What Happened? Green New Deal? European Gas Price Surge Prompts Switch to Coal

Well I am not smiling over this but it is what it is. Any one hear from Greta or AOC on this? I have been using Hellenic Shipping News for over 15 years to see whats really happening out there. Yes, its also been reported out on Google. At the end of the day people need to survive and prosper. I am all for green but here's one example that makes or breaks a new trend, especially when we have adult children run the table on world issues. One way of doing so is replacing the Coal with Hydrogen Plants to generate electricity. Too costly? Bull sheep! It can be done and it is quite green. Just keep the ass holes out of the picture as in so whom pays these people?

'Reminisce nt of Jan. 6': Violent protesters arrested after storming Interior Department, injuring officers

Folks believe me this will turn out for the better. Electric Cars and Hydrogen powered Trains, Planes and Boats. The Earth has the elements and all of this will be better.

My former company Air Products & Chemicals is building a Hydrogen Plant in Saudi Arabia.

U.S. Air Products & Chemicals announces 4GW green hydrogen project with Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power

Here's the Hellenic Link:

Switch to Coal

Soaring European wholesale gas prices are encouraging more utilities to switch to carbon-heavy coal to generate electricity just as the region tries to wean nations off the polluting fuel. Although European coal and carbon prices have also jumped in recent months, they have lagged the spike in gas prices, causing short-term marginal costs to shift in favour of using coal to generate electricity. Benchmark carbon permit prices under the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) have almost doubled since the start of the year while European coal futures are more than twice as high. Wholesale Dutch gas prices, however, are almost four times higher than at the start of 2021. Ahead of the next round of United Nations climate talks in Scotland in November, the EU has been encouraging other big polluters to commit to more ambitious climate targets and move away from coal-fired power.

If there's anything anywhere that will trigger and set off the biggest and worst economic upheaval in World History, it's the Green Deals currently being implemented 🤣🤣

One itsy bitsy micromanaged mistake and it's KABOOM 🤣🤣

a reply to: Waterglass

Apparently they're not listening to 'the science'.
They must not have heard Herman Munster's plan to save the Earth.

originally posted by: Waterglass
One way of doing so is replacing the Coal with Hydrogen Plants to generate electricity. Too costly? Bull sheep! It can be done and it is quite green.

As your Hellenic link talks about, it's minor changes in the pricing of various alternatives that drives the shift to alternatives, so economics do matter. Whether it's too costly at present or not remains to be seen, and depends partly on further flucutations in costs of alternatives. But fossil fuels are limited and thus prices have to go up eventually (or continue to rise), and as they go up the greener alternatives will become economically more viable.

My former company Air Products & Chemicals is building a Hydrogen Plant in Saudi Arabia.

That's nice to see, I hope they are very successful. It sounds like they plan on producing more ammonia as a means of shipping the hydrogen to global markets. This also requires economical ways of getting the hydrogen back out of the ammonia. This article says ammonia can be burned in internal combustion engines, though it seems like those engines are still in development:

Ammonia Internal Combustion Engine
If the ammonia can be used in internal combustion engines, that solves the problem of having to extract, store, and distribute the low-energy-density hydrogen, but I get the impression this technology isnot really ready to go, it will take a lot more research. They are already testing an experimental tractor running a dual fuel blend of 70% diesel and 30% ammonia.

Here's the Hellenic Link:

Switch to Coal

The key point seems to be that changing prices of alternatives can shift demand to the less expensive alternatives. This will continue to be an issue as long as the greener alternatives have marginal economics, but, someday the economics of greener alternatives will work out, as fossil fuel prices go up more and more.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

But fossil fuels are limited and thus prices have to go up eventually (or continue to rise), and as they go up the greener alternatives will become economically more viable.

This is probably the thing I've ever disagreed with you on here, what studies show they are limited?

We constantly find new reservoirs with expansive natural and crude resources, and the current ones being pumped are not running dry. Peak oil is not real.

Funny how when so many of the “old dry wells” get another look see they are full of oil and gas again.
Imagine that….
Hydrogen? LOL
One Word…. Hindenburg 😆😆😆

Representatives from nearly 200 countries will meet in Glasgow, Scotland, from Oct. 31-Nov. 12 for climate talks to strengthen action to tackle global warming under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

A U.N. analysis of new or revised NDCs submitted by the end of July found that by 2030, those 113 countries would together lower their emissions by 12% from 2010 levels.

But the available NDCs of all 191 parties of the Paris Agreement combined equate to a 16% increase in greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 compared to 2010, it said.

link

I'm being to think these guys just like the party lifestyle in places like Glasgow and "climate change" is the perfect excuse to use other people's money to have it.

Everyone here that's been here long enough probably pegs me already for being Green-supportive, which I absolutely am, but make no mistake:

We cannot do it overnight, AND for the current crop of people that will die off in the next 20-50 years? We won't see it as normal daily energy sources that replaced the dino methods before we kick it, I betcha.


I figure at our rate of scientific growth, plus our worldwide human penchant for #ing up our plans for anything along the way, maybe in a century this will produce more than a minority of power.

But not before then.

We're in Functional Green Infancy here, and it's a slow phase. We don't know how to utilize other resources, with the least waste and pollution, anywhere close enough to be a done deal yet. Baby steps and learning, we dislike both. But we HAVE to do both, or anyone's Green ideas are worthless pipe dreams.


Folks need to retrain themselves to think this way -- supplemental for now, not complete replacement of energy production methods. See, instant gratification sudden tech leaps never work. Not without serious drawbacks anyway, usually privacy, rights, etc. Do it right, and GET it right, or just don't bother.

NM

originally posted by: PiratesCut

Hydrogen? LOL
One Word…. Hindenburg 😆😆😆

Uhhhh…The big blimp burned up in a frenzy from the extremely flammable fabric, dope and paint it used on its outer structure. Although the hydrogen didn’t help.

Heating oil in the states is going up. I’m just going to plug my solar panels and wind turbine up direct to my furnace.

originally posted by: Vector99
a reply to: Arbitrageur

But fossil fuels are limited and thus prices have to go up eventually (or continue to rise), and as they go up the greener alternatives will become economically more viable.

This is probably the thing I've ever disagreed with you on here, what studies show they are limited?

We constantly find new reservoirs with expansive natural and crude resources, and the current ones being pumped are not running dry. Peak oil is not real.

There are two questions we can ask:

Are the supplies of fossil fuels limited?
Do we know the limited amounts?

The answer to the first question is clearly yes.
Your comments apply to the second question which infer we don't know exactly what the limits are, which I don't think anybody would argue with. We can discover new resources that were previously unknown, and we can figure out ways to squeeze more out of already known reserves (such as with the use of fracking). Then there are some reserves that are only economically viable once the price gets high enough since extraction of the reserves is expensive. Here's an interesting article discussing some ofthe uncertainties involved in the second question:

How long before we run out of fossil fuels?
In addition to the uncertainties of the amounts of fossil fuels, that article also raises the question of whether we should even use the known reserves, or leave them in the ground. If we use them without a way to re-sequester the carbon, history may repeat itself, to the state when Greenland was a tropical paradise instead of being covered by a giant ice sheet.

...whilst many worry about the possibility of fossil fuels running out, it is instead expected that we will have to leave between 65 to 80 percent of current known reserves untouched if we are to stand a chance of keeping average global temperature rise below our two-degrees global target.

So from that perspective, if we want to limit the temperature increase of the planet, the exact amount of fossil fuel reserves still left in the ground may not be the limiting factor anyway, since we may end up leaving some of them in the ground (though I suspect it's more likely we will keep using them until the green alternatives become the more economical alternative).

The earth itself is basically a rock orbiting the sun. Some smaller rocks and dust fall to the earth but they generally are not composed of fossil fuels, so whatever we have is what was made with an origin in photosynthesis by plants and by animals who ate the plants. We can even see the plant fossils in coal. This link explains the origins of fossil fuels if you don't know the origin:

Fossil fuels