Mark P. Mills – Hack for the Fossil Fuel Industry
Every now and then you need to lend voice to your opponents and expose their (false) arguments to help make your case. Here we have Mark P. Mills from the Manhattan Institute, trying to make his case, namely that efforts to establish a 100% renewable energy base, as agreed upon in the Paris Accords and spearheaded by Europe, can’t work. Depressingly, this gentleman was named “Energy Writer of the Year” by the American Energy Society. We have linked to three of his articles below.
First he attacks renewable efforts by claiming that “batteries are unsuitable as a storage solution”, which is entirely correct. The point is that nobody worth his energy salt is making that claim. Here is what our renewable betters at the German Fraunhofer institute have to say about a possible 100% renewable energy solution for Germany:
[source] Blueprint for a 100% renewable energy base for Germany
From the Fraunhofer model we learn that in a 100% renewable energy base, most storage comes from hydrogen (“power-to-gas”) and seasonal storage of hot water and that mr Mills’ batteries (as well as pumped hydro-storage) can only play a marginal role. Thermal storage is fed by a mix of solar thermal and electric heat pumps.
Storage capacity:
| Category | Capacity (TWh) |
|---|---|
| Thermal | 187 |
| Hydrogen | 179 |
| Biomass | 50 |
| Batteries | 9 |
| Pumped hydro | 7 |
The exact numbers will vary for different countries, but for European nations like Holland, Denmark and Britain, this will be the general picture. Sparsely populated mountainous Nordic countries like Canada, Norway and Sweden in contrast will have to rely on hydro-power and have far less (additional) energy storage needs; the existing drainage-basins are the storage.
But these insights are lost om mr Mills, “US-energy-writer-of-the-year-2016”. In his article in “fee.org” he refers 21 times to batteries and exactly ZERO to hydrogen. In debating clubs this type of reasoning is known as a straw-man: attacking your opponent by attacking an argument your opponent didn’t make. What mr Mills really wants is frack North-America, ‘Till Kingdom Comes’.
“Frack you, mr Mills!”, we already hear Greta Thunberg saying and we can’t help but agree.
[source] Iconic, but little over-the-top Greta Thunberg
[manhattan-institute.org] – If You Want ‘Renewable Energy,’ Get Ready to Dig
[fee.org] – 41 Inconvenient Truths on the “New Energy Economy”
[manhattan-institute.org] – Batteries Cannot Save the Grid or the Planet
[manhattan-institute.org] – Mark P. Mills
[deepresource] – Prejudices From Amateurs Against Wind Energy
(What’s that fascination with the number of “41” anyway with American dissers of renewable energy?)
Below you will find 41 comments (rebuttals) to the 41 thesis mr Mills made in his article “41 Inconvenient Truths on the “New Energy Economy”:
1. Hydrocarbons supply over 80 percent of world energy: If all that were in the form of oil, the barrels would line up from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, and that entire line would grow by the height of the Washington Monument every week.
I’m impressed mr Mills. But I have some impressive renewable energy statistics as well:
The yellow area represents the magnitude of annual solar energy reaching earth. It is larger than the cumulative energy contained in all fossil and nuclear energy consumed throughout human history.
An area the size of Bulgaria plastered with solar panels would suffice to replace all energy consumed globally today. It can be done. In the end of the day neither Mill’s stacked barrels of oil, nor our solar chart are decisive. Decisive are they price of energy per kWh, where price includes ALL costs: financial and environmental. In 2019 the situation is such that wind and solar are the cheapest way to produce a ‘raw kWh’, even without susidies, no matter what Mills says. However, the real challenge is to find a cost-effective way to buffer these cheap kWh’s. We are not there yet, but the entire world minus Mark P. Mills are working on it.
2. The small two-percentage-point decline in the hydrocarbon share of world energy use entailed over $2 trillion in cumulative global spending on alternatives over that period; solar and wind today supply less than two percent of the global energy.
Even the Caesar’s and Napoleon’s of this world started their life as 7 pound diaper fillers. How many years were YOU dependent on mom’s breast and dad’s wallet? 23? How old are you now? 60? See? Before anything can get productive it needs a long period of nurturing, incubation and investment. Assuming these $2T are correct, with a global GDP of $80T, that’s hardly more than 2% yearly global income, which covers the cumulative effort of decades worth of exploration and innovation, with landmark contributors like NASA and its solar panels and Denmark and its modern wind turbines. Currently in 2019 we have 300 Watt, 1.6 m2 solar panels and 12 MW offshore wind turbines. That’s good enough, although further improvements can be expected, especially in further price erosion. The only real remaining challenge is seasonal storage.
3. When the world’s four billion poor people increase energy use to just one-third of Europe’s per capita level, global demand rises by an amount equal to twice America’s total consumption.
That’s not an argument for oil and against alt-energy, it’s the other way around. These people beginning to burn oil and gas would only contribute to climate change and global warming. We need African villages without grid connection but with local installed solar panels and some storage solution. The entire world minus your USA signed the Paris Accords, that intends to phase out your oil and gas. Sorry mr Mills, but you are fighting a rear-guard battle.
4. A 100x growth in the number of electric vehicles to 400 million on the roads by 2040 would displace five percent of global oil demand.
Assuming these figures are correct, what is your point? Cars are replaced every 8 years or 150,000 miles. There are currently 1 billion cars in the world. Over 8 years we’ll have 1 billion new cars. In 2018 4.7 million e-vehicles were sold in China, EU and US. Expect exponential growth of e-vehicles sales, supported by the Paris Accords and EU renewable energy policy.
5. Renewable energy would have to expand 90-fold to replace global hydrocarbons in two decades. It took a half-century for global petroleum production to expand “only” ten-fold.
Nobody claims that a global energy transition is possible in 2 decades. The current renewable energy champ Europe, the only geopolitical heavyweight with an explicit 100% renewable energy policy, has set itself the goal of 2050, that is 3 decades. Expect Europe to complete the transition first. Your comparison with the speed of the development of the oil energy base is not valid, as the world is now much richer than it was in say 1950. Take the example of the Netherlands. The Dutch discovered the 9th largest natural gas field on their territory in 1959. In 1963 the government decided that every household should be connected to a natural gas grid and only 10 years later 75% of the Dutch were using gas.
The author of this post had solar panels installed in 2015. That was a very easy exercise. You call a local installer. Using Google Earth they inspect your roof and make you an offer. A few weeks later they show up with a van and 3 men, build a scaffold, install the 6 285 Watt panels and converter and do the cabling and are gone the same day. The all-inclusive bill was 3000,- euro sharp. 4 years later I can confirm that the yearly yield neatly covers the year electricity consumption and that I can expect a pay-back time of 9 nears, for panels that probably are going to serve me the rest of my life, since unofficial life-expectancy exceeds 30 years.
The renewable energy transition in the household: merely an exercise in picking up the phone. Oh, and the power station is paid for by the public, after which the kWh’s are “for free”, a guaranteed energy income for three decades or more. These few thousand euro’s per household is one holiday plane-flight to a sunny beach less, which is good for the environment.
6. Replacing U.S. hydrocarbon-based electric generation over the next 30 years would require a construction program building out the grid at a rate 14-fold greater than any time in history.
Typical centralized thinking. Fact is, if we want to decarbonize our economy and keep our current wealth, we indeed need two times as much electricity as we do today to additionally power our e-vehicles and heat pumps (next to strict insulation measures and seasonal storage of heat). The point is: there is no need for doubling the grid size, if energy is generated and stored locally. Interestingly, our “US energy thinker of the year 2016”, mr Mills apparently has never heard of hydrogen, let alone the hydrogen economy. His article we are discussing here has ZERO references to hydrogen. Renewable energy is probably going to be stored in hydrogen or one of its many derivatives and can be pumped through a conventional natural gas grid, far more efficient than through the grid. The Dutch government has opted for the hydrogen economy and intends to reuse the extensive pipeline system at the bottom of the North Sea and existing onshore natural gas grid to distribute renewable hydrogen.
7. Eliminating hydrocarbons to make U.S. electricity (impossible soon, infeasible for decades) would leave untouched 70 percent of U.S. hydrocarbons use—America uses 16 percent of world energy.
Yes, Americans are not very energy efficient, they need a lot of energy to make a million buck. Europe, in hindsight, is “lucky” to not have that many fossil fuel reserves, which forces them to be efficient and creative in developing new energy resources. Insisting on driving in SUVs isn’t particular helpful either. Germans use per capita almost twice less primary energy as Americans. Yet Germany is world champion exporter and the US world champion importer, a situation only sustained by the reserve currency status of the dollar. But mr Mills is correct here. Americans face a much bigger task in completing the energy transition than Europe. Point for mr Mills.
8. Efficiency increases energy demand by making products & services cheaper: since 1990, global energy efficiency improved 33 percent, the economy grew 80 percent and global energy use is up 40 percent.
And this is good? Well yes, for the consumer, but for the environment not so much. But for mr Mills and Trump-America (or Obama-America for that matter), the environment is of no concern and to be seen as a cost-free waste dump. After all, the ‘American Way of Life’ is non-negotiable, right?
9. Efficiency increases energy demand: Since 1995, aviation fuel use/passenger-mile is down 70 percent, air traffic rose more than 10-fold, and global aviation fuel use rose over 50 percent.
Same comment as #8. For economy man mr Mills, Demand is Holy and needs to be serviced at all cost. This is absolutely not an argument against renewable energy but in favor. Westerners have enough wealth. They shouldn’t be concerned with realizing ever more car- or air-miles, but instead with refactoring the existing industrial civilization towards a much lower footprint. The West will be rewarded with new skills and industries, the products of which can be sold on world markets and will guarantee future wealth.
10. Efficiency increases energy demand: since 1995, energy used per byte is down about 10,000-fold, but global data traffic rose about a million-fold; global electricity used for computing soared.
Non-argument. Same comment as #8 and #9.
11. Since 1995, total world energy use rose by 50 percent, an amount equal to adding two entire United States’ worth of demand.
Again, according to mr Mills demand is holy and needs to be serviced, regardless of the cost. Real increase in wealth is a cleaner planet that can sustain life rather than an gargantuan economy that destroys everything in its way.
12. For security and reliability, an average of two months of national demand for hydrocarbons are in storage at any time. Today, barely two hours of national electricity demand can be stored in all utility-scale batteries plus all batteries in one million electric cars in America.
He is right and wrong at the same time. Mills insists, probably against better knowledge, that batteries are the only form of storage that will ever exist. He deceptively uses this argument to diss renewable energy in favor of his buddies in the fossil fuel industry and “beautiful clean coal” Trump administration.
13. Batteries produced annually by the Tesla Gigafactory (world’s biggest battery factory) can store three minutes worth of annual U.S. electric demand.
For a 100% renewable energy base to work, as a rule of thumb, we need to be able to store ca. 40% of the annual energy consumption, to even out natural fluctuation in solar and wind and guarantee grid stability. Batteries or even pumped hydro won’t be able to deliver here, not in a long shot; every energy expert knows that. The real solution will need to come from chemical and seasonal storage of solar and industrial heat. Storage technology in general isn’t as developed YET, as solar and wind already are, but that was to be expected. Before you can begin to worry about storing electricity from solar and wind, you first need to be able to generate that electricity in the first place. On top of that, below 40% renewable share of electricity, you do not need to worry about storage. But countries like Germany have meanwhile arrived at 40%, so they no longer can ignore it. Here an overview of several promising leads towards storage solutions. The number of opportunities are virtually endless:
[deepresource] – Iron powder as fuel?
[deepresource] – Renewable hydrogen already cost competitive
[deepresource] – Dutch consortium to build gigawatt electrolysis plant
[deepresource] – Hydrogen Economy Taking Off in Europe
[deepresource] – INGRID Hydrogen Storage and Grid Balancing
[deepresource] – Breakthrough in Electrolyzer Technology
[deepresource] – 10 MW REFHYNE Electrolyzer Project for Shell Germany
[deepresource] – Port of Rotterdam to Build Largest Green Hydrogen Plant in Europe
[deepresource] – More on Ecovat
[deepresource] – ITM Power Opens 1GW/Year Electrolyser Manufacturing Facility
[deepresource] – Heat Storage as Key to Seasonal Energy Storage
[deepresource] – DENS X2 Formic Acid 25 kW Generator
[deepresource] – Charging Your Car in Ten Minutes is Underway
[deepresource] – Voltachem Formic Acid Reactor
[deepresource] – Presentation of World’s First Bus on Hydrozine
[deepresource] – TNO & TUE Heat Battery
[deepresource] – Advances in Lithium-Sulfur Batteries
[deepresource] – State-of-the-Art Electric Energy Storage Technologies
[deepresource] – Chemical and Sorptive Thermal Storage Methods
[deepresource] – Hydrogen Out of Thin Air
[deepresource] – CO2 –> CO/C –> CO2 Fuel Cycle?
[deepresource] – Siemens-Gamesa Electric Thermal Energy Storage
[deepresource] – Electricity Storage Costs
[deepresource] – World’s First Solar Car Presented in the Netherlands
[deepresource] – Hystock Hydrogen Factory Opened in the Netherlands
[deepresource] – Air Compression Example Projects
[deepresource] – Sodium-Ion Batteries
[deepresource] – Lithium-ion Storage Price Development
[deepresource] – Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES)
[deepresource] – Large Power-to-Gas Project in Northern-Germany
We mined our blog for storage posts between now and July 2019 and stop here. There are hundreds of storage posts more.
14. To make enough batteries to store two day’s worth of U.S. electricity demand would require 1,000 years of production by the Gigafactory (world’s biggest battery factory).
Again this straw-man. Only idiots or deceivers would claim that batteries constitute the solution for the storage problem, see previous posts. We leave it to you as an exercise to figure out to which of both categories mr Mills belongs.
15. Every $1 billion in aircraft produced leads to some $5 billion in aviation fuel consumed over two decades to operate them. Global spending on new jets is more than $50 billion a year—and rising.
An aircraft could be fueled by hydrogen as well, via synthetic fuel. They are much closer than you think, for the short and medium range to begin with.
[deepresource] – Electric flying
[deepresource] – Airbus Electric Aircraft Roadmap
[deepresource] – Siemens, Airbus and Rolls Royce Aim at Hybrid Electric Plane by 2020
[deepresource] – Rumours About an Airbus Hybrid Plane A320neo Successor
[deepresource] – New Record Siemens Electric Airplane
[deepresource] – Amsterdam Airport Carbon-Neutral?
[deepresource] – KLM Aims to Have Scale Model Wing Plane Flying This Year
[deepresource] – EasyJet Believes in Electric Flying
[deepresource] – Hybrid Electric Regional Flying Coming
16. Every $1 billion spent on data centers leads to $7 billion in electricity consumed over two decades. Global spending on data centers is more than $100 billion a year—and rising.
And why is this an argument against renewable energy, the cheapest energy form to date, if we ignore storage, an issue that is going to be solved in the coming years? The internet btw has massive potential to save energy. It enables people to work from home or a shared office nearby, eliminating the need for commuting and even car ownership. On top of that, mobile internet opens up the possibility of abolishing private car ownership altogether, because it is much cheaper to order an autonomous driving car from your location-aware mobile phone.
[deepresource] – “By 2030 You Won’t Own a Car”
17. Over a 30-year period, $1 million worth of utility-scale solar or wind produces 40 million and 55 million kWh respectively: $1 million worth of shale well produces enough natural gas to generate 300 million kWh over 30 years.
Let’s verify that claim. In Holland a 275 Watt panel costs 110 euro, say $120. Under mediocre Dutch solar conditions this boils down to 250 kWh per year. 1 million investment in these panels will bring me 62 MWh, not 40 MWh. Expect further price decrease with the rise of thin film solar, that basically will cost little more than the frame required to support it. We have no way to verify the shale well claim, but even mr Mills’ opponents agree that shale gas is going to be cheap (EROI 70-100) and sufficient supply for the foreseeable future. So you might have a point. Except of course, mr Mills, whose article contains zero references to climate, environment or emissions, refuses to admit the existence of environmental problems. The problem though is that the rest of the world does. In Germany proposals for an 80 euro/tonne CO2-tax are being made. Lets see how cheap your shale gas will be under those circumstances.
But the real point to make is that the world minus our exceptionalist friends has decided that fossil fuel has to go, so mr Mills price deliberations do not matter that much, since the US empire is over anyway, after Brexit and Trump, the rise of China and suggestions by president Macron that Russia needs to be a member of the European House.
18. It costs about the same to build one shale well or two wind turbines: the latter, combined, produces 0.7 barrels of oil (equivalent energy) per hour, the shale rig averages 10 barrels of oil per hour.
Yeah, but the difference is that that well is exhausted after a year or so, where the wind turbine merrily produces for 30 years or more. As anecdotal evidence the oldest, still working windmill dates from 1440, long before America was ever heard of. The Eiffel tower, build to last 2 years before taken down, is meanwhile older than a century and experts expect it to last for another 3 centuries. Offshore wind-turbines are guaranteed for 25-30 years, but nobody knows how long they really will hold. And besides, an offshore wind tower can be easily removed and renovated in an electric arc furnace (powered by wind energy!) at 10% of the cost it requires to build a wind tower from iron ore. Nobody takes that into the equation, but in principle, a steel wind tower can be reused “till Kingdom comes”.
19. It costs less than $0.50 to store a barrel of oil, or its equivalent in natural gas, but it costs $200 to store the equivalent energy of a barrel of oil in batteries.
True, but irrelevant. Most energy will be stored in chemical form, likely hydrogen or one of its many derivatives, not in batteries. Straw man.
20. Cost models for wind and solar assume, respectively, 41 percent and 29 percent capacity factors (i.e., how often they produce electricity). Real-world data reveal as much as ten percentage points less for both. That translates into $3 million less energy produced than assumed over a 20-year life of a 2-MW $3 million wind turbine.
That “41%” capacity factor is old data. Modern large offshore wind turbines in the North Sea are over 60% and will increase with increasing size of the turbines until the max. of 20 MW will have been reached.
[deepresource] – Offshore Wind Capacity Factors
21. In order to compensate for episodic wind/solar output, U.S. utilities are using oil- and gas-burning reciprocating engines (big cruise-ship-like diesels); three times as many have been added to the grid since 2000 as in the 50 years prior to that.
Congratulations, but what has this to do with renewable energy. You can run a conventional power station on renewable fuel as well:
[deepresource] – The Netherlands is Placing its Bets on the Hydrogen Economy
22. Wind-farm capacity factors have improved at about 0.7 percent per year; this small gain comes mainly from reducing the number of turbines per acre leading to a 50 percent increase in average land used to produce a wind-kilowatt-hour.
Wind farm capacity from offshore wind farms has made far greater gains. Here Europe, with high quality wind resources over shallow water, is clearly in the advantage to the US:
1600 GW waiting to be raked in. EU average power consumption 300 GW. The old continent has no conventional fossil fuel reserves worth mentioning, fortunately Europe doesn’t need to. Armed with the Paris Climate Accords, Europe effectively dissed everybody else his fossil fuel reserves and is offering a viable alternative instead.
23. Over 90 percent of America’s electricity, and 99 percent of the power used in transportation, comes from sources that can easily supply energy to the economy any time the market demands it.
Translation: America run for more that 90% on oil and gas and coal and we have no intention to change that. Market demands it. That settles it.
24. Wind and solar machines produce energy an average of 25 percent–30 percent of the time, and only when nature permits. Conventional power plants can operate nearly continuously and are available when needed.
The idea is to convert a considerable part of renewable electricity into hydrogen or some of its many derivatives and then we can operate just as continuously as your fossil fuel based plants.
25. The shale revolution collapsed the prices of natural gas & coal, the two fuels that produce 70 percent of U.S. electricity. But electric rates haven’t gone down, rising instead 20 percent since 2008. Direct and indirect subsidies for solar and wind consumed those savings.
We agree that this peak oil theory promoted by Richard Heinberg and ASPO-2000, popular around 2005-2012, is obsolete. In the words of Guardian journalist Monbiot: there is enough to fry us all. We came to the same conclusion as Monbiot by the end of 2012 as well. There is no energy supply problem. We even have options. What we DO have is a massive environmental problem, a problem the likes of Mark P. Mills refuses to touch. Mills promotes economic growth until the world blows up. The market is alpha and omega.
26. Politicians and pundits like to invoke “moonshot” language. But transforming the energy economy is not like putting a few people on the moon a few times. It is like putting all of humanity on the moon—permanently.
That’s ridiculous. In Europe 90% of new installed capacity is renewable. It doesn’t make that much of a difference if you install wind/solar or fossil power, it’s a different branche of engineering, but it is not like placing the entire population on the moon. Outright dishonest argument.
27. The common cliché: an energy tech disruption will echo the digital tech disruption. But information-producing machines and energy-producing machines involve profoundly different physics; the cliché is sillier than comparing apples to bowling balls.
The only one silly here is mr Mills, who pretends not to understand analogies. Everybody understands that IT and energy are different engineering fields, that’s not the point. The point is that a new technology will have profound effect on other areas as well. Just like that solar panels would perhaps not have existed without the Apollo program. The renewable energy policy of the EU and the Paris Accords have unleashed massive innovation program world-wide and this is a boat the US is largely missing. The problem with America is that it is unable and unwilling to think outside the fossil fuel box. There is a little understood connection between early adoption of energy sources and geopolitical power:
[source] Owners of reserve currencies through the ages
The 17th century was Dutch, because the Netherlands applied wind energy with which they could produce a merchant fleet, three times that of the rest of the world combined.
The 19th century was British, because they were the first to apply coal and steam, with which they could set up a world-empire.
The 20th century was American, because they were the first to apply fossil fuel, a fuel superior to coal, with which they could power airplanes.
The 20th century is now over, there is much talk of the end of the American empire, even within the US itself, so the question remains: who is going to succeed the US? If the lessons of previous centuries are applied, the most likely new candidate will be the one who masters a new energy source first and that can only be renewable energy.
28. If solar power scaled like computer-tech, a single postage-stamp-size solar array would power the Empire State Building. That only happens in comic books.
Silly comparison. With energy it is not the physical size that matters, but the price per kWh. And look:
The price for PV-solar came down with more than a factor of 100.
29. If batteries scaled like digital tech, a battery the size of a book, costing three cents, could power a jetliner to Asia. That only happens in comic books.
Indeed. And now batteries are useless or what?
[deepresource] – Renault K-ZE, the Poor-Man’s Tesla
Here is the new Renault K-ZE e-vehicle. Core figures: price in China 10,000 euro (minus subsidies). Battery weight 150 kg, that’s three conventional fossil fuel tanks. Range 278 kmh or two weeks average commuting. Size battery: 28 kWh. In other words
10 km = 1 kWh = 10 cent in the US or 20 cent in Europe at 100 kmh speed.
270 km = 2 weeks commuting for 2.70 in the US or 5.40 in Europe.
You and your fossil fuel can’t compete with that price, mr Mills. In Holland gasoline costs 1.69 euro and will bring me 15 km in a small gasoline car. Compare THAT with 15 km from 30 cents electricity, that’s a factor of 5.5 to your disadvantage!
30. If combustion engines scaled like computers, a car engine would shrink to the size of an ant and produce a thousand-fold more horsepower; actual ant-sized engines produce 100,000 times less power.
Silly argument. Interestingly engines of e-vehicles are much smaller and simpler and hence easier and cheaper to maintain, which much higher life span than gasoline motors. The global car industry expects massive layoffs, because e-vehicles are easier to assemble.
31. No digital-like 10x gains exist for solar tech. Physics limit for solar cells (the Shockley-Queisser limit) is a max conversion of about 33 percent of photons into electrons; commercial cells today are at 26 percent.
That 10 x factor doesn’t exist for efficiency indeed. But how about price? A thin film solar panel in particular has the potential to become cheaper than plywood of the same size.
32. No digital-like 10x gains exist for wind tech. Physics limit for wind turbines (the Betz limit) is a max capture of 60 percent of energy in moving air; commercial turbines achieve 45 percent.
Those considerations are diversions from your topic: comparing fossil fuel with renewable energy. The physical size of wind turbines is not that important as we can meanwhile handle 12 MW offshore wind turbines:
Important is price per kWh and environmental impact. You lose on both counts.
33. No digital-like 10x gains exist for batteries: maximum theoretical energy in a pound of oil is 1,500 percent greater than max theoretical energy in the best pound of battery chemicals.
Again, batteries are only a small part of the renewable energy solution. Regarding energy density… 1 kg gasoline contains ca. 12 kWh. The 150 kilo battery of the new Renault e-vehicle, referred to above, contains 27 kWh or 5.5 kg/kWh. The difference is 66, not your 1,500.
34. About 60 pounds of batteries are needed to store the energy equivalent of one pound of hydrocarbons.
Again, for mr Mills, batteries are the only form of storage that exist. Wonder where he got his diploma?
[deepresource] – World’s First Hydrogen Train Operational in Germany
Take note mr Mills, this train runs on hydrogen, not batteries. And here is a video report of a 900 mile road trip (in the US!) in a hydrogen fuel cell car, so no batteries:
35. At least 100 pounds of materials are mined, moved and processed for every pound of battery fabricated.
So what? 100 pounds moved to power a 3,000 pound car, that will move itself for 10 years over a distance of 150,000 miles. Your point? Any idea how much gasoline needs to be moved from say, Saudi-Arabia, to refineries, to the petrol station? How about 15,000 kg = 30,000 pounds?! You have absolutely no argument here!
36. Storing the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil, which weighs 300 pounds, requires 20,000 pounds of Tesla batteries ($200,000 worth).
Come on, not even Americans put a barrel of oil-equivalent in their tank. Again the example of the new Renault K-ZE e-vehicle: 10,000 euro (in China), 150 kilo, 27 kWh battery, range 271 km or 2 weeks commuting, for $2.70. Your numbers don’t add up, desperate as you are to make your case.
37. Carrying the energy equivalent of the aviation fuel used by an aircraft flying to Asia would require $60 million worth of Tesla-type batteries weighing five times more than that aircraft.
Sigh. Again mr Mills and his infamous batteries. Here is way to fly carbon neutral, with conventional planes, by producing synthetic fuel from renewable electricity:
[deepresource] – Amsterdam Airport Carbon-Neutral?
On the small scale of this experiment the fuel is twice as expensive as regular kerosine, making the price of a ticket perhaps 25% higher. But, so what? The world if suffering from over-tourism anyway. We desperately need a carbon tax on flying.
38. It takes the energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil to fabricate a quantity of batteries that can store the energy equivalent of a single barrel of oil.
There is 1,700 kWh in a barrel of oil. Nobody has these kind of batteries. 40 kWh is more like it, providing an acceptable range of 400 km. Let’s take the example of Renault K-ZE, with 150 kilo battery, containing 27 kWh, enough for 271 km. The average lifespan of a car battery is 50,000 miles or 75,000 km. What is the embedded energy of such a battery. On page 5/6 of this article we find a factor of 1,154 (ratio embodied energy/capacity). Hence it costs 1,154 x 27 kWk to build that Renault battery = 18 barrels of oil. 50,000 miles for a small car would consume 1 liter per 10 miles or 5,000 liter = 31 barrel of oil. So yes, it is true: a car battery has a very high embodied energy, but in the overall economy it pays off, as the example of the Renault K-ZE shows.
39. A battery-centric grid and car world means mining gigatons more of the earth to access lithium, copper, nickel, graphite, rare earths, cobalt, etc.—and using millions of tons of oil and coal both in mining and to fabricate metals and concrete.
The world transports giga-tons of fossil fuel too every year. Lithium from used-car batteries can be recycled, burned oil can’t. At some point you have mined enough lithium for a near-closed circle economy.
40. China dominates global battery production with its grid 70 percent coal-fueled: EVs using Chinese batteries will create more carbon-dioxide than saved by replacing oil-burning engines.
That may be true in the short run, but China did sign the Paris Accords. Coal will gradually be reduced and replaced by manufacturing methods, fueled by renewable energy.
41. One would no more use helicopters for regular trans-Atlantic travel—doable with elaborately expensive logistics—than employ a nuclear reactor to power a train or photovoltaic systems to power a nation.
That’s a false comparison. We do not use helicopters because planes are more efficient to transport passengers, both in terms of capacity, speed and energy per capita/mile. There is no need to equip a locomotive with a dangerous nuclear power station if you can simply send energy to the locomotive through wires. Likewise there is no need to power a nation with fossil fuel if it destroy the ecology of the planet, if you have photovoltaics.
Summary: we wonder why this gentleman was embarrassingly named as “US energy thinker of the year 2016”. His major flaws:
– pretending that batteries are the only storage that exists
– zero concern for climate and environment
– economic growth is the only value that determines human life on this planet, the rest be damned
DeepResource 