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Underground Hydrogen Touted As ‘Significant’ Clean Energy Resource In First U.S. Hearing

Posted on March 1, 2024March 1, 2024 by dishanth

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.”

Source Forbes

Onshore algae farms could feed the world sustainably

Posted on October 10, 2022October 17, 2022 by dishanth

How do we increase food production by more than 50%, on a limited amount of arable land, to feed a projected 10 billion people by 2050?

The solution could come in the form of nutritious and protein-dense microalgae (single-celled), grown in onshore, seawater-fed aquaculture systems.

A paper, “Transforming the Future of Marine Aquaculture: A Circular Economy Approach,” published in the September issue of Oceanography, describes how growing algae onshore could close a projected gap in society’s future nutritional demands while also improving environmental sustainability.

“We have an opportunity to grow food that is highly nutritious, fast-growing, and we can do it in environments where we’re not competing for other uses,” said Charles Greene, professor emeritus of earth and atmospheric sciences and the paper’s senior author. “And because we’re growing it in relatively enclosed and controlled facilities, we don’t have the same kind of environmental impacts.”

Even as the Earth’s population grows in the coming decades, climate change, limited arable land, lack of freshwater and environmental degradation will all constrain the amount of food that can be grown, according to the paper.

Microalgae cultivation facility along the Kona Coast of Hawaii’s Big Island.

“We just can’t meet our goals with the way we currently produce food and our dependence on terrestrial agriculture,” Greene said.

With wild fish stocks already heavily exploited, and with constraints on marine finfish, shellfish, and seaweed aquaculture in the coastal ocean, Greene and colleagues argue for growing algae in onshore aquaculture facilities. GIS-based models, developed by former Cornell graduate student, Celina Scott-Buechler ’18, M.S. ’21, predict yields based on annual sunlight, topography, and other environmental and logistical factors. The model results reveal that the best locations for onshore algae farming facilities lie along the coasts of the Global South, including desert environments.

“Algae can actually become the breadbasket for the Global South,” Greene said. “In that narrow strip of land, we can produce more than all the protein that the world will need.”

Along with high protein content, the researchers noted that algae provide nutrients lacking in vegetarian diets, such as essential amino acids and minerals found in meat and omega-3 fatty acids often sourced in fish and seafood.

Algae, which grow 10 times faster than traditional crops, can be produced in a manner that is more efficient than agriculture in its use of nutrients. For example, when farmers add nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers to grow terrestrial crops, about half runs off fields and pollutes waterways. With algae grown in enclosed facilities, excess nutrients can be captured and reused.

Similarly, carbon dioxide must be added to aquaculture ponds to grow algae. Researchers and companies have been experimenting with adding algae to construction materials and cement, where the carbon gets sequestered and removed from the atmosphere. “If we use algae in these long-lived structural materials, then we have the potential to be carbon negative, and part of the solution to climate change,” Greene said.

One challenge is that sourcing CO2 is currently expensive and energy inefficient, but engineers are experimenting with concentrated solar technologies that use mirrors to focus and concentrate sunlight to heat a working fluid, which in turn can be used in direct air capture technologies that capture carbon dioxide from the air.

Also, while algae farming solves many food-related and environmental problems on paper, it can only be successful if people adopt it in diets and for other uses. Adding nutritious algae as a major ingredient or supplement in plant-based meats, which currently rely on less nutritious pea and soy, is one possibility.

Co-author Xingen Lei, professor of animal science at Cornell, and other colleagues have found that when algae is added to chicken feed, hens lay eggs with triple the amount of omega-3 fatty acids as normal eggs.

A follow-up perspectives piece that highlights and expands on the points of this paper, will appear in the October issue of PLoS Biology. Scott-Buechler, currently a doctoral student at Stanford, is a coauthor on both works.

The study was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, among others.

Source Cornell Chronicle

A cheaper carbon capture is on the way

Posted on March 16, 2021March 30, 2021 by dishanth

As part of a marathon research effort to lower the cost of carbon capture, chemists have now demonstrated a method to seize carbon dioxide (CO₂) that reduces costs by 19 percent compared to current commercial technology. The new technology requires 17 percent less energy to accomplish the same task as its commercial counterparts, surpassing barriers that have kept other forms of carbon capture from widespread industrial use. And it can be easily applied in existing capture systems.

In a study published in the March 2021 edition of International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory—along with collaborators from Fluor Corp. and the Electric Power Research Institute—describe properties of the solvent, known as EEMPA, that allow it to sidestep the energetically expensive demands incurred by traditional solvents.

“EEMPA has some promising qualities,” said chemical engineer Yuan Jiang, lead author of the study. “It can capture carbon dioxide without high water content, so it’s water-lean, and it’s much less viscous than other water-lean solvents.”

Carbon capture methods are diverse. They range from aqueous amines—the water-rich solvents that run through today’s commercially available capture units, which Jiang used as an industrial comparison—to energy-efficient membranes that filter CO₂ from flue gas emitted by power plants.

This animation depicts the two-stage flash configuration, one of several processes..

Current atmospheric CO₂ levels have soared higher in recent years than at any point within the last 800,000 years, as a new record high of 409.8 parts per million was struck in 2019. CO₂ is primarily released through human activities like fossil fuel combustion, and today’s atmospheric concentrations exceed pre-industrial levels by 47 percent.

At a cost of $400-$500 million per unit, commercial technology can capture carbon at roughly $58.30 per metric ton of CO₂, according to a DOE analysis. EEMPA, according to Jiang’s study, can absorb CO₂ from power plant flue gas and later release it as pure CO₂ for as little as $47.10 per metric ton, offering an additional technology option for power plant operators to capture their CO₂.

Jiang’s study described seven processes that power plants can adopt when using EEMPA, ranging from simple setups similar to those described in 1930s technology, to multi-stage configurations of greater complexity. Jiang modeled the energy and material costs to run such processes in a 550-megawatt coal power plant, finding that each method coalesces near the $47.10 per metric ton mark.

Solving a solvent’s problems

One of the first known patents for solvent-based carbon capture technology cropped up in 1930, filed by Robert Bottoms.

“I kid you not,” said green chemist David Heldebrant, coauthor of the new study. “Ninety-one years ago, Bottoms used almost the same process design and chemistry to address what we now know as a 21st century problem.”

The chemical process for extracting CO₂ from post-combustion gas remains largely unchanged: water-rich amines mix with flue gas, absorb CO₂ and are later stripped of the gas, which is then compressed and stored. But aqueous amines have limitations. Because they’re water-rich, they must be boiled at high temperatures to remove CO₂ and then cooled before they can be reused, driving costs upward.

“We wanted to hit it from the other side and ask, why are we not using 21st century chemistry for this?” Heldebrant said. So, in 2009, he and his colleagues began designing water-lean solvents as an alternative. The first few solvents were too viscous to be usable.

“‘Look,'” he recalled industry partners saying, “‘your solvent is freezing and turning into glass. We can’t work with this.’ So, we said, OK. Challenge accepted.”

Over the next decade, the PNNL team refined the solvent’s chemistry with the explicit aim to overcome the “viscosity barrier.” The key, it turned out, was to use molecules that aligned in a way that promoted internal hydrogen bonding, leaving fewer hydrogen atoms to interact with neighboring molecules.

Heldebrant draws a comparison to children running through a ball pit: if two kids hold each other’s hands while passing through, they move slowly. But if they hold their own hands instead, they pass as two smaller, faster-moving objects. Internal hydrogen bonding also leaves fewer hydrogen atoms to interact with overall, akin to removing balls from the pit.

Pivoting to plastic

Where the team’s solvent was once viscous like honey, it now flowed like water from the kettle. EEMPA is 99 percent less viscous than PNNL’s previous water-lean formulations, now nearly on par with commercial solvents, allowing them to be utilized in existing infrastructure, which is largely built from steel. Pivoting to plastic in place of steel, the team found, can further reduce equipment costs.

Steel is expensive to produce, costly to ship and tends to corrode over time in contact with solvents. At one tenth the weight, substituting plastic for steel can drive the overall cost down another $5 per metric ton, according to a study led by Jiang in 2019.

Pairing with plastic offers another advantage to EEMPA, whose reactive surface area is boosted in plastic systems. Because traditional aqueous amines can’t “wet” plastic as well (think of water beading on Teflon), this advantage is unique to the new solvent.

The PNNL team plans to produce 4,000 gallons of EEMPA in 2022 to analyze at a 0.5-megawatt scale inside testing facilities at the National Carbon Capture Center in Shelby County, Alabama, in a project led by the Electric Power Research Institute in partnership with Research Triangle Institute International. They will continue testing at increasing scales and further refine the solvent’s chemistry, with the aim to reach the U.S. Department of Energy’s goal of deploying commercially available technology that can capture CO₂ at a cost of $30 per metric ton by 2035.

Provided by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Source Phys.org