2024 - Keynote - Global and National Energy Security and Geopolitics - Mark P. Mills

Keynote Address: Global and National Energy Security and Geopolitics

Presented by:
Mark P. Mills, Director, National Center for Energy Analytics; Faculty Fellow, Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering; and Partner, Montrose Lane ventures

Wednesday, April 17, 2024
10th Annual Garfield County Energy & Environment Symposium
Oil and Gas Education for Local Government

Presented by:
Garfield County
Colorado Mesa University

[Seawithinyou]

I so love Mark Mills comical but eye awakening research done on this Green Energy Blindness
Also Professor Simon Michaux and Art Berman I highly recommend watching for you shareholders too
Other investment future sources of the future podcasts are Luke Gromen
and Steve St. Angelo🕊🌏😇

[huna]

Soooo dense some and in particular this talk of Marks….
Been back to it three times!!
Thanks

[lesbrattain]

We can't get off oil and we can't live with it. And they call ME a doomer!

[hadiveisi]

Thanks Mr. Mills, it was informative and amazing.

[TheRealSnakePlisken]

Mark is on point but it is strange how he completely ignores the heating of the atmosphere. Path to destruction on unstoppable train.

[klempaa]

We are too many people in the world, thats the real problem

[tobiasberr]

So what do you suggest? We all run into climate catastrophe?

[JonathanLoganPDX]

The important things to note are: (1) fossil fuels generate CO2. (2) CO2 causes global heating. (3) We are at 427 ppm CO2 (growing approx +4 ppm per year), and roughly +2C since 1850. (4) We are accelerating the use of fossil fuels. (5) When the Earth hits between 400 - 450 ppm CO2 this bakes in +2.5C to +3.0C above 1850. (6) Above +2.5C re 1850, self-driving negative CO2 & CH4 feedback loops trigger decreased albedo, increased oceanic warming & acidification, and off-gassing of permafrost (CO2 & CH4), seabed & swamps (CH4), and reduction in natural CO2 CCS by forests and grasslands. (7) The dramatic swings of temperature and rainfall expected in the +2.5C to +3.0C will have a radical negative impact on global food production - driving massive price spikes, and social, economic, and political disruption. We can argue about how, funding, timing etc. but we must get off fossil fuels as soon as humanly possible if we want to maintain any semblance of a modern system of life. 8. Overall food production drops by about 25% globally at around +2C (new estimates @ 2035), and it gets worse as things get hotter. SO, if you ignore all of this and go FULL on increasing fossil fuels, you guarantee the listed negative outcomes and more. What is "nonsensical" is ignoring the physics of fossil fuel global heating.

[MichaelWolfe]

So in a sense he's saying no scarcity of non renewable resources now.. just let the folks worry about it in 200 years instead of 100.

[Reotha]

44:30 i sense a recycling boom in the world.

[Seawithinyou]

By the way scientist James Hansen knows our true ecosystem crisis 🕊🌏😇💖

[peterr]

I love how google add their BS propaganda to this video. God I hate them

[FlameofDemocracy]

What burns in combustion is, in fact the hydrogen component. Just make hydrogen, and use it broadly.

Moreover, NASA has given the world any number of useful spinoffs; namely, running shoes, electrolyzers, microwave ovens, solar panels, superglasses, et cetera.. The R&D was well spent.

Let's think more broadly, and in a far more collaborative fashion.

[RaglansElectricBaboon]

Cherry picked, misrepresented & incorrect data all over the place here. EG chart at 46:34 no mention of lifetime materials use.
Statement at 47:12 is wrong: 'An EV is '80% by weight Nickel, Cadmium, Copper, Lithium, Aluminum, all the exotic stuff'. A Tesla Model 3 can weigh up to 1800kg. The battery is 480kg. I don't know how heavy the motors are but I can lift them & I'm no athlete. So let's say the battery & motors weigh 900kg* all up and that they are all ' exotic stuff'** that's still only 50% of the weight.
*They don't, but let's be kind to the poor guy. As he said, he likes his alcohol & is probably not as sharp as he once was.
**They're not. For example, the battery is mainly steel (steel case, steel cells cans are the majority of the weight in it). The motors have a lot of steel in them.

[amosbatto]

Why would anyone listen to a paid propagandist for the fossil fuel industry? Mark Mills created his think tank, the National Center for Energy Analytics, as a way to milk money from all the incumbent industries which are threatened by green tech, and he's a very good propagandist, because he presents himself as a scientist and energy analyst, but don't be fooled by his song and dance.
In this presentation, Mills presents graphs showing renewables as a tiny percentage of total energy, making it seem impossible to transition to 100% renewables. However, he is comparing primary energy, which is a very misleading way to compare fossil fuels to renewables, because roughly 60% of the potential energy in fossil fuels is lost as heat during combustion. It is downright deceptive to use primary energy when talking about the energy consumed in transportation, because an internal combustion vehicle is only 26% - 28% energy efficient, compared to an electric vehicle which is about 85% energy efficient. Electric heating with a heat pump is 3 to 5 times more energy efficient than a gas boiler.

In other words, in the transition to 100% renewable energy, we can dramatically reduce the total amount of energy required, so we don't need all the energy that Mill claims. At 30:00, Mills claims that we will need to build a thousand 3MW wind turbines every day for the next 30 years, which would be 32.85 TW of capacity. Taking into account all the energy efficiencies that can be gained with electric motors, heat pumps, etc. and the ability to time shift with battery and hydrogen storage, Mark Jacobson et al. (2017) calculate that we only need 11.8 TW of generating capacity to reach 100% renewable energy by 2050, compared to 8.3 TW of global generating capacity today. I think Jacobson et al. may be underestimating the amount of generating capacity that will be needed since wind and solar do have low capacity factors, but we clearly don't need 33 TW of capacity, as Mills claims.

Mills claims that there is no energy transition taking place by showing graphs of global fossil fuel consumption, but he totally ignores how S-curve tech disruption actually works. We can already see how fast renewable energy is taking over the power generation industry. According to EMBER, in Jan-Jul of 2024, 80.4% of new global electricity generation was low-carbon (renewables and nuclear), and the vast majority of that was solar and wind. The global power industry has figured out that solar and wind are now the cheapest energy, and the price of batteries keeps dropping making time shifting possible, but Mills totally ignores how fast the power industry is changing due to S-curve disruption. Yes, Germany's energy transition has been expensive because it invested in renewables when they were expensive and invested a lot in inefficient rooftop solar, but solar and wind plus storage is now competitive with fossil fuel generation in most parts of the world. At any rate, over half of Germany's electricity generation is now renewable, so Germany is now making the energy transition that Mills claims is impossible.

Mills claims that we don't have the metal supply to do the transition to 100% renewable energy and electric transport. Yes, the demand for metals is going to increase with EVs, wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. However, Mills totally ignores the switch from NMC/NCA to LFP batteries in the present day which eliminates the need for cobalt and nickel, and the future switch to sodium ion which will eliminate the need for lithium and copper in batteries. He dismisses the idea that EVs can use aluminum in place of copper in the wiring and motor windings and doesn't even address the idea that ferrite magnets can be used in place of rare earth magnets in electric motors, but if we have future metal shortages, those changes will happen. When the price of copper and rare earth metals rose, the wind industry stopped using direct drive turbines and switched to semi-direct and geared turbines that require much less copper and rear earth metals. When the price of silver rose, the solar industry started switching from silver to copper busbars.

Mills also totally ignores how electric micromobility (e-scooters and e-bikes), two/three electric wheelers and autonomous taxis can dramatically cut the totally number of automombiles that will be needed in the future. In place of 1.5 billion automobiles in the world today, we can reduce to half a billion vehicles. RethinkX predicts that autonomous taxis will lower the cost of transportation per km by a factor of 10, so the demand for private vehicles will dramatically reduce in the future.

Mills claims that the CO2 emissions from producing an EV could be as high as 45 tonnes, and the lower bound in his graph is around 20 tonnes of CO2. Most reputable LCA studies estimate that the CO2 emissions from producing an EV are less than 10 tonnes, and the emissions from battery manufacturing keep falling as it becomes more energy efficient in its drying rooms, so Mills' graph of automobile emissions is misleading propaganda. In the Q&A section, Mills claims that a wind turbine blade only lasts 10 years, but the blades on today's wind turbines are designed to last 30 years, and the average failure rate of blades is low.

Another problem with Mills presentation is his dismissal of smart grids and time shifting. He believes that people won't be willing to charge their EVs at times when there is plenty of electric supply, but it isn't that hard to see how people will let their EVs charge at times when the price of electricity is cheap. Just plug in the EV and let it figure out with AI when to charge. Mills has more of an argument about how AI will increase demand for electricity, but he totally ignores how the tech companies are opting to run their data centers on renewable energy today and how that will increase in the future as the price of solar and wind plus battery storage keeps dropping.

Notice at the end how Mills dismisses climate change as being a problem. He presents no solutions to reduce GHG emissions and is in denial about the problem. Instead, Mills promotes nuclear as the solution in the distant future, which conveniently allows us to keep burning fossil fuels for many more decades. Anybody who has looked clearly at the costs and long time frames to implement nuclear knows that it has no future. Nuclear will never be able to compete with solar and wind plus storage on costs, and it will always be an excuse to keep using dirty fossil fuels.

[seandepagnier]

he thinks we have infinite oil and gas because he is going to die in < 10 years

[chrisconklin]

Mr. Mills tells lots of interesting stories. However, he misrepresents the data. If he made this presentation before an audience of renewable energy experts he would be booed off the stage. This symposium is sponsored by the oil and gas industry.

[maxheadrom]

Mr. Mills is not completely honest but he's preaching to the converted in this Energy and "Environment" Symposium. This seems to be a talking point trainning. Interestingly he says a lot of things I agree (need for nuclear, wind&solar not sufficient, PHEV much better than EV ...) but a guy with his training knows dynamic control theory and knows that climate change is real. He's a sell-out.

[FlameofDemocracy]

It is fallacious to think that electricity and motors have a one-to-one energy relationship with fossil base systems and engines. The energy needed for equivalent work is one third or less, even when using hydrogen, derived from massless energy systems, what is often referred to as renewables.

Furthermore, hydrogen and batteries, along with heat batteries, allow the capture and retention of currently lost or surplus grid streams. Thus, with zero new outputs, far more work can be conducted, and far more energy efficacious systems could be devised.

This talk may indeed be passe.

[Stoddardian]

I don't doubt most of the date presented here, but this guy is funded by the fossil fuel industry.