CHON World

By Ian Page – 2021.12.31 https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/30/high-gas-prices-lead-to-conversion-of-ammonia-plant-to-green-hydrogen/ I’ve written before that the high price of gas means that it's now cheaper to make hydrogen by electrolysis than from natural gas in Europe. This is the first actual plan I've seen and by a big industrial group. I hope it goes forward. Also:  Hyundai has given up on hydrogen powered cars citing technical issues, and lack of marketability after spending a fortune over many years. With Toyotas ambivalence and deal with a Chinese EV car firm to make rebrand-able EVs, hydrogen powered cars are effectively dead. This is good news because energetically it's a lousy idea, and batteries have gotten good enough to eat into the potential market. However, there is still potential for long distance lorries, although we are already seeing in Germany container lorries doing repeated medium distance trips from port to warehouse, trying pantographs on parts o...

 By Ian Page I've been reading a lot about the problems and options for high levels of variable renewables in grids. There are over 1000 papers on the topic, usually quite hefty and often with an agenda. This is my summary. The VRE Suppliers View In most of the world variable renewable electricity (VRE) costs less to build and install, than the fossil and nuclear alternatives cost just to run at marginal cost. Thus, there is no justification for new fossils or nuclear energy. Existing nuclear has a place until decommissioned because of its relatively low operational cost, but it is still more expensive than VRE and so its place is niched (see later). TIME: From the point of view of generators of VRE the problem is that they all come online at once. Thus, all the solar is around noon, and all the wind is when there's a decent gale. This means that at high levels of VRE in the grid they are competing with themselves and the LVOE (linearized value of energy - my term for the total...

By Ian Page – 2021.12.28 The EU standard for fleet level passenger cars is 95gm CO2 emitted per Km (due to finagling and paying Tesla to appear to be part of the fleet the actual figure is larger) The average UK car does 7000 miles/yr.- 11,300 km/year Thus, the annual CO2 emission of a UK car is 11,300*95 gm, or 11.3*95 kg= 1000kg. = 1 metric ton near enough. One ton of CO2 will optimistically cost $200 to remove = £150 pa. (And a fair amount of energy) (recent paper in Joule looking at the potential techno-economic aspects of direct air capture) So, the average car driver should pay at least £150pa (actually more because few people drive as carefully as the companies trying to get a low figure! Also, most driving is short distances which doesn't achieve anything like these figures). US drivers with larger less efficient cars would pay well over $200 extra per year. The average UK natural gas consumption for space heating and water heating is equivalent to 3.2 tons of CO2 emissions...

By Ian Page https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/30/more-battery-electric-trains-coming-to-germany/ Following on from the Hewlett funded report on adapting diesel electric in the US to electric / battery, and my muse at the end that the battery carriage could possibly have a pantograph  to top up the battery every now and again, we have this announcement of trains, that can use overhead lines when available, while also charging the battery,  but also run for 80 km or more just on battery. (This is greater than the 48 km gaps on the intended lines.) Its significant since overhead lines for some reason take a long time to establish (at least in the UK!), and are too expensive for the very long routes in the US and Australia, Thus the ability to just put a few sections of overhead wires (eg in stations where the train is stopped for a minute or so anyway) every 80 km or so would enable quicker transition to fully electric.

By Ian Page BP announced that alongside their 1GW of blue hydrogen production planned for Teesside. They intend 500MW of green hydrogen, which with a network of filling stations , and an agreement with Daimler trucks is enough for 32,000 trucks. There are some obvious questions. Where are they going to get the methane from for the blue hydrogen, where are they going to sequester it, and how confident are they that the cost of their main input which is  natural gas is going to get cheaper , since it now costs more to use natural gas than electrolysis. ( and Asia generally has a large deficit in natural gas and is buying the LNG that BP would need. BP has a large LNG output from Australia, but they can probably get more for it from Asia and China, and anyway why not process it to Hydrogen in Australia and sell the hydrogen to Singapore (one of the projects being discussed).  The next obvious question is where are they going to get the electricity for electrolysis. If it comes fr...