Damian Corfield

Dear Damian

Thinking about your comments on this subject, yesterday evening, I want to share my thoughts with you and with Rob Clinton, Mark Richards and Ros Partridge who also heard your comments and may want to correct or comment on what I am writing here.

My understanding is that any kind of burning releases carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the five main greenhouse gases.  The others are methane (even more potent than CO2 and is being released from the thawing permafrost), nitrous oxide, water vapour and ozone.  (Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas)  We have to cut all greenhouse gases, urgently because climate scientists tell us that they are dangerously enhancing the natural greenhouse gas layer in the upper atmosphere that enables life on earth to survive.  It is called global warming or climate change/breakdown/crisis/emergency or, the greenhouse effect.

I think I am right in saying that hydrogen must be made by using energy or, as you told us last night, from burning metal (did you say aluminium foil, Damian?) that releases greenhouse gases even though it releases hydrogen that can be captured, unless the energy used comes from renewables.  In which case, it is more sensible and has less of an impact on climate breakdown, if the renewable electricity is used directly than to use it to make hydrogen.  Hence, the need to move from gas to electricity that can have less of a climate changing impact.  I don't think that using hydrogen in our gas cookers, heaters and boilers will help.  Energy efficiency and using less of everything will!

Making aluminium, ceramics, cement and steel is very energy intensive, I believe and so is bad news.  Hence, my opposition to replacing perfectly good, existing steel train tracks and trains with steel Metro tram tracks and the very large amounts of cement to make the concrete used for tram tracks much more than than for concrete sleepers (and continuously welded track) for the missing trains that I saw on our mainline railway at the bottom of Castle Hill as recently as the 2000s decade.  This is the mainline railway "of national strategic significance" ...​

 "of national strategic significance".pdf

​... now, part converted to light rail and very light rail, no less!!

But what do others think?

to 'Clun Chronicle'

Dear John and Joan

Yet again, your unbelievably excellent and well-thumbed 'Clun Chronicle' has finally found its way into my hands after others have lapped it up, first!

Jim Halcro-Johnston's authoritative article on hydrogen was good to read.  My disquiet over hydrogen is that it is either made from burning fossil fuels and, therefore, defeats the whole object of the exercise to urgently cut fossil fuel use.  Or, it is made from renewable energy.  In which case, why not use the renewables directly and, thus more efficiently?  This is what I am doing with our 6.24 kWp PV solar and a 14.4 kWh storage battery.  We are still having to import 2 kWh per night because of short daylight hours in November, December and January.  However, it is at night time and that is the very best time to use grid electricity.  We also hope, in 2022, to move from gas cooking to electric induction cooking, as it is important to use less gas if at all possible.

I think our very rich, fossil fuel-addicted, unsustainable lifestyles must somehow change to accommodate the rather unfortunate reality that we are living infinitely on a finite planet and unnaturally on a natural planet.  We are snookered, even if the climate emergency is all one big hoax.  It is most definitely NOT, however and, it IS an emergency!

Sir Jonathon Porritt has called for both tidal stream and tidal range electricity in his recent blog that is publicly available.  That would help, as would his many decades of exhorting us to tread more lightly on the planet and to live more simply so that others may simply live.  I am minimising the car, meat/dairy and all consumption.  Maximising use of insulation, renewables, the self-powered bike and, buying when essential.

Best wishes and thanks again for all your work in producing the Chronicle, month after month.

Highlights from Porritt's blog

Brilliant, authoritative writing from Jonathon, once more.

MY HIGHLIGHT QUOTES:

The rollout of CCS on power stations is about as naked an exercise in PREDATORY DELAY as can be imagined.

about a tonne of CO2 to be released for every tonne of cement produced.

the recent announcement from LafargeHolcim that it will be piloting more than 20 different CCS projects over the next few years.

Does this constitute PREDATORY DELAY? In my opinion, absolutely not.

Definitions:

‘grey hydrogen’ (using natural gas to make the hydrogen through a process called ‘steam methane reforming’), ‘blue hydrogen’ (using the same process, but capturing the CO2 emissions through CCS), and ‘green hydrogen’ (using electrolysis powered by renewable electricity).

all fossil fuel companies, and all EU countries and the UK, that now lump both Blue Hydrogen and Green Hydrogen together as ‘low-carbon hydrogen’.

the extra energy required to power the carbon capture process. What’s more, it takes many tonnes of natural gas to produce a single tonne of Blue Hydrogen.

In other words, unlike with concrete, blue hydrogen represents PREDATORY DELAY at its worse!

PORRITT HAS IT RIGHT

When it comes to understanding the true nature of Net Zero by 2050, I have one huge request: could everybody please stop flourishing their particular ‘get out of jail free’ cards – whether that’s a nuclear card, or a hydrogen card, or a 100% renewable electricity (100% RE) card.

There are no get out of jail free cards. We’re trapped in an energy-intensive way of life, driven by frenetic consumerism, causing massive damage to both people and the planet, and putting at risk the very future of humankind. There is no energy-based solution to this meta-impasse: the only way we’ll avoid an accelerating slide into civilisational collapse is by transforming that suicidal way of life.

Energy is a sub-system of that much bigger economic system – though it is, to be sure, the most important sub-system. And the most important aspect of that sub-system is EFFICIENCY.

Whatever combination of supply-side options we may have settled on by 2050, it’s the efficiency with which we acquire and use every one of those units of energy which matters most – not whether those units are renewable, nuclear or hydrogen.

http://www.jonathonporritt.com/getting-real-about-net-zero/

HYDROGEN IS NOT ZERO-EMISSION!

HYDROGEN IS NOT ZERO-EMISSION.  Even when spending £88 m of greenhouse gases.

Thanks for this.  We must lag ourselves and lag every building - the 1990s energy triangle of conservation (using much less through cutting our demand), efficiency and renewables.

What do you make of hydrogen buses, here Jonathon?

Dear Tim

 

In due course, running bus fleets on genuinely green hydrogen does make good sense – simply because of ease of refuelling at bus depots. But getting to the point where hydrogen is genuinely green is a different story – as laid out in that blog!

 

Best wishes

Jonathon

https://www.wmca.org.uk/news/national-express-to-run-zero-emission-sprint-bus-services/

Solihull gets both flash, flaunting our wealth, grossly extravagant with greenhouse gases, trams and, Sprint hydrogen buses ("These tram-style buses have proved popular with customers on similar rapid transit services across Europe and the UK.")  Simply reduce more greenhouse gases by using electric buses directly on roads without the rails (trams) or, without all the junction changes/upgrades and road widening (Sprint).

Brum leader, Cllr Ian Ward, wrote, “These zero-emission buses, including the 20 hydrogen-fuelled vehicles funded by Birmingham City Council, will offer travellers on the A34 and A45 a comfortable and reliable alternative to the car for their journeys and contribute towards achieving our climate change targets.”

Necessity is the mother of invention

One member of the group at my 60th birthday weekend (photos opposite), came up with this saying to explain that we have nothing to worry about over our limited reserves of fossil fuels. Science and technology will come to our rescue as oil, gas and coal finally become too expensive to be worth exploiting. There will be hydrogen and nuclear to save us. But, hydrogen has to be made and that uses energy. Nuclear fission uses finite resources, too so cannot be the ultimate solution - unless, after all these decades of trying, nuclear fusion is perfected.

It seems that oil is more important as a chemical building block for our five hundred everyday objects around the home and office and in town and country. It is needed for even carpets! I don't think we should be burning, very wastefully, the oil - or gas, for that matter - to turn into electricity. For every $100 barrel of oil that is turned into electricity, two barrels go up the chimney of the power station! Even oil man and Texan, George W Bush admits that Western societies are addicted to oil but does nothing to even slow the rising and prodigious burning of the stuff. The President might well have said, "We need oil to survive as a nation, just like fish need water for their survival."

Our one off, never to be repeated, geological inheritance that took 300 million years to form is being foolishly blown in the Western and Christian and white man's thoughtless dash to blow the lot in just 300 years! What is the matter with the white races with their many centuries of the Judeo-Christian traditions and beliefs at their heart that see them as the peak of creation with the right to exploit this inheritance? This bonanza has gone to our heads and we've been unable to cope with this cornucopia of riches. These nations, alone, are responsible. Now, many other countries are wanting to do the same to even more quickly exhaust the remaining reserves!

The double whammy is that as we all burn the oil and gas and burn down the tropical rain forests, we also screw up, good and proper the climates of the world - to nicely further worsen our long term prospects! And, then, there are going to be 50% more of us on this tiny planet to do yet more of this stupid burning and consuming. The lot of us are the horror species not the human species on this earth, I think!

And, to think that the discovery of first coal (in about 1750) and then oil, followed by gas is an invention! Not even we humans in our arrogance and supreme intelligence can invent something so versatile, invaluable and precious as oil, gas and coal. How can we humans invent more oil when it took Nature 300 million years? Yet, on that evening, I alone was appalled by the complacency that was shown in using that saying to lull everyone into a false sense of security over our prodigality and greed in running through the black gold in the twinkling of an eye - relative to the geological time scale.

Our misguided faith in science and technology to bale us out of our folly and our reliance on the 'solution' of economic expansion from a diminishing capital resource base is like the 'Any Questions' questioner who said, "Our behaviour is like the smoker who keeps smoking confident in the knowledge there will be a cure for cancer - to allow him to keep smoking!"