Column: Maybe we’d be better off if we couldn’t find our politicians – an ocean of ignorance guides Western energy policy
Several years ago, I was discussing the impact of drought on some of Canada’s growing regions with an acquaintance. The guy has no agricultural background whatsoever, which isn’t particularly unusual, nor the often sporadic view of how things really work. After brooding for a minute about the destruction of crops, he asked, “Can’t you just use it as a watering can?”
The guy isn’t a particularly big jerk; he was just isolated and didn’t know how unrealistic and far-fetched the idea was. Without being transported by helicopter to the middle of a 640-acre field, it is difficult to fully describe the reality of the situation.
We could all be in this person’s shoes if we ventured to find a solution to something we have no clue about. If a surgeon mentions some procedural issues at work, I seriously doubt my zero-knowledge/saw-as-miracle tool suggestions will be very helpful.
It is merely an oddity of human discourse, and rarely more than a diversion. But not in the energy world. Garden hose thinkers have reached the decision table.
In January, a group of 400 “energy system scientists, scholars, and modelers” submitted a letter Federal cabinet ministers Freeland, Wilkinson and Guilbealt (which sounds like a scary law firm) called on the federal government not to provide tax credits for carbon capture and storage if that process is used. used to enhance oil recovery (CCUS).
The stance is a special stance; A basic principle of engineering (and common sense) is that dual-purpose efficiency is the lowest outcome there. Since the world is going to burn all that oil, it makes perfect sense to start there and use that infrastructure whenever possible.
Not for the crowd of 400, though, who somehow deemed themselves better suited to solving problems. (Including the signatories to whom we should have technical advice are dozens of public policymakers; dozens of sociologists; professors of film studies, Asian studies, religious studies, history. history, accounting, English, art history, philosophy… pretty much any social science discipline you can imagine.) They all consider themselves experts in CCUS. All told the government that “don’t listen to shilling, the faucet will work fine.”
Consider one of their complaints: “Building CCUS infrastructure will require a massive pipeline to transport carbon.” It’s one of the few entries they don’t bother to cite in their coherent/nonsensical peer-review site, because for them that world doesn’t exist. The hydrocarbons are simply removed from the future equation. The group called on the states to instead pursue “increased electrification, widespread use of renewable energy, and increased energy efficiency.”
There’s nothing wrong with increasing energy efficiency, but what about replacing hydrocarbons with large-scale renewable energy use (their alternative logic, not mine)? For farmers, they’re making suggestions for garden hoses, but let’s hear what others interested in functionality have to say.
The IEA, in some cases still unable to avoid certain facts, has shown that a report Last year, keeping the global temperature rise below 2 degrees would quadruple the requirement for new minerals/mines by 2040, and to hit the net-2050 would mean a sixfold increase.
If that sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is and won’t happen – according to another article by actual engineers, to achieve full energy transition “will not only exceed existing and planned production capacity [for copper, nickel, graphite, lithium, and others]but also known globally storage of those minerals. ”
And that’s the theory part. Here’s a realistic view from the ground up – regardless of the reserves, they’re getting harder and harder to extract. 29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
A few weeks ago, the mining giant Freeport-McMoRan (you know who they are, the people who dropped the multi-billion dollar Bre-X by asking “Can we look at those gold samples in a few minutes?” ?”) the executive said on an end-of-year conference call: “We’re seeing an increasing scarcity in supply, at a time when demand is growing dramatically. There are a limited number of projects, which have been in development for some time… besides, it’s hard to find actionable projects that can be developed in a very short period of time… more and more risky. political risks around the world. its influence on the development of copper supply. Notably in Chile and Peru, where 40% of the world’s copper is, there’s a new President who runs the agenda towards social agendas… you see this in countries like the United States of America, you see other countries restricting the development of new supplies for the social issues community… from Asia to Central America to Africa. All of this adds to supply constraints.”
For reference, and this is very helpful to me, as a mining idiot, FM’s newest mine is coming up in Indonesia – where the company started funding 20 years ago – there are more than 350 miles of tunnels, seven miles of underground tracks to feed the giant crushers, and 5 miles of conveyor belts. That’s why mines take 20 years to come online, and that time will only increase as regulations make them difficult to mine.
There’s no guarantee, of course, that Trudeau/Guilbealt/Wilkinson/Freeland will listen to the 400-man group, but there’s no reason to think they won’t. Western leaders have surrounded themselves with ideological copies that don’t fit the job, lacking any experience in actually running an energy system.
Europe’s energy failure is hardly in need of a discussion, and the most surprising part of it is that many of those failed energy generals are pointing to high natural gas prices as a reason to rise. speed towards more renewable energy. It’s exactly the same solution as the guy who suggested watering mile-wide fields with a garden hose or two.
The amnesia lingers here. Biden is scouring the world for natural gas supplies to Europe in the event of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, while at home his minions are doing whatever they can to alleviate hydrocarbon industry to switch to renewable energy.
Rumors are circulating (based on draft US government discussion paper) that the Biden Administration will raise the gasoline tax rate to 50% (a White House spokesman downplayed the report, call hiking “Pre-decision drafting language”).
The United States is currently one of the largest exporters of natural gas in the worldok title at least temporarily), a world without questions is desperately looking for more, and Biden’s new-energy mavens seem to think that harder production is a reasonable card to play, all even while their boss looks at every rock in the world for more supply.
The extremely dangerous, distorted thinking that underlies many of these decisions is the fundamentally ignorant belief that energy transitions are happening rapidly. So we have armies that now call themselves “energy experts” because they study every aspect of renewable energy with the assumption that that’s going to be the whole story.
It goes without saying that there are thousands of startups trying every imaginable clean new technology, and some will work, but most bring us right back to the same serious mineral deficiency problem. like an impassable crater.
How can you trust any analysis that refuses to integrate the current hydrocarbon system that meets 80% of global energy needs? Any sensible game plan would start with that as a foundation and embrace things like CCUS with relative ease to hit the milestones (and I don’t know if CCUS has economies of scale or not). no; all I know is that ‘decarbonization’ would be too expensive either economically or in terms of living standards, so if that’s going to happen, I vote CCUS as justified as anything).
Furthermore, despite decades and trillions of spending, it can be easily argued that there is no energy transition yet – 80% of global energy transition needs are already met by hydrocarbons. 30 years ago, and that rate is almost the same today. . That’s not the definition of a transition – it’s a picture of a pie that consumes increasing energy with the size of each piece getting bigger as a result of increasing diameter, not scaling.
It feels a bit odd to point to such obvious cases when it is increasingly clear that the world is calling for more hydrocarbons, not less. But as long as our governments – and those who vote for them – continue to live in their la la land, the choice is to surrender and let them take control of the entire system underground, or put They went to the wheat field with the garden hose and waited for the light to come on.
How did we get into such an energy quagmire? Find out how and how to get out – watch “The Ultimate Fossil Fuel Insanity” at Amazon.ca, Indigo.caor Amazon.com. Thanks for the support.
Related
