Clean coal is back - Trump was right, anew
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I watched the whole thing...So they are taking heat, to make light, to make heat. Wow, that's a twist of stupid.
and the whopping cost of 3+ dollars per kWH? Fascinating. Our kWH cost is like 0.15.
By the way, what is the electrical cost to run that whole TPC setup? Obviously it cannot pay for itself, otherwise it would be fusion.
Another BS proposal for people to get free money to "research" an idea that will go nowhere in the end.
Fossil fuels for teh win.
Indeed. No other energy source comes near their EROI. That, and the Holocene epoch, are what made 8 billion of us and our civilization possible. Unfortunately, burning them has pitched us out of that friendly interval and into something much more hostile. Something that will bust all our toys and tools. It's already happening, tipping points have been reached and exceeded. And technology cannot save us, because the only energy source capable of producing so much surplus energy, above what we still need today, and building alternative technology for the transition, is itself FF. This is the human ecological Predicament. If we burn them we're dead, but if we stop we're dead.
Shut down consumption, hard, you say, to free up a surplus of energy and materials to build the alternatives, like nuclear (nuclear I say!)? Unfortunately, we waited too long. We (and I may as well be me and say it, the we is capitalists), ignored the "hippies" of the '70s and just kept on digging and burning. Now we've burned through at least half of Nature's one time endowment of that concentrated solar energy and, naturally, it was the easy half, the profitable half. The other half is dispersed, small, increasingly expensive to obtain. That is, it's EROI is much lower. Our future is going to be much poorer as a result. And along the way, some downsizing will be steady, but there will also be sudden, painful contractions, bringing chaos and suffering.
From an ecological perspective, one that takes energy, materials, and physics itself seriously, all that contraction continues until a new, sustainable equilibrium is reached. Ironically, that equilibrium is going to look a lot like, if we're really fortunate, the time just before FF, maybe mid-18th century New England. That's the best we can hope and strive for. But I personally don't think that's possible for one very clear reason: our environment will be much denuded (it's denuded today) by the time we get there, we won't get to start over with a fresh biosphere and untapped hemisphere.
The earth is a lot bigger than people think it is. This whole idea of there being only a billion bbls of oil left in the ground? We'd run out of oil by the 2050s?
This is what they were saying in the 1980s, when global cooling was the issue du jour.
Guys, the planet is a WHOLE lot bigger than you think it is, like how much larger the sun is over the earth. People have no concept of scale.
Folks, you are all wrong. Fossil fuels will sustain us indefinitely. We're not going to run out of it, because you do not understand how large our planet really is. Add on some wind farms and nuclear etc, and we can use less FF. But it is not a cure-all.
Why would we need to use less FF if there's enough to last "indefinitely"? Cure-all for what, if you're saying there's no problem?
For the people who think it will run out!
Very few any more think it will "run out". It will simply become uneconomic to extract more. If the supply were unlimited (a laughable idea on an obviously finite planet) then we would not expect to see extraction occurring farther away, like hundreds of miles offshore, or in miles deep water.
Anyway, your reaction is common, the situation is scary. But it's something petroleum geologists have been aware of for many years now.
Some background for you to begin with:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-02-16/a-case-study-of-fossil-fuel-depletion/