Climate Change Thread

[ReluctantSamurai]

I was never a fan of the hydrogen cells for cars thing

Fuel cells in general, or just for use in cars?

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Fuel cells in general, or just for use in cars?

Private auto usage is what I am leery of. They work well for fleet vehicles and heavier applications. I will admit that my view of this is also colored by my appreciation for the skills of the typical USA motorist.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I will admit that my view of this is also colored by my appreciation for the skills of the typical USA motorist

Actually, to date, the biggest danger is explosions of plants producing the H2, rather than the vehicles themselves. I don't particularly care for EV's much, not because of the cars themselves, but because of the glut of lithium and the 17 other rare-earth minerals that's needed to produce them. We've raped the land surface plenty to get these, but in order to feed the beast (so-to-speak) countries are going after deep-sea deposits. There is little to no regulations about how this mining will occur, and you know what that means...a SeaQuest DSV situation come to life.

The EU is ahead of the curve, somewhat, when it comes to recycling the minerals for all the planned EV's, but here in the US it's just talk, for the moment. I'm not holding my breath on that one as I remember how long it took to get lead-acid batteries into the recycle bin, but god only knows how many ended up in landfills or out in the back yard junk pile...

This is a pretty balanced discussion of the pro's and con's of BEV's vs FCV's:

https://youmatter.world/en/hydrogen-...ability-28156/

[ReluctantSamurai]

I know you folks probably think I keep crying Wolf! on this topic, but none-the-less, world governments better wake the hell up before it's too late or we really will see seaQuest DSV come to life (somewhere in the ethos, Roy Scheider is smiling):

https://www.theguardian.com/environm...e-the-deep-sea

A short bureaucratic note from a brutally degraded microstate in the South Pacific to a little-known institution in the Caribbean is about to change the world. Few people are aware of its potential consequences, but the impacts are certain to be far-reaching. The only question is whether that change will be to the detriment of the global environment or the benefit of international governance.

In late June, the island republic of Nauru informed the International Seabed Authority (ISA) based in Kingston, Jamaica of its intention to start mining the seabed in two years’ time via a subsidiary of a Canadian firm, The Metals Company (TMC, until recently known as DeepGreen). Innocuous as it sounds, this note was a starting gun for a resource race on the planet’s last vast frontier: the abyssal plains that stretch between continental shelves deep below the oceans.

The risks are enormous. Oversight is almost impossible. Regulators admit humanity knows more about deep space than the deep ocean. The technology is unproven. Scientists are not even sure what lives in those profound ecosystems. State governments have yet to agree on a rulebook on how deep oceans can be exploited. No national ballot has ever included a vote on excavating the seabed.

“This is now a test of governments who claim to want to protect the oceans,” she said. “They simply cannot allow these reckless companies to rush headlong into a race to the bottom, where little-known ecosystems will be ploughed up for profit, and the risks and liabilities will be pushed on to small island nations. We need an urgent deep-sea mining moratorium to protect the oceans.”

And here's the crux of the matter:

Mining companies also insist on urgency – to start exploration. They say the minerals – copper, cobalt, nickel and magnesium – are essential for a green transition. If the world wants to decarbonise and reach net-zero emissions by 2050, they say we must start extracting the resources for car batteries and wind turbines soon. They already have exploration permits for an expanse of international seabed as large as France and Germany combined, an area that is likely to expand rapidly. All they need now is a set of internationally agreed operating rules. The rulebook is being drawn up by the ISA, set up in 1994 by the United Nations to oversee sustainable seabed exploration for the benefit of all humanity. But progress is slower than mining companies and their investors would like.

So net-zero emissions is going to be the back pressure excuse to fuck up the world's deep-sea eco-systems, which we have little to no knowledge of, all in the name of "Green Energy".

History does not offer much encouragement to the denizens of the deep that the issue will be resolved in their favour. In modern times, particularly the great post-second world war acceleration of the past 70 years, more has probably been gouged from the Earth than in all of previous human history combined.

The materials for a built and manufactured environment are extracted at the expense of natural beauty, resilience and stability. For most of human history, this was considered a fair trade-off. The costs – cleared forests, scarred landscapes, polluted water, air filled with dust, carcinogens and greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere – were either unknown or deemed small compared with the gains. They rarely appeared on corporate or national balance sheets. Miners extracted oil, gas, coal, iron, gold, copper, lithium and other minerals, while leaving other species, remote communities and future generations to pay the price.

So we might see a return of the "Robber Baron" era of the 1870's, except that this time oversight will be extremely difficult. News agencies can't exactly send investigative reporters a mile or two beneath the ocean surface to film what's happening.

Stating the obvious:

Matthew Gianni, co-founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, said: “This is all about money – money for DeepGreen [TMC] and its shareholders and money for Nauru – and the fear that if DeepGreen doesn’t get a licence soon, investors will walk away from the company and both DeepGreen and Nauru will lose out on any revenue.” He said the case showed the need to shake up international governance. “The ISA’s decision-making process is seriously flawed and needs to be fixed.”

And who is the ISA (International Seabed Authority)?

https://www.isa.org.jm/about-isa

But, as usual, corruption abounds:

In theory, every country in the world is involved in the ISA’s decision-making. In practice, power lies with a small group of experts that is weighted in favour of mining. There is no specialist environmental or science assessment group to vet applications for new contracts. Instead, new contracts are initially made by the ISA’s Legal and Technical Commission (LTC), which comprises just 30 members. Their decisions can only be overturned by a super-majority of two thirds of the full council, which comprises 36 states.

That's like putting the fox in charge of overseeing the hen house...

The commission has a 100% record of approving exploration applications, for which ISA charges a $500,000 (£365,000) processing fee. Membership of the LTC is skewed towards extraction rather than environmental oversight – a fifth of the members work directly for contractors with deep-sea mining projects. They include Nobuyuki Okamoto, who established Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation, which has started its own seafloor exploration, and Carsten Rühlemann, who works for Germany’s Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources, which holds exploration contracts in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Many others have a background in mining or oil and gas exploration. Among them are the chair of the commission, Harald Brekke, who is a senior geologist at the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate; Pakistan’s representative, Khalid Mehmood Awan, who has worked for offshore oil and gas companies; and an Australian geologist, Mark Alcock, who is listed as working previously in surveying for petroleum and minerals exploration. By comparison, only three members are obviously focused on marine ecosystems, such as Gordon Lindsay Paterson, a zoologist at the Natural History Museum in London.

And, of course, shady deals already abound:

It is not just small island states that are complicit. Seabed resources are supposed to benefit all of humanity and promote sustainable development, but just three companies from wealthy nations have a hand in eight of the 10 contracts to explore for minerals in the Pacific’s Clarion-Clipperton zone that have been awarded since 2010: the Canadian-registered TMC (formerly DeepGreen), the Belgian corporation Dredging Environmental and Marine Engineering (DEME), and UK Seabed Resources, a subsidiary of the US arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin.

The role of these companies is opaque. None of the parent companies are included by the ISA in its list of contractors. A common practice is to operate through subsidiaries or by taking shares in partners in small island states, often in conjunction with national governments. This leads to concerns about accountability in the event of an accident: the subsidiaries are often small, which could leave poor nations with huge liabilities.

Look at the opening picture (in the article linked) of what typical deep-sea mining equipment looks like. Does that look like any of the companies currently involved in deep-sea mineral extraction gives a shit about environmental consequences? For that matter, has any mining company ever conducted business with the environment in mind?

Will McCallum, head of oceans at Greenpeace UK:

“Any claim of not being environmentally damaging is meaningless, as we have no idea now what that environment is.” “We have never entered a frontier and not fucked it up more.”

To date, the earth's oceans have mitigated global warming by absorbing nearly 90% of the excess heat caused by CO2 and other emitted gases since the 1870's. And noone has ANY idea how any of this proposed deep-sea mining will impact the earth's oceans ability to continue as a heat sink for our environmental irresponsibility. So here we are, about to gleefully run through the lush green meadow of net-zero carbon emissions, only to fall into the quicksands of exploitation and greed once again.

Today’s technology has moved on, but scientists and conservationists doubt that it is ready and the environmental risks are fully understood. They would like more time. Nauru and TMC have given them less. The countdown clock now has 21 months left, and counting.

[Montmorency]

Conceivably big news from China; ripe for a deep dive:

One year ago Xi declared a commitment to bring China to carbon neutrality by 2060, seemingly an improvement on previous goals. The news now is, he promises a precipitous end to Chinese investment in coal abroad.

Despite the country’s plans to become carbon neutral by 2060, its domestic coal production has nearly tripled since 2001. By contrast, the amount of coal produced in the United States and Europe has roughly halved over this time. China accounted for more than half of the 7.7 billion tonnes of coal produced globally in 2020, dwarfing the contributions of the next biggest producers (see ‘World’s biggest coal producers’).

[I can't get the chart on "World's Biggest Coal Producers, 2001-2020, to display, nor the other charts in the piece. Can anyone else?]

But China also finances the construction of coal-fired power plants in many other countries, to help Chinese energy businesses profit from overseas markets. Overall, China finances enough coal power abroad to produce 42 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power at least 30 million homes.

Most of this money flows to Bangladesh, Vietnam, Mongolia and Indonesia, but many African countries and some European nations also receive significant amounts (see ‘Coal-power financiers and recipients’).

China commissioned 38.4 GW of new coal plants last year, 76% of the global total of new coal-fired power plants, according to the non-profit organization Global Energy Monitor. Experts say that halting the financing of these coal-power projects is a good start, but add that the emissions they produce are dwarfed by those generated by the 1,000 GW of coal-power that China generates domestically. This is more than four times the capacity of either India or the United States, which are the next biggest generators of coal power.
[...]
Leaders of the G7 group of advanced economies — consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States [Ed. and South Korea apparently] — agreed in May to halt the international financing of coal projects.

Part of it may be that coal is far from the wave of the future it used to be 200 years ago.

Between 2014 and 2020, about $160 billion of Chinese-backed coal-fired power plants were planned or announced outside the country, according to the Green Belt and Road Initiative Center, which conducts research around China’s expansive infrastructure building push.

An analysis by the climate think tank E3G found that China commissioned 76 percent of the world’s coal in 2020, up from 64 percent in 2019.

But a decline in demand has dampened Chinese enthusiasm, as countries recognize the costs of continuing to invest in dirty energy. In some cases, the loans have gone to countries that don’t need them, and that’s led to the canceling of proposed plants.

Of the 52 Chinese-backed coal-fired power projects announced since 2014, 25 were suspended and eight were canceled, according to the Green BRI Center. In the first half of 2021, China did not announce any financing for new coal-fired power plants outside the country, it found.

There’s also the growing risk that coal investments will turn into stranded assets as coal becomes less competitive.

As of July, 37 countries were still considering new coal-fired power stations, a 43 percent drop from 2015, the E3G analysis found. Outside of China and India — which does not seek Chinese financing — Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan account for the bulk of the preconstruction coal pipeline, and all have announced some form of restriction on new coal projects.

China’s announcement could affect around 50 gigawatts of new Chinese-backed coal projects not yet under construction, according to Lauri Myllyvirta, a lead analyst who covers China energy trends at the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

In Indonesia, for example, research by the Institute for Energy Economics & Financial Analysis (IEEFA) shows that more than 15 GW of full or partial Chinese financing has gone to plants that have been commissioned or are under construction and could come online if the policy only applies to new projects.
[...]
"Over the last three months, the Indonesian government and PLN [the state-owned power utility] have been pretty much telling the same story: There will be no more new coal power plants except those that have already signed contracts," said Elrika Hamdi, an Indonesian energy finance analyst for IEEFA.

But without filling the gap, predictably... so withdrawing funding for the one should always be coupled by alternative funding for renewables:

Climate groups have raised fears that China’s decision could give a boost to gas, with Bangladesh and Vietnam already increasing its role in their plans.

Alternatively, it could accelerate the energy transitions in countries that have relied on China if past financing for coal were redirected toward greener, low-carbon projects, as Xi said in his announcement.
[...]
In 2020, renewable energy investments made up the majority of Chinese overseas energy financing, an investment report from the Green BRI Center showed.
[...]
China has been heavily involved in building out solar and wind projects, including in places where it’s also continued to invest in coal, said Lin.

One example is Egypt, where the massive 6.6 GW Hamrawein coal plant was formally canceled in April 2020 amid concerns that its construction would far exceed new energy needs.

Last month the government signed a nearly $300 million deal with China Gezhouba Group to install 500 megawatts of solar power across the country.

Meanwhile in Bangladesh, the joint venture Bangladesh China Renewable Energy Company Ltd. launched a bid for a new solar park in which China is expected to invest $500 million, PV Magazine reported.

“Generally, these have not been directly connected to the cancellation of a specific coal project but instead are responding to a specific call for renewables project bids from the country governments,” Lin said.

There are obvious opportunities to one-up China here for mutual benefit - healthy competition in international financing - but we won't take them.

According to Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center, China has provided roughly 17 percent of all overseas coal financing over the past five years and 11 percent of the planned coal plants in the pipeline.

The rest has come largely from the private sector. But much of that private financing has been leveraged through significant public funding and guarantees, said analysts.

Remove Japan, Korea and China and that’s virtually the death of coal, said Tim Buckley, director of energy finance studies for Australia and South Asia at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

Meanwhile, many (e.g.) deride hydrogen energy hopes for being an illusion of clean or renewable energy.

“Blue” hydrogen – an energy source that involves a process for making hydrogen by using methane in natural gas – is being lauded by many as a clean, green energy to help reduce global warming. But Cornell and Stanford University researchers believe it may harm the climate more than burning fossil fuel.

The carbon footprint to create blue hydrogen is more than 20% greater than using either natural gas or coal directly for heat, or about 60% greater than using diesel oil for heat, according to new research published Aug. 12 in Energy Science & Engineering.

“Most of the hydrogen in the U.S. and Europe comes from natural gas, using steam and pressure to convert the methane from natural gas into a so-called ‘gray’ hydrogen and carbon dioxide,” said Robert Howarth, the David R. Atkinson Professor of Ecology and Environmental Biology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Howarth, together with Mark Z. Jacobson, Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering, authored “How Green is Blue Hydrogen?.”

Blue hydrogen starts with converting methane to hydrogen and carbon dioxide by using heat, steam and pressure, or gray hydrogen, but goes further to capture some of the carbon dioxide. Once the byproduct carbon dioxide and the other impurities are sequestered, it becomes blue hydrogen, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The process to make blue hydrogen takes a large amount of energy, according to the researchers, which is generally provided by burning more natural gas.

“In the past, no effort was made to capture the carbon dioxide byproduct of gray hydrogen, and the greenhouse gas emissions have been huge,” Howarth said. “Now the industry promotes blue hydrogen as a solution, an approach that still uses the methane from natural gas, while attempting to capture the byproduct carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, emissions remain very large.”

“Blue hydrogen is hardly emissions free,” wrote the researchers. “Blue hydrogen as a strategy only works to the extent it is possible to store carbon dioxide long-term indefinitely into the future without leakage back to the atmosphere.”

An ecologically friendly “green” hydrogen does exist, but it remains a small sector and it has not been commercially realized. Green hydrogen is achieved when water goes through electrolysis (with electricity supplied by solar, wind or hydroelectric power) and the water is separated into hydrogen and oxygen.

On Aug. 10, the U.S. Senate passed its version of the $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which includes several billion dollars to develop, subsidize and strengthen hydrogen technology and its industry.

“Political forces may not have caught up with the science yet,” Howarth said. “Even progressive politicians may not understand for what they’re voting. Blue hydrogen sounds good, sounds modern and sounds like a path to our energy future. It is not.”

[ReluctantSamurai]

Two sort of conflicting issues concerning China's energy situation.

First---will China cave to renewed coal use to solve it's current energy crunch?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...e_iOSApp_Other

The situation is widespread. In recent days, factories in 20 of China’s 31 provinces have suffered a loss of power, forcing many to shut down production, at least for hours at a time. Millions of households in the north-east of the country have also lost power and found that they cannot use electricity to heat or light their homes.

Since the beginning of the year electricity production has increased by about 10% as the economy has bounced back from the pandemic. It’s just that the Chinese energy juggernaut has run out of steam after running down stocks of coal apparently in the hope that either Beijing would lift all environmental restrictions that increase the cost of producing electricity with coal or that world prices would fall. While Beijing has eased some emissions targets, world prices have carried on soaring.

Choyleva says Xi’s centralising zeal means regional governments have come under closer control from Beijing and resulted in a series of crises. A clampdown on bank lending led to the near collapse of several banks and earlier this month, pushed the property giant Evergrande close to insolvency. “It used to be that a crisis came up every couple of years and was dealt with. Now they are coming thick and fast,” she said. Evans-Pritchard said Xi’s determination to hurry through reforms forcing businesses to conform more closely to Beijing’s policy agenda is causing problems. “One broader takeaway is that the current disruption highlights the economic costs inherent in China’s push for self-sufficiency and decoupling with the west,” he said.

So if the energy crunch continues, is China willing to submit to a short-term slowing of economic growth, in return for renewable energy picking up the slack, or do they do what's easy and ramp up domestic coal production?

And this podcast is an interesting listen:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/aud...iction-to-coal

At about the 16 min. mark, the conundrum China is in (and other countries with large coal reserves like India), is what I referenced in an earlier post about how China, the US, Japan, and others respond to trying to jump-start their economies during and after COVID. In this article by CarbonBrief, after the financial crisis of 2008, the following years saw an increase in emissions as countries looked to cheap fossil fuels to help their economies back to growth conditions:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/global-c...ssions-in-2020

Personally, I expect to see a similar trend now...

I think Greta does too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwD1kG4PI0w

Meanwhile, many deride hydrogen energy hopes for being an illusion of clean or renewable energy.

I suspect this is a market generated opinion. Those with the funding and the means to produce EV's and other electric consumables, have the upper hand, at the moment. "Blue Hydrogen" is definitely not a viable solution to reducing carbon emissions as it obviously creates more emissions than it eliminates. "Green Hydrogen" produced by cracking water, is expensive, at the moment, and therefore at a disadvantage to BEV technology. But that's not to say Fuel Cells are a dead end:

https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-hydrogen

And this very overlooked synergy with solar and wind power:

Hydrogen can enable renewables to provide an even greater contribution. It has the potential to help with variable output from renewables, like solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind, whose availability is not always well matched with demand. Hydrogen is one of the leading options for storing energy from renewables and looks promising to be a lowest-cost option for storing electricity over days, weeks or even months. Hydrogen and hydrogen-based fuels can transport energy from renewables over long distances – from regions with abundant solar and wind resources, such as Australia or Latin America, to energy-hungry cities thousands of kilometres away.

The "You can't trust solar or wind to produce 24/7" is one of the leading arguments used by the fossil fuel industry to push back against renewables. Storing excess electricity in the form of H2 would go a long way towards alleviating that.

I still think geothermal is getting short-shrifted, in part because of the prevailing notion that you can only generate power if you are located in an area with volcanic activity, which is anything but the truth. And look at the potential:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power

Geothermal power requires no fuel; it is therefore immune to fuel cost fluctuations. However, capital costs tend to be high. Drilling accounts for over half the costs, and exploration of deep resources entails significant risks. A typical well doublet in Nevada can support 4.5 megawatts (MW) of electricity generation and costs about $10 million to drill, with a 20% failure rate. In total, electrical station construction and well drilling costs about 2–5 million € per MW of electrical capacity, while the levelised energy cost is 0.04–0.10 € per kW·h. Enhanced geothermal systems tend to be on the high side of these ranges, with capital costs above $4 million per MW and levelized costs above $0.054 per kW·h in 2007.

Getting the cost of drilling down is the biggest hurdle. But:

A 2006 report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that included the potential of enhanced geothermal systems estimated that investing US$1 billion in research and development over 15 years would allow the creation of 100 GW of electrical generating capacity by 2050 in the United States alone. The MIT report estimated that over 200×10⁹ TJ (200 ZJ; 5.6×10⁷ TWh) would be extractable, with the potential to increase this to over 2,000 ZJ with technology improvements – sufficient to provide all the world's present energy needs for several millennia.

All the world's present---as in current gluttony---for several millennia...

In the aforementioned MIT report, the conclusion (after 330 pages of analysis...) is interesting given the recent Congressional handout of an additional $1 billion dollars to Israel's defense budget:

Analysis suggests that, with significant initial investment, installed capacity of EGS could reach 100,000 MWe within 50 years, with levelized energy costs at parity with market prices after 11 years. It is projected that the total cost, including costs for research, development, demonstration, and deployment, required to reach this level of EGS generation capacity ranges from approximately $600 -$900 million with an absorbed cost of $200-$350 million.

Adjusted for inflation, that about equals what we just authorized for military purposes to Israel. Jeezus we are so effing stupid....

[spmetla]

So if the energy crunch continues, is China willing to submit to a short-term slowing of economic growth, in return for renewable energy picking up the slack, or do they do what's easy and ramp up domestic coal production?

I can't imagine China putting economic stability/growth over the economy. As a one party state failure to deliver basic goods such as electricity; especially with Autumn here and Winter approaching seem non-starters.

Last thing I can imagine the PRC tolerating is power cuts that led to discontent right before the highly visible Winter Olympics.

[Montmorency]

And this very overlooked synergy with solar and wind power:

This scenario would require pretty extensive uptake of solar/wind/geo, to produce excess energy at scale. But in that case, I've heard from hydro-skeptics that efuels would be a more efficient conversion. What do you think of efuels in general?

Meanwhile, pace a more hopeful article you once shared, insurance companies appear to be struggling to price fossil fuels and related investments appropriately, for cultural and for short-term financial reasons mostly.
https://prospect.org/environment/oil...-flannel-suit/