Biden's war on fossil fuels

[Laughing Hyena]

Don't give a shit about your political rant, not getting involved. Here is the fuel prices in New Zealand, please, take your 5 bucks a gallon and ship it over. I mean it. We in Australasia will happily trade your fuel prices for ours.

You source gave me a number to follow but I needed to see the result in terms of nzd to usd. A quick Google search gave me the answer. 5 usd is nearly 8 nzd by only a few cents.

That doesnt sound bad until you recall they pay per liter not pergallon. 3 liters is around one gallon of fuel. So one gallon of gas is much more expensive in New Zealand. If I did the math right that means New Zealand pays 24 us dollars per gallon.

Is this correct Dice?

[Laughing Hyena]

Correction: 3 liter is 1/3 of a gallon. Apologies, I'm posting from a smart phone.

[TheGlyphstone]

That site lets you manually correct for both currency and measure. I set it to US Dollars and Gallons and got $8.15 roughly.

[Laughing Hyena]

That site lets you manually correct for both currency and measure. I set it to US Dollars and Gallons and got $8.15 roughly.

Thank you for the correction Glyph. I was wrong in my math so thank you for that.

[Notorious]

OK, this is my wheelhouse (petrochemical industry journalist). I won't tackle the gasoline pricing issues, which are often state dependent - and by the way, it's around $8.50/gallon here in the UK, because we tax it at a higher rate - but I can speak to some of the comments on processing.

Well yes, but what are those 'usable products'? About 85% of what comes out of a refinery is liquid fuels, mainly gasoline and diesel.

The point about bitumen is that it is a very heavy, sour fraction, and so requires what the oil industry calls 'upgrading' to be usable in a conventional refinery. Recovering bitumen from Canadian oil sands generally requires a lot of steam to melt it to make it liquid in the first place, and then once at the refinery it needs to be broken down into smaller molecules via hydroprocessing. This requires hydrogen, which is mainly generated from natural gas, and adds to the carbon load of converting bitumen into fuel. Some refineries are starting to look at generating hydrogen via water electrolysis using renewable electricity, but this is still in its infancy. Overall, bitumen is close to coal in terms of its carbon cost.

However, the Keystone issue is very much a sideshow, because it's only one pipeline. Canada still exports plenty of oil sands bitumen to the US, via both pipeline and rail; probably 2.5 million barrels per day. Keystone would have made that export cheaper and taken a lot of it off the railroad, but might not have actually increased overall exports a lot in the short term, though it would have generated additional export capacity and maybe led to a longer term boost to Alberta oil sands production.

But another wrinkle is that the US Gulf Coast refineries which take the bitumen have been deliberately modified over the past couple of decades to handle heavy, sour oil. This is because heavy sour oil is cheaper, because it requires more processing. So in the absence of Canadian syncrude, the US refineries have to take heavy sour oil from elsewhere instead, mainly Maya from Mexico, but Middle Eastern crude also tends to be heavy and sour. Ironically, although the US is now almost self sufficient in oil, the shale oil being produced domestically is too light and sweet for US refiners to use a lot of it, so the US exports the surplus light sweet crude overseas to less sophisticated refineries which need it, and imports heavy sour stuff instead. There is no real net benefit planet-wide to killing Keystone because the heavy sour fractions are still being processed somewhere.

However, this brings us to the next point...

Plastics are mainly made from polyelylene and polypropylene, products of crackers. There are two types - ethylene crackers, which use ethane from natural gas, and naphtha crackers, which can use 'natural gas liquids' like propane and butane, or light oil fractions. Synthetic fibres are made from polyamides and polyesters. Polyester again comes from ethylene, polyamides can come from all kinds of different processes. Bottom line: some oil goes to make plastics and fibres, but around 85% of oil goes to make liquid fuels. You're correct that if we were to switch 100% to electric vehicles tomorrow that we would still need some hydrocarbons to make plastics and fibres, but only around 1/6 as much.

Is the use of gasoline as a vehicle fuel a foregone conclusion? By no means. The spread of electric vehicles is proceeding at a very rapid pace. Many auto manufacturers have said that they will not make gasoline or diesel powered models after 2030. Many countries have said that new conventional fuelled vehicle registrations will no longer be allowed after 2030, though hybrids will still be allowed. In countries like Norway electric vehicles (EVs) already represent 80% of new registrations. Europe is moving to EVs, but globally the sea change is coming from China, which is moving to EVs in a major way. The US needs Tesla to be a success, because it's the way that cars are going. Yes, we will still probably be using gasoline in some vehicles for many years to come, but nowhere near as much. We have probably already passed peak global oil demand (most forecasters put it at about 2030, but their forecasts pre-dated Covid and the Ukraine war). From here on in the industry is on the down slope.

You made a reasonable point about the minerals that go into EVs. It's not so much the rare earths as the nickel, cobalt and lithium that go into batteries, and the copper used in electric cabling. There are some very big and ugly holes being dug around the world, but because they happen in Chile, Zambia and Madagascar, they don't attract the attention of environmental activists as much. There are arguments to be made about exactly how 'green' battery vehicles really are. But that shouldn't take away from the pressing issue of climate change and the need to tackle it. There are no perfect solutions, and we may just need to put up with some big ugly holes.

No, on this occasion you missed it, I'm afraid. Let's talk 'fertilizer'. There are three major nutrients that a plant needs from the soil: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen it can get from air and water.

Potassium comes from rock. It's pretty simple - the rock gets ground up and put on the soil to replenish the potassium the plant has used.

Phosphorus also comes from rock, but it needs to be extracted to end up in a form usable by the plant (phosphate). This is mainly done using sulphuric acid. Sulphuric acid is made from burning sulphur, and sulphur comes from oil and gas processing, so in that sense there is an indirect link to oil.

Nitrogen is the trickiest. It comes from the air, but is very unreactive, so to make it react, it is pushed together with hydrogen at very high temperatures and pressures over an iron catalyst in the Haber Process, to make ammonia. All synthetic nitrogen fertilizers (urea, ammonium nitrate, ammonium bicarbonate etc) all start as ammonia.

The hydrogen used to make ammonia mostly comes from natural gas, though China uses coal. Some plants used to use naphtha - I think there may still be one in India - but oil became too expensive to use in the 1970s. But the big thing in the ammonia industry is hydrogen from renewable electricity. At the moment only around 1-2% of ammonia is made that way, but there is a major switchover coming over the next couple of decades. The money going into it is very significant. This is good, as ammonia production is responsible on its own for about 1.5% of all human carbon dioxide emissions.

Here I move back to opinions, but frankly, why would he need to? The orange guy did everything Putin wanted without Putin needing to use his military. Breaking up NATO, leaving allies in the lurch, demolishing the US's position and standing around the world - Trump did all of that. That 'abandoning of US allies in Afghanistan' you mention? You know who made that deal, right? Iniquitous' post has the details so I won't re-hash them.

You're a Republican, I get it. I am slightly left of centre in UK terms - what we call a Liberal (very different from the US use of the term), but probably solidly Democrat in US terms. I understand the tribal need to praise anything that has a red rosette pinned to it. But Trump is not a Republican in the way that Dubya or Reagan was. He's a loudmouthed wrecking ball who has destroyed the GOP and turned it into a weird cult of personality. I hesitate to use the term fascist, because it looks like liberal pearl-clutching at the nasty man, but he's the closest thing I've seen in the US. He encouraged his supporters to storm your seat of government and hang your Vice President. When winning becomes more important than the number of votes cast or the survival of your republic, you are in trouble. Biden is a very old and rather ineffectual seeming man. He may be corrupt, I don't know - I assume most US politicians are in hock to somebody because your election campaigns are so ridiculously expensive - it's a guaranteed recipe for having people who can be bought. Still, at least  Biden published his tax returns. Trump couldn't, because he knows how bad they'd look.

Awesome and insightful information. Thanks for this post.

[GloomCookie]

As an electrical engineer in the industry of power distribution, I'm going to weigh in a bit.

Right now, we have a bit of a crisis going on when it comes to renewables. Not in the renewable sources themselves per se, but rather in sourcing the materials for batteries. Already car manufacturers are running into problems obtaining adequate stock for their current production, which will get worse starting next year and even more so in 2025. Why? Beginning January 1, the California Energy Commission will release the 2023 Building Energy Efficiency Standards Title 24 Section 6, which will mandate that all commercial properties must use a formula (I don't know it off hand, but I have classes scheduled to cover it soon) to determine the minimum required square footage of solar panels required. In addition, you must have inverters and batteries to store said energy. This is going to tie in with current provisions in the 2019 code for Demand Response, where certain loads (mainly HVAC but can include lighting) must be connected to a system to allow local utility companies to send a signal to turn off power to certain devices at a moment's notice.

Beginning January 1, 2025, the 2024 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC for short) will come out and there are similar provisions in it for solar panels and required square footage. Unlike Title 24 in California, IECC is recognized in municipalities from Washington state to Florida (though there are local flavors such as the Florida building codes). Some jurisdictions like Oklahoma and Arkansas use older versions of the IECC (2006 and 2009 respectively) while some states are newer but haven't caught up yet (2015 for Texas for example) while some states don't have state-wide adoption (Mississippi, Kansas, Arizona, etc.) and some adopt the latest codes automatically (Colorado, Washington, Massachusetts, etc.). So this will not be a universal adoption across the board, but some of the heavy hitters such as Chicago, Austin, New York, Miami, etc. will start mandating that solar panels are required.

This isn't a bad thing, but this will cause a worsening crisis trying to source batteries. Right now, there are only so many sources for Lithium that's used in batteries, and most of them in third world countries that use only a tiny step up from slave labor. What we need before we haul off and go too far is a better source of batteries. In case you're wondering, yes, there is a LOT of research ongoing into making alternatives to Lithium-Ion, such as Sodium- and Iron-ion batteries, which are abundant. here's an article for Sodium-Ion batteries if you want to read more about this.

California is pushing for a lot of these things, especially with the ban on small gas engines starting in 2024 and the ban of gasoline car sales by 2035. This is going to require a major overhaul to our current infrastructure and the source of batteries in order to keep up. Is it impossible? No, because humans are adaptable and we'll figure something out, we always do. I'm just pointing out that batteries are going to be a major handicap on green energy soon.

If you'd like to know more, I'll keep an eye on this thread and answer any questions regarding energy codes, electrical distribution, batteries, and the like.

Kisses,
Gloom.

[TheGlyphstone]

Since you offered and mentioned distribution, what is your perspective on the current state of the national power grid(s)? It came up not too long ago in something I was reading about the obstacles to widespread electric vehicle adoption, that the aging and overstressed grid wouldn't be able to handle it.

[Vekseid]

If every gas vehicle was electric tomorrow, that would put about half a terawatt of strain on the electric grid (only counting the US). That would be a bit much for an immediate jump, but we've had bigger jumps over decade-long periods.

[GloomCookie]

I'm not sure where Vekseid got that 0.5TW figure from, but that's not what the current issue is. The current issue is that power companies aren't investing back into their distribution grids like they should. They have these old, aging systems that were installed decades ago when the grid had far fewer dependents on it, and every year that demand goes up and up and up. Hotter summers lead to more HVAC loads, which lead to places like California needing things like demand response to turn off large sources of power drain on the system and initiate rolling brownouts to keep ahead of the situation.

Electrical load comes in two distinct flavors: Real power, measured in Watts, and Reactive Power measured in VARs. Combined, they have a power factor that ranges between 100% and 50%, depending. Motor loads, computers, and LED lighting have atrocious power factor, which leads to generators working harder to produce power and also keep in sync with the grid. In the US we use a 60 Hertz frequency for power, and if a generator gets too much load it starts to slip. If a generator slips too much, it can cause the generator to take damage and go offline. The power company basically would rather throw a switch and turn off power to customers than risk that generator going offline because of damage.

It costs money to maintain the grid, and while we're getting newer green resources online like wind turbines and solar farms, they're still using the existing infrastructure. Power lines can only take so much before they start to incur their own losses in the system that add up, called voltage drop. I won't bore you with details but transmission lines are only rated for certain voltages and loads before they either start arcing to ground (causing up to 3% wildfires each year) or the wires become overheated and can become damaged. There are usually safeguards in place like breakers and fuses to stop this, but it can still occur.

Quite simply, the infrastructure is becoming saturated, but that will start to change in a few decades as baby boomers start dying off. It's a grim reality, but that is one of the outcomes that will reduce total demand on the grid.

Now, as to the implementation of electric cars, I think that has more to do with the cost of an electric car than the cost of the infrastructure to keep them charged. The average cost of an electric car is $15,000 more than a traditional used car, which is not an insignificant amount. The cost of a charging station is around $1000, and uses the same type breaker as an electric oven (30A 2P breaker). They're not difficult to put in or use, and the amount of power isn't going to break the bank on the electric bill. I just think it's that initial sticker shock of an electric car vs. a new car. Right now there's a $7500 government incentive for electric cars, but that's only about half of the extra cost.

I'm thinking that's the biggest reason currently for why electric cars aren't being sold more.

[TheGlyphstone]

To be clear, I wasnt saying the grid prevented electric cars. It was more in the vein of even if electric cars were affordable, the horrifically under-repaired and ill-maintained grid wouldn't be able to support them with components 30-30 years past their design replacement.

[GloomCookie]

I would like to add something to my earlier statements, because I realize my mentioning of the age of the grid makes it sound weaker than it actually is. I think most of the weakness is more on the customer side.

I said that each charging station would require a 30A 2-pole breaker, that's per charging station. That's not bad on a home that maybe sees 40A at most at any given time, and most homes are rated for 200A service. Where you'll see that become an issue is in gas stations, because of the more hazardous locations.

It's been a minute but I worked on a few Mapco gas stations in Tennessee and while we left the gas pumps alone, some of them were near max capacity both in terms of physical space in the panels as well as what the service can handle. The National Electrical Code (NEC) 220.87 requires that for remodels we have to obtain the 12-month peak demand from the power company, that we clamp a meter taking reading every 15-minutes to the highest loaded feeder (or all three) and take a reading every 15 minutes for a full month, or we have to provide full calculations of the electrical load as if it were a new service. If we obtain demand, we must take that value at 125% of the maximum value before we add additional load.

In addition, most gas stations have panels that aren't your standard off-the-shelf panels and have to be built to avoid sparks and causing explosions. Mostly this is done with conduits that prevent gas fumes from the gas pumps seeping in and sparking and exploding. Some stations use panels that are specifically made for this purpose. Any time you have a special enclosure like this, that adds significant cost to the project.

Why do I menton all this? Because most small-town gas stations aren't going to be able to handle the addition or more than one or two charging stations without a significant overhaul of their service, which believe me gets expensive. You figure a 30A breaker will see around 24A (Most breakers are rated to handle 80% of their rated load for a host of reasons that I'll explain if anyone cares) at any given time, which isn't so bad... until you have several. If your entire service is rated for 200A (which some gas stations are limited to), then if they pull 100A on their worst day, we have to assume by code they're pulling 125A at a time. That only leaves us room to add 3, maybe 4 chargers to add before we have to upgrade the service (depends on if the service is single or three-phase). Meanwhile, they have 8 or 12 pumps going all at once.

I think that's the biggest headache for implementation on a local level. Unless a building goes in expecting to feature multiple electric car stations, they're going to run into problems with a system that can't handle the new loads.

I also have been putting off reading NEC article 625... I should look into that. Chapter 6 of the NEC deals with specific applications and 625 is exclusive to electric vehicle charging stations, so I might get my home copy of the code book out and read up. That might also add complications I'm unaware of, as we haven't been asked to provide many charging stations currently. I suspect that will change.

[Humble Scribe]

Right now, there are only so many sources for Lithium that's used in batteries, and most of them in third world countries that use only a tiny step up from slave labor. What we need before we haul off and go too far is a better source of batteries.

Lithium is an issue, but not an insoluble one. The US has some big lithium projects close to commercial production, such as Rhyolite Ridge. [It will use lots of sulphuric acid, which is a market I cover].
But lithium is also going to be coming from Chile, Australia and Argentina, amongst other places. It's a market every mining company wants to be into at the moment. The mining industry can be very conservative and often moves at a slow pace, but if the price is right, it will do what it takes to get these facilities up and running.
Describing mining projects in the developing world as 'slave labour' is a bit of a lazy cliche. While tough and dangerous, these are often some of the best paid jobs in these countries. Of course there is exploitation. If you think there isn't exploitation where you live, you need to get out more.

[Hades]

At the risk of derailing the original topic further, there was an interview on on a science podcast I listen to with the CEO of a start-up company creating polymer plastics to create batteries, as an alternative to lithium-ion ones, though currently they're for large-scale use rather than something that could go into a cellphone or a vehicle.

[TheGlyphstone]

Large scale use is actually really important. From what little I remember,  one of the complications with solar power is our lack of efficient batteries; a solar plant can only generate power when it has sun, so its able to have at best 50% uptime and a lot of its output ends up wasted. Better capacitors would let excess energy be stored for distribution at night.

[GloomCookie]

You wouldn't want to use capacitors for storing energy. We totally use them in very specific applications in power distribution, but mainly for power factor correction to bring places like big industrial plants with large motor loads closer to unity, since if the current lags too far behind voltage, your generator has to work a lot harder, and most utilities will charge a premium since utility meters can only really measure actual wattage, not total Volt-Amps.

Capacitors have an advantage over batteries in that they can be used in alternating current situations without an inverter, since they are basically large metal plates holding a charge. The voltage takes a while to swing back and forth, but as electrons come and go off that plate they can produce almost any current you need, hence their use in power factor correction to bring the current back in line with the voltage. But for storage solutions, they're really not ideal, since they tend to discharge pretty quickly and the only way around that is to either have one big capacitor or banks of little ones, which adds up in a hurry. Plus, since you have to manufacture these things with certain dielectrics between the plates and you need to have a physical gap between the plates to store power correctly, they aren't very energy dense.

Batteries have a different problem. They can be a lot more energy dense than a capacitor, but can only store DC power. Pumping electricity through a rectifier to get it to DC power is easy, you can make a tiny bridge rectifier for literally less than a dollar with four diodes. Getting that power back out and turned into usable AC power is the trick, and that's why large battery banks come with inverters. They're not difficult to find, since that's literally what UPS devices you plug your computer into are. It just depends on how much power you intend to store and for how long.

Another consideration is that any time you have a back-up power supply, you MUST have a way of preventing backfeed. Most inverters have internal automatic transfer switches to take over in the event of an outage, but all it takes is some dumbass not paying attention to lead to deadly backfeeding, which is where electricity flows back through thte secondaries of the utility transformer onto the primary side and onto the transmission lines, the ones likely to have people working on them to restore power. There was a situation around 3 years ago where we were asked if we could put track lights so that some of the track heads were on a back-up circuit, and we said hell no, absolutely not. The issue was that the track they wanted to use had an L1, L2, and a shared neutral, and so if L1 was off but L2 was on the inverter, there was a possibility that electricity could go from L2, through the track head to the neutral, then through another fixture and onto L1, which wasn't tripped and so could backfeed through the panel and onto the utility.

Since we are discussing power storage, I believe the Japanese started this (though I could be entirely wrong) where they create artificial lakes and use periods of energy surplus such as at night to pump water into these reservours and then when they need the power, they just let everything flow backwards. Why? Because if you run a motor backwards, it becomes a generator. I have no idea how feasable that would be since I don't deal with power generation, but I thought I'd toss that out there.

[Oniya]

Since we are discussing power storage, I believe the Japanese started this (though I could be entirely wrong) where they create artificial lakes and use periods of energy surplus such as at night to pump water into these reservours and then when they need the power, they just let everything flow backwards. Why? Because if you run a motor backwards, it becomes a generator. I have no idea how feasable that would be since I don't deal with power generation, but I thought I'd toss that out there.

I don't know about who started it, but if you consider the basic physics of the situation, it makes sense.  Work is done to move the water uphill, giving it potential energy.  When it flows back, that potential energy is turned into kinetic energy (and hydroelectric power has been a thing for a long time).  Some of it is bound to get lost as heat (because that's how entropy works), but it's better than losing all of it.

[TheGlyphstone]

I'll cop to the capacitor thing, my dumb ass didn't know the difference between capacitors and 'really big batteries'. But I was still under the general impression that our decrepit power grid wasn't set up to store large amounts of power, but for in-the-moment distribution according to demand.

[GloomCookie]

So, prior to the wide-scale adoption of renewable energies, that's more or less how the grid was set up.



So there's a set amount of power that's being used all the time, and more often than not this is where nuclear power is strongest. Nuclear energy is about the same cost to run as it is to let sit idle, so any grid with nuclear energy available will use that and then bring other plants like coal and natural gas online to hit peak demands, as those stations cost more to run during peak energy use. This is also why commercial and industrial plants will get charged on-peak and off-peak rates, while residential customers less so. Big energy consumers like steel and aluminum plants will often work at night both to reduce cooling costs and because they want to take advantage of off-peak rates, though of course there are always exceptions.

Renewables will help in this regard because most peak use is in the afternoon, when you're more likely to have sunlight. The biggest goal these days will be to flatten the curve of peak usage and then bringing systems like nuclear and renewables online that can hit those peaks, and then have enough capacity to make up the difference if renewables can't quite make it.

One of the methods I've seen is to avoid using HVAC so much as ground-loop water systems, but those have a ton of issues all on their own. There's also well insulated boxes that they freeze solid with ice at night and then run water through to then cool air moving through a building. Those things have their own issues but they're possible ways to curb the biggest loads on a building, which is HVAC.

When I sit down to design a Starbucks, out of all the loads on that system, HVAC probably takes up 30% or more. A Joann's or similar big box retail over half the load is HVAC. That's where the peak demand is, and that's why I can see the big push for solar, since businesses could curb that peak energy use.

[Blythe]

I gotta say GloomCookie--I am really delighted to read your posts. I feel like I'm learning a lot of stuff from 'em. This is the sort of stuff I love to read when I come to the PROC subboard. :)

[TheGlyphstone]

Likewise. I love learning new things, especially tech stuff, and coming from an expert's mouth is always the best.

[Dice]

Nuclear energy is about the same cost to run as it is to let sit idle

Here's the part where I care about the politics. I don't understand why Australia (Where I am) as a geologically stable nation (Read low risk of the earth shaking) and with a large amount of open space where nothing lives doesn't use nuclear power as a transion source. Fuck that's a horribly worded sentence.

Anyhow, I get that it's dangerous, I get that it's got its draw backs, I get that storing the waste sucks, but of all the nations on earth we, as in Australia, have solutions to each of these issues and we have a massive amount of fusionable material in the ground. I think nuclear power is a good substitute to coal and gas as we transition to whatever renewable energy generation we adopt. I wish we would use it. Because a lot of its risks are minimised by our geographic location and sparseness of population.

[GloomCookie]

There are other considerations, however. Nuclear power has always been more expensive to build and maintain, and that isn't something to overlook when you're asking tax payers to fund construction.

The cost of a coal powered plant is in the neighborhood of $3,500 per kW generated, while nuclear energy is around $6,000 per kW generated. You need on average 1 GigaWatt to power a million homes, or 1.21 GW if you want to get back to 1985.



Since we're talking DeLorean's and such, if you wanted to put a power plant up to power the Time Machine from Back to the Future, it would cost $4,235,000,000 for a coal power plant, or $7,260,000,000 for nuclear.

Now I see why Doc Brown stole the plutonium from the Libians.

[TheGlyphstone]

At least around here, taxpayers don't get a say in the matter - it's up to the Public Utility Commission to approve new power plant infrastructure projects, and they're appointed by the governor directly. And since the utility company gets a % of the total cost as guaranteed profit, the higher the price tag the better for them.

[Dice]

There are other considerations, however.

Sure. But we are talking here about the "Climate Wars" we have over here, were both sides of politics have been ripping each other apart. (we are known as the coup capital of the world for the speed our political parties knife their leaders, all over climate issues) So, if we are going to dam well do something about our dependence on fossil energy and transition over to renewable energy, nuclear power is (imo) the best stepping stone we have available right now.

Sure, it is costly, but the priority here is ending the stupid knifings of our political leaders every 2 years over this fucking issue. Not spewing black smoke, keeping my lights on and political stability sounds like a fine mix of reasons to eat the costs otherwise.

[GloomCookie]

At least around here, taxpayers don't get a say in the matter - it's up to the Public Utility Commission to approve new power plant infrastructure projects, and they're appointed by the governor directly. And since the utility company gets a % of the total cost as guaranteed profit, the higher the price tag the better for them.

That sounds like a major conflict of interests to me. If they get a percentage of the total cost, then surely someone has to oversee them directly, right? Or do they just give a kick back to the governor for their continued cooperation?