Near the start of the war I noted that the real issue with petroleum shortages wasn’t gasoline, it was diesel, bunker fuel (ships) and jet fuel.
Diesel is, despite what many say, feasible to get off of: even some of the massive machines used for mining are already being switched over, and China is moving hard on electric freight trucking.
Hitachi Electric Excavator
But large freighters and super tankers are a lot harder. Electric can work for coastal freighters, but it doesn’t work for long haul shipping because you need constant recharging.
Enter Green Ammonia. This is part of China’s push on hydrogen tech. It’s currently more expensive than bunker fuel, but projections show it might hit parity by 2030, at least for the Chinese, since they’re scaling it hard. It’s made from hydrogen extracted from water, and nitrogen extracted from air, and it has zero emissions (though that’s not what this about.)
What’s important here is that if your shipping fleet uses Green Ammonia, it doesn’t matter if the supply of hydrocarbons is cut. It can still move. China’s been buying up ports all over the world, refueling can occur at them, and it works almost as well as bunker fuel, so you can make long trips across the Atlantic or Pacific if needed. (Indeed, if it’ll reach price parity by 2030, we can assume it will be cheaper by 2035, given the Chinese record on scaling.)
That means the only major vulnerability left is jet fuel, and I’m aware of no real substitues that can scale in the immediate term, though there are efforts underway. Fundamentally, however, air shipping is far less important than ocean shipping, and air travel is a luxury good. Nice to have, but not necessary to have. Jet fuel is important, strategically, for the military.
The point here is that China thinks ahead. They look at strategic vulnerabilities and they do something. This is, in part, about de-carbonization, of course, but strategically it’s a movement towards more self-reliance and less vulnerability. It also emphasizes that hydrocarbons are a wasting asset. You cannot, long term, base your economy on them. You must find a replacement if they’re your main source of foreign exchange.
The world’s changing, and in part it is changing because China is changing it. The great tech revolution of the last 40 years was telecom/chip based, but the fundamental blocks of our society remained hydrocarbon engine based. It’s China, more than anyone else, who is moving as fast as it can to an electrified economy that is not reliant on hydrocarbons, a change in the economic engine which has run our societies since the 40s or so. (The switchover from a coal/steam based economy started much earlier but took a long time.)
China makes the future, the rest of us fight over the bones of the past.
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Nat Wilson Turner
Good piece. I hadn’t heard of Green Ammonia before. Muy interesantte.
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And to think, if not for the loathsome opportunistic Clintons, it may never have been. Evil as the Clintons are, China must be grateful to them. If Perot had won, an impossibility for sure, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. I voted for Perot, fyi. I agreed with Perot about that great big sucking sound. I knew it, he knew it, but unfortunately, most American people didn’t know it and unwittingly voted instead to make the 21st Century the Chinese Century.
bruce wilder
There’s a strange trope in the neoliberal West in that the economy is narrated like the weather: something slightly mysterious in that it seems to just happen, responding to random, largely unseen forces of nature.