Summers are growing hotter, storms more violent, wildfires more frequent and ocean levels are rising. It is becoming increasingly obvious that burning fossil fuels containing millions of years worth of trapped carbon is altering our atmosphere and climate.

Hydrogen is a promising alternative to fossil fuels. It’s abundant, clean burning and has a high mass energy density. With modification it can be used in heating, vehicle engines or fuel-cells as a replacement for carbon-based fuels such as natural gas (CH4) gasoline (C8H18) or diesel fuel (C12H23).

Hydrogen doesn’t have the long-term environmental flaws of fossil fuels. But it is not yet a simple replacement for hydrocarbons. Extracting  green or grey hydrogen takes a considerable amount of energy and geologic hydrogen hasn’t yet been found in commercial quantities.

Hydrogen also has a low volumetric energy density. This means even though one kilogram of hydrogen can provide two to three times the energy of one kilogram of diesel fuel, at standard atmospheric pressure a hydrogen fuel tank requires about 5000 times the volume of a diesel fuel tank in order to provide the same energy and range.

Pressurizing the hydrogen to about 10,000 pounds per square inch improves this so that hydrogen only requires about 7 times the volume of diesel fuel. This pressure is almost twice as high as that which imploded the Titan submersible underwater earlier this year while hunting for the Titantic wreckage.

So while hydrogen is a promising fuel, storage and transport is challenging. If only we could efficiently generate hydrogen near where it is used. A Canadian research team may have the answer in aluminium. 

It takes up to 63 kilowatt-hours to extract one kilogram of aluminium from its bauxite ore. Much of that energy remains trapped in the chemistry of Aluminium in the same way coal and gasoline trap the energy of ancient sunlight.  In fact burning aluminium produces almost twice the energy of burning an equivalent mass of coal.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency the energy embedded in a single soda can could power a 14 watt light bulb for 60 hours or a television for two hours. By tuning the particle size and chemistry, the energy embedded in this metal can be used to extract hydrogen from water.

Reza Kholghy, PhD, is research chair in Particle Technology and Combustion Engineering at Carlton University in Ottawa Canada. Dr. Kholghy was kind enough to provide Green Prophet with some insight on this promising new technology.

GreenProphet (GP): How do you use aluminium to produce hydrogen? 

Dr. Kholghy: Aluminium powder is mixed with water and combusts through a high temperature oxidation process. This way, Aluminium takes the oxygen molecule in water and turns into alumina (aluminium oxide) and releases the hydrogen in water molecules.

GP: What is the efficiency compared to other methods of recycling Aluminium?

Dr. Kholghy: This is not a method to recycle aluminium. By combusting it with water, we can get 100% yield, meaning that all of the aluminium will be converted to alumina and for every kg of Aluminium, roughly 1 kg of water is consumed releasing around 111 gr of hydrogen. 

GP: What is the volume and mass energy density compared to hydrogen fuel cell technology?

Dr. Kholghy: The reactor is very compact, a 2 MW reactors only need a footprint of around 300 to 400 sq sq ft and cogenerate heat, hydrogen and alumina. 

GP: Why weren’t we doing this 100 years ago?

Dr. Kholghy: This reaction has been used in a variety of application including green rocket propellant where Aluminium nanoparticles are used. However, the unique feature of our work is finding a way to burn large Aluminium particles 

GP: What is the best scale for an Aluminium hydrogen generator? (car, house, utility…)

Dr. Kholghy: Utility, from 1 MegaWatt and higher. 

GP: What would you tell someone who is sceptical?

Dr. Kholghy: This is just a pice of puzzle towards transitioning to zero carbon energy production. This technology offers off grid solutions for cogeneration of heat, hydrogen as well as valuable high purity alumina that is used in batteries. 

GP: Are you working with other researchers or corporations?

Dr. Kholghy: We are working with a Company called GH Power to develop this technology. 

GP: What is the next step?

Dr. Kholghy: Our industrial partner is working with us to demonstrate the full scale reactor. 

GP: How are impurities removed?

Dr. Kholghy: For hydrogen generation, there is no need to remove impurities. We get similar hydrogen yield no matter if recycled Aluminium with low purity or high purity Aluminium is used. The purity of alumina is similar to the purity of the Aluminium fuel used and we have developed a proprietary process to remove impurities from the produced alumina if needed. 

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A Soft Day in a Moist Country?  If there is a climate for writing, Ireland has that climate. “Soft day” (Lá bog in the Irish language) is a greeting and acknowledgment of the damp mist that drifts down from low clouds onto the fields and forests. On soft days this island’s climate avoids extremes. It is the weather of poetry such as Austin Clarke’s “The Lost Heifer”: “…And her voice coming softly over the meadow/ Was the mist becoming rain…”

Irish weather can also be brutal with monstrous waves and a howling wind that can push north Atlantic spray vertically 600 feet straight up the cliffs of Moher (watch me Wim Hoffing in the cold). The screech of Irish storms became the voice of the Banshee, the legendary faeries who would foretell of death or steal a child as in Yeats poem “The Stolen Child.” 

Change is the most persistent feature of Irish weather. Stone-splitting sunshine alternates with wind-driven rain almost hourly on some days, leaving the rainbows and mossy-green this emerald isle is known for.

But then Covid-19 and its lockdowns brought an unfortunate irony. Day after day of sunshine and cloudless blue skies came when Irish people were limited to travelling no further than 3 miles from their homes. Dublin airport went from many tourist flights per day to only enough to carry medical supplies and other essentials. The buzz of the motorway and roar of jet aircraft disappeared into a Wadi Rum desert silence. The deep blue sky was unmarred by cloud or contrail.

Weather Before Contrails

Had such perfect weather ever before visited this damp island? I turned to an unlikely source. The author James Joyce wrote the novel Ulysses to commemorate June 16, 1904. This was the day he and his future-wife Nora Barnacle went on their first date. The book tells the fictional adventures of a thrice-baptized Irish-Jew named Leopold Bloom on his journey around Dublin on that single day. Joyce wrote with such detail that he claimed that if the city should ever be destroyed, it could be rebuilt from his book.

And here it is a perfectly sunny day in Dublin Ireland more than 100 years ago: ”Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather. Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can’t play it here. Duck for six wickets… Heatwave. Won’t last. Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.”

Later in the Oxen of the Sun episode of Ulysses, Joyce compares the February 1903 storm that uprooted 3,000 elm trees in Dublin’s Phoenix park to the drought that persisted on June 16, 1904:
“Dignam laid in clay of an apoplexy and after hard drought, please God, rained, a bargeman coming in by water a fifty mile or thereabout with turf saying the seed won’t sprout, fields athirst, very sadcoloured and stunk mightily, the quags and tofts too.

“Hard to breathe and all the young quicks clean consumed without sprinkle this long while back as no man remembered to be without. The rosy buds all gone brown and spread out blobs and on the hills nought but dry flag and faggots that would catch at first fire. All the world saying, for aught they knew, the big wind of last February a year that did havoc the land so pitifully a small thing beside this barrenness.”

Records, annals and tree-rings going back more than 1000 years reveal many Irish droughts including the years 536-550, 1050, 1804, 1887, 1893, 1904-1912. 

A 1984 Guinness ad played with the words drought and draught and suggested that young people don’t remember droughts. Ireland has had fewer droughts since the mid-1970s. Could it be that transatlantic travel has made Ireland wetter and that droughts were more common in Leopold Bloom’s Dublin, only 6 months after the Wright Brother’s first flight? 

Do Contrails Affect the Weather?

The internet is full of wonderfully silly theories about chemtrails that any crop-duster could debunk after flying barely above corn-detasseling altitude. Contrails don’t contain brain-altering drugs or other subversive substances. They are composed of water ice mixed with carbon dioxide(CO2), soot, nitrogen oxides(NOx) and other pollutants. These pollutants and the jet’s pressure wake can produce the conditions for forming contrails which can become cirrus clouds. 

According to scientists at Penn State and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, the diurnal (night to day) temperature difference over the US increased by 1.1 degrees celsius during the three-day US flight ban after September 11, 2001. This is higher than had been in the previous 30 years. UW-Whitewater’s lead scientist David Travis told CNN, “I think what we’ve shown are that contrails are capable of affecting temperatures… Which direction, in terms of net heating or cooling, is still up in the air.”  

Wouldn’t it be convenient if contrail-generated cirrus clouds reflected away exactly the right amount of sunlight to cool the earth and perfectly balance the heat-trapping effect of its CO2?

In 2011 Ulrike Burkhardt and Bernd Kärcher’s published Global radiative forcing from contrail-induced cloudiness in the international society for optics and photonics. They found the net heating effect from contrail-induced cloudiness and other emissions added to and exceeded the heating effect of CO2!

Eunice Newton Foote first discovered that CO2 and water vapor could trap heat in 1856. But unlike relatively inert CO2, the effects of water are difficult to predict. CO2 is transparent to incoming light and relatively opaque to outgoing longwave infrared energy.

The water vapor and ice in contrails blocks both incoming light and outgoing infrared energy but in different amounts depending on time of day, other cloud cover, season, local climate and other factors. The global reduction in air-traffic during Covid-19 provided opportunities to study these factors. Schumann, Pol, Teoh, Koelle et-al published Air traffic and contrail changes during COVID-19 over Europe: A model study in 2021.

Figure 8 from this study shows average optical thickness of contrails March-August 2019 (a) and the difference 2019-2020 (b). In (a) we see heavy contrail thickness over northwestern Europe. This makes sense because more contrails form where there are many flights and where the stratosphere is relatively cool. In (b) we see a drastic reduction in contrail thickness during the pandemic.

Figure 9 shows radiative forcing (RFnet) in watts per square meter from March-August 2019 and again in 2020. Colors from yellow to red mean there is a net heat input to earth and the blue end of the spectrum means there is a net loss of heat to the earth. Note that the areas of northwestern Europe which had high contrail thickness in 2019 also had a higher (redder) radiative forcing heat balance in 2019.

This and related studies are complex but fascinating to read or to pass along friends and family when they say things like, “Well I was cold when I was up to the lake last weekend so that whole climate change thing is B.S.” People devote their careers to studying climate science and the vast majority of these people are warning us to be careful about uncontrolled experiments with our atmosphere.

Bloomsday 2020

Bloomsday happening tomorrow is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, observed annually in Dublin and elsewhere on 16 June, the day his 1922 novel Ulysses takes place in 1904, the date of his first intimate encounter with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, and named after its protabloomgonist Leopold Bloom.

In 2020, Covid-19 shortened the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations. Venice ended Carnival early, Pope Francis gave a blessing to an empty St Peter’s square. The pandemic impacted the Hajj and religious celebrations throughout the world. Ireland cancelled Saint Patrick’s day parades and most Bloomsday celebrations.

But Bloomsday 2020 had something in common with the day Nora Barnacle and James Joyce met in 1904. Ireland’s drought ended after sunset on June 16, 2020 just as described in Ulysses:

“…But by and by, as said, this evening after sundown, the wind sitting in the west, biggish swollen clouds to be seen as the night increased and the weatherwise poring up at them and some sheet lightnings at first and after, past ten of the clock, one great stroke with a long thunder and in a brace of shakes all scamper pellmell within door for the smoking shower, the men making shelter for their straws with a clout or kerchief, womenfolk skipping off with kirtles catched up soon as the pour came.”

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The next time you open a container of carbonated water, sparkling wine or a soft drink you might wonder if the inventors of this green technology were inspired by the pssst fizz sound of carbon dioxide being released from the beverage into the atmosphere? What if this process could be reversed? Could this be used to sequester carbon dioxide?

Climate change is a product of too much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases such as methane in the atmosphere. See the forest fires raging in Canada? An effect of climate change. 

In some ways nature is ahead of us. Carbon dioxide (CO2) dissolves in water even at normal atmospheric pressure.  Captura believes it can take advantage of the natural ability of water to dissolve carbon dioxide.

Billions of tons of carbon dioxide have already dissolved into the water of the world’s rivers lakes and oceans. We can be thankful for this but even nature has a limit. The dissolved CO2 makes carbonic acid which makes these bodies of water more acidic and can impact aquatic life. Acidity is one of the factors affecting coral reef health in the world’s oceans. 

Eventually the water loses its ability to absorb more carbon dioxide. When freshwater lake temperature drops to its point of maximum density of 39°F or 3.98°C,  surface water sinks to the bottom, displacing CO2 saturated water which rises and releases some of this gas back into the atmosphere. This seasonal turning of lakes happens in temperate climates. It also removes methane and introduces oxygen to deep waters. Certain types of fish such as smelt become active when a lake turns. 

In equatorial climates the water temperature never drops to its point of maximum density so many lakes remain stratified and never turn over. Carbon dioxide and other dissolved gases can build up to a point where it is released catastrophically. This happened at Lake Nyos in Cameroon West Africa in August of 1986. The released carbon dioxide killed at least 1700 people.

Captura, from the United States, plans to use renewable energy to gently extract CO2 from the ocean where it can be used for industrial processes. Founded in 2021 using technology developed at Caltech’s laboratories, Captura provides low-cost atmospheric carbon removal by leveraging the world’s largest natural CO2 absorber – the ocean.

They report minimal impacts on the environment and using only renewable electricity and ocean water as inputs, applying a patented electrodialysis process to generate a stream of pure CO2 that can then be sequestered or utilized to make other low-carbon products.

The intake and output are in relatively shallow water with no need for deepwater pipelines or drilling platforms. Most ocean water will not need pre-treatment for the electrodialysis process which separates more acetic carbon dioxide rich water from the alkali water which is released to allow more “breathing room” for shallow ocean waters to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and pass it down to be absorbed by deeper water.

The CO2 output can be used for industrial processes and provides a verifiable measurement for carbon credit accounting.

A pilot is running in the Pacific ocean off Newport Beach California. It’s one of those ideas that when you see it you wonder why you didn’t think of it the last time you opened a can of soda.

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Sonol, a company that operates regular petroleum-based fuel stations in Israel, has opened the country’s first hydrogen fuel station in the Haifa Bay. The world is seeing more and more hydrogen energy breakthroughs and countries nearby like Saudi Arabia are investing in hydrogen fuel.

Sonol is Israel’s third largest gas station chain. Israel’s Ministry of Energy identified a fuel port near Haifa as one of its economic development projects in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Sonol won this tender and worked with Germany’s H2 Mobility on this project. Sonol has also collaborated with Bazam petrochemical refining and the vehicle dealer Colmobile to bring hydrogen powered trucks to this port city.

The Hydrogen station is built close to northern Israel’s Kibbutz Yagur, six miles from the Bazan oil refineries at Haifa Bay. The same Sonol station offers regular fuel pumps and recharging stations for electric cars. It will soon start producing solar energy on the roof to be self-sufficient for its maintenance needs. 

The estimated $3.3 million hydrogen project is a partnership between Sonol, Bazan, a hydrogen manufacturer and and car importer Colmobil, which has supplied the first three hydrogen trucks.

The transportation sector is responsible for about 20% of Israel’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Advantages of hydrogen fuel

As transport fuel, hydrogen has several advantages compared to traditional fossil fuels and electric batteries. Its mass energy density is extremely high which is why it is used to power fuel cells in spacecraft. When it is burned, it produces only water vapor with virtually no harmful air pollution and no carbon dioxide. It can be produced from water using green energy sources or found in natural geological deposits. This makes it an excellent fuel to combat climate change.

Filling is faster than charging: The time required to fill fuel tanks for Hydrogen fuel cells is much shorter than the time required to charge batteries 

Hydrogen’s volume density is relatively low which means it needs a large fuel tank compared to gasoline or diesel fuel. This is why some of the earliest adoption of hydrogen as a transport fuel will be in large commercial vehicles such as the Hyundai Xcient trucks which will be fuelled at the Haifa port. This Hydrogen station will help Israel keep up with other nations in the adoption of this promising new fuel.

Hyundai enters the hydrogen market in the Middle East

Hyundai is bringing its hydrogen fuel cell truck Xcient to Israel, its first market in the Middle East. The aim is to form a hydrogen value chain in Israel. Hyundai’s plan align with Israel’s target to slash national greenhouse gas emissions by 27 per cent by 2030 and by 85 per cent by 2050, relative to 2015 emission levels.

“We are thrilled to support the Israel government’s strong commitment to building a sustainable future,” said Mark Freymueller, a VP at Hyundai. “Establishing the first hydrogen infrastructure in Israel in close collaboration with the country’s key players marks a significant milestone in our efforts to build a sustainable hydrogen value chain around the world.”

Haifa Bay is notoriously polluted. Israel energy and chemical infrastructure for industry operates in this area side-by-side with a growing residential city. We met recently with Ecoocean’s Andreas Weil, who founded Israel’s most influential marine protection NGO. He wonders why in most developed nations such ports are kept far from cities but in Israel they sit side-by-side. Development in more ecological areas is good but maybe it’s time to start moving fuel operations further away from city centers. 

Karin Kloosterman contributed to this report

Have an energy innovation to share with us? Email dreamcatchers@greenprophet.com

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The four-wheel drive vehicle rattled over the desert stones between Wadi Rum village and the Mohammed Mutlak Camp. A vast silence washed over us the moment the driver turned off the engine. A dust storm had passed through earlier in the afternoon but now there was no sound of wind, bird or beast between us and the rust-colored mountains on the horizon.

Anyone who has visited a seashore, forest or meadow thick with birds and insects will know that nature isn’t always quiet. In his poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree the poet W.B. Yeats wrote of a bee-loud glade, cricket sings, low sounds by the shore where “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow…”

But the peace of the Wadi Rum desert dropped quickly like a cotton cloud over ears that were still ringing from the cacophony of ordinary life. The previous night we had accidentally booked a hotel across the street from a UN peacekeeping rock concert in Aqaba. The loud peace concert kept us awake far too late so the silence of the Wadi Rum was welcome.

Our children each found a personal hollow in a wind-worn rock formation to sit and listen to the silence and remember their names. (A wiser person than me once said, “In the desert you can remember your name.’Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain.”)

The Covid-19 lockdown silence wasn’t as sudden or complete. We no longer heard the sound of the motorway three kilometers away but we could hear a dog barking somewhere between our home and the vacant airport. Birdsong suddenly seemed so loud that our 13-year-old complained of it in the morning. We could hear the tide rush in and out of the gates of the railway, though trains were now a rarity. When did I last see a sky so unmarred by a contrail?  When did I last experience an April with so many consecutive clear days and so little rain? Ah yes, the Wadi Rum desert!

As the lockdowns ended and ordinary life returned I had nearly forgotten about the desert and its silence. But again I was reminded of it while watching Dune(2021.) 

Parts of this movie was filmed at this same rock formation near the Mohammed Mutlak Camp. The actor Jason Mamoa played Duncan Idaho in the movie. In this short video Jason explains how the beautify and silence of this desert touched him. 

Thankfully we didn’t see any giant sandworms during our visit. We didn’t encounter scorpions, insects or snakes either. Though we wondered what might be lurking just beneath the surface.

Something lives in the sand in Wadi Rum

Jordan’s Wadi Rum desert served as the real life location of T.E. Lawrence in the film “Lawrence of Arabia(1962).” It was a stand-in for the planet Mars in The Martian. 

In their own way each of these films celebrate the beauty of this amazing place. But all fall short of capturing the full experience of the silent desert. No hum of machinery, no highways, flowing rivers, dogs barking, power lawnmowers, leaf blowers. Some of the camp’s electricity came from green and silent photovoltaic(PV) solar panels so we didn’t hear any diesel generators or loud transformers. Jordan’s Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein is urging the implementation of a Wadi Rum development master plan to improve infrastructure for tourism. Hopefully this can be done without leaving behind the eco in ecotourism.

My family practised some yoga on a rock as the sun set. A short time later Mohammed Mutlak’s campfire chefs prepared a beautiful meal and tea for us. They sang, played guitar and drum. We laid back on a blanket and watched the stars.

I became interested in astronomy during the days of the Apollo moon missions but light pollution gradually encroached on the night sky I once knew. Most people now live their lives without ever having seen it and explaining it becomes like explaining a seashore or sunset to someone who spent their lives inland or indoors. Sometimes I wonder if this loss is some part of what is wrong with the world. The wonder of the desert sky inspired so many poems, stories, songs and works of art. When we lose touch with what the ancients knew, maybe we forget our place in the universe.

Some dust was still in the air from the afternoon storm so the sky wasn’t as clear as it might have been and yet I’ve seldom seen so many stars. 

We were only there for one night but the organizers of the camp made us feel welcome, safe and comfortable. The next time we visit we can explore other parts of the desert and maybe try more adventurous things.

If you need a break from the loud and fast-paced world, you might find your peace of mind in the Wadi. 

RELATED: Is light pollution the end of Arabian Nights?

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Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. It is also a powerful zero-carbon fuel with an energy density of 5.5 kilowatt-hours per kilogram (kWh/kg). This is more than two and a half times the energy density of gasoline and eighteen times the energy density of the 0.296 kWh/kg 4680 battery used in the Tesla Model S.

Hydrogen is used for space travel and other specialized applications but it has not yet replaced fossil fuels in electricity generation, consumer or freight transportation. That may be about to change thanks to these breakthroughs in hydrogen technology.

1. Green Hydrogen

When hydrogen is burned in the presence of Oxygen, it doesn’t produce carbon dioxide (CO2) it only produces water (H2O) and small amounts of the chemicals produced by heating air. But the processes for generating hydrogen consumes energy and that energy can come from sources which produce CO2. Hydrogen is a colorless gas but engineers developed a nine color code to track environmental factors in the production of hydrogen. For example, when coal is used to produce hydrogen, it is known as Black or Brown hydrogen. Natural gas is used to produce Gray hydrogen with the steam-methane reformation process which released CO2 into the atmosphere. Burning black, brown or gray hydrogen appears to be carbon neutral but the overall process contributes to air pollution and climate change.

Blue hydrogen also uses natural gas (mostly methane) but the process is designed to capture and sequester the CO2 byproduct for storage or industrial purposes. 

Green hydrogen goes one step further by producing hydrogen from solar, wind and other energy technologies which do not contribute to climate change. 

Who is working with green hydrogen?

With abundant gas reserves and good climate for solar electrolysis, mideast countries are particularly well-placed for cost-effective green hydrogen production and job creation. Saudia Arabia’s NEOM development is working to produce the world’s largest green hydrogen production utility. 

Oman is also competing in this market with signed contracts for six green projects and a production target of more than one million tons of green hydrogen per year. The war in Ukraine has also forced the European Union to rethink energy dependency as part of regional defence and security. Hydrogen terminals and pipelines are being built and expanded to take advantage of imports from the Mideast and Canada. As Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau puts it: “The enhanced action plan on hydrogen will mobilize investment, support businesses, share expertise and get clean Canadian hydrogen to Europe… Fundamentally, it’s about good middle-class jobs, economic growth and clean energy.”

2. Hydrogen for mimicking photosynthesis

Photovoltaic (PV) electrolysis is not particularly efficient in using sunlight to extract hydrogen from water. The best PV cells are only about 15% efficient and electrolysis is only about 70% efficient. And when the panels are dusty, knock that down even more. Together their total efficiency is only about 10.5%.

Plants do much better but their process is complicated. Reading over my daughter’s shoulder while she was studying biology, I learned something about light-harvesting complex, dyads, ATP, antenna proteins. In my day it was simple, chlorophyll made plants green and turned sunlight, CO2 and water into vegetables our mom made us eat!

On a very high level, light is a form of electromagnetic energy like radio waves. For efficient capture of that energy we need antennas that are a small integer ratio to the wavelength. You may have noticed that the antenna in your 1980s mobile phone was shorter than the ones in your walkie talkie. CB and HAM radio buffs used to tune antenna lengths with a Standing Wave Ratio (SWR) meter. In the early days of television people did something similar with bits of aluminum foil wrapped around TV antennas.

But light has a very short wavelength. The sunlight that filters through our atmosphere has a wavelength of about 400-700 billionths of a meter (nanometer). Because this is a wide range of wavelengths, we need a range of different antenna sizes. Not to worry (says whoever invented photosynthesis) layers of different pigments capture different parts of the spectrum.

No one will ever know this little secret until autumn when the green chlorophyll fades and some of the the other colors are revealed. My explanation may be an oversimplification but our best PV solar cells are not nearly as complex or efficient as the photosynthesis in the broccoli mom made us eat. It’s like comparing a stone tool to the International Space Station. 

But we have to start somewhere and scientists at the University of Michigan took a step in the right direction by mimicking photosynthesis. They used a window-sized lens to focus sunlight onto a panel containing an indium gallium nitride nanostructure catalyst covered with water that was soon bubbling with hydrogen and oxygen gasses with an efficiency of 6.1% indoors and 9% outdoors. This doesn’t beat the efficiency of our best PV electrolysis systems, but it’s a start.

3. Geologic Hydrogen

We discussed this in a recent Green Prophet article about natural hydrogen. The idea is that instead of trying to find green energy to extract hydrogen from water, we search for deposits of hydrogen gas in the same way we search for fossil fuels. Geologic hydrogen is a hot topic in recent weeks because if we find large deposits of hydrogen, it really could be a game changer. At the very least it could serve as a transition fuel to help us phase out fossil fuels before their environmental damage overwhelms us.

4. Hydrogen Fusion

Two isotopes of hydrogen are used in the most common fusion reaction. These are Deuterium and Tritium. Chemically each of these behave very much like ordinary hydrogen which has one proton and one electron but Deuterium also has one neutron and Tritium has two neutrons. These isotopes are relatively rare but the energy released by a fusion reaction is hard to ignore. We already mentioned that the energy density of hydrogen when it is chemically burned in air is about 5.5 kilowatt-hours per kilogram.

But the nuclear fusion reaction between Deuterium and Tritium isotopes can produce 94 trillion kilowatt-hours per kilogram. This is 17 trillion times the energy density of gasoline. The catch is that fusion is difficult. Harnessing this energy isn’t as easy as dumping some rubbish into a device like “Mr. Fusion” in the film “Back to the Future.”

It’s even more difficult than trying to harness the energy in a bolt of lightning. But scientists are working on this from two different angles, magnetic confinement and laser confinement. Both have demonstrated net energy gain but not yet at a level that is commercially practical.

5. Hydrogen Airships

It must have seemed the perfect form of transportation. Dirigibles were luxurious and majestic. School teachers told us what it was like to watch these massive inventions cast shadows across midwestern cornfields. They took the comforts of a passenger cruise ship and sailed among the clouds. The Hindenberg even had a piano lounge.

No form of transportation is perfectly safe and these airships were no exception. Seventy-three people died when the USS Akron crashed into the ocean and 48 died on the R-101. But the Hindenberg exploded on land in daylight with thousands of spectators, photographers and NBC radio broadcaster Herbert Morrison whose famous words “Oh the humanity!” would signal the end of this airship era..

This too may change as we face the true costs of jet aircraft travel. A round-trip transatlantic flight releases about two tons of CO2 per passenger, comparable to the annual carbon footprint of an average person living in Jordan.

One of the disadvantages of airships was that they flew low and slow in a part of the atmosphere prone to gusty winds, turbulence and lightning. When Hughs and other companies took jet aircraft into the stratosphere above the weather, modern flight was transformed. There is no reason why an airship should be confined to the turbulent lower atmosphere. The spy balloons that were in US news in recent weeks launched from China over Canada and the US flew at 60,000 feet, almost twice the cruising altitude of commercial aircraft. 

But hydrogen isn’t just for spy balloons. The developers of an airship called the h2 clipper plan to take advantage of the economic advantages of hydrogen airships in cargo transport. Hydrogen will be used for both lift and power and if it is green hydrogen, it will truly be a zero carbon aircraft. Loz Blain explains in New Atlas:

“We’re talking cargo loads up to 340,000 lb (150,000 kg – or the equivalent of about 115 Toyota Corollas), distances up to 6,000 miles (9,650 km, or roughly the distance between Los Angeles and Barcelona), at cruising speeds over 175 mph (280 km/h, or a little under one-third the speed of a Dreamliner passenger plane – but 7-10 times faster than a cargo ship can go).”

On paper it sounds good, jet aircraft are expensive, carbon-heavy energy hogs and these airships are beautiful. H2-Clipper won the prestigious hydrogen transport innovation awards in 2023. The company has tested models in wind-tunnels and has plans for a prototype by 2025 and a full-size production airship by 2028.

Oceansky’s airship is smaller but it may be perfect for the luxury class. Who wouldn’t want to fly over the north pole on something like this?

These are just five recent breakthroughs in hydrogen technology. However you look at it, it seems that the future is bright for Hydrogen!

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When people think of electric vehicle (EV) companies, most don’t think of countries where electric vehicle research and development takes place, so most don’t think of Lebanon.

Jihad Mohammed, the CEO of EV Electra is working to change that. European Business Magazine named him Middle East CEO of the year in 2023 for his part in successfully launching Electra Lebanon’s first EV company despite the economic downturn that came after the Covid-19 pandemic. Lebanon is facing massive energy blackouts. And people are investing in solar panels because they can’t get access to electricity from the grid. 

In an interview with European Business Magazine, Mohammad said, “I am honoured and humbled to receive this prestigious award from European Business Magazine. This recognition is a testament to the hard work and dedication of our talented team at EV Electra, who are the driving force behind our success. I share this award with each and every one of them.” 

The company’s stated mission is: “Produce electric vehicles, compete at a global scale, and take part in the World’s transition towards sustainable energy. Being the first EV automotive company in the Middle East and the Arab world, we decided to be the front runners and transit our area from a consumer market to an industrial one.”

The company has already begun production of the Quds RISE, named after the Arabic word for Jerusalem. Like its city namesake this car is beautiful!

To say it resembles a Maserati or Porsche 911 doesn’t say enough about this sports car’s unique lines. The technical specifications are also impressive. The 50 kWh Lithium ION battery gives it a range of up to 450km. It can go from 0 to 100km/h in less than 5 seconds with a top speed of 250km/h. It also boasts regenerative braking, butterfly doors, a 360 degree camera system and a UV disinfection system.

It comes in an assortment of colours. This one is called Plum crazy and Metallic White:

::EV Electra

The post Lebanon’s EV Electra an electric car for the Arab world appeared first on Green Prophet.

Fusion is a hypothesized type of nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperature. It would contrast starkly with the “hot” fusion that is known to take place naturally within stars and artificially in hydrogen bombs which leave radiation behind. The promise of fusion of hydrogen atoms has come and gone over the last 40 years, with headlines being made in science once again. If we can solve fusion, we’ve solved climate change and greenhouse gases forever. Hydrogen is available and abundant and we could all have shisha-like reactors at home, charging our private EV everything, but fusion, well, it’s not so easy. We are going to explore the how, why and whens of fusion.

According to both the Financial Times (Mar 23, pg. 1, 26, and 22) and the Wall Street Journal (Mar. 23, b1 & b8) two scientists will announce indications of room temperature fusion of heavy hydrogen (deuterium): This announcement appeared in the Sci.physics Usenet group on March 23, 1989 –– only ten days after a new technology known as the World Wide Web was announced on Alt.hypertext. The net was alive with excitement about the possibility of cheap and clean energy from a tabletop fusion device somewhat resembling a Shisha Middle East smoking pipe, or a Belgian syphon coffee maker.

The price of palladium used in their device rose 30% and the USSR minted a palladium coin. Research teams around the world scrambled to reproduce this “cold fusion” with varying degrees of success. Father of the Hydrogen-bomb Edward Teller expressed scepticism over Pons and Fleischmann’s  fusion breakthrough but later worked with researchers. He was hopeful that the fusion that made his weapon so devastating could finally be tamed to serve humankind. It seemed too good to be true! Clean and cheap energy, forever. And it was.

One of the mistakes Pons, Fleischmann and others made is something Green Prophet discussed in our recent article on geological hydrogen. They had assumed electrolysis was 100% efficient but in reality at least 30% of the energy input is converted to heat. They mistook this resistive heating as fusion energy. The good news is that it didn’t work and hit Pons and Fleischmann with a fatal dose of neutron radiation. Fusion faded into the fringe and lost momentum as its proponents moved to more profitable junk science. But hot fusion research continued its slow and unsteady pace.

Fusion, here we go again?

Anyone old enough to remember the fusion debacle should be forgiven for being sceptical when the America’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced a fusion breakthrough at their National Ignition Facility (NIF) in December 2022. This new hot fusion device didn’t resemble Pons and Fleichmann’s contraption at all.

It looks more like something Dr. Evil would fire at a comic book superhero. The LLNL scientists used 192 lasers, each with a beam width of about a meter. Together they can produce up to 500 trillion watts. Their light was focused and timed so their ten billionth of a second (0.1 nanosecond) pulses of light each about 1 inch long would simultaneously hit a cylinder containing a sphere smaller than a peppercorn. The sphere contained two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium. This hot fusion experiment was a success.

The lasers pumped 2 megajoules (MJ) of energy into the cylinder generating X-rays which compressed and heated the deuterium and tritium enough that some fused and output 3 megajoules. The net energy gain was 1.5 times. 

Fusion energy enough for a tea party

The extra megajoule generated by the NIF fusion experiment was enough energy to bring a few cups of water to a boil. That’s worth about three cups of tea. When we put it that way it doesn’t sound like much does it? This experiment was never meant to become a commercial fusion reactor but it shows that it is possible to use laser confinement to release more fusion energy than is put into the system.

This breakthrough is comparable to the Wright brother’s 12-second flight in 1903. We can’t imagine flying across the world with 36 meter 12 second hops but the brother’s Kitty Hawk experiment with kite and bicycle parts proved that heavier than air flight was possible.

Likewise, LLNL showed that a laser confinement fusion power is possible even if it isn’t practical until it can target its lasers at more than one peppercorn for longer than a ten-billionth of a second.

Composite photograph showing three stories of the Target Bay and many of the final optics assemblies and diagnostics surrounding the Target Chamber at the center. Credit: Jacqueline McBride LLNL.

A brief history of fusion and why it’s so hard

The first nuclear fission chain reaction occurred under the bleachers at University of Chicago’s abandoned Stagg Field. Enrico Fermi led his team to build the Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1) atomic pile out of graphite, uranium, wood and other materials beneath a University of Chicago football stadium. At 3:25 p.m on December 2, 1942 a Manhattan Project scientist named George Weil pulled a control rod from CP-1. With the neutron-absorbing control rod removed, each neutron released by a uranium atom would trigger the release of more than one neutron.

Image from Forest Preserves of Cook County

Chicago Pile-1 became the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear fission reactor. This Lego video explains CP-1 atomic fission history”

Until LLNL produces its own Lego fusion video, we have this explanation of December’s NIF laser confinement fusion breakthrough:

Swords, ploughshares, bombs and cups of tea

The December 1942 CP-1 fission experiment ran for 28 minutes, about 16 quadrillion times longer than NIF’s laser fusion breakthrough but CP-1 only produced about 1/2 watt. This wasn’t even enough power to make a nice cup of tea but shortly afterwards Leo Szilard, the man who invented and patented the nuclear chain reaction told Enrico Fermi that this would be a “black day in the history of mankind.” Szilard was right: the Chicago Pile-1 paved the way for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan less than three years later. 

The first nuclear fusion bombs were tested only six years later and the first nuclear fission reactor began generating electricity at Windscale UK in 1950, only eight years after CP-1. Today there are more than 10,000 atomic bombs in at least nine countries and 400 nuclear fission reactors in at least 30 countries. But as of December 2022, 80 years after Chicago Pile-1 we did not have a single self-sustaining fusion reactor.

Why is fusion better than fission?

In nuclear fission, protons and neutrons are split from a heavy atom’s nucleus, generating energy, radiation and lighter elements. In nuclear fusion, the nucleus of light elements are fused together, releasing energy, radiation and heavier elements. One of the advantages of fusion is also what makes it so difficult. In December’s NIF experiment, carefully timed lasers and perfectly spherical heavy hydrogen capsules could only keep the reaction going for about a ten billionth of a second. Alternative tokamak fusion experiments using doughnut-shaped magnetic confinement instead of lasers have also shown promise but so far the longest sustained fusion reaction was only 17 minutes.

But once a nuclear fission chain reaction starts it will run its course unless something stops it. Chicago Pile-1 had no cooling system and its control system relied on pulleys, clotheslines, electric motors, emergency buckets of cadmium salts and a manual control rod operator named George Weil. In retrospect they were lucky. Building an atomic pile beneath an urban football stadium sounds like a “hold my beer” kind of thing to do. If these scientists had removed the control rods and abandoned the project, the nuclear reaction might still be running today after melting a radioactive hole in the earth near downtown Chicago. 

CP-1, CP-2 and CP-3 were eventually decommissioned and buried beneath a wooded picnic area. In the 1970s to 80s they were found to be leaching radioactive material into the soil and ground water. This gives us the other big advantage of nuclear fusion: The fuel and fusion reaction can be designed to minimize radioactive waste.

In NIF and other deuterium-tritium fusion reactors, two isotopes of hydrogen (tritium being radioactive with a half-life of 12.33 years) are fused into helium. Most of this helium is the same non-radioactive isotope children use in party balloons. The neutrons released during the reaction can make parts of the reactor radioactive but this is easier to manage than the messy mix of spent Uranium, cesium-137 (half-life 30 years), strontium-90 (half-life 29 years), plutonium-239 (half-life 2400 years), technetium-99 (half-life 211,100 years) released into our water, land and air by fission power plants at Windscale in 1957, Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, Fukushima in 2011…

There are plenty of reasons why we should continue research into fusion power. One of the reasons we’re impatient with the slow pace of green technological progress may be that our pop-culture mythology distorts the true history of technology. I previously wrote about the long history of efficient lighting. The same could be said of many other things. Rev. Dr. J. W. Carhart was driving a steam-powered car he named The Spark 13 years before Carl Benz patented his first automobile.

An electric skateboard invented by a Roman Catholic Priest named Ányos Jedlik in 1828 predated Elon Musk’s appointment as CEO of Tesla by 180 years. Rather than obsessing over the question “Are we there yet?” we should ask whether we’re still making progress. December’s NIF experiment shows that, yes, we are still making progress towards the goal of fusion energy.

The post What is fusion and why it’s so hard appeared first on Green Prophet.

It came to him in a dream. Dmitri Mendeleev, the man who invented the periodic table and periodic law, faced poverty in Siberia, prejudice in Moscow, tuberculosis in St. Petersburg and the Crimean war while convalescing from tuberculosis. On her deathbed his mother cautioned: “Be careful of illusion; work, search for divine and scientific truth.” 

In February 1869 he wrote the properties of some elements and played something like chemical solitaire to try to understand the pattern before falling asleep. Mendeleev later wrote: “In a dream I saw a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.” 

Hydrogen, the lightest and most abundant element in the known universe, remains where he wrote it, alone in the upper left corner of his periodic table of the elements. In 1888 Mendeleev measured 5.8 to 7.5% hydrogen gas seeping from cracks in the Makiivka coal mine in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. Chemists were well aware of hydrogen’s relationship to water when they named it hydrogen, but his was one of the first scientific measurements of geologic hydrogen.

Hydrogen as the perfect fuel

Fast forward to the 1970s when environmentalists were beginning to understand what Eunice Newton Foote and other 19th century scientists had predicted about the impact of carbon dioxide on our climate. Coal, wood, oil and natural gas all release carbon dioxide when they burned but hydrogen burns clean, producing only water vapor. The hydrogen economy hype seemed too good to be true. Our atmosphere isn’t pure oxygen so a hydrogen flame produces some nitrogen oxides (NOx) but it emits far less pollution that any hydrocarbon would. Scientists and environmentalists were in agreement, hydrogen is the perfect fuel!

Hydrogen hydrogen everywhere but not a molecule to burn

There is one problem. Where will we get the hydrogen? The sun is 73% hydrogen and Jupiter is 90% hydrogen but they’re hardly as convenient as your local gas station. Every molecule of water in the world’s oceans contains two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. By mass the oceans are 10% hydrogen. But the hydrogen in H2O is stuck tightly to the oxygen so it takes energy to split the hydrogen from the oxygen in water. Electrolysis is a process which uses electricity to do this but efficiency levels are less than 70%. So it takes about six kilowatt-hours of electricity to split the hydrogen from oxygen in a 1-liter bottle of water. (See footnote below)

That would be enough to run a television and refrigerator for about ten hours. If that electricity comes from green or carbon neutral fuels we can consider this to be green hydrogen. Manufactured hydrogen isn’t a replacement for fossil fuels but it can be a useful way to store energy to be burned or used in fuel cells.

Geologic Hydrogen

But what if we didn’t have to split hydrogen from oxygen? What if there were places like the coal mine Mendeleev studied in Ukraine with an even higher percentage of hydrogen? Like the chemical patterns revealed in Mendeleev’s dream, so-called geologic hydrogen was there all along but we weren’t looking for it, or we were looking in the wrong places.

Most known hydrogen producing vents are in Eastern Europe and Russia because people there were looking, partly because Russian scientists had accepted an abiotic petroleum theory that required hydrogen instead of organic matter to create underground oil reserves. The western scientific belief that free geologic hydrogen was rare became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hydrogen is often used as a carrier gas in chromatography instruments used to survey geologic gas. This made these instruments blind to geologic hydrogen.

Prospectors started looking harder in response to the energy shortage caused by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. One such source of “hidden” geologic hydrogen is where an eternal flame burns on Mount Chimaera in Turkey. In his second book of Historia Naturalis (77 AD), Pliny the Elder referred to writings by Ctesias in the fifth century BC suggesting that these vents which “burned with a flame that does not die by day or night” were the origin of the mythical fire-breathing lion-goat monster named Chimera. This is also believed to be the place where the original Olympic torch was lit. The torch in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo Japan was lit from a cauldron that burned manufactured green hydrogen.

Photo of natural fires on Mount Chimaera, Turkey by Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany

How does geology create hydrogen?

The exact processes are not known for all sources of geologic hydrogen but some of the basic chemistry would’ve been known by 1904 when Howard Lane built a device that used a reaction between iron and steam to generate hydrogen. Lane’s process was used to inflate balloons for the St. Louis exposition and airships such as the Graf Zeppelin. There are places deep underground where water comes in contact with hot iron-bearing rock. The iron-rich mineral olivine is common in the earth’s mantle and when it comes into contact with water, a reaction called serpentinization occurs which takes oxygen from water and produces hydrogen and another mineral called Serpentinite. 

Photo of serpentinite by Hermann Hammer

Other hydrogen generating reactions occur deep within the earth but some, such as radiolysis where the energy from radioactive decay splits water are thought to be too slow to produce useful amounts of hydrogen. The serpentinization reactions may be faster than the slow biological decay which produces coal and petroleum.

Follow the hydrogen faeries

The geology which favors coal, oil and tar-sands is not necessarily ideal for generating and trapping hydrogen. Hydrogen can escape or chemically bond with porous sedimentary rock and some microbes eat it. If high purity geologic sources of hydrogen are common enough to replace some fossil fuels, we may find ourselves in a new age of hydrogen prospecting. 

Fortunately nature gives us some clues. Fairy circles are circular patches where grass and other plantlife is altered. Like the Chimera of Turkey, various legends tried to explain what caused them. In English and Celtic folklore said they were caused by faeries dancing in a circle and if a human joined them, they would be forced to dance until they passed out. We now understand that many are caused when trees, mushrooms, decaying stumps and other organic matter alter the soil. But they can also be caused by hydrogen seeping from underground cracks.

A Science.org article entitled Hidden Hydrogen by Eric Hand describes some recent discoveries of geologic hydrogen. One is by a man named Luke Titus who read a 1944 Geologic survey of South Australia during the Covid-19 lockdown. He learned about the use of divining rods and other unusual prospecting techniques and boreholes on Kangaroo island which produced up to 80% pure hydrogen. Mr. Titus acquired prospecting rights in the region and founded a company called Gold Hydrogen.

Other promising sources of geologic hydrogen have been found in Brazil, Namibia, Iceland, Canada, Finland and the US.

The Hidden Hydrogen article describes a 1987 discovery in Mali where a water-well driller was smoking near where wind came from the dry bore hole. He set off an explosion with a flame that was “…like blue sparkling water and did not have black smoke pollution. The color of the fire at night was like shining gold, and all over the fields we could see each other in the light.”

Another place where geologic hydrogen is well known are the black-smoker vents found where volcanic oceanic ridges meet the water of the deep ocean. The relative inaccessibility of this hydrogen is a reminder that there is a difference between knowing where hydrogen exists and being able to economically extract it without causing other unwanted environmental destruction.

For chemists, geologists and environmentalists, geologic hydrogen may be a flash in the pan, or it might be a new hydrogen “gold rush” that forever changes the world.

_____________

Footnote:
My father is a retired science teacher who once called the local power company after calculating how much electricity it would take to split enough water to generate enough hydrogen and oxygen to raise the Titanic. When company officials realized he wasn’t an industrial customer, they didn’t call him back. Assuming a 131186287 liter Titanic just below the surface and I get:

131186287L/1865L/ 6 kWh = 70,348kWh * 6 = 422,092kWh

422,092 kilowatt-hours * 0.12/kWh = $50,651

This is surprisingly inexpensive though this is only in the ideal case where an intact Titanic lies just beneath the surface, not where it sits on the bottom 3800 meters below. The inverse provides perspective the titanic volume of hydrogen and oxygen that must come together to produce 422,092 kWh of energy.

The post The history and promise of geological hydrogen for fuel appeared first on Green Prophet.

Sometime in the 1970s when our family outings were usually to places like Yogi Bear Jellystone park or the local drive-in movie, my father drove us to a coal-fired power plant. The local electric company had just installed smokestack scrubbers to comply with the Clean Air Act. The transformation from sooty grey smoke to puffy white clouds of steam seemed like a miracle. 

Nixon-era greenwashing

Dad taught Science so he was able to explain how the scrubbers used electricity to attract ash and soot. It was similar to the way a charged balloon attracted our hair or clinged to the wall. These scrubbers were amazing but they were not designed to reduce the lung-rotting sulphur dioxide (SO2 – sox for short), nitrogen oxides (NOx – nox for short) or ozone (O3). They did little to reduce the levels of brain-rotting mercury or lead and did nothing to slow the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) into our atmosphere.

Twenty-five years later the company proposed three additional “clean-coal” power plants on the same site to take advantage of the grandfather clause of environmental laws written when the original plants were constructed in the 1950s. The proposal’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) said that new technologies did capture more pollution. Per megawatt-hour, each new plant would produce less SO2, NOx and O3 than the older ones. This factoid was repeated on advertising along with the promise for jobs. But the devil was in the details. In sum total along with the existing plants, regional air quality would decline and barely meet Clean Air Act standards only if the smokestacks were built higher than the Federal Aviation Association (FAA) allowed. 

I learned that photovoltaic solar energy was considered to be too expensive and that new nuclear power plants were disqualified until someone figured out a safe way to store the waste. 

The new “Clean-coal” power plants were expensive to build so they would have to stay online for at least 50 years in order to be cost-effective. Gas turbine power plants produce less CO2 per megawatt and are cheaper to build but they are more expensive to operate. Computer models recommended thousands of megawatts of offshore wind farms as the most cost-effective energy source. But these models were ignored.

Jobs were the ultimate trump card in the power plant debate but environmentalists brought up the probable negative impact of mercury and thermal pollution on the state’s fishing industry and the impact on traffic from the freight trains that would bring more than 6000 tons of coal every day to generate approximately 1100 Megawatts of electricity and release 12,000 tons of Carbon Dioxide into our atmosphere.

Despite more than a century of science showing the impact of CO2 on climate and the fact that a CO2 concentration of 4% is fatal, this invisible gas is not considered a pollutant. When anyone brought up the topic of CO2, the word “sequestering” was used as if it was a magic incantation that would cure our carbon-based troubles.

What is Sequestering?

The dictionary gives:
Se·ques·ter verb

1. isolate or hide away.

“Tiberius was sequestered on an island”

In the context of carbon dioxide, sequestering refers to any method which can lock this greenhouse gas safely away from where it can harm us and our environment.

Since the O2 component of CO2 is not harmful, the simplest way to sequester CO2 would be to separate the Oxygen from the Carbon, reversing the coal-burning reaction:

C + O2 → CO2 + energy

to:

CO2 + energy → C + O2

Unfortunately unburning coal is almost as difficult as unbaking a cake. A wise college professor named Merlin once taught us the three laws of physics as:

• You can’t win
• You can’t break even
• You shouldn’t even try.

Even if coal was pure carbon and air was pure oxygen, the coal unburning reaction would take more energy than we got from burning the coal. But let’s be optimistic. Maybe there is a way to sneak around that third law of physics, a trick to hide the carbon from mother nature.

Nature

Plants use chlorophyll and energy from sunlight to absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen. They already know how to sequester carbon. Over time these plants will eventually become coal which is mostly carbon. So it is possible to reverse that chemical reaction! Climate impact’s nature based solutions use plants as part of the carbon offsets which help companies move towards a carbon-neutral balance. According to an article published in the journal Nature, fast growing trees such as Eucalyptus and Acacia can absorb up to 5 tons of carbon per hectare per year.

Going back to my neighbourhood coal power plant, in order to store the 12,000 tons of carbon dioxide this 1.1 Gigawatt plant emits every day we would need more than 876,600 hectares of eucalyptus or acacia trees. That’s 8766 square kilometre, a forest more than 11 times the size of Bahrain! Even if this much land is available and not being used for housing or agriculture, trees don’t live forever and forests are typically cut down where their wood eventually decays or burns, releasing its carbon back into the atmosphere. Seaweed, algae and other plants have also been explored for their potential to sequester or capture carbon but it’s helpful to put sequestering into perspective. It took nature more than one hundred million years to sequester carbon into the coal we’ve already burned over the past 350 years. So go ahead and plant a tree. Plant as many as you have land for, but they aren’t the quick and easy solution we were looking for.

Physical Limits of Carbon Capturing

A second method for sequestering carbon is to store it directly. For example, the large caverns created by salt mining could be used as giant carbon dioxide storage tanks. Dry oil wells and abandoned coal mines could also be used for direct storage. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, Canada and Norway are already storing more than a million metric tons of carbon dioxide underground every year. Other large scale underground carbon storage projects are underway in the U.S., China, Australia and Europe. But not every hole in the ground would make a good carbon dumpster. High pressure carbon dioxide could cause environmental problems similar to what we’ve already seen with fracking.

The Chemistry of Carbon Capture

One promising form of carbon sequestering involves a chemical trick. If carbon dioxide is pumped into an underground cavern made out of a type of volcanic rock called basalt, a chemical reaction takes place. The basalt is carbonized as it captures carbon dioxide into a mineral form. In an experiment conducted in Iceland where basalt volcanic rocks are common, 90% of the carbon dioxide injected was captured into stone in only two years. Similar natural processes would take thousands of years.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory recently refined this technique and published in a peer-reviewed journal the current record for the cheapest carbon capture at $39 per metric ton. Previous state-of-the-art carbon sequestering typically cost $57 per metric ton. 

Carbon Sequestering raises the cost of coal

We know coal isn’t good for our environment but we still burn it because it’s cheap. Coal currently costs about $40 per ton. But since burning coal produces twice its weight in CO2 and the cost of burning coal and sequestering its carbon is very close to three times the cost of coal: $120 per ton.

There are other chemical tricks involving building materials. One very common building material is lime mortar. Over time the mortar absorbs Carbon Dioxide from the air as it hardens into something resembling limestone in this reaction: Ca(OH)2 + CO2 → CaCO3 + H2O

The lime mortar used in the Great Pyramids at Giza are very slowly reacting with carbon dioxide as the mortar turns into something resembling the limestone from which it came. Self-healing concrete is how the Romans built structures to last thousands of years.

On the surface this reaction happens quickly but even after thousands of years, this reaction is not yet complete for the mortar that holds the great pyramids together. It is possible that new discoveries in chemistry will help us produce buildings that absorb more CO2 than was released during its construction.

What’s next for carbon sequestering?

We have more than a century of solid science telling us that our grand experiment to release millions of years of carbon into our atmosphere over the course of a few hundred years will end in tears. Each generation has kicked this looming environmental disaster down the road and passed it on to the next. The reason coal is still an enormous part of our energy mix is that our global accounting system doesn’t measure its true cost. We pretend coal is cheap but if we could measure the true cost of environmental damage or sequestering, it’s likely it would lose every advantage it has over wind energy, solar power or even nuclear power.

We must continue to explore new ways of sequestering carbon dioxide while reminding each other that the best way to remove carbon from the atmosphere is to not put it there in the first place.

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