Reliance to build 100 gigawatts of renewable energy projects
Mukesh Ambani’s group aims to be net carbon zero by 2035
The conglomerate led by Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man, announced plans to invest $76 billion toward clean energy projects, dwarfing an earlier commitment of $10 billion by the world’s biggest fossil-fuel billionaire.
Reliance Industries Ltd., controlled by Ambani, has signed pacts with the state government of Gujarat for a total investment of 5.96 trillion rupees ($81 billion), according to an exchange filing Thursday. Of this, about 5 trillion rupees would be used over the next 15 years to build 100 gigawatts of renewable power projects and a green hydrogen network while 600 billion rupees will be for factories making solar modules, hydrogen electrolyzers, fuel cells and storage batteries, the filing said.
The remaining sum is to be spent in the retail-to-refining group’s new and existing projects, including the upgrade of its telecom network for 5G services and expansion of its consumer retail businesses. Reliance has already “started the process of scouting land” for its renewable energy power projects and has requested the Gujarat administration for 450,000 acres (182,110 hectares) in the arid Kutch region.
Though the investment pact is just a memorandum of understanding right now, it outlines the scope of Ambani’s green ambitions and is a big step up from the $10 billion investment over three years he had announced in June. Ambani is in the midst of transforming his fossil fuel-fed empire and pivoting it toward green energy and digital technology.
Ambitious Target
These projects will also boost Reliance’s target to make its operations carbon neutral by 2035 – an ambitious target for a company that derived 60% of its revenue from oil refining and petrochemicals.
The announcement follows billionaire Gautam Adani-led conglomerate’s pact with South Korean steel giant Posco to explore business opportunities in India, including setting up a green steel mill in Gujarat, with a potential investment of $5 billion. Adani has committed to invest a total of $70 billion by 2030 across its green energy value chain.
Both the billionaires and their ability to walk the talk on their green energy commitments are crucial if the Narendra Modi-led government has to achieve its target of making the country net carbon zero by 2070.
Like their global peers, Reliance and Adani groups, who made their fortunes from fossil fuels, are now aggressively expanding their clean energy footprint amid mounting pressure to join the fight against climate change.
Panasonic will begin using copper from recycled batteries supplied by Redwood Materials to manufacture new lithium-ion batteries at its factory in Nevada later this year. According to TechCrunch, the first recycled material from Redwood will be copper foil, a vital component of the anode side of a battery cell. The anode is typically made of copper foil coated with graphite. Redwood will begin producing the copper foil in the first half of 2022 and Panasonic will start using it to make new lithium-ion cells by the end of the year.
Last September, Redwood Materials announced plans to produce critical battery materials in the United States. It is building a $2 billion factory that will produce cathodes and anode foils with a projected annual volume of 100 gigawatt-hours worth of materials by 2025. That’s enough batteries made from recycled materials to power 1,000,000 electric cars.
“Our work together to establish a domestic circular supply chain for batteries is an important step in realizing the full opportunity that EVs have to shape a much more sustainable world,” said Allan Swan, president of Panasonic Energy of North America during last September’s presentation.
The announcement marks Panasonic’s push to use more recycled materials, which in turn helps it reduce the amount of newly mined raw materials it must rely on. It also shows how Redwood continues to grow its business.
Image courtesy of Redwood Materials
Redwood Materials was founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel in 2017 with the mission of creating a circular supply chain. Have you ever heard of a similar effort to take old infernal combustion engines, melting them down, and using recycled iron, steel, and aluminum to make new engine blocks, camshafts, crankshafts, pistons, cylinders, and connecting rods? No, you bet your sweet bippy you haven’t.
Redwood Materials recycles scrap from battery cell production as well as batteries from cellphones, laptop computers, power tools, power banks, scooters, and electric bicycles. It extracts materials like cobalt, nickel, and lithium, which it supplies back to Panasonic and other customers to make new cells. Redwood says it is also working with Amazon and AESC Envision in Tennessee. The objective is to create a closed loop system that will ultimately help reduce the cost of batteries and offset the need for mining.
Anti-EV advocates like to scream at the top of their lungs that making batteries for electric vehicles will create lots of pollution, conveniently ignoring the massive pollution caused for the past 100+ years by the fossil fuel industry. Hopefully, news of successful battery recycling operations like Redwood Materials and Li-Cycle will stop their constant yapping.
Stanford researchers are working on ways to inject new life into the lithium used in today’s batteries. The truth of the matter is that electric cars are sparking a whole new interest in a circular economy, something that was never possible when gasoline and diesel engines ruled the roads. That is excellent news for any humans who think it would be nice to keep the Earth habitable for future generations.
Who on earth wants fish tank wastewater, chicken poo, tumble-dryer lint, loo roll tubes, “a plaster mould of a Komodo dragon’s foot” or half a broken toilet? No one, you might think, but the Buy Nothing community begs to differ: these are all real “gifts” snapped up by more than 5 million members worldwide, who give away their unwanted items in the local community. It’s living proof that “one person’s trash is another’s treasure”, as Alisa Miller, the administrator of the Blackheath/Charlton/Lewisham group puts it.
Miller offered her daughter’s broken toy birdcage with little hope anyone would want it; it was snapped up by a local flower-arranging enthusiast, and filled with succulents and trailing plants. Her co-administrator’s son is the current custodian of a toy helicopter that has been played with by five Buy Nothing families to date. Members ask for what they want and usually get it: anything from household appliances, furniture and gardening tools to clothes and baby gear.
There is nothing unique or original about giving and getting stuff for free. It’s a practice as old as humanity. The juggernaut giveaway network Freecycle was founded in 2003 – but what distinguishes the Buy Nothing project from Freecycle, Freegle, Olio and their ilk is that the emphasis is less on stuff, per se, and more on community. In what Buy Nothing describes as its “hyperlocal gift economies”, users are encouraged to let items “simmer” rather than giving them away to the first person who asks, perhaps suggesting they share a joke or provide a story explaining why they would like the item. In addition to “gifts” and “asks”, users are encouraged to post “gratitude”, with a message or a picture showing what a gifted item has meant to them.
That could all sound insufferably twee, but the thinking behind it is fairly radical. It’s a “social experiment”, explain the project’s founders, Rebecca Rockefeller and Liesl Clark, from their respective living rooms in Washington state, effecting a fundamental shift in our attitude to material goods by building a sense of community, and treating items as community-owned and shared. “If you come at it from an angle of joy and human connection,” says Rockefeller, “you’re more likely to inspire lasting change than when you come at it from telling people: ‘You have to do without this.’”
Clark, 55, and Rockefeller, 52, bonded as “Freecycle renegades”, Rockefeller says. She was trying to give away things (twigs, nettles) that her local Freecycle moderator did not consider suitable gifts; both were looking for a deeper connection beyond an anonymous back-door drop or pickup.
There’s a re-use for everything … sweet pea seedlings growing in toilet roll tubes. Photograph: Mike Jarman/Alamy
“We wanted more of that dialogue,” says Clark. Her attitude was shaped by her experiences as a film-maker, exploring mortuary caves on the Nepal-Tibet border with her husband and children. The objects they found there had been used, exchanged, appreciated and transformed over centuries. “It helped me understand a little more the practical side of reuse and how an entire culture could thrive without any stores.”
Users are encouraged to let items ‘simmer’ rather than giving them to the first person who asks
“The stuff is one thing, but the stories that go along with it – the humour, the poignancy, the memories – those are the things we really want from each other,” agrees Rockefeller. Both, too, were shocked at the tides of plastic detritus that washed up on the beaches of their home on Bainbridge Island. “It led us naturally to ask what role do we play in this and how can we lessen our impact?” The pair started out with an in-person gift exchange in a local park at weekends; they launched the first Facebook-hosted group in 2013.
I’m speaking to them surrounded by the debris of a minimal, but not particularly mindful Christmas: cardboard packaging, return labels and scraps of wrapping paper. It’s a time of year characterised for many of us by a sugar rush and guilt slump of conspicuous consumption. Buy Nothing offers members tools and approaches to counter that sickly consumption hangover, but “Buy Nothing” is the name, not the aim.
There’s no expectation or even aspiration that users will somehow forge a fully cashless economy. Indeed, during the pandemic, Buy Nothing changed its rules to allow members to give gifts of cash. “Quite literally, that’s a lifesaving gift you can give another person in a lot of cases,” says Rockefeller. “This was never meant to be an exercise in purity: that doesn’t serve us well. What serves us well is flexibility. A banana, a chunk of concrete or $10 – those are all good gifts.”
Any takers? A bunch of nettles. Photograph: vejaa/Getty Images/iStockphoto
She speaks from personal experience: when the first Buy Nothing group was established, Rockefeller was an unemployed single mother. “I was having to go through the US social services system – it’s horrible and it’s intentionally meant to make you feel horrible about yourself.” Getting food and clothes for her children through Buy Nothing gave her financial breathing space. “I had money to go and buy a cup of coffee or a book, which would have been 100% unreachable for me.”
Of equal importance, she says, was being able to gift bread she had made or foods she had foraged, which allowed her to “get some dignity back”. “The services we can provide are gifts in themselves,” adds Clark. “Gifts of time” (babysitting, gardening, lifts) and “gifts of self” (social meet-ups, offers to become a workout buddy) are a key element of the Buy Nothing experience.
We quickly came to realise how lonely we actually are as a result of not sharing – Liesl Clark
From that first Facebook group, the community has expanded to 7,000 Buy Nothing groups with, at the most recent count, 5.3 million users in 44 countries as diverse as Guatemala, Iceland, Oman, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. On a slow day, Clark tells me, it gains 1,500 members. The greatest concentrations of communities are in Seattle and New York. There is also a huge, dynamic Australian Buy Nothing network. According to Buy Nothing figures, the UK has 50 active groups and approximately 40,000 members. Although Buy Nothing is described by Clark as “an open-source model”, most local groups operate on Facebook, for which Buy Nothing provides guidance, training and ground rules.
A healthy pattern of organic growth, with occasional viral spurts, accelerated during the pandemic. For Clark, physical isolation made people more aware of a deeper kind of isolation. “There’s this ethic of self-reliance, that you fill your house with all the things you need as a family – there you are against the world. But then the pandemic came along. We quickly came to realise how lonely we actually are as a result of not sharing. What we’ve observed is that if people couldn’t physically get together, they’ve been able to virtually connect through sharing items and services.”
Inevitably, this kind of growth creates challenges. As groups “sprout” – the Buy Nothing term for when they reach the maximum recommended capacity of 1,000 members and split geographically – redrawn boundaries have at times perpetuated or reinforced historic racial and socio-economic barriers. These issues have on occasion been compounded by the Facebook group structure where considerable power lies in the hands of local administrators, deciding who can join and what they can post.
Clark and Rockefeller have addressed Buy Nothing’s failings, including the “flaws and racism we as co-founders built into the original structure of this movement”, as they said in a June 2020 statement. An Equity Team now provides guidance to groups on how to develop an “actively anti-racist and anti-oppression policy”, including trying to use geographical group boundaries to create diverse sharing communities.
Miller worked hard to avoid creating a silo of privilege in south-east London when creating the community in 2019. “This area has got huge wealth inequality. It couldn’t be more diverse, and we intentionally wanted to make sure that we straddled those areas; that was a critical goal.”
The newly launched Buy Nothing app is designed to swerve the structural potential for inequity of the Facebook group model. Here, users choose their own geographical limits and create their own communities: “hyperlocal”, “neighbourhood+” or “surrounding areas”. “I’m really hoping our app makes this more accessible [to people] who have been unable for a variety of reasons to connect with it on other platforms, so we get a more diverse set of voices,” says Rockefeller.
There are personal costs to growth, too. A network of nearly 13,000 volunteer administrators keeps Buy Nothing functioning, assisted by a core staff of a dozen, all working from their kitchen tables and living rooms. Clark and Rockefeller have always been unpaid volunteers. “I work weekends, in the holidays, in the hours when you’re supposed to be sleeping,” says Clark, who was able to make money from film-making initially. “There’s certainly some joy in it, but it’s become unsustainable.”
I really believe this will help us, as individuals, to participate in our collective survival – Rebecca Rockefeller
Rockefeller has taken on part-time jobs over the years to support her full-time commitment to Buy Nothing. “My kids look at it as their sibling,” she says. “It’s not just me and Rebecca,” adds Clark. “The key volunteers are an incredible group of, basically, women, who are doing this unpaid labour and it’s not the model we want to promote for the world. We need to get a little more creative with this.”
They hope that the app will also allow them to capture data on what Buy Nothing does to reduce waste and waste management costs, thereby potentially enabling it to raise funds from municipalities. “We’ve never been able to study how much waste is being diverted from landfill,” says Clark. “Imagine if any given community could access that information?”
Moving from the germ of an idea to a global structure is challenging, but for Clark and Rockefeller, the impetus and the motivation is as strong as ever. I ask about their most memorable experiences with Buy Nothing. Clark describes how musical instruments were collected and delivered to victims of the 2018 fire in Paradise, California. As a community, they had enjoyed making music together. Their basic material needs were met by big charities, but they missed having this creative outlet.
For Rockefeller, it’s a source of great pride that her brother-in-law’s community group suggested Buy Nothing as a first port of call when helping refugees from Afghanistan settle in their town. “We’re building this tool that I really believe will have the power to help us, as individuals, to participate in our collective survival,” she says.
Over in south-east London, members of the Blackheath/Charlton/Lewisham group appreciate the new friendships and the sense of local connection. “It’s culturally so different from any kind of other free stuff group out there,” says Miller. “I love giving back to the community and turning to it when I’m in need of something” adds Elif Koç. “I can spend what I’ve saved for charity and other meaningful causes.” Their group has shared camping equipment and loaned books to children; it has supported a victim of domestic violence and a refugee in setting up home and providing clothing for their families. It does feel like a gentle revolution – one houseplant cutting or power tool at a time. As one member, Sarah Wilde, puts it: “I really like the opportunity to quietly rage against the machine.”
Silver Fern Farms, the country’s largest meat processor and marketer, is poised to launch its first carbon-zero certified beef in the United States this month.
It is among just a handful of New Zealand food and beverage companies which have measured the impact of their products on the climate “from cradle to grave”, committed to reducing the impact as close to zero as possible, and offset what can’t be reduced through an internationally accredited programme run by Toitū Envirocare, a subsidiary of Government-owned Crown Research Institute Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research.
Others with Toitū carbon-zero certified products include dairy co-operative Fonterra, chicken producer Waitoa, beverage company Lion, wine group Yealands, and bottled water company Antipodes.
Green Party co-leader and Climate Change Minister James Shaw supports companies taking part in the voluntary carbon market.
“Every contribution that they make helps the atmosphere,” Shaw says. “If they can reduce, or zero out the emissions from a product line, it helps.
“If you could do that across the entire economy, we wouldn’t have a problem, so I’m a big supporter of the voluntary carbon market, and of businesses going the extra mile to reduce the emissions profile of their products and services, and their company operations.”
Climate Change Minister James Shaw says he’s a big supporter of businesses going the extra mile to reduce the emissions profile of their products and services, and their company operations. STACY SQUIRES/STUFF
He acknowledges it can be difficult when doing the grocery shopping to know which is the best environmental option, and he looks for the tick of approval from trusted organisations like Toitū.
Otago University Associate Professor Sara Walton, who specialises in sustainability and business, agrees, saying if a product has been certified through Toitū, it has gone through an element of rigour and is underpinned by a strong science base.
“It’s really hard for the customer,” she says. “I remember buying a ream of paper and just standing there with all the different logos and I wasn’t really up to date with those logos at the time, and it was just absolutely bamboozling as to what each one meant. It is quite difficult for the consumer to actually understand.
“Personally for me, I know what Toitū do in order to give out that label, but not everyone is going to have that knowledge, so we really do need to have some understanding of the rigour behind some of these labels.
“Some of them I don’t know as well, and I don’t know whether that’s good or bad, or what it means – it’s really tricky.”
She encourages people to be a “conscious consumer”.
“It’s really difficult to be perfect,” she says. “I sympathise with the consumer about the amount of information we now have about products and usually we are in a hurry, we are in the supermarket and we are racing around and we have got kids yelling at us and all the rest of it.
“It is really difficult but maybe just pick a couple of products. Just start somewhere. And as you learn about another product, add that in.”
Silver Fern Farms chief executive Simon Limmer says farmers will be rewarded with premium payments for supplying carbon-zero beef.
Walton expects more companies to seek carbon-zero certification for their products in the future, and she says reducing the impact of each product is key, rather than offsetting.
“I think it will be hard for all our products to be carbon-zero unless we have a pretty radical transformation because we probably haven’t got enough room on the planet to offset.”
Toitū product manager Austin Hansell says consumers can have faith that companies with a Toitū certification are genuinely trying to do better and have a better impact on the planet.
“This really gives the consumer a sense that that impact has been understood, and is being addressed. You can feel good that it is being neutralised,” she says.
“They are taking it seriously and they’re setting a real commitment. It really sends a strong signal that that business is committed to being here for the long haul.”
Companies are more likely to seek certification for their operations than their products, because measuring the whole life cycle of a product is harder, she says.
To get its beef certified, Silver Fern Farms has had to look at how it is produced on farm, processed and distributed right up until it is in the hands of the person who will eat it and hopefully recycle the packaging. Offsets will be linked back to the farms producing the meat through new and existing tree plantings.
“Consumers are really thinking hard about where their protein comes from,” says Silver Fern Farms chief executive Simon Limmer. “Red meat has had a pretty bad rap over the last number of years. We’re trying to put that right.”
The carbon-zero beef will be priced at a premium, which will flow through to farmers who supply the product.
“It’s our responsibility to get as much commercial value back to farmers and reward them for the good work that they are doing,” Limmer says. “This is a means for us to connect the market back to the farms very, very directly, and incentivize and reward what they are doing well.”
The first year of certification requires the biggest investment as a company has to build relationships with suppliers, vendors and distributors to source data and then the process builds over time to become more efficient, says Toitū’s Hansell.
To continue to hold a Toitū certification for a product, companies must reduce their carbon footprint, not just offset the impact. That is evaluated every year, and judged on a six-year cycle to allow companies the flexibility to test out different reduction methods. Some companies haven’t retained their certification and have dropped off the list.
The first food and beverage product certified by Toitū was Antipodes Water in July 2007, and the company says it the world’s first and only mineral water to be carbon-zero certified.
Antipodes bottles and distributes still and sparkling water from an aquifer in Whakatāne, which is then served in the world’s finest restaurants, hotels and through select retailers across Asia, the Middle East, North America, Russia, New Zealand and Australia, the company says on its website.
All the water bottler’s production energy is from renewable sources such as geothermal, wind and hydroelectric and the company has created wetland reserves around its water source to continuously enhance and preserve its natural environment, it says.
“Being a sustainable producer is the right thing to do for a fragile global environment,” Antipodes says, noting it is also a member of the United Nations Carbon Neutral Network of companies and countries.
Yealands was one of the founding members of the International Wineries For Climate Action, a collaborative working group that addresses climate change through innovative carbon reduction.
Yealands Wine Group, which owns vineyards and a winery in the Awatere Valley, has certified its entire wine range.
The company’s sustainability manager Tara Smith says the winery was launched in August 2008 with the ambition of becoming a world leader in sustainable wine production. It was the first winery in the world to be Toitū carbon-zero certified from its inception in 2008, and it expanded to product certification in 2013.
Every year, the company measures its emissions, sets emission reduction targets and evaluates its performance followed by an annual audit to verify the information.
Smith says it has many carbon reduction initiatives and was one of the first members to join International Wineries for Climate Action, a group which is taking action to decarbonise the global wine industry.
The company’s Seaview winery in Marlborough generates up to a quarter of its annual energy requirements on site, via renewable generation such as solar, wind and vine prunings. Yealands has achieved freight and packaging emission reductions of about 20 per cent since 2013 by moving to lighter weight packaging and bottling closer to market.
Yealands has also undertaken environmental restoration within its property, with benefits to biodiversity and carbon sequestration, and has reduced its diesel use through introducing inter-row crops in the rows between the vines to cut down on the amount of mowing.
The company offsets all remaining emissions, often on international projects which align with its values. For the first time last year, the company included extensive tree plantings on its property to reduce the number off offsets it needed to source.
The Fermentist brewery’s Kiwi Pale Ale was New Zealand’s first carbon-zero beer.
Beverage company Lion was the first in the country to achieve carbon-zero certification for a beer with The Fermentist’s Kiwi Pale Ale in 2019, and the certification was extended to all The Fermentist’s beer and cider products and the entire Christchurch brewery in 2020.
The Fermentist was closed in September last year because it was losing money however the experience helped Lion in 2020 certify its Steinlager beer range, which accounts for about 10 per cent of the New Zealand beer market.
“Lion is driven by doing the right thing for the long-term and has committed to an active and ambitious carbon reduction strategy to reduce carbon emissions by 55 per cent by 2030, aligned with the target to limit global warming to under 1.5°C,” a spokeswoman said.
“Our market research shows that our consumers are increasingly concerned about the environment and want to see and influence change through the products they purchase. As a result, we decided to go down the path of carbon-zero certification to make a meaningful public commitment to them; to tell our consumers that we take climate change seriously and are doing something about it,” she said.
Lion started from a good position, having invested in the efficiency and sustainability of its Auckland brewery The Pride which opened in 2010. The brewery has since been improved further to optimise the cleaning and refrigeration and improve process heat utilisation such as boiling and pasteurisation.
The company has reduced its carbon emissions by 4.4 per cent between 2019 and 2020 and has two offsetting projects: protecting 738 hectares of Māori-owned native rainforest In Fiordland and a wind farm in Chitradurga, India.
Anchor’s range of specialty milks were certified carbon-zero in November 2020 as Fonterra looks for solutions to reduce its own carbon footprint and that of its customers, says Fonterra’s senior manager sustainability solutions Lara Phillips.
Dairy company Fonterra launched the country’s first carbon-zero certified milk in 2020, and also has a carbon-zero certified organic butter in the United States.
“Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing society, which is why we are committed to finding solutions that reduce both our own carbon footprint and that of our customers while helping to address consumer needs around sustainability,” says Fonterra’s senior manager sustainability solutions Lara Phillips.
“Achieving carbon-zero certification for our products is a great way for us to help our customers and the environment today, while we work towards our aspiration of net zero by 2050.”
The company is investing $1 billion in sustainability initiatives over the next 10 years and is committed to solving the challenge of methane emissions alongside farmers, she said.
Fonterra partnered with Foodstuffs North Island in July 2020 to launch Simply Milk, New Zealand’s first carbon-zero certified milk.
To achieve carbon-zero certification, Fonterra worked with AgResearch to calculate all the emissions associated with making Simply Milk, right from the farm to disposal, which are then offset through credits from projects that sequester or reduce emissions, including native forest regeneration in New Zealand and renewable energy projects overseas.
Five of Anchor’s specialty milks were also certified carbon-zero in November 2020, including Anchor Calci-Plus, Protein-Plus, Organic, Silver Top and Zero Lacto milk.
In March 2021, Fonterra’s global ingredients business, NZMP, made carbon-zero certified organic butter available to customers in the United States.
Waitoa is the first chicken producer to achieve carbon-zero certification in New Zealand.
Poultry company Inghams last year gained carbon-zero certification for its Waitoa free-range chicken and its Let’s Eat range of plant-based meat alternatives.
“We think it makes sense to change what we do so that our products are more sustainable,” a Waitoa spokeswoman says. “Our industry, food production and farming, are changing. We want to be leading the way and to continue to deliver for our consumers.
“Our research shows that sustainability is important to New Zealand consumers, which aligns with our values. By offering carbon-zero certified products, we are making it easier for consumers to reduce the footprint of their lifestyles.”
As well as reducing the environmental impact of its products, the company is offsetting with projects relevant to its business.
The projects include a permanent forest sink initiative in Marlborough where land must be retired from farming and have at least 30 per cent cover of forest species that will reach a height of 5 metres at maturity. Overseas it has picked projects which provide clean cooking methods in Ghana and Bangladesh, reforestation in East Africa and improving water quality in Sub Saharan Africa.
For Silver Fern Farms, the carbon-zero beef pilot in the US is just the beginning. While the opportunity was first identified for consumers in the US market, which is its second-largest, customers in its largest market of China are also showing interest and it’s likely to also roll the programme out to lamb and venison.
The company also expects to offer carbon-zero meat in New Zealand in the future, Limmer says.
“There is only one direction of travel for our industry and Silver Fern Farms wants to be out the front leading,” he says.
As useful as renewable energy sources are, they need to be backed up by storage systems that hold energy for times when the Sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. Ocean Battery is a new design for an energy storage system that functions a bit like a hydroelectric dam at the bottom of the sea.
Developed by Dutch startup Ocean Grazer, the Ocean Battery is designed to be installed on the seafloor near offshore renewable energy generators, like wind turbines, floating solar farms, tidal and wave energy systems. It is made up of three components that together function on a principle similar to that of a hydro dam.
Buried in the seabed is a concrete reservoir that holds up to 20 million liters (5.3 million gal) of fresh water, stored at low pressure. A system of pumps and turbines connects this reservoir to a flexible bladder on the seafloor. Excess electricity from the renewable sources can be used to pump water from the reservoir into the bladder. When the energy is needed, the bladder releases and, driven by the pressure of the seawater above it, squeezes its water back down to the reservoir, spinning turbines on the way to generate electricity that’s fed out into the grid.
A diagram of the Ocean Battery system. When charged (left), the bladder is full of water and the concrete reservoir is empty. When the battery is discharged (right), the bladder is empty and the reservoir full.Ocean Grazer
The Ocean Grazer team says that the system has an efficiency of between 70 and 80 percent, and should be able to run an unlimited number of cycles over an operation lifetime of more than 20 years. It’s also fairly scalable – each concrete reservoir has a capacity of 10 MWh, so adding more of these can increase the overall capacity. Extra units of the pump and turbine machinery can also be added to boost the power output, if more energy is needed quickly.
The Ocean Battery concept is intriguing, but it’s far from the only ocean battery design in the works. Subhydro outlined a similar idea to pump seawater out of tanks placed at the bottom of the sea, then when electricity is needed the water is let it back in, spinning turbines as it fills the tank. MIT also described a similar concept using hollow concrete spheres. Another recent design worked off buoyancy, using electricity to drag and hold balloon-like containers underwater, then releasing them to generate electricity.
Still, there’s not going to be one solution that suits every situation, so solving a global problem like renewable energy storage is likely going to take a whole army of these different, creative ideas.
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is Time magazine’s current Person of the Year, is often accused of neglecting problems on Earth in favor of conducting his private space program. The accusation is unfair on a number of levels. After all, Musk also runs an electric car company. Now, the space entrepreneur has announced on Twitter a new initiative that may prove flying into space could also benefit the Earth.
“SpaceX is starting a program to take CO2 out of atmosphere & turn it into rocket fuel. Please join if interested,” he tweeted.
Human-caused climate change, created by the emission of greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, is an obsession with many both in government and in the media. Musk’s proposal has interesting implications for the issue and the accusations that he wants to abandon Earth to go live on Mars. The project will not only help alleviate climate change on Earth but will be instrumental to Musk’s desire to build a settlement on Mars.
Making rocket fuel with CO2 is the easy part of the proposal. A century-old process invented by a Nobel Prize-winning chemist named Paul Sabatier combines CO2 with hydrogen and a catalyst to create methane and water. Musk’s rocket being developed by SpaceX in Boca Chica, Texas uses engines that burn liquid methane and liquid oxygen. NASA uses the Sabatier system on the International Space Station (ISS) to create water for the crew. The methane is vented from the ISS.
The first part of Musk’s plan, sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, is likely to be more challenging. The idea that carbon capture from the air would reduce the Earth’s greenhouse gasses and thus alleviate climate change is a controversial one. One such project, reported by Techcrunch, is being conducted by a company called Climeworks in Iceland. Thus far, the company spends between $600 and $800 to remove a ton of carbon dioxide, which is considered prohibitively expensive. Climeworks wants to reduce the cost to between $100 and $200 a metric ton (also known as tonne) to make the project more economically feasible.
Another form of carbon capture involves sequestering CO2 directly from power plants. Indeed, NET Power has a pilot plant a few hours’ drive away from Boca Chica in La Porte, Texas. It burns natural gas but saves and store the CO2 emissions. Could Musk buy the CO2 he needs from the NET plant or a similar source? Perhaps, but ever the environmentalist, the Musk might be reluctant to ship the gas to Boca Chica by diesel-fueled tanker truck. Would Tesla be interested in developing an electric-powered tanker truck?
In any case, Musk is interested in developing both the carbon capture from the air and the Sabatier technologies for his planned Mars settlement. The idea is to capture CO2 from the Martian atmosphere, hydrogen from water ice, and then convert them to rocket fuel for spacecraft headed back to Earth from the Red Planet.
Musk has funded a $100 million X-Prize to encourage development of carbon capture technologies, noting that “to win the grand prize, teams must demonstrate a working solution at a scale of at least 1000 tonnes removed per year; model their costs at a scale of 1 million tonnes per year; and show a pathway to achieving a scale of gigatonnes per year in future.”
If and when a direct air capture solution is achieved, a win-win result will have been achieved. Human civilization will have available one or more technologies that will go a long way toward solving the climate crisis. Musk will have a source of CO2 to make his own rocket fuel and continue pursuing his grand design to build a Mars settlement, not to mention taking humans back to the moon and a number of other goals.
A rocket whose engines burn liquid methane and liquid oxygen will create water and CO2 in its exhaust. But a world that has technology that can capture carbon from the atmosphere will likely be more than able to handle the situation.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has denounced carbon capture as a “false solution.” But the delicious irony is that while Green New Dealers concoct schemes to deal with climate change that involve destroying the fossil fuels industry, billionaire capitalists such as Musk are developing solutions that do not involve such a wrenching, economic calamity. Musk and people like him are more likely to succeed where politicians and activists are certain to fail. Musk promises to save the Earth and go to Mars.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of space exploration studies “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
The world’s largest coal port has announced it will now be powered entirely by renewable energy.
The announcement from Port of Newcastle comes as coal power generation in Australia’s national electricity market fell to its lowest level in the final three months of 2021.
Though the port continues to export an average of 165Mt of coal a year, the move is part of a plan to decarbonise the business by 2040, and to increase the non-coal portion of its business so that coal only makes up half its revenue by 2030.
It has signed a deal with Iberdrola, which operates the Bodangora windfarm near Dubbo in inland New South Wales, for a retail power purchase agreement that provides the port with large scale generation certificates linked to the windfarm.
Chief executive officer Craig Carmody said the Port of Newcastle’s title as the largest coal port in the world “isn’t as wonderful as it used to be” and that change was necessary to avoid what happened in Newcastle and the steel industry closed.
“I would prefer to be doing this now while we have control over our destiny, while we have revenue coming in, than in a crisis situation where our revenue has collapsed and no one will lend us money,” Carmody said.
“We get 84 cents a tonne for coal shipped through our port. We get between $6 and $8 for every other product. You can see where I’d rather have my money.”
As part of its transition the port has converted 97% of its vehicles to electric and engaged in other infrastructure projects to decarbonise its operations.
Andrew Stock, climate councillor and retired energy executive who was a founding board member of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, welcomed the development but said there was a “still long way to go”.
“It’s a good thing they’re looking at it, but 50% income diversification by 2030, it’s still a decade away. That’s still a lot of coal that’s going to go through that port particularly when the IEA and the IPCC have made it clear we have to move,” Stock said.
“And 50% by 2030 is still 50% coal income.”
Stock said governments should encourage a “rapid advance in the uptake of renewables” similar to what has occurred in South Australia, which is powered by 100% renewable energy on some days.
Carmody said that as an “open access port” the business was unable to refuse traffic except under specific circumstances, but he hoped showing the company was embracing change would encourage its workforce and others to do the same.
“In some ways it doesn’t matter what the policies of government are, equities and debt markets, they’re making the decision for us,” Carmody says. “It doesn’t matter what the policy settings are in Australia, it’s what some investor in New York or Tokyo is thinking.”
“We don’t really have a choice. Nobody wants to invest in [being part of the fossil fuel supply chain].”
The announcement comes as figures from Dylan McConnell, research fellow the University of Melbourne’s Climate and Energy College, shows renewable energy provided nearly a third of all electricity produced in the national electricity market (NEM).
In the last three months of 2021, coal’s share of the electricity grid fell 5.9% when compared to the same period in 2020, while gas recorded its lowest quarter of generation since 2004
Over the same period, rooftop solar grew 24% and utility solar by 26% – though wind’s share only grew by a “quite modest” 6.4% compared to previous years. This was partly due to poor wind conditions and a lack of new capacity.
“At the high level, solar is squeezing out coal, particularly black coal,” McConnell said. “You can see it quite clearly in the shape of what’s happened to the profile of generation.”
McConnell said that Victoria and South Australia recorded average negative power prices in the middle for the entire quarter.
“It’s a sign of the time that we’re getting negative prices on average,” McConnell said. “Coal’s being hollowed out in the middle of the day and that’s also what’s affecting their bottom line as well, as that’s when you’re having negative prices quite consistently.”
Scientists astounded by performance of sustainable batteries with far-reaching implications for electric vehicles and devices.
Researchers at Bristol have developed high-performance sodium and potassium ion batteries using sustainably sourced cellulose.
Scientists at the Bristol Composites Institute have developed a novel controllable unidirectional ice-templating strategy which can tailor the electrochemical performances of next-generation post-lithium-ion batteries with sustainability and large-scale availability. The paper is published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
There is a rapidly increasing demand for sustainable, ethical and low-cost energy-storage. This is due in part to the drive towards developing battery-powered transport systems — mostly replacing petrol and diesel-based engines with electric vehicles — but also for hand-held devices such as mobile phones. Currently these technologies largely rely on lithium-ion batteries.
Batteries have two electrodes and a separator, with what is called an electrolyte between them which carries the charge. There are several problems associated with using lithium for these batteries, including build-up of the metal inside the devices which can lead to short circuits and overheating.
Alternatives to lithium, such as sodium and potassium batteries have not historically performed as well in terms of their rate performance and the ability to use them lots of times. This inferior performance is due to the larger sizes of sodium and potassium ions, and their ability to move through the porous carbon electrodes in the batteries.
Another issue associated with these batteries is they cannot be easily disposed of at end-of-life, as they use materials that are not sustainable. The cost of the materials is also a factor and there is a need to provide cheaper sources of stored energy.
Additionally, lithium is mined in countries such as Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. This mining is very destructive and there are poor human rights records associated with it.
Work at the University of Bristol in the Bristol Composites Institute, published in Advanced Functional Materials, and in collaboration with Imperial College, has developed some new carbon electrode materials based on an ice-templating system. These materials are called aerogels, where cellulose nanocrystals (a nano-sized form of cellulose) are formed into a porous structure using ice crystals that are grown and then sublimated. This leaves large channels within the structure that can carry the large sodium and potassium ions.
The performance of these new sodium and potassium ion batteries has been shown to outperform many other comparable systems, and it uses a sustainably sourced material — cellulose.
Corresponding author, Steve Eichhorn, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Bristol and a world-leader in cellulose-based technologies, said: “We were astounded with the performance of these new batteries. There is great potential to develop these further and to produce larger scaled devices with the technology.”
Jing Wang, lead author and a PhD student in the Bristol Composites Institute, said: “We proposed a novel controllable ice-templating strategy to fabricate low-cost cellulose nanocrystals/polyethylene oxide-derived carbon aerogels with hierarchically tailored and vertically-aligned channels as electrode materials, which can be utilized to well-tuning the rate capability and cycling stability of sodium and potassium-ion batteries.
“Benefiting from the renewability of the precursor and scalability at relatively low cost in the environmentally benign synthesis process, this work could offer an appealing route to promote large-scale applications of sustainable electric vehicles and large-scale energy storage grids in the near future.”
Professor Eichhorn said: “In light of these findings, we now hope to collaborate with industries to develop this strategy on an industrial scale and to explore whether this unique technology can be easily extended to a variety of other energy storage systems such as zinc, calcium, aluminium and magnesium-ion batteries, thus demonstrating its universal potential in next-generation energy storage systems.”
Paper: “Ice-Templated, Sustainable Carbon Aerogels with Hierarchically Tailored Channels for Sodium- and Potassium-Ion Batteries,” by Wang, J; Xu, Z; Eloi, J; Titirici, M; & Eichhorn, S; in Advanced Functional Materials.
Researchers in Indonesia have developed an innovative way to remove microplastics from water without the need for expensive filters.
It works, says Dhany Arifianto, an engineer at the Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember in Surabaya, Indonesia, by passing contaminated water through a pipe, while underwater speakers make the pipe vibrate like the sound board of a guitar.
We think of sound in terms of what we can hear. But to an engineer, it’s merely a series of pressure waves.
Normally, we think of sound in terms of what we hear. But to an engineer, it’s merely a series of pressure waves. When contaminated water passes through the pipe, the water, being liquid, simply transmits the tone. But microplastic particles, being solid, feel the pressure differently, and are driven away from it, Arifianto says.
Surround them by the same tone coming from all sides, and the only place for them to go is the centre of the pipe. When the water emerges from the pipe, this concentrated stream of plastic can then be diverted, while the rest of the water, now cleansed, flows on. “That’s basically the principle of our research,” Arifianto says, “the force created by sound.”
It’s an important development, because microplastics are a growing threat, both to humans and the environment.
Microplastics are tiny fragments of plastic, produced as larger pieces degrade. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration classifies them as anything smaller than five millimetres in length. “That’s about half the size of a fingernail clipping,” says Charles Moore, founder of Algalita Marine Research and Education, a nonprofit group in Long Beach, California, that is deeply concerned about ocean plastics.
Microplastics are a growing threat, both to humans and the environment.
Moore is a racing-boat captain who first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive concentration of plastic detritus trapped by currents, when he was sailing from Hawaii to California after a race and found himself surrounded by a sea of plastic trash.
But the big chunks of plastic Moore stumbled across aren’t the only ones polluting the seas. In the ocean, big pieces of plastic break down into smaller ones, which then break down into microplastics, and from there into even smaller bits. “Microplastics don’t stay micro,” Moore says. “They get nano.”
This map shows the location of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Credit: NOAA.
When that happens, he says, they can lodge in tissues of animals that ingest them (including people). “They don’t just pass through, they get absorbed,” he says. “They pass the blood-brain barrier; they lodge in the placenta. They get into brains and change behavior, because the brain is an electrical organ, and plastics are insulators.”
For example, he says, fish exposed to microplastics don’t go as far or spend as much time looking for food as they normally would.
They also contain xenoestrogens: chemicals that behave like artificial oestrogens. One of these is bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical that is on the State of California’s official list of developmental and reproductive toxicants, based on a review of more than 300 scientific studies of its effect on the female reproductive system.
BPA can also have effects on males – enough that a recent review article in Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology provocatively labeled it an “emerging threat to male fertility.”
Moore adds that it also has behavioral effects, causing male rats to hang out closer to the nest than normal, though it’s not clear if that’s because it is feminising them or simply making them anxious – a factor revealed in other studies.
“They get into brains and change behaviour, because the brain is an electrical organ, and plastics are insulators.”
Charles Moore
Arifianto’s sound-based cleanup system is still in its infancy, but in lab tests that were scheduled to be presented at the December 2021 meeting of the American Acoustical Society, in Seattle, Washington, his team was able to filter out nylon fragments to an efficiency of up to 99%, and other microplastics to an efficiency of up to 95%. Although, he told Cosmos after he was stranded in Indonesia by US COVID protocols, those results are for fresh water, which is easier to work with than seawater. For seawater, he says, his team has to date only achieved 58% efficiency.
Fifty-eight percent may not sound like a lot – and it wouldn’t be if the goal was to purify drinking water. But Arifianto’s target is more ambitious. He wants to help clean up the ocean, starting in the waters offshore from Indonesia. For that, even 50% efficiency would be an enormous benefit.
To do this, he envisions an array of sonic scrubbers deployed across the narrow straits between his country’s main islands, through which currents circulating between the Pacific and Indian oceans offer perfect locations in which to intercept a lot of microplastics, especially those originating from Indonesia.
It sounds crazy, but the straits aren’t all that wide (the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, for example, is only 24 kilometres across at its narrowest point). And plastics float, meaning that the vast majority of them will be in the top five metres of the water column. To collect them, Arifianto envisions an array of sonic pipes stretching across the straits (except for the shipping channels), moored to the bottom so they stay in place and powered by solar cells, wave energy, or perhaps even the temperature gradient from the top to the bottom of their cables. “There is research [on that] in Japan,” he says of the third option.
Arifianto’s target is more ambitious. He wants to help clean up the ocean.
The big problem (other than cost), is likely to be noise pollution. “We are generating audible sound,” he says, “so marine life is going to be affected.”
How badly, he doesn’t know, but the sonic level used in his lab experiments is around 50–60 decibels, which is somewhere between the level of a quiet conversation at home and the buzz of conversation in a busy office. Either way, he says, it’s enough to be “quite audible” and “noticeable at quite a distance”. Figuring out how to deal with that will be a priority in future research.
Moore is skeptical of the idea of trying to clean up the ocean. “It’s just not possible,” he says.
What’s ultimately needed, he believes, is to rethink our use of plastics and become “plastic smart”. Or, as his organisation’s website puts it in a banner headline: “First, we change our relationship with plastic. Then, we change the world.”
Algalita members protesting against ocean plastic pollution. Credit: Algalita.
Arifianto wouldn’t disagree. “I hope I can spread the message that first, we have to stop dumping plastic on the water, whether it’s fresh water or seawater,” he says. “Because it’s going to come back to us in a very harmful way.”
But that doesn’t mean cleanup is useless. “Our work is inspired by the Clean Ocean Project, which put a net in the Pacific to catch ocean garbage.” That was a great idea, he says, but nets can only catch big chunks of plastic. “[So, we thought] how about microplastics?”
Ultimately, Arifianto says, microplastic pollution is a global problem, requiring international efforts. “I hope [our work] is going to reach more people to be aware of the problem and hopefully participate in this global action to clean up.”
Originally published by Cosmos as Sonic cleanup: using sound to capture ocean microplastics
Whelp, that was fast. No sooner does the firm Sinopec announce a massive new green hydrogen project in China to the tune of 20,000 tons per year, when along comes Chile with plans for a new project dubbed H2 Magallanes, which could pump out more than 880,000 tons per year. It seems the green hydrogen trend has legs after all, and plenty of them.
Chile Has Big Plans For Green Hydrogen
For those of you new to the topic, green hydrogen is a relatively new field. It leverages the low (and falling) cost of renewable energy to pry hydrogen gas out of renewable resources, mainly water. Biomass is also in the mix,but most of the activity is centered on water-splitting systems, powered by wind or solar energy.
Green hydrogen can be used as a zero emission fuel. It can also have numerous applications in agriculture, industry, food processing, and pharmaceuticals, among other areas that depend on hydrogen. That makes green hydrogen a major threat to fossil energy stakeholders, because almost all of the global hydrogen supply currently comes from coal and natural gas.
Chile’s sudden interest in new clean technology may seem sudden. It isn’t. The nation is better known for exporting fruit and fish, but copper is actually its top export, and copper is a key element in the electrification movement.
The copper connection helped sparked Chile’s interest in wind and solar energy several years ago, along with its history in bioenergy, hydropower, and geothermal resources. In 2015, the country launched a new clean power and energy efficiency plan that made a modest but noticeable impact on the nation’s wind and solar profile over the ensuing 5 years, as charted by the International Energy Agency.
Chile still has a long row to hoe before it can ditch fossil energy. H2 Magallanes could help shorten the timeline by providing a model for the rapid scaling up of renewable hydrogen.
If it all pans out, there could be a virtual bottomless pit of investor dollars heading for the green hydrogen hills of Chile. The financial muscle behind the H2 Magallanes project comes from the France-based independent power producer Total Eren. As the name suggests, Total Eren used to be Eren RE until 2017, when the leading fossil energy stakeholder Total S.A. entered the picture as an indirect stakeholder.
By April 2019, Total S.A. acquired a total stake of almost 30% in Total Eren, and then just last June Total S.A. changed its name to TotalEnergies, signifying the company’s new commitment to be a “a world-class player in the energy transition.”
800,000 Tonnes Of Green Hydrogen On The Way
TotalEnergies is apparently one of those fossil energy stakeholders that sees new bottom line opportunities in the green hydrogen field. It remains to be seen how serious they are, but TotalEnergies seems to have recognized that hydrogen buyers are demanding green hydrogen from renewable resources.
That’s a start, though TotalEnergies could leave some wiggle room for carbon capture through a new “clean” hydrogen fund it established last year in partnership with the firms Air Liquide and VINCI, among others.
Meanwhile, TotalEnergies and Total Eren have already launched several large scale green hydrogen projects in various countries, and H2 Magallanes is the biggest one yet.
Total Eren outlined its plans in a press release dated last December 2. It’s way too early to break out the bubbly, since the project is still in the planning stages. Still, they seem pretty optimistic that the vision will become reality.
The initial plans call for up to 10 gigawatts in onshore wind power near the borough of San Gregorio, in the Magallanes region of southern Chile. Another 15 could come on board for a total of 25 gigawatts by 2030, but even at 10 gigawatts of wind power the initial stage of the project is impressive. It will come with up to 8 gigawatts of electrolysis capacity, in addition to a desalination plant and a green ammonia plant, too (more on that in a sec).
If all goes according to plan, construction will begin in 2025 and green production will begin in 2027.
Chile Takes On The Green Hydrogen Hard Sell
As a matter of national policy, Chile is determined to count green hydrogen among its leading exports as soon as possible. In 2020 the company issued a new National Green Hydrogen Strategy. Our friends over at SP Global took note and had this to say:
“As a net importer of fuels, Chile has not been a significant player in global energy markets. But the sun-drenched, wind-rich South American country aims to become a titan in the burgeoning green hydrogen economy, setting a goal to become one of the world’s top three exporters by 2040.”
In its introduction, the new report concedes that there has been a lot of “hypearoundhydrogen.” However, the report comes down hard on the side of the green hydrogen economy, and it details why Chile is sitting in the catbird seat.
“Whatwelackinsize,wemorethanmakeup forinpotential.InthedesertintheNorth,with thehighestsolarirradianceontheplanet,and inthePatagoniaintheSouth,withstrongand consistentwinds,wehavetherenewable energy potential to install 70 times the electricity generation capacity we have today,” they state. “This abundant renewable energy will enable us to become the cheapest producer of green hydrogen on Earth.”
Who Will Be The Earth’s Next Top Green H2 Producer?
It looks like the H2 Magallenes project will enable Chile to get a running start on its low cost green hydrogen goal.
They will have plenty of competition as the field heats up. Among the more interesting developments is an experimental project that parks electrolysis systems on offshore wind turbines.
As for the danger that “hydrogen hype” could end up increasing the use of conventional hydrogen overall, that is clearly going to be an issue over the short term.
However, hydrogen is the main ingredient in ammonia fertilizer, and that should help align the global agriculture industry on the side of green sourcing.
In addition, the global shipping industry is eyeballing green ammonia fuel as a decarbonization pathway. That circles back around to TotalEnergies’ acknowledgement that leading hydrogen buyers are seeking sustainable sources.
Here in the US, things have gotten off to a slow start. Last summer the Department of Energy sent a strong signal by making renewable hydrogen a focus of its new “Earthshot” series of clean tech initiatives, though it still allows for fossil sources to maintain a foothold.
Unlike Chile, the US has considerable domestic fossil energy resources along with politically powerful stakeholders such as US Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, which could explain why the Energy Department is hedging its hydrogen bets. Still, green hydrogen appears to have an edge, so it will be interesting to see what tack the Energy Department takes when the next round of hydrogen R&D funding comes up.
