Comment by tancop
5 hours ago
You can do the whole process from mining and recycling to installation using solar power. Trucks, furnaces, cargo ships can all be electrified. The only reason we're not doing that today is fossil fuels are still cheaper.
I agree with a lot of what you say, except the bit about "cargo ships can all be electrified". It is more likely that they will use ammonia or hydrogen that are fully produced using only electricity (and some air/water).
For pragmatic reasons methanol is more probable: https://methanol.org/what-fuels-shipping
and that production of hydrogen (as a base for either ammonia or methanol production) will likely come via electrical cracking .. but it might also come as a result of atmospheric carbon sequestration in ultramafic rock: https://phys.org/news/2026-09-orange-hydrogen-western-austra...
I could try and explain 'energy return on energy invested' (EROEI) but what's the point? it won't make any difference.
I would guess you've been huffing anti-net-zero stuff which often relies on estimates from 15-20 years ago for the production costs of solar PV and chooses rainy Northern Europe for the insolation curves so as to get an EROEI number that they can trumpet as too low to make sense for generation.
But even then the numbers are positive, they just don't make good economic sense.
Today's numbers embarrass CCGT which is why these same fools will now tell you the problem isn't solar PV it's the batteries, the batteries are too expensive you see, so it's all pointless according to them. Weirdly the answer is always more Fossil Fuels. No matter what the question is, or what the facts suggest, they can assure you that somehow it turns out the answer was Fossil Fuels.
> EROEI
Modern PV typically has an EROEI of ~ 15-30, depending on tech, location, system lifetime, and accounting methodology.
From what I've read, coal might still beat that, but modern oil no longer does. Gas is generally also worse than PV in this regard.
Coal is however also very expensive, which is why e.g. the UK completely stopped using it for electricity.