So you touch upon a good point with the carbon sinks. Fossil fuels with their biogenic origin are obviously a large carbon sink much the same way as plant matter (terrestrial or oceanic) today is, and also in terms of the gas hydrate deposits offshore and in permafrost settings.
I think others have raised the valid point of the carbon here just being recycled in the chain. It leads me to think that what this might be is a nascent pillar of the carbon economy we'd need if we want to go some way towards mitigating the effects of emissions today. It's clear that not only do net emissions need to be cut down we need to sequester a lot of the carbon that's already been emitted. That's where large CCS (carbon capture and sequestration/storage) solutions might come to play. As a geoscientist living through this energy transition, it doesn't surprise me that you have large projects underway in the North Sea, such as the
Northern Lights programme being led by the Norwegians, where to put it simply, the plan is to use skills normally best suited for the discovery and extraction of hydrocarbon to instead trap carbon dioxide underground. Essentially by utilising the existing infrastructure in this area, liquified carbon dioxide (from processing plants onshore) will be injected into reservoir rocks in the subsurface for storage. Now to do this we'd absolutely need a carbon economy that provides a monetary incentive towards this beyond the obvious looming climate requirement. The circular nature of the proposed e-fuel solutions being put forward by legacy hydrocarbon firms does give you the hint that it could set up a self sustaining cycle yes.
The natural solution would be to limit it to the hydrogen cracking stage and directly use that in fuel cells. That seems the obvious way for sure, even I will admit. The attraction for the synthetic fuels and e-fuels comes in their ability to work well with a lot of the existing ICE platforms globally and the fact that it could with little modification be done with existing transport and delivery infrastructure (think of petrol pump forecourts - in a BEV future, you'd need to change the layout to not just incorporate the charging infrastructure but the longer durations for the vehicles to do so, whereas e fuels could just as easily be what's in the underground tanks of the same pumps with a fill up being just as simple). So really it might seem like a lot more thermodynamically and energy expensive to arrive at the stage of the e-fuel but if you think about it in terms of the whole shebang, the entire global mobility picture, ships, planes, vehicles, you name it, e fuels are the compromise solution that involves the least need for total revamps. I think therein lies the attractiveness.
There is of course the fact that increasingly as the reality of the climate situation becomes more accepted, and thus embraced by leadership globally, it could be positioned as a means of a new kind of job creation tied to the massive systemic changes that'll be required for say a BEV future.
I'd love to see a way we could keep the ICE alive and kicking without the large pollutant tail attached to it, thereby not needing to commit vast swathes of machines to obsolescence, but I do recognise that BEVs are the flavour of the times now (though I have concerns about their own footprint if you consider that with current tech as the benchmark - we'll be running into a lithium supply bottle neck and the target will once again be back on traditional baddies, big mining), I remain curious of the fact that Toyota have placed such large bets on hydrogen. Fuel cells, especially if the hydrogen were acquired from cracking using green electricity would be especially attractive, embracing too the need for these new green mobility jobs instead of say legacy ICE related roles. Furthermore, to very gingerly step upon issues with global electricity grid structures, if the cracking for hydrogen was done making use of the traditional night time surplus, you really would be making extremely efficient use of the pieces at play as they are.
11th December 2020, 22:11
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Thanks
