CHON World

Ian Page – 2021.07.30 I have been reading a techno economic analysis of the various IEA and IRENA projections of the future of coal under various scenarios. Basically, a lot of it is going to turn into stranded assets and this will have major implications on jobs, towns, countries, and trade routes.  I don’t want to go into the details, which are quite complicated, however I did want to think about the situation from the point of view of the 3 horizons and climate change. Front point of view of climate change, the sooner we get rid of all coal the better.  From the point of view of 3H, we need to transfer income and resources from coal to renewables but that means that coal needs to be profitable during the transition.  US statistics show that more people are employed in wind and solar already than coal but perhaps salaries are not as high? From the point of view of pension funds, which generally are not under the control of pensioners, we want a profitable exit from coal...

By Ian Page https://www.climateaction.org/ news/edf-and-nissan-launch- new-commercial-v2g-service- for-ev-fleets?vgo_ee= eq5Lv8ggbcISyEJHxI4vwTpxdzkQNl 9LgdxZ9pnzLRY%3D   Vehicle to GRID creating a virtual generator. Tesla has the software and the generating license but musk has said it's silly. Didn't go into why I'm a bit concerned about Nissan battery longevity based on the lead 1 record but hopefully they have thought about this.

 by Ian Page The increase was mainly shale, never made a profit ( although at the end of its life may pay some of the losses off now as investment stops), and that oil resulted in 9,5 million barrels per day being subsidized and burnt,. Stupidity of Wall street. Lost for words.

 by Ian Page https://cleantechnica.com/2021/07/22/ernst-young-electric-cars-are-coming-sooner-than-expected/ A notable feature of exponential change and tipping points is that even those who think they understand them find themselves continuously upping their forecasts. Ernst and Young - never one to ignore  a consulting gift horse - have dived in  with an "AI forecasting system". However the main points here are... The current market shares of EVs around the world  are getting serious (which agrees with all the stuff I've been reading. E.g. over 50% of leasing in some areas being EV's - take the up front capital cost out of the equation and the running costs win out even now). The fun little video they offer which is obviously intended to convince clients that they have to move now and that EY can tell them what to do.

by Ian Page https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/799178.pdf There are lots of deep rock brines in the world, in particular under the Salton Sea in California. These contain between them an enormous amount of lithium. DLE direct lithium extraction is an approach to put an extraction plant at the cool output of a geothermal plant before the brine is returned to the ground. The lithium process gets the drilling and pumping essentially for free which improves the costs. (As well as some low temperature hot water that might be useful in the processing.) The main problems are separation of the lithium from all the other junk and ensuring that the brine that comes up the bore hole doesn't lose lithium concentration because the way brine being returned has no lithium in it. The above paper suggests that it should be commercially feasible, and a challenge has been set up to demonstrate feasibility in two years. It should be faster to implement the results of this than to create a new lithium ...