The Senate held the first congressional hearing on geologic hydrogen, a promising new form of clean energy generated naturally underground, that’s attracted growing interest and investment over the past year.
The Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, chaired by West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin, heard testimony on Wednesday from the Energy Department’s advanced research unit, the U.S. Geological Survey and Pete Johnson, CEO of Koloma, the best-funded startup in the geologic hydrogen space. They concurred that more research is needed to identify the most abundant, promising sites and to develop techniques to amplify the natural production process, but were upbeat about the outlook.
“The potential for geologic hydrogen represents a paradigm shift in the way we think about hydrogen as an energy source,” Evelyn Wang, director of DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy told Senators. “This new source of hydrogen could lower energy costs and increase our nation’s energy security and supply chains.”
Federal scientists have begun working with universities and energy companies to find ways to map and locate potentially large pockets of hydrogen as current estimates are inadequate, said the Geological Survey’s Geoffrey Ellis. “The estimated in-place global geologic hydrogen resource ranges from 1000s to potentially billions of megatons,” he told the committee. “Given our understanding of other geologic resources, the vast majority of the in-place hydrogen is likely to be in accumulations that are either too far offshore or too small to ever be economically recovered. However, if even a small fraction of this amount could be recovered that would constitute a significant resource.”
Hydrogen is already heavily used in industry, including at oil refineries, chemical plants and as a key ingredient in ammonia for fertilizer. But nearly all of it is made by extracting hydrogen from natural gas, a dirty process that emits large amounts of carbon dioxide. Like green hydrogen — a new clean form of the element made from water and electricity, ideally from renewable power — the geologic variety is carbon-free. Scientists believe it’s generated in underground pockets of iron-rich rock in warm, moist conditions that are extremely common. Uniquely, it’s an energy source that’s just sitting there, not one that needs to be created.
“All other forms of hydrogen require more energy to produce than the hydrogen itself holds,” Koloma’s Johnson said. “This is incredibly clean energy. In multiple third-party lifecycle analyses and peer-reviewed journal articles, geologic hydrogen has been found to have a very low carbon footprint. In addition, geologic hydrogen will result in lower land use and lower water consumption than any other form of hydrogen.”
Johnson, Wang and Ellis also noted that drilling or mining for hydrogen leverages techniques used by the oil and gas industry. It’s also likely to aid domestic ammonia production.
“Hydrogen is a great feedstock and it’s used to create ammonia for fertilizer,” said Wang. “If we could really stimulate and extract this hydrogen and produce very large quantities at very low cost I think this could have significant implications to help and support farmers.”
Johnson provided no details about when Denver-based Koloma, which has raised over $300 million from investors including Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Energy Impact Partners and Amazon, would begin commercial extraction of hydrogen but is cautiously optimistic.
“This will take time, money and effort to figure out. Nobody has all the answers today,” he told the committee. “The early data looks promising and I believe that geologic hydrogen can play a very large role as we decarbonize the U.S. energy economy.”
In Kenya, Maasai women have found an eco-friendly solution to an invasive and hazardous plant.
Parts of the opuntia cactus are edible, but its outer layers are covered in spikes and harmful to livestock which try to graze on it.
A group of women are now transforming the prickly pear into a bio-gas and preserves.
It is bringing them a form of employment and a method of empowerment.
Kenya’s livestock threatened by invasive cactus
The wilderness of Laikipia County, near Nairobi, is home to goats and cattle that roam freely.
They are frequently attracted to grazing on prickly pears, but these are an invasive species which threaten the natural environment.
The cacti were introduced by colonialists in the early 1900s as a natural fence and have morphed into an invasive menace that outcompetes native plants.
Its seed gets widely dispersed by the wind and the animals that pass through.
The hairs which cover the fruit can cause internal obstructions when eaten by animals, posing a significant threat to livestock.
Local farmers say the cactus now competes for critical resources, jeopardising community lands, wildlife reserves and livestock ranches.
Its encroachment also hinders wildlife navigation as well as reducing grazing areas.
Naimadu Siranga, a 65-year-old herder, has witnessed the devastation of the cactus firsthand, leading to the loss of over 150 of his goats and sheep.
“I once maintained a herd of more than 100 goats. Unfortunately, a series of losses ensued when they started consuming cactus plants, which led to mouth injuries, severe diarrhoea, and ultimately, the demise of my livestock,” he says.
“These circumstances have inflicted significant financial setbacks.”
Women’s group transforms cacti into bio-fuel
Now a women’s group in Laikipia County is transforming the cacti from a problem into a new enterprise.
They harvest the prickly pear and turn it into biogas which they can use in their homes.
The Iloplei Twala Cultural Manyatta Women Group has 203 members who are now employed in converting the cactus pulp into fuel.
This approach not only eradicates the cactus but also promotes environmental conservation and offers an alternative livelihood for the women.
“We came together because in Maasai culture, women do all the domestic work and own nothing at home,” says Rosemary Nenini, a member of the group, “so we want to empower ourselves.”
The fruits from the cactus are edible for both humans and animals if separated from their sharp spines.
So the Twala women at Laikipia Permaculture are also using the fruit to create a range of products including jams, cosmetics and juices. This generates an independent income for them.
Cacti pose a danger to baby elephants
Loisaba Conservancy, a 58,000-acre wildlife habitat in northern Kenya, home to iconic species such as lions and wild dogs, also grapples with the invasive cactus.
Animals unwittingly facilitate the spread of this invasive plant. Baboons, elephants, guinea fowl, and tortoises consume the sweet fruit and disperse the seeds.
However, elephants, while skilled at extracting the fruit from the spiny thorns, sometimes suffer from digestive issues due to the fruit’s small hairs.
“If the elephant is young, the hairs of the fruit can irritate the gut lining, create diarrhoea and sometimes even irritation in the gut,” says Tom Silvester, the Conservancy’s Chief Executive.
Combatting this invasive species proves challenging, as it spreads aggressively, even on barren rock.
Traditional removal methods, like manual labour and burning, have proved ineffective.
Teams now use heavy machinery to uproot the cactus, transferring it to designated areas and burying it in deep pits to minimise carbon emissions during decomposition.
This strategy results in fertile zones where native plants can regenerate and flourish.
As of June 2023, Loisaba Conservancy successfully cleared 3,100 acres of opuntia, marking a significant step in the fight against this environmental menace.
Research scientist Winnie Nunda from the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International says it’s a step towards preserving the country’s biodiversity.
Data centres are well-known for being energy guzzlers because of the growth of digital demand. Worldwide, they consume an estimated 200 terawatt hours a year (TWh/yr), or nearly 1 per cent of global electricity demand.
That said, the energy consumption of data centres has not grown at the exponential rate of Internet traffic. This is due to the huge strides made in energy efficiency in data centres. Improvements in the efficiency of servers, storage devices and data centre infrastructure, as well as the move away from small data centres to larger cloud and hyperscale data centres, have all helped to limit the growth of electricity demand.
According to figures from a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), from 2010 to 2020, the number of internet users worldwide has doubled and global internet traffic has expanded 15-fold. But global data centre energy use has been flat since 2015, at about 200 TWh/yr.
Globally, leading data centre operators have committed to carbon neutrality and science-based targets for emissions reduction by 2030. To achieve these goals, they have partnered with technology companies to develop ways of reducing energy consumption at all levels of operation – from direct-to-chip cooling to providing on-site prime power through alternative energy fuel cells.
New cooling solutions
One of the main areas of innovation is developing new solutions to cool data centres more efficiently as their capacity grows. Typically, cooling accounts for a large proportion of overall power consumption. Estimates from 2021 suggest that the figure ranges from 30 to 37 per cent.
Air cooling has been widely adopted in data centres since their inception. The basic principle of such systems involves circulating cold air around the hardware to dissipate heat.
More high power-density racks of up to 50kW are being deployed in data centres, such as those at Equinix’s International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres around the world. Source: Equinix.
But air cooling systems are struggling to keep up with the increases in the power density of racks. Thanks to new generations of central processing units (CPUs), rack power requirements have moved from below 20 kilowatts (kW) to up to 40 or 50 kW today, easily.
Air cooling systems have evolved to address higher densities, but there is a point at which air just does not have the thermal transfer properties to do so in an efficient manner. This has caused organisations to look into liquid cooling, as water and other fluids are up to 3,000 times more efficient in transferring heat than air.
Liquid cooling is available in a variety of configurations that use different technologies, including rear door heat exchangers and direct-to-chip cooling.
Rear door heat exchangers is the more mature technology, where a liquid-filled coil is mounted in place of the rear door of the rack. As server fans move heated air through the rack, the coil absorbs the heat before the air enters the data centre.
Direct-to-chip cooling integrates the cooling system directly into the computer’s chassis. A liquid coolant is brought via tubes directly to the chip, where it absorbs heat and removes it from the data hall. The warm liquid is then circulated to a cooling device or heat exchange.
One of the world’s largest data centre providers, Equinix, for example, is developing a new direct-to-chip cooling technology at their Co-Innovation Facility (CIF) located in the Washington DC area. Developed in collaboration with Zutacore, the system introduces a cooling fluid to an evaporator overlying the CPU to absorb heat directly, which in turn causes the liquid to evaporate and produce a constant temperature over the CPU.
Hotter temperatures
Some operators are challenging the thinking that data centres should be operated at low temperatures of 20 to 22 degrees celsius. There is evidence to support the running of data centres ‘hot’, i.e., increasing their temperature by 1 or 2 degrees Celsius, which improves efficiency without any significant sacrifices in system reliability.
In Singapore, the Infocomm Media Development Authority has been trialing the world’s first ‘tropical data centre’, to test if data centres can function optimally at temperatures of up to 38 degrees Celsius and ambient humidity up to or exceeding 90 per cent.
Running with simulated data, the trial would test how data servers react under various situations, such as peak surges or while transferring data, and in conditions such as with no temperature or humidity controls.
Using digital resources and analytics to optimise energy usage
Smart solutions monitoring energy consumption patterns allow data centres to configure the optimal use of their resources, as well as to identify and diagnose equipment problems and take steps to fix them. Software powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can also assist companies to better manage their infrastructure and maximise the utilisation of their CPUs.
In an interview with Fortune, Equinix’s chief executive Charles Meyer explained that AI is used in the company’s data centres to “anticipate where power needs to be applied, how cooling… needs to be done to improve the power usage efficiency of the facility overall”.
Using on-site lower-carbon energy sources
New cooling solutions and digital resources are offsetting the energy consumption from increasing data centre services. However, there remains the question of energy supply to the facility overall.
A totally carbon-free solution would involve locating a data centre beside a wind- or solar-generated renewable energy source, or purchasing 100 per cent green energy from the grid. But these may not always be feasible solutions. In Singapore, for instance, space constraints limit the use of solar energy, and wind conditions are not sufficient for wind power.
Alternatives include the use of fuel cells for primary power supply at data centres. Fuel cells generate power through electrochemical reactions using natural gas, biogas or LPG. Testing by Equinix at CIF indicates they are 20 to 40 per cent cleaner than gas-powered electricity generation.
Fuel cells generate power through electrochemical reactions using natural gas, biogas or LPG. Source: Equinix.
When fuel cells are set up near data centres, there are even greater efficiencies. The generated electricity has less distance to travel and hence less energy is lost in the transmission process.
Equinix has deployed fuel cells at 15 of its facilities, including the carrier-neutral SV11 opened in San Jose in 2021, which utilises 4 megawatts (MW) of fuel cells for primary power production on site and can scale up to 20 MW of fuel cells.
Equinix is also part of a consortium of seven companies (including InfraPrime, RISE, Snam, SOLIDpower, TEC4FUELS and Vertiv) which launched the Eco Edge Prime Power (E2P2) project. E2P2 is exploring the integration of fuel cells with uninterruptible power supply technology and lithium-ion batteries to provide resilient and low-carbon primary power to data centres.
This work will also pave the way to transition from natural gas to green hydrogen (hydrogen produced using renewable energy) in fuel cells. Such advances are a step change towards sustainability where green hydrogen is available.
A holistic approach
Energy efficiency is crucial in determining future emissions in an industry that will continue growing in response to digitalisation and data consumption.
Besides energy efficiency, major data centre operators are interested in holistic sustainability gains that minimise carbon emissions. They consider how sustainable their supply chains are, total resource use and the company’s whole carbon footprint such as the embodied carbon in building materials.
Equinix, for example, has adopted a global climate-neutral goal by 2030 and has embedded decarbonisation actions across its business and supply chain.
Jason Plamondon, Equinix’s regional manager for sustainability in Asia-Pacific, says that the company is “well on (its) way to meeting (its) climate commitments, with over 95 per cent renewable coverage for (its) portfolio in FY21, maintaining over 90 per cent for the fourth consecutive year”.
He adds: “As the world’s digital infrastructure company, we have the responsibility to harness the power of technology to create a more accessible, equitable and sustainable future. Our Future First sustainability approach includes continuing to innovate and develop new technologies that contribute to protecting our planet.”
The City Council on Wednesday passed a bill making New York the largest city in the United States to effectively ban the use of gas in new buildings and to turn to electricity for power.
More than 50 municipalities in California have all-electric building codes, and other cities, including Seattle and Ithaca, are advancing electrification in new buildings. But no other American city has a dense building stock like New York, which faces colder seasonal temperatures compared to most places that have adopted similar legislation.
The New York bill, which establishes a threshold for how much carbon a building can emit, limiting the use of gas, could set an example for the rest of the country, environmental advocates said.
“To think that every new iconic skyscraper on the New York City skyline will soon be built without any fossil fuel use — I think it’s a game-changing moment for the climate movement,” said Jenna Tatum, director of the Building Electrification Institute.
Mayor Bill Blasio is expected to sign the bill or let it lapse into law.
Here’s what you need to know:
What’s the point of prohibiting gas in new buildings?
Buildings are responsible for about 70% of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, which warm the planet and threaten health.
“Furnaces, boilers and hot water heaters emit more carbon in New York City than all uses of electricity combined today, so electrifying those systems becomes our biggest way to fight climate change,” said John Mandyck, CEO of the Urban Green Council.
This measure has the potential to save about 2.1 million tons of carbon emissions by 2040, according to an estimate by the Rocky Mountain Institute. That’s equal to taking nearly half a million cars off the road.
“New Yorkers will look back years from now and say that it had a major positive impact on public health,” said LJ Portis, environmental policy and advocacy coordinator at WE ACT for Environmental Justice.
I’m planning to move to a newly built place soon. Does this mean my building won’t have gas?
Nope — the ban doesn’t take effect right away. The ban would apply to new buildings with fewer than seven stories by 2024. That extends to July 2027 for buildings with seven or more stories.
Any gut renovation that requires a new building permit would also be subject to the law. Affordable housing would be subject to the ban in 2026 and 2028, depending on whether they’re below or above seven stories.
Not every building makes the grade when it comes to energy efficiency. Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Dozens of all-electric buildings are already in the works around the city, providing models for future developments.
How will this affect my current apartment?
New York City is aiming to reduce carbon from existing buildings through Local Law 97, which requires owners to meet certain emissions limits starting in 2024.
Based on how quickly the state can green the grid, most building owners, especially in the commercial sector, won’t have to do much to comply. But retrofits to electrify will help other buildings meet those targets.
This policy, as well as the looming gas ban, will help to “prove the market for energy efficient and electric building technologies and develop the workforce that is needed to install and service them,” according to Amy Turner, a senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.
That means building owners are likely over time to find more — and more affordable — electrical options for appliances if they want to upgrade their heating systems.
So in the future, new buildings won’t have gas stoves?
That’s right (as long as the law isn’t repealed). Buildings won’t be able to use any fossil fuel-powered appliances, like gas boilers and stoves. Instead, they’ll incorporate electric or induction stoves and incorporate heat pumps that move cold or warm air into a home.
These swaps will make residents more comfortable and healthier, according to Russell Unger, a principal and co-leader of the Building Electrification Initiative at the Rocky Mountain Institute.
“The stuff coming off of these open flames is not all that different from having a car idling in your kitchen,” Unger said. “Over time, there’ll be notable improvements in air quality. There’ll be less ozone. There’ll be lower levels of particulate matter, which will reduce cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, asthma, premature mortality.”
How much will this cost me? How much will it cost my landlord?
Studies have predicted lower utility bills as a result of all-electric development — but it’s unclear what the effect would be on bills for those living in multi-family housing in New York City, which sees higher than average electricity costs.
Even with increased electric use, the average New Yorker is bound to save money on paying for new fossil fuel infrastructure like pipelines.
Some studies have shown it’s less expensive for developers to build efficient, all-electric homes than it is to build using fossil fuels, and that electric space and water heating and air conditioning results in lower costs to owners over the lifetime of the appliances.
“These policies are hugely important because they save us future costs so we don’t have to go back and fix the buildings in the future,” Samantha Wilt, a senior policy analyst focused on clean energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Who backed the new measure?
Local environmental and climate justice advocates pushed the measure, saying it would tamp down on the carbon released into the atmosphere, leading to a healthier planet — and healthier neighborhoods. Con Ed, the utility supplying electricity and some gas to city dwellers, also backed the bill, as did businesses that help to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings.
Environmental activists held a “die-in” outside City Hall to advocate for passage of a bill banning the use of fracked gas in new developments, Sept. 23, 2021. Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Supporters pointed to climate science that shows the need to eliminate dependence on fossil fuels to prevent further damage to the earth. They’re looking to pass a bill in Albany that would make New York the first state in the nation to mandate all-electric buildings.
Who opposed it?
Some big players in the real estate industry and National Grid — which provides gas to many New Yorkers — lobbied against the timeline. They warned power might not be reliable in the winter, when heat is needed, and argued it would be difficult for developers to construct large, all-electric buildings. Those interests ultimately won a longer timeline for the ban to take effect, foiling ban supporters who wanted the no-gas rule in place by 2023.
Can New York’s grid handle this change?
While Con Ed says it doesn’t expect blackouts, New Yorkers have lived through past power outages, which could take a bigger toll on people in all-electric buildings. Still, a report by the Urban Green Council found the city electric grid won’t need upgrades to handle the increased reliance on it until after 2035, when, the organization predicts, more than a third of all the building stock citywide is expected to have been electrified.
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