this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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Some of these ships would carry green hydrogen and new lithium batteries and old lithium batteries (to be recycled) and whatnot. Also at least some oil would be still needed for fine chemicals like meds or (idk what's proper english term for that) large scale organic synthesis like plastics, or even straight distillates like hexane (for edible oil extraction) or lubricants. Some of usual non-energy uses of oil can be easily substituted with enough energy like with nitrogen fertilizers but some can't
I'm guessing most countries would try to recycle batteries locally. Or/and throw them onto solar systems straight away
That wouldn’t really need to be shipped around though, domestic supply can cover those needs almost everywhere.
That is true, but part of improving our environmental impact will be decreasing that transport of raw materials, localizing chemical industries near the sources of their raw materials.
We aren’t consuming batteries anywhere near the rate we consume oil and coal. Hydrogen even less than batteries.
So the amount of ships needed would still be a fraction of what we use now.
not now, but if hydrogen were to be used as an energy source/storage, then it'd be used plenty. same with batteries
If you have water you have hydrogen.
there's no reason to transport hydrogen if they build infrastructure to use it as a fuel they will build a process to make it on site
While true, it's very unlikely we'll use hydrogen. It's very impractical for this use compared to alternatives
We can make hydrogen everywhere, we can't 'make oil'.
That implies that we can make electricity everywhere, which is technically true but not really the case because there's countries with more and with less free space, with more suitable places and less suitable places to put renewables.
Those ammonia tankers will happen. At that point btw we're not just talking about electricity, but also chemical feedstock.
you really think this is going to stop the globalism aspect from happening? If you can ship something, and get better market rates on it, you're going to do it. Economics follows the cheapest route, not the most efficient.
It also just makes sense if you think about it. Places like alaska are going to struggle to generate green energy compared to another place like, texas for example. If you can ship in green hydrogen much cheaper than you can locally produce energy, why wouldn't you? It's a reasonable solution to the problem of supply and demand scaling.
Yeah, but Alaska uses dramatically less energy than... like, everywhere. Given that there are no people and the only industries are either oil or resources.
oil and resource industries are pretty well known for being energy intensive no?
last i checked industry is the primary energy consumer. Sure there's less people in alaska, but it was just an example i picked, and the market economics would still be applicable there. If it's cheaper to buy hydrogen, than it is to produce locally sourced power, that's going to be what happens.
Not in comparison to... normal things like people and manufacturing.
And oil is oil, it's self-powering. Many/most are powered off of the propane out-gassing to dedicated turbines.
We absolutely can 'make oil'. Been doing it since world war II. Synthetic oil is extremely common.
I mean, yeah, but also, that's not really efficient or effective for burning.
Neither is hydrogen.
I'm not disagreeing, but if the energy is surplus, might as well make hydrogen, at least we don't end up with pollution.
arguably, compressing natural gas into LNG is fucking stupid, but apparently the market rates work out, so it's economically viable. And here we are compressing a gas into a liquid just to ship it over the ocean lol.
market economies are just funny.
Oh certainly. Power storage is a real problem, especially with up-down renewables. I just didn't understand why you were saying oil can't be produced but hydrogen can. Synthesizing oil for power storage is a terrible idea 😄
Same for hydrogen really. The only case where it really matters is flight, which requires energy densities that will only ever be achieved by hydrocarbons or maybe hydrogen.
Yeah, there's no reason to be transporting hydrogen long distances. You can make it anywhere that has water and electricity. And if you've transitioned to a hydrogen based economy (which is a big if), ships wouldn't run on oil any more anyway, so there's no problem there.
there absolutely is? What if i can buy hydrogen at 1$ per ton, from the hydrogen production empire, meanwhile in the manufacturing empire hydrogen is produced at 2$ per ton. Economically, it would make sense to buy that hydrogen from the hydrogen production empire.
It's not going to be as significant as a trade as something like coal and LNG obviously, but the market IS going to do this in some capacity. And it's a beneficial thing for everybody.
Sure, there'd be some arbitrage, but pretty much every country that has a functional government will invest in domestic capacity for strategic reasons. You won't have countries that have none at all and have to import everything.
obviously not, and that's mostly going to be military contracts more than anything. Regardless, this doesn't change the economics here, if you can buy it from the hydrogen empire cheaper, and your business isn't the US military, then it doesnt fucking matter. Just buy it from them.
Strategic doesn't mean just military. It means strategically investing in this capacity so you don't get caught with your pants down when Russia turns off the tap and destroys your economy overnight. We're past the globalist world now, and if your country is still making decisions as if we are, you're not doing it right.
that's only true if you're a trump supporter, it's absolutely true if you're not. There are most definitely concerns to be had, as there always are, but globalism is fundamentally good for the economy. There is no world in which this isn't true, so you should push towards globalism, even if there is some risk, because it will likely stabilize relations significantly.
The pandemic and Ukraine shows you can't just count on global markets in a crisis, and we're heading into a world with more, not less crises. Countries everywhere are onshoring critical industries, and the BRICS countries are working on getting off the dollar. That's happening whether Trump is President or not (and unfortunately he is).
the pandemic was really the only significant player here, since it stopped world trade.
Sure russia is a fair example, but here in the US we barely felt it, and we did pretty quickly close up the trade problems.
i'm sure countries are moving away from it, and ensuring industry a bit, that's not surprising, it happens everytime. It's going to get outsourced later eventually. And they're not going to onshore every single industry either, it's simply not possible.
Yeah but your electricity also needs to be produced by reusable manners, which commonly results in solar power. And since the intensity of solar rays and the amount of sunny hours per day vary on the global scale there are some countries which are capable of producing more hydrogen and cheaper than producing locally. I know that the German government is looking at Marocco to establish a hydrogen production and import.
no we can't make hydrogen everywhere, there will be regions with large excess of renewable energy compared to population. these places could export hydrogen. you also don't need a lot of transport if crude is extracted near place where it's used, like for example heavy crude from alberta
The problem with the comparison is hydrocarbons are the energy source, hydrogen is no it's just the energy carrier. It is very inefficient to convert energy to hydrogen then convert it back again. Something like 60% round trip efficiency. Not to mention the cost and loss in loading into containers and shipping it around the world. It's also not a very dense fuel per volume especially compared to oil. It's just way easier and cheaper to have cables that run from one place to another. They are already building one from Australia to Singapore and if it's successful that will probably open the floodgates. There aren't many places that are more than 2000 miles away from large sources of renewable energy even if your thinking places like Alaska which could do hydro if there ever was dense enough populations anywhere that would consume it.
this is less of a problem when you don't use it for energy, but instead as a feedstock like in synthesis of ammonia or steelmaking. you can make ammonia in many places, but it's not the case for steel
And oil for Styrofoam. And met coal for steel.
Everything that comes out of a petrochemical plant can be made without oil, in fact BASF had recipes in place for decades now and is switching sources as the price shifts. Push come to shove they can produce everything from starch. It's also why they hardly blinked when Russia turned off the gas.
The carbon that actually ends up in steel is a quite negligible amount (usually under 1%, over 2% you get cast iron), you can get that out of the local forest, and to reduce the iron hydrogen works perfectly, the first furnances are already online.
There's alternative processes, and if you avoid burning oil and coal for fuel you can basically do all that with the amount of oil that's in easy reach instead of using tar sands or drilling into even more difficult to reach places.
the problem with tar sands is a fundamental energy conversion issue. It's really hard to refine because you don't get nearly as much energy out as you put in, compared to something like fracking.
It may become reasonable in the future with really cheap renewable energy and higher oil prices for example, but as of right now, it's economically unviable.
You have to be careful when talking about steel because coal is both an ingredient (steel is iron + carbon) and used for heating afaik. You can take coal out of the heating step (confusingly called steel making) but not out of the ingredient step, unless you want to find a different carbon source.
you're probably talking about direct reduced iron and it's really a problem that can be dealt with easily, just chuck a piece of coke when it's molten for the second time in electric arc furnace (and maybe electrodes introduce enough carbon). substituting coke with hydrogen works also on "ingredient step" if you mean by that fuel needed to reduce iron ore to iron
maybe there's a way to make electrowinning iron economical, and it'd be pretty green too, but i don't know if it is workable
e: you can also avoid need for met coal if you use methane or syngas for direct reduced iron process
There's (admittedly comparatively expensive) alternative processes, and even if you stick to the old process and just stop using coal for electricity generation you'd cut coal use by 75%.
Not to mention, the carbon that stays in the steel doesn't actually go into the atmosphere, so there's less CO2 emissions for that specific use if you can substitute the fuel used for heating.
That's why I said met coal for steel.
coal can be substituted to some degree with processes like direct reduction. hydrogen works but syngas from biomass or trash also works
file styrofoam under plastics
the argument for renewable energy isnt that we should stop using oil, its that we shouldnt burn it. why turn our limited supply of oil into CO2 and water when we can turn it into plastics, medicine, solvents, etc? around 3/4 of crude oil is used as fuel, but if renewable energy was used, the number of oil tankers would decrease by more than 75% bc local supplies would generally be sufficient for industrial, non-fuel uses
this is assuming that its not just cheaper to import that needed oil? This is always going to be a fundamental problem, though maybe we already happen to produce plastic with native oil idk.
ikr, but that tweet implies that all of oil/gas/coal ships would be unnecessary