Shorting Oil, Hedging Tesla

[winfield100]

What you did is prepay for your energy in the form of the investment in the solar equipment, that is not free.

It is analogous to paying up front for an oil well and then receiving "free" energy for the next 20-40 years.

What is really interesting is that oil, like sunlight, is a limitless resource.

Read Julian Simon to understand this. All energy is "free", all it takes is human effort to access it.

i find this to be, to me, a very false analogy, to put it politely
i cannot and do not want to own an oil well, nor do I want an oil well and refinery and all the necessary materials for same in my and everyone else’s back or front yards.

(a few year back, based upon BP Statistical Analysis of energy usage published every yearly since around the 1960’s
humanity has used around 64 cubic miles of oil.)

I think you are also glossing or ignoring over the costs of mistakes that inevitably happen ( spills ) and have real extensive costs for both you and your neighbors to the point of planet wide costs.

Additionally, by adding enormous amounts of heat to a heat engine, the atmosphere, and oceans and shifting the costs to others, our descendants and residents of the planet, disasters exacerbated by this, we are shifting the true costs down the timeline past when we are dead.

And additionally, can you really justify “renting your energy” from polluting sources forever, making payments until you expire from a _non-renewable_ source in a reasonable time frame or ownership of the collection equipment for a nominal cost of literally free energy.

Before you argue costs of fossil fuels vs sunlight
Spindle top oil well was almost literally stick a hole in the ground and oil gushes out around 100+ years ago
now it’s Billion dollar oil rigs that fail, need to go to extremes to get, the Arctic or even miles down at ever increasing prices to get less and less usable delta energy
not quite exponential cost increases and _still_ needing refining

versus

photovoltaics which were roughly $1,600 per watt in the late 1950’s, $101 per watt in 1974 and now well under 50 cents per watt.
almost exponential cost _decreases_ in the cost to collect _free_ energy.

i would respectfully suggest you refine you thinking and get better references
( personally collected over 40 megawatt hours, and used, of free energy, sunlight)

 

[winfield100]

additional because i cannot edit
Julian Simon was with the “Charles Koch Foundation” now Cato Institute

 

[SummerlinChiro]

Additionally, by adding enormous amounts of heat to a heat engine, the atmosphere, and oceans and shifting the costs to others, our descendants and residents of the planet, disasters exacerbated by this, we are shifting the true costs down the timeline past when we are dead.

And additionally, can you really justify “renting your energy” from polluting sources forever, making payments until you expire from a _non-renewable_ source in a reasonable time frame or ownership of the collection equipment for a nominal cost of literally free energy.

You think that fossil fuels are damaging the climate, I understand that is a popular belief right now, but that doesn't make it true.

Oil IS renewable, did you miss where I said that?

So, three areas of disagreement:

1) Oil damages the environment, no good evidence for this, read realsclimatescience.com, Richard Lindzen, Judith Curry, any geologist, etc.

2) Oil being a non-renewable resource. Read "The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels", and the amazing Julian Simon at Julian Simon.

3) The idea of "free" energy. Everything is scarce, everything costs.

Do costs go down over time? Yes, absolutely.

Commodity price decline over time; this is a major thrust of Julian Simon's work.

People like Malthus and Ehrlich predicted famine and skyrocketing commodity costs with population growth, and yet the opposite has occurred.

More people means more ingenuity, more human capital applied, lower commodity costs, and thus increased standards of living.

Malthus and Ehrlich have been proven wrong over and over again, and yet their bone headedly wrong ideas live on...

 

[guidooo]

Oil damages the environment, no good evidence for this, read realsclimatescience.com, Richard Lindzen, Judith Curry

Then consider rewriting a wikipedia page: Environmental impact of the petroleum industry - Wikipedia

any geologist

For sure any geologist seems to be better at mental time travel then simple minded me. But is geology the best and only discipline within earth science for assessing impacts on ecosystems?

 

[jhm]

You've made a fundamental point: "There is no replacement"
We are moving from dependence on a limited energy resource to a virtually free unlimited resource. This has profound implications. Where will all those energy assets go? Many will be stranded. If energy has no value, there is no point in investing in any energy or energy surrogate.

My personal situation is relevant. I've been installing solar arrays to the point now where they meet most of my energy needs (heating, lights, transportation, etc.) and they have all been paid for (using avoided electricity purchase costs). So now I have free energy for the next 20 to 40 years.

I'd like to echo this, "There is no replacement." I don't believe any form of energy will play an analogous role has oil has. It has been a fair unique bottleneck of late industrialization. It is not even distributed around the globe. So it fragmented global geography into oil importing companies and oil exporting companies. The oil importing countries literally could not run an industrialized economy without it, and oil exporting countries tended to become oil dominated economies whole dependent on oil export trade. Even the cold war was largely about partitioning the globe into two oil trading blocks. The power of the USSR over the Soviet Bloc was largely controlling the supply of oil to the Bloc states. Protecting oil trade routes was a primary task for the US military. Oil was more than just energy; it was geopolitical power.

In light of that history, I am hard pressed to see solar power or wind power step in an make us all highly dependent on renewable energy trade. Sure there will be transmission lines, hydrogen and a few other fuels to trade. But fundamentally most wind and solar will be domestic energy. The only thing that comes close to being a global trade bottleneck commodity are batteries or battery minerals. But even here there are a variety a minerals at play, and the diversity of battery chemistries will trade away from the more costly metals. For example, Tesla has be pushing on near zero cobalt cells, just to avoid the complicated cobalt trade. So which mineral is going to become the bottleneck, must have ingredient that countries are will to start WW3 over? Granted there have been conflict minerals for quite a long time, but none of this rise to the level of political conflict that have surrounded the oil trade.

Perhaps we could worry about China dominating production of solar modules. But manufacturing is a different master than extraction. China will dominate the PV market because the have cut the *sugar* out of manufacturing modules. This is a far cry from the glory days of OPEC jacking up the price of oil and throwing the global economy into demand destruction shock. Maybe the Danes will transform wind blades into economic weapons to bludgeon neighbors for a wind premium from globe GDP and prop up an medieval Danish Monarchy.

As feisty as these wee Danish royals appear, I don't imaging any of them growing up to be the next MbS. So we might have to accept that the world will not have a replacement for oil to pivot around in the coming age. Will the economy need not need to revolve around energy at all, not more than it revolves around copper, land, food or water. My hunch is that certain technologies will be much more central to global prosperity and geopolitical stability than any material commodity. What token will most clearly bear the image our new AI overlords? I'll leave that your imagination.

 

[winfield100]

You think that fossil fuels are damaging the climate, I understand that is a popular belief right now, but that doesn't make it true.

Oil IS renewable, did you miss where I said that?

So, three areas of disagreement:

1) Oil damages the environment, no good evidence for this, read realsclimatescience.com, Richard Lindzen, Judith Curry, any geologist, etc.

2) Oil being a non-renewable resource. Read "The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels", and the amazing Julian Simon at Julian Simon.

3) The idea of "free" energy. Everything is scarce, everything costs.

Do costs go down over time? Yes, absolutely.

Commodity price decline over time; this is a major thrust of Julian Simon's work.

People like Malthus and Ehrlich predicted famine and skyrocketing commodity costs with population growth, and yet the opposite has occurred.

More people means more ingenuity, more human capital applied, lower commodity costs, and thus increased standards of living.

Malthus and Ehrlich have been proven wrong over and over again, and yet their bone headedly wrong ideas live on...

oil is renewable, yes, but on what time scale and at what cost?
10’s of thousands of years. millions of years? longer? how long?
i’m perhaps mistakenly making the assumption you are aware of the first “gusher” oil well Spindletop.
literally stick a big straw in the ground and oil comes gushing out.
Now you have multi Billion dollar drilling rigs that _failed_ to drill in the arctic due to storms. and the climate, and floating platforms that drill up to 40,000 feet down. not too delta return on investments most likely quite negative when all costs are factored in.

steadily and rapidly declining resources that pollute when used both correctly and can be disasters when incorrectly.
Canada Tar sands, deep water horizon blowout.
i invite you to go live in the midst of the tar sands or in the Caribbean sea where the deep water horizon spewed a lot of toxic oil and continue to believe oil doesn’t damage the environment.

“.....read realsclimatescience.com, Richard Lindzen, Judith Curry, any geologist, etc. ....” “Julian Simon”
“realclimatescience” a quack website blog at best with inchoate ramblings in the comments
Richard Lindzen Heartland Institute and Cato Institute not terribly credible since associated with those two no matter the rest of his credentials
Who We Are - Richard Lindzen | Heartland Institute

Judith Curry no comment

“any geologist” how about you give a name

Julian Simon. i already responded

The idea of "free" energy. Everything is scarce, everything costs.
Simply put
we have a fusion reactor already giving us free for the taking
it costs a minuscule amount to collect it and store and use it
versus
ever increasing costs and deferred and ignored costs to use ever decreasing amounts of fossil fuels, that will renew over thousands if not millions of years, so not usable by us, and is quite toxic and polluting (try living in it if you disagree)

This discussion seems to happen occasionally in various forms with the same players as experts, CATO. Heartland, climate deniers and causes a bit of dissent.

well meaning people and overly credulous taken in by charlatans, quacks and montebanks.

Cato, aka “Charles Koch Foundation”, Heartland Institute, Manhattan Institute bunch of others.
where do their funding streams ultimately come from.
fossil fuels is a lot and anything threatening that revenue stream is diminished as much as possible by as many varied resources as possible

Renewables threaten existing fossil fuel revenue streams
that is a simple basic truth.

try not to be so credulous in believing the dying industry or perpetuating their untruths,
and
to quote my grandmother,
“don’t try to teach your grandmother how to suck eggs”

 

[Oil4AsphaultOnly]

I see a few supporters for the "moving to a virtually free unlimited resource" ideology, and I just wanted to point out that the cost of energy will reach an asymptotic base cost (maybe 2c/kwh?). It costs energy to produce the panels from which more electricity is generated. And although we might approach a point in time where they can be auto-manufactured with the factory and tooling costs already fully amortized ( thereby rendering the COGS of the panels to be essentially zero), there will be an environmental cost with all that solar irradiation being directly converted into electrons (~30%) and heat (remaining 70%), without contributing any biological "work" into the food chain.

At that point, where any further deployment of solar panels and wind farms will have a cost of directly impacting the foundation of the food chain, the value of energy bottoms, and "farmers" would choose to plant more corn rather than more solar panels. Energy might become super cheap, but never free. Even with panels that are already paid for and amortized, the operating costs [ of keeping the panels clean and the electrical interconnects checked and working ] makes the electricity non-zero.

Edit: I think Elon and JB posted up a slide a long time ago showing that the entire world's electricity production could be replaced by solar panels covering the land area smaller than TX, but that was for electricity at the 15c/kwh rate. As electricity gets cheaper from more renewables, consumption will rise (and carbon-negative tech will become one of the biggest consumers of that cheap electricity), to the point where significantly more land area is needed.

 

[Oil4AsphaultOnly]

Forgive me for the irony (in case anyone remembers John Peterson?) of using Axion Power as my source, but we'd need 115,625 sq miles of solar panels to produce 18.54 TW of solar panels:
Powering The Entire World With Solar: Surface Area and Panel Requirements - Axion Power

California has a total land mass of 163,696 sq miles.

 

[SmartElectric]

solar irradiation being directly converted into electrons (~30%) and heat (remaining 70%), without contributing any biological "work" into the food chain

? My panels on my roof haven't starved anything growing, except they have absorbed energy that would otherwise heat my attic and require venting...

 

[Oil4AsphaultOnly]

? My panels on my roof haven't starved anything growing, except they have absorbed energy that would otherwise heat my attic and require venting...

We're nowhere near 115,000 sq miles of solar panels yet.

Besides, your rooftop panels merely converted the solar radiation into heat, the same amount of heat that would've been produced by your roof, so the impact to the environment was exactly the same as your roof; except that you now spend resources to clean your panels that previously was NOT spent to clean your roof.

 

[mspohr]

I see a few supporters for the "moving to a virtually free unlimited resource" ideology, and I just wanted to point out that the cost of energy will reach an asymptotic base cost (maybe 2c/kwh?). It costs energy to produce the panels from which more electricity is generated. And although we might approach a point in time where they can be auto-manufactured with the factory and tooling costs already fully amortized ( thereby rendering the COGS of the panels to be essentially zero), there will be an environmental cost with all that solar irradiation being directly converted into electrons (~30%) and heat (remaining 70%), without contributing any biological "work" into the food chain.

At that point, where any further deployment of solar panels and wind farms will have a cost of directly impacting the foundation of the food chain, the value of energy bottoms, and "farmers" would choose to plant more corn rather than more solar panels. Energy might become super cheap, but never free. Even with panels that are already paid for and amortized, the operating costs [ of keeping the panels clean and the electrical interconnects checked and working ] makes the electricity non-zero.

Edit: I think Elon and JB posted up a slide a long time ago showing that the entire world's electricity production could be replaced by solar panels covering the land area smaller than TX, but that was for electricity at the 15c/kwh rate. As electricity gets cheaper from more renewables, consumption will rise (and carbon-negative tech will become one of the biggest consumers of that cheap electricity), to the point where significantly more land area is needed.

Re: Land
At a density ratio of 800km per 1000 square kilometers and a total length of 75,440km, the overall area of the US interstate highway system (constructed entirely between 1956 and 1991 – 35 years) is 94,000 square kilometers, or 20% of the overall required area for the world

The Saharan Desert is 9,064,958 square kilometers, or 18 times the total required area to fuel the world.

Agriculture: 70% of agriculture goes to animals which produce that other greenhouse gas, methane. Convert animal agriculture to solar... Win Win

 

[winfield100]

Forgive me for the irony (in case anyone remembers John Peterson?) of using Axion Power as my source, but we'd need 115,625 sq miles of solar panels to produce 18.54 TW of solar panels:
Powering The Entire World With Solar: Surface Area and Panel Requirements - Axion Power

California has a total land mass of 163,696 sq miles.

970 trillion kilowatt hours, __every__ day, for __free__.
All we have to do is capture it anywhere on the entire planet and use it at point of capture at a very nominal cost.
(or the great NE US and parts of Canada blackout of about 17 years ago as example
10,500 megawatts on 3 trunk lines, 1 sagged, and cascading failures costing $11-13 Billion in losses
500 megawatts of PV or PV/Wind combo. (500,000 kilowatts) at $10/watt would have been around $5Billion to install perhaps a bit more if panels etc available
that small amount would have completely averted the blackout due to sagging lines hitting vegetation AND made around over 500,000 megawatt hours per year, using _free_ fuel, around an additional 10 gigawatt hours by now, without burning a drop of oil

 

[winfield100]

Perez.page

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Besides, your rooftop panels merely converted the solar radiation into heat, the same amount of heat that would've been produced by your roof, so the impact to the environment was exactly the same as your roof; except that you now spend resources to clean your panels that previously was NOT spent to clean your roof.

Lol...that's a bit of a stretch! Also, you people are cleaning your solar panels?

A few folks and I sorted out the token issue over BBQ yesterday. The only things that retain value in a post-fossil world are p###y and real estate. Not sure how those coins would work.

 

[SummerlinChiro]

o

snip
Simply put
we have a fusion reactor already giving us free for the taking
it costs a minuscule amount to collect it and store and use it
versus
ever increasing costs and deferred and ignored costs to use ever decreasing amounts of fossil fuels, that will renew over thousands if not millions of years, so not usable by us, and is quite toxic and polluting (try living in it if you disagree)
snip”

I am so curious about this fusion reactor that we have already giving us free energy!

Please elucidate!

 

[canoemore]

...and ignore.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

I am so curious about this fusion reactor that we have already giving us free energy!

Please elucidate!

This guy is great! How have I not seen this troll before? Renewable crude....awesome!

 

[gavine]

This guy is great! How have I not seen this troll before? Renewable crude....awesome!

Climate Change Denial - Discuss

Prepare to be entertained

 

[mspohr]

Lol...that's a bit of a stretch! Also, you people are cleaning your solar panels?

A few folks and I sorted out the token issue over BBQ yesterday. The only things that retain value in a post-fossil world are p###y and real estate. Not sure how those coins would work.

/s My solar panel cleaning bills are killing me /s

(Actually, I've spent. $0 in 6 years.)

 

[Oil4AsphaultOnly]

Re: Land
At a density ratio of 800km per 1000 square kilometers and a total length of 75,440km, the overall area of the US interstate highway system (constructed entirely between 1956 and 1991 – 35 years) is 94,000 square kilometers, or 20% of the overall required area for the world

The Saharan Desert is 9,064,958 square kilometers, or 18 times the total required area to fuel the world.

Agriculture: 70% of agriculture goes to animals which produce that other greenhouse gas, methane. Convert animal agriculture to solar... Win Win

Great, now add in the costs to run conduit to all those sites, the inverters and batteries to make the electricity usable and the maintenance to keep them intact and you'll get to my point that it will never be "free". There will be a baseline cost/kwh for that electricity.

That baseline cost is what makes electricity the ideal energy commodity to replace fossil fuel, as there will be value added to produce the electricity, and value paid to consume/use it to produce products (or just food).