Tag Archives: energy

Big Fossil has a chance

I don’t want to call them big oil or big coal, or big gas anymore. They are big on fossil, fossil fuels. And they have a chance to make the future a better place; one that we all want to be part of. They have the opportunity; enormous opportunity to create the products and services that people need and want which will be good for them, and good for everybody else, not just good for the big fossil companies.

But to take advantage of this opportunity, they need to recognise people are not demanding for fossil fuels. They are demanding for energy, for access to energy, for cheaper energy. But that form of energy is fossil fuel, big fossil might retort. It is not. Fossil fuel is not cheap. It is not cheap because we all are paying in the form of greater natural disasters, in facing once-in-a-hundred-year floods almost every decade, in having to pay even more for heating during winters and cooling during summers. Fossil fuel is not what the world is demanding for.

Big fossil can ignore the NGOs, they can ignore the activist investors or the climate activists, and even government. Heck, they could buy out those sitting on the fence. They could even subsidize all manner of appliance, infrastructure, systems that entrench fossil fuels further. But they cannot ignore climate change; they cannot ignore the fact that we are not destroying earth with carbon emissions. We are destroying ourselves. And for what? Profits? What good are profits if that’s just creating a future no one wants to be part of?

Demand for energy is growing

We’ve been seeing on the news that 2023 will probably go down in history as the year oil majors backtracked on their promises towards the climate transition, and continued their trajectory of emissions as the demand for fossil fuels continue to grow.

This is exactly the kind of behaviour that makes it easy for people to keep painting them as the enemy. As a matter of fact, they risk painting themselves out of the low carbon future when they allow their “core” fossil fuel business to continue cannibalising their renewables business. Yes you heard me right; in refusing to see their core business as that of providing the world with sustainable energy, they are rapidly destroying a market they want to be part of.

Instead of seeing it as demand for fossil fuels, the oil majors need to recognise that there’s demand for energy – and it is growing. The opportunity to convert their customers to green users, energy users of the future rather than keeping them in the past. Their behaviour will at some point push the authorities to act even more aggressively against fossil fuels. The trouble right now is that they think the world needs them to go on spinning.

Story of methane

I thought of writing about methane. It is a curious molecule consisting of a single carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms around it which pretty strong bonds with the carbon atom. The entire molecule is relatively small and exists in gaseous form at room temperatures. It is naturally occurring and comes out of natural processes that involves anaerobic bacteria actions. It is a fuel that can be combusted to produce carbon dioxide and water vapour.

It also happens to be a greenhouse gas. Each methane molecule is thought to have 25 times more global warming potential than carbon dioxide. Natural gas is largely made up of it; hence it is a greenhouse gas by itself though combusting it will also produce carbon dioxide which itself is a greenhouse gas though with lower potential.

The focus on carbon emissions is a result of the recognition that we have spewed so much of this particular greenhouse into the atmosphere that it is having extreme effects on the global climate due to the warming potential. The world needs to move towards low-carbon and that means having activities that are emitting less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In general, fossil fuel based carbon holds the largest responsibility in anthropogenic carbon emissions.

Interestingly, you could produce methane through anaerobic biological process. And cows are known to release methane into the air because of the bacteria actions in their stomach. The dairy industry therefore becomes a rather larger emitter of greenhouse gas for this reason. That is where stuff gets a bit fuzzy when you’re counting global warming potential, anthropogenic emissions and so on.

So biomethane is the methane produced through anaerobic digestion of organic matter can be captured and used as a fuel. When combusted it likewise produces carbon dioxide and water. But this carbon dioxide belongs to the short carbon cycle due to its organic/plant heritage and hence is excused from what typical constitutes carbon emissions. Yet when biomethane leaks or is released into the air, the methane’s global warming potential is counted and the carbon-equivalent emissions actually forms part of the emissions from processes whenever biomethane is used. This ‘short cycle’ argument doesn’t seem to apply.

This may not seem very consistent and can potentially create a lot of confusion around the truly ‘green’ identity of biomethane. One could see how biomethane, or renewable natural gas as it is known in the US, is going to suffer from being conflated with fossil fuel natural gas.

New site for Mondo Gondo

For those who know, I started a podcast late last year named Mondo Gondo and finished a single season with six episodes and have not revived the podcast since. This was largely because I got busy with my work that involved a bit of relocation early this year. I still intend to keep Mondo Gondo going and have recently invested into centralising all my web content into my self-hosted platform.

Therefore, Mondo Gondo’s website had a facelift. It is much simpler now with less heavy graphics. It continues to hold only the show notes for the podcast and the intention is to eventually get back to creating another season, featuring rants, thoughts and ideas around sustainability, incentives and how we could make the world a better place.

I have some ideas around more in-depth topics on energy, discussing whether hydrogen should be used in residential applications, considering if AirBnB can potentially make tourism and hospitality more eco-friendly, thinking about how we need new models of thinking about infrastructure in order to drive more sustainable development, reconsidering the role of urban centers and more.

It might still be a while more but watch the new site for season 2.

Cheap renewables and surging bills

Even as we see the levellised cost of solar coming down, and increasing penetration of renewable energy, the electricity coming to us in our grids are increasing in prices. At least it seems to be so in Australia. There’s a lot of cost associated with the transmission and distribution infrastructure that needs to be recovered – partly because the growth of intermittent renewables mean that the grid infrastructure will have to be expanded.

But it is not just that; there’s also more padding required in the margins of electricity retailers because the intermittency results in even more volatile electricity prices in the wholesale market. That means that if the retailers are still providing fixed price tariffs and long contracts to customers, they will have to manage their risks by putting higher profit margins into the retail packages.

There is a huge price to pay by the society to eventually enjoy more renewable energy. If we don’t adapt to the intermittency through more adding more flexible generation leveraging on demand response and integrating EV recharging networks into the network operation optimisation (ie. Vehicle-to-Grid systems), we can only expect higher bills. We had better accelerate the transition or we’re soon losing the patience of energy consumers.

Making the contribution

For first time in history but it’s already been a while, the world collectively seem to have abundance. The total amount of food produced could feed the entire world one and a half times over. If energy is used efficiently and excesses trimmed, the entire world should have decent amount of power to live normal modern lives. Of course that depends on what you mean by normal but I’m covering the same point that there’s enough in the world but the problem is distribution.

And distribution is not just a physical problem of course. Distribution can be an economic problem in itself. The fact that the market doesn’t really care that much about the distribution of resources, buying power / puchasing power is actually a problem. It skews the global economy towards what the people with means needs rather than producing for the best outcomes of the world. And this is perhaps why energy continues to be skewed towards the developed, high energy consumption countries or markets.

So making a contribution to this world isn’t really about production. If the world continues in the same fashion tomorrow, you can really make a greater impact on someone’s life – from an incremental perspective – by improving the distribution in the system. By bringing access to higher quality energy, better nutrition, bringing critical and vital knowledge to the communities which can use them properly. That sort of contribution is of unparalleled value. Probably not the kind of contribution involving helping companies break into new markets or keeping fossil fuel businesses alive to emit more carbon.

Bridge to the future

Having been based in Australia for two months now and getting a better view of the overall energy landscape, I’d say that the greatest hurdle we need to overcome is developing an alignment in commitment, plans and action to bring bioenergy especially biomethane into the system energy mix in order to decarbonise.

We are trying to build a bridge to the low-carbon energy future. And there has been many announcement, efforts and plans around hydrogen hubs, hydrogen parks. In the year 2023, the prices of electrolysers didn’t seem to come down all that much as expected, renewable electricity in the form of wind and solar, while being cheap, is bringing about a degree of intermittency that challenges grid operations to the extent that overall cost of electricity or at least access to electricity remains high. As it turns out, we were building the bridge from the destination towards us when we were working on the hydrogen projects. They were good, at some point in the future but it seems that they are not being built fast enough to reach us today. We are still unable to adopt those solutions.

This means that as the decarbonisation targets and emission reduction dreams comes back to bite us, we need to start building the bridge from our side. And biomethane is a great solution that allows us to do that. It displaces natural gas on a one-to-one basis and does not require end-users of natural gas to change their appliances. Biomethane can be spec-ed properly in the biogas upgrading process in order to achieve the quality required for gas grid injection. Moreover, the production of biogas (precursor to biomethane) can be done in conjunction with managing our organic and agricultural wastes which were either being burnt, composted openly or sent to the landfill – all of which involves some kind of carbon emission (albeit short-cycle to a certain extent) that does not achieve extra work done. And don’t get me started on the potential of biogenic carbon dioxide as a future market to build.

Lots of clear work and action. Once we get the perception right and eliminate the misinformation around bioenergy in Australia.

The monolithic system

What if the sun could give us all our power and energy, to drive everything we need to power our economies, perform our activities and live life? Or what if we can afford everything that we ever want and need? What if money can buy us everything? What if this one thing can solve all your problems?

If all that hypothetical questioning sounds like a bunch of marketing crap or storytelling, they are actually fantastic devices that somehow appeals so much to our psyche. But they can simultaneously be truth with caveats and also complete bullshit.

In case you are curious, I provide the solutions:

  • The sun does power a lot of things and is capable of providing sufficient energy for all of our activities and more but capturing it and channeling them properly is had.
  • We, as a collective earth, already is able to afford everything we produce and will be able to satisfy all of our needs – wants on the other hand are completely manufactured by ourselves and can be managed.
  • Money can buy us everything that can be bought (or sold).
  • One thing that can solve all your problems is a mental reframe to see them not as problems but challenges to help you grow.

There is always some kind of rhetoric to get you out of those conundrum but doesn’t really address the actual psychological appeal of those questions. The thing is that we naturally gravitate towards some kind of monolithic system or idea where we want a single solution or something that becomes a common denominator for everything else. Money comes close to becoming that. Yet that has probably demonstrated that such a system do not actually deliver what you think it would.

Likewise, the market economy and market system isn’t going to be the one that delivers us all from the problems around energy, climate change, innovations and poverty elimination. The market system needs to be rightly placed for what it is good for just as we should see wind and solar power in their place within the energy system rather than expecting them to deliver all our needs. Even oil and gas was not able to power all of our world’s energy needs even if they came close to that. Monolithic systems reduces resilience even if they provide scale economies.

Mission of energy transition

The market has a role to play in the energy transition but the market is not responsible for the transition. Technological improvements and our sense of purpose or mission does not come from the market – they are exogenous inputs. What is challenging about the market is that it does have a life of its own and there are always entrenched interests pushing against the direction of the mission that the world is on. It is not just about gaining buy-in to the mission but unraveling the interests vested in it.

That is a serious conundrum especially when we need to transition fast. The bigger the vessel, the harder it is to steer and change directions. So it is with the market economy. The most vested the market is with the status quo, the greater the reach of the tentacles of the market through the system across areas of life, the harder it is for change to happen. Or at least directed, meaningful change.

It is probably time to recognise that the market can help drive the demand for greener fuels and renewable energy if the incentives are put right. It is also critical to recognise that the economics around change can be arbitrary and a snapshot in time. Cracking the puzzle is not just about performing a cost-benefit analysis and saying whether to proceed with this or not. It is about identifying the pain-points, challenging the status quo, re-jigging incentives and rallying the champions.

We have done that before, with ushering more peace, with managing overpopulation, with feeding hunger, dealing with poverty. We can deal with the challenge of climate change and the transition of our economy. If we make it our mission to do so, rather than to wait for the market.

Biofuels vs E-fuels

I wrote about the conversation I had around biofuels and e-fuels that are produced through power-to-fuel approaches. They have rather different chemical pathways, costs and constraints. I’d really like to see someone consider the resource intensity of these different approaches. The challenge for most studies is that they consider biofuels from a standpoint of resource potential as though the agriculture activities are inert. Of course there’s the whole question of whether land should be used for cultivation of food or energy. I won’t get into that.

But I’d be curious to see if people who can organise the supply chain across the land, the supply of food alongside the supply of feedstock towards the bioenergy plants had done their analysis on resource intensity. A good comparison of the resource intensity from the water-intensity, output logistics standpoint would be really good. It doesn’t have to be a full-fledged lifecycle assessment – back of envelope calculation would be helpful.

There is a view that bioresources are limited by the amount of feedstocks available. There is only this much used cooking oils (UCO) that you can convert to hydrotreated vegetable oils (HVOs) or into biojet fuel (typically via the Hydrotreated Esters and Fatty Acids (HEFA) pathway). And that power-to-liquid is theoretically not limited in terms of resource potential. That is not exactly true because we are still limited in our green options for power generation and green power itself can eat into resources required by other sectors. The conversion process to fuel also requires carbon dioxide feedstock of suitable concentration as well as pure water to be electrolysed to produce hydrogen.

It’s strange to think that we can have unlimited power or that we can easily power the world – remember those times when people actually calculated the amount of solar panels and space on land that is needed to power all the earth? The investment to be made in terms of building lines to distribute power, and the factories to take that power and convert them into the fuel needed would multiply the complexity problem of supplying the world’s energy needs.