The article is quick to point out the huge role of oil in the modern energy mix. It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat. The so called "Primary energy fallacy". Other than that, it's a great read.
To me (as someone who has worked on oil rigs, oil pipelines, oil refineries, and chemical plants), crude oil seems far more valuable as a material than as an energy source. It feels like a damned shame that we're still combusting so much of it for heat rather than reserving it for physical materials.
I understand the ways that economics are very important, and that the economics still currently favor burning a large fraction of the crude oil. But I also know that the right kinds of investments and a bit of luck can often change those economics, and that would be nice to see.
We can always make polymers and HydroCarbons in general from other sources if we have energy abundance. We literally can just capture the CO2 we emitted from burning fossil and make it plastics.
Of course this does not make sense in a world where we do not have enough energy to even keep datacenters open.
Edit: To clarify, I do not propose burning fossils to capture CO2 and make plastics. I am a Thermo Laws believer.
Methane >> carbon dioxide as a polyethylene/linear polymers feed stock. Double bonded oxygens are hella higher affinity than four loose hydrogens. Also as pointed out, even in a concentrated combustion effluent stack CO2 is low concentration at atmospheric pressure.
I don’t know about methane as an aromatic/hybridized ring building block. Anything is possible with chemical synthesis but is it energy feasible.
There’s always plant hydrocarbon feed stocks but I think using arable land to make plastics is dumb and also carbon intensive. (I do wear cotton clothing tho because you need to make trade offs).
Siemens has a collaboration with Porsche are piloting already eFuel production. Cost is super high (think like $10/liter). But thermodynamically feasible.
That sounds like a hack from late-game Factorio: pollute enough that you can just pull iron filings right out of the air. Everyone wins! Except the meatbags who need to breathe the air …
The problem with carbon capture from air is the low carbon concentration. Try to do the math for how much air you need to process to get even one barrel of oil worth of hydrocarbons from a DAC process.
The answer to this problem as it's currently being pursued is renewable carbon feedstocks. Growing things like canola on marginal land, harvesting it and turning it into biofuels and LCLFs (low carbon liquid fuels) using renewable solar/wind energy.
It's not a solved problem, though. Truly renewable carbon feedstocks have to source their carbon from the air, not the soil, which has to be continually measured. Land selection for carbon feedstock projects has to ensure it doesn't induce land-use change in other locations due to displacing other things like food production, etc. Otherwise the emissions and environmental harm from those downstream effects have to be included in the carbon positive/negative calculations for the project.
Remarkable amounts of carbon are available in waste streams, even if you exclude from the count plastics and other petrochemicals. Paper, cardboard, wood, natural fibers, carbon in sewage and waste food, and especially farm waste (parts of plants not otherwise consumed). Some of the latter is needed for soil conditioning, but most of that is from decay of roots, not stuff left at the surface.
All this can be extended by addition of hydrogen. Naively, if you process a carbohydrate into hydrocarbons, about half the carbon is lost as CO2. Adding hydrogen allows the oxygen to be carried off as water rather than CO2 (or, the CO2 to be converted to hydrocarbons and water in a second step.) Hydrogen currently comes from natural gas but that will have to change anyway, with the hydrogen being produced by (for example) electrolysis of water.
There is way more carbon in the ground as rocks than as oil. If you have plenty of energy, the difference is quite manageable.
Besides, as somebody already pointed out, there is that CO2 on the air that we actually want to get rid of. It's nothing compared to the rocks, and a little harder to get, but getting it first would improve things a lot.
The carbon isn’t valuable elementally as much as it is structurally and molecularly. I mean that as aromatic rings and other ready made building blocks that conveniently can be fractionally separated with pressure and temperature conditions in a column as a gross generalization. All of this is energy intensive but much less so than building up from three atom molecules with strong bonds. And much much less energy intensive than separating a trace % molecule from the atmosphere at low atmospheric pressure and translating that to complex molecules.
There needs to be more appreciation for the laws of thermodynamics when discussing technology. Everything is not a 1-dimensional reduced abstraction.
The density of carbon in seawater is also higher much than it is in air. The relative concentration of bicarbonate in seawater is a few times lower than in air (as % by mass), but because water is nearly 1000x the density of air the true amount of bicarbonate there per volume is much higher.
> there is that CO2 on the air that we actually want to get rid of
For this reason I have long been slightly baffled that development of compostable/biodegradable bio-based plastics is such a priority in materials research. Sure, it's interesting in the very long run, but for the foreseeable future, converting atmospheric CO2 (via plants as an initial step) into a long lived, inert material that can just be buried after an initial use seems like a benefit.
Biodegradable is only one type of degradation. Some of those compounds break down over time, or with exposure to uv or random stuff in the ground, into nasty compounds that you certainly don't want entering the water cycle or food cycle. An additional attribute of biodegradable therefore is: keeps (non CO2 pollution down).
In addition, things that biodegrade don't immediately just turn into CO2. Things like biomass (that is everything alive and dead that isn't decomposed) use a lot of that carbon. A significant fraction of the carbon in rotting stuff doesn't end up in the atmosphere for decades or longer. The carbon cycle isn't just "CO2 becomes plants which become CO2"... there's a lot more steps in between (for example, next time you eat... you are a direct next step!). Some of those steps take a very, very long time.
> It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat.
I've heard the statistic that 40% of the total oil pumped out of the ground just to transporting oil. We use almost half just to move it to and fro before even using it.
Let's say a barrel of oil travels 15,000 km from Saudi Arabia to Texas, gets refined, gets shipped another 10,000 km to Europe, then the last 1,000 km overland by truck.
This reasonably well sourced Reddit post [0] says big oil tankers burn 0.1% of their fuel per 1,000 km, smaller ones a bit more. Say 0.2% on aggregate, that's 5% for the whole journey, 10% because the ship is empty half the time.
From the same source, a truck burns about 3% per 1,000 km. This seems too high: for a 40,000 kg loaded truck that's less than 1 kmpl or 2.5 mpg. But let's believe it, double it for empty journeys, and we still only get 16%.
I used very conservative estimates here: surely most oil doesn't travel anywhere near that far.
Alternative thought experiment: look at the traffic on the highway. If this were true, even neglecting oil burnt for heating or electricity or aviation, you'd expect 40% of the vehicles to be tanker trucks.
> Say 0.2% on aggregate, that's 5% for the whole journey, 10% because the ship is empty half the time.
Fuel saves from slow steaming and being empty are massive.
> If this were true, even neglecting oil burnt for heating or electricity or aviation, you'd expect 40% of the vehicles to be tanker trucks.
The US has a lot of domestic pipelines [1], and a lot of the remainder is done by train [2] because trains are the most efficient way to transport bulk goods over extremely long distances.
Say a tanker truck has a roughly 300 gallon fuel tank and a 10,000 gallon payload tank (per google). Thats roughly 3% loss to cross a lot of the US, which is by no means insignificant but assuming ships are not any worse and the pipeline to the ship is minimal, around a manageable 6% loss.
The energy may go into net processing of the oil, and measures such as EROI or EROEI give some indication of this. But transporting oil itself is ridiculously easy. A supertanker can move a cargo halfway around the world for roughly 1% the energy contained in that cargo.
Much more energy expenditure comes from refining itself, or in the case of shale and tar sands, in heating vast volumes of rock or sand to liberate the (usually very heavy, thick, and "sour") tar-like oil contained within.
I also don’t have a source, but I have heard that 15% of global energy is dedicated to handling petroleum (extracting, transporting, refining) which feels like a plausible number.
i.e. A friend that works on rigs is flown to and from rigs from anywhere on earth every month, then choppers out to the rig and back. Same for everyone that works on the rigs.
The helicopter fuel is a drop in the oil ocean. You can just check this but checking how much oil that rig produces per month. How many flights the helicopter does every month and the amount of oil needed for it. It’s gonna be a drop in the bucket. Otherwise it would not be profitable to drill for oil.
Most of any fuel used for motive power ends up as waste heat simply due to the inherent (in)efficiencies of the Carnot cycle: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle>.
Where liquid hydrocarbons (not necessarily petroleum, but also biofuels and synfuels) have clear wins are:
- Overall energy density. By both mass and volume, little short of nuclear power exceeds this. Battery storage is roughly 1/10th the density of liquid hydrocarbons by mass.
- Handling ease. Liquid hydrocarbons, particularly kerosene (jet aviation fuel), diesel, and fuel oil are quite mild-mannered. Even the rather more rambunctious petrol is safe enough for ordinary civilians to dispense, store, and handle, for the most part. Liquid hydrocarbons can be stored at ambient conditions in simple containers, are largely non-toxic, and can be piped or flowed readily between locations.
- Storage stability. There are very few energy options which are as stable in storage for days to years or more.
- Ease of utilisation. Electric motors are arguably simpler, but other options, including direct (as in on-board) nuclear are not. Again, untrained civilians can use small to large internal combustion engines readily.
In particular, there are usage modes, most notably air, marine, and mobile / remote-location applications, where liquid fuels are quite difficult to substitute for. Ground-based and inland-waterway transport can be electrified, but long-distance freight and passenger travel whether by sea or air not so much. Efficiency considerations pale next to the handling and utilisation characteristics.
I'm not defending fossil fuels, and again the arguments apply equally to liquid hydrocarbons of any origin. But given the properties, prevalence, and low cost (however illusory that may be) of petroleum-derived hydrocarbon fuels, they're not trivially substituted for in all applications.
Primary energy comparisons can make fossil fuels look more "irreplaceable" than they are, because so much of the input energy is lost as heat before it becomes useful work
It also fails to point out the temporal fallacy, that energy that is available only at certain times, and not reliably so, is a substitute for energy that can be reliably and safely stored for decades and used when needed, not when generated.
There have been significant advances in power electronics and electric motors in the recent decades. Yes, there's not a lot to gain when you're starting at 85%+ efficiency, but it's far from "basic" technology.
What you're missing here is that oil production and processing has huge fixed costs. Producers can't just pump out infinite oil at zero cost. The economies of scale break down and fuels become more expensive as demand drops.
I only have pretty tame actions workflows and I have had a hard time replicating simple set ups with this. I can't imagine a company with more complicated setups.
What I wish is github codespaces could just do this out of the box, at least for a specific action/runner.
The problem with private address ranges is that everyone thinks they're available. In a large enough enterprise you're bound to have conflicts. They usually pop up at the most inconvenient time and suddenly you're cosplaying ARIN in your IT department.
I'm okay with writing developer docs in the form of agent instructions, those are useful for humans too. If they start to get oddly specific or sound mental, then it's obviously the tool at fault.
> In the 12 months to June 2025, wind and solar (2,073 TWh) generated more electricity than all other clean sources (nuclear, hydro and bioenergy) combined (1,936 TWh). Just four years ago, wind and solar generated half as much electricity as other clean sources combined.
So, both types generated approximately the same amount of power and it still isn't enough, one type cannot replace the other, they complement each other, that's why China is building more of each type, they know what they're doing.
Those are not really great construction examples, are they? Both projects took 15+ years to complete with huge cost overruns. And for those two "successful" projects, you can find 2 or 3 that failed.
The Finnish reactor had one delay because the concrete used for the containment building wasn't of the 'nuclear grade'. That's why those regulations thankfully exist.
Building more will help though. This whole thread started about how we had lost important knowledge
Specialized EV tires are also optimized for drag and noise, wear is just a factor. Anecdotally speaking I'm at over 80k km on a set of EV tires with at least 20k more to go. The issue has more to do with driving style and engine power than any other factors.
100%. Tire technology is a real thing. Tires have advanced a ton in the last 10 years. But driving style is the biggest thing. Some people can only get 10k miles out of a set of tires, while others with the same car and tires get over 40k.
But they do care about tire wear a lot, they know the acceptable wear life for the class. A couple years ago I bought a set of Pirelli tires that were ~50% off because they were an older version; hoping I’d get some benefit. Unfortunately they had half the life and were a bit worse in every way than the newer tires I had before and after.
Some tires are going to wear fast no matter what. I had some Pirelli PZero summer tires that I could never get more than 15k out of regardless of how I drove. The tire compound was very soft and sticky.
If you have something like really high performance tires, I recommend just using them. The grip is always there and you are always paying for it. As long as you aren't losing traction constantly, the difference is negligible in my experience.
No fundamental reason not to power them with renewables, either off-grid or with a small capacity grid connection. The argument that they need to run at full load 24x7 sounds more like a business requirement than a technical one. LLMs in particular with their stateless nature seem like an ideal candidate for global distribution.
The capital cost of the AI hardware is high and it depreciates quickly, being worthless in 5 years (or less). To make a profit, it needs to be run 24/7.
It’s sort of like how airlines like to fly their airplanes as much as possible.
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