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Biomethane reducing energy fragility

I spent the last three years of my life almost evangelising about biomethane and more broadly, biofuels. Perhaps that is not the right word given that I am a Christian but basically I was trying to get people more aware about biomethane because of the benefits it could bring to the energy transition. It was something that was overlooked during the course of the hydrogen hype, and there had been very aggressive lobbying and campaigning against biomethane for some political and emotional reasons.

In the backdrop of the wars that are taking place in the Middle East now, the potential impacts on energy systems and markets, I want to revisit the whole biomethane story, sharing the good, and explaining some of the concerns away, while also identifying the concerns that remain, which won’t be dealt with by biomethane.

The Good

Biomethane is produced from anaerobic digestion (AD) of organic matter. It is a natural process though it can be rushed and optimised through temperature and humidity control as well as careful management of the substrate (whatever organic feedstock) put together under those conditions.

Left alone, these organic stuff would have produced carbon dioxide and methane anyways. The carbon dioxide is biogenic so it doesn’t add to global warming potential, but the methane does (and it’s 28 times more potent). So by capturing this methane, we are already reducing emissions of greenhouse gas (GHG).

But what’s even better comes when this captured methane is actually used to displace fossil fuel. And it does so in two ways. Remember I mention it the AD process produces carbon dioxide and methane? The carbon dioxide can be used in industries for making dry ice, for cleaning purposes, and even used as feedstock for some specialty chemicals. Traditionally, these carbon dioxide are from fossil sources, so getting it from biogenic sources reduces final emissions. At the same time, when biomethane is displacing the fossil methane, we further reduce final emissions when we combust it for energy or consume it for other processes.

That is quite a bit of GHG emission reduction isn’t it?

The Better

It doesn’t just stop there. The biogenic carbon dioxide can be used to produce other e-fuels including e-methane that will help increase the methane yield of the feedstock. The other chemical process pathways like gasification, methanation and all will play a role in enabling this. This provides a suitable commercial pathway for green hydrogen to help contribute to energy transition at this stage without having to refit the demand-side equipment. It helps kickstart the market without the transport logistics and infrastructure in place yet.

There’s more. AD produces a liquid slurry that is called digestate as a residue in the reactors. These are remaining organic matter that has been mainly stripped of the carbon content, but other nutrient content remains, making it suitable for use as a fertiliser. Traditionally, fertiliser is made using synthetic ingredients, including ammonium salts, featuring natural gas as a feedstock to the chemical process. By using AD digestate to make up for part of the fertiliser, we are reducing the use of fossil fertiliser and once again reducing final emissions.

As energy security and food security become a more relevant topic, we begin to see how biomethane wonderfully contributes to both the energy and food ecosystems. While we all wonder when the holdup at the Straits of Hormuz is going to end, we can start investing in the right areas that will help create the biomethane ecosystem, which can enhance our energy security and resilience, rather than squandering further resources trying to backstop our fragility.

The feedstock concerns

One of the most common issues around biomethane or biofuels in general is the challenge of having enough feedstocks. At Blunomy, I’ve conducted many feedstock studies and mapped feedstocks. The truth is that we probably won’t be able to meet all the gas demand through the biomethane that we can produce from existing feedstocks. But neither should we.

Just as we should not be relying on a single gas field or a single strait to transport all our gas. Biomethane feedstocks are naturally diversified from various sources, and policies could encourage more organic waste or residue to be properly managed upstream to produce more biomethane.

Moreover, we have not even begun exploring the possibility of growing novel crop feedstocks on marginal land that can be dedicated to energy. These crops serve to rehabilitate the soil, the land ecosystems while contributing to energy. The concern about feedstock limitations should not even feature at this moment when we have not even exploited a tiny fraction of it.

Perpetuating oil & gas interest?

Another political and emotive concern raised is that biomethane will allow the energy industry to maintain oil & gas infrastructure, further entrenching our capture by these companies. We should not perpetuate gas infrastructure and entrench ourselves in the fossil ecosystem.

More often than not, the infrastructure is regulated, and we simply need to have the right policy and governance in place to push them to serve the interests of the energy transition rather than the status quo. In many countries that have started introducing blending mandates for biomethane in the gas networks and pipelines, the largest gas consumers and even fuel suppliers have become the biggest customers for biomethane!

The methane slip concerns

So the feedstock limitation or concern around energy industry interests, isn’t something to fuss over. What we can and ought to fuss over, is the fugitive emissions, and methane leakages from continuing to use of methane for energy in the existing infrastructure. Biomethane is still methane, so while combusting it produces biogenic carbon dioxide, which we consider non-additive GHG, the release of biomethane into the atmosphere itself is still a GHG emission.

This continues to be a challenge and certainly contributes to rising GHG emissions. What we cannot always agree on is whether pushing to end the use of methane entirely is worthwhile.

There is greater consciousness of methane leakages precisely because monitoring has improved, sensing equipment is now more broadly available, and I believe the technology to upkeep the infrastructure has also improved. This is an issue to be resolved through better infrastructure, better management and better systems to ensure accountability, compliance and monitoring.

Biomethane will not resolve the issue of methane leakages, but I am not sure if this problem should be stopping us from exploring biomethane as a solution to all the other above issues that I raised. Natural gas continues to be broadly use, and the huge amount of gas infrastructure already invested into could rightly be used to serve the transition if we are willing to build this biomethane ecosystem.

I hope you’re convinced biomethane is something worth working hard to make manifest in the future we are all working for. It’s worth wondering, when we pay for energy, what are we actually buying? And whether cheap energy comes at the cost of fragility, environmental harm, lower end-use efficiency, and reduced resilience. Are we exhausting our resources, and the environment for what really matters to us?

Update (26 March, 11:18am): Initially the post mentioned methane is 12 times more potent than CO2 in global warming potential but that has been corrected to 28 times.

Structures, systems, brain work

There is fundamentally a tension between bureaucratic structures and human judgment. The reason for such structures is to reduce the need for, and also disperse the responsibility of judgment. Often, it tries to aggregate wisdom but sometimes at the cost of creating more inertia for action.

Bureaucracy starts with good intentions: create systems and structures to minimise errors, repeat proven actions by making them a matter of policy, and prevent potential rogue players from having discretion. And potential rogue players within the system mean just about everyone. Yet it promotes conformity and compliance.

The ones who would break the rules and create wins won’t make the cut for promotion if they go too far with rule-breaking. Often, structures prevent them from going far enough to end up with wins. Those who do would probably cause loopholes to be closed up anyway.

But bureaucracy allows you to swap talents for mediocre hires, especially in highly stable environments. Take the example of infrastructure financing; the early pioneers of project finance did the hard work, used their brains to work out the risks, quantify them and set up best practices. They created financially viable structures matching the underlying needs. The ones who come after just copy their templates, sometimes even without completely understanding how the risk management or control works. They are trained more for pattern recognition and for finding market deals that work for the structures they create. This still brings value to the system, and they are rewarded for this stage of industry development. So, more people who can match the patterns will rise within the system. Those who actually think thoroughly about the risk and keep trying to innovate get stuck in the middle. Even if they stick around long enough, they do not have the chance to get their innovation pushed through the system.

New kinds of infrastructure are overlooked because they are “too hard,” when it’s easier to find what fits in the market or wait for the next deal. And so the previous innovation that succeeds cannibalises on future innovation. And the structure to scale up and deliver greater success on something that works inhibits successes of different variety.

Could it be that Singapore is running up against such an issue?

Low-carbon Hydrogen

I came across a point made by a supporter of low-carbon hydrogen when others were arguing that green hydrogen should be reserved for hard-to-abate sectors, but not for other sectors that can easily decarbonise through a lower-cost pathway instead. The point was that if low-carbon hydrogen was only going to target the hard-to-abate sector, the market size simply isn’t enough to create the scale necessary to drive down the cost of low-carbon hydrogen.

This comes at a time when we are discovering that some of the sectors that could actually pay for low-carbon hydrogen are those with much lower-cost approaches to decarbonisation (for example, food product or food services companies). So why would they be willing to pay higher price for low-carbon hydrogen? Technically, this is where economics starts to break down. Part of the reason is that the end customers are willing to pay – this is especially possible for consumer products where the agrifood industry may be able to differentiate the introduce the food prepared using low-carbon hydrogen. This is exactly what some Seven cafes in Japan is doing.

And to a certain extent, every industry starts out this way; if solar panels were simply looking to the locations with huge energy demand in the day, and also lots of solar resources for power generation, the market is going to be incredibly small. And certainly insufficient to enable the lower cost from economies of scale. So finding use cases and continually expanding them is important. While it might be admirable to keep trying to create premium products and then price it well, the alternative way of getting economics in your favour is actually to keep innovating on use-cases and focus on growing scale in a way that lowers unit cost. This then allows for further expansion of demand and use which improves learning at manufacturing and drives the cost advantage further.

That is the story of China’s manufacturing rise. And Lidar technology is a great example. The original use case for lidar technology was very limited to very specialised fields where great precision was needed in sensing and mapping physical spaces. It was initially used almost exclusively in military applications and would probably have remained so if not for China entering the picture and driving down costs through sheer manufacturing scale. By pushing down prices to particular thresholds, the mass market use case in EVs and other driver-assistance technologies emerges and serves to expand the pool of demand further.

During the hype of low-carbon hydrogen during 2020-2023, people were expecting that the cost of hydrogen production could be pushed down to such levels. Yet if we examine the value chain and recognise that the opportunity cost of using renewable electricity for hydrogen production, we would see that it was difficult for hydrogen production to compete with electrification as a commercially viable approach for decarbonising a lot of low-heat industrial applications.

An alternative path to commercialising low-carbon hydrogen is needed; and it is more about finding other use cases. It could be locations where fuel is needed to run mobile applications, or where transport of liquid fuels were prohibitively expensive and being able to easily produce it make sense. And finally, one of my favourite approach, which I am sure would be the first early commercialisation pathway: colocating green hydrogen facilities with biogas/biomethane production facilities, producing green hydrogen, then use Sabatier reaction (methanation) to produce e-methane, boosting the overall output per unit biogenic feedstock.

Yet even then, it is still necessary to drive costs down in order to be able to produce a product catering to a large and expanding market. Even for that pathway highlighted, the actual demand possible for a single hydrogen project would be limited by the available biogenic carbon dioxide which is limited by the scale of the biofuel/biogas plant. These are all bottlenecks of the renewable industry that needs to be managed. Wind and solar, especially solar is a lot more disconnected from local supply chain and ecosystems in order to pull off a successful project as they are modular and largely plug-and-play. While it means government have less hard work on creating the supply chain, there is less local benefits reaped or job opportunities created from building out solar facilities than if the market starts looking into biofuels and hydrogen.

Ultimately, the economics of hydrogen requires very strong government collaboration and the actual boots-on-the-ground work of creating the supply chain, infrastructure and delivery mechanisms. To tap into some pockets of willingness-to-pay at the moment would help.

Carbon capture

I think there is a place for carbon capture and utilisation. But just not the way we have been thinking or approaching it. Carbon capture and storage in some kind of cavern or project and expecting it to hold on to the carbon dioxide does not make sense. But many other carbon sequestration approaches do: applying biochar to ground, injecting carbon dioxide into cement to strengthen the concrete, or any processes that somehow mineralises carbon dioxide into some kind of other compounds including carbonates.

All of the approaches where carbon dioxide is somehow transform into some other form which is more permanent and serves a function make sense. The technologies involve in terms of filtering the carbon dioxide to a certain level of purity, conveying it and handling it, will play important role in the low-carbon economy.

The reason is that carbon dioxide is still an essential part of many industrial production processes. In any case, the main challenge of climate change isn’t really the presence of carbon dioxide – it is the fact that we are taking out fossil carbon and then turning it into carbon dioxide, releasing it into the atmosphere faster than it can be cycled back into other parts of nature. This build-up of carbon dioxide, strengthens the greenhouse effect, making things really nutty for the climate.

But when we are taking biogenic carbon dioxide and using it, there is nothing wrong because the carbon was sequestered from present carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Using it merely ‘recycles’ the carbon around. Human systems that does carbon capture can play that same recycling role. Take for example the capture of biogas from the anaerobic breakdown of organic matter. That is a mix of methane and carbon dioxide gas; the carbon dioxide gas can be filtered out and then used for industrial processes, while the pure methane (or biomethane as we call it) can be used for energy purposes – combustion to produce heat and drive turbines to produce electricity.

Moreover, the carbon dioxide produced from combustion can be captured, purified, and utilised just like the carbon dioxide filtered out from the biogas. This carbon dioxide can actually be combined with green hydrogen to form many other hydrocarbon molecules that act as our more familiar fuels that are compatible with many of the engines and systems we have. Not just that, the combusted fuel will emit that same ‘biogenic’ carbon dioxide, which would not count as greenhouse emissions because they are in the short-term cycle. Nevertheless, we can still capture that carbon dioxide and then return it to those uses we talked about.

To me, that’s the role of carbon capture in the future – it is really to recycle the carbon just as nature already does it. It is not to erase the carbon dioxide that has already been emitted. It is really naive to think that spending more energy trying to capture the emitted carbon dioxide can be more worthwhile than using alternative forms of energy that do not emit so much carbon dioxide in the process. That would be the role of these technologies in the future.

Political culture

Woke Salaryman recently posted this comic article in response to comments towards a previous post about workplace ‘politics’. I really like the realism, the clarity and conviction behind their work. I think it is great that they call out the naivety of those who thinks that they can be ‘above’ politics at work but I’m writing this post because I want to add a more nuance layer to the conversation.

I think Singapore, by and large, have always been sensitive to overt kinds of politicking because of the way politics have been portrayed in our history. We take a more superficial view of what politics mean, as though it is all bad and about behaving in deceptive or conniving, self-serving ways.

And in the workplace, we default to thinking that the virtuous approach is simply to bury head and work hard. That can be a great start in a small working team or organisation where visibility isn’t really a problem. It also works well when productivity, key work metrics are not contentious. Then politicking can seem like it’s all about bootlicking, gossiping and acting in the worse, socially destructive ways.

Politics, which is derived from greek words meaning ‘affairs of a city’ is fundamentally relating to governance and interactions between fellow beings living in the same environment, subject to different constraints and influences that are interdependent on one another in the community. The relationship-building, social interactions, tussle for power, influence or mind-share are all part of it. In a workplace, where we are all coming together to achieve something together, it takes effort and the meta-layer of ‘work’ to organise everyone together.

Work today has evolved and become increasingly complex; it is hard to measure individual effort easily, and particularly challenging to identify precisely what the right skillsets are to progress to the next level. It is ultimately the ability to organise others and persuade them to work together that produces value as opposed to working and contributing directly.

There is a role for politics in all of lives, and maybe Singapore needs to build a culture of politcal-awareness and also encourage citizens to appreciate the positive role it can play in society, workplaces. And we may all also learn the right social, emotional intellect needed to handle tricky situations. With the geopolitical climate of the world today, Singapore needs to cultivate more brilliant diplomats than ever before. How else to do so than to help our people recognise the value of such work to the survival and success of a city state nation.

Driven by inspiration

If you think that Singaporeans were motivated by fear to build up our country in early days of nationhood, think again. There wasn’t really all that much to fear because we didn’t have much to begin with. This narrative that we had no resources, we had to rely on our manpower, and our ingenuity, that’s all true but it wasn’t translating into fear for our forefathers. We had it wrong to think that Lee Kuan Yew fearmongered two generations of Singaporeans into the building up a metropolis we have today.

I believe the early Singaporeans were driven by inspiration – the ‘against all odds’ was possible because it was well worth a shot. We didn’t have much to lose; and there was everything to gain on the table. We had institutions to build, and a new identity. How exciting! And of course, we do not slacken, we are not complacent, because we were not there yet – we were limited only by our ability to envision the future and inspire our countrymen towards it.

Fast-forward today, we seem to think that we managed to achieve all that we did out of fear. We think it was ‘kiasuism’ (fear of losing) that drove us. Probably not. What was there to lose anyways; and yes we are competitive because we want to win, not because we are afraid of losing. Being afraid of losing only happens when you have won at least once. And we did win, more than once, and we begin to hold on to our victories and achievements more than our vision of the future. And in fact, this vision of the future morph, and then slipped.

Consider this press release by the Singapore government in November 1988, there seem to be a clear policy and longer term strategy underpinned by a theoretical framework of the economy. There was a deep understanding of what it means for our economy to grow and the structure by which it is expected to grow with. But without a clear sense of vision for what we want to build Singapore into, we will fall into the trap of just trying to push certain figures up indefinitely.

Ten years ago, in 2015, Ravi Menon sketched out some kind of economic vision for the future framed in a retrospective 100th year anniversary speech for Singapore in 2065. It is brilliant and perhaps reflects Ravi’s aptitude for such high level strategic thinking and visioning. If we look at the decade of performance that took place after the speech was made, I’d say things have not been kind to the world and Singapore in terms of geopolitics. That’s perhaps something Ravi did not anticipate and would not have been expected to identify as a challenge for Singapore.

In the next five decades, our nation will be confronted with lots of geopolitical challenges and turmoil in the world; our economy will require more radical thinking and transformation than the country has ever had to go through. But we can only get through it with inspiration, not fear. We can only be driven by the desire to create a future we want to live in, rather than to react to the world’s situation with the classic ‘bo-pian’ attitude that we might find more common amongst our people.

Policy crowding out

Is job creation the responsibility of the government or businesses/entrepreneurs?

Sure, most governments in capitalistic democracies work hard to reduce red tape, improve ease of doing business and provide all kinds of support to businesses. But can policies to create jobs end up crowding out the private sector activities that create jobs, perhaps even undermining the private sector activities?

For example, when EDB in Singapore attracts MNCs that comes into Singapore and starts hiring, providing good and stable jobs, do they end up disincentivising prospective entrepreneurs from starting their own business? Do they also bid up the cost of strong junior hires for the local companies that need them more? Do the companies that comes into the Singapore market compete out local firms who may have been able to perform the same services in the local economy?

Is there a risk that existing investments in the market hold-hostage our domestic policies? Take, for example, the oil & gas industry in Singapore; do its presence slow down our climate policy? Would the fact that government is busy attracting companies and making things smoother for them cause them to compete more effectively with other local companies who may not have that same support from our own government?

Just bringing up the questions worth pondering over. I’ve no answers but I think it’s worth actually looking into actual data and finding ways to understand some of the answers to these questions I’ve raised.

Energy companies of the future

When I started more than 10 years ago in the infrastructure sector focusing on environmental solutions, I saw a lot of new energy startups. A lot of them were facing difficulty on the capital front because all the wealth of the energy sector is tied up in Oil & Gas or the traditional utilities. The startups needed to access regulated infrastructure, regulated markets as well as capital in order to scale but it was difficult. The incumbents were gate-keeping.

So I came to this conclusion that nurturing startups in the energy space wasn’t so much about forming the next unicorn or tech-giant equivalents. It was about strengthening the incumbents; and that these startups are ultimately finding a match in terms of strategic investors in the incumbents in order to exit or to find their innovations adopted through the value chain.

Even for the commercial & industrial, behind-the-meter type solutions, I had in mind that the traditional incumbents would still win out because of their brands and stability.

Turns out that these became areas where they tend to beat a strategic retreat. Because it was too difficult. The big guys had a couple of things they wanted to sell; and they sure could provide some service in order to sell those electrons or molecules. They would even invest in some hardware on your site such as a metering system, or some tanks and nozzles, etc.

But once things got complex, where they have to manage some operations (even virtual ones), and liability at the customers’ sites, it became too difficult. They also think it’s too small, so they left it to whom they believe would be the small guys.

Now it took a long time but these were still difficult projects for the small guys! The EPC players, system integrators, tech solution providers had to come together, get into the complexities of energy service contracting and setting up new operation protocol to get projects up. Slowly they came up; sometimes with investments from the cashflow of these contracting firms, sometimes from family offices and rich borrowers. Financial innovation sort of quickly caught up to support this.

The resulting model, as it turns out, is more of a fund structure where capital is raised in a vehicle that will deploy capital into those energy-as-a-service projects. There is basically an increasing specialisation in the capital-heavy versus labour/technical-heavy segments of the industry. The market is still struggling to understand whether these C&I type energy assets (be it a new chiller/cooler, some kind of tech-enabled energy management systems, or just a set of solar panels with battery energy storage system) is considered infrastructure. Nevertheless, they see it as riskier than traditional state-granted concession type of infrastructure, but still safer than privatw equity where the money is put into operating companies without committed long-term revenues.

Now, I want to address the segment of the market that is also dealing in utility scale renewable power. The end of market moves and financial innovations seem to also point towards a fund structure. Whether it is Equis Energy (now Vena) or even Brookfield Infrastructure that started off in more traditional infrastructure, a whole lot of large scale renewable projects are eventually funded and operated by funds.

I would have imagined that funds would be taking over the more traditional parts of the sectors but instead, what we are really seeing is that funds have become the vehicle for transiting into a new energy system of the world. Is this just an interim solution or do we expect funds to become the energy companies of the future?

Advancement through dilemmas

As I ponder over the paradoxes of our society and nature, I begin to see more and more how our traditional linear paradigms about advancement and growth jars too much against reality.

There are many things that appears contradictory and yet continue to co-exist peacefully in the world without apparent conflict except in our minds. There are tyrants who are charismatic, loved and admired but also incompetent democratically elected leaders who could set a country back by decades. And there are both decentralised and centralised systems that appear to thrive, and also implode.

We ask ourselves if history proceeds through its course regardless of individual’s actions and it is just collective macro force created by the tiny actions of every individual that matters, or that it progresses through the agency of a few, put in the positions of power and influence? It’s not clear at all.

So when we think that progress in the system involves maturity of technology, of having regulation, standardisation, proper rules of engagement in place, we also recognise that these things stifles innovation and block new, emergent contenders from taking over incumbent structures.

Similarly, having contending standards or technology pathways look as though they are going to create a gridlock that prevents the industry from adopting a single unified approach.

The western, perhaps Anglo-Saxon, thought models make it difficult to hold those juxtaposing, contradictory ideas together because it supposes that there is just this one way that is the right way.

What if that is not reality at all?