Category: Climate change innovation

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We have made wonderful progress towards cleaning up the grid. Now to finish the job…

Incredible progress has been made over the last couple of decades towards greening our grid. Coal is now supplying a very small percentage of our power, and this is likely to fully disappear in the next few years. Gas is the only remaining fossil fuel on our grid. We mad roughly 28 gigawats of electricity from gas in 2018 (last normal year before epidemic). There are plenty of ways to get this from clean sources

As an example, 1 megawatt of solar panels takes roughly 4 acres, and costs about 1 million pounds. Therefore, 1 gigawatt would take roughly 7 square miles and cost roughly 1 billion. That means to replace 28 gigawatt hours of gas generation with solar, would cost roughly 28 billion. The batteries would cost about 2 billion for a similar quantity. In terms of area, we would need roughly 150 miles, which is roughly 2/3 of all the rooftops of the UK housing stock. If, however, all UK commercial governmental and industrial buildings have their roofs covered in solar panels, this would likely take a great deal of the capacity needed. Even if you assume we need extra for night time power, we can not be talking more than 50 billion.

I am not saying that the government needs to invest this now. However, as gas powerplants do not last more than about 25 years, we can assume that by 2050 all the current ones would be decommissioned. If as each gas powered plant goes offline it was replaced with solar and batteries, the cost would be roughly £1.8 billion a year while a huge cost to many countries, would essentially be a rounding error in the UK.

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Will our fight with Covid push the human race to tackle global warming?

Can the human race use the lessons learnt during the Covid epidemic to start addressing climate change as the existential threat that we know it is? Estimates vary as to what the Covid epidemic has cost, but economists estimate roughly $28 Trillion. Now while that sounds huge, it is only about 1/3 of global output annually. Given that Covid has taken place over around 2 years, that means an output reduction of less than 20%.

Now it is true, that governments around the world have spent vast amounts money propping up economies and trying to avoid as much of the pain as possible.

Climate change is predicted to cost about $23 trillion per year by 2050!

In other words, economists are predicting that in 28 years, we will have to find almost the price of fighting Covid – every year (remember that the Covid costs have been spread out over 2 years).

CAN YOU IMAGINE THAT?

We are marching towards a future, where we pay out almost the whole cost of COVID every year, to mitigate the effects of climate change.

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Indonesias leading University has proposed classifying Palm oil as a forest crop – This is insane, read on to find more – urgent condemnation needed

This proposal would mean that Indonesia could cut down all its rainforest and replace them with Palm Oil, and would have engaged in zero deforestation.

Palm oil beside rainforest

This has to be condemned globally, There are myriad problems with this. The destruction of the rainforest would release billions of tonnes of carbon into the air. Palm oil, will be incapable of reabsorbing all this carbon. Furthermore, palm oil plantations support just a handful of species of wildlife, so this would mean the end of the orangutan Sumatran elephant, tiger leopard and rhino.

Thankfully, there are many voices within Indonesia which are already condemning this move.

At the moment, this idea is the thought of various extreme academics (and much of the government). If it were to find acceptance, we could see the wholesale destruction of the forests of Indonesia, an area of deforestation that would have a huge effect on the worlds attempts to mitigate global warming. Arguments that palm oil trees absorb carbon as well, are absurd, as they absorb a tiny proportion of the carbon that would be emitted.

Hopefully, this will remain a crackpot academic idea, and a governmental daydream and never be put into place. We must be vigilant that it isnt.

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Google has more problems – Ads that look like search results are increasingly being used by fossil fuel firms

Last month, I wrote about how google was failing to deal with climate change deniers, now there is a similar related problem.

Google allows advertisers to pay to have their advert appear as though it is a search result. One in 5 ads served on 78 climate related terms were placed their by fossil fuel companies.

The study looked at 1600 articles and found that 20% of the adverts were placed by fossil fuel companies.

A survey back in 2020 found that more than half of those using this service could not tell the difference between the search results and these ‘disguised’ adverts.

Exxonmobil, shell, aramco, Mckinsey, and goldman sachs were among the top users along with a handful of other fossil fuel providers and their financiers.

This is highly concerning. Having been forced to abandon their ridiculous claim that global warming was not happening, they are now trying to influence the discussion of decarbonisation in their favour. Far and away the most regular seen ad was Shells which were seen 156 times, and appeared on 86% of the searches for “net zero” They also kept highlighting their promise to be net zero by 2050 and to align itself with the 1.5 degrees C target (something that virtually all scientists agree are incompatible – you cannot aim for 2050 net zero and 1.5 as waiting till 1050 guarentees we blow straight past the 1.5.

Furthermore, Shells only way to reach net zero appears to be through offsets. They intend to continue to extract coal oil and gas until the end of the century.

How can we reach a concensus about where we are trying to go in fighting climate change if so many people are being fed lies.

I believe that it is time to take google at its word. If they wont stop listing these sorts of lies, then they must be treated with the same contempt as the fossil fuel companies. Further more googles future must be the same – change or go extinct. The current problem is that google is such a dominant player in search and advertising, at the moment it is hard to avoid them.

Now, I should add that I did a quick search, and was not possible to duplicate these results. Further more, i got the same results in incognito. I am unsure if google has tweaked its algorithm since yesterday, but this is part of the problem. Given that a small tweak can transform the results, it is hard to get a proper window into googles behaviour.

We need more openness from google. They are making great strides towards taking their business to carbon zero. However, if they continue to influence the rest of the world to not do so, I believe that a significant amount of the blame is retained. Do they want to be seen as a green advocate? or as a climate change denier. It is not possible to sit on the fence, climate change denial needs to be demoted in their search terms.

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Chevron and Exxon both spent years supressing battery cars should they get away with that?

It has been recognised in many circles but fossil fuels have been a problem for a very long time. Generally the argument has gone, there is nothing that can replace them.

What should we do about companies who were pushing the idea that was nothing to replace fossil fuels, while at the same time working to stop electric cars ever coming to market?

Some people might argue that in a free market society, you can do nothing. That has to be wrong. Exxon bought the lithium ion battery patent back in 1966, and then completely suppressed it -this is why the Sony Walkman only arrived in 1991, precisely 25 years after the patent was given when it expired. Chevron Texaco did something similar in 1999, when they bought the right to certain battery chemistry, and a particular type of battery plug in the hope of stopping that technology ever coming to market in the form of a battery for a car.

Car and fossil fuel companies cannot be allowed to get away with this. Indeed it has to be illegal.

Indeed if it isn’t, the free market system must change otherwise these companies will have the ability to make the fight against climate change that much harder.

There needs to be a way to inflict significant damage on a company which intentionally fights against the long-term human interests in order to maximize short term profits. Perhaps the only way to handle this is to fine the share holders? If the share holders know that they are going to be financially liable for any bad behaviour, this will force the value of the company down when ever they misbehave.

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Half of the world’s fossil fuel resources will be worthless by 2036

It is thought there are roughly £20 trillion fossil fuel resources left in the ground. Yet it is also recognised that in order to meet the temperature increase targets of 1.5 to 2 degrees c half of it needs to be left in the ground.

That means that £10 trillion of assets and resources owned by some of the most wealthy companies in the world cannot be extracted. Looking at it differently, worldwide companies will be desperately trying to sell 10 trillion pounds worth of useless products to get them off their books.

When you cut the bottom out of a market like that it can have devastating impacts. It is thought that the crash that this would cause would be bigger than that felt back in 2008.

Despite knowing that fossil fuel extraction is going to have to end soon, views on the safety of fossil-fuel Investments have not changed. Indeed, the UK, most local councils currently own fossil-fuel investments. 

Fossil-fuel Investments have been quite popular since they arrived. So long as the estimate of the amount of fossil fuels available is accurate, you will get your money back plus more – however if the fossil fuels you have invested in I left in the ground you are likely to lose almost all of your money.

The crash in oil prices during the epidemic is a very bold sign telling us what is going to happen. The big concern for oil companies is clear to see coming down the road. Oil demand did not disappear, it merely reduced as a few people were driving. Yet over the next 20 to 30 years, it is likely that virtually all of the world stock of fossil fuel cars will need to be replaced by electric ones. This will reduce fossil fuel demand by roughly 26%. This increases to 45% when you include air travel – and while currently we do not know how to replace all planes, the current crop of electric vehicles in the pipeline (particularly aircraft such as EasyJet single aisle 180 person plane run on batteries) are likely to reduce aviation fuel requirements by 50% or more. That increases the reduction in fossil fuel requirements to 35% at a minimum – this will occur in the next couple of decades.

Partnering this with a dramatically reducing use of fossil fuels to heat homes, we could easily see oil demand falling by more than half.

This will depress the price by so much that many different untapped resources will no longer be economically viable.

For economists and business analysts as well as those of us who are nearly amateur watches, the next few decades are going to be fascinating, building a market that moves away from a system they have used for hundreds of years is essential and must occur in perhaps as little as a decade.

What will the impact on large oil companies, when it becomes clear that resources that they have paid billions to exploit must be left alone? Will the companies even survive? Shares are likely to take a huge hit, and as each of these companies will see their core business lost, will there be anything to replace the huge profits that they have been used to over the last few hundred years?

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I wrote about blue hydrogen earlier this year, one current suggestion is to replace gas with hydrogen in heating – bad idea?

It is thought that when you add in all the unaccounted emissions, emissions from using hydrogen could be 20% higher than using gas itself.

We must make sure that current gas and oil producers are not able to move forward their idea of changing to blue hydrogen from gas. Green hydrogen – made by splitting water (if done with clean electricity) is completely clean. There is no point in ceasing to use oil and gas if we still need these things in order to create hydrogen.

Instead we must look to green hydrogen either using electricity, or indeed if progress continues, using catalysts.

There is no point in eradicating the use of fossil fuels if its replacement is worse.

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If the UK covered all south facing roofs with solar panels, this could provide all our electricity – but

Currently, the weight of solar panels mean that (along with the cost) it is rare that companies have the money to cover large roofs with solar panels.

A new product developed by a firm in Sunderland may change this. They have developed a light weight alternative which can be stuck in the same place panels would usually go. This method is much cheaper and at least as effective as many flexible panels.

They still have tests to run, but if they are a success, the company aims to start selling it 0.3mm thick solar film in the middle of 2022. This would also easily go on cars and lorries as well. Although the initial aim will be to cover large building, a lorry has roughly 20 square meters of flat roof space – even with relatively poor panels, this should make 20-30kwh a day easily. While an electric lorry will use more than this, over the year, a system like this could make as much as 6megawatt hours, which is certainly not to be sniffed at.

Could this new product move us faster towards gaining significant amounts of our power from solar? I would hope so.

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Vestas a wind turbine company has created a project which allows turbine blades to be fully recyclable

Given the huge number of wind turbines that are being created, and are eventually going to reach end of their life.

It is therefore odd that it has taken so long for people to start to make the blades recyclable. The thermoset composites are able to be split and then broken down into their initial component parts. These parts can then be reused as though they are raw materials just created. Indeed at the current time, the only part of a wind turbine that could not be recycled was the blades. As a result, wind turbines can become completely green after manufacture.

This destroys one of the few remaining arguments against wind turbines, and should make way for a significant worldwide increase in turbine deployment.

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Cop 26: successes and failures

There is much to be pleased about with how the cop26 conference went, unfortunately we are still not at a point where the promises made are going to meet the targets we know we need to hit. It seems that at least for now, the Climate change deniers have now been banned from the room – climate change ‘realists’ who basically claim nothing can be done and it is nothing to do with humans, are unfortunately still being listened to in some places.

Cop 26 brought together many of the world leaders

It is now recognised that while 2 degrees Celsius has been listed as a maximum increase target for some time, warming of this quantity will leave the world in a very poor place.

This is why for a long period, when these gatherings have occurred, the aim has been to reduce carbon emissions by enough to hit 1.5 degrees Celsius rise.

All of the current promises would get us to 1.8 degrees Celsius rise. Now it is encouraging to be that close, however clearly we have not succeeded yet.

There are other significant issues. Most countries promise to phase out the use of coal for electricity generation. This is because it is widely recognised that energy generation from coal is one of the most polluting. Unfortunately China, India, the US and Australia failed to join in this pledge. It should be remembered that Climate change is expected to cause the biggest financial burden on India US and Brazil, so it should be a self preservation move for these countries to help, but as yet this does not seem to be happening.

It should be noted that these countries do not deny the science they nearly aren’t willing to engage in a sensible solution.

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