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How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

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Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#61

Post by toomuchtodo »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #54
toomuchtodo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a bold claim. I don't think it is [1] [2]. Regardless of cell and pack density, there's plenty of open land to install outdoor enclosures. Utility storage isn't cars, where density is terribly important. [1] https://i2.wp.com/evobsession.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06... [2] https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/09/100-kwh-tesla-battery-c...

I fear you do not sufficiently appreciate the gravitas of the energy storage problem. The big Hornsdale power reserve in Australia is 130 MWh. Say you want to store 6 hours of US average energy consumption. That's 1 500 000 MWh, or 11 000 Hornsdale stations. Just for 6 hours of electricity storage.

It's ~6000 Tesla Megapack stations [1], along with HVDC transmission lines (if we're upgrading transmission lines from AC->DC, drop those aerial lines underground while you're at it for reliability and to stave off the NIMBYs). I entirely appreciate the scale of the problem we're facing regarding energy storage (climate change keeps my up at night), hence my arguments for solutions available today, not those that might (might!) start producing power in a decade. You can buy these battery stations today (Tesla quotes a 3 month deployment cycle). You can recycle their battery cells today.

There are over 7,000 power plants in the United States run by over 3,000 companies. There are over 55,000 substations and over 450,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines. I don't believe what I'm proposing is unreasonable. Hard? Sure. But unreasonable? Absolutely not. Going to the Moon was hard, and we still went to the Moon.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/introducing-megapack-utility-scal...

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#62

Post by godelski »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #25
seren wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that nuclear is running 24/7 even if it is not windy (minus the costly maintenance). As long as we don't have a superconductor grid around whole hemisphere, it seems to be the best way to generate power at night.

If it was the best, the entire US commercial generator fleet wouldn't be on death's door due to the economics. If you want to subsidize the last 59 US nuclear plants based on their low CO2 emissions, extending their operating license (if it can be done safely) until cleaner base load arrives, that's a sound decision. Building more nuclear is not. I question if we even have the fortitude to fund safe cleanup of existi…

> If it was the best, the entire US commercial generator fleet wouldn't be on death's door due to the economics.

This is an extreme oversimplification of the issues in nuclear. I'll suggest it's as extreme of an oversimplification as saying "the only reason we don't have nuclear is because public FUD".

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#63

Post by einpoklum »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #43

My climate change plan is simple: a ratcheting carbon fee with dividend[1], together with a carbon tariff as part of a climate club[2] The industries where it's easy will take the easy way to avoid the carbon fee. The industries where it's hard will pay the fee but will see the ratchet coming and will be furiously researching alternatives. Worse come to worse, at some point the fee will be more than sequestration cos…

"Fee"? "Dividend"? That's not a plan to stop and reverse climate change, that's a plan for financiers and capitalists to trade in the blame for continuing climate change.

No no, emissions need to be cut - for real. There need to be schedules and (tax-based) funding to help make this happen. And - an expropriation of intellectual property so that technologies developed to help this happen aren't controlled by any single company or cartel - or nation.

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#64

Post by ThomPete »

I am glad to see Bill Gates being more vocal about this. There has been an unrealistic optimism when it comes to how easy it is to find alternatives to what we are currently using.

What people forget is that things like plastic ever-present not because of some evil conspiracy by oil companies to push an inferior material on the market but because it's superior to all other materials we know of.

The problem isn't product innovation but fundamental science and we have had no new discoveries since oil to fundamentally change how we approach progress.

Having listened to a lot of pitches by claimed alternative to plastic it's been very obvious to me that we simply need improvements in fundamental science not just in technology. I.e we lack fundamentally new discoveries to truly change our ways.

Nanotech might help us some of the way but we are nowhere near the utopia a lot of people seem to be thinking.

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#65

Post by garmaine »

_Microft wrote: post #44
garmaine wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the source of power. It’s the chemical process itself. You get oxygen out of a metal oxide by binding it with carbon and releasing the CO2. Canadian smelting is just as dirty in this respect. The only other alternative is electrolyzing water to get hydrogen, which binds with the metal oxide’s oxygen to make water again. But not only is this really inefficient by comparison, but now you’re adding O2 to the at…

Is using hydrogen for that an actual process or just an idea? There's the problem that hydrogen can make metals brittle, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement

It’s how pure silicon is made today for the transistors in the device you are reading this on.

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#66

Post by _Microft »

philipkglass wrote: post #57
_Microft wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is using hydrogen for that an actual process or just an idea? There's the problem that hydrogen can make metals brittle, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement

It's an actual process. The ability of hydrogen to reduce hot iron oxides to metallic iron has been known at least since the early 19th century. But it has not been done on an industrial scale before because using fossil fuels is cheaper, and reducing GHG emissions has not been a significant priority until recently. EDIT: Joseph Priestley actually discovered that iron oxide ("calx of iron") could be reduced to the me…

Thanks!

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#67

Post by godelski »

travisoneill1 wrote: post #29
toomuchtodo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost [1]. Time from breaking ground to "permission to operate" as well (even if you cut red tape and systemize manufacturing of nuclear generators, you will not be as fast as wind, solar, and batteries). Solar PV Thin Film Utility Scale: $36-$44/MWh | Onshore Wind: $29-$56/MWh | Nuclear: $112-$189/MWh Can you build nuclear faster than the rest of the world can build and install PV solar and onshore/offshore wind turb…

You conveniently forgot to list the costs of storage from the source you linked. The costs range from $108-$471 for utility scale storage. So nuclear is the clear winner in cost because it doesn't require this.

I just want to break in here because that's a large range in prices. To explain those, they are because the different amounts of storage capacity. These very drastically in location. So somewhere like SoCal needs less than in the Bay area because SoCal is almost always sunny and windy. The Bay has plenty of shady days (go talk to the people at LLNL, there's plenty of people there working on this problem). Alternatively, places like Seattle have long periods of low sun and wind so need extremely high amounts of storage.

This is the argument for a nuclear substitute, specifically in places where renewables are difficult. You don't replace renewables in SoCal with nuclear, you replace coal in Seattle with nuclear (and continue the expansion of renewables and storage).

The underlying reason the IPCC promotes nuclear is that it is the only existing technology that can fill in the gap for renewables. It can handle load balancing, reduce storage costs/vulnerability, and helps with the duck curve (which has to this date not been solved by batteries). This isn't a "fund nuclear vs fund battery research" argument (seriously guys, stop with this!). This is a "well this works and we can start building it right now. Let's do that while we keep inventing new solutions because things are too bad to not have a backup plan. We also need to increase the total funding and use every feasible option on the table" kind of argument. I'm not sure why this is so difficult to see. No pro nuclear person is anti renewable. If they are I'll call them anti-scientific too.

No pro nuclear person is anti-renewable. Come on. Let's stop having this debate. It's not a VS game, we have to use every available option.

Edit: I want to reiterate what I said in my original comment. Not following the expert advice of those working in climate is anti-scientific. You may be as smart as them but you sure aren't as close to the data and have access to tons of other people working on the same problem. Trust the scientists. If you don't give a good reason, but you're going to have to go into as much detail as they do. You don't argue with scientist about dark matter, which we know less about than climate. It's just shocking to me that people here get all up in arms and ignore the expert advice.

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#68

Post by dragonwriter »

godelski wrote: post #67
travisoneill1 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You conveniently forgot to list the costs of storage from the source you linked. The costs range from $108-$471 for utility scale storage. So nuclear is the clear winner in cost because it doesn't require this.

I just want to break in here because that's a large range in prices. To explain those, they are because the different amounts of storage capacity. These very drastically in location. So somewhere like SoCal needs less than in the Bay area because SoCal is almost always sunny and windy. The Bay has plenty of shady days (go talk to the people at LLNL, there's plenty of people there working on this problem). Alternative…

> No pro nuclear person is anti-renewable.

I've seen plenty of anti-renewable and pro-nuclear (and often pro-fossil fuel, from the same source) advocacy from people in the US Right. It is simply false to say “no pro-nuclear person is anti-renewable.”

It is accurate to say that some pro-nuclear people are also pro-renewable.

> It's not a VS game

When it comes to resource allocation, it absolutely is. There aren't infinite resources to allocate.

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#69

Post by chrdlu »

I think a lot of this comes down to resources and innovation.

As more money is invested and spent on research and development of new ideas, I think some things will eventually start to work providing a solution to these issues.

For more money to flow into the ecosystem, we need people to see value from being carbon neutral personally.

If you'd like to become carbon neutral, I'd suggest you check out https://projectwren.com/

Re: How do we cut down on emissions from steel, cement, and plastic?

#70

Post by dTal »

einpoklum wrote: post #63
bryanlarsen wrote: post #43

My climate change plan is simple: a ratcheting carbon fee with dividend[1], together with a carbon tariff as part of a climate club[2] The industries where it's easy will take the easy way to avoid the carbon fee. The industries where it's hard will pay the fee but will see the ratchet coming and will be furiously researching alternatives. Worse come to worse, at some point the fee will be more than sequestration cos…

"Fee"? "Dividend"? That's not a plan to stop and reverse climate change, that's a plan for financiers and capitalists to trade in the blame for continuing climate change. No no, emissions need to be cut - for real. There need to be schedules and (tax-based) funding to help make this happen. And - an expropriation of intellectual property so that technologies developed to help this happen aren't controlled by any sing…

You seem to be agreeing violently. A carbon fee + dividend takes money away from people who pollute, and gives it to people who don't. That's essentially tax funded emissions reduction - pollute less and the government will give you money. And schedules? The ratchet covers that.

You make a good point about the intellectual property, though. The system will still work without such precautions, though - eventually if polluting became expensive enough, relevant technology would be licensed.

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