Peak Coal in China: the tipping point is reached.

[JoyofBrex8889]

I laugh in the face of this wishful thinking.

https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/busin ... -p78-l.pdf

See a drop in future fossil consumption anywhere?

Me either.

Looks like a rise in fossil consumption to me!

Renewables rise from a tiny start to still be, well, a bit less tiny by 2040. Still nowhere near a solution to any of the problems of CO2 or depletion, problems just worsen and worsen. And this is with a quite optimistic set of assumptions like the existence of workable carbon capture and storage. #unobtainium

You renewable boosters are just plain wrong. It’s not even remotely a solution to our problems. It’s just a new product to shift and you have fallen for the marketing.

[dspp]

I laugh in the face of this wishful thinking.

https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/busin ... -p78-l.pdf

See a drop in future fossil consumption anywhere?

Me either.

Looks like a rise in fossil consumption to me!

Renewables rise from a tiny start to still be, well, a bit less tiny by 2040. Still nowhere near a solution to any of the problems of CO2 or depletion, problems just worsen and worsen. And this is with a quite optimistic set of assumptions.

I think you need to look more carefully at BP stats, and do some sums, before laughing away renewables. The effect is there in plain sight. See my viewtopic.php?f=16&t=11176#p212769 .

I am very overweight in oil & gas, probably about half my portfolio. But that does not mean I am not concentrating hard about what the future is bringing. My day job at the moment is source-agnostic, but it is electric-biased. Everything I see at the macro level indicates a greater electrical penetration vs thermal, e.g. BEV vs ICE, accompanied by greater renewables penetration vs fossil. Almost everything I am working on is >400kV and that means long term decisions that will be lived with for 50+ years.

The future will be different than the past.

Regarding Gail's article that is just her monetising her normal trope. She gets hired as a speaker at the usual circuit. Then the media regurgitates stuff, aided by her. If you look at papers & studies it is easy to pick out which are survey papers and which are real new stuff just by looking at the list of citations. If they have Gail Tveberg in the citations then they are a survey paper with lots of regurgitation. If they are detail and with GT then they are hard core. If you check out my links in the post I gave on this thread yesterday then you can see the differences.

It is worth noting that we are still unsure which pathway China is on. Again look carefully at those links I gave yesterday and one of them is a hard core reserves/resources analysis for China albeit at a high level (https://link.springer.com/article/10.10 ... 017-0187-9) , and it is very careful to set out some extremely wide error bars. My personal opinion - based partly on watching the science/economics from afar, and partly from being up close and personal in the HV grid dealings including in China - is that they know they have to decarbonise both for economic/technical reasons, and for social legitimacy (pollution) reasons, and that a long way third in that list is global warming reasons. But they need to keep the lid on political issues and so they will/are pursuing the middle pathway.

[?? do people want this thread relocating to energy stuff viewforum.php?f=16 : I'm not fussed either way ?? ]

regards, dspp

[odysseus2000]

Energy is energy & there is far more potential renewable energy than humans need by large factors. With storage & electric motors one can do almost all the things we have used hydrocarbons for. They are just a store of energy that we can tap albeit inefficiently. For every gallon of petrol about 65%+ of the energy is lost & can't be used to power a engine.

OK. Not myself attempting to debate renewable energy vs fossil fuel etc. as I don't have enough knowledge or understanding of the field. Just trying to pick up on a matter that is for some people a cause of misunderstanding - that electrical generators are a source of power.

In principle there is nothing to stop an electric motor approaching to near 100% efficiency in its job of power conversion. In practice of course it can't, nothing is perfect. However, a thermal machine such as an ICE cannot, even in principle exceed some tens of percent efficiency while operating between two practical working temperatures to extract energy from heat - that's a law of nature!

So, IMO, there isn't much obvious point in simply comparing the 'efficiency' of an ICE and an electric motor in this way. That's all.

Regards.

What I was trying to say is that for all the overheads of various energy stores, generating and storing electricity gives a far more efficient end use conversion efficiency than does pumping oil and then storing oil and then using that oil to do work.

Regards,

[JoyofBrex8889]

Dspp,

Your linked post is very well put- you see the renewables increasingly filling in for reservoir depletion, with coal assets being abandoned first. I certainly see some substitution of fossil with electricity and an increase in renewables share. I just don’t see that we can ever wean ourselves off the bulk use of fossil fuels without some serious and insurmountable problems for our industrial society as currently constituted. BP are forecasting no decline in fossil use. We cannot substitute electricity for fossil in too many of the major use cases.

I also think this is particularly true for China, given what China does for the world: industrial process and cheap manufacture

[dspp]

Dspp,

Your linked post is very well put- you see the renewables increasingly filling in for reservoir depletion, with coal assets being abandoned first. I certainly see some substitution of fossil with electricity and an increase in renewables share. I just don’t see that we can ever wean ourselves off the bulk use of fossil fuels without some serious and insurmountable problems for our industrial society as currently constituted. BP are forecasting no decline in fossil use. We cannot substitute electricity for fossil in too many of the major use cases.

I also think this is particularly true for China, given what China does for the world: industrial process and cheap manufacture

In the linked post I am pretty much forecasting the adoption curve for a business-as-usual rate of adoption, i.e. +0.5% per year of total energy (now), plus the acceleration component of 17%yoy, taking renewables to be 2.1% - 2.5% of total energy per year in 2027. That is pretty much the BAU case. It gets you to "So in 2027 renewables will have increased from 3.6% (2017) to 14% of global energy. Assume hydro stays at 7% and nukes at 4% and non-carbon would then be 25% of total energy. "

I actually think there is a much faster transition case, or actually two. One is a fast transition brought about largely by a collapse scenario. The other is the green uplands rapid transition case. Both could easily result in more than 14% in 2027. I do not know which pathway we will - globally - take of the three, but I find them all equally plausible scenarios. Longer term (20-40yrs) they lead to far greater penetration of renewables, ultimately 80%+.

Also what I haven't figured out is how to make money from this as a personal investor.

regards, dspp