Hello Substack,
I am going to use this newsletter to layout my Deep Green vision for energy, the environment, and climate change. My vision stands in direct contrast to the conventional wisdom that solving the climate change crisis requires putting the fossil fuel industries out of business and replacing the energy they provide with renewable energy and/or nuclear power. My philosophies are rooted in nature which is a zero-waste, circular system that we can model and imitate. In this newsletter, I will address the full range of energy technologies within the context of my nature-based philosophies.
Renewables and Hydrocarbons
I am not opposed to renewables, I make my living in the solar business, but I am not under the illusion that wind and solar are all we need to operate an industrial civilization, or that they will even be the majority supply of the electrical grid. There are substantial land-use limitations that will put a cap on overall production. Hydro-power is by far the lowest cost and most reliable form of renewable energy, but we don’t build new dams in North America because of the land-use impacts. Wind and solar will face the exact same challenges as the industries mature.
We have to confront the fact that hydrocarbons are not going away, they are foundational to industrial civilization and cannot be eliminated. We need them for chemicals, high-temperature manufacturing, and heavy-duty transportation, the so-called “difficult to decarbonize” sectors of the economy. Nuclear power does not solve for these sectors either (I will lay out my complete views on nuclear in another post).
But we can dramatically reform the ways we use hydrocarbons, we can move beyond dirty fossil fuels and into the era of living fuels. We can make our fuels clean, we can produce them synthetically and biologically so they will never run out, and we can achieve net-zero carbon emissions through a portfolio of solutions, primarily the restoration of ecosystems.
My vision is simple, put nature first. The single best solution for capturing carbon dioxide emissions is to restore ecosystems and use CO2 for its intended purpose, as a building block of life. Mother Earth wants the CO2 and can use all of it, we can absorb our carbon emissions in farm soils through regenerative agriculture, in forests through reforestation, in peat bogs, grasslands, and ecosystems generally. Farming and ranching play critical roles in this plan and must be incentivized to shift practices from Earth depleting to Earth restoring. The carbon sequestration counts scale logarithmically as ecosystems are restored to vitality with a full complement of wildlife.
Deep Greens and Watermelons
I have been on the record for many years as a pro-natural gas environmentalist. I am also a strong supporter of waste-to-energy plants. Both of these positions put me outside the main-stream of environmental conventional wisdom and liberal political thinking. I disagree with the environmental left on other issues as well. I am an apostate environmentalist.
The dominant mode of thinking on the environmental left today is eco-Marxism, they are Watermelons, green on the outside, red on the inside. I am Deep Green, green all the way through. The eco-Marxists view capitalism as the root of all evil, and ideologically believe that putting the fossil fuel industries out of business is critical to solving the climate change crisis. The environmental left currently fights natural gas infrastructure and incorrectly views LNG (liquefied natural gas) as especially dangerous.
I disagree, I think we should be pushing industries to shift completely to natural gas as a wholesale replacement for both coal and petroleum. We should be talking about a hybrid-gas electric model that can cover all sectors, rather than the current discussion that is centered on electrification without thinking through the overall system required for industrial civilization.
I do believe that we can and should electrify all the sectors we can, particularly light-duty transportation and space heating. Electric vehicles are great, I love them, and I can’t wait until all new cars are electric. Electric motors provide superior performance over internal combustion engines with no emissions and low maintenance, what’s not to like? We can virtually eliminate air-pollution in cities by electrifying urban transport and this will be the biggest improvement in public health since the introduction of sewers and hospital sanitation.
Heavy-Duty Machines
While light-duty transportation can run on batteries, heavy-duty transport cannot. The limitation on electric transportation is not the motors, it is the batteries. There is no battery technology in existence or projected that will provide superior energy density to liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Additionally, liquid fuels can be stored, transported, and vehicles can be quickly refueled, while batteries discharge faster than they recharge. These technical characteristics are important in high-performance applications. Heavy-duty machines used in aviation, long-distance transport, and heavy construction outpace the capabilities of batteries and need liquid fuels to get the big jobs done.
The militaries of the world will be the judge of the requirements for heavy-duty machines, and industry will follow their lead. Battlefield requirements are very simple, kill the other guys before they kill you. The armies, navies, and air forces of the world all use liquid fuels because they offer superior performance and there is a global distribution infrastructure. There is no evidence that global militaries are contemplating a shift to batteries or hydrogen for their battlefield equipment. Hydrogen is expensive, dangerous, and difficult to work with, and batteries require electrical infrastructure that does not exist on the battlefield.
If one country’s military can demonstrate superior battlefield performance with alternatives to liquid fuels then all the world’s militaries will shift. They all shifted in tandem from wind-powered navies to coal-powered steamers to petroleum engines. The next shift will be to synthetic liquid fuels that are superior to petroleum and cleaner, but there is nothing on the drawing board beyond synthetics. Heavy industries like commercial aviation and maritime shipping operate in parallel to global militaries and use the same fuel infrastructures. This fundamental reality is not about to change.
I will repeat that electric motors are great. The latest generation of US Navy battleships, the Zumwalt-class destroyers, and the Littoral combat ships are hybrid gas-electric ships. They are completely electric ships with electric propulsion that use conventional naval fuels in a turbine to produce power. They basically have a power plant onboard, and since turbines are fuel flexible they have a wide range of fuel options from conventional diesel to LNG to synthetics. If batteries or hydrogen fuel cells offered superior real-world performance they would be used, but they don’t.
Hybrid natural gas-electric solutions can cover all sectors of industry and offer superior reliability, cost, redundancy, and fail-safe characteristics over the electric-only solutions envisioned by the climate hawks. We have a robust natural gas infrastructure already in place that is proven for heat, power, and transportation.
Natural gas complements renewable energy in the power sector. Natural gas provides the flexibility to match the intermittency of wind and solar, while renewables enable us to dramatically improve the carbon efficiency of the system. Hybrid gas-electric is proven in heavy transport, as shown by the US Navy, and also by freight trains which have used electric motors coupled with diesel generators since the 1950s.
Methane is Our Friend
Natural gas is primarily methane, and methane is a universal clean fuel that can be used across all industrial sectors; heat, power, transportation, and chemicals. The environmental movement is dead wrong to be opposed to natural gas, though I do recognize and understand the practical concerns with hydrofracking.
It needs to be appreciated that methane is fundamentally abundant and is part of nature’s cycle of life processes. Methane is non-toxic and not harmful to nature when spilled, though it is a greenhouse gas. Methane obviously presents fire hazards and pipeline leaks are serious matters. On the positive side, methane floats and evaporates quickly, it does not soil the ground or water, which is a dramatic improvement over coal and oil, both of which are highly toxic when spilled.
Methane is our most abundant fossil fuel and our most abundant renewable fuel, by a wide margin in both cases. Methane is a basic component of the Earth’s carbon cycle, it is produced in real-time, all the time, by biological processes in vast quantities. Our own bodies make methane, it is fart gas, and it is completely non-toxic. We can produce renewable methane through biogas digesters, methanogenic bacteria, and we already harvest significant quantities from landfills. Renewable natural gas is injected into our natural gas pipelines today, it is by far our most productive and cost-effective renewable fuel compared to ethanol or biodiesel.
We also have thousands of years of fossil methane available, we will simply never run out, any more than we will ever run out of sand in the Sahara. The methane hydrate deposits offshore in the oceans are larger deposits than all of the conventional coal, oil, and natural gas that has been discovered in all of history. The methane hydrate deposits were only first mapped in the 1990s and are now being tapped for the first time commercially. The USGS estimates there are 700,000 tcf (trillion cubic feet) of gas hydrates worldwide, many centuries of supply.
Gas hydrates are a remarkable geological formation. They are vast fields of methane frozen in ice that form in the deep ocean at depths greater than 1500 feet where the temperature and pressure keeps them stable for centuries. Carbon dioxide can also be frozen in these hydrate formations and technology is being developed now that can inject CO2 into the hydrates to release the methane and leave the CO2 behind, providing long-term CO2 sequestration.
We can harvest natural gas and convert it into LNG (liquified natural gas) completely at sea, these ships already exist. The entire industry could be moved offshore and eliminate fracking in the countryside. LNG could replace petroleum as the world’s primary hydrocarbon resource. LNG has an excellent safety and environmental track record compared to oil and coal. The best way to avoid oil spills is to not transport oil. Fossil natural gas can be blended with renewable natural gas with no limits since it is the same molecule and we can produce both in vast quantities.
Hydrogen and Carbon Capture
Many people advocate for hydrogen as an end-use energy product. There are challenges though because hydrogen is difficult and expensive to store and transport. Hydrogen is tiny, does not compress efficiently, is highly reactive to common materials, and is extremely flammable and dangerous. Methane is CH4, with 4 hydrogen atoms attached to one carbon atom. Methane is the closest we get to pure hydrogen and is already our primary resource for industrial hydrogen.
A practical solution for hydrogen distribution is to transport it as natural gas and refine the methane into hydrogen in local distribution centers. If a technique can be developed to capture the carbon while separating the hydrogen, then the CO2 emissions from today’s standard method of steam-methane reforming can be eliminated.
Methane can be blended with carbon dioxide to produce liquid fuels. We already make methanol and DME from a blend of 80% CH4 with 20% CO2, and other synthetic liquid fuels can be made this way as well. As mentioned above, CO2 can be injected into the hydrate formations for long-term geological storage. Methane offers multiple pathways to utilize CO2 captured from industry.
Restore Ecosystems
Finally, we can and should be highly efficient in our use of hydrocarbons and do everything possible to reduce the aggregate emissions that are causing climate change. Let us also recognize that we can absorb vast quantities of CO2 by utilizing nature and restoring ecosystems. The Earth’s natural processes release far greater quantities of CO2 and CH4 every year than humans do. These greenhouse gas molecules are part of nature’s life cycle processes and are intended by nature to be the building blocks of life.
The best way to fight global warming is to restore ecosystems that will absorb carbon dioxide as plant food and store it as soil, plants, and animals. Restoring ecosystems will literally cool the planet by providing shade and producing rain. In my next article, I will detail my ideas for incentivizing regenerative agriculture and ecosystem restoration.
About Me
A little about myself, I have twenty years of hands-on technical and business experience with the full scope of renewable energy technologies; solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, hydro, waste-to-energy, industrial carbon capture, and soil carbon. I currently work in the solar industry as a developer of commercial solar power projects. I studied and worked at Cornell University (BS, MBA degrees) for many years where I worked with some internationally renowned researchers. You can see my archival writings on clean energy and cannabis history on my personal website. www.edwardtdodge.com. I recently published my first book, A History of the Goddess: From the Ice Age to the Bible on the mythology of Mother Earth, which will be available this spring.