Whereas south of the equator and west of the worldwide date line, I had the chance to speak with a couple of hundred individuals in an Australian Sensible Vitality Council webinar. It was organized to take advantage of my uncommon timezone alignment with Oz as I spend a couple of weeks in New Zealand as a digital nomad.

The organizer Steve Blume, former President of the Council, and I believed it will be helpful to reply a lot of the dozens of questions in articles and share with the registrants as properly. That is the sixth and final of some articles with responses, which shall be aggregated and shared by the Council as properly for individuals. The primary article was on aviation and maritime delivery questions, the second coated biofuels and HVDC , the third handled hydrogen, the fourth with fossil fuels, and the fifth on points of politics and geopolitics.

The framing of my ready remarks was the Radical Electrification of Transportation. I’ve printed rather a lot on the topic as I’ve dug by means of most modes over the previous 15 years.

Intro slide to Michael Barnard presentation to Australian Sensible Vitality Council webinar

To summarize my presentation, all floor transportation will electrify. That’s vehicles, vehicles, buses, utility autos, trains, and mining autos. All inland delivery and two-thirds of quick sea delivery will electrify, with solely the longest routes requiring biofuels. Delivery and rail may even drop in tonnage attributable to removing of bulk fossil fuels from masses. Aviation shall be disrupted by electrical regional air mobility, autonomous flight, and digital air site visitors management, and solely trans-oceanic flights would require biofuels in 50 years.

Which means the billions of tons of fossil fuels per 12 months requirement for extraction, processing, refinement, and distribution are going away and being changed by tens of thousands and thousands of tons of expertise metals resembling lithium and cobalt, in addition to a couple of hundred million tons of biofuels for aviation and maritime delivery. That’s all very doable.

The ready remarks skimmed over all of that in half-hour or so, leaving far too little time for questions, and so I’ve chosen to answer most of them in writing.

Do you see a task for nuclear vitality?

Sure, after all. Not an enormous one, but it surely has a task. In any case, China is constructing a number of it, though vastly extra actual TWh of wind, photo voltaic and hydro. Its nuclear program peaked in 2016-2018 and has been limping together with 1-3 reactors a 12 months since, whereas wind and photo voltaic proceed to extend annual deployments.

France stays dedicated to it, form of, this 12 months. A number of years in the past they have been backing away, now they’re backing towards it regardless of a lot of it being offline and therefore contributing to the vitality disaster. South Korea has reversed its plans to eradicate its nuclear fleet, which is worrisome as a result of so a lot of them have been constructed with sub-standard elements as a part of an enormous governmental and company fraud drawback.

The most important program for nuclear by far, nevertheless, is China’s, and as famous, it’s limping, not operating alongside. Different international locations are principally delaying motion by specializing in it. The USA’s fleet is heading for speedy sunsetting simply as they’re lastly getting their renewables program into excessive gear, and perhaps even overcoming wealthy folks’s aversion to offshore wind the place they may see it from their ocean entrance estates and yachts. 

And small modular reactors aren’t an answer. They forego the physics of massive thermal mills however received’t be attaining the numbers essential for considerably decreased per-unit prices. There’ll proceed to be a marketplace for uranium, but it surely received’t be rising massively.

I’m involved about Deep Sea Mining, do we have now sufficient minerals on land? I don’t suppose we should always mine the deep sea for minerals we want for the electrification motion.

Sure, we do have sufficient minerals on land. I might advocate studying Klinger’s Uncommon Earth Frontiers to get a way of why we aren’t mining on land as a lot as we should always. Sure, we must be involved about poorly regulated and really arduous to observe seabed mining, however we should always most likely be extra involved with huge trawlers which can be destroying seabed ecosystems in the present day, not venture-capital backed corporations prone to implode.

For cement decarbonization, 60% of the emissions are process-related. What’s the outlook to decarbonize them, and what are the market drivers?

Cement is the grey glue that holds our world collectively. And it’s 8-10% of the worldwide carbon drawback. There are three sources of serious emissions. The primary is the warmth for the limestone kiln. That’s solely potential to shift to electrical energy, because the temperatures aren’t arduous. 

The second is the CO2 that bakes off the limestone because it turns into quicklime, releasing carbon, which binds with oxygen from the environment. That’s harder to eradicate with out changing the limestone-to-quicklime course of with electrochemical processes, which many are engaged on. There are literally many options on this house.

That is most likely one of many locations the place it is smart to seize and sequester CO2, though that has to compete with the opposite options economically.

The third is the rotating clinker drum with its jet of pure gasoline that heats the quicklime and clay into clinker, a ceramics course of. Even that’s possible to switch, both with a jet of biomethane or an electrical plasma jet. 

Technically, none of those issues are literally that arduous. It’s the financial feasibility of them that’s the issue.

However decarbonized cement is barely 2% of the price of a bridge, as a current instance identified. Pricing carbon intensive cement in order that it’s costlier than alternate options is simply politics and insurance policies, not an financial demise knell. Research have discovered that engineers and designers are overusing cement to keep away from the tiniest threat of building legal responsibility, a suspenders and a belt observe that will change quickly if cement have been a extra sensibly priced commodity.

The issues are extra capex and the sunk price fallacy. A cement plant is a US$500 million greenback piece of equipment with a lifespan measured in many years. And people vitality options can’t simply be bolted onto a lot of the present facility, for essentially the most half. Biomethane jets as an alternative of pure gasoline will be, however that requires a constant and pretty excessive quantity supply of biomethane. As I famous for an additional query, I’m not an enormous fan of making extra methane deliberately.

What do you suppose would be the largest challenges in implementing native worth addition of sources in Australia? Resistance from offshore patrons? Native functionality or different issues?

There are a couple of. I don’t suppose offshore patrons will care in the event that they get the top end result extra cheaply, however that does imply reducing out the center occasion offshore. That’s simply enterprise. 

Native functionality in Australia is a priority, as I perceive it with out being deep on Australia’s industrial capability. My info on Australia is gentle, however creating a contemporary subtle minerals processing capability requires scale, capital, expertise and a breadth of human engineers that Australia’s useful resource pool might need difficulties with. That, nevertheless, is one thing that may be addressed by inviting overseas companions in. China has all of that experience and is more and more outsourcing to different international locations, so there’s doubtless an excellent path for a sensible enterprise individual to determine an excellent partnership there.

It’s unclear to me if Australia has a hardcore expertise coaching program for this in place. That might be a requirement, in addition to upskilling the ancillary enterprise and provide chain expertise.

The most important drawback, I think, is the established order billionaires who like delivery carbon-rich grime abroad and eating on tenderized panda steaks with the earnings. They purchased an terrible lot of politicians in Australia, certainly one of whom proudly held up a lump of coal in Parliament if reminiscence serves, very similar to America’s Inhofe held up a snowball to “show” that local weather change wasn’t actual.

A big a part of Australia’s institution refuses to get the message that change is crucial. That’s why they’ll doubtless not be a part of Australia’s institution in 20 or 30 years, and new ones may have taken their locations. Be one of many new ones.

What purposes do you see for CCUS?

Only a few. I count on it’ll have a play in cement manufacturing, however the scale of the CO2 drawback is 40 billion tons yearly and 1,000 billion tons traditionally, whereas the whole carbon demand in the present day is 230 million tons, a fraction of 1% of annual demand. And 90 million of these 230 million tons, by far the biggest half, is for enhanced oil restoration. All of our large sequestration websites in the present day are sequestering CO2 that they took out of the bottom someplace else, and virtually all of them are enhanced oil restoration websites.

Even cement has alternate options to CCUS, and has to compete economically with these alternate options. 

What do you think about to be the viability of small modular nuclear reactors/electrical energy era, presumably situated adjoining to Australia’s giant cities?

I don’t think about SMRs to be notably viable. They forego the economies of creating thermal era as large as potential so are inherently much less environment friendly and value efficient. They attempt to make up for that by constructing a number of them, however the numbers don’t add up by way of Wright’s Regulation efficiencies.

Oh, and just about all of the designs require high-assay, low-enrichment gas (HALEU) which is barely equipped by Russia at current. Oops.

As for placing them subsequent to Australian cities, that signifies that Australia, the state, the town, and the operator must set up about seven overlapping defensive rings of safety round every SMR, when Australia has no business reactors working in any respect. A lot of the safety for nuclear era services is sponsored by varied ranges of presidency.

SMRs are just like the AP1000 was 18 years in the past, a faint hope by the worldwide nuclear trade that they’d discover a strategy to persistently scale nuclear era. However scaling nuclear era, whereas it’s labored a couple of instances, has at all times had a couple of traits in frequent which don’t exist in most locations in the present day.

The primary is that it’s a nationwide technique initiative, and just about at all times aligned with nuclear weapons functionality. The second is {that a} single expertise is chosen and dominates. The third is that the political system of the nation permits the federal authorities to override native issues and ram nuclear by means of, together with finances slush funds for the inevitable overruns.

SMRs don’t have that situation wherever. The one nation that has near these situations is China, and it’s failing on the only expertise entrance. That’s an enormous a part of the explanation why nuclear reactor roll-outs have flatlined at 1-3 per 12 months since peaking at seven per 12 months in 2016 and 2018. In the meantime, wind, photo voltaic, and hydro are accelerating their deployments yearly.

All the time have a look at world examples for out of doors views on scalability and financial viability. Don’t cherrypick. Renewables outcompete nuclear all over the place each time within the twenty first Century until ideology forces a nuclear win.

And so, the top of fast responses to the handfuls of questions that individuals within the webinar submitted. There was no time to reply them through the session, so I hope that individuals discover these solutions right here or on the Sensible Vitality Council web site the place they’ll be aggregated. I do love good questions, principally as a result of they assist me flesh out my pondering on subjects of curiosity to me, and sometimes problem me to have higher supported and extra nuanced positions. Due to all of the individuals within the webinar who took the time to craft and submit the questions.

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