Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

Mixed bag of results here. Not great news regarding the US, when it comes to the environment and science, but it could (possibly) be worse, but focus on other countries and the UK, and things get far more promising. Hope springs eternal for the US?

Global poll of views on environment and science finds sharpest divide in US

People in the US are more sharply divided along political lines when it comes to science and environmental issues than in other parts of the world, new research shows.

Globally, people who see themselves on the left side of politics are more likely to be concerned about the environment than those who see themselves as being on the right or in the centre ground.

But in the US, that divide is much sharper, according to an international survey by the Pew Research Center. About four in 10 US citizens who are on the right politically would prioritise protecting the environment, even if it caused slower economic growth and some loss of jobs, compared with 87% of those on the left.

Only one in five people with right-wing political views said they had a lot of trust in scientists, compared with more than six in 10 people on the left, in the US.

In the UK, about six in 10 people said they thought the country’s achievements in science were above average, or the best in the world. Nearly seven in 10 said the UK government was not taking enough action on the climate crisis.

Martyn1981

Very tough times for those in the FF industry, but jobs in RE, electric cars etc are booming, so hopefully, overall, this is good news and a start to a very big transition.

What Happened To Coal Is Happening To Oil. Shell To Cut 9,000 Jobs

Younger Workers Fleeing Oil Industry, Some May Work For Elon Musk

These are sad days in the oil patch. US fossil fuel firms eliminated about 105,000 positions — roughly 20 percent of their workforce — between March and June, according to Accenture. BW Research Partnership puts the job losses at 118,000 between March and July. Most of the layoffs have been in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.

The oilfield services sector has taken a particularly heavy blow. The Petroleum Equipment and Services Association says the pandemic-related slump in fuel demand has cost almost 100,000 workers their gigs so far. Oilfield services employment dropped by 15 percent over the last year.

What are the rest of these graduates going to do? More than a few are making the transition to jobs in renewable energy and e-mobility. By many accounts, jobs in clean energy industries already outnumber those in fossil fuel fields. The Natural Resources Defense Council cited a 2017 report from the Department of Energy that found that clean electricity jobs outnumbered jobs in fossil-fuel energy generation by five to one. NewScientist wrote in 2019 that the US “green economy” provided 10 times more jobs than the fossil fuel industry. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, the EV industry accounted for 174,000 American jobs in 2018. The exact figures depend on how you define clean energy, and which sectors of the sprawling fossil fuel industry you look at, but the overall trend is pretty clear.

Martyn1981

Why am I not surprised. Next I'll be hearing that the Science Denier General (and his wife) have caught the 'hoax/fake news' pandemic!

UK held private talks with fossil fuel firms about Glasgow Cop26

Fossil fuel firms have held a series of private meetings with UK government officials in an attempt to be part of next year’s crucial global climate talks, which are to be held in Scotland.

Documents show that some of the world’s biggest polluting corporations have been lobbying the government, offering money in return for exposure at Cop26 and in one case saying they could act as an intermediary between UK officials and other governments around the world.

The government has been widely criticised for its lack of preparation for next year’s delayed climate summit in Glasgow, and the revelation that it has found time to discuss the summit with three fossil fuel firms during at least 13 meetings in the past year have caused concern.

Martyn1981

No pressure then.

A second Trump term would be 'game over' for the climate, says top scientist

Michael Mann, one of the most eminent climate scientists in the world, believes averting climate catastrophe on a global scale would be “essentially impossible” if Donald Trump is re-elected.

A professor at Penn State University, Mann, 54, has published hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers, testified numerous times before Congress and appeared frequently in the news media. He is also active on Twitter, where earlier this year he declared: “A second Trump term is game over for the climate – really!”, a statement he reaffirmed in an interview with the Guardian and Covering Climate Now.

“If we are going to avert ever more catastrophic climate change impacts, we need to limit warming below a degree and a half Celsius, a little less than three degrees Fahrenheit,” Mann said. “Another four years of what we’ve seen under Trump, which is to outsource environmental and energy policy to the polluters and dismantle protections put in place by the previous administration … would make that essentially impossible.”

None of Mann’s 200-plus scientific papers is more famous than the so-called “hockey stick study”, which Nature published on Earth Day of 1998. With two co-authors, Mann demonstrated that global temperature had been trending downward for the previous one thousand years. Graphed, this line was the long handle of the hockey stick, which surged abruptly upwards in about 1950 – represented by the blade of the stick – to make the 1990s the warmest decade in “at least the last millennium”.

Martyn1981

Harmony to reign across Europe!

EU backs Baltic interconnector

The EU has awarded €720m from the Connecting Europe Facility to link the Baltic energy grid with the rest of the Europe, helping to bring renewable energy to the region from all over the bloc.

Martyn1981

I think this is huge news (my only doubts are based on my lack of ability to fully digest it).
It would appear that new gas generation in the US is in decline, whilst new RE generation is growing. This is based on the pipeline of new capacity (note capacity, as of course gas has a higher capacity factor than wind and PV) which for gas is falling (despite coal generation closing), but for RE and storage it's growing, and it seems to be largely based on economics.
If these conclusions are correct, then new gas generation in the US has been declining for a few years, and I'd suspect there is simply no coming back once the economics are against you.
Once RE (and then RE + storage) is cheaper than existing gas generation, it's game over.

Rocky Mountain Institute Study Shows Renewables Are Kicking Natural Gas To The Curb

After analyzing the most recent data from two of America’s largest electricity markets — ERCOT in Texas and PJM in the Northeast — the Rocky Mountain Institute has come to a startling conclusion. Renewables are muscling in on natural gas as the preferred choice for new electricity generation. In fact, according to RMI, what happened to coal is now happening to gas. What is needed, the organization argues, is a move away from the monopoly markets that have been the norm in the utility industry for more than 100 years and toward more open competition. Because when renewables compete head to head with thermal generation, they win hands down 95% of the time.

The data doesn’t lie. RMI looked at the interconnection queues for both ERCOT and PJM and found over the past two years there has been a dramatic shift away from building new gas fired generating plants and toward more renewable energy projects. Interconnection queues track new generation projects proposed to be added to regional grid. That information provides a leading indicator of market trends for new power plants. Not all projects in these queues are ultimately built, but the mix of resources in the queue represents the investments the market is prioritizing, according to RMI.

What Is Causing This Shift?

For those wondering about the explanation for this shift, RMI has the answer. “Though COVID-19 may be contributing to some recent decline in planned gas additions, it’s not the only driver. The trend has been building for years and investors more broadly are now waking up to the implications. For example, just five years ago in ERCOT, the interconnection queue contained an even split between proposed gas and renewables generation capacity. However, gas capacity in the queue started falling steadily in 2015, well before the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic downturn.

Meanwhile, renewable energy and storage projects in the queue have continued to grow even during the pandemic.”
Its announcement goes on to say, “In ERCOT and PJM markets, investors prioritize projects based on competitive risk and return profiles as opposed to regulator-allowed cost recovery. Therefore, it is likely that a more fundamental driver is at play — raw economics, driven by the continually falling costs of clean energy and the associated risks of investment in new gas-fired capacity.” Even if a gas project appears competitive today, thermal generating plants are expected to have a service life of 40 to 50 years. So the economics not only have to look good now, they have to look good for 2060 and beyond. If they can’t remain competitive over that period of time, they risk becoming stranded assets and investors will not realize the return on investment they expected. Investors hate that!

Martyn1981

Plans for 600 zero carbon homes in York.

'This is the Everest of zero carbon' – inside York's green home revolution

Plans have just been submitted for the first stage of arguably the UK’s most ambitious council-led housing programme in a generation. The city is planning to build at least 600 homes across eight sites within the ring road, each designed to have a net carbon emissions figure of zero. Every element of the scheme, from the front door out into the transport network, is tuned to tackle the climate emergency head on.

With the same team of architects and engineers working across all 600 homes in multiple phases, Godber says the city’s programme is a unique opportunity to be able to hone the design and perfect the construction details on each successive scheme for maximum energy performance. Just like New Earswick, this latest type of York house could stand as a model for the rest of the country to follow. If we are serious about averting the climate catastrophe and becoming carbon neutral by 2030, we don’t have much choice.

Martyn1981

Extracts from this week's Carbon Commentary Newsletter:

1, Trade in hydrogen. The lightest gas is often presented as a means of countries securing energy self-sufficiency. However several projects have been announced in the last weeks that link countries that are likely to export cheap H2 with those that will need to import. Portugal, with strong solar power potential, signed up the Netherlands as a customer for hydrogen. Saudi Arabia made its first shipment of ‘blue’ ammonia - a way of transporting hydrogen - to Japan. Germany signed a research partnership with Australia covering the development of an H2 supply chain while a new project in Spain is targeting exports to the hydrogen centre in Rotterdam. For countries with abundant wind or solar, such as Scotland, the opportunities are strikingly large.
 
2, Floating wind. Construction began on the world’s largest floating wind farm. The eleven 8 MW turbines will provide a third of the energy required for five offshore oil platforms in the Norwegian North Sea. Equinor, the developer, says that the farm will have costs about 40% below the pioneering Hywind development off Scotland that was constructed in 2017. My rough calculation is that the new site will still be about 50% more expensive to construct than a fixed foundation farm in the North Sea. However one industry source says that ‘Equinor’s ambition is for floating offshore wind to be competitive with other forms of energy by 2030’. Floating turbines are likely to be needed in all waters deeper than about 50 metres, implying that 80% of the world’s addressable wind resources will require this approach. A new venture off the coast of Scotland said it would use a 2 MW floating turbine to make hydrogen offshore which will then be piped to the city of Aberdeen. It is probably cheaper to put hydrogen into a pipeline than run a cable.
 
3, Imposing ‘net zero’ on suppliers. The last weeks have seen several announcements by large institutions that they will be obliging their suppliers to move towards net zero by a specific date. The UK’s National Health Service joined this group, stating a target of 2030 for ceasing to buy products and services from businesses that don't use renewable electricity. I was surprised by the significance of this promise; the NHS is responsible for up to 5% of UK emissions and its suppliers account for fully 40% of this total. Embedded in pharmaceuticals alone are 1% of national greenhouse gases. The NHS push towards supplier decarbonisation is already matched by some drugs companies that are supplying it. Novo Nordisk, a major diabetes drug supplier, also recently required all its 60,000 sources of supply to begin using renewable electricity by 2030. A doctor I talked to reminded me of some of the clinical complexities of the NHS's wider net zero pledge saying, for example, that many inhalers (for asthma etc.) use global warming HFCs but were regarded as more clinically effective than those using other propellents.
 
4, Cement decarbonisation. Cemex, the multinational cement supplier, said last week that it was working on carbon capture with CarbonClean. This week, it partnered with the innovative Swiss company Synhelion to make synthetic fuels from the CO2 generated in cement manufacture. Synhelion’s particular strength is the generation of extremely high temperature heat using the sun’s energy. This heat will be used in the cement making process and the carbon dioxide driven off will be captured and then used to make synthetic fuels with renewable hydrogen. One of the unusual features of this circular technology is that it can be used to create hydrocarbons, such as diesel, as well as fuels containing oxygen, such as methanol. The Synhelion technology is still early-stage and, although it looks very compelling, much remains to be proved.
 
5, Hydrogen for steel manufacture. I think this may be the first project in the US to begin the decarbonisation of steel production. The Department of Energy gave $6m to a university to set up a prototype of a high temperature electrolysis process that will produce the hydrogen that will strip the oxygen from iron ore, leaving just the metal. (‘Direct reduction’ of ore). The university scientists claim that their process will be easier to integrate into full scale manufacturing than the methods used at SSAB in northern Sweden, the world’s leader in the use of hydrogen for steel-making. The scientists also say that their method will be almost 30% more energy efficient than using coal. The importance of this is that in some parts of the world steel-making will require very significant amounts of extra electricity so efficiency does matter.
 
6, Green chemicals. Siemens and specialty chemicals producer Evonik said a pilot plant had opened which will generate useful products from bacteria that consume carbon monoxide and hydrogen. If successful this plant will demonstrate a route to making green plastics and other high value chemicals such as food supplements.  This partnership is an important trial of whether biological routes can be a financially viable route to making complex hydrocarbons, as opposed to using conventional chemical processes such as Fischer Tropsch synthesis.
 
7, Honda withdraws from Formula 1. Perhaps this has purely symbolic significance, but Honda announced it will withdraw from providing Formula 1 engines, leaving Mercedes even more dominant. What was most interesting was the statement from the Honda CEO that ‘this is not a result of the coronavirus pandemic but because of our longer-term carbon-free goal’. The announcement came a few weeks before the launch of Honda’s first all-electric mass-produced car. This is part of the switch among car manufacturers to focusing almost all R&D on battery or fuel cell vehicles. 
 
8, Volume targets for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). More countries are moving towards setting (small) percentage targets for the percentage of SAF used in aircraft. Norway already requires 0.5%. Germany introduced a demand for 2% by 2030 and it also pushed this week for a block on the use of biological sources for aviation fuel, such as organic wastes or palm oil because of the impact on food availability and deforestation. But in France Total said this week that it would switch an existing oil refinery to making biofuels form organic material in order to meet France’s 2% SAF target by 2025. The hard reality is that aviation’s needs cannot conceivably be met by using the limited volume of organic wastes. SAF is going to have to come from fully synthetic manufacturing processes using renewable hydrogen.
 
10, Capturing carbon from industrial processes. UK company Carbon8 has a process that combines solid waste materials with captured CO2 to make an aggregate that can be used in construction. It sold its first plant in summer 2020 to a French cement maker and this week announced a sale to a Netherlands 'Energy from Waste' facility. In this case Carbon8 will take the fly ash from the EfW plant and combine it with carbon dioxide from the waste combustion process. (The operator of the EfW process already collects 15% of the CO2 for use in local greenhouses). This is an important technology with a potentially wide application. 

Martyn1981

When you've got eight arms, you can pop your fingers in many more pies. Yeah I know that went right off the rails!

'Tech unicorn' Octopus Energy to create 1,000 new UK jobs

Octopus Energy plans to create 1,000 new technology jobs across sites in London, Brighton, Warwick and Leicester, and a new tech hub in Manchester, as part of its vision to make the UK the “Silicon Valley of energy”.

The supplier will employ graduates at the new sites to help develop the proprietary green energy technology platform which has helped to make Octopus one of the fastest-growing companies in the UK.

The company’s newest recruits will help to develop smart grid technologies that can help Britain’s transport and heating systems harness cheap renewable energy, helping them to reduce their emissions in line with the UK’s pledge to be carbon neutral by 2050.

Coastalwatch

So casting radiation risk and huge decommissioning costs aside Nuclear is unable to complete with renewables on carbon emmissions either!

Nuclear ‘not an effective low carbon option’

Researchers in the UK have analyzed 25 years of electricity-production and carbon emissions data from 123 countries. Their findings show renewables are considerably more effective than nuclear in reducing carbon emissions from energy generation and that the two technologies tend to get in each other’s way when considered in a joint approach.

A study led by the University of Sussex (UoS), in the U.K., has found renewables up to seven times more effective at reducing carbon emissions than nuclear power. The paper concluded nuclear could no longer be considered an effective low carbon energy technology, and suggests that countries aiming to rapidly and cost-effectively reduce their energy emissions should prioritize renewables.

“The evidence clearly points to nuclear being the least effective of the two broad carbon emissions abatement strategies and, coupled with its tendency not to co-exist well with its renewable alternative, this raises serious doubts about the wisdom of prioritizing investment in nuclear over renewable energy,” said Benjamin K Sovacool, professor of energy policy at UoS. “Countries planning large scale investments in new nuclear power are risking suppression of greater climate benefits from alternative renewable energy investments.”

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/10/05/nuclear-not-an-effective-low-carbon-option-says-study/