Advanced BioFuels USA

by Tammy Klein (Transport Energy Strategies) • Marginal Cost Abatement: EVs and fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) are no surprise, but how about pyrolysis with carbon capture?

• Biogas Moves Up the Priority List in the EU: The war in Ukraine has caused the EU Commission to level up biogas as a policy priority.
• Revolt in Disney’s Kingdom: How does this relate at all to fuels and vehicles? Bear with me and read on.
• Visualizing DAC: It’s a heavy lift but one that must happen according to IEA.
• The EU’s Dependence on China’s Rare Earths and Minerals: Member States like Germany are looking for solutions – but none of them are easy.

1. Climate Tech VC: MACCing on Marginal Abatement Cost Curves – This article, from a great newsletter on climate tech venture capital I found recently on Substack, goes deep into marginal abatement cost curves (MACC), originally developed by McKinsey in the early 2000s. Using the latest energy models, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) teamed up with Evolved Energy Research to (literally) flip the McKinsey MACC on its head and create a roadmap for policymakers and innovation investors alike to drive U.S. energy and industrial carbon dioxide emissions to zero by 2050.

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From the transport energy perspective, the abatement measures delivering the most GHG reductions for the cost appear to be light and heavy duty EVs and fuel cell vehicles across all classes. Other transport technologies analyzed include pyrolysis with carbon capture, power-to-liquids (PtL or electrofuels) and Fischer-Tropsch (FT) diesel with carbon capture. Also noted, interestingly, was cellulosic and corn ethanol with carbon capture though the GHG emission reduction abatement is much less than the other options. Outside of FT, there is no mention of other technologies being heavily invested in and scaled up right now: other biomass-based diesels (particularly HVO) and biomethane.

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2. Euractiv: Europe Rediscovers Biogas in Search for Energy Independence –With the war in Ukraine raging on and the need to reduce the EU’s dependence on Russian gas has vaulted biogas to the fore within the European Commission. The gas legislative package presented by the Commission last December “would not have been a priority for the French EU Council presidency,” one expert notes to Euractiv. But that’s changed now. The Commission and Member States are looking at scaling up biogas “with renewed interest.”

The legislative package presented in December proposed, among other things, to facilitate the adoption of renewable gases “by removing tariffs for cross-border interconnections and lowering tariffs at injection points.” The aim is to guarantee access for these gases to the wholesale market and establish a certification system for low-carbon gases.

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3. Wall Street Journal: Revolt in Disney’s Florida Kingdom

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With a lack of strong federal backing of climate-related transport energy initiatives coming not just from the Biden Administration but from the Congress, and most of the country either with a divided government or in a Republican trifecta, progressive policies like ZEV mandates and LCFS programs may have difficulty getting off the ground. In the larger picture, climate progress in transport energy and in general may be unnecessarily slowed and hampered.

4. The Verge: Visualizing the Scale of The Carbon Removal Problem – This article notes that to get climate change under control we’re going to have to start sucking a whole lot more planet-heating carbon dioxide out of the air. And we need to start doing it fast.

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5. DW: The EU’s Risky Dependency on Critical Chinese Metals – This article notes that even as the EU tries hard to cut its energy supplies from Russia, the bloc is also heavily dependent on China when it comes to the industrial metals and rare earths that the bloc needs for wind turbines, electric vehicles, solar cells and semiconductors. Today, Russia and tomorrow, China.

DW notes the EU’s dependency on metal imports is somewhere between 75% and 100% depending on the metal. Of the 30 raw materials that the EU classifies as critical, 19 are predominantly imported from China. The list includes magnesium, rare earths and bismuth where China has a de facto monopoly, providing up to 98% of the supplies needed in the EU. This dependency could even increase in the future. The EU estimates that cobalt demand alone will rise fivefold by 2030. Lithium demand is expected to increase 18-fold by 2030 and 60-fold by 2050 on the back of the bloc’s e-mobility campaign.

Potentially compounding the issue is when (probably if) China reduces its raw materials exports. DW highlights that in its latest five-year plan, Beijing made it clear that exports would be cut to satisfy growing domestic demand. Moreover, and as we know, the government is positioning itself as a technology exporter, not an enabler of the competitors’ ability to export themselves.

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Spain just experienced public protests against plans to open a lithium mine in Estremadura. Such protests also occurred in Serbia and Portugal.  READ MORE

Mining lithium and other metals needed for clean energy proves to be a hard sell politically (Houston Chronicle)