Saturday, November 13, 2021

UNICORN TECH
Nuclear Fusion Is Close Enough to Start Dreaming

A world of cheap, clean energy may be closer than many people realize, and its consequences more profound.

By Tyler Cowen 
November 11, 2021

What happens if the coal plant is replaced by a vegetable field?

Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution. His books include “The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.”

The nuclear fusion startup Helion, which announced last week that it has raised $500 million, says it has developed new technologies that may make nuclear fusion viable — practically, economically and environmentally. It is too early to tell if its claims will pan out, but there have been so many breakthroughs lately that they cannot be dismissed.

The possibility of carbon-free energy generation raises a seldom discussed question: Just how much would it change the world if cheap and clean energy sources were truly abundant?

Keep in mind that one source of cheap, clean power will lead to others. Maybe nuclear fusion cannot be used to fly a jet plane, but perhaps it could be used to produce relatively clean hydrogen fuel, which could then be deployed in ways fusion could not. A chain reaction would occur, eventually bringing cheap, clean energy across the economy.

As an inveterate traveler, my first thought is that I would be able to get everywhere much more quickly. How about a supersonic or perhaps suborbital flight from Washington to Tokyo? A trip to Antarctica would no longer seem so daunting. Many remote places would be transformed, one hopes for the better.

One second-order effect is that countries with good infrastructure planning would reap a significant relative gain. The fast train from Paris to Nice would become faster yet, but would trains on the Acela c

Next in line: Desalinating water would become cheap and easy, enabling the transformation and terraforming of many landscapes. Nevada would boom, though a vigorous environmental debate might ensue: Just how many deserts should we keep around? Over time, Mali and the Middle East would become much greener.

How about heating and cooling? It might be possible to manipulate temperatures outdoors, so Denmark in January and Dubai in August would no longer be so unbearable. It wouldn’t be too hard to melt snow or generate a cooling breeze.

Wages would also rise significantly. Not only would more goods and services be available, but the demand for labor would also skyrocket. If flying to Tokyo is easier, demand for pilots will be higher. Eventually, more flying would be automated. Robots would become far more plentiful, which would set off yet more second- and third-order effects.

Cheap energy would also make supercomputing more available, crypto more convenient, and nanotechnology more likely.

With the relative plenty of material goods, however, people might invest more resources in status-seeking. Buying memberships into exclusive clubs — that select group of people who own an original van Gogh, say — might become relatively more expensive.

And limiting climate change would not be as simple as it might at first seem. Yes, nuclear fusion could replace all of those coal plants. But the secondary consequences do not stop there. As water desalination became more feasible, for example, irrigation would become less expensive. Many areas would be far more verdant, and people might raise more cows and eat more beef. Those cows, in turn, might release far more methane into the air, worsening one significant set of climate-related problems.

But all is not lost! Because energy would be so cheap, protective technologies — to remove methane (and carbon) from the air, for instance — are also likely to be more feasible and affordable.

In general, in a carbon-free energy world, the stakes would be higher for a large subset of decisions. If we can clean up the air, great. If not, the overall increase in radical change would create a whole host of new problems, one of which would be more methane emissions. The “race” between the destructive and restorative powers of technology would become all the more consequential. The value of high quality institutions would be much greater, which might be a worry in many parts of the world.

At least in the short run, fossil-fuel-rich nations such as Saudi Arabia and Russia would be the losers. Over the longer run, many commodity-producing nations would have to worry, as nations like China might find it easier to grow more of their own soybeans and stop buying from Brazil and Argentina. Drought-stricken areas with deserts and water problems but decent institutions could be some of the major winners; perhaps the American West would continue to gain economically on the East. All that extra land could be put to more productive use, but improving New Jersey might prove tougher.

As is so often the case with new technology, the challenges are real but the potential is enormous. I’m looking forward to whenever this new world comes to pass.

UNICORN TECH

The Race For Nuclear Fusion Is Going Private

  • Nuclear fusion has been regarded as the ‘holy grail of clean energy,’ but it is an extraordinarily expensive endeavor.

  • Countries around the world have been collaborating on experiments with nuclear fusion.

  • Private firms are now jumping into the race, and investors are ready to fork over huge amounts of cash for the best and brightest in the field.

For the past 100 years, commercial nuclear fusion has existed in a realm far closer to science fiction than to scientific practice. In fact, when English mathematician and astronomer Arthur Eddington hypothesized that our sun and stars generate their own power through a process of merging atoms to create massive amounts of energy, heat, and light just a century ago, he was very nearly dismissed as a quack. But since that time, nuclear fusion has advanced by leaps and bounds, from thought experiments to lab-tested experiments, and in the last few years, to major breakthroughs that hint that commercial fusion could really finally be just around the corner.

Nuclear fusion is sought after as the “holy grail of clean energy” because it is a totally clean energy source with the potential to create essentially limitless power with absolutely zero greenhouse gas emissions if the full power of fusion reactions can be harnessed by humans. “Simply put, nuclear fusion is the process by which two light atomic nuclei combine to form a single heavier one while releasing massive amounts of energy, the International Atomic Energy Agency explains. “Fusion reactions take place in a state of matter called plasma — a hot, charged gas made of positive ions and free-moving electrons that has unique properties distinct from solids, liquids and gases.”

The trick is creating an environment here on Earth that facilitates fusion, but recreating the kind of conditions found in the core of the sun is a tall order. Amazingly, scientists are already capable of creating man-made nuclear fusion reactions in controlled spaces. The issue is that provoking these reactions requires immense amounts of energy, and so far controlled nuclear fusion experiments have not been able to produce more energy than they consume. 

Experimenting with nuclear fusion is an extraordinarily expensive endeavor. The reactors that are built big enough to achieve potentially commercially viable fusion are massive, and require huge amounts of costly materials as well as years of research and development led by some of the smartest scientists out there. Because of these massive barriers to entry, huge government projects have led the charge toward nuclear fusion. Related: Metals Will Be The Oil Of The Future

ITER, an intergovernmental project located in the South of France, has announced that it expects to reach net-positive energy in its massive tokamak reactor by 2036, with a price tag of around $22 billion. China also has an “artificial sun” which set a record for a sustained nuclear plasma reaction this summer. But now, for the first time in nuclear fusion history, private companies are entering the race to get to commercial fusion first. 

In what can be seen as a clear sign that nuclear fusion is getting close to viability, private financiers are getting involved in the research and development process and funneling money into nuclear fusion startups. Just this month, Helion Energy, based in Washington State, was the subject of what is allegedly the largest single fundraising round for a private fusion firm in history. The company raised $500 million in this round alone, and will receive another $1.7 billion, contingent on achieving designated performance milestones. Helion’s reactor has already achieved the necessary temperature threshold of 100 million degrees Celsius, and the company says it will reach net-positive energy by 2024.

“Other private companies have set similar targets: TAE Technologies in California says it will be commercially viable by 2030, while MIT’s Commonwealth Fusion Systems expects its reactor to achieve this goal by 2025,” Quartz reported this week. “The UK, which says it wants to become the first country to commercialize fusion energy, has set a more modest target. The government has invested in a £200 million ($248-million) reactor which it hopes will be viable by 2040.”

Whether by causation or correlation, the nuclear fusion industry is heating up at the same time that the rest of the world is getting serious about combating climate change. Weaning the world off of fossil fuels in time to meet the targets set by the Paris climate accord is an urgent imperative that is going to be extremely hard to meet without serious technological advances. While commercial nuclear fusion still isn’t a proven technology, the influx of new actors to the market with lofty goals of achieving net-positive energy production before mid-century is certainly a hopeful development.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

World’s Largest, Most Powerful Wind Turbine Stands Complete

The third and final 108-metre blade has been installed on Siemens Gamesa’s SG 14-222 DD prototype offshore wind turbine at the test centre in Østerild, Denmark
.
Source: Siemens Gamesa

November 12, 2021, by Adnan Durakovic

With the final blade in place, the SG 14-222 DD prototype has become the world’s largest and most powerful turbine to be installed, taking the mantle from GE Haliade-X 14 MW prototype operating in the Port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

The SG 14-222 DD turbine model has a 14 MW capacity, reaching up to 15 MW using the company’s Power Boost function. The model features a 222-metre diameter rotor and a 39,000 m2 swept area.

The model is expected to be commercially available in 2024, according to Siemens Gamesa.

The 14 MW capacity allows one SG 14-222 DD machine to provide enough energy to power approximately 18,000 average European households every year. Approximately 30 SG 14-222 DD offshore wind turbines could furthermore cover the annual electricity consumption of Bilbao, Spain, the company said.

The 222-metre diameter rotor uses the new Siemens Gamesa B108 blades. Each 108-metre IntegralBlade® is cast in one piece using patented Siemens Gamesa blade technologies.

Additionally, the turbine’s 39,000 m2 swept area is equivalent to approximately 5.5 standard football pitches. It allows the SG 14-222 DD to provide an increase of more than 25 per cent in Annual Energy Production compared to the SG 11.0-200 DD offshore wind turbine, Siemens Gamesa said.

And Siemens Gamesa is not stopping there. As reported earlier this month, the turbine maker is upgrading this flagship model.

The newly introduced, enhanced SG 14‑236 DD offshore wind turbine, has a 236-metre diameter rotor, a 43,500 m2 swept area, and a capacity of up to 15 MW. The SG 14-236 DD prototype is scheduled to be installed in 2022 and the model will be commercially available in 2024.

 

Chemists discover new way to harness energy from ammonia

nitrogen
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has identified a new way to convert ammonia to nitrogen gas through a process that could be a step toward ammonia replacing carbon-based fuels.

The discovery of this technique, which uses a metal  and releases—rather than requires—energy, was reported Nov. 8 in Nature Chemistry and has received a provisional patent from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

"The world currently runs on a carbon fuel economy," explains Christian Wallen, an author of the paper and a former postdoctoral researcher in the lab of UW-Madison chemist John Berry. "It's not a great economy because we burn hydrocarbons, which release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We don't have a way to close the loop for a true carbon cycle, where we could transform carbon dioxide back into a useful fuel."

To move toward the United Nations' goal for the world to become carbon-neutral by 2050, scientists must consider environmentally responsible ways to create energy from elements other than carbon, and the UW-Madison team is proposing a nitrogen energy economy based on interconversions of nitrogen and .

The scientists were excited to find that the addition of ammonia to a metal catalyst containing the platinum-like element ruthenium spontaneously produced nitrogen, which means that no added energy was required. Instead, this process can be harnessed to produce electricity, with protons and nitrogen gas as byproducts. In addition, the metal complex can be recycled through exposure to oxygen and used repeatedly, all a much cleaner process than using carbon-based fuels.

"We figured out that, not only are we making nitrogen, we are making it under conditions that are completely unprecedented," says Berry, who is the Lester McNall Professor of Chemistry and focuses his research efforts on transition metal chemistry. "To be able to complete the ammonia-to-nitrogen reaction under ambient conditions—and get energy—is a pretty big deal."

Ammonia has been burned as a fuel source for many years. During World War II, it was used in automobiles, and scientists today are considering ways to burn it in engines as a replacement for gasoline, particularly in the maritime industry. However, burning ammonia releases toxic nitrogen oxide gases.

The new reaction avoids those toxic byproducts. If the reaction were housed in a fuel cell where ammonia and ruthenium react at an electrode surface, it could cleanly produce electricity without the need for a catalytic converter.

"For a fuel cell, we want an electrical output, not input," Wallen says. "We discovered chemical compounds that catalyze the conversion of ammonia to nitrogen at room temperature, without any applied voltage or added chemicals. This is the first process, as far as we know, to do that."

"We have an established infrastructure for distribution of ammonia, which is already mass produced from nitrogen and hydrogen in the Haber-Bosch process," says Michael Trenerry, a graduate student and author on the paper. "This technology could enable a carbon-free fuel economy, but it's one half of the puzzle. One of the drawbacks of ammonia synthesis is that the hydrogen we use to make ammonia comes from natural gas and fossil fuels."

This trend is changing, however, as ammonia producers attempt to produce "green" ammonia, in which the hydrogen atoms are supplied by carbon-neutral water electrolysis instead of the energy-intensive Haber-Bosch process.

As the ammonia synthesis challenges are met, according to Berry, there will be many benefits to using ammonia as a common energy source or fuel. It's compressible, like propane, easy to transport and easy to store. Though some ammonia fuel cells already exist, they, unlike this new process, require added , for example, by first splitting ammonia into  and hydrogen.

The group's next steps include figuring out how to engineer a  that takes advantage of the new discovery and considering environmentally friendly ways to create the needed starting materials.

"One of the next challenges I would like to think about is how to generate ammonia from water, instead of  gas," Trenerry says. "The dream is to put in water, air and sunlight to create a fuel."New photocatalyst produces ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen at room temperature without fossil fuels

More information: Michael J. Trenerry et al, Spontaneous N2 formation by a diruthenium complex enables electrocatalytic and aerobic oxidation of ammonia, Nature Chemistry (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41557-021-00797-w

Journal information: Nature Chemistry 

Provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison 

'MAYBE' TECH
‘Too risky’ to not use both battery electric and hydrogen tech, Daimler Truck CEO says


KEY POINTS

Daimler Truck is preparing for a planned listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in December.

The electrification of long-haul, heavy-duty trucks poses a set of unique challenges.


An eActros is unveiled at the Mercedes-Benz truck plant of Daimler Truck AG on October 7, 2021.
Uli Deck | picture alliance | Getty Images

PUBLISHED FRI, NOV 12 2021
Anmar Frangoul

The Daimler Truck CEO has spoken of the challenges and opportunities his industry faces in the years ahead, as competition heats up and efforts to develop zero-emission offerings face hurdles relating to cost.

In an interview with CNBC’s “Street Signs Europe” Friday, Martin Daum spoke about the current situation when it came to the cost of electrified trucks, emphasizing that a number of factors were in play.

“The first truth is, in heavy duty commercial vehicles you need such a huge amount of energy, meaning you need such large batteries, that such a truck always will cost significantly more than a combustion engine powered truck,” he said.

“The savings come if the price for green, renewable energy drops and the cost for emitting CO2 rises and then out of that equation you might get a cost parity, or in other … cases road transportation will become more expensive.”

Despite the above, Daum said the manufacturer had to go “straight forward to zero-emission transportation.” It’s previously laid out plans for zero-emission vehicles to account for “up to 60% of sales” by the year 2030.

The electrification of long-haul, heavy-duty trucks poses its own set of unique challenges. The International Energy Agency’s Global EV Outlook for 2021 has described long-haul trucking as needing “advanced technologies for high power charging and/or large batteries.”

Daimler Truck’s focus on zero-emission technology will put it in competition with companies like Tesla and Geely, which are also developing electric trucks. Daum was bullish about the future, however, telling CNBC Daimler Truck was “the pioneer in electric trucks.”

“We deliver, we don’t announce … we just launched our all-electric heavy duty truck in Europe, the eActros, a couple of weeks ago,” he said. “But that was a launch, not an announcement.”

“So how does our technology stack up to the others? We first need to see the trucks of the others to then evaluate the technology.”

Alongside battery electric vehicles, Daimler Truck is also focusing on what it describes as “hydrogen-based fuel cell electric vehicles.” To this end, it is targeting a network of 150 refueling stations and 5,000 “heavy-duty hydrogen trucks” by the year 2030.


In his interview with CNBC, Daum was asked about the debate between battery electric and hydrogen fuel cell. “We go for both because both … make sense,” he replied, going on to explain how different technologies would be appropriate in different scenarios.

“In general, you can say: If you go to city delivery where you need lower amounts of energy in there, you can charge overnight in a depot, then it’s certainly battery electric,” he said.

“But the moment you’re on the road, the moment you go from Stockholm to Barcelona … in my opinion, you need something which you can transport better and where you can refuel better and that is ultimately H2.”

“The ruling is not out, but I think it’s too risky for a company our size to go with just one technology.”

Daum’s comments come as Daimler Truck prepares for a planned listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in December.

'MAYBE' TECH

Canadian SMR to offer 'once in a generation' economic windfall - study

11 November 2021


Construction of a small modular reactor (SMR) at Darlington in Ontario will open up global export markets worth many hundreds of billions of dollars over the next several decades for whichever technology is chosen by Ontario Power Generation (OPG), a new study prepared for SMR developer Terrestrial Energy has found.

The report, prepared by management, engineering and project delivery company Hatch Ltd, was commissioned by Terrestrial Energy, which is developing the Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR). The IMSR400 is one of three SMR power plant technologies selected by OPG for further consideration for the Darlington New Nuclear Project, the others being GE Hitachi's BWRX-300 water-cooled SMR, and X-energy's Xe-100 high-temperature gas-cooled reactor.

The report identifies economic and so-called catalytic impacts if an IMSR400 were to be built at Darlington. In the report, Hatch estimates that the design and construction of a single IMSR400 at Darlington would create over CAD3 billion (USD2.4 billion) in total GDP over the nine-year design and construction phase, and generate nearly CAD6.6 billion of GDP for Ontario and CAD7.9 billion for the Canadian economy over the plant's entire 80-year life cycle from design through to decommissioning. It would support an average of 2,100 total jobs per year during the design and construction phase and 850 jobs per year in operation.

It also identifies what it refers to as the “catalytic impacts” - the broader benefits to the Canadian economy, including increased exports, first mover advantages, and "spillover" impacts, as knowledge gained may boost the productivity achieved by other sectors of the Canadian economy.

"The extent to which Canada and Ontario are able to capture the catalytic benefits will depend on the SMR technology chosen for the Darlington New Nuclear Project - the catalytic benefits are unlikely for a SMR technology developed outside of Canada as they will accrue instead to the country-of-origin of the SMR technology selected," the report notes. "When developing a new nuclear power plant technology, the technology developer is likely to work with its local supply chain to develop the proprietary technology and to continue to work with those same suppliers as the technology is rolled out," it adds.

Hatch's Global Managing Director Robert Francki said the study "reinforces" a strong Canadian supply chain. "The IMSR supply chain will create a strong strategic position for Ontario and Canada as nations pursue the enormous opportunities from Generation IV SMR technology and compete in a global market for zero-emission power generation," he said.

"This month, national leaders have been gathering in Glasgow for COP26 to discuss our planet’s transition to a net-zero economy and lay out credible pathways to achieve net zero," Simon Irish, CEO of Terrestrial Energy, said. "The IMSR, a Canadian Generation IV nuclear technology, developed in Canada with its many Canadian supplier partners, can make [a consequential] contribution to net zero for Canada and for Canada's trade partners, and the Darlington SMR project is the springboard. This is the once-in-a-generation environmental moment and a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Canada to build an industry of great export potential."

Researched and written by World Nuclear News

CONSERVATIVE PRO STATE CAPITALISM FOR NUKES
Liberals leaving nuclear's future 'to the market' while other countries bet big

'We have very ambitious targets and goals from a greenhouse gas perspective, but no concrete plans, in terms of how we're going to use clean electricity to meet those objectives'

Author of the article: Ryan Tumilty
Publishing date: Nov 13, 2021 • 
Its advocates say that nuclear power is the key to meeting the growing need for electricity while cutting global carbon emissions.

OTTAWA – While other major economies are making big bets on nuclear energy to get to a carbon neutral future, Canada’s Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault says the market will decide which carbon-free technologies replace fossil fuels.

At the Glasgow climate summit, which ended Friday, major economies agreed on the need to cut global carbon emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. To do that, means more power to charge electric cars, heat homes and even run heavy industries like steel plants.

The U.K. government gave famed engine manufacturer Rolls Royce $350 million this week to help the company build a new generation of small modular nuclear reactors. China also announced plans to build up to 150 new reactors. And France, which was set to reduce its reliance on nuclear power, announced this week it would instead build more plants.

“We are going, for the first time in decades, to relaunch the construction of nuclear reactors in our country and continue to develop renewable energies,” the country’s president Emmanuel Macron said in a televised address to the nation.

This was meant “to guarantee France’s energy independence, to guarantee our country’s electricity supply and achieve our objectives, in particular carbon neutrality in 2050,” he said.

For Canada, Guilbeault said nuclear will have to compete alongside technologies like wind and solar, which are becoming the least expensive types of power available.

“It’s not up to the government to decide which of these technologies will thrive. It’s going to be up to the market,” he said to reporters in Glasgow.


Why provinces are uniting to build small modular nuclear reactors


The Liberals have helped fund some companies pursuing small modular reactors or SMRs, an industry term for reactors that generate smaller, though still considerable amounts of power.

The reactors are still in the planning and development stage, but they’re promised to be safer and cheaper than current large reactors and could be built in factories and then delivered onsite. They could also be used in remote communities and they generate significantly less waste than traditional reactors.

Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said the government is supporting early projects, but they will have to prove themselves.

“We have supported the development work. And certainly I look forward to seeing what that looks like when they are demonstrated at scale and when we actually have a sense of what the commercial economics of those systems will be.”

Conservative MP Dan Albas said the Liberals are missing an opportunity to take a bolder stance and Guilbeault should be a much more ardent backer of the technology.

“Conservatives believe that nuclear energy is essential to lowering GHG emissions in Canada and taking action on climate change. By failing to clarify his position, Minister Guilbeault calls into question the safety and relevancy of nuclear energy and the countless Canadians that it employs.”

John Gorman, president and CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Association, said the Liberal government has done a lot to help the industry, but the country will need a lot more electricity to achieve net zero.

“We have very ambitious targets and goals from a greenhouse gas perspective, but we have no concrete plans, in terms of how we’re going to use clean electricity to meet those objectives,” he said.

Gorman says solar, wind are great technologies, improving all the time, but nuclear has to be part of the equation to meet the coming increased demands for electricity.
The Bruce Power nuclear generating station in Kincardine, Ont., produces enough power for 30 per cent of the province’s needs.
 PHOTO BY BRUCE POWER/FILE

He said the expertise and talent is available in Canada, but the government needs to send a sign to get companies building the next generation of plants.

“The part that’s missing right now is the actual signal from the federal government and from the provinces and their systems operators that we actually are going to have that demand for electricity and signal that we got to start building,” he said.

One company that is close to building is Global First Power, a partnership between the Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC) and Ontario Power Generation (OPG). The company is planning on setting up a small reactor at the Chalk River facility north of Ottawa.

Ken Darlington, a vice-president with USNC, said their reactor is a test of the technology, but it’s smaller scale, something that could be used in remote communities or in mines.

The reactor is the first to enter the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s formal licensing process and it would be able to generate five megawatts of power, enough to power a small community of about 5,000 people.

Darlington said there are a lot of northern communities especially that rely on large diesel generators and reactors like this could get them off those permanently.

He said Canada has a top regulatory system, but it will need some changes to adapt to the smaller projects that are coming. He said it’s not about looser regulations, but about ones that don’t treat massive power plants the same as the newer, smaller reactors companies are planning.

“The nuclear regulations, they’re all predicated around very large-scale projects.”

Darlington said there is a lot of hope in the industry right now, but the government does need to do more.

“There has been financial support to nuclear projects in Canada over the last couple of years. But do they need to step up? I would say yes.”

In addition to the Chalk River project, Ontario Power Generation has a second modular reactor proposal at the Darlington Nuclear plant just east of Toronto. It’s expected to pick one of three companies soon to build a 300-megawatt reactor beside the existing plant.

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault says nuclear will have to compete alongside technologies like wind and solar.
 PHOTO BY PHIL NOBLE/REUTERS/FILE

Four provinces, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick, have signed onto an agreement to work together on small modular reactors and its possible the reactor OPG picks will be used in other provinces eventually.

Gorman said there are a lot of companies working to make the reactors a reality.

“We’ve got 12 different technologies that are going through the review and licensing process right now. And they range from technologies that produce one megawatt of electricity up to technologies that produce 300 megawatts of electricity.”

On Lake Huron in southwestern Ontario, Bruce Power’s nuclear plant is the largest in the world producing enough power for 30 per cent of the province’s needs.

It and the province’s other large nuclear stations Pickering and Darlington account for the majority of Ontario’s power and have allowed the province to phase out coal generation, the biggest carbon reduction achieved anywhere in North America so far.

Chris Keefer, President Canadians for Nuclear Energy, said small modular reactors are worth exploring, but Canada should also be building new large plants again, because the country will need the clean power.

He said the Liberals and Guilbeault should have been trumpeting how helpful nuclear has been and the country’s technology.

“In my mind, he should have been saying, you know, we’re very proud of what we’ve accomplished,” he said.

The CANDU reactor that powers Pickering and Darlington has been exported to countries all over the world and Keefer said it is a tremendous economic opportunity for the country as well.

The Pickering Nuclear plant is set to be shut down in 2025 and when it does Ontario will begin burning more natural gas to make up the difference.

“We are a world class decarbonized grid, and we’re going to be going up to the middle of the pack again, which is just shocking in the middle of this climate crisis,” Keefer said.

Britain’s investment in nuclear also came with regulatory changes that allow the plants to be financed even while under construction, reducing their overall interest costs and reducing the cost of power. He said Canada could take some of the same steps.

“They need to include nuclear and be proud of nuclear as a green technology, which will encourage investors to do that and de-risk capital.”

Before Gorman worked for the nuclear industry he worked for solar firms. He said more solar and wind projects will be needed, but they haven’t shifted any country off of fossil fuels on their own.

“When I started in that field, we had 36 per cent non-emitting electricity on the world’s grids. And 20 years later, you know, today after trillions of dollars of investment and those incentives and all of the market reform and the huge rollout of wind and solar, we’re still at 36 per cent.”

Gorman acknowledges the industry has a stigma of being high cost. Pickering, Darlington and Bruce generating stations all dramatically overshot their initial construction budgets when they were first constructed, but he argues SMR technology will bring down costs.

Nuclear is also considered dangerous due to disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima. Japan and Germany both shut down most of their nuclear energy after Fukushima and both countries are now burning more coal.

Gorman said the industry definitely has work to do, but he is confident when Canadians get all the facts they will support its carbon-free power.

“The more that people understand the real facts behind nuclear and can get beyond all that stigma and misinformation, the more supportive they are.”

He said the world needs more power and needs it quickly.

“We don’t have 20 years to stay even keeled. We have to clean up the last two thirds of the world’s grids and then we got to double or triple the amount of electricity we have.”

– With additional reporting by Reuters
'MAYBE' TECH
Australia’s only working carbon capture and storage project fails to meet target


Chevron says it failed to meet Western Australia’s target of capturing at least 80% of the CO2 that would otherwise be released at its Gorgon LNG project


Environmental campaigners said the shortfall in emissions reductions at the Gorgon LNG project, pictured, showed carbon capture and storage should not be relied on as justification for allowing fossil fuel production to increase. Photograph: Ray Strange/AAP


Graham Readfearn
Fri 12 Nov 2021 

Australia’s only working carbon capture and storage project in Western Australia has failed to meet its target to lock away greenhouse gases from a major gas processing plant.

Chevron, an America-based multinational oil and gas company, was given a target by the WA government to capture at least 80% of the CO2 that would otherwise be released at its Gorgon LNG project.

But the company has said it fell short of the target by 5.23Mt and will buy the equivalent amount in carbon credits while also investing $40m in unspecified “low carbon energy projects” in the state.

Based on today’s prices for carbon offsets – which analysts say are rising – Chevron would have to pay between $78m and $194m.

Chevron announced last month it made more than $8bn profit in the most recent financial quarter.

The Morrison government is prioritising CCS technology as a way to lower emissions, even though its impact after decades of promises and about $4bn in Australian taxpayer cash has been marginal.

Environmental campaigners said the shortfall in emissions reductions at Gorgon showed CCS should not be relied on as justification for allowing fossil fuel production to increase.


Chevron has not said what kind of accredited carbon offsets it will buy, but analysts told the Guardian the cost to Chevron could range from $15 per tonne for some overseas credits to as high as $37 per tonne for Australian credits.

Calculated over a five-year average with the clock starting in July 2016, Chevron said it had missed the 80% target because of technical problems that delayed the CO2 injection into geological formations under Barrow Island.

Since injection started in August 2019, the company says it had captured and stored 5.5Mt of CO2.

In the 2020/21 financial year, the report says there was 3.17Mt of CO2 available for capture and storage from its gas treatment plant under its agreement with the WA government, but only 2.17Mt – or 68% – had been injected.

Chevron owns 47% of the Gorgon LNG project together with other joint venture partners ExxonMobil (25%) and Shell (25%).

Chevron said the joint venture partners had collectively invested more than $3bn in the carbon dioxide injection scheme. As well as buying offsets, Chevron said it would invest $40m in “low carbon energy” projects in the state.

Mark Hatfield, managing director of Chevron Australia, said: “The package we have announced will see us make good on our commitment to offset the injection shortfall, and ensures we meet the expectations of the regulator, the community and those we place on ourselves as a leading energy producer in Australia.”

Piers Verstegen, policy director at Conservation Council of WA, said when the greenhouse gas emissions generated from extracting, processing and then the use of the gas from Chevron’s customers was added together “the CCS technology would have reduced overall pollution from Gorgon by less than 2%” in the past five years.

He said: “This shows very clearly that CCS cannot be relied upon as a technology to allow fossil fuel production to continue and increase.”

Chevron said in an environmental performance report released yesterday that it would buy the 5.23Mt of carbon offsets and then surrender them before 17 July 2020.

The report lists several different types of offsets it could purchase, including from the Australian government’s accredited market, or from other offset schemes around the world.

The cheapest offsets – known as Certified Emissions Reductions or CERs – can cost as little as $2.20 per tonne on today’s market but a Chevron spokesman confirmed the company would not be purchasing those offsets to meet the shortfall.

Hugh Grossman, Reputex executive director, said other options open to Chevron would be international credits starting at about $15 per tonne or Australian carbon credit units (ACCUs) that were currently trading at $37 per tonne.

John Connor, the chief executive of the Carbon Market Institute, said Chevron would have to buy the offsets on the spot market. The price of ACCUs have boomed from $16.50 at the start of this year.

“This won’t be cheap for Chevron,” he said. “There’s a really tight market in Australia for those ACCUs with the spot price going up faster than house prices. It is important that [Chevron] gets high-quality offsets and work to deal with issues with the CCS technology.”

The volume of credits Chevron would need to buy is unlikely to be met entirely by ACCUs, Grossman said, because of a lack of supply.

“There would be question marks over the capacity of the Australian market to support that size of transaction,” he said.

A spokesperson for Sanderson said she would “have regard to relevant international agreements for carbon offsets and integrity principles which ensure that carbon offsets represent genuine and credible emissions”.

'MAYBE' TECH

Rolls-Royce’s Future Hydrogen Fuel Cell Module Could Power Ten Houses

9 Nov 2021, 07:11 UTC

One of the most interesting products on display at the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow was a hydrogen fuel cell module presented by Rolls-Royce. The brand’s Power Systems business unit has joined forces with cellcentric to create highly-efficient fuel cell solutions for emergency power generation.
 



With a minimalistic design and H-shaped front panel, Rolls-Royce’s mtu fuel cell element is a good example of future technology. This modern-looking module will be able to generate a net power output of 150 kW, enough to power ten homes. But its clean power is meant to be used as a backup for large data centers. Multiple modules can also be connected into fuel cell power plants for impressive megawatts outputs.

This fuel cell module is the result of a collaboration between Rolls-Royce and cellcentric, the joint venture set up by Daimler Truck and Volvo earlier this year. The mtu hydrogen fuel cell solution will be developed based on cellcentric’s fuel cell modules. Hydrogen is promoted as a viable alternative for fossil fuels, but it’s also considered a key element for climate-neutral telecommunications and internet traffic. These domains are linked to huge data centers that require large amounts of energy. So, why not make this clean energy?

Andreas Schell, CEO of Rolls-Royce Power Systems, said that the company is ready to invest heavily in fuel cell research and development over the next years, because it sees it as the answer for carbon neutrality. By using green hydrogen, which is obtained through renewable energy sources, fuel cells become a climate-friendly alternative. The goal is to reduce the CO2 footprint of large data centers that use a lot of energy.

The Daimler-Volvo joint venture intends to accelerate series production and install its fuel cell modules on heavy-duty utility vehicles in the second half of this decade. At the same time, Rolls-Royce will introduce pilot fuel cell power plants with customers in 2023.

Standard production of fuel cell systems is set to kick off in 2025, with an ambitious goal – more than half of the data centers should switch to power from fuel cells in the near future.
Now Climate Change Is Threatening Renewable Energy, Too
NOV 12, 2021
A wind farm in the Shetland Islands, north of Scotland Adrian Dennis/Getty Images

It was a strange summer in Glasgow. The city, like much of Scotland, is notorious for cloudy, blustery, and generally capricious weather, even in summer. But in parts of Scotland and northwestern Europe, the summer of 2021 was uncharacteristically warm, dry, and sunny, a boon for lockdown-weary citizens unable or unwilling to travel to favorite southern vacation spots. It was also eerily calm. Day after day, there was little or no wind, something very noticeable in a country with a reputation as the windiest place in Europe.

Scotland was experiencing a “wind drought”—something that may be more common than we think. And that sounds like bad news for the project to build a carbon-neutral future, an enterprise that hinges on renewable energy. Most renewables are intermittent, and while some forms like tide and sun are more or less predictable, others are not. The energy potential of wind, dammed water, and biomass depends heavily on climatic conditions. And if the climate is changing, as the science community unanimously agrees it is, this will have implications for the green energy revolution. Will climate change cancel renewable energy?

This is an important question, one you’d expect would have been near the top of the agenda at COP26, the climate confab in Glasgow. To be clear, there is no evidence that the wind drought was symptomatic of anthropogenic climate change. Climate science tells us that in northwestern Europe, westerly winds are generated by the North Atlantic Oscillation, a weather motor with two contra-rotating gears. One is a zone of low pressure (the Icelandic Low) spinning counterclockwise and the other is a zone of high pressure (the Azores High) spinning clockwise. When there is a large pressure difference between these systems, strong westerlies and cool wet summers result. When there is less difference in pressure, westerlies are weaker and wet windy weather shifts south. This was what happened this summer. An anomalous zone of high pressure appeared between Iceland and Scotland from April to September, a period some observers characterized as the least windy in the U.K. and parts of Ireland in 60 years.

But even if wind droughts are not connected to climate change, they are an illustrative example of how renewable energy is based on assumptions about how the world works, and the world is currently being thrown out of balance.

Take hydropower, which plays a crucial role in electricity systems. The people who manage electrical load essentially have one purpose: to maintain as perfect a balance of supply and demand as possible because imbalances can collapse the system. But nature doesn’t care about human demand, so intermittent renewables pose particular problems for load managers. When there is more intermittent energy than necessary or when it disappears when it is in demand (like when there’s a wind drought), grids can get stressed. In the former case, load managers shut off or store excess electricity. In latter cases, they call on other forms of generation to fill the gap.

Engineers favor hydropower for storing excess electricity and for filling the intermittent energy generation gap. And hydropower’s important enabling function in balancing electrical load illustrates the intimate relationship between changing climate and the ability of human beings to exploit renewable energy. Surplus electricity, including electricity produced in times of intermittent energy plenty, can be used to recover water that has flowed through a hydroelectric facility and pump it to a reservoir at higher elevation, where it can be stored and release to drive turbines when needed. This is known as pumped storage, an infrastructure often analogized as a giant watery battery. In the U.S., pumped storage accounts for 95 percent of utility-scale energy storage.

The problem is that not all countries have suitable hydropower resources and many that do have already fully developed them. In the West, moreover, big hydro, though it is a form of renewable energy, has long been out of favor on grounds it costs too much and causes too much environmental damage.

Also, worryingly, climate change is threatening existing hydro resources in some parts of the world, undermining the ability of load managers to cope with intermittent energy problems like wind droughts. The two decade-long water megadrought in the U.S. southwest is drying up the Colorado River and sapping the potential of the reservoirs and dams built astride it to store surplus intermittent renewable energy and bridge the generation gap.

The megadrought is also harming crops used for biofuels, another important renewable energy enterprise. Parched conditions stunt the yield of corn used for ethanol and also alter the biochemistry of switchgrass, a hardy crop that requires less water and energy, as well as cellulosic agricultural waste, in ways that make these substances less suitable as fuel.

The imbalances humans cause in natural systems trace directly to the imbalances humans have built into their energy policies. For all the hope invested in the green energy revolution, U.S. energy planners have only ever perceived renewables as a supplement to existing fossil and nuclear energy resources, not as a replacement for them. The Obama administration termed this policy “all of the above,” an expression that connotes big-tent political imperatives.

But the massive expansion both of oil and gas production and renewable capacity under the Obama administration had network effects that served to deepen the conundrums of renewable energy. In the late 2010s, the U.S. surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest producer of crude oil thanks largely to the massive application of hydraulic fracturing, a water-intensive technology that damaged water tables and made arid areas even drier. All that fracked oil and gas generated massive quantities of greenhouse gases that exacerbated climate change, and the resulting weather effects like megadroughts in turn undermined the ability of load mangers to use hydro to integrate intermittent renewables into the energy conversion mix.

As dams become degraded by climate change and are decommissioned by planners, solar panels and especially wind turbines have come to be seen as metonymic of the sustainable energy future. And public policy has subsidized the installation of much more intermittent renewable capacity than can currently be used. In the U.S., excess solar and wind capacity is routinely shut off. In the U.K., the government pays owners of windfarms to switch off the surplus. Oddly, these subsidized constraint payments constitute a perverse incentive to invest in still more wind generation, provoking criticism that the push to renewables is yielding limited returns.

In the U.K., wind generation capacity is so overbuilt that even in this calmest of summers the government still paid out tens of millions of pounds to keep the turbines from turning. Some observers hope to store intermittent renewable energy in rechargeable batteries at scale, including the batteries in electric cars, but these approaches bring their own costs and complications.

Questions of counterproductive energy policies and the relationship between anthropogenic climate change and renewable energy were not discussed in any depth at elite forums at COP26. Yet the popular mood overwhelmingly favored such a conversation, as indicated by widespread protests and street theater that culminated in a massive demonstration during the global day of climate action in Glasgow. Activists like Greta Thunberg criticized government and industry for passivity and hypocrisy in the fight against climate change. Barack Obama’s admonitions for the world to do more and for youth to “stay angry” drew skeptical pushback that referenced the former president’s checkered energy record. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson may also have misread the room in his COP26 keynote address, where he compared climate change to a doomsday timebomb that James Bond is scrambling to defuse.

Johnson’s analogy both expressed the urgency of the crisis and mispresented it. Climate change is not a single cataclysmic event that can be solved by a single heroic act. Wind droughts and other weather anomalies remind us that nature and society are dynamically intertwined in ways that are not always obvious. Environments and infrastructures together comprise hybrid entities that are neither purely social nor purely natural and that operate according to their own sets of rules. The historian Richard White dubbed such entities “organic machines,” a frame of reference surely more appropriate than the Bond bomb in conceptualizing a world humans have badly unbalanced. It will be years before COP26’s practical legacy can be known but in the short term the gathering can mark a moment to begin reflecting on the sometimes paradoxical organic machines we are constructing in the name of planetary salvation. Humanity has accepted that harmony and balance are fundamental to healthy ecosystems and energy systems. Now it faces the challenge of grasping the implications of applying ecological principles across the spectrum of human activity.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.