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points by KellyCriterion 1 day ago | 0 comments

Just imagine:

ALL the money that flew into "Fossil & Co" throughout the last, lets say, 50 or 60 years, including all implicit fundings, like state-building-streets or universities-masters-engineering-focus-ICE, all the money for lobbying, all the money for all the (counter)campaigns (from ALL sides), and all that money....

...WHAT IF we would have spent all of this money instead on Battery Research and all this Renewable Energy stuff?

Where would we be today on techdev curve? ;-) ;-)

[–] eugenekay 1 day ago

We would probably be dramatically farther behind in the Materials Research conducted by the chemical companies underlying the fossil fuels industry, which has itself been necessary to the improvements in battery & semiconductor technologies we are now enjoying. Polyimides don’t invent themselves!

“What If?” history is fun, but there are always Tradeoffs.

[–] KellyCriterion 1 day ago

So, Material Science research progress wouldnt have been possible without burning all the stuff for decades in all types of combustion engines? :-D

[–] eugenekay 1 day ago

Where do you think the fancy metallurgy for a modern combustion engine came from?

[–] actionfromafar 1 day ago

Is the oil industry the secret benefactor of more breakthroughs? That’s some steelmanning.

[–] eugenekay 1 day ago

You have it entirely backwards: Oil is refined to create feedstock chemicals for everything from beauty creams to jet engine ceramics to lithography intermediates to hydrogenated oils and decaffeinated coffee. It is these new and inventive uses which have continuously increased demand for the raw resources and driven research.

[–] fpoling 1 day ago

Since WWII where Germans mastered production of fuel from coal oil is not necessary for feedstock. China is ramping up using coal to produce methanol and other precursors for its chemistry industry. Then Teraform startup managed to produce methanol via CO2 capture from atmosphere using solar batteries.

So in alternative world where oil would not be available coal will serve its role. The only big difference would be less geopolitical tensions as coal is much more evenly distributed.

And in yet another alternative where even coal is not available something like modern civilization will still be possible but the path to it will be entirely different.

[–] adrian_b 22 hours ago

Already tens of thousands of years before learning to use fossil coal, humans learned how to make charcoal from wood.

This can be considered as the first method for extracting an almost pure chemical element from its compounds.

While in the beginning charcoal was used mainly for non-essential activities, like drawing, eventually charcoal was the reducing agent required for smelting metals from their minerals, first lead, then copper, then many others. Without charcoal, humans would have remained in the "stone age".

Without fossil coal, anything that is made from coal can be made from charcoal, except that this requires a lot of additional energy (for making first the charcoal; but with modern technology it is not necessary to pass through charcoal; carbon dioxide can be reduced to substances like methanol or formaldehyde or passing through syngas to hydrocarbons, which can feed other chemical processes).

[–] logicallee 1 day ago

Hard to imagine being farther behind than a static page with no services.

[–] chubs 1 day ago

I'd love to see a 'manhattan project' to get off of oil, in any way possible eg batteries or algae-produced diesel, whatever works, for geopolitical purposes.

[–] shrubble 1 day ago

This was the original mission of the Department of Energy…

[–] contingencies 1 day ago

In a very concrete way China has basically been running it. It's given us EVs, a massive PV cost reduction, cheap hydropower, cheap wind power, lots of battery cost reductions, and perhaps even enhanced competitiveness in the nuclear market. Also modern high speed rail which is readily fueled by non-ICE methods.

[–] rpmisms 1 day ago

Algae diesel would be amazing.

[–] dnautics 1 day ago

Honestly not really. Insolation energy is not that high, and photosynthesis tops out at around 10% under best conditions, and that's energy out the end of photosystem (solar cells are pushing 30% and perovskite might go to 40 or 50%), so doesn't take into account inefficiency in your sugar (much less hydrocarbon) conversio. The care and feeding of algae is annoying, they grow really slowly so contamination is a constant problem, and they self-shade, so the suface area to volume of growth conditions must be high. And a high surface area means awful evap problems... The list goes on

[–] rpmisms 17 hours ago

None of those things change the fact that you're growing your own diesel, which is really cool

[–] dnautics 16 hours ago

if you want that sort of biofuel you would be better off creating a carbon fixing (non-cyano) bacterium and connecting it directly to current coming off of solar panels.

[–] bawolff 1 day ago

Well we could just use the original manhattan project. Nuclear works, it is just expensive.

[–] d_silin 1 day ago

Exactly the same as today.

Ungodly amount of money was spent on battery research since 1945, at least $100-150B since 2000 alone. Every combination of anode, cathode and electrolyte was tried, tested and evaluated. We got silver-zinc, Ni-Cd, NiMH and finally Li-Ion batteries as the result.

[–] KellyCriterion 1 day ago

Do you have some links or stats here?

[–] d_silin 1 day ago

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RS22858

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-rise-of-lithium-ion-bat...

Early Li-ion battery tech was developed by none other than Exxon itself (in second link)

[–] KellyCriterion 17 hours ago

So there wont be never any progress in that field if we pour hundreds of billions per decade into research of this field instead of sending it to the middle east and buying oil?

I cant believe this esp. since CATL is reporting on a regular base new innovations. Im a layman here but if I think about the 3-digit amount of USD that Europe alone is spending on imports of oil, it seems unlikely that this money couldnt be spent on research batteries?

Same with solar: 20 years ago, 1 Wp was about 3-5 EUR, today its 7ct. This wouldnt have been possible if research wouldnt have been massivly accelerted.

[–] d_silin 15 hours ago

There will be progress, but progress vs money relation is non-linear. Low-hanging fruits got picked early, so dumping another $100B might bring zero results or only small improvments.

Dramatic improvements in battery capacity and durability require big material science breakthrough and those may come from unexpected directions (i.e. optimizing ICE engines, as mentioned.)

[–] GuB-42 1 day ago

We would have inefficient and polluting engines, leaded gasoline, steam engines burning coal, no high performance plastics, and probably more even wars around oil and gas and slower economy leading to less resource to fund battery research...

I mean, batteries and solar panels are cool, but thinking about the future doesn't mean we should forget the present. The advance we could have gotten by diverting funding away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and batteries is to balance with the damage caused by using outdated fossil fuel technology before the transition.

Cities are breathable now thanks to all the progresses modern engines have made. They will be even more breathable with zero emission cars, but I prefer to wait a bit more in these conditions than waiting a bit less in a smog filled city.

[–] KellyCriterion 1 day ago

So progress is in burning fossils because otherwise we cant >get it<?

[–] GuB-42 1 day ago

Progress is in doing more work with less impact. Burning fossils more efficiently and burning less of them because we have an alternative are both progress.

[–] cyberax 1 day ago

We might have shaven off ~10 years from the current timeline.

Batteries are only a part of the equation. Practical EVs were enabled not just by Li-ion batteries but by IGBTs. And semiconductor development moved about as fast as possible.

And then there's a gulf between lead-acid batteries and Li-ions. I think only NiMH batteries would have been a reasonable midpoint, and even they would have been impractical for full EVs.