Technically, carbon-free competitive energy may not be so hard

I was recently surprised to find how low operating costs can be for wind energy. At suitable sites, operating costs after initial depreciation (only three years for payback on a wind tower in some cases) are now below those of thermal power, as evidenced by the fact that wind energy is being installed in India and China where the environment is hardly considered at all. This is for average utilisation, allowing for when the wind does not blow. The latter is limiting factor on the proportion of power which can be generated by wind, not its costs - there has to be back up power for windless days.

This report indicates that in Australia, at suitable sites (coastal sites in the very hot N.W Australian desert) a solar thermal energy tower could produce electricity for under 4.5c/KWh, virtually all the amortisation of capital costs. Even if initally out by a factor of 2, then with a normal experience curve, it looks pretty competitive. The best sites are a long way from consumers, except in a few places like southern Spain and southern California, but as discussed in the last blog the best potential for this technology is to make cheap ammonia for fuel

It may prove to be cheaper and easier, with limited technical risk, to replace carbon fuels without resorting to the difficulties of carbon sequestration or nuclear power (although I do regard the latter as the lesser of two evils compared to CO2 emissions). It just requires will, enormous investment, and above all sufficiently high long term price signals for carbon fuels. This probably does require carbon taxes otherwise coal replaces oil, and coal is even worse for carbon emissions - but at the cost numbers above, perhaps not.

So why are we risking destroying the world if it is not so hard to solve? Inertia, ignorance, vested interests and more charitably huge risks on future prices to evaluate projects. If governments across the world (and especially America and China) are serious about a "Manhattan project" on energy, then underwriting this risk may be the best way to proceed

While ammonia does look like a good substitute for gasoline and diesel for land and sea transport, upon reflection the numbers do not add up so well for aviation. Some sort of biofuel may have to be a second best here.

I doubt if "peak oil" will help in time. Raw materials running out is very rare. There is probably plenty of unexploited oil in Russia, and in Saudi, Aramco still caps wells when they stop producing under natural pressure i.e when plenty is left underground. In any case the danger is that China and India especially would then turn even more to coal, even worse for carbon emissions than oil. This chilling article (no pun intended) reinforces the idea that we must act in the next ten years, and cannot depend on the unaided help of energy markets.

More on Ammonia

The Engineer Poet is dismissive of chemical energy transporters for renewable energy, whether hydrogen or ammonia (which after all, is a convenient way of transporting hydrogen). He has a point: direct use of electricity in, for example, fuel cells has much better efficiencies and therefore shouldbe cheaper.

Certainly generating electricity and then producing hydrogen by electrolysis is not on, in efficiency or cost terms. For thermochemical production of hydrogen using S-I or Ca-Br as a catalyst, however, from solar heat or off-peak nuclear, theoretical efficiencies are in the 40-50% range, which compares with electricity generation. These technologies have not yet been developed outside the lab. Why? –because steam cracking of natural gas to make hydrogen (the process used today) is 70-80% efficient, but that produces CO2, and would be pointless for a fuel anyway (just use the natural gas directly)

The key fact however is that there will be a continued need for chemical storage of energy . Most renewables are intermittent and/or a long way from the consumer, given long distance power transmission losses (or not even feasible – Australian solar power sold to China?) Direct distribution and storage of hydrogen is a nightmare. There seems no potential alternative for planes to a chemical fuel, and the elites of the world would rather wreck the world’s climate than give up flying. Yes, oil is a better storage medium than ammonia, but if anyone can come up with a better alternative that does not have those dratted C atoms somewhere in the molecule, please let me know.

Theoretical efficiency isn’t everything, otherwise the internal combustion engine and the steam turbine would be long gone. We have been promised fuel cells and high capacity traction batteries for decades – where are they? The world has got to change its whole energy and transportation within two decades or we are climatically wrecked - the less technological change or technical risk involved, the more likely this is to happen. This path minimises the risk, even if it less than ideally efficient.

The Ammonia Economy

There has been a lot of discussion about "the hydrogen economy" as an alternative to fossil fuels. Some people think it is an alternative energy source, while it is just a transmission medium, and not, in my opinion, a very good one.

The great advantage is that it burns cleanly to produce only water.This is outweighed by the numerous disadvantages. Energy density is low, it would take three times as much hydrogen through a pipeline as natural gas to transmit the same amount of energy. Moreover hydrogen makes normal pipeline steel brittle, and although in theory it works in internal combustion engines, the same embrittlement problem occurs. Liquefaction is horribly difficult (the lightest element of all only liquifies below -200deg C) and although it can be stored in metal hydrides, a hydride fuel tank would weigh a lot and have limited capacity. Hydrogen is highly explosive

There is however an alternative. Ammonia is easily made from nitrogen and hydrogen with an iron catalyst by the Haber-Bosch process and widely used to make fertilisers. It is easily liquefied (-33deg C, a higher temperature than natural gas) and easily and safely transported, by tanker, ship or pipeline - there are already extensive ammonia pipelines in the US to serve agriculture. It does not burn in air at atmospheric pressure, but will do so readily with air under compression, in either an internal combustion engine or a gas turbine (including jet engines). In fact it is a better fuel than petrol(gasoline) with an octane rating of 130 and delivering 10-20% more power than petrol. It burns cleanly to water and nitrogen, the latter accounting for three quarters of the atmosphere anyway. Surprisingly, it produces less nitrogen oxide emissions than petrol or diesel.

There are two disadvantages. While engine power is enhanced, fuel consumption by weight is two to three times higher. The biggest problem is that it is poisonous in moderately high concentrations. It dissipates rapidly in air, however, and has been safely used and transported on farms across the world for years, and its distinctive smell is very strong long before the concentration reaches dangerous levels. We also forget how used we have become to the dangers of petrol and natural gas: our cars are flying bombs travelling at up to 100mph, while ammonia does not burn in open air.

It is also quite cheap. Currently the bulk price for ammonia in dry liquid form is $250-300/metric ton, sharply up on two years ago as over 80% of the costs of production are from natural gas, which is used to make the hydrogen. Taking into account enhanced power from engines and lower miles per gallon, the cost in petrol equivalent terms is around $3 per US gallon, very much the same as US gasoline prices today (actual ammonia costs are two and half times lower).

Current hydrogen production uses natural gas, but there is interesting potential with solar thermal power. Such high temperatures can be generated with solar power that hydrogen can be produced thermochemically, several catalytic reactions being available to assist this (sulpur-iodine, calcium-bromine). If costs of solar thermal power generation can be halved - should be possible with scale, experience, and mass production, then the cost of generating the hydrogen becomes comprable to present day costs from natural gas cracking. The hydrogen then feeds an adjoining ammonia plant. The intermittent nature of solar power does not matter for liquid fuel production, unlike electricity production

The other point is that nearly all the costs of solar thermal are capital costs, and depreciated plants after 15-20 years would be very low cost, compared to today and still more so compared to post-peak oil. Apart from some of the hydrogen cracking catalysis (still in the lab) everything else in the process is either proven or low tech. Above all it is a feasible way to fuel existing land, sea and air engines. The great greeen panaceas of fuel cells and high performance batteries have been so long in development and with so little success that one remains dubious. It is the only way I can think of, to provide carbon-free flight.

Whaat is needed to replace oil for transport? About 15-20sq.kms of hot desert land near the sea (to get the water for hydrogen - sea water will do)for the energy equivalent of one large electric power station, which is not excessive. Southern Spain, Morocco, large parts of the Middle East; Southern California, northern Mexico; western Australia, eastern India (Thar desert); S.W. Africa, northern Chile - there is a long list.

Quick thoughts on "alternative" energy costs

I have been doing some research on the issues of costs, scale,sustainability and short term feasibility. Some very quick thoughts, if anyone wants to look further there is plenty on the web. The "benchmark" electricity generation would be costs at an efficient fluidised bed coal fired power station, some where around 3-6 USc/KWh, depending on location, gas fired generally a bit higher (and up to double a year or two ago) but more flexible and suitable for peak power.

Hydro: drowns valleys but otherwise wonderful, cheap but available resources used up long ago.

Biomass: am I alone in thinking this a short term kludge? At best carbon neutral, good farmland will be in short supply in the global greenhouse, and will encourage deforestation. Utilising wastes like woodchips and straw will be more helpful, but this will not solve world energy problem except at the margin

Wind: not so much higher cost than fossil fuel when the wind blows at the right strength, and a rapid advance in turbine technology, but just so unreliable: even if the wind is too strong (over 25 metres/sec) blades have to feathered and power drops. Even in Denmark, a fairly windy place and the biggest per head investor in wind farms, special connections to Scandinavian hydro grid are in place for when the wind does not blow, and capacity utilisation is around 30%, no better than solar. Massacres birds.

Tidal power: limited sites and environmental issues (turbines in tidal estuaries rather than barrages can alleviate some of these). Needs a lot more research. Great potential for the UK, especially Severn estuary

Wave power: lots of potential, but too early to develop. Big inherent problems with storm damage

Solar photovoltaics. Horrible costs, even allowing for a normal halving on "experience curve" as technology matures, still far too high for mass power generation. Exotic cells use rare elements like gallium, those using more common materials (essentially crystalline or amorphous silicon)have an efficiency limit of 10-15% per cent.

Geothermal: limited sites in volcanic areas where underwater superheated reservoirs can be exploited, attractive costs where they are, but even then no truly renewable. Sites are "harvested" in a few decades, and prolonging life by water injection has problems e.g water disappears down fissures, or can even cause earthquakes. Not everyone can live in Iceland. The really interesting development is hot dry rocks. At certain locations (not sure how prevalent, there is test development in Australia and Germany)naturally mildly radioactive granites at up to 5km depth (the limit for commercial drilling technology) are overlain with impermeable rocks and have a temperature gradient of 40deg c/km instead of the normal 30. Inject water down under pressure to fracture the rock, and pump up again at temperatures of around 200 deg C to drive turbines. Far too experimental to be developed, so costs cannot even be estimated yet, but has the potential to be developed quite rapidly

Solar thermal: either a mass array of parabolic reflectors heating up water or another fluid, or hot air from a greenhouse array being conducted up a solar tower where it drives turbines. Works well in desert mid latitudes (20-40degrees of latitude, plenty of that around the world). Operating costs two to three times normal power costs, mainly because unit capital costs so high (plant only used at peak power for 30% of time) and power obviously intermittent. However there is interesting potential to bypass power generation entirely, with much greater efficiencies: temperatures generated are so high that it can be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen thermochemically.

More about this in a subsequent post, and more about the obvious two medium term solutions, carbon capture at thermal power stations (sequestration) and nuclear

Climate Crisis and Solutions, an Intro

Returning to this moribund blog after more than a year. Why? Firstly climate change had gripped attention worldwide, even to the point of panic. The northern hemisphere has been extremely hot this summer, both in Europe and North America, (36C/97F is not much fun in London when nobody has residential aircon) while Eastern Asia has been even wetter than usual, with extensive flooding. The southern hemisphere winter has been unusually cold, but even this has a catch, as the southern jet stream is unusually far north and the Amazon rain forest is in the grip of a second year of drought.

The usual disclaimer that one year's weird weather is not proof of global warming is wearing a bit thin after yet another very hot year globally, and yet it is not an El Nino year. James Lovelock thinks we are past the point of no return but this lapsed Catholic still retains the conditioned belief that despair is a sin. Anyway as Dr. Pangloss' previous entries show, it is far too early to panic, the latter is only of use if it makes politicians sit up and listen. One has no hope with Bush, but even right wing evangelicals such as Pat Robertson are being converted to the reality of global warming by this summer's heat in the US, illogical and parochial perhaps but very useful. If America's hummer-loving classes start to think again, that just leaves the neo-communists who run China as an obstacle to action, and that is not insuperable. I have certainly been convinced in the past year that it is not a solar cycle, but really is human -caused for all or the most part: the sun's activity this century peaked in 1986, twenty years later it is still getting warmer and warmer!

OK, the debate should be over, but what to do about it? Technology is the key. There have to be carbon-free or carbon-neutral energy sources which are
- competive with fossil fuels on costs, no more than twice existing costs (that is within the level of market price variation of fossil fuels: they have more than doubled in the past three years)
- reliable and sustainable
- scalable enough to provide a lot of power quickly enough to make a difference, within twenty years max
- not too far out on the technological frontier

Another thing which is needed is a suitable energy transmission and storage medium to replace oil products and natural gas. There are problems with both long range electricity transmission and hydrogen, but an alternative (ammonia) looks very promising and can be used directly in internal combustion engines, in fact it is even better than petrol/gasoline.

Will explore all of the above on subsequent posts, but the promising thing is all the above should be achievable.

Cleaning Up The Environment: The Gradual Way

There are plenty of alternative technologies to burning carbon fuels to generate power, all of them with drawbacks, and generally lower efficiencies and higher costs. I do not want to debate here the relative merits of solar, wind , nuclear etc. but simply to look at what sort of system is needed to make sure that the world economy is incentivised to improve them and reduce carbon emissions. Burning fossil fuels and capturing the carbon dioxide may be quickest step forward anyway: not ideal, but better than nothing (probably by reinjecting into spent oil and gas reservoirs, where it may have the added benefit of improving oil recovery rates) .

Firstly an effective system should as far as possible use market mechanisms , essentially carbon taxes and credits. On a global scale regulation without market incentives simply leads to cheating, bad implementation, and corruption. There will be some of the latter with market mechanisms, but less so as decisions are decentralised and self-interest comes into play. Nevertheless certain conditions have to be met .

Examine the world free trade set-up (today, the WTO, and its predecessor GATT). Why does it work?
- it is in the self interest of any one country to introduce free trade even if all others do not: as long as other countries are willing to trade. In other words, it does not need everyone to take part for the system to work
- it is in the interest of countries to join up even if others are more efficient at everything they produce (Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage: a neat way of showing that economics is not all bullshit, as it is both true and non-obvious). This means all parties gain, there are no absolute losers
- advantages are progressive. A bit of cheating through susidies, non-tarriff barriers etc. will not wreck the system, as long as it is not too bad
- an important consideration is that there is at least one power who is strong enough to police the system. In the case of free trade, it is actually two, the USA and the EU. Both of them are generally for free trade, despite some glaring omissions in areas like agriculture and steel, and thus usually if reluctantly obey WTO rulings. In the case of the USA, WTO rulings are thus the only international law which is accepted to have precedence over the will of Congress (although it is doubtful if Congress realises or will admit the fact)

These two players are powerful enough to use sticks as well as carrots to get others who sign up to obey the rules, and incentivise non-members to join or even shadow the behaviour of members.

What about a global emissions system (whether Kyoto or something different). Not everybody has to join, but the major emitters do; too much freeloading wrecks the system. The biggest problem is that it does pay to freeload: you would be an absolute winner if you had no emission controls and everybody else (or even the majority) do. Thus policing of the system has to be more coercive, more akin to punishing lawbreakers than to maintaining the WTO.

Essentially it depends on America- without it nothing can be driven through, including getting rising economic powers like China to take part as well. Not only does the US emit 25% of global carbon dioxide for only 4% of the popluation, at twice the rate per head of Europe or Japan, but the right which is now in power is virulently anti-environmental. The key is any change of attitude among Republican voters, and it is not hopeless . Even some green evangelical groups (the What would Jesus drive? constituency ) are emerging. The problem is to convince them that global warming has nothing to do with other issues on liberal agendas. Too early to despair.

How To Cure The Environment (Oh, Yeah?)

I have been too busy to post for nearly two weeks, in contravention of all the rules about getting your blog noticed (not that anybody will, anyway)

It is perhaps just as well. Brand new evidence seems to settle the issues discussed last time of whether humans are having a major effect on the climate. Apparently ocean temperatures are going up in a way which is not compatible with natural solar cycles . Moreover 20,000 sq.km of Arctic ocean ice have gone in the past twenty years, and the same amount again will probably switch off the Gulf Stream (as a system "flip") and thus, ironically plunge Europe and North America into frozen conditions while the rest of the world boils.

OK the scientists may have got it wrong again but you have to trust the weight of evidence by now (even you New Agers and creationists use some modern technology, right? Then deep down, you too believe). On the principle that a small risk with catastrophic consequences should be attended too, this is the biggest issue facing mankind.

Th trouble is it gets tangled in with religious attitudes. The American right seems to think that it is unAmerican not to consume as much as you want, and some of the nuttier fundamentalists do not think it matters because we are close to the End of Days anyway (how dare they presume to know what God wants?). Europeans are just as bad: since they stopped believing in God, Marx or the superior race, most believe in nothing, (with slow but catastrophic consequences). Some, however, and particularly in nature-worshipping Germany and Scandinavia believe in the green paradise and the sinfulness of the modern world.

The net result is that America does nothing, while Europe foists a do-gooding and ineffective piece of socialism called the Kyoto Protocol on the world. Because America will not join, developing countries are exempt (including China, eventually to overtake the US as the biggest energy consumer) and the rest of the world is not incentivised to comply, it will have little effect.

What is to be done? At the risk of being boring, we need to keep the emotion, morality and quasi-religiousness out of it. I will try in subsequent posts to look at the following:
- gradualism (carbon taxes, mix of technologies etc.)
- radical new energy sources
they are the easy ones:
- we leave the earth to be a nature reserve and go and live in space colonies (interestingly mad)
- and hardest and most dangerous of all, a switch back to non-material goals

Global Warming : Real or Not?

This is not the place to discuss this massive issue in detail. There is plenty of information out there . For what its worth my take on the evidence is as follows:
-Despite some uncertainties about the accuracy if the temperature record, yes. There is far too much evidence now, such as the melting of Arctic icecaps . There was a cooling trend between the 1940s and 1970s, but that was just a blip over a longer term warming trend which now seems to be accelerating.
- Is it man-made? That is less certain. There is fair amount of evidence that the sun has moved into a cycle of activity which warms the earth more than at any time for at least five hundred years, and possibly 8,000 years. There is a strong correlation between man made greenhouse gas emissions and temperature, but that may be coincidence: correlation does not mean proof. On balance however it does seem that human activity is making the effects worse, possibly markedly so. It is like taking a man with a fever, and putting him in a hot bath.
- Have there been similar variations in climate before? Over the very long term, much larger: we are in a 10,000 year old interglacial between ice ages. A thousand years ago, when the Vikings sailed from Greenland to North America the temperature was similar to today or a bit warmer. Three hundred years ago was the depths of the Little Ice Age: In the 1690s it was several degrees cooler on average (this was when the pack ice reached the Shetlands, and a third of the population of Scotland and Scandinavia may have died of famine as the crops froze) . So far the climate changes have been within the 10,000 yr historic margins of variation, but there are early signs that we may be moving into uncharted terrritory (such as the rapid rate of ice cap melting). Does it matter, or is this just another apocalyptic scare story? Yes it almost certainly does matter, for several reasons:
- if climate models are correct ( a big if) then the rate of change of temperature will be faster than ecosystems can adjust to
- more importantly, climate systems seem to be non-linear: they can “flip” from one state to another very rapidly .The latter might mean for example that the Gulf Stream switches off, as ocean currents reverse, with dire consequences for North America and Europe (extreme cold instead of heat); or even scarier a runaway greenhouse effect as positive feedback loops make the climate hotter and hotter. This may have happened 250m years in the Great Permian extinction, which wiped out 90% of the world’s species and was even bigger than the one at the end of the Cretaceous which wiped out the dinosaurs. A possible cause is that global warming due to volcanic eruptions melted the methane hydrates below the sea bed, and methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. It is all a question of how one rates a small risk with potentially huge consequences. Thus your chances of dying in a giant meteorite strike, though very small, are still larger than you might imagine for such rare events. It is just that each event might kill millions or even billions. If there is even a very small risk that a runaway greenhouse effect could kill billions or even wipe out human beings, then we cannot continue to carry out such a massive uncontrolled experiment on the earth.