China reaches 2030 renewables target in 2024

 From Leah Stokes

The news getting you down? I invite you to stare at this chart of solar and wind deployed capacity in China. They blew past their ambitious 2030 target... last July.

Six and a half years ahead of schedule.

Direct carbon capture from water, not air

From New Atlas

The oceans soak up enormous quantities of carbon dioxide, and MIT researchers say they've developed a way of releasing and capturing it that uses far less energy than direct air capture – with some other environmental benefits to boot.

Pulling greenhouse gases out of water is an odd-sounding idea, but the oceans are the planet's number one carbon sink, and direct air carbon capture has pretty serious problems: it costs a lot, and uses a lot of energy. According to IEA figures from 2022, even the more efficient air capture technologies require about 6.6 gigajoules of energy, or 1.83 megawatt-hours per ton of carbon dioxide captured.

Most of that energy isn't used to directly separate the CO2 from the air, it's in heat energy to keep the absorbers at operating temperatures, or electrical energy used to compress large amounts of air to the point where the capture operation can be done efficiently. But either way, the costs are out of control, with 2030 price estimates per ton ranging between US$300-$1,000. According to Statista, there's not a nation on Earth currently willing to tax carbon emitters even half of the lower estimate; first-placed Uruguay taxes it at US$137/ton. Direct air capture is not going to work as a business unless its costs come way down.

It turns out there's another option: seawater. As atmospheric carbon concentrations rise, carbon dioxide begins to dissolve into seawater. The ocean currently soaks up some 30-40% of all humanity's annual carbon emissions, and maintains a constant free exchange with the air. Suck the carbon out of the seawater, and it'll suck more out of the air to re-balance the concentrations. Best of all, the concentration of carbon dioxide in seawater is more than 100 times greater than in air.

Previous research teams have managed to release CO2 from seawater and capture it, but their methods have required expensive membranes and a constant supply of chemicals to keep the reactions going. MIT's team, on the other hand, has announced the successful testing of a system that uses neither, and requires vastly less energy than air capture methods.

In the new system, seawater is passed through two chambers. The first uses reactive electrodes to release protons into the seawater, which acidifies the water, turning dissolved inorganic bicarbonates into carbon dioxide gas, which bubbles out and is collected using a vacuum. Then the water's pushed through to a second set of cells with a reversed voltage, calling those protons back in and turning the acidic water back to alkaline before releasing it back into the sea. Periodically, when the active electrode is depleted of protons, the polarity of the voltage is reversed, and the same reaction continues with water flowing in the opposite direction.

In a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy & Environmental Science, the team says its technique requires an energy input of 122 kJ/mol, equating by our math to 0.77 mWh per ton. And the team is confident it can do even better: "Though our base energy consumption of 122 kJ/mol-CO2 is a record-low," reads the study, "it may still be substantially decreased towards the thermodynamic limit of 32 kJ/mol-CO2."

The team projects an optimized cost around US$56 per ton of CO2 captured – although it's not fair to compare that directly against full-system direct air capture costs. The study cautions that this does not include vacuum degassing, filtration and "auxiliary costs outside of the electrochemical system" – analyses of which will have to be done separately. Some of these, however, could potentially be mitigated by integrating the carbon capture units in with other facilities, for example desalination plants, which are already processing large volumes of seawater.

There are some other benefits too; increased carbon buildup in the ocean over recent years has already caused problems with acidification, threatening coral reefs and shellfish. The alkaline output of this process, if directed where it's needed, could help redress the balance.

The team has a practical demonstration project planned for sometime in the next two years, and says there are plenty of things that still need work. For one, the researchers would love to be able to separate the gas out without a vacuum system. And mineral precipitates are fouling the electrodes on the alkalinization side, so there's plenty of progress yet to be made.

The study is open access in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Which countries are most reliant on coal?

 From Visual Capitalist

This was originally posted on Elements. Sign up to the free mailing list to get beautiful visualizations on real assets and resource megatrends each week.

Global energy policies and discussions in recent years have been focused on the importance of decarbonizing the energy system in the transition to net zero.

However, despite efforts to reduce carbon emissions, fossil fuels still account for more than 80% of primary energy use globally—and coal, the world’s most affordable energy fuel, is also the largest source of energy-related CO2 emissions.

The graphic above uses data from the Statistical Review of World Energy to show how much select countries rely on fossil fuels, particularly coal.

Capping luxury energy use

 From The Guardian

Gently limiting “luxury” demand from the 20% of European consumers who use the most energy saves seven times the amount of planet-heating gases that would be emitted in meeting the basic needs of the 20% who use the least energy, researchers have found.

The study, which modelled the effect of narrowing the gaps in energy use between households within 27 European countries, found capping demand from the top fifth, even at a fairly high level, cut greenhouse gas pollution from energy consumption by 9.7%, while raising demand from people in the bottom fifth who also live in poverty to a fairly low level increases emissions by just 1.4%.

“We have to start tackling luxury energy use to stay within an equitable carbon budget for the globe,” said Milena Buchs, a professor of sustainable welfare at the University of Leeds and the lead author of the study, published on Monday in the journal Nature Energy, “but also to actually have the energy resources to enable people in fuel poverty to slightly increase their energy use and meet their needs.”

To stop the planet heating beyond the levels agreed to by world leaders, rich countries must quickly clean up their supply of energy and cut demand for it. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found in its latest review of the science that demand-side strategies can slash global emissions 40-70% by 2050 compared with business as usual.

Many solutions would need help from governments to become cheap enough for everyone. But some of the most polluting lifestyle choices include flying abroad on holiday, driving large cars that use a lot of fuel and living in big houses with bad insulation.

Buchs and her colleagues sorted people in 27 European countries – the EU plus the UK and minus Austria – by how much energy they used. Then they shrank the “consumption corridor” between the most lavish and frugal within each country.

In an invented country of 100 people, where the first person uses the least energy and the 100th uses the most, the scientists lowered the energy demand of the 81st-100th people to the level of the 80th. They then took the first to the 19th people and increased their energy demand to the level of the 20th.

Across Europe, they found capping luxury demand cut household emissions from energy by 11.4%, from transport by 16.8% and in total by 9.7%. Meeting the basic needs of those in poverty pushed emissions up by 1.2 percentage points from home energy use, 0.9 percentage points from transport and 1.4 percentage points overall.

“The study confirms that energy demand reductions can contribute significantly to climate change mitigation, even as poorer households are lifted out of energy poverty,” said Felix Creutzig, an IPCC author and professor of sustainability economics at the Technical University of Berlin, who was not involved in the study. “High-income, high-education households have more scope and also more capacity in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions – and also carry more responsibility.”

Europe has cut its greenhouse gas emissions about 1.4% each year over the past three decades. Scientists expect the rate to rise as clean technologies grow cheaper and more common but warn progress is too slow to meet climate goals if demand for energy stays high.

If the remaining carbon budget to stop the planet heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels were split equally between everyone on Earth, the study found, Europe would need to cut emissions by 10% a year. If the budget were shrunk to reflect Europe’s historical responsibility for having dirtied the atmosphere, the required emission cuts would soar to 24% a year.

The researchers found that capping energy demand from those at the top, even while helping those at the bottom, makes both targets easier to reach. The yearly cuts needed fell to 8.8% for the bigger carbon budget and to 22% for the smaller one.

“The results need to be seen in context: emission reduction goals will still be, in majority, achieved by technological change,” said Creutzig. “Nonetheless, the required rate of technological change is so high that energy-demand reduction would provide crucial support for reaching the climate goals.”

Studies have shown the global rich – which includes middle-class people in rich countries – play a disproportionate role in heating the planet. In 2015, the top 1% of earners emitted twice as much carbon dioxide as the bottom 50%, according to estimates from the Stockholm Environment Institute and Oxfam.

Rich people have more agency to cut their emissions and those of others. A commentary in Nature Energy argued in 2021 that this covered not just how they shop, which the authors stressed was a powerful lever, but also how they act as citizens, investors, role models and workers.

The main issue was whether the changes needed to equitably reduce energy use were realistic, said Kristian Nielsen, an assistant professor at Copenhagen Business School and lead author of the study. “Policies targeting high-energy consumers might become feasible with large-scale public mobilisation and political pressure,” he said.

 

Prometheus Fuels -- petrol from water, air and electricity

Source: Prometheus Fuels

I talked about this nearly three years ago. Today, I checked back to see how this fascinating startup was going. Of course, it's all taken much longer than they were forecasting then. All the same, there seems to have been clear progress. I've taken the text below from a piece written by the founder and CEO of Prometheus Fuels.

Written by Rob McGinnis, Founder and CEO, Prometheus Fuels


As you know, Prometheus converts renewable electricity from solar and wind power into zero net carbon gasoline, diesel, and jet e-fuels (short for “electro-fuels”) that compete with fossil fuels on price. What some readers may not know is that the process we use to do this is new, is only recently possible, and is unlike anything that anyone else is doing to make synthetic fuels today. It is because of this new process that we are the only company making e-fuels that can compete with fossil fuels without new laws or subsidies — our fuels can compete simply by being better and costing less than the fossil fuels they will replace. This is a truly exciting breakthrough in our ability to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems, like climate change, energy security, and the need for increased energy-driven prosperity. But as often happens with breakthroughs of this magnitude, our process has provoked some dramatic responses - It sounds too good to be true! — and raised a lot of questions: How is it possible that your e-fuels are so much cheaper than everyone else’s? And if you can make these fuels, then where are they? Why aren’t they for sale yet? I’m here to answer these questions.

What’s everybody else doing?

If we ignore biofuels and waste-to-fuels and just focus on fuels made partially or fully from electricity from renewable sources, then everyone else who’s making e-fuels is using high temperature, high pressure synthesis. It’s been possible for almost a hundred years to make synthetic fuels from H2 and CO2 by using the Fischer Tropsch process, (invented in 1925), or similar processes that use high temperature and pressure with a catalyst to combine carbon and hydrogen into fuels. Currently, there are many companies using Fischer Tropsch or related processes that call their products e-fuels, which technically can be true if they only use electricity for CO2 capture and desorption, hydrogen generation, CO2 to CO conversion, synthesis reactions, and downstream cracking and distillation. In practice, it’s common to use fossil methane for the heat needed in these processes and to try to justify the additional CO2 this emits by promising to capture it also. Regardless of how closely they keep to the electricity-only ideal, however, none of these approaches can compete with fossil fuels on price.

What’s new about our process and why do our e-fuels cost so much less that they can compete with fossil fuels?

- Electricity is really cheap now

The first reason our fuels have such a low cost is not specific to us — it’s the recent abundance of really cheap renewable power. E-fuels are stored renewable energy. The day has long been anticipated when the cost of renewable electricity would become low enough to enable e-fuels, and that day has come. Specifically, it arrived in 2018, when the cost of utility scale solar power dropped to $0.02/kWh for the first time in a purchase by the city of Los Angeles. This marks a drop of over 90% in just ten years. The most recent record for the lowest utility scale solar bid was achieved last year at $0.01/kWh. The dramatic drop in costs is due to massive investment in solar panel manufacturing and in learning-by-doing cost reductions from making lots of solar panels. Low cost electrons mean low cost e-fuels.

- We don’t need pure CO2

The second reason our fuels are low cost, and one that is specific to us, is that we don’t need pure CO2. In order to make hydrocarbon e-fuels at scale one needs to capture CO2 from the air by direct air capture (DAC). For everyone else making e-fuels, this is a large cost. This is because their processes all require pure, pressurized CO2 gas. One obtains CO2 from the air by adsorbing the CO2 into or onto something, typically an amine liquid or amine functionalized bead, or in a hydroxide solution in water, or something more exotic, like an ionic liquid. This part isn’t so hard, and doesn’t require much energy, just a fan to blow air. In some cases, passive wind is used, but in either case, it’s not the main energy consumer.

The main energy cost is in getting the CO2 to release from the absorbent — to desorb. And that’s when things get really expensive, because this requires a lot of energy, almost always in the form of heat from burning fossil methane or a portion of the fuel produced. This is why most DAC CO2 processes cost $500-$600/ton of CO2 with a far distant and hopeful target of $100/ton at scale. But even at $100/ton CO2, any fuel one goes on to make is already too expensive to compete with fossil fuel.

At Prometheus, we don’t make or need pure CO2 gas, so we don’t need to desorb it. Therefore, we avoid the vast majority of this cost. Instead, we capture CO2 in water and then use it in water to make fuel. ARPA-E refers to this as “reactive CO2 capture” and identifies it as a significantly lower-cost DAC approach. Because our DAC tech is fundamentally different, our cost to capture CO2 is only $36/ton, the lowest in the world, and the only one low enough to enable fuel that competes on price with fossil. (More on this below.)

- We use electrocatalysts, not catalysts that need high pressure and temperature

The third reason our fuels are low cost, and another reason that is specific to us, is that we use electrocatalysts to do what only pressure and temperature could do before. The first widely read paper on this showed that CO2 in water could be turned into ethanol at a faradic efficiency of 63%. This means that 63% of the electrons that went into products in the process went into ethanol. We licensed a second-generation of this catalyst that has even better performance, making much larger and more complex carbon-based fuels with electricity alone.

Using electrocatalysts instead of the high pressure and temperature catalysts everyone else uses gives us a big reduction in cost because we can do the same job at room temperature and pressure while using much less expensive materials. It’s also great for our system performance because we can turn our process on and off quickly, matching intermittent solar and wind power. High pressure and temperature systems can’t operate like that.

- We’re the only ones who don’t need distillation

The fourth reason our fuels are low cost is that we’re the only company in the world that can replace distillation with nanotechnology to separate fuels from the water in which they’re made. In my previous startup, Mattershift, I commercialized a carbon nanotube (CNT) membrane, and published on it in 2018. Numerous academic publications have shown that membranes like this could separate alcohols from water, but until Mattershift produced them, no commercial CNT membranes were available. Previously, the only way to separate alcohols from water was to use distillation, another highly inefficient and expensive heat-based separation process. The CNT membranes solve this problem, using over 90% less energy than distillation and dramatically lowering the cost of extracting our fuel. This is a big deal because it reduces what is a major cost for other e-fuel makers to a minor cost for us.

Ok, that sounds good, but how does all this compete with fossil oil and gas?

The math on the cost of our e-fuel is pretty simple. The only inputs are air (CO2 and water) and electricity, and the only outputs are oxygen and fuel. The cost of the inputs plus the cost of the equipment and its maintenance make up nearly all of the [operating] cost. There are some other operating costs, like the vacuum pump and coolers on the CNT membranes or the power for pumps and controls, but these are less than 1% of total operating costs. I won’t include taxes or delivery fees since these vary a lot from place to place.

The main cost is electricity. The energy density of liquid e-fuels is very high, the main reason that they have long been desired as a solution for decarbonizing long-haul shipping and aviation. For gasoline, the energy density is approx. 33 kWh/gallon. In a TEA study we did last year with a third-party engineering firm, the estimate for the overall efficiency of our process (chemical energy in the fuel / electrical energy used to make it) is approx. 43%. This is a really great efficiency, because it includes everything involved from start to finish, including DAC of CO2, synthesis of the fuel, and separating the fuel so it’s ready to use. At this efficiency, our gasoline will need approx. 77 kWh of electricity per gallon. If the cost of power is $0.02/kWh, then the electricity cost of our e-gasoline is $1.54/gallon.

The next cost is CO2. The third-party TEA put our DAC cost at $36/ton of CO2 at $0.02/kWh, making it the lowest cost DAC in the world, and this cost drops further with lower costs of electricity. A gallon of gasoline contains approx. 8.9 kg of CO2 per gallon, so at a cost of $36/ton, this results in a CO2 cost for us of $0.32/gallon.

The most important cost after electricity is equipment cost, typically called capital cost. Adding up the electricity and CO2 costs, we get $1.86/gallon. If we want to stay below $3.00/gallon (for example), then we need to keep the capital and maintenance costs less than $1.14/gallon. Our cost models tell us that we can have capital and maintenance costs that are significantly lower than that, due to the advantages listed above, including not needing CO2 desorption or fuel distillation equipment, using low cost materials due to low temperatures and pressures, and deploying mass manufacturing methods like those used to make cars.

[Read more here ---the rest of the article is interesting, too.] 

The critical part of this process is the carbon nanotube membrane.  Without that, dissolving CO2 into water to produce hydrocarbons by electrolysis would be pointless, because you'd need distillation, which needs lots of energy and is expensive.  With the membrane, you just simply "sieve" the water, and the alcohols---from which petrol, diesel and jetfuel can be made---are left behind.

Petrol is currently trading at bulk at ±$2.50 per gallon, or $0.60 per litre.  So for this process to be profitable, it would need to have a capital and maintenance cost below $0.50 per gallon.   Except, that, if this works, then it will qualify for carbon credits.  For example, at a carbon price of $50/ tonne of CO2 emissions, a carbon credit would be worth roughly ±$0.45 per gallon.   For each $10 rise in the carbon price, petrol prices will rise by roughly 10 cents a gallon. 

More to the point, long-distance air and sea transport is still not possible with batteries, though it may well be in 10 years from now.  Also, fossil fuels will provide long-term storage for the grid---diesel generators using green diesel will be able to back up the grid.  We wouldn't have to worry about "dunkelflaute"---when it's cold and still and dark, so electricity demand is high but renewables supply is low.  

Let's hope that this process does work and that it soon scales up.  In my opinion, it looks as if we're still a couple of years away from commercialisation.  But by then, the pressure to de-carbonise will only have grown, as El Niño drives global temps towards the 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial times.

Nuscale SMR costs jump to $119/MWh

From IEEFA

Last week, NuScale and the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) announced what many have long expected. The construction cost and target price estimates for the 462-megawatt (MW) small modular reactor (SMR) are going up, way up.

From 2016 to 2020, they said the target power price was $55/megawatt-hour (MWh). Then, the price was raised to $58/MWh when the project was downsized from 12 reactor modules to just six (924MW to 462MW). Now, after preparing a new and much more detailed cost estimate, the target price for the power from the proposed SMR has soared to $89/MWh.

Remarkably, the new $89/MWh price of power would be much higher if it were not for more than $4 billion in subsidies NuScale and UAMPS expect to get from U.S. taxpayers through a $1.4 billion contribution from the Department of Energy and the estimated $30/MWh subsidy in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

It also is important to remember that the $89/MWh target price is in 2022 dollars and substantially understates what utilities and their ratepayers actually will pay if the SMR is completed. For example, assuming a modest 2% inflation rate through 2030, utilities and ratepayers would pay $102 for each MWh of power from the SMR—not the $89 NuScale and UAMPS want them to believe they will pay.

The 53% increase in the SMR’s target power price since 2021 has been driven by a dramatic 75% jump in the project’s estimated construction cost, which has risen from $5.3 billion to $9.3 billion. The new estimate makes the NuScale SMR about as expensive on a dollars-per-kilowatt basis ($20,139/kW) as the two-reactor Vogtle nuclear project currently being built in Georgia, undercutting the claim that SMRs will be cheap to build.

NuScale and UAMPS attribute the construction cost increase to inflationary pressure on the energy supply chain, particularly increases in the prices of the commodities that will be used in nuclear power plant construction.

For example, UAMPS says increases in the producer price index in the past two years have raised the cost of:

• Fabricated steel plate by 54%
• Carbon steel piping by 106%
• Electrical equipment by 25%
• Fabricated structural steel by 70%
• Copper wire and cable by 32%

In addition, UAMPS notes that the interest rate used for the project’s cost modeling has increased approximately 200 basis points since July 2020. The higher interest rate increases the cost of financing the project, raising its total construction cost.

Assuming the commodity price increases cited by NuScale and UAMPS are accurate, the prices of building all the SMRs that NuScale is marketing—and, indeed, of all of the SMR designs currently being marketed by any company—will be much higher than has been acknowledged, and the prices of the power produced by those SMRs will be much more expensive.

Finally, as we’ve previously said, no one should fool themselves into believing this will be the last cost increase for the NuScale/UAMPS SMR. The project still needs to go through additional design, licensing by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, construction and pre-operational testing. The experience of other reactors has repeatedly shown that further significant cost increases and substantial schedule delays should be anticipated at any stages of project development.

The higher costs announced last week make it even more imperative that UAMPS and the utilities and communities participating in the project issue requests for proposal (RFP) to learn if there are other resources that can provide the same power, energy and reliability as the SMR but at lower cost and lower financial risk. History shows that this won’t be the last cost increase for the SMR project.

The problem with this analysis is that renewable costs have also risen (see chart from Lazards' latest LCOE calculations below).  Supply chain difficulties because of Covid, the Ukraine War, China's Covid lockdowns, "onshoring" (returning manufacturing to your own country, to reduce supply chain difficulties) and rising interest rates have increased wind and solar costs for the first time in decades.   And, presumably, as we improve the supply chain, these costs will fall.   Also, if more NuScale's SMRs can be built, unit costs will fall, in a classic learning curve feedback loop.

We may well need SMRs at high latitudes, while SMRs even in lower latitudes will add to grid security, because the more different sources of electricity available to the grid, the more balanced and secure it is.  It would be a pity not to at least try NuScale's SMRs, given the strong possibility that component prefabrication will cut costs compared to the hugely expensive giant nuclear power plants which are a decade behind schedule everywhere.  

I have said before that if nuclear is necessary for de-carbonising the world's electricity grid, I would grit my teeth and support it, because the climate emergency is so severe.  But the problems with nuclear remain:  expense and delay.  This SMR will only start operating in 2030, if there are no further delays.  By then, if we are to avoid an increase in global temperatures since pre-industrial times of more than 1.5 degrees C, we will need to have increased the share of renewables in the grid to 80%.  The last 20% will be the hardest to de-carbonise.   SMRs may be necessary for that.   

Source: Lazards
Click on graphic to see clearer image

A microbe which gobbles up CO2

The microbe was discovered in volcanic seeps near the Italian island of Vulcano. Photograph: Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images

From The Guardian

A microbe discovered in a volcanic hot spring gobbles up carbon dioxide “astonishingly quickly”, according to the scientists who found it.

The researchers hope to utilise microbes that have naturally evolved to absorb CO2 as an efficient way of removing the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. Ending the burning of fossil fuels is critical in ending the climate crisis, but most scientists agree CO2 will also need to be sucked from the air to limit future damage.

The new microbe, a cyanobacterium, was discovered in September in volcanic seeps near the Italian island of Vulcano, where the water contains high levels of CO2. The researchers said the bug turned CO2 into biomass faster than any other known cyanobacteria.

In February the team also explored hot springs in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, US, where levels of CO2 are even higher. Those results are now being analysed. The researchers said all their data on microbes would be published and made available to other scientists as a database that pairs DNA sequences with banked samples of the bacteria.

Dr Braden Tierney, at Weill Cornell Medical College and Harvard Medical School, said: “Our lead collaborator at Harvard isolated this organism that grew astonishingly quickly, compared to other cyanobacteria.”

“The project takes advantage of 3.6bn years of microbial evolution,” he said. “The nice thing about microbes is that they are self-assembling machines. You don’t have that with a lot of the chemical approaches [to CO2 capture].”

The new microbe had another unusual property, Tierney said: it sinks in water, which could help collect the CO2 it absorbs.

The idea of using bacteria to capture CO2, potentially enhanced by genetic engineering, is an active research area. A recent review suggested that bacteria could produce useful chemicals, as well as trapping CO2, saying: “Using modified bacteria to manage CO2 has the added benefit of generating useful industrial byproducts like biofuels, pharmaceutical compounds, and bioplastics.”

The US company LanzaTech already uses bacteria to convert CO2 into commercial fuels and chemicals. The UK-based CyanoCapture, backed by Shell and Elon Musk, is harnessing cyanobacteria to produce biomass and biological oils. Numerous companies are working on using algae to produce biofuels, although ExxonMobil ended its research on this recently.

When biofuels are burned, the CO2 captured returns to the atmosphere. But research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US is exploring the use of bacteria to precipitate carbon-capturing minerals from seawater, locking up the CO2. This work is based on a catalyst enzyme that is also being examined by scientists in China, who are looking at hot vents on the ocean floor for heat-resistant enzymes.

Bacteria found in caves have also been shown to turn CO2 into minerals. Other scientists are aiming to use bacteria to cut CO2 emissions from cement production.

It's not clear from the article or the company's website just how much CO2 is needed in the water for this process to work.  And the problem is that CO2 makes up only a small proportion of the atmosphere, and that's a key part of the cost of  carbon capture and storage.  However, the exhaust flues of gas power stations contain concentrated CO2.  If this could be dissolved in water, the magic of this cyanobacteria could be put to use. This could be a game-changer.

Coal is NOT making a comeback in Europe

From EMBER

Putin’s energy blackmail has left the EU with few options. Had renewable energy capacity been rapidly expanded, Europe would not need coal to keep the lights on.

Germany, Austria, France and the Netherlands have recently announced plans to enable increased coal power generation in the event that Russian gas supplies suddenly stop. This would allow gas that was being used for electricity production to be diverted elsewhere, in particular into gas storage facilities so they can reach the required 90% full levels by November.

In total, 13.5 GW of coal-fired plants will be placed on stand-by in supply reserve facilities, adding 12% to the EU’s existing coal fleet (109 GW) and only 1.5% to its total installed power generation capacity (920 GW).

The use of coal is only a last resort, short term measure, with consensus in Europe that the only way to extricate itself from cost and security crises is to get off fossil fuels. Germany remains firmly committed to its coal exit plan. The government has reiterated, “the coal exit in 2030 isn’t wobbling at all. It is more important than ever that it happens in 2030.” The Netherlands is not amending its 2029 coal phase-out date. France is only allowing Emile Huchet to be in reserve for this winter. And Austria has clearly stated that the Mellach plant is coming out of retirement “so that in an emergency it can once again produce electricity from coal (not gas)”.

These temporary measures will only result in increased coal burning if Russia cuts gas supply further. If this does not happen the coal plants will not come back online. If all the plants do operate and run at 65% of their 13.5 GW capacity, it would result in 60 TWh of additional coal power generation in 2023. This equates to 14% of 2021 EU coal electricity production and 2% of 2021 EU total electricity production. From a climate perspective, the net additional CO2 emissions in 2023 would be approximately 30 million tonnes, representing 4% of 2021 EU power sector emissions and 1.3% of total 2021 EU CO2 emissions. So while it would be preferable to avoid any increase in emissions, the temporary uptick will not derail the EU’s longer-term climate goals.

The current crisis has acted as a catalyst for an accelerated European clean energy transition. Fossil gas is no longer viewed as a viable transition fuel and instead Europe is implementing a much faster transition away from both coal and gas.

In May, the European Commission published its updated REPowerEU communication. In those plans, it had already incorporated an increase in coal power (+105 TWh) and falling gas power (-240 TWh) without derailing EU climate objectives.

“Despite temporarily higher coal use in power generation, the climate ambition levels are reached since REPowerEU leads to investments in renewables and energy efficiency beyond the Fit for 55 proposals.”

The proposals include a massive ramp-up in wind and solar deployment, with renewables accounting for 69% of electricity production by 2030. And a recent Ember report shows that nineteen European governments have accelerated their decarbonisation in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, gas crisis and Russia’s aggression.

De-carbonisation via carbon capture is a mirage

From The Conversation.

Collectively we three authors of this article must have spent more than 80 years thinking about climate change. Why has it taken us so long to speak out about the obvious dangers of the concept of net zero? In our defence, the premise of net zero is deceptively simple – and we admit that it deceived us.

The threats of climate change are the direct result of there being too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So it follows that we must stop emitting more and even remove some of it. This idea is central to the world’s current plan to avoid catastrophe. In fact, there are many suggestions as to how to actually do this, from mass tree planting, to high tech direct air capture devices that suck out carbon dioxide from the air.

The current consensus is that if we deploy these and other so-called “carbon dioxide removal” techniques at the same time as reducing our burning of fossil fuels, we can more rapidly halt global warming. Hopefully around the middle of this century we will achieve “net zero”. This is the point at which any residual emissions of greenhouse gases are balanced by technologies removing them from the atmosphere.

This is a great idea, in principle. Unfortunately, in practice it helps perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now.

We have arrived at the painful realisation that the idea of net zero has licensed a recklessly cavalier “burn now, pay later” approach which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar. It has also hastened the destruction of the natural world by increasing deforestation today, and greatly increases the risk of further devastation in the future.

 

To understand how this has happened, how humanity has gambled its civilisation on no more than promises of future solutions, we must return to the late 1980s, when climate change broke out onto the international stage.

On June 22 1988, James Hansen was the administrator of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a prestigious appointment but someone largely unknown outside of academia.

By the afternoon of the 23rd he was well on the way to becoming the world’s most famous climate scientist. This was as a direct result of his testimony to the US congress, when he forensically presented the evidence that the Earth’s climate was warming and that humans were the primary cause: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

If we had acted on Hansen’s testimony at the time, we would have been able to decarbonise our societies at a rate of around 2% a year in order to give us about a two-in-three chance of limiting warming to no more than 1.5°C. It would have been a huge challenge, but the main task at that time would have been to simply stop the accelerating use of fossil fuels while fairly sharing out future emissions.

Four years later, there were glimmers of hope that this would be possible. During the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, all nations agreed to stabilise concentrations of greenhouse gases to ensure that they did not produce dangerous interference with the climate. The 1997 Kyoto Summit attempted to start to put that goal into practice. But as the years passed, the initial task of keeping us safe became increasingly harder given the continual increase in fossil fuel use.

It was around that time that the first computer models linking greenhouse gas emissions to impacts on different sectors of the economy were developed. These hybrid climate-economic models are known as Integrated Assessment Models. They allowed modellers to link economic activity to the climate by, for example, exploring how changes in investments and technology could lead to changes in greenhouse gas emissions.

They seemed like a miracle: you could try out policies on a computer screen before implementing them, saving humanity costly experimentation. They rapidly emerged to become key guidance for climate policy. A primacy they maintain to this day.

Unfortunately, they also removed the need for deep critical thinking. Such models represent society as a web of idealised, emotionless buyers and sellers and thus ignore complex social and political realities, or even the impacts of climate change itself. Their implicit promise is that market-based approaches will always work. This meant that discussions about policies were limited to those most convenient to politicians: incremental changes to legislation and taxes.

Around the time they were first developed, efforts were being made to secure US action on the climate by allowing it to count carbon sinks of the country’s forests. The US argued that if it managed its forests well, it would be able to store a large amount of carbon in trees and soil which should be subtracted from its obligations to limit the burning of coal, oil and gas. In the end, the US largely got its way. Ironically, the concessions were all in vain, since the US senate never ratified the agreement.


Postulating a future with more trees could in effect offset the burning of coal, oil and gas now. As models could easily churn out numbers that saw atmospheric carbon dioxide go as low as one wanted, ever more sophisticated scenarios could be explored which reduced the perceived urgency to reduce fossil fuel use. By including carbon sinks in climate-economic models, a Pandora’s box had been opened.

It’s here we find the genesis of today’s net zero policies.

That said, most attention in the mid-1990s was focused on increasing energy efficiency and energy switching (such as the UK’s move from coal to gas) and the potential of nuclear energy to deliver large amounts of carbon-free electricity. The hope was that such innovations would quickly reverse increases in fossil fuel emissions.

But by around the turn of the new millennium it was clear that such hopes were unfounded. Given their core assumption of incremental change, it was becoming more and more difficult for economic-climate models to find viable pathways to avoid dangerous climate change. In response, the models began to include more and more examples of carbon capture and storage, a technology that could remove the carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations and then store the captured carbon deep underground indefinitely.

This had been shown to be possible in principle: compressed carbon dioxide had been separated from fossil gas and then injected underground in a number of projects since the 1970s. These Enhanced Oil Recovery schemes were designed to force gases into oil wells in order to push oil towards drilling rigs and so allow more to be recovered – oil that would later be burnt, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Carbon capture and storage offered the twist that instead of using the carbon dioxide to extract more oil, the gas would instead be left underground and removed from the atmosphere. This promised breakthrough technology would allow climate friendly coal and so the continued use of this fossil fuel. But long before the world would witness any such schemes, the hypothetical process had been included in climate-economic models. In the end, the mere prospect of carbon capture and storage gave policy makers a way out of making the much needed cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

When the international climate change community convened in Copenhagen in 2009 it was clear that carbon capture and storage was not going to be sufficient for two reasons.

First, it still did not exist. There were no carbon capture and storage facilities in operation on any coal fired power station and no prospect the technology was going to have any impact on rising emissions from increased coal use in the foreseeable future.

The biggest barrier to implementation was essentially cost. The motivation to burn vast amounts of coal is to generate relatively cheap electricity. Retrofitting carbon scrubbers on existing power stations, building the infrastructure to pipe captured carbon, and developing suitable geological storage sites required huge sums of money. Consequently the only application of carbon capture in actual operation then – and now – is to use the trapped gas in enhanced oil recovery schemes. Beyond a single demonstrator, there has never been any capture of carbon dioxide from a coal fired power station chimney with that captured carbon then being stored underground.

Just as important, by 2009 it was becoming increasingly clear that it would not be possible to make even the gradual reductions that policy makers demanded. That was the case even if carbon capture and storage was up and running. The amount of carbon dioxide that was being pumped into the air each year meant humanity was rapidly running out of time.

 

With hopes for a solution to the climate crisis fading again, another magic bullet was required. A technology was needed not only to slow down the increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but actually reverse it. In response, the climate-economic modelling community – already able to include plant-based carbon sinks and geological carbon storage in their models – increasingly adopted the “solution” of combining the two.

So it was that Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage, or BECCS, rapidly emerged as the new saviour technology. By burning “replaceable” biomass such as wood, crops, and agricultural waste instead of coal in power stations, and then capturing the carbon dioxide from the power station chimney and storing it underground, BECCS could produce electricity at the same time as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s because as biomass such as trees grow, they suck in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. By planting trees and other bioenergy crops and storing carbon dioxide released when they are burnt, more carbon could be removed from the atmosphere.

With this new solution in hand the international community regrouped from repeated failures to mount another attempt at reining in our dangerous interference with the climate. The scene was set for the crucial 2015 climate conference in Paris.

As its general secretary brought the 21st United Nations conference on climate change to an end, a great roar issued from the crowd. People leaped to their feet, strangers embraced, tears welled up in eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep.

The emotions on display on December 13, 2015 were not just for the cameras. After weeks of gruelling high-level negotiations in Paris a breakthrough had finally been achieved. Against all expectations, after decades of false starts and failures, the international community had finally agreed to do what it took to limit global warming to well below 2°C, preferably to 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels.

The Paris Agreement was a stunning victory for those most at risk from climate change. Rich industrialised nations will be increasingly impacted as global temperatures rise. But it’s the low lying island states such as the Maldives and the Marshall Islands that are at imminent existential risk. As a later UN special report made clear, if the Paris Agreement was unable to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the number of lives lost to more intense storms, fires, heatwaves, famines and floods would significantly increase.

But dig a little deeper and you could find another emotion lurking within delegates on December 13. Doubt. We struggle to name any climate scientist who at that time thought the Paris Agreement was feasible. We have since been told by some scientists that the Paris Agreement was “of course important for climate justice but unworkable” and “a complete shock, no one thought limiting to 1.5°C was possible”. Rather than being able to limit warming to 1.5°C, a senior academic involved in the IPCC concluded we were heading beyond 3°C by the end of this century.

Instead of confront our doubts, we scientists decided to construct ever more elaborate fantasy worlds in which we would be safe. The price to pay for our cowardice: having to keep our mouths shut about the ever growing absurdity of the required planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal.

Taking centre stage was BECCS because at the time this was the only way climate-economic models could find scenarios that would be consistent with the Paris Agreement. Rather than stabilise, global emissions of carbon dioxide had increased some 60% since 1992.

Alas, BECCS, just like all the previous solutions, was too good to be true.

Across the scenarios produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with a 66% or better chance of limiting temperature increase to 1.5°C, BECCS would need to remove 12 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. BECCS at this scale would require massive planting schemes for trees and bioenergy crops.

The Earth certainly needs more trees. Humanity has cut down some three trillion since we first started farming some 13,000 years ago. But rather than allow ecosystems to recover from human impacts and forests to regrow, BECCS generally refers to dedicated industrial-scale plantations regularly harvested for bioenergy rather than carbon stored away in forest trunks, roots and soils.

Currently, the two most efficient biofuels are sugarcane for bioethanol and palm oil for biodiesel – both grown in the tropics. Endless rows of such fast growing monoculture trees or other bioenergy crops harvested at frequent intervals devastate biodiversity.

It has been estimated that BECCS would demand between 0.4 and 1.2 billion hectares of land. That’s 25% to 80% of all the land currently under cultivation. How will that be achieved at the same time as feeding 8-10 billion people around the middle of the century or without destroying native vegetation and biodiversity?


Growing billions of trees would consume vast amounts of water – in some places where people are already thirsty. Increasing forest cover in higher latitudes can have an overall warming effect because replacing grassland or fields with forests means the land surface becomes darker. This darker land absorbs more energy from the Sun and so temperatures rise. Focusing on developing vast plantations in poorer tropical nations comes with real risks of people being driven off their lands.

And it is often forgotten that trees and the land in general already soak up and store away vast amounts of carbon through what is called the natural terrestrial carbon sink. Interfering with it could both disrupt the sink and lead to double accounting.

As these impacts are becoming better understood, the sense of optimism around BECCS has diminished.

Given the dawning realisation of how difficult Paris would be in the light of ever rising emissions and limited potential of BECCS, a new buzzword emerged in policy circles: the “overshoot scenario”. Temperatures would be allowed to go beyond 1.5°C in the near term, but then be brought down with a range of carbon dioxide removal by the end of the century. This means that net zero actually means carbon negative. Within a few decades, we will need to transform our civilisation from one that currently pumps out 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, to one that produces a net removal of tens of billions.

[The article continues, here]

There is only one plausible way to cut CO2 and methane emissions.  And that's to actually cut them.  Offsets won't work.  Negative emissions won't work.  BECCS won't work.  It's no wonder emissions continue to rise.  We are heading towards a 3° C rise, not 1.5°.  And that will be catastrophic for our civilisation, the world's people and the environment.

China's ginormous wind and solar plans

 From a tweet by Simon Evans, an editor at Carbon Brief

I'm still not sure people understand how ginormous China's wind & solar plans are This year it will install a record 156GW, says Bloomberg, citing a govt-linked thinktank For context, 156GW is more than any country in the world has IN TOTAL (bar US, CN)

The Carbon Brief article, long but excellent, as always, can be read here.  In it, they speculate that China's emissions may peak before 2025, though that depends on whether growth in electricity demand goes back to pre-covid levels.

Labor's plan to promote EVs

FEDERAL LABOR LEADER ANTHONY ALBANESE, CHRIS BOWEN AND ED HUSIC VISITING A NISSAN LEAF ELECTRIC CAR DEALER. SOURCE: ANTHONY ALBANESE/FACEBOOK/THE DRIVEN

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) won the recent election on a platform of action on climate change, among other policies.  They plan to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030, which is a quite respectable compound rate of decline of 6% per annum. [Update, 2/7/22:  Since emissions have already fallen ±20% since 2005 because of a slowdown in forest clearing (though many question the data), the effective decline by 2030 is in fact just 23%, or a puny 3% per annum]

One of the prongs of their plan is to promote EVs.   And they have come up with a clever way to do that.

We have in Oz a tax called the 'Fringe Benefits Tax'.  If your employer provides you with a non-salaried benefit, for example, a car, the cost of the lease is treated as a fringe benefit, and is subject to a 47% tax, which your employer has to pay.  In most cases, your employer will quote a salary package to you, and if you want to buy a car through them, they will reduce your salary by the amount of the car's lease plus FBT.  This is called 'salary sacrifice'.  You pay income tax only on your net income after the car's lease costs plus FBT have been deducted.  

What Labor plans to do is to remove FBT from all EVs below the luxury car tax threshold, which in the new fiscal year, beginning 1st July,  is $85,000.  This in effect means that the cost of your EV will be reduced by your marginal tax rate, since it won't be included in your income, and therefore won't be taxed.   This makes EVs much more attractive.  

Since EVs have a 'sticker price' higher than petrol cars, but are cheaper to run, a lease arrangement  makes a lot of sense, and even more so now, since EVs will be exempt from FBT.  A Tesla Model 3 costs around A$71,000.  If your marginal tax rate is 32.5%, that means the effective cost of the Model 3 is reduced by 32.5%, i.e., to around $48K.  The cost of Australia's cheapest EV, the MG ZS, is $50K, which after tax goes down to about $34K.    The Nissan Leaf is ±$51K.  For comparison, the petrol Toyota Camry costs just over $30K, and the hybrid version is about $36K.  To give you some idea of just how big this market could be, 30% of  Camry sales are hybrids.  

You won't get this benefit if you buy the car yourself.  But with this tax change, most employers will restructure their salary sacrifice schemes to allow their employees to buy EVs, and even if they don't, most leases are just for 3 years, at which point the car is sold and a new one bought.  With the massive take-up likely, there will a flood of second-hand EVs on the market in 3 years' time.  Moreover, the large expansion of the EV market will encourage other carmakers, such as BYD, to enter our market.

This clever policy change will drive very rapid increases in  EV penetration.  It will increase the number of models available, and increase the supply of second-hand EVs.  It will rapidly cut our emissions from land transport. 

Multi-billion project to kickstart carbon capture

 From CNN

The US Department of Energy is announcing a massive investment in direct air carbon removal projects, in hopes of kickstarting an industry that energy experts say is critical to getting the country's planet-warming emissions under control.

Direct air carbon removal projects are like giant vacuum cleaners that suck planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it away. They use chemicals to remove the gas from the air and store it in rocks deep underground or put it to use in materials like concrete.

Nature can do this on its own -- forests, bogs and oceans all suck carbon out of the atmosphere -- but not nearly fast enough to keep pace with human fossil fuel emissions. Experts tell CNN these giant, carbon-removing machines are the next frontier to bring CO2 levels down.

The Department of Energy on Thursday is releasing a notice of intent for developers for four direct air capture hubs -- each capable of removing over a million tons of CO2 per year -- using $3.5 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law. Removing 1 million tons of CO2 per year is equivalent to taking around 200,000 gas-powered cars off the road.

"The UN's latest climate report made clear that removing legacy carbon pollution from the air through direct air capture and safely storing it is an essential weapon in our fight against the climate crisis," Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in a statement. Granholm said the infrastructure law funding "will not only make our carbon-free future a reality but will help position the U.S. as a net-zero leader."

Department officials say the notice, which was shared first with CNN, is a crucial step in building this industry in the US.

"For us to get to millions of tons [removed from the air] per year through these demonstrations will be critical," said Jen Wilcox, principal deputy assistant secretary in DOE's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.

President Joe Biden is targeting net-zero carbon emissions in the US by 2050, but experts say that isn't achievable by simply transitioning from fossil fuel energy to renewables -- the country must also actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere because of how much it has already emitted.

Direct air removal "is a suite of tech and strategies to get to this multi-gigaton carbon removal scale we need to get to in roughly 25-30 years," said John Larsen, a partner at the nonpartisan firm Rhodium Group.

The US needs to decarbonize and to dramatically scale up direct air removal, Larsen said, to the point that these machines can remove not millions but billions of tons of CO2 per year. A billion tons of CO2 removed in a year would be equivalent to taking over 215 million vehicles off the road.

Climeworks' direct air removal project in Iceland is the largest, according to the company, removing about 10 metric tons of CO2 every day -- about the same amount of carbon that 500 trees could remove in a year.

The US hubs envisioned by DOE will be much larger. Humans have not yet built a megaton-sized direct air removal system, Larsen said, and DOE's hubs are an important first step to both dramatically scale these projects up and to find out what works and what doesn't.

"What you're really building is an entire carbon removal industry," Larsen said. "The chances of getting to gigaton scale go down dramatically if we don't start this decade. It's way, way harder."

The momentum is growing quickly for direct air removal. Before 2018, the amount of money going to these projects in the US was miniscule -- about $11 million per year. The $3.5 billion Congress recently passed for carbon removal, as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law, is a significant increase in funding.

"There's a huge emphasis around carbon removal as a critical tool that needs to be scaled up today," Wilcox said. "We're definitely going to see the needle move in this space over the next 5-10 years."

DOE said it wants to see applications from different regions in the US that can demonstrate a high potential for carbon sequestration, can be scaled up even further and can create long-lasting jobs. It's also looking for applications from fossil fuel communities or communities with industrial capacity.

DOE officials are also aiming to create hubs that are themselves carbon neutral. For instance, the Iceland project runs on clean geothermal energy.

"Thinking about places where you're going to integrate these with other decarbonization efforts are really important," said Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, an organization focused on carbon removal. "We want to see these powered by zero-carbon energy, by renewables. It's essential for climate that this does not slow down or delay mitigation in any way."

Separately, DOE announced nearly $25 million for six new clean hydrogen projects in several states, including a new hydrogen production plant that captures 90 to 99% of its CO2 emissions, and new research on hydrogen fuels.

[I've talked about this before]

The Climeworks carbon dioxide removal site in Iceland.