The Unbearable Inefficiency of Fossil Fuels
> 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. archived [https://web.archive.org/web/20250920041555/https://thinc.blog/2025/09/16/the-unbearable-inefficiency-of-fossil-fuels/] (Wayback Machine)
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.
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.
Jim East