Paul Martin’s Post

Yes, this is the point people seem to miss. Green iron is considerably more expensive than black dirty emissive iron. Durable policy measures will be needed to push black iron out of the market, and then iron reduction will need to be done where green hydrogen can be made most cheaply - not next door to existing European steel mills

I was asked a good question today: how is it consistent that I advocate the use of biomass to make liquid fuels for those few, narrow application cases that actually need liquid fuels (transoceanic shipping and aircraft, and remote/rural transport), and don't advocate using biomass to make materials and chemicals? Here's my reasoning, and it's dead simple: fuels are burned, chemicals and materials don't need to be. So you can afford to burn oxygens off the source biomass to make a fuel, because that gives you the HUGE benefit of being able to emit the resulting biogenic CO2 back to the atmosphere without cost or environmental impact. Biomass is C6 H10 O5, and all those oxygens must come off as H2O or CO2, both of which represent a waste of energy and a yield loss. For chemicals and materials, we won't be burning those, so the option to use fossil carbon as the feedstock remains. And nature, over millions of years, has already done the deoxygenation for us. If you want hydrocarbons, starting WITH hydrocarbons is cheaper. Not just a little cheaper- vastly cheaper. There are a few options for materials uses that can be made readily from biomass and I encourage those too. But a wholesale shift away from petroleum to biomass, is unnecessary, uneconomic, and won't happen. If we're stupid enough to not realize that you can bury polyethylene, for instance, after it has been maximally mechanically recycled, with no meaningful environmental consequences, and think that we need to burn it instead, then we would have no choice but to use the ethanol to ethylene route to make it from biomass. But if we are smart, we can crack petroleum naphtha or ethane like we do now. My article about this in the comments- I'll add this clarification when I get a chance.

And now, for something completely different. I had precious few non-technical electives in engineering school. Like most students, my time was stuffed with vain attempts to get us up to the state of the art of mathematics circa 1720 or so, plus the usual engineering and science courses. But I had four precious electives: psychology, technical writing, an ethics and law course, and a course about the interrelations amongst society, technology and human values. To me, every one of those courses was a breath of fresh air- anything but a chore. My friend Stephanie Halldorson, PhD has spent years helping engineers to be better communicators. This article provides an interesting insight into why engineering students find "soft skills" training burdensome and irrelevant, despite the fact that clear communication is highly valued by engineering employers. Well worth the read- I get the sense that this is the 1st in a very interesting series of articles.

Our latest- the refinery of the future. Will we be wise enough to do this?

Will we still have chemicals and materials made from petroleum in a decarbonized future? Yes, without question. All we need to do, is stop the burning. The petroleum refinery of the decarbonized future is entirely within our technological reach. The only question is this: are we smart enough to reach for it? There's no technological barrier in the way- but it won't happen unless we choose it, and put the policy measures in place to make it happen.

Spring has sprung and I'm behind, again. Work is getting in the way of fun! After ten years, it was time to retire the remainder of the original 2014 cells in the front pack of the ER-6. All but three cells are replacement "new old stock" batteries of the same dimensions that I got from China on AliBaba at a heavy discount. You can now buy LFP cells which are smaller and lighter than these, with a capacity of 280 rather than 180 Ah, and which have more robust and safer packaging, but the high C rate versions that I'd need are still too expensive for me to consider for a hobby project. Who knows, maybe Spitfire Research will spring for a new pack next year! The old cells still have more than adequate capacity, but their internal resistance has increased to the point that they give a low voltage alarm every time I step on the accelerator to deliver the full 3.3C pulse to my inverter (600A is a lot of current!). That's one downside of smaller packs. Larger packs can deliver- and accept- high power at a lower C rate and hence less heat and stress to the cells. But those old cells are MORE than up to the challenge of storing solar power up at the farm, so that's how they'll live out their retirement. That application is such a low C rate that these batteries simply won't break a sweat. In fact, if we play our cards right, we may even be able to use the new pack to do a partial recharge of our Model Y overnight when we visit. Though the ultralow overnight kWh we use at home are only 4.7 cents each, any we collect up at the farm would be "free", which is even better! Lots of BMS spaghetti to reconnect, then the slow and laborious process of fully charging the cells in groups to top balance the pack. But maybe we'll have the ER6 back on the road in a week or so. Just in time for the April "liquid sunshine" to change into top-down driving weather!

EDITED- correcting a pre-morning coffee mistake! Replacing the ~90 million tonnes of green hydrogen production from Fossil, for uses durable post decarbonization, would take 513 GW of electrolyzers if they all operated at 100% capacity factor, ie impossible without hydropower or grid backup, ie not fully clean. 1900 GW of nebulous projects have been announced. we all know that most of these will never go on to FID 1.9 GW of electrolyzers are apparently deliberately making hydrogen from water, worldwide. 1.9/513 is ~0.4% The notion that we'll have ANY excess green hydrogen to waste as a fuel is therefore decades premature.

Did I say "I told you so" often enough? Even $3/kg green hydrogen is @#$) expensive when you burn it as a fuel! And $3/kg is an aspirational goal for a production cost a long, long time in the future. It doesn't include transport or storage, for sure. The puzzling bit here is that US EPA hasn't just concluded that hydrogen co-firing isn't likely to be an affordable option to keep gas turbine (and, shockingly, coal) power plants operating post 2030- but that they've decided that CCS IS that option. I'm unaware of a single gas turbine power plant, either open or closed cycle, doing real CCS, i.e. with the product CO2 not being used for enhanced oil recovery or some other wanking exercise that doesn't actually permanently sequester the resulting CO2. I'm sure somebody will point me to some pilot scale unit I've failed to notice somewhere. But given that removing 78% of the CO2 from a 3.8 bar CO2 partial pressure process syngas stream at Shell Quest, plus burying it nearby under absolutely ideal geological conditions, is costing $145/tonne CO2 already, it's no surprise to me that going after a 0.04 bar partial pressure CO2 flue gas stream from a gas turbine and attempting to get 90% capture, isn't economically appealing. I'm guessing that EPA is just reaching around for magical solutions to keep burning fossils for longer without feeling guilty about it. Hydrogen was losing its ability to be a sufficiently powerful greenwashing tool for that purpose. EDIT: no, the EPA was smarter than me here! According to a comment below: "...these requirements for gas plants don't go into effect until 2032 and then only apply to natural gas plants that operate more than 40% of the time. The effective result if this is that almost all coal will retire by 2039 and we won't see any new natural gas baseload capacity after 2032. We may see a sprint of new NGCC plants built before 2032 however. Ultimately most of the role for NG long term is as backup and peaker usage and this rule doesn't actually apply to that in a significant way beyond requirements on efficiency that can be met with existing tech. " So really, the EPA is calling the fossil industry's bluff on CCS. Very clever!

Part one of a 2 part interview with Below the Surface.

David Cebon knows what he's talking about when it comes to vehicles and their decarbonization.