Good morning all and welcome back to the Green New Spiel, the newsletter bringing you the latest stories and developments in the world of clean-tech, green energy and other climate related news.
Today’s Green New Spiel covers the following stories:
🏭 2022’s emissions - Moving the needle
🛢 🧿 Carbon capture - Putting oil back in the ground, how charming
🚿 CMA’s coming after greenwashing
🔥 Europe’s wasted heat
🔋 3D printing solid-state batteries
📈 📊 Further reading - Decarbonising: the long trends
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🏭 Moving the needle
We made relative progress in 2022 with a smaller than predicted rise in CO2 emissions of just under 1%. This was in part attributed to clean energy resources as “without clean energy growth the rise in emissions last year would have been nearly three times as high”, according to the IEA.
Electricity and heat generation contributed the most to increases in emissions, partially due to extreme weather (i.e. droughts and heatwaves) as well as nuclear power plants being offline.
2023 has the potential to further reduce the growth in emissions due to the record year we saw in renewable energy installations.
🛢 🧿 Putting oil back in the ground, how charming
We came across a form of carbon capture which hasn’t seen the spotlight as much as other names in the industry, such as Climeworks’ air capture technology, despite apparently capturing much more CO2 than Climeworks.
Welcome Charm Industrial - it takes carbon naturally captured in biomass (think agricultural waste), heats it to 500°C in a few seconds without burning it (a process called fast pyrolysis), producing a bio-oil and ash. The carbon rich oil is pumped deep underground and solidified, avoiding the risk of it escaping back into the atmosphere. The ash instead can be used as a fertiliser.
Should the biomass have been left to decompose, burn or break down, it would have slowly released its stored carbon back into the atmosphere.
What about the energy used in fast pyrolysis? Isn’t that producing emissions? According to Charm, their full life cycle analysis demonstrates that for every one tonne of biomass entering their process, a net 0.85 tonnes of CO₂e removed.
You or your business can use Charm to offset your own emissions - check out their subscriptions here (no this is not sponsored before you ask…).
🚿 Greenwashing yourself clean
Hyundai launched a hydrogen powered car in the spring of 2019: they described the car as being so “beautifully clean” that it “purifies the air as it goes”. To go a step further the firm boasted that 10,000 of their cars on the road would be the equivalent of the benefit of planting 60,000 trees .
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) deemed the advert to be misleading and did not give the full context to consumers. Now, in response to a number of loose green claims being used to sell products across markets, the CMA may soon likely have big corporates worried: firms could face fines equating to 10% of their global turnover for misleading environmental claims.
🔥 Wasted heat
Most industrial and business processes are not energy efficient, wasting valuable energy. Cars for example waste energy in the form of noise, data centres produce heat and old lightbulbs get too hot, despite being there to shine light, not heat your living room. This is even greater issue for larger scale industries and production processes.
Danfoss, a Danish multinational, recently published a white paper on the energy wasted across Europe. According to Danfoss, the EU alone produces excess heat which equates to 2,860 TWh/y, almost equalling the EU’s total energy demand for heat and hot water in residential and service sector buildings.
They argue that a “global push for higher efficiency can help avoid almost 30 million barrels of oil per day (that corresponds to triple Russia’s average production in 2021) and 650 bcm of natural gas per year – around four times what the EU imported from Russia in 2021.” Read the solutions they are already implementing here.
🔋 3D printing solid-state batteries
Silicon Valley based Sakuu has developed a 3D printing platform that it claims can help optimise the time and cost of producing solid-state batteries, helping them reach commercial scale faster.
The significance of such innovation comes from the benefits of using solid-state technology over lithium-ion and other traditional batteries: they degrade less quickly, have shorter charging times, are less hazardous, have a higher energy density and are more compact. Compared to leading lithium-ion batteries, Sakuu says its solid-state batteries are 50% smaller and 40% lighter. Pretty neat.
They are now working with Porsche to develop a gigafactory for commercial manufacturing.
📈 📊 Decarbonising: the long trends
We were recently listening to Shayle Kann’s Catalyst podcast (which is fantastic by the way, you should all check it out) and we heard him interview Nat Bullard, a journalist who writes for Bloomberg New Energy Finance (aka BloombergNEF). Nat produces an annual slide deck taking you through an empirical journey of decarbonisation and the long term trends in our global mission to reach net zero.
If you want some interesting content whilst eating your lunch today take a few minutes to flick through his slides - you’re very likely to learn something new.
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Ciao,
Carlo and Rob