New capture technology turns CO2 into solid carbon, a coal-like product that can be safely reburied.
Scientists may have discovered a groundbreaking new method to pull out of the air and convert CO2 into solid carbon flakes. Researchers at Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) have pioneered an efficient carbon mineralization process using liquid metal catalysts. This technology could provide a sustainable way to capture atmospheric CO2 and safely store it long-term as a stable solid.
Most carbon capture techniques today focus on compressing CO2 gas into a liquid that is injected deep underground. However potential leakage risks make this method less than ideal for permanently storing billions of tons of carbon dioxide. We urgently need innovative solutions to remove and safely store the CO2 already overburdening our atmosphere.
That’s why RMIT’s new mineralization approach to turn CO2 into solid carbon is so promising. It converts greenhouse gases into inert carbon solids at room temperature. This offers a potentially cheaper, more secure form of carbon storage compared to current methods.
RMIT’s method utilizes molten liquid metals to trigger a chemical reaction, transforming gaseous CO2 into solid carbon flakes. This occurs at ambient temperature inside a simple glass tube device. The process works by sending CO2 into the glass tube containing a liquid metal alloy of gallium, indium, tin, and cerium. Running an electric current through the metal accelerates the carbon mineralization reaction.
Carbon steadily accumulates as a layer of solid flakes on the liquid metal surface and the only byproduct of the process is pure oxygen. The flakes are then removed allowing the process to continue indefinitely. Because this process occurs are room temperature, the energy requirements are far lower than other systems.
The researchers experimented with different metal compositions and temperature conditions to optimize the carbon conversion process. Once optimized, the system can continuously pull in and convert atmospheric CO2 into solid carbon without additional heat or pressure.
Unlike underground injection techniques, solid carbon can easily be collected for safe, permanent storage. The carbon solids could even be processed into materials like carbon fiber. And since the process only needs a small amount of electricity and air, it has minimal environmental impact or manufacturing costs.
Turning CO2 into solid carbon could be a more predictable, sustainable and longer lasting approach to carbon capture and storage. The RMIT team is already investigating ways to scale up the liquid metal carbon mineralization method. Adoption by power plants or heavy industry could significantly cut CO2 outputs.
Finding viable ways to remove excess greenhouse gases is critical to slow global warming. Since the Industrial Revolution, over 1.3 trillion tons of carbon dioxide have entered the atmosphere – and the pace is accelerating. New solutions like RMIT’s carbon mineralization technology will be essential to extracting legacy emissions already dangerously heating our planet.
Business Secretary Grant Shapps has been in the North East today (7 November) for both of the announcements, made by Green Lithium and Altiluim respectively.
Green Lithium has announced that Teesport, Middlesborough, will be the location for its refinery. The facility will provide materials to industries such as automotive, energy storage and consumer technology. It will employ around 1,000 people during the construction phase and 250 in its operations.
The UK Government has provided Green Lithium with more than £600,000 of grant funding for its work, in a bid to ensure that the UK remains competitive as the net-zero transition continues, and to help make supply chains more resilient. 89% of the world’s lithium processing currently takes place in East Asia.
Shapps said: “We know that geopolitical threats and global events beyond our control can severely impact the supply of key components that could delay the rollout of electric vehicles in the UK.”
Green Lithium has stated that the proposed facility will produce 50,000 tonnes of battery-grade lithium each year once it enters full operations. It wants to begin production in 2025. The firm takes its name from the fact that its refining process claims to produce 80% less greenhouse gas emissions.
Battery recycling
Green Lithium’s plan, in the long-term, is to co-locate the refinery with battery recycling capacity.
In related news, cleantech start-up Altilium has announced plans to build the UK’s “largest planned recycling facility” for electric vehicle batteries after the Government confirmed a total of £3m of grant funding.
A decision for the final location of the plant will be made in 2023, the company has stated, and an 18-month construction period is envisioned. As such, it is aiming for a 2025 start-date for production.
Altilium has stated that Teesside’s status as a freeport, the support of local authorities and the fact that there are skilled workers in chemical processing in the region were all key factors in its decision on location.
Just last week, Britishvolt, which is currently constructing a gigafactory for car batteries near Blyth, avoided collapse by securing £1.7bn of additional funding. The gigafactory is now set to open in the last half of 2025. The firm blamed “difficult external economic headwinds including rampant inflation and rising interest rates,” for its challenges.
Norwegian energy developer Statkraft has announced plans to develop a major green hydrogen production hub at the site of disused rail storage in Pembrokeshire.
The company is looking to transform the site of the former Royal Navy Armaments Depot into a green hydrogen production capacity of around 30GW. The hydrogen generated there, using electrolysis, would be used to serve the transport, manufacturing and industrial sectors.
Renewable electricity to serve the Trecwn Green Energy Hub will be generated from three onshore wind turbines and a ground-mounted solar array under Statkraft’s plans.
Statkraft told edie that it is hoping to submit the plans by the end of 2023. If the planning process runs smoothly, the site could be operational by the end of 2026. Around 5,000 homes and businesses in the local area will be contacted by Statkraft in the coming weeks asking if they would like to participate in consultations.
Statkraft UK’s head of RES eFuels and European wind and solar, Matt Kelly, said the project “presents an exciting opportunity to produce homegrown green energy for local use and has the potential to act a catalyst for the redevelopment of Trecwn Valley.”
The UK Government has committed to growing national low-carbon hydrogen production capacity to 10GW by 2030. At least half of this will need to be green. Hydrogen is considered necessary to the net-zero transition, for decarbonising hard-to-abate sectors such as heavy transport and heavy industry. It produces no greenhouse gases at the point of combustion. However, most global production is currently fossil-fuelled, meaning that it is not a low-carbon solution across the lifecycle.
Funds and accelerators
In related news, Hy24 Partners – a joint venture from investment firms FiveT Hydrogen and Ardian – has closed what it claims is the world’s largest infrastructure fund for the low-carbon hydrogen sector to date.
The €2bn fund will be used to invest across the hydrogen value chain. As well as production, storage and distribution will be supported.
Among the investors in the fund are TotalEnergies, Air Liquide, Airbus, AXA and Allianz. In total, it attracted more than 50 investors from 13 countries.
Hy24Partners estimates that the fund will enable the deployment of up to €20bn of investment within a six-year period.
Elsewhere, the Carbon Trust has announced a new clean hydrogen accelerator with backing from the UK Government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
Modelled on the Trust’s offshore wind accelerator, the aim of the project is to help achieve economies of scale for clean hydrogen, so that it becomes cost-competitive with the grey (fossil) hydrogen that dominates global markets today.
The accelerator will convene players across the British hydrogen value chain for innovation programmes. It will cover all production methods which can comply with BEIS’s Low-Carbon Hydrogen Standard.
“This new clean hydrogen accelerator fills a gap in the current innovation landscape by focusing on stimulating the supply chain,” said the Carbon Trust’s chair Baroness Brown.
At this point, the Carbon Trust is calling for new industry participants to join the accelerator. Its first step will be to shape a plan for innovation programmes.
Beaches littered with plastic bottles and wrappers. Marine turtles, their stomachs filled with fragments of plastic. Plastic fishing nets dumped at sea where they can throttle unsuspecting animals. And far out in the Pacific Ocean, an expanse of water more than twice the size of France littered with plastic waste weighing at least 79,000 tonnes.
The plastic pollution problem is distressingly familiar, but many organisations are working to reduce it. Alongside familiar solutions such as recycling, a surprising ally has emerged: micro-organisms. A handful of microbes have evolved the ability to “eat” certain plastics, breaking them down into their component molecules. These tiny organisms could soon play a key role in reducing plastic waste and building a greener economy.
The scale of the problem
As a species, we make an enormous amount of plastic. In 2020, the most recent year for which we have data, 367m tonnes were produced globally, according to trade association Plastics Europe. This represented a slight decline compared with 2019, when 368m tonnes were made, but that was probably because of the Covid-19 pandemic: production had previously increased almost every year since the 1950s. A 2017 study estimated that 8.3bn tonnes of plastic had been made in total.
In 2016, the world produced 242m tonnes of plastic waste. Pictured below, volunteers collect plastic rubbish from a beach in Lima, Peru. Photograph: Ernesto Benavides/AFP/Getty Images
A huge fraction of this goes to waste. In 2016 the world generated 242m tonnes of plastic waste, according to the World Bank. Despite the popular image, only a small fraction of this ends up in the ocean – but the seas may still be absorbing more than 10m tonnes of plastic every year. As well as the dangers of the plastics themselves, they contain a lot of additives that leach out into the water. “Over time we really don’t know what effects these have,” says Tiffany M Ramos of Roskilde University in Denmark.
Much of the rest ends up in landfills. That does not sound so bad, but a lot of it is single-use plastic, which is inherently wasteful. Making plastic requires extracting fossil fuels such as oil from the ground, with all the pollution risks that entails. Plastic manufacturing also releases greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. A 2021 report found that the US plastics industry alone releases 232m tonnes of greenhouse gases every year, the equivalent of 116 coal-fired power plants.
The solution is not to stop using plastics altogether, because they are incredibly useful. For example, plastic bottles are far lighter than glass ones, so transporting them requires less energy and releases a smaller amount of greenhouse gases. But we do need a revolution in how we handle plastics, and this is where the micro-organisms come in.
On the scrapheap
In 2016 researchers led by microbiologist Kohei Oda of the Kyoto Institute of Technology in Japan reported a surprise discovery. Oda’s team visited a recycling site that focused on items made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a clear plastic that is used to make clothing fibres and drinks bottles.
Like all plastics, PET is a material made up of long string-like molecules. These are assembled from smaller molecules strung together into chains. The chemical bonds in PET chains are strong, so it is long-lasting – exactly what you do not want in a single-use plastic.
Oda’s team took samples of sediment and wastewater that were contaminated with PET, and screened them for micro-organisms that could grow on the plastic. It found a new strain of bacterium, called Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6. This microbe could grow on pieces of PET. Not only that: Oda’s team reported that the bacterium could use PET as its main source of nutrients, degrading the PET in the process.
A Chinese labourer sorts plastic bottles for recycling, 2015. In 2017, China banned trade in most plastic waste, putting pressure on the EU and US to find new ways to deal with the issue. Photograph: Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images
The key to this ability was a pair of enzymes made by the bacteria. Enzymes are complex molecules that can speed up chemical reactions. They are crucial to life: our digestive system relies on enzymes to break down the complex chemicals in food into simpler ones that our bodies can absorb and use. For example, our saliva contains an enzyme called amylase that breaks up the long molecules of starch found in foods such as bread.
Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6 produces two unique enzymes. The first is a PETase that breaks the long PET molecules down into smaller molecules called MHET. A second enzyme called MHETase then goes to work, producing ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid. These two chemicals are the building blocks of PET, so Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6 can completely reverse the manufacturing process that made PET.
Plastic eaters
The finding made headlines around the world, but it was not the first example of an organism that could degrade plastics. Reports of plastic-munching microbes date back to at least the early 1990s. The earliest examples were arguably less remarkable, because they could only eat plastics that were chemically flimsy or biodegradable. But by the 2000s researchers had found enzymes that could tackle tougher plastics.
A prominent researcher in this area has been Wolfgang Zimmermann of Leipzig University in Germany. His team studied enzymes called cutinases, which it obtained from bacteria such as Thermobifida cellulosilytica, and which could also break down PET.
If you’re the first bacterium in that rubbish pile that suddenly has a taste for plastic, then you’ve got an unlimited food source – Prof John McGeehan, University of Portsmouth
Lars Blank of Aachen University in Germany first heard about this in 2012. He set about creating a consortium of researchers to study plastic-eating enzymes. This became the P4SB project, which ran from 2015 to 2019. Blank has since set up a project called MIX-UP, which sees European and Chinese researchers cooperating.
By the mid-2010s plenty of plastic-degrading enzymes were known. The potential was clear to Gabriella Caruso of the Institute for Coastal Marine Environment in Messina, Italy, who wrote in a 2015 review that “microbial degradation of plastic is a promising eco-friendly strategy which represents a great opportunity to manage waste plastic materials with no adverse impacts”.
So why did Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6 cause such a stir? “The difference with the 2016 paper was this micro-organism could use the plastic as its sole energy and food source,” says John McGeehan of the University of Portsmouth. “That’s actually quite surprising and it kind of shows evolutionary pressure in action. If you’re the first bacterium in that rubbish pile that suddenly has a taste for plastic, then you’ve got an unlimited food source.”
Put another way, the earlier enzymes had not evolved for plastics. They evolved to break down tough chain molecules found in living things, and their ability to degrade plastic was a side-effect. In contrast, the enzymes in Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6 were specialised.
Blank has a different interpretation, arguing that the Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6 enzymes are not especially good because they only degrade PET slowly. “Wolfgang Zimmermann had far better enzymes at that point,” he says. But the excitement the paper created had a huge impact. “Suddenly the media and also the academic literature really cranked up and a lot of interest came in.”
Better and better enzymes
Two years later McGeehan and his colleagues took things further. They produced a three-dimensional structure of the Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6 PETase, shedding light on how it worked. Hoping to understand how it evolved, they tweaked the structure. To their surprise, this made the enzyme more efficient at degrading PET. Clearly, it was possible to improve the enzyme.
McGeehan now wants to take that further, modifying the PETase and other such enzymes so that they can be used on an industrial scale to break down plastics that would otherwise linger in the environment. “We’ve got a big £6m grant from the government,” he says, and they have started a specialist institute called the Centre for Enzyme Innovation.
This is now bearing fruit. In 2020 McGeehan’s team reported that it had linked the PETase and MHETase enzymes together. This “super-enzyme” could eat PET about six times faster than the two enzymes working separately. Other groups such as Blank’s MIX-UP have produced modified enzymes of their own.
Prof John McGeehan, director of the Centre for Enzyme Innovation at the University of Portsmouth. His team have created a ‘super-enzyme’. Photograph: University of Portsmouth/Stefan Ventur/PA
Meanwhile there is evidence that microbes all around the world are evolving similar abilities. A study published in October 2021 looked at microbial DNA from a range of habitats. In areas with high levels of plastic pollution, the researchers found that the microbes were more likely to have enzymes with plastic-degrading tendencies. In line with this, a 2020 study identified a soil bacterium that can feed on some of the components of polyurethane, which releases toxic chemicals when it breaks down.
The question now becomes: how significant a role can these enzymes really play in reducing plastic pollution?
The circular economy
So far, most of the activity has been in universities, but some groups are attempting to commercialise the technology. The University of Portsmouth has set up Revolution Plastics, which aims to forge links between academics and industry. “We’ve already advertised a joint PhD project with Coca-Cola,” says McGeehan. He is also part of an international research team called BOTTLE, which is negotiating with large companies.
The most advanced project is run by Carbios, a French biotechnology company. In September 2021 it opened a pilot plant in Clermont-Ferrand, where it will test a system for recycling PET. Carbios’s system uses an enzyme that was first identified in compost, which they modified so that it worked faster and could operate at high temperatures where PET is softer.
The advantage of these enzymes is that they break down the plastic at the molecular level, so it is possible to recreate the highest-quality plastic. In contrast, other forms of recycling cause a slow decline in quality, until eventually the plastic cannot be recycled again and gets landfilled or incinerated. Enzymatic recycling, in theory at least, is truly circular. “That’s what we call a closed-loop recycling system,” says Ramos. “You recycle something, but then you’re able to make something new of the same quality out of that.” To date, only a tiny percentage of plastics are being recycled in this way, but the enzymes could change that – “Which would be great.”
In a circular economy, everything is recycled as much as possible. Photograph: Yagi Studio/Getty Images
McGeehan says: “I think in the next five years we’re going to be seeing demonstration plants all over the place.”
Still, there are limits to the enzymes’ usefulness. “It will never be a one-size-fits-all type of solution,” says Ramos, and we should not count on the enzymes to mop up all our plastic waste. Some plastics are even tougher than PET.
Blank points out that the enzymes work best if the plastic has been softened by heating. That means releasing the enzymes into the environment would not do much good: they only really work in temperature-controlled reactors. So the solution to plastic in the sea remains the same as before: we have to stop releasing it in the first place.
Nevertheless, it seems likely that plastic-eating enzymes will have a role to play as societies move towards a circular economy in which everything is recycled as much as possible. In a study published in July 2021, McGeehan and his colleagues estimated how much enzymatic recycling of PET will cost. They calculate that it could compete on cost with standard manufacturing methods, which use fossil fuels as feedstock.
The key is to be savvy about where we use the enzymes, says Blank. Some plastics can be mechanically recycled, a technology that is improving rapidly, so they probably are not the best targets. Instead, he says, researchers should go for plastics that cannot be recycled any other way – particularly if they can become substances that are otherwise expensive to make.
Ultimately, the enzymes have to be part of a revolution in the entire way we make and use plastics, says Ramos. Better methods of recycling are useful, she adds, but they are only part of the solution. It is also important for plastic products to be designed in such a way that they can easily be reused and recycled. That might mean avoiding designs that use several kinds of plastic, or fuse plastic with other materials, as these are very difficult to recycle.
As with all our environmental problems, there is no silver enzyme. These chemical machines can help us recycle plastic better, but we will always need to pick up our litter.
The maritime sector is prepared to pay extra for using clean fuel to transport its cargo over one that emits more greenhouse gases, said Søren Skou, chief executive of Danish shipping giant AP Moller-Maersk.
Speaking at a virtual session at the Ecosperity sustainability conference on Tuesday, Skou said that more than half of its 200 largest customers have met – or are in the process of setting – signed science-based or zero-carbon targets that will force them to cut emissions that directly and indirectly impact their value chains. Its major customers include German car manufacturer BMW Group and clothing multinationals H&M Group, Levi Strauss & Co. and Marks & Spencer, among others.
“We are today selling a biofuels-based carbon neutral transportation product which is growing quite nicely from a very small base. But nevertheless, there are customers out there in container shipping that are willing to pay a [green] premium [for low-carbon fuel],” Skou told panellists in the event hosted by Singapore investment firm Temasek.
Maersk signed a contract in August to secure green methanol—produced by using renewable sources such as biomass and solar energy—as the world’s largest shipping firm gears up to operate its first carbon-neutral ship in 2023. With about 90 per cent of world trade transported by sea, global shipping accounts for nearly three per cent of the world’s carbon emissions. Maersk needs to have a carbon neutral fleet by 2030 to meet its target of net-zero emissions by 2050.
While those who can afford to pay the green premium are big global brands which comprise only 10 to up to 20 per cent of the business, Skou noted that customers in other transport sectors like aviation are likewise able to pay for it.
“I think the world can actually pay for decarbonisation. We can afford this if we want to, [like adding] US$50 to the cost of an international airlines flight. For me the issue is more [about] scaling,” he said.
The scale-up of the production of new fuels will require getting global and regional regulations in place, raising efficiency standards, and gettinggovernments to cut bureaucratic red-tape and slash the time for the approval of permits for low carbon technologies, he shared.
Juliet Teo, head of transportation and logistics at Temasek, said that the only mechanism that would work would be to shift the cost of the premium to all the customers along the value chain. This could mean more expensive products for consumers.
“Unfortunately, the transportation industry has the poorest record of getting its customers to help with paying any additional fuel cost. Whether it’s extra fuel surcharge that you have to pay when you fly, or charging additional bunker costs to customers for shipping, it’s very hard. It hasn’t been very successful,” she told the panel.
Peter Vanacker, president and chief executive of Neste Corporation, a Finland-based refining company concentrating on low-emission fuels, called for regulations to be in place to adopt pricier sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), but emphasised the urgency.
SAF, made using biofuel, hydrogen or carbon, is currently more costly than traditional fossil jet fuel due to a lower availability of sustainable feedstocks – compared to widely available fossil oil – and the continuing development of new technologies. It has been used in a blend with conventional fuel since 2011, with the hope it will make up the majority as the technology matures.
“The clock is ticking and the climate crisis is here,” he said. “Do not wait until governments all over the world have agreed upon one measure of how to decarbonise the aviation industry.”
Neste has been in discussions with Temasek, the Singapore government, the national airline and Changi airport about using sustainable aviation fuels for flights departing the nation state. Its plant in Singapore will be the firm’s largest once completed in 2023.
Gates: the green premium may exclude poorer countries
Bill Gates, American tech magnate and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, echoed how there was “no chance” for consumers, especially those from middle income countries to pay for pricier products that emit less carbon over cheaper alternatives.
“Unless that green premium is very low or is being subsidised, middle income countries will say that the rich countries did most of the emissions, so they’ll have to go solve this thing. And with [the price of] today’s premiums, there’s no chance [they would pay for it],” Gates said in a separate virtual session.
The philanthropist describes the green premium as thedifference in cost between a product that involves emitting carbon and an alternative that does not.
“I think the climate movement got very focused on near-term reductions…what can be done by 2020, and then 2030. The hard areas like how we make steel, cement, beef; how jets make long trips or cross-ocean shipping takes place – I think we are grossly under-invested in the research and new approaches in the hard [to abate] areas,” Gates said on Tuesday.
Over US$5 trillion a year in global subsidies was needed to pay for green premiums to support innovations such as carbon capture technologies and green hydrogen, according to Gates. Investment and government involvement to help increase the scale of projects beyond pilot stage could help to drive the cost down by over 90 per cent.
The cost of new technologies, innovations to curb the climate crisis will have to be reduced dramatically for middle-income countries to adopt them at scale. “The skills of the private sector, the policy and involvement of the government is very critical,” Gates said.
Straddling the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire, Indonesia is one of the most geologically active countries in the world, with churning molten rock beneath the archipelago triggering about 1,000 tremors a month. The heat generated by movement in the Earth’s bowels can be harnessed. Where water seeps into the ground, it warms up, creating energy that can power homes and industry if you drill deep enough.
In 1904, Italian scientist Piero Ginori Conti became the first person to use this type of energy to power several light bulbs. More than a century later, geothermal power has become an important source of renewable electricity from the United States to the Philippines, but Indonesia wants to rise above them all.
Home to 40 per cent of the world’s geothermal resources, Indonesia’s government has identified more than 300 sites with an estimated 24 GW in geothermal energy reserves—the world’s largest—across islands including Sumatra, Java, Nusa Tenggara, Sulawesi and Maluku. Most of this remains untapped. Three years ago, it overtook the Philippines to become the second-largest geothermal power producer globally. Now, it only tails the United States, which has a capacity of 2.6 GW.
Geothermal plants use steam from underground reservoirs of hot water to spin a turbine, which drives a generator to produce electricity. An inexhaustible source of heat, geothermal is relatively clean and does not emit carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases, doesn’t produce a lot of waste or make a large footprint on land. Unaffected by the whims of nature, geothermal can generate a stable baseload power around the clock to complement more variable output from other green sources, including wind and solar.
Geothermal power capacity in Indonesia, the Philippines, and the United States, 2011 – 2020. The US is the biggest geothermal power producer globally, followed by Indonesia and the Philippines. Source: IRENA
Increasing domestic capacity will also help Indonesia cushion itself from the risks associated with its dependence on fossil fuel imports and associated price fluctuations while reducing fossil fuel subsidies, which gobble Rupiah 70.5 trillion (US$4.9 billion) a year.
Indonesia’s idea to draw energy from the bowels of the Earth goes back to the Dutch colonial era. Trial well drilling began at Java’s Kamojang crater as early as 1926, although it would take several more decades until the first generator was installed to produce electricity. By the mid-1980s, several geothermal plants were in operation and explorations on other islands were underway. In 2018, a consortium of Japanese and Indonesian firms completed the US$1.17 billion Sarulla project in North Sumatra, the world’s biggest geothermal power plant at the time with a capacity of 330 megawatts, enough to power 330,000 homes.
As of 2020, Indonesia had 19 existing geothermal working areas and 45 new working areas, while 14 areas had been earmarked for preliminary surveys and exploration, according to government data. A total of 16 geothermal power plants have been built.
A worker at Indonesia’s first geothermal field, Kawah Kamojang, in 1935. Image: Christoffel Hendrik Japing, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia Commons
Investors stay away
Despite the sheer scale of its potential, the sector has experienced setbacks. The government’s plans for the industry largely hinge on private money, but major policy uncertainties and the government’s adverse pricing regime for renewables continue to deter investors and drive up costs, making geothermal projects less viable.
Due to this poor investment climate, the energy and mineral resources ministry conceded last year, progress on its ambition to install 7.2 GW of geothermal capacity by 2025, a target enshrined in its electricity procurement plan (RUPTL), will bedelayed by five years. It is estimated that Indonesia will require US$15 billion in investment to meet this goal.
If Indonesia doesn’t develop a clearer framework, the sector will find it difficult to thrive.
Septia Buntara Supendi, manager, sustainable energy and energy efficiency, Asean Centre for Energy
The list of market restraints is long. Two key obstacles are the lack of favourable rates for the power that developers feed into the grid and the high upfront risks facing firms in the exploration stage. Drilling wells can be a gamble because companies never know exactly how big a geothermal reserve they will find. This clouds the economics of geothermal ventures.
“Pricing has been a problem for renewable energy in Indonesia, especially for geothermal energy, because the development costs are very high,” Florian Kitt, a Jakarta-based energy specialist at the Asian Development Bank told Eco-Business.
Complicating matters further is that geothermal resources are often found in remote areas, further increasing costs. The government will need to throw other renewables into the mix to achieve least-cost electricity generation, Kitt said.
“The government wants to be a world leader in geothermal energy, and it will eventually be, but right now it makes more sense to look at how to best diversify and green Indonesia’s energy supply to meet demand at least cost. Key is an affordable mix of geothermal, solar, wind, hydro, biomass, and other renewable energy sources,” he said.
Indonesia also hasn’t laid the necessary groundwork to draw investment. From inadequate grid management and cumbersome negotiation practices to poorly designed power purchase agreements, there are myriad barriers the nation needs to tackle, according to an ADB report released last year.
While the adoption of international best practices for planning, procurement, contracting and risk mitigation will likely bring down clean energy costs, the government has not adequately “taken into account the dependency of renewable energy costs on the broader regulatory and commercial environment”, according to the bank.
A recent report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, an independent Canadian think tank, showed that out of the 75 power purchase agreements that clean energy firms had signed with government-owned utility company Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN) between 2017 and 2018, 36 per cent had not reached financial closing, and nearly 7 per cent had been terminated.
New hope
To plug the industry’s funding gap, the government has backed research on small-scale geothermal plants that come with smaller investment needs and risks compared to bigger facilities. The state also provides tax incentives and has streamlined previously tedious permit processes. In remote areas, it has engaged communities to improve public acceptance of geothermal development. Local opposition to geothermal plants has hamstrung projects in the past.
The government’s focus on de-risking geothermal exploration to incentivise private investment has been an important step towards increasing geothermal development, according to Kitt.
But a presidential regulation announced last year that is predicted to revitalise the renewables sector remains stuck in limbo. While a draft is on the table, the different ministries are still debating the budgetary impacts of the scheme as the Covid-19 pandemic continues wreaking havoc on the economy, soaking up government resources.
The regulation is meant to fix the pricing mechanism for geothermal power and mitigate early development risks through fiscal incentives and state-funded well drilling. Under the scheme, energy planners have also proposed a subsidy to close the gap between the geothermal power tariffs and PLN’s basic cost of electricity, a policy previously recommended by the ADB to encourage the state utility to buy more clean energy. At present, caps on PLN’s retail prices act as a strong disincentive for the firm to purchase anything but the lowest-cost electricity, which is typically coal-fired.
“There are massive opportunities in geothermal energy. The sector will be critical for Indonesia to achieve its sustainable energy ambitions,” said Septia Buntara Supendi, manager for sustainable energy and energy efficiency at the Asean Centre for Energy, a think tank based in Jakarta. “But if Indonesia doesn’t develop a clearer framework, the sector will find it difficult to thrive.”
The European Council adopted a climate change law Monday that legally obliges its 27 nations to collectively slash greenhouse emissions by 55% by 2030 — from 1990 levels — and to become a net-zero-emissions economy by 2050.
The European Union and several other nations increased pledges to cut greenhouse gases and reach carbon neutrality at a virtual climate change summit hosted by US President Joe Biden in April. But there have been concerns over whether world leaders would win the backings of their parliaments to actually enshrine the pledges into law.
Until Monday, only five countries had actually made their pledges legally binding, according to Climate Watch Data: The United Kingdom and New Zealand, as well as EU members Hungary, Luxembourg and France.
Monday’s approval of the package of policies is the final seal on the climate law, which the EU’s parliament passed last week. The EU has been working toward this law since it launched its vision, under the European Green Deal, in 2019.
“I warmly welcome this final step of the adoption of the EU’s very first climate law which enshrines into legislation the 2050 climate neutrality objective,” said Portuguese Minister of Environment and Climate Action João Pedro Matos Fernandes in a statement. Portugal is currently holding the presidency of the EU.
“An agreement on the European climate law has been a priority for the Portuguese Presidency and I am glad that we have successfully brought it over the finishing line.”
Net zero is a scenario where the number of greenhouse gases emitted are no greater than the amount removed from the atmosphere, largely through a method known as carbon capture. Some scientists and environmentalists criticize net zero plans for relying too heavily on technology that isn’t fully developed, arguing the world should be aiming to cut the use of fossil fuels entirely and aim for low- or zero-carbon economies.
The new law seeks to limit its reliance on carbon capture by capping the amount to 225 megatons of carbon. It will also seek to become a negative carbon economy — where it removes more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits — after 2050.
The European Commission also agreed to propose an intermediate climate target for 2040, “if appropriate,” within six months after a first “global stocktake” of emissions carried out under the Paris Agreement. The law states that a scientific board on climate change will be established to advise the EU on its policies.
The current increase in pledges from the EU — as well as other countries, including the US and UK — are aimed at keeping average global temperature rises within 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial levels and well below 2 degrees. The International Panel of Climate Change paints a catastrophic picture in a 2-degree-rise scenario, where 1.7 billion more people experience severe heatwaves at least once every five years, sea levels rise by another 10 centimeters and coral reefs are all but wiped out, among other impacts.
But some environmentalists have warned that even the more ambitious pledges do not go far enough, and are not enough to keep temperature rise to 1.5C.
