Future Fuels Change the Balance of Power

February 04, 2021

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by Chris Edwards (Engineering and Technology) Renewables may actually keep carbon fuels going for decades to come, but a new group of energy-rich countries will emerge. -- ... The question is what these new vehicles will use instead. For most European governments, the answer for most cars and light vans is electrification.

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The other third, which includes heavy goods vehicles, ships and aircraft, faces major problems with such a transition. Batteries are heavy and carry a fraction per kilogram of the energy stored chemically in petrol and kerosene.

In a Stocktaking Seminar held in September 2020 to update members on the ramifications of emissions-control measures, the International Civil Aviation Organization head of environmental standards Neil Dickson told delegates: “A smartphone battery with the same energy density as kerosene would last two months on a single charge.”

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How then, do airlines in the Oneworld Alliance plan to get to net-zero? Through carbon accounting and what the industry calls sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). This is carbon-based fuel from crops and other organic sources that either replicates the mixture of molecules in typical aviation kerosene or mimics its behaviour.

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Virgin Atlantic’s planes had flown a total of a million kilometres by early summer 2019 on fuel that includes butanol brewed by re-engineered yeasts created by biofuel specialist Gevo.

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“Altalto will take ordinary black-bag waste that would otherwise be landfilled,” says Neville Hargreaves, vice president waste-to-fuels at Velocys.

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When completed, the Humberside plant will take up to 500,000 tonnes of household waste a year, using high temperatures to vaporise it into a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. This combination of gases, often called syngas, is the source for a well-established large-scale method of producing fuel-ready chains of hydrocarbons: the Fischer-Tropsch reaction. The company claims Altalto could yield 60 million litres of aviation fuel each year.

Velocys is far from alone. Fulcrum Bioenergy is further ahead though with a smaller plant design that it expects to finish building near Reno, Nevada by spring 2021. It will turn 175,000 tonnes of municipal waste per year into a fuel precursor that will then be processed by established refiner Marathon Petroleum into a usable SAF mixture.

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The scale of the demand has led to questions as to whether it will be possible to obtain enough waste and biomass to fuel net-zero flights completely. The US Department of Energy concluded in a report on sustainable aviation fuel published in September 2020 that the US aviation fuel market alone could consume the country’s biomass.

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One option is to explore other biological sources, such as microalgae. They can potentially be farmed on land that cannot be used for normal agriculture, in sealed ponds suspended in shallow waters offshore or even in industrial tanks lit by low-power LEDs fed by renewable electricity in a form of biological carbon capture.

Japanese company Euglena, which named itself after the Latin name for the algae it favours, claimed in 2012 the organism thrives in atmospheres rich in carbon dioxide and even switches production of the starch it normally makes to oils when starved of oxygen.

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Amyris CEO and former BP executive John Melo described the problem to analysts in a conference call: “We went from a world where we thought we were going to have scarcity of oil to a world today where we have abundance of oil. In a world where there is abundance, it’s very difficult for an emerging technology, especially biotechnology, to really compete in a world that has abundant hydrocarbons with an infrastructure that’s fully depreciated that can make these products really cheap.”

Algaculture suffers from a major problem in that, for most processes, the algae themselves need to be dried and pulverised to release their oil content.

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UK startup Phycobloom aims to sidestep the problem by genetically engineering algae that simply release the oil as they grow so that it can be skimmed off.

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As part of the nation’s (Germany's) strategy for an economy built around hydrogen and so-called power-to-x (PtX) technologies that use electricity to help synthesise a wide range of chemicals and materials, the environment ministry published a draft bill in September 2020 that guaranteed a minimum quota for electricity-based aviation fuels.

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A recent experiment by a team at Spain’s Polytechnic University of València found microwaves can avoid the need for electrolysis. In Sweden, researchers at Uppsala University have used sunlight to give electrolysis a helping hand for a form of industrial photosynthesis. Synthetic biology may yet play a role in the future as a few micro-organisms can be coaxed into producing hydrogen as part of a natural photosynthesis reaction.

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Though advances may make electrolysis less power-hungry, its thirst for cheap energy might lead to a new collection of energy barons that benefit from the accidents of geography.

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‘We think power-to-x is an opportunity for international trade. As they are fuels and gases they can be easily transported. Use the container ships we have today.’ Carola Kantz, German Mechanical Engineering Industry Association (VDMA)

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Elizabeth Minchew, associate operations officer at the International Finance Corporation, notes: “We did a report on offshore wind that found there was double the amount of offshore wind in Africa versus domestic demand.”

Ammonia created by the generated electricity may even power the ships that carry the hydrogen from Chile and other countries. READ MORE

WoodMac on Green Hydrogen: It’s Going To Happen Faster Than Anyone Expects: Public and private commitments are catalyzing green hydrogen through its early development. (GreenTech Media)

2050: The hydrogen possibility (Wood Mackenzie)

Excerpt from GreenTech Media: National hydrogen strategies has set targets for 66 GW of electrolyzer capacity suggesting there is plenty more growth to come.

Last month, the electrolyzer manufacturer Nel set a target of $1.5 per kilogram by 2025, a price level that would beat the traditional fossil fuel-based options. The current price is more like $4/kg.

Predictions on when green hydrogen might be competitive with existing high-carbon production methods keep accelerating.

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“The trajectory of the green hydrogen market will be determined by the amount of policy support its early years, and the amount of corporate commitments that are made to invest in this technology. And both of those things are moving much faster than expected,” Gallagher (Ben Gallagher, senior analyst at Wood Mackenzie and author of the 2050: The Hydrogen Possibility report) said.

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So far most major projects are in the early phases of development. They have enough detail so that they can bid for an allocation of public funding, but very few have specific offtakers ready to sign on the dotted line. Beyond those looking to directly swap gray hydrogen for green, most projects tout transport offtake that has not yet emerged or industrial offtakers that have not committed to investing in the conversion.

If the only sizeable demand comes from projects swapping gray for green, then the current policies and swelling project pipelines will lead to oversupply, said Gallagher. Essentially, if existing hydrogen production was fully decarbonized, the demand falls short of the 66 GW of electrolyzer capacity mapped out in existing policies.

With heat, shipping and aviation demand all further out of reach, Wood Mackenzie expects 80 percent of low carbon hydrogen deployed this decade to replace existing fossil fuel-derived hydrogen. READ MORE