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+--- Thread: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread (/thread-4986.html)
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - Mav - 02-04-2023
Interesting response to a stupid Matt Canavan tweet attacking Green Hydrogen and lauding Blue Hydrogen:
The Australian’s back-of-the-envelope green hydrogen figures are overblown and forget climate impact, The Guardian.
What a flog Canavan is. Why would you bother to consider a ridiculous scenario in which Australia is the sole supplier of Hydrogen to the world? It’s about as sensible as considering whether the Australian Defence Forces would be able to defeat the aliens from Independence Day. Of course, even after making that ridiculous assumption he goes on to fudge his results.
But the article points out the problem with using Blue Hydrogen to combat climate change:
Quote: But Beck said comparing green hydrogen with blue hydrogen was like “comparing apples and oranges”. While green hydrogen would use more land, her own published work suggests blue hydrogen would have a sizeable greenhouse gas footprint.
She said even if the CCS industry could capture 90% of the emissions from the production stage of blue hydrogen, that would still release about 1Mt of CO2 for each 1Mt of hydrogen.
But Beck said if emissions from extracting and processing the natural gas before it’s turned into hydrogen were also counted, this would see blue hydrogen responsible for “a whopping 1314Mt of CO2-e in a year to make 530Mt of blue hydrogen in Australia, using 1961Mt of natural gas.”
For context, that is almost three times Australia’s current greenhouse gas footprint.
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - LP - 02-04-2023
I get it, everybody does, but coal gasification is not the only way to produce hydrogen, and certainly not the long term way, in the long term electrolysis or catalysis will be the main method in conjunction with seawater desalination processes.
btw., Those emissions figures are a bit out of date, they are referring to gasification the old way, which is like the cooking version of a wood fired oven. There are several new techniques under development right now that use bioreactors to generate hydrogen from brown coal, with methane and other useful industrial or commercial gases as the principle by-products, but it doesn't suit the political perspective of some in the renewables sector to discuss these options. They've even been trying to have funding for the projects and Newcastle Uni and ANU to be cut on environmental grounds! That only proves to me how disingenuous the renewables sector is about reducing greenhouse gas, the actions expose profit as their primary motivation.
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - Mav - 02-04-2023
More likely they’re used to the fossil fuel industry peddling nonsense like carbon capture and clean coal and they’re not going to be conned again. No doubt scientists funded by the fossil fuel industry will be more than happy to promise miracles that are only a few years away, but only if we keep faith with the little black rock. As the Minerals Council of Australia tells us, “Coal. It’s an amazing thing.”
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1039036982786817
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - Mav - 02-04-2023
By the way, methane is one of the worst greenhouse gases and it’s pretty audacious to try to sell blue hydrogen on the basis that it produces commercially useful gases like methane. That brings to mind the cigarette industry’s promotion of the health benefits of smoking.
If methane is burnt, carbon dioxide is produced. And I’m guessing the blue hydrogen producers aren’t going to store ad infinitum methane byproducts that are surplus to commercial needs.
Garbage dumps that capture the methane created by decomposition and burn it to produce power are minimising the damage created in disposing of waste. But releasing methane trapped in coal is not in the public interest when hydrogen can be created without creating carbon dioxide and methane.
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - PaulP - 02-04-2023
While politicians squabble and the populace does little to change their ways after decades of overdoing it, things go from bad to worse :
https://theconversation.com/global-carbon-emissions-at-record-levels-with-no-signs-of-shrinking-new-data-shows-humanity-has-a-monumental-task-ahead-193108
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - LP - 02-04-2023
(02-04-2023, 12:33 PM)Mav date Wrote:By the way, methane is one of the worst greenhouse gases and it’s pretty audacious to try to sell blue hydrogen on the basis that it produces commercially useful gases like methane. That brings to mind the cigarette industry’s promotion of the health benefits of smoking.Your lifestyle doesn't exist without methane, it's a base ingredient of many of the materials and chemicals you use hundreds of times a day, like it or not cars, clothing, building materials, pharmaceuticals, appliances, paint, pretty much every modern material or surface treatment has been touched by methane in the resource or material supply chain.
If methane is burnt, carbon dioxide is produced. And I’m guessing the blue hydrogen producers aren’t going to store ad infinitum methane byproducts that are surplus to commercial needs.
Garbage dumps that capture the methane created by decomposition and burn it to produce power are minimising the damage created in disposing of waste. But releasing methane trapped in coal is not in the public interest when hydrogen can be created without creating carbon dioxide and methane.
By the way, methane is fractionally short lived compared to CO2, so while methane is far more reactive, it's gone form the environment in just a fraction of the time that CO2 exists, consumed by organisms as a building block of life, so nature uses it in much the same way humans use it to manufacture and engineer materials.
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - Mav - 02-05-2023
But I don’t recall any articles highlighting a global shortage of methane for commercial use. Presumably, the global demand is presently met by existing suppliers. Why would more be needed?
I also assume the current suppliers only produce as much as they can sell. On the other hand, the amount of methane that will be produced as a byproduct of the production of hydrogen will depend only on the targets for hydrogen production. That won’t stop just because the methane byproduct exceeds the amount that industry can use. Will that excess be stored like the red cycle plastic that wasn’t being recycled? Or will the excess be released into the atmosphere or burnt (producing carbon dioxide)? Or maybe the mythical CCS system will store it underground (where it currently resides trapped in coal) …
As the old saying goes, you can have too much of a good thing. That’s even truer when the good thing is generally a bad thing.
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - LP - 02-05-2023
(02-05-2023, 12:09 AM)Mav date Wrote:But I don’t recall any articles highlighting a global shortage of methane for commercial use. Presumably, the global demand is presently met by existing suppliers. Why would more be needed?Hmm, if you keep posting that sort of comment your leftist gas banning buddies are going to disown you!
The idea is we stop mining new sources of fossil fuels and use the what we already have as by-products of existing resources.
For example, farms in Europe are now putting pavilions over cattle and sheep not to protect them from the weather, but to catch the methane resource they emit and turn it back into the fertilizer or medicines needed.
Waste not want not!
There are many ways to solve problems, but the myopia displayed by the renewables sector isn't one of them! But they know that, which is why they are hypocrites.
I'll laugh when the lefties "revise" or "review" their political position to energy generation as Dan's SEC comes back on line, I bet Socialist Energy is somehow cleaned energy! ;D
Ironically, I'm not at all opposed to base services being controlled by democratically elected governments ahead of private entities. But the change in the left's attitude, and you know it's going to happen, will still be hypocritical.
Climate change and CO2 emissions reductions are either urgent or they are not, if CO2 emissions reduction is urgent you do everything you can to remove CO2 emission from society, including CCS, Hydrogen, Solar PV, Offsets, Wind, Tidal, Wave, etc., etc.. You don't pick one option and damn all the others! Everything, Everywhere All at Once! ;D
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - Mav - 02-05-2023
Methane is just as troublesome as carbon dioxide. While carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for longer, methane is 25 times as effective at trapping heat compared to carbon dioxide over the initial 20 year period. It’s pure sleight of hand to say we should concentrate on reducing carbon dioxide while extolling the virtues of methane.
The examples you cite are attempts to reduce the emissions of methane in existing industries by giving those industries an economic payoff. Often, those industries can’t readily reduce the amount of methane being produced. For example, garbage dumps can’t be eliminated: they’re an essential public service. By persuading the operators to capture methane and burn it to power the site, we make the best of a bad situation. Do nothing and the methane leaks into the atmosphere and poses a fire risk. Capturing it and burning it produces carbon dioxide which is unfortunate, but you have to make hard decisions. The operators reduce their energy costs so the reduction of methane pays for itself.
Livestock farming inevitably produces methane. It isn’t realistic to reduce the demand for meat and the like, so we have to make the best of it by reducing the methane emissions. Scientists are working on doing so by creating feed that will reduce the amount of methane being emitted by livestock. Apparently, adding seaweed helps to do this. And if livestock producers can be persuaded to capture the methane and use it as fertiliser or the like, that’s great (although does this merely delay its emission into the atmosphere?).
However, I don’t think there’s much doubt that governments would prefer to eliminate methane byproducts rather than persuade businesses to capture them. If governments were presented with a button they could press that would make businesses methane-free without incurring any cost, they wouldn’t be able to push it fast enough. Unfortunately, in the real world we can only try to make the best out of a bad situation.
But you aren’t proposing ways to reduce the methane emissions from existing industries. You are pushing the creation of an entirely new process which will create massive amounts of methane. And the joke of it is that you justify this by saying the end product, hydrogen, will combust without creating any greenhouse gases (which is of course true). But you want to use a process that produces heaps of carbon dioxide and methane. That wipes out the environmental benefits of hydrogen. When green hydrogen has the same benefit but without the downside of blue hydrogen, why?
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - LP - 02-05-2023
Claiming or implying methane by-products will be discharged to atmosphere is the real slight of hand in this debate, it's a valuable resource that is easily collected and converted to many useful carbon based products, turning it into waste by making the production of it illegal is certainly the foolish way to go.
Even to the extreme of capture and sequestration. One of the great ironies in the debate is leftists arguing to stop mining of fossil fuels gases like methane, I suppose the premise is just leave it in the ground where it has been safely residing for millions of years. Then the very same people arguing sequestration, that pumps reserves of such gases back to the natural reservoirs where they came from, is flawed and cannot work. Yep, another let's not talk about the war moment for renewables.
Just a small example of no methane, no disposable PPE or single use (sterile) surgical kit, no catheters, no arterial clips, no sterile packaging, just a very small sample of modern life that is produced from or with the assistance of the methane that currently comes out of natural gas reserves.
Mining fossil gas is a process that can be mostly or completely replaced through the use of the methane by-products collected of gasification, farming and recycling / composting. Nobody is claiming they are to be vented to atmosphere, that accusation is just an absurdity.