Methanol Fuel Cells

The MS innogy on Lake Baldeneysee in Essen (Source)

I'd heard about hydrogen fuel cells, but I'd never heard of methanol fuel cells before I read this article.  Methanol is made from methane, i.e., natural gas.  But methane can also come from green sources: biomass, or old rubbish dumps for example.  Or it can be made via the Sabatier process, which takes carbon dioxide, water and heat and produces methane.  So in principle, methanol can be carbon neutral, and if it is used in a fuel cell rather than burnt, it is silent, produces no nitrogen oxide (Nox) or particulate emissions.

After a ship-naming ceremony on Friday, the MS innogy is now ready to take passengers for a green tour on the beautiful Lake Baldeneysee. The MS innogy, the first vessel in Germany to be powered by methanol fuel cells, is a project by innogy, a leading distributor of green energy in Germany and the City of Essen. The methanol fuel cell system powering the vessel is developed and manufactured by the Danish fuel cell manufacture SerEnergy. 

About a year ago, the companies started to develop a plan to turn a diesel-powered vessel into an electric vessel powered by environmentally friendly methanol fuel cells. 

“We are very proud to see the vessel touring the lake in Essen, it is an important milestone in showing the potential of methanol as the green fuel of the future. For us, it has been a very interesting project to be part of, and since the project is a first of its kind we have had to think out of the box to create an ideal energy system matching the energy demands of the vessel”, says Mads Friis Jensen, Chief Commercial Officer at SerEnergy. 

Not only has the methanol fuel cell system zero harmful emissions and is CO2-neutral, it is also low on noise and vibrations, allowing the passengers to enjoy the tour without the characteristic engine noise and vibrations you normally experience on a vessel. 

The MS innogy is a part of innogy’s “greenfuel” project where they demonstrate the entire value chain of environmentally friendly methanol, from a green production of methanol using CO2 from the surrounding air, green electricity and water, to the use of methanol as fuel in the excursion vessel and in cars. The scene of the methanol value chain demonstration project is the City of Essen – this year’s “Green Capital of Europe” and the demonstration project goes hand in hand with the ambitious transition the city is undergoing in reinventing itself as a “Green City”.

[Read more here]

What are the advantages of methanol?

• Lower costs – Methanol is cheap and easy to produce. Typically, there is 15-60% fuel cost savings compared to diesel generators.

• Low to zero emission – Serenergy’s methanol fuel cells offer a CO2 neutral solution. There is a 50-65% CO2 reduction compared to diesel generators and no harmful emissions (NOX or particles).

• High efficiency – The fuel cell system offers a high efficiency compared to internal combustion engines. It has a complete system efficiency up to 50%.

• Reliability and low maintenance –The lack of moving parts in a Serenergy methanol fuel cell, especially compared to an internal combustion engine, signifies that the level of maintenance is low and the reliability of the system is thus very high.

• Energy security – Oppose to fossil fuel, such as petrol and diesel, methanol is a very flexible fuel, which can be produced from a broad range of feedstock, hence ensuring energy security.

• Scalability – The Serenergy methanol fuel cell modules are designed and available in customised sizes from 10 to 120 cells. Furthermore, two or four systems can be connected for higher power ranges. Consequently, this means that is a scalable power output of 1kWp to 6kW

• Quiet energy – A Serenergy methanol fuel cell system generates no (low) noise (<62dB) and no vibrations, which makes them ideal for power generation in residential areas.

• Technology compatibility – Serenergy’s methanol fuel cell solutions must be seen as complementary and not as a competitor, with other energy generation technologies. Especially renewable technologies.

(The benefits of methanol fuel cells)

A critical problem with the hydrogen or methane/methanol economy is that producing hydrogen via electrolysis from water has a substantial energy loss.  How much is lost depends on the precise process used.   But at best it's around 35%.  According to Tesla, their Powerwall battery is around 90% efficient.  So on the face of it, batteries are more efficient.  On the other hand, according to SerEnergy, methanol cells are 1.8 times as efficient as diesel:

Methanol and fuel cells is a good match. Methanol used in fuel cells is highly efficient and in many cases, it make twice as good use of energy as a combustion engine. Serenergy fuel cells have an efficiency of +45 %, whereas a combustion engine has an efficiency of 25-30 %. 

 (Why do we use methanol?)

This is still a developing technology.  But it's certainly interesting enough to keep one's eye on it.

Start with ruthenium and add air

Source: http://methanolch4o.blogspot.com.au/

I mentioned the Sabatier process in a previous post.  Researchers at the University of Southern California have been testing a different approach:

Methanol (CH3OH) is a common topic of conversation when discussing how to replace fossil fuels with a new form of energy storage. The molecule is versatile: it can be used as liquid fuel in internal combustion engines, it’s an important starter for making chemical feedstock used to make plastics or other materials, and it can be produced through a simple reaction between carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen (H2). All these advantages lead some experts to propose a methanol economy, in which methanol replaces fossil fuels as the primary transportation fuel or energy storage medium.

The problem is that burning methanol would still release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (less than other current fossil fuels), unless we could create methanol using the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere! Then all the carbon dioxide released during methanol combustion in an engine or power plant would not create any net gain of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

This idea of a human-made carbon cycle, mimicking how plants use carbon dioxide in photosynthesis, isn’t new. Power plants in Reykjavik, Iceland already use geothermal energy to react carbon dioxide with hydrogen to create methanol and water. But in these cases, the carbon dioxide is not taken directly from the air. Instead, the geothermal plant first captures the CO2, which is then funneled into the methanol production process.

To simplify this method, USC researchers have now developed the first technique to directly react CO2in air to create methanol. The secret lies in two major developments. First, researchers chose a new catalyst, the mysterious key to speeding up the rate of converting reactants to products in so many reactions. In this case, they tested several varieties of ruthenium complexes: molecules with a ruthenium atom at their center, surrounded by ligands made of phosphorous, nitrogen, and hydrogen. Second, the researchers used polyamines to capture CO2 so the catalyst could do its work and foment the reaction to create methanol. Amines are derivatives of ammonia and contain high amounts of nitrogen, which are important sites to attract and absorb carbon dioxide.

With these advantages in place, the researchers injected air into a solution of the polyamine and catalyst (known as ‘bubbling air’). After heating the solution up to about 125-165 degrees Celsius, they ended with a 79% yield of methanol. This percent is the amount of actual yield divided by the theoretical yield predicted by the stoichiometry of the reaction. This high yield should be seen as a success for a first attempt at direct CO2conversion to methanol!

Read more here.

Interestingly, they didn't first need to produce hydrogen by electrolysis, which is the basis of the Sabatier process.  It's not clear, but I assume the hydrogen came from the water.

If we wanted to we could move to a 100% renewables energy system with a decade.  Existing cars and lorries would be converted to methanol, and electricity would be produced by wind and solar.

The concentrated solar power phoenix

A few years ago, concentrated solar power (CSP) looked as if it was going to be an immensely valuable resource to increase the share of renewables in the grid.   

CSP used mirrors to concentrate the rays of the sun on a central "receiver" which got so hot it melted sodium salts.  These molten salts (at ±600 C) could be used immediately to boil water to create steam and drive conventional turbines to generate electricity, or they could be stored to be used later, typically overnight.  The molten salts in their special reservoirs lost heat very slowly, so could be stored for days or even weeks.   

The cost of the CSP power station lay mostly in the mirror array and the receiver, not the storage, so adding storage was much cheaper than adding storage via batteries to solar panels is.  In principle, CSP could provide baseload power more cheaply than coal and much more cheaply than nuclear.   The only problem was ..... the storage tanks kept on cracking, leaking the molten salts and reducing or stopping output.  And so, the CSP dream ended.   

Except it didn't.

An Australian company, Vast Solar, developed storage tanks which were flexible enough not to crack, with a modular system which allowed bigger CSP plants.  I talked about it before, here.

Well, Vast Solar is going from strength to strength.  It's being listed on the NYSE, and has expanded its development pipeline to 3700 MW, with 230 MW of projects under development.

Now that the technology works efficiently, the potential to scale is dramatic. The total addressable market for CSP by 2050 will be between 700 and 1,800 gigawatts (GW), with a revenue potential of over $3.5 trillion, according to a top tier international management consulting firm. The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts deployment of up to 430 GW of new CSP capacity globally by 2050 for on-grid applications alone.

That leaves room for many players to succeed but Vast Solar is a first mover [and owns the copyright to the flexible tanks] – and [is] already getting a piece of the pie. The company has 230 megawatts of projects under development, with a total pipeline of 3.7 GW, as of February 2023.

Large governments around the world are firmly backing the business. Up to A$ 215 million of funding has been committed by the Australian and German governments.

Importantly, the technology is tried and true, with CSP v3.0 already piloted for over five years and de-risked through a grid-synchronized demonstration plant that’s operated for nearly three years. The modular tower modality and sodium-based heat transfer technology provide a design that increases reliability and efficiency, while reducing complexity, cost and construction time.

To accelerate deployments in the US, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is expected to materially improve project economics through the 30+% investment tax credit. The partnership between NETC and Vast Solar represents an attractive entry point for some of the most topical energy transition macro themes: dispatchable power, storage, process heat and green fuels.

Traditional storage solutions come with many compromises such as cost, safety and supply chain issues. CSP offers a variety of key features, including carbon-free, dispatchable power and heat, lower cost technology for sun-belt countries, highly efficient systems with minimal losses, integrated energy storage with thermal batteries that charge themselves with daylight, and a low-risk supply chain consisting primarily of glass and steel.

CSP solves two problems that wind and solar photovoltaics (PV) cannot. Wind and solar PV are intermittent generators. Adding battery storage allows wind and solar PV to be dispatched, but only with limited duration, at a high cost and with significant trade-offs. CSP provides efficient long-duration storage which makes it comparable to traditional fossil generation.

Decarbonizing manufacturing is challenging because many industrial processes require heat that can only be efficiently generated by burning fossil fuels. CSP can generate process heat equivalent to burning fossil fuels, allowing manufacturers to decarbonize.

Vast’s Modular Tower is a new and innovative approach to CSP that seeks to address the challenges facing conventional CSP. The Modular Tower utilizes molten sodium as its heat transfer fluid, which enables a modular tower design that unlocks benefits that collectively drive down costs and de-risk the operation.

These provide a variety of advantages, including reduced construction time, locational flexibility, lower operational risk through better thermal process control, higher operating temperatures delivering improved plant economics in both salt storage and turbine efficiency, and the ability to alter dispatch to meet changes in grid circumstances.

Additionally, modular towers offer a safer and cheaper way to conduct maintenance on a smaller tower and receiver, increasing the ability to meet customer requirements for both power and heat.

Turning to deployment goals, the company has a focus on several sunny regions, including stretches of North America, Europe/Middle East, APAC, Latin America, Central and South America, and Africa.

One proof point is Vast Solar’s 50-megawatt Mount Isa solar thermal plant, located in northern Queensland state, which is also a testament to the growing demand for renewable energy. The isolated mining community will benefit from the plant, which incorporates technology that allows heat from the sun to be stored for up to 16 hours.

[From Yahoo!Finance] 

Because CSP enables longer storage than batteries, it will play a key part in the renewable grid, and it will reduce the need for gas peaking.   The grid of the future will have wind, solar, CSP, and other lesser sources of green electricity (micro hydro, wave power, tidal power).  The greater the variety of generation sources, the more stable the output.

In addition, Vast Solar has also signed a LOI (Letter of intent) to build a green methanol plant co-located with its CSP plant at Port Augusta in South Australia.  Green methanol (CH₃OH) is much more useful than green hydrogen, because it can be stored and transported at room temperature.  See this article and this one about green methanol.  I wrote about methanol here, and you can read other pieces I wrote here. 

Methanol is another way of storing surplus electricity indefinitely.    So both these initiatives will make it easier to get to zero carbon.

The hydrogen furphy

I've been suspicious about the hydrogen mania for a while now.   Michael Liebreich does a much better demolition job than I could.   But his recommendation to use green ammonia, made from green hydrogen, for long-term storage in electricity generation is very interesting.   And I don't share his doubts about using e-fuels for jets.  If e-fuels cost twice as much as jetfuel, so be it.  We survived without intercontinental jet flights before, and we could again.

[From BNEF]

By Michael Liebreich

Senior Contributor
BloombergNEF

Injecting some reality

Two years ago, BloombergNEF published my two-part primer on hydrogen, Separating Hype from Hydrogen. On the supply side, I was optimistic: green hydrogen (produced from renewable energy) would over time become cheaper than blue hydrogen (produced from natural gas but with carbon captured) and eventually cheaper than gray hydrogen (produced form natural gas without carbon capture).

On the demand side I was more skeptical. While clean hydrogen will be needed to decarbonize a number of use cases in industry, and perhaps for long-duration storage, I found it hard to identify any role for it in applications like land transportation or space heating. Since then, as I have done more work on industrial heat, I have even come to believe it has a limited role even there.

If my intention at the time was to inject some reality into discussions about hydrogen, I clearly failed. Rhetoric around hydrogen has become ever more overblown.

According to lobbying group the Hydrogen Council, citing a series of reports commissioned from McKinsey over the past three years, hydrogen can be expected to contribute more than 20 percent of emissions reductions needed for the world to reach net-zero emissions – a figure repeated by politicians and journalists seemingly without the slightest critical examination.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has called hydrogen “the gas of the future” and promised “a huge boom.” Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has declared that “shifting to and developing a hydrogen society is critical for achieving decarbonization.” Frans Timmermans, the EU Executive Vice-President for the European Green Deal believes that “hydrogen rocks.” Jacob Rees Mogg, briefly UK Secretary of State for Energy this year, called hydrogen “the silver bullet”.

Public money is starting to flow. The EU has approved the first 13 billion euros ($13.7 billion) of the 430 billion euros ($450 billion) promised under its 2020 Hydrogen Strategy and is now working to launch a “Hydrogen Bank”. The US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provides a ten-year tax rebate per kilogram of green hydrogen worth $3, which will soon be more than the production cost itself. Free hydrogen anyone?

Of supreme import

In October this year the Hydrogen Council and McKinsey released another report entitled Global Hydrogen Flows, predicting long-distance transport of 400 million tonnes of clean hydrogen and its derivatives (calculated on a hydrogen-content basis) by 2050, out of total global production of 660 million tonnes of hydrogen. It is worth bearing in mind that today, 94 million tonnes of hydrogen are used annually, virtually all of it made from fossil fuels, creating 2.3% of global emissions. The vast bulk of today’s hydrogen never leaves the compound on which it is made, let alone cross an international border.

The idea of hydrogen imports as a way of decarbonizing major industrialized economies is enormously seductive – so much so that Germany and Japan have made it central to their decarbonization strategies. Here’s Japanese PM Kishida again: “Japan aims to commercialize an international hydrogen supply chain by producing hydrogen in bulk at low cost in countries blessed with bountiful renewable energy resources coupled with marine transport infrastructure.”

Chancellor Scholz is promoting hydrogen imports not just as a way of decarbonizing the German economy, but as a replacement for Russian gas. In August he and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau flew to Newfoundland and Labrador to sign an agreement to “create a transatlantic supply chain for hydrogen well before 2030, with first deliveries aiming for 2025”. As I write this, German Economy Minister Robert Habeck is on a five-day trip to Namibia and South Africa to secure hydrogen supplies.

The problem with this vision of large-scale imports of hydrogen is that the physics of hydrogen is unlikely to play ball.

The unbearable lightness of hydrogen

In February this year, Kawasaki Heavy Industries’ Suiso Frontier arrived in Kobe, Japan carrying the world’s first ever cargo of liquid hydrogen from Australia. Did this momentous occasion herald the start of a brave new world of trade in liquid hydrogen, as the press coverage suggested? In a word, no.

Set aside the A$500 million ($334 million) cost of the project; set aside the fact that most of the hydrogen on board the Suiso Frontier was made from coal; and set aside the fire that broke out on board while loading. The 1,250 cubic metres of hydrogen carried by the Suiso Frontier contained just 0.2% of the energy content of a single large LNG carrier. Okay, the first ever LNG cargo, carried 63 years ago from the Calcasieu River on the Louisiana Gulf to the UK, consisted of a similarly picayune 2,475 tonnes. Surely liquid hydrogen can be scaled up in the same way as LNG has been? Kawasaki Heavy Industries, builder of the Suiso Frontier claims it has already lined up the first order for a much larger, 160,000 m3 carrier from Nippon Kaiji Kyokai.

This is where the physics of liquid hydrogen step in. Although the scaled-up vessel would carry 60% of the volume of an LNG Q-Max, it would carry only 22% of the energy.

Hydrogen has very good gravimetric energy density – the amount of energy carried per unit weight. On this measure, hydrogen beats diesel, petrol and jetfuel by a factor of around three, and LNG by a factor of 2.7 – which is why it makes a great rocket fuel. However, it has very poor volumetric energy density – the amount of energy carried per unit volume. It’s worth remembering that while a cubic meter of water weighs 1,000 kilograms; a cubic meter of hydrogen weighs only 71 kilograms.

On a volumetric basis, hydrogen’s energy density is a quarter that of jet fuel, and only 40% of that of LNG. Since ships are volume constrained (think Suez Canal, Panama Canal, etc.), this inevitably means more trips. Even if Kawasaki Heavy Industries was to scale its hydrogen carrier to the same size as a Q-Max, it would need to make 2.5 deliveries to carry the same amount of energy as one cargo of LNG. You don’t need to know anything at all about shipping to know that 2.5 times the trips are going to cost you 2.5 times as much.

But this is only the start. A liquid hydrogen carrier will inevitably be more expensive than an LNG carrier. Its load will be at -253C instead of -162C, and all pipes, valves, pumps and tanks have to resist hydrogen embrittlement. And because liquid hydrogen is both colder and lighter than LNG, the liquid hydrogen ship would have up to nine times more boil-off en route (these ships let some of the load boil off as heat enters the tanks, and then use that as fuel for their engines), unless you add either much more insulation or a complex cryogenic recycling system.

Overall, you would be wise to assume that the seaborne segment of your hydrogen trade will cost around four times the cost of LNG per unit energy.

It’s the physics, stupid

But that only deals with the seaborne segment. We still have to talk about liquefaction and regasification.

Liquefying hydrogen is a is a hugely energy-hungry process, made complex by the quirks of hydrogen physics – things like its negative Joule-Thomson Effect (unlike most gases, hydrogen gets warm when it expands and cold when compressed) and ortho-para isomer conversion (without which liquid hydrogen re-evaporates, irrespective of insulation). Liquefaction of hydrogen currently consumes 30-40% of its energy content, versus no more than 10% for LNG. Ways to improve this are being researched, but nothing can change the fact that liquefying hydrogen is, quite simply, a bear.

As for regasification, again the plants will be more expensive than for LNG. They need to operate at lower temperatures; all valves, pumps, pipes and tanks have to resist embrittlement; and compressors have to be of larger capacity because pressurizing hydrogen gas requires more work than pressurizing natural gas. European politicians, scrambling to build new terminals to receive LNG in replacement of Russian gas, are suggesting that these terminals will be repurposed to receive hydrogen or its derivatives. This is nonsense. You can re-use the docks and infrastructure, and any distribution pipelines can be upgraded, but 70% of everything else has to be scrapped.

In summary, while LNG approximately doubles the cost of gas delivered by pipeline, shipping liquid hydrogen will cost four to six times more than LNG. In other words, you can’t power an economy on imported liquid hydrogen, and that is not because of things that can be fixed – scale, technology, cost of capital and so on – but because of the underlying physics: volumetric density, liquefaction temperature and interactions with other materials.

It’s a gas, gas, gas!

If importing hydrogen in liquid form is out, what about importing hydrogen as a gas?

Here, things look much better. Gaseous hydrogen is already transported by pipeline – all the pipes, pumps, valves and tanks need to be appropriately engineered, but the economics are not terrible. Just as well, given the volume of hydrogen we are going to need at industrial “hydrogen hubs” for industrial uses and to provide long-duration back-up power.

Just replacing the current production of gray and black hydrogen would create demand for 94 million tonnes of clean hydrogen. Pipeline imports are well-placed to meet a decent proportion of this.

There is, however, a caveat. The longest natural gas pipeline in the world (excluding side branches) is Brazil’s National Unification Gas Pipeline (GASUN), just under 5,000 kilometers long. In their report on hydrogen trade, McKinsey and the Hydrogen Council predict 40 hydrogen “trade routes” connecting the globe. Those serving Europe by pipeline from Norway, North Africa and the Gulf are certainly feasible (the one from Russia is clearly off the cards for decades). However, none of the longer trade routes linking the US West Coast with Asia, the US East Coast with Europe, or the Gulf, Africa or Australia with Asia are likely to carry a single cubic meter of gaseous hydrogen.

There are a few companies proposing to carry compressed hydrogen gas by ship. This would allow them to avoid the cost and complexity of liquefaction but would expose them to the same problems of lower volumetric energy density, only more so. Provaris Energy has designed a ship carrying hydrogen gas at 250 bar. But this translates to just 25 kilograms of hydrogen per cubic meter – just over a third of the very poor volumetric density of liquid hydrogen. Scaled up to the size of a Q-Max, their ship would carry around one seventh of the energy. Seven ships to do the work of one, you can imagine what that does to costs.

There may be some niche applications for shipping gaseous hydrogen, for instance moving stranded supplies between islands, but it is not going to happen in more than homeopathic quantities.

The exotics

There are other ways of transporting hydrogen beyond liquid and gas. We’ll get on to derivatives of hydrogen in a moment, but first I want to deal with the exotics – liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs) and metal hydrides. Here the goal is to load hydrogen into a chemical or metal carrier, which allows it to be transported at ambient temperatures and pressures. On arrival the hydrogen is released and the carrier returned to the point of origin.

One promising LOHC is benzyl toluene, being marketed as a solution for hydrogen shipping by a company called Hydrogenious. But again it has a volumetric density problem. One cubic meter of benzyl toluene can only be loaded with 54 kilograms of hydrogen – which means four times as many trips for each energy cargo as you would have with LNG. In addition, loading hydrogen into the organic solvent is an exothermic process, generating heat where you don’t need it, and then you need to add energy at 300C at the arrival location to extract it – using up around 30% of the delivered energy.

That’s not to say LOHCs are not interesting: they could perhaps find a role in long-duration stationary storage – not everywhere has the salt caverns or depleted gas fields required to store gaseous hydrogen, but any tanker farm would be able to handle benzyl toluene and there may be options to store and reapply the process heat between cycles. There may even be a modest import market for LOHCs, to replenish long-duration storage tanks.

Metal hydrides offer the hope of transporting up to twice as much fuel per cubic meter as liquid hydrogen – but each family of hydrides studied so far has shown disadvantages: cost, gravimetric density, time to charge, absorptive capacity, heat required to release the hydrogen and so on. It would be a brave investor who thought we were going to move hydrogen at scale this way, when 50 years of research has not yielded as single commercial application.

First derivatives

Next up, hydrogen derivatives – e-methane, e-methanol. These are certainly easier to transport – drop-in replacements for their fossil equivalents. Their problem is high production cost. For each of them you need a source of clean hydrogen – whether blue, green, pink or red (from nuclear power, whichever color code you use) or whatever – plus a source of carbon nearby, and then you need to combine them into molecules of varying degrees of complexity.

The cheapest source of carbon would be captured from the combustion of fossil fuels – but that would make no sense as it would not be compatible with net zero. The only thing that could possibly make sense would be to use direct air capture (DAC) or secure carbon from a bio-based source, so that when it is burned it just returns to the atmosphere.

A bit of systems thinking, however, shows that even this makes no sense. Take e-methane. By the time you have gone to the cost of securing your carbon, why not just sequester it, instead of incurring further costs in producing hydrogen and combining them into your derivative. You could then just deliver plain old fossil gas to the importing country – along with a carbon credit if needed. That would be identical from a climate perspective and vastly cheaper.

Methanol can and must be made in future using clean hydrogen. Some of it will be made where hydrogen is cheap and exported, but only for use cases where it will be consumed as methanol. In 2022, global production of methanol was 110 million tonnes – but adjusting for molar weights, that is equivalent to just 14 million tonnes of hydrogen. Should demand double and a third of that get traded internationally, only a 9 million-tonne import market by hydrogen mass would be created. That barely scratches the surface of the Hydrogen Council’s 400 million tonnes.

E-methanol also represents a potential pathway to decarbonize shipping – but ammonia and waste-based biofuels both look like being cheaper. Even using nuclear power for the world’s largest ships would most likely be cheaper than e-methanol. Global shipping fuel demand today is around 300 million tonnes per year; let’s suppose, optimistically, that demand increases by 50% by 2050, that 20% is replaced by methanol, and a third of that methanol is traded internationally. Once you adjust for the molar mass and energy content of methanol, that would only create annual demand for another 8 million tonnes of hydrogen imports.

e-Fuels

Some continue to promote e-fuels as the solution for land transportation, particularly in Germany and Japan. They point to the fact such fuels require no changes in consumer behavior, highlight the millions of jobs that depend on the internal combustion engine and claim that scrapping 1.4 billion internal combustion vehicles on the world’s roads would be unaffordable.

Their arguments have no merit. First, those 1.4 billion vehicles will be scrapped anyway before whichever year countries select for net zero. In most cases, electric vehicles are already competitive on a total-cost-of-ownership basis with petrol and diesel. E-fuels, by contrast, will still be three to five times as expensive in 2050, driven by their production complexity and the efficiency losses at each production stage. Yes, Porsche is building a pilot project in Chile to produce e-fuels, but theirs is not exactly a cost-conscious customer base.

The fact is that those jobs associated with internal combustion engine manufacturing will be disappearing anyway, the only question is whether they are lost to other technologies or to China. As for behavioral change, most EV users like the fact that they can charge anywhere, rather than having to visit a gas station every week.

Flights of fancy

Time for a deep dive into hydrogen’s potential use in aviation. Airbus has said that it “considers hydrogen to be an important technology pathway to achieve our ambition of bringing a zero-emission commercial aircraft to market by 2035,” and this month, Rolls-Royce and EasyJet made the news by testing a turboprop engine on pure hydrogen.

It turns out that running an aircraft engine on hydrogen is not the difficult bit – the Soviet Union did it back in 1988, not on a test bench but in the air. The real problems are caused, once again, by the physics of hydrogen.

With just 25% of the energy density of kerosene, replacing the maximum take-off fuel load for a long-haul aircraft would require more space than the entire swept volume of its fuselage – a non-starter. For short-haul flights, the focus of Easyjet’s interest, the fuel tank would take up around a third of the fuselage. That means ticket prices 50% higher than now, even before paying for the higher costs of the plane, the cost of the liquid hydrogen, and cost of its ground handling equipment. In total, expect a doubling or tripling of prices.

The real show-stopper, however, is getting the fuel to the airport. Liquid hydrogen transfer lines exist, but there is no way to keep miles of pipeline at -253C and handle the safety issues of any potential leaks. That leaves road tankers or gas pipelines.

Let’s do a thought experiment: try to replace all 20,000 tonnes of jet fuel delivered daily to Heathrow airport with 7,200 tonnes of liquid hydrogen. By tanker truck, that would mean 2,300 daily movements of liquid hydrogen in West London. The safety and traffic implications don’t bear thinking about. Now the only option is to bring the hydrogen in by gas pipeline, and liquefy it on site. But that would require 2.7GW of electrical power, according to engineer and Oxford University ammonia expert Dr. Mike Mason – approximately the output of a new nuclear power station the size of Hinkley C, plus a lot of pylons. And then you need to dump enough heat to raise the temperature of the Thames by 18 degrees C.

The bottom line is that liquid hydrogen could perhaps end up powering a few executive jets – startup ZeroAvia certainly hopes so – but not aviation as we know it. The only substantial role for hydrogen in aviation would be through the production of e-fuels. These are certainly technically feasible – UK company Zero Petroleum has already made some – but they look like being at least twice as expensive as sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) based on agricultural or forestry waste.

If potential volumes of SAF are limited by feedstock availability, then there is a market opportunity for hydrogen in aviation fuels, if not, there isn’t. Global aviation fuel demand was around 300 million tonnes in 2019, which translates to 46 million tonnes on a hydrogen mass basis. If demand grows by 50%, 25% is met by e-jetfuel and one third of that is shipped internationally, that only generates 6 million tonnes of traded hydrogen.

Moan, moan, ammonia

That brings us, finally, to ammonia – the last option for those hoping to develop substantial long-distance hydrogen imports.

Around 190 million tonnes of ammonia are produced each year, mainly for fertilizer and as a chemical feedstock, almost all of it from fossil feedstock. Around 10 percent of current production is already traded internationally but this only comes to around three million tonnes by hydrogen mass.

Switching to clean ammonia for fertilizer production will without doubt drive a big increase in traded hydrogen. Where there are pipelines, hydrogen can be made where renewable power is cheap and imported in place of natural gas and used to make ammonia at the destination. Where there are no pipelines, green ammonia or finished fertilizer will be produced and shipped instead.

Supposing the fertilizer market grows by half by 2050, all of it goes low-carbon and a third of it ends up being shipped internationally, that would increase ammonia trading from 18 to 95 million tonnes per year – a lot of ammonia. This will be a relief for those investing in ammonia projects in Chile, Canada, Namibia and South Africa: their output may not find much use in the energy sector, but at least they should have access to a very substantial market. It is, however, only 17 million tonnes on a hydrogen mass basis.

Back to shipping fuels. Since ammonia will be cheaper than methanol, as discussed, let’s be optimistic and say half of the volumes described above are replaced with ammonia, and a third of it is traded internationally. That would drive an additional 25 million tonnes of demand by hydrogen mass.

Japan’s big bet

Japan is betting that imported ammonia will be used to generate power. Its national decarbonization plan is based on retaining its coal-fired power stations, but fueling them with increasing proportions of ammonia – first 20%, then 50%, then 100% by 2050. So confident is it – and so keen to keep selling its technology internationally – that it is encouraging Vietnam and other South-East Asian countries to keep building coal-fired power stations. Will the bet pay off?

Let’s look first at ammonia made from green hydrogen. That means generating wind and solar power; using it to produce hydrogen (80% efficiency); making ammonia via the Haber-Bosch process (70% efficiency); liquefying it (90% efficiency); shipping it (90% efficiency); and burning it to generate power (45% efficiency). Your end-to-end efficiency will be an astonishingly poor 20%. Although it might be possible to improve the efficiency of each of stage, the tyranny of multiple process steps means your end-to-end efficiency is hard to budge.

What 20% end-to-end efficiency means is that the resulting power will cost five times as much as the original power – and that is before accounting for capital invested in all those process stages and maintenance. In addition, combustion of ammonia produces nitrous oxides – hazardous to health and powerful greenhouse gases in their own right.

Now, ammonia from blue hydrogen. You eliminate the electrolysis stage, so your end-to-end efficiency is a little higher at 26%, but you have the extra cost of carbon capture and sequestration, so the resulting power cost is going to be about the same. The real question, however, is why bother? Why not just ship the natural gas to Japan instead of ammonia – LNG has 1.7 times the volumetric energy density of ammonia, so you need fewer cargoes. Then you capture the CO2 at the other end, and either sequester or send it back to the point of origin on the same ships. You have the same climate impact, approximately the same cost of carbon capture and sequestration, but significantly greater efficiency and lower shipping costs.

The bottom line for ammonia as a fuel for power generation, whether co-fired or pure, is that no economy can be internationally competitive based on the resulting power prices. My estimates are in line with the more detailed modelling work undertaken by BloombergNEF: BloombergNEF found that 100% ammonia-fired power in Japan would cost around $260 per megawatt-hour in 2030 and $200 by 2050 – around double the cost of renewable energy.

The fact that Japan could generate large amounts of renewable energy – in particular, offshore wind – at much lower cost points to the role that clean ammonia could in fact play in the country’s power system: providing back-up. Bill Gates likes to quote Vaclav Smil on the three-day cyclones that hit Tokyo almost every year – which would shut down renewable generation and leave it short of 22GW of power. He laughs at the idea that batteries could fill the resulting gap, and he is correct to do so. However, the gap is only 1,600 GWh, which could be generated from a million cubic meters of ammonia – an amount that could be brought in on just four Q-Max-sized carriers.

So, while basing Japan’s economy on electricity generated from imported ammonia is an economic non-starter, storing a few million tonnes of ammonia and using it for long-duration storage looks a lot more realistic.

Conclusions and implications

This has been a long journey and we have covered a lot of ground. I want to leave you with a few conclusions by way of summary.

The only way to move hydrogen economically is as a gas, by pipeline. Forget liquid hydrogen: it will struggle to find any role in the future energy or transport systems because of its poor volumetric energy density and difficulties with handling. It will have no role at all as a traded commodity.

Ammonia will be traded and transported, primarily for use in fertilizer production, plus as a shipping fuel. It will not be imported to power bulk power generation, but will be imported and stored to deliver long-duration storage. Some LOHC might also be imported, but only where it is stored for resilience purposes.

Clean methanol will be made near to sources of cheap clean hydrogen and some of it will be shipped around the world for use as a chemical feedstock. E-fuels – whether methanol, petrol, diesel or kerosene equivalents – will not be shipped around the world in meaningful volumes because their cost will severely limit their uptake, with the possible exception of aviation.

Totting up the various future hydrogen trade flows covered here, it is clear that the Hydrogen Council/McKinsey figures of 660 million tonnes of clean hydrogen production and 400 million tonnes of long-distance transportation are out by a factor of at least three. In addition, given that China and India have only pledged net zero by 2060 and 2070 respectively, such flows that do materialize will take decades beyond 2050.

The implications reach far beyond the question of international trade in hydrogen and its derivatives. The prohibitive cost of long-distance imports means that energy-intensive industries will inevitably migrate to regions with cheap clean energy. It is inconceivable for any country to import iron ore from Australia or Brazil, hydrogen from Australia, the Gulf, Canada or Africa, and make steel at a globally competitive cost. Magical thinking will be no defense against de-industrialization.

Finally, it is worth noting that none of this calls into question the fact that clean hydrogen will be required to decarbonize certain sectors, which will eventually create more than 100 million tonnes per year of demand. Just as railway mania left the world with railways, electricity mania left the world with power networks, and the dot-com bubble left the world with broadband fiber, so hydrogen mania will leave the world with a lot of clean hydrogen.

The worry is that, along the way, we are going to waste huge amounts of money on the wrong use cases for hydrogen and the wrong infrastructure in the wrong places. Worse than wasting money, we will also be wasting time – and that is the one thing we don’t have. Let’s be smart.

Selah.

Michael Liebreich is the founder and senior contributor to BloombergNEF. He is also the CEO and chair of Liebreich Associates, founding managing partner of EcoPragma Capital and an advisor to the U.K. Board of Trade.

Source: BNEF

 

The green technology that could save us all

From The Guardian

So what do we do now? After 27 summits and no effective action, it seems that the real purpose was to keep us talking. If governments were serious about preventing climate breakdown, there would have been no Cops 2-27. The major issues would have been resolved at Cop1, as the ozone depletion crisis was at a single summit in Montreal.

Nothing can now be achieved without mass protest, whose aim, like that of protest movements before us, is to reach the critical mass that triggers a social tipping point. But, as every protester knows, this is only part of the challenge. We also need to translate our demands into action, which requires political, economic, cultural and technological change. All are necessary, none are sufficient. Only together can they amount to the change we need to see.

Let’s focus for a moment on technology. Specifically, what might be the most important environmental technology ever developed: precision fermentation.

Precision fermentation is a refined form of brewing, a means of multiplying microbes to create specific products. It has been used for many years to produce drugs and food additives. But now, in several labs and a few factories, scientists are developing what could be a new generation of staple foods.

The developments I find most interesting use no agricultural feedstocks. The microbes they breed feed on hydrogen or methanol – which can be made with renewable electricity – combined with water, carbon dioxide and a very small amount of fertiliser. They produce a flour that contains roughly 60% protein, a much higher concentration than any major crop can achieve (soy beans contain 37%, chick peas, 20%). When they are bred to produce specific proteins and fats, they can create much better replacements than plant products for meat, fish, milk and eggs. And they have the potential to do two astonishing things.

The first is to shrink to a remarkable degree the footprint of food production. One paper estimates that precision fermentation using methanol needs 1,700 times less land than the most efficient agricultural means of producing protein: soy grown in the US. This suggests it might use, respectively, 138,000 and 157,000 times less land than the least efficient means: beef and lamb production. Depending on the electricity source and recycling rates, it can also enable radical reductions in water use and greenhouse gas emissions. Because the process is contained, it avoids the spillover of waste and chemicals into the wider world caused by farming.

If livestock production is replaced by this technology, it creates what could be the last major opportunity to prevent Earth systems collapse, namely ecological restoration on a massive scale. By rewilding the vast tracts now occupied by livestock (by far the greatest of all human land uses) or by the crops used to feed them – as well as the seas being trawled or gill-netted to destruction – and restoring forests, wetlands, savannahs, natural grasslands, mangroves, reefs and sea floors, we could both stop the sixth great extinction and draw down much of the carbon we have released into the atmosphere.

The second astonishing possibility is breaking the extreme dependency of many nations on food shipped from distant places. Nations in the Middle East, north Africa, the Horn of Africa and Central America do not possess sufficient fertile land or water to grow enough food of their own. In other places, especially parts of sub-Saharan Africa, a combination of soil degradation, population growth and dietary change cancels out any gains in yield. But all the nations most vulnerable to food insecurity are rich in something else: sunlight. This is the feedstock required to sustain food production based on hydrogen and methanol.

Precision fermentation is at the top of its price curve, and has great potential for steep reductions. Farming multicellular organisms (plants and animals) is at the bottom of its price curve: it has pushed these creatures to their limits, and sometimes beyond. If production is distributed (which I believe is essential), every town could have an autonomous microbial brewery, making cheap protein-rich foods tailored to local markets. This technology could, in many nations, deliver food security more effectively than farming can.

There are four main objections. The first is “Yuck, bacteria!” Well, tough, you eat them with every meal. In fact, we deliberately introduce live ones into some of our foods, such as cheese and yoghurt. And take a look at the intensive animal factories that produce most of the meat and eggs we eat and the slaughterhouses that serve them, both of which the new technology could make redundant.

The second objection is that these flours could be used to make ultra-processed foods. Yes, like wheat flour, they could. But they can also be used to radically reduce the processing involved in making substitutes for animal products, especially if the microbes are gene-edited to produce specific proteins.

This brings us to the third objection. There are major problems with certain genetically modified crops such as Roundup Ready maize, whose main purpose was to enlarge the market for a proprietary herbicide, and the dominance of the company that produced it. But GM microbes have been used uncontroversially in precision fermentation since the 1970s to produce insulin, the rennet substitute chymosin and vitamins. There is a real and terrifying genetic contamination crisis in the food industry, but it arises from business as usual: the spread of antibiotic resistance genes from livestock slurry tanks, into the soil and thence into the food chain and the living world. GM microbes paradoxically offer our best hope of stopping genetic contamination.

The fourth objection has more weight: the potential for these new technologies to be captured by a few corporations. The risk is real and we should engage with it now, demanding a new food economy that’s radically different from the existing one, in which extreme consolidation has already taken place. But this is not an argument against the technology itself, any more than the dangerous concentration in the global grain trade (90% of it in the hands of four corporations) is an argument against trading grain, without which billions would starve.

The real sticking point, I believe, is neophobia. I know people who won’t own a microwave oven, as they believe it will damage their health (it doesn’t), but who do own a woodburning stove, which does. We defend the old and revile the new. Much of the time, it should be the other way around.

I’ve given my support to a new campaign, called Reboot Food, to make the case for the new technologies that could help pull us out of our disastrous spiral. We hope to ferment a revolution.

[George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist]

Source: Precision Fermentation: What exactly is it?

Rooftop solar refinery makes jetfuel

 From Anthropocene.

Scientists have made a pilot-scale solar refinery that efficiently turns carbon dioxide and water plucked from air into liquid fuels. The system takes us one step closer to making carbon-neutral fuels for flying and shipping pretty much anywhere in the world.

The global aviation and shipping industries together produce about 8 percent of manmade carbon dioxide emissions. Battery-powered electric ships and airplanes are one way to reduce emissions, and are already being tested on small scales. But batteries are large, heavy, and expensive especially for long-haul international travel.

A promising near-term solution is to make fuels like gasoline, diesel and kerosene from water and carbon dioxide using solar energy. Of the several ways to do this, an efficient process with high fuel-production rate involves using concentrated sunlight as a source of high-temperature heat.

Aldo Steinfeld and his colleagues from ETH Zurich in Switzerland used this technique for their solar fuel plant. As an added benefit, they use carbon dioxide absorbed directly from air for truly carbon-neutral fuels. And their system also extracts water from air, which means it could produce fuel in desert regions or areas with limited access to water resources.

Their system, reported in the journal Nature, makes fuel in three steps. First, a direct air capture unit absorbs carbon dioxide and water from air using a sorbent bed. Then a solar unit uses solar heat to convert the carbon dioxide and water into a mixture of carbon monoxide and oxygen. This unit consists of a sun-tracking curved reflector that focuses the sun’s energy onto the chemical reactor. Finally, a third unit turns the syngas into a liquid hydrocarbon such as methanol or kerosene that is used as fuel.

The researchers tested their system successfully on a rooftop, where it produced 32 milliliters of methanol over 7 hours a day. They propose a design for a commercial solar plant made of ten solar towers, with each tower containing an array of solar reactor modules. Such a plant would produce about 95,000 liters of kerosene a day.

All the solar plants needed to produce enough kerosene for the global aviation industry—which used about 414 billion liters in 2019—would have a total land footprint of roughly 45,000 square kilometers, they calculate. That’s 0.5% of the area of the Sahara desert.

Such solar fuels would be more expensive than conventional fossil fuels, however. An analysis of the entire process showed that the fuel would cost 1.4 to 2.3 USD per liter if it were produced on a commercial scale. Regular kerosene jet fuel typically costs about 0.50 USD. The researchers say that the solar fuels would need policy support for widespread use.

Pan-Europe wind & solar = stable output

 A most interesting thread from Sarastro on Bluesky.

The past two days we [have] seen something interesting in the European power market: continent wide balancing that is providing security of supply at the lowest prices driven by commercial incentives…

We know that solar and wind and inverse output characteristics. A system that contains both is more secure than one or other alone. This chart from @ember-energy.org makes the point on a European wide scale

 

You can see that on a European wide scale the combined output of wind and solar is less intermittent than solar and wind alone. These charts do not show the risk of hourly balancing though so you still need a source of flexible generation. [Or storage]

This morning we can see that in action. The French grid is importing power from Spain and exporting it to other markets across the French grid in Northern Europe. That’s how you get solar from southern Europe to Northern Europe and wind from the north to the south

 

But take a look at the output of the French nukes: the French have reduced nuclear output in response: they are not just wheeling power across the French system they are managing the French system for cost and using the nukes as a battery

It’s a revelation for those (like me) who have thought of nuclear has inflexible. EDF is showing us that at the heart of the European grid is a huge battery, its nuclear park, capable of firming both south solar and northern wind.

Yesterday we saw something similar with wind from the uk being imported into France and French exports to other European countries

But critically the nukes modulating output…

A couple of points:

1.  I've talked before about how wind and solar tend to balance each other, not just daily, but also seasonally.  It's not perfect, but on a continent-wide grid (as in Europe) the necessary storage/dispatchable power needed (such as gas) is significantly reduced from what would be needed if just wind or just solar was used.
2. Like Sarastro, I also did not know that nuclear could be ramped up and down.  Notice that the percentage moves are small --- roughly 20% --- but because nuclear is so large in European generation, that's enough to go a long way to balancing total grid output.  From the top chart, I estimate the seasonal variability of wind and solar together as ~10% of total output.
3. New nuclear is still much more expensive than new wind+solar combined with 5 hours of storage.  In Australia (without nuclear), 5 hours of storage with 20% overcapacity of wind and solar is enough to provide a stable grid for 99% of the time.    The tricky period seems to occur in July (mid-winter in Australia), when periods of little wind combine with low insolation and high demand for heating, a situation which is called dunkelflaute.  Even though this is a problem only 1% of the time, it would be unacceptable to close down the grid.
4. The solution, until we get better methods of long-term storage, is gas.  Currently, natural gas, but plausibly, in future, synthetic natural gas via the Sabatier process, produced using surplus green electricity.  
5. Alternatively, concentrated solar power (CSP) may do the trick.  Vast Solar, an Australian company, is busy constructing a CSP plant at Port Augusta in South Australia (on the edge of the desert, with lots of sunshine and heat --- CSP doesn't just use light, as solar panels do, it also uses infra-red, otherwise known as heat.)  CSP provides much more storage than batteries (1 hours compared with 4), so is much cheaper for long duration storage.  (Now called Vast Energy, the 30 MW CSP plant is yet to be started, with start-up now planned for Q2/2025.  However, they will now be co-producing green methanol at the plant as well)

Wind power for sea transport

From CleanTechnica

If fossil energy stakeholders plan to enjoy that “high-carbon lifestyle” much longer, they better act fast. Among the latest developments in global economic decarbonization is the Seawing, a new retrofit for cargo vessels that applies centuries-old sailing ship technology to harvest wind power from the open ocean, aimed at cutting emissions by 20%.

The global shipping industry used to operate on a zero-emission basis until the 19th century, when steam-driven propulsion replaced wind power. The steam era didn’t last long. Marine fuel oil came into the picture in the 1930s and nudged steam almost completely aside by the end of the 20th century.

As described by Maritime Insight, marine fuel oil refers to crude oils with a density at 15ºC higher than 900 kg/m3, fuel oils with a density at 15ºC higher than 900 kg/ m3 (or a kinematic viscosity at 50oC higher than 180 mm2/s), or bitumen, tar, and their emulsions.

If that sounds nasty, it is. The maritime industry share of global carbon emissions currently stands at about 3%, and a winning strategy for decarbonization has yet to emerge. Last February, the American Chemistry Society’s C&EN publication recapped the state of affairs:

“Large multinational organizations aim to cut emissions from shipping by 50% in the coming years, but the path to decarbonizing maritime transport is unclear. Experts are evaluating various methods to clean up ship emissions and are considering alternative fuels, including liquefied natural gas, hydrogen, ammonia, and methanol. All have pros and cons in terms of emissions, safety, feasibility, and cost.”

Apparently, part of the answer has been staring everyone in the face this whole time. A number of startups have been pitching various kinds of sails to capture wind power for cargo ships in recent years, and one of them is Airseas, a French startup under the Airbus umbrella.

The Seawing first came across the CleanTechnica radar in 2018, when Airaseas introduced its signature parafoil sail. Parafoils are canopy-type sails that operate without the need for a fixed mast. Instead, they can be flown at a high distance above the ship, like a kite, to capture winds that are stronger and steadier.

The Seawing is designed to reach a height of 200 meters for an average cut of 20% in fuel and carbon emissions. The practical range goes down to a respectable floor of 10% savings, on up to an impressive ceiling of 40%.

That’s not quite as simple as it sounds. The Seawing is designed to fly in a figure-eight pattern that harvests 10 times the available wind power. Engineers at Airseas applied their aerospace know-how to design a fully automatic flight system for the sail.

In December of 2021, Airseas announced that it applied its new Seawing sail to a Ro-Ro (roll on, roll off) ship for wheeled cargo, commissioned by Airbus. The retrofit took just two days. Airseas also provided the Seawing wind power retrofit for two Capesize bulk cargo ships under the leading shipper K Line (Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha, Ltd.).

Last summer, K Line also added wind power to three of its smaller “post-Panamax” bulk cargo ships, but that was just the tip of the news iceberg. K Line also inked a deal with Airseas to merge its high-tech “Kawasaki Integrated Maritime Solutions” shipboard systems with the Seawing control system. The aim is to harvest the most wind power possible for different types of ships and different shipping routes.

“K LINE and AIRSEAS have signed a technology development agreement for the effective utilization of the traction power from the “Seawing” based on renewable energy,” K Line explained in a press release.

Apparently, this is all just for starters. Airseas and the EU have co-funded a new project called Seawing4Blue, aimed at scaling up the use of wind power as a significant, near-term pathway for maritime decarbonization.

If all goes according to plan, the Seawing4Blue project will have a serial version of the Seawing in production by 2024, towards a goal of 1,000 Seawings in operation by 2030.

“The serial product, developed within SEAWING4BLUE, will be an integrated system composed of a 1000 square meters kite wing controlled by a pod, a deck structure including a 36 meters high mast to deploy the wing and a storage tank, and software technologies to control the flight automatically (digital twin technology) and to help the crew in routing the ship (ecorouting software),” Airseas explains.

The shipping industry is also experimenting with other wind power technologies, including hard sails adopted from racing yachts and column-type energy harvesters that leverage the Magnus effect.

None of these are complete solutions, but Airseas makes the case that wind power can help accelerate decarbonization in the critical near-term period, before the end of the decade.

All else being equal, wind power could also continue to help cut fuel costs for the shipping industry under a low-carbon scenario in future years.

Yara, for example, is among the leading stakeholders scouting green ammonia as an alternative to heavy oil, leveraging the growth of the green hydrogen industry.

Electrofuels provide another newly available alternative. Shipping giant Maersk has teamed with BMW, American Airlines, and other stakeholders to push the envelope in the efuels area.

Battery-electric ships and solar power are also in the mix.

Of course, one sure way to cut emissions in the overseas shipping industry is to stop ferrying so much stuff around the world.

That’s going to take some doing, considering the complex tangle of global supply chains.

Still, signs of an onshoring movement have been growing. The US solar industry, for example, is finally beginning to re-grow its domestic footprint after a 40-year hiatus.

Another emerging factor is new recycling technology that could help provide manufacturers with decentralized, distributed sources of raw material for various goods.

If consumers would start buying less stuff, that might also help.

 

Schemes to recycle plastic flop

Shell "cleaner energy''
How we laughed.

 From Reuters

Some of the world’s biggest multinationals are hailing so-called advanced recycling as the solution to a waste crisis that has lawmakers looking to crack down on plastics use.

The impetus is coming from two sets of players: big oil and chemical companies that make the petrochemicals used to manufacture plastic, and global consumer brands that use huge amounts of the material in packaging. These giants are striking deals with startups that claim they can transform this garbage into fuel or resin to make new plastic.

But some recent efforts in this “high-tech” recycling boom have already fizzled.

At least four high-profile projects have been dropped or indefinitely delayed over the last two years because they weren’t commercially viable, Reuters has learned. Here are the details.

❎ Dow Inc, one of the world’s biggest plastics makers, backed a program that in 2018 began taking plastic waste from residents in Boise, Idaho and trucking it more than 300 miles (483 kilometers) across the state line to Salt Lake City, Utah. There it was to be converted into diesel fuel by Renewlogy, an advanced recycling startup.

Renewlogy touted its technology as capable of handling all types of plastic waste, including takeout containers and cling wrap, things many traditional recyclers won’t touch. But Renewlogy was unable to handle plastic “films,” used to make food packaging and grocery bags, and eventually left the program, the City of Boise told Reuters.

Renewlogy said it left the program because plastic waste being sent from Boise was too contaminated to recycle.

❎ In March 2019, Enerkem, a Montreal-based advanced recycler, announced that Anglo-Dutch oil giant Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSa.L) had joined a consortium of equity partners in a waste-to-chemicals recycling project to be based in Rotterdam, which they claimed was the first of its kind in Europe.

Enerkem says its technology uses extreme heat to turn plastic and other common household garbage into “bio-methanol,” a fuel for use in the chemical industry and transportation sector. The Rotterdam project was supposed to convert waste from the equivalent of more than 700,000 homes, Enerkem said in a March 2019 press release.

Two sources directly involved with the project told Reuters it was cancelled late last year due to uncertainty about the plant’s ability to secure a reliable waste supply and to turn a profit.'

❎ Unilever Plc in 2017 announced it was creating a pilot plant using a “radical recycling process” that turns hard-to-recycle plastic sachets into new packaging. Sachets are used to dispense a vast array of products, including fast-food ketchup, shampoo and toothpaste.

The global consumer products giant told Reuters that its CreaSolv process uses chemicals to dissolve plastic waste into a liquid, drains off the impurities, dries it and extrudes it into clean plastic that can then be turned into new products.

Unilever (ULVR.L) said in its announcement that it would share this technology with its competitors so that recycling plants could be built around the world.

Unilever, which makes Dove soap and Hellmann’s mayonnaise, said publicly it began operating a pilot plant in Indonesia in 2018. But within a year it was clear the technology was not commercially viable, and plans to build a full-scale operation were dropped, two people involved in the program told Reuters.

Although the sachets could be recycled in small amounts, the people said, it was too expensive to collect, sort and clean enough of these packets to scale up the project without incurring large losses.

In an emailed response to Reuters’ questions, Unilever said the project had faced “some disruption due to Covid-19” but that the pilot plant was still operating. It declined to say at what capacity.

“We’re actively working with others to determine ways to scale this technology,” a company spokesperson said.

On May 6, Reuters called the factory complex where Unilever’s plant was situated in Sidoarjo, East Java, Indonesia. A front desk operator at the complex said no one had visited Unilever’s recycling facility in at least six months.

Unilever did not respond to questions about this claim.

Consumer goods companies like Unilever use billions of single-serve sachets to sell laundry detergent, instant coffee and other basics, mostly in poor countries. These packets are nearly impossible to recycle, and have become a major source of pollution in places like Africa and Southeast Asia.

“At best, the sachets end up in landfill. At worst, they end up as litter in the streets, the waterways and the oceans,” Unilever said in its 2017 CreaSolv announcement.

❎ Agilyx, an advanced recycling firm backed by Virgin Group and its billionaire founder Richard Branson, in 2018 announced a deal to convert plastic waste to jet fuel for Delta Air Lines Inc. (DAL.N)

Press releases issued by the companies at the time outlined the plan: By 2020, a new plant near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania would supply up to 2,500 barrels a day of “synthetic crude oil” derived from plastics to a nearby refinery owned by Delta.

“This project marks the first truly commercial-scale facility that will advance the new plastics economy," Agilyx’s CEO at the time, Joe Vaillancourt, said in the release. Branson tweeted on Nov. 25, 2018: “This is a major step forward in the search for a cost effective low carbon aviation fuel.”

Construction on the facility never started.

Current Agilyx CEO Tim Stedman told Reuters in March the project was delayed due to negotiations over contracts and finances and “was eventually killed by COVID,” referring to the pandemic that spread around the world in early 2020. In a June email to Reuters, he described the project as “on hold” and said “we remain optimistic” about its prospects.