Refrigeration uses up to 30% of world electricity

Posted on May 1, 2025 by

Preface. This is a book review of Twilley’s 2024 book Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. It is a really great book, highly recommended.

Refrigeration plays a much larger role in our lives than people realize. Much of the cold chain is invisible, especially the gigantic chilled warehouses. Food spoils quickly if it isn’t chilled after harvest or slaughter all the way to the grocery store or restaurant.

Refrigeration, air-conditioning and heat pump (RACHP) equipment and systems are widely used throughout the economy, from small domestic equipment (refrigerators, air-conditioners) to very large commercial and industrial systems (warehouses, food processing).  According to current estimates, RACHP equipment represents between 25% and 30% of the global consumption of electricity (UNEP 2018). Or less: IIR (2015) estimates the refrigeration sector consumes about 17% of the overall electricity used worldwide.

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Government of Canada: Disruptions coming!

Posted on April 24, 2025 by

Preface.

Just in case you do not have enough worries, the Government of Canada has stepped in to help you out with potential future catastrophes. And there are dozens, perhaps a new one to add to your list, such as: People cannot tell what is true and what is not, Energy is inaccessible and unreliable, Biodiversity is lost and ecosystems collapse, Food is scarce, Vital natural resources are scarce, Civil war erupts in the USA,  Emergency response is overwhelmed, Cyberattacks disable critical infrastructure, Billionaires run the world, Healthcare systems collapse, Downward social mobility is the norm, Democratic systems break down, Antibiotics no longer work, Basic needs to unmet,  Infrastructure and property are uninsurable, World war breaks out, Ageing population has no support,  Homemade bioweapons go viral, Household debt reaches a tipping points,and on.

Each has been assigned a range of years for when they might happen and how likely. Since most of these are interconnected, that makes their probability of occurring even greater, creating feedback loops resulting a perfect storm.

So eat, drink, and be merry, and let the Government of Canada do the worrying for you. The U.S. government isn’t (Peter Kennedy May 23, 2025 Is strategic foresight in the US government dead?).

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CCS plants leak, catch on fire, explode, corrode, and contaminate water

Posted on April 17, 2025 by

Source: Center for Progressive reform (2024) Carbon Dioxide Leak in Decatur, IL, Demonstrates Dangerous Failure of Carbon Capture Storage and Sequestration

Preface. Clearly it is not worth spending billions of dollars to sequester CO2 “permanently” if it may leak. It’s not just bad for air pollution but water pollution as well. The underground pressurized CO2 can leak into drinking water aquifers and pollute them with heavy metals, salts, volatile organic compounds, and radionuclides like radium.

Archer Daniel Midland’s (ADM) facility in central Illinois was the first permitted commercial carbon sequestration operation in the country. It is at the forefront of a multi-billion-dollar carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry that promises to permanently sequester CO2 deep underground. In September, the public learned of a leak at ADM’s Decatur site. Additional testing turned up a second leak, raising concerns about whether more leaks are likely, whether the public has any right to know when leaks occur, and if CCS technology is really a viable climate solution. ADM kept local and state officials in the dark for months about the first leak, detected in March, five months after discovering corrosion in the tubing in the sequestration well.

Who knew these could be dangerous? I didn’t, until I read the second article below (Dela Cruz 2024), which  shows that the ASU and Amine Absorbers have the highest total number of high-severity incidents, with 16 counts each. ASUs are primarily driven by explosions and fires, while Amine Absorbers experience a mix of fires, explosions, fatalities, and material releases. Gasifiers have a high incidence of explosions, with six reported cases, underscoring the critical need for explosion prevention and control. Boilers have a moderate total number of incidents, predominantly explosions, indicating a need for stringent boiler safety protocols. The FGR, Steam Turbine, and Combustion Turbine show lower total incidents but include high-severity events such as leaks, fires, and explosions, highlighting specific areas for safety improvements.

 

This technology is key to government goals of slashing emissions and reaching climate goals. To make CCS happen, the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, has put $12 billion dollars up for grabs for new CCS projects and started a CCS gold rush (DOE 2022 Opportunities to Accelerate Deployment in Fossil Energy and Carbon Management Activities. U.S. Department of Energy).

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Peak food production happened, how will we feed 2-3 billion more?

Posted on April 10, 2025 by

pg-20-food-shortage-graphic.jpg

Preface. Also see related article Limits to Growth? 2016 United Nations report provides best evidence yet.

Nichols (2015) below shows that climate change is already affecting harvests of the world’s top 10 crops that comprise 83% of our calories: barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat. So though the article below says we’re approaching peak food, to some extent we’re already there (Deepak 2019).

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Chemical industrial farming does not work: Pests evolve immunity quickly

Posted on April 3, 2025 by

Pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides destroy soil and ecosystems. Yet a third of crops are lost to pests just as in the many millennia of farming before chemicals

Preface. This is a book review of Dyer’s “Chasing the Red Queen”, and I have added additional information and  conclusions.  This book is not technical and could be read by both high school and undergraduate students as an introduction to soil ecosystems and the damage done by agricultural chemicals, and the science of why this is ultimately not sustainable.

And here’s a new wrinkle, pesticides can increase the number of mosquitoes: Mosquitoes … have evolved resistance to chemicals meant to kill them. The mosquitoes’ predators, meanwhile, have not kept pace with that evolution—and that has allowed the mosquito population to boom. Resistance to the major groups of insecticides is widespread around the world, and especially worrying that mosquitoes are unaffected, since they spread many dangerous diseases (Weathered 2019).

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Trump & Project 2025 want to destroy energy efficiency & raise your utility bills

Posted on March 26, 2025 by

Source: (NYT 2017, LBL 2025)

The Department of energy (DOE) under Chris Wright is proposing to get rid of energy efficiency standards that have saved consumers over 1.5 trillion dollars (CFA 2017).

The average American home saves $321 a year on energy bills due to appliance and equipment energy efficiency regulations. Since 1990: Clothes washers use 70% less energy, dishwashers 40%, air conditioners 50%, furnaces 10%, and water heater standards have saved $124 billion in energy and $1800 over the life of the water heater per household (USDOE 2017).

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The only congressional hearing on Peak Oil was in 2005

Posted on March 20, 2025 by

Preface. This U.S. House hearing happened 20 years ago, but it is still a good introduction to why oil is so important to society. At this hearing scientific experts spoke, warning that we will reach peak oil within decades (which does NOT mean running out of oil, but halfway through the supply and getting too late to adapt to a different future with less energy). This hearing was highly unusual since usually only corporations with vested interests speak to promote energy schemes that they stand to profit from with government subsidies and tax breaks.

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Tom Murphy Stubborn Expectations (on population)

Posted on March 13, 2025 by
U.N.Total fertility rate projections

Preface. Tom Murphy has one of the best blogs on limits to growth, energy resources and more in his blog Do The Math. He is a professor emeritus of the departments of Physics and Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego and has a free online textbook with science and math that show why renewable and alternative replacements cannot replace fossil fuels here.

Both extremist “republicans” and liberal democrats want more babies, more growth, more Ponzi scheme births to fund SSN, Medicare, and other institutions that have to end someday because the earth can’t support a trillion people. More like half a billion people can survive without fossil fuels, and with world peak crude oil production in 2018, time is running out, we should have begun encouraging a steady state birth rate back in 1927 when the world had 2 billion people.

Or as Tom says: “Whatever happens after modernity necessarily self-terminates (one cannot choose or decide to continue a grossly unsustainable approach to life), it won’t be planned, and it probably won’t be monolithic.  Differing conditions, remnants, and cultural attitudes around the world will lead to different experiments in what to try next.  As with modernity, those practices that are not sustainable will eventually fail (possibly destroying sustainable groups along the way, as has happened plenty of times before).  Those that are able to find ecological balance (in right- or reciprocal-relationship with the community of life)—and are isolated from bad actors until those actors necessarily fail—stand a chance at longevity.  It’s not a choice, but a fact in the long term.  Only those modes of living that are sustainable in relation to the ecological whole can survive.

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NIMBY Hydrogen production

Posted on March 6, 2025 by

Preface.  Now that Trump has slashed the hydrogen budget this is not an issue, but perhaps will be again if Democrats gain power in 2028. Which is fine with me, hydrogen is the dumbest of all the proposed alternatives as I’ve written about in posts here: https://energyskeptic.com/category/energy/hydrogen/

Across America groups are opposing new hydrogen production, mainly funded by $8 billion of government hydrogen hub (H2Hubs) money. The main reasons are a lack of transparency, pollution, and that most hydrogen would cause even more drilling since it will be blue hydrogen made out of natural gas with carbon capture and storage (CCUS). CCUS requires so much water it could double the water footprint of humanity (Rosa 2021).

Water shortages are an issue at a proposed $2.5 billion-dollar electrolyzer facility near Corpus Christi and on Navajo nation land in Arizona, who also oppose a 200-mile pipeline that might rupture and explode (Keetso 2023, Kusnetz 2022, Robles 2024).

IRENA (2023) reports that 35% of future hydrogen production in the world planned by 2040 is in highly water-stressed regions.

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Can Geothermal power replace declining fossil fuels?

Posted on February 27, 2025 by

Preface. Today the electric grid stays up because of months of backup power from natural gas, coal, and uranium.  Most of all natural gas because it can quickly balance wind and solar as they suddenly appear or die out. Natural gas also provides peak power during the hottest and coldest times of the year, and ramps up as the sun goes down massively, since this happens before peak evening demand.  Geothermal power can’t provide this balance, it can only be used like coal and nuclear to provide steady baseload power.  Still, wind and solar need all the help they can get, especially in California where all of the best wind and solar sites have been built out.

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