this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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Some of these ships would carry green hydrogen and new lithium batteries and old lithium batteries (to be recycled) and whatnot. Also at least some oil would be still needed for fine chemicals like meds or (idk what's proper english term for that) large scale organic synthesis like plastics, or even straight distillates like hexane (for edible oil extraction) or lubricants. Some of usual non-energy uses of oil can be easily substituted with enough energy like with nitrogen fertilizers but some can't
We aren’t consuming batteries anywhere near the rate we consume oil and coal. Hydrogen even less than batteries.
So the amount of ships needed would still be a fraction of what we use now.
not now, but if hydrogen were to be used as an energy source/storage, then it'd be used plenty. same with batteries
We can make hydrogen everywhere, we can't 'make oil'.
Yeah, there's no reason to be transporting hydrogen long distances. You can make it anywhere that has water and electricity. And if you've transitioned to a hydrogen based economy (which is a big if), ships wouldn't run on oil any more anyway, so there's no problem there.
there absolutely is? What if i can buy hydrogen at 1$ per ton, from the hydrogen production empire, meanwhile in the manufacturing empire hydrogen is produced at 2$ per ton. Economically, it would make sense to buy that hydrogen from the hydrogen production empire.
It's not going to be as significant as a trade as something like coal and LNG obviously, but the market IS going to do this in some capacity. And it's a beneficial thing for everybody.
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Yeah but your electricity also needs to be produced by reusable manners, which commonly results in solar power. And since the intensity of solar rays and the amount of sunny hours per day vary on the global scale there are some countries which are capable of producing more hydrogen and cheaper than producing locally. I know that the German government is looking at Marocco to establish a hydrogen production and import.
you really think this is going to stop the globalism aspect from happening? If you can ship something, and get better market rates on it, you're going to do it. Economics follows the cheapest route, not the most efficient.
It also just makes sense if you think about it. Places like alaska are going to struggle to generate green energy compared to another place like, texas for example. If you can ship in green hydrogen much cheaper than you can locally produce energy, why wouldn't you? It's a reasonable solution to the problem of supply and demand scaling.
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We absolutely can 'make oil'. Been doing it since world war II. Synthetic oil is extremely common.
I mean, yeah, but also, that's not really efficient or effective for burning.
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no we can't make hydrogen everywhere, there will be regions with large excess of renewable energy compared to population. these places could export hydrogen. you also don't need a lot of transport if crude is extracted near place where it's used, like for example heavy crude from alberta
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the argument for renewable energy isnt that we should stop using oil, its that we shouldnt burn it. why turn our limited supply of oil into CO2 and water when we can turn it into plastics, medicine, solvents, etc? around 3/4 of crude oil is used as fuel, but if renewable energy was used, the number of oil tankers would decrease by more than 75% bc local supplies would generally be sufficient for industrial, non-fuel uses
ikr, but that tweet implies that all of oil/gas/coal ships would be unnecessary
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That is true, but part of improving our environmental impact will be decreasing that transport of raw materials, localizing chemical industries near the sources of their raw materials.
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Fun fact: through the 1800s coal-powered steamships mostly replaced sailing vessels for the transportation of people and time-sensitive cargo around the world. But steamships were highly inefficient and required frequent re-coaling, and locally available coal was dirtier and contained less thermal energy than the good stuff that Britain (who was doing by far most of the shipping) got from Wales and other places on their island. Because steamships could not efficiently and cheaply haul the coal that they needed around the world to restock the coaling stations, this was done instead by an enormous fleet of sailing colliers. So the "steam revolution" of the 1800s was actually a steam/wind-power hybrid. It wasn't until the advent of triple- and quadruple-expansion steam engines, turbines, and greatly improved boilers in the early 1900s that steam-powered vessels could efficiently and economically haul their own fuel. And even with that, wind-powered cargo vessels remained economically viable and operating in significant numbers right up until the start of WWII (that's II, not I).
A great read is The Last Grain Race by Eric Newby, about his time as a sailor aboard Moshulu (a large steel sail-powered cargo ship) in 1938-1939. Moshulu went on to star in The Godfather Part II as the ship which brings young Vito Corleone to New York, and is now weirdly enough a floating restaurant in my city of Philadelphia (I've never eaten there but I want to).
These chairs they have inside it would make me not want to eat there.
Won't someone think of the seamen?
I'm constantly thinking of seamen
Capt'n Pugwash and Seaman Stains will both be out of jobs.
correct me if I'm wrong, but the United States doesn't even have oil refineries that are capable of making gasoline out of American oil? like we need the type of oil that the middle East has, so we're constantly trading oil back and forth even though we have plenty of it
I think I've heard this is true. something about politicians wanting to look environmentalist and therefore preventing the building of any more refineries
No, there's a significant amount of oil infrastructure locally. They've even got a colonialist extension with Canada: crude oil crosses over to be refined and sold back to Canada
No, it is true. It is not the quantity of oil infrastructure, but the grades and types they are. The US crude is mostly light sweet crude after the shift to oil shale. The refinery infrastructure was originally built for heavy crude with high sulfur content. Thus the US imports the type of oil our refineries were built to handle, and exports the portion of the oil that is domestically produced, but the wrong type.
The lack of investment in the types of oil refineries to refine US oil domestically isn't as much for optics purposes. But that relative to the amount of investment required to build new refineries to compete with the current foreign ones isn't a good return on investment relative to the up front cost and the existing profits of the current arrangement.
the government should at least subsidize a couple so in the event of an apocalypse we can make our own gasoline.
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Offhand I believe we have a few that can do light oil, but most of ours wouldn’t want to change over even if offered to do so for free. Rather the reason is the US has a lot of chemical engineers and capital and so is good at refining the more challenging to deal with and cheaper to get heavy oils while selling the easy to refine and therefore more valuable light oil we dig up down in Texas to places that have more primitive refineries.
While we could retrofit all of our our refining capacity to use our oil, it doesn’t make financial sense because your spending a lot of money to switch to an more expensive input, so companies arn’t going to want to do it unless the government forces them to, and the government would only force them to if it wanted to spite everyone else and raise domestic gas prices.
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Anyone know how much of the oil transported is actually used for plastic, percentage wise?
≈15%
So what you’re saying is the companies that own those boats will lobby the government so that this never happens? Sweet.
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gotta burn fuel just to get more fuel. Zeno’s paradox but capitalistic economic collapse
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