Sweden is actually the first country to build such an plant. Att the moment it is mostly testing plants but the real ones will be built soon. https://www.hybritdevelopment.com/
In the 1950's Norway had a pilot plant that made iron by electrowinning sulfide iron ore. Which was a waste product from copper mining. Used a low temperature wet cell. And the steel industry was perfectly happy to take their small production runs.
From memory efficiency was 4.5kwh/kg. At 12 cents/kwh that's $0.50/kg.
Seems like a better idea to do that than to pretend hydrogen is 'green'.
You need about 54kg of hydrogen per ton of iron. Assuming it takes 50 kWh of energy to make 1 kg of hydrogen, you get something like 2.7 kWh per kg of iron. This is significantly more energy efficient than the idea you're proposing.
As someone who grew up in Ostrava, a city then full of heavy industry (nowadays it is rust belt): pollution in the form of flying ash and solid particles is absolutely horrible for your health. It can be seen in autopsies, where lungs of non-smokers resemble those of smokers.
As kids, we were sick with all kinds of respiratory disease all the time and the air stank like burnt tires.
I agree with that, however I would say that runaway climate effect and its impacts on the planet outweight (in importance/severity) the issue of decreased life expectancy of beings living in cities/near factories.
Therefore I don't think its misguided to "see the carbon as the enemy".
By the way I live in Slovakia and I was baffled by our previous government stubbornly keeping the dirty hornonitrianske coal mines open through public funding. Even though they are loosing money and it would be cheaper (and much much cleaner) to just pay the miners to do nothing.
Because carbon is a byproduct of our lifestyle. Tomorrow we will replace it with something else. Fighting carbon is a feel good intiative. Where as thousand of other pollutants are being released everyday, example microplastics. Fighting carbon could be as simple as wearing sweaters at home instead of heating it.
Sounds very dramatic ... so let's just assume your actions reflect your words.
Anyway, I don't think the martial wording is appropriate in most cases. For example I don't want to fight carbon dioxide.
I rather want our technology to not disturb the global biological/chemical balance much more. So I support better adopted technology.
And fighting pollution, well, I actually have to restrain myself not to physically attack people who I witness dropping plastic garbage into nature.
But the pollution which is already there, I can only clean up.
So fighting polluters, yes. But fighting pollution sounds like a oxymoron to me, because fighting in itself is mostly dirty and damaging by its definition. War just leaves a mess. So I don't think the martial language really helps the cause.
Sorry if my words ruffled you. I was aiming for being a bit funny while pointing that there is no need of false dichotomies here, because hydrogen would solve both pollution and carbon footprint.
Carbon dioxide in excess is a pollutant. Carbon dioxide can of itself reduce human cognitive capability as well as causing surface heating, which is why it should be kept to roughly the pre-industrial atmospheric homeostatic level in the atmosphere.
Someone will probably mention plants. It's required for plants, yes, but we're not plants.
> Carbon dioxide can of itself reduce human cognitive capability
That seems to be only when the CO2 concentration is raised abruptly. After that the body compensates. For example, submarine crews operate perfectly fine in an atmosphere of 2 to 5% CO2 (roughly 100x what is normal), for weeks on end.
Bill Gates said somewhere that steel and cement production are the key factors for stopping climate change. That's why he invested in a startup for steel production with focusing mirrors.
You need carbon to reduce the iron ore to iron. Coal to heat and melt the iron. And carbon to harden the iron to steel. If I understand it correctly the innovation here is that step 1 is done using hydrogen, presumably the heating is done with (green) electricity, and the last step does not bind the carbon to oxygen, so they are carbon emissions free, not carbon free.
This story is not about carbon-free steel but the production of steel without releasing carbon in the atmosphere.
The most carbon dioxide intensive step of steel production is in the production of iron sponge, from which both steel and wrought iron is produced.
It is where the blast furnace is involved. But hydrogen can be used instead. It is a lot more complicated than one would think because not only is carbon very efficient at picking up oxygen, it is also an exothermic process which makes it very practical. This energy have to be added some other way when using direct reduction.
I know that the story is not actually about zero-carbon steel. I was replying to the commenter I replied to, who had clearly misunderstood the commenter that they were in turn replying to.
Nonsense. Our only hard limits are the laws of physics. Even with our rudimentary understanding of the universe our only practical limitation is usable energy production, and progress is rapid on that front.
We are already experiencing negative effects of climate change. Can we reverse them? If not, we're beyond the point of no return. That's just terminology. It's vague because what our goals are as regards climate change is undefined.
Point of no return suggests some meaningful barrier was crossed. It’s true we are further than after the first person used coal to start a fire, but today is just another step on a process that’s thousands of years old.
Various economic models of the impact of climate change suggest for northern countries we only recently left the realm of net benefit. It’s going to keep getting worse, but it’s hardly a major disaster right now. Limiting future climate change is important, going back to some arbitrary point in the past isn’t a clear net benefit.
Hell, in 10,000 years humanity might be using massive amounts of orbital infrastructure to directly control the weather and actually prefer more atmospheric CO2. Or they might want to lower CO2 below preindustrial levels, we just don’t know.
I find this view to be somewhat whitewashed, at best.
There are multiple obvious, and meaningful, barriers. The effects of carbon dioxide production are not simply a collection of linear relationships. One tonne of CO2 today doesn't have just as much impact as one tonne of CO2 last year.
There are points at which ocean acidity levels become incompatible with certain forms of life. There are limits to carbon sinks. There are points at which positive feedback loops become active.
All of these things - and more - mean that there are very marked differences in the impact of the first coal fire and a steel plant (for a topical example) even after you normalize for the amount of carbon dioxide produced.
Presenting current and modern carbon dioxide production as simply a continuation of the first coal fire is at a minimum ridiculous.
1 ton of atmospheric CO2 released in 2020 is exactly the same as 1 ton of atmospheric CO2 left over from coal fires in 1020. There is vastly more CO2 from fossil fuel entering the atmosphere today, but it’s only a difference in quantity.
Which is the issue, CO2 produced today will generally still be around in another 1,000 years. Across geologic timescales it’s going to be sequestered, but on human timescales it’s basically permanent. There isn’t a clear transition point where suddenly this ton of CO2 kills of the Great Barrier Reef, it’s a very gradual transition that means coral has a very slightly harder time growing today than it did yesterday.
Not burning a ton of coal in yesterday would have been as useful as not burning a ton of coal tomorrow, the only difference is we can’t go back to yesterday.
The difference is that, barring time travel, there is nothing we can do to prevent the emission of a ton of CO2 that was emitted in 1020 (and even with time travel there is little contemporaneous technology we could replace it with.) But there is potentially a lot we can do (at various levels of cost) to prevent the emission of one ton of CO2 in any future year and the consequences of that additional emission may be disproportionately worse. Your own post acknowledges this, and it’s very much the point of the GP poster.
The problem is there are clear tipping points - where one extra ton could trigger outsized negative outcomes. And worse, one tipping point could trigger many others. Scientists just don't know when they will trigger.
For example, the loss of sheet ice. And bleaching events themselves in the reefs too I suspect would fall in this category.
The problem is there are clear tipping points - where one extra ton could trigger outsized negative outcomes. And worse, one tipping point could trigger many others. Scientists just don't know when they will trigger, but with every increase in temperature the greater the risk.
For example, the loss of sheet ice. And bleaching events themselves in the reefs too I suspect would fall in this category.
We have already reached many tipping points, and in the future we will eventually reach many more. However, that is simply another way that the effects of CO2 is non linear even though the quantity of CO2 is linear.
It's absolutely monstrous to think in terms of what's ok just for the global north, here. We've done the vast majority of this polluting, and the global south is, in fact, currently, undergoing catastrophic change because of it.
That’s a fair point, however climate change has a much larger impact on temperatures at the poles than the equator. You still get rising sea levels and a PH change in the ocean, but the impacts aren’t evenly distributed. https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/warmingpoles.html
Another example is tropical diseases can move to colder areas as their carriers migrate north/south. However, there isn’t a hotter place to for insects to migrate to the equator from.
The north is where the majority of the food is grown and people live. At higher latitudes is also where the majority of change will be felt. Not to discount the affects in the south, but they are very likely less impactful.
Most people live there, and most food for those people is grown there. These are people, who are not responsible for the catastrophes destroying their ability to live.
Actually, Europe isn't the low hanging fruit you are looking for. It is the US and China. The current output is much more than the history "head start" of Europe.
For the normal workers in European countries (who might be actually living on a tight budget too), the reality is, they cannot do much about any of this without taking considerable personal toll (so real and fast change mostly doesn't fly politically). They can in certain circumstances e.g. eliminate inefficient heating with coal or oil or maybe drive with a more efficient and less polluting car, which improves air quality in their areas and thus health. This is achievable currently with small incentives and we can also observe most of it happening in richer areas, where there is spare capital in families to invest in such things. All of this has its cost first and the benefit can be felt quite a bit later if at all.
Btw. it will change exactly nothing painting this as a conflict of the global wealthy north against the global poor south (implied). It is not very constructive and quite naive. Don't get me wrong, I am all for healthy environment for everybody as can be seen in my comments elsewhere.
GDP and GDP growth are the universal metrics by which every major international organization judges and ranks economies. IMF voting is literally determined by your GDP.
There are no other metrics that are remotely commonly used to determine real international policies. Every nation on earth is in explicit competition with every other to grow faster because of this. These policies are prescriptions by capitalist countries that weren't like this before and likely wouldn't be after.
It's beyond silly to claim that capitalism doesn't require endless growth.
GDP doesn’t mean growth. A country going through an economic contraction still has a massive GDP. There are no IMF policies that favor growth rates, just the raw GDP.
> It's beyond silly to claim that capitalism doesn't require endless growth.
Capitalism requires no such thing. It’s human reproduction and striving for better conditions that requires economic expansion. That doesn’t change under socialism/communism/whatever.
Finally, GDP growth does not imply anything about carbon production. Some of the biggest growth sectors going forward are entirely about clean energy.
I said GDP and GDP growth, and if two countries are competing on GDP, the mechanism by which they compete is growth.
I know you've seen my book recommendation in the thread here; it's about the incentives behind growth, and how de-growth can work and still encourage human flourishing. Rather than just reacting negatively, why not look it up?
tl,dr; You may have a really good idea, but your presentation is distracting people from the idea.
I think you are incorrectly characterizing capitalism, and people are off-put by the inaccuracy and it's implication that property must be taken from people. Capitalism is simple: it is an economic system where the means of production are owned and controlled by private citizens and operated for profit (the definition of profit is not always making lots of money). Nothing more, nothing less. A lot of the startup and tech economy is based squarely on private ownership of the means of production (i.e. companies). GDP and the focus on GDP growth is somewhat exclusive of whatever ism your country's economy is based on.
It doesn't drive for endless growth. It drives for endless improvements in efficiency, which are theoretically finite, but practically infinite.
A good example of this is agriculture. We have less of that precious Iowan topsoil than we did 100 years ago, but crop yields are higher than ever. That's what capitalism is.
Capitalism isn't about endless growth, it's about growing as quickly as possible. The dark ages have their name for a reason. We simply did not have a societal model that rewarded improving ourselves. We were simply stuck in the status quo. The Renaissance was purely about changing this mode of thinking on a societal level and capitalism is the most effective way of rewarding growth. Communism tends to fall behind because the system is built around people willing to accept their current life as is. If we for some reason end up in a situation where we have done everything that is possible capitalism will cease to provide growth beyond inflation.
Capitalism rewards efficiency with market share. During contraction of an industry, efficient producers should be scaling down slowly while others collapse. We may think it depends on growth, but that’s because we put it to work sustaining an exploding population for several generations.
I’m counting on capitalism. We have already seen renewables become more affordable than coal and nuclear. Now it’s just a matter of handling base loads and we have no shortage of ideas there. Excess energy can be dumped in to carbon sequestration. Market forces have and will drive all of this.
hear hear. capitalism already works in solar’s favour and the moment solar+storage become cheaper than coal the energy sector will switch almost instantly.
with other sectors we need governments still to make the transition
We also need to make sure that the government does not prevent the transition to solar. This is a huge problem, with large moneyed interests sponsoring state legislation to prevent deployment of renewables.
State legislators have been arrested in Ohio for taking bribes to pass anti-renewable legislation, but despite their arrest, the legislation they enacted is still on the books. The companies got what they wanted, the government still is suppressing solar in Ohio, despite the legal system putting corrupt politicians in jail.
What market force do you see driving the use of excess energy to sequester carbon? What force is going to ensure enough carbon is sequestered?
Climate change is a kind of prototypical example of a tragedy of the commons. Capitalism has not been particularly noteworthy for solving these sorts of problems. I can certainly see it helping to make renewables more affordable, but that's simply not enough at this point.
Quick quack suggests CO2 can be converted to carbon fiber. Also looks promising as a feed stock in the chemical and plastics industries. We figured out a use for gasoline, I’m sure we will think of something. Doesn’t hurt for the government to put a thumb on the scale either.
Well we could bury it. Is that so different from taking it out of the air and putting it directly in an old oil well?
Not sure what the recycling story is with carbon fiber. I suppose we could make extremely durable goods but that may not be desirable until we pull enough carbon out of the air.
These were just quick examples though. There’s bound to be a lot of uses for carbon, it’s abundant for a reason.
The point is we can leverage our consumer nature to incentivize markets that help solve climate change. We can literally consume our way out of this mess.
What do you think a just transition will look like? One person's "consumption" and growth is another's "I finally have electricity in my village, powered by solar and batteries," or "EV purchasing grew so much that the oil refinery a mile away shut down and my family no longer gets sick like they used to." What exactly does a Green New Deal look like? Massive consumption is a huge component of it.
And this is why white environmentalists are not trusted by the environmental justice community. Too much vague moralizing, not enough understanding of the plight of people who are being oppressed by the current system, or even what the current system actually is.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that I'm vaguely moralizing -- elsewhere in this thread I recommend a 2020 book called Less is More (https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more) that contains analysis of these problems and very specific strategies for addressing them.
It's well understood that wealthy countries, and especially the US, generate far more junk than poorer ones. We don't need to, and there's a big difference between sustainable strategies for getting people what they need and hoping (because, without planning, that's all we're doing) that capitalism will solve this problem through even greater amounts of consumption.
And while I agree with his numbered policy prescriptions (perhaps quibbling about a jobs guarantee versus universal income), the rhetoric and diction is so objectionable and wrong that it's like we are speaking different language. What he calls degrowth is actually massive growth and consumption in my view. Public services for all? FANTASTIC and exactly what we need. But that's not "degrowth," that's massive growth. Switch to renewables? That requires absolutely huge economic growth and change.
In practice, on the ground in communities using words like "degrowth" in their politics, degrowth is rich people continuing with what they have and nobody else getting access to it. "Degrowth" is the word and philosophy used to block projects that help working people because the wealthy are doing A-OK. The "degrowth" language allows the wealthy capitalists to hold onto everything, and will never enable the correction of wealth inequality and distribution problems of capitalism. I see it in my own small town, that is an outlier in the US. ~30% residents label themselves anti-capitalist, ~30% are working class non-landwoners without much political ideology except populism, ~30% are landlords trying to extract money. A significant chunk of the "anti-capitalist" segment are also landlords and influence the politics of the "degrowth" anti-capitalists to privilege the already privileged, this is really dangerous ways to think about things. The terrible language enables the reactionaries more than the revolutionaries. Make "capitalism" vague and unspecific enough to be a vague "bad" label, make "consumption" a vague and undefinable term, and it will be used by those in power as a tool to subvert any change.
For a school of thought that seems to abhor "contradictions," they seem to embrace them when it comes to using words.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts in this post and elsewhere in this thread, food for thought. You have introduced me to a new concept which in hindsight is obvious but I am embarrassed to admit I had not considered. I'll add resilience.org to my reading list, do you have a blog or other sources you suggest following on the topic of environmental justice?
The value derived from public goods is mostly not factored into GDP growth and (when executed well) serves people both more efficiently and more equitably than the purchases GDP does account for (obvious examples, public or publicly funded healthcare, parks, libraries). The degrowth argument is that overall this increase in efficiency would reduce production/consumption while improving lives, but it does also not ignore that particularly wasteful nations/lifestyles may need to live differently.
Hickel and others who write on degrowth are mostly very clear about these definitions (and Less is More is exceedingly thorough on the matter), but obviously you have to read past the surface level to pick up some of the detail. That's not meant as a dig at you or to imply that you're not willing to do more reading, just to clarify that because oftentimes these analyses are miles apart from typical US/western thinking, a lot of digging can be necessary.
As I noted above, Hickel applies a historical materialist analysis in a lot of his work, which can take some time getting used to (and, indeed, did for me).
> Capitalism is exceptionally good at solving problems when there is money to be made.
Well, unless the money is to be made by exacerbating the problem, but sure.
> Putting the right price on carbon will solve that.
State intervention to set prices to try to steer the market to make progress on social goals that it would not without State intervention is not capitalism.
Regulation is an important part of a capitalist system. “Setting the price” is something the market does. Regulation can influence that by manipulating incentives. That does not mean prices are set by the state.
> Regulation is an important part of a capitalist system.
If by “capitalist system” you mean “bourgeois socialist mixed economy that replaced capitalism throughout the developed West generally around the mid-20th Century through the efforts of a broad coalition of people fed up with the horrors of actual capitalism”, that's true.
But that system isn't actually capitalism, and the central role of government regulation aimed at channeling the effort of “private” industry by rearranging incentives to different places than they would be set by the free market is one of the central ways in which it differs from capitalism.
The only reason people pretend otherwise is to maintain the fiction that they are on the opposite side of the global capitalist/socialist struggle that predated general disillusionment with capitalism in the West, because even though actual ideology shifted, ideological tribal identity didn't.
>State intervention to set prices to try to steer the market to make progress on social goals that it would not without State intervention is not capitalism.
I don't understand this comment. Capitalism is about maximizing outcomes within the context of a system. It's not about the rules that govern the system itself. It doesn't actually matter what goal you are optimizing for. There is also no such thing as having no policies. Not having a policy is a policy in itself.
The producer of an externality is actively using the laws of physics to extract value from all other individuals. That's not capitalism either. It's just someone abusing their power. It's like using a gun to rob someone except the harm is spread over more people.
If nothing is done against the externality then the government is implicitly accepting the externality and is effectively subsidizing the producers of the externality.
Now that we have established that government policies can be compatible with capitalism lets talk about the most extreme capitalist policies possible. Well, a capitalist policy would be based around aligning profit incentives with policy goals. Basically what you want is that companies and people that do the right thing make a load of money and those who don't, make a loss.
So what is an extreme example of a non capitalist policy? Rent control. You've just destroyed the ability for "greedy" landlords to make money off of doing the right thing, namely providing housing. Another non capitalist policy? Prop 13. The policy encourages hoarding housing instead of rebuilding and providing more housing. It's even self reinforcing because it lures normal people in and turns them into hoarders. Again, it's because you have destroyed the ability for greedy people to do the right thing.
Now carbon taxes are the extreme opposite, they are so extremely capitalist that they should bring tears to your eyes. The greediest business owner is the one that produces the least CO2 (or any other externality). It's a system for doing the right thing. The only flaw is that carbon taxes have to be global but since they can be enforced through CO2 tariffs an easy fix is available. There are extreme domestic growth opportunities available in green technologies but without the right incentives nobody will do it. It's absurd that we even have to have this discussion. People are begging for profitable domestic investments because the central banks are flooding the markets. It's not like we end up sacrificing anything if we put underemployed people to work.
> Capitalism is about maximizing outcomes within the context of a system.
No, that's rationality (in the social science sense) not capitalism.
Capitalism is a specific politico-economic system that reached its peak of dominance of the developed world in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries that was named and first systematically described and critiqued by its 19th Century opponents.
(The two are connected in that there are popular arguments for the optimality of capitalism grounded in the assumption of rationality.)
But what if humanity only gets one chance? Is it still best to rely on the capitalist market? This market only reacts to regulation. It is not proactive. All stick, carrot don’t work no more.
Well the ussr had its chance and collapsed into oligarchy. But maybe the Chinese system of authoritarianism and reeducation camps for uighurs can still save us.
| renewables become more affordable than coal and nuclear
And yet emissions keep climbing, because capitalism requires growth and demands deregulation.
| Excess energy can be dumped in to carbon sequestration
There is literally no scalable strategy for this, and no serious combination of strategies. Really. Nobody who actually studies this (who's not also trying to profit) thinks there is. Do the math on the world economy continuing to double every <20 years. Or maybe check out the book I shared above, it's really very good.
Also, capitalism is just fine with a shrinking economy, there's depressions and recessions. What does this grand theory say about those?
Throwing around broad terms with shifting meanings, and then changing those meanings around to fit each set of facts about the world, is a crazy way to deal with the world.
> Do the math on the world economy continuing to double every <20 years.
Easy enough, what's the problem. What sort of resource constraint are you thinking we hit? What defines a "dollar" or "doubling"? Based on your descriptions, there's zero chance I will bother to read the book you recommend, because it sounds like it has negative information content.
I mean, come on, what sort of BS statement is "capitalism demands deregulation"?? Capitalism demands regulation through policing. What sort of possible definition of "deregulation" can you ever provide that fits both these situations? The best reflection on your source is that there is some sort of very technical definition where this statement makes sense. But repurposing common words to narrow meanings such that they become jargon, then attempting to use jargon without explaining that there's a difference with the commonly accepted meanings of those words is just a completely unproductive way to communicate to the world.
Emissions are not down -- they've just been exported. The analysis you're looking at is a common one, but it's a shell game. Plenty has been written on this topic and on actual, hard, ecological limits we face; the book I recommended above also covers this.
Capitalism is obviously not "fine" with recessions -- we dump enormous amounts of money into the economy when they occur in an attempt to stimulate it, and inequality tends to widen permanently in the absence of policies to counteract this.
I’m not so sure. The third sentence on that web site is untrue: “Capitalism demands perpetual expansion”. It does not. If the author is going to be so free with facts right from the beginning, why would I trust the rest of his work?
He's a marxist, so statements like that are grounded in a historical materialist analysis -- very basically, that the material result of policies is their reality, not whatever ideals they might aspire to. He makes a very solid case that capitalism can't really do anything else -- he doesn't just ask the reader to take this on faith (I would have hated it if that were the case).
The book does use a lot of such analysis, which can be pretty offputting if you're not used to it, but each such example is really cogent and well supported, so overall I found it a pretty phenomenal aggregation of history and very solid analysis/math for how we think about what's sustainable and what isn't.
His pattern in the book tends to be 1. strong assertion => 2. actual argument => 3. repeat assertion; I did find myself reacting to the first assertion there negatively because they often sound like overgeneralizations at first, but in each case he really did support them.
> He's a marxist, so statements like that are grounded in a historical materialist analysis -- very basically, that the material result of policies is their reality, not whatever ideals they might aspire to.
Not a very sound way of thinking if you care about confounding variables. Presumably there are always special exemptions when not analyzing capitalism? I.e. The material result of communist policies in the USSR (total collapse) don’t apply to communism because it wasn’t true communism? If so, then we don’t really have true capitalism either so you can’t really make any assertions about capitalism.
Totally separately and having literally nothing to do with anything else here, but since you brought it up, the USSR lost an economic war to capitalism, it didn't collapse because communism doesn't work. They spent their money lifting people out of poverty while american empire was busy extracting resources from other countries and keeping them in poverty.
Note also that I'm not defending individual policies of the soviet union.
EDIT: wanted to tack on: if in 1989 the US and western europe had collapsed and become communist, I wouldn't take that as proof -- or a particular reason at all -- that capitalism didn't work. That would be idiotic -- we were engaged in a decades-long cold war with another giant power, and lost. I may have separate arguments about capitalism, as I do now, but the collapse has nothing to do with it.
Similarly, the collapse of the soviet union has everything to do with trying to eliminate poverty WHILE staring down the barrel of the largest and most powerful empire that's ever existed.
This is historical revisionism. The soviet leaders tried to copy the success story of Deng Xiaoping's transitions from socialism to capitalism in China. The planned economy system just didn't work. The "US Empire" can't explain why by the late 1980s, the Soviet Union had 4x tractors as the United States which was totally wasteful.
If you want to complain about meaning of the economic system just think of a virtual economy simulation. Why would any human participate in such a virtual economy? No matter how much money you possess in the virtual economy it is ultimately meaningless. All the goods and factories that you own are also virtual. Why even care? Well, because we like playing the game.
The real world is exactly the same. We live because we like living. Even if you only produce the most essential products you will still run into the meaning of life problem. Sure your food production is allowing people to live but why even let them live? If they didn't exist you wouldn't have to make food for them. It's completely circular at its core. Essential needs are purely artificial just as non essential needs are purely artificial. The reality is that people are selfish (both in a good and in a bad way), they want things, especially those that don't serve any essential purpose.
They don't care about endless growth, they just care about getting the best deal possible and that's exactly what capitalism offers. Communism at its core doesn't care at all. It just cares about the essentials and nothing else.
It's not nonsense. It's real and we need to face it. Pretending like we have a handle on the universe is brazenly dismissive of the reality. The only thing calling it nonsense does is further demonstrate human's hubris.
> Our only hard limits are the laws of physics. Even with our rudimentary understanding of the universe our only practical limitation is usable energy production, and progress is rapid on that front.
Well yea we could pull miraculous technology out of our ass tomorrow that can reverse human civilization, but I don't see any reason to expect this.
> Bill Gates said somewhere that steel and cement production are the key factors for stopping climate change.
Baby production is the greater key, as noted with his promoting the solutions of Mechai Viravaidya, who helped bring Thailand's birth rate from around 6 or 7 to below 2 children per woman using methods the opposite of the One Child or eugenics policies: voluntary, non-coercive, educating, and fun.
Yeah, population is our real problem. We need to raise the standard of living around the world and empower women to work out of the home and start business. This naturally reduces the birth rate and we get rid of the horrible patriarch societies.
We have a higher carbon footprint in the West, but this is a moot point if the population level stagnates or even drops. Particularly with innovation.
You're forgetting that population growth in the developing world is what drives immigration and leads to more of those very-high-carbon-footprints. The birth rate in the 1st world is stagnant. Our growth is due to immigration. Eliminating global poverty and allowing universal access to contraceptives would effectively kill the problem.
Or use the "Downsizing" (Matt Damon movie) approach: reduce humans in size so as to inherently consume fewer resources.
For example, use growth inhibitors to keep people stunted at, say, one meter in height. If applied to every baby today, would eliminate the need for billions of tons of carbon emissions, meat consumption, cultivated land, etc., after about 15-20 years.
The startup Bill Gates has invested in is called Boston Metal, they use a technology called Molten Oxide Electrolysis:
https://www.bostonmetal.com/
But I'm watching the space a bit and it seems all the relevant companies bet on hydrogen-based DRI and not on electrolysis. I also tried to get a statement from Boston Metal when I wrote an article on the topic, but they didn't even answer. AFAIK they haven't announced any pilot plants yet.
That might be because hydrogen DRI is something that nearly exists already. Modern DRI plants using a mix of H2 and CO as the reducing agent. Going to 100% H2 is basically a shift in process without changing the fundamental technology.
What Boston Metal is proposing is completely unknown to the steel industry. And I seriously doubt it could work without some miracle discovery in material science. Directly electrolysis of iron ore at 1600°C with no attempt to contain the pure oxygen bubbles sounds like an engineering nightmare.
It's okay to downvote if you do not want a bit of humor on this board, but not seeing the :) and actually thinking the comment about carbon content in steel was meant seriously is quite disappointing.
South Australia has started producing "green" hydrogen and will be shipping it compressed to the city of Whyalla. I only mention that because one of the trouble's with hydrogen is transportation, so they must have found at least some solutions, might be worth checking out for anyone interested.
In this same city, the steel plant will exceed it's emissions limits for this year, and so the hope is to see a hydrogen process start taking replacing the current coal process soon.
The hydrogen plant is also supplying a mix of hydrogen and natural gas to the local gas supply, which is pretty rad too. Yet another way hydrogen can help cut reliance on fossil fuels. I don't know what the blend's carbon output is when burned, but reducing the demand for fossil fuels is a net positive in detering investment into drilling and mining. Having a renewable source for a general combustion gas is excellent.
>I only mention that because one of the trouble's with hydrogen is transportation
I think this may be the main reason why the test plant is in Austria. Central Europe has a developed energy grid with lots of energy spikes due to renewables especially in Northern Germany. Austria has an established steel industry and plenty of water, so they can probably produce the hydrogen on-site and immediately use it in the blast furnace.
In terms of transportation, the UK has talked about repurposing the existing domestic natural gas network for hydrogen in the longer term. One first step towards this is hydrogenation of natural gas.
The UK has a particularly well developed natural gas grid by international standards, but if this works well it could be a template for others to follow.
Sure you can transport it that way, but in order for it to be lighter than air it cannot be significantly compressed. The compression factor (when liquid) is about 1000...you'd need a zepellin the size of 1000 trucks in order to transport the same quantity as a single truck. That leads to materials costs and aerodynamic efficiency being significant factors. You simply cannot transport hydrogen very efficiently using such methods.
Maybe… A cubic meter of hydrogen has 3kWH of energy, about $0.25. The Hindenburg was 200,000 cubic meters, so $48,000 of hydrogen.
So, hydrogen production facilities can fill very large balloons and send them off into the sky with little altitude controllers like the Project Loon balloons. They can then do their best to navigate the Earth's air currents to move themselves to pass over energy consumers. When an energy consumer needs more hydrogen they can send a powered airship up to grab a nearby hydrogen balloon and bring it down for harvesting, paying the producer in the process.
Really the best part of this solution is that it will create an underworld caste of sky pirates who use their airships to steal hydrogen. We can only hope they wear vaguely Victorian clothing and wear goggles.
Seems like the best bet would be consuming the hydrogen at the place of origin. If you located a steel plant near where you produced hydrogen then you would just need to transport the steel ore and end product which is a solved problem.
I work in the gas industry. We'll send Hydrogen down the same pipes we currently use for natural gas.
We've solved large scale transmission of gases. Hydrogen has the pesky problem of embrittling metals, but this can be accounted for and monitored. Compressor stations will have to change and so on...
Basically it can be done and natural gas asset owners are VERY interested in being relevant in the future as we transition away from carbon emitting fuels.
The problem is that this already is a commercial race. As long as there are producers who do not care about emissios making cheap steel, winning the green race will only be a consolation prize.
European nations and the US got a 100+ year head start over those places on the overall project of industrialization. It's profoundly unjust for us to outsource our production to them for the cheap labour and lax environmental standards and then simultaneously pin the blame on them for climate change and emissions.
Even if the current state of affairs has the West not producing the bulk of global carbon emissions, there's a solid argument to be made the West still has a responsibility to pioneer technologies that can ultimately be transferred to the planet's largest polluters.
>the West still has a responsibility to pioneer technologies that can ultimately be transferred to the planet's largest polluters.
Or we could stop outsourcing production to those polluters, and do it in countries with better environmental standards instead. It is confusing to me that this isn't the #1 goal of environmentalists right now.
When will those technologies be invented? How long will it take to get them to be used globally? It feels like every few years we're given a new cutoff date for a serious course correction to prevent massive, irreparable climate change from occurring. Do we have enough time? Why do we seemingly prioritize the development of third world economies over climate action?
We do need to compete with production in places with lax standards. Right now it’s apples and oranges, because they aren’t including externalities and modern capitalism is addicted to “too good to be true” stories. Either they need to tax the production fairly, or we do.
Fossil fuel free metal smelting is also space race material.
Anyone who dreams of extraterrestrial manufacturing should be keeping an eye on refining processes that reduce the carbon to a small fraction of the inputs.
Electric arc furnaces are recycling, they cannot produce steal from raw iron. Iron requires carboninzation to become Steel. Thus is done using coal both to produce the heat plus the carbon. Arc furnaces are big business because we've been producing Steel for over a century and Steel only rusts a bit. Thus most of the world historic steel can still be reused once reshaped.
The question is: what are Nucor's inputs. As I understand it, their input is scrap metal, not ore. (I lived down the road from one of their plants, and work with someone who used to work there, but I don't have extensive first hand knowledge)
Nucor steel mills in the US are set up to melt scrap with electric arc furnaces. A varying amount of semi-processed iron (pig iron or direct reduced iron) is added to a batch; they get this iron by shipment instead of producing it on site.
As of time of writing they have one facility in the US that makes direct reduced iron from iron ore and natgas; this plant is in Louisiana at (30.08, -90.86).
I think you mean iron ore not raw iron, there isn't really raw iron (at least not enough). I think you could simply re-melt "raw iron" with scrap steel in an electric arc furnace.
I just saw a random video the other day about aluminum recycling. For many uses they have to add rather a large amount of virgin aluminum in order to get the alloys right. Especially troublesome were alloys with heavy metals, which you have to keep out of food container feedstocks. I can’t imagine steel recycling being much different.
This video was about a plant that ground the aluminum to roughly inch sized pieces (sorting out anything bigger or smaller) then using X-rays and air jets to sort the alloys based on transmissivity of the trace elements. Their goal was to make aluminum billets out of 100% recycled material (although the video claimed the goal was 100% recycling, which is clearly not happening if you are culling pieces from the input stream. Might have been an error in translation or wishful thinking.)
Although EAFs aren't exactly 0 carbon either - even if the electricity and transportation are zero-carbon, the graphite electrodes they use are consumed in the melting operation. Approximately 5 Kg of Carbon is burned for each tonne of iron, releasing 20 Kg of CO2.
This article is mostly about hydrogen-fuelled direct reduction, the step before the the EAF. Some iron is already produced using DR but using conventional fossil fuels, and this plant would use renewable hydrogen instead of fossil carbon as the reducing agent.
This is a looked for and rather important development, but not because it is zero-carbon. Who cares about carbon from steel production? If anyone does, consider reassessing your priorities. 1 plant means nothing.
What is hopeful here is it represents Europe's hydrogen strategy to find a sink for all the currently-wasted energy from the renewable energy facilities that they've been building in Europe. This is looking to bring electricity in to the industrial process in a new way.
In a sentence, this is about the energy storage problem of renewables, not about some sort of pollution problem from steel.
We're talking about industries emitting co2 weren't we ?
in case it was confusing phrasing on my side, my question was neutral. I was trying to remember which industries were the most co2 producers, nothing more.
If every industry and government has someone else to look to as being "even worse" then that's a recipe for gridlock and nothing changing. This is important progress.
It wasn't my goal, don't read negativity in my comments, it very very rarely happen (and I spend time to explain that this is subjective viewpoint when I do most of the time).
Actually, and it's very harming, I was trying to list the most polluting industries we rely on blindly.. in order to keep that in mind on a daily basis. ..
7% of all carbon emissions come from steel production. This article poses it could be reduced to zero. It's not the largest source of CO2, but it's still significant, so if it shouldn't be everyone's priority, it should be someones priority, so it's good that it's Mitsubishi Heavy's priority.
High carbon steel is only a percent or two carbon. You could easily source that from renewables if that was the bulk of the carbon equation.
I’ve heard it said from a couple of sources that ironworks were a major contributor to deforestation in Europe prior to the development of coal-fired smelting, which has a sulfur problem in addition to carbon and oxygen.
i cant wait for the us gov to tax me in order to spend 2x the cost for "carbon free" steel in a building project in a state i dont live in, tied to some other critical legislation that is to important to not pass!
That is good, but of course we also need the clean electrical energy generation to power it, and it likely uses much more power than a non clean plant of the same size/production. We need nuclear plants going up now. As cool as solar and wind is, I don't think we can build enough of it fast enough to undo the damage we have done and prevent large scale climate catastrophes.
You have our build capabilities exactly reversed. Wind and solar are fast, reliably deployed, and cheaper than any fuel based energy source. In the US alone, the pipeline has 174GW planned for deployment through 2024, however we will deploy far more than that because planning and deployment takes far less than 5 years for renewables:
In contrast we have only 2 reactors, 2.2GW of nuclear under construction, they are more than 2x behind schedule, 3x over budget. There were an additional 2 reactors started at the same time with the same design, but they were abandoned due to construction difficulties and budget overruns.
We cant build nuclear in any sort of effective way. Wind and solar get deployed all the time, are always on time and always on budget. They are our only hope for decarbonizing our grid, nuclear offers us zero help.
It takes roughly 15-20 years to build a nuclear plant, looking at Hinkley Point C. In that time you could have half the lifespan of a set of solar panels.
Nuclear cannot be build fast enough to deal with climate change. We need renewables until then.
Wow, I had no idea! I was under the mistaken impression that France managed to build 57 reactors, which produce about 50GW, in 23 years, and the first of those took only 7 years to build. There's even a rumor that some were built in only 5 years. Good thing you taught me that nuclear power cannot possibly be built that fast, or I would have died believing that crazy conspiracy theory!
Hinckley C is being built by the same organization, EDF, that runs the French reactors. Would you like to go over there and ask them why they're taking so long?
Hydrogen production is a fascinating energy case study because of the many possibilities for production.
Consider solar and wind. With variable production, there will always be time where you have more energy produced than you need. Why not use the excess to create hydrogen and store it? Now the energy doesn't go to waste.
Consider nuclear power. Nuclear doesn't scale down well- it's most efficient at a specific rate of production. But demand is quite variable- 2am on a not-so-warm-or-cold day, who needs all that extra energy? Why not use the excess to create hydrogen and store it? Now the energy doesn't go to waste.
In short, the energy used to create hydrogen can be very low, provided you have a cheap means to store and move it to where it needs to be, and provided you can deal with variable production rates.
If this provides an income for the energy producer, then it becomes more financially viable to use wind, solar, and nuclear- all non-CO2 emitters.
> Why not use the excess to create hydrogen and store it?
This is a very popular idea, but it doesn't work out as well as it sounds. The reason is that electrolyseurs aren't free, the capital costs are high. Not saying this is impossible, but it's challenging to make this economically feasible.
One more thought is that you can basically adapt all industry production to excess energy. I think the reason people want to do this with hydrogen electrolysis is because a) it's new and b) they associate both with energy transition. But neither means it's the best option.
This is a good point. Renewable energy is getting so cheap that throwing kWh away can be cheaper than the cost of idling other capital infrastructure.
We will need to rethink a lot of our economic assumptions in energy very soon. Solar farms are already designed to produce 30% more DC energy than their inverters can handle, because it's the lowest cost balance between PV panel capacity and inverter capacity. If somebody has an application for DC energy that can be co-located at solar farms behind inverters, and can be economical running only a few hours a day, there's huge amounts of nearly free energy already available.
>> Renewable energy is getting so cheap that throwing kWh away can be cheaper than the cost of idling other capital infrastructure.
That's missing the point.The problem isn't "what to do with excess of energy at peak times?", it's "where do we get energy from on quiet, wind-less nights?" Solar and wind are highly unreliable, so storing energy for is the necessity. Or we can use nuclear.
Who was making this point that I supposedly missed? Where we are in the conversation, your problem has already been addressed, and part of the solution has been to overprovision renewable generation such that we have excess electricity at many times, amounting to 50% to 200% of current electricity usage.
The problem you discuss has been addressed with tons of predictions and models. It's solvable with excess generation capacity, storage, and transmission capacity. Which path we choose will depend on the relative dollar costs and political costs of each. (For example HVDC transmission would likely save us lots of money, but is so difficult politically that it is unlikely to happen.)
But in any case, nearly all models show that under nearly all cost scenarios, we end up with lots of excess generation capacity, with curtailed renewables generation for a large chunk of time.
This is the future we are talking about, a future where we are meeting our energy demands with all renewables, and we have lots of excess generation capacity with zero marginal cost.
>> It's solvable with excess generation capacity, storage, and transmission capacity
So now you're arguing FOR energy storage? Your previous post was basically: "let's overprovision and let excessive energy go to waste, instead of building costly storage infrastructure.".
We will have a mixture of storage, over-provisioned generation, and transmission, the only question is the relative proportion. And that relative proportion will be determined by how quickly costs fall relative to each other. If a kWh storage costs 10x the amortized capital costs of a kWh solar generation, we will have a lot less storage than if storage only costs 2x the amortized capital costs of a solar kWh.
If hydrogen electrolysis can become cheap in 2030, maybe we will even use hydrogen for some storage, but we will have to balance the capital costs of hydrogen generation and conversion back to electricity with everything else, which will determine how much of it gets deployed.
It's not only about cost, it's also about practicality: there is some baseline demand on electricity even at night. Solar obviously cannot fulfill that demand. Wind also can't because it is too unreliable. So we do need some storage technology, and hydrogen is one of the options. It seems way cheaper than using Lithium-Ion batteries, but might be still more expensive than, say, pumping water uphill and using that to power a hydroelectric plant.
Energy transmission can be some solution here, but we might be forced to transmit energy across the continents (so, for example solar plant in Sahara delivers power to New York City at night) which probably is too costly.
I actually think "curtailment" is not throwing away electricity any more than not running a natural gas power plant 24/7 is.
The only difference is the natural gas plant has fuel costs and the solar doesn't. But both are big capital investments, so you could argue you're "throwing away" electricity you could've generated with that natural gas plant by not running it all the time.
Anyway, just my little contribution to how we think about curtailment. If you have a good grid connection and optimal storage, then you don't end up needing that much curtailment (say 30%), although some is basically always optimal. See: https://model.energy
Oh, also, under-sizing the inverter relative to the solar array DC capacity is not even close to a one-to-one curtailment example. The solar rarely makes its peak power rating, so undersizing the inverter by 25% means almost no curtailment in the real world. Effectively, you're increasing the AC capacity factor and it almost perfectly compensates (until you get very high ratios, but even then the amount actually curtailed is small). This has a bigger impact in places that have more cloudy or overcast weather. If you install more solar panels (which are a much smaller part of the total cost of the project than they used to be), you can compensate for not having as much sun without much increase in cost.
"Surplus" capture/use is a bigger problem than most people realize, not just for solar, but throughout the entire energy economy.
There's a reason you still see so many flare-offs in the petroleum industries, even though it's always been "burning dollars" and is now usually discouraged via imposed regulatory costs. Yet it still makes economic sense in many situations.
Why would people invest capital in capture technology that only gets used a fraction of the time? Whether it be at a solar plant, or a refinary, people will choose to invest that capital where it's use can be maximized. There are certainly situations where it makes sense economically, but many where it doesn't, and more situations where the capital can be better spent elsewhere.
Similarly, if a hypothetical town gets 15kw solar power during the day, and 15kw of hydro or wind during night, and needs 20kw backup/surge capacity from gas/nuclear/other, you've designed a system that requires a surplus of capacity, not just in generation, but also in transmission and distribution. In that context, surplus==inefficiencies.
This can be somewhat minimized by so-called smart-grid technology, but people tend to focus on technical capabilities and not what makes economical sense, which is much more limiting than people realize.
It's true that high efficiency catalytic electrolysis requires expensive materials. But at significantly lower efficiencies you can just do the same thing we all did with a battery in grade school. That's not quite free to build out, but it's close. And relying on low-efficiency energy storage to fill the gaps in production is still better than firing up a gas plant to supply the power.
It seems not unlikely to me that a lot of wind and solar plants might see building out a local hydrogen electrolyzer and generator (or just sell the hydrogen) as a useful choice.
But yes: there's no silver bullet, and there are a lot of very reasonable competitors in the energy storage market.
I'd expect that as in most other cases, it would come down to payback time, wouldn't it? With the floor being "pays for itself before it reaches end of life".
If it doesn't pay for its own existence, it's likely a waste of effort. But if it does, you're adding capabilities & flexibility for zero cost. I don't really see a downside, other than tying up the capital.
What I am saying that hydrogen from natural gas has an incomparable economic advantage over electrolyzed hydrogen, and denying it is as silly as denying thermodynamics.
Electricity has to get tens of times cheaper for it to beat steam reforming, and you absolutely can't produce hydrogen cheaper than the energy you put into its production, most of which comes from, surprise, hydrocarbons.
And obviously, you can't produce more hydrogen than the energy equivalent in hydrogen you consume. This completely crushes whatever ignoramuses thinking that you can "use hydrogen to produce more hydrogen"
Hi slfnflctd! You replied to my comment on a thread on LSD trips some 42 odd days ago, and I kind of missed it when you posted it but I just stumbled upon it today and found your comment to be really insightful and I could relate to it really well. I think I could learn more from you if you were open to a discussion. I was wondering if we could connect through email or any other platform of your choice?
> The reason is that electrolyseurs aren't free, the capital costs are high.
While this is definitely the reason, there is also a bigger one - that the process of turning electricity into Hydrogen is fundamentally wasteful(Energy losses), particularly when the route is electricity->hydrogen->back to electricity.
Where it actually is the best option: and where most of the “Green Hydrogen” gas will likely end up being broadly used to me is looking like industrial applications like this article mentions (Steel production), along with ammonia for fertilizer production.
Capital costs as you mention (combined with utilization rates) - electrolyzers to be most economical need to run 100% of the time, meaning you need “excess energy” 100% of the time. With the implication that the energy will be from variable, renewable sources - there is a fundamental disconnect between these. A main reason why batteries and other techs are likely to win out in many “utilizing excess energy” over the long run.
No one cares about efficiency intrinsically. As long as it's cost effective, this is not an issue.
One of the major improvements in modern electrolyzers is that they don't need to run 100% of the time to function. As costs come down, it's likely we can tap excess energy whenever it is available.
No one care about efficiency, sure. But efficiency in this case is the “tax” that must be paid in all cases.
And you are missing my point: That as far as the options go for “tapping excess energy” hydrogen is overblown and overstated as a solution. Things like demand response and heating applications don’t have anywhere near the same kind of losses. Price and value is what actually matters.
Then it's merely reducing the "tax" until it is no longer an issue. A combination of efficiency improvements and lower source energy cost can solve this.
The alternatives have their own downsides. Usually in the form of weight or raw material usage. Since the raw material of hydrogen is water, this could easily be much cheaper than the competition.
Also storing hydrogen is not as easy and cheap as other gasses due to hydrogen embrittlement, high pressures and very low boiling point (-250C). But as it often is with fuel it's expansive now but soon it might be proffitable (as it was with tar sands).
> Nuclear doesn't scale down well- it's most efficient at a specific rate of production. But demand is quite variable- 2am on a not-so-warm-or-cold day, who needs all that extra energy? Why not use the excess to create hydrogen and store it? Now the energy doesn't go to waste.
The problem is not of the energy going to waste or the plant being unable to throttle down. The problem is that fuel cost is immaterial; a plant running at 1% output power still costs 99% as much per day as a plant running at 100%.
That means that building 10% oversupply is tremendously expensive. If you're using it 10% of the time, it costs 10x more per MWh than the baseload power. If hydrogen is 11% as profitable as baseload, you are only gathering another 10% revenue, and the power is still 5x as expensive as normal electricity. That would be far more expensive than any other source.
You could easily estimate hydrogen economy would be worth >>10% of electricity... but only at the margin. Right now it's reasonable to say hydrogen is worth 50% of the value of electricity used to make it. For all regional grids in the US, daily peak is 30-50% higher than the daily minimum[1]. That's a huge amount of overcapacity to consume, far more than can be utilized by base industry.
Having >70% nuclear and/or relying on hydrogen economy to make nuclear economical is pretty highly dependent on hydrogen vehicles. Fermi math: 142 billion gallons annual[2] @25 mpg fleet efficiency[3] translates to .9 trillion kWh @4 mi/kWh, or ~25% of annual electricity. The bottom line is that it takes a relatively minor (~15-20%) overcapacity would tap out basically all possible uses for hydrogen.
>The plant will use hydrogen instead of coal in the reduction process for iron ore.
Where does this hydrogen come from? The vast majority of hydrogen for fuel cells comes from petroleum and natural gas reserves.
> New blast furnaces require trillions of yen (1 trillion yen equals $9.6 billion) in investment. Although DRI equipment produces less steel, the investment is estimated at less than half of blast furnaces
So they're building a much more expensive furnace to produce less steel. Wouldn't this create more pollution (not just carbon) because you'd want to hit the same outputs and now you need more energy?
I don't understand "zero-carbon" in these cases. You still need trucks to bring in the tools and equipment to build the facility. All of them use hydrocarbons. You have hydrocarbons needed for the roads. Even if all your construction equipment is electric (they're not) you still have all the massive amounts of carbon put in to producing the electric batteries, not to mention all the waste product that comes from creating lithium batteries.
Are they using all this coal and oil and then saying it's being offset by some credit? How would that even remotely work? You plant a thousand trees for ever square meter? What about all the hydrocarbons needed to transport those seeds, feed the planting crews?
Most "Green energy" is really just burning trees (woodchips).
This whole zero-carbon thing would fall apart when you really started breaking it down. It's marketing bullshit.
How is it a step in the right direction, if it produces roughly as much carbon and other pollutants as the original processes?
It's like buying a new EV or hybrid car, thinking you're helping the environment, when in fact the carbon impact of manufacturing such vehicles is significant or even greater.
I wonder how they solved the water problem...burning hydrogen produces water, and water in the smelting process can be problematic for the quality of the pig iron...it leads to pitting in rolled steel.
As a side note, I'm wondering if this will provide lower radiation steel... The big problem why pre-World war II steel is so valuable is because it has been refined in our atmosphere pre nuclear age.
Finding a niche market buyer is usually there toehold a new technology needs to gain traction, research, and investment.
wait... what? Do you have any resources where i can learn more about this? There's enough radiation in the atmosphere to forever alter the composition of steel going forward?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadEDIT: I should have read the article first.
From memory efficiency was 4.5kwh/kg. At 12 cents/kwh that's $0.50/kg.
Seems like a better idea to do that than to pretend hydrogen is 'green'.
You need about 54kg of hydrogen per ton of iron. Assuming it takes 50 kWh of energy to make 1 kg of hydrogen, you get something like 2.7 kWh per kg of iron. This is significantly more energy efficient than the idea you're proposing.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6918249/
The Norwegian pilot plant used a crude asbestos separator for the anode and cathode. The above used some magic polymer.
They got it down to 3.53 kwh/kg
As kids, we were sick with all kinds of respiratory disease all the time and the air stank like burnt tires.
Burning coal is dirty, dirty, dirty.
Therefore I don't think its misguided to "see the carbon as the enemy".
By the way I live in Slovakia and I was baffled by our previous government stubbornly keeping the dirty hornonitrianske coal mines open through public funding. Even though they are loosing money and it would be cheaper (and much much cleaner) to just pay the miners to do nothing.
Anyway, I don't think the martial wording is appropriate in most cases. For example I don't want to fight carbon dioxide. I rather want our technology to not disturb the global biological/chemical balance much more. So I support better adopted technology.
And fighting pollution, well, I actually have to restrain myself not to physically attack people who I witness dropping plastic garbage into nature. But the pollution which is already there, I can only clean up.
So fighting polluters, yes. But fighting pollution sounds like a oxymoron to me, because fighting in itself is mostly dirty and damaging by its definition. War just leaves a mess. So I don't think the martial language really helps the cause.
Someone will probably mention plants. It's required for plants, yes, but we're not plants.
That's also the reason why people should spend more time outside.
Our generation never experienced real fresh air - we don’t know how it smells or feels.
That seems to be only when the CO2 concentration is raised abruptly. After that the body compensates. For example, submarine crews operate perfectly fine in an atmosphere of 2 to 5% CO2 (roughly 100x what is normal), for weeks on end.
The most carbon dioxide intensive step of steel production is in the production of iron sponge, from which both steel and wrought iron is produced.
It is where the blast furnace is involved. But hydrogen can be used instead. It is a lot more complicated than one would think because not only is carbon very efficient at picking up oxygen, it is also an exothermic process which makes it very practical. This energy have to be added some other way when using direct reduction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_reduced_iron
Various economic models of the impact of climate change suggest for northern countries we only recently left the realm of net benefit. It’s going to keep getting worse, but it’s hardly a major disaster right now. Limiting future climate change is important, going back to some arbitrary point in the past isn’t a clear net benefit.
Hell, in 10,000 years humanity might be using massive amounts of orbital infrastructure to directly control the weather and actually prefer more atmospheric CO2. Or they might want to lower CO2 below preindustrial levels, we just don’t know.
Edit: surprised to be getting down votes.
There are multiple obvious, and meaningful, barriers. The effects of carbon dioxide production are not simply a collection of linear relationships. One tonne of CO2 today doesn't have just as much impact as one tonne of CO2 last year.
There are points at which ocean acidity levels become incompatible with certain forms of life. There are limits to carbon sinks. There are points at which positive feedback loops become active.
All of these things - and more - mean that there are very marked differences in the impact of the first coal fire and a steel plant (for a topical example) even after you normalize for the amount of carbon dioxide produced.
Presenting current and modern carbon dioxide production as simply a continuation of the first coal fire is at a minimum ridiculous.
Which is the issue, CO2 produced today will generally still be around in another 1,000 years. Across geologic timescales it’s going to be sequestered, but on human timescales it’s basically permanent. There isn’t a clear transition point where suddenly this ton of CO2 kills of the Great Barrier Reef, it’s a very gradual transition that means coral has a very slightly harder time growing today than it did yesterday.
Not burning a ton of coal in yesterday would have been as useful as not burning a ton of coal tomorrow, the only difference is we can’t go back to yesterday.
For example, the loss of sheet ice. And bleaching events themselves in the reefs too I suspect would fall in this category.
Some research here in case you're interested: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6421/1379
For example, the loss of sheet ice. And bleaching events themselves in the reefs too I suspect would fall in this category.
Some research here in case you're interested: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6421/1379
It's absolutely monstrous to think in terms of what's ok just for the global north, here. We've done the vast majority of this polluting, and the global south is, in fact, currently, undergoing catastrophic change because of it.
Another example is tropical diseases can move to colder areas as their carriers migrate north/south. However, there isn’t a hotter place to for insects to migrate to the equator from.
For the normal workers in European countries (who might be actually living on a tight budget too), the reality is, they cannot do much about any of this without taking considerable personal toll (so real and fast change mostly doesn't fly politically). They can in certain circumstances e.g. eliminate inefficient heating with coal or oil or maybe drive with a more efficient and less polluting car, which improves air quality in their areas and thus health. This is achievable currently with small incentives and we can also observe most of it happening in richer areas, where there is spare capital in families to invest in such things. All of this has its cost first and the benefit can be felt quite a bit later if at all.
Btw. it will change exactly nothing painting this as a conflict of the global wealthy north against the global poor south (implied). It is not very constructive and quite naive. Don't get me wrong, I am all for healthy environment for everybody as can be seen in my comments elsewhere.
My favorite book of 2020 if you'd like to read more: https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more
There are no other metrics that are remotely commonly used to determine real international policies. Every nation on earth is in explicit competition with every other to grow faster because of this. These policies are prescriptions by capitalist countries that weren't like this before and likely wouldn't be after.
It's beyond silly to claim that capitalism doesn't require endless growth.
> It's beyond silly to claim that capitalism doesn't require endless growth.
Capitalism requires no such thing. It’s human reproduction and striving for better conditions that requires economic expansion. That doesn’t change under socialism/communism/whatever.
Finally, GDP growth does not imply anything about carbon production. Some of the biggest growth sectors going forward are entirely about clean energy.
I know you've seen my book recommendation in the thread here; it's about the incentives behind growth, and how de-growth can work and still encourage human flourishing. Rather than just reacting negatively, why not look it up?
I think you are incorrectly characterizing capitalism, and people are off-put by the inaccuracy and it's implication that property must be taken from people. Capitalism is simple: it is an economic system where the means of production are owned and controlled by private citizens and operated for profit (the definition of profit is not always making lots of money). Nothing more, nothing less. A lot of the startup and tech economy is based squarely on private ownership of the means of production (i.e. companies). GDP and the focus on GDP growth is somewhat exclusive of whatever ism your country's economy is based on.
A good example of this is agriculture. We have less of that precious Iowan topsoil than we did 100 years ago, but crop yields are higher than ever. That's what capitalism is.
with other sectors we need governments still to make the transition
State legislators have been arrested in Ohio for taking bribes to pass anti-renewable legislation, but despite their arrest, the legislation they enacted is still on the books. The companies got what they wanted, the government still is suppressing solar in Ohio, despite the legal system putting corrupt politicians in jail.
Climate change is a kind of prototypical example of a tragedy of the commons. Capitalism has not been particularly noteworthy for solving these sorts of problems. I can certainly see it helping to make renewables more affordable, but that's simply not enough at this point.
Not sure what the recycling story is with carbon fiber. I suppose we could make extremely durable goods but that may not be desirable until we pull enough carbon out of the air.
These were just quick examples though. There’s bound to be a lot of uses for carbon, it’s abundant for a reason.
The point is we can leverage our consumer nature to incentivize markets that help solve climate change. We can literally consume our way out of this mess.
And this is why white environmentalists are not trusted by the environmental justice community. Too much vague moralizing, not enough understanding of the plight of people who are being oppressed by the current system, or even what the current system actually is.
It's well understood that wealthy countries, and especially the US, generate far more junk than poorer ones. We don't need to, and there's a big difference between sustainable strategies for getting people what they need and hoping (because, without planning, that's all we're doing) that capitalism will solve this problem through even greater amounts of consumption.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-09-23/degrowth-and-m...
And while I agree with his numbered policy prescriptions (perhaps quibbling about a jobs guarantee versus universal income), the rhetoric and diction is so objectionable and wrong that it's like we are speaking different language. What he calls degrowth is actually massive growth and consumption in my view. Public services for all? FANTASTIC and exactly what we need. But that's not "degrowth," that's massive growth. Switch to renewables? That requires absolutely huge economic growth and change.
In practice, on the ground in communities using words like "degrowth" in their politics, degrowth is rich people continuing with what they have and nobody else getting access to it. "Degrowth" is the word and philosophy used to block projects that help working people because the wealthy are doing A-OK. The "degrowth" language allows the wealthy capitalists to hold onto everything, and will never enable the correction of wealth inequality and distribution problems of capitalism. I see it in my own small town, that is an outlier in the US. ~30% residents label themselves anti-capitalist, ~30% are working class non-landwoners without much political ideology except populism, ~30% are landlords trying to extract money. A significant chunk of the "anti-capitalist" segment are also landlords and influence the politics of the "degrowth" anti-capitalists to privilege the already privileged, this is really dangerous ways to think about things. The terrible language enables the reactionaries more than the revolutionaries. Make "capitalism" vague and unspecific enough to be a vague "bad" label, make "consumption" a vague and undefinable term, and it will be used by those in power as a tool to subvert any change.
For a school of thought that seems to abhor "contradictions," they seem to embrace them when it comes to using words.
Hickel and others who write on degrowth are mostly very clear about these definitions (and Less is More is exceedingly thorough on the matter), but obviously you have to read past the surface level to pick up some of the detail. That's not meant as a dig at you or to imply that you're not willing to do more reading, just to clarify that because oftentimes these analyses are miles apart from typical US/western thinking, a lot of digging can be necessary.
As I noted above, Hickel applies a historical materialist analysis in a lot of his work, which can take some time getting used to (and, indeed, did for me).
Well, unless the money is to be made by exacerbating the problem, but sure.
> Putting the right price on carbon will solve that.
State intervention to set prices to try to steer the market to make progress on social goals that it would not without State intervention is not capitalism.
If by “capitalist system” you mean “bourgeois socialist mixed economy that replaced capitalism throughout the developed West generally around the mid-20th Century through the efforts of a broad coalition of people fed up with the horrors of actual capitalism”, that's true.
But that system isn't actually capitalism, and the central role of government regulation aimed at channeling the effort of “private” industry by rearranging incentives to different places than they would be set by the free market is one of the central ways in which it differs from capitalism.
The only reason people pretend otherwise is to maintain the fiction that they are on the opposite side of the global capitalist/socialist struggle that predated general disillusionment with capitalism in the West, because even though actual ideology shifted, ideological tribal identity didn't.
I don't understand this comment. Capitalism is about maximizing outcomes within the context of a system. It's not about the rules that govern the system itself. It doesn't actually matter what goal you are optimizing for. There is also no such thing as having no policies. Not having a policy is a policy in itself.
The producer of an externality is actively using the laws of physics to extract value from all other individuals. That's not capitalism either. It's just someone abusing their power. It's like using a gun to rob someone except the harm is spread over more people.
If nothing is done against the externality then the government is implicitly accepting the externality and is effectively subsidizing the producers of the externality.
Now that we have established that government policies can be compatible with capitalism lets talk about the most extreme capitalist policies possible. Well, a capitalist policy would be based around aligning profit incentives with policy goals. Basically what you want is that companies and people that do the right thing make a load of money and those who don't, make a loss.
So what is an extreme example of a non capitalist policy? Rent control. You've just destroyed the ability for "greedy" landlords to make money off of doing the right thing, namely providing housing. Another non capitalist policy? Prop 13. The policy encourages hoarding housing instead of rebuilding and providing more housing. It's even self reinforcing because it lures normal people in and turns them into hoarders. Again, it's because you have destroyed the ability for greedy people to do the right thing.
Now carbon taxes are the extreme opposite, they are so extremely capitalist that they should bring tears to your eyes. The greediest business owner is the one that produces the least CO2 (or any other externality). It's a system for doing the right thing. The only flaw is that carbon taxes have to be global but since they can be enforced through CO2 tariffs an easy fix is available. There are extreme domestic growth opportunities available in green technologies but without the right incentives nobody will do it. It's absurd that we even have to have this discussion. People are begging for profitable domestic investments because the central banks are flooding the markets. It's not like we end up sacrificing anything if we put underemployed people to work.
No, that's rationality (in the social science sense) not capitalism.
Capitalism is a specific politico-economic system that reached its peak of dominance of the developed world in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries that was named and first systematically described and critiqued by its 19th Century opponents.
(The two are connected in that there are popular arguments for the optimality of capitalism grounded in the assumption of rationality.)
And yet emissions keep climbing, because capitalism requires growth and demands deregulation.
| Excess energy can be dumped in to carbon sequestration
There is literally no scalable strategy for this, and no serious combination of strategies. Really. Nobody who actually studies this (who's not also trying to profit) thinks there is. Do the math on the world economy continuing to double every <20 years. Or maybe check out the book I shared above, it's really very good.
If your theory is in direct contradiction to actual facts and evidence, then the theory is not super useful for analyzing the world.
Emissions are down over the past 10 years:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
"Growth" as defined by GDP per capita is up over the past 10 years,
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-real-gdp-per-capi...
"growth" defined as population is up over the past 10 years in the US, but falling in Europe:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/projected-population-by-c...
Also, capitalism is just fine with a shrinking economy, there's depressions and recessions. What does this grand theory say about those?
Throwing around broad terms with shifting meanings, and then changing those meanings around to fit each set of facts about the world, is a crazy way to deal with the world.
> Do the math on the world economy continuing to double every <20 years.
Easy enough, what's the problem. What sort of resource constraint are you thinking we hit? What defines a "dollar" or "doubling"? Based on your descriptions, there's zero chance I will bother to read the book you recommend, because it sounds like it has negative information content.
I mean, come on, what sort of BS statement is "capitalism demands deregulation"?? Capitalism demands regulation through policing. What sort of possible definition of "deregulation" can you ever provide that fits both these situations? The best reflection on your source is that there is some sort of very technical definition where this statement makes sense. But repurposing common words to narrow meanings such that they become jargon, then attempting to use jargon without explaining that there's a difference with the commonly accepted meanings of those words is just a completely unproductive way to communicate to the world.
Capitalism is obviously not "fine" with recessions -- we dump enormous amounts of money into the economy when they occur in an attempt to stimulate it, and inequality tends to widen permanently in the absence of policies to counteract this.
He's a marxist, so statements like that are grounded in a historical materialist analysis -- very basically, that the material result of policies is their reality, not whatever ideals they might aspire to. He makes a very solid case that capitalism can't really do anything else -- he doesn't just ask the reader to take this on faith (I would have hated it if that were the case).
The book does use a lot of such analysis, which can be pretty offputting if you're not used to it, but each such example is really cogent and well supported, so overall I found it a pretty phenomenal aggregation of history and very solid analysis/math for how we think about what's sustainable and what isn't.
His pattern in the book tends to be 1. strong assertion => 2. actual argument => 3. repeat assertion; I did find myself reacting to the first assertion there negatively because they often sound like overgeneralizations at first, but in each case he really did support them.
Not a very sound way of thinking if you care about confounding variables. Presumably there are always special exemptions when not analyzing capitalism? I.e. The material result of communist policies in the USSR (total collapse) don’t apply to communism because it wasn’t true communism? If so, then we don’t really have true capitalism either so you can’t really make any assertions about capitalism.
Note also that I'm not defending individual policies of the soviet union.
EDIT: wanted to tack on: if in 1989 the US and western europe had collapsed and become communist, I wouldn't take that as proof -- or a particular reason at all -- that capitalism didn't work. That would be idiotic -- we were engaged in a decades-long cold war with another giant power, and lost. I may have separate arguments about capitalism, as I do now, but the collapse has nothing to do with it.
Similarly, the collapse of the soviet union has everything to do with trying to eliminate poverty WHILE staring down the barrel of the largest and most powerful empire that's ever existed.
Here is a good article on why it's computationally challenging to completely plan an entire economy. https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-us...
The real world is exactly the same. We live because we like living. Even if you only produce the most essential products you will still run into the meaning of life problem. Sure your food production is allowing people to live but why even let them live? If they didn't exist you wouldn't have to make food for them. It's completely circular at its core. Essential needs are purely artificial just as non essential needs are purely artificial. The reality is that people are selfish (both in a good and in a bad way), they want things, especially those that don't serve any essential purpose.
They don't care about endless growth, they just care about getting the best deal possible and that's exactly what capitalism offers. Communism at its core doesn't care at all. It just cares about the essentials and nothing else.
Well yea we could pull miraculous technology out of our ass tomorrow that can reverse human civilization, but I don't see any reason to expect this.
Baby production is the greater key, as noted with his promoting the solutions of Mechai Viravaidya, who helped bring Thailand's birth rate from around 6 or 7 to below 2 children per woman using methods the opposite of the One Child or eugenics policies: voluntary, non-coercive, educating, and fun.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Buildings-are-good-for-peo...
Mabye some women don't want to work out of the home. Do women seem happier here than before? (Though the option should be available to them).
But seriously - an increase in living standards can go hand in hand with carbon reduction. It’s a matter of proper tech and policies.
I would love to see evidence of this supposition.
You're forgetting that population growth in the developing world is what drives immigration and leads to more of those very-high-carbon-footprints. The birth rate in the 1st world is stagnant. Our growth is due to immigration. Eliminating global poverty and allowing universal access to contraceptives would effectively kill the problem.
For example, use growth inhibitors to keep people stunted at, say, one meter in height. If applied to every baby today, would eliminate the need for billions of tons of carbon emissions, meat consumption, cultivated land, etc., after about 15-20 years.
But I'm watching the space a bit and it seems all the relevant companies bet on hydrogen-based DRI and not on electrolysis. I also tried to get a statement from Boston Metal when I wrote an article on the topic, but they didn't even answer. AFAIK they haven't announced any pilot plants yet.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7703861/Star...
What Boston Metal is proposing is completely unknown to the steel industry. And I seriously doubt it could work without some miracle discovery in material science. Directly electrolysis of iron ore at 1600°C with no attempt to contain the pure oxygen bubbles sounds like an engineering nightmare.
As long as electricity generation, transportation, and space heating are carbon intensive, there is just no point in worrying about steel and cement.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with carbon in steel.
In this same city, the steel plant will exceed it's emissions limits for this year, and so the hope is to see a hydrogen process start taking replacing the current coal process soon.
The hydrogen plant is also supplying a mix of hydrogen and natural gas to the local gas supply, which is pretty rad too. Yet another way hydrogen can help cut reliance on fossil fuels. I don't know what the blend's carbon output is when burned, but reducing the demand for fossil fuels is a net positive in detering investment into drilling and mining. Having a renewable source for a general combustion gas is excellent.
I think this may be the main reason why the test plant is in Austria. Central Europe has a developed energy grid with lots of energy spikes due to renewables especially in Northern Germany. Austria has an established steel industry and plenty of water, so they can probably produce the hydrogen on-site and immediately use it in the blast furnace.
The UK has a particularly well developed natural gas grid by international standards, but if this works well it could be a template for others to follow.
So, hydrogen production facilities can fill very large balloons and send them off into the sky with little altitude controllers like the Project Loon balloons. They can then do their best to navigate the Earth's air currents to move themselves to pass over energy consumers. When an energy consumer needs more hydrogen they can send a powered airship up to grab a nearby hydrogen balloon and bring it down for harvesting, paying the producer in the process.
Really the best part of this solution is that it will create an underworld caste of sky pirates who use their airships to steal hydrogen. We can only hope they wear vaguely Victorian clothing and wear goggles.
That seems disappointing, but it's roughly the UK retail value of a tanker full of petrol.
We've solved large scale transmission of gases. Hydrogen has the pesky problem of embrittling metals, but this can be accounted for and monitored. Compressor stations will have to change and so on...
Basically it can be done and natural gas asset owners are VERY interested in being relevant in the future as we transition away from carbon emitting fuels.
Space race but green race?
It needs to be profitable first and foremost.
Even if the current state of affairs has the West not producing the bulk of global carbon emissions, there's a solid argument to be made the West still has a responsibility to pioneer technologies that can ultimately be transferred to the planet's largest polluters.
Or we could stop outsourcing production to those polluters, and do it in countries with better environmental standards instead. It is confusing to me that this isn't the #1 goal of environmentalists right now.
When will those technologies be invented? How long will it take to get them to be used globally? It feels like every few years we're given a new cutoff date for a serious course correction to prevent massive, irreparable climate change from occurring. Do we have enough time? Why do we seemingly prioritize the development of third world economies over climate action?
We do need to compete with production in places with lax standards. Right now it’s apples and oranges, because they aren’t including externalities and modern capitalism is addicted to “too good to be true” stories. Either they need to tax the production fairly, or we do.
Anyone who dreams of extraterrestrial manufacturing should be keeping an eye on refining processes that reduce the carbon to a small fraction of the inputs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_arc_furnace
As of time of writing they have one facility in the US that makes direct reduced iron from iron ore and natgas; this plant is in Louisiana at (30.08, -90.86).
This video was about a plant that ground the aluminum to roughly inch sized pieces (sorting out anything bigger or smaller) then using X-rays and air jets to sort the alloys based on transmissivity of the trace elements. Their goal was to make aluminum billets out of 100% recycled material (although the video claimed the goal was 100% recycling, which is clearly not happening if you are culling pieces from the input stream. Might have been an error in translation or wishful thinking.)
I wonder if someone will do the same with steel.
This article is mostly about hydrogen-fuelled direct reduction, the step before the the EAF. Some iron is already produced using DR but using conventional fossil fuels, and this plant would use renewable hydrogen instead of fossil carbon as the reducing agent.
What is hopeful here is it represents Europe's hydrogen strategy to find a sink for all the currently-wasted energy from the renewable energy facilities that they've been building in Europe. This is looking to bring electricity in to the industrial process in a new way.
In a sentence, this is about the energy storage problem of renewables, not about some sort of pollution problem from steel.
in case it was confusing phrasing on my side, my question was neutral. I was trying to remember which industries were the most co2 producers, nothing more.
No, we’re talking about a single large emitting industry.
Actually, and it's very harming, I was trying to list the most polluting industries we rely on blindly.. in order to keep that in mind on a daily basis. ..
This is not all that high - curtailment is very infrequent. Most places just turn down their natural gas usage in this case.
I’ve heard it said from a couple of sources that ironworks were a major contributor to deforestation in Europe prior to the development of coal-fired smelting, which has a sulfur problem in addition to carbon and oxygen.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
In contrast we have only 2 reactors, 2.2GW of nuclear under construction, they are more than 2x behind schedule, 3x over budget. There were an additional 2 reactors started at the same time with the same design, but they were abandoned due to construction difficulties and budget overruns.
We cant build nuclear in any sort of effective way. Wind and solar get deployed all the time, are always on time and always on budget. They are our only hope for decarbonizing our grid, nuclear offers us zero help.
Nuclear cannot be build fast enough to deal with climate change. We need renewables until then.
Consider solar and wind. With variable production, there will always be time where you have more energy produced than you need. Why not use the excess to create hydrogen and store it? Now the energy doesn't go to waste.
Consider nuclear power. Nuclear doesn't scale down well- it's most efficient at a specific rate of production. But demand is quite variable- 2am on a not-so-warm-or-cold day, who needs all that extra energy? Why not use the excess to create hydrogen and store it? Now the energy doesn't go to waste.
In short, the energy used to create hydrogen can be very low, provided you have a cheap means to store and move it to where it needs to be, and provided you can deal with variable production rates.
If this provides an income for the energy producer, then it becomes more financially viable to use wind, solar, and nuclear- all non-CO2 emitters.
This is a very popular idea, but it doesn't work out as well as it sounds. The reason is that electrolyseurs aren't free, the capital costs are high. Not saying this is impossible, but it's challenging to make this economically feasible.
One more thought is that you can basically adapt all industry production to excess energy. I think the reason people want to do this with hydrogen electrolysis is because a) it's new and b) they associate both with energy transition. But neither means it's the best option.
We will need to rethink a lot of our economic assumptions in energy very soon. Solar farms are already designed to produce 30% more DC energy than their inverters can handle, because it's the lowest cost balance between PV panel capacity and inverter capacity. If somebody has an application for DC energy that can be co-located at solar farms behind inverters, and can be economical running only a few hours a day, there's huge amounts of nearly free energy already available.
That's missing the point.The problem isn't "what to do with excess of energy at peak times?", it's "where do we get energy from on quiet, wind-less nights?" Solar and wind are highly unreliable, so storing energy for is the necessity. Or we can use nuclear.
The problem you discuss has been addressed with tons of predictions and models. It's solvable with excess generation capacity, storage, and transmission capacity. Which path we choose will depend on the relative dollar costs and political costs of each. (For example HVDC transmission would likely save us lots of money, but is so difficult politically that it is unlikely to happen.)
But in any case, nearly all models show that under nearly all cost scenarios, we end up with lots of excess generation capacity, with curtailed renewables generation for a large chunk of time.
This is the future we are talking about, a future where we are meeting our energy demands with all renewables, and we have lots of excess generation capacity with zero marginal cost.
So now you're arguing FOR energy storage? Your previous post was basically: "let's overprovision and let excessive energy go to waste, instead of building costly storage infrastructure.".
If hydrogen electrolysis can become cheap in 2030, maybe we will even use hydrogen for some storage, but we will have to balance the capital costs of hydrogen generation and conversion back to electricity with everything else, which will determine how much of it gets deployed.
Energy transmission can be some solution here, but we might be forced to transmit energy across the continents (so, for example solar plant in Sahara delivers power to New York City at night) which probably is too costly.
The only difference is the natural gas plant has fuel costs and the solar doesn't. But both are big capital investments, so you could argue you're "throwing away" electricity you could've generated with that natural gas plant by not running it all the time.
Anyway, just my little contribution to how we think about curtailment. If you have a good grid connection and optimal storage, then you don't end up needing that much curtailment (say 30%), although some is basically always optimal. See: https://model.energy
Oh, also, under-sizing the inverter relative to the solar array DC capacity is not even close to a one-to-one curtailment example. The solar rarely makes its peak power rating, so undersizing the inverter by 25% means almost no curtailment in the real world. Effectively, you're increasing the AC capacity factor and it almost perfectly compensates (until you get very high ratios, but even then the amount actually curtailed is small). This has a bigger impact in places that have more cloudy or overcast weather. If you install more solar panels (which are a much smaller part of the total cost of the project than they used to be), you can compensate for not having as much sun without much increase in cost.
There's a reason you still see so many flare-offs in the petroleum industries, even though it's always been "burning dollars" and is now usually discouraged via imposed regulatory costs. Yet it still makes economic sense in many situations.
Why would people invest capital in capture technology that only gets used a fraction of the time? Whether it be at a solar plant, or a refinary, people will choose to invest that capital where it's use can be maximized. There are certainly situations where it makes sense economically, but many where it doesn't, and more situations where the capital can be better spent elsewhere.
Similarly, if a hypothetical town gets 15kw solar power during the day, and 15kw of hydro or wind during night, and needs 20kw backup/surge capacity from gas/nuclear/other, you've designed a system that requires a surplus of capacity, not just in generation, but also in transmission and distribution. In that context, surplus==inefficiencies.
This can be somewhat minimized by so-called smart-grid technology, but people tend to focus on technical capabilities and not what makes economical sense, which is much more limiting than people realize.
It's true that high efficiency catalytic electrolysis requires expensive materials. But at significantly lower efficiencies you can just do the same thing we all did with a battery in grade school. That's not quite free to build out, but it's close. And relying on low-efficiency energy storage to fill the gaps in production is still better than firing up a gas plant to supply the power.
It seems not unlikely to me that a lot of wind and solar plants might see building out a local hydrogen electrolyzer and generator (or just sell the hydrogen) as a useful choice.
But yes: there's no silver bullet, and there are a lot of very reasonable competitors in the energy storage market.
And "high" here is only 70%.
And this way, you only get around 15 grams per kwh.
If it doesn't pay for its own existence, it's likely a waste of effort. But if it does, you're adding capabilities & flexibility for zero cost. I don't really see a downside, other than tying up the capital.
Electricity has to get tens of times cheaper for it to beat steam reforming, and you absolutely can't produce hydrogen cheaper than the energy you put into its production, most of which comes from, surprise, hydrocarbons.
And obviously, you can't produce more hydrogen than the energy equivalent in hydrogen you consume. This completely crushes whatever ignoramuses thinking that you can "use hydrogen to produce more hydrogen"
While this is definitely the reason, there is also a bigger one - that the process of turning electricity into Hydrogen is fundamentally wasteful(Energy losses), particularly when the route is electricity->hydrogen->back to electricity.
Where it actually is the best option: and where most of the “Green Hydrogen” gas will likely end up being broadly used to me is looking like industrial applications like this article mentions (Steel production), along with ammonia for fertilizer production.
Capital costs as you mention (combined with utilization rates) - electrolyzers to be most economical need to run 100% of the time, meaning you need “excess energy” 100% of the time. With the implication that the energy will be from variable, renewable sources - there is a fundamental disconnect between these. A main reason why batteries and other techs are likely to win out in many “utilizing excess energy” over the long run.
One of the major improvements in modern electrolyzers is that they don't need to run 100% of the time to function. As costs come down, it's likely we can tap excess energy whenever it is available.
And you are missing my point: That as far as the options go for “tapping excess energy” hydrogen is overblown and overstated as a solution. Things like demand response and heating applications don’t have anywhere near the same kind of losses. Price and value is what actually matters.
The alternatives have their own downsides. Usually in the form of weight or raw material usage. Since the raw material of hydrogen is water, this could easily be much cheaper than the competition.
However because upfront construction cost is high, you want to use nuclear reactor as much as possible.
The problem is not of the energy going to waste or the plant being unable to throttle down. The problem is that fuel cost is immaterial; a plant running at 1% output power still costs 99% as much per day as a plant running at 100%.
That means that building 10% oversupply is tremendously expensive. If you're using it 10% of the time, it costs 10x more per MWh than the baseload power. If hydrogen is 11% as profitable as baseload, you are only gathering another 10% revenue, and the power is still 5x as expensive as normal electricity. That would be far more expensive than any other source.
You could easily estimate hydrogen economy would be worth >>10% of electricity... but only at the margin. Right now it's reasonable to say hydrogen is worth 50% of the value of electricity used to make it. For all regional grids in the US, daily peak is 30-50% higher than the daily minimum[1]. That's a huge amount of overcapacity to consume, far more than can be utilized by base industry.
Having >70% nuclear and/or relying on hydrogen economy to make nuclear economical is pretty highly dependent on hydrogen vehicles. Fermi math: 142 billion gallons annual[2] @25 mpg fleet efficiency[3] translates to .9 trillion kWh @4 mi/kWh, or ~25% of annual electricity. The bottom line is that it takes a relatively minor (~15-20%) overcapacity would tap out basically all possible uses for hydrogen.
[1]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
[2]: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/gasoline/use-of-gasoline...
[3]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-autos-emissions/u-s-v...
Where does this hydrogen come from? The vast majority of hydrogen for fuel cells comes from petroleum and natural gas reserves.
> New blast furnaces require trillions of yen (1 trillion yen equals $9.6 billion) in investment. Although DRI equipment produces less steel, the investment is estimated at less than half of blast furnaces
So they're building a much more expensive furnace to produce less steel. Wouldn't this create more pollution (not just carbon) because you'd want to hit the same outputs and now you need more energy?
I don't understand "zero-carbon" in these cases. You still need trucks to bring in the tools and equipment to build the facility. All of them use hydrocarbons. You have hydrocarbons needed for the roads. Even if all your construction equipment is electric (they're not) you still have all the massive amounts of carbon put in to producing the electric batteries, not to mention all the waste product that comes from creating lithium batteries.
Are they using all this coal and oil and then saying it's being offset by some credit? How would that even remotely work? You plant a thousand trees for ever square meter? What about all the hydrocarbons needed to transport those seeds, feed the planting crews?
Most "Green energy" is really just burning trees (woodchips).
This whole zero-carbon thing would fall apart when you really started breaking it down. It's marketing bullshit.
It's like buying a new EV or hybrid car, thinking you're helping the environment, when in fact the carbon impact of manufacturing such vehicles is significant or even greater.
No evidence presented that it does produce as much.
> carbon impact of manufacturing such vehicles is significant or even greater.
No it isn't.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQLbakWESkw
A quick google for mitsubishi hydrogen turns up several large scale investments they’ve made in developing alternative generation processes.
Is this one of those cases where you need to invest to produce something but that’s wasted investment if there’s nothing to consume that something?
Finding a niche market buyer is usually there toehold a new technology needs to gain traction, research, and investment.