Scott Tinker
speaker
207 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Scott Tinker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
We have our own electric grid. I've been inside ERCOT and there are a wall of panels and grid operators and all the different lines and you see arrows flowing different directions and they are literally calling on people, start up that gas plant. Shut it down. It's orchestrating it. It's incredible. Make sure the baseload nuclear is always running. You don't turn nukes on and off. They just run.
We have four nuclear reactors in Texas, two at Comanche Peak, two at South Texas Project. They always run. Coal, it likes to always be on. Yeah. Think of cooking indoors in your kitchen. Would you bring charcoal in and light it up? That takes a while to get started. And once it's going, it takes a long time.
No, you... Everybody likes it always on. Some are not fully reliable, reliant on it. But so, you know, coal isn't great for that. Nuclear and coal, they're called baseload. They satisfy the minimum demand on that grid. So that's what you want in place. You need that in place, some baseload. That's the foundation. Foundation. Yeah. And natural gas... It's like cooking.
I can turn on my gas stove, boom, it's hot.
No sulfur, no SOX, no nitrogen in NOx, no mercury, no particulates. Right, right. It has CO2 when you burn it.
Well, we won't go there. But let's, yeah, relative to coal and oil, natural gas is extremely clean. It doesn't have all the... Why? Coal is all carbon. Hydrocarbons or oil is complex carbon and hydrogen chains. Natural gas is CH4, methane, one carbon, four hydrogens. It has more energy intensity density, natural gas, than oil and coal. And that sounds weird. Gas? Per unit weight. Right.
So I take a pound of natural gas, you gotta get it really cold to make it liquid or a super critical form. A pound of natural gas has more energy in it than a pound of oil.
Sure, and we'll come back to the grid. And also I want to say with the grid, the electricity, most people don't think about this, including our leaders. Electricity is only about 25 to 30% of our total energy consumption. 65 to 70% is something else. Okay, and that's all the fuels we use, the molecules, to do transportation and commercial and residential and industrial uses of various kinds.
Travel's a big piece of it. Residential, commercial, and industrial heating and cooling, basically, to keep buildings cool or warm. And then we use molecules for a lot of other things. We make fertilizers.
At least now, and growing. Ammonia comes from methane. Yeah. And plastics. We use natural gas for plastics. All the things we do in the world that have physical constructs around them are molecules. So we're not going to electrify everything. That's a silly notion. Right, right. It's a soundbite, but it's a silly notion.
Globally.
And even in this country still, we're not over 50% in the US.
Or hot ones.
They're tough. Again, that's a good topic to come to. But I'd say density is a fundamental concept. I did a TEDx talk to 1,100 kids and the way I explained density to start it was with food. I just said, hey, there's kale and there's cow. Right. And they both give me calories. Only marketers think kale is food, by the way. Well, okay. And a lot of people have written me and said, kale?
Can you pick something else? But no, kale and cow are kind of fun. And I threw in ice cream too. But I'd have to eat a whole lot of kale. to get the same calories as a piece of steak, just volumetrically, right? And so the density, when you start thinking about density, you can think about it in food terms now.
Yeah, cows chew forever.
Now, I happen to think, at least for my body, a mixture of food inputs isn't a bad thing. Okay, I don't have allergies, I'm good. So I have vegetables, I have some fruits, I eat meat for sure and other things, and it's a diverse diet. Think about that like energy. So in density terms, we come back to energy. Energy per unit weight.
Things like hay, our first energy ever that our vehicles ate to motor themselves around, and wood, and dung. And other kinds of biomass were the early human-like things used for energy.
And still do. We are consuming more of those things than we ever have still, which is ironic. There are more people. So not percentage-wise, but in actual consumption units, more of those. No, you start to transition naturally. We discover charcoal or coal. Nature took all the plants and made it into a dense carbon form called coal. Nature did the work, time, heat, pressure.
So now I've got dense plants called coal. And in 1804, the very first commercial steam engine for a train in Wales took its first journey, 1804. And there were a billion people in the world in 1804. We'd grown from 110 million in 1000 BC. It was a perfect census back then, we know. They counted them all. 110 million to 1 billion in those thousands of years.
Showing 21–40 of 207 · page 2 of 11
← Previous
Next →