Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Sydney Morning Herald Andrew Charlton just said something about climate change which almost made sense, before getting lost in the weeds of the fake green hydrogen revolution.
I hate to say it, but Barnaby has a point on climate
Andrew Charlton
Co-Director of the e61 Institute for Economic Research
October 29, 2021 — 5.00amEleven years ago, as adviser to prime minister Kevin Rudd, I sat in the room with US president Barack Obama, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, German chancellor Angela Merkel and other world leaders in the dying hours of the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen.
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Hour after hour, hope drained out of the room. It became clear that the meeting was going to fail for one simple reason: the developing countries were blocking the deal.
At one point a Chinese official thumped the table and shouted: “Rich countries cannot tell people who are struggling to earn enough to eat that they need to reduce their emissions.”
A Latin American negotiator explained what was happening. “For centuries your countries have prospered by exploiting the world’s resources,” he whispered into my ear. “How can I go home from this meeting and tell the slum dwellers they must stay poor to help clean up your mess.”
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Watching the failure in Copenhagen taught me an important lesson about climate change. No amount of moral energy from those who are less affected and less vulnerable will motivate those who are most affected and most vulnerable. This lesson is relevant for Australia’s domestic politics. For 10 years since Copenhagen, Australia’s climate debate has foundered for a version of the same reason.
Climate activists from the inner cities promote their impeccable science, their colourful rallies and their passionate rhetoric. But no super-majority of urbanites will ever convince regional workers whose jobs are at risk to heed their righteous commandments.
Most of Australia’s 18 coal-fired power stations are expected to close over the next 15 years, leaving about 10,000 direct workers looking for new jobs.
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So, as I watched the messy compromise this week between the Liberals and Nationals, I had a horrifying reflection. Barnaby Joyce is right. Or at least, the Nationals leader is right about one thing: we need to solve this for the regions first.
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The great shame is that this was possible. The clean energy opportunity for the regions is real if we choose to capitalise on it. Research released last week showed that many of the jobs in the new clean energy industries are in hydrogen production, renewable energy, batteries, green metals and mineral processing using clean energy are just some of the opportunities that can create tens of thousands of new jobs in Australia’s regions.
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Andrew Charlton is a managing director at Accenture, adjunct professor at Macquarie University and co-director of the e61 Institute for economic research. He was an economic adviser to Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd.
Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/i-hate-to-say-it-but-barnaby-has-a-point-on-climate-20211028-p593uu.html
I’m impressed Andrew, for a SMH contributor you almost had it, then sadly lost it. Your green hydrogen “solution” to rural jobs will never fly, because you forgot another great pillar of country life – nobody trusts the government.
If green hydrogen was remotely economically viable, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Every farm would have its own green hydrogen plant, we would be churning out gigalitres of the stuff, like farms do in the USA when they have a frackable natural gas deposit on their land.
But green hydrogen is not economically viable without massive government support, and likely never will be. Green hydrogen produced by anything other than steam reforming fossil fuel, or maybe in the distant future zero carbon nuclear power, is a politically motivated chimera, which will need an indefinite period of generous government life support to exist.
From tech entrepreneur and regular WUWT contributor Rud Istvan, the author of Blowing Smoke;
… Most hydrogen is made by steam reformation of natgas, which isn’t green. Less than 5% is via water electrolysis, mostly special non-industrial circumstances because more expensive. Electrolysis is about 70% energy efficient.
To be stored in meaningful quantities, hydrogen is either highly compressed in special costly carbon fiber wound epoxy cylinders (90% efficient because of PV/T=k heating), or liquified, about 75% efficient. Needs to be used in PEM fuel cells (cars, grid) since SOFC (Bloom Energy) crack and have poor lifetimes, PEM are at best 60% efficient and use platinum catalyst on Nafion membranes. Expensive, why there aren’t many in commercial use anywhere despite years of Plugged Power trying and hyping. So 1*0.75*maybe 0.9*0.6= Maybe 0.41 net hydrogen energy efficiency. Same as CCGT. But with a lot more capital expense for an ‘industry’ that does not exist yet for good reason.Now over at Judith’s a while ago we recalculated the faulty EIA LCOE for on shore wind. 2.15x CCGT. So Australia green hydrogen will be at best as energy useful as natgas at over twice the cost. Yup that is what makes it ‘green’. GREEN anything means more expensive AND more problematic.
Source: WUWT Comment
Even The Guardian in one of their saner moments noticed green hydrogen numbers are shaky.
Using hydrogen fuel risks locking in reliance on fossil fuels, researchers warn
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Renewable electricity production is increasing rapidly as costs tumble. But it still makes up a small proportion of all energy used, which is mostly provided by coal, oil and gas. Using the electricity directly is efficient, but requires investment in new types of car and heating systems.
Using the electricity to create hydrogen from water and then using carbon dioxide to manufacture other fuels can produce “drop-in” replacements for fossil fuels. But the new study concludes this cannot work on a large enough scale to tackle the climate emergency in time.
“Hydrogen-based fuels can be a great clean energy carrier, yet their costs and associated risks are also great,” said Falko Ueckerdt, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany, who led the research.
“If we cling to combustion technologies and hope to feed them with hydrogen-based fuels, and these turn out to be too costly and scarce, then we will end up burning further oil and gas,” he said. “We should therefore prioritise those precious hydrogen-based fuels for applications for which they are indispensable: long-distance aviation, feedstocks in chemical production and steel production.”
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/06/hydrogen-fuel-risks-reliance-on-fossil-fuels
If there is a path to economically viable green hydrogen, it will take a long time to find it. So the huge government subsidies required to kickstart the green hydrogen revolution would not have an end date.
A switch from mining and farming to green hydrogen production would require rural people to abandon livelihoods which do not require government support, and switch to putting their entire lives in the hands of fickle city politicians, who would have to provide a reliable long term subsidy of hundreds of billions of dollars per year, to fund an entirely new industry which currently has no real market.
Andrew, you are expecting people who have never seen anything but ham fisted job killing environmental regulations, an almost complete failure to invest in vital infrastructure like roads and water reservoirs, and ongoing utter disrespect from city politicians, to suddenly about face and completely trust those same politicians with their livelihoods.
Good luck selling that plan to rural communities.
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I find most if not all these comments on Hydrogen as an energy provider totally irrelevant as once you apply the Thermodynamic Laws to the concept, whatever you do it will require more energy to produce and distribute the hydrogen than the energy which it eventually produces. End of story.
Dancing around subsidies and manipulated legislation relating to costs is a total waste of time except for those who gain from the corrupted policies, where one guy’s profit is another’s loss.
However it can be fun reading some of the comments.
Slightly off topic,
Unbeknown to the 668 residents of Winlaton in NE England in August 2021 they began to use a blend of up to 20% hydrogen with 80% natural gas in their heating and cooking.
https://hydrogen-central.com/hydrogen-heat-homes-uk-wired/
Some quotes from a researcher at Exeter Uni and a member of the Institution of Energy & Technology’s Energy Policy Panel
“Higher concentrations would require not only significant network and infrastructure upgrades but also hydrogen specific appliances and boilers……..It could be rolled out across the UK…..But as hydrogen has a lower energy density per metre cubed of gas than methane this would give a maximum reduction in emissions from the grid of 7%……so blending is only an interim measure till we can find a more effective solution.”
“While to many people pure hydrogen may feel like the logical answer there’s a chasm between the rhetoric and the reality, which raises another important question, how much should we be bothering with it at all?”
“The more you drill into it the more expensive and complicated it becomes and I think people are finally realising it does’nt look good”
“Current research shows that polyethelene is safe to transport 100% hydrogen, though the pipes need to be adjusted because you need to push through approximately three times as much hydrogen to supply the same amount of energy”
Will it stay “unbeknown” when the bill arrives?
It seems that a few newspapers bent the story a bit. It was originally announced in 2019 that Winlaton would be used in the trial although it does seem that they were largely unaware of the start date.
As to the bill who knows?
Since consumers pay based on the volume of the gas, will they get a discount for the “unbeknown” dilution of their energy source?
There seems to be an absence of engineers or a reluctance to consult them in any green energy tech (I grace the sector with the word tech reluctantly). The adolescent ‘understanding’ of them by climate scientists, the media and activists gives a distinct highschool science fair-like level of knowledge.
Even good scientists have an appallingly poor understanding of economics (once again you need engineers for economic-technological understanding). They report “breakthrough” world changing discoveries that an enginneer generally discounts in minutes once he studies the experiment. Think of all the “breakthroughs” we never hear of again.
Even if you can only make it out pure gold or diamonds, some scientist will jump up and down screaming when an engineer tells them it is too expensive to manufacture in any quantity.
I see the mention of various expensive and inefficient technologies holding back green hydrogen. This is one of the results of ignoring markets, or perhaps better distorting markets by government edict.
Free markets are the most efficient way possible of allocating resources. If the price or oranges rises compared to apples, you don’t have to ponder whether this is from a freeze in Florida, fuel price rises making local apples cheaper than distant oranges, a new apple orchard maturing and flooding the market … it does not matter. You buy fewer oranges and more apples, the decision is made in seconds without further ado.
People have been trying to make efficient and cheap electric cars for well over a century. That it hasn’t happened yet is a big-ass clue-by-four. Ignoring this in favor of arbitrary bans on ICE vehicles by 2030, 2040, 2050, or any other politically-inspired date just destroys the price signals which make markets so efficient. If politicians instead merely stole more taxes to fund more research, they’d get better results, but that doesn’t exercise the control they enjoy so much, and the political payoff is years down the road. Just as Biden took credit for the vaccines whose development began under Trump, so would politicians 20 or 50 years down the road take credit when some research started today finally developed the holy grail of efficient, reliable, cheap batteries or super capacitors.
Worse yet, research doesn’t work like that. You don’t work on something for 20 or 50 years and it suddenly pops out overnight. You get gradual improvements. First customers pay a lot for not much except the novelty. Each year brings gradual improvements, some more astonishing than others. But there is never a point at which something went from totally useless to perfect. Edison’s light bulb has a date assigned to it, but that is fake news; the ones before burned out quicker and gave less light, ones after burned out later and gave more light. Early adopters used them to show off their wealth and modernity.
That is how just about everything works. I bet even things like Pet Rocks had gradual phases. Frisbees did, hula hoops did, just about everything did.
“Andrew Charlton is a managing director at Accenture.”
Accenture is big time into IT services and consulting. If they believe in the hydrogen solution, why aren’t they jumping into it big time? Should be a very sound, can’t lose, business proposition.
Perhaps some inquiries into Accenture’s net-zero plans would be in order. Bet hydrogen is not a part.
Here’s a major fallacy in Andrew Charlton’s analysis: “hydrogen production, renewable energy, batteries, green metals and mineral processing using clean energy are just some of the opportunities that can create tens of thousands of new jobs”.
When you just count jobs in the energy industry, you are missing the most important fact: the energy itself can create a lot more jobs than are needed to create the energy. Worse than that, the rule of thumb is that every time you increase the price of energy by the equivalent of one job, the extra energy cost destroys 2-3 jobs in the rest of the economy. This is exactly what happens with inefficient “green” energy. All those praised jobs in the renewable energy industry would destroy many more jobs in the rest of the economy, simply because the energy produced would be more expensive.
“Green” renewable energy is a large-scale Bastiat’s Window.