Oh fuck it, thread time.
Inspired in a way by a certain long discussion by a well known Sci-fi author about the announcement of a Nuclear powered container ship from China. I wanna talk about "technology won't save us" When it comes to climate change.
"Technology won't save us" is the usual refrain when someone mentions Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). CCS is often touted by the fossil fuel industry as a way of us being able to keep burning dinosaurs. Continue our lives unchanged...
1/n
so we can continue the lifestyles to which we have become accustomed. Alas, for all the talk of CCS in the last couple of decades, it's never come to pass. At least not at a large scale, not capturing 100% of emissions from that which it is fitted. And it doesn't work on mobile emitters like trucks and ships. CCS is a bit like a disability dongle, but for fossil fuel companies.
BUT, and here comes the but. There are some technologies, which we are going to need if we are to have a hope...
2/n
of surviving climate change. So in this thread I want to talk about some of those technologies, and how far away they are from being reality.
To start with, I wanna talk about ammonia. Currently ammonia production accounts for about 1.8% of global emissions. Which is about the same as shipping globally. It's made by taking Methane in natural gas, splitting that to make hydrogen, and CO2. The CO2 is dumped, and the hydrogen is combined with Nitrogen. Ammonia is however critical...
3/n
to our society. It's used primarily for fertiliser production, as well as a feed stock for various industrial processes. It can also be used to creation greenhouse gas emission free electricity via fuel cells. Those fuel cells could be used on ships... or trains... As long as the ammonia is produced without needing fossil fuels, it's a good way of powering things where Batteries don't scale.
Ammonia can be produced electrochemically, using just nitrogen (from air), & hydrogen (from h20)
4/n
Proof of concepts are there, we just need to scale it up. It's a great way to use surplus energy from renewables, or for renewables constructed in places with lots of sun, but few people. It's safer and easier to transport than hydrogen. It's an technology we are going go need to develop.
Next up. Steel. Those who remember my recent epic thread on the subject will know that steel is really important to our world. But it also accounts for about 7% of global emissions.
5/n
Steel is produced by reducing Iron ore with a source of carbon, this is usually from coke made from coal. So to make this emissions free, we need to replace that carbon source, or find a way to bypass it entirely. Here we have two potential technologies showing promise. One is to use hydrogen instead of carbon as the reducing agent. Hydrogen can be produced cleanly via electrolysis of water. This method is already in commercial production in Sweden, producing steel for volvo.
6/n
The other option is Electrolysis. A bit like how we make Aluminium. This has shown promise in small scale setups, and there is a commercial scale pilot due to go online in 2025. It's showing great promise, as is the Hydrogen approach. They just need to be rolled out at scale. (something something, future not evenly distributed yet).
Next up. Cement. This is about 3-8% of global emissions depending on source. Cement is a key part of our modern society.
7/n
Cement is a fundamental part of our society. The built environment would be very different if we didn't have cement. While there are moves to reduce it's use (see wooden sky scraper). We can't reduce our use to zero. We're gonna always need some cement. But it's production is problematic. It's basically made by cooking limestone at over 1400°C, to remove Co2 from the limestone, to make quick lime. This is one area we don't really have a viable technology to avoid emissions.
8/n
There's lots of people trying to find a way of making cement without emitting greenhouse gases, but none are ready for use at scale. But we're gonna need a solution here if we are to have some hope.
Next up. Heating. Let's step away from chemical processes for a bit and look at the built environment we live in. 17.5% of emissions come from our buildings, via heating, cooling, and lighting. Lighting is a solved issue. LED's are incredibly efficient, and can be powered by renewables.
9/n
But for most of the world, heating still takes the form of burning stuff to keep warm. In the developed world most homes and offices are heated by burning natural gas. And while the fossil fuel industry has talked about using hydrogen in the gas pipes to fuel these, so we don't have to change anything. That has proven to be unviable stuff used to distract politicians. We have a technology for heating that is incredibly efficient (like 300-500% efficient), and well understood.
10/n
Heat pumps are an amazing technology. They are essentially a very large fridge run in reverse. If you want to know more about them, Technology Connections on Youtube has some great videos explaining how they work. They are absolutely brilliant, and combined with better insulation, they are going to allow us to heat our homes and offices with 100% renewable electricity cheaply and efficiently. Alas there's a lot of FUD out there from those who make a living from boilers.
11/n
So that's 4 technologies. Ammonia, Steel, Cement, Heating, that between them could help us reduce our emissions by over ⅓rd. Something that is going to be critical to the chances of our society surviving beyond 2040. And with all bar cement, we have solutions for them now. We just need the political will to roll them out more. But we also need the renewable energy sources to support them. That means thousands, if not tens of thousands of wind turbines.
13/n
The largest turbines now are able to generate upto 16Mw of energy. There's a lot of offshore wind resources we're not yet making use of. Ditto solar. Every suitable surface in our built environment needs to be covered in solar panels. Solar has come down so much in cost now, and will only get cheaper. there's little excuse now. Think of all the big warehouses and apartment blocks and shopping centres. Cover them all with solar.
14/n
With energy from renewables we can power the industrial processes (ammonia, cement, steel), heat our homes and offices. All without destroying our environment. There's no excuses anymore. We know what we need to do. We have the technologies we need to do it (OK, except for cement). As William Gibson said. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. It's time to distribute things a bit more evenly. Some technologies won't save us. But these ones. These are critical to our survival.15/15
@quixoticgeek I really appreciate threads like this because "we have the technologies" is believable to folks without an incentive not to believe, but non-obvious. Actually enumerating the individual things we need to change with what we already know about how to change them makes the problem feel a lot more tractable and gives ppl grounding to counter narratives that we can't.
@quixoticgeek At least in the US, if you want to lower your electric bill by going solar, you have three options:
1 - if you have 10s of thousands of dollars extra somewhere, you can use that
2 - you can take out a loan, but if you don’t plan to stay in your current house forever, this probably raises your monthly bill, and you’re effectively buying solar for the next owner
3 - you can do a lease/PPA, paying a lower monthly bill, but on a 20+ year contract that may make selling painful.
@quixoticgeek Each of these options creates just enough friction that it’s easy to end up not doing anything, unfortunately. I’d love to have solar on my roof - I’m in a great location, just got a new roof this year - but we don’t have a big enough chunk of savings to make paying out of pocket work, financing doesn’t meet the goal of lowering our costs in the next 10 years or so, and too many people say they’d never buy a house with a PPA because of headaches.
@quixoticgeek Which makes me think this is a decision that needs to be moved above the average consumer’s head, but the mechanism to do that is beyond my grasp.
@quixoticgeek I'd like to add #sai. My blog describes how SAI can cool the earth in 2 years and keep temperature steady even if CO2 keeps rising. Will give us time to reduce emissions.
Risks are many times smaller than impact #climatechange and manageable
Please read the blog before you disagree
And sorry, its very long and thorough
@quixoticgeek and parking lots. Covered parking is more valuable than uncovered so you get a double benefit. Also it's a whole lot easier to retrofit solar car ports on an existing concrete pad than haul them up to a roof.
@SkipHuffman nah. Just get rid of parking lots. Private cars are ridiculously inefficient, they destroy cities. Deploy public transport, cycling, and walking. Either use the parking lots as places to build new buildings, or convert them back to nature.
@quixoticgeek parking lots exist, as does significant private car ownership. Changing that is far more complicated than just sticking solar roofs over big patches of concrete and asphalt.
@SkipHuffman if society is to have any hope. We need to move away from private car ownership. It's that simple.
@quixoticgeek I've got plenty of hope there. In a century from I expect car ownership to be as much of a specialist hobby as airplane ownership is now. And all the old "parking lots" will just be solar farms with weird lines on the concrete underneath.
@SkipHuffman my hope is they are converted into parks, or buildings. There are a lot of parking lots...
@quixoticgeek oh yes. Especially the ones closer to town centers and train stations. The ones surrounding suburban and exurban big box stores and malls will need rewilding as populations continue to concentrate.
@quixoticgeek@social.v.st it’d be interesting if a sort of “transparent solar cell” could be invented, which sounds like a contradiction, but let’s pretend it isn’t and it made sense
@quixoticgeek It doesn't actually have to be expensive to install a heat pump. We installed a heat pump in our house in NL at very low cost because we couldn't afford to do it otherwise.
Unfortunately it's only possible to get a grant from the Dutch government for a heat pump if you have a commercial company come along to do an expensive install of a bigger and less efficient system than we now use to heat our home.
That's pretty ridiculous IMO.
http://davidhembrow.blogspot.com/2023/08/an-all-electric-home-with-air.html
@hembrow @quixoticgeek
Very interesting report. One question: how much noise does the outdoor unit generate, and could it be a problem for the neighbours?
@andrewprice @hembrow i wouldn't put it outside your neighbours bedroom window. But other than that pretty quiet.
@andrewprice @hembrow looking at some datasheets. 59db for the outside unit and 22db indoors.
@quixoticgeek That's about right. I can't hear it at all from inside our home so I don't think it likely that the neighbours can hear it in theirs either. You can hear it outside when you stand next to it, but by the time you're a few metres away other city sounds are louder @andrewprice
@andrewprice @hembrow @quixoticgeek Just like an outdoor air conditioner, of which umpty-zillion exist around the world.
@quixoticgeek
As an aside, @TechConnectify is here in the Fedi
@dpflug @TechConnectify yeah. I was trying to be kind by not tagging Alec and blowing up his notifications.
@quixoticgeek
Uh....my bad. 
Though I assume his notifications are a constant explosion these days.
@dpflug I can still try not to make it worse...
@quixoticgeek
Yep! Now I'm curious what they'd prefer.
@dpflug no harm In asking. @TechConnectify if I'm doing a thread and I mention your videos. Would you prefer to be tagged so people can find you, or untagged so as to be kind to your notifications?
@quixoticgeek This is so true... but explaining it to people without a thermodynamics background is really tricky. It seems like magic. 300-500% efficiency? You're pulling my leg, right? 😬
But their main drawback currently is they are expensive to install. This is a political problem that is easy to fix with subsidies and simple economy of scale. .NL installed 100000 heat pumps in 2023. They hope to install another 120000 in 2024. Still tiny numbers, but a great start. You can also run a heat pump in reverse, solving cooling too. This is a great technology. It's mature. It works. It's understood. And it's really unevenly distributed.
12/n