The decarbonization journey

This week, on the Exponential View podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking to Ramez Naam. Ramez is a well-regarded angel investor and an advisor on clean energy. We spoke about the challenges of decarbonisation, the environmental equivalent of Moore’s law and the relationship between tech firms and clean energy.

Here are some highlights from our conversation. You can listen to it in full here. 

When we think about storage, there are probably three strategies. First, find some kind of reservoir or battery that you can store electricity in. Second, build so many different types of renewable generation systems that you're bound to get something to cover you. And third, pipe it across using high voltage direct current lines from places where there is energy being generated. Do you think it's a real problem to pick one of those three strategies? Is it a mix? Is it something else?

Ramez Naam: “It’s the intermittency problem rather than the storage problem. All the studies show that the larger a grid you build, the less you worry about intermittency. If you look at Europe, for instance, if you build a really continental grid, you can have solar coming from Spain and Portugal, especially in the summer. You can have wind coming from the North Sea in winter, and you've got less sensitivity to weather because the weather is less correlated the further apart you go

Realistically, we're going to do some mix of all three. The hardest of those to do today is actually building long-distance grids – not because of technology of cost, but because of politics. It's very very difficult to get approval to do that.”

Listen to my full discussion with Ramez Naam here.

What proportion of our CO2 emissions do you think is covered by, in this sort of 5-to-7-year period, or 10-year period?

Ramez Naam: “Electricity and ground transport, cars and trucks, come out to a little bit less than half of humanity's carbon emissions. The harder problems that we haven't started on as much are: a quarter of the world's carbon emissions are agriculture and what they call land-use change, which is mostly deforestation. Then the next biggest chunk is what we'd call industrial emissions, which is making steel, making cement, making petrochemicals and plastics, glass. These are high-heat applications where we just burn fossil fuels directly for heat, and there are some process emissions in there. Some of the chemical transformation of iron into steel actually by itself produces CO2.”

One way that we tackle those is by cleaning up the production of energy through decarbonizing our electrical system. But for the rest of it, what is that path?

Ramez Naam: “Let's start with industrial emissions. For instance, steel. In the industrial sector, that's the biggest chunk. It used to be that both raw steel, primary steel production, turning iron ore into steel, and recycling, were both done with blast furnaces that just burnt coal to do this.

Now, in almost all recycling, the growing volume of recycling is done with electric arc furnaces, that are electrically powered. That electricity tends to come from fossil fuels, but it is getting cleaned up. With things like primary steel, it's a harder problem.

Those technologies, and similar technologies for cement, are still in their infancy. They're still substantially more expensive than the brute force fossil way that we view it today. To me, in those sectors, there's a role for more government R&D dollars. More venture investment in these companies, but ultimately you need to create demand to scale them.

Will clean steel ever be cheaper on its own than primary steel made from coal? We don't know yet. But for right now, the mission is, let's get these industries moving, let's create demand for them, let's scale them and watch that learning rate, watch Wright's Law have an impact in them.”

To receive my weekly analysis, subscribe to Exponential View. 35% of each annual membership this month goes to tackling Covid-19. Read more, subscribe and donate here!