038 our new annual storage production is 116,000 GWh, with something like 350,000 GWh of cumulative installed capacity.
Still short of 8,120,000 GWh.
(But this exponential growth is only starting to hockey-stick upwards at this 50% growth... we WOULD hit our goal within the third decade)
So, even assuming very optimistic conditions where the storage capacity production is exponentially growing, consumption stays flat, and capacity does not degrade once installed, electric cars still will barely make a dent in petroleum usage in transportation after two decades.
I hope I made some error on my metaphorical napkin here (like a battery can be recharged... if you have 365 Wh of annual consumption, that can technically be serviced by a 1 Wh battery being used every day, right? So we don't quite need to match the 8,120,000 number exactly, right? Maybe like 1/10 or 1/100th of that?) Because if I didn't, that means we need an Apollo-level effort sustained for a few decades to have a meaningful path off fossil fuels.
[1]: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/... [2]: https://www.tesla.com/gigafactory
What lead me down this path is some solar thermal plants store heat as a large vat of molten salt. The supposed advantage is they can produce power at night. However PV has solar thermal significantly beat in price. Meaning it would be cheaper to just generate electricity using PV and convert it to heat for later. Bonus, unlike molten salt, solid media (AKA rock) can run much hotter and thus higher eff.
I did try a calculation for the amount of rock needed for thermal storage. Using your numbers, assume you need 2.5 X 22,500 GWH that's aprox 56,250 GWH of thermal storage.
Turns out 'rock' has a heat coeefecient of about 2000 J/(DegC Kg).
So amount of rock needed.
56,250 X 10^9 * 3600 sec/hr) / (2000 * 800) degC -> 1.26 X 10^11 kg.
Common rock is about 2500 kg/m3 so the volume would be
1.26X10^11/2500 -> 5.06 X 10^7 m3.
That is about 20 times the size of the great pyramid.
Those things are on my mind as I contemplate a switch from heating oil to natural gas at my home. It does not seem to make financial sense, but it makes more sense when I consider those things. That said, until technology that allows solar to be economically used for everything is available (e.g. amazingly cheap, high density, long lasting batteries), we are going to need natural gas to replace other fossil fuels in places where solar cannot be used.
Natural gas is not a sustainable energy source. Fracking, which is what makes it cheaper, has tons of environmental problems. Sure, it's better than worse fuels, so go ahead and upgrade. But please don't hijack threads about a sustainable planet.
Land isn't going to be a constraint in most countries. Solar resources, while distributed unevenly, are significantly more evenly distributed than fossil or nuclear fuels, or even wind resources. See for example this map of insolation in the US: http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/solar/national_photovoltaic_2...
In the continental US the very best solar resources are maybe ~7 kWh/m^2/day and there's hardly anything below 3.5. Or to put it in terms of cities, Seattle gets 58% as much annual insolation as sun-drenched Phoenix: http://www.i4at.org/lib2/solarrad.htm
So it took many historical performance:price doublings before unsubsidized solar electricity got within shouting distance of fossil electricity in even the sunniest places in the US, and then just one more to reach that threshold across most of the country.
The technical and economic performance of wind/PV has already improved enough, and has enough assured near-future improvements already in the pipeline, that I'd say it would be destined to "eat the world" for electricity if storage were a solved problem. But storage isn't a solved problem.
Most discoveries that get hyped as "battery breakthrough" by university press offices aren't really breakthroughs, but there's so much research that there's an abundance of riches even after you throw away the ~95% that looks bad on slightly closer examination. Common problems with battery "breakthroughs" that justify quick rejection: dependence on rare elements (lithium is reasonably abundant; I mean things like tellurium, germanium, rhenium...), low cycle life, effects demonstrated only at interfaces or in nanostructures without any obvious path to bulk scaling. Among the remaining ~5% that looks interesting, assuming the publications aren't fraudulent, I have little idea which ones will end up industrially significant. Chemistry is a lot easier to model than market success. There are also partial substitutions for electricity storage that could displace and/or complement it: supergrids, demand response, thermal buffering...
But if the price of solar panels keep plummeting like this, it seems sensible to first cover all roofs with them and see how far we can get.
The tech is simple. Dig a hole in your backyard, put a large steel tank in it with an air compressor and a small turbine generator.
Putting the tank underground vastly improves the safety of the system and hides it. You can also derive heat from this process.
Is there sufficient market pressure to drive demand for grid-scale storage? Batteries have been mostly driven by weight constraints (mobile tech, cars) and not by the need for large-scale stationary deployments.
I think that when renewables reach higher levels of grid penetration they will increase the demand for storage with different tradeoffs.
If coal mining had an EROEI under 1 no industrial revolution would have happened, because the manual labour for extracting the energy source would have been better spent at other tasks. Now that we have some energy sources with very high EROEI in the energy mix we use we can think about some sources as you say, for some very specific tasks.
Obviously, charged battery storage has an EROEI < 1, and that's fine because it's a portable storage medium, not an energy source.
On the individual scale a company in a >1 ratio line of business sells energy, which incidentally happens to be in the form of Jet-A or 93 octane but what really matters is they sell energy that runs the other economic sectors. Whereas a company in the <1 ratio line of business sells fascinating petrochemical feedstocks, which incidentally happen to be flammable and could be used as expensive fuels and they compete for needed energy with the rest of the economy.
The ethanol debacle shows how important that is. Certainly aged 12 year crown royal is not energetically feasible as engine fuel and that doesn't matter as long as its affordable for drinking. The distillery produces human fuel, but not energy, in fact its a net sink of energy. Likewise you can build a plant to produce ethanol, and it will produce fuel, and as long as you don't worry about energy or CO2 that's OK. Inevitably after its built someone will point out that rather than importing 30 million barrels of crude oil energy per day, if you want to run cars on ethanol we'll have to import and burn 60 million barrels of crude oil energy per day and there will be freakouts.
Part of the confusion is in the old days it was only possible to simultaneously produce both energy and fuel whereas we've burned the cheap oil such that now we're going to be deciding to make industrial plants and processes that produce energy OR fuel but often not both at the same time. In the old days it was impossible for a refinery not to produce and sell both fuel and energy at the same time...
There's been talk of using solar energy to help with oil sands extraction ( https://www.google.com/patents/US9039893 ), because oil sands have such low EROEI that the cost of fuel for melting them is a considerable part of the cost (as is finding the other chemical feedstock for diluent to produce "dilbit"). In some ways this is great - replacing a fossil source with a renewable - in others it's terrible, as it increases the transfer of carbon from the ground to the atmosphere.
Did monetary ROI ever made sense to you? EROEI is the same thing, except in units used by nature.
Let's take two hypothetical means to produce electricity, A and B.
A is, from EROEI point of view, almost a perpetual machine, with EROEI of 1,000,000. Unfortunately it is really expensive, investment costs are one million dollars per watt generated.
B then, has really bad EROEI, 1.0001. However, getting that electricity costs only 0.0001 USD/MWh.
I do not understand in which circumstances it would be relevant or interesting to use EROEI as a metric to compare these power sources.
Note also that in absence of subsidies, ROI contains all the information EROEI gives.
The issue is not so much about the EROEI of an particular process in the small, as about the headline overall availability of energy from all sources to civilisation as a whole. That article discusses the "EROEI cliff" possibility, where as it declines more and more human effort must be put in to replace it, resulting in a civilisational collapse.
The main thing environmentalists (among others) seem to forget is that you can't make plastic out of sunlight. Or air. Or by pedaling a bicycle.
Oil (and natural gas, especially in the US where petrochemical refineries use it for ethane) will continue to be in demand if for no other reason than to be used as a feedstock for plastics and a litany of other chems that make modern life possible.
If switching to solar from oil would eliminate 96% of our use of fossil fuels, I'm pretty sure those "environmentalists" you refer to would still be happy.
But honestly whenever somebody brings up plastics in a discussion about sustainable energy or climate change I always assume they just like being contrarian.
Alkanes, aromatics, alkenes... it's all accessible starting from methanol. China's already making plastic feedstocks from methanol on an industrial scale though the methanol comes from coal rather than CO2 and clean electricity.
Having established this fact, the importante of solar, - and all other renewable energy sources as well, - grows even more instead of diminishing. We need to start using solar et all right away, not until after fosil fuels have gotten depleted; so that we can treat oil as an strategic reserve that is used for those applications that do not have any other alternative. Petrochemicals, - at least some of them, - being one example.
The drop in Oil demand would mean the end of the OPEC bloc.
You might not have noticed, but OPEC is dead.
A combination of shale oil in the US, Saudi and US desire to the disrupt the Russian oil-economy and Iran/Saudi rivalries mean OPEC can't set prices anymore. The best they can do is try to restrict supply enough to stop them going bust[1].
Even that isn't a sure thing anymore - no one can be sure that even that small agreement will stick[2].
An Exxon/Russia agreement under the Trump presidency will bury OPEC. (Not sure Exxon/Russia will be better than OPEC, but OPEC won't be able to do anything about it.)
[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-01/opec-get-its-cartel-mo...
[2] http://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Goldman-Flip-Flops-Aga...
Are you sure? OPEC's November 30th deal moved world oil prices drastically in every direction. For a dead entity, they sure seem to exert change upon the living.
PS: I'd love for OPEC to die also, but I think they are very much alive, albeit less relevant than 20 years ago.
What I am afraid is that the nuclear renaissance may be further delayed in the west, which is what we badly need now to reduce carbon footprints, provide stable energy production and to fill te gap until fusion gets there. (Which despite the recent great news is still 30 years far, as ever since the 1970s)
As a European as much as I hope that the OPEC shall fall, I am also afraid of the turmoil it may cause as its core states are rumored to be closely linked with the funding of terrorism in the middle east for their political purposes, which recently has reached Europe as well.
Of course we need storage and backup generators for renewables. It will be mostly pumped water with gas and oil. Nuclear does not fit as a backup.
In the future, the pricing must include renewables PLUS their backup plan (e.g. a gas generator on standby) to achieve level pricing and availability.
Having a large grid and moving to more flexible consumers in order to distribute and smoothen out supply and demand will also be a huge factor.
In the end I'm positive that it can be done.
I love solar though, and yes, storage dependency is there, but then, we have done no research on it. the main problem is the will to do research.
I'll give you an analogy, for pumping water to x height, we use an electric water pump. As you might be aware trees are the best water pumps available, with 0 noise they pump water all the way upto their top, some trees are just crazily huge, so if we are to harness the tech in trees to figure out how the heck are they able to move water from roots to the top, we'll have a revolution on our hands, but in the words of Henry Ford, "If I asked what people wanted they'd have said faster horses" :-)
I want to see the entire world powered by solar with microscopic solar panels which are stuck to things like walls and stuff sending electricity wirelessly (invented by Tesla) to the home/office/car etc
As a solar panel owner, I want to know, is this a response to the tax credit going away or is there something else of which I am not aware? If solar is able to stand on its own, the tax credit would seem to have served its purpose. The discontinuity in the level of feasibility when it goes away will not be fun, but I thought that people expected that to happen when it eventually does go away.
What kind of/magnitude of subsidies does oil and gas enjoy?
By 2040 natural gas will meet 25 percent of energy demand.
By 2040 nuclear and renewables will grow 50 percent
approaching 25 percent of energy demand.
Oil will remain the world’s primary energy source,
fulfilling 1/3 of all demand.You should really step out of your "all corporations are inherently evil" box. It's juvenile.
Oil's greatest investment potential is how volatile it actually is. Look at the charts for brent crude day-to-day, or jump back a step and look at the crude ETFs(sco/uco/and-friends). There is a lot of money to be made with that much volatility.
Back to the original question, does anyone here actually invest(as in hold long positions) in oil OR solar? If so, I am curious why you chose those particular investment vehicles, since they are technically(as in looking at the company's technical breakdown) bad long investments.
Other emerging energy sources all ding the price of solar stocks. Eg...if tomorrow a press release for "huge natural gas power plant opens in California!" breaks, you get a (sometimes large) dip in all your solar positions, despite no value being lost at all. I would sum it up as "solar equity prices are affected by too many things other than their performance".
Power to gas is just more of the same "hydrogen" economy. correct?
I read a book about the hydrogen economy back in 2000. Thought it was a great idea.
Then lithium ion batteries kicked hydrogen's butt.
There is really no association between the price of oil & the price of solar.
Oil is an expensive form of energy because it is portable & used for transportation. It competes with the price of lithium ion batteries.
Solar is for generating electricity. It competes with coal, gas, geo, hydro, wind.
And don't come back at this with some pathetic reasoning that on some islands or remote places idiots use generators. I say idiots because generators are loud, smell, need maintenance and these days are probably quite a bit more expensive than a solar + battery system.
Where is oil used? Cars. Trucks. Planes.
Will a solar panel on the top of a car ever power a car? No. You need batteries.
It's the price of batteries vs. price of oil that we should be discussing.
Oh, I'd almost forgotten about that. Thanks for the laugh!
(Honestly, I have no idea what I'm talking about, I just thought it was funny the one green diamond was lower than the other thingies.)