TECHNOLOGY HOTSPOTS IN SUSTAINABLE ENERGY
TECHNOLOGY HOTSPOTS IN SUSTAINABLE ENERGY
Geothermal
Air/Ground Sourced Heat Pumps
Cellulosic Fuels
Liquid Dessicant A/C
Storage – Li-ion, Graphene, Li-S
Green Ammonia as a fuel
Our civilization has just celebrated its 50th Earth Day. In celebration of the progress made, we are publishing our view of 6 major areas of innovation that have huge application in an economy that is transitioning to a sustainable paradigm. One of the fastest changing energy stories is the transition of energy use from polluting, finite, volatile price, geopolitically controversial, over-subsidized, climate change inducing, human health reducing fossil fuels to more abundant sustainable energy forms. Led initially by hydroelectric and biomass, solar power was kickstarted by the space industry in the 60’s and saw its price decline strongly ever since. Almost a mirror to solar was wind, where conversion efficiencies, turbine scale, windfarm sizes, blade sizes have all risen remarkably, while again, costs have plummeted. These falling costs have caused renewable energy to become directly competitive with fossil fuel energy.
While the penetration of sustainable energy capacity into the global energy mix has been rapid, there is still much to do. The pace is picking up and the future looks bright. Often forgotten are imminent technological steps forward which have the ability to transform our lives. This blog is a close look at 6 different oncoming technologies which individually have the potential for big change, but collectively mark a revolution in the way humanity finds power for light, heat, cooling and transportation. There are many other ways that the sustainability world is growing, meatless meat, lab grown meat, DNA based medicine, etc etc.
Geothermal. The world’s first geothermal plant was started in Italy in 1904 by Prince Piero Ginori Conti of Trevignano at the Larderello dry steam field. Initially it generated just 10 kilowatts for five light bulbs. It was expanded to 250 kW in 1913 and today Italian energy company, Enel Green Power (EGP) has 800 megawatts of capacity in 34 plants at Larderello. It’s the 6th largest geothermal plant in the world and represents 2% of the Italian grid. It wasn’t until 1958 that the world’s second geothermal plant was built in Wairakei, New Zealand, once more exploiting the energy in a hydrothermal water/rocks system. Traditional geothermal makes use of the plentiful heat in the earth by drilling deep and tapping into water-soaked, hot rocks which, once tapped, rises to the surface and generates power. At the end of 2018 there were 13.3 gigawatts of geothermal power installed worldwide in 20 countries. All of these traditional geothermal wells use resources where water was available within the rock formation to work as a heat transfer medium and bring the energy to the surface. This source of renewable energy has not grown like solar and wind and its potential has been capped by the upfront capital expense, dry wells and the lack of places where there is both water and hot rocks. As a result, geothermal energy accounts for less than 1% of global capacity today.
The attraction of the geothermal energy is clear. It provides the highest available power capacity of all types of energy, even nuclear, without emissions or other pollution and a long life cycle.
The Earth has plenty of heat inside it. Its interior still smolders from the impacts of space rocks that formed the planet and whose kinetic heat has persisted, aided by the radioactive decay of heavy elements like uranium that migrated into the Earths molten interior and by the grinding, daily tidal action of the orbiting Moon. The core of the Earth is as hot as the surface of the Sun at 6,000°C.
There is huge potential. A 2006 study[i] by Cornell University professor Jefferson W. Tester showed how enhanced geothermal energy could address 130,000 times the energy currently used by the US every year and the heat from just the top 3 kilometers in the Earth’s crust is thousands of times the scale of the current world’s total energy demand. Temperatures are also available that are very hot. In the same way that doubling wind speed results in harvesting three times as much energy from a wind turbine, hotter water coming from the ground has more energy. As it gets hotter water transforms into a supercritical fluid. It’s a combination of the liquid and steam phases in one and holds five times the energy at 400°C as water at 200°C. It also has a lower viscosity and can flow through pipes more easily. In 2003, Friðleifsson and Wilfred Elders[ii] established that a supercritical well could produce ten times the energy of a conventional one. Now there is a first wave of supercritical ESG projects in Japan, Iceland, the US, Mexico, New Zealand and back at Larderello in Italy. EGS with lower temperature water and effective heat exchange is also moving forward. We only need to exploit a tiny fraction of the available geothermal energy to completely replace the fossil base load energy that did a great job getting us here, but which has worn out its welcome. The result would be a considerable step-up to a sustainable, long lived, base load, clean, geopolitically benign technology.
Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) have looked at either injecting liquid into hot dry rocks or fracturing rocks to make it possible for liquid to move easily through them. Both of these methods have experienced negative side effects of pollution and seismic activity. EGS systems being built in Lausanne, Switzerland and Pohang, South Korea, resulted in earthquakes that caused considerable damage. If oil can be found by drilling 10 miles deep and geothermal energy is so plentiful nearer the surface it means that almost any geographical location can be supplied with power if the heat can be safely mined.
Water in hot rocks is not that common. There are so many more formations of hot rocks that have no water that geothermal energy experts have salivated at the chance to exploit the huge untapped potential market for heat and power. Without a heat transmission medium like water, it was almost impossible to mine the heat from hot rock formations but if no water was present it wasn’t possible at all. To make matters worse, traditional hydrothermal resources often experienced the same problem as oil wells that struck no oil, a dry well. If you found the heat but no water, it was essentially a waste of money. Many such dry wells exist worldwide.
The ideal solution was to somehow sink an efficient heat exchanger with all its surface area, down to rocks that have sufficient heat energy, and then seal it so that a heat transfer medium like water could do its job and convey the thermal energy to the surface. No chemicals and no fracking. This way, water could be safely and effectively circulated down the well to the heat exchanger and then back up to generate power. In hot dry rocks though, there were too many issues. Injected water was lost in cracks or evaporated as steam. What was needed was a way to line the wellbore and increase the surface area of the drill hole within the thermal rock formation. Advances in drilling technology have made all this possible.
Drilling an oil well involves two basic components, a drilling bit that has rotating teeth attached to a length of pipe. The pipe is rotated and the bit’s teeth shear and grind the rock away. It slowly descends. When the pipe is fully submerged a new pipe is attached and the well drills ever deeper and can be tens of thousands of feet deep and hundreds of pipe segments. Traditionally, the whole long pipe continues to rotate. It was in the 1920s that it was realized that oil or water wells did not have to be vertical. Initially, lawsuits revealed that oil wells drilled from a rig on one property could access oil in another. The idea of horizontal and then directional drilling became a thing. It took a while to be able to navigate a specific trajectory. Inclination was done with a simple pendulum, but the direction itself was more challenging. Magnetic efforts were stymied by plentiful metal in a well. Then, gyroscopes modified from aircraft instruments made by Sperry became the next most accurate method of judging direction. The gyroscope supplies all three points of information, the “survey”, to pinpoint the location of the drill head. Consecutive survey’s describe the progress and trajectory of the wellbore. The method of driving the direction of the wellbore was a result of long experience with rotary drilling where the downhole equipment configuration that deviated the wellbore from straight down was used to bring a well back to vertical.
In 1934, George Failing saved the Conroe, Texas oil field, which was on fire due to huge gas pressure in the well. He invented a truck holding a portable drilling rig which could drill relief wells at an angle and succeeded in reducing the pressure and putting out the fire. The May, 1934 edition of Popular Science magazine stated, "Only a handful of men in the world have the strange power to make a bit, rotating a mile below ground at the end of a steel drill pipe, snake its way in a curve or around a dog-leg angle, to reach a desired objective."
In the 1970s downhole drilling motors using the hydraulic power of the drilling mud circulated down the wellbore to cool and lubricate the bit, made drilling much more efficient by allowing the actual drill pipe to remain stationary while the drill bit continued to rotate on the cutting face. A bent pipe could be now used to change the drilling direction more acutely, without the arduous task of having to pull out miles of drill pipe. Techniques used to measure while drilling improved over time and now permitted sending directional data back to the surface without interrupting drilling operations. Today rotary steerable systems (RSS) allow access and directional control of the bit, even in previously inaccessible or uncontrollable formations.
Another advance in oil well drilling are the many forms of wellbore lining or casing that are essential to preserve the integrity of the wellbore during its function. You can line a wellbore with a casing of cement that allows thermal transfer but keeps a limited amount of water within the wellbore. The challenge was to develop a bore coating that resists the corrosive, cycle of low and high temperature liquids that can be found in the depths which can dissolve valves and expand and contract cement resulting in a blow out or at least cracks. High temperature resistant electronics is also needed and not just the standard manufactured for the oil and gas industry.
Descriptions of directional drilling are so new to geothermal that references of its history or descriptions of it do not yet include geothermal energy use. While directional drilling revolutionized the upstream oil industry it has also created a huge opportunity in the geothermal industry. New methods of drilling using energy waves, high pressure fluids, or lasers hold out the hope that wellbore drilling will become both faster and cheaper.
Today, several companies are taking the directional drilling and wellbore casing advances and scoping out opportunities to finally start developing this huge global resource, which can easily replace the dying coal industry and hopefully undercut even the costs of natural gas, to provide a sustainable, base load replacement power source finally able to make a real difference in the transition to a sustainable energy world. Companies like Seattle-based AltaRock Energy, Eavor Technologies in Canada and Fervo Energy in California are the vanguard of the new EGS era. They have capitalized on the evolution of drilling expertise and the vision of EGS and have put together plans for wells with slanting or horizontal sections that cover long distances with hermetically sealed pipe allowing the heat to be effectively and economically mined. The world is changing fast and this development offers the best opportunity over time, to replace base-load coal and gas fired power stations that still power a significant portion of the planet.
Air Sourced Heat Pumps.
The new version of the Tesla EV, the model Y, a crossover SUV is only the second car in history to incorporate a heat pump. The other is the Nissan Leaf. The reason they are appearing in EVs is that they are 300% more efficient method for heating the interior of the vehicle compared to resistive heating. Most EV cars use resistive heating, a coil which heats up and air blown over the coil takes warmth into the vehicle. Internal combustion engine (ICE) cars use engine coolant circulated through a heat exchanger where much of the vehicles waste heat ends up, and a fan blows the hot air into the heating vents. This is a very efficient method of heating inside a car and does not use any more energy than the car was already using. ICE air conditioning however, is electric and uses energy to maintain electrical power in the alternator charging the lead acid battery. There is very little heat created in an efficient electric motor, and not enough for heating the interior of the vehicle.
Instead of inefficiently converting electricity to heat, the heat pump takes existing heat from ambient cold air, compresses it and puts it into the vehicle only using a fraction of the electrical energy, something highly important for an electric vehicle. Using less electricity means that the cold weather range of the vehicle is improved. Winter brings with it lower range for all cars anyway via more rolling resistance between the tire and the road due to rain or snow and snow tires. It also reduces range slightly due to higher drag in cold air.
The model Y’s heat pump circulates warm air inside the cabin and also warms up the vehicle’s batteries if necessary. Resistive heating and cooling in an electric car can consume up to 40% of the energy in the battery.
The heat pump does not make heat, it just moves it from a cold environment to a warm environment. The power needed to move the heat is nominal. It means that the heat pump can generate a 2 – 3-kilowatt heat equivalent using only 1 kilowatt, which implies a 300% efficiency. Such large efficiencies are common to heat pumps. Another way to look at it is to take a heat pump we are all familiar with, the refrigerator, and see that warmth is taken from the freezing interior and dumped into the warm exterior by the compressor pump. In the case of a heat pump used for heating an interior, this is simply reversed where the “interior” cold of the fridge is now the exterior cold of the winter atmosphere. The “outside” of the fridge is warmer and that’s where the waste heat of the fridge is placed. In the case of the heat pump, the warmth found in the outside air is brought inside. In extremely cold weather, a heat pump does not work as efficiently although this is improving as research on new materials improves heat pump efficiency even further.
I am mentioning the arrival of the vehicle heat pump because it’s not just cars that are turning more electric. Houses everywhere use fossil fuels to cook and heat water and the interior space of the dwelling. A heat pump can use renewable electricity to do its magic with the very small active power requirement and this results in no combusted fossil fuel. Using fossil fuels for housing is ubiquitous still. Imagine the change if, all at once, 128 million households (2019 Statista) were to switch to a zero-emissions, home heating system, if factories, hospitals, hotels and all other buildings were to do it too? Imagine if all the buildings in Europe and Russia and Asia were to do it too? The answer to that invitation to a visionary future is that emissions from building heating would disappear, causing a massive reduction in fossil CO2. It’s not just good for car mileage, but beneficially impactful for the entire globe and a bonanza for heat pump manufacturers.
Heat pumps exist in three varieties. Water, ground and air sourced heat pumps. A ground sourced heat pump (GSHP) is a sort of geothermal energy without using the deep mantle lava heat. Rather the fact that 6 feet below the surface in a temperate latitude, the temperature of the ground is always about 56 °F and in winter this is balmy warm, and in summer its chillingly cool. Ground and water sourced heat pumps (WSHP) are very efficient but air sourced heat pumps are catching up. They have the advantage of not requiring a significant capital expense in a heat exchanger. Namely hundreds of meters of tubing buried in the ground or sunk to the bottom of a pond, to extract the warmth or cool in the thermal mass required for the specific project. Air sourced heat pumps (ASHP) look and feel like a regular air conditioning unit, placed on a concrete slab outside the house.
Many familiar manufacturer names are featured in air sourced heat pumps including Daikin Industries, Ltd., Emerson Electric Co., Carrier Corporation, Vaillant Group, Stiebel Eltron, Trane Mitsubishi, Hitachi, Samsung, Bosch, Panasonic, Carrier and many more. In 2018 the market size of the global residential heat pump market was $8.2 bn and a growing 65% of it was air sourced heat pumps.
European Commission data shows that heating and cooling accounts for fully 50% of all the energy consumed by the European Union (EU). Hot water and heating account for 75% of all European residential energy use. Eurostat said that in 2018, 75% of energy needed for heating and cooling was still produced by fossil fuels with the remainder from renewables. Heat pumps on their own can cut a huge amount of energy out of this equation and if renewable energy is used, emissions disappear. Imagine that, all heating and cooling in the world with no emissions! Governments realize the potential and are promoting heat pump usage. In New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) greenhouse gases from heating and cooling represented 32% of New York’s total. In New York there is a target to cut greenhouse gas emissions from heating and cooling in residential buildings by 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050. They will achieve this using a policy that encourages use of clean heating and cooling technologies which will increase demand for heat pumps.
The technology has come a long way. Air sourced heat pumps are now in the market lead due to the lower installation time, small footprint and the key point about heat pumps, that it delivers three times the energy it consumes. That is that the electric fan, pump and compressor finds three times more BTUs of heat in the cold outside air to pump inside, than those components use in electricity. Since the active energy component is much lower, its easier to supply it from a renewable resource such as solar or wind, making heating a house in the winter a completely emissions free, footprint free activity.
The IEA tells us that in 2018 only 3% of residential heating worldwide was met with heat pumps meaning the market is pregnant with opportunity for future growth and development. It appears clear that HVAC emissions will drop significantly, cold temperature tolerances will increase and market penetration will continue its growth.
Governments wishing to encourage air sourced heat pump installations have introduced various incentives. The UK government has the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) which provides cash payments over 7 years to install heat pumps. They hope that by this year 2020, that 12% of the energy needed for residential heating will be sourced from renewable means. The global market is consolidated due to the presence of global manufacturers
Regional Insights
Asia Pacific was the largest regional market for residential heat pumps, accounting for more than 40.0% share of the overall revenue in 2018. The growth is attributed to large consumer base in various countries including China, Japan, and South Korea. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), in 2017, approximately 80% of new installations of household heat pumps were done in U.S., China, and Japan, collectively. Moreover, purchase of water heaters (primarily for sanitary hot water utilization) has increased by three times since 2010, largely driven by significant demand from China. These consumer trends are expected to contribute to the regional residential heat pump market growth over the foreseeable future.
Europe is expected to be the fastest growing region in the market, expanding at a CAGR of 12.2% from 2019 to 2025 as a result of increasing awareness regarding the climate change and global warming. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), in 2017, around one million households installed the pumps including heat pumps for sanitary hot water production. Moreover, Germany, Estonia, Sweden, Finland, France, and Norway accounted for the maximum penetration rate, with over 25 heat pumps sold per 1,000 households annually.
Residential Heat Pump Market Share Insights
The global market is consolidated in nature as a result of presence of a large number of players across the globe and major share of the market is held by few strong players with global presence. Major manufacturers include Daikin Industries, Ltd., Emerson Electric Co., Carrier Corporation, Vaillant Group, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, and Robert Bosch LLC. Moreover, these players are manufacturing compact and technologically advanced pumps with higher efficiency in order to cater to the increasing demand for clean and green cooling solutions in the residential sector.
Furthermore, key manufacturers are adopting various strategies such as innovative product launch and mergers & acquisitions in order to gain the maximum market share. For instance, in June 2019, Nortek Global HVAC, a U.S. based manufacturer of HVAC equipment, introduced the new W-Series of heat pump and air conditioning equipment primarily for the residential sector and light commercial applications. These product launches are expected to open new avenues for residential heat pumps over the forecast period.
Cheap Abundant Cellulosic Ethanol – Finally
In 2012, a friend called me with a list of five company descriptions and asked if any stood out. One of them did. I had spent many years with my first fund investigating non-food biofuels and came up shorthanded. That time sensitized me to the importance of an economic method to break down cellulose into its constituent parts, sugar and lignin. This trick had been achieved of course, but at a cost, so there were no cellulosic fuel companies making any profits. More than 30 global efforts costing billions and resulting in bankruptcy and closures was all the industry could manage. There was even a 2018 publication of a document[iii] called “Dead End Road: The False Promise of Cellulosic Biofuels” by Biofuelwatch, a UK based group determined to see no more government money “wasted” on cellulosic research. Their executive summary made the mistake of saying that production of plant materials for cellulosic use would also crowd out food crops, forgetting that the plant portion of a food crop is just as valid as a cellulosic feedstock as trees or grass.
Cellulose sugars have been guarded by nature for billions of years, as long as plants have existed. It was perhaps a simple fix to an early problem to evolve plants resistant to predators. If this had never happened, and plants were just sugar and lignin to us, evolution would have been a very different story with free available energy growing everywhere. In the end though, scientists even call nature’s cellulose structure “recalcitrant” because it will not yield its contents. The methods on which so much money has been spent and mentioned above, involve using enzymes, acids and alkali chemicals and heat to prise the sugars out of the plant material. Various parts of the cellulose molecule are easier to hack than others, and the hemicellose part has succumbed to some of these approaches more easily.
Cellulose grows at 16,000 tons per second throughout the world. The northern hemisphere spring is especially good at this and the zigzag of the CO2 chart produced in the Keeling Curve, the measure of CO2 in the atmosphere taken at the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, describes exactly this seasonal flux in the presence of CO2 as it is influenced by the huge, Springtime uptake into growing plants and then output by dead and rotting plants in the autumn and winter. There are other inputs into the carbon cycle that affect this chart and the springtime growth is a major one.
A NASA scientist called Dr. Richard Blaire at Jet Propulsion Labs in Los Angeles noticed chemistry happening while using a ball mill. These machines are used commonly to crush minerals into fine powders. Talcum powder is one such well known product. However, they are mainly for making big lumps into small lumps and had until this point never been known for chemistry. Dr. Blaire noticed a black powder while he was milling uranium yellowcake. Uranium oxide is one of the only metal oxides which is black. Dr. Blaire asked the question if oxidization chemistry happens under the extreme milling conditions in a ball mill, what other chemistry can happen? In the process of that exploration, plant material with mud was put into the mill and the astonishing result was the emergence of finely ground powder of a mix of sugar and lignin. Running cellulose through a ball mill had happened before but the only result was powdered cellulose. Dr. Blaire had discovered something potentially revolutionary. The ball mill could convert 80% of any source of cellulose to sugar and lignin in 30 minutes. Over the years from 2012 to today, a patent was filed, a corporation started, and today, that corporation, Alliance BioEnergy Plus is on its third CEO. It is a public corporation with ticker ALLM on the NASDAQ bulletin board.
Also, that last CEO, Ben Slager, is a seasoned founder of companies. As a businessman his insights have helped him improve well known products. He was invited by CEO 2 to become a board member in about 2017 and became fascinated by the ‘inefficiency” of the ball mill process. For him, the almost inevitable happened. He figured out a significant improvement in the machinery that resulted in conversion of 95% of plant cellulose to sugar and lignin in just 15 seconds. This was too great an opportunity to allow to lapse, even though its corporate entity was clouded by toxic debt and bad decisions and too many expenses. Ben Slager became the CEO in 2019 and immediately took the company into chapter 11 for reorganization. For months he renegotiated debt with creditors and emerged from Chapter 11 in late 2019 with a clean balance sheet and a small amount of insider funding.
I have rarely ever seen such a value proposition. A company with 140 million shares and a price of less than 7 cents per share which has the patent protected, single working solution to economically replacing liquid fossil fuels globally – a multi-trillion-dollar market! Have I missed something? ‘
Green Ammonia
Ammonia’s chemical formula is NH3.
[i][i] https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/MITEI-The-Future-of-Geothermal-Energy.pdf
[ii] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032000-300-supercharged-geothermal-energy-could-power-the-planet/#ixzz6Ixi3g1B9
[iii] Biofuelwatch. 2018 publication of ‘Dead End Road: The False Promise of Cellulosic Biofuels”. https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Cellulosic-biofuels-report-2.pdf