if we only have 8500 coal power plants globally and this is the single largest source of emissions, shouldn’t we be trying to eliminate 20% of global emissions?
Furthermore, if renewables are cheaper shouldn’t we immediately stop adding to the coal problem?
We need to replace a billion gasoline powered cars, etc. Coal power generation seems like an easy thing to do.
> What is better for the environment, A gas powered car or an electric car where the electricity comes exclusively from coal?
Rhetorical question, I assume. A coal powered EV is still something like 15-20% less polluting than a gas powered car. And the EV gets instantly more efficient when the coal plant inevitably gets replaced with something cleaner.
Sounds great until you remember you're not get even half of that nameplate capacity. Capacity factors of solar/wind is between 10% and 30%. Offshore wind can be as high as 45% but your link says it's only 5% of wind capacity (in 2020).
Intermittents like solar/wind aren't suitable for grids without a backing firm energy source. Today that is fossil fuels. We don't have a proven viable replacement right now. Most people think that we'll use batteries instead but that's a pipe dream with today's battery tech. We literally don't have enough minerals. See this report: https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf
Lots of people are trying to address this storage problem but there's nothing that is proven and manufacturable at scale today.
Lithium (element #3) is a very abundant resource and widely distributed across the Earth. Saying we don't have enough is laughable. At certain price levels some of it is uneconomical to extract, but the price today is very different than the price when that report was written.
The report doesn't even mention price. That is a whole other level of analysis. The fact is, the known global reserves of several minerals (not just lithium) needed for a primarily wind/solar grid are insufficient for today's battery tech. We need a new plan. Underground hydrogen storage looks more promising than batteries, but again we don't have anything scalable ready to go today in terms of cheap energy storage.
> It's not like fossil fuels where it is plausible that there are limited amounts. Elements are created by the same processes that formed the universe.
This is a non sequitur. There is a limited amount of anything on Earth. The pertinent question is: can we get enough of these minerals economically to use them as storage by 2050. If it is not economical, it won't happen.
If you think extracting more than 4x the known global reserves of lithium is going to be economical, I don't know what to tell you.
It hasn't even doubled in the past 10 years. At today's global lithium mining rate, it would take 220 years to get today's known reserves out of the ground. Nevermind 4x. And then there's the human and environmental impact of all that mining. We're just talking about a single element. There's several more that are just as constrained if not worse.
Today's batteries just aren't suited for grid storage.
Because mines take 10 years to open on average from minerals found to minerals being moved out of the ground. 1% of surveyed mineral deposits become mines.
Because for the better part of a decade, the green transition plan has been to move to solar/wind plus energy storage. The obvious question is, how many machines will we need? What kind? How much will it cost?
The author of this report described how he convinced his management to fund this work. He works at a Finnish government geological survey organization. He told his management, "Who do you think the EU leadership will blame when they realize that we don't have anywhere near the resources needed to complete the green transition as it is imagined today?"
The spglobal link connects to a product (global database + updating tools) that S&P acquired from it's source here in Western Australia, between here and the Toronto TSX you'll find the vast weight of companies and capital that form the bulk of global transnational mining (sans Russia and China, although they are threaded in and tracked also).
> Because mines take 10 years to open on average from minerals found to minerals being moved out of the ground.
Bear in mind that "minerals being found" is when they first become "resources" (see JORC terminology which has become standard across the global mineral industry) .. when minerals have been proven (tightly estimated by volume and density) and had an Economic Feasibility Technical Report completed and filed they become "reserves" .. known amounts with a costing to extract.
Also bear in mind that mines can open much faster when there is a demand .. mines generally don't open faster unless there is a demand, now that past global supply issues and ramping production of end goods upwards you'll see mines open on proven reserves and more resources being advanced toward reserve status.
I agree with your general point about general EV resources (there's a looming Copper issue and with the processing of rare earths in general) .. but your argument here WRT lithium is overly simplified, there are political issues that weigh more on mid future lithium extraction more than known reserve issues.
I'm just paraphrasing (likely poorly) Associate Professor of Mining Engineering Simon Michaux. He wrote a ~1000 page report on this. I assume he understands those definitions of reserves etc. Lithium is only one of the minerals we seem to be short of.
FWiW and just as a note, I'm ~60, have written several million SLOC of exploration geophysics code, first worked in a mine at 16, have an engineering ( and math and Comp Sci ) degree, and put together that global registry of mineral resources with a few others I know, most of whom are mining engineers, geologists, etc.
In the course of tracking resources we'd find ourselves dealing with four to five 300 - 2,000 page technical reports for each resource across several thousand companies spanning the globe. Come Annual report and quarterly report filing times we'd also have to deal with each company dropping several hundred pages of report and finnacials.
Prior to onselling that business to S&P some 15+ years ago we sold mineral intelligence to most of the large players in the mineral exploration and production game, from Rio Tinto and BHP down.
While I still have a large contact list I must say I've never spoken to or heard of Associate Professor of Mining Engineering Simon Michaux in Finland ... although I did visit Finland several decades back and was given a nice SAKO rifle system for efficiently finding a target drum of nuclear waste in a forest from 80m altitude in a two second window at 70m/sec.
Still, a great many people have written about and modelled the boom | bust dynamics of mineral exploration and production and time to life of mining operations and their retirement, etc ... specially those large organisations do this on daily basis.
A report which contains delightfully scientific assumptions such as:
- All solar panels are thin film or polysilicon from the late 2000s
- All wind and solar stations are the same size as an average pulled from a single report and "number of power stations" is a metric that matters.
- You need to put energy in a 4 week buffer of 6 year old NMC811 batteries which use double the lithium of a new one (along with nickel and cobalt even though noone would pay more for a battery that is worse at grid storage than LFP, and other chemistries have been scaling since before he started writing this) before putting it in a car battery, and this is more likely than just convincing most EV owners to leave their cars plugged in when parked by offering a discount.
- You need to put energy in the same battery before electrolysing hydrogen with it for transport or feed stock.
- Air conditioning must be able to run during cloudy days in the middle of the night in hot regions backed by the same obsolete NMC battery storage.
- All heating must be backed by batteries and not thermal storage.
- It's impossible to build pantographs, rail, or LEVs.
- That all EVs and Electric motorbikes in india, africa, and southeast asia will be long range US/EU style with built in batteries rather than the already popular battery swap systems for bikes and LEVs.
- Some incoherent mess where km/kWh is used interchangeably with kWh/km and then drivetrain and motor losses were added to get battery capacity for EVs when that was already based on their range for some reason and then multiplied by distance travelled and then thrown away.
- All shipping can only run on NMC batteries or fuel cells, and refuelling or recharging at a floating platform near one of the many areas with world class solar or wind resource you pass is less likely than giving up 75% of your cargo space for battery on short trips just in case you need to do a 25000km trip.
- Meeting demand during off season can be achieved with chemical storage alone, and not by curtailing loads that are added for that purpose such as electrolysers and multi-month thermal storage.
- Improving electrolysers or using CSP to run them or running them in good climates and transporting ammonia is impossoble.
- Burning any amount of that ammonia you made or any amount of fossil fuel gas in the turbines you already have as a last resort is impossible, even if only for a few tens of hours a year.
- All storage must be battery, and using the existing hydro production for dispatch or any of the 1000s of TWh of undeveloped PHES sites is impossible.
- 0% of variability in demand can be met with long distance transmission.
- The 50% of the planet that lives within transmission distance of cloudless deserts cannot tap them for CSP+thermal storage that is available 8000 hours a year.
And on top of that, the report completely rejects the idea that a nuclear fleet could meet the required power in any reasonable timescale on similarly shaky grounds. So even if we believe it, you're still completely wrong.
Unless, of course the conclusion you're trying to push is to delay the transition for a century on the faulty premise that adding renewables achieves nothing.
> it would take 220 years to get today's known reserves out of the ground
That doesn't strike me as particularly constrained then - it's highly unlikely known reserves won't expand in that time or that we'll find no alternatives.
The question is: do we have enough minerals to switch to a solar/wind plus batteries energy system as a species? There is a controversial report from a mining professor who says the answer is 'not even close'. https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf
Fortunately I don't believe we'll need to. From a previous glance of that report, scenario F is pretty close to what I'd imagined we'd likely aim for. It would've been a lot smoother and less costly if we'd started 40 years ago, but it's not shortage of minerals like lithium or cobalt that have been holding us up.
If the "Big rare-earth-metals-mining" industry had anything like the clout of Big Oil/Gas/Coal, we'd probably be half way there by now.
You might want to look at figure 26.10 of Scenario F. We still hit mineral constraints.
The author says outright the report is not an attempt at simulating a realistic transition because it's asking first order questions: along the lines of "do we even have enough stuff to try this?". There's no attempt to ask if this is economical or logistically possible because it is not.
The author is convinced that we're all about to be much poorer because the IV drip of cheap energy that the world has enjoyed for at least 50 years is about to be ripped out. Personally, I think what's most likely to happen is that we will fail to get the world's nations to stop using fossil fuels and we will suffer the environmental consequences of that. Plus all the consequences of the resource wars that will follow. It's a shame.
I think our best chance to avoid this is to rush research on mass manufacturable gen 4 nuclear reactors. We need a factory that spits these things out so we can ship them to developing nations because otherwise, they build coal plants. I have high hopes for Thorcon. They plan to use shipyards to build annually up to 200 GW of modular shippable reactors.
That report is a pathetic attempt at a hit piece from a coal shill.
Cherry picking reports from 2014 that refer to technologies from 2008 and assuming an order of magnitude more batteries than anyone is seriously suggesting of an old version of a chemistry that is never going to be used for bulk storage isn't science. It's just pathetic.
And dredging up this report in order to try to sell people on a solution that actually is resource constrained every time the subject comes up is even more pathetic.
It's true he worked in Australian mining (I assume coal). The guy has been working in industrial recycling and 'circular economy' since 2015 https://www.simonmichaux.com/current-work
> And dredging up this report in order to try to sell people on a solution that actually is resource constrained every time the subject comes up is even more pathetic.
We will literally never run out of fissile material.
An ad hominem is where you use someone's character as a faulty reason their argument is flawed. Pointing out someone's argument is flawed and is a standard part of the coal propaganda machine as a valid reason to question their motives is not ad hominem.
The absolute most generous interpretation of the report you linked is that it was a mastubatory exercise by a completely naive person who thought he was the first person to think of problems that have been studied for decades and have detailed roadmaps for overcoming the real roadblocks (which are not even issues he considers).
> We will literally never run out of fissile material.
There are no commercially viable or even prototype closed loop breeding programs and there never have been. The current stock of economically accessible fissile material is around 40,000 tonnes and each GW of reactor needs 3-20 tonnes. There are no processes with a doubling time under 10 years because spent fuel needs time to cool, so rolling out your non-existent reactor in place of renewables rather than after one or two generations still requires mining all of it.
Even in the scifi world where breeding is viable, we still need a 70-95% renewable transition to fill the 20-40 year gap.
You started by trying to discredit the work based on the author's work history. Then you threw out a few unspecific attacks on his data sources. Hardly convincing. Essentially name calling.
> The absolute most generous interpretation of the report you linked is that it was a mastubatory exercise by a completely naive person who thought he was the first person to think of problems that have been studied for decades
Here is a paper published by IEEE this year, On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research. It is a comprehensive review of the research in this field. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
Section D. Raw Material Demand for 100% Renewable Energy Systems
As the previous criticisms are starting to become less and less tenable, increasing attention is now shifting towards the more salient point of raw materials needed for the transition towards a sustainable energy system. Practically all research in this field finds critical limits for material availability. This may be a major concern and should be addressed with more consideration and analyses to truly test the material limits.
> As the previous criticisms are starting to become less and less tenable, increasing attention is now shifting towards the more salient point of raw materials needed for the transition towards a sustainable energy system. Practically all research in this field finds critical limits for material availability. This may be a major concern and should be addressed with more consideration and analyses to truly test the material limits.
Yes. There are real critical minerals, as well as real broad overviews that highlight them without going into industry specific roadmaps for addressing them.
The limits are entirely unrelated to the paper you first linked because the Michaux analysis does things like assuming all new PV will be CdTe or there will be weeks of battery storage for any electrolysers built in the form of NMC811 batteries.
Trying to conflate the former with the latter or use overviews to pretend said roadmaps don't exist is just as dishonest as your first attempt.
You're trying to use this to push nuclear, but 1kg of lithium gets you 1kW of diurnal storage for a decadeor two, whereas 1kg of Uranium gets you 1kW of power production for at most 8 years.
Lithium has larger reserves, is mined in larger quantities at lower impact than uranium, and won't even be relevant to grid storage because in contradiction to Michaux's claims that he's the only one to ever consider the idea of a different chemistry, nobody is assuming there will be a week of NMC batteries for every watt of renewables.
There were multiple news items about sodium ion, zinc bromide, iron batteries, pumped hydro, thermal storage, and a-caes being released the entire time he was fishing through ancient LCAs and IEA reports to try and claim there isn't enough Tellereum to make solar panels that don't contain any or not enough Niobium to make dual wound generators with no permanent magnets.
He considers LFP in his more recent work and you still run into mineral constraints. Even if you take his 4 week buffer to 48 hours.
> 1kg of lithium gets you 1kW of diurnal storage for a decade or two, whereas 1kg of Uranium gets you 1kW of power production for at most 8 years
That is an absolutely cursed comparison. What forms of these elements are you talking about? Why are you comparing energy storage to energy generation? It doesn't matter. We have enough U and Th to power humanity for millennia. We only use 0.7% of the U we mine for fucks sake. We're not even trying.
> There were multiple news items about...
Oh please, the news is saying we've solved nuclear fusion. The report was constrained to tech that was commercially available in volume. Come back to me when we're pumping out gigawatt hours of storage. Pumped hydro is great, there's not enough suited geography for it. No we can't just dig the reservoirs anywhere because then the energy payback goes negative.
Stil 4x as long as any serious proposal and still assumes all low grade heat and all energy that will eventually drive an electrolyser will be stored in a battery for no reason. Any report that suggests an electrolyser needs guaranteed 100% uptime backed by chemical storage has the same amount of credibility as a report that suggests all PV will be polysilicon or thin film.
> That is an absolutely cursed comparison. What forms of these elements are you talking about? Why are you comparing energy storage to energy generation?
Because you are trying to say that storage is a constraint to using renewable generation. And the form to compare doesn't matter. It's the elemental material you need to extract used in technology that is currently commercially viable.
> It doesn't matter. We have enough U and Th to power humanity for millennia. We only use 0.7% of the U we mine for fucks sake. We're not even trying.
Fertile material isn't fissile material. Even in a closed fuel cycle (which is not a thing that exists in reality) you still need startup fuel material, and none of the proposed over unity breeder scenarios have a fast enough doubling time to be useful. That's a very nice double standard where the technology that actually exists and has a tens of GWh/yr supply chain already 90% built has to have already solved the problem to be feasible, but vague hand waving at reactor designs and fuel cycles that don't even exist as a prototype get a pass.
> Pumped hydro is great, there's not enough suited geography for it
There are thousands of TWh of sites with suitable geography. Only a fraction of a percent need to pass environmental feasibility to cover the plurality of storage.
> The report was constrained to tech that was commercially available in volume.
Then why did he repeatedly say thing like sodium ion has yet to show industrial scale feasibility mere weeks after CATL announced that they were building out an industrial scale pipeline having already finished proving feasibility? Why not include Zinc Bromide that was developed in the university whose logo he put on the report?
I'd love to see this serious proposal that says we can globally replace fossil fuels with intermittents and 4 hours of energy storage.
> That's a very nice double standard where the technology that actually exists and has a tens of GWh/yr supply chain already 90% built has to have already solved the problem to be feasible, but vague hand waving at reactor designs and fuel cycles that don't even exist as a prototype get a pass.
You're conflating my explanation for why U/Th supplies are not a concern with your assumption for what my proposed solution is. PWRs are sufficient for today and can be built today. We can and should work on new reactors and fuel cycles that don't just leave 90% of the energy on the table. US energy usage alone is 26,400 TWh a year. 10's of GWh a year may as well not get out of bed.
> Then why did he repeatedly say thing like sodium ion has yet to show industrial scale feasibility mere weeks after CATL announced that they were building out an industrial scale pipeline having already finished proving feasibility? Why not include Zinc Bromide that was developed in the university whose logo he put on the report?
You must a different idea of what "in-volume" means.
> I'd love to see this serious proposal that says we can globally replace fossil fuels with intermittents and 4 hours of energy storage.
Not only is 48 / 4 not 4, but serious proposals like this one https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z don't involve trying to replace the last 20% of electrical generation in the few areas without PHES resources before tackling the much larger and more cheaply solved emissions involved in currently non-electrified industries.
Once you have your ammonia, hydrogen, and ethylene supply chains mature, then you can just burn some of those in the handful of areas where a dunkelflaute can't be managed with 12hr storage and dispatchable loads.
> You're conflating my explanation for why U/Th supplies are not a concern with your assumption for what my proposed solution is. PWRs are sufficient for today and can be built today. We can and should work on new reactors and fuel cycles that don't just leave 90% of the energy on the table. US energy usage alone is 26,400 TWh a year. 10's of GWh a year may as well not get out of bed.
Putting U235 in a burner ractor just lengthens the time before your burner can come online. There is not enough viable uranium for a single fuel load to provide primary energy in existing designs. Your serial production of Gen III+ reactors cannot put a dent in world emissions before it needs to change course to breeders and all your new built reactors are mothballed for 20 years while fuel supplies are bred.
> You must a different idea of what "in-volume" means.
Your statement about what was in the paper was a lie as evidenced by the statements made in the paper referring to industrial feasibility. Those statements were a lie as evidenced by industrial feasibility being already proven. Why does your reasoning about the transition from an imaginary PWR supply chain to an imaginary Gen IV supply chain not apply to transition from a real TWh/yr battery supply chain transitioning into a real drop in replacement already mostly built that uses the same equipment?
> but serious proposals like this one https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z don't involve trying to replace the last 20% of electrical generation in the few areas without PHES resources before tackling the much larger and more cheaply solved emissions involved in currently non-electrified industries.
That's your example? That paper is about electricity demand and they don't even manage to meet that. We're talking about global primary energy here. Surely you can do better.
You see, the thing about energy that needs to be available in chemical form is that it can be stored in chemical form. And the bizarre thing about low grade heat is it can be stored as low or high grade heat. And the absolutly wild thing about energy that needs to be stored in a vehicle for an average of a week is it's stored in a vehicle for an average of a week. Weird twist, huh?
The next thing that would shock you if you were arguing in good faith and not just trying to spread FUD to delay the death of coal is that provisioning 5x electricity to meet those dispatchable loads reduces the storage required for the electricity even further.
If renewables can meet 95% of the goal with just the previously industrially deployed technogy stack and have proven but not deployed technology for the remaining 5%; then it makes no sense to stop deploying them and instead switch to a technogy that can meet 40% at much higher cost and has no answer even in the demonstration stage to the remaining 60%.
Just because the 5% is contained in the 40% doesn't make it a sane strategy. Especially when in most of the world that 5% already has preexisting hydro that can serve it with a simple turbine upgrade.
Lithium batteries (as focused by the paper) are attractive for mobile applications, for grid storage the energy density is not very important and li-ion batteries have disadvantages like going up in flames frequently.
There are lots of overlapping options for running the grid with renewables from other battery chemistries to hydrogen, pumped hydro storage, long distance hvdc, hourly pricing to cut demand peaks, etc.
Yes there are many competing battery technologies in the works right now and I sincerely hope that one of them turns out to be manufacturable/scalable. Or any kind of energy storage becomes cheap at Terra-watt hour capacities.
But right now, it's just a bunch of 'maybes'. The fact that we don't have a solid plan RIGHT NOW for something so important is alarming. Everyone is just hoping it will work out. Maybe we'll find a good cheap battery. Maybe we can unify our grid and build thousands of miles of HVDC interconnects. Maybe we can find more pumped hydro sites.
In the absence of a buildable storage solution for renewables today, we should be building the only other scalable clean energy technology we have: Nuclear energy. No energy storage. No brand new grid. No massive expansion in mining. Thankfully, more people are coming around to this. No it won't cover 100% of our energy. But it is an incredibly underutilized tool. We should at a minimum, replace all coal power plants with nuclear.
Even if we keep looking at only batteries for grid storage instead of all the estabilished and proven ways: the predicted lithium shortage would happen gradually over O(100 years), leading to rising cost of lithium batteries which should give lots of lead time for investment in alternatives, of which we have many, both in old ones (pre-lithium) and many prospective ones under development.
IMO the more alarming problems currently in climate change are the missing plan for global fossils rampdwn and solving the international-relations collective action problem of enacting the required energy saving policies in a coordinated and fair way.
The expensive part of coal power is the coal itself. The upfront costs for the power plant are quite low. This is the opposite of solar. It has an very high upfront cost, but for the next couple decades, you only need to pay a little for maintenance, so the amortized costs are cheaper. However, poorer areas of China can't afford this large upfront cost, but they still have a lot of demand for energy, so they build new coal plants.
Also this is always how transitions look. Incandescent bulbs were still sold next to LEDs, CRTs were still manufactured during the LCD transition, platter drives are still for sale during the SSD revolution, people still buy gas cars.
There is a time before commodity prices are hit at scale but when it happens, the price floor of the new technology will be below the price floor of the old technology (for instance the cost of a big screen TV) and that's when the old technology finally exits. Solar still has a long way to fall.
We're in a transition and they always look like this.
China doesn't build coal plants because areas cannot afford nuclear. They do so because need they need stop gap solutions. Their new coal plants use supercritical CO2, and phase out older, less efficient and more polluting coal plants. Check out this thread by Chinese energy sector consultant David Fishman which states that the new Chinese plants are amongst the most efficient in the world: https://twitter.com/pretentiouswhat/status/16004256242919055...
He explains that these more efficient coal plants are not only motivated by climate targets, but also by market prices.
Even these new plants aren't going to be around forever. They're going to be phased out eventually as China moves towards their 2060 net zero goal.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/26/too-many...
Coal is at record levels.
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Business/wireStory/report-worlds-...
Removing coal power plants would have made a noticeable difference.