An article written while I worked at Zeton may be instructive in relation to this topic as a backgrounder: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scaling-up-down-paul-martin/ Once we reach a certain maximum practical vertical scale for a particular piece of equipment, it becomes impractical to build a bigger unit, or to transport and erect it once it’s built, as noted in […]
Author: spitfireresearch
Economy of Vertical Scale
There are lots of proposals emerging seemingly every day, based around the notion that we will mass produce some device, plant or process, and then use those mass-produced devices to produce some commodity product- frequently a product made by devices, plants or processes already operated commercially at much larger scale. A few examples seemingly popular […]
Are German Gas Pipelines “Fundamentally Suitable” for Hydrogen?
A recent study https://www.dvgw.de/medien/dvgw/forschung/berichte/g202006-sywesth2-steel-dvgw.pdf carried out by Open Grid Europe GmbH with the assistance of the University of Stuttgart, paid for by DVGW (Deutscher Verein des Gas- und Wasserfaches- the German Association for Gas and Water) did rather careful, extensive and thorough testing of a wide and characteristic variety of pipeline steels in hydrogen atmospheres of […]
The Myth of Hydrogen as an Energy Export Commodity
There is a popular myth in the marketplace of ideas at the moment: the notion that hydrogen will become a way to export renewable electricity in a decarbonized future, from places with an excess of renewable electricity, to places with a shortage of supply and a large energy demand. It seems that the hydrogen #hopium […]
Blackish Blue Bruise Coloured Hydrogen Part 2: the Ghost of Blue Hydrogen’s Future
Blackish-Blue Bruise Coloured Hydrogen Part 2: The Ghost of Blue Hydrogen’s Future As we found in Part 1, conventional hydrogen production from natural gas using steam methane reforming (SMR) coupled with carbon capture and storage (CCS) is easily written off as a waste of everyone’s time and money. It’s fooling nobody. Because nearly half the […]
Blackish-Blue Bruise Coloured Hydrogen
My readers will know that I have never liked the “colours of hydrogen” that has been spread, as a meme, by the hydrogen-as-a-fuel lobby. There is only really one kind of hydrogen in the world right now. Hydrogen- 98.7% of it by generous estimate- is made from fossils, without meaningful carbon capture. It is barest […]
Waste to Energy/Waste to Fuels: the Great Greenwashing Machine
Most of us find waste to be viscerally repugnant. The smell and even the appearance of garbage revolts us. And yet we all generate it, in seemingly endless quantity. In “developed” (rich) nations, we therefore have built extensive systems to get this repugnant material out of sight, and hence out of our minds, as quickly […]
Global Warming Risk Arises From Three Facts
Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a real risk for future generations including my own children. It’s a risk I’ve personally taken seriously, and have taken personal action against, since the late 1980s when I was in university. And while we’ve seen some extremely positive developments in the past 30 years such as the creation of new industries […]
What Are the Energy Solutions?
What are the Energy Solutions? UPDATED 25/06/2024, because LinkedIn messed up the formatting, deleted every apostrophe etc. How the hell does that stuff happen? No idea…but I’ve cleaned up the mess, and added a lot of links to new articles on related topics. And I’ve also admitted that my predictions about Ontario’s tendency to re-kindle […]
So: Exactly How Much Electricity Does it Take to Make a Gallon of Gasoline?
First, why do I care what the answer is? And why should you care? A little history may help you understand. My son Jacob and I took on a project a little over three years ago, to convert my 1975 Triumph Spitfire roadster into a fully electric vehicle, which we call the E-Fire. The project flowed from […]