Energy Notes

The big buzz in energy today is the report that the Lawrence Livermore Lab has made a potential breakthrough in fusion energy, for the first time getting more energy out of a fusion reaction than was put in to ignite the fusion process:

The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed. . .

A formal announcement is expected tomorrow.

While encouraging, a few notes of realism need to be kept in mind. First, as the cliche goes, fusion energy has been ten years away for the last 50 years. I recall hearing Lawrence Livermore Lab people saying ten years ago that they were “very close” to the necessary breakthrough. Perhaps this is it at last, but there are immense engineering challenges to making fusion commercially scalable and affordable. I toured the Max Planck Institute’s fusion project in Munich, Germany, back in 2008, and their timeline for developing fusion energy ran all the way out to 2040 before hoping to have the first practical self-sustaining fusion reactor. The international ITER fusion project based in France, conceived in the 1980s and finally launched back around 2006, didn’t start principal construction of its small research reactor until 2020—more than 10 years later than originally planned. ITER has been estimated to be the most expensive science project in human history, which is why it is funded by seven nations including the United States. There’s a long long way to go.

Ask yourself two more questions: how fast will environmentalists move to oppose fusion energy, even though it has none of the hazards of nuclear power? Keep in mind that Paul Ehrlich once said that a cheap and inexhaustible supply of energy—which fusion in theory promises to be—would be a disaster for humanity (“Would be like giving an idiot child a machine gun” was his exact phrase), because reasons. My guess is we’ll hear environmentalist opposition to fusion energy expressed after tomorrow’s announcement.

Next, ask yourself how the rent-seekers currently pocketing billions of dollars of subsidies for wind and solar power are going to react to the prospect of (eventually) cheap fusion power? “Not well” would be an understatement. Look for the planet-saving rent-seekers to hobble the development of fusion energy with regulatory and funding constraints with the same playbook used to hobble nuclear power 50 years ago.

Meanwhile, right now the conventional (meaning fossil fuel) energy comeback continues apace. The most amazing story today is that a Biden White House official is chiding Wall Street for its opposition to expanding shale oil and gas production:

The White House’s chief energy adviser has described as “un-American” the refusal of US shale investors to ramp up drilling, even as Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine causes havoc on global oil and gas markets. US oil groups have been under pressure from Wall Street to funnel record profits back to investors this year, despite repeated calls by President Joe Biden to pump more oil to help tame rampant inflation.

“I think that the idea that financiers would tell companies in the United States not to increase production and to buy back shares and increase dividends when the profits are at all-time highs is outrageous,” said Amos Hochstein, President Biden’s international energy envoy. “It is not only un-American, it is so unfair to the American public. “You want to pay dividends, pay dividends. You want to pay shareholders, pay shareholders. You want to get bonuses, do that, too. You could do all of that and still invest more. We are asking you to increase production and seize the moment.”

Wall Street remembers that shale overproduction a decade ago created large losses for investors, and besides, it wasn’t that long ago that the Biden Administration declared its intent to shut down the shale oil and gas industry as soon as it possibly could. Do they think Wall Street is stupid? The London-based energy analyst John Kemp comments:

When policymakers appeal to “patriotism,” or decry its absence, it usually means they have run out of good arguments. When I hear arguments based on patriotism and its variants, I am instinctively suspicious about the speaker’s motivation, and try to work out how someone is trying to mislead or distract attention from their own failures.

Finally, coal continues its comeback:

KOLKATA, Dec 12 (Reuters) – Coal India will increase spot auctions of the fuel in the coming months, the chairman of the world’s biggest coal miner said on Monday, as the company’s rising output has left them with enough fuel to meet increasing demand from non-utility power plants.

An increase in spot auction sales, which offer higher margins than its mainstay long-term contracts, will help Coal India to build off its record profit from this year and maintain a share price, which has climbed 25% since April and outpaced a 5.9% rise in the broader Nifty index.

So much for that whole “decarbonization” stuff.