17 surprising Facts from Fossil Future – Alex Epstein

[Dardedar]

Epstein has a book about energy and climate and he seems to think these are his 17 best, or most surprising, points.
I respond here to his first ten.
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17 surprising Facts from Fossil Future – Alex Epstein

1) “Fossil fuels are uniquely cost-effective…”

They used to be. Not anymore. The Energy Return on Investment (EROI) for FF used to be really great, about 44:1. Now it’s down to 8:1. Why? Because we’ve already gotten the easy stuff. It only gets harder to extract from here.
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The Downwards Spiral
In 1950, the EROI of global oil production was really high, at about 44:1 (meaning, for every unit of energy we put in, we were getting a whopping 44 out). Yet as the graph below from the new study illustrates, this value has undergone a shockingly steep decline.
By 2020, it reached around 8:1, and is projected to decline and plateau to around 6.7 from 2040 onwards.
https://bylinetimes.com/2021/10/20/oil- ... cientists/?
Know what does have an EROI of 44:1? Wind power. And the fuel is free.

2) "After 100 years of vigorous competition from alternatives, fossil fuels provide 80% of the world’s energy,"

This is a common tactic from the fossil fuel folks, conflate primary or total energy with electricity generation to try to make it look smaller.
Wind and solar make electricity. So that’s the portion of the energy sector they will be, and are, taking over.
The other energy categories will be cleaned up and electrified later, but that’ll be awhile.
“In 2020 renewable energy accounted for 90% of new electricity generation. In the next five years, the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects renewable sources to overtake fossil fuels as the world’s dominant form of electricity generation.”
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/conten ... nd-future/?
In the next four years renewables will be 95% of new added power capacity, per year.
That’s adding up, as the coal and nuclear continute their decline.

3) “Only 1/5th of the world uses what Americans would consider…”

A poll of what some Americans think.

Now on to his nuclear category, four points:
4) Nuclear energy is the safest…
5) Nuclear energy is the cleanest…

Nuclear is usually pretty safe, until it isn’t and racks up a trillion dollar mess like in Japan. Which is why no nuclear plant can be built without government backing the insurance risk. Without that, it’s untouchable.
Nuclear is relatively low carbon, but not as clean as wind and solar. And then there’s the fantastic amount of super toxic long term waste left over. Nuke fans like to try to minimize that. Consider:
Here’s the UK spending $65 billion (US) just to store their nuclear waste.
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Cost of new UK underground nuclear waste facility jumps to £53 billion
“A larger volume of waste and 'more realistic' scope of costs has resulted in a bigger price tag for building and operating a long-term storage facility for radioactive waste
The cost of a proposed underground storage facility to safely house the UK’s nuclear waste for millennia has risen to as much as £53 billion in the past four years, more than double the previous estimate…”
https://www.newscientist.com/article/23 ... 3-billion/?
For that much money they could build enough offshore wind to power the entire country.
Break down of that provided upon request.

6) “Nuclear energy has become many times more expensive even though…”

Absolutely true. He probably goes on to give excuses for why this is, and some of them may even be good excuses. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s true. Nuclear priced itself out of the market decades ago. Which is why the US gave up on it decades ago.
The whole world managed a net 3GWe total increase of nuclear last year while solar and wind installed 300GW. This year renewables will do 330GW, and new nuclear will be about zero. Maybe 3GW again. A rounding error.

7) There is no low-cost, scalable way of capturing CO₂ in existence or on the horizon

That’s absolutely true. Which is why we need to stop burning carbon for fuel. Nuclear will be a part of that but a small and diminishing part of it going forward, since it can’t remotely compete with the renewables on cost and delivery time.
And equivalent annual TWh of wind and solar can be delivered on grids in 2–3 years for a third to a fifth the cost of nuclear. Meaning, we can have at minimum THREE times the actual annual generation of low-carbon electricity for the same price delivered to the grid before a nuclear plant starts operating.

8) “The anti-fossil fuel “green” movement claims to want to lower CO₂ emissions at all costs, yet opposes the two most proven, cost-effective ways of lowering CO₂ emissions: nuclear energy and hydroelectric energy.”

Yes, we need to lower Co2 emissions. Green folks generally like hydro, unless it displaces a lot of poor people (which it often does). Most viable US hydro was tapped out years ago, and hundreds of US dams are approaching retirement. Hydro doesn’t go well with drought and climate change, as California is learning the hard way.
We could do a lot of our low carbon needs with nuclear but we won’t because it’s way to slow to build and isn’t remotely competitive on cost. It makes sense to limp along the old plants built 30-40 years ago a little longer (as CA just did with Diablo), and the new Biden bill just passed has $23 billion to do that.
Very unlikely there will ever be another nuclear plant built in the US. The last two attempts, started 15-20 years ago, we fiascos. They gave up on VC Summers and walked away after spending $11 billion on the failed attempt.

9-10) “…climate experts… have actually been far too catastrophic—predicting a dramatic increase in climate-related death… Climate-related disaster deaths have decreased 98%”

This ignores that fact that the concern is actually for what we have loaded for the very near future.
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"...global warming is already responsible for some 150,000 deaths each year around the world, and fear that the number may well double by 2030. Besides killing people, global warming also contributes to some five million human illnesses every year."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... nd-health/?

As of 2030, climate change is expected to contribute to approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress.” https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/han ... sAllowed=y

The Syrian migration disaster was from just one million people migrating. Times that by 200, or 1,000.
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“Beginning in 2011, about one million Syrian refugees were unleashed on Europe by a civil war inflamed by climate change and drought — and in a very real sense, much of the “populist moment” the entire West is passing through now is the result of panic produced by the shock of those migrants.” …
The climate induced refugee crisis is a through-line from Syria to Guatemala, and one that is only beginning. The U.N. projections are bleaker: 200 million climate refugees by 2050…. The high end of what’s possible in the next thirty years, the United Nations says, is considerably worse: “a billion or more vulnerable poor people with little choice but to fight or flee.” A billion or more.”
https://medium.com/amateur-book-reviews ... 9dd4e5283e

11-17) The rest are just very silly denier talking points and only reveal Alex doesn’t understand even the basic concepts of climate science either. Which should be a surprise to no one.

His article is posted here: "17 surprising Facts from Fossil Future – Alex Epstein"
https://energynow.com/2022/02/17-surpri ... x-epstein/?