Carbon Commentary newsletter

1, Methanol to kerosene. My guess is that the dominant fuels for shipping and aviation will be green methanol and kerosene respectively. I’ve assumed very different production processes for each fuel but this may be incorrect. Last week green methanol pioneer European Energy announced a deal to divert some of the production from a site in southern Denmark to Metafuels. This young Swiss company will convert the methanol directly into kerosene. Planned volumes are small; the daily production of e-kerosene will be about 12,000 litres, enough to keep an Airbus 350 in the air for about an hour. Nevertheless, this announcement suggests that the conversion of methanol to kerosene by the Metafuels process may be a plausible way of generating competitively priced aviation fuel.

2, Hydrogen from Africa. TotalEnergies and Austrian hydropower utility Verbund gave details of plans to make green hydrogen in Tunisia using electricity from onshore wind and solar. The intention is to build the capacity eventually to make 1 million tonnes of hydrogen a year, which would require about 50 gigawatts of new solar power. The hydrogen will be transported via a pipeline across the Mediterranean to Italy and taken northwards to Austria and southern Germany.  This pipeline project, also agreed in outline last week, will be managed by Italy’s gas network operator SNAM which committed €4bn of investment. The new pipeline is backed by the EU, which is looking to set up routes for at least 10 million tonnes of hydrogen to get to major industrial areas from low-cost renewables locations such as Tunisia within the next few years. Hydrogen transport from North Africa into Europe will a major source of EU stored energy.

3, PET recycling. An important symbolic moment. Chemical recycling pioneer Carbios showed off a small number of fully recycled small PET bottles for perfume manufacturer L’Occitane. The transparent product was made from coloured PET products and other wastes, none of which could be recycled using existing mechanical technologies. Chemical recycling, such as the enzymatic process used by Carbios breaks down plastics into the constituent monomers which can be rebuilt into clear polymers. Carbios specialises in PET recycling but its technology can be extended to many other types of plastics.

4, Bacteria to eat N20. Norwegian researchers published work which suggested that adding a specific and tenacious type of bacteria to soil could help break down nitrous oxide (N2O), a powerful global warming gas. Nitrous oxide on farmland arises mostly from the addition of artificial fertilisers The bacterium identified by the scientists is hungry to get access to the nitrogen in the gas and can be supplied mixed with the waste from biogas manufacture. The researchers say that their technique reduced emissions from soil by ’50-95%’. In the UK nitrous oxide emissions from soil account for only about a quarter of one percent of the national total but the figure is much higher in some other countries. In India, N2O emissions, most of which arise from the applications of fertilisers to soil, are possibly as much as 7% of total emissions so extensive use of this bacterium can make a measurable dent in the national GHG output .

5, EV sales. New forecasts from EV Volumes suggest a rise in global sales from 14.2 million vehicles in 2023 to 16.6m this year. World market share for all plug-in vehicles will rise to 19%. This rise is being driven by China, which saw a 44% share of car sales for plug-in cars in April, up from 33% a year earlier. Chinese EV sales now account for substantially more than half of the world market with total sales in 2023 of over 8 million cars, almost three times the EU figure and five times the volume sold in the US.

6, Hydrogen-ready power stations. UK utility Centrica said it would installing gas turbines capable of running on 100% hydrogen in a new ‘peaking’ electricity generator. The turbines will be gradually ramped up from 3% hydrogen in trials beginning in late 2024/early 2025. Hydrogen will be produced and stored locally. The process for making the hydrogen is innovative, using natural gas as a source and with the carbon being stored as carbon black.

7, Growing cotton. Some estimates suggest that cotton cultivation is responsible for almost half a percent of global emissions. This arises largely because of the extensive use of fertilisers (as well as unequalled amounts of pesticide and increasingly scarce fresh water). One experiment in the Netherlands grew cotton in greenhouses. The positive results suggests a possibility that cotton production could be transferred to regions outside the normal hot and humid growing areas. The Dutch textile manufacturer sponsoring the work reports that production per unit of land was up to 23 times the levels expected in the tropics while fresh water use was minimised and pesticide spraying was avoided completely. The cotton was whiter and higher quality than field grown products. Fertiliser use was also significantly reduced because the cotton was not grown in conventional soil. The manufacturer reports that the cotton grown in this small trial was used to make jeans using an entirely local supply chain. If greenhouse growing works in high latitudes the long term impact on the poorer countries that specialise in cotton growing and textile manufacture could be severe but climate change is unfortunately likely to make cultivation increasingly difficult in decades to come.

8, Netherlands steel. One of the most important steelworks in Europe at IJmuiden on the Dutch coast gave more details of its plan to convert to hydrogen. It expects that the large blast furnace at the site will be switched to direct reduction and electric arc furnaces by 2030. The equipment will be provided by Italian engineering companies Danieli and Tenova, which seem to be gaining a good share of European steel decarbonisation business. The owner of the steelworks, Tata looks to achieve complete carbon neutrality by 2045 with substantial backing from the Dutch government. The measures announced this week will reduce emissions by 40%, or around 3% of total Netherlands emissions, by about 2030.

9, Small Modular Reactors. Several nations are attempting to build SMR fleets, although without clear sight of the likely costs or timescales. Britain has set up a competition between 6 potential suppliers to find the best design. One of the six – Holtec, a US energy engineering business – has started the process of finding a manufacturing site in the UK. The publicity for this announcement said that Holtec’s 160 megawatt reactors, which are still at the design stage, would cost between £1-£2 billion. This is between 25% and 150% higher than specified on Holtec’s US web site, which offers a figure of $1 billion. The troubling lack of certainty over any aspect of SMRs should trouble the backers of this technology. This week IEEFA put out a short report stressing the huge cost overruns in the tiny number of SMRs that have been developed worldwide. The only SMR currently in construction, CAREM 5 in Argentina, is now expected to cost at least seven times its initial estimate.

10, Electric trucks for mining. The huge energy consumption of enormous mining trucks, and the need to work continuously for many hours of the day, has made some think that this sector will be one of the few transport markets to use hydrogen or low carbon ethanol rather than batteries. But BHP and Rio Tinto are going to trial electric trucks made by Caterpillar and Komatsu over the next few years at their Pilbara mines in Australia. Data from the experiments will be shared. The Caterpillar 793 battery vehicle weighs 240 tonnes and a further announcement recently said another vehicle will also be working at a Vale mine in Brazil.