The Unemployment Machine

[william the wie]

The vaporware news for consumers is good;

Joule has gotten more good news out about the feasibility of their bio-fuels and over the next 2-5 years will replace natural fuel.

If reality is half as good as the hype Bloom box fuel cell cars will send MPG ratings through the roof. 5-20 year transition due to pollution from old cars increasing air filter maintenance in fuel cell cars.

The price trendline for Kindles will intercept zero later this year. Amazon neither confirms nor denies that this is their plan.

The vaporware for workers is the inverse.

Current jobs in the fuel and field service industries worldwide will go bye-bye over the next decade.

Many car service jobs will go bye-bye too if fuel cells replace fossil fuel engines.

If Amazon lower the costs of ebooks enough then book stores and ancillary jobs will go bye bye.

Well manufacturing, Ag and extractive industries have already seen huge employment shrinkage if service jobs start automating where will people work?

 

[skeptic]

The Bloom Box folks promote their gadget as being capable of producing electricity at 81% the cost of grid power. A modest efficiency increase but with a catch: Conventional power plants that also burn nat gas are actually considerably more efficient than the Bloom Box, but half their power gets eaten up as heat in transmission across a vast grid. This ability to produce decentralized power instead of centralized power production is what accounts for the 19% savings.

The only thing that makes the bloom box attractive is that some firms can afford to plunk down a $ million in advance for a small savings in power over the next decade. And again, the BB still consumes nat gas. I don't expect people to convert en masse to nat gas burning vehicles since propane is already more efficient than gasoline and it hasn't caught on in 30 years.

Joule may have a better offering for us, but again not a real game changer at all. The Joule system relies on a concentrated source of CO2, like an existing conventional power plant or a concrete plant, and it requires sunshine to operate which means 10 hours/day of operation. Alongside a traditional power plant. It is also more expensive than oil at present. They advertise they can produce liquid fuel at an equivalent price as oil at $30/bbl.

But oil already costs less than $30/bbl to produce. The fact that it is sold for $114 has little to do with production costs. A few years ago Exxon was able to produce oil from Saudi Arabia for less than $10/bbl including royalties drilling and exploration costs as well as delivery infrastructure.

Joule sounds like it will have a niche in our future energy platforms, but certainly not a game changer.