Hydrogen-Powered Transport Key To Climate Targets, Says Shell

The Guardian - Adam Vaughan

Oil firm says gas could account for 10% of global energy consumption by end of century 

Hyundai’s hydrogen car, the ix35 Fuel Cell. Photograph: Hyundai 

Planes and trucks powered by hydrogen will be a crucial part of efforts to cut carbon emissions to safe levels, according to oil giant Shell.
For the first time, the Anglo Dutch firm, which is facing calls by activist shareholders to take stronger action on global warming, has mapped out how the world could hit the Paris climate deal’s target of keeping temperature rises below 2C.
While development of hydrogen cars has stalled in the face of rapid growth in battery-electric vehicles, Shell believes the gas could account for 10% of global energy consumption by the end of the century.
The company’s Sky scenario, published on Monday, envisages that as fossil fuel use declines, old oil and gas facilities will be repurposed for hydrogen storage and transport.
Shell has no large scale hydrogen production but is a major player in natural gas, from which hydrogen can be made. The company launched its first hydrogen refuelling station in the UK last year and on Tuesday will open a second at a service station in Buckinghamshire.

The scenario envisages the first intercontinental flight in 2040. By 2070, the majority of trucks will be powered by hydrogen or batteries, as Tesla is planning.
Shell sees oil demand stagnating in the 2020s, followed by gas demand falling rapidly from 2040 as competition from renewables bites.
Many power grids will be forced by legislation to become entirely run off solar, wind and hydro power by 2040. But the biggest impact from governments will come from carbon taxes or prices put in place by 2030 across rich countries and China.
Industry watchers noted that the Sky scenario would still see temperatures rise to around 1.7-1.8C, above the Paris accord’s goal of pursuing efforts to limit rises to 1.5C, in addition to “well below” 2C.

Links

• Shell to open electric vehicle charging points at UK petrol stations
• Electric and plug-in hybrid cars whiz past 3m mark worldwide
• Shell Shareholder Resolution 2018
• Elon Musk unveils Tesla electric truck – and a surprise new sports car
• Hydrogen-Powered Trains Are Coming To Germany In 2021

As A Grazier I Rely On Water. Adani’s Latest Plans Put Our Future At Risk

The Guardian - Bruce Currie*

Scientists are concerned that the Carmichael mine could drain ancient Great Artesian Basin springs. Out in the dry country, this would be a disaster

Waterlillies at the natural springs on Doongmabulla Cattle Station. ‘We’ve been working incredibly hard to stop the damage and restore the Great Artesian Basin to its former glory’ Photograph: Tom Jefferson

It’s dry country up here, west of Emerald in Central Queensland. Free standing water is like liquid gold to us.
Luckily for graziers like me, we have the Great Artesian Basin, our greatest inland water resource, which covers 22% of Australia. Sometimes the Basin expels water from deep underground up to the surface, in the form of natural springs. They are like oases, providing reliable water in times of drought and supporting remarkable ecosystems.
But they’re under threat. More than 81% of Great Artesian Basin springs are now inactive, and I’m the first to acknowledge that a lot of that harm was caused by water extraction by graziers and farmers. In the past, we didn’t understand the impacts that our water extraction was having on the Great Artesian Basin, or how to fix it.
But we do now, and we’ve been working incredibly hard to stop the damage and restore the Great Artesian Basin to its former glory. Graziers across the Basin have been switching from uncontrolled bores and open drains to capped bores and pipes to control flows. In fact, over the last 17 years, more than 750 bores have been upgraded and more than 250 billion litres of water saved per year.
It’s taken a huge concerted effort and it’s had the support of Australian governments who have contributed approximately $250m to make it happen.

But when it comes to water conservation, it seems all are not equal. Just as we started to make real progress in reducing water wastage, the mining boom arrived and blew all our efforts out of the water (if you’ll pardon the pun).
Now, the very same governments that spent so much time and effort working with graziers to cap bores and install pipes, are handing out unlimited quantities of water, including Great Artesian Basin water, to coal and gas companies.
Last week we’ve heard that Adani’s Carmichael coal mine could threaten the magnificent Doongmabulla Springs – a sequence of 160 separate wetlands that stretches across a large area inland of Clermont. Scientists have pointed to new information which raises greater concerns that the Carmichael mine will drain these ancient Great Artesian Basin springs.
The federal department of environment has commissioned additional reports as part of the bioregional assessment for our region. These reports indicate that there is major uncertainty about the source of the Doongmabulla Springs, which leads to risks that they may not survive should the Carmichael mine proceed.
But that information is missing from a key document submitted by Adani to the Queensland government. In Adani’s Groundwater Dependent Ecosystem Management Plan, which determines how they deal with the risk to these natural springs, they ignore the information from the bioregional assessment.
The Adani Management Plan does not refer to the new research that has found geological faulting in nearby areas or the fact that the true source of the Doongmabulla Springs is still unknown. It does not refer to the new research that the bioregional assessment recommended should be undertaken to identify the source of the springs and assess the true risk of the mine – seismic surveys and a nest of deep bores.
The bioregional assessment was initiated by the commonwealth government several years ago, to quantify the cumulative impacts and risks that multiple new coal and gas projects were having on Queensland’s water resources. Large sums of taxpayers’ funds are being spent on it, and yet it is being ignored by mining companies such as Adani.
The mining process, through long wall and open cut operations, threatens aquifer structures. There is no management plan that could reverse this proposed destruction, confine toxins or reinstate aquifers.
I can’t help but feel there’s one set of rules for the mining industry and a different set for everyone else. It’s not just the double standards that grate on me, it’s the fact that what they are putting at risk is impossible to replace – aquifers of the Great Artesian Basin and ancient natural springs.
And out here in this dry country, that puts our future on the line.
Put simply no water means no business, no food production, no communities, just a toxic wasteland to be suffered by future generations.

*Bruce Currie runs a cattle grazing enterprise with his family in Central Queensland

Links

• Why Adani's planned Carmichael coalmine matters to Australia – and the world
• Brenda the Civil Disobedience Penguin v the Adani mine. Democracy is fatally compromised! 
• Federal Government To Lend Money To Adani Business Associates
• Shorten Says Talk About Adani Mine 'Dumbing Down Climate Debate'
• Bill Shorten Says There's A 'Role For Coal' And Adani Mine Just 'Another Project'
• Could A Future Labor Government Really Stop The Adani Mine?
• Labor Pushes For Federal Investigation Into Adani
• Adani Coalmine Won't Get Federal Rail Funding, Liberal Minister Says
• Big Surge In Opposition To Adani, New Polling Reveals
• Shorten Hails Cheap Wind And Solar, But Will He Stop Adani?
• Adani Parts Ways With Mining Services Company Downer Over Proposed Carmichael Mine
• Qld Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk Seeks To Veto Adani Loan
• Another Blow For Adani As Chinese Backers Pull Out
• NSW Coal Mines In The Pipeline Are 'Bigger Than Adani', Lock The Gate Says

How Smartphones Are Heating Up The Planet

The Conversation - Lotfi Belkhir

Smart phones are rarely recycled and that’s just one reason tech devices are increasing our carbon footprints. Here Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, is seen in 2016 talking about new iPhones. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

When we think about climate change, the main sources of carbon emissions that come to mind for most of us are heavy industries like petroleum, mining and transportation.
Rarely do we point the finger at computer technologies.
In fact, many experts view the cyber-world of information and computer technologies (ICT) as our potential saviour, replacing many of our physical activities with a lower-carbon virtual alternative.
That is not what our study, recently published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, suggests.
Having conducted a meticulous and fairly exhaustive inventory of the contribution of ICT —including devices like PCs, laptops, monitors, smartphones and tablets — and infrastructure like data centres and communication networks, we found that the relative contribution of ICT to the total global footprint is expected to grow from about one per cent in 2007 to 3.5 per cent by 2020 and reaching 14 per cent by 2040.
That’s more than half the relative contribution of the entire transportation sector worldwide.
Another disconcerting finding is that all this extraordinary growth is mostly incremental, essentially shattering the hope that ICT will help reduce the global carbon footprint by substituting physical activities with their virtual counterparts.

The impact of smartphones
Perhaps the most surprising result of our study was the disproportionate contribution of smartphones relative to the overall ICT footprint.
We found that the relative emissions share of smartphones is expected to grow from four per cent in 2010 to 11 per cent by 2020, dwarfing the individual contributions of PCs, laptops and computer displays.
In absolute values, emissions caused by smartphones will jump from 17 to 125 megatons of CO2 equivalent per year (Mt-CO2e/yr) in that time span, or a 730 per cent growth.
The lion’s share of this footprint (85 to 95 per cent) will be caused not by the use of the device, but rather by its production. That includes, in addition to the manufacturing energy, the energy for material mining for gold and the so-called rare-earth elements like yttrium, lanthanium and several others that today are almost exclusively available only from China.

Want to help combat climate change? Stop replacing your phone every two years. (Shutterstock)

Another guilty participant in this excessive carbon footprint are the phone plans that encourage users to get a new smartphone every two years. That accelerates the rate at which older models become obsolete and leads to an extraordinary and unnecessary amount of waste.
These findings pertain to the device side.

Every text, download, email uses server energy
On the infrastructure side, we predict the combined footprint of data centres and communications networks will grow from 215 megatons of C02 equivalent a year (Mt-CO2e/yr) in 2007 to 764 MtCO2-e/yr by 2020, with data centres accounting for about two thirds of the total contribution.

Data centres are an increasing source of carbon emissions. (Shutterstock)

For comparison purposes, the entire carbon footprint of Canada was about 730 MtCO2-e in 2016 and is expected to decrease by 2020.
The growth in smartphones and data centres aren’t unrelated.
Indeed, it’s the dizzying growth in mobile communications that’s largely driving the pace for data centres. For every text message, video download, photo exchange, email or chat, there’s a 24/7 power-hungry server in some data centre that’s making it happen.
It’s the energy consumption that we don’t see.

Software companies spur growth
Finally, and perhaps the most ironic aspect of all this, is that it’s software that is driving the overall growth in ICT as a whole, devices and infrastructure included.
Software companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo boast some of the largest data centres in the world. The rise in dominance of the mobile operating systems, namely Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, along with the millions of mobile applications that are built on top of those platforms, has spawned the mobile communication age.
The incredible —as well as unsustainable— growth in the emission footprint of all this hardware is there for only one purpose: To support and serve the software universe.
In other words, while it’s the hardware that does all the dirty work, it’s the software that’s calling all the shots.
The way out?
At the societal level, we must demand that all data centres run exclusively on renewable energy.
At the individual level: Hold on to your smartphone for as long as you can, and when you do upgrade, make sure you recycle your old one. Sadly, only one per cent of smartphones are being recycled today.

Links

• Why we need to tackle the growing mountain of ‘digital waste’
• Global Emissions
• Assessing ICT global emissions footprint: Trends to 2040 & recommendations
• Where to Find Rare Earth Elements