/ world today news/ The developed countries themselves are to blame for the chaos in the energy market. The renewable energy they praise is not really renewable, and instead of energy freedom, there is a risk of new dependencies – on the weather and China. Such thoughts can be heard in the report “Sodom and Gomorrah on the energy market” by Igor Sechin.
The head of “Rosneft” Igor Sechin, speaking at the forum in St. Petersburg, presented a vivid report “Sodom and Gomorrah in the energy market”. He believes that the blame for the chaos in the energy market lies with the neo-colonialists playing with the infamous “green agenda” that has proved unsustainable.
According to Sechin, “without clearly defined goals, stable technologies and an understanding of the long-term consequences of their actions, they launched a process that created a crisis in the global energy sector and unleashed inflation in world markets.”
Unfortunately, the announced energy transition is not provided with the necessary technologies. “We are faced with the fact that ‘renewable energy’ is not really renewable,” Sechin stressed.
According to him, a significant part of the production of renewable energy equipment is located in China, which has concentrated in its hands the full cycle of solar panel production – 79% of the world production of polysilicon, 97% of wafers, 85% of cells and 75% of panels . Thus, the PRC occupies an 85% share in the world production of solar panels, said Sechin, noting that the authors of the global green transition, imposing certain standards, did not understand that this should be agreed with the resource owners.
“The European Union, together with the United States, have indeed led to an energy crisis and accelerated inflation with their actions. This is very clearly visible in the example of the EU. It was the EU that wanted an accelerated energy transition to completely stop the use of fossil energy sources by 2050: first to abandon coal, then oil and finally gas. With this, they scared the energy companies, who stopped investing in new projects. For example, British Petroleum, a global company with European roots, predicts in 2020 that humanity will never consume as much oil as in 2019, which was the peak, and after the coronavirus, everyone will switch to electric vehicles,” says the expert Igor Yushkov.
If the world refuses to use hydrocarbons, this will lead to their excess in the future and extremely low prices. So why spend tens of billions of dollars now on new projects that won’t pay off later? So reasoned the pragmatic business. This is very clearly shown by the behavior of oil companies in the US, which previously invested their earnings in new drilling platforms, and now withdraw the profits in cash or pay off their debts, but do not invest in development, the expert says.
What did all this lead to? “After the coronavirus, the world economy started to recover, energy demand started to increase and we saw deficits and rising prices. This is clearly visible on the European gas market, when already in the middle of 2021, prices began to rise and in the fall exceeded 1,000 dollars per thousand cubic meters. And the sanctions against Russia in 2022 only exacerbated the energy crisis, but they were not its cause,” the expert recalls.
The increase in the price of energy made all final products more expensive, which led to an acceleration of inflation, both in the US and in Europe, which they continue to struggle with to this day.
As for the fact that renewable energy isn’t really like that, it really is. Even if we miss the point that initially all energy is solar: once the algae under the influence of the sun turned into peat, then into coal, then into oil and gas, the source recalls.
We are talking about the fact that the creation of renewable energy requires the energy of traditional hydrocarbons and many natural resources without which we cannot do.
“They try to imagine that renewable energy is created directly from the air and the sun. However, first to capture wind or solar energy, you need quite a few minerals. For example lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel. Nuclear power plants need uranium – it is also a fossil source. Second, you need to build more infrastructure – more networking, storage and so on, because the current ones won’t be able to cope. Rare earth and common metals will be needed many times more than now. All this means huge investments,” says Yushkov.
According to Sechin, the cost of power grids and related infrastructure should quadruple by 2040, from about $300 billion a year to more than $1.2 trillion a year (at current prices).
By 2030, BP expects investment in copper mining to grow at least 13-fold from $20 billion to $250 billion, but only about $50 billion has been confirmed. For the remaining $200 billion in required investment, BP believes it is important to create attractive fiscal and regulatory conditions. And that’s just about copper. All this has a strong impact on the environment.
“In places where, for example, lithium is developed, the production of which is concentrated mainly in developing countries, there is no living thing, the water there becomes poisonous, not even a blade of grass grows, the landscape becomes lunar. One can come up with many different examples of how “green” is not really “green”. For example, how windmills near the mountains kill eagles, so expensive video equipment with artificial intelligence is needed to detect flying birds and automatically stop the fins,” says Yushkov.
Another issue that the EU has apparently not taken into account is China, which owns 85% of the world’s solar panel production market. It appears that the EU risks replacing one dependency with another. Not only does it depend on the weather, which is not controlled by anyone, but it also depends on China’s resources and industry. But the main reason for abandoning traditional hydrocarbons in favor of renewable energy was precisely that Europe, deprived of oil and gas, would become energy independent thanks to alternative energy. Otherwise why all this suffering and waste of money?
“In the first stage, both the windmills and the solar panels were manufactured in Europe. European manufacturers were world leaders as they were the first to receive these technologies. However, China was able to copy or gain control of such technologies quite quickly. It can now produce solar panels and windmills of a quality no worse than European ones. Thanks to cheaper labor, more capital, and its own large market for sales, China began to overtake the Europeans. Many European renewable energy equipment manufacturers have not been able to withstand this competition and have gone bankrupt in recent years. Now China is the world leader both in terms of investments and installed capacity for renewable energy”, says Igor Yushkov. In addition, China is also the world’s largest player in the market for rare earth metals, which are also needed for renewable energy sources.
What is left for the Europeans? Either subsidize local manufacturers or buy equipment from China, which undermines the political goal of creating energy security and independence.
Another extremely important problem is the lack of viable technologies to introduce RES as a sole source without the support of traditional energy. One of the main problems is the impossibility of saving electricity from RES. And this is a non-permanent source that cannot be influenced in any way. You can’t tell the sun and the wind to work at their maximum in the morning and peak in the evening and weaken at night.
“In traditional power generation, tons of coal were piled up at the site – this is the storage system. Storage facilities for oil and gas can be built. Energy is stored in coal, in oil. And how to store RES? At night there is wind, but the consumption is low, and in the morning the peak of consumption begins, when even a strong wind may not be enough to satisfy the demand,” says Yushkov. There are two ways to store renewable energy. The first is industrial storage with giant batteries that require a lot of lithium and a lot of money. This is a very expensive story. “The second way is the hydrogen industry. It’s not a very efficient technology, but the Europeans haven’t invented anything else. But the main thing is that the storage system in the hydrogen industry on a national scale has not yet been created, the Europeans only assume that they will produce hydrogen by electrolysis of water and then from hydrogen back into energy, “says the expert.
The second problem is the unpreparedness of networks and infrastructure for everything to run on electricity, including heating. Power grids, transformers, etc. are simply not ready to accept that amount of electricity.
The third problem is the problem of recycling. “We are already seeing Europeans disposing of old wind turbines. How do they do it? They choose a field, take the blades of windmills and just bury it, that is, they do nothing”, says Yushkov. Such an approach cannot be called ecological and “green”.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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