Suppose we had an ample source of cheap, clean, reliable electric power. How much would we need to provide all the world’s energy needs? In which use sectors, such as surface transportation, shipping, building heating, industry, residences?
Let’s try to find out how much power we use now, and which sectors use it.
90% of world energy comes from burning oil, coal, and natural gas. “Primary direct” energy consumption is thermal energy, the energy released by burning oil, coal, and gas. The top fine print emphasizes the difference between thermal energy and useful energy, such as electricity.
This graph comes from OurWorldInData.org, which is a great source for much global information. It includes tables, charts, animations, raw data, and references. Click on it for more details.
I’ve labeled oil, coal, and gas power in red, in gigawatts, thermal. The other energy sources in red are in gigawatts, electric. One watt(e) is roughly three times as valuable as one watt(t).
The vertical scale labels are TWh, terrawatt-hours; there is an assumption that these are annual energy consumptions. They really should be labeled TWh/year to represent power. Many different energy units are used in energy industries.
In these scrolls we’ll convert varying energy measures to power — energy per unit time. This simplifies comparison and helps memory. To help memory, most numbers will be rounded to only 1 or 2 significant digits. So 53,620 TWh/year from burning oil is 6,200 GW(t). A typical big power plant generates roughly 1 GW(e); this can help your mental imagery.
At the bottom of the chart, the hydropower, wind, and solar sources generate useful (electric) power directly, so it’s not fair to compare these directly to thermal power sources such as oil, gas, or coal. Typical electric/thermal conversion efficiencies are ~33%. Sometimes there are implicit adjustments in published comparative data, but not here.
Usually nuclear power plant generation power is published as MW(e) of the useful electric power, not the thermal power created by fission and converted to electric power.
Note that nuclear power generation exceeds wind and solar combined.
To convert terawatt-hours/year to gigawatts, remember giga means 1,000,000,000 and tera means 1,000,000,000,000. Also use the fact that a year is about 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 seconds.
Have Google do this for you by typing “50,000 TWh/year in gigawatts”. Google can help with many sorts of units conversions, like “$1 in euros”.
World power consumption is ~ 19,000 GW(t). This chart is from BP’s annual publication. It’s in another energy unit, exajoules. One exajoule is 1,000 petajoules. One petajoule is 1,000 gigajoules. 1 exajoule is roughly 1 quadrillion BTUs, yet another energy unit. Here we express everything in power units, multiples of watts, joules/sec.
It’s not clear whether the orange renewables band at the top is expressed in useful energy units or has been up-adjusted to comparative thermal energy units, but it doesn’t matter much for our purposes.
The Our World in Data data showed ~ 16,000 GW(t) from oil, gas, and coal, plus ~ 1,000 GW(e) from hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, etc. If we multiple the latter by the value factor of 3X, the total is roughly 19,000 GW(t), consistent with this BP data.
Our objective is to understand the approximate power consumption of civilization on earth; it’s about 19,000 GW(t).
The object here is to appreciate the relative magnitudes of electricity uses. These two graphs are in units of energy per year. On the left graph, note the dominance of developing nations both in the amount and growth of electricity use. On the right is the US Energy Information Agency projection of use by sector, in order:
- Industrial
- Residential
- Commercial
- Transportation
This is just for electricity consumption doing business as usual. To electrify everything we first need to understand the total energy consumed.
The industrial sector is by far the largest consumer of thermal energy, led by making steel and cement. Transportation and industry seem responsible for 80% of thermal energy use.
The US EIA world use projection is in quadrillion BTU per year thermal units. On the right, 2018 energy flows are expressed as power in GW, rounded for simplicity.
The International Energy Agency is an international membership of ministers of energy of OECD nations. It reports on and forecasts global energy use. It promotes its Sustainable Development Scenario as a method to reduce CO2 emissions. The chart above compares energy uses and sources for 2019 (column 3), for 2070 sustainable develop scenario (column 5), and for the stated energy policies of nations (column 6). You can download their report here after registering.
These projections are in units of MTOE, the thermal energy from burning one million tonnes of oil Tonne is 1000 kg, about 10% more than a US short ton (2000 pounds). Interesting numbers are converted to GW and displayed in red.
13,800 GW(t) is world power consumption for 2019. In this EIA report, the components Industry, Transportation, and Buildings have similar power consumptions, in contrast to the previous slide prepared by US EIA.
2,600 GW(e) of electricity is a bit less than the 3,000 GW I anticipated for 2020. Other lines in this table are in GW(t), so IEA is guilty of adding apples and oranges.
19,000 GW(t) is EIA’s projection for primary, thermal energy in 2070 in the stated-policy (business as usual?) scenario, but they feel that total energy demand can be reduced to 12,600 GW, burning some fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage and increasing electric power use to 6,000 GW(e).
In summary, EIA’s ~ 14,000 GW of world power consumption is consistent with US DOE 15,000 GW.
Stanford professor Mark Jacobson has tried to model world energy supplied exclusively by water, wind, and solar sources. His popular writing estimates current world power at 16,519 GW(t), a bit more than IEA (14,000 GW(t)) or US EIA (15,000 GW(t)).
Jacobson’s model requires ~ 12,000 GW(e) from WWS sources. EIA’s model uses 6,000 GW(e), but also includes fossil fuel combustion and carbon capture and storage.
Carbon capture and storage is not practical. CO2 injection has been used to pump oil up from depleting oil fields, has never worked at utility scale, and will likely leak back into the atmosphere. It’s attractive to oil companies, airlines, and vehicle drivers because it holds out a vague promise that the world can continue to burn petroleum indefinitely by capturing the CO2 from power plants and from air then storing it underground or undersea.
Let’s take 12,000 GW(e) as a target, understanding that this does not include demand growth as developing nations begin to prosper.
An earlier 2017 Hargraves/Uhlik estimate of 9,000 GW to power up the world with electricity was a bit lower than Jacobson’s.
How might we substitute 12,000 GW for the power we generate today by burning fossil fuels, emitting CO2?
This chart from Our World In Data shows China annually emitting > 7.5 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2, the US > 5 Gt, and Russia > 1 Gt.
Look again at the IPCC Gap Report chart on the left. The vertical scale starts at 20 Gt/year, so the chart is moved up so zero aligns with the right side. Note that the 2°C scenario and 1.5°C scenario do not reduce CO2 emissions to zero. What if we zero all CO2 emissions?
For example, the blue triangle hypotenuse plots a steady decrease of CO2 emissions from 50 Gt/year to zero over 30 years. The area of the triangle is the total 750 Gt of CO2 that would be emitted during that 30-year downturn. Even that rapid downturn would accumulate 150 more ppm (parts per million) of CO2 in the globe’s 5,000,000 Gt of atmosphere.
Climate scientists say doubling CO2 adds ~ 3°C. Adding 150 ppm to the existing 400 ppm of CO2 in the air predicts warming of ~ 1°C. Reducing CO2 more slowly, over 60 years, would double CO2 additions, leading to 2°C warming.
Global warming is a difficult problem needing a timely solution.
Unfortunately, the world is not reducing CO2 emissions, but increasing them. Media headlines present an impression of progress in electric cars, cheaper batteries, off-shore wind farms, cheap solar panels, closing coal-fired plants. Here’s the US EIA projection, expecting a global increase of about 1% per year.
Even though the US and EU slowly reduce CO2 emissions, China and India, the world’s largest nations, are increasing them. Both nations argue that most of the existing 400 ppm of atmospheric CO2 was deposited in the air by US and EU emissions. They say it is unfair to restrict the economic growth of developing nations, when the US and EU built their economies with the cheap energy of burning fossil fuels. The unfairness is even more extreme on a per capita basis.
This Science article deals with the hard-to-reduce CO2 emissions.
- 5% Iron and steel
- 4% Cement
- 3% Shipping
- 2% Aviation
- 1% Heavy trucking
The Science article classifies the 12% load-following electricity as a hard problem. Actually thiis is a false issue created by expectations that wind and solar will be major energy sources. It is exemplified by the California “duck curve” describing daily power generation.
As more solar power generation capacity was added in California, electricity generation from dispatchable gas, coal, and fission plants is now cut back daily when the wind blows or sun shines. When the sun begins to set as people return home and use more electricity, the controllable power plants are ordered to produce more power. Consequently such dispatchable power sources are now powered up and down more rapidly and more extremely, reducing power plant lifetimes caused by material stress and creep from thermal shock.
The duck curve also reduces revenue needed to pay back capital investment. Fission power plants pay little for fuel; their costs are largely fixed capital depreciation recovered by selling kWh of energy. Using them to back up intermittent wind and solar sources is economically disasterous. For example, using such a plant at 45% capacity factor rather than 90% cuts revenues in half, making fission plants uneconomical or forcing per kWh prices to double.
Thus the 4.0 Gt-CO2 per year load-following electricity problem is an artifice created by assumptions of use of wind and solar power sources. Not only is reliable fission power a cheaper power solution than intermittent wind and solar power, using this fixed-cost fission power source wipes away the artificially large, difficult-to-eliminate load-following power problem. The duck curve load also increases CO2 emissions by operating high-efficiency, combined cycle natural gas (CCNG) generators inefficiently when ramping power up an down.
Customer demand variation will cause some need for load-following electricity generation.
Modern fission power plants can indeed load-follow changes in customer power demand throughout the day.
The Science article also presents hard-to-decarbonize sectors expressed in gigatonnes of CO2 emissions. With cheap, fixed cost fission power rather than intermittent solar we’ve eliminated the duck curve, the largest (12%) problem presented in this article, but we still have the difficult issues of eliminating CO2 emissions from these percentages of world power use.
- 5% Iron and steel
- 4% Cement
- 3% Shipping
- 2% Aviation
- 1% Heavy trucking
World Resources Institute published this detailed Sankey chart of energy flows in this chart of CO2 emissions sources. This is an approximation. Categories like “Electricity and Heat” are too gross to be very helpful.
World Resources Institute has much detailed data. The left hand column denotes emissions percentages, not proportional energy use.
Here’s another simple representation of energy use. Transportation and industry account for half of all thermal energy use, and buildings 13%. This graphic roughly matches US EIA estimates below.
In this EIA chart, US primary thermal energy flows to energy application. By primary energy, EIA means the 9% that is heat in the nuclear electric power plant, not the electricity output. Wind and solar (11% renewable) generate final energy directly, so they are scaled up by a factor of ~3 for comparison purposes.
These percentages are for the US only, but they’re probably similar to world-wide use of energy. Transportation and industry total 51%, says EIA for 2017.
We’ll examine how to use electricity for transportation, industry, and buildings (residential and commercial). Liquid fission power can provide the electric power.
Of course electricity has an end use, too, and for 2019 the EIA shows more details. The electrical system energy losses of 65% are the rejected heat from thermal to electric power conversion.
Mark Z Jacobson and his group at Stanford put together a detailed model of powering up 139 countries with water, wind, and solar energy sources. Many green environmentalists claimed it to be proof that 100% renewables would solve the climate/energy crisis. It provided academic support for the Green New Deal.
Jacobson’s WWS paper was subsequently refuted by 21 leading scientists. Without precedent, Jacobson shocked academia and sued the authors of the published critique for libel. Eventually he withdrew the suit.
Jacobson’s WWS strategy had many attractive benefits.
The published critique showed the falacies of features such as WWS reliance on more hydro power than could be marshaled. Battery storage costs assumptions were way too low.
The capital spending of $125 trillion isn’t just about money. Such spending would divert massive amounts of society’s labor and earth’s resources. For example, China has a gross industrial product of $4.5 trillion per year, the largest of any country in the world. Implementing the WWS strategy is equivalent to diverting all of China’s industry to WWS construction for 28 years.
Jacobson’s WWS 100% renewables strategy won’t work.
David MacKay, the late scientific advisor to the UK government warned at his death that “powering the UK with 100% renewables was an appalling delusion”.
The International Energy Association is also developing a climate/energy strategy. Here are comments on their 5 strategic principles.
1. Transforming the (electric) power sector with advanced fission power would indeed (not “only”) solve one-third of the problem.
2. Using emission-free electricity in more ways is clearly useful.
3. Hydrogen is a vehicle to make electricity’s energy more portable, and also a feedstock used in industrial processes.
4. Carbon capture at utility scale has not been successful and is expensive. Raising biomass for energy takes away cropland used for food production and depletes minerals from soils.
5. Indeed, heavy trucking, air transport, and heavy industry are the most difficult sectors to electrify.
IEA uses the word power to mean electric power. The scale is Gt-CO2 per year. Note IEA strategy expects negative emissions beyond 2055.
The IEA strategy posits hydrogen production from three sources.
1) The lavender boxes denote H2 production from natural gas (methane, CH4) releasing CO2 (steam methane reforming, SMR).
2) The light lavender boxes assume carbon capture and storage keeps the CO2 from entering the atmosphere.
3) The rose boxes denote hydrogen from using electricity to split water (H2O) into H2 and O2 (discarded); half the hydrogen is produced by electrolysis, half by SMR.
This scroll presentation will model all hydrogen being produced from electrolysis using modern liquid fission power plants for electricity.
Altogether the IEA strategy projects consuming hydrogen with the energy of 1500 million tonnes of oil per year. This is about 2,000 GW(t).
Zooming in shows hydrogen for synfuels. labeled in GW rather than mtoe/year. We’ll use IEA’s strategy to provide us with estimates of the end uses of the hydrogen.
IEA strategy expects that most ammonia (NH3) production will continue from methane steam reforming, adding equipment to capture and store CO2 underground.
Synthetic kerosene (jet fuel, diesel, gasoline) production uses hydrogen, but also requires a “climate-neutral” source for carbon, implicitly biomass.
Direct use of using hydrogen instead of natural gas for turbines to generate 214 Mtoe/year of electric power is silly. Why convert electricity to hydrogen to electricity? Just send the electricity via the electric transmission system and avoid conversion losses. Direct use of hydrogen for building heating would be less energy efficient than simple resistance heating with the needed electricity from the grid.
If we substitute synfuels for gasoline and diesel there is no need for 22 Mtoe of hydrogen used by refineries to manufacture these fuels from crude oil.
Lucid Catalyst has recently completed a study of using advanced fission power and electrolysis to manufacture hydrogen economically.
The report finds that high temperature electrolysis (steam electrolysis) can convert electric energy to the thermal potential energy of hydrogen with 95% efficiency about a decade from now. If the electricity is cheap enough, this hydrogen can compete with hydrogen from steam methane reforming.
Hydrogen production will be covered in more detail in the Hydrogen scroll presentation.
We’re trying to develop a strategy as simple as this for electrifying the world.
Here’s one suggested basis for a strategy, starting with this detailed Super Sankey chart of US energy flows. It shows 2018 energy flows, but though amazing it’s too detailed for strategy.
You can even zoom in to see and select minute details, at energyliteracy.com.
Yet another strategy is proposed by the Energy Transitions Commission, with some leadership by Rocky Mountain Institute and Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Their report nicely quantifies energy use by sectors, in exajoules (EJ) per year.
2,500 GWt of power comes from burning fossil fuels, compared to current use of 16,000 GW(t). ETC expects that the CO2 emissions from 2,500 GW(t) of power sources will be captured and stored forever.
1,500 GWt will come from biomass, using significant cropland that can produce food.
9,000 GWe of electricity is expected to come from intermittent wind and solar sources.
1,300 GWt of power flows through the hydrogen intermediate, used as fuel, feedstock for synfuels, and chemical reducing agents. The prior IEA strategy projected 2000 GW(t), in the same ballpark, useful for strategic estimates.
The right hand column quantifies ETC strategy power by end-use sectors. Those guide the grand strategy.
Electrify everything! We now have enough information to propose a grand energy strategy, based on electricity from fission.
SECTORS
Transportation is already being electrified for light, battery-operated vehicles and electric trains. Shipping can use fission-powered ships or ammonia synfuels. Batteries become inefficiently massive for heavy transport, so hydrogen or ammonia fuels are feasible.
Heating and cooling buildings efficiently requires good insulation and building codes. Heat pumps and even resistance heating can be economic. Buildings can be heated with heat from nearby fission power plants.
Electrifying industry will require new processes for metals refining, cement sintering, etc.
KEY TECHNOLOGIES
Liquid fission technology uses thorium and uranium fuel dissolved in hot, liquid salt, described in the next scroll.
Hydrogen is not a primary energy source but an intermediate energy carrier; efficient high temperature electrolysis makes hydrogen economic.
Ammonia can be a fuel with no carbon; its formula NH3 shows it can be made from air and water.
Shipyard manufacturing enables economic, rapid, mass production of power plants and factories.
Fission energy grand strategy proposes these power flows to Electrify Our World.
12,000 GW of electricity from liquid fission powers the world. See the Mass produced fission power plants scroll.
Biomass is essential for food, but some is taken to make limited quantities of carbonaceous C-synfuels for airplanes, which need lightweight, high-energy, concentrated fuel.
3,000 GW of hydrogen is an potential intermediary for powering the end use sectors on the right hand side. The arrows under the cyan box symbolize that power may flow through or bypass the hydrogen intermediary, depending on economics. For example, medium size trucks might be powered with either batteries or hydrogen fuel. See the Hydrogen scroll.
700 GW of ammonia (NH3) is fertilizer empowering food growth and ammonia is also fuel for shipping and perhaps heavy transport. See the Ammonia scroll
These GW power numbers are rough approximations, subject to changes in technologies, efficiencies, specific economics, and sector demands. Subsequent scroll presentations discuss the individual power sources and uses.
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