Is the US wasting its time saving the planet?
Tommorow's News Today - The ENB Daily Stand Up stories delivered early.
We must ask: Is the west wasting our time and money trying to get to Net Zero? When dealing in energy Physics and Fiscal Responsibility matter.
These are the stories covered in the Daily Stand Up.
In our first story, I bet that the additional sanctions on LNG will have no effect.
1: EU to Ban Re-Export of Russian LNG
The European Union is set to ban the re-export of Russian LNG in the bloc’s waters in a first sanctions measure targeting Russia’s gas, EU diplomats told Reuters on Thursday.
The EU has been debating the 14th sanctions package against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine for a month, including proposals to ban LNG trans-shipments in EU waters and ways to address Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers.
“EU Ambassadors just agreed on a powerful and substantial 14th package of sanctions in reaction to the Russian aggression against Ukraine,” Belgium, which holds the rotating EU presidency, said on Thursday.
“This package provides new targeted measures and maximizes the impact of existing sanctions by closing loopholes,” the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the EU said.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen commented,
“This hard-hitting package will further deny Russia access to key technologies. It will strip Russia of further energy revenues. And tackle Putin’s shadow fleet and shadow banking network abroad.”
2: The $2.5 trillion reason we can’t rely on batteries to clean up the grid
Physics and fiscal responsibility matter when energy and the grid is concerned. And in California, the amount of money required to use 100% renewable energy is unobtainable.
“The system becomes completely dominated by the cost of storage,” says Steve Brick, a senior advisor for the Clean Air Task Force. “You build this enormous storage machine that you fill up by midyear and then just dissipate it. It’s a massive capital investment that gets utilized very little.”
These forces would dramatically increase electricity costs for consumers.
“You have to pause and ask yourself: ‘Is there any way the public would stand for that?’” Brick says.
Similarly, a study earlier this year in Energy & Environmental Science found that meeting 80 percent of US electricity demand with wind and solar would require either a nationwide high-speed transmission system, which can balance renewable generation over hundreds of miles, or 12 hours of electricity storage for the whole system (see “Relying on renewables alone significantly inflates the cost of overhauling energy”).
At current prices, a battery storage system of that size would cost more than $2.5 trillion.
A scary price tag
Of course, cheaper and better grid storage is possible, and researchers and startups are exploring various possibilities. Form Energy, which recently secured funding from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, is trying to develop aqueous sulfur flow batteries with far longer duration, at a fifth the cost where lithium-ion batteries are likely to land.
Ferrara’s modeling has found that such a battery could make it possible for renewables to provide 90 percent of electricity needs for most grids, for just marginally higher costs than today’s.
But it’s dangerous to bank on those kinds of battery breakthroughs—and even if Form Energy or some other company does pull it off, costs would still rise exponentially beyond the 90 percent threshold, Ferrara says.
“The risk,” Jenkins says, “is we drive up the cost of deep decarbonization in the power sector to the point where the public decides it’s simply unaffordable to continue toward zero carbon.”
3: Monday’s Energy Absurdity: These Lithium Battery Factories Burn Like Chicken Farms
Another great sorry from David Blackmon’s Substack.
We see the same pattern around the manufacturing and recycling facilities for the damn things. My podcasting partner Tammy Nemeth tipped me off to a pair of major battery-related fires that took place over the weekend, one at a manufacturing facility in South Korea, the other at a recycling plant in Scotland, and provided links to the initial reporting on them.
In South Korea, Reuters reports that a major plant about 90 miles outside Seoul went up in flames, killing 22 workers – most of them interestingly Chinese nationals – in the process. Reuters states that the fire was “largely” put out, which is that corporate media operation’s subtle way of admitting the damn fire is still burning because it is almost impossible to fully extinguish lithium battery fires once they get going.
Further down in the body of the story, we see this admission: “The blaze began at 10:31 a.m. (0131 GMT) after a series of battery cells exploded inside a warehouse with some 35,000 units, Kim said. What had triggered the explosion remains unclear, he added.”
Well, we all know by now that “what had triggered the explosion” was, um, nothing. One of the batteries just spontaneously combusted, which these things tend to do in certain conditions, and the fire rapidly spread across the factory.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, the Ardrossan and Saltcoat Herald reports that a battery recycling facility in Renfrewshire broke out on Sunday, just 3 months after a similar fire destroyed another lithium battery facility in nearby Kilwinning.
4:Crude Oil Shipments Return to Arctic as Russia Sends Tanker To Asia
The raw volume of oil that Russia is sending to Asia is amazing and is one of the key reasons the dark fleet will remain strong, and sanctions will not slow Russia down.
AIS currently designates Port of Kozmino near Vladivostok as the journey’s end on July 20, though that may not be the vessel’s final destination. The 41,401 dwt Shturman Skuratov can carry around 200,000 barrels of oil.
During last summer’s shipping season oil tankers carried 1.5 million tonnes of crude across the Arctic Ocean to a number of ports in China, including Ningbo, Tianjin, and Huizhou. Russian officials aim to more than double those volumes to 3-4 million tonnes for 2024.
The voyage by Shturman Skuratov comes around 6 weeks earlier than last year’s initial oil shipment at the end of July, confirming Russia’s ambitions to carry greater volumes along the route this season.
Crude oil is routinely carried in ice-capable shuttle tankers from points of production in the Gulf of Ob and the Pechora Sea to transshipment points near Murmansk.
But direct transits from west to east were exceedingly rare prior to 2023. When EU Sanctions rendered the European market off-limits to Russian crude, the country began redirecting a small share of its Arctic production to Asia.
5: Why Asia’s Carbon Emissions Are Erasing Western Progress
I wonder why we even look to fund carbon capture or net zero. There is nothing the West can do to change climate change.
Take a look at the Billions of metric tons per country in the chart below.
The only thing the US has lost is .9%, and we are doing that by installing natural gas and retiring coal plants. I do not believe the charts are accurate when you consider the number of coal plants that China is bringing online and their impact on the environment.
In conclusion, the latest data underscores a pressing global challenge: while significant strides in carbon reduction are being made in the U.S. and EU, these efforts are being overshadowed by rising emissions in Asia Pacific, driven primarily by China and India. The economic development and rapid industrialization in these regions are pushing global carbon emissions to new heights, complicating the battle against climate change.
As the graphics show, the West cannot do this alone. The path forward requires a multifaceted approach, combining continued emission reductions in developed countries with substantial investment in sustainable technologies and infrastructure in developing nations. Coordinated global action is essential to curbing the trajectory of carbon emissions.
And finally:
6: Houthi strikes continue to terrorise merchant shipping
Where are the climate activists when you need them? They should be camped out at the Houthis front door, demanding they stop their terrorist activities. The amount of damage they are doing to the environment is amazing.
The Houthis continue to terrorise merchant ships heading in and out of the Red Sea, while also claiming strikes at ships moored at Israel’s Haifa port.
The Houthis claimed to have struck the Transworld Navigator bulk carrier twice in the space of 24 hours today in the Red Sea, using drones. The ship has suffered damages while a number of crew were injured in the strikes. In the Indian Ocean, meanwhile, the Stolt Sequoia product tanker came under fire from a number of missiles yesterday.
The Houthis also claimed carrying out a joint military operation with an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia, known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, to target four vessels in Israel’s Haifa port on Saturday, although there has been no confirmation of this from the Israeli side.
The Houthis have upped their attacks over the past 10 days both in terms of numbers and sophistication.
Fourteen of the world’s largest shipping associations issued a release last week, asking for help from states with influence in the region.
“This is an unacceptable situation, and these attacks must stop now,” the release stated, adding: “We call for States with influence in the region to safeguard our innocent seafarers and for the swift de-escalation of the situation in the Red Sea.”
Thank you, and the podcast will be released first thing tomorrow morning.
Another bad news week, which seem endless, Stu.