Industry news
Things I noticed and thought were interesting
Week ending 8th November 2020
1, Zero carbon ammonia. Natural gas is largely methane, a molecule containing carbon and hydrogen atoms. Monolith Materials said it will built a full scale zero-carbon ammonia factory at its existing plant in Nebraska. It has a proprietary technology for splitting gas into its constituent elements. Hydrogen is generated, while carbon black, a very useful form of almost pure carbon, is the other output. Hydrogen will then be turned into ammonia through the conventional Haber Bosch process, which can be powered using renewable electricity. Ammonia is the key ingredient of fertilisers and responsible for about 1% of world emissions. The output of almost 200,000 tonnes of carbon black a year will probably go into tyre manufacture, which is the most important use of this raw material. But tyres only use about 10 million tonnes a year, so the Monolith Materials technology will probably not be used worldwide. Nevertheless this is a potentially important route for decarbonising some portion of the fertiliser industry. (Thanks to Brian Tyler).
2, More green ammonia. Iberdrola committed to a partnership with supplier Fertiberia that will see the creation of 800 MW of electrolysers for the complete switch of Spanish fertiliser supply to green hydrogen by 2027 using solar electricity. The companies said that they will spend €1.8bn on the fertiliser plants, which will take Spain to 20% of its 2030 electrolyser target. (This new plan hugely extends earlier announcements for a pilot plant at Puertollano). In another sign of growing enthusiasm for a switch to green hydrogen for making ammonia, the South Australian government subsidised some of the infrastructure for 75 MW electrolyser project that will produce ammonia to be exported by sea. Until the Spanish plants are completed, this will be the largest source of green ammonia in the world.
3, Hydrogen barges. An inland barge in the Netherlands is being converted to use a hydrogen fuel cell for propulsion. (Another plan to move Heineken beer around the country on zero-emission barges has been previously covered in the newsletter). The new venture sees a 110m carrier converted to use two 40 ft shipping containers to store compressed hydrogen. The vessel, to be adapted next year, will also have a large capacity battery. The developers acknowledged that hydrogen will be more expensive than diesel but, perhaps optimistically, said that the difference have ‘inconsequential’ impact on the price of the goods that are transported. In an important sign of the maturing of the hydrogen economy, the Netherlands government also publicly advocated the setting up of the world’s first hydrogen bourse, although only by 2026. A fully functioning market for hydrogen would be an important step in the full integration of the gas into the energy economy.
4, Ground source heat pumps (‘geothermal’). Along with California, Boston is one of the places in the US most committed to reducing the use of natural gas for building heating. New construction projects cannot connect to the gas grid. But the local utility comments that the consequent rise in electricity demand in dense urban areas will be difficult to accommodate. ‘The struggle we have is, we don't know where we're going to put the infrastructure. We're having a hard enough time building a substation today’, said a senior executive of Eversource Energy. This may be a problem in many dense urban areas trying to switch away from gas boilers to home heat pumps. The utility says it will explore the use of hydrogen in its gas network and will also look at the providing district heating and cooling using near-surface ground source heat pumps (a technology confusingly sometimes called ‘geothermal’). While these heat pumps would still use electricity, the amount would be much less than the air source equivalents at individual buildings. The advantages for the utility would also include the ability to use its rights to dig up streets and maintain a network of pipes, a task analogous to its current activities. Of course this is only copying what happens already in many Nordic towns and cities. (Thanks to Thad Curtz)
5, Combustion of iron for heating. Very finely ground metals will easily combust, producing large volumes of heat. The product will be a metallic oxide, which can then be converted back to the pure metal using renewable electricity, creating a zero carbon loop. For some industrial processes that need very high temperatures, it is possible that burning iron or aluminium may be a potential low carbon alternative to natural gas or coal. A brewery in the Netherlands installed a trial iron powder combustion unit made by a student group at the University of Eindhoven. This is a world first. Commentators quickly questioned whether the round trip efficiency of this process - roughly 40% - would be any better than using hydrogen for heat. But I think it is too early to dismiss metal combustion. It could be cheap, safe, easy to store and may operate cost-effectively at a smaller scale. (Thanks to Jeremy Hinton, Thad Curtz).
6, Solar refrigerators. A Brazilian company has developed a solar fridge for off-grid uses, such as vaccine storage, in countries with poor grid connections. It claims an electrical efficiency four times better than conventional products. As with other solar devices, the 100 litre fridge is now sold on 24 month financing, usually to small entrepreneurs. Connected to the internet, it stops working if payments are missed. The fridge can keep its contents cold for 36 hours without sun using the attached battery. The Kenyan business selling it has now provided over $400m of financing for off-grid solar products.
7, Support services for fossil fuels. It’s not just investors. Professional service firms are also breaking away from fossil fuels. One of the world’s leading engineering firms, Black and Veatch, promised it would take on no new coal-fired power station assignments and would refuse any consulting projects to extend the life of existing coal plants.
8, Bioenergy and CCS (‘BECCS’). Chiyoda, a Japanese company with one of the strongest portfolio of technologies for carbon capture from industrial plants, said that it had completed work on a small biomass power station in Japan that burns palm kernel shells. Its process will capture more than 50% of the emissions from the plant. This is the world’s first BECCS power station working at a significant scale.
9, Iberdrola ambitions. The Spanish utility produced an extremely useful summary of a global future dominated by renewable energy. It upped its own expansion ambitions to around 5GW a year over the next few years, roughly the same as BP, which has annual revenues of seven times as much. But the scale of the global challenge was made clear in one set of numbers: Iberdrola sees the world needing investments of around $2.7trn a year in the electricity system by 2030, three times the current amount and well over 2% of global GDP. Iberdrola is perhaps the world leader in renewables and is responsible for about 1% of global electricity production. But even its enhanced investment ambitions (€15bn a year) are only equivalent to two thirds of one percent of the world’s requirements of $2.7trn.
10, Hydrogen for steel-making. The manufacture of steel is responsible for 7-9% of global CO2 emissions. The route to decarbonisation is almost certainly 100% replacement of coal by hydrogen using what is known as the ‘direct reduction’ process. I wrote a blog post that looked at the scale of the challenge. The key numbers are striking. Replacing today’s volumes of blast furnace steel will require about 120m tonnes of hydrogen, more than doubling today’s global volumes. The energy needed to make green hydrogen will require more than a quarter of today’s global electricity production and about 650 GW of electrolysers. (Compare this to the Spanish target of 4GW by 2030 mentioned in note 2). If the electricity came entirely from wind, the new turbines required would almost triple today’s wind power.
I apologise for falling behind in my responses to correspondence and for missing last week’s newsletter.
|
|
