Humanity is graduating from burning fossil commodities to mastering manufactured technologies—from hunting scarce fossils to farming the inexhaustible sun, from consuming Earth’s resources to merely borrowing them.
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The Unbearable Inefficiency of Fossil Fuels
Submitted 1 week ago by wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net to energy@slrpnk.net
https://thinc.blog/2025/09/16/the-unbearable-inefficiency-of-fossil-fuels/
count_dongulus@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The efficiency of fossil fuel energy sources is in their energy by volume. That’s is and has always been their main benefit.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
Sort and compare. Battery technologies, even state of the art ones, are an order of magnitude worse than fuels for energy density. This matters immensely in transport, less so in stationary energy.
Sorry, these sensationalistic headlines just irritate me. I’m all for avoiding the externalities of oil based energy.
486@lemmy.world 1 week ago
While it is true, that their energy density is high, often it is actually much less relevant due to the poor efficiency of the devices burning said fuel. With cars, you’ll notice that ICE cars have a pretty terrible efficieny themselves, which partly negates the effect of high energy density of fossil fuels. These days electric cars and ICE cars can have very similar driving ranges despite their differences in energy density.
rainwall@piefed.social 5 days ago
And to compound om these losses, while the energy source is dense, it is heavy. You have to move fuel around by spending fuel, lots and lots of it. We use an ungodly amount of fossil fuels moving fossil fuels somewhere to be used. Fuel and coal tankers are a huge amount of the energy we spend.
Electricity on the other hand can be locally produced nearly anywhere with wind/solar, and with infrastructure upgrades, be moved over wire with very little loss and no fossil fuel expenditure.
antler@feddit.online 6 days ago
As the blog post discusses, there are multiple ways to measure efficiency; energy density is one, and possibly the most important advantage of hydrocarbons. The first figure in the blog post describes another: quantity of mineral extraction per energy production. From that metric, renewables are much more efficient.
Personally, I’m not bothered by the blog post. The advantages of fossil fuels are well known - that’s why they continue to be widely used. Their main disadvantage, emissions, are also we’ll publicized. The perspective of the blog post is that there are other, less discussed metrics under which renewables have an advantage.
l_isqof@lemmy.world 1 week ago
As much as that’s true you cannot recharge your old fossil fuel like you can with a battery so you are really replacing your energy source every time.
Considering that we knew that everything is finite, we do have to transition at some point anyway.
Womble@piefed.world 1 week ago
You recharge your storage device (a metal tank) by pouring in more liquid over 30 seconds. That ease of use combined with how energy dense oil derivatives are is such a massive benefit for them.
The problem with fossil fuels is that they are slowly choking our planet, except for that they are phenomenal energy sources on who's backs the modern world was built. That is why it is so hard for us to transition away from them.