40 | http://www.nationalreview.com MARCH 23 , 2020t e c h n o l o g y s e c t i o nare no cost/performance curves for EV
innovation that can remotely replicate
either the performance gains or the veloc-
ity of market adoption seen in the digital
world. And when the number of EVs in
the world does increase by a hundredfold
from today, such an outcome, arithmeti-
cally, eliminates less than 10 percent of
global petroleum use. That’s a meaningful
impact, but it’s not a revolution.
This reality often elicits the response
that “if we can put a man on the moon,
surely we can.. .” But transforming the
scale of the energy economy isn’t like
putting a few people on the moon a few
times. It is like putting all of humanity on
the moon—permanently. In other words,
society-scale physical systems have, to
use a physics term, a lot of inertia. Making
big changes in enormous systems takes a
very long time. The scales are hard to
visualize, but we can try.
The world’s economies today use near-
ly 90 billion barrels of hydrocarbon ener-
gy per year, counted in oil-equivalent
terms. That divides up roughly in equal
shares: petroleum, natural gas, and coal.
To visualize the physical scale: If all that
energy were oil, every year it could form
a stack of barrels ten mileshigh lined up
from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.
Changing that is a heavy lift, and replac-
ing it with “clean tech” entails an even
greater physical quantity of materials.
Batteries, windmills, and solar panels
are physical systems that also require
mining and processing of minerals. Butthere’s one important distinction. Com -
pared with hydrocarbons, “clean tech-
nologies” require a three- to ten-fold
greater tonnage of stuff extracted,
processed, and assembled to deliver the
same amount of energy. The sheer quan-
tities of materials involved are stagger-
ing. A wholesale switch to “clean tech”
would be a gift to the world’s miners and
result in a radical increase in U.S. im -
ports, as America has discouraged its
mining industries for decades.
As for using batteries to store grid
power and thereby prop up wind and
solar, a sense of scale is needed here too.
The optimists at Bloomberg New Energy
Finance predict that a massive, trillion-
dollar level of grid batteries will be
installed by 2040. Even if that happened,
it would allow us to store only 15 minutes
of global energy needs.
Still, let’s stipulate the obvious. There
will be many more EVs, batteries, and
wind and solar farms in our future. Not
least because, policy aspirations aside, all
are in fact far more useful than they’ve
ever been in history. And innovations will
continually make them better. But innova-
tion will make oil and gas technologies
better, too. And the technological innova-
tions that unlocked shale oil and gas in the
U.S. are newer and still in their earlier
days of inevitable advancements.
It bears noting that, over the past
decade, innovations in the extraction of
shale oil and gas have added ten times
more energy to the U.S. supply than wind
and solar combined. As for the world,
hydrocarbons still supply 85 percent of all
energy; wind and solar, 3 percent. If we’re
looking for innovation to launch an ener-
gy transition, two things will be required:
patience and magic. Even Microsoft, in its
lengthy carbon pledge, noted that aspira-
tional energy transitions “will require
technology that does not exist today.”
Where might we find radically new ideas?
It’s no small irony, and it’s instructive,
that Stanley Whittingham, one of the
three recipients of the 2019 Nobel Prize in
Chemistry, for the lithium battery, made
his discovery while employed at Exxon’s
R&D labs in the 1970s. Many pundits
seem to think that foundational innova-
tions are available in a kind of cafeteria
line where one can pick one of these, two
of those. The reality is far more complex
and requires more faith, and funding, in
basic science, and more patience.nutshell, illustrates the stark difference
between the world of bits and the world of
atoms. Nonetheless, analogizing energy
to digital tech remains a go-to for policy-
makers and pundits. One example, from
an International Monetary Fund report:
“Smartphone substitution seemed no
more imminent in the early 2000s than
large-scale energy substitution seems to -
day.” It’s still no more imminent. Let me
explain, again with the battery.
The first commercially viable lithium
battery, circa 1985, had the capability to
store more than twice as much energy per
pound as did previous chemistry. Then,
because engineers invariably squeeze
more performance out of new technolo-
gies, the next two decades saw the energy
per pound roughly double for lithium
tech. Such progress brought us useful (if
still expensive) EVs, because miles per
pound of fuel is the defining metric for 99
percent of all transportation.
Meanwhile, in the digital world, perfor-
mance is measured in bits, not miles, per
pound of battery. Today’s smartphone
gets 1,000 times more megabits per fill-up
of a phone’s “fuel tank.” Such astounding
gains came from the ineluctable strange-
ness of software and new kinds of silicon
logic. Cars can’t follow such trends. If
they could, one EV “fuel” tank would
have a range of 300,000 miles. That won’t
ever happen in our universe.
For many eager to abandon petroleum,
300 miles per EV tank is good enough.
And it may be for a lot of people. But thereManufacturing lithium-ion batteries in a battery-research facilityMONTYRAKUSEN/GETTYIMAGES3col - TECH_QXP-1127940387.qxp 3/4/2020 1:01 AM Page 40
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