Humanity uses around 25 000 TWh of electric energy yearly.
With batteries storing that is technically possible but it would take the whole world decades to build the required infrastructure.
With propane or other similar hydrocarbons it's around 2 million tonnes. 4 million if you account for 50% efficiency of turbines (we have better ones BTW).
4 million tonnes of gas seems like a lot, but currently USA has about 5850 bcf (1.6*10^14 liters) of underground gas storage ready, at 1.8 kg per m3 you could store about 300 million tonnes of propane. Enough to power the electricity grid of the whole world for 75 years.
So it's a choice between spending billions and turning our whole industrial output to it for years - or just using a fraction of what's already there in a slightly different way :)
Another point is - once you have one kind of hydrocarbons - you can burn them in adapted ICEs or transform into other hydrocarbons to be able to use existing cars. Suddenly you can continue to use the whole infrastructure we built in the last 100 years as if nothing happened with net 0 carbon footprint.
Propane has a thermal energy content of 13778 watt-hours per kilogram [1]. That's (25000 * 10^12) / 13778 = 1,814,486,863,115 kilograms, or 1.8 billion tons. 3.6 billion tons of propane if you recover electricity at 50% efficiency. That would make the 300 million ton underground storage equivalent to one month of global electricity demand. That's still a lot of storage, of course.
Yeah, it's going to be a long time before we can get completely away from hydrocarbon fuel. There's nothing that comes close for energy density for something that is practical to use. (Hydrogen beats it considerably but comes with a million headaches. There's a reason SpaceX doesn't use hydrolox engines despite their considerable performance advantage!)
Thus we should be looking for efficient ways of turning clean energy into hydrocarbon fuel.
With batteries storing that is technically possible but it would take the whole world decades to build the required infrastructure.
With propane or other similar hydrocarbons it's around 2 million tonnes. 4 million if you account for 50% efficiency of turbines (we have better ones BTW).
4 million tonnes of gas seems like a lot, but currently USA has about 5850 bcf (1.6*10^14 liters) of underground gas storage ready, at 1.8 kg per m3 you could store about 300 million tonnes of propane. Enough to power the electricity grid of the whole world for 75 years.
So it's a choice between spending billions and turning our whole industrial output to it for years - or just using a fraction of what's already there in a slightly different way :)
Another point is - once you have one kind of hydrocarbons - you can burn them in adapted ICEs or transform into other hydrocarbons to be able to use existing cars. Suddenly you can continue to use the whole infrastructure we built in the last 100 years as if nothing happened with net 0 carbon footprint.
It's the only thing that makes sense, really.