Month: December 2020

Geothermal energy is having a moment.
Historically, geothermal plants work in areas like Iceland, or California, where hot springs and hot rocks are close to the surface.
Newer techniques seek to make geothermal reservoirs available anywhere. Big implications if they can crack it.

Deseret News:

SALT LAKE CITY — Imagine having an unlimited supply of clean, renewable energy at your feet that could revolutionize the nation’s — and even the world’s — approach to turning on the lights in billions of homes and powering up economies across the globe. 

A Utah project playing out near a little town of less than 1,500 residents could transform what is only imagination into a formidable reality by using the first-of-its-kind technology that reaches thousands upon thousands of feet underground to harness geothermal resources on a commercial scale.

The possibilities are endless if the technology is proven successful, and the project in Milford, Beaver County, spearheaded by the University of Utah’s Energy & Geoscience Institute is being watched by a lot of counties — Germany, Japan, China, the United Kingdom. 

“There’s worldwide interest,” said Joseph Moore, principal investigator of the Utah Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy, or what they call FORGE, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy at a tune of some $200 million.

The project hit a milestone recently with the start of the drilling of one of two deep, deviated wells that ultimately reach depths of 10,800 feet underground and are seeking to capture geothermal energy bubbling at 437 degrees.

The enhanced geothermal technology works like a radiator, if you will. 

The well will go vertically to a depth of 6,000 feet and make a 65-degree turn. The total length of the well will be approximately 11,000 feet with the “toe” — or the end of the well — reaching a vertical depth of 8,500 feet.

Continue reading “Results Could Indicate Geothermal Breakthrough”

Discusses heat pumps for HVAC at 14:50.
Also touches on induction cooking, heat pump for water heater, etc..

This guy says newer air source heat pumps work well in cold climates, and he’s in Cleveland, so that’s very good news if true.

Pretty sure there’s some kind of heat pump in my future.
Furnace guy came by this week and reminded me that my gas furnace is more than 20 years old. Still efficient, still works, but I’m looking for a replacement that will make the home all-electric some time in the not too distant future.

The unit described above is an “air source” heat pump, meaning it works like an air conditioner to cool, and like an air conditioner in reverse, to heat. This works pretty well, I understand, till you get much below freezing, when efficiency goes way down.

Looking for answers out there – what is the answer? Do you have to get a (more expensive) ground source heat pump? OR is there any system that could tap a stored heat source, like, say, an extra large hot water tank – as a boost in cold weather?

Useful primer on where we are with H2.
Relates to previous post about new life for old coal plants – here.

Guitar ace and singer Molly Tuttle has a nice cover.

Across the country and the world, coal fired power plants are being shut down and abandoned. This usually means that a community is losing not only a stable source of jobs, but vital revenues that undergird local economies.
Could potential blight become opportunity? Some Utilities are thinking out of the box.

Lincoln Bleveans in Utility Dive:

Lincoln Bleavens is an interim general manager at Burbank Water and Power.

..Burbank Water & Power in California, is managing a long-term commitment to a large coal-fired power plant in rural Delta, Utah, while we race towards a zero-GHG future. And not just by abandoning the old for the new. Together with our neighbors Los Angeles and Glendale and our partners in Utah, we’re bringing that old coal-fired power plant (and its local and regional ecosystem) along into the sustainable future. Even though we will retire the coal plant itself in 2025. We’re committed and the world is watching. But to what? And when and why and how?

You see an old coal plant and an obsolescent workforce; I see a superb opportunity for green hydrogen. Green?Hydrogen? Let’s start with hydrogen. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe but just coming into its own as a versatile fuel for a world moving away from hydrocarbons. Capturing hydrogen is simple in theory: just apply a lot of energy to water to break the two H’s (hydrogen) from the O (oxygen) to create pure hydrogen. Like natural gas, that hydrogen contains heat that can be released with combustion to drive a generator. Unlike natural gas, that combustion is GHG-free.

Continue reading “Could Old Coal Plants be Reborn?”

Rocky Mountain Institute:

A recent announcement by Europe’s largest iron ore producer, LKAB, may seem like a technical detail only relevant for metallurgists and steel nerds. However, the company’s plan to invest up to 400 billion kronor (US$46 billion) over the next 15–20 years to expand into an emissions-free iron process being piloted in Northern Sweden is big news for Sweden, the global steel industry, and future generations around the world.

From a climate change perspective, steelmaking is considered one of the “hard-to-abate” sectors. Given that the industry contributes directly to 7 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions, it is impossible to ignore it. But in contrast to other areas of our society—such as automobiles or power generation—technical solutions to replace conventional methods have seemed either quite expensive or simply unknown. However, this view has rapidly changed over the course of only a few years, and Swedish industry has played a pivotal role in this shift.

In 2016, the HYBRIT project was launched as a joint venture between the utility Vattenfall, iron ore producer LKAB and steel maker SSAB. Both Vattenfall and LKAB are owned by the Swedish state, while SSAB was privatized in 1994. And with the political backing and de-risking of the early stage of the HYBRIT project, it can be argued that HYBRIT is the outcome of a long-standing political intent to ensure a competitive basic industry sector in Sweden. Looking forward, with customers, investors and policymakers increasing pressure to adhere to the Paris Agreement, reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a critical element of maintaining competitiveness.

The process that HYBRIT is currently piloting in Luleå, a small town in northern Sweden, holds the key to unlocking dramatic CO₂-emissions reduction for steelmaking. By using hydrogen instead of coal as a “reduction agent”—to remove the oxygen from the iron in iron ore—the most critical step in the steel value chain becomes virtually free of carbon emissions. These steel plants can replace polluting blast furnaces with a process that emits water vapor instead of CO₂.

On November 23, LKAB announced that it intends to integrate forward in the steel supply chain and start producing “sponge iron” as a value-added product from its current pellet product, using the HYBRIT process. This pivot in business strategy has major significance for the global steel industry.

There are three reasons LKAB’s announcement is big news for the global steel industry as well as the economy at large:

1. LKAB will single-handedly contribute to greenhouse gas reductions corresponding to more than 50 percent of Sweden’s total footprint by obviating the need for blast furnaces—many of which are located in other nations
2. The hydrogen required will significantly contribute to bringing down the cost of this zero-carbon fuel, which in turn can help the economy to address emissions from other sectors such as aviation or shipping
3. While the process trials are still ongoing (the pilot plant is producing sponge iron, but its scaffolding has hardly been taken down) the confidence demonstrated by this announcement clears up any questions as to whether this technology will be commercially scalable

Continue reading “Green Steel Ramping Up”

A decade ago “peak oil” meant a time when we maxed out the production of oil and entered an age of scarcity. The Shale technology boom put that to rest – we have enough oil, if we want, to fry the planet.
Nowadays, peak oil means “peak DEMAND for oil”.

The most stunning thing about BP’s projections for the coming decades is that the “Business as Usual” case assumes that oil use has peaked and will begin a decline.

Bloomberg:

A year ago, if anyone in the petroleum business had suggested that the moment of Peak Oil  had already passed, they would have been laughed right off the drilling rig. Then 2020 happened.

Planes stopped flying. Office workers stayed home. “Zooming with the grandkids” replaced driving to see family. A year of global hunkering yielded the sharpest drop in oil consumption since Henry Ford cobbled together the first Model T. At its worst, global demand dropped by a staggering 29 million barrels a day.

As a once-in-a-century pandemic played out, British oil giant BP Plc in September made an extraordinary call: Humanity’s thirst for oil may never again return to prior levels. That would make 2019 the high-water mark in oil history.

BP wasn’t the only one sounding an alarm. While none of the prominent forecasters were quite as bearish, predictions for peak oil started popping up everywhere. Even OPEC, the unflappably bullish cartel of major oil exporters, suddenly acknowledged an end in sight—albeit still two decades away. Taken together these forecasts mark an emerging view that this year’s drop in oil demand isn’t just another crash-and-grow event as seen throughout history. Covid-19 has accelerated long-term trends that are transforming where our energy comes from. Some of those changes will be permanent.

It’s often difficult to recognize civilization-sized shifts in behavior until after they’ve occurred. Until the pandemic none of the major oil forecasters had seen an imminent demand peak. The debate won’t end now, especially with signs that the pandemic will ease in 2021. But if we look back from here and see the oil peak clearly in the past, what follows will be the evidence of how the energy future snuck up on us.

Energy analysts usually present multiple scenarios. The gap between each forecast comes down to differing assumptions about government policies, economic conditions and consumer preferences for things such as new electric cars and solar panels. A business-as-usual scenario assumes little impact from policy shifts or new technology.

Most analysts had only predicted declining demand for oil in improbably green scenarios that could only be achieved with far stronger global climate policies. What made BP’s 2020 forecast unique is that peak oil now snuck into its business-as-usual baseline. If technologies and pollution rules improve, the dropoff in demand would be even more swift.

Continue reading “Have We Seen Peak Oil in 2021?”

Very impressive investigation in Politico – risk exposure to housing market, and entire financial system, from climate-driven storms and floods.

Very much a topic in my conversation with Kerry Emanuel last winter.

Politico:

But behind the vibrant life in Hialeah (Florida) is a troubling reality: flooding. Heavy rains overran the streets this year, last year — almost every year. And the problem is projected to get worse: Some scientists fear the city could be underwater within the lifetimes of some current residents.

Despite that grim prognosis, the federal government keeps pumping mortgage money into Hialeah, as it does in hundreds of other communities now facing grave dangers from climate change. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac hold the majority of home mortgages in some Hialeah neighborhoods. More significantly, federal taxpayers hold greater than 60 percent of mortgages on homes in some areas outside the specially designated federal floodplain, according to an analysis of federal data by Amine Ouazad, an associate economics professor at Canadian business school HEC Montréal.

That’s important because being outside the so-called “100-year floodplain” means homes aren’t required to carry flood insurance. Thus, if the homes are damaged sufficiently that their owners can’t afford to fix them, and must abandon the property, the federal government gets stuck with the house. That’s a relatively small risk in a time of rising real estate values, when families can use their home equity to take out repair loans, but a potential economic disaster if home prices start to plunge and owners can’t find ways to make repairs on houses that are worth far less than their outstanding debt. And there are compelling reasons to believe that climate risks are starting to catch up to the real estate market in Hialeah and beyond.

Continue reading “The Next Big Short: Climate Fuels Real Estate Time Bomb”