Many smart people disagree with me on this, but I think the best way to account for the “externalities” of the fossil fuel business was, and is, a strong, global, cap and trade scheme. That’s a gigantic discussion in its own right, but if the majors like Shell, Exxon, Chevron, et al had bought in early and energetically to C&T they would be in better shape today and not facing the specter of most of their value becoming stranded assets.
The prospect of cheap, utility scale storage transforms renewables, and indeed all power generation and grid management. This along with building code driven solar roofs / siding / paint and residential battery storage will make the electrical grid incredibly robust and efficient. Even the remaining fossil fueled plants can operate at peak efficiency all the time as demand matching will no longer be necessary. Battery storage, whether chemical or mechanical, can react almost immediately. This eliminates any need for cycling service and makes “peaker” plants obsolete entirely.
Natural gas will continue to be a big part of the mix going forward, but coal will continue to die out one plant at a time. Photovoltaics and wind will keep getting cheaper and cheaper and so will batteries.
That’s always good place for grounding our understanding of the oil and gas business and the economics of “big corporations”, in general. Now if only some people would get busy turning in to oil…
The biggest problem would be that the publicly held majors make up a fraction of the oil production in the world. Production, and price, has been at the whim of government owned “companies” for quite some time now. Exxon/Shell/Chevron getting together means squat if the Chinese aren’t on board.
Excellent point. Not only the Chinese majors but Saudi Aramco, ADNOC, KNPC, etc. would have to buy in. I don’t think the Mid-East nationals would have much trouble signing on, though. I worked with ADCO on their GPPs to comply with Kyoto. The Emir was enthusiastic about compliance.
Right…non only from the production side, but from the usage side, which is REALLY where China comes in. If China and India don’t give a shit about their carbon footprint and renewables, we’re pissing in the ocean.
If new construction was incentivized to add solar and battery capacity, it will begin to fundamentally change how power is captured and used. How amazing would it be to be capturing solar and storing it for your base load needs, only tapping into the grid for peak use or when shorter days/bad weather has reduced your solar production?
This is absolutely doable and economically viable right now, but the payback takes a long time because of the initial outlay. That is changing too, and quickly.
We may see, in a few scant years, people working from home, using their own solar, and using a electric car to do the errands they have. Next up: food replicators.
The society that dominates the 21st century will be the one that has the cheapest, most reliable, and most abundant electricity. If electricity can be provided at less than $0.02 / KWH , almost anything is possible. Consider Iceland dominates aluminum smelting not because they have bauxite (they don’t), or because they are convenient to users of aluminum ingots (they aren’t), it’s because smelting aluminum requires enormous amounts of electricity and Iceland has the cheapest; thanks to being situated on a volcano.
Quite a bit. Not as much as the U.S. or Saudi Arabia (US, KSA, and Russia are the top three), but about 5 MMBPD. More than Iraq or Iran or Kuwait or Venezuela…Also, they’re near the top in oil consumption. Not as much as the US who leads the world (USA! USA!), but they’re not far behind in second place.
China is making serious efforts to move to cleaner forms of energy, both in production and consumption. There is a major propaganda push that has been going on internally for more than 5 years moving toward clean energy in homes. (I know this because I live half of each year in China and I see the propaganda every day, and also because I run a translation business and a good deal of our material over the past several years has been focused on both scientific and propaganda writing about efforts to move to clean energy.) On the ground, there are countless initiatives pushing toward clean energy use by individual households, as opposed to the traditional reliance on coal. There are even very strict rules in place about what time of the day one can dispose of waste from one’s household, and the disposal is strictly monitored by grassroots cadres to ensure that it is separated into the correct categories. In many parts of China, and especially in the northwest where the Gobi Desert and the Tibetan Plateau meet, there are huge wind and solar farms, with more being constructed every day. All over China, you will find villages that are revamping their entire energy systems as they modernize, almost completely eliminating their reliance on coal. The village of Tengtou, in Zhejiang Province, is considered something of a miracle of modernization, having built an entire ecosystem within a single village that focuses on sustainability and clean, renewable energy. It is being touted as a model for other villages to follow. No single village alone is a very big part of the picture, but if the model is replicated in other villages across the country, it will have an enormous impact. If you’re familiar with the way the system works in China, you know that a top-level decision to make a massive move like what is required to revamp an entire energy system is something that can be done much more quickly there than it can in any Western country.
China is very convinced that the nation that produces the most efficient energy will become the global leader in most other aspects as well. They aim to be that nation within the next 2-4 decades. The move to clean energy is a huge part of their overall plan for the immediate and mid-term future, and they have a very effective way of implementing such plans. The real question is whether they will be able to show restraint when that is what is warranted. That has not traditionally been the strong suit of the Chinese government since 1949.
One thing about the CCP, and Chinese in general, they always play the long game. Even social and economic upheavals can be viewed in a much larger context. They will relentlessly pursue the cheapest KWH regardless. In the '90s I worked on a number of Chinese coal fired power stations, designing mostly turbine bypass systems. It was not a shining moment in my career. The challenge was to get something that would nominally work and last 366 days. That shit was CHEAP!
Some of those plants have since been operated, upgraded, and some have even been shut down and replaced by gas fired units. Now, some are being replaced by solar PV plus batteries. I expect a few TWH of PV+storage in the PRC over the next ten years. I also expect China to deploy the new SMRs (small modular reactors) more than maybe anywhere else. When the CCP pulls the plug on new I.C.E. cars, that will be a watershed moment. My wild ass guess is that China will ban new I.C.E. cars by 2040.
This is very true. China wants to be efficient, but until they demonstrate that means anything other than “cheapest solution”, I won’t be holding my breath.
ALL the major components of Biden’s relief package - down to and including increasing the minimum wage to $15 - have a majority of public support. The minimum wage increase is the least popular, at 54% support, which is +15 points.
House and Senate have passed the resolution to put Biden’s COVID relief package through the reconciliation process. That’s the good news. The bad news, is that it’s a slow process that theoretically allows for endless amendments effectively blocking passage. That’s why it’s the 2010 ACA even though Obama took office in 2009 (and there were 188 Republican amendments added to the final bill which then received no Republican votes in the House and only 3 in the Senate). Passage is still weeks away.
On the plus side, de facto President Joe Manchin is not perturbed by the $1.9 trillion price tag; he seems on board with the economic consensus that there is little or no downside to spending too much, but a huge downside to spending too little. He is resistant to the $15 minimum wage though - preferring $11, apparently - and wants to lower the income threshold for qualification for direct relief checks.
I’d concede to him the $11 minimum wage in a heartbeat, if it got everything else done. Minimum wage - if means tested from its introduction - needs to be around $25, but getting a 50% increase right now is a good start while the balance of the package is so important that holding out for $15 to the detriment of its passage would be counter-productive. A minimum wage increase won’t pass on its own in the current Congress, so take what you can get and move on; it may not pass muster with the Parliamentarian for passage through reconciliation in any case.
Meanwhile, I have seen Tim Kaine also questioning the income threshold for direct relief checks; unfortunately for Kaine, this was on Chris Hayes’ show and he was left embarrassingly laughing at himself after Hayes very politely shredded all his justifications. At the end of the day, we’re talking about an arbitrary cut off point; so there will be people below the line who don’t need the money and people above the line who do. If you move the cut line lower, you create more of the latter, while the former will spend the money anyway which is good because it’s fucking stimulus.
As noted above, the consensus is that too much is not the problem, so why penny-pinch now? Further, these income thresholds are based on people’s 2019 income tax returns and since then there has been [checks notes] a fucking worldwide pandemic, economic collapse and exploding unemployment. A family making $200,000 in 2019 may be making half that now and in desperate need of a cash injection. Plus, as Hayes noted as a kind of coup de grace on Kaine, they can adjust the tax code for 2022 to recover stimulus from those who received it while showing income in 2021 that was above the line.
