Tag: energy

Transportation CO2

CO2 emissions from shipping are 2x those of aviation and could rise by 75% in the next 15-20 years which will have a serious impact on global warming.

time for those humongous sails on tankers and container ships.
2020-02-04: Removing CO2 from transportation is going to be really difficult around the world due to NIMBYs.

There are a number of headwinds to the replacement of cars with public transportation, all of which are politically or technically nontrivial in ways that mass installation of solar and wind power isn’t:

  1. Public transport is the most convenient in large cities and least convenient in rural areas, but modern nationalism holds the rural to be more authentic and moral. Thus, when rural motorists riot the state is paralyzed with inaction and the media urges understanding of populist anger at elites, whereas when urbanites riot the state immediately engages in mass arrests and the media urges law and order.
  2. The pace of urban redevelopment is too low, thanks to local NIMBYism, making it hard for people to live in cities where car-free living is already convenient. Local housing activism always focuses on people already present; Berlin passed a new rent control law that is projected to reduce investment by 25%. Even Paris, which is building more housing, is doing so almost exclusively in the suburbs and not in the city proper.
  3. Local notables tend to drive even controlling for income and social class. One does not become a local notable by working at a city center office with people from many neighborhoods, many of whom are recent migrants to the city, but by staying within one neighborhood and interacting with old-timers. The latter kind of economic and social network is less convenient to travel by train. Thus, the loudest voices in a local discussion are against seizing space from cars and giving it to pedestrians, cyclists, buses, or trams.
  4. At low levels of public investment, the car will predominate, for 2 reasons. First, some state action is needed to give buses priority on roads. Second, public transportation has more moving parts that must be integrated – fares, schedules, infrastructure, equipment, development. This makes fiscal austerity a drag on the ability of a developed society to demotorize unless this austerity specifically takes the form of very high taxes on cars and fuel.
  5. A political process that slows down investment in order to mollify NIMBY opposition makes it very hard to shift priorities on the ground. In this sense, the freeway revolts and the changes they led to are the best thing that ever happened to car culture, even more than the freeways themselves; in the American context, the revolts happened largely only when the freeways intruded on middle-class neighborhoods.

2020-04-02: Ships are 3% of global emissions, and because it’s “only” 90k ships, easier to upgrade. The proper solution would be safe nuclear reactors, but of course we can’t have that due to paranoia.

Fusion

Inertial electrostatic confinement fusion provides a potential breakthrough in designing and implementing practical fusion power plants. This is a $5T / year market.
2007-04-27: inertial confinement is a lot more promising than magnetic confinement. Plus 1000x cheaper to build. This is very very exciting (and a $5t/ year market).
2008-01-15: Fusion power grows more quickly than Moore’s law. It has increased by a factor of 10000 in the last 30 years, and another factor of 6 is required for a power plant. ITER will be 500MW, 10x over the energy threshold.

2011-08-03: Mark Suppes:

I do believe this is the WORLD’S FIRST AMATEUR POLYWELL!!!

Science. It works, bitches. Mark Suppes is one of my heroes. He lives in Brooklyn. His hobby: building his own bussard fusion reactor. He will very likely fail, but what if he succeeds? Here is a nice article on him. If you are behind in your fusion terminology, bussard reactors are an alternative design that doesn’t require 10s of billions to get if off the ground. The best introduction is this tech talk:

2014-04-12: Since the big science / consortium approach hasn’t worked so far, maybe a macgyver approach will.

Ivanov’s story is just one example of the serendipity involved in this small Canadian company’s rise to the forefront of a worldwide race to harness nuclear fusion, a race that has been going on fitfully, consuming $10Bs, for more than 50 years. (All existing reactors operate using nuclear fission, rather than fusion, which is a very different process.) Started in 2002 by a successful corporate scientist in the throes of a midlife crisis, General Fusion has already outlasted past private-sector attempts to commercialize fusion energy. Instead of petering out, it’s garnered the attention and respect of a small but growing cadre of scientists, energy executives and adventurous investors around the world.

2016-08-15: Towards commercial fusion

If LPP is successful with their research and then successful with commercialization they will achieve commercial nuclear fusion at the cost of $400K-1M for a 5 megawatt generator that would produce power for about 0.3 cents per kwh instead of 6 cents per kwh for coal and natural gas. It would be a game changer. Their monthly reports have shown that there are many technical, material and theoretical challenges. LPP has shown a lot of grit and ingenuity to overcome challenges.

2016-11-04: Longer plasma

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) in Heifi, China was able to sustain plasma in the H-mode confinement regime for 102 seconds.

2019-02-17: Fusion Projects Use Misleading Power Terms

ITER has spent over $14B so far and will only reach some level of plasma energy gain for a few minutes at a time if everything works as planned. The condition of Q = 1, when the power being released by the fusion reactions is equal to the required heating power is called breakeven or scientific breakeven. Plasma breakeven can be 100x away from what is needed for a practical reactor.

As explained by Sabine Hossenfelder:

The Q-plasma also doesn’t take into account that if you want to operate a power plant, the heat that is created by the plasma would still have to be converted into electric energy, and that can only be done with a limited efficiency, optimistically maybe 50%. As a consequence, the Q total is much lower than the Q plasma. If you didn’t know this, you’re not alone. I didn’t know this until a few years ago either. How can such a confusion even happen? I mean, this isn’t rocket science. The total energy that goes into the reactor is more than the energy that goes into the plasma. And yet, science writers and journalists constantly get this wrong. They get the most basic fact wrong on a matter that affects 10s of billions of research funding. The plan is that ITER will generate 500 MegaWatts of fusion power in heat. If we assume a 50% efficiency for converting this heat into electricity, ITER will produce about 250 MegaWatts of electric power. That gives us a Q total of about 0.57. That’s 6% of the normally stated Q plasma of 10. Even optimistically, ITER will still consume 2x the power it generates. What’s with the earlier claim of a Q of 0.67 for the JET experiment? Same thing.

2019-06-27: Commonwealth Fusion Systems

The Reactor Core of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. This Tokamak plasma fusion ring supports the steepest temperature gradient in the solar system (1 million degrees to room temp within 2mm)!

2020-10-01: Venture capital is entering fusion

This third party analysis verifies our investment thesis; tokamak fusion is an engineering project, not a science project. If they can build it, the scientific community agrees on the performance that will result.

2022-05-24: An unwelcome bottleneck, tritium.

The tritium used in fusion experiments like ITER, and the smaller JET tokamak in the UK, comes from a very specific type of nuclear fission reactor called a heavy-water moderated reactor. But many of these reactors are reaching the end of their working life, and there are fewer than 30 left in operation worldwide. 20 in Canada, 4 in South Korea, and 2 in Romania, each producing about 100 grams of tritium a year. But now, with the help of AI-controlled magnets to help confine the fusion reaction, and advances in materials science, some companies are exploring alternatives. TAE Technologies is attempting to build a fusion reactor that uses hydrogen and boron, which it says will be a cleaner and more practical alternative to D-T fusion. It’s aiming to reach a net energy gain—where a fusion reaction creates more power than it consumes—by 2025. Boron can be extracted from seawater by the metric ton, and it has the added benefit of not irradiating the machine as D-T fusion does. It’s a more commercially viable route to scalable fusion power. But the mainstream fusion community is still pinning its hopes on ITER, despite the potential supply problems for its key fuel. “Fusion is really, really difficult, and anything other than deuterium-tritium is going to be 100x more difficult, 100 years from now maybe we can talk about something else.”

Lithium scarcity

A world dependent on lithium for its vehicles could soon face even tighter resource constraints than we face today with oil. Lithium-rich South America would become the new Middle East. Concentration of supply would create new geopolitical tensions

2021-06-28: Lithium 3x cheaper

“Over an 18-month period, only 30% of the available lithium is captured because the lithium co-precipitates out of the brine with other salts. By using membranes, we can now control this mechanical separation process, avoid the co-precipitation that causes 60% of that loss, and achieve a 90% recovery rate”

Battery capacity has to scale at least 1000x in the next decade, and Lithium prices are one bottleneck.

2022-05-20: Demand is growing 2x faster than supply.

  • Demand for lithium from the EV industry is growing at 2x the rate of lithium production. As a result, lithium prices have skyrocketed over the past 6 months — 4x last year’s prices in tight markets. By 2025, the US could need up to 75k tonnes per year of lithium to supply new gigafactories.
  • The US currently produces only 1% of global lithium production — 1k tonnes of lithium content. This currently comes from a single brine operation: Albemarle’s Silver Peak site in Nevada.
  • The US theoretically has enough lithium in the ground to meet the growing demand. The USGS reported that the US has 750k tonnes of economically recoverable lithium in 2021. This estimate will continue to grow as new reserves are proven; as recently as 2018, the US had only 30k tonnes of established domestic reserves.
  • The Thacker Pass project in Nevada has received all required permits to begin construction and is the closest to bringing new US lithium production online (5k tonnes of lithium content in Phase 1). Because the lithium at Thacker Pass is found in clay rather than in a brine, it can be extracted quickly with relatively standard technology once facilities are constructed.
  • The heated brines pumped out of the ground for geothermal power in California’s Salton Sea region also contain significant amounts of lithium — 24k tonnes of lithium content passes through these plants a year by NREL’s estimate. Extracting this lithium is hard because of the wide range of other minerals present, combined with relatively low lithium concentrations and elevated temperatures. However, building out more geothermal capacity is an amazing BOGO opportunity: clean energy + lithium, and lots of it!
  • 3 challenges prevent the USA from achieving lithium independence. The first is the long development times needed to bring a new resource to production (4–10+ years). The second is the low average lithium concentration of US deposits, which make them more complicated and expensive to process than Chilean brines, for instance. The third is creating a streamlined (and appropriately staffed) permitting process that ensures that environmental impacts are kept to a minimum, while enabling a predictable outcome for responsible parties.

2023-09-13: The market solved it.

When I first read about the discovery of a vast new deposit of lithium in a volcanic crater along the Nevada-Oregon border, I can’t say that I was surprised. Not because I know anything about geology — but because, as an economist, I am a strong believer in the concept of elasticity of supply.
It’s worth dwelling on the significance of this find, which could help limit climate change and ease geopolitical tensions. The find, 20-40m tons, would be larger than the current largest, 21m tons beneath the salt flats of Bolivia. (The discovery awaits final confirmation, but at least 1 company says it expects to start mining this supply in 2026.) And lithium is of course a crucial ingredient in batteries for electric vehicles, demand for which is surging and which are an important part of any plan to fight climate change.

Energy Innovation

From a correspondent at the World Economic forum in Davos: I went to the energy dinner hosted by MIT and the striking thing was the composition of the audience. No top guys from Shell or BP in evidence. But Silicon Valley packing the room. The tech crowd included Vint Cerf, Vinod Khosla, John Doerr, Larry Page, Chad Hurley … and Sergey Brin came late. So full that even Page and Hurley had trouble getting in. Topics: nanobatteries, solar, natural selection and biofuel bugs, transmission grids.

2015-07-29:

If we create the right environment for innovation, we can accelerate the pace of progress, develop and deploy new solutions, and eventually provide everyone with reliable, affordable energy that is CO2 free. We can avoid the worst climate-change scenarios while also lifting people out of poverty, growing food more efficiently, and saving lives by reducing pollution.

2015-11-30:

2 related initiatives are being announced at today’s event. One is Mission Innovation, a commitment by more than 10 countries to invest more in research on clean energy. The other is the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a global group of private investors who will support companies that are taking innovative clean-energy ideas out of the lab and into the marketplace. Our primary goal with the Coalition is as much to accelerate progress on clean energy as it is to make a profit.

this is a good step but coal needs to be defunded much more.