[HN Gopher] The Case for Energy Optimism ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-10-17 23:00 UTC)