The Group of Seven Nations agreed Friday to release 100 million barrels of oil from its stockpiles—following a desperate plea from the White House.
The G7 held an emergency meeting Friday morning to discuss global energy costs. The discussion came in the wake of a pressing call between Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron, during which the U.S. leader asked for assistance amid the current oil crisis and floated the idea of banning U.S. diesel exports, according to CBS Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Margaret Brennan.
Donald Trump announced after the meeting that “Europe has just agreed to release a massive amount of their heavily stocked Diesel Oil. The process will begin immediately.”
The European barrels are expected to hit the market over the next four months.
Serious question: if Europe were to fully commit to installing renewables, how much dependence on diesel would it maintain in, say, one year? I mean really putting it all in, like a war economy but with this
The whole transportation business run on diesel. There are currently no good truck EVs and if there are they will require special charging stations, so it would be very difficult to change to renewables and EV overnight.
We will still be dependent on petrol though, but much less, but petrol is needed in the chemical industry for the production of plastic, for plane fuel, etc.
What about trains, can’t those be electrified?
Don’t forget freight ships. A quarter or so of worldwide commerce is international shipping by sea. I’m not aware that there’s any commercially viable solution for powering these ships with renewables. The closest I know of are US Navy Carriers, which don’t require diesel, but they’re powered by nuclear reactors, which are neither renewable nor commercially viable (not that the USN would care about profitability) and require a huge amount of expertise to maintain.
Ships use bunker fuel, which varies in refinement between 1 notch above crude oil to slightly thinner.
Then I have been misinformed, thanks for the correction. Still, they’re dependent on oil for now, which is gonna become more and more of a problem than it already is.
But less of a problem for things like ships that still use fossil fuel as other means of transportation move away from fossil fuel.
A nuclear tugboat model where the shipping boat (“barge”) is attached to the nuclear tugboat by some linkage is probably inevitable. It would give a way to meet security requirements of the barge crew never having access to the tugboat while still having sustainable fuel and not having to redesign all ships. If Maersk didn’t have a research paper somewhere in a drawer doing cost estimates for that, a fully nuclear container ship, and a time estimate for when current fuel sources run out then their 50 year plan is probably incomplete. I’m sure there’s a bunch of companies who’ve done stuff like that without making it public like with Exxon and climate change.
Not the whole transportation business. Most of it perhaps, but not all.
https://www.scania.com/ie/en/home/products/trucks/battery-electric-truck.html
Depends on how much society is willing to sacrifice. One year isn’t long, but you could conceivably get just about every car and van off diesel, get just about everyone off heating oil (which is just diesel), go crazy on electric trains, dramatically decrease construction and electrify what you can there, and switch backup generators to gas (which doesn’t really help the climate of course but helps with no diesel). The biggest near term issue is likely heavy transit. You could displace some with trains and petrol/electric vans, but there’s going to be serious rationing going on and supply chains will be hanging on by a thread. Farming equipment also a big issue. Hydrogen might be able to start replacing diesel for these uses but within a year is crazy ambitious. This would be hard to do in a decade.
Regardless, we need to approach this from a “war economy” standpoint, so I like the question.
A lot. EU has fairly shit power generation. For example if France and Spain citizens had access to window air conditioners it would have overloaded the grid by like 2x. Now you want to plug in a hundred thousand cars that are way worse?
Time of day matters a ton for electrical generation capacity.
Didn’t both countries generate an energy surplus large enough to export energy?
Spain’s a lot mostly due to solar and wind generation: https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Spain/electricity_exports/
And France even doubles that due to relying in Nuclear power as their backbone:
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/France/electricity_exports/
I know that without the energy France sells to my country, Italy, we’d be fucked. And much of our goods are (idiotically) transported on the road via semis, so no diesel would be a disaster. And making new railways is an… interesting challenge in a country that’s mostly mountains.
What’s the source for this? I didn’t realize the power grid was so fragile in the EU. I thought most EU citizens with cars these days drive EVs already.
Of course I can’t speak for the entirety of Europe, but EVs have not taken over. They are more common in some places rather than others and they’re slowly getting more popular, but they’re not the majority.
Also, at least at a local level, the power infrastructure is not really a problem and is improving. In my particular city, where it used to be confortable enough during the summer to not require AC, people have been installing AC units en masse some years ago, creating a sudden load on the network and causing outages. Over the past few years they’re getting less and less frequent. This summer the power didn’t go out once. Now the cost is another matter entirely, due to idiotic decision by several incompetant politicians.