CHON World

 2021.05.29 - Ian Page Direct Air Capture of CO2 to Increase 150-Fold By 2024 DAC of CO2 sold to Coca Cola displaces other CO2 sources but it's still put straight back into the air days later when the bottle is drunk. DAC sold to enhance oil recovery is also a displacement of other sources but increasing the extraction of oil to burn is not a win! DAC to make fuels specifically for air travel where we don't have alternatives yet does make sense.  Missing is DAC to make chemicals to displace petrochemical inputs. The only really positive thing is that if CO2 from DAC displaces CO2 from oil or natural gas it may reduce the overall economics of fossils. I suppose that if this is an intermediate scaling path to get costs down we could treat it as H2 plus.  

 2021.05.29 - Ian Page From Gail Tverberg's blog... https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/05/27/dont-expect-the-world-economy-to-resume-its-prior-growth-pattern-after-covid-19/ Ian's main observations ... Peak car peak cement peak coal all look as though they happened 4 years ago. Availability  of various things per person is dropping. Gail sees this as a resource function. Resources reaching the point where cost of production is meeting ability to buy at a price that allows a profit, which we see as an MROI effect.

 2021.05.25 – Ian Page The following graphic shows some interesting things The relation between energy consumption and emissions hasn't changed much in 50 years and I can't see an obvious change in the last few years. overall The energy per person increased until US peak oil, then was relatively flat for 20 years until the shale oil/interest rate reductions, disinflationary entry of china to the world economy, choose your reason, and has then been pretty flat for the last 8 years.  Gail Tverberg would interpret the consumption of energy as a metric of how well-off people are becoming. Thus, her interpretation would be that people got richer until the late 70's, didn't get any richer for 20 years, then got a bit richer but only because of flooding the economy with low-cost money. There is some evidence that emissions per capita have dropped a bit lately- hopefully renewables and energy efficiency are having some effect, or it could just be that people in the US can't...

2021.05.24 – Ian Page Nature’s catalysts are usually enzymes, and for many key pathways these involve single atoms of iron (or small clusters) surrounded with a few nitrogen or phosphorous atoms locked in to very a specific structure, surrounded by piles of organic protein scaffolding that also guides the reactants to the reacting center. These are very complicated structures, and it’s not clear which bits are critical and which are just evolutionary debris. The problem is that these enzymes often do things in cells that chemists can’t replicate without rare metals and extreme conditions, yet they are also easily destroyed in use. Nature probably uses iron because it was easy to find in volcanic vents or wherever life started and has tuned it over the millennia to be remarkably effective at catalyzing all sorts of critical reactions. This paper is particularly exciting because it replicates the environment of the iron atom in a natural enzyme, within what looks like a robust fairly str...

2021.05.24 – Ian Page I was musing on the fact that many regions of the world have continuous sun in huge quantities (Australia) but no access to water. Given that one of the things you want to do with the very cheap electricity from solar PV in such places is to generate hydrogen and perhaps then make ammonia for fertilizer or fuel, where do you get the water from? Being far from the sea, unable to use rivers or clean water aquifers as they have better uses and using brackish water aquifers involves energy intensive clean up before use and is not a sustainable source, it seemed obvious to me that the eventual route might be via direct air capture. There is of course  a literature on this ( I discovered it’s called AWS  https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acsmaterialslett.0c00130 for a review), and membrane separation ( https://bmcchemeng.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s42480-019-0020-x ) Even desert air contains significant humidity, but the issue with AWS is that it is...

  2021.05.24 – Ian Page Is aluminum a real threat to copper? The CHON element cascade is based on the idea that as the MROI of extraction of an element drops, the price you can sell it for reaches a "cap" at which users can't make enough profit from using it to keep their businesses going and are forced to substitute either directly or in more holistic / systemic ways. Many of these substitutions are surprising before the event, and I don’t know how to have a process to identify the specifics, however the general pattern is clear as are the endpoints which are CHON and Aluminum essentially. The concentration of copper ores is dropping in all the major copper mines and is well below 1%. One commentator said that at 0.25% (some are close to that) reserves drop sharply. (There is a proposed new mine in the Congo with what is described as an " eye watering 6% ore quality" but it's not clear if this is real yet even if it is it will be some time before it produce...

2021.05.21 – Ian Page This was stimulated by a paper in Joule 5 551-563 Mar 17, 2021. " A Reaction Engineering Approach of Non-Aqueous Battery Lifetimes", which is a lot more interesting than the title suggests. I'll get to that in a minute after setting some context In my view most of the focus on battery development has been on increasing the factors most important to EV’s: These are capacity per kg and charging speed. However, when you look at LCOE, what's most important is lifetime. If a $10K battery cycles 600 times in its life rather than 300, its half the cost per used kilowatt hour. If that figure were to approach the cost of the electricity used for charging it would cease to be a major issue. Now for a bit of science for context. All chemical reactions are reversible. Thus, if A+B=>C+D then C+D=>A+B Thus, a reaction will typically end up in a mix of the two sides, the proportions defined by thermodynamics. To add to the fun, all chemicals are potential...

Ian Page - 2021.05.18 The general opinion of the major areas for research over the next decade is often AI/Robots/Computing/Nanotechnology. However, if you look into the huge e-transition coming, and largely this decade, this generates a long list with, electrolysis for hydrogen production, ammonia production, steel and aluminum production, batteries, fuel cells, pushing solar to 40%, and CO2RR/DAC for chemical industry. There is also a huge minerals issue of converting mines that are exhausting their ore quality and merging the mining and recycling industries into something more appropriate to future needs. If you add the very significant problem of refrigeration and space heating these seem to be the main areas. While the general list of foundational technologies first mentioned are contributors, my second list is quite a long way from being directly driven by them. However, there are some distinctive foundational technology areas that are directly relevant and also relevant to most ...

2021.05.06 – Ian Page This new term was introduced in a Joule paper, proposing a methodology for evaluating the use of various primary fuels for various categories of heating. While it admits that it's a flawed measure, it's better to have some measure! The paper is introductory, and might lead non expert readers to the wrong conclusions, so some way to go, but it led me to a thought on an extension to the slivers series (i.e. take a limited resource, decide what your climate objective is, and develop a series of slivers of applications of increasing effectiveness to establish a strategy for using the limited resource.) (Joule 5 531-550 mar 17 2001) In this case the estimates of the temperature of heat needed for various segments of American and EU industry show that 1/3 to 1/2 of heat needed is at fairly low temperatures (less than 200C) the "boiler "category. This is cost effectively achieved with heat pumps up to around this temperature (higher presumably if it can...

2021.05.05 – Ian Page https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/05/04/how-the-worlds-energy-problem-has-been-hidden/ I don’t fully agree with Gail, but she has arrived at her description of the CHON energy desert from her financial perspective, and also identified the GDP energy relationship we have also graphed. She also creates an interesting presentation indicating that wars happen when the "excess" GDP hits zero and are often only resolved with a new form of primary energy. She indicates that we are at the zero spare energy point now and says this is the basis of many of our current ills and our dire future. The CHON scenarios see this as leading to a fight for resources within a zero/negative sum game, resource retention by countries with great strategic focus on capturing the resources in imported goods, and an inability to afford the multiple layers of government in modern societies and centralized manufacturing and offices. Plausibly good news from my point of view is that I un...

2021.05.05 – Ian Page https://cleantechnica.com/2021/05/05/tesla-consumed-more-lithium-than-byd-vw-renault-audi-combined-in-2020/ Last year Tesla consumed more lithium than BYD, VW, Renault, Audi combined. Every battery of whatever chemistry for the foreseeable future carries its energy on lithium ions, so just counting the lithium tells you who is using the most batteries, and thus who is putting the most aggregated range on the roads. One interesting aspect of the graphs was the number 2 brand by volume SGMW. I've never heard of this and of course it's a Chinese company! It makes cheap microvans that carry goods small distances typically in second and third tier Chinese cities (of which there are an enormous number). SGMW started as an ICE joint venture but seems to be embracing EV's with enthusiasm as well as having a very distinct segment in a world where most brands seem to be at the higher end of the market.