Future of Energy

Jan 30

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY WITH MICHAEL BARNARD

What will the global energy mix look like in 2060? Which technologies will dominate in future, and which will “dead-end?” What about the tough problems, like powering long range ships and aircraft? What happens to nuclear?

I asked Michael Barnard, global expert and consultant to the biggest energy investors on the planet.

Michael lives and breathes energy tech. He is utterly pragmatic, laser-focused on cutting through the nonsense, and backs all his assertions with science and comprehensive, quantified, costed analysis. He is also passionate about debunking the myths and spreading the word about where the real opportunities lie. He shares his insights via his Redefining Energy – Tech podcast, and publishes prolifically in Clean Technica and Forbes Magazine.

All of which explains why I like him so much. Honestly, he's a standout. I endorse him unequivocally: the more organizations and investors who consult Michael the better -- for their balance sheets and for our future.

He also happens to be a prolific energy commentator on LinkedIn. You can follow him, or reach out to him for consulting, here.

Michael was at home in Vancouver, Canada when we recorded. He has a terrific sense of humour and was extremely generous with his insights, covering so much ground we had to split our discussion over two episodes. In Episode 1 below (or download it on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts) he shares his no-nonsense assessments of a bunch of energy generating technologies. The entire discussion is peppered with his first-hand stories from real projects around the world. Just wait until you hear what he has to say about hydrogen projects! In Episode 2 we have a ton of fun discussing biofuels, long-range shipping, carbon pricing, nuclear reactors, geothermal, grid-scale energy storage and more, and we wrap up with Michael's short list of Climate Actions That Will Work.

Scroll down for a list of Michael’s go-to articles for further reading — each one is a model of clarity and insight — and scroll a little further for full transcripts of both episodes.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS

Please note, these transcripts were AI generated and lightly edited for clarity and will doubtless still contain some minor errors. The true record is the audio version.

FUTURE OF ENERGY WITH MICHAEL BARNARD - PART 1

BRUCE MCCABE: Welcome to Future Bites where we explore pathways to a better future and my guest today is Michael Barnard, an energy strategist and consultant based out of Vancouver, Canada. Welcome Michael to the podcast.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Well thank you for having me Bruce.

BRUCE MCCABE: It's my pleasure and I am so looking forward to this conversation because I've been reading so much of what you've been writing. You write about energy, you speak about it and you consult on it. I know you live and breathe it, but I've been reading all your articles in Forbes magazine and Clean Technica and these places and you are robust and direct and absolutely ruthlessly honest about what works and what doesn't in energy. And you back it with numbers and that makes... You're absolutely one of those people that I want to share with my listeners because of that.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Yeah I have breadth and the climate crisis is too important to allow waffling, diversion, predatory delay. My goal in life is to get billions and trillions of dollars we need to spend quickly, spent wisely. So I do projections out through 2100 of what the likely mix of technologies and solutions are that make sense, are they technically viable, are they fiscally competitive with alternatives which have the same value propositions, and will human beings accept them. I've got the basics of science, math, I've got the basics of economics, I've got the basics of cognitive science. I'm not doing PhD level stuff but there's just too much urgency to waffle.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah and so much nonsense out there, where just a few numbers and a little bit of time on calculations just cuts through it all. You just coined a phrase there that I hadn't heard but I love it and I'm going to borrow it. Predatory delay.

MICHAEL BARNARD: This is not original to me. This is a very common term that is applied to legacy industries that attempt to prevent the diminution or dissolution of their business cases. In the case of gas utilities, which I was writing about this morning for example. Gas utilities are going away you're not going to blend hydrogen and pipes, you're not going to heat homes with it, it's not going to end up in ground transportation. So all of the pipelines are going away and all the gas utilities are going away and they are fighting tooth and nail to prevent that. And it is predatory delay because most of them know better.

BRUCE MCCABE: They do, or they just simply grind away at what they do know and refuse to look at even perhaps what the alternatives are. I mean they're all paying the sins for lack of diversification for 20 years, since everyone really did know, but anyway. So I get that all the time... I'm going to use that term predatory delay. I get these questions which have been planted in the public consciousness about why EVs are terrible and why wind turbines are terrible and it's just nonsense.

So I thought maybe we could run through a bit of a checklist of your future energy sources and we can maybe spend some time on the ones where there's a lot of misunderstanding about potential. Would that be reasonable? I'd love to do that.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Absolutely.

BRUCE MCCABE: Because I think you and I are probably in fervent agreement on things like, hey solar is blistering at its pace, its simplicity, it's going to double in efficiency again for the cost. There's so much upside potential. Wind, very similar learning curve, very good things happening there. There's not so much to say right in controversy. Are they our top two?

MICHAEL BARNARD: Oh absolutely. They're going to be something like 80 to 90% of our generation mix combined, they're just huge and to be clear there's some pros and cons of each, right. They complement each other because when sometimes the wind is blowing at night and the sun oddly enough doesn't shine at night on the same part of the planet.

And wind, offshore wind especially, it gets rid of some logistical things. You can make really massive wind turbines and deliver them by ship which you can't do on roads.

But solar panels, they work really well with the containerization of everything. All those shipping containers, everything that goes into a solar farm can be packed into shipping containers and delivered anywhere in the world by the cheapest mechanism, most commodified standardized mechanism of logistical transportation we have. It's one of the reasons they're winning. They're going to be solar.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah and we can put them in so many places. I'm always fascinated by where we can put them. The creative ways people are putting them over cycleways, on industrial facilities, embedding PVs in the skins of motor vehicles, although the economics of that aren't so wonderful, but it's creative. The solar windows, solar glass, PVs in construction. It's fascinating to see what that real-estate picture looks like because it's actually pretty healthy long-term. A lot of people worry about how much real estate solar could take up but it's actually a pretty minimal additional amount of real estate isn't it?

MICHAEL BARNARD: Well it doesn't even matter. People just don't do the numbers on how much ground we have. We have a lot of ground. The amount of energy we actually need from solar doesn't cover that much of it. People see these massive farms and they go, wow, that's a huge number of solar panels. But if you do the math, just calculate what percentage of the land of China is covered in solar panels, minuscule amount. Mark Jacobson has done the calculation. I think it's something like 2.1, no 1.7% of the world's surface is covered with fossil fuel infrastructure or mines or refineries.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: And all of the renewables necessary for all of our power generation in the future takes up less room than that.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, I love it. So we get real estate back. Yeah, in the transition. We actually get real estate back and I love Mark for that. Mark is the head of atmospheric sciences, for our listeners, at Stanford University and another hero of mine because again, he puts the numbers behind it. Publishes his numbers and he's open to criticism. Improve his numbers if you want to make an argument.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Yeah, I mean he gets spiky sometimes but you know what? I get spiky sometimes.

BRUCE MCCABE: So do I. Yeah, so we actually get a net gain in real estate by transitioning off all those pipelines, refineries, gas fields — gas fields, take up so much real estate as well as coal mines and all those things. So it's amazing, isn't it? And that's a misnomer.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Well, it's actually, we get so much back. I mean, just think about this for a second. The average coal plant kills 80 people a year. The World Health Organization says that I think, what is it, 7.5 million premature deaths a year. And that's somewhat due to internal air pollution, which we fixed by electrifying, and the rest is by mostly burning fossil fuels. And so we're killing lots of people and degrading their life and giving a whole bunch of kids asthma. Well, guess what? Everybody's life is going to be better. And I'm not sure about anybody else, but I've walked to a lot of places with a lot of fossil fuels. I lived in Toronto when coal was still being burned there, and the air sucks a lot of days, it's just not pleasant. But if you're in a place that's run by renewables the air is really nice smelling. Unless, unless there's a paper mill in town.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah. Yeah. I'm constantly trying to tell people there's so much new wealth to be generated and so many jobs, which Mark Jacobson also does as well, quantifies the jobs in the transition. One of the fun facts in Australia is that the entire fossil fuel industry, if you actually look at the Bureau of Statistics data here, employs fewer people than McDonald's does in this country. [laughter] Right? Now... Well, now that's... They're important people. Do we care about them? Yes, we do. Do we want them to have new jobs and all that? Yes, of course we do. Can we transition them? Absolutely. It's not that big a problem to transition them to great new jobs in the whole renewable side. But anyway, [laughter] proportionality. Right.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Well, let's take an example, because coal mining has been heavily automated, mountain top removal, and all the technology that goes with that, lots of engineers made it as efficient as possible. How efficient? Well, in the Appalachians coal country and the east side of the United States, the turn of the 20th century, there are about 750 to 800,000 people working coal.

BRUCE MCCABE: Okay.

MICHAEL BARNARD: As of a couple of years ago, there were 60,000.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: And the Appalachians are delivering just as many tons of coal as they were us over a century ago. We don't... The fossil fuel industry has been very effective at making itself more efficient at extracting those things and eliminating jobs. Like, let's take Calgary where I've lived, Calgary, Alberta, oil sands, business central. Well, through the 2010s, 2000 and 2010s. Well, they were hiring a lot of people and they're developing a lot of oil sands. And then the oil boom, oil bust came along and they laid everybody off. And around 2015, 2016 oil came back, oil sands came back, but they'd invested a lot of money so that the jobs didn't come back. Last time I counted there were 19 empty office spaces, 19 office buildings in downtown Calgary. They're desperately trying to get call centers into them. They're desperately trying to get... Turn them into condos for people who, I'm not sure what the people are going to do when they move to Calgary, but it's a fascinating process in transition. But you said something important there, which is really important for everybody to understand. You said there's a lot of money in this.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yes.

MICHAEL BARNARD: And so that's why there's so much disinformation involved in this, that fossil fuel industry is losing all their money. A whole bunch of people, like the methanol and ammonia industries think they're going to get enormous amounts of more money, and so they're just getting way out over their skis or their surfboards and not in an attractive hang 10 sort of way. Telling porkies about the energy transition, it's fascinating to watch and track. But it's a pain as we try to actually decarbonize intelligently.

BRUCE MCCABE: It's very painful. Very, very painful. And if we run through the list, the next one that comes up all the time at the moment, so much hype now is hydrogen. And I know you've been writing an enormous volume of stuff debunking that. And I wrote a piece of analysis, which was a minuscule compared to what you've put out, where I started to do some of the maths around hydrogen in Australia. So I want us talk about the maths [laughter], because...

MICHAEL BARNARD: Yeah.

BRUCE MCCABE: In fact, I saw a diagram you put out, which was like the six acts in a hydrogen [laughter] business. And I laughed out loud, just run us through those six acts because this is... It almost tells the story of what's going on in hydrogen at every level.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Oh, sure. So act one, some greasy lobbyists, eau du hydrocarbons floating around his head, leaving an oil slick behind him as he waddles, is wining, he's dining. He's convincing people that hydrogen for energy and hydrogen for transportation is the play. And in act two, he finds a glomerulus politician whose heart is in the right place, but has got the STEM literacy of, oh, let's just call it a planarian a single celled worm. [laughter] It's lots of great politicians who are really trying to do good. The STEM literacy among politicians is like the STEM literacy among bankers. It's not high. And so he looks at this lobbyist thing and says, the lobbyist must be right and this makes sense. And so he unlocks a big bundle of money, and so they've got the sack of money for hydrogen for something. And so act three, along comes the poor fleet owner, typically a transit owner, or, IKEA in... Although I don't think of IKEA this way, but fleet owners are operators and especially for public transit and for regional light rail, they're typically always running out of money. They have no money. It's like they're always hunting to scrape a... Brilliant operational people. The efficiency they gain out of these things and the maintenance they manage to do is amazing, but they have no money. So the money goes plump and they go, oh my God, that's more money than I've seen in years.

BRUCE MCCABE: This is the subsidy money from government that's on offer to try hydrogen in their ferry, train, truck fleet, or whatever. Right? That's, they go, “Oh, wow. There's some free money available.”

MICHAEL BARNARD: Yeah. And it's typically about a million US or a million euros per truck …

BRUCE MCCABE: Oh.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Or 15 million per two car train. These are two car light trains. Most are... Like in the refueling infrastructure, because it costs $10 or $20 million to set up a hydrogen refueling station.

BRUCE MCCABE: Oh, there you go.

MICHAEL BARNARD: So they've spent the money, they've got the hydrogen fleet, everybody shows up, the hydrogen chorus is going, "Ooh and ah" and being really excited. And everybody around the world in the hydrogen bubble is saying, "Look more momentum for hydrogen."

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: But then along comes act four.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, this is the crunch.

MICHAEL BARNARD: The crunch. So, at this point, the transit organization or the fleet owner is spending $15 to $35 per kilogram for hydrogen, but they're getting money from the government. The money is subsidized. They're going, "This is okay, I can afford to do this." And then somebody who's not gormless in the governmental goes, "Wait a minute, we're spending a lot of money on that. This county over here isn't spending nearly as much of that. They're spending a quarter or an eighth of that on electricity. Why are we giving this county over here all this money for hydrogen?" And they say, "Well, utility, or transit agency, you're going to have to just accept that and find a way to pay for it yourself."

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah. At which time the actual calculations emerge, the truth emerges to what hydrogen really costs to make, if you're going to make it green. And compress... Refrigerate transport and then lose energy through when you burn it, because it's really inefficient as combustion. All that suddenly surfaces, the truth ‘outs.’

MICHAEL BARNARD: Yeah. As we look around the world, the average is three times the total cost of ownership for hydrogen for transportation fleets.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah. But compared to...

MICHAEL BARNARD: Over battery electric. Correct. Battery electric. And the assessments right now, everybody is just waiting for hydrogen... For battery electric trucks. Because the total cost of ownership is better for battery electric trucks than for diesel trucks. And most of the world is already electrifying their rail massively because the total cost of ownership of electrified rail is vastly better than diesel rail.

BRUCE MCCABE: The dollar drives it. See, the economics align capitalism. Everybody's on... Should be on board. Yeah, it's interesting. So 300%, if you went hydrogen with a fleet of trucks, it would cost you 300% what it would cost if you were electrifying those trucks? Three times as much.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Yeah. Three times as much.

BRUCE MCCABE: This is what people need to know.

MICHAEL BARNARD: No. I want to be honest, I found two hydrogen for energy plays in the world that actually makes sense.

BRUCE MCCABE: Oh, I think there's more than two. Let's talk about these. Yeah. Okay. [laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: Oh, there's two that I've found. Two. That's it. Like I looked at a lot, and I've only found two that make any sense. The first is a tiny village of 4000 in Mali in Africa. In the village, pure hydrogen vents up out of the ground from a geological store of hydrogen, white hydrogen. And they pipe it into a little gas turbine and they make electricity for the village. So that's one. Free hydrogen from the ground inside the village.

The second is in Prince Rupert, which is just up the road from me. Prince Rupert or Prince George? I think it's Prince George. Prince George... Like 500 kilometers as the obsessive compulsive crow flies north of where I'm sitting. It's like middle of nowhere inside the Rockies. Inside the coastal range. It's a pulp and paper plant, a pulp and paper town. And there's a chemical plant that makes bleach for the pulp and paper industry. Side by side of it, half a kilometer away. And when you make sodium chlorine, the bleaching agent, the stuff that turns into the bleaching agent, hydrogen comes out.

BRUCE MCCABE: Oh, by-products.

MICHAEL BARNARD: As a byproduct. And so they just... A company called Teralta has put themselves in the middle of this, they capture the hydrogen, they get rid of the water in it, they pipe it half a kilometer in stainless steel 20 times the cost of PVC pipes in parts, the entire cost structure for hydrogen, it makes no sense. And they're reducing... They can reduce, once they start this year, I think is expected, 25% reduction in natural gas burning or processing. They got about two million gigajoules they burn every year. About 1500 gigajoules of natural gas. They'll save about 700,000 tons of CO2e. And not venting the hydrogen, but the hydrogen itself from the plant which they were venting, it's 53,000 tons of CO2e a year from its global warming potential.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, nice.

MICHAEL BARNARD: So it's actually good. Now if they'd electrify it...

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Yeah. That's two.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah. Two real projects actually working economically, everything, the lot. Yeah. Interesting.

MICHAEL BARNARD: And one of them's not in operation yet. The rest of them? I've never found one that pencils out. I looked at hydrogen for a maritime shipping, it's going to be four to six times the cost for methanol and ammonia derivatives as it is for variable-sulphor fuel oil today. And biofuels, which we make enough of today for the end state after electrification and a couple of things. Biofuels are only two and a half, two to two and a half times as expensive. So you don't have to...

BRUCE MCCABE: Go on.

MICHAEL BARNARD: You don't have to change your tanks and your engines at great expense, $15 million per small ship to burn biofuels. And you don't have to change your port. You just mix the biofuels with the other diesel in increasing amounts over time, and you just put it into the ship and burn it.

BRUCE MCCABE: I want to ask about those biofuels in a minute. Because you said we can produce enough.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Yeah.

BRUCE MCCABE: And I'm particularly keen to explore that in a second. But just still on hydrogen, before we leave it. It doesn't really make sense also in long-haul aviation. You look at the aircraft designs and there's no windows for two thirds of the fuselage because it's so volume inefficient that you... [laughter] So long-haul aviation doesn't seem like a suitable target.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Well, it's actually worse than that. It's actually worse than that.

BRUCE MCCABE: Okay.

MICHAEL BARNARD: You remember the Boeing? What is it 387 Max or 380... The one that keeps falling out of the air, and they got grounded for five years. [laughter]

BRUCE MCCABE: I knew you'd be direct!

MICHAEL BARNARD: The reason they grounded it was really simple and in order to put the bigger engines on it they had to move wings back a bit and they changed the balance of the plane. Which they then controlled for with software but it created unstability conditions that pilots had no idea what to do with and that was with a stable winged platform where the weight didn't change over the flight … Here's what happens with hydrogen, you put all that liquid hydrogen in the back of the plane, say 5,000 tons of it in the example I looked at, and then you burn it over your flight. So you take the weight of five African elephants out of the back of the plane and the plane all of a sudden is that massively nose heavy and dives out of the sky and kills everybody on board.

BRUCE MCCABE: Right because it doesn't go on the wings, right? You need to have spherical pressurized containers. It's got to be in the fuselage. It's so out there and so...

MICHAEL BARNARD: It's not even pressurized. It has to be liquid in order to get sufficient energy density and that's the next piece, liquid hydrogen is 20 degrees above absolute zero. That's like 273 degrees colder than we fleshly humans like, and we have to be in this aluminum pressurized tube with this 273 degree colder gas that or liquid that really wants to turn to gas, really wants to ignite and turn us into a ball of flames in the sky. It's just non-sensical.

BRUCE MCCABE: You know what killed it for me? None of these things. What killed it for me was looking at aviation and particularly passenger vehicles when Toyota, which still persists with this whole hydrogen thing... You just... It just kills it on maintenance. So you look at a hydrogen fuel cell with electric, hybrid in a vehicle or you look at a similar thing in aviation and we're talking about 20 times the maintenance requirement and cost overhead of an electric version. Now obviously in aviation electrification works well only with short-range aviation, but they're gorgeous aircraft and for leisure aviation lots of stuff... It's 1/20th the maintenance and in vehicles that just kills it instantly before you go any further, if it's going to cost me that much more to maintain the vehicle than it is for pure simple EV. Why would you do it? It's impossible!

MICHAEL BARNARD: Well, let's take a... I'm not sure what class you use. It's class eight in North America, There's a different way they call it in Europe same thing kind of like 27, 26 ton vehicles, 80,000 pound vehicles and these are the big trucks that just drive along the highways. So let's take one of those for a second take that tractor at the front. The thing with all the power. Well in order to make a battery electric truck, you need a couple of electric motors and you need the batteries and then you need a power management unit.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Right, and then you need brakes and stuff like that. But this is like it's pretty simple. To create a fuel cell truck, you need all of that and then you need high-pressure or liquid hydrogen tanks.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: And then you need pumps. And then you need all the thermal management because...

BRUCE MCCABE: All the thermal management is huge.

MICHAEL BARNARD: It's enormous. But you've got 700 atmosphere hydrogen when you release that to use it that temperature changes... because that's what gas does, everybody's got... Ever work with compressed air cans? Why is it so cold? Well, that's gas changing pressure and that just you can ice those things up so easily, it just takes a tremendous amount of thermal management of the process and then you've got to actually take... When a fuel cell is used with hydrogen it creates water, which sounds innocuous. But let's take high... Once again, you've been a Whistler, I know this. I don't know if you're there between 2010 and 2014. That's when they had one of the hydrogen fuel cell bus initiatives. In time for the Olympics, Olympics is always an opportunity.

BRUCE MCCABE: So you can show. Yeah, absolutely. Showcase that “we're clean. We've got a hydrogen bus running.” That's every city in the world goes down this path.

MICHAEL BARNARD: It's like $160 million to put these hydrogen buses in place and run them for four years. And the story gets worse, one of them is they're buses for Whistler, BC and you … what did you do when you went to Whistler?

BRUCE MCCABE: I skied.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Because it's a ski town.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: And so if they were going there for the Winter Olympics, guess what happens to hydrogen fuel cell buses that emit water that isn't carefully thermally managed out on the tailpipe? They freeze. [laughter] The hydrogen buses kept being stuck beside the road because they were frozen inside because the water froze. Oh, but trust me that is far from the stupidest thing. Here's my favorite thing about the Whistler bus experience, there wasn't enough green hydrogen being manufactured in British Columbia. The closest place they could get enough green hydrogen was Quebec which is 4,500 kilometers away and they put it in a pressurized maybe 300 atmospheric tanker truck and they drove it across Canada one way.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: And then they drove the empty truck back now...

BRUCE MCCABE: Oh, no. [chuckle]

MICHAEL BARNARD: I did the math on this.

BRUCE MCCABE: No! [laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: 9,000 kilometers round trip for the hydrogen trailer delivering about 10,000 kilometers of range for a bus.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, there you go!

MICHAEL BARNARD: And guess what? That 9,000 kilometers was diesel.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: [chuckle] This was such...

BRUCE MCCABE: Insanity.

MICHAEL BARNARD: I'm trying to remember the Potemkin village. It was a Potemkin village. It was a facade. And so every...

BRUCE MCCABE: But, and this is everywhere...

MICHAEL BARNARD: This was...

BRUCE MCCABE: Hydrogen. Every hydrogen... Let's just stop on that word. It's true, isn't it? Pretty much every... Maybe there's a few exceptions here, but pretty much every hydrogen project I've seen is exactly that. It's a facade to look greener and cleaner, or look like you're doing something to build a greener and cleaner future. But it's either black hydrogen, well, it almost always is, or it's steam methane reforming and all that sort of stuff, so there's plenty of emissions. They haven't gone green, and therefore they haven't hit the truthful numbers yet. And the economics would just kill it when they go to green hydrogen.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Well, let's just take a recent example, because it's fun. Everyone is like this, you can just ask the question, where do you get the hydrogen from? How much is it? CO2 intensity? So let's take Colorado, and let's take Amazon, and let's take Plug Power. Plug Power recently had this great announcement, where they said, "We're going to build the first electrolyzer at an Amazon distribution facility." Amazon distribution facility that uses hydrogen forklifts. The Amazon facility has the hydrogen forklifts, because the United States Department of Energy for 20 years was giving subsidies to people to build hydrogen refuelling stations and buy the initial forklifts. And now they say, well, it's a success story, because half of the forklifts were bought after we stopped giving them money, because the people already had the expensive hydrogen refuelling station, and they said, oh, we've got a forklift, so let's buy another one. We didn't really think about it. Contextually, there are 50,000 hydrogen forklifts in operation in the world, almost all of them in the United States. [chuckle]. In 2022, 2.1 million battery electric forklifts were sold. One year, 2.1 million. So this electrolyzers, of course, they're going to run it on green electricity? No, they're running it off Colorado's grid electricity.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, there you go, there you go. So it's all a lie. [laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: And Colorado, Colorado has a lot of coal still on its grid. Its grid intensity is something like 380 grams of carbon dioxide or equivalent per kilowatt hour. So it turns out to be something like 23... I've worked it out, something to the effect of 23 kilograms of CO2e per kilogram of hydrogen, which is eight times worse than burning diesel.

BRUCE MCCABE: Wow. Yeah. It's a crime. That is a crime. It's just terrible. Can I...

MICHAEL BARNARD: If you look around the world, the number of places that are running on green hydrogen, I mean, it's already homeopathic, but it just gets to be even more homeopathic.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me throw one number at you because I haven't done a half, well haven't done one one-thousandth the calculations you have [chuckle] but I did one for my home country in Australia because various billionaires and government people got excited about, "Hey, the transition plan for the natural gas export and domestic consumption in Australia — and the export industry is huge — the transition plan is hydrogen. We're going to move to this." And a very prominent businessman began spruiking that. So I did the math. What would it require to replace Australia's gas exports on an energy parity basis, the same amount of energy in hydrogen, petajoule for petajoule. And to make the same energy content in hydrogen, just the electrolysis alone, would take eight times the national electricity grid, all the fossil fuels included. So the entire grid of the country of Australia multiplied by eight, just to make enough hydrogen! That's not liquefying, it's not refrigeration, not transportation. It's an impossibility. It's absurd. But anyway, yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: It's not just natural gas. So I reviewed hydrogen or Australia's net zero strategy, which is hydrogen-heavy, and a couple of things. Australia, for the listeners, exports eight times as much primary energy, coal, and natural gas as it consumes for its entire economy, four times as much...

BRUCE MCCABE: Absolutely, which is why politics is slave to it. Our government is slave to it. But anyway, go on. [laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: And so let's talk about a neighboring-ish country, Japan. Japan imports a lot of coal from Australia, and they've been talking. And what Australia and Japan have been agreeing to do is that Australia is going to make hydrogen and turn it into ammonia and put that in ships at minus thirty... Liquefy it to minus 33 degrees Celsius and steam it up to Japan, presumably, hopefully burning ammonia, but likely burning diesel. And Japan is going to burn it in their coal-fired boilers to replace coal. So this is the theory. So this is part of this hydrogen flow, and it's just absurdly expensive. You work this out, pretty much anybody who imports hydrogen or any derivative for energy is signing up for a cost 10 times the cost per unit of energy of liquid natural gas. And liquid natural gas is the most expensive form of energy any country uses today. Liquefying natural gas isn't as bad as liquefying hydrogen, but it's really expensive energy. It's the energy of last resort. And so it's got some advantages, it's got some disadvantages, but nobody wants to use it. They're forced to use it. So let's multiply that cost by 10, and imagine what that does to an economy, which starts depending on it. [chuckle]. Well, compared to an economy which just electrifies with renewables and connects themselves to neighboring countries with high-voltage direct current transmission. Well, one is going to have an energy cost that's a fraction of current energy costs, especially when you start pricing the unpriced negative externalities, or start looking at the EU's carbon border adjustment mechanism...

BRUCE MCCABE: Actually pricing in carbon...

MICHAEL BARNARD: And the one... Actually pricing in carbon and some pretty significant numbers coming. So anybody who currently exports to Europe, you should really look at the EU's budgetary guidance for business casing for their carbon border adjustment and ETS. And then start thinking about how to get rid of fossil fuels in your value chain. But 10 times the cost per unit of energy or half the cost per unit of energy. So 20 times the gap between these things. Which economy will be able to thrive and which economy will become non-competitive and not import any expensive money because they can't afford to?

BRUCE MCCABE: Isn't that interesting.

MICHAEL BARNARD: So the entire premise... The entire premise of ammonia energy flows or liquid natural, liquid hydrogen flows or pipelines from Northern Africa into Europe with gaseous hydrogen, they all fall apart on basic economics. Any country which depends on that for energy is just going to become uneconomic. The companies which sign up for it are going to become un-economic and un-competitive. They're going to fail economically and the entire thing falls apart because there's alternatives.

BRUCE MCCABE: I love it. We're now predicting the rise and fall of nations on this and I love that. It's perfect because, what could be bigger? Now, hydrogen, we know it's not a part of our long-term future. What we've got now because of this. Because we're going through short-term mythology and once we get past that phase, there's no way it's a big part of our future. Just tell me about steel-making because when you look at that, replacing... This is one where I get excited The costs are higher, no avoiding it, but steel-making with hydrogen at least can eliminate the carbon emissions, the CO2 emissions and it seems exciting to me. If you're going to prioritize hydrogen, this seems to me to be the priority. What would you say to that?

MICHAEL BARNARD: Absolutely. So, yes, it's the only place in my hydrogen demand projection through 2100 where there's an increase. About 31 million tons in 2100 hydrogen demand from steel. It's not guaranteed. So when I went through all the technology, I'm sorry, I went through from 1990 to 2020 to all the annual demands, where the demand was, what countries it was in, what technologies were used, I found out some interesting stuff. So let's say, for example, 70% of all the United States steel was made from scrap, whereas only 40% of Europe's is. So scrap steel goes into an electric arc furnace, yeah, where in some cases they add natural gas burning for deep heat, but they don't have to. When you price natural gas for its negative externalities, or you lose your access to cheap natural gas, then you just use electricity. It's not rocket science, just economics. And so that through 2100, I project we're going to move to the point where the world is running 70% of wrapping stuff like the ultra large crude carriers and the 5 million kilometers of pipelines in the United States. Oh, let's mine this horizontal line of high quality steel that's 6 feet underground or 4 feet underground. Let's just do that. It will make sense. So that's one thing. Then the next thing I found was that obviously blast furnaces and open furnaces with lots of coal, mostly going to the big problem. China now makes 10 times more coal than the next biggest country in the world, which is India. But China's steel manufacturing has peaked because their infrastructure boom has peaked and so we're going to see some changes there that flatten out demand. But I also found 100 million tons of direct reduction of iron already being done annually. Direct reduction of iron, you take... Mostly in this case, you take natural gas and you shove it in and it turned into a syngas and you mix it with the iron ore and the syngas, the hydrogen in it reacts with the iron ore to remove excess oxygen, de-rusts it. That's basically what we're talking about. Reduction of iron is de-rusting it. And then that turns into iron, which you then turn into steel. So is there anything special about the natural gas that couldn't be replaced with biomethane? Well, no. So you can actually turn the DRA process, make it much more environmentally friendly just by using landfill gas. And is there anything special about the heat that's used in the MIDREX process, for example, that, or the, I can, ArcelorMittal, I can never get their name right, so it's like too many syllables for my brain. In their MIDREX, in their DRI process, that would prevent them from using electricity for the process? No. So we can actually get with the DRI process, which is already scaled to 100 million tons of steel a year, we can get close to zero carbon steel, zero CO2 emission steel. Then there's direct, there's actually two or three I know … Boston Metals, Fortescue has proven the direct electrolyzation process, where they basically use some advanced stuff and green electricity and de-rust the steel using that. And then we've got the hydrogen stuff, which only takes 55 kilograms on average for the hybrid process of green hydrogen for a ton of steel.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: So it's not...

BRUCE MCCABE: It's not a huge requirement. It's only that last, the chemistry where we really need it and rather than the heat and inputs and all that sort of stuff. And we can do that. We can supply that. We can make it work. So what do you think will affect in steel price will be? What are we going to have to deal with here? Now, assuming we're not pricing in the carbon properly, because in which case steel will be cheaper this way. But if the world still persists with resistance against properly pricing in the full price of carbon externalities, current steel prices are going to go up 5, 10, 15 percent? Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: They're definitely going to go up. We're probably not doubling it.

BRUCE MCCABE: That's something we have to deal with. Yeah, no, not doubling it.

MICHAEL BARNARD: It's something we have to deal with. Yeah. But it's, I did the math for some hydrogen or some steel manufacturing in Ontario recently, because now here's another stupid hydrogen-for-energy play. They're going to make green hydrogen from excess hydroelectricity at Niagara Falls and they're going to put it in trucks and drive the trucks.

BRUCE MCCABE: Oh, no.

MICHAEL BARNARD: 110 kilometers [laughter] to a natural gas plant and blend it with the natural gas and burn it there and then they're going to drive the truck back empty 220 kilometers.

BRUCE MCCABE: Michael no... No more of those. Stop. [laughter] That's so depressing!

MICHAEL BARNARD: Oh yeah, Ontario's hydrogen strategy... I've read one hydrogen strategy in the world — and I've read a lot of them — which makes any sense, and it's Morocco's. One of the things I did I was engaged to assess European green hydrogen plays in northern Africa and so I looked at Algeria, Egypt and Morocco's hydrogen strategies and initiatives in them and stuff like that. So Morocco, here's how I paraphrase their stuff. You stupid Europeans have no idea what you're doing. We're quite willing to take your money, build wind solar transmission and storage to decarbonize our grid as long as you're paying stupid amounts of money for something that you'll never need for green hydrogen. And by the way, we'll probably start making green ammonia-based fertilizers with OCS, our massive fertilizer plant which currently extracts, provides 55% of the phosphate-based fertilizers for Africa and turn ourselves into a fertilizer web thing. But we'll keep pretending that we're going to ship you hydrogen or hydrogen derivatives for energy. That's the only one globally that I've read, and you have to read between the lines because it's a politically sensitive document.

[laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: Ontario's on the other hand, oh my god. The average hydrogen strategy, what happens is they say, okay, so we're going to start with a false premise. I'm a big fan of Richard Rumelt. I've never talked to the man but I hope somebody tells him sometime, you've got a really big fan. He's a professor and he's worked with global strategies, "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, the Difference and Why it Matters" is the name of his book. It is literally, if you read only one book on strategy, read that one. Everything else is mostly nonsense. The good strategy, bad strategy says every good strategy has a kernel. It has a clear-eyed diagnosis of reality. It has a policy for how you as an organization are going to profit from the implications of that reality or avoid the risks from that reality and it has an action plan which is aligned with the policy and reality. That's it. It's not much. It's very simple. 90% of strategies fail to have those three things. Most of the hydrogen like Ontario's thing says, well, hydrogen for energy is going to be this huge growth market so we're going to get all over that and then... [laughter] the policy was we're going to build more nuclear and make hydrogen and we're going to store hydrogen in salt caverns which don't exist. [laughter] Then they said, let's get interested parties into the room to help us work on this policy.

BRUCE MCCABE: Oh, bet that was... I know who the interested parties were. [laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: It was lovely. I was looking through the stakeholder list and to be clear, there are two massive potential consumers of hydrogen, one of which exists or three. There's the refineries in Ontario which are uninterested in green hydrogen. There is the big ammonia based fertilizer plant in Western Ontario which is obviously going to be interested in green hydrogen and there's the steel plants. Those are the three.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Only the steel plant representatives were invited to any of the meetings. They didn't invite any of the refinery or the fertilizer people. They didn't show up. I don't know. But meanwhile, we've got chapter and verse of hydrogen for energy people. We've got like Plug Power people and power generation people who are looking, we burn natural gas now, we need to burn hydrogen tomorrow. So they have this massive list of stakeholders who all are in the wrong place in part because they started with the wrong diagnosis of reality and then had the wrong policy and then invited the wrong stakeholders. I actually wrote an assessment of their strategy. I published it. I said, here's the kernel of good strategy you should be applying, tick, tick, tick. Here's diagnosis of reality. Here's the policy that Ontario will follow. Here's the action plan.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: I gave it to them for free. I know that it was circulating around Ontario's independent whatever it is, IESSO, Independent Energy Standard System Operator. I know it ended up in their morning mail summary digest and everybody got a chance to ignore it completely and everybody did as far as I can tell. No one's asking me about it.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, I mean there's one thing to actually do the numbers, but there's another thing of whether they actually want to see the numbers and the motivation is there to just ignore them. It's incredible. Now, let's get off hydrogen because I want to ask you a bunch of other stuff.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Sure.

BRUCE MCCABE: I don't want to use up so much of your time that I don't get to ask all my questions. So I want to get punchy here. Shipping. People ask a lot about ammonia and I know you think that's appalling, because it's so bad as something to handle, the safety issues, all that kind of stuff. [laughter] It's terrible. So long range, long haul shipping, short range, the future is electric, I guess, or internal coastal, inter-lake shipping, but the long stuff, those big container ships, it's biofuels, right? Like you said earlier, and you said we can make enough. Now, just tell me about that, because this is a black hole in my knowledge. I look at methane, ‘biomethane’ being taken out of dumps and landfill, I look at all these various sort of... Let's take wastes out of the food industry and then the agricultural overflow from harvesting ... How efficient is all that? And is that a big part of our future?

MICHAEL BARNARD: Sure. So let's talk about how much shipping will occur.

BRUCE MCCABE: Okay.

MICHAEL BARNARD: A lot less than we think, because 40% of transoceanic shipping is moving coal, oil, and gas.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah. Right there.

MICHAEL BARNARD: That's all going away. And we talked about steel. 15% of transoceanic shipping is raw iron ore that's unprocessed. Which can now through the magic of green electricity or green hydrogen be processed a lot closer to the mine, a lot more efficiently and containerized.

BRUCE MCCABE: One of the huge opportunities...

MICHAEL BARNARD: The bulks are going to plummet.

BRUCE MCCABE: … One of the huge opportunities for Australia is to do the processing locally.

MICHAEL BARNARD: And I've talked to one of the major investment people who's trying to make that work without carbon pricing, and it's an interesting thing. Like Canada, Australia is hewers of wood and choppers of trees and drawers of water, and they export raw resources, and it's hard to change that. So reduced demand, increased container shipping, but not as much as people think, because regardless of what decarbonized fuel we use, it's going to be two to two and a half times, in the best case, as expensive as what's used today.

BRUCE MCCABE: Okay.

MICHAEL BARNARD: And so increased fuel costs, that means a reduction in... A pressure to do more local processing, and a reduction in some of these stupid example use cases, like the cup of peaches, where the peaches are grown in Argentina or some place like that, and then they're put in bulk, and they're sent to China, where they're done something to, and then they're sent to the Philippines for packaging, then they're sent back to Argentina, where they're sold in little cups of peach juice. Some of those supply chains don't make any economic sense in a higher energy cost world, and so they'll collapse.

And then let me get into, well, what are we going to do? And of course, as you said, batteries. We've already got 700-unit container ships sailing the Yangtze, 1,000 kilometer journeys running on batteries. Containers of batteries are winched on and off from the ports, they're charged in the port, and the ship just keeps going, and it's quiet, and it doesn't make any noise, and it doesn't emit any pollution, and it works just fine. That one's just... Containerized batteries for maritime shipping is a solid problem, won't get us across the ocean. So across the oceans, we have some choices, we have ammonia, we have methanol, we have liquid hydrogen, we have sails, and then we have, oh, biodiesel, which behaves just like the stuff that's burnt today and burns in the same engines.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: It has the same capital costs, you don't actually have to invest, change the 900 ports around the world to handle this stuff.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, so it's a one-for-one fit. Tell me about that. Tell me about that biodiesel supply chain.

MICHAEL BARNARD: So after we do all this reduction of off-shipping and increasing container shipping, and we slow down our ships — amazingly — I mean, container ships used to sprint across the ocean at up to 25 knots. Last year, the average was 14 knots because it's an exponential curve for energy demand, and when the energy prices went up, ships slowed down. It's just, they had to. They said, the operator said, "Oh, I can't afford to go 25 knots. What can I afford to go? Oh, 14. Hey, buyer, you okay with being a week later? Okay, we're going to do some number crunching." They figure out how much they do. Bulk shipping is around 12 knots, so it's slimmed down, and there's a bunch of advantages, other efficiencies, hybrid boats, all that stuff. So reduction, reduction, reduction, all the inland electrified. We end up with 70 million tons of diesel or equivalent energy required in the end state in 2100, per my projection, and it's a big error bias. But the interesting coincidental number, the International Energy Agency did an update late last year, their 2023 renewables update, which used to be a joke because they'd always flatline solar and wind stuff, and would publish a new version of his exponential growth chart just by layering on their annual projections. It was, ‘Fatih Birol's doing a great job of slowly turning that ultra-large crew carrier around towards renewables.’ So yeah, they released it. The interesting charts and data in there were the biofuels updates. We're already manufacturing about 100 million tons of biofuels globally in various forms. About 70 million tons of that is biodiesel. We need 70 million tons of biodiesel, the end state of maritime shipping. We're already manufacturing and wasting it on ground vehicles, which are all going to electrify. Cheap. So we don't actually... And we're making biofuels more virtuous with every passing year, biofuels get lower carbon and cleaner and more effective and stuff like that. It's just chemistry. It's just industrialization.

BRUCE MCCABE: What's the principal source? What's the principal source of that biodiesel? Just it's a blank spot for me. Where's it coming from when we manufacture it?

MICHAEL BARNARD: Yep. So right now most of it is, hydrogenated vegetable oil. I mean...

BRUCE MCCABE: Okay.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Do you ever eat Margarine?

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah. Not often. I go for the dairy, the full dairy product. But hey. [laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: A hydrogenated vegetable, the ‘hydrogenate’ should give you a clue that we're going to use hydrogen with oils to create a change in the oils. The hydrogenation is used to cream, make them a bit more dense, make them a bit more stable, a bunch of stuff. We do that with palm oil, which is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. And waste cooking vegetable oil. And waste pig fat oil lard. So basically take all these waste fats. And some newly grown fats, and then we hydrogenate them and we've got something we can burn in engines.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, interesting. And I guess in my mind was, how much of this can we produce, which is truly in a virtuous cycle? If it's coming from palm oil, if that's a big chunk of it, it's something we're going to have to live with. We've got to run stuff on biofuels. I would say long-haul aviation, that's the only pathway I can see there as well for those guys. It's probably one of those things we're going to have to focus on how to do this really well and efficiently as possible from an agricultural perspective, without raping the planet through another means …

MICHAEL BARNARD: Let's talk biomass to biofuels. So it takes about a ton of dry biomass to make about 0.4 tons of biofuels. Okay, so that's a number. We currently throw away 2.5 billion tons of food that we manufacture, a full third of our global food annually. 2.5 billion tons, there is no famine that is due to biofuels or anything except our economic system and our inability to distribute the food to where people are hungry. There is zero concern. We throw away, then we get equivalent or greater masses for livestock dung. There's 1.5 billion tons of livestock dung that has to be handled every year in the EU, just the EU. That's why they're starting, guess what? Livestock dung to jet fuel program. It's just chemistry. It's not that hard. It's just engineering, not even science. It's just engineering.

BRUCE MCCABE: Now, that's brilliant. That's a great clarifier for me. That's... I love that, in terms of how much wasted biomass there is already. Wow. Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Well, look, so let's take a ton of ammonia fertilizer. It's got 0.18 tons of hydrogen. Let's pretend we take that ammonia and we burn it in a ship and we get 42% of the energy as a ton of diesel. We've got 40% of the energy of diesel. Let's suppose we put that ton of ammonia fertilizer on a field which currently doesn't have hydrogen inputs in some lesser developed part of the world, where the green revolution has not arrived. Well, every ton of ammonia fertilizer that you put in a field creates 28 tons of new biomass. Nitrogen, the big component of ammonia, is 1-5% of every plant. That's why we use ammonia fertilizer, which we've been making with fossil fuels. So we take that, we put it on the field, we get 28 tons of biomass. 50% of that is moisture. Also, we've only got 14 tons of dried biomass. Oh, times 0.4. Gee, that's 6 million tons of biofuels for one ton of ammonia.

BRUCE MCCABE: Wow. Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: It's six or seven times as much fuel just if we do that. There's huge swaths of the world where right now agriculture is inefficient because they can't afford the green revolution inputs. I'm going to piss off a bunch of people. I think small scale, a small hold farming is inefficient, ineffective, a romantic holdover, a waste of resources. It is typically not as effective as well-managed industrial agriculture. It's often worse for the land. It's certainly less productive. And the people who are doing subsistence farming, the one or two billion people who are scraping calories from the earth like locusts, they aren't having romantic, nice lives. They're just poor people …

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah. Absolutely.

MICHAEL BARNARD: … deeply impoverished people who are trying desperately to put food for the family. Let's help them move to cities and give them actual opportunities.

BRUCE MCCABE: Well, we certainly have ...

MICHAEL BARNARD: The arable land

BRUCE MCCABE: We certainly have the wealth required to redistribute and cover all that. We have all of that material food wealth. Yeah, absolutely.

MICHAEL BARNARD: And for the past 50 years, we've tried everything. We know what it takes to move people. We actually know what works. The United States spent very little money with their ATA, which was, I think it was basically it was China's killing our manufacturing. We're going to help some people survive that by giving them this program. And the program was intelligently designed. It was just massively underfunded. Where the funding went, it worked. People actually moved to places where there were jobs.

BRUCE MCCABE: All right.

MICHAEL BARNARD: So we know how to do this? Then we've got timber waste. Then we've got biomethane that's coming out of landfills and hog manure ponds and dairy barns. Then what have we got? I think I missed one. The point is, we waste so much biomass today. It's nutty. Here's a factoid. So, the Rocky Mountain Institute, love them, except for their hydrogen and carbon capture groups now. They grow massively.

BRUCE MCCABE: And we're not doing carbon capture, by the way, because we both agree it's an abomination. It doesn't work. The economics is so destructive. We can both do two hours on that. Direct air capture is not part of this podcast because we both know it's crap.

MICHAEL BARNARD: 2022, 2023 is a great year for methanol for shipping. The methanol industry, like the ammonia industry has got its nose wide open. We're going to sell five times as many tons of methanol per year, and it's going to cost more. We're going to be so rich. They've been telling porkies for seven, eight years on methanol. Just leaning into every odds. Yeah, well, from the tank to the wake, it's very clean. What about from the well to the tank, ignore that, we'll clean that up, don't worry about it. Oh, and it'll be the same price. No, four to six times the price, and it's a massive carbon bomb right now, it's filthy. So methanol, everybody has been talking about shipping, because Maersk and a couple of other firms have bought like, 24 methanol ships, dual fuel ships, ships that can burn methanol. You can put methanol in a tanker, in the tanks, you can burn it, and you can flip a switch and get diesel from other tanks and burn that in the same engine, dual fuel ships. It's a thing, that works, we've been doing that for a while.

BRUCE MCCABE: Complex, but yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: And the RMI's hydrogen lead said, well, what about all the hydrogen-powered ships that everybody's been buying, meaning the methanol ones? Well, except that Maersk is buying methanol made from biomethane, not green hydrogen. Sourcing from places like their first ship sailed from Korea to northern Europe on methanol, on methane from a landfill in the United States, which is deeply imperfect, deeply Rube Goldberg, but it was actually working as methane. Here's the kicker for you, all that waste biomass, a lot of it sits in piles and turns into methane because of anaerobic digestion. The same microbes that turn into CO2‚ if there's no oxygen around, they turn it into methane instead. And methane is 86 times to 89 times worse than carbon dioxide. So we've got this massive problem. The World Carbon Organization, I think that's the name, I'm bad with names, calculates that our anthropogenic biomethane is greater than all of the fossil fuel industries methane emissions combined. Which is saying a big thing. We've got to solve that problem. Turning that into biofuels solves that.

We actually, we decarbonize things by creating biofuels from waste biomass. We actually get negative carbon because we're removing that methane bomb and then we're turning it into stuff, typically using, I'm going to say that technology for biofuels, man, is it ever cutting edge science. This waste biomass is a big methane problem. Now, if it was... The problem is, of course, this is rocket science to turn biomass into biofuels. One of the big technologies, we didn't invent until 8,000 years ago — I had a beer recently — we've been brewing beer, which is fermentation with yeast, which is one of the big biomass to biofuel technologies. Had a drink of scotch or vodka recently? Well, that's distillation, which we invented 6,000 years ago. And by the way, we can distill alcohol with electric heat. It can make that quite virtuous. [laughter] We don't necessarily do it because...

So then there's some other stuff, which is more recent, like ethanol to jet and ethanol to diesel, which some of those, I mean, the first time we made biodiesel, it wasn't 8,000 years ago, 6,000 years ago. It was only 130 years ago. Otto Diesel himself made biodiesel. It's not hard to do. We've known how to do this for a long time. It was industrialized at the turn of the last century when fossil fuel deposits weren't as available. People were turning coal into it. People were turning vegetable grease into it. This is all easy stuff. Yeah. The technology, it's engineering. There's some interesting new stuff coming out, like Carbauten has these interesting pyrolysis things where they have paired pyrolysis furnaces. And pyrolysis, basically you bake biomass in the absence of oxygen. And what it turns into is two things, typically. Typical pyrolysis. One is a bio-crude, which you can then refine into crude oil products like diesel or gasoline, for example. So you've got that crude. And then it also turns into this leftover carbon, which is just pure carbon. And you can just bury it, or you can sell some of it, or do some stuff with it. But there you have these wrap around paired pyrolysis things where the high temperature heat in one thing, the waste heat from that, powers the low temperature heat in the second one. And they burn some of the bio-crude to do this. So they actually generate enough heat but they have leftover bio-crude and the carbon black. So they're not net energy positive because they're putting a lot of biomass and the energy's all coming from the biomass. But they're self-powering with the biomass in the process. They have to create the initial bio-crude. But after that, it just keeps going. It's not perpetual motion. It just looks like it. And their website is hilarious. You really got to go C-A-R-B-A-U-T-E-N.

BRUCE MCCABE: Just repeat that again slowly, the website?

MICHAEL BARNARD: C-A-R-B-A-U-T-E-N, I believe it is. Carbauten.

BRUCE MCCABE: I'll check it out.

MICHAEL BARNARD: German company, yeah. I'm just going to say that their website has a big white, their splash page is big white background, Anglo-Saxon fricative carbon. [laughter]

BRUCE MCCABE: And on that note, dear listener, we thought we'd bring to an end part one of our conversation with Michael Barnard. I'm sure you agree he's very forthright, very passionate, and as promised, backs up his arguments with numbers. Stay tuned for the second episode. Don't miss it. We've covered a lot of ground already. But in the second one, we're going to get into, finish our discussion of biofuels and then get into shipping fuels — very interesting subject — carbon pricing, nuclear reactors, geothermal, tidal energy, grid storage, and a little bit more. And at the very end, we're going to wrap up with Michael's short list of climate actions that will work. And I promise they are priceless because again, he's very punchy, very forthright about what it will take pragmatically to get things done and what we can do and what will work. Really wonderful way to wrap up. So stay tuned for episode two of Michael Barnard on the future of energy. And thank you for listening to Future Bites.

FUTURE OF ENERGY WITH MICHAEL BARNARD - PART 2

BRUCE MCCABE: Welcome to FutureBites, where we look at pathways to a better future. My name is Bruce McCabe, I am the global futurist, and you're about to listen to part two of my conversation with Michael Barnard, this amazing energy strategist out of Canada who works with global investors on the big changes in our energy future, and most importantly, he's very pragmatic. He quantifies everything and he backs everything with the science, which is critical to really understanding what the future looks like. So in this episode, you're in for a real treat. We’re going to cover off a whole lot of other forms of energy generation. Also going to talk a little bit about transmission and grid-scale energy storage, and we're ending with Michael's short list of climate actions that will work. Enjoy the podcast.

MICHAEL BARNARD: … This is the point though. This is not hard to do. We have mass of waste biomass. It's a big problem today. It's just more expensive than treating the atmosphere as an open sewer with fossil fuels. As soon as we start pricing the negative externalities, which the carbon board adjustment mechanism in EU is forcing us to do at very significant rates, then, “oh, look!” I'll give you an example. Here's an example of carbon pricing. In British Columbia in 2030 for our natural gas, which might cost $2.50 per gigajoule, dirt cheap natural gas, with carbon pricing it's going to cost $11. Next to Alberta, which had a lot of coal one on that thing. Well, coal was $40 a ton. The carbon pricing was a lot more than that, it was $400 when you burned a ton of coal, in 2030.

BRUCE MCCABE: Wow, wow.

MICHAEL BARNARD: It up-ends the business cases for everybody that has fossil fuels in their value stream. And if you got fossil fuels anywhere in your value stream, you're going to become uncompetitive unless you remove them.

BRUCE MCCABE: And really quickly, and even with only partial carbon pricing, it'll just annihilate it.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Oh yeah.

BRUCE MCCABE: So, how interesting.

MICHAEL BARNARD: So in Canada is... Yeah, 2030 is 170 dollars Canadian, which is like $133 US right now and so that in 2030 the social cost of carbon is supposed to be $294, so $124 more, 294 is $210. $210 US to get to a currency that people can actually compare it to, in a decade we'll be using Chinese Renminbi and people will actually know what we're talking about, but for now we're still taking about the US dollar. Point is, that social cost of carbon is where all the carbon prices are heading for, and that's where the EU's budgetary guidance is.

BRUCE MCCABE: And if you want to make money, you're going to have to live with it. Okay. Biofuel, you've educated me. Thank you. That's why I love this conversation and what you do, because everything you're backing with numbers and examples, and that depth of knowledge is just what we need to share. No one else is doing this. Wonderful.

MICHAEL BARNARD: I really want to kick ammonia while it's down after the year of methanol, because...

[laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: I've got to say, one of the stupidest things I've ever heard is the thought of using ammonia as a shipping fuel.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah. And it got a lot of traction the last year in the press, there was a lot of coverage.

MICHAEL BARNARD: It did. To be clear, I don't have a problem with ammonia. It does burn. It's nitrogen and three hydrogens, the hydrogen will burn, the hydrogen burns cleanly, the nitrogen turns into nitrous oxide, 273 times the global warming potential as CO2. But that's manageable. It's only a problem when you burn a ton of... I think, what did I work out? When you burn a ton of ammonia, you get two tons or three tons of CO2 equivalent of nitrogen on average with better engines, worse engines. But that's not my problem with ammonia-based fertilizer, and it's not the fact that it's going to be four to five times as expensive as current fuels or twice as expensive as biofuels. No, those aren't my problems. Ammonia as a gas at room temperature, we have to liquefy it to -33 degrees Celsius and that takes energy, it's not nearly as much energy as hydrogen. So far it just sounds like a really stupid idea.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: But I haven't gotten to the bad stuff yet, this is just makes... This is just why you say really, you're really thinking about that compared to methanol, which is a liquid or just biodiesel, which is cheaper and burns in the same rate? Okay, so tell me more about ammonia. Well, ammonia at -33 is a liquid. Great and it's 0.42% as dense as diesel. So you have to have 2 1/2 times as much to get anywhere, which a lot of people keep forgetting to do in their calculations about price, that's why it's four to five times more expensive because you need 2 1/2 times as much and it costs twice as much, blah blah. But as soon as you expose ammonia to room temperature, it turns into a gas. And that gas is toxic to human beings. It kills us.

BRUCE MCCABE: Really, wow.

MICHAEL BARNARD: It literally kills us. Okay, so you can vent the gas, but is there anything else about ammonia we should know? Well, when you mix it with water, it turns into a caustic acid which rots our lungs and kills fish. Oh, but that's not a problem. We're just going to use it on our ship. [laughter]. And we're going to require sailors and master engineers to go into the engine room with gaseous ammonia and water on their clothes, and we're going to be killing the shipping crew left and right. And further, right now, we actually have about 66 ammonia tankers floating around the world. Mostly from, like, there were a bunch from Russia, they were these old tankers to make ammonium.

BRUCE MCCABE: To be clear: transporting it, not running on it, just, yeah, tankers that are transporting it around the world.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Transporting it. Yeah, because our previous discussion said, oh, ammonia is a great fertilizer. Look how much biofuels we can get from ammonia-based fertilizer. Yay, let's do that. Oh, well, we have to get the ammonia from somewhere. Where can we get it from? Places with lots of natural gas, like Algeria, Egypt, Russia, the Middle East, the United States. Oh, okay. And in green ammonia, we can get it from, oh, just right here, because we've got nitrogen from the air, we've got water, we've got green electricity. Let's just do that. Let's stop tankering it around. But when one of those tankers goes into a port, it goes into the toxic waste, toxic materials handling section of the port, which is isolated from everything else because it's dangerous. And then handling it is a subset of the port crew who are specially trained and certified to deal with highly dangerous substances, and they're great. This is no flies on them. They are amazing. I respect the work they do. The ammonia transport stuff, I have no problems with shipping ammonia around to make fertilizer or the work that these amazing people do in dangerous circumstances. All props to you. But that's not how we fuel ships. We send barges out to moored ships, and we pump stuff across to the ship in heavy seas. We'd have to actually transform every single port to just turn that and create an entire toxic materials handling facility for bunkering. It's just, one of the things I do is I think of it like a systems engineer because that's more what I am than anything else, which means I think, okay, well, let's look at the end to end. Let's start at the beginning of the process and go to the end of the process and look all the way along the process and figure out what that looks like. Which is why it stunned me to find out that only recently did the International Maritime Organization stop going from tank to wake and start doing a full life cycle carbon assessment well to tank. It's only in 2021 they said, "Well, we're going to start doing it end to end now."

BRUCE MCCABE: Okay.

MICHAEL BARNARD: But one of the things I look at is that we've got these 900 ports around the world and any solution has to work with the ports. Ports are expensive real estate and typically limited real estate.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, it has to work with all the ports as well, not just a few of them. You've got to be unloading and loading at all ports around the world. So they all have to be converted to this kind of facility. It's insane.

MICHAEL BARNARD: And right now the ports are being told, well, you have to have liquid hydrogen facilities to be able to liquefy hydrogen down to -233 degrees, -253 degrees Celsius. You've got to have ammonia stuff where you're going to be able to liquefy hydrogen to -33 and transport it onto ships. You've got to have methanol tanks, which you don't have right now. And you've got to have biofuel blending tanks with biodiesel.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah. Yeah, it's nuts.

MICHAEL BARNARD: And then of course, all their vehicles are just electrified. All the port vehicles, the tugboats, the land vehicles, they're all just going to be electric. The cranes are already electric.

BRUCE MCCABE: They're doing it now. Yeah. Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: So just add more electricity.

BRUCE MCCABE: All right, we've killed ammonia. Ammonia is not part of our future for energy.

MICHAEL BARNARD: We have not. We have not. We have not. So a gas which kills you, a caustic substance which will rot your lungs and kill you and then it turns into a third chemical, which is just bad for human health and bad for wildlife health. It's nuts.

BRUCE MCCABE: All right. Okay.

MICHAEL BARNARD: The ammonia industry is kind of downplaying all that.

BRUCE MCCABE: I'm going to stop you on that one and move on because I want to talk to you about even more controversy, but it's all good because we just, again, need to cut through the reality. So let me just quickly summarize a couple of the key things. When we talk nukes, current generation nukes, amazing, wonderful, horrendously expensive, unfortunately, compared to all our technology. People don't realize that, but the whole process of building, decommissioning, making them safe — horrendously expensive. So obviously we've got to run what we've got for as long as we can, but they're not going to be part of our future in their current form. But lots of people get very wound up, especially this last couple of years — and I've had conference calls with the Argonne people in Chicago because they love nuclear and they're trying to convince me these small modular reactors really are a possible way forward — and they've got to be fast breeder reactors because they've got to make their own fuel because if we just run the current technology, some scientists did the math and worked out we've only got enough economic fuel to run the planet on nukes for five years. So that's how little fuel we have unless we're breeding fuel. So the future, according to these people, might be lots and lots of small modular reactors — I can't wait for your response on this — but they've also got to be fast breeder reactors. There’s got to be the whole six or seven new potential technologies to do that. Where the neutrons are flying fast enough to actually knock other atoms apart and make more radioactive fuel as part of the heat transfer process and all the rest of it. They've got to be doing that as well. So what are your thoughts? I know you put a very small percentage down on nuclear as part of our future when you're looking at what you think it's going to be, you think it's tiny. Tell me what you think of that technology.

MICHAEL BARNARD: So let's start with gigawatt scale nuclear reactors, just briefly. The average nuclear reactor. Third generation nuclear reactors are completely fine. It's not the technology that's the problem. And we have multiple instances around the world of successful scaling of those things at reasonable costs for electricity. France, South Korea and United States come to mind. There's 100 and, there's 200 reactors between them. It's 40% of the world's reactors between them. They did that okay. How did they do that okay? They did it okay because they had a strategic nuclear weapons requirement because of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, or because they had North Korea, a crazed dictatorship that was attempting to doing nuclear tests north of them. So they had to have the ability, at least the ability to create nuclear weapons. They had to have a national security, strategic security requirement to create nuclear weapons. And they had to have military involvement. To create the discipline to do a few things.

BRUCE MCCABE: And heavy subsidization has been part of that picture, as part of that thing, the government subsidization. Right?

MICHAEL BARNARD: You need federal level bucks/funds to make this work.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Macron couldn't figure out how much it costs, and he used to be working in the department that paid for it. And so...

[laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: Nobody knows how much we really spend on nukes, on nuclear reactors, but even... But we can do it efficiently, I don't have a problem with this, but it requires a strategic military thing, it requires the federal government to run it as a strategic program like the US New Deal, or the Manhattan Project. It requires military discipline about creating standards and training all the people necessary for instruction, certifying them and security enabling them and maintaining them for 30 years. It requires a single design or only two designs that are rigorously controlled to prevent any changes to them.

BRUCE MCCABE: Standardization.

MICHAEL BARNARD: With federal and military standardization. And we have to keep building that for 20 or 30 or 40 years with the same stuff and the same people so that we can actually leverage our lessons learned across those sites. And that's the recipe for success for gigawatt scale nuclear. It is not a free market success story. It's much more like hydro dams. No, nobody's going to build a hydro dam as a... Base it in a free market economy, because there's no way to figure out 125, 150 year value propositions and have them make sense. Need a government to say, no this is infrastructure. If any country, and you have to build a couple of dozen of them, you need at least a couple of dozen to pay off all the overhead. So if any country was going to say, we're going to build two dozen gigawatt scale nuclear reactors, we're going to treat it as a national project, and oh by the way, we're going to have governmental stability. We have bipartisan support from this, and we have all of our population supporting us. I'd be all for it. I'd say, "Go fill your boots. You have the conditions for success." Oh, one last one. It actually has to be gigawatts scale nuclear reactors. Because thermal physics. If you've got a small cup of hot water and you've got a big pot of hot water, which one gets cold faster? The small cup, all else being equal, because you need a big thermal mass so that most of it is interacting with the thermal mass, not the shells and insulation. And for thermal generation, the reason that coal plants and nuclear plants all are about a gigawatt is because that's the scale that's sufficient, and it's the compromise size between material, stuff and cost of equipment and stuff to get cheap electricity. You need to get the gigawatt scale.

BRUCE MCCABE: So I mean, instantly...

MICHAEL BARNARD: And you've got the condition for success.

BRUCE MCCABE: … when someone says “small modular reactors,” or let's say “economic small modular reactors” it’s an oxymoron, you're actually in opposition to what you need. You need the scale to make the economics work, and the small ones will be modularized and therefore they're just not the thing. Is that where we're going?

MICHAEL BARNARD: Well, I, oh... If we'd never tried it before and had some data about smaller reactors and their economics, perhaps we could just say, "We've not done this experiment, or we've done this... We haven't done this experience. We should try it." Except that was the beginning of the nuclear generation industry. They took the reactors out of nuclear subs, the same subs and aircraft carriers, and they put them in commercial generation. They found they were really way too expensive. So they scaled them up to gigawatt scale.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yes. [laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: In the '60s and '70s. [laughter]

BRUCE MCCABE: Do you know something? That's exactly the argument that's put to me. It's exactly as you phrase it. "We need to experiment. because we can't tell you the economics yet, Bruce. We're going to have to run the experiments and build them and get better at them, and then we'll give you the economics and you can do the levelized cost comparisons then." But at the moment, I love it. So we're... Of course, we've done it. We tried this way back in what? '50s? 1950s, '60s. 1960s. We were doing this stuff. Right?

MICHAEL BARNARD: Yeah. History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. And sometimes that rhyme is really bad doggerel.

[laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: With small, modular reactors, it's really bad doggerel. Now, if a big geography got together and said that single small module reactor design, we're going to build thousands of it, then you've still got this efficiency scale. But you might have an argument for modularization. Except right now, the last time I counted, there are 18 different designs, and every government has their own idea. United States has like four or five, there is no economies of scale. I looked at just the two, like NuScale, which is now dead, and another one. And I just gave them every benefit of the doubt through 2040. I said, "Those two are the only ones that get implemented and they get implemented by the thousands." And in 2040, they're still a lot more expensive than wind and solar are today.

BRUCE MCCABE: I've been following in your footsteps. I'm doing the same thing, trying to go through the designs and have a look at each one. And you've really short-circuited that for me. You've really simplified my way of thinking about it. It's really helpful.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Yeah. I'll send you a couple of the... After this I'll send you the papers and stuff I've published on this. Actually, this is actually an interesting story. Briefly, I kind of did this analysis of the headwinds facing small modular reactors, why they're a bad policy. And I published that and then the peer review organization out of Germany said, "We want to put this in our peer-reviewed textbook and we want to put this in our peer-reviewed journal." I went, "Oh, okay. What do I have to do?" "Nothing. It's just so good." "Okay, that's great." I think it has an impact factor of 0.49 or something. It's not a big journal, but you know what, I took it.

BRUCE MCCABE: For sure. For sure. You got to do what you can, I mean, that's the thing. It's had an impact somewhere. Someone read it.

[laughter]

BRUCE MCCABE: I love it. So I've got two more things on my list. Oh my God, but we've blown through a lot of time. So I hope you're okay to just finish this off.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Even if we just talk about them and you cut a bunch of stuff, that'll be fine.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah. [laughter] We're going to... For the listeners, this is going to be part two by now. I'm sure we're going to be splitting this up, but geothermal. Now, geothermal the issue as I understand it, digging costs are horrific. And we're not speaking of Iceland. We don't... Forget Iceland. Iceland and all these guys, they've got all the hot lava and all that sort of stuff. But molten rock when it's close to surface, good. When you got to dig deep, bad. Evil, huge economics. But I have seen approaches, they're untested, unproven out of MIT, where they're saying, "Yeah, we could use plasma to linearize the digging costs because they go up exponentially with every mile. But if we actually use hot plasma to dig and also to basically glaze the borehole as we went, maybe we can transform the economics of the digging." That's one of the only little wild cards I've come across that might transform geothermal, but I'm sure you have much deeper understanding of it. Again, you've put it down as a very small percentage. I think 1% of our future is geothermal in your little analysis.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Yeah. And by the way, that's shared with the other things, 1%. It's like between them, 1%.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: So geothermal, let's start with, I love Iceland. I've written about Iceland, I haven't visited, I love New Zealand. I was in a digital nomad in New Zealand last year for six weeks. I described them as collections of dormant volcanoes rather than countries. And it's temporarily dormant volcanoes.

[laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: Wonderful places. They both get a lot of electricity from geothermal because they're on the verge of just disappearing in a Krakatoa scale vent. So live off the avails of the volcano God. And it's great, great that they can do that. Japan is another one. But Japan, geothermal would interfere with the onsen culture and you cannot interfere with their hot springs.

[laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: They don't do any geothermal. Where I live, it's a tectonically active area, there's the Rockies, there's lots of hot springs but we've got hydro, so we just don't pay attention. It's like the answer and question. You start saying, "Let's talk about energy in BC." And they said, "Okay, so where are we going to put the dam?" "No, no, let's talk about energy." "Yeah. But where are we going to put the dam?" "No, no, let's talk about energy." [chuckle] "I'm not following, where's the dam going?" So geothermal is great where it can be used where it doesn't interfere with weird stuff. We made a breakthrough in '72, I think it was to make the thermal transfer more efficient and could then run processes off of it. Everything since then has been a weird edge condition. So people talk about super critical CO2, which has these really interesting physical characteristics where radical changes in volume with small changes in temperature can drive Brayton cycle turbines and the problem is of course is that super critical CO2 is highly corrosive and destroys the turbines. [chuckle] And insanely expensive turbine blades. And even then, nobody's been able to make it work. Supercritical CO2, Brayton cycle, Allam cycle turbines were... 80 years ago was the first attempt to do it because we've known about supercritical CO2 for a long time. So anytime you see super critical CO2 and anything in power generation, be skeptical. Nobody's managed to make it commercially viable for 80 years. Just be critical. Be super critical of super critical. So that's one technology that people purport to put in. It sounds good. Also dangerous as heck. Just rapid expansion of CO2 gas in a populated area that it's heavier than air and settles into low lying areas and is fatal to people in concentrations as low as 10%. And that's, by the way, carbon capture and sequestration, one of its many Achilles heels. It's just going to kill a lot of people. And we don't want to do that.

BRUCE MCCABE: Oh, man.

MICHAEL BARNARD: So then let's get back to drilling. So don't forget this is actually something that I actually have some respect for. And I've spent some time with an Latin American energy major who is seriously considering deep geothermal as one of their VC investment thesis. I was helping him with investment thesis around biofuels and a few other things. Drilling companies that drill are really good at drilling. We have now managed to... A lot of the fracking, we can now drill down two kilometers and then drill sideways four kilometers to inject sand and other stuff. They can drill. The problem is they drill when there's a really high value extractable burnable fluid or gas, natural gas or oil that makes it worth it. It costs a lot. And you can end up with situations where you're drilling an exploratory hole and finding nothing. So we can get down there. So let's explore deep geothermal, go down a kilometer in a reservoir that's operating at high temperatures. And then you've got to get a heat exchange fluids. You've got to run two pipes down this drill hole. You've got to pump water or something. Maybe super critical CO2 because that's certainly one of the proposals, down a kilometer and then have it come back up the other side. And then you got to run a turbine off of it.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Right now we don't do that. We just push stuff down and it comes up someplace else. We don't run pipes down and pipes up in the same hole. And thermal mass just you lose a lot of heat on your way out. It's possible, but the cost per kilowatt-hour right now, I'm not suspecting it's going to pencil out. All of this is technically doable. Remember, it's technically viable, fiscally viable compared to alternatives, and human beings will accept it. Japanese people don't even accept normal geothermal. And right now we're starting to see a lot of pushback around fracking because this is more drillings underground.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah. Well, when you look at the chemicals...

MICHAEL BARNARD: And one of these geothermals. Yeah.

BRUCE MCCABE: So we won't get into fracking, but when you look at what BTEX actually is and what chemicals they're pumping down there, and what's coming out, oh my Lord. We won't get into that. We won't get into that. Yeah. Stick with geothermal.

MICHAEL BARNARD: I think geothermal is going to be put on a lot of places that might turn into Krakatoas and that'll be good. I don't hold out a lot of hopes for deep geothermal.

BRUCE MCCABE: Okay. And tidal comes up. Now I look at tidal, I've never worked out how you could think tidal would generate enough energy unless you're in a nice basin or inlet where you can capture good flow. Because a lot of people think, well, hey, there's so much energy just in the rising water. The ones I've looked at, I've looked at some really interesting small scale tidal things, which have artificial blow holes, down Tasmania. They're actually forcing air up through a turbine, but the economics aren't great either. And the maintenance of those assets is really difficult.

MICHAEL BARNARD: So you ever seen a ship that's been in the ocean for a while without being defouled? If you're a sailor, anybody who's a sailor on the ocean, basically small boats, they try and get them out of the water as soon as they finish sailing. And because otherwise they just end up fouled with stuff.

BRUCE MCCABE: I have a picture. I have a picture right now. Barnacles. That's what I'm thinking. It's over. It's over for tidal. The barnacles kill it.

MICHAEL BARNARD: That's kind of thing one. Thing two is, it's kind of a rule of thumb. If you build something on shore, it's one times the capital cost. You build something on the water, on a platform on the water, it's 10 times the capital cost. You build something under the water, it's a hundred times the capital cost. And maintaining it is that ratio as well. So anything that's under the water that we have to maintain, especially anything with moving parts, like wind turbines, offshore wind turbines, here's what's underwater. A big concrete base on the floor and a big coated steel mast coming out and nothing moves. It can barnacle up and it does. Wind farms are great for creating artificial reefs and increasing biological diversity in subsea areas they're implementing. Little known, definite virtue. Some disruption when they're being installed, but after that, sea life improves quite substantially. And they don't kill seabirds because seabirds aren't stupid enough to run into things that stick out of the water. Otherwise, they wouldn't have persisted through evolutionary time. Oh, there's an island. That's interesting. Smack. Oh, let's just take, that's a Darwin award for that one. That's what radar mapping shows. Seabirds, they go around wind turbines. So we've got all these moving parts, they're getting fouled. We've had decades and centuries of trying to do this. And there's a couple of places that are in operation, but they're small. And everything else that tries to insert itself into the Bay of Fundy, for example, attracts a lot of governmental funding and attracts a lot of research people, and it attracts a lot of press and attracts a lot of hype. And then it fails quietly and goes away. And then a decade later, it comes back.

BRUCE MCCABE: All right, last one. It's a big one though. I want to talk to you just about the storage side of things at the grid scale. When we look at energy storage grid scale, hydro is clearly the principal one. Everybody says, "Look, we're doing that well, we're going to do more of it." So storing energy as potential energy. It's great, but it's not always available. Not all geographies have height discrepancies and all the rest of it. So we get back to, at the moment, we're using a whole lot of lithium ion batteries, the great big one in South Australia that kicked off the ones in the US and all that. A real stretch for that technology, which was invented for camcorders, but we're doing it. What do you see that future looking like when we just put hydro aside as the mainstay, the one that's really doing the heavy lifting? What do you see around the edges? Because I'm hearing, when I talk to Argonne, I hear a lot about organic batteries. They think there'll be another generation of those flow batteries. That'll be really helpful. And then other people talk about storing gas. I think we've dealt with the hydrogen one, but in cabins and all the rest of it, it's oh no, it's crazy. So I feel like there's a layer of battery technology which we're going to see a whole lot more innovation around of the flow battery level. What are they now? They're redox and there's some other one. And I feel like there's certainly replacements of lithium ion coming, but they're almost misapplied except for peaks and rapid load changes on the grid. What are you seeing?

MICHAEL BARNARD: Well, I'm going to start by disagreeing with you. We're going to have to find something I disagree with you about, and this is it. I think you have no clue how clueless people are about pumped hydro. I talk to energy people globally and they go, "Well, there's no space for pumped hydro. All those best sites are gone. There's no opportunity. We're not going to do any of that." And some of them say, "What do you mean pumped hydro?" I talk to energy professionals...

BRUCE MCCABE: Really? Okay.

MICHAEL BARNARD: … who don't know it exists. I talked to Michael Liebreich the first time he and I got face-to-face over a Zoom call before we had dinner that other time, and he was like, "Oh, there's no room for pumped hydro." So I pulled up the Australia National University Global Greenfield Pumped Hydro site of closed-loop off-river sites, near transmission, not on protected lands, and with 400 or more meters of head height, not on rivers, for just the Europe that's near the UK. And he said, "Well, there's no room for the amount we need." We're talking about Chris Llewellyn Smith's great study for the UK, where he started with, "we need hydrogen. Let's do all the weather mapping and prove that hydrogen is required."

BRUCE MCCABE: Oh, no!

MICHAEL BARNARD: And by the way, pumped hydro can't possibly work. Michael Liebreich was the same way. He said, "Well, there's no room for it out there." I said, "Well, we need three terawatt hours of storage, right?" Well, there's 150 gigawatt hours, 150 gigawatt hours, 150 gigawatt hours, 100 gigawatt hours, 100 gigawatt hours, 50 gigawatt hours, 50 gigawatt hours. Next week, I'm going to be talking to Mark Wilson, who's actually on Loch Ness. He's developed the Red John Pumped Hydro facility with a turkey's nest thing on the top of a hill, and then Loch Ness. He's going to suck Nessie into his turbines and kill her, and it'll be a scandal I'm sure [chuckle] but he's now sold that to StatKraft, and they're going to develop that. He's got three sites, 2.5 gigawatts of power capacity, 60 gigawatt hours of energy storage. People think the pumped hydro, there's no room for it, that it's terrible, that it uses water. It's a closed loop. Water goes down, water goes up, water goes down, water goes up, water goes forward. Water doesn't get a choice. Water goes down, water goes up. A little bit evaporates, you pour in a few buckets. It's a closed loop. It's not in a river. It's not impeding fish things. It's 400 meters of head height, so a gigaliter, which is a gigawatt hour at 500 meters. 500 meters, a gigaliter of water, a billion liters of water, a billion kilograms of mass at 500 meters is a gigawatt hour of electricity, and it requires two square kilometer ponds, one at the top, one at the bottom. These are ponds.

BRUCE MCCABE: There you go.

MICHAEL BARNARD: They're not lakes. There's 100 times the global resource requirement for pumped hydro in just the GIS maps that Matt Stocks and the team at ANU have. It's 100 times the requirement. If 99% of them don't work out because there's a village there, let's move to the next one. And I'll also disagree with you about, well, it's not available everywhere. You might have heard about this thing called transmission.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: These are grid infrastructure assets.

[laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: They're going to be where they are.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, we need to wire up. We need to connect up all these grids properly, like with direct current lines and all that, so do it really properly, yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Yeah, so two or three years ago, I was talking to China Light and Power, CLP. They're Hong Kong's electrical utility. They keep the lights on in Hong Kong. How do they do that? Well, they have a pumped hydro facility on the mainland a couple of hundred kilometers away. It's got like 25 gigawatt hours of juice and can run Hong Kong for 12 hours or 10 hours by itself. But it's a few hundred kilometers away because that's what HVDC is for.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: All right, so that's kind of statement one and two. So now that we've disagreed …

BRUCE MCCABE: No, I love it. I love it.

MICHAEL BARNARD: … you're right. And pumped hydro, by the way, it decouples power from energy, which cell-based facilities don't, which is important. So redox flow also decouples power from energy. And so we have lots of redox technologies. I was on the advisory board of a carbon dioxide-based redox. So they took bromide and CO2, and they put it through a gas-liquid electrolysis thing, and they created carbonates with high energy density. And also we could actually make potassium carbonates, which are actually worth hundreds of dollars per ton. So it actually replaces the Solvay process, and it's high... It just runs on electricity at room temperature. Fascinating stuff. So we've got CO2, we've got zinc, we've got vanadium and most of these techs have been known for decades.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yep.

MICHAEL BARNARD: The reason we've got zinc and vanadium is because the patents are all over protection. I walked around Invinity, which is so bad. This is a vanadium one out here. I walked around their site and looked at their 14,000 ton shipping containers, which have lots of vanadium liquids in them, and fuel cell stacks on top or electrolysis stacks on top. And they just put them on cars, and they ship them. It's just a shipping container with 250 kilowatt hours of storage. So it's not high energy density. But right now, that's the fun fact. The thing about vanadium redox flow is you can put all the stuff in a building, and you can put big tanks on either side, and then just run pipes in and plumb them and stuff like that. So you've got plumbing and power going in. You can run them all through. You can scale them up and scale up the energy side without having to scale up the power. In cell with lithium, sodium whatever. Every time you want to scale up the energy, you've got to scale up the power too. It's like you don't get one without the other because they're tightly coupled. So cell-based technology is amazing right now where we are in the grid storage transformation. And I've got to transform... A projection through 2060 of all the demand for all those technologies, a business architecture for making the choices, asserting which ones are the all-surrounds, hydrogen compressed air, liquid air, compressed CO2, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Flywheels, I looked at them all.

BRUCE MCCABE: Flywheels, oh, my God.

MICHAEL BARNARD: I know.

[laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: I'm just going to say, I talked to one guy and he said, "Flywheels." I said, "Do you know what precession is?" He went, "What's precession?" Look up precession and then pivot [laughter]. The earth turns and flywheels lose energy because the earth is turning.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah. Oh man, those bearings. I'm just thinking about it, anyway. Yeah, I mean we clutch at straws. It's humanity, it's, we're fated to clutch it as many straws as possible. It's something in our nature. [laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: So here's where we agree, pumped hydro for the win. I'll just say, guess what China is doing. In the next five years, they're going to build 365 gigawatts of power of pumped hydro. Giga, G, gigawatts. That's probably four to eight terawatt hours of grid energy storage, four to eight terawatt hours.

BRUCE MCCABE: That's massive.

MICHAEL BARNARD: That would power Ontario for two weeks, three weeks, so it's a lot and they're just, they've got to go 60 gigawatts of capacity, they're going to multiply that by seven. So that's, one of the things in energy you want to know what the future of low carbon energy is, look what China is doing an awful lot of because that's going to be the model in the rest of the world because they're doing it. I mean, they've got the coal and they've got the other problems, but if they're going big on something, there's a reason. They're going big on pumped hydro.

BRUCE MCCABE: If I try and summarize a lot of what we've covered here, the future is so much simpler than people realize. Mark Jacobson's on the same track. It's like we're going to have a lot of solar, it's cheap, it works. We're going to have a lot of wind. We've got to grid up properly and actually redistribute energy around. Lot more hydro, I'm getting, from this conversation I guess, than people really expect. A lot more hydro storage and that sort of thing. And everything else goes down to the 1% or less, or nothing, it's a really simple future. So I think you've... I read somewhere, if we could just stop, I think you said something, but if we just stop getting distracted. [laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: On my list of the short list of climate actions that will work, it's not a long list. One of them is, ignore distractions. Carbon capture, hydrogen for energy, nuclear, they're distractions.

BRUCE MCCABE: Can we finish on this list, Michael? Can we just punch through that list of those things that we all need to do? And if we just did that, we'd be nailing this.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Okay. Electrify everything.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yep. Efficient, no losses or minimal losses compared to everything else. Electric to electric, end to end. Yep.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Vastly more than anything it expects. Virtually all industrial heat can electrify and will … Overbuild renewable generation. When we say overbuild, it means 25% more in the model. We need 25% more than we think we do because we're going to put some on grid storage, we're going to put some on pumped hydro, we're going to do some activities, we're going to have HVDC cables crossing jurisdictions so that the sunshine in one place is feeding the nightlife in another place. It's just what it is. I'm involved in a 6 to 20 gigawatt transatlantic cable between Europe and Canada.

BRUCE MCCABE: Fabulous. Really?

MICHAEL BARNARD: It follows the same route undersea as the first transatlantic and trans-oceanic communication cable was built in 1865. So we're going to store some, we're going to transmit some of HVDC, but overbuild … Continent-scale electrical grids and markets. China's got an advantage there because they came late to electrification so their utilities are the size of their states or provinces. Whereas in the developed world, our utilities started out as cities or towns and frequently still are and so they've kind of aggregated up. But every often counties or states have their own regulatory commissions. Whereas the regulatory commission in China is much broader, which is what you need because the patchwork of regulations is inhibiting performance … Build pumped hydro and other storage, covered that one. Redox flow. Yes. So pumped hydro and redox flow batteries. I'm questioning whether the batteries will be more than the redox flow based upon some figures. Going to take another couple of years to get more data and make a new call, but I'm not ready to change my current projection yet ... Plant a lot of trees. I've talked about this with — oh God, I'm so bad with names — Dr. Joe Romm now working with Michael Mann at the University of Pennsylvania recently. So he and I agree, trees won't solve climate change. Planting a trillion before 2050 will not solve the problem.

BRUCE MCCABE: No, I've done the math. Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Yeah.

BRUCE MCCABE: Tiny, tiny fraction of what we're needing. Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: So I say, though, we need to enhance our ecosystem. Planting trees is a good way to do it where they make sense. So we can plant diverse cultures. I say plant 100 million a week for 200 years.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: And we get to a trillion trees and then that gives us a whole bunch of benefits over time. We're not trying to pretend it's a wedge for 2050.

BRUCE MCCABE: Absolutely. And it's no solution, but it's a hugely important part of the mitigation process. And what I love about this is there's actually really good news on reforestation in a whole bunch of areas in Europe and even in the US and Canada where we're actually, we can reforest, and we have been in various areas. So anyway, yeah. So there are some good areas, but deforestation is still awful, but we can recover those places and we can reforest because we demonstrably do that.

MICHAEL BARNARD: But I'll also say we've got all these subsistence farmers who are impoverished, who are stripping the covers from the land to get them the heck into more productive and better things for them, all that land becomes available to rewild or to put solar panels on or to put wind turbines on. Change agricultural practices. That ammonia comes with a big carbon debt has nitrous oxides coming at the end, it's six to nine tons of CO2e per ton of monies today. We've got to make it green, we've got to reduce it with precision agriculture, low tillage agriculture, stuff like that. Fixed concrete, steel and industrial processes. We've talked about steel fixes in there, talked about the Solvay process. Hey, there's an electrochemical process that can displace that. Cement, we have technologies which can decarbonize cement. They're just more expensive. And carbon capture works if we electrify the cement kiln and stuff and still are creating CO2 from baking limestone.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yes, capture it there.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Because that's actually the one of the few places where we have an almost pure source of CO2, capture it there. Good enough. That's a place where carbon capture has to compete with other technologies.

BRUCE MCCABE: And both carbon and steel. As soon as we start to price in any of this externality with carbon, the economics are fine for the new product. I mean, this is the... When we say it's more expensive, it's only more expensive when we're not pricing in the external carbon.

MICHAEL BARNARD: If we price carbon appropriately. And the next thing is … price carbon aggressively.

BRUCE MCCABE: There you go. [laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: So I just did the math for, this interesting thing I told you about this hydrogen for energy thing. The second one I found in the world, in the hundreds I've looked at that actually made sense, the chemical plant, as producing excess hydrogen as part of making sodium chlorate, which is used to bleach paper. And the plant over here, the plant over here is burning a lot of natural gas. So they put the hydrogen in instead of the natural gas and they reduce their emissions by about 25%. But if they electrify that with BC's grid electricity carbon intensity, they'd remove all of the carbon emissions. It'd be 3.2 million tons of savings. But you have to get out to 2040 social cost of carbon before the cost point of our dirt cheap natural gas is more expensive than our all also cheap electricity. So it's not a slam dunk. But carbon pricing, got to do it. Shut down coal and gas generation aggressively, like Ontario did it, 37 million tons of CO2e avoided and...

BRUCE MCCABE: We can do it.

MICHAEL BARNARD: We went from 55 bad air days, unhealthy air days a year to zero. Save people's lives. Pick the worst ones, create a schedule, shut them down one by one, keep the reserves running so we have sufficient reserves with fossil fuels as we decarbonize down to the end. Keep people alive and warm and stuff like that. But be aggressive about sunsetting stuff. Stop financing and subsidies for fossil fuels. 7.47 trillion per the IMF with negative externalities. It's like 2.1 trillion just of direct subsidies. And here's the kicker. Every time you see a hydrogen play or a carbon capture play, it's almost always another subsidy for the fossil fuel industry. Just cut that out!

BRUCE MCCABE: Cut the subsidies. Absolutely. That one really makes me... Yeah. It makes your head spin. The money's being wasted supporting a dying industry and it...

MICHAEL BARNARD: 2009. 2009, the G20 agreed we're going to cut subsidies. And they went up.

BRUCE MCCABE: Right. [laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: So heat pumps love heat, pumps. Dirty secret, HFCs, hydrofluorocarbons. Hydrofluorocarbons replaced chlorofluorocarbons, which were eating the ozone layer much to the people in Australia's chagrin and arguably the rest of world. But we don't mind sunburned Australians in our YouTube videos, [laughter] so we fixed that. But we replaced that with HFCs, and there's some good news. HFCs are lower global warming potential than CFCs. They still suck.

BRUCE MCCABE: They're still pretty high [laughter].

MICHAEL BARNARD: Oh my God. [laughter] Like 1,200 to 4,500 times worse than CO2. So you only have three pounds in a mini split. But we leak 3% a year and it's 4,000 times that. Okay. So we've got to fix that. We're doing that in Europe with, mostly we're going with propane and other fossil fuel-based stuff, which works perfectly in that space. And the United States are going with HFOs and the HFOs have forever chemicals involved with them, which is why the EU is avoiding them. And the HFOs the United States is going with are only better, like propane is 0.017GWP. C02 is zero, is 1GWP. The HFOs the United States is going with are 700.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah. Terrible.

MICHAEL BARNARD: I'm not really, and forever plastics or forever chemicals. No, I think the United States needs to rethink its HFC policy and of course we're in Canada, so we're just going to eat whatever the United States does. So I'm not happy about that.

BRUCE MCCABE: And the rest of us will, eventually we eat it as well. [laughter]

MICHAEL BARNARD: Yeah. Except that if you're, you can begin in with the EU ... Then there's ‘ignore distractions,’ which we've talked about. Nuclear, CCS, hydrogen for energy, not hydrogen for steel, ammonia or methanol for industrial feedstocks for their current purposes. Got to solve those. And then ‘pay attention to motivations.’ As we've discussed a couple of times, there's a lot of money on the table that's going away from some industries and potentially flowing into industries that are bad choices. If you pay attention to how people would likely benefit from the message they're sending, you're more likely to be able to identify messages you should be skeptical about. And you should look for backup stuff. I do this regularly. I talked about their Rocky Mountain Institute. Their motivations are not bad. Their hydrogen team is being captured by the fossil fuel industry. And I suspect that's true for their carbon capture team, but they grew massively over the past decade. And so some bad stuff happened and it's a common problem. The hydrogen lead is a very bright guy, 13 years at Shell, eight of them selling, doing big deals and doing policy for fossil fuels. Five of them for carbon capture and hydrogen. He's not, he is... His heart is in the right place, but the data he has internalized and the way he views the world has got cognitive biases associated, which makes him difficult, easy for him to get the wrong message. And he's got an economics degree, brilliant guy, PhD in economics, top-ups in London School of Economics, I think, in Oxford, something like that. No flies on this guy, but it's easy for him to get the wrong end of the stick because he doesn't know the science.

BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, yeah.

MICHAEL BARNARD: And he's...

BRUCE MCCABE: Comes back to that.

MICHAEL BARNARD: And that's so true.

BRUCE MCCABE: If you really want to understand the future, you need to know the science. You need to know the physics of the universe. It's fairly fundamental. It's pretty hard to break the physics. They don't change.

MICHAEL BARNARD: I have actually... I published something yesterday or the day before, which I want to get back to just briefly at the end because there's an answer to that.

BRUCE MCCABE: Education?

MICHAEL BARNARD: Here's the thing, pumped hydro versus pulling trains up hills. You can do the math on this with grade five math and grade seven physics. If you have a 13-year-old, ask them to do the math for you because they're taking it in school. You've forgotten it, the kids haven't … Anyway, that's it. That's the short list.

BRUCE MCCABE: Well, what we have to do, Michael, is get a bunch of links to some of these papers on the pod, and then I'll also do a blog for our listeners so that they can get to see all the things you're writing and doing. And I know you also host your own podcast. So let's give that a plug as well because you're focusing, it's Redefining Energy, right? Did I get that right? Is that what's called?

MICHAEL BARNARD: Sub channel on Redefining Energy: “Redefining Energy — Tech.” I spend 90 minutes going deep with STEM literate leaders, often women and no mediocre CFO White men. Sorry. If you feel you're special as a man without STEM degrees, don't ask me to be on the thing unless you can prove you're special. Like Mark Wilson, special. And so I break that into two episodes. So every month it's two episodes, a 90-minute conversation with someone deep who's got the STEM literacy, who's doing major decarbonization. I was doing hyperspectral. I had a great discussion about hyperspectral methane detection satellites with an entrepreneur there.

BRUCE MCCABE: Really interesting space.

MICHAEL BARNARD: This year, this month, it's HVDC with the head of power systems advisory group for DNV North America, a PhD in power systems engineering. That's the stuff I talk about.

BRUCE MCCABE: We'll put the links up and we'll also link to those predictions. That little table was in one of your papers of your predicted mix of energy. So I'll get that on the pod and the website as well. Thank you so much, Michael. It's nice being part of FutureBites. All right, sir. I had a ball and I learned a heck of a lot. And thanks for doing all the math and being so forthright. Keep doing what you're doing.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Nerdy. I can't help myself. I enjoy it.

BRUCE MCCABE: Keep doing what you're doing. The planet needs it.

MICHAEL BARNARD: Bruce, pleasure. Ciao.

BRUCE MCCABE: Well, that wraps up part two of our FutureBites episode with, in this case, Michael Barnard, the amazing Michael Barnard discussing the future of energy. I'm sure you'll agree, he was extremely generous. We covered so much ground and really picked his brains on the numbers that back up his forecast for what will work and what won't work as we transition to a clean energy future. Wonderful conversation. As promised, I'm going to include a bunch of links to his papers. But I would also urge you, because he's written so much in Clean Technica and Forbes Magazine and he's a LinkedIn top voice and so many other things, Google him and include a keyword on any subject you're interested in learning more about — so, “Michael Barnard and hydrogen,” for example — and you'll find a bunch more than what I'm going to post. But do go and have a look at the blog and check out the links for further reading. And in particular, the first paper I'll put in will be his forecast for the energy mix in 2060. So in the meantime, spread the word. Keep sharing the podcast. Keep the world pragmatic as we try and build a better future.

And if you happen to be part of an organization that needs a keynote speaker, that is what I do. I give shows, basically, on the future, where we're going, what it all means and what the opportunities are, most importantly, to do things better in every industry. I cover every country and every industry. So just go to the website and reach out if you're hosting an event and you want to get a speaker.

Other than that, keep spreading the love, keep spreading the word and the facts about this amazing, positive, wealth-generating transition that is clean energy. See you in the future!

Bruce McCabe

Future of Energy

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY WITH MICHAEL BARNARD

FURTHER READING

HIGH-LEVEL ENERGY & CLIMATE

Maritime shipping decarbonization

Aviation decarbonization

Steel decarbonization

Grid storage

Hydrogen

nuclear

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS

FUTURE OF ENERGY WITH MICHAEL BARNARD - PART 1

FUTURE OF ENERGY WITH MICHAEL BARNARD - PART 2

Future of Energy

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY WITH MICHAEL BARNARD

FURTHER READING

HIGH-LEVEL ENERGY & CLIMATE

Maritime shipping decarbonization

Aviation decarbonization

Steel decarbonization

Grid storage

Hydrogen

nuclear

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS

FUTURE OF ENERGY WITH MICHAEL BARNARD - PART 1

FUTURE OF ENERGY WITH MICHAEL BARNARD - PART 2

CALIFORNIA’S 100% RENEWABLES REVOLUTION

INTERFACING WITH THE NERVOUS SYSTEM