Sustainability Symposium 2024: Existential Solutions – Michael Barnard
all right our next speaker is Michael
Bernard uh he develops projections and
scenarios for decarbonization 40 to 80
years into the future while also
assisting Executives boards and
investors to Choose Wisely today whether
it’s refueling Aviation grid storage
vehicle to Grid or hydrogen demand his
work is based on the fundamentals of
physics economics and human nature and
informed by the decarbonization
requirements and Innovations of multiple
domains leadership positions in North
America Asia and Latin America have
enhanced his global point of view he
publishes regularly in multiple outlets
on Innovation business technology and
policy Michael joins us to talk about
the reimagining of buildings distributed
energy concrete and steel Renewables
vehicle to grid Technologies and
hydrogen hello sir welcome to the
sustainability Symposium thank thank you
for the wonderful introduction and you
know thank you John for the overview of
the excellent work that RMI has done and
continues to do um I’ve got a more
future oriented stuff um you’ll see a
lot of themes out of John’s excellent
work and rmi’s excellent work that will
be projected forward into the future um
you know the our low carbon future is
coming fast and it’s coming amazingly
quickly and it’s very spiky I live in
the pockets I look for pockets of the
future and the pockets of the future are
very broad um so without further Ado I I
like to start with this it’s not as bad
an i chart as some but this is a sanky
diagram of energy in the United States
for 2022 basically what it says is
here’s all the energy that comes in on
the leftand side into the United States
economy and this is extract
extrapolatable to the every economy goes
through electrical generation goes into
residential commercial industrial and
transportation and use cases and comes
out here here’s what we get the reason
this is
important is because of this big gray
box up here rejected energy um rejected
energy is the energy that comes in out
of primary energy which John mentioned
um but we don’t actually get any use out
of it um and that’s because it all
virtually all the stuff down here on the
lower left the petroleum the coal and
the natural gas when we burn it for
energy that’s a very inefficient process
we throw away a lot of the energy as
waste heat um and we actually make a lot
more carbon dioxide than we have with
the petroleum this is why we’ve got a
problem today you know uh as we consider
those those energy Pathways one of the
ways I like to describe fossil fuels is
that when we burn them they create CO2
and waste heat and oh by the way some
useful work for us so that’s something
that’s going to change now as we look by
comparison at those low carbon forms of
uh generation up in the upper leftand
corner solar nuclear Hydro wind and
geothermal well there’s a lot less
rejected energy there and so we don’t
actually have to replace all of the
energy on the left we just have to build
out the more much more efficient
Pathways drive them through
electricity and Electrify all these end
points and we get down to radically
lower
energy requirements for the same
economic and comfort values for a
society now I’ve done the math on this I
do napkin math on enormous numbers of
subjects which is part of the reason I’m
you know privileged to be here today
with you know John and with Jeremy
riffkin who follows me you know um and
but other people have done really deep
math on this like Mark said Jacobson um
and team out of Stanford they and the
team are the ones who are responsible
for the projections of 100% renewable by
2050 um you know a very credible
scenario imperfect in some ways as are
all of mine and I’ll share mine but
they’ve done the same math and under 50%
of the primary energy coming into United
States is actually required when we move
to Renewables and when we move to
electrified Energy
Services um you so Saul Griffith also
did that work and he calculates that
only 42% of the energy we actually use
today is required to get everything we
need um to not lose any comfort now this
is why um I I annoy long-term efficiency
boffin um you know because I I consider
um efficiency to be a secondary question
electrification is first efficiency is
used to make it uh cost beneficial and
more economic um you know a heat pump
takes three units of energy from the
environment for every one unit of
electricity because we can do that with
electricity so all of the transportation
is three to four times more efficient
when electrified than non-electrified is
that an efficiency measure or is it an
electri benefit of electrification I
tend to call it a benefit of
electrification which is why my short
list of climate actions that will work
starts as so many do with Electrify
everything so let’s keep going um of
course the big question is what
electrical generation are we going to do
John’s talked about the plummeting cost
of wind solar and batteries that’s been
absurdly beneficial um we now are
building more wind and solar than the
rest you know than anybody could have
projected the Ia got it wrong famously
as John pointed out with one of his
charts and you know they’re getting
better but you know the Ia was formed as
an oil gas and coal um organization
about 50 years ago and fatti Baro is
slowly turning the Helm of an
ultra-large crude carrier it’s a slow
process so we know that this is working
um we’ve seen it in behavior and and
more to the point we see amazing grid
reliability all the questions all the
concerns about intermittency of
Renewables are being answered California
is seeing 100% delivery of electric
generation needs by Renewables for many
days for many hours over many days over
the past few weeks um Denmark sees over
100% from wind energy alone Germany is
now at approaching 60% Renewables on its
uh for its its grid and Denmark and
Germany have among the most reliable
grids in the world 13 minutes of outages
per customer per year this is not
actually that hard to do it’s a trans
we are Transforming Our grids and our
generation but we’re doing it very
effectively and the more Renewables are
on a grid it turns out the slightly more
reliable the grid becomes you know the
transformation enhances things so this
is just indication that this is where
we’re going um I’m not going to dwell on
it because it’s one of the more obvious
things but what about longer duration
storage um so one of the big questions
is how do we store all this electricity
what happens when the wind doesn’t blow
and the sun doesn’t shine well there’s a
couple of answers to that this is by the
way um my projection of grid storage
requirements through 2060 you know it’s
a uh slightly adapted based on the
decline in cell-based batteries
recently but it’s still fairly still
holds true in my opinion so the first
question about intermittency though that
we have to ask is how do we inter our
wind and solar in reality um we t think
of them when we think about them at all
as well the wind doesn’t blow all the
time that’s not quite true the wind
doesn’t blow as strongly all the time
the sun sun doesn’t shine as brightly
all the time and at night of course it
doesn’t um shine at
all but wind energy actually generates
wind farms actually generate electricity
85% of the year just not at
100% uh of their maximum potential so we
actually get 85% coverage of some demand
from wind farms and for solar Farms well
whenever the sun is shining from the
beginning of the day to the end of the
day some electricity is coming out of
solar Farms so we actually have
overlapping curves with wind and solar
which are easier to accommodate than you
might think it’s not like a nuclear
plant if the nuclear plant um that you
know shuts down as happened in Texas a
couple years ago in the ice storms well
that’s just off there’s no degrad
there’s no slow ramping down of an
plant
um but what will work well pumped Hydro
um you know that’s going to be the
dominant one for energy storage on their
grids just as it is today just as has
been since 1907 when the first one was
built this is highly commoditized
Solutions it’s great for coal country um
you know I I I’m fascinated that the
discourse in the United States does not
include turning coal workers in Coal
country to building TI more it’s just an
obvious thing using very strongly
overlapping skills and domain knowledge
but it’s going to continue to
grow and I I have a proof point for that
um so one of the things I’m doing is I’m
doing an ongoing series of discussions
with India’s utilities under the aaces
of the India smart grid Forum um
and that means I’m spending more time
learning about uh India they’ve actually
already got plans for they’ve got 19 gws
of storage for Pumped Hydro under
development and have they have projected
a capacity of 106 gws I think that’s
light based upon the work of the
Australia National University their GIS
model shows enormous uh closed loop off-
River pumped Hydro capacity just north
of the highly populated New Deli region
in Northern India um you know I’ll be
talking about that explicitly within the
next couple of weeks
but we also have Redux flow which is
basically big tanks of chemicals with
kind of the battery part in between
instead of all the chemicals inside the
battery and so you can scale up energy
storage and have power storage decoupled
from that so I think Redux flow I’m
bullish on Redux flow as we move forward
cell-based batteries are really hot
right now lithium ion especially but
they have limits um they’re cost
effective for four to eight hours
they’re great for for putting Sunshine
from the afternoon into the evening but
you know we’re going to run out uh when
I talked to Mark Wilson of intelligent
land investments in Scotland he just
sold his pumped Hydro fac developed
pumped Hydro facility on Lo Ness to
Norway stcraft who’s developing pump
High globally but Mark and Company are
also delivering cell-based battery
Solutions at a tremendous rate in the UK
his perspective however is that the
entire projected demand for that short
term battery storage which is so highly
valuable in the UK will be finished in
20828 or
2029 that the it’s a short-term
opportunity to put those in then it’s a
replacement as they age out you know the
growth area is not nearly as required
some of that is because we’re going to
build more Renewables and some of it is
going because we’re going to build a lot
of high voltage direct current
interconnecting major geographical
regions now I like to say that high
voltage direct current is a new pipeline
uh but it’s also the new oil tanker and
lmg tanker uh as we develop as we
generate a lot more electricity inside
countries um that means we don’t have to
and and because we’re using it so much
more efficiently in electrified
Solutions we don’t actually have to
import as much energy into fossil uh
fuel poor areas you know if we have a
lot of sunshine we every place has
Sunshine I’ve lived in Singapore you
know the tiny dot at the uh bottom of
Malaysia here and even Singapore can
reach uh 15% of its electricity demand
today with solar and it’s building a lot
of solar on top of all its rooftops you
know so that
means local Renewables inside a
country much more efficient use through
electrified systems means a lot less
energy needs to come into country or
region through pipelines or tankers or
l& tankers um this diagram is from Geo
which is the uh Global energy
interconnection development cooperation
organization it’s a un uh organization
but it was kicked off by China in 2015
or 2016 uh to consider how seriously
China takes this um the premier of China
was at the launch the executive chairman
of guo is is the single person at the
top of all grid planning and development
and deployment in China and the person
responsible for the development of the
Asian super grid uh this is a massive
component of what we’re talking about as
one proof point on this uh the Bel and
Road initiative is in almost the same
countries has got almost the same
membership as guide ccoe does and you
know the Bel and Road initiative and
guide C were involved in a 12 country
10,000 kilometer sub subsaharan Africa
super grid assessment to link the uh
western subsaharan part of Africa across
to the east into Kenya and down south
into South Africa providing a strong
backbone for electricity sharing across
renewable zones in Africa to assist in
electrifying the billion people that
live there um tremendous amount of work
that’s being done in this space and some
of that is invisible to North American
audiences you so it’s there’s really
good news happening globally around the
world with these types of
things um when we start talking about
the efficiencies of uh transport
efficiencies of use I always like to
start with Transportation now this is
you know kind of fun chat GPT and Del
generated image of a futuristic San
Francisco with all electrified
Transportation but you know uh right now
battery electric cars have won you know
globally uh there is no alternative that
is delivering the value propositions
there are range is increasing the prices
are coming down there’s a blip in the
west around um purchasing of uh electric
vehicles right now but I like to compare
that to when I flew from Singapore to
Las Vegas in 2014 for U wind power 2014
under the aices of the American wind
energy Association everybody in Vegas
was depressed because the United States
wind energy uh industry was depressed
because of the uh end of the the looming
end of the investment tax credit um and
I was wandering around looking why is
everybody so down faac because I’d been
in Singapore and I was paying attention
to China’s wind energy development to
Latin America’s wind energy development
where i’ spent time in s Pao talking
wind overlapping with Hydro in in that
great country um and also you know
looking at Australia and everywhere else
wind was booming what we’re seeing in
ter terms of some of the um artifacts
the narratives around electric vehicles
right now in other words are a blip and
they’re more of a geographically
constrained blip uh growth in the
biggest car market in the world China is
not of internal combustion vehicles and
EES are not slowing down similarly in
India where I’m spending know a fair
amount of my attention these days
they’re expecting to have 50,000
electric buses on the roads by 20 2027
and they actually have thousands of
electric buses on their roads right now
one nice thing that India has is they
don’t have the um expectations that we
have of having a 100% replacement for
our current most of you know best in
breed solution they’re much more
interested in right sizing so one of the
reason one of the things that they’ve
done with their buses is they said how
much battery do we need to service our
different scales of roots and so what
they’ve done is they’ve bought B buses
with smaller batteries for shorter routs
medium batteries for medium roots and
bigger batteries for bigger routs and
put a lot more buses on the roads
instead of having a bus that they expect
to service the maximum route they have
buses to serve their minimum RS um it’s
an obvious thing not really done in
North America or Europe in the same way
but tremendous stuff there similarly on
trucking right now there I spent quite a
lot of my time in the past six months
going through uh International
organizations and um research papers on
electrification and decarbonization of
freight Trucking on the ground uh you
know the I was involved the Swedish
study which was simulating all Freight
Trucking for Europe and in every one
once you tear apart the assumptions the
reality is battery electric Freight
Trucking is going to dominate we’re
already at a point where with North
America the North American Council on
freight efficiencies run and L program
in September of
2023 a couple of Tesla semis had service
days of over a thousand miles each that
was an electric truck with one or with
two or three drivers over the course of
the day couple of fast charges well
within operational requirements for the
trucks working driving a thousand miles
in a single day delivering Flats of
Pepsi Flats of Fredo Lake um stuff and
well the Tesla semi is Head and
Shoulders Above the Rest because it’s
built from the ground up for Trucking it
is not um alone there were five or six
other vendors all strong battery
electric trucks all were doing service
um deliveries of 500 Mile days it was
obvious that with the battery
improvements that we’re seeing and the
megawatt scale charging like the 960 uh
kilowatt liquid cooled charging that a
Chinese manufacturer just unveiled which
provides 400 kilometers of range in 36
minutes of charging 250 M miles of range
in 36 minutes of charging for a freight
truck that’s bigger than a Class 8 great
truck in the United States this is all
technically doable it’s engineering and
economics um on rail well the rest of
the world outside of North America is
just electrifying rails uh the Trans
Siberian railroad 9300 kilometers
through some of the most inhospitable
Terrain in the world is running is
electrified China’s massive growth of
highspeed rail now 45,000 kilometers is
all electrified uh India is actually um
going to be finished electrifying all of
its heavy Freight rail this year I will
say the United States is really
recalcitrant on the point of
electrifying rail there are reasons for
that but it’s something that the United
States is lagging uh in terms of this
and it’s lagging in terms of freight
trucks and buses China has 1.2 million
electric trucks and buses on its
roads the United States is just getting
started so great news around around the
world on red on ground transportation
but what about the hard to Abate sectors
like Maritime shipping well there’s some
great news there too uh did you know
that 40% of bulk shipping that’s
crossing our oceans is whole oil and gas
and that that’s going to go away in the
next few decades in other words all the
fossil fuels we burn to move caros
through the oan across the oceans are
going to diminish naturally as we stop
using fossil fuels and that’s not all
right now another 15% of bulk is raw
iron ore raw iron ore most of those
shiploads are steaming to the same ports
that are where the coal ships are going
or they’re put into blast furnaces well
um as we decarbonize Maritime shipping
the cost of fuel will go up a bit but as
we decarbonize raw uh steel which I’ll
talk more about later well we’re going
to stop us coal for that and we’re going
to start using green electricity for it
a couple of different ways and that
means we’ll actually be able to process
the raw iron ore into iron or even steel
products much closer to the mines and
ship just container loads of iron as
opposed to bulks of iron ore there’s
going to be a change and a shift in
terms of those bulks moving through the
stuff and so while container shipping of
processed and finished grids will
increase it won’t increase as rapidly
now we had a very rapid increase from
1980 to
2019 um but a lot of that was due to the
radically the the unprecedented speed of
growth of China uh China’s manufacturing
capabilities and delivering stuff to the
West U for our consumer economies and
that
transformation while India is growing
and Brazil is growing and Indonesia is
growing all places I’ve been all places
I’ve spent time they aren’t they don’t
have the conditions for success to grow
as rapidly as China did so their growth
will be slower than China while still
enviable to those in the west whose
rapid growth periods are are mostly
behind us they’re going to be bringing
their populations out of poverty um and
as John said leap frogging in most cases
uh in a in a more in a slower
way the combination means really good
news as we move forward but there’s also
more good news uh we don’t actually have
to use burn fuels in a lot of the ships
in my projection of Maritime shipping
through 2100 um I looked at all Inland
short sea and Deep Water Shipping
requirements and I worked out the the
math on it I unified the data sets
because they’re different segments in
the way that shipping industry thinks of
them so they don’t have a unified data
set and all the Inland shipping the
stuff that goes up to Mississippi or the
Yang sea that can all Electrify um most
short sea shipping like um in the
Caribbean for example or between Norway
and Germany or Denmark and Sweden that
can all Electrify these are routes that
are just not that long but even the
length isn’t really the point it’s the
economics a study uh last year that was
published they did the math and they
said if we had batteries that cost $100
per kilowatt hour of
capacity um you know in other words a
Tesla battery maybe that has 60 kilowatt
hours $100 oh that’s 100 66,000 for the
battery if we had
that Freight journeys of up to 1500
kilometers about 900 miles would be
viable with batteries with virtually no
loss of cargo capacity uh
when we talk about batteries and ships
ships carry massive amounts of stuff and
they got lots of volume batteries don’t
take away that much space so $100 was
Break Even for500
kilometers except that we’re already
below 100 kilometers now we’re actually
at um the point this year where we’re
going to see um K catl John mentioned a
couple of times are seeing are
projecting that they’re going to be
selling their basic batteries for $56
per per kilowatt hour this year now
we’re projecting we’re seeing very
likely $30 per kilowatt hour a third of
that $100 uh Break Even
point1 $30 per hour in 20 uh $30 per
kilowatt hour in 2030 the transformation
in this space is going to be tremendous
uh here’s another proof Point um last
year uh Chinese shipping organization
launched two 700 container ships they’re
not huge the biggest container ships are
24,000 containers but 700 containers is
not something you put in your garage um
you know this is 700 containers that are
8 and a half feet W tall 8 and a half
feet wide and 20 and up to 60 feet long
most of them are under 60 60f Footers
are absurdist
um 700 container ships two of them
they’re traveling 1,000 kilometers
that’s 600 mile routes on the Yan SE
with containerized batteries they winch
the battery container off and drop it on
the trans shipment Port where it gets
plugged into recharge and they winch a
full battery back onto the ship this is
very easy to do it’s already being done
it’s going to be part of that
now that doesn’t mean you know as we go
through this that we don’t need some
burnable fuels for crossing oceans um
but we need a lot less than most people
think in my projections and this is a
scenario I don’t CL to be right I I I
merely claim to be less wrong so you
know take this as a projection uh that
is
likely from some from one individual uh
there are other projections which should
also inform any strategic decision
making you make but if my projection is
accurate we only need about 70 million
tons of Maritime diesel or equivalent to
burn for all shipping in
2100 and per the International Energy
agency’s uh renewable update from uh
late last year we already make 70
million tons of biodiesel we just wasted
on ground transportation which as I
shared is all going to be electric so
that’s really good news that means the
carbon curve or shipping is going to
plummet and of course biofuels are
becoming are increasingly beneficial as
we use them with waste waste biomass
I’ll talk a bit more about that later
but what about Aviation can we what can
we do with Aviation it’s another hard to
aate sub U thing well um Co proved that
we don’t have to fly as much as we do we
just like to fly um and the recovery
from covid isn’t
finished and it’s not going to have the
growth projections that it had in the
past you know once again the rate of
global change of affluence between 1980
and
2019 was unprecedented I I don’t expect
it will continue as much and there’s a
whole bunch of Inhibitors on the growth
of electric uh electric a of Aviation
you know one of the key ones is simply
that well as we decarbonize Aviation uh
and we replace that with sustainable
Aviation fuels um you know my my
projections biofuels they’re going to be
more expensive than current fuels and
airline industry is already has se 19 %
of their expenses are fuel if that
doubles or triples in price those get
added to tickets and they reduce the
likelihood that people it’s a
significant enough purchase for most
people that it will reduce their
likelihood of taking that but further uh
as I said highspeed rail is growing
globally uh right now we’re seeing
enormous numbers of Passenger miles
being taken in China where people just
said why would I bother to fly when can
go downtown by Subway get on a train get
off a train without going through much
security um a couple hours later and I’m
in Beijing you know it’s just more
convenient to take the train if the
train is going 350 kilometers per hour
um and so we’re seeing a significant
reduction there uh right now there’s
more High-Speed Rail in India Indonesia
and even in Africa than there is in all
of North America which is quite remble
to me uh of course Europe has about
19,000 kmers highspeed Rail and is
seeing a significant shift of Passenger
Avi passenger movement to rail through
policy and governments with for example
France saying if there’s a rail flight
or the rail line that goes between two
cities uh and under this period of time
uh we’re not going to allow flights
between those places why would we
support Aviation between those when the
train gets there fast enough um and
so this is how it’s all going out right
the battery electric the energy density
stuff that John was talking about from
the catl 500 wat hours per kilogram well
many organizations thought we wouldn’t
see that till 2050 and we saw it in 2023
you know we’re seeing much more rapid
expanses on that the battery electric
Drive trins are just vastly more
efficient they’re 80 to 90% efficient
versus 50% efficient for modern jets
when the modern jets are at 38,000 feet
at Optimum cruising speed you know
battery electric is just as efficient on
the carac when it’s taxing when it’s FL
when it’s um taking off when it’s
landing and we’ll start with smaller
airplanes but even right now battery
energy density right now is sufficient
for a Hybrid drivetrain and a turbo prop
that would carry 100 passenger 600 kmers
that provides us divert Reserve that
we’re not doing that is um in part
because of certification to ensure
safety in part because the major oems in
aviation have unfortunately had some
really interesting times and are having
trouble innovating they can invent and
they can do demonstrations uh but the
you know the challenges that Boeing had
recently with its major new airplane are
indicative of a problem in the aviation
industry that’s going to go away
we have new contenders and stuff and so
in that case only about 110 million tons
on top of the 70 million tons of diesel
for maritime is required at
Peak and we already make 100 million
tons of
biofuels and we’ve got a lot of waste
biomass capacity which I’ll talk a bit
more so here’s the CO2 emix it goes down
a lot contrails go down um the uh
nitrous oxides go down and you know AV
Agriculture and waste biomass derived
fuels actually could arguably make um
aviation fuel carbon negative so this is
actually a really positive story about
Aviation growing more slowly but still
growing but decarbonizing much more
rapidly than you might think and this is
real zero not Net Zero in my projection
we don’t get down to real zero in 2050
but we’re really close and organizations
like um air Singapore which has getting
nesty to build you know provide already
providing as Nest already providing 1.5
million tons of biofuels uh sustainable
Aviation fuels in Singapore for its
operations is leading the way so there
will be um carriers who are actual Zero
by 2050 quite
easily um one of the questions that was
asked well what about the MS you know
what about the minerals I like this
chart um this is visual capitalist data
um for the infographics which I thank
them um now over on the left we have
about 20 billion tons 20 billion tons of
fossil fuels between coal oil and gas
that we extract process refine and
distribute mostly to burn
once it’s not a reusable there’s no
recyclability despite our um you know
the discussions about carbon captur
and carbon capture use um we can’t reuse
or recycle that much waste because 20
billion tons when we burn them turns
into 40 to 60 billion tons of carbon
dioxide the entire Global Market for
carbon dioxide today is 230 million tons
um an order of two orders three orders
of magnitude below you know many orders
of magnitude actually below that space
and you know I I’ll be clear here car
carbon captur and
sequestration 90 million tons of CO2 is
used for enhanced o recovery be
skeptical every time somebody says we’re
going to capture carbon and sequester it
as a way out of our Dilemma on the right
here’s some quantification of that
question that was asked earlier so the
Industrial Metals point2 billion tons
you know um three orders of magnitude
below fossil fuels recyclable long-term
durable goods um you know aluminum
copper uh chromium technology and
precious metals which is to say the
battery Metals
lithium
0.002 billion tons it’s a rounding error
compared to the extraction of fossil
fuels today the range between those two
is enormous yes we have to double or
triple our
extraction of some of those
Metals um but it’s from a very small
base the part of the reason our lithium
um shortage last year and the blip and
battery prices occurred well you know
why it disappeared was because well
people just turned on more capacity
there is a lot of minerals under the
Earth and there’s actually something
else going on material
substitution um material substitution
basically says oh I’ve got a copper
transmission wire well I could have an
aluminum transmission wire because
aluminum is actually used in a lot of
transmission wires a lot of overhead
wires that we see as we drive around
actually have aluminum cores with steel
for a bit of
reinforcement but now we’re seeing um uh
composite uh transmission lines and
something called reconductoring
occurrent a composite inside carbon
carbon fiber and some other stuff that
transmits electricity quite well is much
stronger than steel or aluminum doesn’t
sag as much when it Heats so we can
actually Rec conduct our existing
transmission lines with these new
Composites and put 30% or 40% more
electricity through them quite easily
and we can build new transmission lines
with the pylons further apart and
they’re cheaper so in the space of
electrification we have vast ability to
substitute while in the space of fossil
fuels well you can burn coal or you can
burn liquid natural gas or you can burn
crude oil but you don’t have much other
substitutability there so
substitutability is a key message that
gets missed in the materials St we’re
doing this right now um last point in
this John uh alluded to this we’re
already recycling enormous percentag of
this there’s a a disinformation meme out
there saying we’re only recycling 5% of
batteries well that’s like 5% of the
batteries in my Apple watch when we come
to EVS where there are big batteries
we’re already at 95% recycling of EV
batteries even at this nent stage
because there’s so much high quality
pure minerals in them in a single
accessible ton uh and the last lever is
just reuse so we take call it an 80 kgam
battery in a Tesla Model 3 well operates
for 10 years and gets recharged
thousands of times re it’s just being
used over and over and over again
without being depleted at all um you
know without creating CO2 and then well
we take a bunch of them out of the model
3es at end of life and we say okay let’s
stack them all together and create a
behindth meter battery storage facility
for a light industrial fac site so that
we don’t have to increase transmission
to it and then we use it for another 10
years until it’s deg to 70 or 80% and
then we mine those batteries and turn
them into new batteries um you know
Michael lebre refers to this as one of
the um you know superheroes of the
transition you know as we get even more
efficient at all these things we get
close to um the point where we have a
fully circular economy for battery
minerals uh this is you the the degree
of disinformation in this is right to
pull a thread from the beginning
we don’t have to replace the energy in
20 billion tons of fossil fuels we have
to replace the Energy
Services because of all the waste that
comes from those then we get over and
over and over and over and over reuse we
get material substitution and we get
recyclability our requirements for
minerals are a tiny
fraction and we’ll just be using them
more and more okay biofuels I promise
bit on biofuels uh this is the chart
from the uh International Energy
agency uh uh Renewables update um
basically it amounts to if you count it
all up uh 100 million tons of um
biofuels we’re already doing and about
70 million tons of it is biodiesel
between renewable and biodiesel
renewable diesel there’s different
categories and ways to cut it what this
means is we’re already manufacturing is
we’re already bunkering renewable
kerosene in jet aircraft you know
biomass derived jet fuel is in carra
here’s a slightly stinky story the um EU
has 1.4 billion tons of livestock dung
waste a year now livestock dung you
think well that’s what are we going to
do with that well one of the things you
can do is turn it into K into kerosene
for jets and it’s an engineering problem
and an economic question not a
scientifically difficult thing it’s just
biomass every ton of dried biomass turns
into about 04 tons of highquality
biofuels and so if you got 1.4 billion
tons of livestock dun and say 50% of
that mass is um 50% of that mass is
water so you’re down to 700 million tons
oh and then 04 so that’s 04 so that’s 28
0 million tons of biofuels just from a
livestock dung in Europe which right now
emits a lot of high global warming
potential methane and we have that’s not
the only waste stream we also have 2.5
billion tons of food waste um that’s a
full third of the calories we
manufacture every year globally we throw
in landfills you know we don’t have a
there is no um caloric poverty there is
a distribution problem when it comes to
calories there is no biofuels competing
with calories for people problem except
in microl local places what we have is a
place where we’re wasting vast amounts
of biomass which frequently turn into
methane and we can fix that and part of
the fix is turning into the relatively
small numbers of biofuels we require for
Long Haul Aviation and shipping when we
Electrify everything we
can but what about heating you know you
have various things come into this play
there and there’s various silly ideas up
here but I’d like to draw your you know
attention down to the left hand corner
the bottom left corner of the sexy
versus map practical versus foolish
quadrant charts I set up um I did this a
series of them across multiple
Dimensions I’ve iterated them a couple
of times but just look at all the
Technologies heat pumps they’re amazing
right now to be clear in industrial heat
45% of industrial heat is under 200
degrees Cs and we’ve got heat pumps that
can deliver 200 Dees C heat now there’s
lots of solutions for all of that um
induction stoves are better to cook with
than gas in innumerable ways and they’re
all over much of the rest of the world
um I was in uh doing a digital Nomad in
um New Zealand last year for a few weeks
and doing a speaking tour about you know
radical trans transformation of uh uh
radical electrification of
transportation and other things and
every unit we stayed in had an induction
stove it’s just common across Asia
electrode boilers electric Arc furnaces
I’ll talk a bit more about those heavy
big wedge up to 3,000 degrees C heat
used in electric Arc uh furnaces for
scrapping steel um we have all the
heating Solutions we need District
heating is huge uh biomass combined heat
and power I’m as long as combined heat
and power I’m somewhat okay with it but
it’s I’m considering moving it over to
the foolish quadrant electric plasmas
are now up to the temperature of the Sun
and are used for certain classes of
ceramics that are fascinating
electromagnetic frequency like
microwaves but industrial microwaves are
there and yeah insulation insulation
helps too um there’s a we also have the
emerging area of heat storage um it’s
not a slam dunk it’s a bit overhyped in
some ways you know it’s too much into
the sexy and foolish space especially
when it’s talks about uh uh you know
being used for electrical storing
electricity and then retrieving the
electricity that’s a very inefficient
pathway for electrical storage but when
we talk about industrial heat where we
have one process which creates heat and
a process a few hours later which needs
heat just because of the mechanisms heat
storage makes sense and heat storage
makes sense even down at the domestic
level uh I spent time with global
thermostat and the CEO there and they’ve
built a hot water heater that’s a CO2
based heat pump that puts hot water into
a big tank of water and then uses that
for domestic Heating and domestic
Cooling and a bunch of other stuff works
really well um California Innovation and
now being applied to M unit residential
buildings in Brooklyn and elsewhere
great
stuff I did mention
steel so one of the things I did is I
did a big broad view of Steel I looked
across Ross all the existing steel the
growth of Steel since 1990 over here and
that rapid ramp up when China was
building absurd amounts of
infrastructure uh here here’s a data
point for Americans
um at the beginning of 198 1988 China
did not have a
highway now it has
177,000 kilometers of Highway second
only to the United States in length of
Highway ecosystem unit States I think
350,000 kilometers um that’s part of
their massive infrastructural buildup in
2007 they didn’t have High-Speed Rail uh
anywhere now they have 45,000 kilometers
of High-Speed Rail they built cities
they built highways they built railroads
they built Bridges they built enormous
amounts of stuff and that’s what that
curve is but they’re at the end of that
curve their domestic demand for
infrastructure is now tailing off
they’ve built enough infrastructure for
their entire economy and their entire
population and now they’re
replacing um things like uh the worst
coal plants that they built with Hyper
critical coal plants on that note by the
way uh coal is projected to have be Peak
coal in China this year uh gasoline was
Peak gasoline last year in China per the
head of copek the biggest um refiner in
China and we’re you know as B has
pointed out the International Energy
agency says Peak fossil fuels is this
decade and so after this the decline but
steel making we already make a 100
million tons with direct reduction of
iron that’s basically taking a synthetic
gas and mixing it with a high
temperature process with raw iron ore
and derusting it turning rusty iron ore
into unrusted iron and then we can put
that into uh steel manufacturing facil
facilities well the nice thing about
drri that synthetic gas currently comes
from methane from coal or natural gas
well we can use biomethane in there we
also have and I’ve looked at and done
the math on the hybrid green steel
solution and H2 green steel solution um
northern uh European green hydrogen
reduction of iron or to create iron to
create steel and I’ve also looked at the
Boston metal solution um and the foresy
solution which is
electrolysis and no hydrogen at all to
turn any grade of iron ore into iron and
then hence steel um but there’s another
piece it’s that eaf piece here EF is
electric Arc furnaces it’s electric
steel minims now this is a place where
the United States has been leading
globally for a long time so you know
this is a place where the United States
can definitely Pat itself on the
back 70% of us steel demand is met from
Steel electric Arc furnaces uh com
comparably Europe is only 40% that means
they’re not scrapping their steel and
making new steel with it they’re making
new steel from Iron Ore for their steel
demands and the not the optimum is
probably about
75% and that electric Arc furnace of
course 1500 to 3,000 degrees Celsius
heat can be powered by renewable
electricity and increasingly is so great
news there and and once again a
plummeting carbon dioxide emissions from
Steel in the coming decades we’ll see a
flattening of demand we’ll see much more
scrapping especially of fossil fuel
infrastructure like the
911 very large crude carriers floating
around the world or the you know 3
million miles of pipeline of fossil fuel
pipelines in the United States I I like
to think of them as linear mines that
are buried six feet deep um you know and
so they’ll stop being needed because
hvdc is a new pipeline why do we need
pipelines when we’ve got electrons and
so we’re going to be starting to see
much more scrapping and much more low
carbon production with drri of multiple
types and it’ll be pretty good steel is
actually Sol a solvable problem with
Technologies we have in hand it’s an
economic and transformation and capital
question not a technological one this
might be a bit optimistic but it’s
entirely
doable a bit on agriculture this this is
a another Del generated image I put
together for my India discussions uh
just take agriculture is a major climate
problem well green ammonia made from
Green hydrogen is a big part of the
climate solution but also drone-based
agriculture is a big part of it we’re
already doing drone seeding across large
farm areas we’re doing uh seeing in Hyo
uh out of the United States as 200 pound
of of product being applied from a
single
14ot diameter wingspan qu
hexacopter um and two of those units
with all the base station and everything
cost about 200 Grand a tractor from John
Deere which can do the same and compacts
the soil when used it’s about
$700,000 to buy so the tractor eats
about 13 gallons of diesel an hour these
things sip at
electricity drone-based agriculture is
an amazing transformation we’re seeing
crop dusting replaced with electrically
powered drones we’re seeing aerial
surveillance and oversight for data
gathering for precision agriculture
replaced with with drones with sensor
packages we’re seeing that all
integrating it’s a tremendous area of
growth and a tremendous area of
decarbonization and once again
agricultural waste when we divert that
into biofuels it doesn’t turn into
methane and it stops being a greenhouse
gas problem um we don’t have an aable
land problem what we have is a lack of I
most effective automation for
industrialized Agriculture and we need
to move the subsistence Farmers off the
land this is all solvable it’s all
occurring just because of demographic
Trends the um rural areas globally are
diminishing in population cities are
burgeoning automation is occurring and
and we’re going to be able to Green
ammonia as well which is a great A great
win um last slide um this is a heterodox
projection on hydrogen through
2100 the thing that doesn’t get told
often enough in the hydrogen story is it
right now it’s a climate change problem
on the scale of all of Aviation it’s
like 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide
an equivalent per year from
manufacturing hydrogen but there’s a
really good news story about how we’re
going to solve that problem part of it
is a full third of that is being used in
refineries to make gasoline Diesel and
kerosene for jets and guess what well
that’s going away you know we’re not
going to be eliminating refining floss
of
fuels because we still need
petrochemicals but we’re not going to be
taking Alberta crude out of the ground
and spending lots of hydrogen on it to
turn it into diesel for tractors or
gasoline for cars
the use cases are going down and so as
we decarbonize hydrogen which will be
more expensive the um petroleum we
extract will be the lighter lower sulfur
petroleums which don’t need as much
hydrogen so that’s good fertilizer once
again we have Precision agriculture we
also have biogenetics like a full
quarter of hydrogen today is used for
ammonia and that comes from natural gas
or coal when we make that into green
hydrogen it’s more expensive
but with Precision Agriculture and
biogenetics like pivot bio out of the
United States which uses basically turns
off the nitrogen sensor and microbes
that exist around plant roots anyway so
they just instead of you know when we
add fertilizer it goes oh there’s enough
fertilizer I’m just going to get fat
happy and multiply instead it just keeps
making more nitrogen at the root of
plants where it’s needed and so they’ve
already got uh over a million acres of
corn in the United States under with
their product and are seeing a 25%
reduction in fertilizer so this is great
um hydrogen is going to stop being a
problem but it isn’t a transportation or
Energy Solution to be really clear um
you know this is a case where
electrification is being proven so
effective and so efficient there are
very very few use cases and everyone
keeps falling off so that’s it um you
know I got 10 minutes or so for for
question questions so let’s
talk Michael thank you so much uh just
like with John your presentation was
riveting and uh my head is spinning you
did a wonderful job of um outlining the
the market factors that are driving
these enabling Technologies and creating
transformation so thank you so much for
that um so many good detail
um I have one question and then I know
Mike has a question for you as well so
let’s see if we can get to both of those
in the few minutes that we have left um
you had
mentioned that you do you don’t think
that carbon capture is feasible and I
certainly understand that because you
know we’re talking about Technologies at
scale that are very expensive and you
clearly outlin that there are better
ways to phase out um you know highly
emitting uh products product production
things like steel and we all know
concrete’s in there as well and looking
at um
Solutions um that inherently reduce
carbon emissions um but I am curious uh
to hear a little bit more about why you
think that carbon capture at scale is
not feasible um and that you don’t
believe the
hype oh uh so let’s let’s be really
clear about what I assert about carbon
capture and sequestration it’s entirely
possible to capture carb
we’ve been doing it in industrial
processes for 150 years the salv process
which makes the baking soda we put in
our fridges to keep them motor-free well
that captures carbon CO2 in one process
to use it in the next step out of
process we know how to do this and we’ve
been doing it in industrial scales for a
long time similarly we’ve been shoving
carbon dioxide underground for decades
as well in enhanced oil recovery and
we’ve been putting it in pipelines in
for that purpose as well none of this is
technically non
viable um you know there’s significant
problems of economics and com
Alternatives you know uh so that’s kind
of statement one is it gets really
expensive really fast boundary Dam and
Saskatchewan tried to plug um carbon
capture onto its coal plant in order to
use it for enhanced oil recovery to get
some economic benefit out of it and they
at the end of the project said we’re
never going to do this again because
it’s too expensive and it’s a waste of
time this is a coal
a plant that wants to persist and
enhanced o recovery that wants to
persist and they said this is just
economic suicide um similarly as we look
around the world the places where you
can put carbon dioxide in high volumes
are rarely near where the carbon dioxide
is
created you know so as we consider where
we want cement plants well a cement
plant has to be near to the market for
cement because cement is a really heavy
thing you want to minimize the
transportation of that but cement plants
aren’t near great places for carbon
capture and sequestration under the
North Sea in um Europe for example and
so you have to build massive CO2
pipelines well satara Mississippi is a
kind of a case point in couple of years
ago Satan Mississippi population
41 um it’s a little tiny Town kind of
halfway up Mississippi on the western
side well a CO2 pipeline that’s used for
enhanced o recovery in the region had
dense phase CO2 in it which means it was
compressed and liquefied so was a liquid
well when it the pipeline sheared
because of a land slip because of excess
rain oh gee something that is occurring
more and more these days well that dense
phase CO2 turned into 590 times the
volume of CO2 and CO2 is heavier than
air so it rolled downhill in a thick
blanket into satar a mile away across a
highway and put 46 people into
convulsions unconscious on the ground
caused the um caused the evacuation of
over 200 people um 45 people were
hospitalized for observations and
probably have some significant
challenges you know probably have some
significant challenges uh but internal
combustion emergency vehicles and
evacuation Vehicles didn’t work because
they needed too and that blanket occurs
any significant growth of carbon capture
sequestration would require significant
numbers of CO2 pipelines through heavily
populated areas in North America and
Europe in order to get the CO2 from
where it’s being created to where it
needs to be sequestered the safety
concerns are not a policy discussion
right now and must be um the this
doesn’t mean we won’t use carbon capture
in sequestration you mentioned cement
once we elect Electrify everything else
in a cement plant when we bake the
Limestone to turn into Quick lime that
chemical process releases a lot of
carbon dioxide but it’s almost pure easy
to capture we still need to do something
but even there that’s much more
expensive than they use today because
they don’t they just use the atmosphere
is an open sewer today in the future um
what alternatives exist and will they be
cost competitive my assertion is in many
cases alternatives carbon capture will
be cost competitive and so we use
electrochemistry and other Solutions
instead of traditional uh Solutions
bolting on carbon
capure thank you so much and U Michael I
think that we have come up against our
our timeline so again thank you for the
wonderful session uh Mike kigan I’m
gonna pass it back over to you to
introduce our next
presenter great and thank you Michael
for joining us we do appreciate
appreciate it and uh uh hope to have you
back again sometime
Esteemed futurist Michael Barnard will outline projection scenarios for the decarbonization of our global economy as it unfolds for decades into the future, including the reimagining of buildings, distributed energy, concrete and steel, renewables, vehicle-to-grid technologies, and hydrogen based on the fundamentals of physics, economics and human nature.
Subscribe to our channel and visit our website for more information: https://www.greenbuildermedia.com
__________________________________________
Connect with us on Social Media:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/greenbuildermedia/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GreenBuilderMedia
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/GreenBuilderMedia
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/green-builder-media-llc/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/greenbuildermag
Flipboard: https://flipboard.com/@greenbuildermag
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/greenbuilder/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@greenbuilder
__________________________________________
Green Builder Media is North America’s leading green building and sustainable living media company. Through our magazine, website, demonstration homes, and data services we provide actionable information to consumers and builders about how to build and remodel sustainable homes. We focus on net-zero building, green products, energy efficiency, healthy homes, resiliency, connected living, and building science. We also produce environmental-related thought-leadership content and events on such topics as climate change, decarbonization, and electrification.
Learn more on https://www.greenbuildermedia.com/
Subscribe to our once-a-week Vantage e-newsletter—your one-stop digest for green building news, trends, research marketing tips, data, products, and projects…everything you need to know in one quick-read digest. https://www.greenbuildermedia.com/enewsletter-subscribe