Comments by "looseycanon" (@looseycanon) on "Will High Oil Prices Restart Europe’s Energy Crisis?" video.
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I sooo much hope, that there will be proper oil shock. The West had ostricized oil industry to the point of banks considering them too riskey to provide services to, because of BS CSR rules implemented for political purposes (polititians trying to get environmentalists to vote for them specifically). We've lost the Russian capacity due to the war, which we could forsee since occupation of Crimea would come eventually, yet, we refused to drill at scale under the "oil=bad" mantra (inspite of oil being in one form or another in some 40 000 products). Well now, it's coming back to bite us. Saudis know, that people will vote based on their wallets. US elections are steadily approaching one day at a time and they'd much rather have Trump than Biden in the White House, inspite of the fact, that Biden is essentially second Trump term, as far as economy is concerned. It is our environmental hubris, that we are this open to blackmail by groups like OPEC (which, fun fact, is actually headquartered in Vienna, Austria. One of the most staunch ecologist nations in the EU) or Russia. We need this slap in our faces, to wake up from the green dreams of children and into the black, liquid reality of the world.
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@mikaelantonkurki Let's take plastics for instance. We need them. Even tin/steel cans and paper containers have internal lining made from plastic. We need to produce them and no, they can't be recycled. It's not efficient enough due to how energy intense recycling is. The only other way, thto produce plastics is from biomass. Not all biomass can be used for this. One suitable plant is corn. Now, that's how much extra corn planted? How many acres of rainforests turned into fields? Because you need the land to be cheap to keep costs down and you still need fuel to harvest that corn, or you need to some kind of grid based energy to run the harvesters, because batteries are impractical due to vehicle weight as I mentioned already, further decreasing competitiveness of this method. And that's one product group, that's produced from oil! Even if I claimed it be 1000 different products, that's 1/40 of products made from oil!
What about heating? Are you seriously going to endorse whaling, because not everywhere can have electricity as source of heating, because of no access to grid, not good location for wind and solar won't heat you enough in winter. Nobody wants to permit coal due to CO2 emissions and even wood is frowned upon. So what's the alternative? This is something "green people" don't like to hear, but it's a historical fact. Expansion of use of oil sourced fuels for heating saved whales from extinction, because before this shift, we used whale oil for lighting and heating! Without oil that would have to be walked back.
Roadbuilding. How much more gravel would we have to refine and mine to replace asphalt, which is a petroleum product? The final fraction of oil. That's how much more land destroyed by mines for these resources?
Where will you get sulphur and other chemicals, which are byproducts of oil industry (containted as contaminants in crude oil)? That would now have to be produced actively! Where will you get that? Let me remind you, that even wine needs to be sulfured to stop it's fermentation process (yep, even wine has oil industry product in it)
95% of all food is made with use of oil, mostly in fuel, packaging, but also in fertilizers and herbicides. Those would also have to be replaced or farms would have to be enlarged. That's how much more land cleared, so that we have same foodstuffs output?
The option, of producing less or not producing doesn't work. You need to eat, no way around it. You need to have clothes and have stuff you need for your work, whatever that is. These also have some oil cost in them. And forget about redistribution. That also needs fuel, because you really can't have 100% renewable or electric power source for ships. Forget about sails too. Assuming one TEU (standard for container shipping), weighs 24 tones (limit for three axle trailer for road transport in Czech Republic) and I will be generous and say that's just cargo, to replace Emma Maersk, just one of the larger container ships, you'd need 66 clippers. The last sailship, that could compete with a steamer was a clipper. There are dozens of ships similar in size of Emma Maersk and hundreds and thousands of smaller ones. That's how large total crew and therefore how big a strain on marine wildlife feeding them, if you were to replace entirety of worlds merchant fleet with the best sail had given us? Electricity doesn't work either, because of the distances these ships travel. You'd have to tow a barge with sole cargo of batteries for the ship itself, and that's assuming you'd even be able to move that barge without external source of power! And forget about Lion batteris on a ship. Lithium fire on one would be guaranteed deaths for the entire crew!
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@mikaelantonkurki :D And how do you get electricity to that place? Nope, doesn't work that way. You can't store it in necessary amounts. That is why actual grid specialists were warning against wind and solar. You need fossil fuels for base load, unless you've got nuclear, but look at Germany and even that has it's draw backs, given current prices of Uranium. There are very very few places, where you've got consistent enough winds to have green base. Furthermore, electric heating in any shape or form will always be more expensive than other methods, because electricity is a more refined product, meaning, unless you artificially make other heat sources more expensive (which is a problem, because if you do it in a targeted way, it will get overturned by the courts as illegal market manipulation), electricity will never be competitive with localized heat sources, partuclarly with wood, which is all around us outside of deserts! It is, because at some place, somewhere on the grid, you had to burn some kind of fuel, to have energy NOW. Not when it shines or blows somewhere sixty miles away! What you suggest, leaves you without source of heat in the middle of a winter, because someone wanted to save money on a powerline. However, your "response" didn't answer my other points. Where is your clipper fleet? Where are your alternatives to plastics, that have exactly the same characteristics like plastics? Where are your ecnomically comparable fertilizers and pesticides and where are the laws of physics denying tractors and harvesters to harvest crops on electricity?!
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@mikaelantonkurki Nope. While nuclear can provide base load, Europe doesn't have it's own nuclear fuel production capabilities, nor do we have uranium deposits, which could easily be mined (due to a number of factors, including greenness of today's population. Wink, wink Germany). Solar and wind are intermittent and there is no way of storing power to account for this intermittency on this scale. Consumption is also intermitent, but along a different curve. As for hydro. Nope. Hydro power has one major problem. Water is used for other purposes as well and with increased tamperatures, water storage for drinking and irrigation will become far more prominent uses of dams, meaning they can't be used to counterbalance this intermittency. And on top of that, there is the grid itself, which is already at capacity. Add more high energy consumption like EVs or large scale heating to it, you will cause nation wide blackouts. And that's still note addressing all the need for plastics I mentioned earlier.
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