...one's level of knowledge in hearing or reading the text; this is true whether it is an answer to a question in any setting.
This is why the process of learning starts off slowly but ultimately accelerates as one ages, until of course, one's intellectual capacity declines from "the slings and arrows" of the neurological diseases of aging.
Now, if I give a lecture of piezoelectric tensors to a high school student who has repeatedly failed his or her 9th grade algebra course, that person will derive no benefit. It will waste my time and theirs.
This the science section of DU. I should be comfortable here, because I am a scientist; and I am comfortable here. I consider one of the moderators here to be a personal friend, an internet friend, but a friend all the same.
In the last 24 hours I have written 4 posts here, all of which are discussions of papers in the primary scientific literature which I read regularly and broadly with some diligence.
I write posts here for two reasons; one being that writing about the things I read and want to remember helps reify them in my mind. They also represent a kind of diary about what I was thinking on particular days. If, as a side benefit, someone learns something from them or is intellectually stimulated by them, well, that makes me very happy.
In response to a question about whether steel, really consumes as much coal and the electricity it generates, I directed the questioner to a previous post in which I addressed the issue.
Here is the text, which contains the following text:
The profound
environmental problem with so called "renewable energy" revolves largely around its high mass intensity. I noted, with reference to an article in
Nature Geosciences in the previous thread this about the mass intensity of wind energy were it dedicated to making enough
energy just to make enough motor fuels to displace petroleum.
12,000 TWh is 43.2 exajoules. By simple math 727 exajoules is 16.8 times larger, or in "percent talk" 1,680% more than what what the WWF predicted for wind and solar in "by 2050" talk.
The translates into 53 billion tons of steel, 5.2 billion tons of aluminum, and 673 million tons of copper. The production of steel involves coal, the current process for the production of aluminum utilizes petroleum coke electrodes (which are oxidized), and copper involves intense heat and the release of copious quantities of sulfur oxides.
Renewable? Really? Whither the ores for this pixilated process?
What I did
not note was the coal intensity of steel. The world
coal association has a wonderful page on the subject of making steel. It is here:
Uses for coal, how steel is produced. It has interesting factoids like this:
Coking coal is converted to coke by driving off impurities to leave almost pure carbon. The physical properties of coking coal cause the coal to soften, liquefy and then resolidify into hard but porous lumps when heated in the absence of air. Coking coal must also have low sulphur and phosphorous contents. Almost all metallurgical coal is used in coke ovens.
The coking process consists of heating coking coal to around 1000-1100ºC in the absence of oxygen to drive off the volatile compounds (pyrolysis). This process results in a hard porous material - coke. Coke is produced in a coke battery, which is composed of many coke ovens stacked in rows into which coal is loaded. The coking process takes place over long periods of time between 12-36 hours in the coke ovens. Once pushed out of the vessel the hot coke is then quenched with either water or air to cool it before storage or is transferred directly to the blast furnace for use in iron making.
...and...
Around 0.6 tonnes (600 kg) of coke produces 1 tonne (1000 kg) of steel, which means that around 770 kg of coal are used to produce 1 tonne of steel through this production route. Basic Oxygen Furnaces currently produce about 74% of the world’s steel. A further 25% of steel is produced in Electric Arc Furnaces.
This means that to produce 53 billion tons of steel would require 37 billion tons of coal, most of which would be oxidized to CO2, thus producing about 135 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Current annual emissions of carbon dioxide from
all dangerous fossil fuels is roughly one fourth this amount, roughly 35 billion tons per year and
rising despite the world wide rote enthusiasm for so called "renewable energy."
The internal reference makes reference to another reference, a
scientific publication this one:
Metals for a low-carbon society
It contains the following text:
However, this transition will also cause much additional global demand for raw materials: for an equivalent installed capacity, solar and wind facilities require up to 15 times more concrete, 90 times more aluminium, and 50 times more iron, copper and glass than fossil fuels or nuclear energy (Supplementary Fig. 1). Yet, current production of wind and solar energy meets only about 1% of global demand, and hydroelectricity meets about 7% (ref. 2).
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 (Fig. 2). This corresponds to a 5 to 18% annual increase in the global production of these metals for the next 40 years. This rise in production will be added to the accelerating global demand for ferrous, base and minor metals, from both developing and developed countries, which inflates currently by about 5% per year5,6.
This analysis
should give pause to engage in critical thinking, but if it doesn't, well, that's not
my problem,.
25,000 TWh is about 90 exajoules, or roughly 15% of the amount of energy humanity was consuming as of 2017, according to the EIA. Of course, in 2050, when the people making these predictions will likely be dead, and the people who will have to live with the absurdity of their lazy predictions will be suffering severe deprivation because our
lazy generation was happy to lazily google their way to websites, and energy demand may be more like 600 or 700 exajoules, mostly produced by marginal fuels.
Now, the figures for steel 700 grams of coal/kg steel, do
not include mining the steel, transporting the ore, machining the steel into parts, transporting the parts, all of which have a carbon intensity of their own. In addition their is the matter of building roads through the pristine ecosystems being converted into wind industrial parks, asphalt maintenance trucks, and the matter of hauling that shit away in 20 years.
I note, with disgust at poor thinking and wishful thinking, that this enterprise will consume the best ores, a process nearly completed for all of the elements required in a piece of shit wind turbine, which will have the effect of
raising the energy requirements attached to this mining intense enterprise.
Finally I note that wind turbines require redundant systems to back them up when the wind isn't blowing. The cost of these systems, including the cost of steel, copper, concrete and aluminum in them should accrue to wind, but doesn't, because of the intellectually dishonest practice of looking at the failed so called "renewable energy" in isolation from its supporting infrastructure, the enormous financial and environmental cost of redundancy, requiring two systems to do what one can do.
Now if one is lazy, and will accept any answer from any person googling for a few seconds so long as the answer is the answer one wants to hear, one is engaging in disingenuous rhetoric and not curiosity or a sincere interest in the facts
Sorry, reference to a googled graphic as authoritative is not an seeking a legitimate answer, and buying it lock stock and barrel is intellectual laziness.
If one is asking a
legitimate question one takes a tone like a correspondent in the post about the thermodynmics of wind to hydrogen just referenced:
Have been reading news and thoughts at DU for many many years. Decided to get in the conversation here to keep from randomly screaming at head-in-the-sand folks I encounter on the regular here in central Texas.
Will keep working my way through your posts and recommended links. Honestly, reading that long piece of yours turned into a respite from the daily onslaught of political news. This, even as the consequence of humanity not getting real about carbon emissions rang thru loud and clear. Ya might see me chime in now and again with with questions, some of which may be more dumb than I realize.
(For whatever it's worth, I've been an atheist for three decades now, and science fills the spiritual space and time that church going would require. I have an underutilized degree in economics, roughly remember my calculus, and generally can digest topics of chemistry/physics as a know-it-all daughterofanengineer. Basically, I'm a nerd.)
...to which I responded...
The dumbest quesitons are the ones you don't ask...
...I have made it a point in my life to work as hard as I can to be the dumbest person in the room as often as is possible, and now whenever I go to a talk that is beyond me, I make a point of struggling to find a question to ask, especially if the topic is completely new to me.
It's a good way to learn.
Almost 100% of speakers will be patient and accepting.
I recall one talk I went to where I guy asked a speaker on the genetics of the ocean something along the lines of, "did space aliens build the pyramids," and I admired the patience and respect that the speaker, Kay Bidle of Rutgers Department of Oceanography, gave the questioner.
Prof. Kay Bidle, Rutgers University: The Invisible World of Marine Microbes: How Earth’s Smallest Living Things Have the Biggest Impact on How Our Ocean Works
My sons still laugh at the face (as an audience member) I made when the question was asked, but Dr. Bidle was very gracious, and I learned a little bit about patience from his manner of response every bit as important as what I learned all about ocean microbes in the body of the talk itself.
It was a beautiful thing.
I'm sure you won't ask me about space aliens and the pyramids, but if you do, don't worry about what I think. Questions are good, all of them.
After all these years, now that I'm an old man, when I go to certain kinds of regular meetings, people
expect a question from me, since I've gotten better at it, and I'm very proud of that.
You can't be good at anything you don't practice.
Thanks again for your kind words and again, for
thinking. Politics are important, but in a Democracy we cannot guide our best leaders unless we know what we're talking about. The time of Trump will pass; but the problems of the planet will still need to be addressed and the more we know, the better we'll do.
But there is another kind of
dumb question, a question in which a clearly uneducated person at a low level asks a question to which he or she insists
must have the answer he or she
wants to hear, and not a question connected with
reality.
I was satisfied with my answer to the question, which is all encompassing. The wind industry is useless. It has not addressed climate change; it is not addressing climate change and it will not address climate change. There are literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of papers in the scientific literature on life cycle analysis of wind turbines, and not all of them agree. However one does need to think critically about whatever one reads or sees.
It doesn't matter if the reason it is useless is limited to steel, to aluminum, to concrete, to lanthanides, to copper...
It hasn't worked. It isn't working. It won't work.
That's a fact and facts matter.
I'm a scientist, and I'm tired of lazy people claiming rudely demanding that I answer questions whenever they ask. It's not my job to educate the ineducable, and I feel compelled to answer questions having answers with which I am familiar
only when I am speaking to someone who has an open mind.
It is a waste of time to address closed minds.
Have a nice life. I need to expand my ignore list, since I am disinterested in the people who have caused this tragedy through laziness and inattention.
Have a nice life.
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