Engineers at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries have created a solvent that has improved CO2 capture efficiency from 90% to nearly 100%. That changes the math for thermal fuel combustion and creates major implications for the energy transition. How and where will the solvent be used? And how soon will it really be ready to use? We have questions.
Patent infringement may sound boring in comparison, but it causes plenty of trouble for everyone involved – and it looks like GE could be in trouble. Since a jury ruled that GE infringed on one of Siemens Gamesa’s patents, Siemens is seeking permanent injunction against the use of Haliade-X turbines on offshore wind projects. What does that mean for Orsted’s Ocean Wind in New Jersey? Will the US government step in? We’ll find out. Meanwhile, off the Taiwanese coast, Orsted is seeding turbine tower foundations with baby coral. Orsted and scientists hope to create viable spawning populations by 2025.
Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
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EP128
Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. We have an excellent show ahead for you. Mitsubishi created a solvent that can remove almost a hundred percent of CO2 from large industry emissions and then GE and Siemens Ganesa have been in a court battle and it’s coming to a close and GE is in trouble.
Rosemary Barnes: And then we have a couple of projects from Orsted they’re planning to reduce emissions from their steel supply. And also they have another interesting project with Newcastle university in Australia to seed coral on Taiwanese offshore, winter buyin found.
Allen Hall: Stay tuned. We’ll be back after the music.
Mitsubishi of all companies has created a solvent that takes CO2 out of the air. And they’re calling the solvent Ks 21. It’s a trademark actually Ks 21. And it’s, it’s, it’s the summation of almost a decade’s worth of work by researchers. And I think this is actually happening up in Norway. So they’re testing this in Norway, but it improves carbon capture efficiency or carbon dioxide capture EF.
From existing about 90% to practically a hundred percent which is remarkable. So the way this system works and there’s a really cool YouTube video that explains it. They have the solvent and they have the emissions coming up. The flu is with the CO2, the solvent grabs the CO2 and it I’ll use a chemical term precipitates.
So it all falls to the bottom. And then they pull that solvent plus CO2. Out break the solvent and the CO2 apart using heat, it looks like, and then they, then, then they just capture the CO2 and store it and then eventually turn it into rock, bury it. So in a sense, they’ve created a system in which doesn’t require added solvent.
Once you have the solvent in place is totally recyclable and they can pull nearly 100% of CO2 from industrial sources. So, if you think about it a steel plant or places where you really have to use a lot of CO2 to make, to make things like steel, you could essentially bring the CO2 emissions almost down to zero.
That’s crazy. And they’re saying that the, the it’s holding the, looking at a couple places. Heavy transportation, steel and concrete as being the, the big drivers here. So if the system works, you could actually put it on trains or you could put it on in theory, like aircraft. That’s crazy. Right. Is, is this something you ever heard of before?
Because it’s, it’s completely new to me.
Rosemary Barnes: I have a lot of questions more than answers. So I think the first thing to note is that you can already remove like essentially a hundred percent of carbon dioxide, if you want to, if you’re prepared to spend enough money and, and energy to do so. And in a lot of processing like air processing industries or.
Yeah, like natural gas when they’re turning that into L and G, they need to remove all the CO2, right. Because otherwise it will, it will freeze out before the gas liquefies and ruin their equipment. So they have a really strong financial incentive to remove it all. And, and they do, they manage to remove it all in that case.
The only. Place where we don’t manage to achieve, you know, the reductions that we would probably like to see is where you’re removing CO2 for the purpose of keeping it out of the atmosphere, because there is no financial incentive to do that, that, you know, we don’t, you don’t pay anything to put. CO2 in the atmosphere.
So why would they spend the money to do it? And when you do, you know, it’s like a lot of engineering processes getting to 90% you can do, you know, maybe quite cost effectively getting to 99% costs a whole lot more than that. And then getting to 99.9%. You know, like the more, more nines that you get the exponentially more expensive that.
That the, that it gets. And that’s generally due to just the amount of residents time that you need for these reactions to take place. You know, it’s like I’m no, I’m no Cameron, since it’s been a little while, since I did my video on, on this technology, but basically, you know, there’s a reaction.
Happening and at the start of the reaction, right? There’s a whole lot of molecules there ready to grab CO2 out of the solution. And then you know, as time goes by, there’s less CO2 in the solution. And so it takes longer for a co CO2 molecule to you know, Hit the thing it’s trying to react with and precipitate out.
So. Sure. Yeah, in the end, you, you need really long times or, and, or big vessels to get to the really high levels of removal. Yeah. So if they have some way that they can get all the way to very close to a hundred percent without needing a massive vessel, then that would be definitely. And a significant advance cuz currently like if you look at a, you know, Coal power plant or, or any kind of power plant.
That’s got CO2 removal on it. The CO2 removal, right? Pro equipment is some of the biggest kit on site, right? It’s just, it’s humongous. There’s these big vessels that they need to, to run the, the process and it uses a lot of energy. You, you know, maybe 30% of the energy that is that power plant is generating will need to go back and yeah, power, the CO2 removal.
Yeah, I haven’t seen the it’s interesting, you know, like what you call efficiency. It’s, it’s removing with a hundred percent efficiency, which they are intending, right. Means they’re capturing all the CO2. That’s not. Brand new or impossible. What’s the energy efficiency though. You know, if you put it on a, a power plant, how much of the, that power plant’s output needs to actually be diverted to power, the CO2 removal.
And then if they’re really gonna put it on transport, which is definitely something I have never, never heard anybody with a, a process that they remotely thought could be fitted. On transport. I mean, the, the question then is not just how much energy it’s gonna use, but how big is it gonna be? And are they still getting that 99 point whatever percent removal at the scale that they can plausibly put on a, a truck or a.
A train or, I mean, it’s not going on airplanes. Surely ships. Yeah. Ships ships would probably be maybe the easiest place to put it because you, yeah. Mass doesn’t matter space doesn’t matter nearly so much. There doesn’t matter so
Allen Hall: much. Right? Well, yeah, because the, the marketing people from Mitsubishi put out a statement, it it’s, and this is a quote from one of the marketing people said, I think most people still don’t truly understand how important this breakthrough is for the future of CO2 capture and the decarbonization effort.
I think that’s a very true statement. If it does what it, we think it does. And it, like you said, if it doesn’t use a lot of energy to repeat the cycle. Mm. That would be gigantic. You think you’re right. It’s, it’s a question of how much
Rosemary Barnes: energy I suspect. It’s not the hugest breakthrough. Otherwise I feel that I would’ve heard of it already.
it? Cause that’s the real problem that I have with, with talking about carbon carbon capture is that it’s always, you know, like the company that has the, the innovation, the technology or the product, they wanna make it sound sensational because they want attention. Because they wanna raise, raise funds.
But when you make it sound sensational, it’s always done in a way that makes it sound like this is you know, instead of decarbonization kind of thing, you know de carbon capture, it has that risk that it makes it sound like why would you bother doing anything else? Energy transition when we’ve got carbon capture now.
So all you need to do is just. As you were just continue business as usual. And we’ll just, we’ll just suck it all out of the atmosphere or, you know, the, in the case of direct air capture or in case of this one. Yeah. We’ll all like, don’t worry about electric vehicles. Don’t worry about renewable energy because there’s a new technology coming that you know, is just going to make that problem go away.
And the the carbon capture technologies that we have for now are definitely not close to that, that level, especially because of the energy use, you know, it’s you make the problem worse. more of these things that you install, the, you increasing your, you know, your energy needs by 30%, which means submissions by 30%.
And so, you know, it’s kind of like diminishing returns Yeah. And the other thing is that you often see, like in reporting on all, all technology, but especially clean energy technologies, they never really give you a sense of how much development time is left. And, you know, in the case of carbon capture, I’m really glad people are researching this because, you know, come 20, 50 ish.
We’re, we’re gonna need that for all this stuff that you just can’t decarbonize, which will that’s right. I, I, I don’t think that will include steel. We can talk about that more later, but that’s gonna include, you know, some aspects of, of agriculture and some natural processes. You know, if we’ve already started off permafrost defrosting, then that’s gonna be, you know, some big big emissions coming from that, and we’re gonna need carbon capture for, for those sorts of things.
So I, I’m a hundred percent on board with research and development. Carbon capture, but what gets tricky is in the reporting of it. I think it’s so important to you know, make it really clear. What are the, the energy costs of this? You, you know, if energy costs are high, it’s never gonna be instead of decarbonization, it’s, it’s gonna be for, you know, specific use cases.
And I note that these the spokespeople from this company are, are saying that, so, you know, it’s they’re not saying this is, you know, gonna, gonna eliminate the need to decarbonize. They’re saying this is gonna be for the hard to decarbonize industry, which implies it’s gonna be expensive and energy intensive, or at least one of those two.
Yeah. And the other thing is you, you just gotta be really honest about how much time is is left before you can plausibly commercialize this. And that’s, that’s something I’ve been talking about a bit recently on my channel. You know, it takes very often. 20 years after the really exci exciting science has happened, which is probably where they are here.
Exciting science. Cool. It’s probably 20 years of engineering before they have a chance at rolling this out on an industrially meaningful scale. And I think if you’re not honest about that, it can make people give people the impression that This is, you know, some sort of silver bullet solution and really get in the way of all the other stuff that we we need to do in the meantime, the technologies that exist now.
Yeah. Well, I
Allen Hall: think there’s two good things going in, in this news piece, which is one it’s Mitsubishi. So Mitsubishi doesn’t tend to exaggerate too much. They. Pretty much were straight shooters from all my experience with Mitsubishi. And the second is they have been working on this for 10 years. So I, I like you think it has to be developed for probably a good five or 10 years.
And having done that myself, a couple of times, you, you see, it’s like, oh yeah, it’s a 10 year development cycle just to get it to the point where they can marketize it. So they’re there and it’s, so it’s not. it’s just there. Maybe it’s reached the maturity point where they can start talking about it and they have been doing this demonstration site up in Norway.
Those are all good indicators that maybe this technology is worth looking at and companies or people like Elon Musk and some of the Google families that are, that are throwing money at carbon capture may want to take a look at something like this, because this may be. Your biggest bang for your buck.
If it doesn’t use too much energy in Rosemary you’re right. I think that the missing piece in this news release is how much energy does it take to make this chemical cycle go more to come
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Allen Hall: All right. Rosemary, your old employer is going through a huge battle with Siemens Kamasa yes, too. Right. And well, it is mine too, actually, but I, I didn’t work in the renewable energy part of it. I worked in the, the spacecraft part of it from years ago, but GE and Siemens Kamasa have been locked in a patent battle.
So GE was suing Siemens Kamasa for a particular patent infringement. Siemens Kamasa came back and said, well, you’re infringing on our patent. and it turns out that Siemens GAA got a court to agree. So now GE is kind of in a bind. So the back in June court in Boston agreed with Siemens GA Mesa, that GE has infringed upon one of Siemens’s patents and having to do with sort of bearings and structure supports around bearings and their direct drive platforms.
When you go, whoa, direct drive that. That’s hall aid, right? That’s that’s what it is. So the, the court is now progressing into this penalty phase, which is the worst and probably the scariest part of any patent litigation is what is some judge or jury going to lay out for the amount of penalty you gonna pay for this?
What Siemens is pushing is $30,000. Per megawatt. So most of the ADEs offshore ADEs are like 12 megawatts. So you’re talking about $360,000 per turbine sort of penalty. That’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of money per patent infringement. Now that’s where it starts to get really. So if you can think, well, the hall eight is gonna be used on vineyard wind, the next real big wind project offshore in the United States.
And there’s a couple of others. There’s one ocean wind down in New Jersey or two relatively new projects. What’s GE gonna do is Siemens gonna let ’em put vineyard wind in. Now, what it seems like at the moment is Siemens is saying, Hey, there’s 62 wind turbines. That is gonna go in vineyard. We’re gonna let you do those.
We’re not gonna. Penalize you like those 62 you can do, but not a turban more. It’s not 63. It’s not 64. It’s 62. So you can make that many after that. You have to stop now as you can. Well, imagine you’re playing in big time politics in the United States and in terms of offshore wind, there’s a lot of state involvement.
So the state of New Jersey gets in front of the court recently and says, Hey.
You can’t shut us down. We’re trying to create offshore wind on the state of New Jersey. We have this big project going on. If Siemens shuts down GE we’re stuck and we’ve got millions and millions of dollars to, I think the, the vineyard has already paid GE like $150 million. So there’s, there’s a huge pile of money here.
I don’t see how this ends happily and Rosemary. Does does this even make sense for, for Siemens to push this hard on GE? Does this say GEs, guilty, whatever that is, whatever, whatever you feel like, but 30,000, basically $350,000 to $400,000 a wind turbine as a penalty. Does that seem commensurate with the infringement?
Rosemary Barnes: You, it seems like a lot. . I mean, you can buy a big, big chunk of a wind Turine for that amount of money. I mean, obviously there’s a huge offshore wind turbine, so, you know, like even each, each blade would cost more than that. I’m assuming. But it’s, it’s not small. Haven’t you, you love trolling through patent databases.
Haven’t you looked up the, the patents and yes. And how a look just brief. It just sounds so. Yeah, it just, it really doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that I would imagine there being a you know, an exciting PE on an offshore direct drive turbine, structural support mechanism and the physical and structural AR arrangement of the main shaft.
Barings. I mean, that’s so boring. it’s yeah, it’s incredible. , it’s incredible to me that that has such a valuable patent associated with it, a design detail like that. And of course it’s a, it’s a, a huge, huge stuff up on the part of GE. And I, I know that they have a very proactive legal team. When you, you know, you are working on a new design, then you will, as of, you know, project managing new technology product developments and you will sit through hours and hours and hours of, of meetings with yeah, the, the GA Payton attorneys to troll through any possible remotely similar patent that could, could cause problems.
So I don’t know if they missed this one or if you know, it’s really, I, I can’t understand the language I could never do. It’s interpret. I could never do that on my, on my own. You need the lawyers, you need the engineers there to understand what on earth the patent means, and if it’s similar to yours, but you need the legal team there to, you know, interpret the language.
And there’s always, you know, you’re reading the, the patents and it’s, you know, this is the, the primary claim and, you know, they say all this stuff in there. Is that actually an intrinsic part of the patent? Or is it just peripheral? Is their prior art. Yeah. Blah, blah, blah. It’s so incredibly boring.
for an, for an engineer. I’m sure. Peyton attorneys love it. Otherwise they do something else for a living, but yeah, it’s it’s incredible that it’s gotten this far. I’ve never had anything I was working. I never, never had a, a problem. So I don’t know what a normal amount to award is. But your question about is Siemens, right?
To push it. I mean, I would push it if I , I was Siemens that’s, that’s what these companies have. Yeah. They have their intellectual property. They, you, you know, if you don’t enforce it, why is anybody innovating? You kind of need it to be enforced, to keep the whole system working. It’s tricky.
Allen Hall: Isn’t there an offramp to this in the sense of, I think Siemens can get their pound to flesh.
I’m totally fine with that. You can’t doing this forever because at some point GE is a, is going to have to either redesign it or pay some something to Siemens. That’s a reasonable amount. Those are your two options.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So I think that GE has some redesigns, Siemens should be able to get together and work out an arrangement because if GE has no choice, but to redesign, then Siemens doesn’t get any money.
Anyway, they get some extra sales while GE isn’t able to sell anything. That’s about it. So I guess that, that is why they have made this initial concession on the first 62 turbines. But I think that yeah, GA and Siemens need to get together and say, you know, there would be an amount of money that GA would be prepared to pay rather than redesign.
And Siemens would, you know, probably wanna find the what’s the maximum amount that that is and, and hit it. You know, they need to get around a negotiation table and see if they can, they can find a, find a deal.
Allen Hall: It seemed like Siemens’ initial, initial starting point was GE has to cease and desist mm-hmm and I get that as a bargaining point that you have to start there because, you know, you’re not likely to end up there, but it, it seems like there’s a big disparity right now.
And when the us sees it as a, as a national interest, and I think at this point, it GE can make an argument that it’s of the national interest and of state’s interest. to petition the court to either lower this thing or, or to make it go away. Now, now you’re in now, Siemens may have all of a sudden, a weaker case, right?
If the president of United States says, Hey, this is going away. I think, I think they can do that. I think they can make it make life miserable for Siemens, if they wanted to in a myriad of ways. That’s so uner,
Rosemary Barnes: I, I don’t know if you want to do that. That will never happen. I mean, it’s a, you know, no one pursues intellectual property rights more than, than the us.
Right? What’s the that’s
Allen Hall: that’s true, but it’s yeah, it’s not a us company. See that this that’s the that’s the piece.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but then that’s like, you know, do you want foreign investment in your, your country? Or do you wanna, you know, become this isolated country that only uses us technology? I think that you’ll suffer, suffer more for that that perspective than I, I I’m not already, you know what you’ve got now.
Yeah.
Allen Hall: Yeah. I, I, I, as a, as a patent holder, you’re a patent holder too. Right? Rosemary, you have patent. Or patent.
Rosemary Barnes: I’ve got my I’m an inventor. I have my name. I was the inventor of, of patents. I don’t own them. But yeah. Yep. Yep. I’m okay. Well, there you go. Typically, an inventor like you .
Allen Hall: So you’re part of the you’re part of the large I’m part of the club family.
Right? So we always feel you’re part of the club. You’re part of the in crowd. Yeah. So you feel pres really protective of your intellectual property and that’s and intellectual property and patents are part of the us constitution. So it’s a big deal in America. I totally agree with you. I’m on your side with this intellectual property rights are ultimately the thing that shouldn’t be touched by government, but the reality is is that if push comes a shove and it gets to be a big deal, I could.
Where either, I guess there a couple ways they could do it. The federal government could just write a check to GE and say, Hey, yeah, isn’t that better way?
Rosemary Barnes: Isn’t that better? That they just, you know, they, they just chip in some money. Okay. We’ve had a cost blowout on this particular project we’ll chip in we’ll chip in some money to, you know, to cover that now move forward.
But yeah, I, I think intellectual property is really interesting problem because it, it, it. Both accelerates innovation and hampers it at the same time, you know? Yes. So any time you look at an individual case of patent infringement, you’re almost always feel sorry for the person that infringed, if it was, you know, accidental, which yeah, right in, in, you know Countries that are developing the products that we, we deal with.
That’s usually the case. They’re not doing it on purpose. But true. Yeah. On the other hand. So it sounds like, okay, everything should just be open and then we’d be able to move faster if we shared all the knowledge. And that sounds like a really nice idea, but then you think, well, why, why would the first person invest millions of dollars into the development of something?
And. Once they’ve made all the expensive mistakes and let figured out how to do it. Somebody else just comes along. Doesn’t have to spend that money that puts you at a disadvantage for having been the one to innovate. So you can’t have that either. I think that one interesting model is You know, Google’s well, alphabet, I guess it’s the way around alphabet owns Google, but you know, they, they invest in a lot of new technologies and they had one Mac Carney airborne wind, for example, that I’ve looked into a lot and they.
They stopped developing that because basically the economics weren’t gonna work out for them. But when they, when they give up on a technology, they release all the IP to the public domain. So, you know, if you wanna develop an airborne winds, Them, you can go and have a look at all. They’ve got all this data from you know, like test flights and, and everything.
And you can, you can see what they’ve done and they’ve promised that they, they’re not going to you know, launch legal action if you use one of their patents and, and stuff like that. So that, that’s kind of one that’s one model that you can kind of maybe get a bit of the best of both worlds,
Allen Hall: right?
Oh yeah, absolutely. So I think, I think your point. How many patents or patents there are on a wind turbine. And then making sure you don’t stumble into one is true. If you look at the number of, and we talked about it, I think it was last well in the previous episode we talked about and how many patents there are, there’s a lot of patents related to wind
So if you have to sift, sift through all of those and make sure you have an infringe, that’s a, that’s all, that’s a full time job for a number of people just to, to do that and to, to stumble across one Accidentally I think is totally likely, but I think the, the thing, the thing you’re seeing in editorials right at the moment is that what GE brought upon brought it upon itself, cuz GE was very aggressive going after other companies that have infringed on their patents and getting the royalty payment.
So it became a sort of a little bit of a cash cow for them. And I think the feeling is, is that a little turnabout is fair. So Siemens is gonna get their yeah, it’s gonna have their whack at GE here. And the industry is like, well, GE kind of deserved it. That’s I, I disagree with that, but I think that’s where some of the industry is going well, GEs just gonna have to pay for it.
And yeah, I get it. Sure. But it is very complicated. It’s not as cut and dry as some of the news reports put it out to be is as you and I. Making sure you don’t stumble across somebody’s patent. That’s like you’re saying something that’s a mechanical support in deep inside a wind turbine generator. The chance is that somebody saw and said, Hey, I’m gonna steal this and put in my GE turbine.
That chance is essentially zero. There’s no way GE would allow that to go on internally. So
Rosemary Barnes: yeah, it’s just cause if it was intentional, I mean, that could have. More easily just designed it in a different way. I’m sure that there was another solution available to them. Sure. That was practically as easy.
Yes. That they would’ve, they would’ve gone down that path, but now, you know, obviously everything’s designed manufactured, certified, tested, validated. It’s not very easy to change, change something at this this point. Yeah. But I don’t, I never like, it’s a, it’s a. Yeah. I never like to see that, you know, a solution moving forward is that companies are a bit nicer to each other or nicer to the environment or nicer to, you know, whatever.
I, I, I don’t trust that companies are just gonna be nice. And I would rather, you know, trust that gov governments and you know, international organizations put rules in place that everyone knows the rules and plays by the rules. You get the rules, right? You don’t need companies to be nice because when you can ever.
Rely on that, you know? So I don’t think that GA is, is maybe wrong for having pursued their, their patents. I mean, you spend so much time and money developing them of of course, of course you need to pursue those. And I don’t think that Siemens is wrong for having. You know turn the tables and I’m sure they feel some sort of Chardon for it about it.
And that’s fair enough. I would too. But yeah, I think, you know, it’s, it’s it’s business. It’s not, it’s not a couple of kids in the playground. It needs to be sorted out in a way other than, or just, you know, play nicely.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. And, and we’re, we’re seeing the result of that. So I think over the next 30 to 60 days, you’re gonna see some sort of direction GE may just say, forget it.
We’re just gonna redesign it. And I think I’ll ask you this. If it’s a, I’m guessing it’s probably like a $10 million redesign in terms of like the engineering time to, to make the, make the change and get all implemented. But then it’s this, the re-certification part of. Yeah, I think a, a 10 million design change turns into a hundred million really fast.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It depends how, I mean, you don’t need to re-certify for every design change. But true. If, if you, if you do then that’s that’s expensive and time consuming, probably people aren’t gonna be wanting to buy these right. In the meantime. Yeah.
Allen Hall: Bingo. Right. I, I think SEMA knows that, right. I think it’s buried so deep inside that if you change.
You really could affect performance in lifetime. That’s my guess at this, having seen a little bit of it is that’s where that Siemens knows they have. ’em in a sense that they know it’s gonna be really expensive to change so they can ask for the sky. Yeah. They can ask for the sky. Cause they know if they had to do the same change at, on Siemens, they how much it would cost.
So they, they have a pretty good idea how much pain it’s gonna be. And they’re willing to take it up to that line. Fascinat.
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Okay. So the next topic is on Estol or Ted company. I never know. I never understand why they, they chose to change their name from Don, which was a, yeah, a bad, bad name in English to something that’s totally unpronounceable in English, but they have plans to reduce their emissions from steel.
There’s a lot of steel in, in wind turbine towers, obviously foundations for offshore. So they wanna decrease their. Upstream emissions linked to manufacturing steel and their plan for that is basically to, instead of using cooking coal as a reducing agent to get rid of the oxygen from the iron, or they’re going to replace it with either natural gas or biomass.
And they say that they’re gonna be able to reduce emissions by about 20% by that method. So that’s that’s good. That’s in line with, you know, basically anybody that has any kind of emissions reduction target, or any net zero date in mind is looking to reduce upstream emissions and the changes that they’re planning to make.
I actually, haven’t heard of too many projects where they’re using natural gas instead of coconut coal. But yeah, either natural gas or biomass, it’s really similar to the way that we currently make steel. And this is something that I’ve made a couple of videos now on the YouTube channel about reducing emissions from steel.
And yeah, this is the, the easiest way. It’s very similar to the current method using you just replace the, the carbon that is in cooking coal with carbon, from natural gas or from bios. And it happens basically the same and you don’t need to change too much equipment, but you’re still obviously the reaction when you reduce, when you react carbon with the iron R, which is F E oh two.
So. You need to get that, oh, two out of the Inor, you react it with carbon, then you get CO2 and that goes off into the atmosphere unless you capture it. So you’ve still got carbon emissions, but a bit less, if you use gas, I don’t even know how much less, minimal, less. I would’ve thought if you use natural gas.
And then I think so with biomass, same amount of emissions, but they were presumably recently captured outta the atmosphere. So you end up with something approximating. zero there, although it never is zero because you know, things, things are complicated, but yeah, very, very simple, simple swap out.
Basically doesn’t involve a lot of equipment changes, but you are really limited in the amount of reductions. You, you can’t get to zero zero emissions this way, then you need to move to other technologies.
Allen Hall: Why is or stood jumping in the middle of this? They’re not the really large user of steel, not ship building has gotta be.
Buildings have gotta be a lot more in terms of steel. And none of that, we haven’t heard anything really from the wind turbine, OEMs, not that they’re involved in tower manufacture all the time, cuz sometimes they are. Sometimes they’re not, I, it seems like it’s not a project war yet to get involved in. It seems like there’s other industries that should be doing this already.
And maybe Ora, just gonna decide to, to, to buy from somebody that’s using well call greener technology. Using creating less CO2 or maybe switching to electricity to heat. The furnaces is, is that where, where the emphasis is, is just gonna make a decision that we’re just not gonna get involved with companies that make steel the old fashioned way?
Like I can imagine. Yeah. I, I think it’s a lot of countries still do.
Rosemary Barnes: I think it’s that I don’t think are still planning to get into steel manufacturing, become a steel manufacturer. That would be absolutely insane and doomed to failure. I mean, it says that they’re, they can encourage and accelerate the the use of electric arc furnaces.
For example, steel producers can switch their electricity to renewable sources. I mean, it’s all like, I, I assume they have a, they have a net zero date in mind. I think something like 50% of their upstream emissions, their supplier emissions come from the manufacturer of steel. So there isn’t a lot of zero emission steel on the market today.
There is some Sweden has a, has some, I believe is being produced mostly with with hydrogen using hydrogen which does a similar thing. Wow. Okay. You still gotta react out that, that oh two, but if you’ve put hydrogen in, then you can react and make H two O water. So that’s a way that, you know, if your hydrogen production doesn’t have a lot of emissions associated with it.
Then you can end up with a low emission steel. Yeah. Is this
Allen Hall: a way for wared to sell their product back into the steel companies? Cause it sounds like Ted’s talking about making green hydrogen, right. Is this a way to sell a product? Say we’re not gonna buy any steel unless it’s bay with our clean green hydrogen, it sounds like a very circular argument, but maybe it’s profit.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, yeah. Maybe vertical integration. But they haven’t mentioned hydrogen in this this little announcement. Yeah, but I suspect this is all about, you know, they want, they want zero emission still. There’s not enough available yet. And so then they have to go to their suppliers and encourage them in that direction.
I mean the best encouragement is probably in the form of a, you know, higher price that they’re willing to pay for, for this product. I think eventually we won’t need that for green steel. Eventually it will compete on its own, but probably. Not for another 15 years or so. It would be my total guess.
But you mentioned, or you haven’t heard okay. Wind turbine OEMs with the same types of projects. Yeah, but it will surprise me if they aren’t doing something similar and I don’t know why they haven’t, you know, made a big deal about it. Because they, they do have. Net zero targets, right? The wind turbine OEM, at least some of them do and OG renewables does or whatever, whatever it’s gonna be called moving forward.
I assume that they’ll take that commitment with them. And for no, yeah, steel currently has a lot of, a lot of emissions associated with that. I think it’s like 1.9 tons of CO2. Ton of steel if you make it in a traditional way with which everyone does currently. So we’ll see more of that. Sure. Yeah.
There seems to be exciting technology with steel though. So they, you know, these technologies they’ve mentioned here with the gas or biomass or hydrogen. It’s really similar to the way we do it currently. And those are, you know, technologies that are pretty, pretty ready to roll out rapidly. Those are the kinds of technologies, steel companies are thinking they’re gonna use to hit their 20, 30 emissions reduction targets, which are.
For most of the steel producers, they’re aiming for about 30% reduction by 2030, but then everybody’s got a, you know, right. Zero by 2050 target. And you just, you can’t get there with these technologies unless you also try and add carbon capture, which I haven’t seen any big steel producers announce that they’re seriously investing in carbon capture.
Then you have to move onto other technologies like electric arc furnace is, is good. Yeah, but you need recycled scrap steel to, to you know, feed into it. You can’t just use, make it go iron or you can’t make it yeah. Make it from right from dirt in the ground. Which is, you know which we need as long as the industry is expanding.
And then there’s a couple of different electrolysis processes at under development. And the most advanced is probably the one from Boston metal who I got to tour while I was in, in Boston, near you guys. Didn’t get to, didn’t get to catch up with you there though. But yeah, so those are more like 20, 30 and beyond processes.
And those ones, once we have, you know, a fully decarbonized electricity supply, tho those will be, you know, zero emissions processes.
Allen Hall: I think that I think we just defined a, a very Rosemary thing, the age of maturation for anything to do with renewable technology. Well, 20, 35, well, you know, it’s another 10, 12 years.
Ah, you know, at that point it’ll be ready to go.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And obviously they, this is like, they invented
Allen Hall: it last week. Right?
Rosemary Barnes: no, no. Yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s, I guess it’s, it’s always like front of mind for me that I you know, I talk about these technologies that I don’t wanna be part of the problem where I make people think that you know, I’ve been called a techno optimist before, and people don’t use that as a, that’s not a compliment when people call you a techno optimist, what they mean is you are one of those people that thinks that we don’t need to do anything because technology will save.
And I do think that technology will save us, but it doesn’t mean we don’t have to do anything. Like it takes a lot of work to get technology to the point where it will save us. And, you know, I’ve been working, working towards that goal for the last 17 odd years. So, you know, when people get upset, oh, you know, oh, we didn’t have to do anything.
The technology just happened. It’s like, oh, a lot of us were doing something. And I mean, you are, you are the same. I don’t think that you think that your technology that yeah. That yeah, weather guard did not just, no. Oh, look, here’s this fully formed technology. That’s commercially viable, you know, like it’s, it’s a lot of work.
So yeah, I do try to balance like, yes, the technology is gonna be there. But I want to, you know, put it in context. So people get the right idea. And if you think we need to reduce emissions before 2035, which. I, I think the majority of people agree that we do by now, then, you know, this is not gonna be all steel.
Isn’t gonna be decarbonized, just, you know, because technology says so by that, no, that point. So, no yeah, that’s why I always talk about the, the ages and they probably sound real flippant like off the top of my head, just guesses, but usually it’s based on it’s based on, you know, our conversations that I’ve had with the, the companies that are developing these technologies.
I know, I know where they are in the maturation cycle. You know how many prototypes they’ve gotten, how far they’ve got left to scale up. So it’s not, yeah, it’s not based on nothing, any,
Allen Hall: anything? Oh yeah. Anything non-software takes time and it takes time to get the manufacturing right? Your time to get all the bugs worked out.
It takes time to, to get it into marketplace, get to prove itself, to get some case studies. I think our technology. 16 years old. Right. So it’s able to drive right now. if it were, if it were a person, it would be driving right now. And that’s what it feels like, is like, oh, with this thing, this thing’s obvious everybody would be using it next year.
And it did feel like that for the longest time, but it just takes time. And I think we, we. I’ll put America into this. We Americans think everything is like Facebook. You know, it’s not there one day and in the next day, or there it is, and it’s got a billion users. No, it takes a long time. And you have to, to realize that great technology is in their infancy, even Tesla.
I mean, Tesla’s a good example. The same thing. It took them a long time to get their product to a point where average people could in theory, buy it and appreciate. the early vehicles were not that great. Right. And I think anything manufacturing wise is always that way. So I’m not sweating whether we’re gonna get to the steel thing.
I, I’m just glad that we’re starting. I think you are too, that it needs to start. Now, if we’re gonna make 2050, it needs to start now because you’re not gonna make it. If you, if you don’t. All right. Worst data involved in another project they are looking to seed, wind tur. Foundations towers on offshore with coral.
So coral reef Harbor, about 30, over 30% of all known Marine species are right there on the coral reefs, which was amazing. I didn’t know, as that much of the organic living creatures in the ocean are actually on coral reefs. That’s a lot. And they’re saying that the coral reefs benefit more than a billion people through their ecosystems.
I guess, fish eat the coral reef. We eat the fish, the cycle continues. And that there’s roughly $3 trillion per year in NA NA natural infrastructure, food security, tourism medicines that come from coral reef. So Ted is looking at seeding, the wind turbine foundation’s jackets with coral to see if it’ll stick.
Now, this is taking place in, in Taiwan’s waters, and they’re gonna try it on. Turbines to see how it goes. And they’re gonna monitor it for a little while, but this is I think it’s being run out of Australia, new castle university. Is that around you? Rosemary new
Rosemary Barnes: castle university. It’s about four and a half hours north of me.
Yeah, that was there. There recently. Oh, built. There’s a ton of Quill tech projects coming outta that university. . Yeah. Wow. So it’s not surprising. So the, yeah.
Allen Hall: Oh yeah. So they’re saying that the, the turbine structures have a unique environment for coral to grow because it’s close to the close to the surface where they can get sunlight, which helps obviously helps them grow and the need, it has a proper temperature.
So it’s gotta be, I guess, kind of warm and sunny for coral Reese. So this is, this is a new trial. I, I think everybody in America would say, oh, that’s, that’s crazy. You know, putting coral on a wind turbine is going to cause problems. It’s just eventually gonna cause problems. It’s gonna degrade the, the towers and it, and it’s almost like one of the concerns to hear from the fisheries is if a wind turbine were to expire, stop using it, what are you gonna do with all the jacket?
Everything is sort of below the water line. What would you. Well, if you seeded it with coral, the chances you moving, it are zero because you know, the environmental impact, that would be significant. So does that essentially make these foundations permanent and, and, and maybe it does, and maybe it’s better for the fish anyway, and maybe it creates more of an, a habitat for Marine life to, to grow any thoughts to rose.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I, I, I don’t see the huge problem with, with leaving that sort of stuff in place afterwards. You know, we’ve been putting stuff in the ocean for a long time, as you know, shipwrecks at a hundreds of years old. And, you know, there’s a great location to go scuba diving cuz you know, animals love it.
So it it’s that to me is not, not a huge risk, you know, it’s impacting the environment in some way, but Has it, so, so far the evidence doesn’t suggest that it’s, you know, causing massive problems. Yeah. I think this is an interesting project and in some ways, Obvious, but, you know, obvious once you hear that they’re, they’re doing it and it is kind of obvious that it’s coming out of Australia actually, because, you know, we’ve got the great barrier reef the longest coral reef in right in the world.
I’m, I’m pretty sure, definitely the best one. I’ll say as a non non-biased Australian, we’ve got some other power reefs as well. But it, it, it is amazing. And yeah, it’s. I, I guess you guys haven’t been to you haven’t been to Australia, right? So you wouldn’t have gone to the barrier reef, but it is amazing for the biodiversity there.
And then if you yeah, just amazing part of the world you go, if you go up around cans or, or further north then you can also get to the Dre. Rainforest is right adjacent to the, you know, on land next to the coral reef. And that has immense biodiversity. two. I read that actually one square meter of that rainforest has the same biodiversity as all of Europe.
as as many species in that one, one square meter, you know, going up the talls are, the trees are really tall. Yeah. So it’s just, just amazing place to go if you’re an nature lover, but the reef, the reef is suffering. There’s more and more. Bleaching events has always been bleaching events every now and then, but now you’re seeing them you know, sure.
Back to back and just, you know, like seems like more years than not there’s another, another mass bleaching event. The solution to that is to, you know, stop climate change immediately and you know, get rid of the one and a half or, you know, whatever degrees we’re already locked into. But. Since we can’t do that immediately.
And you no one country can control that in Australia is not pulling our way anyway, but you know, they’re, they’re looking at mitigation strategies for, for the reef. And that includes figuring out how that we can re rebuild it once to damage is in place. And so there is actually a lot of, of research projects into how to seed bits of coral reef and try and repair them.
So I guess they’re taking what they’ve learned from that. yeah. Applying it here. Yeah.
Allen Hall: Ha have you seen or listened to podcasts talking about reseeding the coral reefs and basically taking pieces of coral reef and then nurturing it and a laboratory to make it more resilient to temperature changes or to environmental mm-hmm environmental changes and then receding it that’s actually happening in like the C.
There was a really interesting podcast and I forget the name of the company, but they were doing this and, and, and trying this process to make the reefs more resilient by, I don’t, I don’t wouldn’t call it genetic modification, but that, it’s what it sounded like to me, select degrading, I guess, the.
Yeah, selective breeding. I think that’s essentially what it is. Yeah. Yeah. To, to, to then re repopulate and that it is there were some companies that were actually funding that effort. So it isn’t like this is new. It seems like there’s a lot of. Of money and time and effort being researching into this, I think it was happening at Yale university of all, places that they were trying to, to bring this technology to bear and make the, the Reese more active.
And I, maybe this is something at Ted would, could use to, instead of just basically transplanting existing coral reef and organisms, maybe they. You know, breed a superhuman version of a coral reef that could withstand some of these environmental changes are about to happen. I think it’s, it’s, I think it’s interesting that you can even conceive of that.
Right? I think there was, I would say two years ago, even sort of pre pandemic that most people would say the coral reefs have no shot that, that, that they’re just gonna be wiped out over time. And I, I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I think there’s a.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I’m really scared for our reefs and yeah, last year or something, the, our, our previous government, you know, we’ve just changed government in Australia.
So we had a conservative government. Now we’ve got a more progressive government. The previous government had announced this, you know, huge amount of money to save the reef. And then it turned out that like the bulk of that was for a kind of project, like what you’re describing, where, you know, it’s not humans that need to change our behavior.
To climate change. What’s the coral that it’s the coral that need. To change it, you know? So I was kind of I think most of us just rolled our eyes because it was like, yeah. Okay. We thought that you were, you know, doing something for the reef, but we should have known better than to think that you were actually gonna try and stop.
Well, stop damaging the reef. Yeah.
Allen Hall: Well, I, you, you hear two projections though, right? I think there’s different projections on what the ocean temperatures will be. You see this sort of rapidly increasing unstoppable ocean increase. I think you have to be able. Negotiate those waters just as well as, you know, controlling cot emissions and, and stabilizing ocean temperatures.
I’m not sure if anybody has a real lock on. But I would rather hedge my bets than not.
Rosemary Barnes: No, I, I, I agree. But it was just like a bit of a eye roll moment. I think collectively most Australias that care about the way we were like, oh, this is what you meant when you, when you committed however many million dollars to To the reef.
I mean, there have been good things done as well. Cuz climate change, isn’t the only problem that the reef has faced. There’s a lot of issues from agricultural runoff and stuff. And, and there has been a lot of, a lot of hard work and successful work done there to, you know, reduce that I haven’t seen as many, you know, like in recent years there have been trying to, you know, dredge parts of the reef to make, you know, Coal export ports.
And I haven’t heard so much about that recently. I think it’s kind of stuck in yeah, I think it’s a borderline economic and there’ve been, you know, some legal, legal action that’s been, you know, delaying it. I don’t think it. Been definitively shut down yet, but yeah, that we’re at least doing less, less often actively harming the reef now than we probably were five, 10 years ago.
Yeah, but it it’s, you gotta go there and see it. I think , I think because it is like, you know, this it’s a miraculous ecosystem. It really is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. I mean, there’s other coral reefs and good ones and they’re all, you know, different, unique in their own way. But. You know, you see like how on earth did this ecosystem manage to evolve to, to be like this it’s so, you know, balanced with all these species playing together.
I mean, you’ve seen finding Nemo, right? So you know about the the clownfish and the enemy, you know about it. Yeah. A, and then, you know, because because of climate change and other, you know, just stupid behavior from humans, it’ll just be gone, you know, that, I just find that quite devastating. It’s that sort of you know, protecting those special environments.
That’s the reason why I. I personally am involved in renewable energy, cuz it’s just not acceptable to me that this amazing thing exists and we’re just trashing it. So yeah. I, I, I wanna I wanna see, well, that’s every that’s to protect these raves. Yeah.
Allen Hall: Well that’s why you named your company part of lot, right?
Yeah. It’s named after the Australian national bird.
Rosemary Barnes: So, so that’s not our national bird. I didn’t know what our national bird is. Actually. You, I guess it’s not Incredibles, not part. No pads. no one even knows what a pad pads, just as tiny, tiny bird, it’s like weighs six grams and they’re, they’re common.
They’re not in danger. They’re they’re doing okay. But they, you know, they hide up, fairly high in the, in the trees. So. Once, you know what you’re looking and listening for. They’re quite easy to spot when you get out in a habit, bit of Bush, but yeah, no, not our national bird. But if I ever become prime minister, then I’ll, I’ll lobby for change.
I don’t think it would be popular cause no one, no one knows this bird.
Allen Hall: Most me, I, I don’t see you being a really good politician. I think that’s one thing that you,
Rosemary Barnes: you just, but my T my immense T.
Allen Hall: You’re a great engineer. That usually means not so good at politics.
Rosemary Barnes: yeah, no, I, I I’m sure that I would hate it. So I probably, probably won’t be prime minister and we probably won, well, I’m sure you would too. We probably won’t rename our national bird after my consulting company.
Allen Hall: So if you wanna see what a part of is, just go to, Rosemary’s. Well, I’m sorry. parlo.com, right? Isn’t it part of lo.com pot
Rosemary Barnes: consulting.com.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Consulting. Sorry. Parlo consulting do com yeah. And check it out there. That’s gonna do it for this week’s uptime wind energy podcast. Thanks for listening.
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