TL&DR Summary: they can. But the economics of energy storage depend on the application, and no energy storage option makes cheap kWh unless it is used to deliver enough kWh. Long term storage must have an ultra-low capital cost to be affordable, because otherwise its cost is not distributed over a large enough number of […]
Author: spitfireresearch
A Short Screed About Biofuels
Apologies to the millions of artists whose work was scraped by Google to make their generative AI tool possible. TL&DR Summary: we’ll need biofuels for shipping and aviation, which need rather than merely want liquid fuels. We’ll also potentially need biofuels to serve as our reservoir of stored fuels to serve periods of renewable electricity […]
Blue Hydrogen Reconsidered?
TL&DR Summary: blue hydrogen will be cheaper than green hydrogen for the foreseeable future. But the risk remains that the product will be much cheaper if we ignore the fact that it’s not blue, but rather blackish-blue and bruise coloured due to methane and uncaptured CO2 emissions. But that can also be said about green […]
The Circular Economy is a Thermodynamic Myth
TL&DR Summary: all real systems have energy and matter inputs, and generate waste streams of both matter and “entropy” (i.e. the entropy of the universe always increases). A “circular economy” is a thermodynamic impossibility. We should instead talk about optimal recycle, where the environmental impacts of matter waste are balanced against energy input and its […]
ER-6 Battery Pack Replacement
I converted a 1975 Triumph Spitfire to a fully electric vehicle in 2014. The project is described here, including the specifications of the motor, inverter and other components. And a word of warning: this project changed my life infinitely for the better. Be careful what you get up to in your spare time! https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/e-fire-triumph-spitfire-ev-paul-martin After […]
Chemical Recycling of Plastics
People hate plastics, or at least often say they do. In fact they are happy to have their lives saved by single use medical plastics, and they reward the convenience of plastics at the cash register whenever they’re offered, unless somebody gets in the way with regulations, but they still claim to hate them. Why […]
The Ocean Cleanup is as Dumb as DAC- and that’s saying something
photo credit: Ocean Cleanup UPDATED: 7 Aug 2025, to fix typos and to repeat myself about real solutions, because commenters simply will not click on the links to other articles where I deal with these solutions in depth To some, this one is a really sacred cow for some reason. And frankly I find the […]
Wrecking Stuff to Make Hydrogen
A Coke can that has been dissolved in sodium hydroxide, revealing its internal plastic liner (photo credit- YouTube) TL&DR: destroying reduced metals/metalloids like aluminum and silicon is a really, really dumb way to make hydrogen. It is energetic vandalism, and generates unnecessary toxic emissions to generate a low value product. A shorter, more perfunctory version […]
Green Hydrogen as a Fuel is a Zombie Meme Idea
TL&DR summary: hydrogen as a fuel is a zombie idea. Thermodynamics and the properties of the molecule ensure that it will never be alive in economic terms. Hydrogen’s dirty present hasn’t meaningfully changed over the last 20 years, and hydrogen as a fuel isn’t a real decarbonization idea. However, while it will never be alive, […]
Green Steel = Green Iron
Image credit: Google Gemini What is “green steel”? Simple. It’s a misnomer. Iron in nature is rarely found alone. We mine its oxides as iron ores. These oxides need to be chemically reduced (gaining electrons = reduction) to take the Fe+2 and Fe+3 ions in the iron oxides, to Fe metal. And the oxygen needs […]