#hydrogen storage companies

[poojagblog-blog]

The global Hydrogen IC Engines Market in terms of revenue was estimated to be worth $12 million in 2024 and is poised to reach $327 million by 2035, growing at a CAGR of 34.7% from 2024 to 2035 according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets™. The global Hydrogen IC Engines Market is anticipated to grow at a higher level. There are various drivers responsible for the growth of the market such as government policies and incentives and technological advancements among others. Existing ICE technologies can be adapted to run on hydrogen with modifications, leveraging established manufacturing and maintenance infrastructure, and reducing the development costs and time compared to completely new technologies.

[ecaico]

What are the types of Hydrogen?

[dsiddhant]

The global Blue Hydrogen Market is projected to grow from USD 18.2 billion in 2022 to USD 44.5 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 11.9% according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets™.

[nasa]

ALT: This video shows blades of grass moving in the wind on a beautiful day at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. In the background, we see the 212-foot-core stage for the powerful SLS (Space Launch System) rocket used for Artemis I. The camera ascends, revealing the core stage next to a shimmering body of water as technicians lead it towards NASA’s Pegasus barge. Credit: NASA

The SLS (Space Launch System) Core Stage by Numbers

Technicians with NASA and SLS core stage lead contractor Boeing, along with RS-25 engines lead contractor Aerojet Rocketdyne, an L3Harris Technologies company, are nearing a major milestone for the Artemis II mission. The SLS (Space Launch System) rocket’s core stage for Artemis II is fully assembled and will soon be shipped via barge from NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans to the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Once there, it will be prepped for stacking and launch activities.

Get to know the core stage – by the numbers.

Standing 212 feet tall and measuring 27.6 feet in diameter, the SLS core stage is the largest rocket stage NASA has ever built. Due to its size, the hardware must be shipped aboard NASA’s Pegasus barge.

900 miles

Once loaded, the barge – which was updated to accommodate the giant core stage -- will travel 900 miles to Florida across inland and ocean waterways. Once at Kennedy, teams with our Exploration Ground Systems team will complete checkouts for the core stage prior to stacking preparations.

18 Miles + 500 Sensors

As impressive as the core stage is on the outside, it’s also incredible on the inside. The “brains” of the rocket consist of three flight computers and special avionics systems that tell the rocket what to do. This is linked to 18 miles of cabling and more than 500 sensors and systems to help feed fuel and steer the four RS-25 engines.

8.8 million

Speaking of engines… Our SLS Moon rocket generates approximately 8.8 million pounds of thrust at launch. Two million pounds come from the four powerful RS-25 engines at the base of the core stage, while each of the two solid rocket boosters produces a maximum thrust of 3.6 million pounds. Together, the engines and boosters will help launch a crew of four Artemis astronauts inside NASA’s Orion spacecraft beyond Earth orbit to venture around the Moon.

733,000 Gallons

Achieving the powerful thrust required at launch calls for a large amount of fuel - 733,000 gallons, to be precise. The stage has two huge propellant tanks that hold the super-cooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen that make the rocket “go.” A new liquid hydrogen storage sphere has recently been built at Kennedy, which can store 1.25 million gallons of liquid hydrogen.

Four

The number four doesn’t just apply to the RS-25 engines. It’s also the number of astronauts who will fly inside our Orion spacecraft atop our SLS rocket for the first crewed Artemis mission. When NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, and Victor Glover along with CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen launch, they will be the first astronauts returning to the Moon in more than 50 years.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[indiaenergystoragealliance]

SAFETY AND STANDARDS TASKFORCE | IESA

Standardization is a critical topic with a direct impact on new product development and existing product propagation. IESA’s Safety and Standards Task Force works on developing performance & safety aspects of energy storage. IESA is a part of the BIS standards committee (ETD-52) and provides inputs on new standards for Li-ion cell, BMS, ESS systems, and charging infrastructure.

With the same thought process IESA and UL signed a MoU to create an Energy Storage Standards TaskForce in 2015.

The key areas of mutual working are:

Educating IESA members on standards development process

Standards gap analysis in the identified areas of interest

Standards training

Formation of standards cell and UL to act as a secretariat for standards development

UL standards development tool–CSDS deployment for standard development

Access to relevant UL Standards

IESA also joined the EES Sectional Committee by BIS (Bureau of Indian Standards) in 2016.

The scope of the committee includes standardization in the field of grid integrated Electrical Energy Storage Systems in India. The Sectional Committee focused on the following:

Standardization in the field of grid integrated Electrical Energy Storage Systems.

EES to include any type of grid-connected energy storages, which can both store electrical energy from a grid or any other source and provide electrical energy to a grid.

Activities:

Organized a training on safety and standards with ARAI.

Conducted India’s first two days training workshop for li-ion cell fabrication and battery testing in Pune with Centre for Materials for Electronics Technology (C-MET) on 11th and 12th March 2020.

Helped Indian companies and startups for the technology due diligence with the help with IESA's lead acid and Li-ion lab. 

Sign up for IESA's newsletter for more information

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #12

March 29-April 5 2024

President Biden united with Senator Bernie Sanders at the White House to review Democratic efforts to bring down drug prices. President Biden touted his Administration’s capping the price of insulin for seniors at $35 a month and capping the price of  prescription drugs for seniors at $2,000 a year. Biden hopes to expand both to all Americans through legislation next year with a Democratic congress. The President also praised Senator Sanders' efforts as chair of the Senate Health Committee which has lead to major drug manufacturers capping the price of inhalers at $35 a month. “Bernie, you and I have been fighting this for 25 years,” Biden said “Finally, finally we beat Big Pharma. Finally.”

The White House gave an update on its actions around the Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster. The federal government working with state and local governments hope to have enough of the remains of the bridge cleared to partially reopen the Port of Baltimore by the end of the month and have the port working normally by May. The Administration has already released $60 million in emergency money toward rebuilding and promises the federal government will cover the cost. The Department of Labor has released $3.5 million for Dislocated Worker Grants and plans up to $25 million to cover lost wages. The Small Business Administration is offering $2 million in emergency loans to affected small businesses. The Administration is working with business and labor unions to keep workers at work and cover lost wages.

Vice-President Harris and EPA Administrator Michael Regan announced $20 billion to help finance tens of thousands of climate and clean energy projects across the country. The kinds of projects that will be financed through this project include distributed clean power generation and storage, net-zero retrofits of homes and small businesses, and zero-emission transportation. 70% of the funds, $14 billion, will be invested in low-income and disadvantaged communities. The project is part of a public private partnership so for every 1 dollar of federal money, private companies have promised 7 dollars of investment, bring the total to $150 billion for ongoing financing of climate and clean energy projects for years to come.

The Department of Transportation announced $20.5 billion in investments in public transportation. This represents the largest single investment in public transit by the federal government in history. The money will go to improving and expanding subways, light rail, buses, and ferry systems across America. The DoT hopes to use the funds to in particular expand and improve options for public transport for people with disabilities and seniors.

The Departments of Energy and The Treasury announced $4 billion in tax credits for businesses investing in clean energy, critical materials recycling, and Industrial decarbonization. The credits till go toward 100 projects across 35 states. 67% of the credits ($2.7 billion) will go to clean energy, wind, solar, nuclear, clean hydrogen, as well as updates to grids, better batter storage, and investments in electric vehicles. 20% ($800 million) will go to to recycling things like lithium-ion batteries, and 13% ($500 million) to decarbonization in industries like automotive manufacturing, and iron and steel.

The Department of Agriculture announced $1.5 Billion in investments in climate-smart agriculture. USDA plans to support over 180,000 farms representing 225 million acres in the next 5 years move toward more climate friendly agriculture. 40% of the project is reserved for disadvantaged communities, in line with the Biden Administrations standard for climate investment. $100 million has been reserved for projects in Tribal Communities.

The Department of the Interior approved the New England Wind offshore wind project. To be located off Martha’s Vineyard the New England project represents the 8th such off shore wind project approved by the Biden administration. Taken together these projects will generate 10 gigawatts of totally clean energy that can power 4 million homes. The Administration's climate goals call for 30 gigawatts of off shore wind power by 2030. The New England Wind project itself is expected to generate 2,600 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than 900,000 homes in the New England area.

The Department of the Interior announced $320 Million for tribal water infrastructure. Interior also announced $244 million to deal with legacy pollution from mining in the State of Pennsylvania, as well as $25 million to protect wetlands in Arizona and $19 million to put solar panels over irrigation canals in California, Oregon and Utah. While the Department of Energy announced $27 million for 40 projects by state, local and tribal governments to combat climate change

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Electrons, not molecules

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

When hydrocarbon barons do their damndest to torch the Earth with fossil fuels, they call us dreamers. They insist that there's a hard-nosed reality – humanity needs energy – and they're the ones who live in it, while we live in the fairy land where the world can run on sunshine and virtuous thoughts. Without them making the tough decisions, we'd all be starving in the frigid dark.

Here's the thing: they're full of shit.

Mostly.

Humanity does need energy if we're going to avoid starving in the frigid dark, but that energy doesn't have to come from fossil fuels. Indeed, in the long-term, it can't. Even if you're a rootin' tootin, coal-rollin' climate denier, there's a hard-nosed reality you can't deny: if we keep using fossil fuels, they will someday run out. Remember "peak oil" panic? Fossil fuels are finite, and the future of the human race needn't be. We need more.

Thankfully, we have it. Despite what you may have heard, renewables are more than up to the task. Indeed, it's hard to overstate just how much renewable energy is available to us, here at the bottom of our gravity well. I failed to properly appreciate it until I read Deb Chachra's brilliant 2023 book, How Infrastructure Works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Chachra, an engineering prof and materials scientist, offers a mind-altering reframing of the question of energy: we have a material problem, not an energy problem. If we could capture a mere 0.4% of the sun's rays that strike the Earth, we could give every person on the planet the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, only colder).

Energy isn't just wildly abundant, though: it's also continuously replenished. For most of human history, we've treated energy as scarce, eking out marginal gains in energy efficiency – even as we treated materials as disposable, using them once and consigning them to a midden or a landfill. That's completely backwards. We get a fresh shipment of energy every time the sun (or the moon) comes up over the horizon. By contrast, new consignments of material are almost unheard of – the few odd ounces of meteoric ore that survive entry through Earth's atmosphere.

A soi-dissant adult concerned with the very serious business of ensuring our species isn't doomed to the freezing, starving darkness of an energy-deprived future would think about nothing save for this fact and its implications. They'd be trying to figure out how to humanely and responsibly gather the materials needed for the harvest, storage and distribution of this nearly limitless and absolutely free energy.

In other words, that Very Serious, Hard-Nosed Grown-Up should be concerned with using as few molecules as possible to harvest as many electrons as possible. They'd be working on things like turning disused coal-mines into giant gravity batteries:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Not figuring out how to dig or flush more long-dead corpses out of the Earth's mantle to feed them into a furnace. That is a profoundly unserious response to the human need for energy. It's caveman shit: "Ugh, me burn black sticky gunk, make cave warm, cough cough cough."

Enter Exxon CEO Darren Woods, whose interview with Fortune's Michal Lev-Ram and editor Alan Murray contains this telling quote: "we basically focus our technology on transforming molecules and they happen to be hydrogen and carbon molecules":

https://fortune.com/2024/02/28/leadership-next-exxonmobil-ceo-darren-woods/

As Bill McKibben writes, this is a tell. A company that's in the molecule business is not in the electron business. For all that Woods postures about being a clear-eyed realist beating back the fantasies of solarpunk-addled greenies, Woods does not want a future where we have all our energy needs met:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/the-most-epic-and-literal-gaslighting

That's because the only way to get that future is to shift from molecules – whose supply can be owned and therefore sold by Exxon – to electrons, which that commie bastard sun just hands out for free to every person on our planet's surface, despite the obvious moral hazard of all those free lunches. As Woods told Fortune, when it comes to renewables, "we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders."

Woods dresses this up in high-minded seriousness kabuki, saying that Exxon is continuing to invest in burning rotting corpses because our feckless species "waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society." In other words, it's just too late for solar. Keep shoveling those corpses into the furnace, they're all that stands between you and the freezing, starving dark.

Now, this is self-serving nonsense. The problem of renewables isn't that it's too late – it's that they don't "generate above-average returns for our shareholders" (that part, however, is gospel truth).

But let's stipulate that Woods sincerely believes that it is too late. It's pretty goddamned rich of this genocidal, eminently guillotineable monster to just drop that in the conversation without mentioning the role his company played in getting us to this juncture. After all, #ExxonKnew. 40 years ago, Exxon's internal research predicted climate change, connected climate change to its own profits, and predicted how bad it would be today.

Those predictions were spookily accurate and the company took them to heart, leaping into action. For 40 years, the company has been building its offshore drilling platforms higher and higher in anticipation of rising seas and superstorms – and over that same period, Exxon has spent millions lobbying and sowing disinformation to make sure that the rest of us don't take the emergency as seriously as they are, lest we switch from molecules to electrons.

Exxon knew, and Exxon lied. McKibben quotes Woods' predecessor Lee Raymond, speaking in the runup to the Kyoto Treaty negotiations: "It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now."

When Woods says we need to keep shoveling corpses into the furnace because we "waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society," he means that his company lied to us in order to convince us to wait too long.

When Woods – and his fellow enemies of humanity in the C-suites of Chevron and other corpse-torching giants – was sending the arson billions to his shareholders, he held back a healthy share to fund this deceit. He colluded with the likes of Joe Manchin ("[D-POLLUTION]" -McKibben) to fill the Inflation Reduction Act with gifts for molecules. The point of fantasies like "direct air carbon-capture" is to extend the economic life of molecule businesses, by tricking us into thinking that we can keep sending billions to Exxon without suffocating in its waste-product.

These lies aren't up for debate. Back in 2021, Greenpeace tricked Exxon's top DC lobbyist Keith McCoy into thinking that he was on a Zoom call with a corporate recruiter and asked him about his work for Exxon, and McCoy spilled the beans:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#exxonknew

He confessed to everything: funding fake grassroots groups and falsifying the science – he even names the senators who took his bribes. McCoy singled out Manchin for special praise, calling him "a kingmaker" and boasting about the "standing weekly calls" Exxon had with Manchin's office.

Exxon's response to this nine-minute confession was to insist that their most senior American lobbyist "wasn't involved at all in forming policy positions."

McKibben points to the forthcoming book The Price Is Wrong, by Brett Christophers, which explains how the neoclassical economics establishment's beloved "price signals" will continue to lead us into the furnace:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3069-the-price-is-wrong

The crux of that book is:

We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing.

Nearly 100 years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Today, we can say that it's impossible to get an oil executive to understand that humanity needs electrons, not molecules, because his shareholders' obscene wealth depends on it.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

[thoughtlessarse]

When the oil giant ExxonMobil sponsored an event at the re-energizing Democratic national convention (DNC) in Chicago last week, it was disrupted by climate activists outraged that big oil was invited on to an influential political platform. “Exxon lies, people die,” protesters shouted before being evicted. The event included a “fireside chat” with Vijay Swarup, the company’s senior climate strategy and technology director. Swarup is a 30-year Exxon veteran who headed the company’s research and development team for just under a decade, and oversaw initiatives on biofuels, carbon capture and storage (CCS) and hydrogen. Speaking at the DNC event, Swarup said: “We need new technology and we need policy to support that technology. We need governments working with private industry.” The Exxon executive also praised the Biden administration’s landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed in 2022, for helping the company pursue new CCS and hydrogen projects. He is not alone in that regard. At an oil summit in Houston earlier this year, Exxon’s CEO, Darren Woods, said, “I am very supportive of the IRA” and acknowledged the legislation “especially benefited” the company. Exxon is set to receive billions in public subsidies because of the legislation. The US multinational has not always been such a strong advocate for the technology, but now argues that CCS is crucial in the climate fight and works, in theory, by capturing carbon dioxide from hard-to-abate heavy industries, like steel or cement, and pumping it underground to be stored indefinitely. Exxon champions itself as a “global leader” in CCS, maintaining it is driving “meaningful change” in the fight against global heating. But an estimated two-thirds to three-quarters of the carbon currently captured in the US is used to extract hard-to-reach reserves, a practice known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR). And the reputation of CCS has largely been one of “underperformance” and “unmet expectations”, the International Energy Agency said in 2023.

continue reading

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Chemists recycle shrimp waste as catalyst for hydrogen generation

Flexible spheres of the biomolecule chitosan, made from shrimp waste, can be used for catalysts that generate hydrogen gas from borohydride salts. In a paper in Green Chemistry, a research team at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) shows how the spheres can "breathe out" hydrogen bubbles without breaking. This is an important step towards practical and safe hydrogen storage and release units. Since 2020, the Heterogeneous Catalysis & Sustainable Chemistry group at the UvA's Van 't Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences has been working on using alkali metal borohydride salts as future hydrogen carriers. These solid salts can be stored safely in air under ambient conditions and release hydrogen gas only when reacting with water. However, controlling the hydrogen release, and thus preventing runaway reactions, is challenging. One solution is to stabilize the solution with a base, and control the hydrogen release by using a catalyst. The UvA team, led by Prof. Gadi Rothenberg, is developing such catalysts in collaboration with the Austrian Competence Centre for Tribology (AC2T) and the company Electriq Global.

Read more.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Anthropocene Magazine:

Nearly ten times as many people in America now work at Starbucks than dig for coal. Coal mining has long been a canary of America’s energy transition—it lost hundreds of thousands of workers in the 20th century, and has shrunk in half again since 2012. 

Losing dirty, dangerous coal jobs is one thing, but the wholesale dismantling of our fossil fuel economy promises to be far more disruptive. True, but there’s a huge caveat. The bright light on the horizon is that most estimates of new clean energy jobs dwarf even the largest oil refineries and auto plants. 

Winners

1. Everyone (on average). 2021 was a big year for energy jobs globally—it was the first time that more people around the world were working in clean energy jobs than fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Authority (IEA). While the US is still lagging behind that curve, clean energy jobs here are growing at twice the rate of the rest of the energy sector, says the Department of Energy (DOE). And the future looks rosy. Researchers at Dartmouth College calculate that a low carbon economy in the US would create two or even three green energy jobs for every fossil fuel job lost. (That fits with an earlier study out of Berkeley, which found that renewable and sustainable power sources inherently require more people per gigawatt hour of electricity generated, compared to fossil fuel plants).

2. Solar installers and battery makers. Photovoltaic and energy storage companies have been on a tear, adding tens of thousands of workers last year in the US. When considered along with wind, EVs, heat pumps and critical minerals supply, solar power and batteries accounted for over half of all job growth in global energy production since 2019. And the IEA expects these sectors to add tens of millions more jobs by the end of the decade.

3. Some surprise hires. Don’t count out Big Oil and Big Auto just yet. Both the IEA and the DOE expect the fossil fuel industry (particularly natural gas) to hire more workers in the immediate future, albeit at slower rates than clean energy jobs and tailing off in years to come. The IEA notes that if fossil fuel companies could successfully transition to hydrogen, carbon capture, geothermal and biofuels processing, they could almost offset decreases in core oil and gas employment all the way to 2030. It also expects car makers to pivot to EV production, retraining workers and safeguarding many jobs.

Losers

1. Oil workers. Changing careers means more than just a quick retraining session. Morgan Frank at the University of Pittsburgh went down the rabbit hole of what transferring US fossil fuel employment to green jobs would actually mean, and the answer isn’t pretty. His team’s paper in Nature found that green energy jobs are not co-located with today’s oil and gas workers, leading them to predict that almost 99% of extraction workers would not transition to green jobs. And any workers that do make the change face a financial hit. The IEA notes that workers moving from oil and gas to wind, solar and hydrogen today would see pay cuts of 15 to 30%.

2. Petro-states. The shift to green energy will be difficult for economies that rely heavily on fossil fuel extraction and processing. Consultancy EY has an illuminating, interactive webpage allowing you to compare employment in regions around the world, under different decarbonization scenarios. Spoiler alert—oil producing nations in the Middle East and Australia are likely to see employment slump, and even Africa could experience a destabilizing wobble unless it accelerates production of green hydrogen and EV battery materials. “Due to the transition, socio-economic sustainability risks will likely increase as the employment rate drops,” warns author Catherine Friday.

3. Homer Simpson. Some low-carbon energy sectors aren’t exactly booming. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) expects the employment of nuclear technicians to decline 6% from 2023 to 2033. The US hit peak nuclear power stations in 2012 and has been declining ever since, as facilities age into decommissioning without being replaced. Meanwhile, a planned new generation of safer, cheaper and more efficient fission reactors continues to suffer cost overruns, red tape and delays, and commercial nuclear fusion remains a decades-distant dream. D’oh!

What To Keep An Eye On

1. Labor shortages. Workers skilled in green energy jobs won’t just appear from nowhere. Projects are already facing delays in the EU and the US from labor shortages. Biden’s omnibus Inflation Reduction Act included incentives for partnering with apprentice programs and other funding that could be used to train maintenance workers, and installers for clean energy projects. But millions of workers will be needed, and in short order.

2. Carbon capture. The IPCC estimates that between 350 and 1200 gigatons of CO2 will need to be captured and stored this century. No one really knows yet what the technologies needed to achieve that will look like, but they will likely involve a lot of new workers. Climate research firm Rhodium Group estimated that each gigaton captured could translate to 1.5 million construction and 500,000 operation jobs.

3. Chat (and other) bots for hire. Any predictions about the future workplace should be taken with a large pinch of AI and robotics. The BLS just issued a report that shows dozens of occupations employing hundreds of thousands of Americans are likely to shrink in the years ahead. Top of the list are clerks and supervisors, but there are plenty of manufacturing and production roles at risk, too, that could affect the green energy roll-out.

[poojagblog-blog]

The global Electrolyzers Market is expected to reach USD 57.2 billion by 2030 from USD 0.5 billion in 2023 at a CAGR of 97.7% during the 2023–2030 period according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets™. The growing demand for cleaner fuels is one of the major factors driving the Electrolyzers Market. Global electrolyzers demand has been increasing gradually due to goals set to achieve net zero emissions in recent years. Governments worldwide are taking proactive measures to establish the necessary infrastructure for the development of green hydrogen, with a notable focus in Asia and the European Union, alongside select American and Middle Eastern nations. The increasing investment and funding landscape have emerged as formidable catalysts propelling the electrolyzer market into a phase of rapid expansion and technological evolution. Nations have incorporated electrolyzer targets into their hydrogen strategies. With the spotlight on green hydrogen intensifying as a linchpin in the roadmap toward a net-zero future which presents a significant opportunity for the Electrolyzers Market.

[fenrislorsrai]

ProPublica and Capital & Main reporters visited dozens of Remnant wells and tank batteries — facilities used for oil storage and early stages of processing — scattered across this rural stretch of New Mexico. Multiple sites emitted explosive levels of methane, with one leak clocked at 10 times the concentration at which the gas can explode. Several wells belched sour hydrogen sulfide at concentrations that maxed out the gas detector, registering levels three times as high as what is “immediately dangerous to life or health,” according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Oil Conservation Division inspectors hadn’t visited some of the wells since 2017, according to agency records. - - - Based on the per-well cleanup costs Fuge’s agency submitted to the federal government, the wells belonging to Remnant and a related company could cost the state $67 million if they are orphaned. The companies have only set aside about $1.5 million in bonds across three state and federal agencies. Under current New Mexico rules, companies only need to put up a single bond worth a maximum of $250,000 — no matter how many wells they have — with the Oil Conservation Division. The failed reform bill would’ve increased that cap to $10 million. The division can request additional bonds to cover the increased risk from idle wells, but when it asked Remnant and a related company for about $3 million, the operators put up less than a tenth of that and kept pumping oil. Weak bonding rules and an unwillingness to take on the industry have created similar shortfalls across the nation. The Pennsylvania General Assembly in the 1990s, for example, forced the state’s oil regulators to hand back money that oil companies had set aside to plug wells drilled prior to 1985, which numbered in the tens of thousands of wells. Oklahoma allows oil companies that prove they’re worth at least $50,000 — about the price of one of the ubiquitous pickup trucks cruising the oil fields — to set aside no money to plug their wells. And Kansas gives companies, no matter how many wells they own, the option of paying a flat $100 annual fee instead of setting aside a bond, as long as they have not committed recent infractions. Seven out of eight companies in the state take this route, leaving an average of less than $13 in bonds for each of the state’s 150,000 unplugged wells. The state’s estimated cleanup costs — which experts said may be low — would mean the state faces about a $1 billion shortfall between the bonds and plugging costs. “Regulations that may have worked well enough in the past have left the public and the industry ill-prepared for this last phase of life for millions of old wells,” Purvis, the petroleum reservoir engineer, said. “Left unchanged, current regulations and practices will continue to accrue liabilities that will ultimately fall on taxpayers.” All told, oil drillers have set aside only $2.7 billion in bonds with the 15 states that account for nearly all the country’s oil and gas production and $204 million with the Bureau of Land Management, the main federal oil regulator. The expected cost to plug and clean up wells in those states is $151.3 billion. ProPublica and Capital & Main obtained and analyzed more than a thousand pages of states’ applications for funding to plug orphan wells as part of the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The documents reveal for the first time states’ own estimates of the cleanup costs in a way that allows states to be compared. “You can give us probably the entire infrastructure act funding — $4.7 billion — and we'd probably spend that in Pennsylvania,” Kurt Klapkowski, head of the commonwealth’s Office of Oil and Gas Management, told a national meeting of regulators in October.

You should read the whole article for exactly how companies get out of paying to cap wells. Which is basically bankruptcy... and then sometimes selling the remaining producing wells to themselves to continue producing, but without that pesky cleanup for the ones tapped out. there's also a breakdown of different states and their liabilities.

The main issue with the leaking wells is methane, which aside from being potentially explosive, is also a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

[dsiddhant]

The global Blue Hydrogen Market is projected to grow from USD 18.2 billion in 2022 to USD 44.5 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 11.9% according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets™.

[theculturedmarxist]

“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.” – Hellen Keller

Republican Congresswoman Carol Miller has a quintessentially American political biography. As the owner of a bison farm in Huntington, West Virginia, Miller first became active in state politics, gaining election to the West Virginia House of Delegates in 2006. During her 12 years of service at the state level, Miller rose to the position of majority whip. In 2018, she ran for Congress, decisively winning West Virginia’s 3rd district seat on a pledge to “cut the bull” in Washington. She currently sits on the powerful Committee on Ways and Means.

Separately, The Hill is one of the leading politically focused news organizations in the US. Founded in 1994 to cover the inner workings of Congress and the intersection of politics and business, The Hill is known for its non-partisan style, a rare distinction in today’s hyper-politicized media environment. With more than 100 journalists and tens of millions of monthly readers, The Hill is considered an essential resource for those in the Beltway. In 2021, the company was sold to Nexstar Media for $130 million.

When someone of Miller’s stature takes to the editorial page of The Hill to address the topic of energy, we pay close attention. Imagine our dismay when we read this last week (emphasis added throughout):

“Hydrogen is often described as the future of clean and affordable energy. There are multiple ways it can be developed, but the most effective way is through a process called carbon capture utilization and storage. This process takes coal and natural gas emissions and converts them into hydrogen. At the beginning of 2022, hydrogen was supplied almost entirely from fossil fuels. More than 70 percent was generated from natural gas and 27 percent generated from coal. In the last year, my home state of West Virginia’s coal and natural gas production rose 5.7 percent and 6 percent, respectively. Using natural gas and coal emissions to create hydrogen energy is the perfect example of a comprehensive energy solution.”

We are not sure which version of ChatGPT was used to create this gibberish, but Miller’s language model needs a new training set. There is so much wrong with what she wrote that it is difficult to know where to begin—we are stunned that The Hill would publish it.

Hydrogen is typically made by reforming natural gas or by using an electrolyzer to split water, not by “a process called carbon capture utilization and storage.” When people refer to “natural gas and coal emissions,” they almost universally understand this to mean carbon dioxide (CO2). There is no “H” in CO2, of course, which makes Miller’s prose indistinguishable from alchemy.

After having read the entire opinion piece a half-dozen times, our best guess is that Miller must have been referring to the prospect of turning coal bed methane into hydrogen via steam reforming, burning the hydrogen thus produced as a fuel source, executing a water-gas shift reaction to convert the byproduct carbon monoxide into CO2, capturing the resulting CO2 emissions for storage, and having the federal government pay handsomely to have all this done. But honestly, who knows?

Whatever Miller was advocating for, the issue that provoked her to take to the pages of The Hill is a high-stakes one: an upcoming and highly anticipated rule-making announcement by the US Department of Treasury that will decide who qualifies for some of the most lucrative (and scientifically dubious) tax credits codified into law by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA). The race is on to pilfer scores of billions from the US taxpayer in the name of chasing green energy unicorns, and there is a full-blown administrative brawl underway between the various factions trying to get theirs while the getting is good. It is a story of cronyism, a failure to learn from Europe’s energy madness, and a familiar scheme guaranteed to incinerate heaps of the public’s money. Let’s head to the swamp and expose some of the disturbing details.

[energy-5]

From Extraction to Usage: The Lifecycle of Natural Gas

The journey of natural gas from the depths of the earth to the blue flames on a stove is a complex and multifaceted process. As a fossil fuel, natural gas plays a pivotal role in the global energy supply, accounting for approximately 24% of global energy consumption. This narrative will traverse through the lifecycle of natural gas, highlighting the intricacies involved in its extraction, processing, transportation, and usage, as well as its environmental and economic impacts.

Extraction and Production:

Natural gas extraction begins with geological surveys to identify promising reserves, followed by drilling either on land or offshore. In 2022, the United States, one of the largest producers, extracted approximately 99.6 billion cubic feet per day. The extraction often employs techniques like hydraulic fracturing, which alone contributed to around 67% of the total U.S. natural gas output in 2018. The extracted gas, containing various hydrocarbons and impurities, requires substantial processing to meet commercial quality standards.

Processing and Purification:

Once extracted, natural gas undergoes several processing steps to remove water vapor, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, and other contaminants. This purification is essential not only for safety and environmental reasons but also to increase the energy efficiency of the gas. Processing plants across the globe refine thousands of cubic feet of raw gas each day, ensuring that the final product delivered is almost pure methane, which is efficient for burning and less polluting than unprocessed gas.

Transportation:

Transporting natural gas involves an expansive network of pipelines covering over a million miles in the United States alone. In regions where pipeline infrastructure is not feasible, liquified natural gas (LNG) provides an alternative. LNG exports from the U.S. reached record highs in 2022, with approximately 10.6 billion cubic feet per day being shipped to international markets. LNG carriers and storage facilities are integral to this global trade, making natural gas accessible worldwide.

Storage:

Strategic storage ensures that natural gas can meet fluctuating demands, particularly during peak usage periods. Underground storage facilities can hold vast quantities; for instance, the U.S. can store approximately 4 trillion cubic feet of gas, helping to manage supply and stabilize prices. These reserves play a critical role in energy security and in buffering any unexpected disruptions in supply.

Distribution:

Natural gas distribution is the final leg before reaching end-users. Companies manage complex distribution networks to deliver gas to industrial facilities, power plants, commercial establishments, and residences. The U.S. alone has over 2 million miles of distribution pipelines, ensuring that natural gas accounts for nearly 30% of the country’s electricity generation and heating for about half of American homes.

Usage and Consumption:

The versatility of natural gas makes it a preferred source for heating, cooking, electricity generation, and even as a feedstock for producing plastics and chemicals. In the residential sector, an average American home might consume about 200 cubic feet per day for heating and cooking. For electricity, combined-cycle gas turbine plants convert natural gas into electricity with more than 60% efficiency, significantly higher than other fossil-fueled power plants.

Environmental Considerations and Future Prospects:

While natural gas burns cleaner than coal, releasing up to 60% less CO2 for the same energy output, it is not without environmental challenges. Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, can escape during various stages of the natural gas lifecycle. However, advances in technology and regulatory measures aim to mitigate these emissions. As the world leans towards a lower-carbon future, the role of natural gas is pivotal, with investments in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies and the potential integration with renewable energy sources.