Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Bit by bit, we are learning the truly horrifying cost of Net Zero.
Over the years of course successive governments as well as the Committee on Climate Change have tried to pull the wool over our eyes, avoiding specifics and instead talking in generalities about green jobs and economic growth.
The first chink appeared in 2019, when Philip Hammond’s Treasury team put an estimate of £1.2 trillion on it, a figure which the government at the time did its best to hide and discredit.
Since then various independent estimates have suggested the real costs might be even greater.
The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) has just published its Second National Infrastructure Assessment, which has looked in detail about the projected costs, and it backs up what the Treasury feared four years ago.
These are the key takeaways:
Up to £35 billion per year between 2025 and 2050 of investment in renewable generation capacity and flexible sources of generation, electricity grids, and hydrogen and carbon capture and storage networks £2.5 billion per year between 2024 and 2050 to decarbonise public sector buildings by deploying heat pumps, heat networks and energy efficiency £12 billion per year to cover the extra costs of replacing gas boilers with heat pumps, most of which will be financed by the government rather than homeowners. 300,000 EV chargers – no cost is given, but it is likely to be in the region of £30 billion. Add that lot up, and we are looking at over £1.3 trillion. And all of these investments are superfluous. We already have plenty of gas generating capacity, most of which should still be in working order in 2040. We also have a working grid that has no need of extra storage, and is capable of handling existing demands. And of course, we also have efficient heating systems and motor vehicles. All of this extra expenditure is therefore of no benefit.
But that is only the start. The NIC, for instance, assume that EVs achieve price parity with ICE cars by 2030. They currently cost at least £10K more, and there is no evidence that this will change significantly in the foreseeable future.
If we assume this price difference lasts until 2040, the extra cost would amount to £230 billion in the 2030s alone.
By the nature of the beast, a lot of these costs are front loaded in the next decade or so. So although cost pressures might ease after 2040, costs will be particularly heavy until then. Hence the NIC’s suggestion that the government should provide zero interest loans for household heat pumps, the idea being that homeowners can pay them off in instalments, in the hope they don’t notice them!
But providing interest free finance is merely one more hidden cost that the government must bear. Money does not grow on trees, so the government will find yet more debt servicing costs added to an already unsustainable public deficit. Worse still, this money that they will need to borrow will drain resources away from more productive investments.
But there is one more glaring underestimate. The NIC claim that annual household energy bills will be £1000 lower eventually, thanks to “wonderfully cheap renewables”. But the report’s small print tells us that all of their energy costings are based on the government’s latest Electricity Generation Costs report, published in August this year.
And lo and behold, this tells us that the levelised cost of offshore wind is £44/MWh at 2021 prices. The recent CfD auction of course failed to get any offshore wind bids at a higher price than that. And studies of the real costs of construction indicate that the true cost is double this assumed cost.
Worse still, the report also states that the cost of CCGT generation is only £54/MWh, when the fictitious cost of carbon is taken out.
In short, our electricity bills will increase and not decline. Not only that, but a doubling of offshore wind costs will add hundreds of billions more to that investment bill.
There is no recognition either in the NIC report of the fact that heat pump running costs are higher than a gas boiler.
So when we add all of these extra costs in, as well as the cost of interest and the tendency for official estimates to be too low, we could easily be looking at a total bill of £2 trillion and more.
But even the £1.3 trillion works out at £48 billion a year, and that’s £1700 for every household in the country every year.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why the costs explode. They can build thousands of wind turbines and solar panels, but they can’t get rid of any of the dispatchable power plants because they are all needed for backup.
A couple of days ago, a Substack called Doomberg had a piece titled “False Utopia.” The piece featured a discussion of a post of mine from February 2023 with the title “We Must Demand A Demonstration Project Of A Mainly Renewables-Based Electrical Grid.” My post argued that we should demand a demonstration project of a mainly renewables-based electrical grid that would include all the key elements — generation mainly from solar and wind, plus sufficient back-up or storage to make the whole thing work for the long term without involvement of the evil fossil fuels, plus any other necessary elements to make the whole thing work.
The Doomberg guys called my post “brilliant,” which is very flattering. I would not say it was brilliant, but only that it says obvious things that for some reason few other people are saying. Among the people who will definitely not mention the need for an all-element fossil-fuel-free renewable grid demonstration project are government officials and green energy advocates. The reasons they won’t mention this need could be (1) they are not bright enough to understand the subject, or (2) their understanding is impaired because they are too blinded by religious fervor to “save the planet,” or (3) they are intentionally deceiving the public to make money or fame or career advancement for themselves. Or it could be all three!
Meanwhile though, the government “net zero” or “Green New Deal” (or whatever they are currently called) promotional sites are full of talk of things they call demonstration projects. So are they responding to my demand? The opposite. All of what they call demonstration projects follow a common approach, which is only to attempt to demonstrate various portions of the full system that would be needed to provide reliable 24/7/365 electricity from predominantly wind and solar generation.
Consider for instance the latest news on energy storage. A few days ago on October 13, the Department of Energy announced big new grants and subsidies for a series of what they call “hydrogen hubs.” Here is a report from E&E News Energy Wire. Excerpt:
The Department of Energy on Friday announced seven projects that will receive $7 billion to build landmark hydrogen hubs, delivering a major boost to a nascent U.S. industry. The long-awaited move is a key piece of the Biden administration’s climate agenda. On Friday, the White House said it expects the DOE funding to help cut 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, roughly equivalent to removing 5.5 million gasoline-powered vehicles from the road each year. “With this historic investment, the Biden-Harris administration is laying the foundation for a new, American-led industry that will propel the global clean energy transition,” said Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.
According to this further piece from Energy Wire on August 21, the Biden Administration has set a goal of having the U.S. produce 10 million metric tons of “green” hydrogen (by electrolysis from water) by 2030. The E&E piece states that the massive funding for “hydrogen hubs” is coming from a part of the Energy Department called the “Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations,” and also cites the Department as calling the hydrogen hubs “demonstrations.” So this must be the demonstration project we are calling for!
Not quite:
DOE envisions the hydrogen hubs as a demonstration of production, storage, transport and consumption.
I guess at least this is intended to be a demonstration of more than just production of the hydrogen. But still, they are clearly leaving out the critical piece of the puzzle, which is the demonstration of how much of this hydrogen, and capacity to make more of it, will be needed, and at what cost, to get the country — or even some small town — through a full year (or two or five) without need for fossil fuel backup. That completely obvious elephant is not part of this multi-billion dollar “demonstration.”
And DOE is not putting all of its energy storage eggs in the hydrogen basket. They separately have another big bucks effort called the “Long Duration Storage Shot” that is throwing bucketsful of cash at various research efforts into batteries. But the battery efforts are even farther removed from any relevant demonstration project. From DOE’s opening webpage describing that initiative (with a date of September 2021):
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Earthshots Initiative aims to accelerate breakthroughs of more abundant, affordable, and reliable clean energy solutions within the decade. Achieving the Energy Earthshots will help America tackle the toughest remaining barriers to addressing the climate crisis, and more quickly reach the Biden-Harris Administration’s goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 while creating good-paying union jobs and growing the clean energy economy. . . . The Long Duration Storage Shot establishes a target to reduce the cost of grid-scale energy storage by 90% for systems that deliver 10+ hours of duration within the decade.
On September 22, 2023 the Administration announced some $325 million for “15 projects across 17 states and one tribal nation” to “accelerate the development” of these “long duration” battery technologies. The $325 million may seem rather paltry compared to the $7 billion just thrown at the hydrogen hub thing last week; but don’t worry, they have many billions more to spread around on this over the coming months.
So are these battery technologies, or any one of them, even a potential solution to the problem of making a mostly wind/solar electricity grid work without fossil fuel backup? Again, you will not find any mention at those links, or at other government or advocate sites discussing the issue of how many of these batteries would be necessary and at what cost to actually fully back up a predominantly wind/solar grid and make it into a functional 24/7/365 electricity system. Indeed, you will not find any mention at any such sites of the fundamental problem with all batteries as the means to back up an intermittently-supplied grid, as identified in the big (and otherwise badly flawed) Royal Society energy storage report that came out in September. That problem is that stored energy as the backup mechanism entails engineering requirements that no battery can ever meet. Those include: holding at least several months of average usage, being capable of keeping that energy in storage for years in anticipation of worst-case once every multiple decades wind “droughts,” and being capable of discharging over the course of months if not a full year. The “10+ hours of duration” mentioned as the goal of the Energy Department’s battery program is almost trivial against the real engineering requirements.
Hydrogen, by contrast, has the theoretical capability of meeting all of those engineering requirement. However, there are many elements that don’t currently exist that would be needed to make a fully-functioning wind/solar/hydrogen storage 24/7/365 electricity grid. These include not just the electrolyzers, but also storage for huge amounts of hydrogen (underground caverns?), a full collection of thermal power plants capable of meeting peak demand burning pure hydrogen, and a transport system (pipelines?) to take the hydrogen from the electrolyzers to the storage caverns and then on to the power plants.
I could do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on this to get a rough idea as to cost, which would come to a multiple (not necessarily a huge one, but nonetheless a multiple) of what our current electricity system costs. But I’m not going to do it. The reason I’m not going to do it is that there as an obvious fact that tells you all you need to know, which is that no one in the country is spending their own private money to build out this system. They are all waiting for the government handouts. If this system could be built profitably at a cost competitive with what we have, there would be investors falling all over themselves to build it. When Thomas Edison built his first electricity plant, he did not go to the government for handouts to build it.
Because this is all a fantasy kept alive by government handouts, as soon as the handouts go away or even slow down, the whole thing will dry up and fade away.
The UN played down the role of farming in Climate Change. How can we start reducing the food production in a world where so many people are hungry? Nearly 828 million people around the world go to bed hungry every night.
“No one wanted to go to the next step of saying … we need to mitigate it [Agriculture] – including … reducing production levels …”
‘The anti-livestock people are a pest’: how UN food body played down role of farming in climate change
Ex-officials at the Food and Agriculture Organization say its leadership censored and undermined them when they highlighted how livestock methane is a major greenhouse gas
The night before publication, Henning Steinfeld was halfway across the world dealing with panicked politicians and an outbreak of avian flu. His report, and how it would be received, was frankly the last thing on his mind.
With a small group of officials, Steinfield, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s livestock policy branch, had been working for months on a report analysing the link between the six major species of livestock and climate change, which they all knew could be explosive. “I was very frustrated by the fact that the livestock-environment issue hadn’t resonated even though people accepted in private that it was a big issue – for climate change, and also water and biodiversity,” he said. “But no one was interested in getting into it because I think they were afraid of what it could mean.”
Another FAO official, “Michel Criollo” (not his real name), remembered: “No one wanted to go to the next step of saying agriculture is a problem for the planet and we need to mitigate it – including by potentially reducing production levels or changing things in less profitable ways.”
…
Between 2012 and 2019, “the lobbyists obviously managed to influence things”, Holstein said. “They had a strong impact on the way things were done at the FAO and there was a lot of censorship. It was always an uphill struggle getting the documents you produced past the office for corporate communications and one had to fend off a good deal of editorial vandalism. You had to accept relatively small steps forward in changing the narrative on livestock.”
Volta Trucks has begun search for insolvency experts following collapse of main battery supplier. A wave of EV start-ups have emerged in recent years amid booming interest in green technologies and ready access to venture capital funding.
Its UK division is also applying for administration and intends to appoint insolvency experts Alvarez & Marsal. The collapse puts roughly 600 British jobs at risk. The majority of Volta’s 850 staff were based in the UK, largely in the Midlands.
The company said: “Volta Trucks accomplished a great deal from a standing start in 2019, revolutionising commercial vehicle operations for a sustainable future.
“However, like all scale-ups in the EV manufacturing sector, Volta Trucks has faced challenges along the way.”
It is the latest electric vehicle company to run into difficulties. A wave of EV start-ups have emerged in recent years amid booming interest in green technologies and ready access to venture capital funding.
However, many of them have since gone bust as economic conditions worsened and interest rates have risen. Others have experienced lengthy production delays.
Concerns also arise regarding obsolescence, with an estimated seven million smart meters requiring component replacement when the 2G and 3G mobile communication networks are phased out.
Billpayers will be forced to foot the cost of upgrading seven million smart meters which will become obsolete in less than 10 years, the spending watchdog has warned.
In a damning report highlighting a number of failures in the smart meter roll out, the The Public Accounts Committee said seven million smart meters would need to be replaced before the 2G and 3G networks they use are switched off in 2033.
It warned that the financial burden of replacing the redundant smart meter hubs will be ultimately borne by energy bill payers and could be “very significant”, exceeding previous estimates.
The report went on to say that demand for the smart devices, designed to help consumers monitor their energy use and cut bills, had dried up. It said many customers were turning against the devices over fears they allow suppliers to remotely switch them to more expensive prepayment plans.
Smart meters were also said to be most likely to benefit rich, old men who own their own houses, the report said, while low-income renters are at risk of being “left behind” because blocks of flats pose a headache for installers to fit the devices.
Ministers are also facing growing questions about its purported money-saving benefits to households, with Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the committee, saying the evidence of whether smart meters in fact benefited consumers was “unclear”.
She said: “Smart meters have serious reputational obstacles to overcome with the public. Our inquiry has found that consumers’ enthusiasm for adopting one has been understandably harmed by recent shocking reports of forced installations.”
JUNIPER HILLS, CA – SEPTEMBER 20: The remains of a burned home as the Bobcat fire continues to burn in the Angeles National Forest in Juniper Hills Sunday, Sept. 20, 2020. Some houses and structures in the Juniper Hills area were lost in the Bobcat fire but most were saved. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Wildfires are not getting more severe or lasting amid climate change. Worldwide, the number of wildfires and acreage lost to them has actually declined over time.
A recent article in the Sacramento Bee (The Bee) claims that this year’s mild wildfire season in California shouldn’t be attributed to climate change, and also that climate change has caused California wildfires to be more severe. The first point is partially true, a single season’s mild weather should not be attributed to climate change, but neither should extremes in the other direction. The second point is false, climate change has not in fact increased the severity of California’s wildfire seasons.
The number of acres burned so far this year is less than one third of the five-year average, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Experts attribute the drop to this year’s historic winter storms and a record snowpack that soaked the state.
But those atmospheric river storms also created ample new vegetation growth that can act as fuel, state fire officials said. And with the help of gusty fall winds in the weeks ahead, wildfires could still ignite and grow through November or even into December.
It is true that excess vegetation growth can add fuel to fires if and when the brush dries out, this is part of what happened in Maui this year that led to their devastating killer wildfire. Invasive Guinea grass grew lushly during a mild and wet spring, then dried out in the summer weather and created an abundance of extremely flammable material.
It is interesting to note that while the winter weather and atmospheric river events were intense this year in California, it was not unusual or historically unprecedented, as discussed in Climate Realism posts here, here, and here. The Bee goes on to say that unless wildfires suddenly spike this fall and winter, the state “will be experiencing its second straight year of mild wildfire after having endured California’s worst wildfire seasons on record.”
It’s almost as if an average is made up of higher-than-average years and lower-than-average years.
The real kicker from The Bee is what follows, that scientists “are confident that warming temperatures have helped increase the severity and length of fire seasons,” but on the flip side, they are “reticent” to make similar claims when the fire seasons are mild.
But they are wrong in the first point regardless, wildfires are not getting more severe or lasting amid climate change. Worldwide, the number of wildfires and acreage lost to them has actually declined over time. Climate Realism has pointed to the data in numerous posts. NASA satellite data show that carbon dioxide emissions have no impact whatsoever on wildfire occurrence. (See figure below)
Figure 1: Graphically combined figures for CO2 and Wildfire burned area, with numerical values of yearly CO2 concentrations for 1982 and 2018 added at those years. Combination and scale matching by Anthony Watts, source for CO2 data is here: https://gml.noaa.gov/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2/co2_annmean_mlo.txt
The best explanations then for regional upticks in fires are differences in forest management practices, arson, as well as improper maintenance of power lines in the case of California, or combinations of factors that can lead to massive infernos.
California is particularly prone to seasons of drought a deluge, and one of the people interviewed by The Bee, Hugh Safford, chief scientist of Vibrant Planet and faculty of the UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy, admits as much when he says “California has the highest inter-annual variability and precipitation of any state[.]” Safford says it’s “normal to go from a record wet year to a record, or nearly record, dry year and that’s just the way it is.” This is completely true, and is in line with what Climate Realism has reported regarding California weather history, explained in detail in “Mega-droughts and Mega-floods in the West All Occurred Well Before ‘climate change’ Was Blamed for Every Weather Event,” by meteorologist Anthony Watts.
The Sacramento Bee and the scientists they interviewed are probably right to hesitate to attribute two years of mild fire seasons to climate change, however they should practice the same caution when conditions are inevitably reversed at some point. The Bee does conclude its post by saying the state is doing better about fire prevention. They also quote California Fire’s assistant chief, who tells the public to maintain their properties to prevent the spread of potential fires. This is actually useful advice, and instead of blaming fires on human carbon dioxide emissions, they should pressure local governments to likewise take more initiative on clearing brush, logging dead trees, and other preventative measures.
This year Energy Minister Rob Jetten presented the new National Energy System Plan (NPE), which lays out how the country wants to be climate neutral by 2050 and the Dutch government wanted to play a bigger role in the country’s quest for climate neutrality .
Jetten presented the new National Energy System Plan (NPE), which lays out how the country wants to be climate neutral by 2050. [EPA-EFE/BART MAAT]
The Netherlands will take “extraordinary” measures to reduce stress on the national grid caused by electricity demand and supply reaching similar levels, such as proposing incentives for large companies to use less electricity at peak times, outgoing Dutch Energy Minister Rob Jetten (D66/Renew) announced on Wednesday.
Earlier this year, the country’s grid operators warned that the electricity network was almost exhausted in all provinces, mainly due to the growing demand for heat pumps, solar panels and charging stations for electric vehicles – a problem shared by many other European countries.
“Despite substantial investments by grid operators and previous measures, the power grid is reaching its limits in more and more places,” Jetten stated in a letter to parliament.
“Without action, this seriously impacts our sustainable ambitions and economy. That is why we are now taking new measures that go off track to accelerate the expansion of the power grid and create more space,” he added.
From 2023, the country’s grid operators will double their investment in the power grid from the current €4 billion to €8 billion.
The new measures seek to incentivise large electricity consumers to reduce their consumption during “peak hours” between 4 pm and 8 pm to prevent blackouts, as both industrial and household consumption is exceptionally high during that time frame.
Under the new measures, large consumers will pay less for electricity if they reduce consumption during these hours, while excess consumption would conversely lead to higher prices.
The Netherlands still relies largely on coal and gas for its electricity, up to about 80% at times of low wind and high demand. If the grid cannot cope now, heaven knows how it will be able to when fossil fuels are abandoned.
However, the association fears that the costs for owners of self-propelled machines and forklifts will increase as a result of the planned regulation. The sums insured would have to be raised to the level of car insurance.
Imminent compulsory insurance for slow vehicles below 20 km/h. Now the ride-on lawn mower is also to be insured
That’s right – no joke! If the EU gets its way, homeowners won’t be allowed to cut their grass with their ride-on mower unless they can show it is covered by their insurance!
German Insurance Association (GDV) does not see ride-on mowers as a problem, though. “These slow-moving machines are normally covered by the owners’ liability insurance policies, such as private liability or business liability. The German government plans to extend compulsory insurance to vehicles traveling between six and 20 kilometers per hour.”
What could be behind all this? We can only speculate. Certainly it would not be any stretch of the imagination that all this is designed to harass citizens off their rider-mowers off their butts and back to using the regular push-mowers.
And what’s next? Compulsory insurance coverage for the use of power tools? And what about ladders, or even stairs? There’s no limit for EU bureaucrats.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) new designation of copper as a critical material follows the lead of the EU, China, Japan, and others in labeling the metal as critical – and shows copper is on the cusp of a generational shift from an everyday material to a geopolitically significant commodity.
This new strategic importance stems from copper’s criticality to a wide range of clean and renewable energy technologies, such as waste heat recovery and electric vehicles, which can reduce global GHG emissions by two-thirds. As a result, experts estimate copper demand is set to double between 2035 and 2050 as industries work to meet their climate goals.
It is no wonder, then, that some are referring to copper as “the new oil.”
[…]
The shift from a global economy built entirely on oil to a digitized and electrified future, with copper at its foundation, has already begun. If Washington wants the U.S. to lead this global shift, it must recognize copper as a critical material for the nation’s future economic and national security.
Andy Kireta, Jr., is the President and CEO of the Copper Development Association and the North American Regional Director of the International Copper Association. RealClearEnergy
The notion that we are transitioning from fossil fuels to an electrified future is nonsense. However, technological advances and government policies are increasing the demand for many mineral resources. This is having an effect on the mineral resource criticality matrix. Non-critical mineral resources are shifting towards becoming critical materials.
The Energy Act of 2020 defines a “critical material” as:
Any non-fuel mineral, element, substance, or material that the Secretary of Energy determines: (i) has a high risk of supply chain disruption; and (ii) serves an essential function in one or more energy technologies, including technologies that produce, transmit, store, and conserve energy; or
The Energy Act of 2020 defines a “critical mineral” as:
Any mineral, element, substance, or material designated as critical by the Secretary of the Interior, acting through the Director of the U.S. Geological Survey.
The US DOE’s 2023 critical materials report is an odd combination of wishful thinking and reality checks.
Wishful Thinking
Executive Summary
The global effort to curb carbon emissions is accelerating demand for clean energy technologies and the materials they rely on. Demand for these materials will only continue to grow, especially as some nations aim to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. While some major materials like steel, copper, and aluminum are already powering the fossil fuel economy, others are more minor materials with potential supply risks. These risks could jeopardize the ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions within the desirable timeframe to avoid significant climate change. In some cases, it may be necessary to take action to improve the resilience of these material supply chains and mitigate supply risks. Understanding the importance of individual materials to clean energy and the supply risks associated with them is necessary to identifying which materials may serve as potential roadblocks to a clean energy future.
Pretty well all of the assessed individual materials face roadblocks, irrespective of the government’s clean energy wishes.
Reality Checks
The report assesses the supply of critical materials under four scenarios:
Demand trajectories were developed for each material that passed the screening in Chapter 3. For each material, four trajectories were developed using high and low market penetration and material intensity assumptions for different energy technologies/applications, shown in Table 4.1. The goal of these trajectories is not to predict the future, but to outline various possibilities of material demand that can inform RD&D strategies.U.S. Department of Energy, Critical Materials Assessment 2023
DOE forecasts that the demand for copper for uses other than energy (gray curve) will exceed current production by 2035. They forecast that copper demand will exceed current production capacity by the end of this decade.
DOE forecasts that cobalt demand will exceed production capacity by 2025 in three of the four trajectories. Cobalt is a key ingredient in long-range electric vehicle batteries.
The demand for almost all of the assessed materials quickly exceeds production capacity in almost all of the scenarios.
You Can’t Get There From Here
Identified world terrestrial cobalt resources are about 25 million tons. The vast majority of these resources are in sediment-hosted stratiform copper deposits in Congo (Kinshasa) and Zambia; nickel-bearing laterite deposits in Australia and nearby island countries and Cuba; and magmatic nickel-copper sulfide deposits hosted in mafic and ultramafic rocks in Australia, Canada, Russia, and the United States. More than 120 million tons of cobalt resources have been identified in polymetallic nodules and crusts on the floor of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans.USGS
The USGS estimates the current global cobalt reserves to be 8,300,000 tonnes. Trajectory D would burn through the global cobalt reserves by the end of this decade. At the 2035 rate of 2,700,000 tonnes/year, Trajectory D would eat up the entire terrestrial resource in less than a decade.
Although the nodules appear in various places around the deep ocean, the primary target of potential mining is the Pacific’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a 5,000-kilometer stretch of seafloor between Hawaii and California that extends 4,000–5,500 meters deep. The CCZ hosts trillions of mineral-rich nodules.
The Clarion-Clipperton Zone spans approximately 4,500,000 square kilometers. Credit: Horizon, CC BY 4.0
Reaching the nodules involves a three-stage process: First, a support ship lowers a remotely operated vehicle to the seafloor. Next, the vehicle—like a Roomba vacuum for seafloor mining—drives around through the soft sediments scooping up nodules. Last, a large pipe sucks the nodules to the ship above. Cobalt, copper, iron, manganese, and nickel can then be extracted from the nodules during onshore processing and refining.
A dozen European and Asian countries and several island nations have sponsored companies for exploration permits so far. The United States cannot apply for permitting through ISA because it has not ratified the treaty that presides over it, the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. However, a subsidiary of the U.K. arm of the American company Lockheed Martin, UK Seabed Resources, has two permits for exploratory mining.
No need to worry about environmental issues… Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. I wonder how many opponents of offshore oil & gas drilling will be all for deep-sea mining?
Are You Psyched Up for Asteroid Mining?
Opportunities in Asteroid Mining
Generally, asteroid mining remains hypothetical, mostly because of its exorbitant cost. While specific estimates of the cost of commercial mining remain unclear, similarities can be drawn between such programs and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which seeks to obtain samples from a near-earth asteroid named Bennu. Despite only being projected to return between 400 grams and 1 kilogram of material, the mission is projected to take 7 years and cost over US$1 billion. Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries were unable to finance themselves to meet such high development costs. Both companies were acquired by other businesses in 2018 and 2019, respectively.
Despite the high price tag, the development of asteroid mining technology may very well be a worthwhile endeavor due to the extremely valuable resources that asteroids have to offer. For example, Asterank, which measures the potential value of over 6,000 asteroids that NASA currently tracks, has determined that mining just the top 10 most cost-effective asteroids–that is, those that are both closest to Earth and greatest in value–would produce a profit of around US$1.5 trillion. There is also great potential for further expansion. One asteroid, 16 Psyche, has been reported to contain US$700 quintillion worth of gold, enough for every person on earth to receive about US$93 billion.Harvard International Review
Maybe the Psyche mission will save the day. Although, recent work indicates that the mineral treasure trove might be less than originally thought.
Better start rounding up the world’s best deep core drillers.
Texas has seen a host of oil and gas related records recently, the Texas Oil & Gas Association’s (TXOGA) latest monthly energy economic analysis, which is prepared by the organization’s Chief Economist Dean Foreman, pointed out.
In the analysis, TXOGA estimated that, for the month of September, Texas saw its highest crude oil production rate ever, at 5.9 million barrels per day, and its highest natural gas production gross withdrawal figure ever, at 34.6 billion cubic feet per day.
When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, it sent a tsunami racing around the world and set off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice. The underwater eruption in the South Pacific Ocean also blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.
This looping video shows an umbrella cloud generated by the underwater eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on Jan. 15, 2022. The GOES-17 satellite captured the series of images that also show crescent-shaped shock waves and lightning strikes. u003cstrongu003eCredits: NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens using GOES imagery courtesy of NOAA and NESDISu003c/strongu003e
New study shows Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha’apai eruption depleted ozone layer
A large team of atmospheric specialists has found that when the Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha’apai volcano erupted last year, it took part of the ozone layer with it. Their findings are published in the journal Science.
Prior research has shown that the Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha’apai eruption was one of the more powerful explosions ever recorded. It was also unique in that instead of spewing just volcanic material, dirt and rocks, it also sent a very large amount of ocean water into the atmosphere. In this new effort, the research team have found that all that saltwater reacting with other chemicals in the atmosphere, resulted in breaking down O3 in the ozone layer.
To learn more about the impact of the eruption, the researchers sent balloons with sensors into the atmosphere from nearby Réunion Island just five days after the volcano erupted. In studying the data from the sensors, the researchers found that ozone levels in the plume were approximately 30% below normal levels.
As the balloons continued to monitor the plume as it floated across the Indian and then Pacific Ocean, they found depletion totals of approximately 5%. The depletion, they found was due to ocean water reacting with molecules in the atmosphere that contained chlorine, leading to a breakdown of ozone—in amounts that had never been seen before in such a short time.
The research team from Université de La Réunion, working with colleagues from the NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory, the University of Colorado, St. Edward’s University, the University of Houston, the Finnish Meteorological Institute, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and California Institute of Technology, notes that a 5% reduction in the ozone layer is not alarming both because it was localized and because in real-world terms, it was not that much. They note that the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica sees a 60% depletion toward the end of every year.
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