The Energy Transition and technologies

[Azure]

Long time in the making. New Manitoba NDP government sure is making all the right moves early into their term.

A solar glass manufacturing facility is coming to the city of Selkirk, Man.

On Wednesday, the government of Manitoba said it green-lighted Canadian Premium Sand (CPS) to go ahead with a project that will see silica sand extracted from Hollow Water First Nation and processed in the factory coming soon to Selkirk.

Premier Wab Kinew said the project will create more than 700 jobs during construction and about 270 permanent positions.

In a media release, the province said the Selkirk factory will “produce up to 800 tonnes of solar glass per day,” which it said is a key part of making solar panels. The release added that “the project will be North America’s only low-carbon patterned solar glass manufacturing facility and will appeal directly to countries like the United States that are looking to onshore manufacturing inputs.”

https://globalnews.ca/news/10295406/...sand-manitoba/

[SeeGeeWhy]

Originally Posted by Azure

Long time in the making. New Manitoba NDP government sure is making all the right moves early into their term.



https://globalnews.ca/news/10295406/...sand-manitoba/

Would've been neat to see a fully electrified process in hydro rich Manitoba. It would be cool to see renewables produced by renewables some day.

[SeeGeeWhy]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is unfortunately a necessity. Even if a feasible energy substitute was found for aviation today the fleet would take 30-40 years to change over. What we need is a drop in substitute until a solution is found.

Right now, there's SAF made mostly by fermentation of organic cellulosic waste (corn stalks, etc) as it's easier than making hydrogen, trapping CO2, then using more energy to combine them. The trouble is, of course, that there's nowhere near enough organic waste to make enough SAF. From a carbon budget perspective, it's far better to use carbon that's already in the carbon cycle than to add more carbon to the system from fossil fuels.

Indeed.

Even if you take gasoline out of the energy mix entirely, there is just a huge amount of heat going into the production of other material goods like chemicals production and aviation fuel that will be required long into the future.

Carbon capture, sequestration and reformulation should become big business, and will be a massive new energy load on the system.

SAF and other synthesized products seem like the only way anyone will be able to figure out how to make carbon capture a revenue creating activity. As it stands right now, penalty avoidance has not been sufficient to change behaviours.

Here's a cool paper that breaks it down, albeit from a "nuclear can supply the heat" perspective. Focus is meant to be placed on the overall market opportunities and the relevant temperatures of the thermal demands by end use. Electrification, renewables, using less don't offer credible substitutions for these things and fossil fuels are losing their ability to sustain these activities as well.

https://www.radiantval.com/nuclear-heat-power

[Red Slinger]

There's also a local angle to the Twelve project as the main EP is in Calgary.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by SeeGeeWhy

Indeed.



Even if you take gasoline out of the energy mix entirely, there is just a huge amount of heat going into the production of other material goods like chemicals production and aviation fuel that will be required long into the future.



Carbon capture, sequestration and reformulation should become big business, and will be a massive new energy load on the system.



SAF and other synthesized products seem like the only way anyone will be able to figure out how to make carbon capture a revenue creating activity. As it stands right now, penalty avoidance has not been sufficient to change behaviours.



Here's a cool paper that breaks it down, albeit from a "nuclear can supply the heat" perspective. Focus is meant to be placed on the overall market opportunities and the relevant temperatures of the thermal demands by end use. Electrification, renewables, using less don't offer credible substitutions for these things and fossil fuels are losing their ability to sustain these activities as well.



https://www.radiantval.com/nuclear-heat-power

Interesting read. Thank you. It makes a good point about some of the unnecessary limits on nuclear build that are currently there.

The only problem I have with nuclear as industrial heat is once again it goes against the current grain of decentralizing energy. To make the economics work you'd have to build the industry near the energy source, not the other way around. And you'd have to wait a long time to get it.

I think industrial heat will largely be solved by thermal batteries (cheap materials, not chemical batteries) that can store heat for days and provide temps up to 1700°C with 95% round trip efficiency at a cost that is almost competitive with natural gas. I don't see industry lining up to fund and secure a Nuclear plant when they could buy a cheap box of rocks

Thermal batteries are cool. Pun intended

https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyi...costs-in-half/


As for carbon capture, I'm not sure there'll ever be a way for it to be truly economical. CCUS can't scale because each system is bespoke and even with a very small percentage of the CCUS we'd need for difficult electricity markets that may need gas like Alberta, there's still way more carbon than all the SAF would need. The market just doesn't make sense for a true carbon molecule market. In fact, I'd bet CCUS plants will pay for the CO2 offtake to make SAF not the other way around

[SeeGeeWhy]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

Interesting read. Thank you. It makes a good point about some of the unnecessary limits on nuclear build that are currently there.

The only problem I have with nuclear as industrial heat is once again it goes against the current grain of decentralizing energy. To make the economics work you'd have to build the industry near the energy source, not the other way around. And you'd have to wait a long time to get it.

I think industrial heat will largely be solved by thermal batteries (cheap materials, not chemical batteries) that can store heat for days and provide temps up to 1700°C with 95% round trip efficiency at a cost that is almost competitive with natural gas. I don't see industry lining up to fund and secure a Nuclear plant when they could buy a cheap box of rocks

Thermal batteries are cool. Pun intended

https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyi...costs-in-half/


As for carbon capture, I'm not sure there'll ever be a way for it to be truly economical. CCUS can't scale because each system is bespoke and even with a very small percentage of the CCUS we'd need for difficult electricity markets that may need gas like Alberta, there's still way more carbon than all the SAF would need. The market just doesn't make sense for a true carbon molecule market. In fact, I'd bet CCUS plants will pay for the CO2 offtake to make SAF not the other way around

I am 10,000% on side with thermal batteries. I happen to like salt as the medium, but am definitely curious about the refractory style designs being proposed. Salt will be a little more forgiving, managing thermal stress on refractory materials is a major challenge in operation. There are not too many thermal applications that exceed 850C, so that 1700C upper bound is a really juicy way to "extend" the effective exergy reservoir in the overall system. I think it is perfectly acceptable to accept otherwise curtailed renewable generation into such a thermal buffer, and have the draw on the reservoir be sized to be continuous, economic, and forgiving to the materials storing the heat potential.

This is ab-so-freakin-loutely the way forward, and the perfect way for fission and renewables to work together, as it obviates the need for high footprint solutions like pumped hydro storage, and gets into the promised land of $20 - $100/kW/h storage costs. If we can get there, we can have a system that delivers between 3 - 6x nominal wind LCOE. The key is to focus on backing up 100% of expected load in order to be primarily served by VRE. Contributions from clean firm like hydro and fission bring that multiple of LCOE down, to a point as well. We cannot forget that fuel is effectively the same thing as storage, and we are on a mission to substitute our fuel. VREs alone are fuel savers, not fuel substitutions. Fission and hydro can substitute the fuel, but they also benefit from the fuel saving features of VRE in so far as they can co-operate through common storage buffers.

I'd say the major issue preventing this is economic/political. A system with huge thermal storage capacity being fed by low cost, low emission generation would be extremely stable. Great for the broader economy, but requires being right about future demand forecasts, and it kills a lot of the opportunity for short term profit maxing via pricing arbitrage and ancillary service provision. It reduces fuel extraction and processing demand. The stochiastic nature of renewable generation creates perfect conditions for economic withholding, which we see owners of short-term storage (like BESS) and incumbent thermal plant assets taking advantage of this effect in deregulated markets today - Alberta is a textbook example. Regulated or capacity markets feel like a solution, but history shows these are vulnerable to different flavours of corruption and manipulation. Honestly, this is a really tough problem to solve, I don't know how to do it. It is getting into non-technical human factors and we are not rational creatures.

I hear what you're saying about the co-location of industry with NPPs. The industrial operator who would take the heat, power, hydrogen, syngas, whatever from the NPP does not want to build, own or operate the NPP. The same is true of the NPP owner/operator the other way - they don't want to own/operate the refinery or chemical plant buying their output. The key is the commitment each is willing to make to the other. The NPP can secure financing through the take-off agreement the customer is willing to commit to, which is backed by the strength and longevity of the underlying business. Then it comes down to pure willingness of the regulatory and stakeholder engagement processes, followed by the ability of all parties to follow through - just like any other project. The longer the take-off agreement is, the lower the cost of financing for the NPP will be, and typically this means the energy opex for the industrial demand on the other side can be set at a reasonable, known value for long stretches of time which is perfect for those kinds of operations.

Both tend to be located away from populations, but not so far as labour becomes an issue. They tend to be located at some point between close to the primary resource being processed and the point they can sell their product.

Both tend to take 5 - 10 years from resource discovery to operating, and project lifespans are on the order of 40 - 50 years... so the timing lines up pretty well on a case-by-case basis. The long tail lifespan makes the upfront effort worth it, and if enough such projects move forward then we will see meaningful impacts on high level metrics. This is a marathon, we want these solutions to endure.

I'd offer a small shift on thinking regarding nuclear being against the distributed trend. Nuclear-Industrial partnerships are going to have to tap high temperature, small modular designs. This is a non-traditional market for nuclear. Historically, NPPs were designed for a sweet spot of maximum power output per reactor volume unit, constrained by manufacturing limits on the reactor unit, costs of the containment structure, and to some extent turbine offerings. Thats how industry arrived at GW scale output ratings. THEN they went after the markets that could support that. Slim pickings! You could only go after high density population centers, sold as major civil works to municipalities, with very limited order frequency. The market got saturated super quickly, but the players all found plenty of ways to make additional money despite that peculiar set of circumstances.

The successful SMR designs will be able to decentralize the traditional go to market strategy of electricity only NPPs. The trade-off being a loss of power per reactor volume efficiency for a wider pool of potential customers that do not need to be major metros.

Large, high quality thermal loads are sort of the same as big human population centres in some ways. Modern economics does not account for energy in it's models, but it does account for labour. If one sets a standard of the thermal work available in a barrel of oil as 1700 kWh, and a day's worth of human labour as 0.6 kWh, after conversion losses we can estimate that one barrel of oil is roughly equivalent to 4.5 man-years of labour.

Humanity is consuming roughly 140,000 TWh of primary energy from coal, oil and gas each year. Using the conversion factors above, this is the same amount of work as ~370 BILLION people.

Applying that same lens to a site like the Dow Seadrift complex referenced in that whitepaper, we can see that 800MWt total service equates to a "labour population" of almost 18 million people per year. More than enough concentration to support such an allocation of resources. And it takes up 26 acres on a site that already consumes 4,700 acres. I don't really see how that's different from a person who is wealthy enough to put solar, GSHP and batteries on their property to get off the gas grid for heat and power. It's just that the "person" is a company, and their property is a chemical complex. What's more, is that they'll continue to take methane as feedstock but will be converting it into material goods that are not put into the atmosphere as combustion products, so it's a little more aligned with the interest of incumbent resource extraction interests.

I don't know, maybe I'm just autistically rambling again, trying to convince myself

I'm with you on CCUS, I am not 100% clear on how it's going to work, but we need to create reasons for people to actively take C out of the air and ocean somehow. Long term geologic storage options are so limited, and tend not to be sited where fuel gas is being delivered. Removing economics from the exercise, I could imagine LNG delivery infrastructure augmenting their operations in ways to accept processed CO2 from their points of delivery so it can be "backhauled" in their empty containers and "returned" to the productive areas that are more likely to possess suitable geologic storage options. The world needs to figure out how to pay the people that will go to the extent of building and operating such schemes. Alberta's trunkline is still only about 10% full, for example. Who is going to build more CC infrastructure if no one is bringing them volume to handle? The carbon pricing / penalty avoidance game we have set up ain't cutting it.

[Azure]

Originally Posted by SeeGeeWhy

Would've been neat to see a fully electrified process in hydro rich Manitoba. It would be cool to see renewables produced by renewables some day.

Manitoba does have the unique advantage here of being hydro rich, and hopefully the new NDP government makes the moves necessary to keep that in place after the disaster the last 20 years, and then also having a huge mining sector that will be essential going in the future.

I know the mayor of Selkirk, and he's been like a dog on a bone with this facility. Pretty happy to see him and his team come out successful.

What is not really stated in the article is Selkirk worked with Manitoba Hydro to make sure the electrical needs are in place a year ago, and then pitched the brown water idea from their waste water plant as a water source. In fact when they built the waste water plant the recycled water was one of the main reasons it was pushed. Super long-term thinking that will benefit all of North America.

Also why we are better off when we have great leaders making great decisions as close to the source as possible.

Where were the feds in this? Nowhere to be found. As it should be.

[#-3]

So as the owner of an EV, who is regularly asked by smart asses who have read a Western Standard headline, if I am worried that my car will catch fire. I am a little annoyed that the gravel truck burnt to a crisp on Stoney Trail this afternoon isn't even in the news.

ICEV are fire hazards, when will we do something about this.

[btimbit]

Originally Posted by #-3

So as the owner of an EV, who is regularly asked by smart asses who have read a Western Standard headline, if I am worried that my car will catch fire. I am a little annoyed that the gravel truck burnt to a crisp on Stoney Trail this afternoon isn't even in the news.

ICEV are fire hazards, when will we do something about this.

It's always been a dumb talking point. ICE vehicles catch fire more often than electrics. Lithos are just harder to put out.

Of course morons take that all the way too "Durr it's going to ignite randomly!" because they're scared of anything that's different

[Street Pharmacist]

Let's talk about heat batteries! They offer a unique solution to Alberta's grid stability issues.


Heat batteries have been around for decades and are extremely simple. Heat up an insulated rock or brick for hours or days, then use the heat when you need it. There are some really interesting companies doing this like Rondo where they've got the cost down so cheap it starts to compete with gas for most industrial heat uses. For years companies had no good options for industrial heating because using heat pumps would mean completely tearing down their factories and installing all new lines and workflow. With a heat battery, it's a drop in substitute.

Where it gets interesting is when you pair it with variable renewable generation. Have low or negative electricity prices? Heat up them rocks! Price goes up? Stop heating them and use the heat you've stored!

Where this gets really interesting for Alberta is that it is uniquely great for variable renewable generation and also an extremely high industrial heat load. It's a perfect marriage in my mind

[#-3]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

Let's talk about heat batteries! They offer a unique solution to Alberta's grid stability issues.


Heat batteries have been around for decades and are extremely simple. Heat up an insulated rock or brick for hours or days, then use the heat when you need it. There are some really interesting companies doing this like Rondo where they've got the cost down so cheap it starts to compete with gas for most industrial heat uses. For years companies had no good options for industrial heating because using heat pumps would mean completely tearing down their factories and installing all new lines and workflow. With a heat battery, it's a drop in substitute.

Where it gets interesting is when you pair it with variable renewable generation. Have low or negative electricity prices? Heat up them rocks! Price goes up? Stop heating them and use the heat you've stored!

Where this gets really interesting for Alberta is that it is uniquely great for variable renewable generation and also an extremely high industrial heat load. It's a perfect marriage in my mind

What's the catch on heat batteries?

Cheap to build low efficiency I assume.

It does sound like a good solution if your plan is to over build on intermittent supply and store a portion of it for your generation gaps.

Are there big tech hurdles still to effectively re-electrifying the heat on an industrial scale?

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by #-3

What's the catch on heat batteries?



Cheap to build low efficiency I assume.



It does sound like a good solution if your plan is to over build on intermittent supply and store a portion of it for your generation gaps.



Are there big tech hurdles still to effectively re-electrifying the heat on an industrial scale?

There's no catch! 98% efficiency to turn electricity into heat, then you just use that heat when you need it. The "catch" is it's still a newer tech that most industry isn't used to. They've already got gas lines and are using gas so there needs to be a leap of faith to buy one of these systems. They'd need to have someone watching electricity prices and arbitraging by changing the power flows based on electricity price.

It obviously doesn't work in a place like BC where the electricity cost is a flat rate. I'm a deregulated place where you can buy electricity wholesale like Alberta you could pay wholesale prices and ride the wave. At the end of the day, it's cheaper in Alberta to burn gas for heat than to heat a coil because average gas price is cheaper than the average electricity price it would take to give the same amount of heat. But what if you only bought the electricity when it was super cheap and used the excess you stored when it isn't cheap? Now it's cost competitive and emissions free.

I suspect if someone built a demonstrator in an operation more would quickly follow

[calgarygeologist]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

Let's talk about heat batteries! They offer a unique solution to Alberta's grid stability issues.


Heat batteries have been around for decades and are extremely simple. Heat up an insulated rock or brick for hours or days, then use the heat when you need it. There are some really interesting companies doing this like Rondo where they've got the cost down so cheap it starts to compete with gas for most industrial heat uses. For years companies had no good options for industrial heating because using heat pumps would mean completely tearing down their factories and installing all new lines and workflow. With a heat battery, it's a drop in substitute.

Where it gets interesting is when you pair it with variable renewable generation. Have low or negative electricity prices? Heat up them rocks! Price goes up? Stop heating them and use the heat you've stored!

Where this gets really interesting for Alberta is that it is uniquely great for variable renewable generation and also an extremely high industrial heat load. It's a perfect marriage in my mind

How big does this "heat battery" need to be in an industrial situation to work as you are suggesting in a low cost storage, high cost usage scenario? Is this the size of a normal HVAC system or does this need to be the size of a warehouse?

I'm having a tough time picturing a room full of rocks that are super heated and how big that would need to be for practical purposes.

[Fuzz]

Drake Landing does something similar but with solar heated water, for heating.


https://www.dlsc.ca/district.htm

[calgarygeologist]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

Drake Landing does something similar but with solar heated water, for heating.


https://www.dlsc.ca/district.htm

Interesting. I hit up Google to try to learn more about Drake Landing and this was one of the top search results which doesn't sound very encouraging.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calga...ture-1.7148389

Drake Landing, once the leading solar heating community of its kind in North America, may have to rely on fossil fuels as the aging system is breaking down and may be too expensive or impossible to fix.

[Regorium]

Why doesn't Alberta do some demand shaping via time of use pricing like Ontario?

It seems like a very easy way to make our electricity cheaper and also drive some interesting storage innovations.

[para transit fellow]

Originally Posted by calgarygeologist

Interesting. I hit up Google to try to learn more about Drake Landing and this was one of the top search results which doesn't sound very encouraging.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calga...ture-1.7148389

We should bear in mind that drake landing was a solar heat prototype village. They used the materials of the day.

Back in those days, I recall a lot of interest for heat storage system using a salt that turned to liquid when heated by the solar heating system. The phase change allowed much more storage.

[para transit fellow]

Oops -- a double posf

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by calgarygeologist

Interesting. I hit up Google to try to learn more about Drake Landing and this was one of the top search results which doesn't sound very encouraging.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calga...ture-1.7148389

Ya, and it's certainly a risk developing communities around stuff like this with no long term plan.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by calgarygeologist

How big does this "heat battery" need to be in an industrial situation to work as you are suggesting in a low cost storage, high cost usage scenario? Is this the size of a normal HVAC system or does this need to be the size of a warehouse?



I'm having a tough time picturing a room full of rocks that are super heated and how big that would need to be for practical purposes.

It's actually incredibly energy dense. It varies a bit, but roughly 1 m² per 1MW which is very good. They're also quite modular and can placed outside with proper transfer medium and lines