Inaugural Edition of the Green Innovations Newsletter
Welcome to the first edition of the Green Innovations Newsletter! Every last week of the month, we'll send you an email featuring 4 to 6 amazing articles about advances in the climate technology sector. The email will be long-form but divided into different topics, so you can read them separately.
Why are we doing this? We (Santhosh and Martijn) get a lot of inspiration and hope from these innovations, and we want to share that feeling. This newsletter is our way to learn as much as possible about climate technology from the perspective of two climate-curious engineers. 😊
Why Green Innovation Matters
Before we begin telling you about the amazing innovations, a quick story about why we started this newsletter.
Fossil fuels started being used widely around 1850, which caused carbon emissions (like carbon dioxide and methane) to increase. Nature usually takes away carbon from the atmosphere, but since the industrial era, we have produced too much and nature can't keep up.
Carbon emissions trap heat from the sun, and the more carbon there is, the higher the temperature. This could cause bad things like food shortages, melting ice caps, rising oceans, flooding and hot weather. We have to stop this from happening because we have not inherited the planet from our ancestors; we have borrowed it from our children1. That's why green innovation matters.
We produce carbon in almost everything we do - in the houses we live in, the items we use, the food we eat, the transportation we take, the air conditioning we use and even when we breathe. We need to find ways to reduce emissions and take away the carbon that's already been released. We're seeing lots of breakthroughs to do this, which we'll be featuring in our newsletter each month. Here we go!
🌾 Charm: Turning Plant Waste into Oil
“What happens to plant leftovers after the harvest?” - is a question I never thought to ask. Think about it: stalks, husks, straws, and leaves from crops like wheat, rice, and corn are not used for consumption. It turns out that most of the developing world burns those leftovers. A study published in 2020 found that 10.5 billion metric tonnes are burned each year, releasing 9.8 billion tonnes of CO₂e2 (the harmful kind).
Charm Industrial is a company that found a better purpose for this plant waste: turn it into CO₂-holding oil and biochar that’s used on the farm fields for nutrients. Using a mobile device on a semi-trailer, they use a process called Pyrolysis to convert the waste. It’s basically an oven set to around 450-550 degrees Celsius, but without oxygen. When the plants are heated to these temperatures, the cellulose and hemicellulose in the plants break down into liquid oil.
Then they store the resulting oil underground, in empty oil wells or empty salt caverns.
Charm has delivered about 5,500 tonnes of CO₂e removal to date, which is not much compared to the billions of tonnes in the study. But we’re in the early days of this type of sequestration, and I’m hopeful about scaling it!
For a deeper dive, check out this MIT Technology Review article.
💭 Capturing and Converting CO₂ into Rocks
To stop and reverse climate change, it turns out that we should not only stop emitting more carbon, but also suck out the billions of tons that we've already let out into the atmosphere.
How does one suck out carbon from the atmosphere? And what does one do with it anyway? Startups like Travertine have developed solutions for both. Travertine uses recycled sulfates, a byproduct of mining that contaminates soil and water, to capture CO₂ from the air and produce sulfuric acid, calcium carbonate, and magnesium carbonate. Sulfuric acid is a key ingredient in extracting critical battery metals such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt. The solid carbonates can be safely stored away underground in abandoned mines, or used as a raw material for cement or fertilizer.
Curiously, Travertine's process mimics Earth's natural processes that create solid carbonate minerals from the CO₂ in the air, but at a much faster rate.
Check out this video to get a closer look at Travertine's process.
☀️ Nuclear Fusion: Clean energy forever
Nuclear fusion is the energy source of the stars, including our very own Sun. It occurs when two hydrogen atoms are arm forced3 to come together and turn into a single helium atom. In the process they shed some mass to release a whole lot of energy (remember E = mc² ?).
Why is fusion a big deal? It's a big deal because because it’s almost limitless, clean (no carbon, no harmful radiation) energy that's always on - much like our Sun. The energy efficiency is through the roof. Every one kilogram of fusion fuel could provide the same amount of output energy as 10 million kilograms of fossil fuels 4. 🤯
Although we've been doing fusion for several decades now, we’ve so far been unable to harness it as a continuous source of energy. Because doing so requires a fusion reaction to generate more energy than what was used to trigger it, which wasn't possible until now.
The recent achievement by the scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the United States changes that. They were able to trigger a fusion reaction by firing laser beams at hydrogen atoms and produce more energy than was what required to trigger it. Check out this infographic for a step-by-step explanation of LLNL's fusion reaction.
LLNL's achievement is remarkable and sets the stage for a future of clean, sustainable energy. That future is though not too far away. Startups like Helion are already building fusion reactors that could generate electricity in the next 3 to 5 years. Helion uses super-strong electromagnetic fields to trigger its fusion reactors. Watch this video for a closer look at Helion’s fusion reactors.
The idea of a personal fusion reactor in the backyard powering our lives may not be far-fetched, after all.
⚡ ‘Virtual’ Power Plants
When I first heard about a 'Virtual Power Plant', I thought it was some type of software or a virtual machine that generated power. Boy, was I wrong.
With battery prices dropping by 60% in the last five years and the increasing deployment of solar panels and electric cars, more batteries are being placed inside or outside homes. While capturing the energy you generate and consuming it yourself is great, working with others can help you go further.
Imagine a suburb where all the solar, cars, heating systems, wind turbines, and batteries are connected and can communicate with each other. They would know how much power is generated and consumed and be smart enough to help each other. They would be able to determine how much energy is needed to get through the night, how much they will generate tomorrow, and offload the rest of their power to the larger energy grid (while the homeowners get compensated).
A Virtual Power Plant (VPP) is similar to a Microgrid but more distributed and intelligent.
Ford, Google Nest, Sunrun, and other companies have recently partnered to make this a reality.
VPP research has been ongoing since 2019, and the results are expected in 2023. After that, more companies will create devices and software to help you set up your own collaborative power plant in your neighbourhood!
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Sources
This quote is often attributed to an ancient Native American proverb.
There are different kinds of greenhouse gas emissions - Co₂e or “carbon dioxide equivalents” is a measure used to express the combined emissions of different greenhouse gases in terms of the amount of CO₂ that would have the same warming effect.
Gravity forces the hydrogen atoms together in the stars.