[HN Gopher] The Case for Energy Optimism
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       The Case for Energy Optimism
        
       Author : worldvoyageur
       Score  : 10 points
       Date   : 2022-10-17 10:17 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (syncretica.substack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (syncretica.substack.com)
        
       | worldvoyageur wrote:
       | " Annual vehicle sales are 90 million, give or take. Assume 50kWh
       | per battery, and around 850 grams of lithium carbonate per kWh.
       | No recycling, no tech improvement, full market penetration, no
       | savings from autonomous vehicles or the like and it is 3.8
       | million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent - market price
       | assuming today's lithium price of $60k works out to $230bn, or
       | the dollar equivalent of 23 days of global oil consumption.
       | Assume more normal lithium pricing of $20,000 and you get 8 days
       | of current run rate oil consumption for a year's worth of lithium
       | vehicles at 100% market penetration. This is existential for
       | commodity trading houses longer term: they can sell more lithium,
       | copper and nickel but the core businesses they are in are big,
       | lucrative and going to shrink and there is no certainty that
       | lithium is not going to disappear into vertically integrated
       | supply chains that do not need freewheeling intermediaries or
       | "financialized capital". [...] This math for lithium stands
       | before we consider really disruptive things such as: maybe
       | lithium isn't it for grid storage, or even autos? This is the
       | latest from the Sadoway lab - if we are going to use primarily
       | sulphur and aluminium for batteries they will be laughably cheap.
       | A tried and tested way to make money in materials science is to
       | "do it better, with more available materials and less energy" -
       | this is all three if commercialized. Over the last few years
       | cobalt demand estimates have been crushed by developments in
       | cathode chemistry due to cost and performance improvements in
       | simpler chemistries - I am sceptical that this is the last time
       | that today's "unobtainium" becomes tomorrows chopped liver. Maybe
       | new nuclear works, even if at low levels of total energy provided
       | simply for stability and security reasons? Perhaps we can do a
       | lot more pumped hydro than we thought? All the while the solar
       | wafers get thinner and more efficient and use less materials....
       | the preponderance for everyone now calling for longer term
       | structural energy inflation when papers like this are coming from
       | Oxford which take account of these dynamics seems deeply unwise
       | if you are doing anything but playing quarterly revisions. "
        
       | ZeroGravitas wrote:
       | Interesting to see the commodity traders take on this, freaking
       | out about a boring, predictable energy supply system not needing
       | them as middle men.
       | 
       | > An extremely dull future awaits of energy flows being largely
       | local or in grids where the best meteorologists and machine
       | learning engineers rake the table.
       | 
       | Tragic that it took a war to accelerate the right thing, but
       | better than people using the chaos to do their usual disaster
       | capitalist thing, like the UK tried and surprisingly had to
       | retract.
        
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       (page generated 2022-10-17 23:00 UTC)