Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

EDF Renewables has unveiled plans for an up to 110MW onshore wind farm in Wales.

The Garn Fach project will comprise up to 22 turbines with individual capacity of about 5MW, the company said.

EDF has carried out ecological and other feasibility surveys and today is submitting an environmental scoping report to the Welsh Government and an application to Powys County Council to erect a met mast on site to gather wind speed data.
It aims to submit a planning application at the end of the year.

The company said that Garn Fach will support a £5000 per MW community benefit fund, which could be worth around £550,000 a year – depending on the final capacity.

Global offshore wind installations will hit 165GW by the end of the decade and are on track to reach 418GW by 2040, according to new research by UK analysts Rethink Energy.

The global expansion of offshore wind will see the technology provide 5% of global electricity in two decades, as installed capacity balloons from the 25GW installed worldwide today.

The report predicts this growth will require some $1.3 trillion in investment and create 8 million jobs.

Some of the chemicals used have now been proven to cause significant health problems, and will for generations to come. A new white paper by Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), “Climate and Health Risks of Liquified Natural Gas,” highlights some of these problems.

A Yale study published that of 1,021 chemicals were identified in fracking fluids. Of those identified, a great many showed dramatic contraindication for human or animal water supply. At least 157 were disruptive, disturbing, or toxic to the human reproductive system or human development. Chemicals that had federal guidelines regulating them — arsenic, benzene, cadmium, lead, formaldehyde, chlorine, and mercury — and 157 others were associated with either developmental or reproductive toxicity.

“The hydraulic fracturing extraction process injects a slurry of chemicals and millions of gallons of water thousands of feet underground at high pressure,” the article states.

The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) build more on the body of information, revealing associated problems. An article titled “The False Promise of Natural Gas” by Philip J. Landrigan, M.D., Howard Frumkin, M.D., Dr.P.H., and Brita E. Lundberg, M.D., reports, “Natural gas, composed principally of methane, has been hailed as a clean ‘transition’ fuel—a bridge from the coal and oil of the past to the clean energy sources of the future … but beneath this rosy narrative lies a more complex story. Gas is associated with health and environmental hazards and reduced social welfare at every stage of its life cycle.”

“As physicians deeply concerned about climate change and pollution and their consequences, we consider expansion of the natural gas infrastructure to be a grave hazard to human health,” the report states.

Laalitha Surapaneni, MD, MPH, lead author of “Climate and Health Risks of Liquified Natural Gas,” adds, “Our current climate crisis is a health emergency. The actions we take now by extracting, transporting and liquefying fracked gas will determine the health of generations to come. It is unconscionable that we continue to subject our communities to these risks when we have the technology to make a just transition to renewable energy.”

Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) encourages everyone to share information about the health risks of LNG and advocate for a rapid transition to clean, safe renewable energy solutions such as solar, wind and geothermal.

1, CCS from cement. Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) is one of the major backers of Carbon Engineering’s direct air capture technology. The CO2 from the first commercial plant will be injected into its Permian Basin fracking wells to enhance the amount of oil produced. Oxy has just announced another partnership with cement producer LafargeHolcim to investigate carbon capture at a cement works in Colorado using the very interesting technology offered by Canada’s Svante. Once again, the assumption is that Oxy sees the CO2 as being useful in improving oilfield yields so the true amount of carbon capture is a highly contentious calculation.


2, Zero carbon urban development. Toyota gave details of its plan to build a 70 hectare, 2000 person town at the base of Mount Fuji. It will be the site for a very wide range of experiments in zero carbon living, including autonomous vehicles, fuel cell power systems and wood-based buildings. Researchers will live there alongside the other residents. Toyota calls it ‘a fully connected ecosystem powered by hydrogen’.


3, Electricity prices. A week of high winds over the UK reduced short-term electricity prices. All seven nights saw figures of below £10 (€12) per megawatt hour for periods, with three nights touching zero. Carbon intensity fell to as low as 62 grams per kilowatt hour, not that far from last year’s record lows. The projected further investment in 30 gigawatts of onshore wind by 2030 would have meant that total demand would have been met entirely by wind for many of the night hours this week. As yet, I see no serious consideration in the UK of what will happen when wind power systematically exceeds power demand.***


4, Adding hydrogen to natural gas. Increasing the content of renewable hydrogen in natural gas reduces CO2 emissions. Several countries around Europe are carefully edging up the percentage of hydrogen allowed in the pipes. Snam, the Italian gas distributor, increased the H2 content to 10% in one portion of its network, while a major experiment in the UK is now putting 20% into pipes around a university. Energy giant E.ON is beginning an similar experiment in Saxony also taking hydrogen up to 20%. But it is unlikely that levels can be raised much higher without new central heating boilers in domestic homes. So is raising H2 levels a technological dead-end when what we will eventually need is a 100% hydrogen grid? Perhaps not, partly because hydrogen can be separated from natural gas at its destination. So the existing network can in effect be used as a distribution medium for pure hydrogen while users switch away from methane. This may be the cheapest way of shipping hydrogen across land masses.


6, Waste CO2 and hydrogen to synthetic fuels. A Finnish cement producer and a chemicals manufacturer with surplus hydrogen have partnered with a wide variety of other businesses to commission a study into using their waste gases to make methanol, a precursor to a wide variety of other fuels. The work will be carried out by LUT, the university now the world leader in research into synthetic fuels. A senior LUT academic commented ‘that the production costs for synthetic fuels are already reasonable in areas where the price of hydrogen or electricity is low’. Other study participants include Shell, Wartsila, Neste and Finnair, suggesting widening interest in developing low-cost substitutes for oil.


10, Drones for planting trees. Companies and politicians want to increase the rates of forest planting. The world needs many billions of new trees. A Canadian company has invented a drone that plants germinated tree seeds encased in nutrient pods. The device pneumatically fires the pods into the ground and can plant up to 20,000 seeds a day. (That’s at least 10 times what human labour can do). The company says that the world cuts down 13 billion trees a year, so - in theory - less than 2,000 drones could reverse all deforestation. A Kickstarter campaign, with a very good video showing how the drone operates, is here.