Distilled Thoughts On Hydrogen

image credit: physicsworld.com

All my concerns about hydrogen #hopium, in one convenient place!

Hydrogen is being sold as if it were the “Swiss Army knife” of the energy transition. Useful for every energy purpose under the sun. Sadly, hydrogen is rather like THIS Swiss Army knife, the Wenger 16999 Giant. It costs $1400, weighs 7 pounds, and is a suboptimal tool for just about every purpose!

The Wenger 16999 Giant (the Wenger brand is discontinued- owned by Victorinox)

Why do you hate hydrogen so much? I DON’T HATE HYDROGEN! I think it’s a dumb thing to use as a fuel, or as a way to store electricity. That’s all.

I also think it’s part of a bait and switch scam being put forward by the fossil fuel industry. And what about the electrolyzer and fuelcell companies, the technical gas suppliers, natural gas utilities and the renewable electricity companies that are pushing hydrogen for energy uses? They’re just the fossil fuel industry’s “useful idiots” in this regard.

https://www.jadecove.com/research/hydrogenscam

If you prefer to listen rather than read, I appeared as a guest on the Redefining Energy Podcast, with hosts Laurent Segalen and Gerard Reid: episodes 19 and 44

https://redefining-energy.com/

…or my participation in a recent Reuters Renewables debate event, attended by about 3000

This article gives links to my articles which give my opinions about hydrogen in depth, with some links to articles by others which I’ve found helpful and accurate.

Hydrogen For Transport

Not for cars and light trucks. The idea seems appealing, but the devil is in the details if you look at this more than casually.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-fuelcell-vehicle-great-idea-theory-paul-martin/

When you look at two cars with the same range that you can actually buy, it turns out that my best case round-trip efficiency estimate- 37%- is too optimistic. The hydrogen fuelcell car uses 3.2x as much energy and costs over 5.4x as much per mile driven.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mirai-fcev-vs-model-3-bev-paul-martin/

What about trucks? Ships? Trains? Aircraft?

For trucks- I agree with James Carter- they’re going EV. EVs will do the work from the short range end of the duty, and biofuels will take the longer range, remote/rural delivery market for logistical reasons. Hydrogen has no market left in the middle in my opinion.

Trains: same deal.

Aircraft? Forget about jet aircraft powered by hydrogen. We’ll use biofuels for them, or we’ll convert hydrogen and CO2 to e-fuels if we can’t find enough biofuels. And if we do that, we’ll cry buckets of tears over the cost, because inefficiency means high cost.

(Note that the figures provided by Transport and Environment over-state the efficiency of hydrogen and of the engines used in the e-fuels cases- but in jets, a turbofan is likely about as efficient as a fuelcell in terms of thermodynamic work per unit of fuel LHV fed. The point of the figure is to show the penalty you pay by converting hydrogen and CO2 to an e-fuel- the original T&E chart over-stated that efficiency significantly)

Ships? There’s no way in my view that the very bottom-feeders of the transport energy market- used to burning basically liquid coal (petroleum residuum-derived bunker fuel with 3.5% sulphur, laden with metals and belching out GHGs without a care in the world) are going to switch to hydrogen, much less ammonia, with its whopping 11-19% round-trip efficiency.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ammonia-pneumonia-paul-martin/

Heating

Fundamentally, why do we burn things? To make heat, of course!

Right now, we burn things to make heat to make electricity. Hence, it is cheaper to heat things using whatever we’re burning to make electricity, than it is to use electricity. Even with a coefficient of performance for a heat pump, so we can pump 3 joules of heat for every joule of electricity we feed, it’s still cheaper to skip the electrical middleman and use the fuel directly, saving all that capital and all those energy losses.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/home-heating-electrification-paul-martin/

Accordingly, hydrogen- made from a fuel (methane), is not used as a fuel. Methane is the cheaper option, obviously!

In the future, we’re going to start with electricity made from wind, solar, geothermal etc. And thence, it will be cheaper to use electricity directly to make heat, rather than losing 30% bare minimum of our electricity to make a fuel (hydrogen) from it first. By cutting out the molecular middleman, we’ll save energy and capital. It will be cheaper to heat using electricity.

I know it’s backwards to the way you’re thinking now. But it’s not wrong.

Replacing comfort heating use of natural gas with hydrogen is fraught with difficulties.

(this is my peer reviewed article in Energy Science and Engineering on this topic in detail)

https://scijournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ese3.1861

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-replace-natural-gas-numbers-paul-martin/

Hydrogen takes 3x as much energy to move than natural gas, which takes about as much energy to move as electricity. But per unit exergy moved, electricity wins, hands down. Those thinking it’s easier to move hydrogen than electricity are fooling themselves. And those who think that re-using the natural gas grid just makes sense, despite the problems mentioned in my article above, are suffering from the sunk cost fallacy- and are buying a bill of goods from the fossil fuel industry. When the alternative is to go out of business, people imagine all sorts of things might make sense if it allows them to stay in business.

Hydrogen as Energy Storage

We’re going to need to store electricity from wind and solar- that is obvious.

We’re also going to need to store some energy in molecules, for those weeks in the winter when the solar panels are covered in snow, and a high pressure area has set in and wind has dropped to nothing.

It is, however, a non-sequitur to conclude that therefore we must make those molecules from electricity! It’s possible, but it is by no means the only option nor the most sensible one.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-from-renewable-electricity-our-future-paul-martin/

…But…Green Hydrogen is Going to Be So Cheap!

No, sorry folks, it isn’t.

The reality is, black hydrogen is much cheaper. And if you don’t carbon tax the hell out of black hydrogen, that’s what you’re going to get.

Replacing black hydrogen has to be our focus- our priority- for any green hydrogen we make. But sadly, blue (CCS) hydrogen is likely to be cheaper. Increasing carbon taxes are going to turn black hydrogen into muddy black-blue hydrogen, as the existing users of steam methane reformers (SMRs) gradually start to capture and bury the easy portion of the CO2 coming from their gas purification trains- the portion they’re simply dumping into the atmosphere for free at the moment.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956

There is no green hydrogen to speak of right now. Why not? Because nobody can afford it. It costs a multiple of the cost of blue hydrogen, which costs a multiple of the cost of black hydrogen.

The reality is, you can’t afford either the electricity, or the capital, to make green hydrogen. The limit cases are instructive: imagine you can get electricity for 2 cents per kWh- sounds great, right? H2 production all in is about 55 kWh/kg. That’s $1.10 per kg just to buy the electricity- nothing left for capital or other operating costs. And yet, that’s the current price in the US gulf coast, for wholesale hydrogen internal to an ammonia plant like this one- brand new, being constructed in Texas City- using Air Products’ largest black hydrogen SMR.

https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2020/01/08/major-ammonia-plant-project-to-start-construction.html

At the other end, let’s imagine you get your electricity for free! But you only get it for free at 45% capacity factor- which by the way would be the entire output of an offshore wind park- about as good as you can possibly get for renewable electricity (solar here in Ontario for instance is only 16% capacity factor…)

If you had 1 MW worth of electrolyzer, you could make about 200 kg of H2 per day at 45% capacity factor. If you could sell it all for $1.50/kg, and you could do that for 20 yrs, and whoever gave you the money didn’t care about earning a return on their investment, you could pay about $2.1 million for your electrolyzer set-up- the electrolyzer, water treatment, storage tanks, buildings etc.- assuming you didn’t have any other operating costs (you will have). And…sadly…that’s about what an electrolyzer costs right now, installed. And no, your electrolyzer will not last more than 20 yrs either.

Will the capital costs get better? Sure! With scale, the electrolyzer will get cheaper per MW, as people start mass producing them. And as you make your project bigger, the cost of the associated stuff as a proportion of the total project cost will drop to- to an extent, not infinitely.

But the fundamental problem here is that a) electricity is never free b) cheap electricity is never available 24/7, so it always has a poor capacity factor and c) electrolyzers are not only not free, they are very expensive and only part of the cost of a hydrogen production facility.

Can you improve the capacity factor by using batteries? If you do, your cost per kWh increases a lot- and that dispatchable electricity in the battery is worth a lot more to the grid than you could possibly make by making hydrogen from it.

Can you improve the capacity factor by making your electrolyzer smaller than the capacity of your wind/solar park? Yes, but then the cost per kWh of your feed electricity increases because you’re using your wind/solar facility less efficiently, throwing away a bunch of its kWh. And I thought that concern over wasting that surplus electricity was the whole reason we were making hydrogen from it!?!?

John Poljak has done a good job running the numbers. And the numbers don’t lie. Getting hydrogen to the scale necessary to compete with blue much less black hydrogen is going to take tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of money that is better spent doing something which would actually decarbonize our economy.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6761296385645117440/

UPDATE: John’s most recent paper makes it even clearer- the claims being made by green hydrogen proponents of ultra-low costs per kg of H2 are “aspirational” and very hard to justify in the near term. They require a sequence of miracles to come true.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6826148496073207809/

Why Does This Make You So Angry, Paul?

We’ve known these things for a long time. Nothing has changed, really. Renewable electricity is more available, popular, and cheaper than ever. But nothing about hydrogen has changed. 120 megatonnes of the stuff was made last year, and 98.5% of it was made from fossils, without carbon capture. It’s a technical gas, used as a chemical reagent. It is not used as a fuel or energy carrier right now, at all. And that’s for good reasons associated with economics that come right from the basic thermodynamics.

What we have is interested parties muddying the waters, selling governments a bill of goods- and believe me, those parties intend to issue an invoice when that bill of goods has been sold! And that’s leading us toward an end that I think is absolutely the wrong way to go: it’s leading us toward a re-creation of the fossil fuel paradigm, selling us a fossil fuel with a thick obscuring coat of greenwash. That’s not in the interest of solving the crushing problem of anthropogenic global warming:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/global-warming-risk-arises-from-three-facts-paul-martin/

Where Does Hydrogen Make Sense?

We need to solve the decarbonization problem OF hydrogen, first. Hydrogen is a valuable (120 million tonne per year) commodity CHEMICAL – a valuable reducing agent and feedstock to innumerable processes- most notably ammonia as already mentioned. That’s a 40 million tonne market, essential for human life, almost entirely supplied by BLACK hydrogen right now. Fix those problems FIRST, before dreaming of having any excess to waste as an inefficient, ineffective heating or comfort fuel!!!

Here’s my version of @Michael Liebreich’s hydrogen merit order ladder. I’ve added coloured circles to the applications where I think there are better solutions THAN hydrogen. Only the ones in black make sense to me in terms of long-term decarbonization, assuming we solve the problem OF hydrogen by finding ways to afford to not make it from methane or coal with CO2 emissions to the atmosphere- virtually the only way we actually make hydrogen today.

If Not Hydrogen, Then What?

Here’s my suite of solutions. The only use I have for green hydrogen is as a replacement for black hydrogen- very important so we can keep eating.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-energy-solutions-paul-martin/

There are a few uses for H2 to replace difficult industrial applications too. Reducing iron ore to iron metal is one example- it is already a significant user of hydrogen and more projects are being planned and piloted as we speak. But there, hydrogen is not being used as a fuel per se- it is being used as a chemical reducing agent to replace carbon monoxide made from coal coke. The reaction between iron oxide and hydrogen is actually slightly endothermic. The heat can be supplied with electricity- in fact arc furnaces are already widely used to make steel from steel scrap.

In summary: the hydrogen economy is a bill of goods, being sold to you. You may not see the invoice for that bill of goods, but the fossil fuel industry has it ready and waiting for you, or your government, to pay it- once you’ve taken the green hydrogen bait.

DISCLAIMER: everything I say here, and in each of these articles, is my own opinion. I come by it honestly, after having worked with and made hydrogen and syngas for 30 yrs. If I’ve said something in error, please by all means correct me! Point out why what I’ve said is wrong, with references, and I’ll happily correct it. If you disagree with me, disagree with me in the comments and we’ll have a lively discussion- but go ad hominem and I’ll block you.

Popular Myths I’ve Never Believed (and which you shouldn’t, either)

Castle in the Pyrenees- one of my favorite Rene Magritte paintings.  I often felt that many of my customers were asking me to build them such a castle.

My recent article about things I’ve gotten wrong and had to change my mind about, got me thinking about things that other people seem to believe and which I’ve never found credible.

So here is a very partial list of myths which seem to be popular and which are often repeated by posters and commenters on LinkedIn, why I don’t believe them, and why you shouldn’t, either.

Note that a myth is different than an outright lie in that myths usually contain a kernel of truth.  That kernel however has usually been turned into popcorn with hyperbole and then sold well beyond its potential to do any good.

Many of the myths I mention in this piece are used as nirvana fallacy arguments or FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) vectors to delay decarbonization, keeping us happy to burn fossils for longer.  This is a strategy which I refer to as predatory delay.  Others are marketing ploys, using #hopium to sell people on bad ideas, either to attract credulous investors or public money.  As usual, where I’ve written an entire article which addresses the core of the myth, I’ve provided a link to the article as backup.

Electrification Can’t Possibly Replace Fossil Fuels Use

The primary energy fallacy makes the incredibly difficult and expensive problem of decarbonizing our economy, look totally impossible.  Fortunately, a little knowledge of thermodynamics shows us that the problem is about 1/3 as hard as the likes of Vaclav Smil would have us believe.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/primary-energy-fallacy-committest-thou-2nd-sin-paul-martin-nty3e

Here’s my most important piece- and one that has needed the least editing since I wrote it.  It explains how we can decarbonize- not immediately, not completely, but substantially and in a way that’s not only possible, but practical.  The only question is this:  will we be wise enough to choose it, and will we grow up and hence give up on trying to find somebody else to pay for it?

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6746179919799300096

Embodied Energy Destroys Decarbonization

Many have argued that solar, wind turbines and especially EV batteries, create so much toxic pollution, mining impact, and GHG emissions in their fabrication, and consume so much fossil raw material, that they cannot generate a net environmental benefit over their lifetimes.

Fortunately, good quality, disinterested 3rd party lifecycle analyses (LCAs) have been done on these topics.  These LCAs demonstrate conclusively the following:

  1. Both wind and solar not only reduce GHG emissions relative to the grid power that they replace, but actually both generate considerably greater exergy returned per unit exergy invested than the next barrel of petroleum that we must find, refine and burn
  2. EVs produce toxic emissions benefits even on grids which are substantially coal-fired, and on the average grid (such as the US grid at ~ 450 g CO2e/kWh) save tens of tonnes of GHG emissions over their lifecycle in net terms – even if battery recycling is totally ignored (battery recycling reduces GHG emissions even further, as batteries are better ores for the metals they contain than any native ore found on earth)

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/much-ado-embodied-energy-paul-martin

The End of Fossil Fuels Means the End of Fossil Petroleum Chemicals and Materials

A myth often repeated by people who are in the fossil fuel business, but don’t actually understand petroleum refining- or hope that you don’t.

A related myth, this time from the biomass crowd, is that the only feasible decarbonized future involves making materials and chemicals exclusively from biomass.  While this is sensible and possible, it is sensible and possible to such a limited niche extent that it is more or less chemical idiocy to think that biomass will be our major source of chemicals and materials post decarbonization. 

In fact we can and will make chemicals and materials from petroleum in a decarbonized future.  We will do that without the burning, and with no need to throw away 75-85% of every barrel into the lowest value use of those materials to humankind- as fuels.  It won’t be cheap, or easy, nor is it a future that any of the fossil fuel industry wants to retreat to- but it isn’t just possible, it’s possible without requiring a single new invention.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/refinery-future-thought-experiment-paul-martin-4pfoc

There’s a Market for CO2- to Make Useful Products

Another myth rather than an outright lie.  The amount of CO2 that can be converted into any valuable use, whether chemical or physical, is such a trivial fraction of the total amount of CO2 we generate by burning fossils that it’s not even worth talking about.  And the fraction of those uses that will actually meaningfully keep that CO2 out of the atmosphere over its lifecycle are more or less zero.  This is just people trying to find revenue streams to prop up carbon capture and storage or its idiot cousin direct air capture- or more properly, to fool you into believing that such revenue streams will ever exist.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/co2-utilization-empty-promise-paul-martin-x0xec

We Need a Circular Economy!

The circular economy is a thermodynamic myth and a dangerous ideological concept.  We should instead think about optimal recycle- and focus on cleaning up our energy supply, so the environmentally optimal recycle rate can increase for most things.  But the 2nd law dictates that sometimes, the optimal recycle rate will be zero.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/circular-economy-thermodynamic-myth-paul-martin-9nfic

Direct Air Capture is Necessary and Hence Inevitable- the IPCC Says So!

The IPCC does say that to avoid the worst of climate change, after humans have managed to bring fossil GHG emissions to an end, a significant amount of past fossil CO2 emissions will need to be removed from the atmosphere by some means.

That notion, however, is absolutely no justification whatsoever that mechanical/chemical direct air capture (DAC) is either useful or sensible- either now, or in the future.  And it ignores DAC’s real use:  the main use of the idiot cousin of carbon capture and storage, is as a fossil fueled meme and a predatory delay strategy.  And no, improvements in adsorbents, better processes for DAC etc., are unlikely to ever change that conclusion.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-direct-air-capture-sucks-good-way-paul-martin

Excess Renewable Electricity Can Be Used to Make Chemicals

Renewable electricity that would otherwise be curtailed, is a tempting target for all manner of utilization schemes.  Electricity markets sometimes even assign this electricity a “negative cost”- tempting, until you understand it better. 

The reality is that any strategy to use electricity which is only available a few percent of the time, needs to have extremely low capital cost in order to ever provide a payback.

No chemical manufacturing scheme forced to run only when renewable energy is in excess, will ever have low enough capital cost to meet that requirement.  In fact, no chemical manufacturing or even waste treatment scheme will ever have low enough capital to permit it to operate from just sun or just wind energy- the entire output, much less the portion that would be in excess were it grid connected.

And the second you try to run the capital asset at higher capacity factor by importing energy from the grid, you lose the economic benefit (free electricity) you were trying to take advantage of.

Commodities Can Be Made Cheaply By Mass-Producing the Means of Production

The meme of chemical plants consisting of numbered up shipping container-sized modules made in a factory, or of small modular nuclear reactors (SMNRs) comes to mind immediately.  This idea gets a failing grade in engineering economics class, again due to marginal capital intensity (the cost of capital per unit of valuable product produced).

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paul-martin-195763b_if-a-company-shows-you-a-plan-for-the-production-activity-7247955242200276992-qOxp

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scaling-examples-pt-1-small-modular-nuclear-reactors-smnrs-martin

We Will Make Fuels From Their Combustion Products Using Electricity!

No, we won’t.

Even the simplest e-fuel, hydrogen, fails spectacularly when you take a look at it more than trivially.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-from-renewable-electricity-our-future-paul-martin

And it should stand to reason that every fuel made from hydrogen and something else inert, whether it be nitrogen or CO2, is similarly going to be a failure, for the same reasons- structural inefficiency in the use of both energy and capital.

Here’s a worked example of the 2nd simplest e-fuel:  methane, made by reacting electrolytic hydrogen with biogenic CO2.  It’s an exergy destroyer on steroids, and a money shredder, which converts $13-$16/GJ electricity into $40-$90/GJ heat, i.e. many times worse than a hardware store electric resistance heater.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/e-methane-exergy-destroyer-steroids-paul-martin-ynhee

Similarly, anybody saying that hydrogen, ammonia, methanol, liquid organic hydrogen carriers, or any other e-fuel is “the new LNG”, is either deluded or lying.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/myth-hydrogen-export-spitfire-research-inc

We also won’t be wasting hydrogen- a 120 million tonne per year commodity chemical, 99% of which is still made from fossils without carbon capture- as a natural gas replacement, even if our wind turbines and solar panels are within reach of a pipeline.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-replace-natural-gas-numbers-paul-martin

This grand myth is so important to so many people, that I had to co-found the Hydrogen Science Coalition to gather allies together to counteract it.  It has already siphoned billions of dollars of credulous investment and ill-considered public subsidy, into a vast hole from which no meaningful decarbonization outcome will ever manifest itself.

A related myth is that we must store excess electricity in summer for use in winter.  While annual heat storage in aquifers for use in winter can make sense in the right geography, there is no imperative to store excess solar electricity in summer for use to cover “dunkelflaute” events in winter.  There are much cheaper and saner options, which make better use of capital.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-cant-batteries-store-more-than-four-hours-worth-power-paul-martin-fy9fc

Wright’s Law Makes Everything Cheaper- Hence Limitless Cheap Hydrogen!

Wright’s Law, the notion that we improve and lower costs with each doubling of production of a new technology, is a real thing that unfortunately is very poorly understood.  And no, its ability to limit the cost of future hydrogen cost is very much limited.  Hydrogen equipment will not follow a cost reduction curve anything like that experienced by solar, wind and batteries.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scaling-lesson-2-water-electrolysis-paul-martin

Biofuels Are Not Any Kind of Climate Solution

People like Dr. Mark Jacobson would like you to believe this.  They point to the fact that biofuels are not zero in GHG or toxic impact, and cannot be scaled to even approximately replace our current fossil fuels use, and both of those points are absolutely correct.  But to jump to the conclusion that biofuels are useless and must be avoided, is a non sequitur.  Biofuels will be essential as the tools by which we decarbonize aviation and shipping across transoceanic distances.  And if we really care about knocking down the last 5% of our fossil GHG emissions, we could store a year’s worth of biogas methane and use it to make power during dunkelflaute events and other emergencies.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/short-screed-biofuels-paul-martin-y7ohc

Decarbonization is Impossible Because We Will Run Out of …

The only thing we have ever “run out of” is the carrying capacity of the earth’s atmosphere for the effluent from burning millions of years’ worth of fossils for energy.  There are numerous examples of things which were previously precious, which are now commonplace as a result of a critical invention- aluminum being the key example of that.

The Malthusian predictors of doom who say we will run out of anything- pick your favorite “critical mineral” here- are all wrong.  While there are many things where supply will be under stress in the future,  most of the confusion in relation to this issue comes from people who confuse reserves with resources and don’t understand what the two terms mean in a mining context.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reserves-versus-resources-cautionary-tale-paul-martin-kxgpc

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/part-3-lithium-cobalt-risky-materials-paul-martin

The other key problem with these arguments is that they usually ignore substitution.  In the fossil fuel era, we could only substitute coal with oil or gas or the like- but when we’re talking about batteries, electrical conductors etc., there are numerous choices.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paul-martin-195763b_you-are-looking-at-something-mundane-but-activity-7291534146391158784-JPOm/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAIRv0EBAIGT-A3bAJVWCwX5iF72SdoTP3Q

That’s not to say that the ability of individual countries, particularly China, to control certain raw materials or the processing capacity to make finished goods from those raw materials, isn’t worrisome.  Rare earth elements (lanthanides), whose worrisome applications are military not cleantech, and even the much more mundane metal magnesium, are examples of where our pursuit of the absolute bottom dollar has allowed China to dominate supply and by so doing, generate not just an industry in China, but also a strategic advantage.

Final Thoughts:  Hope is Always Preferable to Despair

I agree with Goethe that hope is always preferable to despair- but only when hope is founded within the limits of physics.  False hope is a drug – #hopium- that is pushed by interested parties and by people who benefit from our belief in that false hope whether it turns out to be true or not.  We need hope, but must resist #hopium.  The very real problems we must face, including the risk of climate change, require sober thought and analysis, not green-wishing.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-hopium-paul-martin

So be careful out there when traveling the world of ideas.  There are lots of myths that don’t stand up to scrutiny.  There are lots of #hopium pushers and dealers out there, selling you all sorts of horseshit.  Don’t be afraid to ask difficult questions, and don’t for a moment assume that merely because an idea is popular in the media, or has been invested in by people with lots of money, that it must be correct.

Disclaimer:  this article has been written by a human, without the aid of automated plagiarism software.  Humans are known to make mistakes from time to time.  If I’ve gone wrong, please point it out to me with good references and I’ll be happy to correct my piece, and my mindset.

If however what you don’t like is that I’ve taken a dump on your pet idea, please complain to my employer, Spitfire Research Inc., who will be happy to tell you to piss off and write your own article.

Where I’ve Gone Wrong- And Changed My Mind

My disclaimer always says that my articles are written by a human, and humans have been known to make mistakes from time to time.  Point me to where I’ve gone wrong, with good references and analysis to change my mind, and I will gratefully edit my work- and my mindset too.  I actively try, though not always successfully, to care more about getting the issues right, than about being right myself.

A reader suggested that I might give examples of where I’ve been wrong and had to change my mind.  While nobody would read such a long tome- and I might not survive writing it either- listing a few examples of where I’ve been wrong and had to change my mind, might be useful to some.  And self-reflection something I’ve always found essential anyway, so writing this will be useful to me too.

It’s important to have an open mind, but as Sagan said, not so open that your brain falls out of your head.  And especially not so open that people can take a dump in your skull and fill it with disinformation.

It’s also critically important to realize that most ideas- including most of your own ideas- are worthless.  I do my bit for the environment by composting most of my ideas, hoping that something worthwhile will grow out of the resulting humus.

A warning:  this piece won’t focus only on technical topics.  It’ll go a bit deeper, into the world of values where by definition we will not all agree- because that’s where the most poignant examples are to be found.

Hydrogen as a Fuel

In my youth, it seemed obvious to me that we’d need fuels in the future, and that when fossils ran out, which they clearly would one day, we’d need to burn hydrogen made from water using nuclear power.

As climate change risk became a more obvious reality, that option- making hydrogen from water to burn as a fuel- seemed more and more obviously necessary in the future.

I’ve changed my mind on that entirely.  Building small reformers for Texaco and later Chevron, intended to make fuel for fuelcells first for vehicles and then later for combined heat and power in homes, forced me to contend with hydrogen’s immutable, intractable problems as an energy vector.  In the decades since that work, my extensive experience making and using hydrogen and syngas, and with developing and scaling chemical process technology, has reinforced this conclusion.

Hydrogen made from electricity, will never be cheap enough to waste as a fuel.  Virtually everything that hydrogen can do as a fuel, electricity can do better on its own.  And those few applications where we’ll need liquid fuels in the future for decades (aviation and shipping for transoceanic distances), will not use fuels made from their combustion products using electricity.

I’ve written about this extensively, but here’s the most positive of those articles, which focuses on where green hydrogen “fits”, rather than shitting on all the bad applications that interested parties have been pitching hydrogen for, trading one drug (#hopium) for another (#OPM, i.e. other people’s money).

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/where-does-green-hydrogen-fit-paul-martin-oc8ac

Nuclear Power More Generally

I once believed that nuclear power was the only alternative for electricity generation, once the obvious hydropower had been as fully exploited as the environment would allow.  Then again, to be fair,  I thought that in the 1980s and early 1990s.

But I’ve changed my mind about nuclear- a couple times.

Nuclear offers low GHG power and can be made adequately safe.  Its construction in my home province of Ontario, saved hundreds of thousands if not millions of premature deaths by ending the combustion of coal.  There’s lots positive to say about nuclear.

But I’ve since learned that nuclear is economically inflexible to demand.  Nukers are all capital cost and operating costs that exist regardless of whether the unit is running or down- their cost of fuel is trivial in comparison.   The only way you can afford nuclear power is therefore to run the plants as near to 100% capacity factor as possible, to spread their enormous capex over as many kWh as possible.  So while you can modulate the output of a nuclear reactor, few ever do, for reasons of cost and cycle life on the extraordinarily expensive equipment involved.  In Ontario, for instance, capacity factor is in the 92-94% range for units that are not down for extended periods for refits.  The 6-8% of unrealized capacity arises from outages or maintenance, rather than operating at less than 100% output.

Realistically, nuclear is only suited therefore to the very base of baseload demand.  If you build nuclear reactors with more capacity than to produce the lowest hour’s demand throughout the year, you’re wasting money, and not small amounts of money either.  Worse still, you need to predict that lowest hour of demand at least ten years in advance.  Either that, or you need to build storage.  And once you have storage, wind and solar eat a good chunk of your prepaid lunch.

Here’s the only article I ever intend to write about nuclear power.  It’s about the scaling-related myth of small modular nuclear power plants- a delusion that will never become a reality.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scaling-examples-pt-1-small-modular-nuclear-reactors-smnrs-martin

Biofuels

I once thought that biofuels had a decent shot at competing economically against expensive petroleum when it is properly burdened with a carbon tax.  I figured that surely, when petroleum ultimately ran out, we’d need to gasify biomass and use Fischer Tropsch to make the hydrocarbons we’d need.

Decades of hands-on work with biofuels, however, has convinced me that we can only count on using them for the last resort applications which need, rather than merely want, liquid fuels- transoceanic aviation and shipping.  And hands-on experience with F-T, taught me that it is actually an acronym for “f*cking terrible”, or “fundamentally terrible”- actually, both at the same time. 

We can use biogas methane, stored in the existing fossil gas infrastructure, for dunkelflaute and emergency response power generation, assuming we think that’s a good investment relative to just burning unmitigated fossil gas for ~ 5% of our energy needs.

Everything else- substantially all land transport for instance- is going electric.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/short-screed-biofuels-paul-martin-y7ohc

Environmentalism

I’ve always considered myself to be a pragmatic environmentalist, and still do.  But my attitude toward environmentalism has matured considerably since my university days.

My first jobs after graduation were related to environmental remediation- cleaning up the sins of the past, after the fact, which I figured was the only real way to be a serious environmentalist as a chemical engineer.  It didn’t take much experience with the difficulties of “end of pipe” type solutions- including hands-on experience with pointless battles against the 2nd law of thermodynamics- to realize that the real effort to make the world a better place, is best expended at the front of the pipe. 

Fortunately, I learned that lesson young enough that I have actually spent most of my career dealing with what goes into the pipe rather than what comes out of it, post dilution!

You can imagine, therefore, my attitude toward direct air capture- the idiot cousin of carbon capture and storage.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-direct-air-capture-sucks-good-way-paul-martin

I continue to be more than merely skeptical of “doomers”- people who think that humans are a “cancer” and that there are no solutions possible to the environmental problems that humans are creating- that all technological solutions are a delusion.  While I have some sympathy for people who despair at the extreme harm that humans have done and continue to do to the natural world, I think that anyone who loathes their own species to the point of calling it a “cancer” should be given a wide berth and their ideas- on environmental matters at least- should be treated with considerable suspicion.  I similarly have no sympathy and give no credence to people who use real concern over anthropogenic global warming or other environmental harms, as a cudgel to bring about ideological objectives they have failed to bring about by political means- ending capitalism, or ending the eating of meat etc.  I no longer consider such people to be allies in the fight against climate change.

Waste is Always Wrong

I am a scavenger and salvager at heart- I come by that honestly by nurture and I believe it also suits my nature.  I treat other people’s cast-offs as my inputs as often as I can manage.  I also am a campaigner for efficiency, because all inputs of matter and energy have environmental, social, political and economic impacts that make thrift and efficiency a worthwhile default policy.  But whereas I once believed that almost everything that was a waste, could and indeed should end up as a feedstock or source material to somebody or some process, an education in the 2nd law of thermodynamics has made me realize that we should stop talking about the “circular economy”, and instead talk about optimal recycle.  And while the optimal recycle is never 100%, it is often zero.  That leaves us with a different decision:  is the benefit from that single use, worth the impact?    

I have no less right as a human, to use the resources of the earth to meet my needs, than any human who has ever lived or who will ever live- we can have a long philosophical discussion, over beers or something stronger- about just how much I deserve to use to satisfy my whims and wants- to make art for instance- but we are unlikely to come to a uniform agreement on that, as our values likely differ.  One thing however is certain:  as our energy systems become cleaner and lower in emissions, the optimal recycle rate of many things will increase- some rather dramatically.  Our focus should therefore remain on cleaning up our energy supply, and using that energy wisely rather than in vain attempts to reverse thermodynamics.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/circular-economy-thermodynamic-myth-paul-martin-9nfic

I’ve also realized that my time on earth is a finite resource too- and one which I can’t justify spending more than a certain amount of, in the pursuit of keeping old, worn out shit running and functioning properly.  As the son of a mechanic, I took pride in driving old rust-buckets- generally small ones which got good gas mileage, but still, cars whose next destination was the scrapyard.  I got lucky with a few of them too.   I always thought that anyone who bought a new car was as sucker, as that depreciation the second the keys touch your hand was just an expenditure that could very easily be avoided.  But after a used car nearly ended my honeymoon in divorce, I bought my first brand new car.   When I drove that new car in to work, I had numerous colleagues feel my forehead for a fever, and ask who I was and what I’d done with Paul Martin…I’ve learned that things I’m going to use more than trivially, I am better off to buy new and maintain myself, than to trust in the risk of buying used.    Of course that isn’t a hard and fast rule- I do owe my current career to a great hobby project- electrifying a 1970s car which I owned out of love rather than reason.  But even there, I learned that trying to cure multi-metastatic car cancer is a fruitless exercise.  If you’re going to do a conversion, start with a clean “roller”- don’t waste your time on rust buckets!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/e-fire-triumph-spitfire-ev-paul-martin

Arguing with Climate Change Denialists

I was dead wrong here too.  I used to think that abandoning the discussion to climate change denialists was a bad strategy, as it left undecided bystanders at risk of being convinced that the loudest and most persistent voices were the right ones.  Now I know better:  when a denialist presents a denial or climate minimization argument, I call them on it, post a copy of my article on the solid evidentiary basis behind climate change for the bystanders, and then block the denialist and move on.  I don’t allow my comments or posts to become platforms for their disinformation, nor do I draw my followers’ eyes to their nonsense.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/global-warming-risk-arises-from-three-facts-paul-martin

It is critical to realize that a position which has been arrived at without recourse to data, logic and analysis, cannot be changed by data, logic or analysis.  People so deep in confirmation bias and in-group membership to believe, in this day and age, that climate change risk isn’t real or isn’t serious, are simply lost.  The planet will bury them eventually and humankind will move on.

Belief in the Supernatural

I was raised a Catholic, and while Catholic school eventually did a number of any straightforward Christian belief I held, for a long time I was convinced that there was some kind of transcendent reality that made human life and consciousness make sense by giving it some kind of transcendent meaning.   Sure, a native sense of ethics made it obvious to me that hell was a bullshit human construction, and that good people who weren’t Christians couldn’t possibly go on to eternal torment at the hands of a loving god (and by the way, if you don’t believe this, you aren’t a Christian any more, regardless how you think of yourself!).  

Over time, after much reading and learning and experience of the world as it is rather than as I’d have liked it to be, I went from full-on theist (believing there was a god who responded to prayer, and a get-out-of-death card called heaven if not the lake of fire for the damned), to deist (i.e. the universe is god), to atheist.  In fact, I’ve tried my best to get rid of all beliefs I hold on the basis of either poor or entirely absent evidence- the last god just went along with all the others, plus lots of other stuff.   The sooner we realize that the world doesn’t reward virtue or punish vice, and that bad things happen to good people every day and vice versa, the sooner we’ll be fully adult and properly compassionate toward one another.  

All that said, I do have more than a passing fancy for the Flying Spaghetti Monster- a god who is too dumb to intervene meaningfully in human affairs except to have a laugh from time to time, and too drunk to care, does explain a lot about the universe as I’ve observed it so far.

Be Willing to Change Your Mind!

Confirmation bias is a real thing, and the internet is the perfect tool to reinforce it.  It’s very easy to become locked into a world view that is self-reinforcing- one which also often comes with a sense of community which we humans seem to long for as social creatures. 

“Every complex problem has a solution that is clear, simple and wrong”- H. L. Mencken

I’ve come into this world with some key advantages that some very smart people lack: a willingness to be disagreeable, a functioning and undamaged cognitive dissonance detector, and a keen nose for bullshit (one that hasn’t been fatigued by constant exposure).  People’s desire to get along, to not cause a stir, to not question because it might reveal ignorance or might provoke a reaction from authority- is one of the most dangerous tendencies among humans, because it is ripe for exploitation by malevolent people.  And if you think there’s some good in everybody, you’re simply not meeting enough people!  Groupthink leads to the incineration of billions, the wasting of lives, and delay to real progress.

It can be very challenging to abandon a world view that is not in fact supported by the evidence, to admit you were wrong, and to move on to a greater understanding.  I’m very far from perfect at this, but I do at least make a very conscious effort to try!  And a big part of that, is the well reasoned, well supported argument of people who read and comment on my articles and posts on LinkedIn.  Some of them have even become real friends- sometimes real friends who I may never meet in person. 

My Personality is a Weakness

In fact, certain people had me convinced that my personality- who I truly and naturally am- was a weakness that I needed to work on. If I could only learn to get along, to hold my tongue, to suffer fools and foolish ideas gladly etc., I’d be easier to promote and more successful in business. And that was likely true! But where I went wrong, was in believing that the people who were offering this advice, were doing so in my own best interest rather than in theirs. In reality, they wanted me to be easier to control, and to ignore when it suited them.

When I went into business for myself, I really started liking my boss. We do still get into arguments from time to time, and have to take one another out for a drink so we can have it out and come back of one mind on the subject! But I also realized, like Popeye, that “I yam what I yam and that’s all I yam!”. What I really needed was to be able to use my natural tendencies toward truth-telling and to sell it as a service to people who are tired of being fed a line of bullshit- people who are betting their money and their effort on things that have to be right. People that need help cutting through the natural tendency to fall in love with an idea and then to lack clarity about it. Since I started playing to my own strengths, rather than trying to make myself into a poor copy of what someone else thought would suit their own interests, I’ve never been happier- and my independent consultancy has thrived. So when you visit www.spitfireresearch.com, you’ll find that one of our products is described as follows:

No Bullsh*t: We call a spade a shovel, in the interest of clarity and to save you time and money. If you’re looking for someone to flatter you and buoy confidence in your precious new idea, you probably should look elsewhere. But if you want clear, direct, no-bullsh*t advice about process development and decarbonization matters, you’ve come to the right place.

And finally: as a recovering #hopium addict myself, I suggest that we all smoke less #hopium. Sober people are more likely to make sound decisions- and more likely to be correct on matters of great importance.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-hopium-paul-martin

If you found this interesting, here’s a link to all my articles.  And if you want to help, and to motivate me to write more, the best way you can do that is to share them so that others get a chance to read them.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/links-all-my-articles-paul-martin-6gxxc

Written by a human, who tries to care about getting things right more than about being right personally- without the assistance of automated plagiarism software (AI).     

CO2 Utilization- an Empty Promise

Image produced by generative AI, using the stolen works of millions of artists.

TL&DR summary:  CO2 is a low Gibbs free energy product of energy producing reactions.  That fact makes it a thermodynamically unfavourable feedstock from which to make more than a handful of useful chemicals.  The notion of widespread use of CO2 as a chemical feedstock is based on #hopium smoke and green-wishing, promoted by the fossil fuel industry and credulous hangers-on.  It is 100% a false hope.  It is an attempt to pretend that CO2 could be a revenue stream rather than what it actually is:  a waste product with a rather high disposal cost.  A cost so high that the role of fossils as sources of energy, must simply end in a decarbonized future.

We’ve had an incredible party for the past 300 years on stored solar energy in the form of fossil fuels.  We quite like the party, and if it weren’t for the annoying fact that the “empties” from that party are piling up- the fossil GHGs we’re emitting in the process, leading to the destabilization of the climate- we’d keep right on partying.

Sadly, the party’s over.  We know this from measurements and basic physics.  That’s not in credible scientific dispute.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/global-warming-risk-arises-from-three-facts-paul-martin

The reason fossil fuels are a valuable store of chemical potential energy is pretty simple:  our atmosphere is 20.9% oxygen, and we can release energy in the form of heat and light when we react fossil fuels with oxygen.  The reason combustion releases energy is also quite simple:  fossil fuels have high Gibbs free energy, and the products of complete combustion- CO2 and water- have low Gibbs free energy.  The difference in Gibbs free energy between feedstocks and products, is heat energy, some of which we can use.  When we need heat, burning things is what we’ve done for about 800,000 years or so since our progenitors learned how to harness fire.  As sources of mechanical energy or electricity (thermodynamic work rather than heat), fossil fuels aren’t particularly efficient, despite 3 centuries of technological development.  However, what they lack in efficiency, they more than make up for in effectiveness, i.e. they are energy dense and hence easy to move and store. At least while the Strait of Hormuz is open, that is!

So:  what can we do with all this CO2?  That’s the question that people automatically ask themselves, any time something is generated in excess as a waste- can we do anything useful with it?  And generally, they’re wise to ask that question.  What they’re not wise to do is to assume that there’s a satisfactory answer.

Sadly, thermodynamics, plus a mass balance,  give us a solid answer to this question.  The answer is nothing– or so little that it might as well be nothing!

The very flip-side of the fact that CO2, and water, are both low Gibbs free energy products of energy producing reactions, is all we need to know that they’re positively energetically craptastic feedstocks from which to make anything much of value.

“Global Greening”- a #hopium Myth

Wait a minute, I hear some of you saying to yourselves through the aether:  aren’t water and CO2 the basic building blocks of all life on earth, more or less?  The answer to that question is yes- photosynthesis in green plants, uses the energy in several visible light photons added on top of one another, by means of a complex process evolved over at least a billion years, to chemically reduce water and CO2  to carbohydrates.  That’s the base of most of the food chain on earth.

But when people say that “CO2 is plant food”, they’re expressing either ignorance or stupidity.

CO2 is “plant food” in more or less exactly the same way that concrete blocks are “food” for construction workers!

Consider construction workers building a concrete block wall.  They don’t eat concrete blocks, clearly.  If there are more concrete blocks lying about, it takes them less effort and energy to find the next one to use to build the wall.  But their source of energy is the chemical energy in what they eat, not what they use to make their product out of!

The same is true of green plants.  Depending on the environmental niche they’ve evolved to occupy, there’s an optimal amount of water to maximize growth and ability to reproduce.   They need the right amount of water, at the right time, in the right places, of the correct salinity etc.  There’s such a thing as too much, and too little water.

With CO2, it’s a little more complex.  More CO2 in the atmosphere does enhance growth, but only to the extent that all other growth limitations on the plant allow.  More CO2 in a greenhouse environment, where humans provide optimal amounts of other nutrients and water, and control light levels, humidity and temperature extremes, results in a big increase in growth.  But out in the real world, extra CO2 may enhance growth by a lot or almost not at all, depending on what other factor is limiting growth.

So “global greening” is a myth.  Not an outright lie, as there’s a kernel of truth there.  It’s a real-ish thing that climate scientists take into account- but in no way will plant growth ever be able to sop up more than a small fraction of the rate at which we’re dumping CO2 into the atmosphere by burning fossils.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/trees-cant-save-us-from-climate-change-paul-martin-edpqc

Furthermore, if extra CO2 comes along with global temperatures which are increasing faster than they’ve ever increased in the geological records we have access to, the likely outcome for green plants isn’t particularly good.  They’re used to changing their “range” very gradually as climate changes due to earth orbital and tilt cycles over thousands of years, and evolving to suit new conditions over millions of years.  Giving them excess CO2 while raising global temperatures faster than they can adapt, is going to be rather cold comfort to the earth’s plant cover.

Physical Uses of CO2

CO2 has its uses due to its combination of physical and chemical properties.  It is comparatively inert, and denser than air, so it can be used to extinguish fires, and in gas mixtures used as shield gases for welding.  It can be used as a refrigerant, to replace more complex molecules which have even higher global warming potentials (but which work at lower pressures).   It is only mildly toxic below about 5000 ppm- the atmospheric concentration will never rise high enough for toxicity to be a concern.  It can be used to carbonate beverages, giving them a pleasant sparkle.  It is used in shielding atmospheres in food preparation and storage, and to make dry ice for cold storage.   All of these physical rather than chemical uses of CO2, add up to perhaps 25 million tonnes per year of CO2.

Enhanced Oil Recovery

But far and away, its most important current use- consuming far more tonnes of CO2 per year than any other- is in enhanced oil recovery (EOR).  Supercritical CO2 can be used to effectively dry-clean porous rock layers that contain petroleum.  The CO2 dissolves in the oil, and vice versa, reducing viscosity and freeing oil trapped inside tiny pores, increasing the rate that the oil-CO2 solution flows to the recovery wells. 

When the oil is brought to the surface, the portion of the CO2 that was dissolved into the oil, flashes out again as pressure is reduced, carrying light hydrocarbons like methane, and water vapour, along with it.  But since CO2 costs money to purify, compress and transport to a well site, it is- at that location at least- a somewhat valuable commodity.  Contrary to popular belief, that flashed CO2 isn’t vented- it is separated from any light hydrocarbons and water, compressed, dehydrated and re-injected.  While there are some losses to leakage and venting, because the gas isn’t THAT valuable,  these losses have been overstated by critics of EOR practice. 

Some CO2 will stay behind, trapped in the oil reservoir’s emptied pores.

 And EOR does mean that we can extract more oil from existing reservoirs, which means no new emissions from drilling and developing new ones.   However, the mass of CO2 that would be produced when combusting a unit volume of oil, is much larger- even as a supercritical fluid- than the space in the rock originally occupied by that unit of oil. 

To be clear, the real criticism of EOR isn’t that the CO2 is vented.  The real criticism is that when the product oil is combusted, between two and four times as much mass of CO2 will be released to the atmosphere than will be retained by the reservoir.  If we were doing EOR to recover petroleum to feed a “net zero” petroleum refinery which makes only materials and chemicals that are not burned at their end of life- a possible but expensive future way we could use petroleum- then this issue wouldn’t really be a concern. 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/refinery-future-thought-experiment-paul-martin-4pfoc

But since 75-85% of every barrel is currently made into products which are burned as fuels- EOR is every bit as much of a greenwash as it seems.

Currently EOR consumes about 70-80 million tonnes per year of CO2. For comparison, the 2025 figure for fossil CO2 generation worldwide was 38 GT, i.e. 38,000 million tonnes.  EOR is therefore, and always will be, an absolute drop in the bucket, or barrel if you will.

Chemical Feedstock Uses of CO2

Far and away the largest use of CO2 as a chemical feedstock is in the manufacture of urea.  About 130 million tonnes per year of CO2, captured from hydrogen production from either methane or coal, is reacted with ammonia to produce the intermediate ammonium carbamate, which decomposes to produce urea and water.  Urea’s major use is as a nitrogen fertilizer, and when urea is applied to soils, within days 100% of the CO2 in the urea molecule, returns to the atmosphere.

All other current chemical uses of CO2, add up to less than 1 million tonnes per year.  That’s all the organic carbonates, polycarbonates, salicylic acid production, precipitation grade calcium carbonate production- all of it.

Less than 1 million tonnes per year, out of the 38,000 million tonnes we produce by burning fossils yearly.

And that should not be a surprise, since we’ve already talked about the thermodynamics of CO2.

Thermodynamics is the Reason that CO2 Utilization is FUBAR

Back when I was a chemical engineering grad student at the University of Waterloo in 1991, a drunken old sot of a professor decided to hold a departmental brainstorming session to come up with ideas about what to do with all the CO2 from fossil combustion, which even drunken old sots at that time were realizing was a very real and present danger to the continued thriving of humankind on earth.

A good chunk of the grad students and about a third of the tenured faculty showed up.   An interesting topic, then and now!

One by one, people would toss out ideas.  “Well, you could do this!”  And one by one, someone would give an answer that amounted, ultimately, to “Yeah, but thermodynamics…”

 Frustrated, the old sot eventually shouted out, “This is a brainstorming session!  Let’s just park thermodynamics for a moment and get out some ideas!”.

My brilliant friend Landon Steele, who I have the great fortune to still call a dear friend and colleague after all these years, gave voice to what all of us were thinking:  “Well, then let’s just make diamonds and oxygen, and go get a beer at the Grad Club!”

CO2 + $$$ ==> 💎 + O2

🍺 ⬆️ AGW ⬇️

Problem solved, right?

Right?

Sure- we could make diamonds and oxygen- or graphene, or carbon nano-whatsits, or any number of other exotic things.  We could even make much more mundane and realistic things like methanol.  But all suffer from the same problem:  thermodynamics.  In particular, the 1st and 2nd Laws.

The 1st Law says that whatever energy you get out of a reaction- say, the combustion of methanol to water and CO2- you must put back in again if you were to reverse the reaction by, say, making methanol from CO2 and water.

As if reversibility and conservation of energy weren’t heavy enough sacks of cement to help us swim upstream here, the 2nd Law comes along and says, “Yeah, and every step in both directions, will have losses associated with the fact that we won’t be carrying out these reactions at equilibrium”.  The 2nd law will charge us a tithe too, on every energy conversion step we carry out along the way- say, in using electrical energy to break water back apart into hydrogen and oxygen, so we can then react CO2 with hydrogen to make methanol and…water.

The very feature which makes CO2 a desirable product of energy producing reactions- its low Gibbs free energy- make it an undesirable and energetically punishing thing from which to make almost anything of value.

And the more complex a thing we wish to make from that CO2, the more punishment we’ll receive from the 2nd Law in return for our efforts. 

Making jet fuel molecules, 12 carbon units long, for instance, will hurt us a lot more than making methane- which will hurt us more than making a more oxidized single carbon chemical like methanol.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7249403462017245185

These aren’t bugs, they’re features.  You can’t fix this with a better catalyst or more screwing around in the laboratory.

Is There Anything Which DOES Make Sense To Make From CO2?

Possibly.

Now hold on- how, in light of the thermodynamics, could that make any sense?

Simples.  There are a couple simple, highly oxidized molecules, which we find difficult to make, for kinetic and stability reasons.  And while neither of these things will offer any hope of being a meaningful use of any significant quantity of CO2 from burning fossils, they are major commodity chemicals in their own right.  Chemicals we currently make from fossil methane.

There are only two of them.

One is formic acid, and the other is formaldehyde.

Formic Acid

While the reaction of methane with oxygen to form formic acid, formaldehyde, methanol, CO and CO2 are all spontaneous and exothermic, sadly the reaction cannot be made to stop at anything OTHER than CO and CO2 under realistic conditions-despite a lot of effort trying!

Formic acid is therefore currently made by the following bizarre, thermodynamic zig-zag:

  • Start with methane
  • React methane with steam in a reformer to make CO and H2, i.e. oxidizing methane all the way to CO, which is too far, in a step which is endothermic and hence requires an external source of energy (generally produced by burning about 30% of the feed methane)
  • React CO with H2 to make methanol, ie. Reducing CO back to methanol- a step backward, with an energetic penalty
  • React methanol with more CO, producing methyl formate- another oxidation
  • Hydrolyze methyl formate using an acid catalyst to produce formic acid and methanol, which is recycled

Instead of this messy, methanol-destroying process, we should be able to electrochemically or catalytically reduce CO2, with or without added hydrogen produced by the electrolysis of water, to directly produce formic acid.  It might make sense, if it can be made to work efficiently enough.

We use about 2 million tonnes per year of formic acid, most of it for preserving silage in agriculture and for the tanning of leather, and a few other uses.  Again, most of its CO2 ends up in the atmosphere at its end of life, so making formic acid is not a CO2 sequestration strategy.

And before you ask- just forget about wasting formic acid as a fuel or to make hydrogen.  That would be dumbass- and yes, it’s been proposed, many times.

Formaldehyde

About 60 million tonnes per year of this poisonous gas are produced, either as the gas or as a solution in water called formalin.  Substantially all of this formaldehyde is used to make polymers- adhesives and coatings for wood products like urea- and phenol-formaldehyde, and melamine-formaldehyde.  About 10% is used to make acetal polymers and co-polymer thermoplastics (Delrin is a popular tradename).

Just like with formic acid, it cannot be made directly from methane via a practical process.  Instead, it is made by the catalytic oxidation and dehydrogenation of methanol- again, another thermodynamic zigzag.

Formaldehyde or formalin solutions might again be made electrochemically by the reduction of CO2.  This would be seemingly a more direct path, but it does seem to also be a difficult one.

Will it help, to make formic acid and formaldehyde from CO2?  If it’s possible, it will help- but only a little.  And as the late David Mackay of Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air fame, quipped, “Every little bit helps, but only a little.  We need to focus on the big bits!”

What About CO2 for E-Fuels?

The simplest fuel to make from CO2, methanol, can be made from CO2 and hydrogen, whereas today it is made from syngas containing mostly CO and H2.  The reason is that all methanol catalysts are also water-gas shift reaction catalysts: they can produce CO and H2O from CO2 and H2.

Sadly, you need to make hydrogen from something- and if that something is water, using electricity, you’ve already fallen into a thermodynamic hole, by converting pure exergy (electricity) into a smaller quantity of chemical potential energy (hydrogen)- a proxy for heat, hence lower in exergy.  The hole is made deeper by the fact that the reaction of CO2 + H2 produces methanol and water, requiring you to use energetically punishing distillation to separate the product from the worthless water.

The making of e-methane simply compounds and makes worse the main problem of making hydrogen to use as a fuel or energy storage medium.  It’s a failed attempt to improve the effectiveness of hydrogen as a fuel, by improving its energy density per unit volume and by producing a liquid which is easier to move and store, by making its energy and especially its exergy efficiency, even worse.

Fortunately, it’s possible to also make methanol by gasifying biomass to produce the necessary syngas.  Much more expensive than making it from cheap fossil gas and dumping fossil CO2 into the atmosphere, but way cheaper than wasting electricity to “un-burn” CO2 and water into a liquid fuel.

There’s a logic to trying to make methanol from captured biogenic CO2 and electrolytic hydrogen.  The idea is that large, centralized methanol plants could produce methanol at low cost continuously from these feedstocks, and that despite their extra cost due to thermodynamic idiocy, the product will still be cheaper than dealing with the difficulties and transport costs of feeding biomass to gasifiers to feed smaller methanol plants.  I just don’t share that opinion, based on my own estimates of what green hydrogen could possibly cost, even in the best places in the world to make it.

But any even approximate sense for e-fuels as a concept, simply ends when you go beyond methanol. 

The other fuel that is technically trivial to make from CO2, is methane.  CO2 + 4 H2 => CH4 + 2 H2O plus a shitload of heat- produced where energy is already in excess, mind you, because otherwise where are you getting your hydrogen?  Called the Sabatier reaction, or “methanation”.  Its major use today is to purify hydrogen, removing traces of CO and CO2 from product hydrogen which can damage downstream equipment, replacing them with less bothersome methane.  The reaction happens over an active and not terribly expensive nickel oxide catalyst.  Easy peasy- technically, that is.  Sadly, it’s also an exergy shredder, on steroids.  An utterly stupid thing to do.  A way to convert $14-$18/GJ electricity- pure exergy- into $40-$90/GJ methane, i.e. a proxy for HEAT.  Utter idiocy.  Here’s a worked example if you want to understand just how bad e-methane is as a concept. 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/e-methane-exergy-destroyer-steroids-paul-martin-ynhee

By the way, e-fuels are dumb even if you try to use nitrogen in place of CO2.  Using ammonia as a fuel isn’t just energetic and exergy vandalism- it’s also a dangerously stupid violation of the 1st rule of safety in design.  It’s an idea which will have an otherwise avoidable body count. 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ammonia-ship-fuels-more-like-fuel-fools-paul-martin-jb7nc

E-fuels are a result of an ideological application of the thermodynamically faulty notion of the “circular economy”.  From thermodynamics, we know that energy cannot be “recycled”, regardless what clever arrangement of matter we attempt to use to do so.  In the real world- the one governed by laws of physics rather than by wishful thinking under the influence of #hopium and OPM (other people’s money)- we can’t talk about “circularity”- we can only talk about optimal recycle.  And the optimal amount of recycle for CO2, using electricity as the feedstock to do so, is zero.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/circular-economy-thermodynamic-myth-paul-martin-9nfic

Billions of dollars- of other people’s money- are being bet against the assertion I’ve just made.  And 100% of that money, is being wasted.

The Bottom Line:  CO2 is a Waste- With a Disposal Cost

We know what carbon capture and storage costs, under ideal conditions, executed at scale by experts.  We know this from the public cost data available from the Shell Quest blackish blue, bruise-coloured hydrogen project in Alberta, which has captured and stored 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year for over a decade- more than all the durable chemical feedstock carbon utilization on earth during that time.  We Canadians paid for that data- over a billion dollars.  You’re welcome- but please use the data, rather than ignoring it in favour of the hyperbolic dreams of future low costs being put forward by the fossil fuel industry!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/blackish-blue-bruise-coloured-hydrogen-spitfire-research-inc

That project’s last cost data is from 2023, because the Province of Alberta hasn’t released the 2024 and 2025 cost data figures yet.  I suspect there’s a strategic reason on the part of Alberta’s currently rabidly fossil fuel-addled government for that, as pesky data makes it harder to argue that oil sands production can continue if the industry uses CCS to meet its carbon emission targets.

But the last data showed that costs were going up each year, and that the figure from 2023 was $165 CDN/tonne of CO2 emissions averted.  That’s about $120 USD/tonne, and that’s cheaper than a lot of other things that people are talking about doing.

It’s a lot cheaper, for instance, than blending imaginary future $3 US/kg hydrogen into the natural gas system as a partial GHG emission mitigation- that would cost north of $350 USD/tonne.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-hydrogen-blending-gas-network-bollocks-paul-martin-i5sdc

Can that cost be partially paid for by revenue from EOR?  It should be no surprise whatsoever that EOR has been the destination of most of the world’s CCS-captured CO2 so far, because the costs of CCS are so high that any source of revenue is better than nothing.  But we also know, or should know, that EOR must simply end when we stop wasting 75-85% of every barrel of petroleum as a fuel.

Can any meaningful revenue be generated in future from CCS-captured CO2, then?  For any combination of purposes?

That question has a very solid answer, and the answer is not just no- it’s hell no!

As to direct air capture- it’s nothing but the idiot cousin of CCS.  It will never be a “thing”, other than a biofuels project of the 2nd kind- a project which consumes bales of paper money, producing a product called salaries.  That would be bad enough, but it is also a fossil fueled meme, designed by the fossil fuel industry to keep us feeling good about wasting fossils as fuels for as long as possible.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-direct-air-capture-sucks-good-way-paul-martin

“Carbon utilization” is nothing more than a fossil fuel marketing term.  The “U” in CCUS, has no utility other than marketing.  It is yet another distraction from real decarbonization.

Disclaimer:  This article was written by a human, and humans have been known to make mistakes from time to time.  If you can show where I’ve gone wrong, using good references, I will correct my work with gratitude.

If however, what you don’t like about my article is that I’ve taken a dump on your pet idea, then I encourage you to contact my employer, Spitfire Research Inc.- who will be quite happy to tell you to piss off and write your own article.

Mark Carney’s Speech- Interpreted for 5 yr olds

The authorship of this piece is unknown to me- I came across it in my Facebook feed.

“There has been a lot of discussion over the past few days about our Prime Minister’s speech at the World Economic Forum. I believe he delivered remarks that will be remembered and referenced for years to come, and that they may serve as a catalyst to shift some of the rhetoric that has been steadily rising from south of the border.

That said, I also expect there will be backlash. It’s likely that anonymous accounts and foreign influence machines will go into overdrive—pushing one-sided memes, isolating tiny fragments of the speech, and using them to shape opinions among people who didn’t read the full remarks or, unfortunately, couldn’t grasp the language and ideas being expressed.

So, being the instigator that I am, I decided to try something different. I asked my AI friends to rewrite the Prime Minister’s speech as if it were being delivered to an audience of three-year-olds.

And as it turns out, the message is actually pretty simple.

Hello everyone 👋

Sometimes, big kids fight.

The biggest kids try to take toys.

The smaller kids feel scared.

For a long time, we had playground rules.

The rules said:

“Be fair.”

“Don’t push.”

“Share.”

But now, some big kids don’t follow the rules anymore.

Some kids pretend the rules still work.

They smile.

They nod.

They say, “Okay,” even when it’s not okay.

They do this so they don’t get in trouble.

A long time ago, a man told a story.

It was about a shopkeeper.

The shopkeeper put a sign in his window.

He didn’t believe the sign.

But he kept it there anyway.

He was pretending.

The pretending made the bad system strong.

The truth made it weak.

When one person takes the sign down,

the lie starts to break.

It’s time to take the signs down.

For many years, Canada played nicely.

We followed the rules.

We trusted the playground.

And it worked for a while.

But now the playground has changed.

Some kids use food, toys, and games to control others.

They say, “Do what I want, or else.”

That means the old way doesn’t work anymore.

So what do we do?

We could all build tall walls.

We could hide.

We could say, “Mine!”

But a playground full of walls is lonely.

And sad.

And weaker.

Instead, we can work together.

Canada wants to do two things:

• Be kind and fair

• Be strong and smart

We believe in rules.

We believe in helping people.

But we also know not everyone plays the same way.

So we open our eyes.

We don’t pretend.

We deal with the world as it is.

Canada is getting stronger at home.

We are building things.

Learning things.

Protecting ourselves.

And we are making many friends.

Different friends for different problems.

Helping each other when we can.

Because if we sit alone at lunch,

we might be next.

When smaller kids work together,

they don’t get pushed around as much.

The most important thing is this:

Stop pretending everything is fine.

Say what is real.

Be fair to everyone the same way.

Build what you believe in.

Canada has a lot to share.

Energy.

Smart people.

Ideas.

Kindness.

Canada is a place where many people live together.

We talk loud.

We argue.

But we care.

And we keep going.

The old playground isn’t coming back.

That’s okay.

We don’t cry about it.

We build a better one.

We take the sign down.

We tell the truth.

We stand together.

That is Canada’s choice.

And anyone can walk with us.

Thank you 😊

Why Can’t Batteries Store More Than 4 Hours of Energy?

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 kWh.

There’s a lot of misunderstanding around batteries.  Myths abound.  The myths arise because a kernel of truth is misunderstood and then turned into popcorn by the FUD spreaders (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and nirvana fallacy pushers.

One popular myth, or misunderstanding, is that batteries can’t store more than about four hours worth of electricity.

A lithium ion battery can store energy for months.  Self-discharge rates in LFP cells are on the order of 1-5% per month.  So no, it’s not that if you store energy for longer in a battery, it will drain away or disappear.

However, it is quite a different matter to say that you could afford to build a battery storage system which stored a month’s worth of electricity!

The economics of energy storage are pretty simple, but you need to understand them to know why people target a particular storage duration- and why the problem of long duration or worst of all, seasonal energy storage, has so many people scratching their heads and looking at all sorts of weird and wonderful things to solve it.

Numbers are instructive here.  So let’s take a simple example:  a home energy system.

Let’s say that you buy LFP batteries and put them together into a 100 kWh pack, with a total cost of $100 USD per kWh of storage.  That’s quite achievable these days, if you don’t need a pre-packaged, certified battery product “solution”- just one that is safe enough to use and reliable enough to depend on.

Large format LFP cells have a guaranteed cycle life on the order of 6000 cycles, meaning that you can charge and discharge these batteries to (near) their full capacity about 6000 times before they drop to 80% of their original capacity.  6000 daily cycles would take 16.4 years.

All lithium ion batteries also start degrading from the first time they’re charged.  So-called “calendar life” results in a degradation of about 1% per year, even when they’re just stored, not cycled at all.  It would therefore take 20 years for these batteries to degrade to 80% of original capacity even if they were never cycled.  If the batteries are stored at 90% state of charge (SOC), degradation can be much faster-up to 3% per year, or 6.7 years to drop to 80% of original capacity.  So in a sense, the cycle life of Li ion batteries is to some degree a “use it or lose it” proposition.

But to make the math simple, let’s make the following assumptions:

100 kWh of battery storage

90% state of charge per cycle, i.e. taking the cells from 100% to 10% SOC each cycle

One full cycle per day

6000 cycles guaranteed life.  And calendar degradation of a little more than 1% per year, so that the battery will still need replacement in 16.4 years

$100/kWh initial capital cost.

90% round trip efficiency, i.e. if you feed 10 kWh of electricity to the charging circuits, you get 9 kWh back out again at the input of your inverter.

The battery would therefore return 100 kWh x 6000 cycles x 0.9 SOC x 0.9 efficiency = 486,000 kWh, delivered over 16.4 years of operation.

The raw capital cost of the battery would be $100/kWh x 100 kWh = $10,000.  Of course we pay that on day 1.

Ignoring interest rates, the simple cost of storage per kWh returned is therefore $10,000/486,000 kWh = $0.02/kWh, plus the cost of electricity fed to the battery (divided by 0.9, because we must feed 10 kWh to get 9 back due to the efficiency).

Add in an interest rate, because we don’t get capital for free, and the cost per kWh goes up, because the kWh are delivered in the future, whereas the capital must be paid for on day 1.

What happens if we chose to do a cycle every 2 days instead?

Nothing changes, except the number of cycles, which now drops to 3000 in 16.4 years.  The battery will still need retirement due to calendar life.  The simple cost per kWh simply doubles as a result, to $0.04/kWh.

What happens if we were to cycle it only once per month?

Wow- now the simple cost of capital is spread over only 16.4 x 12 = 197 cycles.  The cost per returned kWh is now $0.63/kWh! Or maybe a little less, if the battery cycled so infrequently, lasts 20 rather than 16.4 years.

You can see what happens if we cycle the battery less frequently, just from this simple math!  And remember- real projects need to provide a return to their investors, so our simple cost of capital calculation (ignoring discount rates, i.e. interest) underestimates the real costs per kWh.  And for real projects, the revenue from production more than 20 years after the project is initiated, at the sorts of interest rates expected by lenders or investors, ends up not mattering all that much.

The same sorts of calculations can be done for every kind of energy storage scheme imaginable.  And the end results are similar.

You can summarize the influence of each factor as follows:

Capital cost: the cost per stored kWh, or per potentially returned kWh in lower efficiency storage schemes, is strongly dependent on the capex of the battery.  Expensive batteries can only pay back their investors if they are cycled frequently.  Batteries which will get few cycles per month, or per year, because they are designed with longer discharge periods in mind, will need to either be very cheap, or to have very desperate customers willing to pay a high cost per returned kWh.

Cycles: more frequent and hence shorter cycles, reduce the cost per returned kWh, irrespective of capital cost

Cycle life: as long as cycle life is long enough to match calendar life, increasing cycle life beyond this, doesn’t matter in economic terms- though it might matter in lifecycle environmental impact terms.  And money spent to extend cycle life, generates diminishing returns.  Note that while sealed batteries of all kinds have both cycle and calendar life, other schemes such as flow batteries, pumped hydro, compressed air storage etc., all have other things like operation and maintenance costs that vary in more complex ways with how frequently and deeply and quickly they’re cycled

Efficiency:  high efficiency helps by dropping the cost per returned kWh.  Low efficiency means that the cost per returned kWh increases.  It’s also important to note that with Li ion batteries, which have high efficiency, there is little difference between storage capacity (the ability to absorb kWh) and returned energy capacity.  However, if you have a 100 kWh battery or storage system which has return-from-storage efficiency of only 50% (which may be the case with iron-air batteries), it’s really only a 50 kWh battery.  Stating its cost per stored kWh, gives a false notion of the cost of each kWh returned.

The implications for various use cases and types of storage batteries are worthy of consideration.

Solar Storage: the presence of significant solar in the supply mix, more or less guarantees one cycle per day to a grid storage system.  And grid storage doesn’t care much about energy density per unit mass or volume.  But what do you do to level out differences between sunny days and cloudy/rainy ones?  Or between summer and winter, particularly in snowy regions?  You certainly will NEVER use batteries to store excess solar kWh in summer, for use in winter- you’ll need another strategy.

Aircraft: electric aircraft would more or less be guaranteed one or more cycles per day.  Their main concern therefore isn’t capital cost per kWh stored, but things more important to feasibility:  energy density per unit mass and volume for instance

Ships:  transoceanic ships are very sensitive to fuel/energy cost, and would initially seem like a good option to be electrified if they can be recharged with inexpensive electricity from wind and solar.  However, because it takes a ship over a month to cross the Pacific at an economic travel speed, any battery used in a ship would need to be very, very low in capital cost, or each returned kWh within its calendar life will be unaffordable to the ship’s operator.  However, applications like ferries are at the opposite end of the spectrum.  A short distance ferry may have its battery cycled several times per day, and are therefore an obvious target for electrification

Flow Batteries: the putative benefit of flow batteries is that they allow the decoupling of power (energy produced per unit time, ie. kW) from storage of energy (i.e. kWh).  A vanadium redox flow battery (VRB) is the simplest example:  a flow battery stack, rather like a fuelcell but constructed differently, is used to charge and discharge the battery, and its size (and cost) is determined by the rate at which it must be able to absorb power during charging and supply power during discharging.  Energy storage, in contrast, consists of paired tanks, generally plastic tanks, full of anolyte and catholyte- solutions of vanadium ions in sulphuric acid.  Charging and discharging involve pumping solution from one tank to the other.  While the tanks themselves are very inexpensive, the vanadium solution sadly isn’t.  Enough vanadium solution to store 1 kWh currently costs over $100 at market prices for V2O5 and making reasonable assumptions for the cost of making a suitable electrolyte solution.  When LFP prismatic cells can be purchased retail for $50/kWh, and with the potential for sodium ion batteries to be cheaper still in no more than a decade, VRBs therefore seem to be a technology that is dead in the water.

Iron/Air batteries: proponents such as the well funded startup Form Energy, propose to use very simple (in concept) reversible aqueous iron corrosion and plating as a method for very low cost long duration energy storage.  However, the devil seems to be firmly in the details here.  Very low efficiency combined with practical constraints related to the rates of charging and discharging, the stability of the battery in storage (ie. High self discharge rates) etc., mean that to be competitive, iron-air batteries would need to be very, very cheap per stored kWh to fill a niche as longer term storage media which are therefore cycled infrequently.  It is not clear that they will achieve the necessary low costs at scale to find a niche.

Hydrogen:  low cycle efficiency plus high capex and low energy density per unit volume, make hydrogen a structurally bad battery scheme.  While the cost per stored kWh of hydrogen energy in a salt cavern might be very low, the very best case efficiency is about 37% on a cycle basis, i.e. buy 3 kWh, get 1 back.  Furthermore, the capital cost per kg of hydrogen produced, is strongly sensitive to capacity factor of the electrolysis equipment.  Similarly, the cost per returned kWh is strongly sensitive to the capacity factor of the equipment (fuelcell or gas turbine power plant) that is used to make electricity again from the hydrogen.  Furthermore, electricity production and storage locations are not co-located, requiring bespoke new infrastructure to move hydrogen from where it’s produced to where it’s to be stored, and then on to where it will be burned again.  The end result is that the notion that we will make hydrogen only from renewable electricity when it is available in excess, and then store it for use during kalt dunkeflaute conditions that might exist only a week or two per year, is just utterly an economic myth.  It will never be affordable as an energy storage scheme.

Emergency Response/Dunkelflaute Power Storage

Any emergency backup power solution must meet the following criteria to be successful:

1)        It must be reliable, without fail.  If this condition isn’t met, the solution is worthless

2)       It must have a low capex, because it will be operated infrequently and hence it will have very few kWh to spread its capex over

3)       Opex (fuel cost) and efficiency are important, but secondary to capex, again because there are few kWh being consumed so total cost of fuel is small

4)       It is presumed that all the strategies practical to mitigate and minimize the depth and duration of these emergencies, have already been deployed:  overbuilding renewables, wider bidirectional grids, smart demand management etc., as detailed in my article about the whole subject of energy decarbonization:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-energy-solutions-paul-martin

To me, the solution that best fits this need, is stored fuels. Fossil fuels perhaps at first, and ultimately, if we are worried about the last few percent of decarbonization, biofuels.

Best of all, we have fossil fuel infrastructure which can be repurposed to meet this need.  There are, for instance, existing transmission and storage infrastructure for natural gas, which are fully paid for, which have no other use in a decarbonized future, and which therefore only need to be maintained.  We could, for instance, store a whole year’s worth of anaerobic digestion biogas in the existing natural gas infrastructure, using it only to supply those few applications which need fire rather than just heat, and also serving as a reservoir of energy for both emergencies and the dunkelflaute (periods of cold, dark calm when wind and solar power fall away for periods of days to a week).

These emergency generation assets would need to be low capex, because they would be used to make comparatively few kWh each year.  And any asset that is used infrequently, will be very dependent on the cost of capital, i.e. the borrowing cost to pay for it.  Such assets are therefore best publicly owned, because governments have the lowest borrowing cost.

If you find the topic of energy storage interesting, Rosemary Barnes’ video is worth watching:

Disclaimer: this article was written by a human, who uses generative AI only to generate images that I can’t draw myself, not to write anything. Humans, just like the AI who scrapes their content without permission, are known to make mistakes from time to time. If you find a mistake, feel free to bring it to my attention with good references and I’ll happily change the text- and my mind.

If however what you don’t like is that I’ve taken a dump on your pet idea, feel free to contact my employer, Spitfire Research, who will be happy to tell you to piss off and write your own article.

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 drought and to respond to other emergencies.  While these fuels are absolutely possible to produce in the quantities required, they will at scale represent quite a high cost per tonne of net CO2e emissions averted.  They are with certainty going to be cheaper at scale than any fuel made from its combustion products using electricity.  While some hydrogen will be needed to deoxygenate biofuels, so-called e-fuels are thermodynamic and hence economic nonsense, so we’d better hope we don’t need them.

I spent more than a decade working on chemical and biochemical biofuels schemes, so I know a lot about what has been tried, what worked, what didn’t, and why.  And while some of that knowledge is subject to durable client NDAs, some of it is just public knowledge within the biofuels industry that needs to be spread more broadly.

Where Biofuels are Needed

All land transport is going electric, with certainty.  The very edge cases- remote and rural transport for instance, running trucks over ice roads into northern Canada for instance, won’t go electric- but amount to ¾ of f*ck all in terms of GHG emissions anyway.  And they’re sure as hell not going to be served by hydrogen, either.

What’s left, then?  What actually needs, rather than merely wants, a liquid chemical fuel?

Only really a few things:

1)      Transoceanic aviation.  Batteries won’t be high enough in energy density for decades, barring a major unforeseen breakthrough.  And hydrogen isn’t a feasible alternative for many reasons.

2)      Transoceanic shipping.  Ships don’t need higher energy density batteries, but for a ship to be feasibly recharged only once every month after a crossing of the Pacific, batteries will need to be greatly cheaper than they’re likely to get in the next decade or two, again barring major unforeseen breakthroughs.  Hydrogen isn’t an alternative, and the easiest so-called e-fuel, ammonia, is a toxic corrosive nightmare that will have a body count.

3)      Dunkeflaute and emergency storage.  100% decarbonization using electricity is economically infeasible unless we use stored fuels to satisfy 5-10% of demand.  Season to season storage of electricity, either in batteries or in chemical fuels like hydrogen made from electricity, is an economic myth.  So our choices for seasonal fuel energy storage are either fossils, or biofuels.  While my bet is on the former, the latter, in the form of biogas methane, could become an economic contender if we were worried about the last few percent of decarbonization

4)      A few applications where fire, rather than just heat, is needed in industrial processes.  While electric heating can do nearly everything, there are still a few applications where a carbonaceous reducing agent and/or a hot flue gas are required, rather than just heat.  And those applications may be best served by burning biomass or fuels derived from biomass.

The Myth of Insufficient Biomass

The myth of insufficient biomass arose when hyperbolists and interested parties were seriously talking about replacing land transport fuels with biofuels.  That was a nonsense concept that could easily be disproven by a Google search and a simple mass balance.

The myth is also exacerbated by the assumption that biofuels must be made from food biomass, or must not be made from food biomass.  Both assumptions are wrong.

Currently, food-derived biomass in the form of corn, sugarcane, wheat, food oils etc. is converted into molecules like ethanol and biodiesel (fatty acid methyl esters) for use in land based engines.  Those fuels can be redeployed for the applications that actually need rather than merely want them.

There is also a myth related to the economic impossibility of cellulosic biofuels.  In past, people were trying to make biofuels from non-food cellulose- woody materials, agricultural leftovers like corn stover or sugarcane bagasse, or purpose grown cellulose crops like switchgrass (miscanthus), in the hope that these fuels could compete, bare knuckles, with gasoline and diesel made from $150 barrels of petroleum.  Of course this turned out to be economically impossible.  But in a decarbonized future, we’ll need fuels for shipping and aviation that are not derived from fossils.  And since the alternative will be to not ship long distances or to not fly, the costs per joule or litre of delivered fuel energy can be considerably higher than those of fossils and still make economic sense- to some users.

Whether or not they make sense in terms of dollars spent per tonne of CO2e emissions averted, is entirely another matter.

There certainly is no shortage of cellulosic biomass.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paul-martin-195763b_2016-billion-ton-report-activity-6825852496083337216-v_F-

 But to be clear, agriculture today is optimized around generating concentrated food calories, not biomass.  Accordingly, biofuels will use food biomass because this will produce cheaper fuels of the required quality.  Food will be used as a fuel, unless we regulate or tax food derived biofuels out of the fuel system.  However, in my view, we need to be much less precious about food, and more honest about what causes high food prices at the grocery store.  When we do that, we’ll be less concerned about farmers having alternative markets for their crops, and more interested in rooting out the parasites who eat 9 out of every 10 dollars that we spend on commodity foodstuffs like corn meal at the grocery store.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/corn-farming-food-prices-amateur-study-cost-value-paul-martin-dmzbc

Let’s look in turn at each application and consider the various approaches.  We’ll do this in only the most perfunctory way however, as I leave the real meat and potatoes of this analysis for my paying clients- feel free to contact Spitfire Research to inquire.

Aviation

Jet aircraft are durable assets with a huge associated infrastructure and regulatory cost component.  Accordingly, the only economically and practically feasible option for aircraft is to replace fossil jet fuel with the same molecules, except made from biomass.

The cheapest way to do that is via the hydrotreating of vegetable and animal fats (trigylcerides).  These molecules are already nearly the same length as those required for jet fuel, but they do need their oxygen-containing acid groups and their carbon-carbon double bonds to be reacted with hydrogen to remove them.  The necessary hydrogen can be produced by reforming byproducts from the hydrotreating process, or by the electrolysis of water if you can afford that.  These fuels are referred to as hydrotreated vegetable oils (HVO) or hydrotreated esters and fatty acids (HEFA).  The end result is a blendstock that, combined with aromatics produced from biomass by other processes, would make a perfectly acceptable jet fuel of pure biological origin.  The only fossil GHG emissions associated with such fuels would, in the ideal case, be those associated with upstream agricultural production.

Sadly, the maximum amount of food fats that we can realistically produce, is too low to satisfy even aviation demand.  And if we further restrict supply by requiring that only “used” or “waste” non-comestible oil products be used for fuel production, we’ll come up very short.

While some have proposed using the Fischer Tropsch process to make jet fuel, either from syngas produced by gasifying biomass or biogas methane or, stupidest of all, by reacting CO2 and electrolytic hydrogen, I have too much experience with F-T to give that any credence.  F-T stands for “fundamentally terrible”, and another even more accurate word starting with f.  You can’t fix this process- it is fundamentally unsuited to making just jet fuel, or even to making “synthetic petroleum” even if you could find a use for the entire suite of other products produced. Fischer Tropsch’s problems are many, but non-selectivity and inefficiency plus high capital intensity are the major ones, and they’re all deal killers here.   It can’t make money even when given a free feedstock and a free atmosphere to dump its effluent into, unless it is also built at a scale of tens of billions of dollars worth of capital.  The notion that F-T will ever make money when fed CO2 and expensive green hydrogen and constrained to sell just jet fuel, is just nonsense.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paul-martin-195763b_expensive-green-hydrogen-based-fuels-might-activity-7148351737572098048-f0ME/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

So:  once we’ve tapped out the food oils, how will we satisfy the rest of jet fuel demand?

Sadly, pyrolysis won’t do it. The molecules you get from either biomass pyrolysis plus hydrotreating, or better still, integrated hydropyrolysis and hydrotreating (Shell/GTI’s IH^2 process), are just too short to be useful as a jet fuel.

There are but two remaining options.

One is making ethylene by removing water from ethanol.  We’ll have plenty of ethanol left over when we stop wasting it as a gasoline additive.

CH3CH2OH ==> H2O + H2C=CH2

This conversion is 1960s technology or even older, and is not difficult in terms of operating conditions, catalyst durability etc.  The yield is reportedly excellent, and few byproducts are produced.

Ethylene is a workhorse industrial chemical, used for all sorts of purposes.  However, whereas we could continue to use fossil ethane and naphtha to make ethylene to make polyethylene- as long as we don’t burn it at end of life- for fuels use, ethanol is really our only source.

Ethylene can then be made into short oligomers with precisely the range of lengths required for jet fuel, with again very few byproducts and excellent yield.  This again is at least 1980s technology, used to make linear alpha olefins for the production of surfactants and synthetic lubricants.  There’s nothing magical here, just routine chemical engineering.

The end result will, of course, be much more expensive than fossil jet fuel- but it is very far from impossible.  LanzaJet is doing this already in a facility built for them by my former employer.

Sadly, once you add cellulosic ethanol production’s extra cost to this, the resulting jet fuel is likely unaffordable. So if we look at the ethanol to jet pathway, we’re still definitely talking about a food-to-fuel pathway, just like with HEFA/HVO.

The other “alcohol to jet” conversion pathway can start with non-food cellulosic biomass- but it’s not without its problems. This pathway is to make methanol, which will be discussed in relation to shipping, and convert it to olefins, which themselves can be short oligomerized to jet fuel range molecules.  About 30% of world methanol production is already converted to olefins, so that technology is already commercially deployed at scale.  But that’s a lot of steps:  biomass to syngas, syngas to methanol, methanol to olefins and olefins to jet fuel…the economic viability of this pathway is very much in dispute.

Because the cost of a typical airline ticket is currently only about 20% fuel cost, aviation has a lot of potential to absorb higher fuel costs should we, as a worldwide society, decide to force it to decarbonize.  But the notion that it will voluntarily transition to fuels which cost a significant integer multiple of the cost of the fuels they’re using today, just to avoid GHG emissions, is idiotic.  Aviation will decarbonize only to the extent that we force it to with durable carbon pricing and emission bans.

Transoceanic Shipping

Ships are energetic garbage dumps.  While they do need liquid fuels for fuel logistics reasons, and can’t use hydrogen due to its ineffectiveness (its low energy density per unit volume, making it impractical for bunkering), the operating cost per tonne-mile of freight is today around 40% fuel cost, even using the cheapest fossils they can buy.

There are really only two economic contenders for shipping that merit consideration:  methanol, and liquefied biogas methane (bioLNG).

While ships could burn ethanol, my bet is that ethanol stocks will go into either ethylene production for plastics or into ethylene to jet fuel as noted above. Aviation can out-bid shipping for fuel in a fuel supply-constrained future.

While I see biogas methane production as very important, biogas is already useful as a fuel without further processing. Separating out the CO2, liquefying the methane (wasting about 8% of the energy in the methane in the process) and then feeding it to ships, offers the advantage of being able to re-fuel the small fraction of ships already converted to run on fossil LNG. Sadly, methane is a poor engine fuel, particularly in low pressure ships engines. The problem is methane slip through the engine, leading to significant GHG emissions. While engines can be modified to reduce methane slip, it’s not an easily solved problem- and can easily negate any GHG emission benefit from using biomethane versus burning fossil residuum-derived fuels.

Methanol is the cheapest liquid biofuel that can be made from cellulosic biomass.  Aviation will outcompete shipping for any HEFA/HVO fat derived fuels, which, like ethanol, will be supply constrained as already discussed.

Those pushing ammonia as a shipping fuel, are doing so in violation of the first principle of safety in design.  While ammonia would be the cheapest even marginally effective fuel per joule that you could make from electricity, it is a toxic and corrosive gas utterly unsuitable for use as a marine fuel.  Those pushing this concept will have a body count to contend with.  And I say that as an experienced chemical engineer, who has designed systems for handling chemicals vastly more hazardous than ammonia.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ammonia-ship-fuels-more-like-fuel-fools-paul-martin-jb7nc

It is also unclear if ammonia’s lower theoretical cost per joule of fuel energy, would actually end up being cheaper once its significant hazards are even approximately accounted for.

Methanol is made from synthesis gas, i.e. mixtures of carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen.  Syngas can be made by gasifying biomass or by reforming biogas methane.  While it can also be made by running the water-gas shift reaction in the unconventional direction by reacting CO2 with H2 to produce water and CO, this is unnecessary in methanol synthesis because all methanol catalysts are also water-gas shift catalysts.  However, green hydrogen will not be cheap enough to make this feasible in the foreseeable future, for reasons discussed at length in my other articles:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scaling-lesson-2-water-electrolysis-paul-martin

The major problems for e-methanol are as follows:

–          the need for purely biogenic CO2 where green hydrogen is also available cheaply enough to make methanol synthesis make sense.  This is a geographically rare condition

–          expensive green hydrogen is wasted making CO and water

–          the water is co-produced with the product, requiring energy-intensive distillation to separate them

It is clear to me, based on my analysis, that methanol should be possible to produce from gasified biomass or biogas methane at lower costs than we will ever see for e-methanol.  Conditions which would shift the underlying economics without relying on subsidy unsustainable at scale seem extremely unlikely.

Methanol can also be used to make olefins as noted in the section under Aviation- but importantly, 1980s methanol to gasoline technology can also be used to make the aromatics fraction required in commercial jet fuels. Byproduct naphtha from other biofuels processes can also be cyclized and dehydrogenated to make aromatics, just as we “plat-form” petroleum naphtha today to make them. They won’t be cheap, but if you start with biomass, they will be biogenic.

While biogas methane is itself already a useful, transportable fuel without further modification, cellulosic biomass must be collected and transported to plants for conversion.  And its distribution in space, water content, low energy density per unit mass and volume, and intermittent production in time (harvests in many places are only once per year) make it a potentially very troublesome feedstock.  While the maximum feasible transport distance for cellulosic biomass will increase as the rest of transport becomes cleaner and electrified, those who are betting on e-methanol are in fact betting that it will be cheaper to move biologically generated CO2 and electrolytic hydrogen to large, centralized methanol plants than it will be to make methanol in more numerous but smaller and hence less economic plants from cellulosic biomass.  In my view, green hydrogen’s cost both as a feedstock and in terms of distribution infrastructure that doesn’t exist and is unlikely to ever be built, make the troubles of moving around cellulosic biomass seem worth the considerable bother.

Note that syngas can be made from pyrolysis products, too.  I prefer this option when possible, because it would allow us to make transport carbon-negative by returning biochar to the fields and forests from whence it came- and along with it, all the inorganics that came from those soils in the biomass that was harvested there. To be clear, this will drop the yield of biofuel and will cost more money. Carbon credits for the biochar will need to be quite high to justify doing this.

Dunkelflaute Storage

Emergency energy storage systems need to meet the following requirements:

1)      They must be reliable, above all else

2)      They must have a stable fuel that can be stored without difficulty

3)      They must have low capital cost, because they must distribute their capex over comparatively few kWh

Energy efficiency and fuel cost, therefore, matter less than they do in bulk energy generation or fuels uses like transport.

The ideal solution therefore is something which can re-use infrastructure which already exists and hence only needs to be maintained.

Accordingly, to me, the obvious solution for providing the small amounts of electricity to keep essentials running during “kalt dunkelflaute” conditions (when the wind isn’t blowing, and the solar panels are covered in snow for instance) is to re-use the existing fossil gas storage and transport/distribution infrastructure.

In Canada, depleted gas reservoirs are used as gas storage.  Gas produced throughout the year is stored in these reservoirs to satisfy peak heating and power demand in the winter months. Unlike with hydrogen, new bespoke salt caverns are not required.

In my view, the likely optimal solution to dunkelflaute energy storage is to simply store and burn fossil gas.  We can gradually transition from fossil gas to storing a year’s worth of biogas methane, made by the anaerobic digestion of food waste, manure, and other wet organic waste streams. If we really become concerned about the last few percent of our fossil GHG emissions to bear that cost, that is.  Anaerobic digestion will be required to dispose properly of wet biomass such as food and yard waste, human and animal manure etc., simply to reduce methane emissions to the atmosphere.  It seems obvious that we’ll want to maximize biogas generation therefore as a source of chemical heat energy and energy storage.

It also makes sense to me that these emergency storage and production systems, be publicly rather than privately owned.  Public institutions and governments have the lowest possible borrowing cost, which gives them a tremendous advantage relative to private entities in providing capital for essential but rarely used assets.

Storing excess hydrogen made in summer for use as a fuel in winter is simply uneconomic.  It is technically feasible, but the intermittent use of capital kills the idea by burdening every kg of hydrogen, and hence every kWh of electricity, with the double whammy of costs due to poor efficiency and poor, intermittent capital utilization.  There’s no way to make this idea look pretty in economic terms.

Agricultural Emissions

Critics of biofuels, other than those whose concerns are misplaced worry about the impact of food prices on the poor etc., generally are concerned about the emissions of intensive agriculture.  And those concerns are very well founded.  Agriculture uses fossil fuels, including fossil derived hydrogen to make ammonia from which all nitrogen derived fertilizers are produced.  Nitrogen fertilizer use results in nitrous oxide (N2O) being generated by soil organisms and released as a powerful GHG to the atmosphere.  Methane from agricultural practices makes global warming worse.  And then on top of the GHG emissions, we have the very real worries that people in developing countries will want to hew down their forests and plant crops, just as Europeans did all over Europe and later in North America.

However, there are a few truths about agriculture that make it clear to me that we’re going to use biofuels, despite these concerns- and that doing so won’t be an environmental disaster:

–          Agricultural emissions need to be mitigated anyway, because we still need to eat

–          We all would do well to eat less meat and animal products, for health and also to reduce agricultural emissions.  If we do so, we’ll leave more agricultural production potential that can, without increasing the amount of tilled land, make increased biofuels production more feasible.  And even today, biofuels production can be and is paired with animal agriculture:  distiller’s grains plus solubles from ethanol production is already used as a high protein feed supplement for cattle

–          Much of the attributed emissions associated with today’s biofuels production arise from the use of blend mandates rather than carbon taxes or emission bans as the implementation and funding mechanism.  Ethanol producers burn natural gas therefore, rather than corn stover, to raise steam to run their stills and dehydrators.  Good GHG emission reduction policy will also result in reduced biofuels-associated emissions

Biomass For Materials

I think there are many biomass materials- wood and engineered wood materials, biomass fibre composites, and a handful of bio-derived polymers- that make sense already.  However it’s crystal clear to me that we won’t be making -CH2- from C6 H10 O5 (the generic atomic ratio formula for biomass) when there’s -CH2- in the form of petroleum lying around in the subsurface that we know about.  And if we use that petroleum only for chemicals and materials that we don’t burn at their end of life, we can reserve biomass for those applications where CO2 will ultimately end up back in the atmosphere- for plants to recycle to useful carbohydrates for us.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/refinery-future-thought-experiment-paul-martin-4pfoc

Summary and Conclusions

I’m not worried about biofuels availability or environmental impact.  That said, I think it’s crazy for us to even worry about aviation and shipping right now.  There are far cheaper, quicker gains to be had by cleaning up electrical production, and by electrifying land transport and low temperature heating.

Biofuels options are all expensive per tonne of CO2e emissions averted, even in the best case.  And because we haven’t decarbonized agriculture yet for its most important purpose- feeding ourselves- stoking emissive current agricultural production with yet more demand to decarbonize aviation and shipping would be foolishly premature.

Like replacing black, fossil hydrogen with green hydrogen, biofuels for shipping, aviation and dunkelflaute storage, are something we should be thinking about for the future.  Research and development?  Certainly.  Planning?  Strategy?  Sure.  But public subsidy and market building?  To me, that’s premature.  Because carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has a time value, and because public resources are always limited, we should focus on the easy, fast GHG tonnage savings first, and focus on the hard stuff later when those major gains have already been made.

Disclaimer: this article has been written by a human, and humans are known to make mistakes from time to time.  Show me where I’ve gone wrong, with good references, and I’ll be happy to correct my work.

If I’ve taken a dump on your pet idea however, or you wish to use this topic to push your pet technology, your ideological concerns, your veganism, fallacious notions about “regenerative agriculture”, or enviro-religionism, then please reach out to my employer, Spitfire Research, who will be very happy to tell you to  piss off and write your own article.

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 hydrogen, which can only be considered green once we’ve eliminated fossil burning in the areas where it is being produced.

Today a connection asked me if I agreed with Michael Liebreich that blue hydrogen is the “only answer”.

I’ve read enough of Michael’s work, and watched enough of his presentations, to know that he’s never said anything of the sort.

Michael and I have gone back and forth over these topics for many years.  And today it’s difficult to fit more than a couple sheets of paper between our opinions in relation to hydrogen and its role in decarbonization.

I think it’s fair to say that both of us agree- as his famous “hydrogen ladder” shows, that the only meaningful decarbonization uses of hydrogen are pretty much applications where hydrogen is already used- as a chemical.  The “new” uses of hydrogen that make sense in a decarbonized future, are in a sense, really existing uses of hydrogen, simply expanded.  One example is replacing some of the carbon monoxide currently used in direct iron reduction, with hydrogen and electricity, to produce lower GHG iron for steelmaking- what people have been calling “green steel”.  Another is dealing with the oxygen in biomass, running the “hydrogenolysis” reactions to effectively burn the oxygen out of the biomass to leave behind a stable fuel that can be used in existing engines.

We agree that hydrogen won’t be wasted in heating, transport, or as an international energy export vector.  That “hydrogen economy” stuff is just hyperbole, being put forward by interested parties and their useful idiot hangers-on.

While Michael gives credence to the use of hydrogen for applications like “long duration storage”, I don’t.  I think he’s just throwing the hydrogen fanatics a bone, frankly, because the idea of making excess hydrogen in summer to burn in winter, cannot ever make economic sense.

But what to do about the GHG emissions of existing hydrogen production?

That’s another thing that Michael and I agree on.  And while I’ve long said that our focus must be on replacing black hydrogen (fossil derived hydrogen- 99% of world current H2 production- is derived from fossils with no attempt at carbon capture and hence is BLACK, not gray or brown) with green hydrogen, Michael has been suggesting that blue hydrogen would be the better choice.

The reasons for that are pretty straightforward:  blue hydrogen is going to be cheaper than green, for the foreseeable future.  And on that, we agree.

The problem I have with blue hydrogen is that it’s very likely to be called “blue”, when it’s really blackish blue and bruise coloured. And Michael acknowledges that this is true, too.  He’s just unabashedly more optimistic about how regulated the industry can be.  He hopes that we can demand that any blue hydrogen project be done under stringent regulatory control that ensures that not only is the right technology selected to allow high percentage CO2 capture, but also the upstream methane emissions will be properly measured and abated.

And I have no hope of that at all.

Why is that?

Because of Shell Quest.

Shell Quest- A Story of Public Cost and Partial Carbon Capture

Shell Quest, which I talk about quite a bit in my piece about blue hydrogen:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/blackish-blue-bruise-coloured-hydrogen-spitfire-research-inc

…makes quite blackish blue, bruise coloured hydrogen.  But I LOVE that project!  Why is that?  Because it was publicly funded, and hence the data about the project is, largely, public.  Or at least it was until 2023.  No 2024 report has come out on the Government of Alberta website, and since this is near the end of 2025, it would not surprise me if 2023’s data is the last we ever get.

What Quest proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that “blue” hydrogen, done at considerable scale (1 million tonnes of CO2 captured and sequestered per year), by very competent people (Shell and Fluor, both of which have some of the world’s best chemical engineers working for them), under nearly ideal conditions, still costs a fortune.

Despite the fact that Quest only goes after the CO2 in the syngas stream of the steam methane reformer (SMR), which has to be removed to make useful pure hydrogen anyway- which amounts to only ~55% of the CO2 emissions from hydrogen production in an SMR.

Despite the fact that its target was to capture only 80% of that CO2, and it eventually had to be adjusted down to 78% to avoid burner stability problems in the firebox of the SMR unit.

Despite the fact that heat and electricity to run the CCS equipment is produced by burning fossil gas, with no CCS attempted.

Despite the fact that the other ~ 45% of the CO2, which comes out of the SMR’s firebox flue, is just vented, just like it was before.

Despite the fact that there’s a perfect hole in the ground- a deep saline aquifer- only ~ 60 km away from the plant, so only a short CO2 pipeline needed to be built.

Despite all these advantages, it STILL cost, in 2023, $145/tonne of CO2 captured and sequestered.  Those are Canadian dollars however, so that’s a paltry $106 USD/tonne.

Truly Blue Hydrogen is Hard and Expensive

At first blush, you might think: “well, that’s not so bad”.

Typical SMR hydrogen has direct CO2 emissions of around 10 kg CO2 per kg H2 produced.  Multiply that out by $106 USD/tonne of CO2 emissions, and you might conclude that blue hydrogen could be produced for an extra $1.06 USD per kg, driving up black hydrogen cost from $1 to $1.50/kg wholesale to perhaps $2.50/kg at most.  And since green hydrogen will never get that cheap (see my article about electrolysis to understand why I conclude that):

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scaling-lesson-2-water-electrolysis-paul-martin

…you might conclude that blue hydrogen will be cheaper than green will ever be.

And you’d be right.

But you’d also be wrong.

To do truly “blue” hydrogen, you need to do things differently than they did at Quest.  And by “different”, I mean “things that are much more costly”.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/part-2-ghost-blue-hydrogens-future-spitfire-research-inc

As my piece explains, you need to either run electric SMR or an autothermal reformer (ATR). An electric SMR, with ~ 30% of the energy in the hydrogen, coming from electricity instead of fire.  This energy is required at high temperature, but electric heating can definitely do that- it’s challenging, and costly, and must be run continuously as must all truly high temperature equipment- but it’s far from impossible.   But while that would require a lot less electricity than electrolyzing water (about 1/3 as much), it would still leave you with the cost, and geological and logistical challenges of CCS.

Or, you can do autothermal reforming, so that the “fire” that you need to supply the endothermic heat of reforming reactions, is produced by partial combustion inside the reactor instead of in a firebox, by feeding oxygen in with the steam and methane before passing the gas over a reforming catalyst.  We know how to do that- it’s fully TRL9 commercial technology and has been for decades.  But ATR is less efficient than SMR, and would still require clean electricity to make oxygen and to run the CCS equipment.

And you would still end up with the problem of gas purification.  Because pure hydrogen is required, and by “pure” I mean CO+CO2 less than 10 ppm total if you want to feed a fuelcell without killing it, so you will end up with streams of “mostly hydrogen” which contain those unwanted gases.  In a conventional SMR, they are fed to the firebox where fire sorts them out.  But in an electric SMR or an ATR, you must either burn those streams and emit the CO2, or do costly post-combustion CCS on them. 

Neither is an attractive option.

Undeterred, Shell and its partner ATCO, are planning a project called Polaris, which will attempt to recover another 650,000 tonnes/yr of CO2 to dump into the proposed Atlas Carbon Storage Hub, which will use the Basal Cambrian Sands as the CO2 repository.  This is the same deep saline aquifer that has been used by Quest to store around 10 million tonnes of CO2 so far since 2015.  Polaris apparently is going after post-combustion CO2 from the Scotford upgrader, probably including the firebox flue of the SMR.  Whereas the CO2 in the syngas at Quest is ~3.8 bar partial pressure, the firebox flue effluent will be somewhere between 8 and 15% CO2 and at atmospheric pressure.  And basic physics tells us that capturing CO2 from a 0.08 to 0.15 bar partial pressure stream, will cost a LOT more per tonne of CO2 than capturing it from a 3.8 bar CO2 stream.  Carbon capture costs from this project have not been announced, but rest assured- we Canadians will be paying whatever it costs.  Sadly, we won’t likely get the cost data from this project, either.

Methane Emissions

But the elephant in the room is methane emissions.  The gas industry and gas users alike, simply pretend that it’s not a problem.

In Canada, you can’t get good data on methane emissions per unit of gas delivered.  I’ve looked.  Thoroughly.  The data that there is, was provided by the industry with no independent verification and is totally incredible, i.e. not believable.

There’s nothing magical about gas in Alberta, either.  It’s just as likely to be vented or to leak as gas produced anywhere else in the world.  There are no magical regulations in Canada that make this unaffordable or illegal, either.  And regulatory capture in Canada by the fossil fuel industry is no less of a problem than it is in many other places in the world- though we fortunately have no equivalent to the utterly indecent and corrupt Texas Railroad Commission.

A little methane goes a long way.  With a global warming potential 33x that of CO2 on the 100 year timeline, and 84x that of CO2 on the 20 year timeline, it’s a powerful greenhouse gas.  And if you don’t ignore it, and especially if you see hydrogen as a transitional energy resource (rather than as a permanent chemical that we will always need), you really should be using the 20 year GWP figure.

Hydrogen produced by SMR without carbon capture has CO2 emission intensity of about 10 kg CO2 per kg H2.  Add in methane emissions at the worldwide average estimate of 1.5% of delivered gas, and that jumps to 14 kg CO2e per kg H2.  And CCS, and ATR, and even electric SMR if it is operated on grid electricity,  make this worse, because these approaches sap the energy efficiency of the process, wasting more gas, and hence dragging along more methane emissions.  Howarth and Jacobson’s paper, linked in my article about bruise coloured hydrogen, made this argument more eloquently than I can manage.

Michael Liebreich’s point is that we, as the public, can and in fact should demand that blue hydrogen be produced properly, with high CO2 capture and low upstream emissions.  And while we agree that we should do this, there is every incentive for the gas industry to simply ignore the methane emissions, and for government to blissfully pretend that they’re not real too.

In conclusion, we know that it will take very vigorous regulation to ensure that any “blue” hydrogen produced, will be truly blue, rather than the blackish blue, bruise coloured shit the industry will inevitably try to get away with producing and passing off as if it were “blue”.  And frankly, aside from being confident that it will cost more than $3 USD/kg, we really don’t know for sure what it will cost.  That depends on many things, most notably the secure supply of ultra-low methane leakage source gas.

Green Hydrogen is No Saint, Either

But green hydrogen isn’t necessarily green, either.  It can vary from bright green to blacker than black, depending on how it is made, too.

This excellent paper by de Kleijne et al, explains that green hydrogen’s carbon intensity varies greatly with the conditions under which it is made- even when it is to be used for inarguably good applications such as replacing black hydrogen in ammonia production for use as a fertilizer.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-green-hydrogen-lifecycle-basis-paul-martin-pbhyc

To be truly green, hydrogen must be produced in “islanded” facilities fed only low GHG electricity (wind, solar, nuclear, cold water hydro etc.), with any excess electricity fed to the grid to offset fossil generation.  The second a green hydrogen project takes grid electricity as an input, a shell game is underway, by which the operator pretends that they are feeding the project only green electricity, whereas in reality, the electricity the project is being fed, has a carbon intensity identical to that of the grid from which it is drawing.  Even under these ideal conditions, the resulting hydrogen has a rather high GHG emission potential, of 2.9 kg CO2e/kg H2 produced, with a range between 0.9 and 4.3. 

While this is of course better than the ~ 14 kg CO2e/kg of black H2 calculated using 1.5% methane leakage on the 20 year time horizon, only under the very best conditions would this green hydrogen meet the Hydrogen Science Coalition’s criterion for truly “clean” hydrogen- 1 kg CO2e/kg H2- which is necessary for hydrogen to be produced under conditions suitable for a “net zero by 2050” type decarbonization scenario.

Clean Hydrogen Definition

To mitigate this problem, regulators have attempted to put controls on what conditions are considered acceptable for green hydrogen production subsidies.  These include the so-called three pillars:

Additionality:  hydrogen must be produced only from new renewable sources that would not otherwise be built.  This is obviously a large and speculative test, and is really an ideological nonsense on any grid which still burns fossils for more than a trivial fraction of its power generation

Proximity:  power used must be produced within a real wire’s reach of where it is consumed.  Projects which pretend to consume Labrador hydropower in Nova Scotia, despite no excess grid capacity interconnecting the two locations, would be considered a fraud, for instance, because it really would be a fraud, regardless what power purchase agreements might say

Temporal Matching:  instead of taking a basket of kWh over a year, under a power purchase agreement, and claiming that the plant consumed only green electricity despite being grid connected, the power used by the electrolyzer must be green during every hour of its operation.  Otherwise, there would be no incentive to shut down the electrolyzer when the grid is dirty

These conditions are restrictive, burdensome from a regulatory perspective, and hence are the subject of vigorous lobbying to dilute them.  Green hydrogen producers are in business just like everybody else, and know that they need to make cheap hydrogen to have a hope of having an economic value proposition.  If the result is that their green hydrogen becomes olive drab or even an intense green barely distinguishable from black, then so be it- at least in the minds of some project developers.

Green hydrogen, just like blue hydrogen, can be made either well or poorly, with low or extremely high GHG emissions.  And regulatory controls are required to ensure that any green hydrogen produced, is meaningfully green.

The difference is that even under rather lax conditions, the resulting hydrogen, which is not particularly green or low in GHG emissions, will be expensive.

Even in the best locations in the world, where there is nobody within economic reach of an HVDC cable who needs electricity,  islanded wind+sun fed electrolysis plants are built to make ammonia for export, and built at giant scale- GW, not MW- will make very expensive ammonia.  And that ammonia will represent a very high cost per tonne of CO2 emissions averted.

“Turquoise” Hydrogen is No Salvation, Either.

Some have argued that the solution to “blue” hydrogen is to pyrolyze methane to make carbon and hydrogen.  I’ve already written about this on the basis of what portion of my considerable experience with clients, that I am at liberty to share publicly.  Rest assured, methane pyrolysis will never represent a significant fraction of world hydrogen production.  It can be, if done correctly, a good way to make valuable carbon products, with low GHG hydrogen as a valuable byproduct.  But every little thing, helps only a little.  And throwing away ½ of the energy and ¾ of the mass of the feedstock into low value applications like asphalt extenders, or worse still, burying it in reverse coal mining operations, makes no economic sense to me.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-methane-pyrolysis-paul-martin-vacnc

There Are Better Things to Do

Michael and I agree that despite the fact that hydrogen production represents somewhere in the neighbourhood of 3-4% of world GHG emissions (calculation provided in my article here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-from-renewable-electricity-our-future-paul-martin/ ) there are much more urgent and better things to worry about, than about whether we use blue or green hydrogen to replace black hydrogen.

Michael’s work shows that there are far lower cost options for reducing GHG emissions, which include cleaning up electricity supply, and electrifying land transport and low temperature heating.  And my own work for clients, only some of which I am not permitted to talk about publicly, confirms those conclusions.

Given that CO2 and other GHGs have a “time value” in the atmosphere, pursuing the fastest, lowest cost gains we can make, is the only decarbonization strategy that makes any sense.

And by that thinking, as sensible as the decarbonization of hydrogen production for chemical uses durable post decarbonization might be, they really should not be any kind of near term priority.  Just like the various carbon-negative technologies touted by many who have read the various IPCC reports, only some of these strategies make any technical or economic sense- and the ones that remain are really appropriate only for use AFTER we’ve tackled the “easy and cheap” to decarbonize sectors.

Disclaimer: this article was written by a human, and humans are known to make mistakes.  And while I’m sure Michael will correct any misperceptions about his positions that have made their way into my piece, I count on my readers to correct anything that I’ve gotten wrong, by providing good references which steer me in the right direction.

However, if what you don’t like is that I’ve taken a dump on your pet idea, you are directed to contact my employer, Spitfire Research Inc., who will promptly tell you to piss off and write your own article.

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 associated impacts.  As our energy system becomes cleaner, the optimal recycle will increase.

Article content

So, why is a ~27 ton excavator parked in front of a cute little Toronto bungalow?

No, Arthur Dent isn’t lying in front of it in his bathrobe.  Rather, this perfectly liveable home, built likely just after WWII, is about to be demolished, to make way for what we affectionately know in the neighbourhood as a “McMansion”- a building built within an inch of every dimension permitted by local zoning, plus whatever extra they can get via a trip to the Committee of Adjustment, designed to maximize resale value by having as much floor area and indeed also as much interior volume as possible.  Aesthetics?  Function as a home?  Good sense from an urban planning perspective?  Nah.  Those are all second thoughts at best!

Demolition is dangerous work.  Taking a house apart piece by piece to permit recovery and re-use of those components worth salvaging used to be done by hand, by people with crowbars and sledge hammers.  Or, in rural areas, with a can of kerosene and a match… I have fond memories of going to the salvage yard, Teperman’s, outside Kitchener Ontario with my father, where he would buy planks sawn from old growth trees.  Planks salvaged from factories built in the 1800s that they had torn down- lumber that simply doesn’t exist in Ontario any more and never will again.

But labour costs too much now, and machines make this work much less hazardous.

What will inevitably happen is that an excavator operator will smash this house, often complete with contents left behind by the former owner, and sort the rubbish into piles using the “fine” control of the excavator “thumb”.  Wood will go in one pile, if space allows- masonry and brick in another, and whatever metal that can be salvaged- wire, pipe, aluminum eavestroughs etc., into yet another, much smaller pile.  It is rare for a worker to set foot outside the excavator the whole time.

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A day later- smashy smashy- pile of salvaged metal in the foreground

The wood might be recycled, after a fashion.  Wood waste in Toronto is sometimes taken to a facility where it is shredded, nails and all, and the wood shreddings are used for paper-making.

The brick, concrete and masonry are destined for landfill.  The Leslie Street spit which extends into Lake Ontario, consists of a lot of this kind of fill- in fact, much of the land south of Front Street in Toronto is “lake-fill”, not native soils.   Unlike the concrete from large buildings, which is often ground up for re-use, there’s too much diversity in materials in the masonry waste stream from house demolition to make it useful even as aggregate for making new concrete, or as road bed material.

All the roofing, drywall or lath and plaster, insulating materials- foam, mineral fibre or fibreglass etc., and a host of other material, will go to landfill.  And as long as the wood and other biodegradable materials have been sorted out adequately by the clever excavator operator, most of these materials will simply remain in landfill for millennia, with no ongoing environmental impact.  But of course, the sorting isn’t perfect, as people are in a hurry and equipment is expensive, and so the potential for that wood and paper construction material to very slowly degrade to methane and CO2 in the landfill is very real.

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A day after that: the house is gone, leaving only a pile of rubble to be compacted and transferred into roll-off boxes on their way to the landfill

Circular Economy- An Ideological Concept

Most of us just aren’t all that curious about what happens to our things at their end of life.  We toss them into a bin, or hire a contractor to do demolition, and don’t give it much thought after that.

But there are some people who have a different notion.  They’re selling us on a concept called the “circular economy”.  And that concept is often sold with a diagram like this:

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A popular cartoon of the “circular economy”. Definitely unfunny, and inaccurate.

Sadly, what the diagram is missing some important things.  Here’s a more accurate representation:

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My version of the cartoon- not accurate either. There is a recycle rate where impacts are optimally low. And I never claimed to be an illustrator, either!

I’m a scrounger and salvager by nature and nurture- and I’m also cheap. As a child I would accompany my father to the local industrial metal scrapyard where he would salvage electric motors and steel for his projects, and I came face to face with the realities of industrial recycling. So much waste! So much potential for re-use, squandered. I remember sharing my father’s disgust to see brand new electic motors, still in their cardboard boxes, that somebody had taken the extra effort to smash with a sledgehammer before throwing them into the scrap bin- the thinking being that if they didn’t have a use for them, they were damned if anyone else would gain the benefit! So there’s no need to preach to me that the notion of “circularity” should include the low energy processes of re-use and re-purposing. I live those principles, and wish the rest of our society were less driven by laziness and self importance and aesthetics. But then again, if they were, I’d find fewer treasures on the side of the road on garbage day, and that would deprive me of both cash and pleasure.

But when we’re talking about a product as heterogeneous as a house- at a certain point, the land occupied by a 1950s bungalow is worth more WITHOUT the bungalow on it, than it is with it- because it saves the future owner the cost of demolition and disposal. Things do change, and nobody who built a 1950s bungalow during the post-war boom, was thinking about anybody trying to live in it in 2025. The reality is, we do have to think about end of life demolition, and make smart decisions between recycling and disposal.

If we want to reduce how much matter in any system goes to waste, we’re really fighting a battle against the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics- the important law that says that for any expenditure of energy, the entropy of the universe must increase.  A house is an example of a modern product:  a complex mixture of numerous materials, each optimized to deliver the features and functions desired at as low a cost as is considered reasonable.  And over the ~ 70 years since that particular house was likely constructed, our methods and materials have changed, as the costs of labour and materials and the energy they embody has changed.  So it’s really a dog’s breakfast of materials- even moreso when for labour cost and safety reasons, you smash the whole thing into a heap with a giant excavator.

Take, as an example, the demolition waste from my own major home renovation project.  I added what amounted to a new house to our existing house, while we were still living in it.  At various points in the process, I had to demolish parts of the old house to tie it together with the addition.  I could have hired a bin and just chucked everything into it, but that would not only have been a waste of materials, it would have cost me a “tipping fee” for the weight of mixed waste that had to be hauled off to landfill.  So, to make myself feel better, being a bit of an enviro-masochist combined with hereditary frugality (cheapness, really…) I dutifully separated out all the wood from the plaster, drywall and other junk, cut it into firewood sized pieces, and stacked it in a giant pile in my backyard.  That wood waste fueled my workshop’s woodstove for the next couple of years, and I pulled seven gallon pails full of nails from the ashes.  We often joked that the guy who built our house in the 1920s, must have had shares in Stelco (the local steel mill which made most of the nails used in the province in the last century). We also re-used the original Don bricks from the side of the house, to re-brick the front of the extended house. Knocking those bricks down one by one with a deadblow mallet, and cleaning them – all 900- was a real pain in the ass at the time, but it the end result looks amazing and in hindsight it was a great decision. As was the decision to hire a bricklayer. The first 100 houses you brick, you don’t want to be your house- or visible from your house!

Of course, if the local laws permitted me to toss the debris over my neighbour’s fence and get away with it, I might have been sorely tempted to do so.  Hence, there is environmental value in a landfill tipping fee for any waste that might be generated.  (Aside:  we lack such a tipping fee for using the atmosphere as a giant “air-fill”, or public sewer, for the effluent from fossil fuel combustion, and hence we need a “tipping charge” in the form of carbon pricing to discourage the continued emission of fossil GHGs.  Otherwise, decarbonization is trying to fight economics, and decarbonization usually loses)

Recycling:  A Systems Overview

All real systems, including all “natural” (biological) systems, take a matter and energy input, use the energy to transform the matter in some way, generate a product or service, and generate both a matter waste stream and, in a sense, an “entropy” waste stream, generally in the form ultimately of heat.  Systems can be and often are, heavily coupled, with the waste stream from one process being the matter stream or even the matter and energy inputs to another system.

But the recycle in all real systems is never 100%.  Why is that?  The 2nd Law.  The 2nd Law establishes an energetic penalty for the perfect separation and recovery of matter from any real process.  That penalty can be small, moderate, large, or positively enormous, depending on the nature of the materials and process and what purities or levels of recovery are required.

So the greater the recovery or purity or both required, and the greater dilution of the valuable material in the source, the greater the energetic penalty associated with recovery.

Some systems are simple enough that we can calculate a minimum necessary reversible energy input required to separate, say, salt water from fresh water. Producing fresh water from seawater takes about 1.5 kWh per m3 of freshwater, assuming a reject stream which is about 50% greater in salinity than seawater. However, there are always irreversible, 2nd law losses associated with all real processes. In the case of reverse osmosis water purification, we can actually achieve that separation for about 3.5 kWh/m3, which is astoundingly good. What that also means is that no process we will ever invent, will reduce that 3.5 kWh/m3 to 1.5 or lower. No magical membrane will ever increase the energy efficiency RO by a factor of three, much less a factor of ten.

And since all energy generation and use and transformation comes with environmental, economic, social and political impacts, there’s no such thing as a free ride from recycling.  As we try to increase the recycle rate, the energetic penalty will often grow to a point where any increased recovery generates more impact from energy use than it saves in terms of impacts from disposal of the waste stream.

But hey, we’re humans- and humans have a demonstrated tendency to prefer large but invisible problems, to smaller but more visible ones…We can’t see GHG emissions, so we think they don’t matter!

If we care about the environment, truly, that’s a very human tendency that we need to fight- with our brains, by doing proper analysis.

Optimal Recycle

Since true “circularity” is basically ideological nonsense in the form of a meme, abhorred by the laws of thermodynamics, we need a better concept.

The replacement concept that I think we should reach for is “optimal recycle”.

The optimal recycling rate of anything, is the recycling rate that generates the lowest lifecycle impacts, taking into account the production of new material, the disposal of wastes, the value of the new use for the recycled material if that use is different (which it frequently is) than the original one, and importantly- the impact of the energy use and emissions therefrom.

Something should become fairly obvious fairly quickly, and that is, the optimal recycle rate- while it will NEVER be 100%, will certainly increase for most things as we reduce the impacts associated with energy production and use.  That is yet another advantage of pursuing a cleaner, decarbonized energy system.

The other thing that should become obvious is that it’s not easy to determine what the optimal recycle rate actually is.  To do so requires a lifecycle analysis, and such analyses must be done in accordance with a standardized methodology to avoid being taught to quack like a duck for whoever is paying for the study.

Down-Cycling Versus Recycling

An example of optimal recycle thinking is the way we already recycle copper.  Metals have the advantage that they’re just atoms- there’s nothing stopping us from collecting them and re-using them.  Copper mined by the Romans is still to be found in modern copper articles.  Old copper atoms aren’t damaged in any way by that recycling.

What does change, however, is purity.  And we don’t needlessly fight the entropic battle of returning all items to their original purity, because that would have a huge energetic and hence economic penalty associated with it.

So:  we don’t recycle old copper wire into new copper wire, because very small additions of other atoms into copper, reduce its electrical conductivity.

Instead, we recycle copper wire into other copper products, where small amounts of contaminants or alloying constituents don’t prevent the re-use, and may actually be necessary anyway.  An example is copper pipe and tubing.

And so with copper pipe and tubing:  we recycle it not into wire or pipe, but into brasses and bronzes- copper alloys which can tolerate even more contamination.

Only at the very bottom of this “down-cycling” purity chain, do we re-dissolve the products and purify them again by hydrometallurgical steps and “electrowinning”- the process of recovering and purifying copper by electrochemical recrystallization.  The result is very pure copper, suitable for making wire or anything else we may desire- but there are losses, and the energy requirement of that step is huge. And there are still wastes generated- lead, zinc, tin, nickel, phosphorous, aluminum, iron and other metals that end up in the copper waste stream, all have to come out- and a similar entropic battle has to be fought to recover them into useful forms, or else they have to be chemically stabilized to be disposed of as “tailings”.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong about “down-cycling”.  In fact, it’s just good engineering and environmental practice.  It’s also commonsense- it’s what our ancestors did with nearly everything, because everything took so much human labour and effort to produce. When energy became inexpensive because we learned how to mine fossils and burn them, all sorts of consumption that our ancestors would have seen as abject idiocy and decadence, became learned “normal” behavior.

Plastics

Plastics represent an even greater challenge.  Unlike metals, plastics are molecules, and molecules can be damaged by heat and UV light and oxygen exposure.  This can change mechanical properties, colour, or generate toxic or otherwise noxious materials that can end up in the products made from this material.  Plastic molecules, being long chains, are also deadly difficult to separate from one another once they are intimately mixed.  Plastics also often contain additives- plasticizers, UV stabilizers, antioxidants, stiffeners and other fillers- which render recycling difficult. And small amounts of one polymer can render the properties of a “blend” with another, unsuitable for any purpose.

And then there are “composite materials”, made of crosslinked molecules and structural fillers.  Things like rubber tires and fibreglass boats.  These materials, being one big molecule, basically cannot be meaningfully recycled. While limited repurposing/re-use potential for rubber crumb from chipped rubber tires, for instance, is possible and sensible, ultimately the optimal recycle rate of composites is very near zero. That however does not mean that they are an environmental disaster if used appropriately- quite the opposite can in fact be true. Witness the enormous amount of fossil GHG and toxic emissions that can be offset by a set of wind turbine blades which, after 20 years of service, need to be landfilled because they have exceeded their safe fatigue life limitation.

While I have no objection to slicing them up into pieces that are re-usable for whatever function smart people can put them to, I certainly would NOT stop us from using wind turbine blades even if 100% of them had to be landfilled! That would be the sort of mindless, ideological, nirvana fallacy-based “circular economy” thinking that frankly boils my blood.

Pure thermoplastics recovered relatively pure and easily cleaned, can sometimes be mechanically recycled right back into their original uses- in a blend with fresh material.  PET plastic bottles, for instance, frequently contain some post-consumer recycled content, despite the need for purity due to its food grade use.  They can also be recycled into carpet fibre and other valuable products.  PET is therefore quite valuable as a plastic recycling feedstock.

Not so with the big dogs of the polymer industry, polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).  While pre-consumer recycling of all thermoplastics is common, with molding sprues and mis-molded parts being re-ground and mixed back into the feed, post-consumer recycling of PE and PP generally produces quite low value products, again often blended with fresh plastic material.  Examples include pallets and other dense packaging materials, plastic decking, railroad sleepers and the like.  Only a small fraction of PE and PP collected for recycling, end up in valuable products.

And no, converting plastics to energy (i.e. incineration or “air-filling”), either directly or indirectly via making syngas or liquid fuels from them, isn’t “recycling”, it’s converting a fossil fuel into a smaller quantity of another fossil fuel.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/waste-energy-fuels-great-greenwashing-machine-paul-martin

Chemical recycling of some plastics is possible, but needs to be viewed with every bit as much a jaundiced eye as waste to energy or fuels schemes.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chemical-recycling-plastics-alchemy-waste-management-paul-martin-byg1c

The key with plastics is that their ultimate end of life options are either incineration or landfilling.  And while the former seems to be popular in places that are very precious about their land use, the latter actually generates the lowest end of life environmental impact.  Landfilling baled, separated waste plastics that are too dirty and mixed to be mechanically recycled, is with certainty the lowest cost post-consumer fossil CO2 sequestration strategy imaginable.  All we need to do is not burn it.  In landfill, protected from oxygen and sunlight, plastics will remain essentially unchanged for millennia. They don’t generate leachate or CO2 or methane- or “microplastics”, if you happen to be scared of that particular bogeyman.  Perhaps future generations will find these materials useful- but in the meantime, they’re doing no harm in landfill.

Design for Re-Use and Right of Repair

It seems logical, at first blush at least, to regulate how articles are designed and made, to extend their useful life and to make their handling at end of life easier.

There are plenty of examples we can find in our everyday lives, of products that seem to be designed with pre-programmed obsolescence, or which are made using such absurd assembly processes that repair is next to impossible.  Cellphones, for instance, used to have removable batteries so they could be swapped out with charged ones, or replaced when they go bad.  And there are examples where manufacturers take measures to prevent the repair of their goods, justified largely by trumped-up concerns about liability.

What isn’t being said, however, is why certain design decisions and material choices are made in the 1st place.

The main reason that cellphones lost their removable/replaceable batteries, was to make them thinner, and also more water resistant by means of water-tight, glued construction.  This frustrates repair, but also means fewer people with their phone in a bag of rice in the hope to recover its function after an accidental dip in the water.

I certainly would like to know that the products I buy have parts available so I can repair them, and use methods of assembly that allow repair to at least be possible.  Then again, I’m an engineer who grew up taking things apart and putting them back together again to see how they work, and repair – especially of goods salvaged from other people who lacked the skill or knowledge or time to do it themselves- became a matter of personal pride.  But rather like with demolition, the cost of skilled repair labour has become stratospheric, rendering repair rather than disposal/recycling frequently an economically fraught decision.  While YouTube has taken some of the fun out of diving into a dead product with a screwdriver and prayers or oaths, knowing that the patient is already dead and hence can’t really be harmed anyway- online retailers make access to repair parts that were formerly next to impossible to obtain, now just a roll of the dice as to whether or not the advertised compatibility with your model of thing is actually true.  Self-repair of many things is definitely still a viable option. But you have to want to do it…the motivation, skill and free time to do that, run in short supply in our society.

The thing that people seem to be missing, though, is just how much engineers pride themselves in using the optimal material and method for the job- and how little control they have over the objectives of their clients or employers.  And all design decisions are an optimization exercise, weighing cost of materials, cost of transformation labour and energy, and how important the various design specs are relative to one another- weight, safety, energy consumption etc.  We as a society definitely have a right to weigh into that already complex decision making matrix with our own values related to energy use, waste disposal and other environmental impacts- but we’ll need to tread carefully or we are likely to make things worse rather than better.

Tying engineers’ hands with more regulatory controls which limit their range of choices, might in fact make the world a better place.  But it would likely do so by making goods more expensive, so that we just buy less stuff.  It likely wouldn’t fix the learned propensity of people to throw things away when they don’t work any more.  That’s been learned now for many generations.

One regulatory control I’m a bit in love with is deposit-return. It works brilliantly with lead-acid batteries, ensuring that around 99% of them end up returned for proper recycling, rather than adding lead contamination to landfill leachate. Win-win. But if we apply deposit-return to everything we make, expect costs to skyrocket, and anticipate more than a little environmental impact from all the very sub-optimal transport required to make that happen. Like all regulatory controls, it needs to be applied with a brain rather than ideologically.

Conclusions

If you’ve made it this far, you likely care at least as much about these issues, and about getting them right, as I do.  And you’ll hopefully understand that reality is much more complex and less clear than a simple meme- slogan like “circular economy”.  Perhaps you’ll also be just a little better prepared to discuss these issues in your particular industry.

Disclaimer: this article has been written by a human, and humans are prone to mistakes.  If I’ve gotten something wrong, and you can show me how with good references, I will correct my work with gratitude.

If, however, you don’t like what I’ve written because  I’ve taken a dump on your pet idea, by all means contact my employer, Spitfire Research, who will be very happy to tell you to piss off and write your own article.

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 the E-Fire was destroyed, I dropped its electric drivetrain into a 1973 Triumph TR-6, converting it to a fully electric car, as my COVID project in 2020.  The project is described in this article:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/er-6-electrifying-conversion-paul-martin

This article gives considerable detail about my recent battery pack upgrade on the ER-6 project.

After 11 years, the lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery pack from the E-Fire was starting to show its age.  Many cells were below 80% of original capacity, and several failed outright.  The range of the car was therefore reduced by quite a lot- from a low starting number.  The pack also had considerable voltage sag in particular cells during hard (650A) acceleration, resulting in nuisance battery management system (BMS) alarms while driving.  The older Sinopoly cells I used in that build had a design flaw:  they used a plastic case which was fitted with a relief valve rather than a rupture disk.  Over time, the electrolyte- a solution of LiPF6 in ethylene carbonate, dimethyl carbonate and other proprietary additives, does suffer from some solvent loss to evaporation through these relief valves, which are quite flimsy things which don’t seal tightly.  The trunk (boot) of the car always had a vague smell of these solvents.  Modern LFP cells have metal cases and are fitted with rupture disks, not relief valves, to protect against venting caused by a short circuit or damage to the cell.

For some time I’d been buying the new generation of LFP cells directly from China via Alibaba.  The first order took some effort and research to ensure that we were getting adequate value for money and weren’t being taken advantage of by the seller, but after buying cells for the solar installation at my farm and for my friend’s huge home battery system, I eventually became comfortable that I knew what  was going on.  An Austrian living in Australia and his YouTube Channel “Off Grid Garage” was also of particular help.

Sadly, the original cells we were buying, though inexpensive, had specifications adequate for solar installations of limited power, but had too low a “C rate” for use in the car project.  The C rate is the maximum current draw (or current supply for charging) that the battery can handle, expressed in amps per amp-hour, i.e. in hours^-1.  A C rate of 1 means that the cell can be safely discharged from 100% to 0% state of charge (SOC) in 1 hour.  For the 280 Ah cells we were buying originally, the C rate for discharge was 0.5 C (2 hrs or 140 A) continuous and 1 C (1 hour or 280 A) for short periods.  Since the inverter was capable of drawing 650 A- and that extra current makes the car fun to drive, there was no point in using these initial cells.  Cells with higher C rate were available, but tended to be quite expensive.

That all changed however in 2024.  LFP cells popular with the solar community, made by manufacturer EVE, were finally made available with an English language specification sheet showing the following C rate data:

EVE LF304 LFP Prismatic Cell Data

Standard charging current:  152 A (0.5C)

Maximum continuous charging current:  304 A (1C)

Maximum instantaneous charging current:  2C, 30 s, <80% SOC, 25+/- 2 degrees C

Standard discharge current:  152 A (0.5 C)

Maximum continuous discharge current:  304 A (1 C)

Maximum instantaneous discharge current:  3C (912 A), 30 sec., > 20% SOC, 25+/- 2 degrees C

Initial internal resistance:  0.16 milliohms at 1 kHz, 15-40% SOC

DC internal resistance:  1.2 milliohms, 50% SOC, 1C, 10 seconds

Cycle life:  4000 cycles at 25 C   2000 cycles at 45 C

The car’s inverter is capable of drawing only 650A for short periods- a 30 S discharge at 650A would have the car up to its top speed, at a motor RPM where current draw falls off due to back EMF.   So these cells can definitely handle, in theory, “fun” currents for fast acceleration.  In fact a more detailed table in the spec sheet shows that the peak discharge is 2.12C or greater even down to -5 C temperature as long as the SOC is greater than 30%.  That’s the coldest weather this 2 seater convertible will ever be driven in- in fact as soon as road temperatures threaten to be frosty, the local road authorities dump salt on them- and this car goes away for the winter, because British cars are soluble in saltwater!

At highway speeds, current draw is around 150 A, so right about at the “normal” discharge rate for these cells, much less the maximum continuous discharge rating of 304 A.

The inverter is capable of generating 200 A of regenerative braking current, so that too is well within the capabilities of the cell. And no charger I can afford will ever charge the car at 152 A, much less 304 A!

So the specs looked good- time to negotiate!

I ordered 36 cells- 33 for the pack replacement and 3 spares.  Wise move as it turns out!

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New (EVE LF304, left) versus old (Sinopoly 180 Ah, right) cells, for comparison purposes.

Each cell holds about 1 kWh (972 Wh), and costs for the cells were on the order of $60 USD/kWh.  Shipping door to door, taxes (including Canada’s 13% HST), and the small (~3%) duty on energy storage batteries from China, added another $21/kWh.  A whole pack replacement for $2675 USD.  33 kWh this time.  My previous pack cost around $4000 USD for 18.5 kWh…that’s a pretty dramatic reduction, from $216 to $81/kWh, between 2013 and 2024.  And the prices haven’t stopped falling yet.

Better still, the new cells have a higher energy density per unit mass and volume:

Volumetric energy density:  old cells 164 Wh/L vs 395 Wh/L for the new cells- a 2.4x improvement

Mass energy density:  old cells 110 Wh/kg vs 183 Wh/kg for the new cells- a 1.66x improvement

The mass of the old and new cells were nearly identical- 5.3 kg each, so the new larger pack would not change the weight or weight distribution of the car in any respect except one- it would allow the centre of gravity to be lowered slightly, because the new cells are shorter than the old ones.

For comparison, Tesla 2170 NCA cylindrical cells are ~ 711 Wh/L and 247 Wh/kg- but remember that cylindrical cells don’t pack to the same volumetric density as prismatics do- and are way sketchier from a safety perspective for a DIYer to handle.

Turns out I had to wait a long time for delivery of my cells- much longer than the normal 5 weeks or so.  They were ordered in mid December, 2024, and weren’t received until March 24th. A combination of freight forwarder incompetence and congestion in the Canadian ports led to a very long wait, and with Alibaba you pay 100% up front, so there were some nerve-wracking days while I wondered whether or not the order had disappeared.  Although they did show up undamaged, sadly the late delivery ate much of my schedule window to install the pack before other tasks ate my life.  So the project slipped a bit onto the back burner.

All the cells were capacity tested using a very practical method:  charge at 40A to 3.65 V, then wait 10 minutes, then discharge to 2.5V at 40A, then recharge a bit for storage.  Why 40A?  Because that’s all my friend’s tester can do.  It took weeks to test all those cells, old and new!  All cells had at least 304 Ah capacity when tested that way.  The usual soak at 0.05C (15A) to get the cells with certainty to 100% SOC was ignored.  Capacities varied more with cell temperature in my partially temperature controlled shop than they did from cell to cell.

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A typical charge/discharge curve is given below:

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The charge voltage is very flat, varying little with state of charge between about 5% and 95% SOC for LFP cells- unlike with high nickel cells, voltage is nearly useless to infer state of charge with these cells.  Coulomb counting (integrating current versus time) is about the only reliable way to assess SOC, and even that must be re-set occasionally with a full charge to 100% SOC.  That’ s my normal practice with the car anyway- charge until one cell trips the BMS, then reset the coulomb counter in the car to 100% SOC/ 0 Ah drawn.  It’s worked well for years.

A graph for an old cell (purchased in 2013) is given below for comparison:

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You can see that at 40 A, the energy efficiency (discharge energy divided by charge energy) has dropped only a little, from 95% to 89%.  As the cells age, internal resistance increases, and that will show up as more cell heating and lower energy efficiency at high discharge rates.  This was observed in the pack’s performance in the car in its last year, with several cells alarming the BMS by dropping below 2.5 V during heavy acceleration.   But these cells are more than good enough to put into a solar storage application, where currents will be much lower.  So that’s where the entire old pack is going.  I expect this pack will still be doing its thing, storing and returning energy, for another decade.

Once all the cells passed their capacity tests, the “fun work could begin.

A preliminary measurement of the new cells made me quite confident that they would be a drop-in replacement, with only minor modifications required to my battery boxes.

Boy, that was wrong!

The combination of a very small (~ 1 mm) nominal width increase, plus a considerable stack-up variation in width due to small amounts of bulging in the cell sidewalls, plus the thickness of the epoxy fibreglass plates that are recommended to separate the metal-cased cells from one another in a pack (which I’ve never bothered with for my solar installations, but seemed necessary with the vibration of a car installation), meant that I had to totally re-do my front and rear battery packs.  While the new rear pack fit with ease, and the shorter cells gave enough space to finally work on the rear pack while it was installed- the front battery pack was within a few millimetres of being too wide to fit between the former engine mounting points.  Fortunately, I had a few millimetres to spare, and there was sufficient room for the polycarbonate sheets I used to armour my battery boxes- never liked the idea of using steel for that purpose.

Removing the old battery box allowed me to pull the motor, mounting plate and clutch/pressure plate assembly.  This allowed me to replace and properly re-install the clutch throw-out bearing.  The clutch is barely ever used in the EV, but the old bearing’s squeaking was driving me nuts because other than that, the loudest sound in the car is the buzz of the little 12V vacuum pump I use to provide vacuum to assist the mechanical brake master cylinder (because there is no intake manifold vacuum to do that job any more!).

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The HPEVS AC50 motor with CanEV transmission mounting plate and hub, and Toyota W50 clutch

A considerable amount of grinding, welding and cursing later, the battery boxes were finished and painted and ready to drop into the car.

Note that there is no thermal management on the batteries, because none is needed.  It’s a 3 season car, which goes away before temperatures drop to zero degrees C because that means salt will be put on the road- and British cars are known to be quite soluble in saltwater.  The pack also doesn’t need cooling, because it will never be rapid charged.  Its heat capacity is large, and the most I’ve seen the battery pack rise in temperature during a drive is about 5 degrees C.  Thermal management is simply unnecessary with LFP cells under my driving and charging conditions.

Now, the really fun stuff:  the new battery management system.

Back in 2014, there seemed to be two options for BMS:  an open-source project called “miniBMS”, which I used because it was simple, brainless and affordable, though not cheap at about $15/cell, and the Ewert Orion BMS- an expensive Cadillac of a thing which gave cell by cell data which you could display on a Bluetooth device.  I balked at the price which was over $1000 USD.

Sadly the miniBMS developer sold his project to a company which abandoned it.  Some of the boards failed in nasty ways, drawing 12 mA instead of their usual 2 mA and causing cell imbalance.  Replacement boards were not to be found.  Fortunately a donor came forward. Rasmus Banke of Banke ApS (https://banke.pro) , a maker of electric drivetrains and electric power take-off units for heavy duty trucks, had a professional quality BMS lying around that couldn’t go into a client project for a variety of reasons- and was grateful to me for dissuading him from further work in relation to hydrogen trucks…so I was happy to accept his donation. 

Sadly, the BMS requires an expensive software tool to program it, so I’d need to waste the time of the Banke team to use that option.  And in conversations with others here on LinkedIn, a couple Chinese BMS options came to my attention that I hadn’t heard of before.

I settled on the AntBMS: https://antbms.vip/products/ Things have come a long way in 11 years- this thing was about $100 CDN including shipping on AliExpress, and is full featured with Bluetooth output. No more watching blinking LEDs to tell the status of my pack, or using my Back to the Future group of six voltmeters to compare voltages on groups of cells- I can l look at every cell voltage on my phone, at a glance.

I bought the lowest current version they sold (40A) which was capable of supporting 32 cells.  That would leave me with one cell to manage manually, which I was comfortable with.

The BMS strategy I used in the E-Fire was a tried and true one recommended by Randy Holmquist of Canadian Electric vehicles back in 2013 when I was shopping around for conversion parts.  Randy has since retired, but he was very much a no nonsense “do what works and no more than that” kind of guy.  That strategy was to interlock the BMS to the charger, such that charging was terminated when any cell rose above 3.65 V.  He simply allowed the charger to “bounce” on the BMS signal, turning the charger back on again if any of the celltop BMS boards reached its reset voltage of about 3.5 V.   During discharge, i.e. while you were driving, a BMS alarm would only trigger an audible alarm- it was not interlocked to shut down the inverter or even to trigger a “limp mode”.  This would startle the driver and might be unsafe.  Risking a cell voltage reversal from over-discharge- in practice requiring deliberate ignoring of the BMS warning alarms- was worth it from a safety perspective while driving.

Implementing that same strategy, I used the BMS’s main 40A current path to drive a very simple circuit:  a 2 watt resistor was connected to cell 32, and then to the input side of an optoisolated solid state relay on the AC side of my charger.  The input is an LED which operates between 3 and 32VDC and draws about 10 mA at 12 V.  I chose the resistance to drop the voltage at the input to 12V at peak pack voltage.  I’ll use a single miniBMS board to monitor cell 33, once I get around to it.  For now, cell 33 has been discharged by 5 Ah relative to all the other cells, ensuring that it will never be the cell that trips the BMS during charging.

In hindsight, I could have used two of the somewhat better supported JK BMS units that are talked about in gruesome detail on the Off Grid Garage YouTube channel. One would handle 16 and the other 17 cells, with each acting on its own solid state relay. But then display management for my planned Bluetooth BMS display would have been more challenging.

I don’t yet have an audible alarm from the BMS, but have some ideas for how to implement one. It will take a bit of logic to tell when the car is charging (and I don’t want the noise) versus discharging (when I want a LOUD beep any time there’s a BMS alarm).

Sadly, when tightening up the bus bar connections, one of the studs welded to the battery terminals, broke off.  The studs are welded to the batteries by the supplier, not the manufacturer, and they obviously had some quality problems on their end.  I’m negotiating with them to get some spares- hopefully they live up to their responsibilities.

I wired the connections of the BMS and dutifully checked every one with my multimeter- and did find that one of my solder joints had come loose on the way to the rear pack.  Once that was fixed, I connected the BMS and pressed the on button – and was greeted by a cheery “beep” and some blinkenlights – LED status indicators that to this day I still can’t find any description of.

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Left: front battery pack (19 cells) with BMS in box on top. Centre: 4 cells in quick removable 12V pack. Right: charger variac. Centre: Curtis inverter. Lower centre: vacuum storage chamber and vacuum pump for brake master cylinder assist

Off to install the ANT BMS phone app- and that was an experience of full contact Chinese software-wrangling.  No troubleshooting information available- the unit didn’t even come with a wiring diagram.  Installing the app required me to defeat every safety feature on my Android phone, and requires full-time location access (GPS) even when the app isn’t running.  And the download page is in Chinese without an English translation. User-carnivorous software.

Downloaded the app, finally, and turned it on.  No joy.  No Bluetooth connection- and without a Bluetooth connection, the BMS is a brick.  There’s no way to configure it.

Uninstalled and re-installed the app, this time with location permissions on by default.  Powered down the device completely, and then re-started it.  Finaly the app connected – and it has never been a problem since. But still far from a satisfactory experience.

The BMS is quite full featured, but because neither my charge nor discharge current is flowing through its main metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) switch, many of its features are useless to me.  One thing I did notice during initial pack charging was that the primary overvoltage settings don’t actually open the main MOS circuit.  The device still thinks it has separate MOS switches for charging and discharging, even though it comes with two wires (B- and “everything else”, ie. a common point for both charge AND discharge) rather than with three (separate wires for charger and discharge device connection).  So after taking one cell briefly to 3.8 V (not good!), the problem was fixed, and I set all overvoltage settings to 3.65 V and reconnection to 3.55V.  It worked flawlessly throughout the arduous process of charging and balancing the pack, because my cell SOCs were all over the map before I started.

Although the BMS has a very low balancing current, that doesn’t bother me.  I don’t mind manually balancing my pack once per year- something that’s easy to do when every cell is accessible to you directly, unlike with an OEM pack.

My charger might also be of interest.  It is the cheapest, dodgiest, simplest charger imaginable, as I had no desire to re-purchase an ElCon unit after my first one let out its $1000 USD worth of smoke soon after I’d installed it into the ER-6 (after four years dutifully charging the E-Fire).

My charger consists of a 120VAC input variable autotransformer (variac) of Chinese origin, purchased on Amazon for $100 CDN.  Its switch and fuse were garbage and failed in no time- note that these things are not CSA/UL certified, should be illegal for sale as a result, and are a fire hazard until you remove their garbage switch and fuse components), but the variable autotransformer unit itself is absolutely robust and is rated for 20A.  Its input is turned on and off by the BMS via an optoisolated solid state relay as already mentioned.  The output side of the variac is fed into a 20A bridge rectifier mounted on a heatsink.  Both the rectifier and the variac are cooled continuously by an AC muffin fan.  The bridge output (full wave rectified DC) is fed to the pack via an analog ammeter and a fuse.  I have an Anderson connector on the charger’s output, which allows me to unplug it from the pack and plug the charger into a pair of clip leads which I can use to charge any group of batteries I want- an extremely handy feature when top-balancing the pack.   You simply start with the dial at zero, plug it in, and then turn the dial until the ammeter shows the current that you want. The unit can charge anywhere from one cell to the entire 33 cell pack at currents up to 15 A, though you’d need to feed it with a 20A AC circuit to keep the breaker from tripping.  But let’s just not talk about the power factor…this thing draws current only at the peak of each pulse.  It’s cheap, flexible and very cheerful though, with a “mad scientist” look, and will charge my new pack in, um, 20 hours.  Longer than overnight…Oh well, fortunately I won’t be running the pack anywhere nearly completely flat on the regular.  And of course forget about charging at even a Level 2 charging station.  Maybe one day I’ll break down and spend another $1000 USD on a “real” charger- the ones from Thunderstruck look pretty cool.  But for now I’m happy with my evil scientist Variac.

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The dash still looks sweet 5 years on. Tung oil yearly. The Intellitronix LED speedo will be replaced with a GPS speedo shortly. Gauges are, left to right: speedo, tach, coulomb counter/fuel gauge, analog ammeter, Inverter display, and 12V A/V

Initial test drives revealed some problems with the build which still need fixing. In particular the Hall effect device I’m using for accelerator pedal position sensing, doesn’t work well with my Curtis controller.  I will be putting a zero/span adjustment device on its output to feed the Curtis a signal it’s more comfortable with, and that should avoid some seasickness from the thing jerking from 50 A drive current to 50A regenerative braking every time you go over a bump and your foot moves the slightest bit.  I’ve adjusted the acceleration rate (throttle position response time constant) to compensate for now, but it makes the car sluggish off the line which is decidedly un-fun.

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Note that the car is in what my friend Tom calls “50/50 condition”, meaning that it looks great at 50 miles per hour from a distance of about 50 feet.  It badly needs bodywork and paint, and I’ve reached my lifetime limit of painting one car, so I’ll need to spring for somebody else to do this work for me-maybe next year.

The first long-ish drive I did, revealed another problem:  out of laziness more than anything else, I’d used three of the vendor-supplied solid copper bus bars on the small removable 12V pack I have up front, rather than the heavier multi-layer bars from the E-Fire.  Sadly, they weren’t up to the heavy currents drawn by my inverter.  One got hot enough to melt the heat shrink.  The hot bus bars also melted the insulation on a couple BMS wires, causing a short circuit which fried them.  In the process of replacing the inadequate bus bars, another cell post snapped off- so now I’m down to one spare cell.

The pack is now all neatened up, with the inadequate parts replaced and all the BMS wires carefully routed away from the bus bars.  A long drive today was very satisfactory and incident free.  I’m going to enjoy driving the car this fall.  After some range calculations I’ll hopefully find out if I have enough to make it both to and from the annual British Car Day show in Burlington, Ontario on a single charge.  If so, the ER-6 will be there for the first time.  It never made it there as a gasoline car- it was too unreliable to risk the trip!

Disclaimer

This article has been written by a human.  A human whose original electric conversion project, totally changed his life for the better.  A human who likes cars that drive rather than as art objects to polish or museum pieces to restore.  A human who is 100% an amateur, i.e. someone who loves both British roadsters and EVs.  If you’re pursuing a conversion yourself, do yourself a big favour and read all the threads you can at www.diyelectriccar.com, and do a bunch of additional research and reading.  Rules and regulations vary greatly from country to country- what works for me could be 100% illegal where you live- or it might be legal, but you may not be able to insure it to drive it legally on the road even if you dot all the Is and cross all the ts.  As they say, your mileage may vary!

A note to the “haters”: if you’re a classic car fanatic, and think that electric conversions are sacrilege, then please just f*ck off.    An EV conversion is no different than an engine swap, and people have been doing that with classics since cars were invented.  The TR-6 is not rare- there are tens of thousands of them still on the roads of the world, and this one was in rough shape anyway.  And it’s my car not yours, so it’s none of your damned business either way. And not everybody is in love with toxic exhaust emissions, noise, grease, and constant tinkering with 50 year old junk made at the lowest ebb of car reliability in history.  I’m in fact very grateful that most of the problematic components of this car are now being used in somebody else’s restoration project.

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 hate?  Because plastics are cheap and durable, they invariably become a waste problem.  And because we’ve largely socialized the cost of waste management, there isn’t a direct economic incentive- other than where that is imposed by regulation- to reduce waste plastic generation.  So most of us- this household included- seems to be positively drowning in single use plastic waste.  We dutifully chuck it all into the recycling bin and haul it out to the curb every 2 weeks, but we are also aware that less than 10% of waste plastic ends up actually being recycled.  The rest is often combusted (particularly in Europe) or landfilled, because it is collected in a form that is too dirty and mixed to make mechanical recycling feasible.

One person’s waste is often seen as another person’s resource.  And so the notion of what beneficial purpose we can put this mixed, dirty plastic waste “resource” to, has plagued the imaginations of countless people over the years.

Conversion to Energy or Fuels

Plastic is a fossil origin resource, with very few exceptions.  So no, you can’t take mixed municipal solid waste, or even “refuse derived fuel” (RDF) from sorted MSW, and convert it to other fuels by pyrolysis or gasification and get away with calling those fuels “biofuels” or “green fuels”.  Had you left the plastic alone, and simply not burned it, but rather landfilled it, its fossil origin CO2 would have remained out of the atmosphere for literally tens of thousands of years.  And no, “air-filling” is not a green alternative to landfilling.  If you want my opinions on the inherent greenwash that is “waste to energy or fuels”, you can read them in my article here.  I’ve recently re-read it and I stand by everything it says.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/waste-energy-fuels-great-greenwashing-machine-paul-martin

Circular Plastics- New Monomers From Post Consumer Plastic Waste

If you’ve been reading my work for an appreciable period, you likely know already that I view the whole notion of a “circular economy” as standing squarely against the 2nd law of thermodynamics- and in that battle, thermodynamics always wins.  Rather than the foolhardy notion of “circular economy”, we should always be talking about optimal recycle.

(my modification of the popular circular economy cartoon, which gets things totally wrong and hence needed fixing)

The optimal recycle rate is rarely zero and is NEVER 100%, for 2nd law reasons.  As we try to reduce the amount of matter waste from any process to 100%, the 2nd law looms large and eats an ever-increasing amount of energy.  As our energy sources become cleaner as we decarbonize our energy system, the optimal amount of recycle- the amount which generates the lowest net environmental harm- will increase for all processes.  But it will never be 100%.

The real question this piece must answer though, is this:  is it possible to develop a process to take post-consumer plastics and to chemically disassemble them into fresh monomers suitable for making new plastics

?

The TL&DR answer to that question is yes- but it’s very, very difficult.  It is much easier to pretend that you’re doing that, and to end up with most of the mass being used for other purposes, particularly as fuels, with most of the mass therefore ending up as CO2 in the atmosphere.  And that’s inarguably worse than simply landfilling the plastic and being done with it!

Why Fresh Monomers?

Well, because the reason we can’t recycle this shit is that it is a mixture of plastics generally- or even when it can be sorted into a pure stream of just one kind of plastic- PET water or pop bottles for example- the plastic still contains dyes or pigments, additives, fillers and other materials that render the mechanical recycled plastic product unsuitable for certain uses.  That’s not a problem as my other piece mentions:  we should have no more problem with PET bottle waste being used to make carpet fibre, than we have with copper wire being recycled into copper pipe and tubing rather than back into copper wire. 

That said, if we could de-polymerize the material into its monomers, purify those monomers to the (sometimes extreme) levels of purity that is required to make polymers of the necessary quality, and then blend those with fresh monomer to make up for losses, we could have true circularity for those materials.  On paper, or in a spreadsheet, at least.

Types of Polymers

The problem, and the size and quantity of devils associated with making fresh monomers out of post consumer waste plastic, varies greatly with the sort of polymer we’re talking about.

Polyolefin Thermoplastics

Far and away the greatest mass of plastic, and hence of waste plastic, is thermoplastics, particularly polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), with polystyrene (PS) and PVC coming up close behind.  These polymers are all made from olefin monomers, i.e. monomer chemicals containing a carbon-carbon double bond called a “vinyl group”, with either catalysts or free radical initiators used to cause them to polymerize (to link up into long chains, a process which releases a lot of heat). 

Pyrolysis

Of these major polymers, only PS depolymerizes to a significant fraction of its monomer when you heat it up in the absence of oxygen (a process called pyrolysis).  Even the yield of PS back to styrene is quite low in the best case.  There is no catalyst capable of selectively reversing the process of polymerization back to pure monomers, and there are good chemical reasons to suspect that no such catalyst will ever be developed.

Pyrolysis is reached for because it is “easy”, conceptually at least, and it yields a pyrolysis oil which can be sent to a petroleum refinery.  Done very carefully, small markets for short polymers otherwise made from fresh monomer, can be supplied by pyrolysis of waste plastics.  However, because those markets are small, most producers try to produce a generic pyrolysis oil- and of that oil, only a tiny fraction of that oil will end up being made back into olefin monomers again- perhaps 10% at best.    The rest will end up in fuels, and the fossil CO2 in that waste plastic will end up unnecessarily in the atmosphere.  Pyrolysis is disastrous when any quantity of PVC is found in the waste stream- the yield to very dangerous halo-organic molecules such as chlorinated dioxins and furans can be significant and cannot be entirely eliminated, and the best case product is hydrogen chloride which must be scrubbed out of the product vapour.  There are also additives in all of these polymers which can produce hazardous chemicals in the gas, liquid and solid (char/inorganics) fractions coming out of the pyrolysis process. 

So to call pyrolysis “chemical recycling” is, frankly, a massive greenwash.

You could increase yields to monomers by feeding pre-treated pyrolysis oil to a dedicated fluid catalytic cracking unit, but the unit economics would be poor at best.

Gasification to Syngas, and Methanol to Olefins

The other approach used for these materials is gasification, where waste materials are heated- often by partial combustion, often with steam as a co-reagent- to the point where large molecules can no longer exist.  The product is, compared to what you get when you feed natural gas to a steam reformer, quite a dirty synthesis gas containing CO2, CO, hydrogen, methane, nitrogen (if air is used as a combustion feed), water vapour, and of course HCl, HBr and HF if the waste isn’t completely free of halogens.  It is possible, with knowledge, effort and considerable investment, to clean up this gas stream to produce a feed suitable for methanol production, but there will be a significant amount of fossil origin CO2 that will need to either be disposed of via CCS or expensively back-reacted with green hydrogen to produce more CO and water using the water-gas shift reaction.  Neither option is very appealing economically. 

While methanol is itself not a monomer, about 30% of world methanol production is already being converted to olefins including ethylene and propylene in places like China and India. 

Gasification to syngas, syngas to methanol, and then methanol to olefins- wow, that’s a lot of steps!  But this process can, if you can afford to do it correctly (which is an open question!), result in considerably higher yields of waste polyolefins to fresh olefin monomers than can be achieved by pyrolysis.  However those many steps, each with energetic losses, GHG emissions and capital and other operating costs to contend with, can make the economics challenging.  Waste materials also are bulky and expensive to ship, so plants tend to be small in scale, complicating matters further.  The unit economics of post consumer waste plastic back to olefins of monomer purity via gasification and methanol to olefins (MTO) are at present undemonstrated.

The added complication is the desire to use methanol as a fuel, particularly for shipping.  It will become obvious that people starting with mixed municipal solid waste or waste-derived solid fuel, will want to count some of their resulting syngas and methanol as having come from biomass, and hence to be suitable for use as a fuel, while the rest might only be acceptable if it can be economically back-converted to polymers.  The opportunities for fraud and the need for stringent regulatory control is therefore evident.

And no, Fischer Tropsch is not a suitable consumer of the resulting syngas, either.  FT stands for “fundamentally terrible”, or a ruder but more accurate word starting with F may also be substituted here.

So far therefore, chemical recycling of polyolefin thermoplastics is at best a concept, and more often than that, if pyrolysis is involved, it can be a borderline environmental fraud- effectively a waste to energy process masquerading as waste to chemicals or plastics.  This makes it hard for legitimate project proponents who are truly interested in decarbonization and environmental solutions, to differentiate themselves from the enviro-alchemists who attempt to convince us that waste to anything is better than landfilling.  It’s important to realize that it ain’t necessarily so!

Thermosets

Thermosets are a class of polymers which involve crosslinks between the polymer chains. Crosslinking provides beneficial mechanical properties to polymers such as rubber, coatings, epoxies and vinylester resins which are used to make composites such as glass- and carbon-fibre reinforced plastics etc.  However, crosslinking processes are even harder to reverse than polymerization itself.  So far, nobody has good processes for recycling any post consumer thermoset plastic back to its constituent monomers that I’m aware of.  I’m constantly hearing people announce that they’ve found beneficial ways to recycle materials such as tires or wind turbine blades, but they usually mean recovering energy or similar pyrolysis oils to what we’ve previously mentioned, and reinforcing materials like glass fibre or carbon black. That is a long way from true chemical recycling, and in my view there isn’t a good prospect for that to change any time soon.  Redesign of the source polymers might yield some hope, but if crosslinks can be easily reversed, environmental durability of the material will almost certainly suffer.

While the potential for re-use or repurposing of post consumer thermosets is very real- witness the wonders which are done with rubber crumb from tires, and the creative solutions for the re-use of sections of fatigued wind turbine blades- most thermosets are destined for landfill.  And that frankly shouldn’t concern us too much, because they are inert in landfill and their environmental impact ends after they are properly collected and disposed of.

Condensation Polymers

A whole class of polymers, some of them thermoplastics, others thermosets, are so-called condensation polymers.  The main examples include polyesters like polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyamides (Nylon) and polyurethanes, and natural examples such as cellulose.  These polymers involve either two different monomers, or bifunctional monomers with different reactive groups at each end.  These groups react with one another to form chains, with the elimination of a small molecule in the process (generally but not always water). 

Polyesters and polyamides involve the reaction of an organic acid group with an alcohol or an amine respectively, with water being the byproduct.  It is therefore possible, at least in theory, under the right chemical conditions, to hydrolyze (break with water) these polymer molecules to re-form the monomers.  Regenerating isocyanates from polyurethanes is, in contrast, not something  worth considering.  Over millennia, hydrolysis may even happen, at least in theory, on contact with subsurface water- therefore unlike polyolefins which are absolutely stable in landfill with high certainty, there may be some arguable environmental benefit to not landfilling certain condensation polymers.  It is also possible to carry out alcoholysis, by substituting an alcohol like methanol or ethylene glycol for water, which can give certain advantages.

Condensation polymers require very high purity monomers.  Any quantity of a monomer with a damaged or missing 2nd reactive group becomes a chain terminator, limiting the molecular weight and hence badly affecting the mechanical properties of the polymer. Even once polymers are broken apart by hydrolysis or alcoholysis, purification to pure monomer can be expected to be a tricky problem.

While it’s clear that when mechanical recycling is possible (as it is readily with PET), it is the more environmentally sensible approach, it certainly is technically feasible to achieve even quite high yields of fresh monomer from post-consumer condensation polymers.  However, a good 3rd party lifecycle analysis study is essential to understand whether or not the option of chemical recycling is of any value at all, even if the company developing the process thinks that they can make money doing it.  The capital and energy and reagent intensity can all be very large.

Summary and Conclusions

While it is clear from even a perfunctory LCA that mechanical recycling, where feasible, is a better alternative, chemical recycling can be an option for condensation polymers- but only where a good, disinterested 3rd party LCA shows a real environmental benefit relative to landfilling (an option often ignored in LCAs).  The main problem polymers, PE and PP however, can only be meaningfully recycled by a multistep process involving gasification, methanol synthesis and conversion to olefins, which has not yet been economically demonstrated.  And thermosets are largely a disposal problem, not one of feasible recycling, until we invent reversible crosslinks that are environmentally durable.