Never say never. But, I think we'll never be able to engineer a system that can safely and effectively use hydrogen. Energy thin. A very small molecule. And more. Maybe the Magic Unicorn comes thru. Never say never. But, I wouldn't want to build policy around a highly unlikely event.
Uneconomic resources which require high inputs such as offshore methane hydrate deposits merit as much consideration as the methane and ethane on Saturn's moon Titan. What do I mean by high inputs? The steel and cement and labor needed to recover even 0.001% of those deposits exceed what's available. Recovering fossil fuels requires much more than estimating in situ volumes, the conversion to possible reserves requires something more than a small pilot, and thus far no one who has been in this business seriously can remotely describe how they would attempt to actually recover more than a few cubic feet. Also remember the CO2 found in oil deposits is a tiny mol fraction, and there's no practical way to turn it into an useable product, with very few exceptions.
Sort of interesting, but it ignores the real issues with Hydrogen: storage, flammability, and transportability. Pure hydrogen is simply difficult and dangerous handle. Propane and natural gas are much easier and safer to deal with. I just dont see hydrogen becoming a major power source without resolving the well known issues around its usage.
I was going to say much the same, but you beat me to it. The idea of massive hydrogen gas use is a delusion. It will never happen. I appreciate the author's enthusiasm for nuclear, but not because it is needed to produce H2.
Nuclear, beyond electricity needs, should be used to desalinate fresh water and to synthesize hydrocarbons using the U.S. Navy's technique developed about ten years ago which combines dissolved CO2 extracted from saline water with H2O plus energy to produce hydrocarbon fuels. The Navy's target was jet fuel to free aircraft carriers from a steady stream of jet fuel tankers, but the same technology can produce gasoline at about $5/gallon to the consumer.
Interesting piece and views, but what is the real driver? "Deextinctionalism" (OK, I guess a new word) might be added to an "environmental quartet." I no longer hear the Whippoorwills and only see one or two lonely fireflies. My life is missing more than just more non-carbon-based energy, more "stuff," or more land when I miss seeing the night sky or the night glows of hundreds of fireflies. If the night sky is now extinct or the last rhinoceros is within gun range, will it matter if we have switched to "Net 0", don't buy more "stuff" or use less land, if our souls still long to see the firefly of our youth?
On decarbonization I find it a bit strange to talk about the hydrogen to carbon ratio when the issue is energy. As an example, even though there are 80% hydrogen atoms in methane, the thermal energy of methane is 55% from hydrogen. So even though his figure shows something approaching the 80% H/C ratio it says little about the challenge of power and energy. The reason for the stagnation in his curve below the 80% ratio is to do with power and energy.
Then the author asserts that "Abundant nuclear causes, indeed requires, abundant hydrogen" without any attempt to justify that assertion. I have no idea why the author thinks this, let alone why he thinks it is undisputably so.
What seems to me to be true is that hydrogen is an energy intensive vector. In that sense, abundant hydrogen requires abundant nuclear. For the reverse to be true one needs to imagine that for some reason someone has built a system where there is a lot more power and energy from nuclear over a substantial part of the operating time than what is consumed. I do not see that this is an inherent part of a nuclear powered system.
The issue of substantial overbuilt capacity is definitely an integral part of systems that rely heavily on variable and uncontrollable power sources such as wind and solar. It is indeed impossible to build electrical power systems on such generators without substantial overproduction. But nuclear is controllable to a much larger degree than wind and solar and can have a much better match to consumption. Thus the capacity and nature of necessary storage of excess energy is very different from wind and solar. Hydrogen is only one of many possible ways of doing it, albeit a very costly and inefficient way.
I have my expertise within energy and power, that is why I jumped on that part first. The other two - materials and land use - I need to think more about. But my gut moved when reading those parts as well, so I'll have to figure out why.
Thank you for this, it is always good to read such things and be pushed into re-thinking stuff I thought I knew.
Yes, that statement "Abundant nuclear causes, indeed requires, abundant hydrogen" is ass backwards. Abundant hydrogen will require abundant nuclear, not the other way around.
Hydrogen not being an energy source but an energy carrier, as electricity is. Also a way to store energy and some use as chemical feedstock. Unfortunately it is a very poor, expensive, ineffective carrier & storage for energy. The only way to make it practical is to combine it with a carbon feedstock which may be flue gas (i.e. cement plant), carbonaceous waste, any biomass, peat/coal or seawater CO2 (carbonic acid) and convert it to methanol & DME. Which are in turn feedstock for chemical industry, a far superior energy carrier to H2, even better than methane. Methanol can also be converted into jet fuel for aircraft. And will operate direct methanol fuel cells.
High temperature nuclear reactors can supply up to 1000degC, and can directly crack water into H2. H2 can be used for high temperature furnaces like for metal smelting or steel making. But for general transportation applications and building heat, remote power generation, methanol is the best fuel, once oil & gas becomes in short supply and is too expensive. SMRs may also power long distance shipping directly. But otherwise transportation will be dependent on battery electric, methanol, DME(diesel engine fuel) or synthetic jet fuel.
Energy storage to supply peak power requirements can be done with molten salt storage that is done with high temperature reactors. A system being built right now in Wyoming with the Natrium 345 MWe, liquid sodium fast reactor, which has a 1GWh molten salt storage system which it can use to boost output to 500 MWe. Storage is calculated to cost $50 per kwh.
I agree with your views on a potential energy mix. I am working with R&D on alternative fuels for maritime use, and currently there are 7-8 alternatives on the table. Since 2015 many have touted the idea that "the future is multifuel" in the sense that we need all these alternatives. We are starting to move this opinion towards a more realistic view of having one or two fuels - DME and methanol - in combination with batteries.
The 100 Commodities table made me chuckle. In the USA dematerialization list, it includes things like lithium and rare earths. The demand h usage for those is increasing
not dematerializong. It's just transfer of supply from the rest of the world. I.e. China.
Many of these things on the list are considered strategic minerals and have fraught national security implications by becoming dependent upon foreign sources. The geo-political implications of this type of dematerialization could be catastrophic.
I am puzzled by the chart headed "100 commodities aligned by absolute & relative dematerialization". The source is Wernick "submitted to PlosOne", so there may be an explanation, but I cannot yet see it on that site.
But if the chart axes are correctly described, then for any commodity, if
C0 and C are 1970 consumption and current consumption
G0 and G are 1970 GDP and current GDP
then the axes show
x = log(C/C0) = log(C) - log(C0)
y = log(C/G) - log(C0/G0) = log(C) - log(C0) - log(G/G0) = x - log(G/G0)
Since log(G/G0) is the same for every commodity the plot must be a straight line with slope 1 by definition. The few points not quite on the line must be data errors (latest data not available, so out-of-date figures used for C and/or G?)
I don't think that the picture adds anything to the table immediately above, and the table itself is only interesting if one understands the stories behind each item. Over time, some commodities will become relatively less important and others must therefore become relatively more important. Saying that is trivial; explaining why particular commodities fall into each group may be interesting and important.
When someone introduces new terminology for old ideas it is a sign of funny business, a weak attempt to be original. I give you the original meaning of Ausubel’s new terminology. Dematerialism means reduction in consumption. Land sparing means improvement in agricultural production per acre. Decarbonization means reducing atmospheric CO2.
It is interesting that decarbonization works against land sparing because increased CO2 in the atmosphere increases agricultural production. It is incorrect to lump together wood, hay, coal, oil and gas. The first two items are carbon neutral, at least if sustainably managed. Coal, oil and gas are fossil fuels.
Ausubel touts the company Net Power that is planning to build a natural gas power plant with carbon sequestration. This is an unlikely technology because it is expensive and dangerous. Expensive because much energy is consumed to compress the CO2 and pump it underground. Dangerous because a leak in the underground storage can suffocate thousands as has happened with natural releases of CO2 in Italy and Africa.
Ausubel is confident that the future of energy is hydrogen produced from nuclear energy. Nuclear certainly has a future. Hydrogen not so much. Hydrogen leaks out of containers and pipes. It is explosive over a wide mixture in air. It destroys steel pipelines. The gas must be stored under fiendishly high pressure.
Dear Mr. Rogers, I am a PhD metallurgist with several decades of experience handling, storing and transporting hydrogen in industrial settings. Therefore I hope you will forgive me for contradicting you in some aspects of your comments about handling hydrogen. Whether or not hydrogen leaks out of a container or pipeline depends on the pressure and the material of construction. Aluminum, brass and austenitic stainless steels have usefully low rates of hydrogen diffusion. Even mild steels can be used up to about 2000 psi pressure without excessive loss. It is true that hydrogen is flammable (not explosive) across a wide range of mixtures in air, but then so is methane. Explosions occur when any flammable gas is burned in confinement. It is not correct to state that hydrogen destroys steel pipelines. "Steel" is a category of over 1500 standardized industrial alloys ranging across a wide spread of compositions and strength. Hydrogen will indeed embrittle high-strength steels. But many thousands of tonnes of industrial hydrogen are transported in low-carbon, low-strength steel pipelines and stored in low-strength steel storage cylinders in chemical plants and oil refineries all over the world. You are quite correct to point out that hydrogen's very low density means that using it to fuel cars and trucks would mean storing it at scary high pressures. The hydrogen storage problem is undoubtedly the main barrier to its use as a transportation fuel. Sorry to be picayune but you happened to touch on a topic on which I have spent many years of my professional life.
Elon Musk was just talking about why he went with methane instead of hydrogen. There is no better application for hydrogen than rockets. It has the highest energy/mass for any fuel. And all that mass saved = mass in orbit, worth ~$10k/lb. But there are just so many problems and difficulties with using hydrogen that Musk is quite certain they made the right decision in switching to methane rather than his original plan of using hydrogen for the Starship & its booster. Note the serious fires and explosions that have happened from H2 usage in rocketry. And most new rocket companies are also going with methane rather than H2, including Blue Origin.
Dear SmithFS, yes, my understanding is that the shift to solid rocket fuel for the Space Shuttles was also driven at least in part by concerns with handling hydrogen.
I’m amazed that copper use is stagnant. Doesn’t the electrify everything push require huge, increasing quantities of copper?
What about the amount of material (including tailings) that is removed from the earth to supply our needs, e.g metals, sand, stone, hydrocarbons, etc. Which direction is that metric headed?
"I’m amazed that copper use is stagnant. Doesn’t the electrify everything push require huge, increasing quantities of copper?"
I think it's the result of the focus of the paper and the likely methodology. The paper deals with *U.S.* consumption of commodities, not global consumption. And it likely deals only with copper as a *commodity*. That is, if the copper comes into the U.S. as a part of a finished product, like copper in a motor or copper in copper wires, it is probably not counted as "commodity" consumption.
A paper that looks at global consumption of commodities would be far more useful towards establishing where humanity currently stands with regard to dematerialization.
"Estimates of the total resource vary widely. Gas units are often given in units of one trillion cubic feet (TCF). The USGS says that resources estimates from studies over the last 15 years vary from one million- to fifty million TCF of natural gas. The lower estimate is more than 4,000 times the annual US consumption of natural gas. The lower estimate is also at least twice as much as all other fossil fuels combined."
But the website's very next sentence contains the key question:
"The big question now is: can these resources be technically and economically recovered?"
So there's no real question that there is enough natural gas available in the form of methane hydrates to replace all oil and coal. The main question is whether the natural gas in those hydrates can be *economically* recovered? (There are other potentially significant questions, including whether the methane potentially released during the recovery would cause more environmental problems than result from the coal and oil being replaced.)
P.S. * IMPORTANT NOTE: "Resources" are different from "reserves." From this website:
"You might say that 'reserves' are what you are (almost) sure you can use in the modern economy with modern technology, whereas 'resources' are what you think you can have in the future."
I would like to read a description by experienced engineers of the technology they think can be used to profitably extract methane hydrates. Thus far nothing I see comes close. This is why I classify methane hydrate resources together with the imaginary hydrocarbons the Earth supposedly produces from ultradeep granites and volcanics.
"This is why I classify methane hydrate resources together with the imaginary hydrocarbons the Earth supposedly produces from ultradeep granites and volcanics."
That is not an accurate classification at all. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has mapped the presence of methane hydrates throughout the world, and many countries have completely coring/borehole testing (to evaluate the scale of the resources). Some countries have even completely exploratory production testing:
With methane hydrates, there's simply no question that they're there, in abundance. The question is whether they can be profitably extracted. And in order for them to be profitably extracted, the cost of production needs to be low enough, and the market value high enough, in order to make a profit.
In the United States, current natural gas prices are not high at all. In fact, they're low. This U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) webpage traces Henry Hub (Louisiana) prices going back to 1997. Those prices are *not* adjusted for inflation, so price in 2024 has so far been as low as it's ever been, since 1997.
Therefore, companies in the U.S. are extremely unlikely to even be *investigating* methane hydrate production in the foreseeable future. Rather, investigations will likely continue in Japan, and in other countries where natural gas is much more expensive than in the U.S.
The Japanese have traditionally had a very impractical approach to hydrocarbon production. Couple that with their energy insecurity and we see them spending money on Rube Goldberg ideas, such as producing subsea methane hydrates. :-))
Dear Mr,Fernando, I was once involved on the fringes of a project to free the methane from methane hydrates using CO2. CO2 also makes a hydrate in appropriate conditions and apparently it is thermodynamically possible to substitute CO2 for the CH4 in hydrates without destabilizing the structure and causing collapse, earthquakes and tsunamis in the prolific subsea hydrate deposits. The project was reportedly technically successful in that the injected CO2 was sequestered and the CH4 liberated for production. It was a time of very low natural gas prices so the economics were not favorable at that point. To date I have not heard of anyone else pursuing the method but it might be worth revisiting at some future date.
The technology you describe requires CO2 for injection, which makes it a nice intellectual exercise and lab experiment...because pure CO2 isn't usually found close to large methane hydrate accumulations, and the technology will remain on the shelf as another idea which didn't pan out.
Dear Mr. Fernando, I beg your pardon, did I not make it clear that the production of methane from clathrates using CO2 was a full field trial and not some bench-top test-tube laboratory experiment? The project drilled into an arctic location where there were methane clathrates under the permafrost, and was technically successful at producing methane by displacing the methane in the clathrates with CO2. Apparently you are unaware that large tonnages of CO2 are readily available and widely used in oil and gas production for tertiary recovery. The technical success of the project was intriguing, but like any real-world operation it had to make a profit. The economics would not work with nat gas selling for around $2-4/ mmscf.
Assume I know about the subjects I discuss. The CO2 deposits are limited geographically, are seldom found close to locations where methane hydrates are found, and their volumes are miniscule in comparison to large natural gas fields, which in turn have limited potential to replace the huge volumes of crude oil we are consuming. I suggest you look up the BP yearly energy report, and estimate the amount of natural gas needed to replace the ~82 million barrels per day of crude oil and condensate refineries consume in recent years. When you do that you'll see that natural gas FROM ANY SOURCE just can't replace oil.
This strikes me as less damaging way to think about mankind’s relationship with the planet than what current purveyors of environmentalism advocate. Thanks Roger for posting it. For Ausubel, Decarbonization, Dematerialization, and Land-sparing are the core elements of Ecomodernism and are worthy pursuits for humankind. I can imagine Dematerialization and Land-sparing would occur as a natural consequence of economics. Dematerialization allows the same desirable output with less mining and associated transportation costs. Land has many uses and the supply is fixed so using less land to produce the same desirable output will contribute to prosperity. The case for Decarbonization is less clear to me. Eliminating the toxicity associated with some forms of fossil fuel emissions is obviously desirable but beyond that Decarbonization is desirable only if the associated warming is unquestionably bad and proliferation of plant life beyond what we have today is undesirable. I agree that the shift to hydrogen intensive fuel produced by nuclear will happen naturally as fossil fuels become less plentiful and more expensive. Until that happens I haven’t seen the justification for setting it as a societal goal. The most cited justifications, extreme weather events, and rapid changes in precipitation patterns have been effectively debunked by Roger and others in THB. As others have mentioned Decarbonization through the use of low density sources like solar and wind works against Land-sparing so one would have to be very much averse to a temperature increase to justify that sort of transition.
Roger, I note that the plateau in decarbonization, at around the year 1970, corresponds roughly to the time when the anti-nuclear movement began to expand their protests against nuclear weapons to the broader issue of stopping nuclear power plants. From about 1970 on it became increasingly difficult to build new nuclear power plants in the US without paying an enormous political and public relations price for the attempt. Yet physically there is just no practical way to decarbonize combustion fuels past CH4 without vast supplies of heat and electricity to make hydrogen in nuclear power plants. Thus the emotional, fact-free resistance to nuclear power by passionate, vocal segments of the environmental movement was seriously counterproductive towards the long-term good of decarbonization.
The excellent discussion on dematerialization might be summarized as vindication for Julian Simon's bet against the ecological prophet of doom Paul Ehrlich.
Regarding land-sharing, Roskoff's fine book "Factfulness" enlightened me to the fact that, as of 2018, 14% of the world's land surface has already been set aside as national parks or nature preserves. Starving people don't do that. Let us not forget that it was artificial fertilizers derived from natural gas and the Green Revolution in plant science, between them, that made it possible to feed a growing world population and eliminate famine from peaceful parts of the world. Resisted at every step by chair-bound environmentalists touting organic farming.
The common result here is that some of the most vocal voices in the environmental movement have used their passion and commitment in ways counterproductive to the greater good. To be blunt, a fair percentage of those well-intentioned, ignorant folks are a boil on the neck of progress.
Odd that the article did not point to the relation between land sparing and energy use. The experience of agriculture in the Netherlands is particularly instructive. And lab-grown protein is likely to be more energy intensive (although less CO2 emissions intensive) than conventional animal sources. This only reinforces the need to reduce net CO2 emissions in the least cost way possible.
Even to the extent that "decarbonization" is desirable, it seem odd to measure it as a ration of energy from carbon oxidization to hydrogen oxidization. Wind, nuclear, solar, and geothermal energy can also displace carbon oxidization as a source of energy. [Hydrogen may be a cost effective way to store and transport energy generated from other sources, but this still doe not make C/H a good measure of atmospheric CO2 optimization.]
Never say never. But, I think we'll never be able to engineer a system that can safely and effectively use hydrogen. Energy thin. A very small molecule. And more. Maybe the Magic Unicorn comes thru. Never say never. But, I wouldn't want to build policy around a highly unlikely event.
Uneconomic resources which require high inputs such as offshore methane hydrate deposits merit as much consideration as the methane and ethane on Saturn's moon Titan. What do I mean by high inputs? The steel and cement and labor needed to recover even 0.001% of those deposits exceed what's available. Recovering fossil fuels requires much more than estimating in situ volumes, the conversion to possible reserves requires something more than a small pilot, and thus far no one who has been in this business seriously can remotely describe how they would attempt to actually recover more than a few cubic feet. Also remember the CO2 found in oil deposits is a tiny mol fraction, and there's no practical way to turn it into an useable product, with very few exceptions.
Sort of interesting, but it ignores the real issues with Hydrogen: storage, flammability, and transportability. Pure hydrogen is simply difficult and dangerous handle. Propane and natural gas are much easier and safer to deal with. I just dont see hydrogen becoming a major power source without resolving the well known issues around its usage.
I was going to say much the same, but you beat me to it. The idea of massive hydrogen gas use is a delusion. It will never happen. I appreciate the author's enthusiasm for nuclear, but not because it is needed to produce H2.
Nuclear, beyond electricity needs, should be used to desalinate fresh water and to synthesize hydrocarbons using the U.S. Navy's technique developed about ten years ago which combines dissolved CO2 extracted from saline water with H2O plus energy to produce hydrocarbon fuels. The Navy's target was jet fuel to free aircraft carriers from a steady stream of jet fuel tankers, but the same technology can produce gasoline at about $5/gallon to the consumer.
Interesting piece and views, but what is the real driver? "Deextinctionalism" (OK, I guess a new word) might be added to an "environmental quartet." I no longer hear the Whippoorwills and only see one or two lonely fireflies. My life is missing more than just more non-carbon-based energy, more "stuff," or more land when I miss seeing the night sky or the night glows of hundreds of fireflies. If the night sky is now extinct or the last rhinoceros is within gun range, will it matter if we have switched to "Net 0", don't buy more "stuff" or use less land, if our souls still long to see the firefly of our youth?
On decarbonization I find it a bit strange to talk about the hydrogen to carbon ratio when the issue is energy. As an example, even though there are 80% hydrogen atoms in methane, the thermal energy of methane is 55% from hydrogen. So even though his figure shows something approaching the 80% H/C ratio it says little about the challenge of power and energy. The reason for the stagnation in his curve below the 80% ratio is to do with power and energy.
Then the author asserts that "Abundant nuclear causes, indeed requires, abundant hydrogen" without any attempt to justify that assertion. I have no idea why the author thinks this, let alone why he thinks it is undisputably so.
What seems to me to be true is that hydrogen is an energy intensive vector. In that sense, abundant hydrogen requires abundant nuclear. For the reverse to be true one needs to imagine that for some reason someone has built a system where there is a lot more power and energy from nuclear over a substantial part of the operating time than what is consumed. I do not see that this is an inherent part of a nuclear powered system.
The issue of substantial overbuilt capacity is definitely an integral part of systems that rely heavily on variable and uncontrollable power sources such as wind and solar. It is indeed impossible to build electrical power systems on such generators without substantial overproduction. But nuclear is controllable to a much larger degree than wind and solar and can have a much better match to consumption. Thus the capacity and nature of necessary storage of excess energy is very different from wind and solar. Hydrogen is only one of many possible ways of doing it, albeit a very costly and inefficient way.
I have my expertise within energy and power, that is why I jumped on that part first. The other two - materials and land use - I need to think more about. But my gut moved when reading those parts as well, so I'll have to figure out why.
Thank you for this, it is always good to read such things and be pushed into re-thinking stuff I thought I knew.
Yes, that statement "Abundant nuclear causes, indeed requires, abundant hydrogen" is ass backwards. Abundant hydrogen will require abundant nuclear, not the other way around.
Hydrogen not being an energy source but an energy carrier, as electricity is. Also a way to store energy and some use as chemical feedstock. Unfortunately it is a very poor, expensive, ineffective carrier & storage for energy. The only way to make it practical is to combine it with a carbon feedstock which may be flue gas (i.e. cement plant), carbonaceous waste, any biomass, peat/coal or seawater CO2 (carbonic acid) and convert it to methanol & DME. Which are in turn feedstock for chemical industry, a far superior energy carrier to H2, even better than methane. Methanol can also be converted into jet fuel for aircraft. And will operate direct methanol fuel cells.
High temperature nuclear reactors can supply up to 1000degC, and can directly crack water into H2. H2 can be used for high temperature furnaces like for metal smelting or steel making. But for general transportation applications and building heat, remote power generation, methanol is the best fuel, once oil & gas becomes in short supply and is too expensive. SMRs may also power long distance shipping directly. But otherwise transportation will be dependent on battery electric, methanol, DME(diesel engine fuel) or synthetic jet fuel.
Energy storage to supply peak power requirements can be done with molten salt storage that is done with high temperature reactors. A system being built right now in Wyoming with the Natrium 345 MWe, liquid sodium fast reactor, which has a 1GWh molten salt storage system which it can use to boost output to 500 MWe. Storage is calculated to cost $50 per kwh.
I agree with your views on a potential energy mix. I am working with R&D on alternative fuels for maritime use, and currently there are 7-8 alternatives on the table. Since 2015 many have touted the idea that "the future is multifuel" in the sense that we need all these alternatives. We are starting to move this opinion towards a more realistic view of having one or two fuels - DME and methanol - in combination with batteries.
Thx for posting this - quite interesting!
The 100 Commodities table made me chuckle. In the USA dematerialization list, it includes things like lithium and rare earths. The demand h usage for those is increasing
not dematerializong. It's just transfer of supply from the rest of the world. I.e. China.
Many of these things on the list are considered strategic minerals and have fraught national security implications by becoming dependent upon foreign sources. The geo-political implications of this type of dematerialization could be catastrophic.
I am puzzled by the chart headed "100 commodities aligned by absolute & relative dematerialization". The source is Wernick "submitted to PlosOne", so there may be an explanation, but I cannot yet see it on that site.
But if the chart axes are correctly described, then for any commodity, if
C0 and C are 1970 consumption and current consumption
G0 and G are 1970 GDP and current GDP
then the axes show
x = log(C/C0) = log(C) - log(C0)
y = log(C/G) - log(C0/G0) = log(C) - log(C0) - log(G/G0) = x - log(G/G0)
Since log(G/G0) is the same for every commodity the plot must be a straight line with slope 1 by definition. The few points not quite on the line must be data errors (latest data not available, so out-of-date figures used for C and/or G?)
I don't think that the picture adds anything to the table immediately above, and the table itself is only interesting if one understands the stories behind each item. Over time, some commodities will become relatively less important and others must therefore become relatively more important. Saying that is trivial; explaining why particular commodities fall into each group may be interesting and important.
Six criteria make a new product, service, or process a superior substitute for an existing product, service, or process.
Is it?
1. Faster
2. Stronger
3. Lighter
4. Smaller
5. Cleaner
6. Lower Cost
When someone introduces new terminology for old ideas it is a sign of funny business, a weak attempt to be original. I give you the original meaning of Ausubel’s new terminology. Dematerialism means reduction in consumption. Land sparing means improvement in agricultural production per acre. Decarbonization means reducing atmospheric CO2.
It is interesting that decarbonization works against land sparing because increased CO2 in the atmosphere increases agricultural production. It is incorrect to lump together wood, hay, coal, oil and gas. The first two items are carbon neutral, at least if sustainably managed. Coal, oil and gas are fossil fuels.
Ausubel touts the company Net Power that is planning to build a natural gas power plant with carbon sequestration. This is an unlikely technology because it is expensive and dangerous. Expensive because much energy is consumed to compress the CO2 and pump it underground. Dangerous because a leak in the underground storage can suffocate thousands as has happened with natural releases of CO2 in Italy and Africa.
Ausubel is confident that the future of energy is hydrogen produced from nuclear energy. Nuclear certainly has a future. Hydrogen not so much. Hydrogen leaks out of containers and pipes. It is explosive over a wide mixture in air. It destroys steel pipelines. The gas must be stored under fiendishly high pressure.
Dear Mr. Rogers, I am a PhD metallurgist with several decades of experience handling, storing and transporting hydrogen in industrial settings. Therefore I hope you will forgive me for contradicting you in some aspects of your comments about handling hydrogen. Whether or not hydrogen leaks out of a container or pipeline depends on the pressure and the material of construction. Aluminum, brass and austenitic stainless steels have usefully low rates of hydrogen diffusion. Even mild steels can be used up to about 2000 psi pressure without excessive loss. It is true that hydrogen is flammable (not explosive) across a wide range of mixtures in air, but then so is methane. Explosions occur when any flammable gas is burned in confinement. It is not correct to state that hydrogen destroys steel pipelines. "Steel" is a category of over 1500 standardized industrial alloys ranging across a wide spread of compositions and strength. Hydrogen will indeed embrittle high-strength steels. But many thousands of tonnes of industrial hydrogen are transported in low-carbon, low-strength steel pipelines and stored in low-strength steel storage cylinders in chemical plants and oil refineries all over the world. You are quite correct to point out that hydrogen's very low density means that using it to fuel cars and trucks would mean storing it at scary high pressures. The hydrogen storage problem is undoubtedly the main barrier to its use as a transportation fuel. Sorry to be picayune but you happened to touch on a topic on which I have spent many years of my professional life.
Elon Musk was just talking about why he went with methane instead of hydrogen. There is no better application for hydrogen than rockets. It has the highest energy/mass for any fuel. And all that mass saved = mass in orbit, worth ~$10k/lb. But there are just so many problems and difficulties with using hydrogen that Musk is quite certain they made the right decision in switching to methane rather than his original plan of using hydrogen for the Starship & its booster. Note the serious fires and explosions that have happened from H2 usage in rocketry. And most new rocket companies are also going with methane rather than H2, including Blue Origin.
Dear SmithFS, yes, my understanding is that the shift to solid rocket fuel for the Space Shuttles was also driven at least in part by concerns with handling hydrogen.
I’m amazed that copper use is stagnant. Doesn’t the electrify everything push require huge, increasing quantities of copper?
What about the amount of material (including tailings) that is removed from the earth to supply our needs, e.g metals, sand, stone, hydrocarbons, etc. Which direction is that metric headed?
"I’m amazed that copper use is stagnant. Doesn’t the electrify everything push require huge, increasing quantities of copper?"
I think it's the result of the focus of the paper and the likely methodology. The paper deals with *U.S.* consumption of commodities, not global consumption. And it likely deals only with copper as a *commodity*. That is, if the copper comes into the U.S. as a part of a finished product, like copper in a motor or copper in copper wires, it is probably not counted as "commodity" consumption.
A paper that looks at global consumption of commodities would be far more useful towards establishing where humanity currently stands with regard to dematerialization.
Huge thanks for posting this. Gave me a ton to think about. And a nice change from your usual “I have an axe to grind” vibe.
The author forgot there aren't sufficient natural gas resources to substitute oil and coal.
"The author forgot there aren't sufficient natural gas resources to substitute oil and coal."
Actually, it is likely that there are far more natural gas resources*, in the form of methane hydrates, than there are oil and coal resources.
This site ("Methane Hydrates Could Fuel the World") describes methane hydrates, and their potential as an energy resource:
https://wryheat.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/methane-hydrates-could-fuel-the-world/
From that website:
"Estimates of the total resource vary widely. Gas units are often given in units of one trillion cubic feet (TCF). The USGS says that resources estimates from studies over the last 15 years vary from one million- to fifty million TCF of natural gas. The lower estimate is more than 4,000 times the annual US consumption of natural gas. The lower estimate is also at least twice as much as all other fossil fuels combined."
But the website's very next sentence contains the key question:
"The big question now is: can these resources be technically and economically recovered?"
So there's no real question that there is enough natural gas available in the form of methane hydrates to replace all oil and coal. The main question is whether the natural gas in those hydrates can be *economically* recovered? (There are other potentially significant questions, including whether the methane potentially released during the recovery would cause more environmental problems than result from the coal and oil being replaced.)
P.S. * IMPORTANT NOTE: "Resources" are different from "reserves." From this website:
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth104/node/1018
"You might say that 'reserves' are what you are (almost) sure you can use in the modern economy with modern technology, whereas 'resources' are what you think you can have in the future."
I would like to read a description by experienced engineers of the technology they think can be used to profitably extract methane hydrates. Thus far nothing I see comes close. This is why I classify methane hydrate resources together with the imaginary hydrocarbons the Earth supposedly produces from ultradeep granites and volcanics.
"This is why I classify methane hydrate resources together with the imaginary hydrocarbons the Earth supposedly produces from ultradeep granites and volcanics."
That is not an accurate classification at all. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has mapped the presence of methane hydrates throughout the world, and many countries have completely coring/borehole testing (to evaluate the scale of the resources). Some countries have even completely exploratory production testing:
https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/modern-perspective-gas-hydrates
With methane hydrates, there's simply no question that they're there, in abundance. The question is whether they can be profitably extracted. And in order for them to be profitably extracted, the cost of production needs to be low enough, and the market value high enough, in order to make a profit.
In the United States, current natural gas prices are not high at all. In fact, they're low. This U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) webpage traces Henry Hub (Louisiana) prices going back to 1997. Those prices are *not* adjusted for inflation, so price in 2024 has so far been as low as it's ever been, since 1997.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/rngwhhdM.htm
Therefore, companies in the U.S. are extremely unlikely to even be *investigating* methane hydrate production in the foreseeable future. Rather, investigations will likely continue in Japan, and in other countries where natural gas is much more expensive than in the U.S.
https://www.japex.co.jp/en/technology/research/mh/
The Japanese have traditionally had a very impractical approach to hydrocarbon production. Couple that with their energy insecurity and we see them spending money on Rube Goldberg ideas, such as producing subsea methane hydrates. :-))
Dear Mr,Fernando, I was once involved on the fringes of a project to free the methane from methane hydrates using CO2. CO2 also makes a hydrate in appropriate conditions and apparently it is thermodynamically possible to substitute CO2 for the CH4 in hydrates without destabilizing the structure and causing collapse, earthquakes and tsunamis in the prolific subsea hydrate deposits. The project was reportedly technically successful in that the injected CO2 was sequestered and the CH4 liberated for production. It was a time of very low natural gas prices so the economics were not favorable at that point. To date I have not heard of anyone else pursuing the method but it might be worth revisiting at some future date.
The technology you describe requires CO2 for injection, which makes it a nice intellectual exercise and lab experiment...because pure CO2 isn't usually found close to large methane hydrate accumulations, and the technology will remain on the shelf as another idea which didn't pan out.
Dear Mr. Fernando, I beg your pardon, did I not make it clear that the production of methane from clathrates using CO2 was a full field trial and not some bench-top test-tube laboratory experiment? The project drilled into an arctic location where there were methane clathrates under the permafrost, and was technically successful at producing methane by displacing the methane in the clathrates with CO2. Apparently you are unaware that large tonnages of CO2 are readily available and widely used in oil and gas production for tertiary recovery. The technical success of the project was intriguing, but like any real-world operation it had to make a profit. The economics would not work with nat gas selling for around $2-4/ mmscf.
Assume I know about the subjects I discuss. The CO2 deposits are limited geographically, are seldom found close to locations where methane hydrates are found, and their volumes are miniscule in comparison to large natural gas fields, which in turn have limited potential to replace the huge volumes of crude oil we are consuming. I suggest you look up the BP yearly energy report, and estimate the amount of natural gas needed to replace the ~82 million barrels per day of crude oil and condensate refineries consume in recent years. When you do that you'll see that natural gas FROM ANY SOURCE just can't replace oil.
This strikes me as less damaging way to think about mankind’s relationship with the planet than what current purveyors of environmentalism advocate. Thanks Roger for posting it. For Ausubel, Decarbonization, Dematerialization, and Land-sparing are the core elements of Ecomodernism and are worthy pursuits for humankind. I can imagine Dematerialization and Land-sparing would occur as a natural consequence of economics. Dematerialization allows the same desirable output with less mining and associated transportation costs. Land has many uses and the supply is fixed so using less land to produce the same desirable output will contribute to prosperity. The case for Decarbonization is less clear to me. Eliminating the toxicity associated with some forms of fossil fuel emissions is obviously desirable but beyond that Decarbonization is desirable only if the associated warming is unquestionably bad and proliferation of plant life beyond what we have today is undesirable. I agree that the shift to hydrogen intensive fuel produced by nuclear will happen naturally as fossil fuels become less plentiful and more expensive. Until that happens I haven’t seen the justification for setting it as a societal goal. The most cited justifications, extreme weather events, and rapid changes in precipitation patterns have been effectively debunked by Roger and others in THB. As others have mentioned Decarbonization through the use of low density sources like solar and wind works against Land-sparing so one would have to be very much averse to a temperature increase to justify that sort of transition.
Roger, I note that the plateau in decarbonization, at around the year 1970, corresponds roughly to the time when the anti-nuclear movement began to expand their protests against nuclear weapons to the broader issue of stopping nuclear power plants. From about 1970 on it became increasingly difficult to build new nuclear power plants in the US without paying an enormous political and public relations price for the attempt. Yet physically there is just no practical way to decarbonize combustion fuels past CH4 without vast supplies of heat and electricity to make hydrogen in nuclear power plants. Thus the emotional, fact-free resistance to nuclear power by passionate, vocal segments of the environmental movement was seriously counterproductive towards the long-term good of decarbonization.
The excellent discussion on dematerialization might be summarized as vindication for Julian Simon's bet against the ecological prophet of doom Paul Ehrlich.
Regarding land-sharing, Roskoff's fine book "Factfulness" enlightened me to the fact that, as of 2018, 14% of the world's land surface has already been set aside as national parks or nature preserves. Starving people don't do that. Let us not forget that it was artificial fertilizers derived from natural gas and the Green Revolution in plant science, between them, that made it possible to feed a growing world population and eliminate famine from peaceful parts of the world. Resisted at every step by chair-bound environmentalists touting organic farming.
The common result here is that some of the most vocal voices in the environmental movement have used their passion and commitment in ways counterproductive to the greater good. To be blunt, a fair percentage of those well-intentioned, ignorant folks are a boil on the neck of progress.
Odd that the article did not point to the relation between land sparing and energy use. The experience of agriculture in the Netherlands is particularly instructive. And lab-grown protein is likely to be more energy intensive (although less CO2 emissions intensive) than conventional animal sources. This only reinforces the need to reduce net CO2 emissions in the least cost way possible.
Even to the extent that "decarbonization" is desirable, it seem odd to measure it as a ration of energy from carbon oxidization to hydrogen oxidization. Wind, nuclear, solar, and geothermal energy can also displace carbon oxidization as a source of energy. [Hydrogen may be a cost effective way to store and transport energy generated from other sources, but this still doe not make C/H a good measure of atmospheric CO2 optimization.]