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Posted on April 28, 2023 | 46 Comments
A few remarks in this post arising from an episode of Nate Hagen’s always interesting ‘Great Simplification’ podcast, in this instance with chemical engineer and hydrogen expert Paul Martin.
A key message I took from Martin’s remarks is that hydrogen has various important uses as an industrial chemical – principally for agricultural fertiliser – but is pretty much a non-starter as the currency of a future green industrial energy economy, for various reasons connected with its energetic, physical and chemical properties.
While hydrogen is being talked up as a potential solution for decarbonizing industry, in Martin’s view it’s less a decarbonization solution than a decarbonization problem, partly because of its climate forcing effects in the atmosphere and partly because almost all of it in human use is derived from fossil fuels. A lot of future hope is pinned on using low-carbon electricity to make ‘green’ hydrogen as the medium for various industrial and energetic processes, but Martin says it almost never makes sense to use electricity to produce hydrogen as a combustible energy source, mostly because of poor energy returns on investment. It’s better to use electricity directly to replace processes based on fuel combustion in the fossil economy, like heat pumps for gas boilers and electric engines for petrol ones.
All this is quite relevant to some of the concerns of my recent writing, in particular manufactured food. The most heavily touted approach involves feeding hydrogen, among other chemicals, to species of hydrogen-oxidising bacteria, resulting in high-protein edible biomass. But to do that in a renewable and climate-friendly way, first you need green hydrogen. There’s not much of it around currently and, per Paul Martin’s comments, whether it makes sense to produce it is questionable. In sectors that have traditionally burned fuel to do a job, the new-fangled idea is to do it directly with electricity and without fuel (back to the electric vehicles and heat pumps). By comparison, in the food sector there isn’t a way of producing food directly with electricity. But there is a direct, zero carbon energy source for food – that big ol’ ball of fire tracking across the sky each day. So – farming. Not, I confess, a new-fangled idea, but old-fangled isn’t always the worst way to get things done.
The only reason it makes any sense to even contemplate a green hydrogen rather than a solar route for food production is because solar energy is diffuse, meaning that farming is land-hungry, especially if people want to eat high up the food chain, which they generally do. And the problem with agricultural land hunger is that it potentially crowds out other species – which is often bad for us, and is always bad for them.
So we arrive at this line of reasoning:
There are a lot of ‘mays’ in that chain, each one vulnerable to the counter-possibility that it ‘may not’. I’d suggest the analogue in the food sector to Martin’s point about bypassing the hydrogen energy economy and taking the direct route to the goal is to focus on the ‘may’ in Point 1 and let go of all the other mays. So let’s farm, while trying to make it less bad for wildlife. More on that another time.
Let’s now turn from energy forms to energy flows. Life can be tough if you have no or little access to useful energy beyond what’s in the food you eat. But if you have access to too much energy – as an individual, as a country or as a species – life can also get tough for yourself, for other people servicing your demands, or for other species. So we need to find a sweet spot that works for people and other species worldwide, grounded in plausible clean energy futures.
Let’s go back to those electric vehicles and heat pumps for a moment. My household lives an off-grid but pretty high-tech lifestyle, with domestic life energized mostly by an array of twenty photovoltaic panels and a small wind turbine, along with wood for space and winter water heating from the adjacent woodland we planted (plus a bit of LPG for cooking). We have just about enough electricity from our generating setup to run a typical modern high-energy home, although it’s a bit touch and go in the winter. We don’t have enough to run an electric car (we’ve got an electric goods delivery trike, which is challenging enough to energise year-round), nor enough to run an air-source heat pump.
A lot of the discussion on the podcast focused on the relative costs of different forms of energy, in money or energetic terms. Which is fine. But I’d like to hear more about absolute availabilities or, to put it another way, expected flows. Sure, you get more energy return for energy invested from a heat pump, but if I tried to run one from my setup in the winter I’d have no energy left to do anything else, and probably not even enough to run the pump properly a lot of the time.
My bad, maybe, for running such a piffling little off-grid system. Although by global or historic standards, it’s not that piffling. And it confronts me with the daily reality of just how little energy by contemporary standards all this high-tech circuitry, battery arrays, PV panels and suchlike provides. So my question is not so much whether things like heat pumps are a good choice on a present energy price or EROEI basis, but whether they’re a feasible choice for society at large on an expected energy flow basis.
On a trip the other day, I witnessed huge diesel-powered construction machines scouring the earth and putting steel and concrete bridge architecture in place, three huge tractors in one field ridging it for potatoes, a tractor in another field spraying synthetic fertilizer and, in the harbour at the end of the trip, a ferry, cruise liner and fishing boats belching diesel fumes from smokestacks that make the one on my tractor look as thin as a hair. Plus uncountable numbers of fossil-powered trucks, cars and buses plying the roads. Non-renewable fossil energy everywhere I looked. I get that electrification offers efficiency gains, but you’re telling me we’re going to electrify all that in the next few decades? How?
On top of that gargantuan task, the boosters of manufactured food are wanting us to use yet more generated electricity to make food. With that, the gargantuan task gets way bigger still. Then there’s population and economic growth and the expected or ongoing transitioning of low/middle income and energy economies to higher income and higher energy to contend with.
Maybe I’m missing something that everybody else can see, but I’m just not finding the evidence to suggest that all this prodigious and growing energy use can be sustained on the back of low carbon electricity. Hardly anyone seems to be even discussing it. Nate and Paul Martin didn’t really discuss it, even though they’re super well-versed in energy issues – though, to be fair, Nate’s discussed it with other guests on his podcast like Simon Michaux, whose argument in a nutshell is no it can’t be. The International Energy Agency has just brought out a big report which necessarily is more upbeat in its messaging, but reading between the lines looks to me not far off saying no it can’t be too. The vibe I got from Nate’s podcast was basically that this is the big challenge of our age that we need to overcome. Well, what if we can’t?
Paul Martin made some thought-provoking remarks during the podcast that bear on this. He raised the idea that humanity has been having a fossil fuel party for the past 300 years which, he said, has released us from abject poverty and slavery. But now the party’s over and people are latching onto all sorts of foolish things like the hydrogen energy economy in a vain attempt to prolong it. Later, he admonished listeners not to be Luddites, not to blame technology or to think that there was some great agrarian past we can return to when everyone was in harmony with nature.
I think there’s some grain in these comments that needs sorting from the chaff. Yes, the party’s over, and yes people are latching onto foolish things like manufactured food to try to prolong it. And no, indeed there wasn’t some great agrarian past we can return to when everyone was in harmony with nature. But there may be opportunities to create an agrarian future that’s better than the present, a future where people will have a greater chance to be in harmony with nature than most of us today (they could hardly be less). And in that future people may be open to learning from numerous premodern pasts, many of which did not involve abject poverty or slavery (conditions that in any case the modern energy economy has manifestly failed to extinguish, and has often exacerbated).
To foster those opportunities there’s a lot to be said for embracing Luddism – that is, for assessing whether new technologies are likely to benefit in the round the people or other organisms they affect and, if not, organising against them. In that respect, I thought Martin’s criticisms of green hydrogen boosterism and his exhortations for people to do work that makes the world a better place were excellent examples of low-key Luddism in action.
But invoking the low-energy past as a kind of bogeyman of unredeemed misery constrains thinking about the future and delivers us back into the techno-fix space, even when – as per Martin’s criticisms of green hydrogen – we’re well aware of the ‘latching on to anything’ it involves. Hence, I think, the void in public culture around realistic energy futures. With our scornful view of the past, we just can’t conceive of energy solutions involving less, so we imagine there’ll be more because there has to be more. I’m beginning to think of this scorn for low energy pasts as perhaps the biggest impediment to a liveable future.
The issue of nitrogenous fertilizer touched on in the podcast is also relevant here. As discussed therein, about half the nitrogen in human bodies nowadays comes from the Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis process, which greatly boosted crop yields when it was introduced. But even as it boosted crop yields it destroyed work – this ‘nitrogen capitalism’, in Aaron Benanav’s term, was, says Benanav, the major destroyer of livelihoods in the 20th century. Some of those lost agrarian livelihoods got reconfigured as urban industrial ones, but there’s no guarantee this can be sustained. And the fact that half of our nitrogen nutrition now relies on Haber-Bosch doesn’t mean that half of us would die without it, as incautious commentators are apt to claim. It probably does mean we need to rethink the nature of livelihood. And ‘abject poverty’. And Luddism. And how much energy is enough. But doing all that is long overdue.
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I am not caught up on my podcast listening list yet far enough to have managed to listen to this one, but I look forward to it.
I think one real strength of household solar systems, especially ones that aren’t connected to the grid, is that they really do encourage people to use less energy in the first place. Whether this is offset by the material costs that go into the manufacture of such systems depends, I suppose, on how long they last.
Tangentially: an argument I see sometimes about pastures Vs wildlife is that livestock produce X amount of methane and by eliminating them we’ll reduce climate warming. I’m not sure this is the case, partly because of the shorter life of methane in the atmosphere; but also partly because, well, surely deer also emit methane. And if we don’t want to reintroduce wolves to keep the deer in check — and I suspect few people will really be happy with this if they are living anywhere near humans — then we’re going to have to get used to venison. I don’t necessarily mind that but I do like cheese and butter, so maybe one response is to eat wild game but keep a milk cow or two and limit beef to culling off those male cattle surplus to requirements for breeding or pulling wagons. (I’m assuming here that oxen are just cattle trained to pull a cart but I could, of course, be wrong, city kid that I am.)
Just a thought, as I construct some fences around raised beds, to keep said deer from chowing down on my peas.
You’re exactly right about deer and methane. And other ruminants like bison, buffalo, yaks… all methane manufacturers. So the simplistic suggestion to remove our domesticates (cattle, sheep, goats, camels, etc.) from grasslands in favor of rewilding loses on that front. The remaining value to rewilding then is some measure of increasing biodiversity.
Eating those other ruminants – deer, bison, buffalo… could serve on both fronts… increase biodiversity and offset loss of meat from present system. There are other herbivores we might consider… horses for instance. As hind gut fermentors (as opposed for fore gut like ruminants) horses emit less methane. Eating horses then shouldn’t be the non-starter most of us imagine. [not considered here though is the matter of efficiency – whether very highly bred cattle for instance can convert grass more efficiently than wild alternatives]
And before I go, another pitch for the lowly rabbit. While this is not exactly the ruminant vs non-ruminant gut fermentation and release of methane… there is also methane released from manure. This piece suggests that rabbit manure emits less methane than other domesticate manures:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/648/1/012112/pdf
My understanding is that it takes quite a bit more land to feed a horse than an ox or a dairy cow, but it used to be worth it because they go faster. Horse meat is still eaten in France; I’m not sure about elsewhere.
I really want to like rabbit but haven’t learned to, yet. Sigh. I guess I’d manage if I were hungry enough. I like squirrel better but they are really very small and fiddly.
We will need all the horses we can get !
Yep you can use near any domesticated breed of cattle to pull , but some are nastier / bad tempered than others ,oxen like heavy horses are bred to be docile .
Rabbit’s are very low on fats yep you can eat them but they are not the complete nutrition you get in beef say .
The hydrogen economy has some big shoes to fill. The sales pitches are all about using renewable energy to obtain the hydrogen, but the future renewable energy ‘pie’ seems to already be oversubscribed. It seems highly unlikely that there will be enough of that limited pie to cover the burgeoning demands for it.
‘E-diesel’ is just one example. Diesel fuel for automobiles and trucks, as well as jet fuel, can be ‘created from carbon dioxide, water, and electricity with a process powered by renewable energy sources…’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-diesel
So we can still have internal combustion engines and jet-set lifestyles, ‘powered by renewable energy sources’, yay! But it seems more like oversubscribed pie in the sky.
On top of that gargantuan task, the boosters of manufactured food are wanting us to use yet more generated electricity to make food.
This is not always the case. Some of the inputs (raw materials) for precision fermentation are biomass sources. Simple sugars frequently – and these can be bashed for the inputs necessary to provide them. But there are lots of biomass sources currently available to be ‘up-cycled’ for fermentation energy sources. Corn cobs as one example. It can be argued that most corn cobs are now left in the field and they have a value there as carbon for the micro flora. However, in a fossil fuel diminished future where human effort to harvest corn from the field will not include shelling the grain from the cob in the field… all those cobs will need to do something. They can be burned for heat (or to generate electricity), but they can also be up-cycled for food. Link for this coming in the following comment
[other alternatives for corn cobs documented here:
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/14/6281 ]
The corn cob to food article:
https://agfundernews.com/the-supplant-company-makes-wheat-flour-from-grains-and-upcycled-stalks
BTW, this is from the venture capital source I linked earlier (different thread).
So one can poo-poo this approach as techie…. but controlling fire was once a techie thing. Fermentation is techie. Writing books is techie… Some technologies stand the test of time – tossing a new tech to the cutting room floor simply because our ancestors didn’t do it seems, well – simpleminded.
Who is dismissing approaches as being “techie” or rejecting a new tech “simply because our ancestors didn’t do it”? Chris is instead pointing out the problems with the energy costs of manufactured foods.
That linked article is mainly about a high-fiber lower-calorie wheat flour product made using processed wheat straw as well as the grains. The product from corn cobs sounds like its primary use is as a lower-calorie substitute for table sugar.
Yet there’s no mention of the energy requirements for the processes. In another article, “[Tom] Simmons said that enzymes produced by fungi are used to break down the long complex chains of sugar found in fibrous materials. From there, the shortened chains can be more easily converted to sugar.”
The energy costs of producing these fungal enzymes, as well as the energy required for the subsequent chemical conversions, are not mentioned.
https://thespoon.tech/the-supplant-comapnys-fiber-based-sugar-launches-in-the-u-s/
Some clues about those fungal enzymes can be gleaned from this journal article abstract. The fungus used here is a species of Penicillium which was genetically engineered:
“Enzymatic conversion of corn fiber to fermentable sugars is beneficial to improving the economic efficiency of corn processing. In this work, the filamentous fungus Penicillium oxalicum was found to secrete enzymes for efficient saccharification of un-pretreated corn fiber. Separate engineering of transcriptional activators ClrB, XlnR, and AraR led to enhanced production of different sets of lignocellulolytic enzymes. Particularly, the enzymes produced by XlnR- and AraR-engineered strains showed a synergistic effect in corn fiber saccharification. Combinatorial engineering of all three activators generated a strain MCAX with 3.1- to 51.0-fold increases in lignocellulolytic enzyme production compared with the parent strain. In addition, the enzymes of strain MCAX released significantly more fermentable sugars from corn fiber than those of the parent strain at the same protein dosage. The results suggest that this strain has potential for on-site production of enzymes for corn fiber saccharification.”
Combinatorial Engineering of Transcriptional Activators in Penicillium oxalicum for Improved Production of Corn-Fiber-Degrading Enzymes
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jafc.0c07659
The thing I always wonder about turning crop wastes into food using fungal enzymes is: why aren’t we just using them to grow oyster mushrooms (which will grow on a pretty wide variety of substrates) and eating those? Or feeding crops wastes to livestock and eating them? Or composting or making biochar with the crop wastes and returning that carbon to the soil?
If it isn’t energy efficient to grow the mushrooms, it’s hard to see how the next steps will be better.
I find that manufactured food industry sources and venture capital writings tend to be overly ‘optimistic’. But this pro-precision-fermentation article from 4 days ago paints a somewhat more realistic picture.
The article says that a “many-fold reduction” in costs is needed to be competitive with conventional food, but the benefits of scaling up production will not even come close to bringing down costs sufficiently.
“Leading scientists and technologists from the industry and academia tend to tell me — often in hushed tones and sometimes only off the record — that the economics of food-grade precision fermentation is nowhere near competing with commodity dairy or eggs. This problem, they warn, will not be solved by simply upscaling to larger tank volumes. At best, scaling up production to immense tank volumes will reduce costs by 35% to 40% instead of the many-fold reduction needed.”
Precision fermentation’s capacity craze: Have we lost the plot?
Blake Byrne
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/24/precision-fermentations-capacity-craze-have-we-lost-the-plot/
Well as a young men many years ago I made hydrogen tankers supplied to Air Products in the UK , few who have not been in the industry understand the explosive problems of hydrogen .
1 it burns with a clear flame ( ya can’t see it ) and it burns hot , you looked for leaks with a spray bottle filled with water looking for steam .
2 It’s flash point is 60 degrees Fahrenheit , just open to the air of burns !
3 if the pressure in the tank dropped below 1200 psi it was likely to flash back into the tank and explode , ( a semi / artic trailer is several tonnes of explosive )
4 All repairs were done with brass or bronze tools as a spark could cause a explosion .
5 In 1980 the company making the trailers insured each of us that made them for 6 million pounds . The
That is why the storage facilities are way way out in the country ! ( and I quit )
Every energy conversion is a loss. Some more than others. And when one factors in embedded energy in the conversion technology, it gets negative real fast. Unlikely to happen, but if Odum’s emergy concept was ever completed to the point of useful calculations, many techno fixes would be shown as losers.
TANSTAAFL as my thermo prof said back in the day.
Nate Hagens is one of the best out there ( in addition to our host) at trying to counter the notion that our cheap energy lifestyle will continue, or at least easily transition to a green George Jetson happy future.
A few months ago, I suggested to Nate that you would be a good episode on The Great Simplification. Did he contact you?
It just so happened that green hydrogen came up on Farming Today yesterday:
A 1,000-plus hectare farm and seven homes near the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeenshire have sought Scottish Govt. funding to meet all the energy needs of the farm (including tractors etc) and seven nearby homes via renewable electricity powering an electrolyser to make (green) hydrogen fuel. It was acknowledged that battery-powering alternatives for today’s diesel-powered farm machinery was a “very difficult” proposition with the current technology.
Solar panels and a large wind turbine will be required to power the electrolyser – when there is excess energy, it is expected to create and store hydrogen for times of low renewable energy production. The HydroGlen pilot project hopes to be ready by 2025.
Interestingly, it was noted that it is the development of smaller hydrogen-creating equipment suitable for farms and homes that is keeping costs high (in the region of 4 million GBP for the hydrogen plant, plus another million-plus for the wind turbine (the solar panels are already in place)). The senior scientist professor overseeing the project hoped costs would fall in future if farming communities could get together to bulk-buy dozens of electrolysers by pursuing a collective procurement route.
A little further south, near Whitby, hydrogen fuel is hoping to be trialled in residential homes, for fuel and heating, using the existing gas piping network together with a replacement hydrogen boiler. Should also be ready in 2025. (https://hydrogenvillage.com/)
Just as a side , have a search for whales dying / washing ashore on the east coast of the usa caused by offshore wind development , MSN is keeping real quiet about it .
Thanks for comments. Briefly –
* Agree with Kathryn on those merits of energetic self-provision, despite its ‘inefficiency’ – a stewardship argument paralleling small-scale food production
* Yes to wild ruminant rebound effects. I touch on this in Chapter 4 of my new book, and on the livestock methane issue a bit more extensively.
* Yes to bush meat, and a stewardship ethic around it. Glad to find a squirrel-eater – perhaps a post on that is due sometime!
* To echo the two Steves’ points in response to Clem, indeed my critique is not that microbial (SCP) manufacture is new but that it’s problematically energy intensive. It’s true there are SCP processes with biomass feedstocks, but then we get into energy/land-sparing trade-offs that look more problematic than the green hydrogen route, so I’m not entirely persuaded of the rationale for the biomass approach over green hydrogen, though open to further discussion.
* Diogenese’s observations on the difficulties of handling hydrogen are also to the point. Sounds like an exciting job!
* Re Simon’s points from Farming Today, yes there’s no doubt that green hydrogen-based systems can work. The question is whether they can work globally to replace the present fossil energy system. So I think the problem really is large scale, not small scale. There’s a lot of hope (or ‘hopium’ as Martin calls it) about prices across the sector, and a lot of boosting of hydrogen by fossil gas interests because it fits their existing model – in the podcast mentioned above, Martin is pretty sceptical about the moves around this in the UK. But for sure I’m interested in other views…
* Thanks for suggesting me to Nate, Steve. Nope, not heard from him!
It will be interesting to see if either of those UK-based projects are realised by 2025AD… I’m sceptical.
… Sceptical due to concerns for the water required as feedstock – a common concern that’s not really a problem, apparently. To a luddite like me, there are some enlightening links from the podcast – thanks for bringing it up, Chris.
https://spitfireresearch.com/distilled-thoughts-on-hydrogen/
In the interests of full disclosure: I took the very easiest option and bought pre-prepared, oven-ready squirrels from a posh meat seller on the internet. I’m not romping through Epping Forest with an air rifle or setting traps in the back garden or anything like that, though the squirrel that keeps digging up my various seeds is looking tastier by the day. But I wanted to at least find out if I enjoyed eating it, and the answer was yes.
The same company did sell un-prepped squirrel, so maybe I’ll try that sometime, just to find out how bad I am at it. I assume that in a scenario where we’re all romping around Epping Forest or setting traps in the back garden, an enterprising local butcher will emerge and I’ll be able to trade a few extra carcasses for the fiddly work. Pigeons are probably easier to catch. I don’t imagine the larger birds (Canada geese, and those funny-looking Egyptian geese that are a recent arrival, and ducks) will last long at all in a fast transition.
The advantage of eating squirrels is that you also get to eat more nuts. The squirrels last summer were very prolific in planting hazel trees on our allotment. I’m going to try to take some to church, where some of the ornamental border shrubs could do with replacing in the next few years and we may as well use hazels.
Replacing the amount of dairy we get through as a household would be a harder problem than meat, I think. There are cattle on Wanstead Flats again, fitted with some kind of radio collars to prevent wandering, but I don’t think it’s a dairy herd, and even if it were, I doubt it would support very many people.
Just heard back from Nate Hagens staff- you are on their list, but as you can imagine they have a huge backlog. They said you have been suggested a good number of times.
I’m pleased to hear it — I have made the suggestion in the past.
The new ‘Glass Onion’ movie seems to nod towards this in it’s hilarious denouement!
I share your scepticism for the denigration of past agrarian societies as some kind of Monty Pythonesque toothless mud pit of plagued slavery. There is clearly alot of fear in it and if you’ve never made anything with your hands or grown your own food, I can empathise. However, If you read JM Neesons ‘Commoners’ you hear a very different story, from the intelligent, worldly people who lived there, and fought – TO THE DEATH – to preserve our right to the land. This is the key, have all the tech you want but return to us our (god) given right to the land. This is the problem that Luddites so devastatingly defined – that technology is hand in glove with the colonisers and land thiefs, the enclosers and the gate keepers. Junkaporta says all aboriginal stories are about the hubris of power and the folly of narcism. Nate’s take is like the beginning of our own!
In the early 80’s I was lucky enough to be allowed in the machinery spaces of teh 1955 TSS Manxman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSS_Manxman_(1955)
and the 1965 Ben My Cree
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Ben-my-Chree_(1965)
Remembering being in the boiler rooms and watching the fuel pump spinning to pump over three tons of oil an hour into the boilers – yes modern ships are more fuel efficient but often have larger engines makes me wonder what on earth do you think can replace that sort of fuel demand? I can’t see batteries or biofuel doing it. Lots of other stuff ditto.
We dont only need renewables but we need to get use to using much much less energy than we do now
I agree John, it’s as if the question is more a moral one – not can we do this, but should we, even though that conclusion seems unconscionable in the current culture.
The short answer is we won’t.
I think there might be, in future, decent demand for traditional sailing clippers with smaller (battery? Biodiesel?) motor assist — a bit like e-bike delivery vehicles. The impact that will have on trade is immense, but trade existed long before huge oil tankers did.
I am more and more thinking of a best-case scenario in terms of “everything you don’t produce yourself becomes twenty to 100 times more expensive than it is now”. That will require a profound change in lifestyle for the majority of the West, but how much actual suffering is involved depends on how soon we accept this and start making changes.
This is only tangentially relevant, but it made me smile: a traditional three-mast tall ship rescued a modern sailing boat.
https://www.gotheborg.se/news/rescue-of-sailing-boat/
Interesting series of articles starting here
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-04-19/its-getting-to-look-a-lot-like-degrowth-part-1/
My mother was much intrerested in environmental questions, I remember her sending me an article about hydrogen driven cars some 40 years ago. I wrote back, that Yes it can work, and No it will not be the future of the automobilism as it is a very wasteful way of creating a fuel for the car.
It is hard to understand how hydrogen can be so hyped. It might have the potential for storage of surplus solar or wind energy” I can’t see that much has changed except for enormous sums wasted by governments to promote a new “hydrogen economy”.
There are som applications that are less dumb than others, You COULD use surplus solar or wind to make hydrogen and use it for nitrogen fertilizers or “fossil free steel” (https://www.ssab.com/en/fossil-free-steel), but I still think this is very far from being commercially interesting (and before the steel becomes fossil free, the iron sponge needs to be fossil free, https://lkab.com/en/what-we-do/our-transformation/carbon-free-sponge-iron/) . With triple the price of N-fertilizer the use will be considerably lower. Probably the same with steel. So in any case, there is no scenario where hydrogen from renewables will just replace fossil fuels.
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2023%2F04%2F29%2Fvegan-diet-meat-scientists-british-beef-livestock-farming%2F
Wow, Jokes! Having listened to the pod cast he even references Monty Python! Apart from the parade of grinning professionals ‘too busy to farm’ and ‘having a ball’ creating gate keeper tech and materials to ‘make a lot of money’, we have to endure their film inspired history and patronising, paternalistic, pitying views on ‘regen agriculture’. Nate Hagen’s interview with Vandana Shiva perfectly shows the gaping, tumble weed blowing gaps in American academic thinking that emerge in this interview.
On a more curious note, when will we be able to put the haber-bosch ag vs regen at hatchet firmly in the soil? Sure you got some increased yields off the bat but isn’t it sterilising the soil in the longer term? Don’t small farms produce more per acre than mega farms?
“Hence, I think, the void in public culture around realistic energy futures. With our scornful view of the past, we just can’t conceive of energy solutions involving less, so we imagine there’ll be more because there has to be more. I’m beginning to think of this scorn for low energy pasts as perhaps the biggest impediment to a liveable future.”
That and our current collective inability to re-think and re-imagine livelihood in a plausibly realistic future economy, which, as you suggest, means rethinking and re-imagining livelihood itself (for these and a hundred other reasons).
I’ve been arguing that modern people are deeply (and literally) out of touch (and other senses too) with the very notion of livelihood which will be required. E.g., https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-04-18/livelihood-a-new-and-old-idea/
And I see the mainstream notion of a continued high energy future economy as pure propaganda of the disinformational sort, which is mainly why it seems to me that a small farm future isn’t just a nice and quaint idea, but far more likely an urgent necessity we should be smoothing they way for today, before it becomes a fully emergency response attempted too late.
Thanks for all the many interesting points in further comments. Alas, I’m a bit short on time for replying just now but please do keep the comments coming – I do read and learn from all of them, and they’re the lifeblood of this blog!
In my spare time, I’ve been tinkering around with a rocket stove, of my own creation.
Having watched YouTube videos of rocket stoves running off wood pellets, my “holy grail” is to get mine running off of pellet size bits of stick/twig and small tree branches cut into 1cm lengths.
I cut the twigs by hand and dry them out on a black tarp on a sunny day.
I’m not quite there yet, but I’m “homing in” on the ideal set up. Haven’t got the air flow quite right. Got the twigs to run the stove at about 120 degrees C, but not hot enough to cook on. I get over 240 degrees C burning bits of old pallets.
1/10th the wood for the same output as a woodburning stove.
I’ve realised that running a conventional wood stove is a diesel intensive activity, which involves me driving round the countryside with a chainsaw and my van, scavaging what I can find.
Not really an option in a SFF.
Twigs however, I generate from very close to home and usually have to dispose of at the local tip.
I also use everything that’s pruned from nearby. Sometimes small twig pieces mulch a path, but mostly I burn wood for heating/baking indoors. It is more common to see wood ‘brush’ burned off in the garden, leaving wood ash, which also has a use, as it’s certainly more fiddly and time-consuming to gather and store twigs, sticks and branches for use indoors, but what I do have is time, hence I’ve never needed to buy a load of firewood (which then requires a chainsaw, and an old Russian truck to deliver it). I’ve always appreciated the creation and use of ‘faggots’ to get the fire going in the old-style bread ovens. Waste not, want not:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUdZebtbd0o&ab_channel=BritishPath%C3%A9
@Simon H
Our garden produces quite a bit of stick/trig.
We live in an ex-council house, so the garden is allotment size (ish), but I’m not sure the neighbours would be too pleased if I had bonfires to burn it all off.
A rocket stove properly set up, burns very hot, so there is very little smoke or ssh to deal with.
“ash”
Sounds like a good project!
Why 1cm.lemgths rather than 5cm or 10cm.lemgths? That’s a lot of cutting if you’re doing it by hand.
@Kathryn
The 1cm length is to mimic the wood pellets which are roughly that size.
The rocket stove is “self feeding” by gravity, so the twigs have to be quite small to stop them jamming themselves up in the feed pipe. But, twig length will be something I will play around with once I’ve got the thing burning properly.
Cutting the twigs actually is not as labour intensive as you might think. Plenty of times in the day where I can cut twigs whilst doing other things. Listening to the radio, watching TV or chewing the cud with friends.
A sharp pair of secatuers helps!
I’ve also come to the realisation, that collecting conventional firewood for my conventional wood stove, would be a very labour intensive task without transport and cutting/splitting by hand.
My preferred manual method for cutting branches and twigs to small lengths involves not secateurs but a good quality (made in Nepal) khukuri around 15″-16″ overall length, along with a log on the ground (or some other type of chopping block).
With a thick convex edge like an axe, the khukuri resists getting stuck in the log, and it’s more nimble than a hatchet.
My left had holds a sheaf of branches, slowly advancing them across the log while my right hand lightly and rapidly chops the log at one spot, cutting off the bunched ends of the branches with each chop. The feed rate of the left hand is synchronized with the chopping rate of the right hand to obtain the desired length. It might take some practice to consistently cut 1 cm lengths.
@,Steve L.
Thanks for the tip. I’m going to give it a go.
I’ve got a nicely weighted Grünsfor Brick axe that might do the job.
If the trigs are no too thick, I bunch a few together and cut them in one go with the secatuers.
I’m also tinkering with rocket stoves. I like the designs that Peter van den Berg has put out on http://www.batchrocket.eu also the work of Matt Walker of walker stoves is interesting, then there is the french Uzume.fr.
The key seems to be to not use steel in the hottest parts of the stove but ceramic products like firebricks and ceramic fiber board and ceramic fiber wool.
The prototypes we have built burn very cleanly, and with very little fuel
@Chris Holtslag
Yes. I agree.
I’ve cast the burn chamber in situe, out of my own refactor cement. It’s a mix of perlite and cement fondu. 10 parts perlite to 1 part cement fondu.
Seems to be holding up well so far.
(I’ve also used the same recipe to make fire bricks for my conventional wood burner. It’s had much more use than the rocket stove and the bricks are doing fine.)
If I can get the burn air/fuel mix correct for the twigs/sticks, then it’s Happy Days !
I might put out a YouTube video if all goes well.
(Also, my attention is being drawn to making a biochar kiln!!! My next project )
Thanks for the firewood discussion. I plan to write something about this in due course. The ‘labour intensive’ argument can be a slippery slope – the same applies to growing vegetables … preparing firewood is something you do, because it’s what you do. But I agree it’s good to do it as efficiently as possible within the parameters. Firewood coppice or pollards with the right sized poles so you don’t have to split the logs is one way to go. We also have a kindle jig which works pretty well along with … an electric chainsaw. What was I saying earlier about not using clean electricity to produce heat?
I agree, but alas, I haven’t got any trees close to home that I can have access to and the garden isn’t big enough to grow a coppice of hazel. I have one tree, but, though it is fast growing, it isn’t fast enough!
It’s a bit of a trek to get to any local woodland that I can harvest and get home. (And even then, I’m careful to not be spotted!!!)
Regarding coppicing and fuel, has anyone out there tried growing hemp?
I’ve read good things about it’s versatility, speed of growth and hardyness in poor soil.
I’ve got some seeds on the go on the window ledge.
It’s definitely hemp and not its sister (or is it brother? I can never remember)!!!!