This blog is moving to Substack

After almost 11 years on this platform, I have decided to move full time to the Substack platform. There are a range of reasons for this. 

First, the Substack platform encourages communication and sharing between people with similar views. In just a month I have been blown away by the quality of the content available in the Climate space. The algorithm is designed to bring people together, not feed them ads; the revenue comes from a levy on paid subscriptions. The Google Blogspot platform is neat, but I have almost never had any feedback, and certainly I have never met any fellow travellers running blogs here. 

Second, I discovered that Substack would import all my posts with no fuss. I have been trying to gain the ability to read and edit old material, short of laboriously copying and pasting every post; there is a greater feeling of control. 

So thank you for reading this far, whoever you are; this blog will remain but new material (and all the old material) will be available on Substack going forward. (The other blogs, my personal story and the model car building, will also remain and will be updated on occasion.) Click here for my Substack page. 

Ciao!

Drill, baby, drill! Lessons from the collapse of the newsprint industry

Note: I have scheduled this to appear on my Substack (click here) next Tuesday morning. But since you are reading here, you get a preview! Enjoy, and please consider writing to comment. And please consider subscribing to my Substack as this blog may eventually disappear -- for now it is all free. 

I had a front-row seat for the collapse of the newsprint industry while working for the Canadian pulp and paper industry from 1994 to 2016.

Some of you may remember the typical weekend newspaper: a slab of paper weighing a couple of kilograms and filled with advertising inserts, classified ads, editorial content surrounded by ads, ads at the bottom of every page, you get the picture. Ads everywhere. Where I live the Wednesday paper was also an advertising-filled slab. All that paper, generically called newsprint, had to come from somewhere, and a lot of the North American supply came from Canada with its abundant forests and water.

Then came Craigslist and Kijiji. The classified ads, which were a large portion of that weekend paper, started migrating online; soon I could find every 5-year-old, blue Honda Civic 4-door with a manual transmission within 50 km of my postal code, sorted by price and mileage. No longer did I need to get up at the crack of dawn on Saturday to pore over page after page of classifieds, only to find the car I wanted had just been sold.

This was a problem for the newspaper publishers; the price of a newspaper at the newsstand covered the cost of the paper only. Not the printing, not the delivery, and most certainly not the salaries of the journalists and editors: all of this was paid for by advertising.

The inserts also started migrating online. These flyers, often made with a coated newsprint-type of paper to make them glossier, weren’t attracting the eyeballs. Then the ads surrounding editorial content started shrinking, and finally the editorial content itself went online. Demand for hard copies of newspapers plummeted.

So what happened to the Canadian newsprint industry? It tanked as demand plummeted. At one time Canada produced up to 25 million tonnes of different newsprint grades per year, most of it destined for the US; major US publishers owned shares in Canadian newsprint mills in places like La Malbaie or Kapuskasing. Today Canadian production is probably a couple million tonnes, if that, and is still sinking; the publishers have all long sold their stakes in Canadian newsprint facilities.

Here is how it played out. We’d see prices drop amidst declining demand until one of the bigger producers couldn’t take it anymore and shut a paper machine somewhere in a bid to prop up prices. A month or two later, another shut in another mill town. Publishers got wise and bought up large amounts of paper for inventory when the prices dropped so they didn’t need to buy high-priced paper in the immediate aftermath of a mill shut, thus hastening the next shut. Today the list of shuttered mills across Canada is huge.

Moving on to oil: There is a lot of talk of drilling for new oil and gas, in spite of the environmentalists (and the IEA) saying we have enough, we don’t need any more. Where do they think all that oil is going to go?

Today something like 75% of the barrel goes to gasoline and diesel. Another 5% or 8% goes to other transportation fuels and other energy uses: jet fuel, marine fuels, the railways and stationary combustion for things like steam generation. The last 18% or 20% goes to non-combustion uses, and there will remain a need for these products in a post-2050 world: lubricants, paraffin waxes, asphalt, and (at about 5% of the barrel) petrochemicals and plastics. The newsprint example shows a possible future for the oil refineries out there, if demand tanks for their major product (namely carbon-intensive fuels): an industry in steady decline, with a refinery shut announced every few months or so. The only difference is that the oil and gas people have some clout with governments, and will likely soak up a whole lot of public money before sinking; the decline of newsprint rarely made the front pages of national newspapers, and governments barely noticed.

One additional subtlety here is the fact that a lot of petrochemicals actually come from natural gas wells, not petroleum. As I’ve mentioned in the past, natural gas is an organic molecule, called methane, with only one carbon atom (CH₄); but gas wells usually deliver heavier organic molecules as well, such as ethane (two carbons, C₂H₆), propane (three carbons, C₃H₈) and butane (four carbons, C₄H₁₀). The collective name for these molecules is one of my favourite oxymorons, “natural gas liquids”. So are they gas or liquid? The answer is yes, depending on temperature. At room temperature and pressure, they are all gasses. The so-called wet gas coming direct from the well is cooled and the heavier molecules turn to liquid as the temperature drops: first butane can be siphoned off as a liquid, then propane and finally ethane. These are the feedstocks most commonly used for three of the six basic petrochemical building blocks, namely ethylene, propylene and iso-butylene.

Heavier organic molecules, those with six carbons and up, tend to be liquids at room temperature and pressure. (As you get into molecules with 100 or more carbon atoms, you are into bitumens and asphalts that are solid at room temperature and pressure). You might be familiar with octane; at eight carbons, this is a main component of gasoline. The other three basic chemical building blocks for petrochemicals are the so-called BTX trio: benzene, toluene and the xylenes, based on the six-carbon molecule heptane. And while there are paths from natural gas to heavier molecules such as benzene, and from oil to lighter molecules such as ethylene, it is likely that only the heavier portion of petrochemicals will continue to be made from oil in a post-2050 world, for the benzene molecules, lubricants, asphalts and other small non-combustion markets.  

So why would the industry want to drill if their major product is going away? Arguably the goal is to be the Last Man Standing in a race to the bottom. Some oil will still be needed, if only for the non-combustion uses described above.

It turns out that I am not alone in thinking this way; an investment analyst’s note brings up the same concerns (click here). The analysis addresses four assumptions presented by the oil and gas companies to justify continued or increased drilling. They are:

1. Petrochemical demand is set for strong growth;
2. Petrochemicals will support oil demand;
3. Petrochemical yields can be increased at scale;
4. Existing refining infrastructure can be repurposed.

Each is discussed and shown to be full of “yes, but” issues. For instance, increased moves to reduce, reuse or recycle will lead to a decoupling of GDP growth from raw material consumption, thus putting a dent in the demand for new petrochemicals. And from my experience in the pulp and paper industry, I would say that it is very expensive and time consuming to repurpose heavy industry assets to make something different, even when the new product appears, to the layperson, to be very similar to the existing product. While conversions of newsprint machines to cardboard have become common, not every papermachine is easily converted and there are plenty of pitfalls along the way.

So I am personally only a little worried about the “Drill, baby, drill!” crowd. If it all works out and we all shift to electric vehicles, no one is going to want the product, no matter how cheap, and the drilling will stop amid a glut of oil. (The natural gas story will be a somewhat different.) The trick is to stick to our electric cars even if oil is dirt cheap!

Unless I have missed something totally obvious. I would of course be interested in your views.

Hydrogen: a primer

Note: I have scheduled this to appear on my Substack (click here) next Tuesday morning. But since you are reading here, you get a preview! Enjoy, and please consider writing to comment. And please consider subscribing to my Substack as this blog may eventually disappear -- for now it is all free. 

What is it, how do we make it, and what is it good for

Recently a reader (I have a Reader!) wanted to know more about hydrogen. I provided a quick answer, offering to dig a little deeper if useful. So here goes. There will be a bit of basic chemistry which I hope I have simplified sufficiently. Ultimately every bit of analysis here relates to energy: where does it come from, what does it cost, and what are the greenhouse gas emission implications; and generating energy often involves the chemistry of combustion. After all, 75% of total world greenhouse gas emissions are related to energy production and use.

Hydrogen is the name of an atom, with the symbol H, as well as the name of a molecule made up of two hydrogen atoms, H2. Similarly, two oxygen atoms O pair up to make an oxygen molecule O2. Hydrogen, like a lot of things, will burn in an oxygen atmosphere. The chemists call this process “oxidation”, because the stuff being burned is broken up into smaller units which combine with the oxygen in the air. Combustion, or oxidation, releases a lot of heat, which is why it is useful. So oxidising hydrogen looks like this:

2 H₂ + O₂ → 2 H₂O

This simply says that 2 molecules of hydrogen H₂, containing a total of 4 atoms of hydrogen, combine with a molecule of oxygen O₂, containing two atoms of oxygen, to make two molecules of H₂O, also known as water. (Both sides of this equation contain four hydrogen atoms and two oxygen atoms, so it is balanced – we haven’t created or destroyed any atoms. This is a basic concept called conservation of mass.)

The interesting thing about this is that there is no carbon anywhere in the process, so there is no opportunity to oxidise carbon to carbon dioxide (CO₂); the only emission is water vapour. (Combustion in air, which contains nitrogen as well as oxygen, is a bit more complicated, but we’ll leave that aspect for another day.) From a greenhouse gas perspective, this appears to be a winner: heat without CO₂ generation.

But the real question is where the hydrogen comes from. Production and transportation of hydrogen both require energy, potentially creating a GHG impact.

Hydrogen: how is it made

There are several ways of obtaining hydrogen, which isn’t just lying around – it tends to react with oxygen pretty quickly and turn to water. It is also a key part of fossil fuels. The two major approaches to making pure hydrogen molecules are to break up the water molecule that we just made above, or to break up a hydrocarbon molecule of some sort. We’ll start with the hydrocarbon path.

Natural gas is the simplest hydrocarbon, being made up of a carbon atom and 4 hydrogen atoms: CH₄. This molecule is also known as methane. Separating hydrogen from methane is done with two reactions, the first called steam reforming (see the Wikipedia article for more information, click here):

CH₄ + H₂O → CO + 3 H₂

In this reaction, methane and water (in the form of steam) combine to generate one molecule of carbon monoxide (CO) and three hydrogen molecules. The carbon monoxide is a nuisance, so more water is added (this is called the water gas shift reaction):

CO + H₂O → CO₂ + H₂

So overall we’ve used two water molecules and a methane molecule to make four hydrogen molecules and one molecule of carbon dioxide (CO₂). While the chemists will scream that this is not an accurate representation of what happens at the molecular level, the following illustrates the overall combined mass balance of the two reactions:

CH₄ + 2 H₂O → CO₂ + 4 H₂

If you are burning hydrogen made using this way, your tailpipe or smokestack emissions may consist only of water vapour, but you have generated greenhouse gas emissions (one carbon dioxide emitted for every four hydrogen molecules generated) somewhere else.

It is worth noting that similar processes can be applied to most carbon-containing materials, such as wood chips, oil, coal, etc. (For those interested, look up gasification and the Fischer-Tropsch process.) If the material comes from plants, for example wood chips, the process is presumed to be greenhouse gas neutral, as the CO₂ emitted is presumed to have been pulled out of the air when the plant grew; the assumption is that we are not putting new carbon (from fossil sources) into the atmosphere, but simply returning carbon to the atmosphere that was there until the seedling took root. This assumption comes with a certain amount of hand waving and deserves a deeper dive in a future article.

It is also worth noting that unlike combustion, which generates heat, this reaction, like baking a cake, requires heat: there is an energy cost to this approach.

The proponents of this approach counter the GHG argument by proposing a technology called carbon capture, use and sequestration (CCUS) to redirect the CO2 back into the ground. But this technology is an expensive energy hog which doesn’t remove 100% of the carbon dioxide in a gas stream, and which remains to be proven at large scale. The whole objective needs to be a smarter use of energy, and using lots of energy to make more energy is problematic in my view, especially if it isn’t a zero-carbon approach. We also need technologies that work now, as time is getting very short.

The second path involves reversing the combustion process described above. If that process created heat, i.e. energy, reversing it needs energy. Typically this involves a process called electrolysis (you can also look this up on Wikipedia, click here) which requires a lot of electricity. The result is the generation of molecules of oxygen and hydrogen which need to be separated to prevent them combining again:

2 H₂0 →2 H₂ + O₂

This approach generates no carbon dioxide, as long as the power is not generated with fossil fuels; if power is fossil-based, once again we have simply shifted the emissions elsewhere.

Hydrogen: How would we use it if we had a lot of it

Hydrogen is a very dilute gas and needs to be compressed to very high pressures in order to get a reasonable amount of energy into a reasonable sized reservoir, such as a vehicle fuel tank. So beyond the energy required to make it, there is the energy required to compress it.

Furthermore, it is highly explosive. Oxidation as described above happens very quickly and can make a huge mess if there is enough hydrogen available. Think of your barbecue propane tank on steroids, or Google “Hindenburg disaster” for a preview. So safe handling is a major issue. For this reason, I think using hydrogen to fuel vehicles is a major disaster looking for an opportunity to happen; Hollywood movies notwithstanding, a ruptured gasoline tank burns nice and hot but a ruptured pressurised hydrogen tank can fling hot, flaming shrapnel over distances of hundreds of metres, potentially killing or injuring many random bystanders.

Hydrogen is used in the production of a range of petrochemicals and fertilisers. These are non-combustion processes and generate no GHGs, except in the production of any energy required to run the reactions in question; they take place in large industrial sites where occupational health and safety (OH&S) procedures for dealing with high pressure flammable gasses are in place, so we’ll leave these for another day. But I will point out that this will be a problem eventually as the hydrogen used in these processes typically arises as a byproduct of oil refinery operations: if we stop burning gasoline and diesel, which we should, this source of hydrogen may disappear. So these users may eventually need to find new hydrogen sources.

Hydrogen could replace fossil fuels in a variety of industrial processes such as steel or cement making. If these large industrial users have access to green power (hydro, solar or wind), hydrogen production onsite from water begins to make sense. The hydrogen would then be used onsite, with no pipeline or tanker transport required, in situations where industrial-grade OH&S procedures are in place to prevent an explosion.

It has been suggested that hydrogen could be distributed via the existing natural gas pipeline network to homes and factories across the continent, but this requires assurance that every single inch of pipe in the network is made of steel grades that resist hydrogen embrittlement, a condition where hydrogen attacks and weakens steel. And when I say every inch, I mean right to the burner tip in every gas appliance connected to the grid, whether domestic, institutional, commercial or industrial. To my mind, this creates an unacceptable risk to the public unless a local green hydrogen production facility is paired with new pipelines to new developments. 

Hydrogen’s place in a Net Zero world

So there you have it: Hydrogen is best used on large industrial sites, where it can be made onsite from water using green electricity. Onsite storage and use can be regulated through OHSA or other regulatory bodies to eliminate safety risks to the public. The benefits are decarbonising large industrial processes for which there aren’t really any immediately obvious substitutions available today.

Hydrogen use in vehicles is possible but the safety issues are huge. The same is true if we try to put hydrogen into the existing natural gas pipeline network.

Hydrogen from natural gas raises uncomfortable questions around fugitive methane emissions, carbon capture at less than 100% levels, and high levels of complexity, cost and energy demand. In particular, the cost per tonne of CO₂ abated, the so-called carbon index, should be a guide: Could those dollars and energy resources be better invested elsewhere, with greater levels of GHG reductions per dollar spent? And the technology is not yet proven at large scales; arguably we don’t have the time to sit around and hope it all works.

I hope I’ve answered my Reader’s questions; and I would be happy to try to answer yours too! Please write, especially if you feel this outline has been excessively or insufficiently simplistic.

2050: More actual real things you (yes, you) can do today

Note: This was also posted on my new Substack page (click here). Please bookmark that page as I may eventually stop posting here.

It is easy to look at the problem of climate change from a citizen’s perspective and throw up your hands in despair, because it appears there is little we can do given the scale of the problem, or because of the perception (perhaps justified) that corporate interests are driving decisions, not citizen’s concerns. But small local efforts add up quickly when taken up by enough people. In this post I hope to provide some positive approaches we can all take.

The first step is to vote, and to research politician’s platforms thoroughly prior to doing so. I have mentioned Mark Jaccard’s book (click here for the free digital version) and my first suggestion is to read it. He cuts though a lot of the obfuscation and gets down to the basic facts. 

The next step is to start to look at changes in your lifestyle that might be beneficial to the planet without being painful to you. Agriculture represents a part of the problem, and eating less meat will help the climate (and perhaps your health as well), but three quarters of the problem is due to the production and use of energy. And everything we do in our industrialised society has an energy impact.

For over 21 years I commuted 65 kilometres daily to work and back. A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation shows this generated about 4 tonnes of CO₂ per year, a piddling amount when compared to global energy emissions of about 8.5 billion tonnes (8.5 Gt CO₂) from transportation sources in 2020. Today there are options: buy an electric vehicle, take public transit (at the time I could beat public transit on my bicycle), or work from home for some or all of the time. (Cycling a 65 km round trip in urban situations with lots of stoplights added up to close to 3 hours on the road daily, once time for the shower at the office was included. I did it a few times a month, but it was not a daily solution, and was a non-starter in winter weather.) 

Next, let’s look at the grocery store, where I will try not to look like a hippy-dippy, crunchy-granola type wearing socks in my Birkenstocks.

I live in Eastern Canada, a location known for its winters. When I see lettuce on the shelves in February, I guess there has been some energy used to transport it here from somewhere warm, like California. Hopefully that truck will be electrified shortly, and in any case we should not be depriving ourselves of lettuce. But consider mineral or sparkling water shipped from France or Italy in a bottle, frequently made of glass. Yes, marine transport is cheap, but do we not have water in North America? In fact, our property taxes pay for safe and abundant municipal tap water, and any further concerns about the level of safety can be dealt with using a simple replaceable filter at much lower cost. And even if that filter comes from China, the embedded energy of a new filter every few months is presumably a lot lower than for several 750 mL water-filled glass bottles every week. 

Moving on, one also finds imported jams, pickles, etc., on the shelf next to local brands. This 250 mL jar of imported cherry jam weighs in at 579 grams off the shelf, but the empty jar weighs 217 grams with the lid, which works out to 37.5% of the total shipped weight excluding the inevitable carboard box. Every aisle should raise similar concerns or questions.

Outside the grocery store, Chinese goods are cheap, but the energy costs to get them here are significant, not to mention that the low price comes from offshoring well-paid local jobs to low-paid overseas jobs. My own view has always been to buy the best you can afford and look after it; it will last you much longer and cost less over the long run. “Cheap” is actually “expensive”.

At home, we all use energy for heating and cooling. Small steps, such as changing thermostat settings by a degree or two, combined with wearing a sweater and slippers in the winter, can have an impact. If the budget doesn’t allow for more efficient windows or doors, installing or repairing weatherstripping to reduce leaks will still make a difference. Incandescent bulbs use 8 to 10 times more energy than modern LED bulbs, which additionally last 10 times as long before failing. Shutting off the computer or entertainment system when not in use saves more energy than allowing it to go to sleep mode. And while most appliances today are reasonably energy efficient, running energy hogs such as washers, dryers and dishwashers outside peak hours lessens the load on the grid and reduces the investments needed to build new generating capacity. (Peak hours are usually defined as weekdays, 6:00-9:00 and 16:00-20:00, when people are home cooking.)

In a cold climate, however, the bulk of your energy bill is going to be heating. Where I live, the temperature difference in winter between outside and a comfortable inside environment can be as much as 40 or 50 degrees Centigrade; in a hot climate the temperature difference in summer can be 20 degrees or more. (Both depend, obviously, on your thermostat setting). Larger energy efficiency steps include improving insulation any time you are redoing a wall, either from the inside (such as kitchen renovations) our outside (new siding or bricks). Staying with the building envelope, savings from properly insulated basements, attics and modern windows and doors can add up quickly.

Moving inside, heat pumps are typically three times as energy efficient as gas or electric heating and can additionally provide air conditioning in the summer if you don’t already have it. (In the last 10 years, air conditioning in my neck of the woods has gone from a nice-to-have technology to something we can no longer do without.) These are available in ductless form for older homes without forced air, or as an insert to replace a burner or electric element in a forced air system.

Thinking further out there, housing in my neighborhood consists mainly of 100-year old three-story walk-up flats with flat roofs. A very rough first pass shows that the 1000 square foot roof on my building, if carpeted with solar panels, could provide, on average, one third of the building’s power use annually, or enough for roughly one of the three flats. This would need to be paired with local battery storage backed up with a grid connection. It would be expensive, but prices for batteries are dropping along with those for solar panels; meanwhile government incentives (including incentives for the grid operator to allow individual generating capacity to connect to the grid) will be essential. See the recommendation to vote, above, because this would be a huge step to reducing climate change as well as dependence on large generating stations and the necessary transmission lines and transformers.

Of course I am talking here of energy efficiency, not cost efficiency; relative prices for natural gas and electric power are highly local and may serve to slow or accelerate the move to greater electrification. Government carrots (incentives) and sticks (carbon costing of some type) will be essential to get the more expensive but ultimately more effective solutions implemented faster.

And if, through all this, you are saving electricity generated in a hydroelectric station, this can all be justified by the fact you are freeing up power to electrify the vehicle fleet while minimising the need for new dams.  

Moving on to recycling, the industrialised West obviously sends too much stuff to landfill. Recycling can be an option, but recycling comes with energy consumption and, particularly in the case of paper, water use. In the late 1990’s I edited monographs on the topic of energy and water use in pulp and paper processes, including recycling processes, and I would be happy to provide information as needed. So the act of disposing of something, whether a broken toaster or the packaging your groceries or goods came in, also has energy implications. Far better to prioritise repair, recover and reuse before recycling; products that are designed with end-of-life in mind at the start are key to the concept of a circular economy and will become more common as circularity becomes more accepted. Take the time to seek these products out as they become more available.

Finally, going beyond recycling, we have composting and biodegradability. While nice on paper, both lead to CO₂ emissions as the organic portion of the raw material decomposes. Use this for food scraps, not “biodegradable” plastic forks.

I realise that much of what I have described here applies to people who own their home and have some financial capacity to invest in goods, services and technologies that might not pay off for a number of years, as well as the ability to pay for healthy foods and high-quality goods which tend to be more expensive. The decisions described here can be difficult if you are having trouble paying the mortgage or buying basic groceries; tenants are at the mercy of a landlord when it comes to investment in energy systems. The social systems needed to generate decent living conditions for all are well documented by a large number of other bloggers on Substack and elsewhere, and are just outside the scope of this blog. Meanwhile you can plan your vote while being mindful of the energy impacts of everyday decisions.

Write to discuss!