The US energy secretary says the quiet part out loud: the tributary $750 billion in energy purchases the EU has promised in its Trump deal is meant to lock Europe into “long-term” energy dependence.
This is, as it has been said several times over (including here on Lemmy if I am not mistaken), very likely unachievable.
The EU imports of U.S. energy consists currently mainly of crude oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG). The EU also buys coal from the US, mainly metallurgical coal that is used to produce steel, although volumes are quite low. (Nuclear was not mentioned in this EU-US negotiation, and even if we include refined oil into the calculation, it wouldn’t change much as US exports of refined oil to the EU add up to a number in the lower double-digit billions in 2024.)
Of these three relevant energy sources - crude oil, LNG, metallurgical coal - the EU’s total imports reached a combined value of USD 64 billion in 2024. This is some 26% of the required USD 250 billion it should now buy from the US alone.
What is more important, however, is that US exports of these three energy sources total USD 166 billion in 2024, which is 66% of the proposed volume. This means that even if the EU bought the United States’ entire export volume - and even if the US energy companies would be able to ramp up production quickly enough to meet the demand desired by Trump - it fell still short of the proposed USD 250 billion.
All analysts agree that these numbers will never show up.
Most commodities are traded as futures. One can buy billions worth of futures today, with delivery date far in the future?
I’m confused: what alternative does this protestor imagine to natural gas, to solve the seasonality and intermittency problems of wind and solar? Or are they solely argueing russian gas instead of US gas? - neither of which we have “escaped”
A lot of people seem to be ignoring the fact that natural gas isn’t only used in electricity generation, but also in industrial chemical processes, where it’s not only an energy source, but also a reagent. And replacing it in that capacity is much more difficult than replacing it in electricity generation.
It’s natural gas is often extracted with fracking that permanently poisons watersheds for these oil bosses to make a quick profit and leaving those entire communities permanently damaged, areas they never set foot in.
Yes, ideally no gas would need to be bought.
The question is what would the alternative look like?
Long-term the alternative should be running turbines off of mediums with lower boiling temperatures close to Natural temperature differences we can find to boil and cool a medium with very little extra energy. But we can’t do that because of oil.
Wait, this is an idea I’ve not heard before.
The idea would be that turbine efficiency would increase because the alternative evaporating compound, traditionally water/steam, has a lower boiling point?
Or is the idea that the lower boiling point allows for ecologically preferrable heat sources?
Yeah for instance there are ammonia boilers that boil ammonia at 80° f and cool it at 60° and take advantage of natural temperature variations to do it. With the right medium you could use this in anywhere from Antarctica to Death Valley. With the right engineering.
BESS, geothermal, and moar solar. And consider this: everything that burns fossil today and gets electrified (water boilers -> heat pumps, electric cars), is the equivalent of a source of energy if the same amount of fuel is put into high efficiency generators instead; what one gas boiler burns is enough for ~3-4 homes with heat pumps. One diesel car -> 3-4 evs. Which means we’ll need a lot less of it overall. All this without counting the costs of pollution which are astronomical since we have socialized healthcare almost everywhere in Europe.
We still have nuclear and hydro of course, but those are kinda maxed out for our geography or they cost too much to scale up.
Even in the best case scenario of oversizing production by solar and wind generation, storage requirements are very large. It’s only technically feasable with some sort of long term storage and massive interconnect investments (see 1. Section 3.6 The relevance of storage ).
But that technology doesn’t exist (yet?) beyond lab scale. Our current path of investing in solar and wind thus cements the need for fossil fuels for decades to come.
Hence the question: what future is the author arguing for?
Hydroelectricity can work. It’s really destructive for the environment, though. When you have excess solar and wind, pump some water back up behind the dam. Then make more hydroelectric power when there’s no wind.
Hydroelectricity will certainly be necessary! But sadly even that’s insufficient (1). Many people underestimate the scale of the intermittency problem, and resulting storage requirements.
There’s a need for long term storage. But sadly existing technology such as green hydrogen, syngas, compressed air… is still incredibly inefficient and/or does not scale. Until that exists, our current path of wind + solar power generation will require fossil fuels. Of those fuels, EU bet hard on gas. That was (is?) politically the most convenient in terms of price - ecological impact tradeoff.
