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July 8, 2020 at 02:31AM

The European Commission will present its new hydrogen strategy today. As renewables run into the thermodynamic sands, desperate Net Zero advocates are invoking hydrogen as saviour of the EU’s green energy agenda.

Hydrogen is dangerous; hydrogen is safe; hydrogen is cheap; hydrogen is very expensive; hydrogen is old hat; hydrogen is the future. Hydrogen is… all things to all men, and every one of these contradictory claims is more or less true from some perspective. Whatever hydrogen is, it is a very buoyant gas and makes for the perfect climate political football. Indeed, the authentic promise of hydrogen is rapidly becoming the victim of failing green policies.

As renewables run into the thermodynamic sands all over the world, desperate advocates are covering up their disastrously bad advice by calling for still more ambitious, Net Zero emissions targets. To make these extreme demands look plausible hydrogen is invoked as an energy carrier for those sectors where it is most difficult to create the appearance of decarbonisation. 

The United Kingdom is a good example of the emerging European approach. The UK is planning to burn hydrogen rather than natural gas to generate electricity to balance and secure the unstable wind and solar system created by $12 billion a year in subsidy. Hydrogen will replace diesel for agricultural traction and for trucks, and will supply almost all industrial process heat. Converted to ammonia, hydrogen will replace bunker fuels for marine transport. And to ensure that domestic households don’t resort to resistive electric heating when their Ground and Air Source Heat Pumps fail to deliver on the coldest days of the year, every house will have a back-up hydrogen fuelled boiler.

For climate policy makers suffering from Net Zero headaches hydrogen is the universal aspirin. Take as many as you need, and lie down in a darkened room until the news cycle moves on.

But this desperate face-saving haste means that hydrogen must be generated by two relatively unsophisticated commodity production processes, namely the electrolysis of water and the chemical reforming of natural gas using steam (Steam Methane Reforming). Both processes are acceptable if hydrogen is required for niche and non-energy purposes, but it is a plain foolish to suggest using them for the production of hydrogen as a society-wide energy carrier. There are four principal disadvantages.

Firstly, the costs will be huge. Steam Methane Reformers and electrolysers are expensive to build and to run, and electrolysers at least do not have long plant lives, implying a short capital refreshment cycle. To this we can add the replacement of end conversion devices and the establishment of hydrogen infrastructure, pipelines, and storage systems ranging from tanks to salt caverns.

Secondly, due to conversion and storage losses, hydrogen from electrolysis and SMR can never in principle compete economically with its own input fuels. The consumer will always be better served by using the electricity and natural gas directly. Consequently, there will be substantial competitive advantages for economies that do not hobble themselves with hydrogen.

Thirdly, Steam Methane Reforming emits large quantities of carbon-dioxide, compromising any Net Zero target unless the SMRs are equipped with Carbon Capture and Sequestration, which is expensive and currently unavailable at scale. Indeed, what the current hype around hydrogen reveals is that the global Net Zero targets are in fact critically dependent on methane – the UK plans to derive 80% of its annual 270 TWh of hydrogen from SMRs – and are therefore a gamble on Carbon Capture. But if CCS becomes viable, which is possible, it will be more effective to use the methane directly in Combined Cycle Gas Turbines with CCS, and supply the consumer with electricity, and there would be no reason to make hydrogen, with all its attendant costs, problems and dangers.

Finally, the production of hydrogen from both electrolysis and SMRs uses large quantities of clean, fresh water. The UK’s current hydrogen target would increase national water consumption by between 1 and 2 percent at a time when climate policy advisors are themselves predicting a constrained fresh water supply, with deficits in a quarter of the country’s resource zones towards mid-century.

This is clearly bad hydrogen. Is there a good hydrogen? Perhaps. As long ago as the early 1970s the physicist Cesare Marchetti, then EURATOM, persuaded the Japanese government that hydrogen might have a future as a universal energy carrier if it was generated from a very high quality energy source, such as high temperature nuclear reactors, and through the thermal decomposition of sea-water in the presence of a suitable catalyst. Japan continues to work quietly on this. But the nuclear and chemical engineering problems are of the first order, and results will not come quickly. But at least the concept has authentic physical promise. 

Indeed, it is perhaps the only fossil-free energy future that also preserves human well-being. Those jeopardising that future by forcing rapid and sub-optimal adoption of hydrogen in order to prolong the current mal-engineered renewables farce should hang their heads in shame.

For more information about the cost, benefit and limits of hydrogen see John Constable’s new report Hydrogen: The Once And Future Fuel (pdf)

Dr John Constable is the energy editor of the London-based Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

The post John Constable: Why Europe’s ‘Green’ Hydrogen Hype Is Likely To Flop appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

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July 8, 2020 at 02:09AM

Doomsday thinking about the environment has been popular for decades. A rational optimist lays out the many reasons we can be hopeful about the future of the planet.

In 1980, the year that PERC was founded, I spent three months in the Himalayas working on a wildlife conservation project. The purpose was to do wildlife surveys on behalf of the Indian government in the stunningly beautiful valleys of the Kulu region in northern India, among forests of deodar cedar and evergreen oak. One species of particular interest was a bird called the western tragopan, a large, spotted gray forest pheasant with red plumage around the neck and bright blue skin on the male’s throat. The bird was found only in a few places and thought to be teetering on the brink of extinction. 

Though we saw other pheasant species, we never saw a tragopan that year, but some of the people we met knew of the bird, and one even handed me the remains of a tragopan that had been shot for food. I feared it might be the last one. I wanted to come back in the spring when the birds’ mating calls might give them away in the deep bamboo thickets they preferred, but work prevented me.

If you had asked me in 1980 to predict what would happen to that bird and its forest ecosystem, I would have been very pessimistic. I could see the effect on the forests of growing human populations, with their guns and flocks of sheep. More generally, I was marinated in gloom by almost everything I read about the environment. The human population explosion was unstoppable; billions were going to die of famine; malaria and other diseases were going to increase; oil, gas, and metals would soon run out, forcing us to return to burning wood; most forests would then be felled; deserts were expanding; half of all species were heading for extinction; the great whales would soon be gone from the oil-stained oceans; sprawling cities and modern farms were going to swallow up the last wild places; and pollution of the air, rivers, sea, and earth was beginning to threaten a planetary ecological breakdown. I don’t remember reading anything remotely optimistic about the future of the planet.

Today, the valleys we worked in are part of the Great Himalayan National Park, a protected area that gained prestigious World Heritage status in 2014. The logo of the park is an image of the western tragopan, a bird you can now go on a trekking holiday specifically to watch. It has not gone extinct, and although it is still rare and hard to spot, the latest population estimate is considerably higher than anybody expected back then. The area remains mostly a wilderness accessible largely on foot, and the forests and alpine meadows have partly recovered from too much grazing, hunting, and logging. Ecotourism is flourishing.

This is just one small example of things going right in the environment. Let me give some bigger ones. Far from starving, the seven billion people who now inhabit the planet are far better fed than the four billion of 1980. Famine has pretty much gone extinct in recent decades. In the 1960s, about two million people died of famine; in the decade that just ended, tens of thousands died—and those were in countries run by callous tyrants. Paul Ehrlich, the ecologist and best-selling author who declared in 1968 that “[t]he battle to feed all of humanity is over” and forecast that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death”—and was given a genius award for it—proved to be very badly wrong.

Remarkably, this feeding of seven billion people has happened without taking much new land under the plow and the cow. Instead, in many places farmland has reverted to wilderness. In 2009, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University calculated that thanks to more farmers getting access to better fertilizers, pesticides, and biotechnology, the area of land needed to produce a given quantity of food—averaged for all crops—was 65 percent less than in 1961. As a result, an area the size of India will be freed up by mid-century. That is an enormous boost for wildlife. National parks and other protected areas have expanded steadily as well.

Nor have these agricultural improvements on the whole brought new problems of pollution in their wake. Quite the reverse. The replacement of pesticides like DDT with much less harmful ones that do not persist in the environment and accumulate up the food chain, in addition to advances in biotechnology, has allowed wildlife to begin to recover. In the part of northern England where I live, otters have returned to the rivers, and hawks, kites, ospreys, and falcons to the skies, largely thanks to the elimination of organochlorine pesticides. Where genetically modified crops are grown—not in the European Union—there has been a 37 percent reduction in the use of insecticides, as shown by a recent studydone at Gottingen University.

One of the extraordinary features of the past 40 years has been the reappearance of wildlife that was once seemingly headed for extinction. Bald eagles have bounced back so spectacularly that they have been taken off the endangered list. Deer and beavers have spread into the suburbs of cities, followed by coyotes, bears, and even wolves. The wolf has now recolonized much of Germany, France, and even parts of the heavily populated Netherlands. Estuaries have been cleaned up so that fish and birds have recolonized rivers like the Thames.

Global Greening

Here’s a question I put to school children when I get the chance: Why is the wolf population increasing, the lion decreasing, and the tiger now holding its own? The answer is simple: Wolves live in rich countries, lions in poor countries, and tigers in middle-income countries. It turns out that we conservationists were wrong to fear economic development in the 1980s. Prosperity is the best thing that can happen to a country’s wildlife. As people get richer, they can afford to buy electricity rather than cut wood, buy chicken rather than hunt bushmeat, or get a job in a town rather than try to scratch a living from a patch of land. They can also stop worrying that their children will starve and start to care about the environment. In country after country, first in Asia, then in Latin America, and now increasingly in Africa, that process of development leading to environmental gains has swiftly delivered a turning point in the fortunes of wild ecosystems. 

Full essay

The post Matt Ridley: Against Environmental Pessimism appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

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July 8, 2020 at 01:48AM

The post “In Climate Debate, Exaggeration Is a Pitfall” (NYT article revisited) appeared first on Master Resource.

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July 8, 2020 at 01:02AM