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Originally Posted by SeeGeeWhy
Indeed.
Even if you take gasoline out of the energy mix entirely, there is just a huge amount of heat going into the production of other material goods like chemicals production and aviation fuel that will be required long into the future.
Carbon capture, sequestration and reformulation should become big business, and will be a massive new energy load on the system.
SAF and other synthesized products seem like the only way anyone will be able to figure out how to make carbon capture a revenue creating activity. As it stands right now, penalty avoidance has not been sufficient to change behaviours.
Here's a cool paper that breaks it down, albeit from a "nuclear can supply the heat" perspective. Focus is meant to be placed on the overall market opportunities and the relevant temperatures of the thermal demands by end use. Electrification, renewables, using less don't offer credible substitutions for these things and fossil fuels are losing their ability to sustain these activities as well.
https://www.radiantval.com/nuclear-heat-power |
Interesting read. Thank you. It makes a good point about some of the unnecessary limits on nuclear build that are currently there.
The only problem I have with nuclear as industrial heat is once again it goes against the current grain of decentralizing energy. To make the economics work you'd have to build the industry near the energy source, not the other way around. And you'd have to wait a long time to get it.
I think industrial heat will largely be solved by thermal batteries (cheap materials, not chemical batteries) that can store heat for days and provide temps up to 1700°C with 95% round trip efficiency at a cost that is almost competitive with natural gas. I don't see industry lining up to fund and secure a Nuclear plant when they could buy a cheap box of rocks
Thermal batteries are cool. Pun intended
https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyi...costs-in-half/
As for carbon capture, I'm not sure there'll ever be a way for it to be truly economical. CCUS can't scale because each system is bespoke and even with a very small percentage of the CCUS we'd need for difficult electricity markets that may need gas like Alberta, there's still way more carbon than all the SAF would need. The market just doesn't make sense for a true carbon molecule market. In fact, I'd bet CCUS plants will pay for the CO2 offtake to make SAF not the other way around