ASX-listed gas junior Pilot Energy says feasibility studies have confirmed “significant opportunity” to develop a large-scale hydrogen production project using gas and novel carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology first, and renewables later, in Western Australia’s mid-west region.
Pilot said in a statement on Monday that the studies, commenced last year, aimed to assess the economic and logistical feasibility of developing a large-scale “clean” – but certainly not green – production project using the company’s existing oil and gas production operations.
Broadly, the company said the results showed Pilot was “well positioned to play a significant role in the energy transition through harnessing the world-class CCS and renewable resources of the Mid West region of Western Australia.”
More specifically, the studies found that the existing Cliff Head Oil Field offshore facilities, wells and pipelines were already suitable for CCS to the tune of 6.4 million tonnes of CO2 at an injection rate of 500,000 tonnes of CO2 per annum.
Pilot holds a 21.25% interest in the Cliff Head Oil Field through its 50% ownership of Triangle Energy, the operator of the Cliff Head Oil Field. The CCS and blue hydrogen feasibility study is being jointly funded by Pilot, APA Group and Warrego Energy.
Pilot said that the feasibility studies also highlighted the Mid West region could produce “clean ammonia” on a globally competitive basis for export into emerging Asian clean energy markets.
The company said the next steps would be to progress into the permitting and approvals process and front-end engineering and design for a staged development of commercialising CCS and blue hydrogen leveraging technology from US cleantech firm 8 Rivers.
8 Rivers Capital has been working on development of gas plants in the US using the proprietary technology of a company called Net Power, of which it is a co-owner, that burns natural gas with pure oxygen instead of air, producing only CO2 and water as byproducts. Excess CO2 is captured, “pipeline-ready,” for underground storage.
This will no doubt please the federal Morrison government, which as Pilot notes has prioritised CCS in its Technology Investment Roadmap, in the hope that CO2 compression, transport and storage can meet a “stretch target” of under $20 per tonne.
But whether this counts as “clean hydrogen” production is highly questionable, particularly after factoring in the emissions along the gas exploration and production life cycle.
Increasingly, the true “colour” of hydrogen, particularly in the export market, will determine its competitiveness in the market, with a premium being placed on renewables derived green hydrogen as businesses and governments reach for ambitious climate targets.
Still, Pilot Energy chair Brad Lingo welcomed the results of the studies, saying they outlined a clear multi-stage development path, starting with CCS and “building off this platform,” to produce clean power and hydrogen for domestic use and for export, as low-cost “clean” ammonia.
“This staged development path is very much in the reach of the company in terms of financial capacity and technical delivery taking advantage of the existing Cliff Head Oil Field infrastructure and operations,” Lingo said.
“The Company is very focused on delivering a First-to-Market CCS Project in the Mid West to anchor the further development of a Clean Hydrogen/ Ammonia and Renewable Energy Project.
“We are very much focused on engaging with NOPTA and the other relevant regulators to secure the necessary approvals to implement this project with an aim of having the first stage of the development pathway operational by 2025 and generating positive cash flow from these operations as well as delivering a material impact on carbon emissions in the Mid West,” he said.
Germany recorded about 25% more electricity generated from renewable sources in the first three months of the year compared with the same period last year thanks to unusually windy and sunny weather, industry officials said Monday.
Preliminary calculations by the energy lobby group BDEW and the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research indicate that Germany generated about 74.5 billion kilowatt hours of renewable power in the first quarter.
Renewable energy provided about 54% of Germany’s energy needs in January and February, they said.
The German government has pledged to ramp up the use of solar and wind power as part of its plan to wean the country off Russian fossil fuels because of the war in Ukraine.
But like other European countries, Germany is expected to fill part of the shortfall with fossil fuel imports from other regions of the world in the short term.
Switching lights off when they are not in use, turning up the temperature on air-conditioning, and saving water – these may seem like small actions, but they are vital to the fight against climate change.
Today, buildings are responsible for nearly 40 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, with their construction and operations contributing 11 per cent and 28 per cent respectively. Efforts to improve their sustainability are not going far enough, and buildings remain “off track” to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 according to a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in November.
Managing climate-friendly and energy-efficient buildings is crucial to achieving the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global warming under 2 degrees Celsius, and preferably under 1.5°C, but there are many challenges.
“Since 2010, rising demand for energy services in buildings – particularly electricity to power cooling equipment, appliances and connected devices – has been outpacing energy efficiency and decarbonisation gains,” the IEA said. “Very high temperatures and prolonged heatwaves set records in many countries, driving up demand for air-conditioning.”
The United Nations, in its latest climate assessment published in February, added that if greenhouse gas emissions remain high, all Asian regions studied in the report – Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan and Vietnam – will be affected by dangerously high heat and humidity levels, sea level rise, flooding and other physical climate risks.
As governments aim to meet ambitious climate goals, they will increasingly look to the building sector to reduce its impact on the environment.
By accelerating digitalisation and embracing the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and other innovative digital technologies, we can achieve smarter, healthier and more sustainable buildings.
Chang Sau Sheong, chief executive, SP Digital
In Singapore, for instance, buildings make up over a third of the country’s electricity consumption. The city-state’s Building and Construction Authority (BCA) notes that the built environment plays a “major role” in helping to achieve the national sustainability agenda to tackle climate change and global warming.
This presents huge opportunities, and challenges, for landlords trying to drive efficiencies in commercial buildings. Technology is key in this effort, according to SP Digital, the digital arm of SP Group, a utilities group in Asia Pacific that focuses on low carbon, smart energy solutions.
“By accelerating digitalisation and embracing the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and other innovative digital technologies, we can achieve smarter, healthier and more sustainable buildings,” said Chang Sau Sheong, chief executive of SP Digital.
Mindset shifts key to green buildings
Setting regulatory benchmarks and fiscal policies has helped to green buildings and boost efficiencies. Technologies and smart systems have also improved sustainability. But changing the behaviour of landlords and tenants could prove to be the biggest hurdle yet.
Dr Clayton Miller, assistant professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS) who leads its Building and Urban Data Science Lab, told Eco-Business that there are many underused green building technologies, including innovative cooling systems that tap on high temperature radiant, desiccant dehumidification and mixed-mode ventilation.
“There are too many decision-makers who want to play it safe and stick with conventional systems, because they are afraid that trying something different will bring problems,” he said.
Some property owners and landlords may be put off by the costs and difficulties of retrofitting older buildings for sustainability. For example, installing green technologies may require space that is scarce in buildings not designed for them.
“With the myriad of green technologies out there, one of the key challenges that building owners may face is simply how and where to start the retrofitting process,” added Associate Professor Kua Harn Wei, of the Department of the Built Environment, NUS School of Design and Environment.
A smart way to achieve sustainability
Tenants may be stymied by a lack of data too, noted Chang. “Most landlords and property owners provide monthly utility bills, which makes it challenging for tenants to know how and where to best focus their efficiency efforts, and track how they are faring,” according to Chang.
A typical office in Singapore expends most – 60 per cent – of its energy on cooling, according to BCA. Lighting takes up 15 per cent of consumption.
GET TenantCare is a smart and automated tenant submetering solution designed to help landlords and property owners efficiently manage tenant utilities consumption. [Click to enlarge] Image: SP Digital.
To give tenants and landlords more granular data to manage their energy and water use, SP Digital created Green Energy Tech (GET) TenantCare, a smart and automated tenant submetering solution. Tenants and landlords can get visibility of their utilities consumption in granularity of 30-minute intervals, unlocking more ways to save electricity and water. The platform not only increases operational efficiency, but can improve tenant engagement that will drive sustainability efforts, Chang said.
As a tenant, for instance, you can better understand how you use electricity, get alerted to unusual usage earlier, find out which of your equipment is using a lot of energy, whether through faults or inefficiency, and make changes to lower your energy consumption.
“If you’re a landlord, you can use our solution to automatically calculate your tenants’ energy use intensity, based on their units’ energy usage and gross floor area. You can identify which tenants are using more electricity than expected and engage with them to persuade them to adopt more energy-efficient equipment or habits,” Chang said.
Smart technologies have other advantages. With GET TenantCare’s automated meter readings, landlords do not have to deploy manpower to check on and read the meters. This also eliminates human errors in the readings.
Smart building management systems, connected to motion and other occupancy sensors and weather forecasting systems, can automatically adjust air-conditioning temperatures, switch off unneeded lights, and do more to save electricity and water while maintaining comfort for occupants.
Promoting greener behaviours
With insights from smart technologies leading to quick wins in energy and water savings, landlords and tenants may be more motivated to continue on their sustainability journey.
“If people have good experiences trying out sustainable behaviours, they are likely to repeat them and form green habits over time,” Dr Sonny Rosenthal, cluster director of smart and sustainable building technologies at the Energy Research Institute at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), told Eco-Business.
Other novel systems and ideas could enable tenants and landlords to work in tandem to slash the carbon footprint of the buildings they occupy.
SP Digital’s GET Engaged solution is a digital dashboard that provides updates on buildings’ electricity and water use, and the resulting carbon emissions. When displayed in lobbies and other public areas, the information could spur tenants to make more sustainable choices.
Equipping people with relevant skills is essential too. Last year, the Singapore government launched the Sustainability in Singapore programme, which trains people from organisations to be green ambassadors.
This includes teaching them how to design effective sustainability campaigns to persuade their colleagues and other occupants in their buildings to be more environmentally friendly.
BCA chief executive Kelvin Wong explained: “As a building user myself, we tend to think that staying in green buildings alone is sufficient. But this is not true. Practising sustainable behaviour within building premises is equally important to make the most of green buildings.”
“Hand in hand, both green buildings and sustainable user behaviour would translate to lower carbon emissions, with the added advantage of monetary savings,” he added.
The BCA has also created “green lease” toolkits to guide landlords and tenants in crafting mutually-agreed-upon, sustainability-related agreements for office and retail buildings. These would set out objectives for how the building is to be improved, managed and occupied to reduce its impact on the environment.
Greener buildings go beyond providing environmental and economic benefits, Chang noted. Greener buildings can also enhance occupants’ health and overall well-being.
The 1kW pico-hydro generation system can be used with factory drainage systems and irrigation canals. According to the manufacturer, it is made with 3D-printed sustainable materials based on recycled plastics and is able to generate electricity even with a small stream of water. Solar and storage may be linked to the system to ensure stable power supply.
Japanese multinational imaging and electronics company has launched a 1kW pico-hydro generation system that can be used with factory drainage systems and irrigation canals. Pico-hydro systems are all hydropower systems with a capacity of less than 5kW and are commonly used as a cheap and easy-to-deploy source of power in theworld’smost inaccessible places.
Image: Ricoh
“The system can also be used in combination with photovoltaics and batteries to ensure stable power supply, ” a spokesperson from the company told pv magazine. “Depending on the amount of electricity generated, it can be used for IoT devices such as sensors, lighting devices, and charging systems.”
Called 3D-Pico Hydro Generator System, the new product will be initially sold in the Japanese market. “Service validation will begin in Japan, and the system will gradually be offered globally to markets where it is needed,” the spokesperson further explained.
The system was tested at Ricoh’s Numazu Plant. Image: Ricoh
According to the manufacturer, the system is made with 3D-printed sustainable materials based on recycled plastics and is able to generate electricity even with a small stream of water.
It was tested at the company’s Numazu Plant. “In our demonstration experiment using factory wastewater from the Ricoh Numazu Plant, we confirmed the possibility of lighting a lamp and using it as a power source for a security camera for nine months,” the company said. “We are also considering using it as a power source for disaster prevention in combination with battery storage.”
“Ricoh is also planning to improve the system so that it can also be used in microgrids,” the company’s spokesperson concluded.
There are many factors that determine the feasibility of a mini-hydropower project. These include the amount of power available from the water flow, the turbine type, the capacity of electrical loads to be supplied, and the initial and operating costs.
During the past decades, Pico-hydropower systems have been used with success in countries such as Nepal, Vietnam, Laos and Peru, as a way to provide electricity to rural locations.
A new type of battery charging technology could reduce the charge times of electric vehicles from hours to minutes, researchers claim.
Calculations made by scientists at the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea revealed that so-called quantum batteries would reduce typical home charging times of electric cars from 10 hours to just three minutes.
“The source of this quantum speedup lies in the use of entangling operations, in which the cells are charged collectively as a whole,” the researchers noted in their study, published this week in the physics journal Physical Review Letters.
“In contrast, classical batteries are charged in parallel, meaning that each cell is charged independently of each other.”
Quantum charging would cut charge times at charging stations from 30 mins to 90 seconds (Institute for Basic Science)
The extraordinary properties of quantum technologies have seen billions of dollars poured into adjacent fields like quantum computing and quantum cryptography, though quantum batteries remain relatively unexplored in terms of practical applications.
Earlier this year, researchers demonstrated a proof-of-concept device that used lasers to charge a quantum battery.
More development is needed before a fully functioning quantum battery prototype can be built, which scientists hope will usher in a new era of ultra-efficient batteries for use in electric vehicles and electronic devices.
It is hoped that the latest findings will incentivise funding agencies and businesses to invest in quantum charging and quantum battery technologies, which the researchers claim could “completely revolutionise” the way we use energy.
When large automobile companies need to build a physical example of their designers’ latest flights of computer-rendered fancy, they call British fabrication specialist shop Vital Auto. Vital creates concept cars for a roster of clients that includes Rolls-Royce, McLaren, Jaguar, Lotus, Volvo, Nissan, Tata, and Geely.
The outfit uses two different methods to render these concepts into the physical world. The first is what is known as subtractive manufacturing. This is when a Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machine does the carving, following a software model of the part to know what to carve away. Commonly the process starts with a solid block of aluminum and the machine whittles a massive block of metal down to a finished component.
The second is 3D printing, which, in contrast, is additive manufacturing. This is when parts are made by gradually adding layers of material until enough have accumulated that there is a finished object. Additive manufacturing can be more efficient than subtractive manufacturing because it doesn’t produce a pile of aluminum shavings to be recycled, and it has the added benefit of being able to create shapes that are impossible to form using traditional subtractive methods.
“Clients typically come to us to try and push the boundaries of what’s possible with the technology available,” said Shay Moradi, Vital’s VP of innovation and experiential technology, in a video describing the company’s operations. “They don’t have time for experimentation themselves, but they can rely on us to bring about all the different elements that go into creating the exact tool that they require to do the job.”
Because it sounds like it comes from the realm of science fiction and the replicators of Star Trek lore, 3D printing is what we might expect that an outfit like Vital would prefer for its modern creations. In fact, the company says that it has found both 3D printing and the subtractive technique to be technologies that are complementary, not competitive, so it uses them both to create concept cars.
A 3D-printed brake caliper. Vital Auto
“A lot of people think additive manufacturing is here to replace subtractive manufacturing,” observed Vital design engineer Anthony Barnicott in the same video. “We don’t think that. We use the two together to support each other. We have many parts where we would use subtractive manufacturing and then have additive manufacturing produce all of the finer details. This allows us to have a more cost-effective way of producing our concept models.”
Vital got its start with a project to build the EP9 concept car for Chinese electric car maker NIO in 2015, and that low-slung supercar remains the company’s signature creation. The company employs an array of 3D printers, including 14 large-format FDM printers, three Formlabs 3L large-format stereolithography (SLA) printers, and five Formlabs Fuse 1 selective laser sintering (SLS) printers.
Each of these devices provides a unique capability as complements to subtractive manufacturing techniques. This has let Vital work more quickly while evaluating more alternatives than would otherwise be possible.
“Formlabs materials give us a nice, smooth finish for our painters to work with, we can use these parts straight out the printer, straight onto a vehicle,” said Barnicott.
“What interests me most about the Form 3L machines is their versatility, the ability to do a material change in less than five minutes and the variability of those materials going from a soft, flexible material to a hard and rigid material for us is priceless,” he added.
While highly visible parts like door handles and brake calipers might seem like the glamor components on projects like these, it is the new ability to 3D-print soft rubber door seals rather than having to tool up the extrusion process to make those parts, that the company points to as a highlight.
These tools have also had an impact on the process of creating concept cars because the shorter timeline for making parts permits rapid iteration of changes. “Typically when we would CNC machine parts, we would have to wait two, three, four days to get the parts in our hands,” recalled Barnicott. “The Fuse 1 has allowed us to have hands-on parts, in most instances, less than 24 hours.”
A typical show car—which generally will provide the appearance of the eventual product, but probably won’t include a drivetrain—can go through many design iterations, so speed is essential. “Sometimes we will have one or two iterations, sometimes we will have ten or twelve iterations,” he said. “Within those iterations can be further iterations of smaller components.”
With computer images of designs, we might wonder why these iterations are all done virtually. But that just isn’t a good enough representation of the parts, according to Moradi.
“I think there’s always going to be a place for physical manufactured objects as well,” he said. “There’s nothing that beats the sensation and feeling of holding an object in your hands with the correct weight, with the correct proportions, and the dynamics of how the physical environment changes your perception of that physical object.”
“There are certain things that you can’t qualify as emerging technology anymore,” Moradi noted. “3D printing is one of those things. 3D printing has gone from being a novelty to being an absolutely inseparable part of what we do.”
The Royal Mint is to start recovering gold from electronic waste to use in its coins and bars.
It hopes its new plant in Llantrisant, south Wales, will next year start salvaging the precious metal from the circuit boards of laptops and mobile phones.
The Royal Mint expects to process up to 90 tonnes of UK-sourced circuit boards per week, retrieving hundreds of kilograms of gold per year to re-use in its coins, bars and other products.
Currently 99% of the UK’s circuit boards are currently shipped overseas to be processed at high temperatures in smelters, the company estimates.
“As the volume of electronic waste increases each year, this problem is only set to become bigger,” said Sean Millard from The Royal Mint.
Britons throw away over 300,000 tonnes of electricals each year, and 95 tonnes of precious metals including silver and palladium could be recycled from unwanted goods, according to waste research group Material Focus.
The United Nations estimates that less than 20% of e-waste is recycled globally each year.
The plant is just one planned by various waste companies for the UK to retrieve metals from electricals.
By recovering the waste domestically, rather than exporting it, using a process at room temperature rather than smelting temperatures, and reducing the need for new metal mining, they firms hope to reduce the environmental damage of the metals they use.
Scott Butler, executive director of Material Focus, said there was “huge potential” in recycling electricals.
“Our research has indicated that if all the unwanted electricals we hoard or throw away every year in the UK were recycled, we’d have enough gold to make over 858,000 rings,” he said.
The Royal Mint hopes eventually to recover silver along with non-precious metals such as copper, tin, steel and aluminium.
Material Focus’s postcode locator allows consumer to locate their nearest electricals recycling point.
The UK government is reportedly considering a £16 billion proposal to build a solar power station in space.
Yes, you read that right. Space-based solar power is one of the technologies to feature in the government’s Net Zero Innovation Portfolio. It has been identified as a potential solution, alongside others, to enable the UK to achieve net zero by 2050.
But how would a solar power station in space work? What are the advantages and drawbacks to this technology?
Space-based solar power involves collecting solar energy in space and transferring it to Earth. While the idea itself is not new, recent technological advances have made this prospect more achievable.
The space-based solar power system involves a solar power satellite – an enormous spacecraft equipped with solar panels. These panels generate electricity, which is then wirelessly transmitted to Earth through high-frequency radio waves. A ground antenna, called a rectenna, is used to convert the radio waves into electricity, which is then delivered to the power grid.
A space-based solar power station in orbit is illuminated by the Sun 24 hours a day and could therefore generate electricity continuously. This represents an advantage over terrestrial solar power systems (systems on Earth), which can produce electricity only during the day and depend on the weather.
With global energy demand projected to increase by nearly 50% by 2050, space-based solar power could be key to helping meet the growing demand on the world’s energy sector and tackling global temperature rise.
Some challenges
A space-based solar power station is based on a modular design, where a large number of solar modules are assembled by robots in orbit. Transporting all these elements into space is difficult, costly, and will take a toll on the environment.
The weight of solar panels was identified as an early challenge. But this has been addressed through the development of ultra-light solar cells (a solar panel comprises smaller solar cells).
Space-based solar power is deemed to be technically feasible primarily because of advances in key technologies, including lightweight solar cells, wireless power transmission and space robotics.
Importantly, assembling even just one space-based solar power station will require many space shuttle launches. Although space-based solar power is designed to reduce carbon emissions in the long run, there are significant emissions associated with space launches, as well as costs.
Space shuttles are not currently reusable, though companies like Space X are working on changing this. Being able to reuse launch systems would significantly reduce the overall cost of space-based solar power.
Solar power systems on Earth can only produce energy during the daytime. Diyana Dimitrova/Shutterstock
If we manage to successfully build a space-based solar power station, its operation faces several practical challenges, too. Solar panels could be damaged by space debris. Further, panels in space are not shielded by Earth’s atmosphere. Being exposed to more intense solar radiation means they will degrade faster than those on Earth, which will reduce the power they are able to generate.
The efficiency of wireless power transmission is another issue. Transmitting energy across large distances – in this case from a solar satellite in space to the ground – is difficult. Based on the current technology, only a small fraction of collected solar energy would reach the Earth.
Pilot projects are already underway
The Space Solar Power Project in the US is developing high-efficiency solar cells as well as a conversion and transmission system optimised for use in space. The US Naval Research Laboratory tested a solar module and power conversion system in space in 2020. Meanwhile, China has announced progress on their Bishan space solar energy station, with the aim to have a functioning system by 2035.
In the UK, a £17 billion space-based solar power development is deemed to be a viable concept based on the recent Frazer-Nash Consultancy report. The project is expected to start with small trials, leading to an operational solar power station in 2040.
The solar power satellite would be 1.7km in diameter, weighing around 2,000 tonnes. The terrestrial antenna takes up a lot of space – roughly 6.7km by 13km. Given the use of land across the UK, it’s more likely to be placed offshore.
This satellite would deliver 2GW of power to the UK. While this is a substantial amount of power, it is a small contribution to the UK’s generation capacity, which is around 76GW.
With extremely high initial costs and slow return on investment, the project would need substantial governmental resources as well as investments from private companies.
But as technology advances, the cost of space launch and manufacturing will steadily decrease. And the scale of the project will allow for mass manufacturing, which should drive the cost down somewhat.
Whether space-based solar power can help us meet net zero by 2050 remains to be seen. Other technologies, like diverse and flexible energy storage, hydrogen and growth in renewable energy systems are better understood and can be more readily applied.
Despite the challenges, space-based solar power is a precursor for exciting research and development opportunities. In the future, the technology is likely to play an important role in the global energy supply.
A California-based start-up has found a way to use limestone — a cheap and widely available material — to remove carbon dioxide directly from the air, potentially overcoming a major hurdle in scaling up the technology needed to avoid catastrophic global warming.
Heirloom Carbon Technologies said Thursday it raised $53 million from investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a clean-technology fund led by Bill Gates, and the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund.
As a growing number of companies have set goals to reach net-zero emissions in the coming decades, demand has surged for ways to offset their ongoing pollution. However, experts warn that cheap credits based on avoiding deforestation or building renewable energy projects tend to exaggerate their climate benefits. Technologies that actually remove carbon from the atmosphere can more credibly back the promise of capturing and storing a set amount of greenhouse gas.
But those technologies are still nascent and often require complex machinery, making them tens of times more expensive than carbon credits from projects that plant trees or build wind farms, which can cost as little as $3 per ton.
One reason for the high cost is that direct-air capture technology has so far relied on the use of expensive solvents that can separate CO₂ from the air, like iron filings to a magnet. Once the gas is bound to the solvent, it needs to be heated to a high temperature to release the CO₂, which can be captured, compressed, and buried deep underground in rock formations similar to those that hold oil and natural gas.
Heirloom uses a similar process, without the expensive solvents. The company starts by heating limestone, also known as calcium carbonate, to more than 600°C in an electric furnace that’s powered by renewable electricity — the most energy-intensive and expensive step. The process releases CO₂ — which is captured — and the leftover calcium oxide is spread out in hundreds of trays that are stacked 20-feet high and exposed to the air.
“It looks like cookies in a baking tray,” said Heirloom Chief Executive Officer Shashank Samala. “We’re trying to simplify as much as possible.”
Over months or years, calcium oxide gets converted back to limestone as it absorbs CO₂ from the air. But Heirloom says that by turning the material into a fine powder and carefully placing the trays to maintain the right conditions, it can shrink the process down to a week. Once calcium carbonate is created, the cycle is repeated 15 times or so before the material isn’t able to effectively capture CO₂.
Samala declined to provide more details on the company’s approach because some of the tweaks it has made to accelerate the capture process are quite simple and yet to be patented. The engineering work “could be easily replicated by others, even with a couple of clues,” said Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct Capital Management, another fund that contributed to Heirloom’s latest investment round.
Heirloom has so far only tested the different steps in its process individually. The new money will be used to build a pilot plant by next year that will put them all together and attempt to capture a few tons of CO₂ every day. Unlike some other direct-air capture start-ups, Heirloom does not need to overcome basic science challenges, such as whether the capture process can actually work quickly, said Friedmann. The technology is based on peer-reviewed research published in 2020.
The most advanced direct-air capture companies include Switzerland-based Climeworks, which has sold credits to Gates for as much as $600 a ton, and Canada-based Carbon Engineering, which has been working for a few years with Occidental Petroleum to build a plant that could capture as much as 1 million tons each year.
Even though Heirloom has yet to build a facility of that size, technology companies Stripe, Shopify, Klarna Bank, and Wise have already paid for CO₂ it may capture in the future. Stripe said that it paid more than $2,000 a ton with the understanding that the cost will come down rapidly as the technology is scaled up. Heirloom aims to eventually lower the cost of its captured carbon to as little as $50 a ton.
The Airbus A380 represents the last superjumbo of a bygone, kerosene-guzzling era. Now the double-decker will serve as the unlikely test bed to help the industry fly into a fuel-efficient future.
Airbus will use a model to test its first propulsion system using hydrogen, a fuel the planemaker wants to introduce on a new passenger aircraft by 2035. The modified double-decker, the first of its kind that Airbus ever built, will maintain its four conventional turbines, while a fifth engine adapted for hydrogen use will be mounted on the rear fuselage.
The unusual design of the demonstration aircraft, developed in collaboration with engine-maker CFM International, will allow engine emissions including contrails to be monitored separately from those of the engine powering the aircraft, Airbus said in a statement. Contrails, or the wispy clouds planes leave behind in the sky, are of growing concern in lowering emissions as they trap warmer air in the atmosphere.
The hydrogen test programme will give at least one of the troubled jumbo jets, consigned to the commercial scrap heap even before the pandemic, a second life as it tests the new technology.
While hydrogen is still under research for use in jet engines, Airbus is attempting to rally the aviation industry behind the technology (file photo).
Bloomberg reported on Monday that Airbus was poised to announce the collaboration with CFM, a joint venture of General Electric and Safran.
While hydrogen is still under research for use in jet engines, Airbus is attempting to rally the aviation industry behind the technology as it faces mounting pressure to reduce emissions that lead to global warming. Last year, the airline industry’s main trade group endorsed a plan to reach net-zero carbon emissions by the middle of the century.
“To achieve these goals by 2050 the industry has to take action now and we are,” said Gael Meheust, CFM’s CEO.
The demonstrator is set to begin flying in the middle of this decade. While a commercial product will be much smaller, the development plan allows Airbus to take advantage of the A380’s size to give engineers room for extra tanks, testing equipment, and the fifth engine at the back, executives said.
The main deck of the aircraft will have four hermetically sealed hydrogen tanks and a distribution system to the engine, a modified GE Passport turbofan. That smaller-scale version of CFM’s LEAP engine was originally designed for the business jet market and was chosen because of its light weight.
Airbus will carry out ground tests this year, then convert the aircraft, targeting flight tests by the end of 2026. This is in line with the company’s existing timetable to make its technology choices by 2027 and launch a hydrogen jet by 2035, Chief Technology Officer Sabine Klauke said.
Airbus rival Boeing is testing hydrogen fuel cells on its ScanEagle3 pilotless military drone, while expressing scepticism about the 2035 target for commercial jetliners.
Safran has called hydrogen a “promising candidate” for future aircraft models, and has been developing materials and fuel-system adjustments to be used with the technology.
With manufacturers gearing up to ultimately make the shift to zero-emission flying, engine makers GE, Safran, Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce will all compete for a share of the new market.
Rolls-Royce, which currently specialises in widebody engines, has said it is now considering a return to the single-aisle market and is speaking to both planemakers about possible opportunities. Pratt, a unit of Raytheon Technologies, said Monday that it received US Department of Energy funding to further its work on hydrogen propulsion.
