The argument has shifted
When it becomes too obvious that climate change is real, the thing to do is say we can’t do anything about it.
The world is facing a new form of climate denial – not the dismissal of climate science, but a concerted attack on the idea that the economy can be reorganised to fight the crisis, the president of global climate talks has warned.
André Corrêa do Lago, the veteran Brazilian diplomat who will direct this year’s UN summit, Cop30, believes his biggest job will be to counter the attempt from some vested interests to prevent climate policies aimed at shifting the global economy to a low-carbon footing.
Sort of the way you want to prevent firefighters from fighting the fire.
As the climate crisis has gathered pace, temperatures have risen and the effects of extreme weather have become more obvious, scientists have been able to draw ever more clearly the links between greenhouse gas emissions and our impacts on the planet. So the argument has shifted, Corrêa do Lago believes, from undermining or misrepresenting the science to attempts to counter climate policy.
“It is not possible to have [scientific] denialism at this stage, after everything that has happened in recent years. So there is a migration from scientific denial to a denial that economic measures against climate change can be good for the economy and for people.”
The rise of populist politicians around the world has fuelled a backlash against climate policy, most clearly seen in the presidency of Donald Trump in the US, where he has set about cancelling policies intended to boost renewable energy and cut greenhouse gases, and dismantling all forms of government-sponsored climate-related institutions, including scientific research labs.
It’s not his problem, it’s his grandchildren’s problem, so why should he care?
A similar incident occurred here in Australia a few years ago. The argument is often “We only emit x% of the world’s carbon dioxide, so anything we do is irrelevant,” along with accusations about how much China emits compared to how little China is doing to reduce emissions. You know, that China that leads the world in solar generation, design and manufacture of solar panels, etc.
Sure, we may be small emitters overall, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a role to play in being good world citizens, talking the talk AND walking the walk, as well as setting a good example.
South Australia has led the nation in renewables, and we have the largest uptake of rooftop solar. Not just houses, but shopping centre carparks have joined in, providing shade for parked cars and power for the retailers.
Today, SANTOS, a major fossil fuel producer, has likened the state of Victoria to North Korea. Is it because the people are starving, there are no elections, and it’s an international pariah? No, it’s because Victoria has implemented sensible rules for gas exploration and is rapidly transitioning households to all-electric with no new gas connections for residential developments.
When you lose an argument, don’t accept that you were wrong; just find another angle to argue.
All according to what we learned from Yes, Minister. This is now stage 2:
I recently wrote a little piece on this issue, which I no longer have a web site to publish. I don’t know if anyone here would be interested. For what it’s worth, my nuclear background is basically the Reed college reactor.
Thoughts on a fossil carbon-free base for heavy industry
At this point I hope we have all imagined the possibility of a future with economic
prosperity and without fossil carbon-based motor fuels. You can use electricity and
renewable sources for most things. OK, but what about everything else? Motor fuels and
fossil carbon electricity generation aren’t the whole story by a long shot. There’s
steel and aliminum, oh and also cement. And then there’s organic chemistry more
generally – can’t you do that without burning the oil? Well, no, not today you can’t.
This is what I want to take the knife to. We have the tools, but I don’t hear many
people talking about how to really use them to full effect.
I’m talking about nuclear power of course. We certainly want to take the fullest
advantage of solar power and other renewable sources as well. I want to additionally
propose the use of radioisotope heater units to replace a number of unobvious carbon
sources in today’s heavy industry. Nuclear advocates have recommended the reprocessing
of fuel to extend the nuclear fuel cycle in the past, but relatively little has been
done so far. This lackadasical effort needs to end yesterday, of course. I fully
recommend an expanded nuclear fuel cycle including reprocessing and fast breeder
reactors, and maybe also a thorium cycle. But in addition to that, I want to re-propose
an old idea (I don’t know where it originates) in a new context – not only extracting
and fully using the actinides in the fuel cycle, but also extracting the fission
products to make Fission Product Radioisotope Heater Units, FPRHUs.
Now let me change tack for a bit and talk about some very nasty fossil CO2 sources in
heavy industry today. We use coal to make iron and steel. We use petroleum coke to
make aliminum. We have lime kilns which release the CO2 from carbonate rocks, which is
perhaps the very worst. And then there’s the awful oil-powered oil refinery. If you’re
not familiar with the industry (I have never been any part of it), you may not have
heard any of the details, so let me try to explain from what I’ve been able to piece
together.
My explanation of the oil refinery will focus on what I consider to be the two
fundamental processes in a refinery that’s not dedicated to motor fuels, which is a
difficult thing to imagine based on what engineers build today. One is called the
hydrotreater, which is an industry name for the high-pressure hydrogenation of
hydrocarbons. The so-called naphtha hydrotreater seems to operate somewhere around 200
atmospheres and maybe 700-800 celcius. There is also a diesel or lube oil hydrotreater
which operates at milder conditions and processes a smaller feed. These hydrotreaters
are fed with hydrogen from a reaction which overall is basically
CH4 + 2 H2O -> 4 H2 + CO2 (where does the CH4 come from? – not natural gas)
The second fundamental process is called the olefins unit pyrolysis furnace, which
operates at more like 150 atmospheres and maybe 1000 celsius. This is simply the
thermal decomposition of hydrocarbons, in this case only the lighter naphtha mixture.
The feeds to both of the fundamental precesses are highly miscellaneous mixtures of
hydrocarbons, although not exactly the same. The hydrotreater in effect comes first,
after the main fractionation (called the crude unit). The feed from the crude unit
typically still includes organic sulfur and nitrogen, and the hydrotreater is the
sledgehammer for dealing with that, as sulfur comes out as H2S and N as NH3. But the
other effect of the hydrotreater is to add hydrogen across carbon-carbon double bonds to
make single bonds, although this makes it sound far more surgical than it is. On the
other hand, the pyrolysis furnace in effect cooks hydrogen out – how many things can a
hydrocarbon decompose to? So in that one you make double bonds, and also triple bonds,
and some coke too no doubt, and some hydrogen, and also some methane. Well, more than a
little bit in fact. The hydrotreater is also a prodigious producer of methane, being a
hydrogenator after all. So that’s where the methane comes from. As it happens, only a
little of it is needed to make the hydrogen that’s needed.
So neither of the fundamental processes is especially chemically efficient. And if
you’ve looked at the reaction conditions you can see that some thermal and mechanical
power inputs are required also, not a small amount. What a horrible mess. How can you
ever make money doing something like that – OH WAIT. You can burn the methane. So at
the inlet to the hydrotreater there’s a jet engine the size of a large truck burning,
in effect, the same methane that’s cooking out of the reaction. The naphtha
hydrotreater at a medium size refinery costs over 200 megawatts to run – but not in
money. The pyrolysis furnace is a very similar story. This is where ethylene for
plastics comes from. And the big embarrasment is that you have to send the same oil to
the hydrotreater fisrt even though the pyrolysis furnace undoes the single bond-double
bond thing. The cruse unit – the tallest tower – also has a house-sized burner fed by
the so-called refinery fuel gas mix. All the other hundreds of other smaller towers
also have their fuel gas-powered preheaters or compressors. It’s said that you can turn
crude oil into anything, but it you want to turn all of it into polyethylene you have
to, basically, burn half or more of it first, counting carbon atom by carbon atom. But
in every case what you need is a concentrated heat source, and so I propose the FPRHU.
There is a question about the effect of ionizing radiation on the chemical process, but
I have a surprising answer for that.
What’s needed is a convenient high-temperature heat transfer material, and I have no
idea what chemical engineers would propose based on that criterion alone. But I will
propose the use of molten silicates for another reason. The Radioisotope Silicate
Foundry (RSF) can be the basis of a carbon-free construction industry. The idea is that
the RSF is located at a nucear fuel reprocessing facility and uses its freshest isotopes
to produce both a high-temperature heat source for co-located heavy industry and a
precast building material to replace concrete. This may not sound remotely believable
based on the scale of recently-imagined nuclear reprocessing efforts, but I propose a
great increase in that. Another benefit is that all of this activity, together with the complete
nuclear fuel cycle for actinides, reduces the final amount of nuclear waste produced for
each ton of uranium mined.
It starts to become clearer what the overall picture looks like. Let me say a little
bit about the metals first before sharpening the chemistry picture a little more. You
need a reducing agent to make metals. One possibility is a electrical/nuclear biomass
charcoal furnace. What biomass you would want and how much would be available is an
interesting question I don’t know much about, as the chemical quality of the charcoal is
important. An interesting alternative is hydrogen produced either by electrolysis of
water or the pyrolysis of fossil carbon methane, not yet fully developed.
The steel mill coke ovens also produce a coal gas which is now called coke oven gas, and
is used in the steel mill to het furnaces much the same as the oil refinery fuel gas.
This would also be replaced by FPRHU/RSF. Preparing aluminum ore is mainly mechanical
and wet chemistry, but iron ores are roasted and that’s a nut to crack. Heat is no
problem with abundant FPRHUs, but some carbonates are decomposed here also. This may be
on a scale that can be accepted if all other main sources of fossil CO2 are really
eliminated. The other possibility is to treat carbonates with a wet chemistry, i.e. to
use an acid to release CO2 and then a mineral base to absorb it. That would require
support from the chloralkali process, more or less.
Finally, what would carbon chemistry look like? You will still need things like oil and
coal to produce a number of things including asphalt and lubricants. Polymers and
chemical feedstocks are also needed. Some of this can come from biomass, e.g. you can
easily make ethylene from ethanol, although competing with food sources is not
necessarily a good idea. Some real new chemical enginnering is needed, to say the
least. I would presume butadiene still comes out of oil and coal. You can picture a
refinery that processes heavy inputs with FPRHU/RSF heating, and which uses pyrolysis to
destroy the methane which is the ultimate waste product. The hydrogen can be used
liberally for anything, making iron, whatever. The carbon black has to end up in steel,
tires, carbon fibre materials, and on printed pages I guess. There’s another
interesting engineering question as to the overall balance between electricity usage and
FPRHU, the point of which is that the FPRHUs need to be available on a real market.
OK, so I hope I’ve shown that it’s basically possible to do things this way, and emit
only the smallest amount of fossil CO2 while making all the things we expect to make and
have. The extensive handling of radioisotopes within the heavy manufacturing centers
will necessitate an increase in automation, but the industry was really heading in that
direction anyway. The big question is the capital expenditure. Of course the answer to
that is state involvement to some degree – it’s just a question, politically, of what
kind of future we want.
Can you fix the formatting? I could guest post it then.
Thanks Ryan:
So you would use fission products separated from used nuclear fuel to generate high temperature heat for industrial processes. Another possibility is that some reactor designs can run at the high temperatures needed for those processes. Mostly these use lead for their primary coolant. One that looks promising to me is the Dual Fluid Reactor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_fluid_reactor
https://dual-fluid.com/
Thank you so much for the opportunity! Can you give me a little time to make some edits? In particular, I would like to include some links to my main information source for the petroleum industry stuff, which are the accident investigation reports of the CSB (csb.gov). There have been hundreds of reports on various aspects of oil refineries over the years since CSB was created under Clinton, but there was one extremely interesting recent report that triggered me to write this that I really want to link to. I’ll post a new version here in a few hours.
OK, here’s a test with one paragraph
At this point I hope we have all imagined the possibility of a future with economic prosperity and without fossil carbon-based motor fuels. You can use electricity and renewable sources for most things. OK, but what about everything else? Motor fuels and fossil carbon electricity generation aren’t the whole story by a long shot. There’s steel and aliminum, oh and also cement. And then there’s organic chemistry more generally – can’t you do that without burning the oil? Well, no, not today you can’t. This is what I want to take the knife to. We have the tools, but I don’t hear many people talking about how to really use them to full effect.
And one link
BP-Husky Toledo Refinery 2002
Those reports aren’t really written to get the numbers out of them, and that took some work, I’m glad I went back, because my memory had made some embarrasing erriors, in particular Fahrenheit for Celsius. The industry really seems at pains to not disclose the exact pressure of the hydrotreater reactor, and so far there haven’t been any accidents specifically touching that vessel.
That worked!