Air conditioning requirements will grow rapidly as developing nations prosper. Heating without burning is critically important. 

Building operations, heating, ventilation, lighting, air conditioning use about 2500 + 1700 GW of power.

Air conditioning is a growth market. As developing nations become affluent, their people want the comfort of air conditioning. Moreover, productivity can be increased in offices and factories with more comfort.

More efficient units are possible using current technology, with coefficient of performance (COP) doubling to 6. The hydrofluorocarbons used as refrigerants are potent greenhouse gasses, so scientists are trying to resolve the conflict between energy efficiency and refrigerant leakage. The Corona Virus Relief Bill contains refrigerant restrictions.

Of the 2.8 billion people living in the hottest parts of the world, only 8% currently possess ACs, compared to 90% ownership in the United States and Japan.

Here in the North at Dartmouth, we’re more concerned with heating than cooling, which uses more US energy. Reducing heat flow from inside to outside, or vice versa, depends on low air leakage and good insulation. Upgrading existing structures is difficult and unfortunately not usually cost-effective.

100,000 pascal = 1 bar ~= 1 atmosphere of pressure. Reducing leakage is important, but health concerns require replacement fresh air at least once every two hours, certainly more to protect against corona viruses. A heat exchanger transfers heat between inbound and outbound airflows.

Costs for buildings certified to be “green” can be expensive. The Dartmouth Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center cost over $100 million. The (~16,000 m2, 174,500 sq ft) building is designed to consume “30 to 35 percent less energy than standard construction”.

Standardized construction by experienced contractors can reduce the cost premium, to be recovered in later years by energy cost savings.

Here’s the breakdown of home electricity use in the UK. Even the commercial sector uses 45% of electricity just for heating. There’s a nice tutorial here. 

Resistance heating can be affordable in cold climates if the building is well designed. Remember that all household appliances’ light and motion degrade to thermal heat. Hot water down the sewer is lost heat. Figure each person to be a 100 watt heat source.

Installing electric heat costs little, so I’ve seen electric heating baseboards in motel rooms, which are unheated unless there is a paying guest.

Many heat pumps do not work well in New England cold winter weather. Be cautious and gain assurance from your heating contractor.

Dartmouth generates some of its own electricity, burning residual fuel oil to make steam to turn a steam-turbine-generator. The rejected heat from the steam condenser, at lower temperature, is transferred to steam and hot water pipes under the campus to heat buildings.

This is an example of a specially designed atomic fission heating reactor. Electric power generation reactors create high pressure, high-temperature steam, but district heating reactors run at low pressure and temperature, below boiling. They are designed to be located within cities, so that the heat can be distributed to the district efficiently.

China has three models of district heating reactors. The DHR-400 (see the previous slide) can supply heat to 200,000 three-bedroom apartments — a whole city.

Our estimate of 2500 GW(t) for heating was based on transforming fission-sourced electricity and hydrogen to heat. District heating can reduce that demand. ThorCon, for example, has an admirable 46% efficiency for converting thermal energy from atomic fission to electricity. But if all the fission-generated heat could be used for nearby district heating, we’d need less than half that much fission heat power as we’d need with electricity or hydrogen intermediaries. 

It’s an exception to “electrify everything”. We can use the fission heat directly. Co-generation is a nice hybrid solution for fission electric power generation plants near cities. 

This is the most challenging and possibly expensive aspect of electrifying everything.

The International Renewable Energy Association promotes wind and solar, but industrial processes can not be competitive if they can only operate when wind and sun co-operate. The aluminum industry uses some “renewable” hydropower. The Columbia river energy source is the reason US aluminum smelters were built there, and why Boeing grew in Seattle. IRENA did do energy consumption analysis for us.

The International Energy Agency data differs by 20-30%. This is one of the reasons these scroll presentations use rounded numbers. We can’t assess current energy use or predict the future precisely.

This book is a companion to David MacKay’s famous “Sustainable Energy: without the hot air”. It’s now freely available. We’ll use it as a guide.

 

We’ll look at three CO2 emitting industrial processes:

  1. Cement: 2800 x 1 = 2,800 million tonnes of CO2 per year
  2. Steel: 1400 x 3 = 4,200 Mt-CO2/yr
  3. Aluminum: 70 x 10 = 700 Mt-CO2/yr

Concrete is made from sand and gravel bound together with cement. China is responsible for most cement production and consumption.

There are several types of cement. This is an ancient one. CO2 is typically created by burning natural gas to heat limestone. The limestone itself gives up CO2 before being mixed with water. As this cement cures, it absorbs CO2 from the air, but not as much as was emitted. 

The most common, Portland cement, includes silica (sand) as well as limestone. It cures differently.

Simply adopting best practice in making cement can cut cement-manufacturing CO2 emissions nearly in half. Improving the technology presents the opportunity to approach cutting emissions to 36% of today’s.

Making cement requires higher temperatures than fission power plants can achieve, about 1,450°C. [ThorCon’s molten salt reaches 700°C.] Hydrogen plasma electric arcs can reach such temperatures. Local firm Hypertherm has expertise in plasma arcs, used in their cutting torch products.

My friend Darryl combines many technologies in this graphic idea, not a near-term solution.

If we could produce cement without CO2 emissions we might pave roads with concrete instead of asphalt. Asphalt eventually oxidizes to CO2; then the road is repaved. These estimates of CO2 emissions seem low, compare 2,800 Mt/year on the BothEyesOpen slide.

Steel production is an even larger contributor to CO2 emissions.

Both Eyes Open describes many steel products, but we are only interested in the total.

Note that recycled scrap steel provides about 1/3 the material input to steel manufacturing. This saves the energy otherwise used for reducing (removing oxygen from) iron ore (Fe2O3, Fe3O4).

Note in the upper left that the power to blast furnaces alone is 16 EJ/year, or 500 GW(t). The furnace burns coke instead of coal in order to increase the temperature. The CO combustion product bonds with the oxygen from iron oxide ore (Fe2O3, Fe3O4) to make CO2 and leave iron behind.

Electric arc furnaces are used to melt and refine scrap steel.

Iron ore can be directly reduced with natural gas (CH4).

 

Importantly, this chart deals with the costs of hydrogen versus alternatives. Subsidies are economically impractical. Just a $1/kg subsidy for hydrogen would cost $100 billion/year for 100 EJ (3000 GW-years) of hydrogen per year.

Hydrogen itself, H2, can be the reducing agent to remove oxygen from iron ore, if H2 costs less than $1.9/kg.

Rocky Mountain Institute writes that Sweden is demonstrating direct reduction of iron ore using hydrogen. If this process were expanded to include all of Sweden’s iron smelting, its CO2 emissions would be halved.

We use electric current to remove oxygen from water to make hydrogen. We can remove oxygen from iron ore to make iron.

Bill Gates has invested in this Boston area company. Click here to see a video and learn about the benefits and technology.

Aluminum smelter are located near 24×7 supplies of ample, cheap electricity. Making one kilogram of aluminum requires 170 kWh of electric power. Electricity is the principle ingredient in aluminum. Sometimes aluminum is called solid electricity.

Aluminum has replaced much steel in making autos, in order to reduce the vehicle weight and lower its energy consumption. We’ll be installing a lot more aluminum wrapped electrical cables to distribute power if we electrify everything.

Note that 22 million tonnes of scrap is recycled into production streams, saving 170 kWh of electricity for each kg of recycled aluminum.

Developing new manufacturing processes is an important part of reducing energy consumption for all materials production.

We can re-engineer how we build factories. Building ThorCon-like power plants hardly taxes shipyard capabilities. A single shipyard could build 20 GW of such power plant factories per year!

Pictured above is a factory to convert natural gas to LNG (liquified natural gas). It will be anchored near a natural gas field off Australia, producing LNG and loading it onto large LNG tankships which will transport it to global destinations. When the natural gas field becomes depleted, the factory-ship will be moved to a new location.

We can use shipbuilding technology to build other factories, such as for large scale steam electrolysis of water to make hydrogen. Such an electrolysis plant could be moored right next to a ThorCon-like power plant supplying electricity and steam.

Future shipyard-produced factories may include electrolysis for smelting iron and making steel, smelting copper, making ammonia, desalinating water, or producing jet fuel from seawater CO2,

We need to educate and inspire policymakers to look at the big picture. How can we solve both energy poverty and global warming at planet scale?

It’s attractive to lawmakers to solve problems simply by passing a law. Lawmakers can be influenced by special interest groups making persuasive arguments that are incomplete, or based on attractive-seeming future technologies.

Requiring ethanol in motor fuel upset people because corn was diverted from food purposes to fuel refining. The emerging technology of “cellulosic ethanol” held out the promise that the whole corn plant, not just the sugary kernels, could be digested into ethanol, reducing the land are taken away from food production.

Congress mandated production of 5.5 billion gallons of ethanol by 2017. The US only produced 5 million gallons, off by a factor of 1000X.

Fracking allowed the costs of oil and natural gas extraction to be reduced, and many companies invested in drilling rigs. The cost reductions from private competition are impressive, causing prices to be halved.

Aside: since most US electricity comes from natural gas generators, ask yourself why electricity prices have risen.

These bankruptcies were unexpected bad news for investors, but the public gained immensely by halving the cost of energy from natural gas. Free market capitalism can often provide a public good that governments can not.

The world has a dependable, safe, ample, inexhaustible source of zero-emission energy, but many people do not realize this and do not consider adopting atomic fission. Factual education is critical.

Problems

  1. Projections of future costs of wind and solar power are economically attractive, but actual cost experiences are so masked with subsidies and market failures that operational evidence is lacking. Utilities in Vermont pay 20-to-30 cents/kWh for intermittent wind energy, for example. The biggest analytical failure is focus on LCOE (levelized cost of energy) at fleeting time instants, rather than the full cost of energy over a year. The media constantly praises declines in the cost of batteries, but the public does not realize that costs are at least 10X too high to be economic. We covered this in Session 2.
  2. Many people do not realize that fission power plants’ cooling towers only emit water vapor, not CO2. They lump coal-fired and fission-heated plants together as climate endangering relics. Environmentalists and the public in France actually want less fission-sourced electricity, even though France has the cleanest and cheapest electric power in Europe. The nil fission power CO2 emissions mentioned in Session 2 include those from plant construction and fuel mining.
  3. Chernobyl did indeed blow up and spew radioactive materials far and wide. The design errors are well understood and modern fission power plants with intrinsic passive reactivity control do not depend on trained operators or special mechanisms for safety. The public needs to be reassured by more failure demonstrations, such as for China’s high temperature gas reactor and the US sodium fast reactor. Otis made elevators successful by touring with an assistant who cut the suspending rope.
  4. Radiation is a poor carcinogen, yet the disproven persistent LNT myth is embodied in regulatory policy of many nations and international advisory bodies. They attempted to assuage unfounded public fear by regulating the chance of fission radiation exposure to fractions of natural radiation exposure, but instead confirmed fears instead of presenting facts.
  5. Members of respected international and national advisory organizations appoint their own successors, continuing a chain of deceptive misinformation and delays such as advocating studies with a million participants claiming the harm (if any) is real but now too small to observe statistically. Unfortunately regulators and the public cling to the precautionary principle rather than dissecting the politicized science of these intellectually dishonest, powerful scientists.
Solutions
  1. Educate young people. They will have to live with the consequences of the actions of old people. Young people learn quickly. They should be taught fundamentals of mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology, and economics. With such tools they can study and analyze issues of our environment, natural resources, population, government, leadership, marketing communications, conflict, and optimization.
  2. We need to communicate with the public about the importance of total energy cost, quality, supply, availability, health  and environmental impact, especially in developing nations, where the contribution on prosperity is so obvious. 
  3. We’ve used “fission” instead of “nuclear” throughout this course. It’s more accurate. It doesn’t trigger the mind block that often prevents consideration.
  4. Political leaders often endorse atomic fission R&D gaining praise from supporters of fission power.  Politicians rarely address the root cause of the fear and consequent regulation that has made conventional nuclear power too expensive. By not building a repository for government-owned used fuel they also satisfy fission power opponents. It will take a real leader to speak truth to the public. Assigning blame all who continued the ALARA fraud, a common enemy, is a tried and true political tactic.
  5. More positively, political leaders should frame fission energy not for itself, bu as feedstock for a pristine, prosperous, global economy, such as on the following slide.

Political leaders should frame fission energy not for itself but together with its electricity, heat, hydrogen, synfuels, ammonia as feedstock for a new, pristine, prosperous, global economy.

  1. ThorCon is a start-up company developing a power plant with thorium and uranium fuel dissolved in flowing molten salt. Second and third financing rounds will be needed to raise ~ 900 million dollars to continue development then build, test, and operate the prototype 2×250 MW(e) power plant in Indonesia.
  2.  Hydrogen electrolysis is receiving funding from governments and investors, with the expectation that there will be surplus electric power from wind and solar, because of attempts to ameliorate intermittency with overcapacity. Efficient high temperature steam electrolysis makes use electricity and also heat from fission plants, not available with wind and solar. Intermittent energy sources are not conducive to operating electrolyzer factories, and even if they could adapt they could only recover capital investment costs about 1/3 of the time, tripling capex/kWh. Instead, the successful investment focus will be on low cost H2, under $2/kg to compete with steam methane reforming, and possibly as low as $0.95/kg. 
  3. Batteries for vehicles are being improved and refined rapidly, with leadership from companies such as Tesla. If the kWh/kg weight penalty can be reduced, battery power may become feasible for long haul trucking, competing with hydrogen-fueled trucking from companies such as Nikola.
  4. Fuel cells convert hydrogen or ammonia to electricity. Efficiency is a key attribute; R&D may drive it higher than 60%. Solid oxide versions are important. Solid Oxide Electrolysis Cells (SOECs) are the reverse of SOFCs and can be used to produce ammonia or produce hydrogen.
  5. Ammonia synthesis may provide ammonia economical enough to power transport ships. The Haldor Topsoe SOEC is interesting. 
  6. Ammonia internal combustion engines may be simpler to build if they run at low RPM. Ammonia may need to be mixed with primer fuels to speed combustion propagation. Ammonia can also be dissociated with heat, making H2 and N2.
  7. Hydrogen fueled buses are already popular in China. Long distance trucking requires an extensive infrastructure of H2 fueling stations.
  8. Resonant highway charging systems may allow rapid battery charging at stoplights and bus stops. Charing on the move is possible. The technology could reduce the size and weight of batteries in vehicles, conserving technical metals resources.
  9. Hydrogen enhanced biofuels can deliver 3X the energy from biomass as today’s ethanol production technology. South Africa and Germany developed initial coal to liquid technolgies that could be advanced.
  10. Combining CO2 and H2 from seawater is an under-appreciated technology that has great promise for delivering the synthetic hydrocarbon fuels (jet fuel, diesel, gasoline) we now get from petroleum. In this distant future seawater CO2 capture can lower CO2 in the atmosphere.
  11. High speed trains and other public transportation can be electrified, diminishing demand for individual passenger vehicles and their fuel consumption.
  12. Building heating and cooling technology is already advancing with new air conditioners and new heat pumps. One challenge is implementing best technologies. Another is making efficient use of electric power in the face of bans on fluorine-containing refrigerants such as R410A.
  13. Iron electrolysis is one way to convert iron ore to iron using electricity. Another is direct reduction using hydrogen derived from electrolysis.
  14. Cement production is a difficult process decarbonize, but just adopting best practices could halve CO2 emissions. Plasma arc heating may replace high temperatures sintering of silica and calcium compounds now powered by combusting natural gas or coke.
  15. Shipping could benefit from the direct use of fission power, as do dozens of warships and submarines today. The global fleet of tankers and container ships may possibly be retrofitted with ammonia-fueled engines, after ammonia bunkering depots and production facilities are in place.
  16. Building new-design factories in shipyards is a method to rapidly build the new infrastructure of plants such as electrolyzer factories, fission power plants, biomass hydrogenation facilities, SOEC fabs, and ammonia synthesizers.
  1. To allow fission power plants to be economic enough to replace coal and LNG fired plants, governments must remove barriers such as the unfounded LNT regulatory model of harm from radiation. Its wrong principle that any radiation can be deadly leads to the corollary ALARA, which increases power plant costs at the whim of the regulator. This example of politicized science may prevent solving the energy/climate crisis. The fission industry simply needs governments to get out of the way.
  2. The US EPA is expanding the LNT model to all substances, extrapolating harm seen at high exposures to predicted, unobserved harm at low exposures. This, in spite of centuries of medical observation of sigmoidal (S-shaped) dose-response relationships with thresholds.
  3. All fission plant permitting in the US is paid for by the applicant. The regulator charges almost $300 for every person-hour spent in reviewing applications for permits. Delays increase cash-flow to the bureaucracy. Permits end it. Just achieving a permit to test a liquid fission reactor in the US would cost at least $1 billion. The regulator’s incentive is to ask for another safety analysis.
  4. Power lines and pipelines and rail lines all need rights of way to move the electricity, hydrogen, and TGVs to replace petroleum, natural gas, and short haul airline flights. Here in the Northeast US we have marginal energy supplies because natural gas pipelines to feed power plants have been denied, and HVDC transmission line imports of hydroelectricity from Canada have been denied. Too many “stakeholders” have been given sway and the last resort of eminent domain is rarely used.
  5. The US electricity market is broken, with complex subsidies favoring politically friendly renewable energy developers. At year-end 2020 solar developers were granted tax credit subsidies 250 times those granted for fission power. Furthermore the market is ruled conflictingly by the federal government (FERC), state governments, regional transmission organizations, and cities. No one claims responsibility for blackouts that will increase as reliable power plants are shut down.
  6. Greenpeace and Sierra Club are examples of special-interest groups who have no direct standing but achieve intervener status, sometime in secret, such as the latter’s secret common interest agreement with a California agency supposed to protect consumers. Similar agreements will shut down California’s Diablo Canyon and New York’s Indian Point nuclear power plants.
  1. Open competition will drive costs down. Unfortunately temporary stimulus laws become permanent. An example is the end-2020 re-authorization of the production tax credits for wind and solar energy sources. The old Jones act prohibited foreign LNG tankers from moving LNG from Texas to freezing Boston in the 2019 winter, to stimulate US shipbuilding. Unfortunately there are no US LNG tankers. New England was saved by Russian natural gas moved to England, reloaded, then shipped to Boston.
  2. Directive technology rules should be ended. Why should legislatures determine that electricity from rooftops is worth more or less than electricity from manure methane or fission power plants?
  3. Becoming a “certified” supplier is a common hurdle to limit competition and raise costs to protect a few companies. The “N-stamp” for components in fission power plants is an example. It should be up to the plant buyer, contractor, builder, and designer to choose the most economical supplier of components that can meet specifications. There is a whole world of potential, unknown suppliers that can help lower energy costs.
  4. Special tariffs that favor or burden supplier companies in certain countries similarly prevent choosing the best, least expensive suppliers for power plant components. China, for example, has the world’s largest gross industrial product, yet opportunities to share specifications and purchase goods are severely restricted.
  5. It should be in every company’s interest to diversify its supply chain, both to enable competitive bidding and to guard against unexpected supply interruptions. Perhaps some government mandated supplier reporting would remind all who participate in supplying energy, the mother of all industry. Supplier choices are often trade secrets, however.
  6. Taxes are necessary, but taxing authorities should not make judgements about which energy sources are preferred. Carbon dioxide emission taxes or limits would be much fairer than the mishmash of favoritism in force today.

 

The difficulty with taxes or mandates is scope. They can only be national. Those nations that do not comply with a norm gain advantages. Economics, on the other hand, is international in scope. Buyers choose products from among many supplier countries. Politicians need to look past their power to set local rules and consider how to make the costs of alternative clean energy sources so low that burning fossil fuels becomes uneconomic. 

  1. Clearly, ample 24×7 electricity from fission power plants can be cheaper than coal and LNG, and competitive with fracked, pipelined natural gas. This is key to “electrify everything”.
  2. Electric vehicles already demonstrate that they can transport people and goods at a lower cost per kilometer than can internal combustion engine vehicles. This does require cheap electricity at 3-5 cents/kWh. Checking CO2 emissions this way requires that the electricity source be zero-CO2, which is not true in the US. EVs are only climate neutral in places such as France. Electrifying long haul shipping, airplanes, and shipping is more challenging. Some mandates are coming into force to limit SOx emissions from shipping powered with residual fuel oil.
  3. Building operations’ CO2 emissions can be limited using efficient air conditioners and heat pumps. The most difficult part is reducing the costs of construction of high efficiency buildings. Improving energy efficiency in existing buildings can help a bit. The public is already compliant with the concepts of building codes, which can be tweaked to increase energy efficiency. 
  4. Cheap electricity is the ingredient to help persuade industries to change. R&D is already underway to check emissions in one of the largest industries, steel production via hydrogen direct reduction or electrolysis. The cement industry can be coaxed to use best practices, and alternatives to Portland cement may be developed. 

Electrifying the World grand strategy energy use sectors are on the left, key technologies on the right.

Now that you have reached the end of these scrolls you have become a credible global energy strategist. You are welcome to give talks or write articles using the slides, available here. 

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