We did land a man
on the moon in 1969,
but all we got were
some rocks and dust.
An amazing success,
but also a complete waste
of money, if you ask me !
Stanley Whittingham
was one of the three
recipients of the 2019
Nobel Prize in Chemistry,
for the lithium battery.
He made his discovery
while employed at Exxon’s
R&D labs in the 1970s !
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.
Hydrocarbons currently
supplies 85% of all energy
-- wind and solar, only 3%.
The first commercially
viable lithium battery,
circa 1985, had the
capability to store
more than twice
as much energy
per pound as did
the previous
chemistry.
The next two decades
saw the energy per pound
roughly double for lithium.
That progress brought us
useful, and expensive,
Electric Vehicles (EVs).
As the Nobel committee
enthusiastically noted
last year, EVs would not
have been possible
without the discovery
of lithium-battery
chemistry.
If it were not for
the use of lithium,
a battery pack
for a single Tesla
would weigh more
than two entire cars.
In a decade,
the number of
electric vehicles (EVs)
grew from zero,
to about four million,
on the world’s roads.
EVs, however
have less than
0.4% of the
global market for
personal mobility
devices.
Despite many
billions of dollars
in subsidies and
mandates for EVs,
market penetration
over their first decade
has been slow,
especially when
compared with
another new
technology:
smart phones
The platituge:
“if we can put a man
on the moon,
surely we can . . .”,
has nothing to do with
moving the world’s
economies away
from the use of nearly
90 billion barrels
of hydrocarbon energy
per year, counted
in oil-equivalent terms.
Batteries, windmills,
and solar panels are
physical systems
that also require
mining and
processing
of minerals.
Compared with
hydrocarbons,
“clean technologies”
require a three- to ten-fold
greater tonnage of stuff
extracted, processed,
and assembled, to deliver
the same amount of energy.
That would cause
a large increase
in U.S. imports,
because the U.S.
has discouraged
its mining industries
for decades.