Novel Process Concepts
My chemical engineering education and passion for sustainability stand behind my fascination with novel clean process design. Over the years, I’ve dreamt up many new concepts. Most of them proved useless upon more critical evaluation, but a few good ones started emerging in recent years. This section presents the best of the bunch.
Advanced blue hydrogen and ammonia
The world will need lots of clean fuels over coming decades. Hydrogen is a good candidate that can be exploited without any CO2 emissions, but it is quite challenging to store and distribute. Ammonia is a promising solution for making hydrogen easier to handle.
Converting fossil fuels and biomass to hydrogen is much more efficient than converting them to electricity. When the CO2 formed during this conversion process is captured and stored, the resulting product is called blue hydrogen – a clean fuel for the future.
Blue hydrogen can already be produced at a reasonable cost, but there is plenty of potential for increasing efficiency and reducing cost. When it comes to natural gas, the two most promising concepts are gas switching reforming and membrane-assisted autothermal reforming. The latter configuration also shows great promise for ammonia production, achieving CO2 capture at a cost below today’s carbon-intensive benchmark.
Solid fuels (coal, biomass, waste) may also play a major role in future blue hydrogen markets, especially in regions where natural gas is expensive and negative emissions from biomass are highly valued. We recently proposed a highly efficient membrane-assisted concept based on coal and biomass co-gasification.
Flexible power and hydrogen production
Future energy systems with high shares of variable wind and solar power will need to be highly flexible. One of the major challenges with this situation is the large amount of expensive capital that sits idle during times of too little or too much wind or sun.
To address this challenge, we have concepts developed to operate all the time, alternating between electricity and hydrogen output depending on market demands. To date, we have published two such concepts: one working on natural gas and another on coal (with potential for biomass co-firing).
Industrial CO2 capture retrofits
Decades of resistance to change and overly ideological clean energy strategies have left us in quite a pickle. We now need to decarbonize at a speed that requires early retirement of an increasing amount of perfectly functional carbon-intensive infrastructure (along with the intricate value chains that support them) at a tremendous socio-economic cost. In addition, we face the challenge of large industrial sectors like cement production where CO2 emissions are unavoidable.
This is where CO2 capture retrofits can play a major role. These processes can be bolted onto an existing plant to capture the CO2 from its flue gas. One important complication with this approach is that most CO2 capture processes consume vast amounts of heat that can only be efficiently supplied by a separate thermal power plant.
That is where the swing adsorption reactor cluster (SARC) comes in. This concept captures CO2 from flue gases using heat and vacuum pumps driven by electricity. Thus, SARC is a convenient plug-and-play solution for capturing CO2 from any industrial flue gas, showing promising economics.
Scale-Coupled Open Innovation Network (S-COIN)
Process technology development spans four distinct scales. At the very top, we have the future energy-industrial system with lots of variable renewable energy and high emission taxes. One scale down, we need to design highly efficient new processes that fit perfectly into this increasingly complex system. Next, we get to the novel process units in each newly proposed process that require some detailed design work. And finally, there are the functional materials (e.g., catalysts, membranes, or construction materials) required to make each novel process unit work.
All scales must be carefully considered when designing a novel clean process. However, the current approach is highly fragmented with far too much work happening in isolation. The S-COIN is my attempt to create an attractive system where different groups can work together seamlessly to bridge these scales and design better processes.
We only got started recently with the connection between process design and system-scale modelling. Step one was the creation of a standardized economic assessment framework to help different groups complete techno-economic assessment studies that can be directly compared to each other. The results can then be stored in a central data file for inclusion in system-scale modelling to see which technologies get deployed in an optimized future energy system.
The S-COIN database is also ideal for open sharing of data. We have included convenient links to the full data in our two latest scientific article submissions (1, 2).
Energy and Economic Policy
Today, over 80% of our energy comes from unabated fossil fuels. This needs to change. However, given that energy is the very foundation of modern society, we must be extra careful in this transition.
Most critically, we need to take into account that almost 5 billion global citizens still live on less than $10 per day (please take a few seconds to think about this). It will be truly tragic if ambitious decarbonization plans dreamt up by rich folks hamper the upliftment of the billions of people who lost out at the lottery of birth (see this article for some valuable perspective on the matter).
Sadly, this is where we’re heading with all the ideologically driven 100% renewable energy plans put forth by rich world thinkers. The pragmatic ideas shared below aim to facilitate decarbonization without the tremendous social costs of delayed economic upliftment.
Technology Neutrality
Most clean energy deployment today is driven by technology-forcing policies such as subsidies, tax breaks, mandates/bans, price guarantees, and low-cost financing. Technology forcing means that politicians decide which technologies should be deployed and manipulate the market to make each chosen technology profitable.
I’m strongly against technology forcing because it provides highly inefficient emissions cuts and stalls the development of alternative solutions. For example, here are some popular science articles uncovering the cost of Norway’s electric car revolution and Germany’s Energiewende.
Instead, I support technology-neutral policies such as a carbon tax that incentivise any technology or behaviour change that reduces CO2 emissions. Such policies call on the full power of the free market to address climate change.
The big argument for technology forcing of wind, solar, and electric cars is that their price reductions will soon make them cheaper than fossil fuels. But this is simply untrue. Yes, they are already cheaper than fossil fuels in some niches, but there are other niches where they are 10x less competitive and other decarbonization pathways offer much better solutions. Here is a full explanation of the ten main challenges that will continue to mount as wind and solar expands.
Make no mistake, we need lots of wind, solar, and electric cars. But we need them in the market segments where they make sense. There are many other options in the niches where they don’t. Technology neutrality will ensure that every technology gets to do what it does best. It will also ensure that lifestyle design plays its part. Which brings us to…
Life Efficiency
The common decarbonization narrative has only two levers for reducing emissions: clean energy and energy efficiency. But there is a third, even more powerful lever our consumerist culture has conditioned us to ignore: life efficiency.
Life efficiency is the amount of happiness and longevity we can derive from a given amount of economic output (measured in happy life years per unit GDP). Here is a full description, complete with equations showing where life efficiency fits into the decarbonization picture.
Today, life efficiency in the rich world is embarrassingly low. We consume so many things that do nothing for our health and happiness. Even worse, a substantial slice of our consumption is self-destructive in nature, reducing our happy life years and enforcing even more consumption to try and repair the damage. As illustrated in the previously linked article, we can increase life efficiency by a factor of five with tremendous positive effects for ourselves and the planet.
I spend plenty of time developing this big idea, as documented on my blog about building a happy, healthy, wealthy, productive, and sustainable life.
Oil & Gas Export Decarbonization
Oil and gas have made several nations very rich. Over here in Norway, saving and investing only a third of our oil & gas profits has grown an investment fund that returns 20% of GDP in an average year. As a fraction of GDP, that’s more than the entire tax revenue of the United States!
The most tangible way in which Norway is giving back to the climate is by giving huge tax breaks to battery-electric cars, helping them reach more than half of new car sales. Sadly, the 10% of Norwegian cars that are currently electric avoid a mere 0.1% of the CO2 released from the use of Norway’s ongoing oil & gas exports. And this highly inefficient decarbonization costs more than 2000 $/ton.
There is a much better way for oil & gas exporters like Norway to contribute to climate protection: blue hydrogen and industrial base products like steel. These oil nations have all the expertise to make CO2 capture and storage (essentially reverse oil & gas production) work. Hydrocarbons can be converted to hydrogen and other clean industrial products for export, helping importers decarbonize much faster.
Local production and export of energy-intensive industrial base products like steel, cement, and chemicals is particularly interesting from a climate perspective. Alongside long-distance transport (where hydrogen can play a big role), these industries are commonly viewed as the most difficult sector to decarbonize.
Our recently submitted paper shows that Norway can play a major role in decarbonizing these challenging sectors, and do so at a tidy profit. If this philosophy is embraced in Norway, much larger oil exporters will soon catch on, decarbonizing the most difficult sectors much more rapidly than expected.
An Environment for Efficient Living
As mentioned in the previous section, life efficiency (getting more happiness and longevity from less consumption) has a leading role to play in building a fair and sustainable global society. Sadly, today’s society is fundamentally designed for woefully low life efficiency, exposing us to 5000 daily ads for things we don’t need and surrounding us with all manner unhealthy temptations.
Understanding this toxic environment makes it easy to see why there is so much obesity, depression, and degenerative disease in the rich world, despite our massive ecological footprints. It also explains why it’s so difficult to get people to implement lasting positive lifestyle changes.
The unfortunate fact is that progress will remain frustratingly slow until this toxic environment is revamped. Here are my ideas for getting this done.
Shared Universal Mind
Digitalization, big data, and machine learning are big topics. And the biggest way to combine these big topics is to create a shared universal mind (SUM) where everyone has full access to the combined experience of humanity when making important life decisions.
In its final form, the SUM will collect data from everyone and find the links between lifestyle choices and outcomes for different demographic profiles. With increasing digitalization (e.g., smartwatches and various apps), this data can be collected automatically. Also, the link between the data and each individual person will be broken instantly upon collection so that no datapoint can be traced back to a given individual.
Using this vast database, the SUM’s machine learning engine will be able to give definitive recommendations about which lifestyle choices create the best life for any given demographic. Thus, anyone would be able to conveniently access the total experience of humanity to make big choices.
The SUM will have profound effects. Everyone will gain the power to build their best life without having to wade through the intimidating, confusing, and conflicting information overload online. The resulting positive changes in consumer demand patterns will soon create a much healthier environment, making efficient living even easier. This will finally unlock the true potential of life efficiency for building a better world.
Lifecoin
The SUM is more of a long-term solution for ushering in the golden age of humanity. In the medium-term, we need other incentives for high life efficiency. The simplest incentive is to tax all products according to their true societal cost. For example, I recently calculated that many junk foods should be triple their current price when tallying up their vast costs to society.
Sadly, these products have been so carefully engineered for maximum addiction that there will be massive resistance to any plans to make them more expensive. Thus, we can approach the problem from the opposite angle: rewarding high life efficiency instead of punishing low life efficiency.
The best way to do this is via a specialized digital currency (I’d call it Lifecoin) that can be earned via socially responsible behaviour like buying healthy food, exercising, meditating, downsizing, volunteering, etc. These actions can be tracked automatically via various authorized apps, specifically tailored to dissuade cheating. I’m slowly working towards this goal in collaboration with a startup called MyResonance.
Governments or other institutions like insurance companies can then use a predetermined slice of their budget to buy Lifecoins from users. The more money they spend on Lifecoins, the more the population will be incentivized to live healthy and productive lives. Benefits in terms of lower social welfare and healthcare payments and increased tax revenue from elevated productivity will greatly exceed the sum they spend on Lifecoins.
Fixing the Internet
The internet is a wonderful arena housing a wealth of valuable information. But the big problem is that this valuable information is drowned in so much BS that it can be very hard to find.
Why does all this digital BS exist? Because it’s carefully engineered for addiction and convenience. In essence, it’s the digital equivalent of empty calories – we know it’s bad for us but we can’t stop consuming. As a result, most things that go viral have a neutral or negative effect on the long-term health and happiness of the millions of people who see them.
Another serious problem with the internet is digital echo chambers. The internet gives you the opportunity to find support for almost any idea. People with predetermined ideas can therefore flock to echo chamber websites where they collect and share only information that supports their views (ignoring any contradictory evidence).
Fixing these grave problems should be fairly easy: a little browser extension that lets users quickly rate any website on whether it genuinely made their lives better and whether it is an echo chamber. Search engines can then rank websites not by the number of hits, but by the degree to which it enhances people’s lives and opens their minds.
This upgraded internet will make a massive contribution to building a better world.
I don’t have the capacity to pursue all the ideas outlined above. Thus, I claim no ownership and encourage any interested party to freely develop any of these concepts.
Lastly, on the off chance that you’re a wealthy philanthropist, I’d like to invite you to sponsor a PhD student to work on any of these topics. I will happily advertise the position and supervise the student for free. Also, we’ll be sure to acknowledge your contribution in all our outputs. Please contact me at mail@schalkcloete.com if this is of interest.
Last updated: 11/11/2021