Wind farms need more people than coal mines

It is still common to hear that one of the disadvantages of renewables is that they do not create good new jobs. ‘Old’ industries, such as coal mining or power station operation, are portrayed as better for employment than solar or wind.

 We saw one example yesterday. Sarah O’Connor of the Financial Times wrote an article (paywall) suggesting that jobs would be lost in the energy transition. She wrote

 ‘Wind farms, once up and running, do not require as much labour as digging-up coal’. 

But is this right? Or are we all stuck with memories of photographs from the 1950s of huge numbers of blackened miners pouring out of collieries at the end of a shift?

 The application to develop a new metallurgical coal mine in the north of England gives us some useful data. The proposed mine in Cumbria is said to offer a maximum of 500 permanent jobs. So I estimated whether the energy produced per employee would be more or less than that typically produced by the people running, repairing and maintaining wind farms. The evidence is that employees working at operational wind farms are responsible for less energy production per person. In other words, Ms O’Connor’s assertion is not correct; wind farms will actually need far more labour than modern coal mining to give us the energy we need. 

Cumbria mine

Employees                                                      500 employees

Projected coal output per year                 3.1 million tonnes

Coal output per employee                         6,200 tonnes

Energy value of metallurgical coal           8.3 MWh per tonne

Energy value per employee year              51,460 MWh

 

Wind farm operations and maintenance (NOT construction)

 

Estimate average number of employees per MW of capacity[1]        0.29

Typical annual output per megawatt of capacity[2]                              3,504 MWh

Typical output per person employed                                                   12,083 MWh

To deliver all the energy an economy uses will therefore require more employment in wind farms than in mines. In fact, over four times as many people are needed to run wind farms than to operate a new coal mine in the UK. 

[1] Source Page 17 of Wind Power and Job Creation, L. Aldieri, 2020.

[2] At a 40% capacity factor

Crowd-funding to convert natural gas pipes into hydrogen-ready equivalents

In one of the latest offerings from Abundance, the crowd-funding platform, Northern Gas Networks (NGN) is seeking to raise £1m from individual investors to help fund a very small part of its programme of making the pipeline network ready for a transition away from natural gas to hydrogen. NGN says that this fund-raising is part of its programme to involve the UK public in its plans for moving towards zero carbon emissions. 

Why is hydrogen so important?

Green hydrogen will provide a boost to decarbonisation efforts. It has two principal roles

1.    To allow countries around the world to switch to 100% renewable sources for their electricity. The key issue facing wind and solar power is the intermittency and unreliability of electricity generation. We won’t always have power when we need it.

Green hydrogen made from water electrolysis solves this problem. When electricity supply is over-abundant, the surplus is used for making hydrogen, which is then stored. And when power is in short supply, hydrogen can be extracted from storage and then burnt in conventional gas power stations to provide an immediate boost to electricity generation. In this way, it is a near-perfect complement to ever-cheapening renewables.

2.    Separately, hydrogen can also replace fossil fuels in those activities that cannot be switched to electricity. For example, steel-making currently uses about 20% of world coal and is responsible for perhaps 8% of world greenhouse gases. Coal can be entirely replaced by hydrogen. And green hydrogen stored in the form of ammonia will provide the fuel for long-distance shipping. Some heating needs may shift from natural gas to hydrogen, including those of domestic homes.

These two areas of use will allow green hydrogen to grow rapidly over the next decades. It will become a central pillar of our move to ‘net zero’. 

How will green hydrogen be transported?

Some hydrogen will be used close to where it is produced. For example, the Spanish utility Iberdrola is developing a large PV farm next to a fertiliser factory.[1] The solar electricity will be used to make hydrogen, a critical ingredient for fertiliser production. Another big scheme in Germany envisages hydrogen made from offshore wind used in a new steel plant near the port of Wilhelmshaven.[2]

Alongside local use of hydrogen, developers are also planning huge pipeline networks. One proposed scheme sees a total of 40,000 km of pipeline criss-crossing Europe by 2040.[3] About two thirds of this grid will use existing natural gas pipelines, repurposed to carry hydrogen. This will provide much of the capacity to move the gas from where it is made to the place of utilisation. So, for example, hydrogen will be made at offshore wind farms, at the base of the turbines or on dedicated platforms, and then carried by pipe to large industrial centres where the gas will be used.

This shouldn’t surprise us: it is far cheaper to transport hydrogen over long distances than it is to shift electricity. One estimate is that the cost could be as low as about 0.3 Euro cents per kilowatt hour for a 1000 km link.[4] That’s roughly the distance from Penzance to Aberdeen. The cost of building a new pylon link to move electricity over this distance would be much greater. And it would be almost impossible to get the political support to allow a new above-ground electricity link, as policy-makers in countries such as Germany have found when they have proposed new north-south power networks. 

But is it safe to move hydrogen around in pipelines? Doesn’t the gas corrode the pipes, resulting in eventual leakage? No, hydrogen can probably be moved with greater safety than methane, or natural gas. Pipelines cannot be made from iron or steel which is embrittled by hydrogen, but thick plastics are effective and safe. The world already has several large pipeline systems for hydrogen, including at least 1,600 miles of pipe in the US, without any serious reported problems.[5]

At normal pressure, hydrogen is a much less dense substance than methane, the primary ingredient in natural gas. So it will be need to be transported at higher pressure. This means that pipelines being converted from natural gas to hydrogen will need to add compressors along the trunks and branches of the networks. 

How will the hydrogen be stored?

Of course we will also need substantial storage to enable hydrogen to match the supply and demand for energy. The UK is lucky in that large parts of the country have thick layers of salt well underneath the surface. Hydrogen can be stored by dissolving some of this salt in water and then extracting the brine. This creates what are called salt caverns, which usually have the approximate shape of a wine bottle, sometimes hundreds of metres in height. The remaining salt is almost totally impermeable to hydrogen. In fact, three salt caverns have been used for hydrogen storage in the UK for several decades and more can be found in the US. Salt caverns also already provide large storage capacity for natural gas in various parts of the world, including China.

To summarise; a switch to an energy economy that combines renewable and green hydrogen is the most likely route to net zero, in the UK and elsewhere. Large fractions of our solar and wind farms will need to be devoted to making hydrogen, at least part of the time. And this hydrogen will need to be transported to the end-user. This looks both technically possible and highly economical. Many of the users will be large industrial companies. 

Hydrogen in the home

Many UK homes will switch to heating with electricity, principally using what are known as ‘heat pumps’. But hydrogen can also be used a fuel for heating buildings and in many circumstances this may be cheaper for the homeowner and equally compatible with the UK’s zero carbon objectives. This will replace natural gas, which creates CO2 when burnt. On the other hand, hydrogen just turns into water vapour. We’ll need new central heating boilers but these are likely to be no more expensive than today’s natural gas equivalents. And much, but not all, of the UK’s gas pipeline network still needs to be modified to carry hydrogen to homes, schools, offices and other buildings.

This is where the Abundance debenture issue for Northern Gas Networks (NGN) comes in. NGN wants to have pipelines, small and large, that can safely and effectively accommodate a possible switch to hydrogen from natural gas. This is a costly programme, but we cannot continue to burn fossil fuels in homes and other buildings and hydrogen is the obvious replacement for some of our homes and other buildings.

[1] https://www.iberdrola.com/press-room/news/detail/iberdrola-fertiberia-launch-largest-plant-producing-green-hydrogen-industrial-europe

[2] https://www.uniper.energy/news/uniper-plans-to-make-wilhelmshaven-a-hub-for-climate-friendly-hydrogen

[3] https://gasforclimate2050.eu/news-item/european-hydrogen-backbone-grows-to-40000-km/

[4] https://gasforclimate2050.eu/news-item/european-hydrogen-backbone-grows-to-40000-km/

[5] https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-pipelines

Even removing environmental levies won't bring electric heat pumps to cost parity with gas boilers

(The rise in energy prices in the UK on April 1st 2022 affected gas more than electricity. The ratio between the two prices has changed. Using the COP assumptions in this article, removing all environmental levies from electricity and placing them on the price of gas would now mean that a heat pump would currently reduce the overall bill if a heat pump is installed).

Even after deducting all environmental levies, heat pumps remain more expensive than gas.

Some comments about a previous post on the costs of heat pumps focused on the effect of high levies imposed on electricity in the UK. The purpose of this short piece is to suggest that even after moving all environmental and social charges from electricity to general taxation, air source heat pumps will still have higher energy costs than gas boilers.  

This is a fundamental obstacle to the government’s plans for a huge growth in air source heat pump use.

Slide1.jpg

In the previous article I used the prices for electricity and gas provided by British Gas, the UK’s largest supplier, for a household in Oxford. 

These were over 17.7 pence per kilowatt hour for electricity and 3.3 pence for gas.

Slide2.jpg

The ratio between these numbers is about 5.33 times. This implies that unless a heat pump is very much more efficient, the household’s energy costs will rise substantially when one is installed. This is what is usually experienced by families around the UK, if my email inbox is any guide.

Heat pumps can be very efficient, putting up to 4 units of heat into a house for each unit of electricity consumed. But typically in the UK air source heat pumps do not deliver efficiency gains of anything like this number. Academic research for the UK government suggests that the real ‘Seasonal Performance Factor’ is probably below 2.8.[1]

Even after taking into account the efficiency loss of a gas boiler, arising from the small percentage of the energy value of gas not being delivered into hot water, heat pumps will therefore be very much more expensive. 

Calculating the impact of ‘Environmental and Social Obligation Costs’ on the economics of heat pumps.

I looked at British Gas’s most recent ‘Consolidated Segmental Statement’ for 2019.[2]This allowed me to deduct the financial charges loaded onto electricity prices. (These arise from costs such as Feed-in Tariff payments). 

If we removed all these costs entirely for 2019, the price of electricity would decline by about 23%, bringing it down to about 13.4 pence per kilowatt hour or just over 4 times the price of gas. At this ratio, and assuming 85% efficiency for a gas boiler, switching to a heat pump will still add about 22% to a household’s bill for home heating. 

The government could take one further obvious step. It could transfer all the current Environmental and Social Obligation Costs from electricity to gas. This action would approximately equalise the cost of running an air source heat pump and operating a gas boiler in the average UK household. 

If the UK wants to push heat pumps – and I can certainly see the logic of this ambition, even with all the reservations expressed in my previous post – it will have to radically shift relative gas and electricity prices. It needs to cut electricity prices by a quarter and add a quarter to gas. I wonder whether there is any impetus to achieve this?

 

 

 

 

 

 




[1]https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/606829/DECC_RHPP_160428_On_performance_variations_v20.pdf

[2] https://www.centrica.com/media/4011/centrica-2019-ofgem-statement.pdf

Hydrogen versus heat pumps for decarbonising heat

Chris Goodall 

DRAFT, for comment

SUMMARY

Many times a year I am contacted by people who have had electric heat pumps installed at their house. Almost all complain that their utility bills have sharply risen and also that their home is no longer as warm as it was. Sometimes the reason is that the householder has not been properly trained on how to operate the heat pump but mostly the causes seem to be a mixture of poor installation and inappropriate choice of equipment.

Despite increasing evidence of underperformance and high costs, the UK continues to push to increase the rate of installation, targeting 600,000 new heat pumps a year by 2028. I use this note to identify six reasons why this surge may be a mistake and why it might be better to replace natural gas central heating with hydrogen boilers to achieve our decarbonisation objectives.

* Electricity in the UK is over five times more expensive than natural gas. Although heat pumps are about three times more efficient that gas boilers, this isn’t enough to compensate for the vastly higher price of electricity.

* Heat pumps are far more expensive to install than gas boilers, whether running on hydrogen or natural gas.

* Heat pumps often don’t work effectively. (This may be a consequence of poor installation or, more likely, the low insulation standards of typical UK houses).

* Heat pumps use a lot of electricity. As a result, the distribution network, currently responsible for 22% of domestic bills, will need very expensive upgrading to deal with the increased electricity demand.

* Hydrogen can be stored in large volume whereas electricity cannot be. This means that on cold days, when heat demand might be ten times today’s electricity requirements, hydrogen will be much better at dealing with peak demand

 * Similarly, hydrogen will be more able to cope with high rates of increase in energy demand as the cold weather arrives. 

These arguments are dealt with in detail below. My conclusion is that hydrogen needs to considered as the primary means of decarbonising domestic heat, the creator of about 20% of UK emissions.

I start by looking briefly at why heat pumps are generally thought to be better than hydrogen at servicing domestic needs before going on look at the weaknesses in the case for any form of electric heating compared to the use of hydrogen.

The arguments against hydrogen in heating.

 1, Electricity can be decarbonised relatively easily. The current wisdom is that we should therefore shift as many energy-using activities to electricity as we can. This includes domestic heating, which is currently responsible for about 20% of UK emissions.

2, The most energy efficient way of delivering electric heating is through the use of heat pumps, say the proponents. Therefore we should try to expand the use of heat pumps as fast as possible. Why are heat pumps relatively efficient? A heat pump will normally deliver more heat into a building that it actually consumes in electricity. It is transferring heat from one place to another, not generating it. This is the crucial reason why researchers and policy-makers are emphasising the virtues of rapid expansion of heat pump installations.

The reasons why hydrogen will be a better alternative than heat pumps for at least a large fraction of UK heating.

I suggest that there are six reasons why hydrogen should nevertheless be extensively deployed for domestic heating in the UK. (These are not arguments that there should be no heat pump installations but rather that hydrogen will be better at serving the bulk of demand. New housing developments with well-insulated properties should certainly be furnished with ground source heat pumps, for example).

1.    The relative price of gas and electricity

Proponents say that heat pumps save householders money. This is very unlikely to be true. The reason is the ratio between the price of gas and that of electricity in the UK.

In early April 2021 the prices offered to me by the largest UK utility, British Gas, were as follows[1]:

 

Electricity     17.753 pence per kilowatt hour

Gas                3.331 pence per kilowatt hour

 

In other words, electricity is well over five times as expensive as gas per unit of energy.[2] A quick look at tariffs from other suppliers confirm that the British Gas ratio is broadly representative. A customer switching to electricity from gas will therefore pay far more unless the new heating system is very much more efficient.[3]

Heat pumps are indeed more efficient. In the best installations, where a ground source pump is feeding a well-designed underfloor network in the home, it may be possible to get 4 units of heat for each unit of electricity supplied over the course of the year. But typically an air source heat pump feeding domestic radiators will only achieve about 2.7 units of heat with one unit of electric power.

Gas boilers aren’t 100% effective at turning gas into heat in the radiators. The rated efficiency of a new boiler can be as high as over 92%. However even the best modern units are sometimes badly installed or the home heating network is not ideally set up to achieve the best heating from the gas consumed. It might be better to assume a figure of 85% for a new boiler.

Let’s compare the costs of a home using 12,000 kilowatt hours of gas and a residence delivering the same amount of heat using a heat pump.

Gas – 12,000 kWh of gas costs £399.72 (plus the standing charge). This delivers 85% of 12,000 kWh as heat into the house, or 10,200 kWh.

 Electricity – 10,200 KWh provided from heat pump at an efficiency ratio of 2.7 = 3,777 kWh of electricity consumed. This costs £670.68 at current prices, or £271 more than gas.

The conclusion is clear. Switching to electric heat pumps from gas central heating will cost most UK householders substantial amounts of cash, probably increasing typical bills by more than 50%.

Would the use of hydrogen be any better? It depends on the price of hydrogen of course. And we cannot forecast that accurately. (Even though people like me try to do this all the time). 

Let’s use two different numbers. First, $1.50 per kilogramme of hydrogen. This price is often used as an estimate of what price hydrogen will achieve by the end of the decade. But this depends on the rate of fall of renewable electricity costs. These dominate the cost of making hydrogen.

At $1.50 a kilogramme, hydrogen costs 4.5 US cents per kilowatt hour. This is equivalent to 3.26 UK pence per kilowatt hour. Gas is currently priced at around 1.6 pence per kilowatt hour on the UK wholesale market. So hydrogen will be about 1.66 pence per kilowatt hour more expensive than gas at wholesale, or around double the cost.

We can estimate the price of hydrogen delivered to the home by adding this amount to the price of today’s gas, plus a small addition to reflect the slightly higher cost of shipping hydrogen through today’s natural gas pipelines.[4] 

If we add a total of, say, 1.8 UK pence to today’s price of gas we arrive at 5.131 pence per kilowatt hour for a domestic user. A gas usage of 12,000 kilowatt hours will cost the householder £615.72. This is an annual increase of over £200 but is still cheaper than the heat pump alternative at £670.68.

The second number I want to use is the price that would equalise the cost of the energy typically used for a heat pump and that of hydrogen. This could either be achieved by lower electricity prices or higher hydrogen prices. Very roughly, we achieve equality of heat pump and hydrogen prices either by raising the hydrogen price to about $1.72 per kilogramme, up from the target of $1.50, or cutting the price of electricity to about 16.2 pence per kilowatt hour, down about 9% from today’s rates. 

A hydrogen price of $1.72 per kilogramme is possible in low-cost locations by 2030. These places may include the UK as the price of offshore wind and solar continue to decline. A recent report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance said[5]

Our analysis suggests that a delivered cost of green hydrogen of around $2/kg ($15/MMBtu) in 2030 and $1/kg ($7.4/MMBtu) in 2050 in China, India and Western Europe is achievable. Costs could be 20-25% lower in countries with the best renewable and hydrogen storage resources, such as the U.S., Brazil, Australia, Scandinavia and the Middle East.

The key conclusion is this. A push into heat pumps will significantly raise the heating costs of UK homes. (Partly, of course, this is because they are so badly insulated by European standards). At possible 2030 hydrogen prices, it may be cheaper to switch to hydrogen for most homes, unless government reduces the costs imposed on electricity suppliers.

2.    The cost of installing heat pumps versus replacement hydrogen central heating boilers

Heat pumps are expensive to buy and to install. It depends on the size and complexity of the installation but a figure of £4-5,000 for a typical UK house (semi-detached, 160 square metres) is probably reasonable for an air-to-water unit. If the radiators in a house need replacement, which is likely in many installations, the cost will be even higher, possibly doubling the eventual bill.

We cannot yet know the cost of a hydrogen boiler for the home. But Worcester Bosch, the largest provider of gas boilers in the UK, says that it expects them to cost about the same as today’s models. It has units on trial. So the average house should see a cost of around £2-2,500, including installation. This is half the cost of a heat pump. Very, very roughly, the annual depreciation of a heat pump is likely to be at least £100 more than a hydrogen boiler. So even if cheap finance is available, the heat pump is going to add substantially to the full costs of heating a home.

3.    The reliability and performance of heat pumps versus standard boilers

The UK heat pump installation industry is still small and installation standards have yet to reach uniformly high levels. Many owners are unhappy with the performance of their heat pumps, saying that they feel that the units do not deliver reliable heat. Partly this may be as a result of householders trying to restrict the use of the pumps because of the high bills that are being received for increased electricity use. But it is undoubtedly true that many homeowners with heat pumps are not able to heat their house consistently to a comfortable level. Bills are also far higher than expected across the country.

4.    The extra infrastructure required across the country

The demand for heat for houses varies hugely throughout the year. At peak, domestic heating probably requires about 170 gigawatts during half hour periods on very cold days.[6] This can be compared to levels peaking at around 50 gigawatts for today’s electricity consumption at similar times. 

 If the average heat pump delivers 2.7 units of heat for each 1 unit of electricity consumed, the figure of 170 gigawatts is lowered to around 60-65 gigawatts if all housing is converted. This is equivalent to adding 120% to total electricity demand. Actually, the numbers will be far worse than this because air source heat pumps work less efficiently at lower outside temperatures when heating needs are greatest. The actual increment to UK electricity demand is likely to be more than 100 gigawatts from a full conversion, tripling maximum electricity demand.

Two problems result from this. First, it will require large amounts of new network infrastructure, ranging from transmission lines to local transformers. I cannot estimate the cost but it will almost certainly add very substantially to electricity bills, further raising the running cost of heat pumps.[7] In addition, many of the required upgrades will be intensely politically controversial. Large-scale transmission lines are already extremely difficult to impose on communities, as both the UK and other countries such as Germany have found. 

The second problem is the availability of renewable electricity supply to meet the increased peak demand levels. To provide reliable power at 150 gigawatts in deep winter, when wind speeds are likely to be low because of the anticyclonic conditions, is an almost impossible challenge. 

  

The four reasons for deep reservations about the viability of air source heat pumps above are complemented by two reasons why hydrogen will be a more appropriate choice for much domestic heating.

  

5, Hydrogen can be stored cheaply and shipped around without major investment in new infrastructure.

Within a few years, the UK will frequently have too much electricity as offshore wind booms. The government has a target of 40 gigawatts offshore by 2030, up from just over 10 gigawatts today. This will meet total demand on its own over long periods even before considering onshore wind and solar PV. Solar PV is also likely to double by 2030, based on current indications of future build-out. 

When renewables supply exceeds demand, hydrogen is the only viable long-term storage medium. The UK is well supplied with potential salt caverns in which hundreds of terawatt hours can be stored. The hydrogen can then be used for domestic heating at some future point, as well as for other applications such as ammonia manufacture, steel-making, chemicals manufacture and for use in electricity generation at times when renewables supply is limited.[8]

Hydrogen can use existing pipelines and domestic supply networks. They can be switched relatively easily from the distribution of natural gas and the UK gas operators are heavily engaged in planning for this. (As are most European networks) More compressors will be required on the distribution lines but the cost of this is likely to be insignificant compared to the extra electricity distribution costs required by a large scale switch to heat pumps. 

6, Hydrogen is far better than electricity at dealing with sharp peaks in demand

It is not simply that hydrogen is easy to store and transport. It is also that it is better able to cope with rapid changes in the level of demand. The ‘ramp rate’ is the amount of change in energy use as demand rises, for example when householders return from work. At the moment, the electricity ramp rate peaks at less than 5 gigawatts an hour. But the ramp rate for heating is probably more than 10 times this level.[9]

This number would fall if heat pumps were providing 100% of domestic heat because they should be operated constantly, even when householders are out of the house. But, nevertheless, a full transition to heat pumps will significantly increase the variability of electricity demand, posing problems for suppliers and distribution network operators. Gases, including hydrogen, are far better at handling this variability, partly because the gas in the pipelines themselves represent substantial stores of energy which can meet sharp changes in demand.

 

 To summarise: domestic heating uses more energy (about 300 terawatt hours a year in natural gas alone) as all electricity requirements combined. And usage is highly variable, peaking on cold days at almost six times electric power employed for all purposes. Running an energy system to service such a large and unstable demand using electricity is unlikely to work. It is far better to employ a more easily storable energy vector such as hydrogen, which can be easily made and stored at times of excess power generation and then distributed when needed.

Hydrogen is currently substantially more expensive than natural gas. But the gap between the two commodities is highly likely to narrow sharply in the next decade and may then disappear in energy-rich countries such as the UK. The current focus on heat pumps as the principal route for decarbonisation of heating therefore makes little sense.

 

April 8th 2021

Chris Goodall

chris@carboncommentary.com

+44 7767 386696

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


[1] Direct Online Only tariff Version 7 for a house in Oxford.

[2] Part of the reason for this large difference is that the costs of decarbonisation have been largely loaded onto electricity rather than gas. 

[3] It is helpful to note that the ratio between gas and electricity prices is particularly wide in the UK. EU Commission data suggests that the average ratio in the EU is about 3.3, not the 5.3 recorded in the current British Gas tariff. Seehttps://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Electricity_price_statistics and https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Natural_gas_price_statistics

 

 

[4] Hydrogen is less dense and although it can probably be transported at higher pressure than natural gas it still requires more compressor stations to ship through the network.

[5] https://assets.bbhub.io/professional/sites/24/BNEF-Hydrogen-Economy-Outlook-Key-Messages-30-Mar-2020.pdf

[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421518307249

[7] Currently distribution charges make up 22% of the average domestic electricity bill. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that this number could double if the UK had to install the infrastructure to handle peak electricity flows of 3 times current levels.

[8] Hydrogen power stations, such as adapted gas turbines, are now being planned in Europe and elsewhere. 

[9] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421518307249

The UK would require 100 GW of offshore wind for domestic heating, not the 300 GW the CCC claims

The Chief Executive of the UK’s Climate Change Committee is reported as saying that the UK would need to multiply its offshore wind capacity 30 fold in order to produce enough hydrogen to fuel domestic boilers. He appears to say that this therefore makes hydrogen impractical as a substitute for natural gas. I don’t think his number is remotely correct.

The CCC has always been a little sceptical about hydrogen for the obvious reasons that it is currently expensive and a switch to using it for domestic heating is a difficult and highly ambitious step.

In this case, its scepticism is overdone. To make enough hydrogen to completely cover the energy needs of all UK domestic homes currently using natural gas for space and water heating would require about 101 gigawatts of extra offshore wind, not the 300 gigawatts the CCC claims. (There is about 10 GW of offshore wind at the moment).

This is an important difference. The UK government is promising 30 gigawatts of new offshore wind in the next ten years so 101 extra gigawatts is easily conceivable. 300 is much more difficult. 

By the way, we hydrogen fan-boys don’t argue for exclusive use of hydrogen in domestic heating. if we can electrify space heating using heat pumps we should do so. But heat pumps will not work effectively in many circumstances and hydrogen will therefore probably be necessary for some homes. It is well within the capacity of the UK offshore wind sector to provide the electricity necessary, despite the CCC’s statements.

Assumptions

Here are the assumptions behind my calculation.

1, Offshore wind capacity factor – 50%. (Probably a bit low for future wind farms but a bit higher than is currently achieved).

2, Electricity to hydrogen conversion factor – 70%. (Achievable today with a PEM electrolyser).

3, Requirement for total terawatt hours for domestic gas use – about 310 TWh. (Source: DUKES Energy for 2020)

4, Total offshore wind capacity required to provide 310 TWh of hydrogen – About 101 GW.

5, I have not added in the small amount of relatively extra energy needed to pump hydrogen through a network of pipes compared to natural gas.

How much hydrogen will be needed to replace coal in making steel?

About 7-9% of the world’s emissions arise from the manufacturing of steel. It is the world’s most polluting industry. Hydrogen could entirely replace the massive use of coal, although the transition will be expensive. However it is probably the only realistic way that steel can get to net zero, a conclusion that seems increasingly shared within the industry.

This note looks at the likely costs of making steel without significant emissions. It assumes that hydrogen is made using renewable electricity and briefly assesses how much new wind or solar capacity will be required to allow the industry to get to ‘net zero’. Making hydrogen from steel only takes place today in tiny quantities so the figures in this article cannot be definitive but I thought it would be helpful to give a sense of scale. Corrections are very welcome.

The basic numbers

The world makes about 1.8 billion tonnes of steel a year. This number is expected to rise to possibly double this level by 2050, although there is a very wide range of forecasts. 

Steel use in developed countries will not rise substantially, if at all. A modern economy typically requires a stock of about 12 tonnes of steel per person to provide the buildings, cars and other infrastructure required. Most OECD countries are already at this level. A decade of rapid building has given China a large fraction of the circa 12 tonnes per person required. 

But total steel sales of about 1.8 billion tonnes a year only provides about a quarter of a tonne per person globally. Although we will probably see improvements in the efficiency of steel use, replacing some metal with wood or carbon fibre, the world is very far from sating its needs.

‘New’ steel versus recycled metal. 

About three quarters of all steel made today comes from the processing of iron ore. Coal is burnt in a blast furnace to ‘reduce’ the ore, that is extract its oxygen leaving metallic iron. The remainder is almost all made from the recycling of existing steel in electric arc furnaces. 

 ‘New’ steel                 1.35 billion tonnes

Recycled steel             0.45 billion tonnes

Total                            1.80 billion tonnes

 Some processes in the manufacture of ‘new’ steel can be improved. New plants use less coal than ones that are fifty years old. But the processes employed today will always need very large amounts of coal.[1]

 Each tonne of ‘new’ steel typically requires about 0.77 tonnes of coal, meaning that the industry as a whole uses just over 1 billion tonnes a year.

The energy value of the type of coal used for steelmaking is about 8 megawatt hours (MWh) per tonne. So each tonne of ‘new’ steel has typically required about 6 MWh in the process of getting from iron ore to a finished steel product, such as coil used for making the exteriors of cars. 

The coal energy needed for steel-making is therefore

1.35 billion tonnes of steel times 6 MWh = about 8,000 Terawatt hours (TWh) = as a comparison, about one third of global electricity consumption

 By contrast, recycled steel uses much less energy per tonne. One source suggests about 0.67 MWh per tonne of finished product. 

Using hydrogen instead

A small quantity of steel is made today using what is called the ‘direct reduction’ process and the technology is mature. A synthesis gas (hydrogen and carbon monoxide) made from methane (natural gas) is burnt in a large chamber to extract or ‘reduce’ the iron ore to metal.

The first experiments in large scale direct reduction using pure hydrogen are now being carried out at the SSAB steel works in Sweden. These experiments will give us more accurate data on the amount of hydrogen needed. 

Direct reduction using hydrogen will almost certainly be more energy efficient than using coal. From reading around the subject, I guess that a tonne of finished ‘new’ steel will require about 3 MWh of hydrogen, considerable less than the 6 needed for coal-based processes. However the process of making the hydrogen will incur some additional energy losses in the electrolyser, taking the amount of electrical energy required up to between 4 and 4.5 MWh per tonne of steel. Let’s assume the figure is about 4.25 MWh.

 Amount of electricity required to create the hydrogen to make all the world’s ‘new’ steel at today’s production levels = 1,350 million tonnes times 4.25 MWh = 5,700 Terawatt hours or about one quarter of world electricity production.

If the hydrogen is all made from renewable electricity, how much extra wind or solar capacity will be required?

 If the average new wind turbine has a capacity factor of 40% (low for offshore, probably about right for onshore) then the world would need about 1600-1650 gigawatts of extra turbines. This is well over two and a half times the currently installed amount of wind power globally. The figure for solar PV would be roughly twice this level.

What weight of hydrogen will be required?

 Figures for the world’s current hydrogen production vary between sources but most indicate that about 70-80 million tonnes of the gas are made each year. None is currently used for making steel.

A tonne of ‘new’ steel will need about 90 kilogrammes of H2 (with an energy value of about 3 MWh). 

 1,350 million tonnes of steel, each requiring 90 kg will use about 122 million tonnes of hydrogen, or about 50% more than current world production.

What about the capacity of electrolysers?

If we assume that the electrolysers work every hour of the year, then we will need about 650 gigawatts of capacity. This compares to less than 1 gigawatt installed globally at present. 

Conclusion

A swing to hydrogen as the fuel and reducing agent for steel production will involve a major transition. Very large amounts of new renewable capacity will be required if ‘green’ hydrogen is used. The electrolyser manufacturing industry will need to expand by several orders of magnitude. And, of course, the steel industry will have to invest billions in the new plants required. Most sources suggest that for the main steel firms to make the transition voluntarily that they will have to see a mixture of low power prices (say below $40 a MWh) and a reasonable carbon tax (at around $50 a tonne). These figures seems entirely attainable to me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


[1] Today’s plants use a blast furnace (BF) in which coal is used to reduce ore to liquid iron. The iron is then turned into steel in a basic oxygen furnace (BOF). The BF-BOF process is now used to make a very large fraction of all ‘new’ steel.

Nine steps towards Net Zero. (published in the Guardian Tuesday 6.10.2020).

Net zero. It’s a simple enough concept to understand – the notion that we reduce carbon emissions to a level such that we are no longer adding to the stock in the atmosphere. More and more companies and countries are taking the pledge, promising to hit ‘net zero’ by 2050, 2030 or even sooner.

But it’s easier said than done. Industrial processes remain carbon intensive, agriculture and aviation too. Even the sudden economic halt brought about by Covid 19 this year will result in a mere downward blip in greenhouse gas emissions.

The sharp decline in energy use at the beginning of the pandemic has not persisted. Government stimulus programmes have done little to prioritise green projects - barely 1% of the funds made available around the world will target climate change mitigation (LINK). Hopes that the virus would push us into radical action to reduce emissions have proved illusory.

This may make us pessimistic about the future – but that would be mistaken. The last six months have seen a growing realisation around the world that fully decarbonising our societies is technically possible, relatively cheap and potentially of major benefit to society, particularly its less prosperous families.

A sensible portfolio of actions can reduce emissions, provide jobs and improve living standards in forgotten parts of the UK. It won’t be completely painless but this nine-step plan can beneficially transform much of the British economy.

1. Energy

Successful action will start with electricity generation. Britain has made surprisingly good progress in recent years, cutting CO2 from power plants by 60% in the last decade, largely as a result of the replacement of coal generation by wind and solar power. We should go much further because we’ll need to generate far more electricity to meet demand from electric cars and from heat pumps for home heating. If we increase generation by about 20 times from today’s levels. (CAN YOU describe here what that would look like: x new mega wind farms? Solar panels on every house? Are we on track for this kind of expansion - increasing anything 20fold seems an enormous task?) this will give us sufficient electricity almost all the time, significantly reducing the problems arising from the unpredictability and intermittency of most renewable sources. Is such as massive expansion actually possible? I have calculated (LINK) that the UK would achieve this target by devoting about 5% of its maritime zone to offshore wind, 2% of the land area to solar panels and about 12% to onshore wind. These are large numbers, but far from impossible. BP, a recent convert to the importance of the expansion of global renewables, makes a similar estimate that wind and solar should also be expanded 20 times around the world to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. (LINK)

2. Batteries and hydrogen

Under the scenario described above, we will have far too much electricity almost all the time. Batteries can cope with some of this surplus but most of the power should be converted to hydrogen. Today, hydrogen is created from fossil fuels but it can be easily made from water using the electrolysis process. The gas can be stored for later use to make electricity on the rare occasions when renewable power is insufficient. Hydrogen is hugely versatile; it can also be deployed to power vehicles, to provide the energy for steel-making and other industrial processes and to act as the critical raw material for the chemicals industry. Although ‘green’ hydrogen made from renewable electricity is currently much more expensive than natural gas, the consistently rapid fall in renewable energy prices is pushing down costs every month. This means that for those buildings that cannot be heated by electric heat pumps, hydrogen boilers may even become a viable alternative to gas central heating. 

In the last few months, major European countries have shifted strongly towards this plan. France (LINK) and Germany (LINK) have promised a total of €16bn to help build a hydrogen sector. Companies in Norway (LINK) and Denmark (LINK) have announced plans to create chemical plants to build zero-carbon liquid fuels made from hydrogen and using carbon dioxide captured directly from industrial processes. Italy’s dominant gas distributor has begun mixing hydrogen into its pipelines (LINK) while Spain’s largest utility will build a facility to make the gas from solar electricity(LINK) and use it to provide all the needs of a large fertiliser plant. Shell will take surplus electricity from North Sea wind farms to provide hydrogen for an oil refinery in the Netherlands (LINK). A Finnish partnership has suggested using the CO2 from paper mills to combine with green hydrogen to make substitutes for petrol and diesel (LINK) while a French mill will be using it to make electricity when power prices are high (LINK). All this has happened in the last year and the number of announcements is speeding up across the continent.

3. Utilities

As a supplement to decarbonising energy supply, we also need to wrest control over the energy networks back from their current owners, often non-UK businesses owned by private equity funds. Many other countries, such as the US, have publicly controlled energy companies that can act to meet local needs and minimise the cost of gas and electricity. We should follow the example of Germany and offer the chance to local governments to run all the utility networks in their areas. So far, municipal energy companies have not been successful in the UK but they have never actually been able to own the pipes and wires within their towns and cities. This should change.

4. Efficiency

We need to complement the decarbonisation of energy supply with measures to improve energy efficiency. In the UK the crucial target is the poor insulation standards of almost all our housing. Policy has been lamentably weak in this area over the last decades. We have seen minor improvements but now require programmes of deep refurbishment, working street-by-street across the country. This may seem an expensive and difficult programme but nothing else can provide an adequate boost to jobs and incomes in our most deprived areas. The refitting of our substandard homes is the best way of avoiding the worst consequences of the otherwise inevitable rise in unemployment over the next months and years. France is devoting a large fraction of its economic expansion plan to improving the energy efficiency of its homes and public buildings such as schools and prisons. We can also follow this example.

5. Motoring

The obvious other target is car use. Many European cities have pedestrianised large areas of the centre, introduced better cycling provision and improved public transport. As far as I know, none has reversed these changes. Taking cars out of cities is the single best way of reviving centres, reducing pollution levels and getting more people on bikes. Let’s particularly embrace electric bikes, which use a hundred times less energy than a car. Detailed analysis in the Netherlands city of Utrecht (LINK) showed that the spending on cycle lanes was more than repaid by lower health costs as a result of the population embracing active means of getting around the urban centre.

6. Farming

Energy use represents around two thirds of carbon emissions. Easily the next most important source of greenhouse gases is farming. Cows and sheep emit methane and fertiliser use creates nitrous oxide, both powerful greenhouse gases. Moving towards a diet dominated by plants is a vital part of the fight against climate change. We’ll probably never get a stable climate until meat has almost disappeared.

However it is increasingly clear that we can make fully vegan foods that resemble meats for those who would miss the taste and texture of the real thing. Meat production dominates farming around the world and reducing animal numbers will give us space to introduce properly climate-friendly agriculture. That means farming that is less intensive and less dependent on herbicides, pesticides and fertilisers. It will also employ more people.

7. Reforestation.

We need a massive programme of reforestation. The UK woodland cover is little more than a third of the extent of other large European countries and the planting of mixed trees will help capture CO2, bring jobs back to the periphery of the British Isles, help control flooding and improve air quality, as well as providing greater opportunities for leisure.

8. Flying and shipping.

In the long term, we can probably replace the fossil fuels we use for flying with low carbon alternatives made from captured CO2 and hydrogen. Today, we should cut our flying, either taking the train or avoiding long distance travel. This is costly and difficult for some people but the ‘Flight Shame’ movement originating from Sweden has helped push down passenger numbers, particularly in Germany. Flying really matters to your personal carbon footprint; a return journey from London to New York will typically produce more CO2 than your share of the emissions from driving a car for a year.

9. Carbon tax

Lastly, we should try to bring the reluctant oil and gas industries onto our side by instituting a tax on the production of anything which results in carbon emissions. Rarely in the past have businesses asked to be more heavily taxed. But today almost all large fossil companies are pleading for a carbon levy that provides the necessary incentive for them to wean themselves off extracting oil and gas.

Fighting the causes and consequences of climate change is neither particularly difficult or expensive. The net impact on jobs and living standards will be strongly positive. The programme will require direction from central government, and probably an effective carbon tax, alongside a willingness to hand over some powers to local authorities.

Perhaps this is the most contentious part of the programme I propose - the idea that Whitehall should recognise both that the free market needs some assistance when it comes to climate change, and that devolution of real power to towns and cities could be beneficial to everybody.

Chris Goodall is an author and environmentalist whose latest book, What We Need To Do Now, assesses the steps needed to build a low-carbon world and was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize. He writes a weekly newsletter on low carbon progress around the world, available at www.carboncommentary.com

Business is now the dominant force pushing the speed of decarbonisation

Most of us assume that governments and international organisations will take the crucial roles in the fight against climate change. But over the past year more and more commercial companies have chosen to become the leaders in the battle to reduce emissions. While countries have prevaricated and blustered about their response to the environmental emergency, businesses have quietly taken action to align their activities to the ‘net zero’ objective.[1]

These steps may not pay off immediately. In fact, it is likely that many decisions by corporations will end up by costing them money. Nevertheless, the number, complexity and size of projects announced by major businesses in the last few months have shown a striking commitment to taking important steps to develop low-carbon technologies, even without an obvious monetary incentive.

Here are six examples of very recent path-breaking steps by businesses - many currently involved in activities that produce large volumes of CO2 - in advance of any obligation to take action to decarbonise. Some of these projects have been financially assisted by governments or the EU but all have been partly funded by private companies taking a risk on their investment of money and management time.

 1.    Norsk e-Fuel will make aviation fuel from renewable hydrogen and CO2 captured from a cement plant.[2]Eventually, the company will incorporate CO2 that has been directly captured from the air. It intends to make 100 million litres of fuel by 2026, enough to cover a large fraction of Norway’s needs for domestic routes. The company is a joint venture between technology providers and two industrial companies seeking to build a business that pioneers low carbon fuel for airplanes. The backers of this ambitious venture know that the price of the synthetic fuel may well be twice the cost of today’s fossil oils. Nevertheless, they have pushed ahead knowing that the long-distance aviation will only be possible if this, or other similar technologies, have begun producing low carbon fuel.

 2.    Hydrogen made by electricity from a solar power station will provide the crucial ingredient for a fertiliser factory in southern Spain. Spanish utility Iberdrola has said it will take the power from a new 100 MW solar farm and convert it into hydrogen for use in a large fertiliser factory nearby.[3] The company will use advanced electrolysis techniques to make the hydrogen and will store it as a liquid combined with other chemicals. This highly innovative project will require subsidy from Iberdrola in the form of reduced hydrogen and electricity prices but it says that it is willing to bear these costs in order to speed up the development of new technologies.

3.    Cement producer Lafarge and the Austrian oil and gas company OMV announced that they would cooperate to design and build a plant to capture 700,000 tonnes of CO2 coming from a cement works and turn it into ‘renewable’ hydrocarbons.[4] The other two partners, the largest Austrian utility and a specialty chemicals company, will respectively provide the hydrogen and turn the hydrocarbons into fully recyclable plastics. The plan will take the rest of the decade to come to fruition but nevertheless this is a highly significant project: four different companies embedded in the fossil fuel economy have become participants in a venture which will develop wholly green alternatives to conventional hydrocarbons. 

4.    Steelmaking represents about 7% of world emissions, largely because coal is consumed to reduce iron ore to molten metal. Speciality Swedish steel producer SSAB was the first to take substantial action to move away from this fuel.[5] It is constructing a new steel works that will use hydrogen instead of coal. This will be a new process which several other major steelmakers are also beginning to experiment with. SSAB’s initiative is costly, with a total bill of around €200m to the end of the pilot phase, and the steel produced will be perhaps 25-30% more expensive than metal made using coal. Nevertheless, the company and its partners are confident that the switch away from coal is necessary and its new process will, in time, be the most economical way of producing steel.

5.    In France, a large paper works owned by Smurfit Kappa has decided to employ hydrogen in a different way.[6] It will replace a natural gas turbine that makes a combination of heat and power with one that uses hydrogen. When the energy market is in surplus, the company will convert electricity into hydrogen, and then burn it to make heat and electricity at times of short supply. This pioneering project may be the first time that a commercial company has built its energy strategy around the conversion of power into hydrogen for later use in a gas turbine. It is highly unlikely that the choice makes financial sense today but successful firms are good at taking decisions that reflect what is likely to happen in the future. 

6.    Lastly, I wanted to note a very different sort of project. The US payments processing company Stripe recently asked for bids for a pot of $1m of money that it had set aside to pay other companies to collect and permanently store CO2.[7] Winners included a Swiss company that captures CO2 from the air and then injects it into basalt rock. The rock is chemically altered by this action, permanently sequestering the gas. Stripe is doing what we all need to do, thinking about ways in which it can counterbalance remaining emissions once it has taken all the actions it feasibly can to reduce its carbon footprint.

The first five of these examples share a similar characteristic. The companies are intending to use renewable electricity to provide the energy to break water into oxygen and hydrogen in the process called electrolysis. This hydrogen will be made in times when electricity is in surplus. The gas can be turned into other products or transformed back into electricity when renewable sources are not freely available. 

 This pattern is no accident; we are all becoming increasingly aware that full decarbonisation will require us to invest trillions of Euros in renewables ever year for the next few decades. And because the supply of wind and solar electricity can never be fully guaranteed, we require a storage medium such as hydrogen. Batteries will never provide enough capacity to store surplus power for months on end. The second crucial value of H2 is that it can be transformed relatively easily into close substitutes for fossil fuels. Renewable electricity and hydrogen provides the clearest route to net zero, a view probably shared by all the companies covered in this article.

 These six short case histories illustrate the second phase of the long journey towards decarbonisation. The first was the rapidly growth in investments in wind and solar across the world, increasing the production of green electricity. ENEL Green Power was one of the most important actors in this global movement, accompanied on the journey by the many companies that decided that their electricity purchases came from exclusively zero-carbon sources. The business world now needs to ensure that the momentum is maintained, showing governments and the rest of civil society that decarbonisation is both technically and financially feasible.

Chris Goodall July 2020


[1] We use the expression ‘net zero’ when describing a company or a country that has reduced its responsibility for overall emissions down to zero, possibly by employing techniques that capture CO2 to counteract any remaining greenhouse gases which it creates.

[2] https://www.norsk-e-fuel.com/en/

[3] https://www.europapress.es/castilla-lamancha/noticia-iberdrola-entra-negocio-hidrogeno-inversion-150-millones-proyecto-puertollano-20200312140251.html

[4] https://www.omv.com/en/news/200624_lafarge-omv-verbund-and-borealis-join-hands-to-capture-and-utilize-co2-on-an-industrial-scale

[5] https://www.ssab.com/company/sustainability/sustainable-operations/hybrit

[6] https://www.paperfirst.info/smurfit-kappa-saillat-france-will-produce-paper-with-the-worlds-first-industrial-scale-hydrogen-turbine/

[7] https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases

COVID and the energy transition

 Chris Goodall 29 July 2020.

(This article was published by Roca Gallery, part of the Spanish ceramics company and a business I have had the privilege of working with before. URL is http://www.rocagallery.com/covid-and-the-energy-transition)

Many of us hoped that the profound shock delivered to the world by the pandemic would speed up action on climate change. COVID gave us what the English call ‘a teachable moment’, an event that can be employed to communicate a wider truth. The infection arose because mankind’s chronic abuse of nature has allowed more diseases to cross from animals into humans. It ought to be obvious, say climate activists everywhere, that the use of the atmosphere as a dumping ground for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is creating a similar disaster just waiting to happen. Climate change is both more dangerous than COVID and more difficult to control. There may eventually be effective vaccines to the disease but there is no drug that can make us immune to increasing temperatures, fiercer storms and rising waters. 

Nevertheless, I think we will be disappointed by the response to the pandemic. I guess that we will eventually return to the lives we lived before the storm arose. We’ll travel, work in offices and buy too many unnecessary things, just as in the past. At the global peak of the pandemic, greenhouse gas emissions were down about 17% from the equivalent period in 2019. But in China, the world’s biggest carbon polluter, emissions were back to pre-COVID levels by May 2020. The rest of the world will probably follow quickly.

Is this sufficient reason to be pessimistic about the long-term climate effects of the pandemic? Not necessarily. The impact on greenhouse gases will be principally felt through indirect repercussions to the world’s economies, not through the changes directly caused by the disease itself. 

The first such repercussion of the disease is the crushing rise in unemployment, particularly amongst the younger and less-skilled members of society. Governments have begun to react to this, usually by stepping up investment programmes in order to provide jobs. In many countries, such as Germany, new capital has been carefully directed towards the green sectors of the economy. For example, €9 billion has been promised to develop hydrogen made from renewable electricity which helps store the energy generated on windy days. In France, the activist group WWF and consultants Ernst & Young combined to argue that a green restart to the economy might result in one million new jobs. Most of these will be concentrated in building renovation work and in renewables. 

 It makes good sense for governments to push their money into these sectors. A recent report highlighted the greater impact on jobs of investment in the green economy. It estimated that every $1m of support from public funds would add almost eight new jobs in green industries, such as housing refurbishment, compared to less than three in the rest of the economy.

The second indirect repercussion of the disease will be a wish to dismantle complex international supply chains and move business back to individual countries. Local self-reliance, whether in food, energy or medical drugs will probably reduce emissions. Not only will the carbon costs of shipping and aviation be reduced but - more importantly - the CO2 arising from local manufacture will be more carefully monitored and controlled. 

A further consequence of the virus will be increased confidence about the feasibility, and desirability, of a rapid energy transition. During the worst days of the pandemic, electricity demand was down more than 25% in some nations. Countries in which a large percentage of supply arises from intermittent renewables, principally solar and wind, were understandably concerned about the stability of the grid as fossil fuels were pushed out of the electricity market. But electricity supply remained stable and resilient almost everywhere. This has improved our confidence that renewables will be able to provide larger and larger portions of energy requirements. Moreover, many large companies, such as Iberdrola in Spain, have noted the resilience of the grid and accelerated their plans for investment in wind and solar.

At the beginning of this article I suggested that the disease will have little direct effect on the energy transition. I think there is one exception to this conclusion. A consequence of the restrictions on travel was a striking improvement in inner city air quality. City mayors want to avoid going back to the levels of pollution prior to the pandemic. Particularly in Britain, they also seek to encourage walking and cycling to reduce obesity, which has had a profound effect on the severity of the illnesses experienced by COVID victims. My guess is that only significant policy change arising from the pandemic will be a rapid growth in car-free areas, reclaiming our urban centres for pedestrians and cyclists. 

Human beings focus on highly visible events, such as the emptying of the airports after COVID, and wrongly assume that they are illustrations of wider trends. Single battles, even those as profound as the struggle against the pandemic, are as nothing compared to the longer war against climate breakdown. In a year’s time my guess is that we will find it difficult to quantify the direct impact of COVID on emissions. Nevertheless we are gradually beginning to flatten the curve of greenhouse gas growth as renewables become ever cheaper and companies around the world finally begin to take full responsibility for their impact on the atmosphere.

 

Key figures from the winning Hollandse Kust (Noord) offshore wind farm bid

1, The Nederlandse Kust (Noord) offshore wind site sits 18.5 km off the northern Netherlands coast. It is split into two parts.

2, In total, it covers 125 km2.

3, Kust (Noord) will contain 69 turbines with a capacity of 759 MW. (Some sources say 769 MW). The Siemens Gamesa turbines are 11 MW in size.

4, Power output is expected to be at least 3.3 TWh per year. (Some reports omit the words ‘at least’ or say ‘about’). 

5, It is expected to be operational in 2023. The winning bid was announced on 28th July 2020.

6, It will deliver part of its electricity to a hydrogen unit in the port of Rotterdam. The electrolyser is said to be sized at 200 MW.

7, No subsidies are payable. The winning bidder was selected on the basis of qualitative factors. (‘A beauty contest’ in English jargon). I suspect that the government authority that awarded the Shell/Eneco consortium with rights to develop the area may have been swayed by the commitment to use part of the output to make hydrogen.

8, The Netherlands plans to produce 16% of its electricity from offshore wind energy by 2023 and increase this to 40% by 2030. Total current electricity consumption is about 115 TWh a year. 

Resulting numbers

a)    MW capacity per km2 = 759/125                                            = 6.07 MW/km2

b)    Hectares per MW = (125*100)/759                                        = 165 Ha/MW

c)     Annual output per MW = 3.3*1000/759                               = 4.35 GWh/MW

d)    Annual output per km2 = 3.3*1000/125                                = 26.4 GWh/km2

e)    Watts of output per m2 = Convert 3.3 TWh to Watt hours and then divide by the number of hours in the year and the number of sq metres in 125 sq km = 3.01 watts/m2

f)     Capacity factor = 3.3 TWh/759 MW divided by numbers of hours in a year. = 49.0 %

g)    Share of total national electricity use = 3.3TWh/115 TWh  = 2.9%

Sources: 

https://windeurope.org/newsroom/press-releases/combined-offshore-wind-hydrogen-project-wins-dutch-hollandse-kust-noord-tender/ (press release)

https://www.offshorewind.biz/2020/05/07/shell-and-eneco-jointly-submit-hollandse-kust-noord-bid/

 

 

 

 

BP’s strategy change will leave it producing almost as much useful energy as today

BP announcements this week included a stated intention to reduce its oil production by almost 40% by 2030 at the same time as ramping up to 50 gigawatts of renewables capacity. 

Initially I thought this would mean a significant fall in the amount of useful energy produced by the company. Cutting oil output from 2.6m to 1.5m barrels a day will reduce the world total by slightly more than 1%. And in the little spreadsheets below I show that 47.5 GW of extra renewables will probably only produce about 0.5% of world electricity. Given that oil is globally a more important source of energy than electricity today, I assumed that BP was going to see shrinkage its share of the overall world market.

This may well not be true. Less than 20% of the initial energy value in a barrel of oil typically gets translated into useful actions, such as moving a car. Electricity is much more efficient and up to 90% of the energy value is available via an electric motor. As a result, $50bn of investment in renewables will produce almost as much useful energy in 2030 as is lost by BP letting its oil output decline. 128 terawatt hours of useful energy from oil will be lost by the strategy change while 113 hours of renewable electricity is gained. 

BP energy calcs.jpg

·      The critical assumption in this calculation is the expected capacity factor of the renewables. In a good solar region, PV would produce approximately 25% of the absolute maximum output if the sun shone 24 hours a day 365 days a year. Onshore wind might average 40% in a windy area while offshore wind will go over 50%. BP says it will invest $50bn to achieve an extra 47.5 GW of capacity. This isn’t currently enough to pay for that much offshore wind, so I assume a 50:50 mixture of solar and onshore wind. This would be fundable by an investment of $50bn and an average capacity factor of 32.5%.

This analysis suggests that BP’s output of useful energy will be down by about 7% to around 113 terawatt hours. 113 TWh is about 0.07% of the world’s total current need for energy, or about 1/1500 of the total. In other words, BP will continue to have to invest billions a year to make a truly significant contribution. However we should remember that the vast majority of current needs are provided by burning fossil fuels which captures only a relatively small fraction of the combustion energy. 113 TWh is about 0.4% of world electricity requirements.

What about the value of the output as recorded on the company’s profit and loss statement? 

Crude oil trades for about $46 today; let’s call that $50. (BP’s long term assumption for the oil price is $55). BP refines about ¾ of its output which probably adds about $20 to the value of the product although some of the energy content of the original oil is lost. The cash value of the output it is losing by letting oil production drift down by 1.1 million barrels a day is about $24bn. 

The equivalent number for the electricity output gained is just under $7bn, so the strategy switch will cut BP’s turnover by about $17bn, or around 7% of its annual total. However a billion pounds of renewable electricity is produced with very low operating costs. A PV farm doesn’t need anybody working on it while an offshore oil rig is expensive to service and operate. So the impact on immediate profitability will be much less, provided the price of electricity stays at around $50 per megawatt hour. 

The UK’s flight addiction is paused. The only safe recovery is a synthetic jet fuel revolution

(This article was published in Business Green on June 24th 2020. Many thanks to Ned Molloy for all his help).

The Coronavirus lockdown, including the shutdown of most air travel, cut global carbon emissions a whopping 17% at the peak of the confinement in April, compared to a year earlier.

This pause is a good time to reflect on our “flight privilege”. Astonishingly, more British people took flights abroad pre-crisis than from any other country in the world. If you feel it’s unfair you can’t fly abroad this year, just remember that you’re now, temporarily, in the normal situation for 80% of humanity that has never stepped foot on a plane in their life.

And yes, that’s the 80% that’s probably going to be hit hardest by Coronavirus, and climate change.

So if we are going to start flying at pre-crisis levels at some point, we’ve got to have a real plan for how to do so without adding carbon into our dangerously saturated atmosphere.

Coronavirus has reminded us it’s a good idea to listen to the science. To maintain a safe climate for human habitation, scientists say the world must have abandoned the use of fossil fuels by 2050 or before. Some parts of this transition to low carbon energy have an obvious route. For example, we know how to get to zero emissions from electricity production and road transport. 

But what about flying? This month the largest yet electric plane made a successful half-hour flight - but it was still tiny, with room for nine passengers only.  Longer flights, carrying hundreds of people, will need to be powered by energy-dense liquid fuels for decades to come. 

Investment in zero-carbon aviation fuels then, is the most important measure of much airlines care about climate change, and on that measure, during the last 10 profitable years for the airline sector, the answer is - almost zero. Now that airlines are in crisis, and receiving huge sums of public money, it’s time to fundamentally rethink the business model. Building a new industrial sector around zero-carbon aviation fuels is an obvious target for a green stimulus.

The development of climate-safe aviation fuel is undoubtedly a challenge. Nevertheless, it is technically feasible and well within the competence of the UK’s universities, our innovative young companies and chemical engineering industries.

Research work at the moment focuses on making fuel from wastes such as plastics or wood chippings. This route is a dead end, because thevolumes of aviation fuel required around the world (around 7 million barrels per day, pre-crisis) dwarf any available source of waste. 

A different route is necessary, making carbon-neutral fuel in a anindustrial process that does not require use of scarce materials. Is this even possible? Surprisingly, yes, it’s been done already. We can make chemically equivalent versions of jet fuel by combining hydrogen produced from water via a process called electrolysis, and carbon dioxide captured from the air or from industrial processes such as cement making. If the hydrogen is made using renewable electricity, and the CO2 is sucked from the atmosphere, this synthetic aviation fuel adds no carbon to the atmosphere, and is compatible with the UK’s ‘net zero’ target.

This is not speculative science on a blackboard. The reaction of hydrogen and carbon atoms to make complex hydrocarbons occurs in a process called “Fischer-Tropsch”, that was invented in Germany almost a hundred years ago. We are able to employ well understood rules of chemicals production to make hydrocarbons that are almost exactly the same as those made from fossil oil.  In fact, they will be better because they contain no sulphur or any of the other unwanted materials contained in fossil fuels, and will cause far less pollution from ultra-fine particles.

So we’re not “waiting for a breakthrough” - we face a large engineering project. Decarbonising aviation requires mass manufacturing of hydrogen using electricity generated from renewable sources, the capture of carbon dioxide at the lowest cost, and the building of large Fischer-Tropsch refineries that can produce millions of tonnes of fuels a year. Although small groups of companies in Germany, the Netherlands and elsewhere have begun to develop integrated plants that can make this carbon-neutral synthetic aviation fuel, the field is still wide open for the UK to dominate.

At present, synthetic fuels are more expensive that fossil equivalents. One estimate is that the cost is equivalent to oil at $100 a barrel, even in regions where cheap hydrogen can be made.[1] However the only way to bring these costs down sharply is to scale up production. The UK’s task is to establish a synthetic fuels industry to capitalise on what will become a multi-billion dollar global industry. ITM Power, a Sheffield company, is already a world-leader in making hydrogen from renewable electricity. Several UK businesses, such as C Capture in Leeds, have expertise in CO2 collection. 

What policies do we need to push the development of carbon-neutral aviation fuels? I suggest four: tax, regulation, subsidy of the first commercial plants and new research. Firstly, fossil jet fuel is currently free of any tax and the first change should be a levy that pushes its cost per litre at least up to the level of petrol. (There are barriers in international treaties but the global interest in imposing fair taxation on aviation is probably at an all-time high). Secondly, regulation to mandate the airlines use a small but growing percentage of zero carbon fuel, copying Sweden and Norway.. The immediate boost to the UK synthetic fuel industry would be enormous. 

Thirdly on subsidies, use some of the revenue from taxing fossil jet fuel to run competitions to develop commercial-scale Fischer-Tropsch refineries that use zero-carbon hydrogen and captured CO2. The industrial infrastructure is there to build these refineries today, and sufficient government support will rapidly bring low-carbon aviation fuel to market. Importantly, the scale of the eventual market for low carbon fuels would mean that the oil majors would pitch for these funds. It gives them a route away from fossil fuels. Lastly, it makes sense to direct research funding towards this sector, particularly because it fits the UK’s existing skills in chemical engineering.

It’s not going to be easy. But the world has no alternative to synthetic fuels if we want to continue to be able to fly. The UK’s green stimulus should include all four of the above measures, to speed up the development of this potentially vast new industry. 

Chris Goodall’s new book is called What We Need To Now – For a Zero Carbon Future

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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'Renewables plus hydrogen' - almost all that we need

The world’s entire energy system is going to be built around renewable electricity and green hydrogen. This was an unconventional assertion to make as little as six months ago. In some parts of the world it is now perceived to be a statement of the obvious. 

The purpose of this note is to provide basic details of the major large-scale experiments and commercial projects in Europe and elsewhere that demonstrate that hydrogen can fully complement green electricity and will provide the energy source for almost all activities that cannot be electrified. I write because I think that the development of a ‘renewables plus hydrogen’ economy should be the policy priority for the UK and other countries.

Renewable electricity

 Electricity will become the power source for almost all surface transport, including buses and many heavy vehicles. Electricity will provide increasing percentages of the low temperature heat that we need, principally through the use of heat pumps in homes and offices. 

I propose in What We Need To Do Now that we deal with the problem of intermittency of most renewable source of electricity by massively expanding our capacity to collect energy from the wind and the sun. This will give us sufficient electricity almost all of the time, reducing to almost zero our need for backup sources of power. 

Most of the time our electricity system will have major surpluses. These surpluses will be converted into hydrogen, perhaps accompanied by batteries for storing daily surpluses of solar electricity. This large volume of hydrogen (perhaps as much as 1,000 terawatt hours in energy value for the UK, or 3 times our current power consumption) should be productively employed to provides the energy for almost all other activities in the economy.  The best use is to employ it to make hydrogen, via the simple process of electrolysis of water.

A list of the other many potential uses of hydrogen follows, alongside the brief statement of recent large scale trials that have been announced.

Hydrogen uses

1, Hydrogen as a source of energy for generating electricity

On the rare occasions when renewable electricity plants are not providing enough electricity, hydrogen can be used as a zero carbon fuel to generate electricity. This can either be done through the use of fuel cells or by employing turbines modified to burn hydrogen. 

 The hydrogen will have been initially made by water electrolysis and probably stored in underground salt caverns or disused oil or gas fields. The process of making hydrogen from electricity and then converting it back to electricity when needed is called ‘PowerToGasToPower’ (P2G2P).

Key experiments: In southwest France, paper company Smurfit Kappa operates a paper mill. The 12 megawatt power and heat needs for this mill are provided by a Siemens turbine that currently runs on natural gas. A project announced in May 2020 will see the existing turbine repurposed to run on hydrogen. When electricity is in good supply, an electrolyser will produce the hydrogen, which will be stored on site. The hydrogen will be used when power is scarce, or the price high. By 2023, this €15m scheme should be able to demonstrate flexible operation that allows the turbine to be run on up to 100% hydrogen. 

On Orkney, a chain of islands off north eastern Scotland, hydrogen produced at a wind farm is transported by sea to the main port where it is used in a fuel cell to create power to operate dockside equipment. This trial was one of the first P2G2P experiments in the world.

2, Hydrogen provides the fuel for building heating systems

 Scottish Gas Networks, which manages gas distribution across Scotland and parts of England, announced a plan to shift 300 homes in the Levenmouth area in eastern Scotland from natural gas to hydrogen, starting in 2021. The hydrogen will be made using electricity from an offshore wind turbine. . Individual homes can be converted using a replacement of the central heating boiler with a hydrogen equivalent. Worcester Bosch, the UK’s largest supplier of domestic boilers has produced hydrogen equivalents that are similar in cost to standard devices. 


In the Netherlands, a house refurbishment was completed last year that includes a hydrogen central heating boiler, powered by an electrolyser that gets its electricity from solar panels on the roof. The hydrogen is stored in a small container in the garden of the house. 

A small number of other places around Europe are operating gas networks with 20% hydrogen added. One example is the network around Keele University in the UK. SNAM, the main Italian gas company, is similarly running experiments that gradually increase the percentage of hydrogen in natural gas piped to two factories near Naples.

3, Running road vehicles

Electricity stored in the car’s batteries will probably be the power source for almost all domestic and light commercial vehicle use. But some car companies still believe it will be possible to use fuel cells instead, even though they are currently much more expensive to build. 

Hydrogen is stored in the car and is fed into the fuel cell. Electricity is generated which then powers the car’s electric motors. This can provide much longer range than most pure electric cars. Germany, for example, now has about 100 hydrogen refuelling points. This enables a hydrogen car to be driven with security around the entire country.

The highly-rated US commercial vehicle startup Nikola will launch a pickup truck that can either be powered by batteries or by a hydrogen fuel cell. The fuel cell version will have a claimed range of 600 miles. Launch will be in 2022, but the company’s larger full sized truck will be available in late 2021 fuelled by hydrogen.

Because they can be powered by hydrogen or batteries, road vehicles are entirely compatible with a ‘renewables+hydrogen’ future.

4, Trains and ships

The French manufacturer Alstom has launched a train that runs on hydrogen. It has operated successfully on a line in northern Germany and will also be trialled in Italy and the UK.  

Ships that travel regularly between islands or across fjords can be easily switched to electric power. Over 100 battery powered ships are at work around the world. Longer distance shipping cannot be fully electrified because of limitations on battery capacity. The industry is actively debating whether the future is based around ammonia (which is made from hydrogen) or hydrogen itself. 

A new Norwegian cruise ship will be powered by hydrogen (and batteries) when it is launched in 2023. . Norway is the leader in moving to hydrogen for ships alongside France. Hydrogène de France is working with Swiss engineer ABB to build large-scale hydrogen fuel cells for international shipping. 

A recent study concluded that almost all cross-Pacific shipping could be switched to hydrogen without difficulty.

5, Aviation fuel

 Although very short distance flights may be possible in battery-powered planes, the large bulk of greenhouse gas emissions arise from longer journeys. 80% of emissions come from journeys over 1,500 km, The alternatives are hydrogen fuel cells for smaller planes and low-carbon replacements for conventional fuels for larger aircraft. These two routes will be vital if we are to avoid greenhouse gas emissions from aviation making the achievement of ‘net zero’ impossible

ZeroAvia makes an airplane for 10-20 passengers that uses hydrogen in a fuel cell as the power source. It plans to start a service between Edinburgh and Orkney, off the north-east coast of Scotland. 

Larger airplanes will use synthetic kerosene, almost certainly made from hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Although some waste materials can be gasified and turned into fuel, the large volumes of aviation kerosene required around the world probably mean that most will be made from hydrogen coming from water electrolysis.

Two projects have been recently announced that seek to make ‘drop-in’ replacements for today’s fuel. In Norway, Climeworks and Sunfire have joined local partners to build a plant that makes aviation kerosene from air-captured carbon dioxide and hydrogen made from renewable electricity. By the end of 2023, Norsk eFuel targets output of enough synthetic fuel to cover 50% of the needs of the busiest 5 Norwegian internal flights. The venture then aims to make 100 million litres of fuel a year by 2026 in a ten times expansion of its pilot plant.

A similar new enterprise in Denmark seeks to replace 30% of the aviation fuels used at Copenhagen airport by 2030. The business is operated by a consortium that includes Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company, and Orsted, the offshore wind operator.

6, Steel

At present, new steel is made in blast furnaces in which coal is used to heat iron ore. The carbon from the burning coal merges with the oxygen in the ore, leaving liquid metal, which flows out of the furnace. This process, and the associated manufacturing activities, may be reasonable for as much 7% of global emissions.

Steel can be made using hydrogen instead of coal. Burning hydrogen can capture the oxygen in iron ore in an analogous way to coal. The furnaces are different but the outcomes are similar. A good description of how the hydrogen production compares to coal is given here.

Several steelmakers have announced plans for switching to hydrogen. Among the most advanced is the large speciality steelmaker SSAB which makes steel in Sweden and Finland. SSAB is building a trial furnace running entirely on hydrogen made with renewable energy. The company says that it will have commercial carbon-free steel available by 2026 and all its steel production will be completely zero-carbon by 2045.

In June 2020, German steelmaker Thyssen Krupp announced a move towards hydrogen. It will buy renewable hydrogen from the utility RWE for use in a blast furnace at its plant in Duisburg. A 100 MW electrolyser will make sufficient hydrogen to produce about 50,000 tonnes of carbon-free steel. Thyssen Krupp makes about 8 million tonnes of steel a year or 160 times as much but this is a first step towards entirely carbon-free steel production by 2050.

7, Fertiliser production

The Norwegian fertiliser giant Yara is heavily involved in trials of making the hydrogen for fertiliser production from renewable electricity. It will supply part of the part of the hydrogen need for its Porsgrunn plant in Norway from a 5 MW electrolyser. 


It is investigating a much larger trial at its plant in Pilbara, Western Australia. Here it hopes to integrate green hydrogen made by a subsidiary of the French energy giant Engie into its existing production process.

8, Oil refineries

Oil refineries use almost half the total amount of hydrogen produced today. Almost all is generated from fossil fuels, principally natural gas. Several refineries are investigating switching to hydrogen from renewable electricity. On the east coast of England, for example, Danish offshore wind company Orsted is planning to bring power onshore from the Hornsea 2 farm and put into an electrolyser. The hydrogen will be then piped to the Immingham oil refinery. 

In the Netherlands, a similar scheme will feed Europe’s large oil refinery at Pernis near Rotterdam owned by Shell. Offshore wind power will be used to make hydrogen which will be used in the refinery’s operations

 Any output of a conventional oil refinery is, of course, not zero carbon. But making hydrogen from renewables will reduce the net climate impact of using fossil fuels. In the long term, the world will still need refineries to make materials such as plastics from synthetic fuels made from hydrogen and sources of carbon. 

Conclusion

What CO2 generating activities cannot be switched either to electricity or to hydrogen? The list is very short. The most important industry is probably cement making. Heat is needed to drive off the carbon dioxide from calcium carbonate and this can be provided by hydrogen rather than coal. But the chemical reaction in the process must inevitably produce CO2. This CO2 is gradually recaptured by concrete or other uses of cement but this reaction is quite slow. (Innovative technologies, such as that used by CarbonCure can incorporate CO2 into drying concrete at a much faster rate). 

Otherwise electricity or hydrogen can cover almost all our energy needs. Other greenhouse gases will be produced from activities outside the energy system, of which agriculture is the most important culprit. However the central fact is that nearly complete decarbonisation of the energy system is possible using renewable electricity and hydrogen. As renewables become cheaper and cheaper around the world, also pulling down the price of making hydrogen, this decarbonisation will involve only small and temporary cost increases for energy. In the medium term, ‘renewables plus hydrogen’ will be cheaper than any other sources.

 June 17 2020

Public Opinion Strongly Favours Renewables, Including in the Local Area

Calls are growing around the world for expansion of renewable power as part of the route out of economic depression. Alongside a submission from a wide array of British business leaders, Greenpeace UK added to the calls overnight. Justin Rowlatt, the BBC’s environment correspondent, responded with some scepticism this morning (4th June 2020)

He wrote:

(M)any local communities are likely to resist the plan for a big increase in onshore wind and solar power to complement a proposed massive expansion of offshore wind farms - few things unite local communities like a proposal to put in an array of wind turbines.

The evidence to back this is non-existent. British people overwhelmingly back local renewables, particularly if ownership is also localised.

Here is the evidence from the latest BEIS (the UK government’s department for industry) survey.

Renewable opinions mar 2020.jpg

Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/beis-public-attitudes-tracker-wave-33

Negative emissions: how one US business bought $1m of CO2 storage

The world will find it difficult to completely eradicate fossil fuel use. By 2050 some sources see a minimum of 5 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions, down from about 50-55 billion tonnes today. We therefore need to develop a series of technologies for capturing carbon dioxide and permanently storing it in order to achieve ‘net zero’. 

Several industries, such as oil extraction, find it difficult to envisage how they might completely abandon their core activity. They have usually suggested, often in the vaguest possible terms, that they could offset the remaining emissions by planting woodland. As it grows, a tree takes in CO2, although this will gradually return to the atmosphere after it dies. Even rapid reforestation across millions of square kilometres is unlikely to fully compensate for the greenhouse gases produced by burning oil. The world needs a much wider variety of different carbon capture technologies.

Stripe and the CO2 capture challenge

 Stripe is a payments processing business based in San Francisco. Valued at tens of billions of dollars, it is a world leader in providing robust systems for handling the transfer of money and financial obligations. 

In the autumn of last year, it asked for bids from entities offering robust greenhouse gas collection and storage. Stripe said it would pay a total of $1m to the best schemes. It got responses from 24 different companies and research teams around the world and awarded four a quarter each of the funding on offer. May 2020 saw the award of the cash.

These 24 offers illustrate the wide range of possible negative emissions technologies. In an extremely helpful move, Stripe published details of each bid. (See ‘Source Materials here . I split them into ten different categories. 

Type of CO2 capture and/or storage + brief description 

Soil carbon improvement (4 bids)

Global soil contains about 1.5 trillion tonnes of carbon, far more than is present in vegetation. Modern agriculture and deforestation is tending to reduce the carbon content of soil. Measures to regenerate carbon in soil can result in very long term carbon capture.

 Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) (1 bid)

Wood and other organic matter captures CO2 as part of the photosynthetic growth process. If the material is then burnt, perhaps to generate electricity, and the the resulting CO2 is then captured and stored, the lifecycle results in negative emissions.

 Woodland Maintenance (2 bids)

Keeping a wood that would otherwise be cut down will, in effect, store carbon.

Reforestation (2 bids)

Putting forests back in areas where they have been lost.

Afforestation (2 bids)

Creating forests in places that currently do not carry trees.

 Olivine weathering (2 bids)

Olivine is a rock that naturally absorbs CO2. Large volumes exist and it can be ground into small specks to speed up the permanent capture of carbon.

CO2 capture in building materials (5 bids)

Several building materials either naturally retain CO2 (such as structural bamboo) or can be altered to permanently capture more of it (such as concrete)

 Direct Air Capture of CO2 (1 bid)

Although CO2 is only a tiny fraction of the world’s atmosphere, it can be separate out and then stored. 

Biochar/Bio-oil (4 bids)

Heating organic material to high temperatures in the absence of air will break it down into gases, oil and nearly pure carbon. The oil and the carbon can be stored permanently in the top soil or deeper.

 Ocean storage (1 bid)

The bidder proposed to bring up water from the deep ocean to the surface. Plankton growth will be encouraged (which absorbs carbon from the sea water) and then the water will be returned to the deep. There, the plankton will die and store the carbon on the ocean floor. 

The winning bids were from the Olivine, CO2 capture in building materials, Direct Air Capture and Biochar/Bio-oil sectors. No money was awarded to forestry or soil carbon offerings, even though some of these bids were substantially cheaper than the winners in terms of cost per tonne of CO2.

The winners

Climeworks, the Swiss company which has done the most to bring Direct Air Capture into consideration, runs a plant in Iceland which captures CO2 from the air and then injects into deep basalt, permanently absorbing it. Its technology is currently expensive and it will be paid over $700 a tonne for just 322 tonnes of collection and storage. Climeworks says that the potential of its technology for storing CO2 is almost limitless.

Canadian company CarbonCure has a technology for injecting CO2 into concrete before it sets. The carbon dioxide is permanently stored and actually makes the concrete stronger. Carbon Cure estimates a worldwide potential for its group of technologies of about 500 million tonnes a year, about 1% of world greenhouse gas emissions. The company asked for $100 a tonne and agreed to absorb 2,500 tonnes.

Project Vesta will grind up olivine and leave the sand on beaches where it will be weathered by the CO2 in the air. Its says its approach is cheap, requiring a payment from Stripe of only $50 a tonne today. Project Vesta says that olivine weathering could permanently store tens of gigatonnes of CO2 per year since the rock exists in large quantities around the world. 

Charm Industrial takes waste biomass, such as shells from farmed nuts, and puts it through a pyrolysis process. A carbon-rich oil is one of the outputs. This can be injected into depleted oil wells where it will be permanently stored. This is currently an expensive process and the company offered to sequester CO2 at $600 a tonne. Charm Industrial claims that its process might be able to store 7 billion tonnes of CO2 in 20 years. However it is still at an early stage in its development.

The bidding process bought Stripe just over 6,500 tonnes of negative emissions at an average price of about $150 a tonne. All four seem very convincing processes. I was slightly surprised to see that all the projects backed by Puro, a highly plausible Finnish operator of an auction system for CO2 storage, failed to get backing from Stripe.

How much will carbon capture and storage cost? 

The simple average of the 24 bids to Stripe was $177 per tonne. Participants generally expect very significant reductions in cost, projecting a figure of just $37 a tonne in 20 years time (Simple average). Let’s put these numbers into context.

 $177 a tonne – total cost to neutralise 50 billion tonnes of 2020 emissions – about 9% of world GDP

$37 a tonne – total cost to neutralise 10 billion tonnes of 2040 emissions – about 0.4% of current world GDP

 Of course the 2040 numbers may be absurdly optimistic. Some - such as the $10 estimated by Project Vesta for olivine weathering - do look highly ambitious. But even at an average figure of $100 a tonne that I suspect may be more reasonable, the costs of storage of 20% of today’s emissions are only about 1% of the world’s economy. This is manageable. 

 What other lessons should we learn from the Stripe call for bids?

A promise of $1m of funding brought forward 24 bids, most of which seem potentially effective. We need other entities (companies, governments, charities, philanthropists) to go through the same process, encouraging and developing the nascent carbon storage industry. By the way, conventional CCS, particularly on power stations, looks far more expensive than the bids we have just seen.

My first guess is that regenerative agriculture needs active sponsorship to show whether, and at what rate and with what degree of permanence, it can add carbon to the soil. Slightly surprisingly, none of the four offers in this ‘auction’ won funding. I think a prize specifically for soil carbon storage would be particularly beneficial.

Many congratulations to Stripe on carrying out this vital and highly productive task.

 

 

'What We Need To Do Now': an inexpensive online edition and a chance for online discussions.

Books and ideas are the new currency in these lockdown times …

I’ve been approached by a couple of XR groups who have been setting up online reading groups and wanted to discuss the ideas in my book, What We Need To Do Now (for a zero carbon future).  This set my publisher, Profile Books, and me to thinking – how can we make this easy and inexpensive?  We have arranged to have a nominal price of 99p for the book if downloaded from Apple, and (currently) £1.61 if bought as Amazon Kindle. The Kindle price should drop to 99p, too, but it is controlled by Amazon so out of Profile’s hands.

What We Need To Do Now (for a zero carbon future) is what it says on the tin: a program for how the UK can reach zero carbon across every sector of the economy – not just electricity but housing and heating, transport, flights, fashion, heavy industries (notably concrete and steel), agriculture and food. My conclusions are that each area is challenging but possible. We need to build an over-capacity of wind and solar energy, storing the excess as hydrogen. We can then use hydrogen to fuel our trains, shipping, boilers and heavy industry, while electrifying buses, trucks and cars. We need to farm – and eat – differently, encouraging plant-based alternatives to meat, and paying farmers to plant and maintain woodlands. Fashion has to become sustainable and aviation must pay its way, funding synthetic fuels and CO2 removal. And we then still have some way to go, using technical solutions to capture CO2 from the air and biochar to lock carbon in the soil. To help the transition, we’ll need to tax carbon emissions in a fair and equitable way that doesn’t penalise the less well-off. We should begin a programme of research into ‘geoengineering’, particularly working on how we reduce the intensity of the sun’s energy reaching the earth.

My program may not be the definitive answer.  But I hope that anyone reading the book will feel it shows a possible pathway. And, of course, I’m eager to hear new ideas, which will be included in future editions of the book.

Please encourage your local groups – XR groups, for instance, or regular book groups – to take part and use the book. I am very happy to participate in any online discussions via Zoom.

Here are the links

Apple Bookstore for 99p and at Amazon Kindle for £1.61

 

The victory at Heathrow; just a first step

(This article was published in the Independent newspaper in early March)

The block to the expansion of Heathrow is an early victory in the fight against climate change. The third runway would have expanded the number of flights from the airport by over 40%.  If the decision is upheld by the Supreme Court, emissions from aviation will be lower than they otherwise would have been. 

But our celebrations should be muted. We still need to address the underlying problem. How does the UK achieve a target of zero emissions by 2050 while aviation remains such an important source of CO2? There is only one way forward: the UK needs to focus on making jet fuel from man-made sources that don’t add to carbon emissions.

 Flights from the UK add almost 40 million tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere each year, around 7% of the national total. These numbers are particularly high by international standards. Another way of expressing the unusual importance of aviation to UK emissions is to note that more British people engage in international air travel than Americans or Chinese, even though those countries have vastly greater populations.

The carbon consequences of individual trips are severe. A return flight to New York adds over a tonne of CO2 to an individual’s carbon footprint, almost as much as the typical annual emissions from a small modern car. Moreover, that figure excludes the extra impacts of burning fossil fuels high up in the atmosphere, which scientists estimate may roughly double the overall greenhouse effect of flying.

Unfortunately, the energy for flying will need to come from liquid fuels into the foreseeable future. Batteries are too heavy to power any but the very shortest flights, such as between Scottish islands. Hydrogen, another alternative sometimes mentioned, cannot compete with the energy contained in an equivalent volume of aviation kerosene. ‘Flight shaming’ may reduce the number of people in the air, but even a halving of departures would still require the UK to shift 15% of its land area into forestry to fully offset the remaining emissions. 

However there is a route forward, although many technical and financial obstacles remain to its full implementation. We can chemically create man-made alternatives to fossil oil so that we can continue to fly without a net impact on emissions (although the extra effects of burning fuels at 35,000 feet will persist). 

Are man-made alternatives to aviation fuels really possible? Yes. The molecules contained in fuels such as aviation kerosene are composed of atoms of hydrogen and carbon (hence the expression ‘hydrocarbon’). If we have supplies of these two basic chemical elements we can use well-understood engineering techniques to create complex hydrocarbons that are full replacements for fossil fuels. The processes employed have been in active use for many decades and already make hundreds of millions of tonnes of useful chemicals each year.

The crucial question to answer is therefore this. How can we create abundant amounts of hydrogen and carbon in a way that doesn’t add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and at a reasonable price? Hydrogen is the simpler case. All we need is a supply of renewable electricity which we then use in a machine called an electrolyser. This uses the electric power to separate out the hydrogen and the oxygen in water molecules. The hydrogen can then be stored. 

Carbon is a little more difficult. The conventional source in today’s chemical processes is carbon monoxide, a molecule that is a mixture of one atom of carbon and one atom of oxygen. We can generate carbon monoxide very simply from carbon dioxide. 

In turn, our carbon dioxide can come from two main sources. We can burn natural materials such as wood, perhaps in a power station, and collect the CO2 that arises. Because the carbon in that wood had been originally collected from the atmosphere by the process of photosynthesis we can use it to make aviation fuel without any net consequences for greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. The problem is that we have restricted supplies of wood or other biological fuels to burn, particularly since we are trying to add forests to the world’s land surfaces.

Probably the best way of getting large quantities of carbon dioxide is to collect it directly from the air. This is possible, but the technology is still at an early (and expensive) stage. Once we have good supplies of CO2 and hydrogen we can manufacture abundant amounts of a fuel that will not result in net additions to greenhouse gases. 

We cannot completely avoid the need for flying, even though each of us has an obvious responsibility to avoid taking the plane when we can. Because of the particular importance of aviation to the UK economy, it now makes clear sense for the country to invest in the research and development to push synthetic fuels forward, probably using money raised from taxation on today’s ultra-polluting aviation.

 Chris Goodall

 

The road to ‘Net Zero’

(This article was published by BBC Focus on 14th February 2020).

Belatedly, the world has realised it has to eliminate greenhouse gases within a few decades. The UK has promised ‘net zero’ by 2050. Is this is an achievable aim? How much will it cost? In what ways will our lifestyles need to change?

In summary, the answer to these questions is that reducing carbon emissions sharply is feasible but the change will be expensive and requires hard adjustments to some aspects of our lives. It will be almost as disruptive as the first Industrial Revolution. But, at the end of the process of decarbonisation, we might reasonably expect to have built a far safer world and a society that is both more prosperous and more equal.

The UK needs to set out a programme of carbon-cutting actions across all parts of today’s society, starting with energy supply but spreading across activities as diverse as agriculture and clothing manufacture. Alongside the plan, the book also demonstrates how ‘net zero’ can be made politically attractive by improving the availability of decent jobs and by cutting the cost of living. 

Many people assume that this country is already well on the route to zero emissions. But the sharp reductions in greenhouse gases that the UK has achieved thus far have almost entirely come from improving electricity supply by switching out of coal and increasing wind and solar power. This was the easy bit. The challenge now gets far more difficult because we still use carbon-based fuels for about half our electricity supply as well as almost all our other energy needs. 

We can, of course, increase our low-carbon energy sources by installing more wind farms, on- and off-shore, and by welcoming more solar parks around the country. But, as sceptics are fond of pointing out, the cheapest renewable energy sources do not always provide electricity when we need it. The sun doesn’t shine at night and we can have weeks of low winds around the British Isles. 

A clear proposal is that we hugely expand our renewable installations - perhaps twenty fold -  so that almost all the time we have enough electricity to match demand. This will be the case even after we have switched as many energy uses as we conceivably can from fossil fuels to electric power, such as by driving battery cars and powering many of our homes with heat pumps.  

Oversupplying the UK with renewable power means that most of the time we have too much electricity. Isn’t this wasteful? No, we can use this surplus to generate hydrogen - the key low carbon energy source - by electrolysis. Large numbers of major experiments around the rest of Europe are now looking at using hydrogen to help balance the electricity system. The UK should do likewise but, with the exception of real development on Orkney, interest is limited. Hydrogen stored in depleted oil fields or in underground salt caverns can be used to generating electricity when the wind isn’t blowing either using rapidly improving fuel cells or even modified gas turbines. We can also replace natural gas for domestic use with central heating boilers that burn hydrogen instead. 

Over the course of the year we will still have too much hydrogen for our electricity needs. The second use of the surplus will be to provide energy for all the activities we cannot electrify. This will include almost all aviation, long distance shipping and some heavy industrial processes. We can use standard chemical engineering processes to create synthetic alternatives to conventional oil and gas. 

Fossil fuels are largely composed of atoms of hydrogen and carbon (hence the name ‘hydrocarbons’). We know from where we are going to get our hydrogen for our alternatives to fossil fuels.  Our carbon will come from capturing CO2, either directly from the air or from industrial processes such as cement manufacture. although not yet cost competitive in most circumstances. If we then burn the synthetic hydrocarbons as fuel, the CO2 will return to the atmosphere so the UK will also need to invest in long-term storage for further carbon capture. 

We therefore have a well-defined route to ‘net zero’ when it comes to energy supply. But this only covers about two thirds of all emissions. The next most important source of greenhouse gases is agriculture, either in the UK or arising from the growing of foodstuffs that are imported. As is becoming increasingly well understood, cattle farming is a particularly important source of methane which, like CO2, helps heat the global atmosphere. Perhaps 10% of all greenhouse gases arise from cows and other ruminants. Other animals are less bad but are still significant contributors to the climate change problem. It is very uncomfortable to say this but climate stability is impossible to reconcile with today’s levels of meat-eating. 

The world’s diet needs to shift towards plant-based foods. Grains, pulses, seeds and vegetables use far less land than meat animals, allowing us to reforest a substantial fraction of the world’s surface. As an aside, global food production is currently about 6,000 calories per person per day. So there’s no shortage of food; it’s just that most of it is fed to animals. And, of course, a varied diet that avoids farmed meat is likely to improve human health in rich countries such as the UK. Artificial meats and new forms of indoor agriculture will help us reduce the area of land we require.

We will also need to create an agricultural system that helps rebuild the depleted levels of carbon in our soils. This means moving away from our destructive emphasis on intensive monocultures and recreating an agriculture that improves local ecologies. As with many recommendations in the book, this change will be highly disruptive and farmers will need to be properly protected. 

What else else do we need to do? The next most important sources of emissions are steel-making, cement and fertiliser production. In each case, we can use some of the renewable hydrogen that we generated from surplus electricity production. Steel-makers around Europe, all aware that the coal used in making new metal is having destructive effects on the environment, are committed to using hydrogen for their energy source as soon as possible. Cement is somewhat more difficult but fertiliser production can shift very easily to renewable hydrogen. 

 Alongside the proposals for the reduction in carbon emissions, we need to examine how the UK can increase the capture of CO2 from the atmosphere. Building a restorative agriculture is one step but needs to be accompanied by a programme of reforestation. The UK is the least wooded major country in Europe and we can comfortably double or triple the land area given over to forests. This will help build a natural sink for carbon worth many tens of millions of tonnes of CO2 per year. It will also help us decrease the £8bn or so that is spent each year on imports of wood products and provide an important source of jobs in rural areas. 

What about energy efficiency? The single most important need is for the UK is to improve its almost medieval standards of home insulation. Existing programmes have failed dismally but new approaches towards complete or ‘deep’ refurbishment of houses show enormous promise, though they are likely to be expensive. The scope for high quality job creation is obvious. 

 Other steps we will all need to take include a move away from flying, better public transport and the creation of large car-free areas across towns and cities to encourage cycling and walking, while reducing the need to own a car. We’ll want to reduce our purchase of clothes, a major current of emissions and environmental degradation, as well as making sure that we create a fully ‘circular’ economy that recycles and reuses everything we need. 

 There’s no denying the painful nature of many of the changes we need to make to get to zero carbon. It would be nice to pretend that we could continue with minor measures such as banning plastic bags or turning the lights off. Unfortunately, the reality is that we will need to spend at least ten per cent of our national income for the next twenty years on investments to secure a liveable future. The good thing is that the UK - and the rest of the world - has the spare capital to invest on the scale that we require. 

 And at the end of the process we will have low energy costs, more comfortable housing, better public health, more nutritious food and more jobs embedded in the less prosperous parts of the UK. Put like that, I don’t think we should be too frightened of the challenge.