> we simply don't have enough space for wind and solar to feed our thirst for hydrocarbons with renewable power.
I'm not sure if this is the case or not. To give some numbers:
Current global oil consumption is 54225 TWh, or 6.2TW [1]
Current global solar panel generation capacity is 628 GW (2019) [2]. Median capacity factor maybe 25% [3]
Current global wind power capacity is 650 GW [4]. Median capacity factor maybe ~37% [5]
Other renewables are unlikely to achieve the same growth as wind and solar, so can be ignored.
So we need to install 15x current renewables, times whatever the hydrocarbon creation process efficiency is, to produce all our annual oil demand.
Assuming a 50% process efficiency, we'd need to install 30x what we have now. That's a big installation, but it's not outside the realms of possibility. There's a lot of untouched desert in the world.
Thanks for doing the math. On a global scale it does look better than the math I did for Germany.
However, I think 50% process efficiency is too high. High temperature electrolysis is about 60% efficient, but then you only have hot uncompressed hydrogen. There are a number more steps involved to get to a liquid fuel, each of them with considerable losses. I can't find the sources right now but I believe I remember something like 15% end-to-end efficiency for getting to something you can fuel your car with.
Yeah, it probably is. There's not really a nice process for making liquid fuel - hydrogen isn't a great fuel really. My understanding is that the biggest problem with making a practical liquid fuel is ironically getting the carbon. Hydrogen is in water, but carbon is only really in carbon dioxide - which is at very low atmospheric concentrations and so takes an incredible amount of energy to capture.
Ammonia would be easier (ubiquitous nitrogen everywhere), but isn't a particularly nice fuel either. At least it's easier to store than hydrogen.
I'm not sure if this is the case or not. To give some numbers:
Current global oil consumption is 54225 TWh, or 6.2TW [1] Current global solar panel generation capacity is 628 GW (2019) [2]. Median capacity factor maybe 25% [3] Current global wind power capacity is 650 GW [4]. Median capacity factor maybe ~37% [5]
Other renewables are unlikely to achieve the same growth as wind and solar, so can be ignored.
So we need to install 15x current renewables, times whatever the hydrocarbon creation process efficiency is, to produce all our annual oil demand.
Assuming a 50% process efficiency, we'd need to install 30x what we have now. That's a big installation, but it's not outside the realms of possibility. There's a lot of untouched desert in the world.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-consumption-by-region... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country [3]: https://emp.lbl.gov/pv-capacity-factors [4]: https://wwindea.org/blog/category/statistics/ [5]: https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors