The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

[Mav]

Assume away. As Felix Unger noted, when you ass-u-me, you make an ass out of u and me. Why don’t you buy me a huge tranche of shares just so you can make it so  . Maybe you’ll have to sell off your big stake in the HESC project to do so though:

Japan to spend $2.35bn on turning Victorian Latrobe valley coal into ‘clean hydrogen’, The Guardian.

Critics have previously described the project as “just a new fossil fuel industry” that would see Australia generating greenhouse gas emissions onshore while exporting a cleaner fuel.

Neither of the two carbon storage sites identified by the project are close to being operational, yet are key to the project’s goals of producing cleaner hydrogen.
…
Stone said the project would bring coal gasification technology from J-Power’s Osaki CoolGen facility to Australia which, he said, was able to capture 90% of CO2 emissions from the process of turning the coal into synthetic gas and then extracting the hydrogen.

Stone said there were still investment decisions and government approvals to be gained, but the project was looking to produce its first hydrogen before the end of the decade.

Capturing and storing the CO2 “has to be part of the project” because without it “we can’t reach the carbon intensities that countries want” from clean hydrogen, Stone said.

The project’s target was to produce hydrogen clean enough to meet emerging benchmarks, he said, such as those of the US government which is providing tax breaks for hydrogen that emits less than 4kg of CO2 for every kilogram of the gas produced.

“We’re doing everything possible to make this as clean as possible. We’re trying to minimise CO2 in all elements of the project. Right now there’s 90 million tonnes of hydrogen being made every year with no abatement at all. That’s about 11.5kg of CO2 for every kilo of hydrogen.”

Captured CO2 would be sent by pipeline, Stone said, with two potential offshore storage facilities in the Bass Strait – Exxon’s Bream field project using depleted oil reservoirs or the Victorian and federal government-backed CarbonNet project. Neither project has been given the go-ahead.

Harada said: “This is a complex project and there is still some way to go in terms of approvals, design, construction and commissioning but this is a major boost for the Victorian economy on its journey towards a clean energy future.”

Dr Fiona Beck, an ANU expert on hydrogen’s role in the low carbon energy transition, said investment in infrastructure to liquefy, store, load and transport hydrogen was “really welcome”.

But she said investment in producing hydrogen from fossil fuels “risks locking us in to using fossil fuels for longer” when costs of producing hydrogen from renewable energy were falling fast.

“There’s a risk of stranded assets in this area,” she said.

Yep, nothing in there about converting methane into useful product or other means of disposing of it. And we have the pie-in-the-sky assumption that CCS will work even though there’s no CCS as yet. But we do note at least 10% of the carbon dioxide will be emitted. And we know damn well that if the scheme is approved, governments won’t allow the failure to make the CCS system operational to derail the project (given that it allows Victoria’s coal resources to be exploited and it’ll provide jobs in the Latrobe Valley). And that’s assuming that the government won’t be locked in by guaranteed contracts/subsidies and/or investments. As the final comment in the quote notes, ‘investment in producing hydrogen from fossil fuels “risks locking us in to using fossil fuels for longer” when costs of producing hydrogen from renewable energy were falling fast … There’s a risk of stranded assets in this area.’

In reality, we’ll just be extending the life of fossil fuels so we can make a product which can be shipped overseas as a clean energy source. We’ll have to hope that Australia or its customers won’t be forced to account for the emissions when climate change obligations tighten.