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pile-o-stone

NigeWick wrote: »

Besides the fact that the western diet is killing us, the short answer is yes. If, Permaculture systems are used.

I gained an interest in permaculture from our earlier conversations. I believe your wife did a course in it and you posted some links for me to research the area?

From what I have gleaned permaculture is essentially growing food in a way that mirrors nature rather than fights against it, so companion planting (or guilds as it’s called in permaculture) so that each plant helps the other to grow. For example planting garlic or onions next to other plants to ward off insects. Lots of different crops mixed together rather than a large mono crop.

This would seem to work well on a small scale, such as allotments, small holdings or m6 back garden, but on a larger scale I don’t see how the food can be gathered? One of the main reasons for monoculture is so the farmer can sow and then reap a vast field of a single product (wheat for example) using machinery.

I don’t see how this could be done if there are multiple crops in the field, some of which are ready for picking, some of which are not or where some are grains and some are root vegetables so the harvesting methods are different and harvesting one crop mechanically can damage another crop.

ed110220

GreatApe wrote: »

It's definitely a fascinating prospect

However economically mathematically easy to prove why it won't happen

Food eg rice wheat corn = 30p /kg retail (eg flour in Tesco)
So probably closer to 15p/kg wholesale
Do the math and it's only about 3.2p/KWh

Electricity costs much more than that
Plus any electricity to hydrogen to bacteria to bigger food chains is going to have losses in every step and costs in every step

So your starting point is off
You're not going to be able to use 10p a unit electricity to make 3.2p a unit food

However it might be more interesting in space where electricity could be as much as 10x cheaper or on Mars where traditional crops may be harder to do

I think you’re making two major mistakes.

First of all you haven’t looked into how much electricity the process would require.

Second, you’re using UK retail prices for electricity. If this was to be done at a large commercial scale it wouldn’t be done using UK retail electricity, but somewhere electricity can be purchased very cheaply. The cheapest power purchase agreements for renewable energy are now below $20/MWh and prices are expected to continue to fall, eg the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power signing a deal for $19.97/MWh for solar last year. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ladwp-plans-to-break-new-low-price-records-with-massive-solar-battery-proje#gs.4gdihs As bulk foodstuffs are already routinely shipped around the world, it’s not implausible to imagine such electricity > food processes being run in places with abundant solar or wind power but without nearby large electricity markets such as northern Chile or parts of Australia etc.

Sillman et al (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221191241830141X?via%3Dihub) give an electricity consumption for production of protein of 18.26 kWh/kg. At $20/MWh it would be $365.2/tonne in electricity costs. Whey protein costs about $1100/tonne (34% protein). I’m not going to breezily declare this to be an panacea that will definitely soon happen, but it can’t be dismissed on electricity cost grounds. As you can see this is not "my starting point", but something into which serious scientific research is going.

GreatApe

ed110220 wrote: »

I think you’re making two major mistakes.

First of all you haven’t looked into how much electricity the process would require.

Second, you’re using UK retail prices for electricity. If this was to be done at a large commercial scale it wouldn’t be done using UK retail electricity, but somewhere electricity can be purchased very cheaply. The cheapest power purchase agreements for renewable energy are now below $20/MWh and prices are expected to continue to fall, eg the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power signing a deal for $19.97/MWh for solar last year. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ladwp-plans-to-break-new-low-price-records-with-massive-solar-battery-proje#gs.4gdihs As bulk foodstuffs are already routinely shipped around the world, it’s not implausible to imagine such electricity > food processes being run in places with abundant solar or wind power but without nearby large electricity markets such as northern Chile or parts of Australia etc.

Sillman et al (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221191241830141X?via%3Dihub) give an electricity consumption for production of protein of 18.26 kWh/kg. At $20/MWh it would be $365.2/tonne in electricity costs. Whey protein costs about $1100/tonne (34% protein). I’m not going to breezily declare this to be an panacea that will definitely soon happen, but it can’t be dismissed on electricity cost grounds. As you can see this is not "my starting point", but something into which serious scientific research is going.

Lots of scientific research is nonsense that goes nowhere
Commodity prices for wheat = 23 cents per kg = 5.75 cents / KWh
Your idea to buy cheap electricity, First I am doubtful of the PPA for renewables being honest accounting I'm guessing they include lots of direct or indirect subsidies. Secondly if there is really cheap electricity somewhere why turn it into food why not run a line to export that electricity to somewhere Electricity is more expensive?

Anyway using wholesale US prices of around $40/MWh = 4 cents /KWh

To convert 4 cents electricity to 5.75 cents food you'd need the process to be 70% efficiency and for there to be ZERO capital costs and ZERO labor costs and ZERO land or taxes. Firstly I very much doubt you can get 70% efficiency. Just the electricity to hydrogen part will be not much more than that. You then need to turn this hydrogen into living tissue which isn't efficient at all and will probably be in the single digits efficiency range

You have absolutely no chance
Not without Free electricity and free industry and free labor
It might be possible if AI makes everything free
But then everything is possible when the AI arrives

NigeWick

pile-o-stone wrote: »

I believe your wife did a course in it and you posted some links for me to research the area?

I was going to do a course and then decided against it.

One of the benefits of permaculture is that it is comparatively small scale. This means that a lot of people can make money from it rather than huge conglomerates. Each specific area will need its own system in place so that there will be a large variety of produce from a reasonably small geographical area. Because there will be a variety of crops in a fairly small area it will mean less mechanisation and a little more human input.

The really big problem will be the changeover period from degenerative chemical & mechanical industrial scale farming to regenerative productivity.

Martyn1981

Just a short article on Manganese smelting and the use of RE leccy. For comparison, the company's consumption of 2TWh's pa would be a tad over 1% of all the UK's annual consumption. [Oops, tad over 0.5% based on UK average of around 350TWh pa. M.]

Macquarie wind to power Norwegian smelters

Macquarie’s Green Investment Group (GIG) is to supply electricity to metallurgy company Erament Norway from two Norwegian wind farms under long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs).

Two PPAs have been agreed to deliver electricity from the Tysvaer and Buheii projects in Rogaland and Agder, respectively, to Eramet Norway's Norwegian smelters.

Eramet Norway is a manufacturer of manganese alloys for the global steel industry.
It has an annual electricity demand of more than 2 terrawatt-hours and relies on long-term and predictable power supplies to ensure stable and efficient operation in its processing plants in Porsgrunn, Sauda and Kvinesdal.

GreatApe

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Just a short article on Manganese smelting and the use of RE leccy. For comparison, the company's consumption of 2TWh's pa would be a tad over 1% of all the UK's annual consumption. [Oops, tad over 0.5% based on UK average of around 350TWh pa. M.]

Macquarie wind to power Norwegian smelters

Using renewables on site makes sense as it lowers grid costs

However the same could be sad for gas fired turbines

Many electricity heavy industries would do well to invest in OCGT for electricity generation on site

With natural as as low as 0.8 cent per kWh in the US a 40% efficient gas turbine generator works out to just 2 cents per kWh for electric much cheaper than grid electricity

Martyn1981

A veritable smorgasbord of items in this weeks Carbon Commentary newsletter, and much of it close to home:

1, Portugal green hydrogen. Many new announcements this week of large scale commitments to green hydrogen around the world. In one example, Portugal said it would attempt to become the European hub for the gas, intending to use a new 1 GW solar farm near the port of Sines to provide the power. The country has access to probably the lowest cost solar in Europe – well below €20 a megawatt hour - and Portugal is well positioned to export hydrogen. As another indication of the rapidly growing interest in the gas, the UK’s ITM Power began the fitting out of its new factory in Sheffield, which can manufacture 1 GW of electrolysers a year, having seen a near I00% rise in its share price in the last month.


4, Land requirements for artificial food. In an earlier newsletter I mentioned Solar Foods, a Finnish startup making an edible protein using hydrogen from electrolysis and captured CO2. Critics have questioned the feasibility of the Solar Foods approach, focusing on the land area requirements for the renewable energy necessary to make hydrogen. These concerns are mistaken; the energy we need from food is about 3 kWh per day (compared to about 100 kWh for the rest of daily life in a typical industrial country). At Solar Foods’ claimed electricity to food efficiency of 20% the total need would be 15 kWh per person per day to cover all food requirements. Even in a densely-populated, poor sun country such as the UK, this would only require about 3.5% of the landmass to be covered in solar panels, compared to over 50% for conventional agriculture today.

5, Capital markets and climate change. This week’s letter from BlackRock suggested that fund manager has finally begun to realise that environmental issues threaten company valuations. In the last two years, these long annual messages only used the word ‘climate’ once, but 2020’s letter was concerned with little else. CEO Larry Fink writes that ‘climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects’. ‘We will see changes in capital allocation more quickly than changes to the climate itself’. But how deep is the commitment to actually shifting funds towards the low-carbon sector? These letters are far from clear. In a separate letter to investors, Fink also wrote that ‘the portfolios we manage will continue to hold exposure to the hydrocarbon economy as the transition advances’. Coincidentally, we had a reminder that BlackRock’s conversion into an investor concerned about climate change has come approximately 10 years too late. A study showed that the share price of the international oil majors barely shifted in the last decade, compared to a 200% increase in the S+P500. The top five majors paid out $200 billion in dividends more than their net cash flow after investment. This is a significant fraction of their current $1,200 billion valuation. Even before Larry Fink starts selling their shares - if this is BlackRock's intention - the oil majors are actually liquidating themselves already.

6, Capacity additions. The US will see over 30 GW of new wind or solar this year, providing three quarters of new capacity. Additions of both solar and wind will be all-time records, says the official Energy Information Administration (EIA). Retirements of old coal and gas plants (9.5 GW) will exceed the total fossil fuel capacity additions this year (9.3 GW).


9, Zero-carbon housing. Larger scale developments of genuinely zero carbon housing at moderate cost are rare around the world. Getting to 'net zero' in the use of the building is not difficult, but the carbon costs of the construction are substantial. A proposed development in South Wales will use cross-laminated timber (CLT) construction, which stores carbon in the wood, to balance the emissions from the concrete foundations when the buildings are constructed. CLT allows wood to replace metals in many applications in building construction. Day-to-day carbon neutrality will be provided by PV and heat pumps. Storage of energy will both in batteries and thermal stores.

10, Cost of steel made from hydrogen. I wrote a post on the likely cost of moving to hydrogen as the means of turning ore into metallic iron, responsible currently for about 7% of global emissions. The new hydrogen technology – as yet untested at scale – seems likely to become the favoured choice of European steelmakers, but Chinese producers are more interested in carbon capture. I used figures provided by the Swedish steelmaker SSAB to estimate how much more steel would cost if made by hydrogen. With low Swedish electricity prices, hydrogen made from electrolysis would add about €57 to the cost of a tonne of steel (less than 10% of the unfinished steel price). A €30/tonne carbon tax – barely higher than today’s European trading scheme prices – would equalise the energy costs of conventional blast furnace steel and steel made using hydrogen. SSAB is cautious but suggests the hydrogen route is commercially viable. It looks for 100% decarbonisation by 2045 for its 6 million tonnes of high quality steel.

GreatApe

If global warming induced by CO2 is so negative could heating be reserved for negative CO2 emmissions? It's the most difficult to electrify and perhaps the easiest one to do CCS with

For instance could you repalce gas boilers where gas comes in and co2 is emmited into the air with say bio oil boilers where the gas infrastructure is instead used to take away the CO2 from the oil burnt in the boiler?

Something like 50 million tons a year could be CCS from UK homes going from gas boilers emitting CO2 into the air to becoming bio oil boilers taking co2 out the atmosphere and pumping them back through the same pipes etc back into discussed gas fields.

For an idea of cost bio oils cost about 6p/KWh in large quantities
So more expensive than gas but cheaper than electricity
Storage is also easy unlike storage for electricity
And it would give negative emmissions
Lots of side effects though
Not least the fact that the quantities that would be needed are vast
And adding more land use to growing energy is probably not the best of ideas

Martyn1981

Nice news, at least to find out that we are moving ahead already at a rate that removes the need for additional investment in gas.

EU could waste €29bn on gas projects despite climate action plan

The European Investment Bank risks wasting €29bn (£25bn) of EU taxpayers’ money by overinvesting in gas projects which will be unnecessary under Europe’s climate action plans, according to a report.

The EIB vowed late last year to end its support for fossil fuels within the next two years to become the world’s first “climate bank”, but 32 gas projects are still eligible for funding before the crackdown.

The majority of these projects would waste billions of euros of taxpayers’ money, according to Artelys, an independent data science company, because they would be left as “stranded assets” in the move towards cleaner energy.

The report warns that gas investments will be unnecessary in the decades ahead because Europe already has enough infrastructure – such as pipelines and processing plants – to meet the continent’s future demand.

Under Europe’s climate action roadmap, gas demand is expected to fall by almost 30% by 2030 compared with 2015 levels. But even in scenarios in which gas demand climbs higher, the report found that new investments in gas infrastructure would be “superfluous” from an economic perspective.

The report said Europe’s existing gas projects could even withstand a wide range of extreme disruptions to gas pipelines, including year-long supply shocks to gas from Ukraine, Belarus or Algeria, by importing shipments of liquefied natural gas through existing port terminals.

Martyn1981

The pressure on Big Oil regarding their decades long mis-information campaigning is not letting up:

Big oil is the new big tobacco. Congress must use its power to investigate

In reality, today’s climate chaos is big oil’s legacy, not ours. Unlike the rest of us, the fossil fuel industry saw this climate chaos coming, then literally and figuratively added fuel to the fire, doubling down on a business model incompatible with the science of stopping global warming; buying political inaction; and building a global climate denial and delay machine that has confused the public and fomented distrust of science, media and government.

In October last year, the US Congress began to investigate this history. Before a packed audience at a congressional subcommittee hearing titled Examining the Oil Industry’s Efforts to Suppress the Truth about Climate Change, the Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questioned the climate scientist Dr Martin Hoffert about his collaborative research with Exxon in the 1980s.

“So in 1982,” she said, referring to a recently uncovered internal company memo containing a graph of global carbon dioxide and temperature levels rising over time, “1982 – seven years before I was even born – Exxon accurately predicted that by this year, 2019, the Earth would hit a carbon dioxide concentration of 415 parts per million and a temperature increase of 1C. Dr Hoffert, is that correct?”

“We were excellent scientists,” answered the former New York University physics professor, triggering laughter from the audience.

“Yes, you were; yes, you were,” the congresswoman agreed. “So they knew.”

Investigative journalism and peer-reviewed research, including our own, clearly demonstrate that the fossil fuel regime has deliberately denied Americans and Congress their right to be accurately informed about the climate crisis, just as tobacco companies misled Americans about the harms of smoking. From strategy to networks to personnel to rhetoric, the fossil fuel regime’s efforts to deny and delay come straight out of big tobacco’s playbook.

The historical record is incontrovertible. As we summarize in a recent report, the fossil fuel industry’s own internal documents reveal that it has been studying CO2 pollution for more than 60 years. As early as the 1950s, it knew its products had the potential to change the climate. By the late 1970s and early 80s, Exxon scientists were explicitly aware that burning fossil fuels could lead to what they called “catastrophic” global warming. In 1986, an internal “greenhouse effect working group” at Shell concluded: “The changes in climate … may be the greatest in recorded history.”

But instead of taking action or warning the public, fossil fuel interests stayed quiet. Then, in the late 1980s and early 90s, when global warming finally caught the world’s attention, the carbon majors sprang to action and took the low road, spending billions of dollars over the next 30 years on advertising and lobbying challenging science, slandering scientists and attacking policies to protect their profits. In so doing, they have undermined – and continue to undermine – Americans’ chances of a just and stable future.