S2, E4: Why We Tin Tomatoes
S2, E4: Why We Tin Tomatoes
Series 2 Previously Published on LinkedIn, March 22, 2023 (minor edit)
Previously...
The thrust of this series has not just been about making the case for hydrogen but it is an attempt to answer the question of what it means to decarbonise and the elements of that decarbonisation. The destruction of climate stability and ecosystems is not a problem that can be solved by the gentrification of energy in the northern regions at the expense of the devastation of ecosystems and communities in the predominantly poorer, southern hemisphere.
I have referred to this as 'the rehabilitation of energy' because the aim should be to remove the destructive environmental impacts of energy production and use wherever they occur. This does not mean giving a free pass to favoured energy solutions on the assumption it will all work out. I discuss the impacts of mining and energy hegemony in two forthcoming series.
As discussed in an article last week, fossil fuel demand has almost doubled every 20 years since 1900 and this can be checked by simply looking for a graph from any credible source including the IEA, EPA and IPCC. Hydrocarbons dominate the energy mix because the demand for it is unmatched, although, existing demand is about to be dwarfed by the that of the economically developing world.
Appreciating that hydrocarbons can't be simply switched off, puts us in the position to think about what we need to do, which is to displace the carbon. The case presented so far in this series is that blue hydrogen is a true carbon displacer and it represents our biggest enabling opportunity to decarbonise. If it is authentic blue, by definition, carbon is captured that would otherwise be emitted.
In S2, E2/4 The Hidden Dimensions of Value, I also introduced my concept of multi-dimensional value, which includes intrinsic-value (e.g. energy or information), emissions-value and availability-value. I am going to add one more dimension to that in this article and it is relevant to the future viability of green hydrogen.
The (Future) Case for Green Hydrogen
The popular operational argument against green hydrogen, is that the acquisition is inefficient; we have to use electricity to chemically isolate it from water and in addition to this energy overhead, there is a reduction in the energy content of the end product. This is similar to the argument against blue hydrogen dismantled here:
and the two episodes that followed.
If decarbonisation adds value and costs energy why would we expect it to be free? The price of that added value is determined by the market, thus, as with any commercial venture, it is the job of the producer to work within the parameters of cost and the expectations of the market.
However the case for green hydrogen is different in a number of ways.
I have previously stated why, under current constructs, green hydrogen is not a displacer of carbon, since any carbon displacement would have already been achieved at the point of electrical generation. The rationale for this can be found in 'S2, E3: False Equivalences'. The argument runs that if anything the reduced energy content would imply a reduction in carbon displacement.
However, the claim here is that under different circumstances it could be a true carbon displacer, and those circumstances are also contingent on being able to monetise another dimension of value. That is the case I am building towards now.
Deferrable Use
Electricity is instantaneous in nature. It must be used immediately but if we want to defer the use of the energy we have to store it in another form. The ability to store that energy has an energy cost in terms of hardware and process. Every time a mobile phone is charged, there is an energy cost over and above what is actually made available to the device later. That is the price of portability and convenience.
Like any other animal, hunter gatherer humans ate what the environment made available, which was seasonally and geographically determined. Agriculture made more food available but that would only be useful if it could be stored. The globalisation of food commodities made it possible for those in rich nations to have whatever they want, whenever they wanted, by removing the geographical constraints on what was seasonal. The result is a voracious demand economy in wealthy regions, but owing to certain limits to growth, the expectations that this is built upon are not currently scalable.
As storage methods improved, consumption became increasingly decoupled from the seasons, but now it is easy to forget that the preservation of anything costs energy. The processes for drying, freezing, pasteurising and canning are all means to preserve harvested foodstuffs for a future time. Effectively they are being endowed with a time-value that makes them available in the future. Adding time-value to energy is what we are doing when we store it.
Carried Forward
Historically, the our relationship with stored energy has been skewed, because human economic and technological development was built on the back of energy that was already found in storage. Hydrocarbons are found with their time-value because hundreds of millions of years of free-energy was harvested from the sun by organic lifeforms, to be stored by natural processes over geological time. The true costs of this are quite literally sunk in pre-history and all modern humans have paid for is the price of access.
By contrast, 'renewable' energy comes from harvesting free energy in real time. Please don't mistake me for using an analogy when I say, 'harvested'; because wind or solar deployments are 'farms'. Sure, sun, wind, wave, current etc are not biological yet there is no fundamental difference between the energy we can harvest from them and what the ecosystem already does. The biology evolved regulated reproduction and growth cycles to harness seasonal variation.
Adding Time-Value to Availability
Harvested energy is therefore intermittent or 'non-dispatchable', meaning it is not available on demand. To overcome the irregularity of supply energy must be stored for use when it is not available for collection. Also, In lieu of energy storage, excess renewable generation is lost as waste heat, which is again solvable by storage. In fact, if baseload energy requirements are to be supplied by renewable sources, storage is unavoidable. Whether for buffering intermittent supply or reducing waste the effect of storage is to give energy an added time-value dimension. This time-value means that green hydrogen can displace hydrocarbons flexibly in the future. This would be most effective in regions where capacity for local Utility Scale Storage (USS) has been achieved.
Decoding our Energy Choices
The differential energy content between what is used instantaneously and that which has been stably stored for future use is exchanged for time-value. Nobody wants a mobile telephone that only works on mains power and portability comes from the ability to store energy. The convenience of fossil fuels is that they were found in storage and could be refined into something that can be pumped into a tank and transported with the vehicle - unfortunately that comes with carbon. In an electric vehicle the energy 'tank' might weigh a metric tonne.
What must be recognised is that demand-side behaviour emerges from combinations of subjective value judgements. The choices made about energy usage are rarely entirely rational and this explains the erratic behaviour of markets.
If I have a car that can travel 50 miles on a gallon of fuel and you drive a limousine that takes five gallons to cover the same distance I can, with some justification, say you are being wasteful. Let's look at this in terms of the subjectivity behind it. You would be trading energy efficiency for the intangible experience of travelling in luxury. If I drive rather than take public transport, I am trading energy efficiency for convenience and possibly, time.
These are choices that people want while they are available and although we can waste some time discussing whether or not they should have them, changing behaviours for the better can only come from providing better options.
Trade offs are made in the use of energy all the time but presumably we can agree that hospitals should have all the energy they need. We can readily accept that the process of producing tinned tomatoes requires high temperatures not to mention the cost of cans or jars, but who would suggest that the ability to stop food perishing is not worth the energy? Yet that is a decision that is made by the willingness of people (and therefore the market) to pay for the added value.
If you have fresh fruit and vegetables, the best way to avoid waste is to eat them before tucking into the frozen and tinned supplies. You may prefer fresh produce but that does not detract from the value of having storable versions that can be used at some future unspecified time, perhaps when other options are not available.
For instance, if you are resolved to displace convenient but unhealthy snacks with fruit, the shelf life of the fruit becomes a factor to consider to make it sustainable. If too much is bought some will spoil so managing stocks is really time-value management. Get that wrong and you may be breaking into a bag of preservative laden potato chips with the half-life of Carbon-14. However, if you have some dried or tinned fruit, you have a choice because they come with time-value too.
So just because time-value is not something we consciously appreciate doesn't mean it does not exist, just that provision for it is made indirectly, unwittingly even. Typically, energy providers are contracted to provide power for baseload demand, regardless of the generation profile of their assets. For renewables, this bakes in the problem of intermittency but regardless of how production gaps are bridged (including the use of fossil fuels), the cost of doing so amounts to the purchase of time-value.
Thought Experiment
As a thought experiment, imagine there are two renewable energy suppliers, A and B. Supplier A generates electricity for supply to the grid when it is available and B specialises in generating electricity that will be used exclusively for producing green hydrogen that will be put into storage for deferred use. In an ideally equitable arrangement, both suppliers should get the same price for their generating efforts net of differential overheads, despite the fact that there is a difference in energy content. How then, you may ask, can these possibly be equivalent?
Simply put, the intrinsic-value in terms of electrical power from A, must equal the intrinsic-value plus the time-value of B. It is a simple equation and the equivalence happens if the time-value equals the difference in energy.
Is that a big 'if'?
Not really, because despite my deliberate emphasis, it is the objective cost of storage and can't be anything else. To hide it within a Power Production Agreement (PPA) is to miss the point that making energy storable adds a different dimension of value.
That is not to say the market opinion of value does not have an impact, just that the influence is limited to how much stored energy the market needs, or the availability-value. With time-value occupying its own market, there will be developmental pressure for the creation of increasingly efficient storage technologies. This is only a thought experiment, because for the sake of clarity, I am not going to specify how this can be done here. Of course the more pertinent question is that, even if we can agree this is possible, what would be the point?
Well it would address the matter of value equivalences which is a problem below the radar. It monetises more of what we want and negatively monetises what we don't want. It allows us to attach a price to the value of deferred benefit. It would allow the energy diner can have a portion of electricity without the side order of carbon. I discuss carbon markets in the wider context of waste in a future series of articles. Before closing, I will make a brief connection to the subject of waste, by taking one last liberty with the food analogy.
"..., nutritionally important amounts of vitamins, such as vitamin C and riboflavin, and minerals such as iron and zinc, are found in the peel of seven root vegetables: beetroot, field mustard, wild carrot, sweet potato, radish, ginger and white potato. And the U.S Department of Agriculture shows that unpeeled apples contain 15% more vitamin C, 267% more vitamin K, 20% more calcium, 19% more potassium and 85% more fiber than their peeled equivalents. Also, many peels are rich in biologically active phytochemicals, such as flavonoids and polyphenols, which have antioxidant and antimicrobial properties."
Kirsty Hunter Fruit and vegetables: Is it better to peel them? | Salon.com
When ordering a dinner at a restaurant the preparation is rolled into the price but nobody asks to take home the vegetable peelings in a doggy bag. The point is that waste is what we don't personally value, it is not inherently valueless, so it behooves us to value what is important, including the benefit of burning something that has already had its carbon removed.