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Motherboards: too complicated to make after oil | Peak Everything, Overshoot, & Collapse
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this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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It's a cool article on how motherboards are made, but it starts with the premise that motherboards will go away because we will never find a replacement for diesel fuel and all international trade and domestic shipping will stop and that seems... kind of unlikely.
You might be unaware that there is a rising gap in diesel supply starting since about 2014 which is rapidly getting worse. What kind of replacement for mining truck and ship diesel or jet fuel in the coming decade are you anticipating? Hint: batteries are not the right answer. Synfuel either.
Bagger 288 and Bagger 293 were fully electric, AFAIK. 1995 already. Tallest terrestrial vehicle.
Tons (excuse the pun) of different electric excavators seem to exist already (e.g. from Hitachi). I'm sure even those which are powered via cables won't go to a diesel generator and the electricity they get can very well come from renewables.
In Nordic European countries already 17% of their trucks drive battery electric.
I heard with the Hormuz situation there's a substantial push to electrify the truck flotillas right now in the rich EU countries. Many postal vehicles are electric also.
No objection regarding (jet-)planes or cargo-ships. Know nothing about the details but could imagine those to be hard to optimize for weight with a myriad of batteries for long hauls in unpredictable power requirements.
Yes, you can use a massive brown coal excavator to feed an adjacent power plant with a conveyor belt that powers it. Since no storage needed. As you can run an electric mining truck that transports full from the quarry downhill, and goes back up back empty again, effectively mostly recharging on potential energy. These are very special cases.
The kind of mining trucks I'm talking about https://www.lectura-specs.com/en/model/construction-machinery/rigid-dump-trucks-belaz/75710-11738579 run 24/7. The giant size and the continuous mode of operation are due to economic pressures. Notice that without mining and manufacturing you cannot fabricate the renewable infrastructure.
For heavy long-haul trucks currently running on diesel you need some 1 MWh battery of several tons and according material footprint and price tag. Diesels are cheap and have more than 40 times higher energy density.
Small scale EVs are fine, though they have a material footprint and need for recycling most people ignore.
Hey don't get me wrong, the international shipping situation is crazy, the whole Port of Hormuz thing painted that rather starkly, it's just ridiculous that kind of bottleneck even exists. I suppose my point was that things are usually somewhere in the middle, I highly doubt international trade will come to a halt but it will create a lot of situations where it's no longer feasible price wise or logistics wise to build such things I guess.