UPDATED August 8, 2023 You’ve likely heard the sales pitch before: What am I talking about? Direct air capture- the act of using active mechanical/chemical equipment and vast quantities of renewable energy, in a totally pointless fight against entropy, to try to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere for either durable burial or “use”. You’ve […]
Category: Energy and Decarbonization
E-Methane: Exergy Destroyer, On Steroids
TL&DR: grinding up electricity to make heating fuel is just a way to waste energy and capital, by destroying exergy (the potential to do thermodynamic work). It’s obviously worse than just making hydrogen. It is wasteful, and wasteful means expensive. It also means higher emissions than if you did something sensible, like feeding a heatpump. […]
Scaling Example #2: Water Electrolysis
Scaling Object Lesson #2: Water Electrolyzers For Hydrogen Production We learned about vertical scaling in the 1st article in this series: …and about horizontal scaling or “numbering up” in the 2nd: Now we’ll use these tools to examine the scaling future of an extremely important decarbonization technology: electrolyzers for producing hydrogen from renewable electricity. My readers will […]
Scaling Example #1: Small Modular Nuclear Reactors
Now, let’s used the tools we’ve learned, to took at some examples from the effort to decarbonize our economy. The first example to take a swing at with our new understanding of vertical and horizontal scaling is the small modular nuclear reactor, or SMNR for short. SMR means something else to me- steam methane reformer- […]
The Myth of Hydrogen as an Energy Export Commodity
There is a popular myth in the marketplace of ideas at the moment: the notion that hydrogen will become a way to export renewable electricity in a decarbonized future, from places with an excess of renewable electricity, to places with a shortage of supply and a large energy demand. It seems that the hydrogen #hopium […]
Blackish Blue Bruise Coloured Hydrogen Part 2: the Ghost of Blue Hydrogen’s Future
Blackish-Blue Bruise Coloured Hydrogen Part 2: The Ghost of Blue Hydrogen’s Future As we found in Part 1, conventional hydrogen production from natural gas using steam methane reforming (SMR) coupled with carbon capture and storage (CCS) is easily written off as a waste of everyone’s time and money. It’s fooling nobody. Because nearly half the […]
Blackish-Blue Bruise Coloured Hydrogen
My readers will know that I have never liked the “colours of hydrogen” that has been spread, as a meme, by the hydrogen-as-a-fuel lobby. There is only really one kind of hydrogen in the world right now. Hydrogen- 98.7% of it by generous estimate- is made from fossils, without meaningful carbon capture. It is barest […]
Waste to Energy/Waste to Fuels: the Great Greenwashing Machine
Most of us find waste to be viscerally repugnant. The smell and even the appearance of garbage revolts us. And yet we all generate it, in seemingly endless quantity. In “developed” (rich) nations, we therefore have built extensive systems to get this repugnant material out of sight, and hence out of our minds, as quickly […]
Global Warming Risk Arises From Three Facts
Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a real risk for future generations including my own children. It’s a risk I’ve personally taken seriously, and have taken personal action against, since the late 1980s when I was in university. And while we’ve seen some extremely positive developments in the past 30 years such as the creation of new industries […]
What Are the Energy Solutions?
Oh Paul, you’re so critical! You just crap on other people’s “green solutions”, telling us why they won’t work in your opinion! Where are YOUR solutions? Put up or shut up! First Premises First, what are we trying to solve, exactly? Anthropogenic global warming https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/global-warming-risk-arises-from-three-facts-paul-martin/ (Any denialist posts to this article will be deleted. Want to argue […]