Introduction

Thank you for your interest in the “Practically Carbon Free” initiative.

In summary Practically Carbon Free presents practical methods for addressing the underlying sources of the global problem with carbon dioxide (CO2), by:

For all these there are existing technical solutions. However, globally we are not tackling the major problem head on – we are continuing to burn fossil fuels to fulfil the majority of our global energy requirements. This is continuing to increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

There is a treasure trove of information collected at the PCF website, but a brief overviews follows.

There are multiple intertwined problems facing the world:
  • Renewables are good – but are far from a solution as they are inevitably intermittent. Furthermore they focus on generation of electricity, which is only a part of the global energy consumption and thus CO2 problems. They make the electricity grid less stable, which is a problem. Renewables currently only contribute about 10% of electricity produced.
  • Burning of fossil fuels, aka dumping CO2 in the atmosphere, has to stop as soon as possible. Over 60% of the fossil fuels are currently used to provide industrial heat or in transport.
  • Systems that capture (and store) CO2 emissions inevitably consume more energy than is produced by burning the carbon fossil fuels in the first place
  • Biological CO2 capture by growing trees is far, far, far too slow
  • Electric vehicles only make sense for short journeys, otherwise too much energy is wasted moving the heavy batteries around. They also only make sense at all, if ALL the electricity is generated in a totally CO2 free manner.
  • The hydrogen economy is deeply flawed as the vast majority of industrial hydrogen is made by steam reformation of methane/natural gas, and thus produces CO2.
  • Hydrogen can be made by electrolysis using electricity but this wastes the majority of the energy, and again the electricity has to be made in a CO2-free manner for this to make sense.
  • Standard industrial processes, to produce: cement, iron, steel, aluminium, fertilisers, etc. consume vast amounts of energy, mostly heat rather than electricity.
  • Nuclear fission has a terrible reputation and generates unpleasant waste, and is not a global solution because of potential proliferation problems
  • Nuclear fusion is still only a dream and we need solutions by yesterday not 30+ years in the future
  • Solar-thermal and Geo-thermal are only available in limited geographic areas
  • Bio-crops/fuels have an efficiency of at best 3%, often much worse. Farms which grow them also consume a lot of energy for ploughing, harvesting, and fertilizers
All these problems can be tackled in a CO2-free and climate friendly fashion but it requires a rethink:
  • Industrial process, which mostly require heat, should be driven from CO2-free heat sources
  • New electricity “power stations” should be built to make both electricity and to drive chemical processes – with the power balance between the two functions able to be changed dynamically.
  • The electricity grid should be made “stable” by building grid-sized battery systems
Surprisingly these changes only require three new technologies to be deployed – all of which already exist.

If deployed:

  • The electricity grid would no longer have to limit the amount of renewable electricity 
  • Genuinely Green, 100% CO2-free hydrogen could be made efficiently without wasting power
  • Removal of CO2 from the atmosphere will become feasible
  • Synthetic fuels could be made from the captured CO2 and the green hydrogen, to cope with the need for energy-dense fuels (for planes, trucks, shipping and long-distance transport)
The three main new technologies needed are:
  1. Grid-scale batteries – for example Liquid Metal batteries
  2. Thorium-based thermal plants
    • which can produce electricity
    • provide thermal power for all the traditional industrially “bad” industries: cement, iron, steel, aluminium, fertilisers (Haber Bosch)
    • produce hydrogen by thermal dissociation of water – more efficiently than by electrolysis
    • run at high temperature and low pressure and are “walk-away safe”.
  3. Atmospheric CO2 capture using thermal energy from the above

The oil companies already have commercially viable processes for  converting coal, or methane into synthetic liquid fuels. The chemical process to combine CO2 and hydrogen to make hydrocarbons exists, but needs to be made into an efficient industrial process to produce synthetic fuel from atmospheric captured CO2 and hydrogen, which would then be genuinely net-zero in terms of CO2.

There are companies already working in all these areas, but so far no one appears to have joined the dots to put them together into a workable solution. Inevitably each company wants to put forward their own technology as “the solution”, whereas in reality the combination is far more powerful than any of the individual parts, and all of them need coordinating, encouraging and helping.