Carbon Commentary newsletter
1, Battery recycling. No European car company yet recycles vehicle batteries. Renault said it is now in ‘advanced’ discussions with partners aiming to develop a new factory to extract the metals from batteries that are being scrapped. Industry sources suggest lithium, cobalt and nickel represent almost 30% of the total cost of a passenger car. Renault first announced that it would enter the recycling business three years ago, saying it was intending to develop an experimental factory with large waste processing companies. That venture appears to have stalled but Renault’s interest in full recycling seems to have been restarted by concerns over China’s dominance of the supply chain for new batteries. Renault is also in the process of converting an existing car factory in France into a location for repairing existing batteries and restoring old cars for resale.
2, CCUS at cement plant. One of the largest projects funded by the US Industrial Demonstrations Program is a plan to capture the CO2 at a Heidelberg Materials cement works in Indiana. The target is the capture and storage of about 2 million tonnes of CO2 a year. Heidelberg Materials is unusual among global cement manufacturers in pursuing CCUS as its main decarbonisation route. Other major participants are largely looking at avoiding CO2 emissions by using non-carbonate raw materials. (Much more on this complicated topic in Possible). Heidelberg Materials has set an ambition of 10 million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2030 and has about ten individual sites on which it is working. These include the cement works at the port of Brevik in Norway which will be ready to send its first carbon dioxide to the Northern Lights storage site in the North Sea by the end of 2024. (Thanks to Greg Yakolev).
3, Zeolites for Direct Air Capture. Zeolites, compounds of mostly aluminium, silicon and oxygen, can absorb gases in tiny molecular sieves. These gases can then be released with gentle heating. ZeoDAC, a new US company, raised venture capital to build a business that will use a proprietary zeolite with sieves that preferentially capture CO2. The carbon dioxide can be driven off and stored. One of the new investors is a large Coca-Cola franchise, a business that could use the CO2 in its products. This is a relatively low technology approach to DAC, using cheap materials. Some analysts think it will very much cheaper than the conventional routes pioneered by Climeworks and others.
4, Biochar. Of the 125,000 tonnes of paid-for carbon sequestration in 2023, biochar seems to have been responsible for over 90%. Biochar is very largely composed of carbon which would have eventually entered the atmosphere as CO2. One source suggests that the cost of a tonne of CO2 avoided using this route fell to as little as $131 in 2023. Microsoft added to the purchases of biochar by signing a six year 95,000 tonne carbon removal deal with a company operating in Mexico. The biochar will be made from agricultural wastes and then returned to farms where it is applied to soils to help improve yields and reduce fertiliser use.
5, Charging infrastructure for trucks in the US. A sharp intake of breath greeted an estimate that the cost of infrastructure to allow full electrification of US road freight would be about $1 trillion by 2040 (about 4% of US annual GDP). This would include charging points and electricity network improvement. Others rushed in to question the estimates produced by the Clean Freight Coalition. The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) suggested the report exaggerated the cost of chargers by about ten-fold, quoting estimates from Daimler Truck. The ICCT also suggested a much lower cost for upgraded electricity infrastructure. Whoever is right, if the US is to reach its target of 100% electric truck sales by 2040 it will need very substantial investment in charging, new charging parks and greater electricity supplies.
6. Non-Chinese solar PV manufacturing. Details are missing on some of the main projects to set up PV manufacturing sites outside China but nevertheless the momentum seems to be increasing. Nordcell, a new Swedish company, announced a plan to build a factory with 1.2 GW capacity in the north of the country. (The world had production capacity of about 450 GW at the end of 2022). This factory will use about 1% of the country’s electricity supply and the very low cost power available in northern Sweden is a critical component of any plan to manufacture PV modules. In India, a market analyst wrote that the country had installed about 21 GW of new production facilities for making solar modules in 2023, adding about 50% to the already available capacity. India’s capabilities to manufacture the cells that form the main components for solar modules remains much more limited. As in Sweden, solar PV manufacturing tends to be located where electricity prices are cheap. Australia pledged a US $650 million fund to push local PV manufacture. At the announcement, electricity producer AGL and an innovative Australian solar cell company said that they would explore plans to develop a manufacturing plant at the site of former coal-fired power station in New South Wales.
7, Hydrogen boiler. Very few analysts give hydrogen much of a role in low temperature heating for homes and commercial buildings. Nevertheless, what I think may be the first commercial hydrogen boiler has just been installed to provide heat to a 1400 square metre industrial building in the port of Antwerp. Antwerp is vying with Rotterdam and Hamburg to be the centre of hydrogen shipment in Europe. The hydrogen comes from a 30 kw electrolyser using the output from solar panels on the roof of the building and from grid electricity supplies. Waste heat from the electrolyser is also used to heat the building. No sceptic is going to be convinced by this demonstration site but the project is carefully structured to show hydrogen heating in its best possible light.
8, Buildings made from mass timber. Large buildings made from wood products such as cross laminated timber are being built more frequently and are becoming more complex and interesting in their designs. These structures sequester carbon rather than needing large quantities of high emissions concrete. The first university building in Europe to be constructed in solid wood was recently completed at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Clad in stone, this a remarkably lovely piece of architecture. An even more striking proposal is to build a 155,000 square metre warehouse for a fashion company entirely in wood on the Dutch island of Flevopolder. A beautiful addition to the landscape.
9, Green steel. The battle as to how to decarbonise steelmaking is far from over. Electra makes iron using electricity and some proprietary chemistry. Crucially, it only needs to heat the iron ore raw material to about 60 degrees, unlike Boston Metal which also uses electricity but heats the ore to well over 1,000 degrees. Also of importance, Electra’s process can turn ore containing 55% iron into raw metal whereas hydrogen direct reduction requires much higher percentage iron content. A third advantage is that the process can be powered by intermittent electricity, meaning that users should be able to operate the plant only at times of surplus low-cost power. Finally, Electra’s technology can be operated at any scale. The iron plants can be small or large. Last week the company announced the opening of its pilot plant in Colorado and reiterated its target of ‘millions of tonnes of clean iron by the end of the decade’. (Total global primary steel production is about 1,300 million tonnes a year.) Countries with large reserves of low quality iron ore, such as Australia, will be studying this company’s progress carefully.
Hannah Ritchie wrote a very useful Sustainability by Numbers post that summarised the chapter in Possible on the decarbonisation of steel.