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Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

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Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#61

Post by sandworm101 »

SEJeff wrote: post #54
693471 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs 6kW to refine a single gallon of gasoline. We can shift our energy away from the refineries as their demand tapers off.

I'd say that number is a bit suspect as the amount of work to refine Texas Sweet (WTI) vs the more difficult to refine oil you find from Venezuela or the entire Middle East (it is heavier or more "sour") is vastly different. This gives a primer on it: http://canaryusa.com/crude-oil-refinery-primer/

>> the entire Middle East

Except for Saudi sweet. There is plenty of very high quality oil in Saudi Arabia, which is no doubt in the heart of the "middle east". (Iraq and the UAE also produce sweet crude.) The really nasty stuff, the really energy-intensive gunk, is the tarsand bitumen from Canada. Saudi oil is positively green in comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_crude_oil

>> The term sweet originates from the fact that a low level of sulfur provides the oil with a mildly sweet taste and pleasant smell.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#62

Post by Robotbeat »

vonmoltke wrote: post #56
Robotbeat wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, we cannot afford to pull all of the fossil fuels out of the ground. There are trillions of barrels of unconventional oil shale (confusingly, not the same as shale oil) in the Green River formation in Wyoming/Colorado alone. If it was all extracted and burned and put into the atmosphere (assuming none makes it as ocean acidification, etc), it'd raise the CO2 level from the current 400ppm (about 3 trilli…

> And there's 5 trillion tons of coal in Alaska Say what? There is only 909 billion tonnes of proven coal reserves in the entire world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_by_country

Right. Only about 1 trillion in proven reserves, a number which often increases over time due to technology and economics and exploration.

I was discussing how much actual coal is there. Coal resources, which is a (relatively) fixed number.

The fellow I was responding to was talking about extracting all the oil and gas from the ground (not just that which is today known with high certainty and both technically and economically viable).

For instance, look at this graph of US proved oil reserves. It has climbed for most of the last 100 years and peaked in 1970 at about 39 billion barrels, declined and has started rising again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_Sta... ...but that data only goes until 2012. The reserves have kept climbing, and as of 2017 have now equalled their peak of 39 billion barrels: https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/crudeoilreserves/pdf/table_1....

In other words, technology and economics has improved access to fossil fuels faster than we can burn it.

But it's not like there was a bunch of oil added into the ground. It was there the whole time. Hence why I'm using resources: It's the ultimate limit.

We cannot rely on Peak Oil (or Peak Coal for that matter) to stop our reliance on fossil fuels and the ensuing climate change. We just keep getting better and better at extracting them. Trends in automation of mining do not bode well for the climate, either.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#63

Post by kennywinker »

qsymmachus wrote: post #7

As far as I'm concerned, this move is pure greenwashing until Amazon stops collaborating with oil and gas companies to extract fossil fuels faster. https://aws.amazon.com/oil-and-gas/

Dude... amazon is a big company. It has lots of different groups. One sees an opportunity to make money by providing service to oil and gas - the other sees an opportunity to reduce their costs and/or get good pr by using ev’s.

This could be greenwashing, if this was done purely or mostly as a pr move, but that’s separate from the fact that another wing of the company does business with oil and gas.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#64

Post by mcintyre1994 »

csours wrote: post #50
jt2190 wrote: post #6

Amazon led a USD 700 000 000 investment round in Rivian last February. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/electric-truck-startup-... (Edit: change amount from thousands to millions)

So 700 000 000/100 000 would be 7 000 - So an initial investment of 7 000 per vehicle they want to buy. Now if they buy 100 000 vehicles at a rate of $100 000 each (pretty reasonable for industrial vehicles), that is 10 000 000 000 (10 Billion dollars). If it's $50k each, that will be $5B. $5-10 Billion in sales ain't too shabby.

> Earlier this week, Reuters reported that Amazon and General Motors were both expected to invest in Rivian, "in a deal that would value the US electric pickup truck manufacturer at between $1 billion and $2 billion."

Assuming that valuation is vaguely accurate they must own a pretty decent chunk of the company too.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#65

Post by benj111 »

fallous wrote: post #52
693471 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs 6kW to refine a single gallon of gasoline. We can shift our energy away from the refineries as their demand tapers off.

6kWh to refine a gallon of gasoline? That's not a bad conversion rate given that the energy in a gallon of gasoline is 33-34kWh.

I suppose you'd want to include transportation 'costs', and off gassing (edit: I meant flaring), etc, etc.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#66

Post by erdleerdle »

ducleonctor wrote: post #13

For once, mighty Amazon comes late to the show. Germany's parcel service DHL builds up a fleet of small electric delivery vans since 2014: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter Living in Bavaria, I see these drive around everywhere now.

be more German

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#68

Post by paggle »

onychomys wrote: post #59
paggle wrote: post #51

The idea of going "carbon neutral" is the biggest crock of shit. Literally sitting and breathing is not carbon neutral, all human activity spews out carbon and even in the craziest case if you plant a gazillion trees and bury them it only delays the carbon emissions by a few hundred years.

Even if that was true, so what? It's clearly better to emit N minus X tons of carbon after buying electric trucks than it is to emit N tons before.

Yeah, I'm not talking about buying trucks, I'm talking about their claim to go "carbon neutral" by 2040 and all of the other dipshits who use that term.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#69

Post by danhak »

fallous wrote: post #52
693471 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs 6kW to refine a single gallon of gasoline. We can shift our energy away from the refineries as their demand tapers off.

6kWh to refine a gallon of gasoline? That's not a bad conversion rate given that the energy in a gallon of gasoline is 33-34kWh.

The typical internal combustion engine is only ~30% efficient, getting only ~10 kWh of energy out of that gallon.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#70

Post by notdonspaulding »

perardi wrote: post #57

Warning: petty partisanship ahead. Our last Republican governor in Illinois spent some quality time trashing this company, which sure looks shortsighted in retrospect: https://www.adaptbn.com/home/2018/5/16/breaking-rauner-criti... He also made a point to trash all of Central Illinois as a place to do business, which is a heck of a strategy for business development. https://www.news-gazette.com/news/rauner-apologizes…

Fellow Normalite here, you still in the area? Would love to talk shop with a local Hacker Newser. Email in my profile if you're interested.
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