[Mr.Coffee]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

I'll break the list down to make sense:


Petrochemical materials. We don't burn life jackets, ball point pens, or boats, so I'm not sure what your getting away unless you mean the emissions from petrochemical manufacturing and manufacturing goods. Direct electrification takes care of most, but hydrogen is more efficient for the processes that require a large amount of heat. There's not many companies in the space yet, largely because the space is dominated by O&G companies who produce the petroleum.

Diesel/gasoline: hundreds of companies working on this. Where electrification isn't possible, and substitute energy carriers aren't feasible, biodiesel already exists. I suspect there very few applications where electrification and hydrogen won't work, but there's companies all over the world (even in Alberta!) selling biodiesel

Buildings: This is a big one. Some of the most innovative companies are working on efficiency first. This is where the biggest gains are. Next is heat pumps. In the vast majority of populated areas, great pumps are more economical than NG furnaces. There's cold climate heat pumps that use a newer refrigerant to get much colder (below -30 in some cases) but due to low volumes so far the lack of scale makes them pretty expensive. This is why the government is offering incentives for heat pump installation. If the demand increases enough, the costs can come down. The most difficult part of this sector is you need billions of bespoke solutions. It won't be easy for sure

Ammonia/fertilizer: This one is straightforward but difficult. There are many, many companies working on this. At least hundreds, maybe thousands. Hundreds of billions of not trillions allocated here. Fertilizer is made from ammonia (70% of all ammonia uses), same ammonia is made from hydrogen. At this point, 98% of hydrogen is made from coal or natural gas (other 2% from renewables). The answer is both easy and hard. The easy answer is make all hydrogen from water with renewables using an electrolyzer. There are 2 big issues though. The first is that there's already not enough renewables yet and this adds further need. The second is bigger. Right now we move natural gas or coal to the fertilizer plant where they make the hydrogen and then the ammonia, which then becomes fertilizer. We do this because shipping hydrogen is insanely difficult and expensive and creates a lot of loss of hydrogen in the process. This means fertilizer plants will need to be located where the hydrolysis is going to happen, which in a lot of cases may mean moving facilities.

Did I miss anything?

So still use petrochemical byproducts?

So, still produce and use oil and gas then?