Where has it been shown? Please show your math.
Those cities didn’t have access to important low-energy advances like composting, disposable utensils that use corn starch, the Beyond Burger, and moisture wicking fabrics. Those technologies change everything.
We make ammonia from hydrogen. The current cheapest source of hydrogen is methane (via SMR). However, the chemistry works just fine if the hydrogen comes from water electrolysis. There are, right now, people making ammonia from air and water. It does cost more.
Oil is a decreasing share of our primary energy resource consumption, and energy consumption per GDP is steadily decreasing. Petroleum is primarily used for transportation, primarily for light duty vehicle transportation, which also happens to be the easiest to electrify. Especially in denser areas.
Heavy duty transportation and aviation are beholden to liquid fuels. However, they are not beholden to petroleum. You can run a class 8 truck off of CNG, biogas, ammonia, alcohols, synthetic hydrocarbons derived from DAC + hydrolysis –> syngas –> F-T. No exotic chemistry required, just wind, solar, or nukes and know processes. Yes, it costs more than today’s cheap fuels.
But it takes energy to arrange them. If the purpose of the item was to use it as a source of energy, then using more energy to create it than you get out of consuming it is a losing game.
We’re not going to run out of energy. But we could run out of cheap energy. And a lot of our economy is based on the availability of cheap energy.
True, but there’s a big difference between “We’re going to run out of resources” and “Resources will be harder to get.” We’ll always be able to get whatever we need. It’s just going to be a bit of a challenge at first.
Yes but ammonia can be made out of the hydrogen from any fossil fuel. We can use coal or oil instead of natural gas and as was mentioned, we can use the hydrogen from water too.
According to this, the world produces about 175 million tons of ammonia a year for industrial purposes, of which about 31 million tons are hydrogen and 144 million tons are nitrogen.
Nitrogen is abundant in the atmosphere, but obtaining 31 million tons of hydrogen a year shouldn’t be that hard I would assume. There are over 1 trillion tons of proven coal reserves on earth. I don’t know what % of coal is hydrogen since coal also has nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, etc in it but even if it is only 1% hydrogen, that is 10 billion tons of hydrogen just from coal. In theory enough hydrogen to fuel ammonia production for 300 years just from coal.
I’m sure we will run out of some resources, and pollution will become a problem. But I’m not sure which resources we will run short on. And even if we do, I don’t know if we won’t just find alternatives. Helium seems to be one of the few resources we really will run short on since it escapes the atmosphere, but even with that supposedly nitrogen can be used instead for cooling in some situations.
Plus each year, the amount of financial and human capital that we can devote to solving problems grows. In 20 years we will have far better tools, more educated citizens and trillions in additional wealth (in both the public and private sectors) we can use to resolve these issues.
But as energy costs go up, more sources of energy become affordable.
I mentioned earlier we could build 300 nuclear plants for 3 trillion dollars, and that would probably replace all the fossil fuel usage in the electric grid. We’d have a system that is 80% nuclear, 20% renewable at that point. 3 trillion is a lot of money but its 15% of one year’s worth of GDP. During WW2 we were spending 40% of GDP per year on military expenditures for 3-4 years straight. 3 trillion is also roughly the net worth of the richest 400 Americans.
And nuclear is one of the most expensive ways to get energy. But unlike solar and wind it doesn’t require storage tech that isn’t advanced enough yet.