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NNadir

(33,368 posts)
Tue Jul 3, 2018, 11:56 PM Jul 2018

Science Paper: Zero Emission Hopes Are Ignoring Some Intractable Issues.

The paper from the primary scientific literature to which this post refers is this one: Net-zero emissions energy systems (Davis et al Science 29 Jun 2018: Vol. 360, Issue 6396, eaas9793)

The paper is a review article, and the large body of authors come from a wide array of academic and government institutions.

Some years back, in a blog post elsewhere, I quoted this text from a paper in Nature Geoscience:

If the contribution from wind turbines and solar energy to global energy production is to rise from the current 400 TWh (ref. 2) to 12,000 TWh in 2035 and 25,000 TWh in 2050, as projected by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)7, about 3,200 million tonnes of steel, 310 million tonnes of aluminium and 40 million tonnes of copper will be required to build the latest generations of wind and solar facilities….


Source: Olivier Vidal, Bruno Goffé and Nicholas Arndt, Nature Geoscience 6, 894–896 (2013). The source references for the calculations are found in the supplementary information for this paper.

In terms of energy, the WWF prediction for wind energy, 25,000 TWh, amounts to about 90 exajoules of energy. As of 2016, the world was consuming 587 exajoules, so this cannot be called a "zero emissions" program. WWF, by the way, stands for "World Wildlife Fund." One would hope, naively I'm sure, that the current membership of the "World Wildlife Fund" is not hoping for this outcome, since the rendering of all our wild spaces into industrial parks for the wind industry will surely render many species of bat completely extinct, and many species of birds as well. But the reality is that they are hoping for this horror, since most putative "environmental" organizations these days are largely funded by bourgeois people who can't, or refuse to think.

The good news is that he wind industry will never produce 90 exajoules of energy in a year, but the bad news is that a lot of time, money, and even more regrettably, wild spaces and wildlife will be destroyed trying to make what has not worked, is not working and will not work, work.

In my blog post, building on this paper, I wrote:

The “WWF” figures assume that the steel for the predicted energy production for wind energy will take place over a period of 35 years. This would mean that two year’s steel production more or less would go to make wind turbines, and 33 years of production would produce other things, if, and this is a very big if, steel production can be maintained through this period at the levels now obtained.

The situation with respect to aluminum is more problematic. According to the World Aluminum Institute, in 2014, the world produced 53,034,000 MT of aluminum.[20] Thus over the next 35 years, about the total of 7 years of production of this metal, at current levels, would be needed to construct the wind plants that the WWF happily predicts.


I noted that at the time of that writing, that the entire wind industry on the entire planet after half a century of wild eyed cheering for it was only capable of producing 67% of the electricity required to produce aluminum in a typical year.

The authors of the paper cited at the very beginning of this post note that while (some forms) of electricity can conceivably be decarbonized, other forms are exceedingly difficult to imagine addressing.

They post a photograph of a steel operation, and let's be clear about something, OK? Steel making is coal dependent, irrespective of all the delusional nonsense one hears in which it is claimed that coal is dead. It's not even close. In the 21st century, coal has been the fastest growing form of energy production on the planet as a whole, growing roughly more than 9 times as fast (by 60 exajoules per year since the year 2000) as the hyped, expensive, and useless solar and wind industries (which grew by a little less than 7 exajoules since the year 2000).

IEA 2017 World Energy Outlook, Table 2.2 page 79 (I have converted MTOE in the original table to the SI unit exajoules in this text.)

The photograph:



The caption:

A shower of molten metal in a steel foundry.

Industrial processes such as steelmaking will be particularly challenging to decarbonize. Meeting future demand for such difficult-to-decarbonize energy services and industrial products without adding CO2 to the atmosphere may depend on technological cost reductions via research and innovation, as well as coordinated deployment and integration of operations across currently discrete energy industries.


The caption is, by the way, pure optimism.

The introductory text from the paper:

BACKGROUND: Net emissions of CO2 by human activities—including not only energy services and industrial production but also land use and agriculture—must approach zero in order to stabilize global mean temperature. Energy services such as light-duty transportation, heating, cooling, and lighting may be relatively straightforward to decarbonize by electrifying and generating electricity from variable renewable energy sources (such as wind and solar) and dispatchable (“on-demand”) nonrenewable sources (including nuclear energy and fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage). However, other energy services essential to modern civilization entail emissions that are likely to be more difficult to fully eliminate. These difficult-to-decarbonize energy services include aviation, long-distance transport, and shipping; production of carbon-intensive structural materials such as steel and cement; and provision of a reliable electricity supply that meets varying demand. Moreover, demand for such services and products is projected to increase substantially over this century. The long-lived infrastructure built today, for better or worse, will shape the future.


Some commentary on this paragraph: There is nothing "straight forward" about generating electricity using "solar and wind." If there were, they would be significant forms of energy on this planet given decades of mindless enthusiasm they've generated, never mind the trillions of dollars squandered on them. Moreover, to the extent that the effort is made to make them significant, again, to beat a horse or maybe to behead a hydra, the effort will represent an environmental disaster.

Please note that some of the authors come from NREL though, and thus this de rigueur claim is unsurprising.

Nor is it true that nuclear energy is nonrenewable, at least to the extent that anything is "renewable," to use the magic if abused word. It can be shown, literally with thousands of citations and appeal to a few facts that follow from them, that it is physically impossible for humanity to consume all of the uranium on earth. Thus the fuel is can no more be depleted than sunlight; it is the energy conversion device that matters in terms of cost and environmental sustainability.

According to this paper, there are six major categories of carbon emissions that are difficult to eliminate, totaling (based on their appeal to 2014 data) 9.2 billion metric tons out of 33.2 billion metric tons attributed to dangerous fossil fuels as of that year.

(These figures are undoubtedly higher in 2018 since we have been completely ineffective at reducing either worldwide energy consumption or the portion of it coming from dangerous fossil fuels, both of which are actually increasing, not decreasing.

They have a nice graphic explaining this:



The caption:

Fig. 2
Difficult-to-eliminate emissions in current context.

(A and B) Estimates of CO2 emissions related to different energy services, highlighting [for example, by longer pie pieces in (A)] those services that will be the most difficult to decarbonize, and the magnitude of 2014 emissions from those difficult-to-eliminate emissions. The shares and emissions shown here reflect a global energy system that still relies primarily on fossil fuels and that serves many developing regions. Both (A) the shares and (B) the level of emissions related to these difficult-to-decarbonize services are likely to increase in the future. Totals and sectoral breakdowns shown are based primarily on data from the International Energy Agency and EDGAR 4.3 databases (8, 38). The highlighted iron and steel and cement emissions are those related to the dominant industrial processes only; fossil-energy inputs to those sectors that are more easily decarbonized are included with direct emissions from other industries in the “Other industry” category. Residential and commercial emissions are those produced directly by businesses and households, and “Electricity,” “Combined heat & electricity,” and “Heat” represent emissions from the energy sector. Further details are provided in the supplementary materials.


The Nature Geosciences paper linked above notes, by the way, that so called "renewable energy" requires 15 times as much concrete per joule (or megajoule or gigajoule or exajoule) as an equivalent amount of energy from a nuclear plant. Arguably it is fairly straight forward to recover used steel and aluminum, and for that matter copper, although the processing (or better put, reprocessing) will require a significant energy input, but it going to be very difficult to recycle concrete sustainably. Any concrete squandered on off shore wind facilities will end up in less than 20 years (if the Danish data remains unchanged for the average lifetime of wind turbines) as little more than navigation hazards.

On concrete the authors write:

Cement

About 40% of the CO2 emissions during cement production are from fossil energy inputs, with the remaining CO2 emissions arising from the calcination of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) (typically limestone) (53). Eliminating the process emissions requires fundamental changes to the cementmaking process and cement materials and/or installation of carbon-capture technology (Fig. 1G) (54). CO2 concentrations are typically ~30% by volume in cement plant flue gas [compared with ~10 to 15% in power plant flue gas (54)], improving the viability of post-combustion carbon capture. Firing the kiln with oxygen and recycled CO2 is another option (55), but it may be challenging to manage the composition of gases in existing cement kilns that are not gas-tight, operate at very high temperatures (~1500°C), and rotate (56).


I have some criticisms of the statements here as well, but will spare the reader.

The authors spend a considerable amount of time discussing hydrogen and hydrogenation products as energy storage tools. All energy storage wastes energy; it is a physical requirement of the laws of the universe which are not subject to repeal.

They spend a fair amount of time discussing electrolysis, which is probably the best known, but also one of the worst means of generating hydrogen, although there are some very high temperature (supercritical water) forms of electrolysis that can achieve a mildly reasonable energy efficiency in terms of loss to waste. (For example at Neodymium Nickelate electrodes in solid state oxide fuel cells.)

They produce this graphic to discuss the costs of energy production using various technologies.



The caption:

Fig. 3 Comparisons of energy sources and technologies.

A) The energy density of energy sources for transportation, including hydrocarbons (purple), ammonia (orange), hydrogen (blue), and current lithium ion batteries (green). (B) Relationships between fixed capital versus variable operating costs of new generation resources in the United States, with shaded ranges of regional and tax credit variation and contours of total levelized cost of electricity, assuming average capacity factors and equipment lifetimes. NG cc, natural gas combined cycle. (113). (C) The relationship of capital cost (electrolyzer cost) and electricity price on the cost of produced hydrogen (the simplest possible electricity-to-fuel conversion) assuming a 25-year lifetime, 80% capacity factor, 65% operating efficiency, 2-year construction time, and straight-line depreciation over 10 years with $0 salvage value (29). For comparison, hydrogen is currently produced by steam methane reformation at costs of ~$1.50/kg H2 (~$10/GJ; red line). (D) Comparison of the levelized costs of discharged electricity as a function of cycles per year, assuming constant power capacity, 20-year service life, and full discharge over 8 hours for daily cycling or 121 days for yearly cycling. Dashed lines for hydrogen and lithium-ion reflect aspirational targets. Further details are provided in the supplementary materials.


Some commentary is necessary here:

The costs reported in graphic B here are definitely misleading, although they are so in the way that almost all such representations are misrepresented. For one thing they exclude external costs, the costs to human health, animal health, and environmental health. Secondly they isolate two forms of so called "renewable energy," solar and wind from the costs associated with making power available when they themselves are unavailable. This is the cost of natural gas, since the solar and wind industries are completely dependent on access to dangerous natural gas to operate. As I often note, if it requires two separate systems to do what one system can do alone, the costs of each accrues to the other, and this is true of both external and internal costs. Thirdly, the cost associated with nuclear's variable cost assumes that current technology, which involves (questionably) mining and enriching uranium, i.e. in non-breeding situations. This is not the way to make nuclear energy sustainable. We have already mined enough uranium and enough thorium (the latter being dumped as "waste" by the wind industry and thus not mined for its larger and cleaner energy value.)

I have a remark on graphic D, concerning grid scale storage. One of the storage mechanisms here is compressed air. The way that air compression loses energy is that compressing air causes it to heat. If this heat is lost - and it almost always is - when the air expands it will cool and the pressure will drop, reducing the effectiveness of the turbine.

There is an energy device that uses compressed air: The jet engine. In a jet engine the air is reheated using a dangerous fossil fuel. There are papers that propose to store wind energy as compressed air and use dangerous natural gas to reheat it.

Personally I believe if we must store energy - and I'm not sure we must - the most reliable and sustainable way to do so would be compressed air. Arguably, although I will not discuss this here, such processing of air could be coupled with cleaning the air, since the types and volumes of very dangerous air pollutants are increasingly present in our atmosphere, including but not limited to carbon dioxide.

There are options for avoiding the need for dangerous fossil fuels for compressed air storage. This would involve the use of waste heat, plenty of which is available. There are other options as well using materials often (incorrectly) defined as waste.

But that's for another time.

Have a happy 4th.




6 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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Science Paper: Zero Emission Hopes Are Ignoring Some Intractable Issues. (Original Post) NNadir Jul 2018 OP
Not letting you get away with this particular bit of nonsense, you know better NNadir ... mr_lebowski Jul 2018 #1
I stand by my claim and note I've been studying this issue for more than a decade. NNadir Jul 2018 #3
Don't blame me for your imprecision NNadir & PLEASE try to just 'read I write', rather than making mr_lebowski Jul 2018 #4
Thanks for posting. braddy Jul 2018 #2
Rather than storing energy... hunter Jul 2018 #5
I absolutely agree. NNadir Jul 2018 #6
 

mr_lebowski

(33,643 posts)
1. Not letting you get away with this particular bit of nonsense, you know better NNadir ...
Wed Jul 4, 2018, 12:22 AM
Jul 2018
"Nor is it true that nuclear energy is nonrenewable, at least to the extent that anything is "renewable," to use the magic if abused word. It can be shown, literally with thousands of citations and appeal to a few facts that follow from them, that it is physically impossible for humanity to consume all of the uranium on earth. Thus the fuel is can no more be depleted than sunlight; it is the energy conversion device that matters in terms of cost and environmental sustainability. "


Guess what, it's also physically impossible that we'd ever use up all the worlds oil or coal or natural gas, either. So ... those are not being depleted either? That would be true, per your logic.

'Non-renewable' means continued consumption of the resource to produce energy inherently degrades the EROEI of the remaining supply, because in net you are consuming it, whilst not replenishing it. That happens with EVERY fossil fuel, AND with Uranium ... but NOT with hydro, wind, solar, etc.

Now, if you want to argue that NOTHING is truly 'renewable' (and you have) because you still need steel to build wind turbines, etc, that's one thing. But the inherent energy SOURCE ... the sun and wind ... are not permanently depleted ... by our use thereof.

Implying humanity literally has an endless supply of net positive EROEI uranium (100% critical to properly calling something an energy source as you very well know) at its disposal, just because we could 'never use it all up' ... is disingenuous at best.

NNadir

(33,368 posts)
3. I stand by my claim and note I've been studying this issue for more than a decade.
Wed Jul 4, 2018, 02:45 AM
Jul 2018

In one of the diagrams above, the energy to mass ratio for all of the common fuels is given, graphic A from figure 3.

The highest energy to mass ratio is given for hydrogen (a storage medium, not a primary source of energy.) It is 120 mJ/kg.

The energy density of plutonium is not shown, and there's a good reason for that, which is that the scale of the graph will not accommodate the figure.

However, it is simple for anyone who cares to do so, and who has a modicum of scientific knowledge to do so, and I have utilized this calculation many thousands of times in my life. The figure is based on 190 MeV/fission of recoverable energy, ignoring neutrinos.

From this, using elementary algebra and readily available conversion factors, one can calculate that the energy/mass ratio for plutonium is 80.3 trillion joules per kg.

There is theoretically only one fuel that has a higher energy/mass ratio, the deuterium tritium pair in a putative fusion reactor, but thus far, the technical challenge in building such a device has proved insurmountable; zero fusion reactors.

The ocean contains less than 0.1% of the planetary uranium, which is well known to be cycled through it by various means so long as the atmosphere contains oxygen, which it still does, owing to the low, but still very significant, solubility of U (VI) carbonate complexes in the ocean.

Tens of thousands of papers, almost all of them written by highly trained and intelligent people have been written about the recovery of uranium (and other elements) from seawater. Hundreds of strategies for doing this are well known, and many have been demonstrated at either lab or pilot scale.

I personally find it a little amusing and silly how people throw around the term "EROEI" with such laziness and ignorance.

The mindless asshole Mark Z. Jacobson - Professor of Civil Engineering at Stanford - has claimed that wind turbines can be utilized to stop hurricanes. (Mark Z. Jacobson is pretty good evidence why no one should send a kid to Stanford to get a civil engineering degree.)

Taming hurricanes with arrays of offshore wind turbines (Jacobson, Nature Climate Change, volume 4, pages 195–200 (2014))

It's amazing that a civil engineering professor anywhere can have such a poor understanding of the physics of matter, but stupidity in science has never actually been unknown.

If he weren't such an idiot, it might have occurred to him that if wind turbines can stop hurricanes they must also be able to severely impact normal wind flows. (I don't take anything he writes or says seriously, and thankfully I don't think he knows who I am as I know who he is since he is famous, or infamous for choosing to address scientific debate by filing lawsuits against people who call him out in scientific journals for being a crank, albeit in perfectly appropriate terms.

From where I sit, everyone willing to bet the planet's future on wind and solar trash is a crank. We're at 410 ppm and we aren't moving backwards, the rate of destruction is accelerating, not decelerating.

The reason that so many Nobel Laureates - 100% of whom were smarter than Jacobson - held such high hopes for nuclear fission is the energy/mass ratio. What they did not know, was that ignorance triumphs very easily, and that technical issues are swamped by specious appeals to emotion and propaganda.

Every time I read Seaborg's plaintive appeal in one of the last books he wrote on the actinides, I want to weep.

Please, if you want me to take you seriously, do not use the term "EROEI" with me. It's childish. It's basically garbage thinking unless you've done the calculations yourself, which I have done many times in my life. It's clear you haven't.

It is obvious that there is a reason that humanity abandoned reliance on the wind and sun light - the weather - for all of its energy needs in the early 19th century, and all of the specious bullshit about how the wind and the sun never go away is simply reactionary trash talk about sustainability, which ought to be rejected a priori, but somehow is still taken seriously.

The reason was that most people lived short miserable lives of dire poverty even more so than today, and the reason that this in turn was true was the low energy to mass ratio of wind and solar capture devices, as well as their intrinsic lack of reliability.

Now, it's quite clear to me, after decades of study, that humanity for all of the wonderful accomplishments will not choose wisely to assume what I have convinced myself is the only viable means of saving itself.

It is increasingly clear that the key to saving anything will involve processing ocean water in such a way as to involve considerable amounts of energy for the processing. There are definitely some risks in doing this, but the chief material that requires recovery is not actually uranium, but is fresh water itself, which can be obtained by the use of energy for seawater. There are many places in the world already using energy to obtain fresh water from seawater. Other commodities can be recovered of course as side products, magnesium, probably lithium and perhaps even gold. One of these products is uranium which can clearly be recovered in sufficient quantities to run all of the world's energy needs indefinitely. It is estimated that the cost of uranium would range from $100-300/kg, about twice what is required to mine it on land. But the cost of fuel is a trivial component of nuclear energy, as the energy density calculation of 80 trillion joules per kg shows.

By contrast, nothing will stop the use of the next highest form of matter to have a high energy to mass ratio, as represented in Figure three graph A in the OP by the purple dots for diesel, gasoline, jet fuel and E10. (Coal is not shown, but is comparable.) The energy/mass density of these fuels is 4 ten millionths that of plutonium.

I have shown elsewhere that if we were to eliminate human poverty by doubling the world per capita average continuous power consumption to 5000 Watts (which is roughly half the average continuous power consumption of an American) a person living for 100 years would consume 1 gram of plutonium per year for all his or her energy needs, roughly 100 grams in a lifetime.

I note that the uranium already mined, if converted to plutonium in any of a multitude of types of reactors, along with the thorium dumped by the useless and ineffective extremely low energy to mass wind industry, a wasteful scam involving the worst sort of wishful thinking.

There is a limit to the amount of fission products that can accumulate dictated by the Bateman equation which shows that radionuclides asymptotically approach a maximum at which they are decaying as fast as they are formed. Thus this stupid remark that people make about "would you want "nuclear waste" in your backyard - an emotional appeal - is so goddamned ignorant. The fact is that I could store less than six grams of cesium-137 in my backyard indefinitely with little risk to myself, but I could not store the dangerous fossil fuel waste I've generated safely in my backyard.

A few years back we heard all kinds of whining about "peak oil" which regrettably turned out to not be true for our generation.

It's regrettable because our waste dump for dangerous fossil fuel waste is the planetary atmosphere. Because people are lazy and don't think, because they throw around nonsense about EROEI that they read on the internet without clearly understanding what the term involves, the hope that the waste dump will end up being able to accommodate more waste is obviously dying rapidly, and with it the whole damned planet.

I have also heard people blabber and blather about "peak uranium," which is a clear indication that they are totally and completely ignorant of what is involved with nuclear technology.

Heckuva job humanity, heckuva job.

Have a happy 4th.

 

mr_lebowski

(33,643 posts)
4. Don't blame me for your imprecision NNadir & PLEASE try to just 'read I write', rather than making
Wed Jul 4, 2018, 06:53 AM
Jul 2018

dozens of assumptions about 'what I believe', and going off on all manner of random tangents?

I've told you >1 time I'm not a 'solar and wind are a panacea' person, at all. So don't paint me with that brush.

The question of whether or not it's physically possible for humanity to 'ever use up' all the supplies of a given energy source is really not material to the question of whether or not said energy source is 'renewable' or 'non-renewable'. YOUR statement I called out ... directly implied that it IS. Go back and read it. MY retort simply said ... that is not the 'standard' used to determine whether some energy source is defined as 'renewable'.

To illustrate, I pointed out that it's ALSO physically impossible that humanity would ever use up all the energy contained in the worlds coal, petroleum, natural gas, etc. But that doesn't make those sources 'renewable', now does it?

Follow me so far?

Now, is it or is it not factual that there is a 'finite' supply of uranium on this planet?

Is it factual also that when one utilizes uranium in any way to produce energy, the total amount of potential energy of all the uranium present in the world, decreases?

Unless I'm wrong on that basic scientific concept, at SOME POINT, assuming humanity lasted long enough, and it was leveraging Uranium as an energy source, there would come a time, when humanity would expend more energy to locate/acquire/relocate to a power plant/prep for use as an energy source ... an average piece of Uranium ... than could be produced BY that piece of Uranium. Hence, a negative EROEI situation would occur.

I mean, unless you're suggesting that uranium is so magical it violates the most basic laws of thermodynamics I'm fairly certain I'm correct on this one.

(Or are the laws of thermodynamics also childish ... just like 'Energy Returned on Energy Invested', both passe concepts, rendered null, void, and ridiculous by the proclamation of the NNadir?)

My ENTIRE POINT (nothing about windmills being humanity's savior lol) was simply that finite resources like a particular metal in our earths crust are NOT 'renewable', because they are finite.

hunter

(38,264 posts)
5. Rather than storing energy...
Thu Jul 5, 2018, 06:29 PM
Jul 2018

... there may be better options for putting excess energy to use.

Most of California's State Water Project, which requires large energy inputs to pump water over mountains, throttles down to minimal levels when other electric demands are high and runs at full power when they are not.

Rather than "storing" electricity in batteries, pumped storage projects, or as compressed air, fuels and chemical feedstocks could be made, water could be desalinated, sewage could undergo tertiary and quaternary treatment, etc., whenever electricity supply exceeded other demands.







NNadir

(33,368 posts)
6. I absolutely agree.
Thu Jul 5, 2018, 08:25 PM
Jul 2018

From my perspective the basic form of energy should be high heat. Electricity under these circumstances might well be a side product of cooling operations.

I have long considered sewage sludge to be an interesting water source will considerable carbon and phosphorous to boot. I often dream up chemical reactors of various types that are either driven by nuclear heat or by closed combustion in an unvented pure oxygen atmosphere.

There is some valuable stuff in sewage, but probably the most critical is the phosphorous. This is going to be a real problem for future generations.

I also think a lot about bringing seawater to a supercritical state to recover the fresh water (most salts are insoluble in supercritical water), the higher amount of carbon dioxide it contains, and depending on the location of the intakes, microorganisms driving eutrophication, waste plastic, etc, also a carbon source.

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