Ke Liu is a specially invited senior researcher of the Globalization Think Tank (CCG) and the dean of the School of Innovation and Entrepreneurship of Southern University of Science and Technology
Carbon neutrality myths and their realistic paths
Liu Ke
Distinguished leaders and distinguished guests, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to share carbon neutral and relevant content with all of you today.
I myself have worked overseas for more than 20 years, previously working at GE, UTC, Exxon-Mobil and other units, and returned to China in 2009. After returning, his first job was to participate in the preparation of the Beijing Low Carbon and Clean Energy Research Institute (now the Beijing Low Carbon and Clean Energy Research Institute of the National Energy Group), and served as deputy director and chief technology officer. Later, I decided to come out and do something my own. At that time, Academician Chen Shiyi, former president of southern university of science and technology, invited me to go to southern university of science and technology, and I came to Shenzhen a few years ago.
After coming to SUSTech, I served as the dean of the School of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the dean of the Clean Energy Research Institute, because I have been studying low carbon and energy, so I take this time to talk to you about some of the contents of carbon neutrality today.
Carbon neutrality has been hot lately, and everyone is talking about it, but not many people really have a comprehensive understanding of this aspect. Once I met a friend who said that we are now specifically studying how to measure the carbon dioxide emissions of various units and companies in the future, which is a big industry. I said he was a laborer who hurt his money. In fact, on the one hand, carbon neutrality is a macro problem; on the other hand, looking at the carbon emissions of a city, such as Shenzhen, as long as you look at how many tens of thousands of tons of coal are consumed a year, how many tens of thousands of tons of natural gas are consumed, how many tens of thousands of tons of oil are consumed, each multiplied by a coefficient, plus the carbon emissions of the power generation end caused by electricity consumption, the total amount of carbon dioxide emissions in this city can be estimated, so that the carbon emissions calculated basically account for about 92% of the actual emissions, and others such as straw, biogas and garbage combustion account for only about 8%.
So, today I'm going to talk to you about some data and facts.
According to statistics, in 2020, China's carbon dioxide emissions are about 10.3 billion tons (the reported data is 10.2 billion tons to 10.8 billion tons, and I select the intermediate figure of 10.3 billion tons also used in other literature), of which coal, oil, and natural gas emissions reached 9.5 billion tons, and the other part is a variety of small, such as biogas, biomass, and some other emissions. Therefore, about 92% of CO2 emissions are generated by the combustion of the above three fossil energy sources: coal, oil and natural gas. Measure any company, any unit, any system, and count these three accurately. The country has statistics on all three and there is no need to additionally measure CO2 emissions. In 2020, China's total coal consumption is about 3.6 billion tons, which translates into about 2.8 billion tons of standard coal, and each ton of standard coal is multiplied by a coefficient to show that coal emits about 7.35 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year. In 2020, China's oil consumption is more than 700 million tons, which is converted into about 900 million tons of standard coal and emits 1.54 billion tons of carbon dioxide; natural gas consumption is converted into 400 million tons of standard coal, emitting 600 million tons of carbon dioxide; the three add up to 9.5 billion tons. 10.3 billion tons divided by 1.4 billion people, per capita is about 7.4 tons, a family of three emits an average of 22 tons of carbon dioxide per year, which is a daily figure. How to say it? If carbon dioxide is converted into a product, 22 tons of raw materials will produce 22 tons of products, no matter what product, which family can consume 22 tons of so much a year?
Regarding carbon neutrality, I am most afraid of talking about concepts and not talking about numbers. As a scientist, I'm going to share some numbers with you today. Everyone says that every day with air conditioning, driving, etc. are related to carbon, every person, every small step of energy saving, can make a little contribution to carbon neutrality, but the task of completing carbon neutrality is still very arduous, and it is a long process, which is why General Secretary Xi proposed to reach the peak in 2030 and neutralize in 2060, not now. In the 40 years of reform and opening up, China has undergone earth-shaking changes, and I believe that under the leadership of General Secretary Xi Jinping, we will definitely achieve the grand goal of carbon neutrality in the next 40 years; but in the short term, we will not lack fossil energy. Although wind energy, solar energy, CO2 conversion into chemicals, CCS, CCUS, and improved energy efficiency will all contribute to carbon reduction, and it is worth encouraging exploration and implementation, the proportion of CO2 reduced in the current daily emissions is quite limited in the near future. How can we achieve carbon neutrality in this case with minimal economic impact? What are the realistic paths to carbon neutrality, which I hope to discuss with you further.
01 Myths about carbon neutrality
Carbon neutrality is a very complex system engineering, the need to reduce carbon through a variety of technical channels and various efforts; each industry has its own carbon reduction route is emphasized, but the amount of carbon reduction path and various paths to carbon reduction in other industries is not very clear, the public has certain limitations on the challenges and cognition of carbon neutrality, there are the following misunderstandings, which need to be explained by data:
The first misconception is that wind and solar are cheaper than thermal power, so solar and wind can completely replace thermal power to achieve carbon neutrality. This sentence is only 1/5 to 1/6. Because there are 8760 hours a year, and China's solar power generation hours vary from place to place, ranging from 1100 hours to more than 2000 hours, there are not many areas with more than 2000 hours, and the national average is about 1450-1750 hours. That is to say, solar energy is cheaper than thermal power in about 1/6–1/5 of the time period; and in other 5/6-4/5 time periods, if you want to store electricity, its cost will be much higher than thermal power. Wind energy generation time is slightly longer than solar energy every year, about 2000 hours, but electricity needs 24 hours to supply, can not say that a power plant is only provided for one or two thousand hours a year, because we can not say that there is electricity when there is a sun and wind, no sun, no wind when the power is blackout. Solar and wind energy are cheaper, but the biggest problem is non-stable power supply.
It is undeniable that China's wind and solar energy has developed for nearly four decades and has indeed developed greatly and achieved very great achievements, and we must pay high tribute to scientists and engineers who have contributed to this field. But after forty years of development to this day, although the increase in wind and solar energy is huge, it is still quite limited compared with coal power. Taking 2019 as an example, the combined total wind and solar power generation in the country is equivalent to about 192 million tons of standard coal power generation, that is, the total amount of wind and solar power generated on the grid can only replace about 12.5% of coal power generation.
Moreover, the concept of battery storage in the power grid is very dangerous. It is estimated that the battery production capacity of battery manufacturers around the world for more than 5 years can only meet the power of the 3-day power outage in Tokyo. If we have 4/5 or 6 of the time to rely on battery storage, this is unimaginable. Moreover, the world does not have so much cobalt and lithium, and it is impossible for us to build so many batteries. In this case, the problem of curtailment of light and wind is very serious, because the grid can only accommodate ~15% of the unstable power supply. The electricity generated by wind and solar energy cannot be fully absorbed by the power grid. If we continue to increase wind energy and solar energy, the problem of large-scale energy storage cannot be solved, and more can only be abandoned.
There are two reasons for abandoning light and wind in China, one is technical factors, that is, solar energy, wind energy is impossible to predict, the power grid is less than 15% can be accommodated, more than 15% can not be accommodated, with the development of smart grids, this proportion will rise, but it still takes time; the second is the mechanism factor, the existence of local protectionism may make the local out of consideration of local GDP, prefer to use local thermal power, but also for various reasons do not use wind power, photovoltaics, hydropower. The mechanism problem can be solved in the context of the central government's vigorous promotion of "carbon neutrality", but the solution of technical problems depends on the development of science and technology, and this development process is difficult to predict and still takes time.
Therefore, solar and wind energy need to be vigorously developed, but at present, the cost of power storage is still high, and it is still impossible to completely replace fossil energy power generation in the foreseeable future.
The second misconception is that people think that there is a magic large-scale power storage technology, that if energy storage technology advances, wind and solar energy can completely replace thermal power. This hypothesis is too big, because since the invention of lead-acid batteries for more than a hundred years, humans have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on research and development funds to study energy storage, which can be increased from 90 kWh/ m3 of lead-acid batteries to 260 kWh / m3 of Tesla today, and the energy density of batteries has not been revolutionized fundamentally. You know, gasoline is 8600 kWh / m3. At the same time, the cheapest large-scale GW (billion watts of installed power generation capacity) level of electricity storage to date is the pumped storage technology that was invented more than 100 years ago.
Breakthroughs in science and technology are not impossible, but only discoveries can be known. It is impossible to predict tomorrow's discoveries today. I often give the example of the invention of the gunpowder, which was invented nearly a thousand years after the invention of gunpowder. Once the principle of the gun is understood, it is actually very simple, but if you say that after the invention of gunpowder, you can predict that the gun will soon be invented, which is outrageously wrong. With gunpowder, we can't assume at the time that we will soon invent guns and soon rule the world. It's just a metaphor, but it's a good reminder that when developing any strategy, don't use breakthroughs and assumptions that haven't happened to decide what you can do. In the past, our overall level of science and technology lagged behind that of the West, and a blank piece of paper could learn from the verified technical route to depict the development strategy of science and technology in combination with China's development needs. But now that we have achieved and even led in many areas, the strategy must be fully demonstrated in this case. Our strategy must be based on an existing, proven, realistic technical route.
The progress of different industries is not the same, the computer industry has Moore's Law, so many years have indeed developed rapidly, but the energy industry has not yet found a similar law like Moore's Law, "carbon neutrality" must choose a realistic and feasible route to advance.
One joke is that Bill Gates told boeing presidents that if technology in the aircraft industry were advancing as fast as computers, everyone would now be able to fly private jets instead of driving. The president of Boeing said, If my technology were the same as yours, no one in the world would dare to fly, because computers would crash at every turn. Therefore, don't think that one industry is developing quickly, and all other industries can develop rapidly. The energy industry itself is an industry that is constantly spending money but technological progress is slow. We encourage the innovation and development of energy storage technology, but when formulating strategies, it is necessary to base on the technology that has been proven on a large scale today, and it is not proved that technological breakthroughs cannot be assumed that this technology will definitely have breakthroughs.
The third misconception is that some people think that we can convert carbon dioxide into a variety of chemicals, such as plastic wrap, cosmetics, and so on. These must be able to be transformed, to make money, to be able to do, but these can not fundamentally solve the problem of carbon dioxide. Rough estimates show that a family of three emits an average of 22 tons of carbon a year, but a family cannot consume more than 20 tons a year.
On the other hand, it is estimated that only about 13% of the world's oil produces all of our petrochemicals, and the remaining about 87% of the oil is burned. If the world's chemicals are made of carbon dioxide, it will only solve the carbon neutrality problem of 13% of oil emissions. Therefore, chemicals made from carbon dioxide on a large scale do not have carbon reduction value. The contribution of carbon dioxide to other chemicals to carbon reduction is quite limited.
Therefore, convert carbon dioxide into any chemical, if you can make money, you can do it, but if you can't make money, don't use the concept of "carbon neutrality" to take state subsidies. I may offend a lot of people by saying this, but we scientists have to tell the truth and talk about the numbers. I've also been to a lot of forums on carbon neutrality, and a lot of times even some economists are talking about it, and there's no concept of numbers, only a rough generalization, saying that this way can reduce carbon, that can reduce carbon, but there is no concept of how much to reduce. You can't blame them for this, interlaced like a mountain.
The fourth misconception is that carbon dioxide can be captured and utilized in large quantities. Using CCUS (Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage Technology) technology, the carbon dioxide emitted in the production process is captured and purified, and then put into a new production process for recycling or storage. In theory, large-scale capture of carbon dioxide can be achieved. Now everyone says that the carbon dioxide is separated in the power plant, and after the separation is completed, it can be used to flood the oil and bury it, and so on. I see a figure that in recent years, China's entire CO2 flooding consumption is about a few million tons of CO2 consumption per year, and our annual emissions are 10.3 billion tons of CO2 is very limited. And the stage of oil flooding is that part of the carbon dioxide enters the ground, and a part of it will follow the oil out, it is not a complete burial. Burying carbon in the ground, I studied this at GE before I returned home. Coal and water and oxygen are converted into hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and hydrogen is burned to generate water vapor, and carbon dioxide is hit underground. At that time, we did a demonstration project, before and after spending 2.8 billion US dollars, with the participation of hundreds of doctors, it took 7 years to build a 630MW IGCC thermal power plant, once planned to separate the CO2 generated by the IGCC power plant that consumes more than 6,000 tons of coal per day and bury it all underground, this technology can achieve net zero emissions, but it is not economical, and finally decided to only generate electricity, not bury CO2. This demonstration has environmental significance, and the factory has been operating in the United States so far, and after we finished this project, we found that even if we did not separate and bury CO2, this is the most complex industrial system since GE was founded. Don't look at GE's production of the world's ~80% of the aircraft engines, and a large number of large medical equipment such as nuclear magnetic resonance, CT, etc., including the Three Gorges Water Conservancy Project equipment and the locomotive of the Qinghai-Tibet Line, etc., but this 630MW near-zero emission IGCC thermal power plant is the most complex industrial system ge has built since Edison founded General Electric more than 100 years ago, which has advantages in advanced and environmental protection, but the cost is too high.
Before I returned to China, I communicated with the former general manager of GE Nuclear Energy, and he also mentioned in a public speech that GE will solve the carbon dioxide problem through coal-free coal-fired power plants in the future, but after the speech, he came down and told me, don't look at what I said at the meeting, it is better to do it than dry nuclear energy, nuclear energy is much cheaper than zero-pollution thermal power plants. Of course, the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident had not yet occurred, and nuclear energy could do it. France now has more than 60 percent and almost 70 percent is nuclear, and it has been doing it for decades. But after the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, the world is increasing the safety factor of nuclear energy, and every time this safety factor is raised in the later stage, the cost increases a lot. Nuclear energy is an important base load power generation technology for carbon reduction, but whether people can accept the high electricity prices caused by their high costs need to be discussed. Therefore, the issue of carbon neutrality is not only a technical problem, but also a comprehensive problem of balanced economic and social development. Now in the power plant to separate carbon dioxide, after the separation to the ground can do oil flooding and buried this road, in the place where oil can be changed, there are some economic benefits, China's Xinjiang and other places have a similar carbon dioxide flooding project. The cost of this piece is mainly the cost of separating carbon dioxide from the exhaust gas of the boiler, we have calculated, assuming that the cost of CO2 hit the ground is 30 US dollars a ton, of which 20 US dollars is to separate carbon dioxide from the entire exhaust gas into pure carbon dioxide, 5 US dollars is to transport it to the burial point, and the other 5 US dollars is to compress it underground. Separation is the core and the cost is the greatest. Under the current technical means, the cost of relying on CCUS to deal with it is very high, and the role is limited, of course, the cost of this aspect can also be reduced through research and development, and whether it can be economically competitive depends on the price of the future carbon tax.
In fact, everything I just talked about, such as wind, solar, CO2 conversion, CCS, CCUS, contributes to carbon neutrality, and each of us should invest in research and development, to implement, but the current level of technology is limited in terms of quantitative contribution to carbon neutrality. Of course, this does not mean that everyone should not do it, each of us should do our best to promote the above carbon reduction technology progress, and strive to do it, after all, the accumulation of less is more.
The fifth misconception is that carbon neutrality can be achieved by significantly reducing carbon emissions in industrial processes and product use through improved energy efficiency. Energy efficiency will always improve, and improving energy efficiency is the lowest cost carbon reduction route in the world. But I often ask, in the two decades since joining the WTO, has our country's energy efficiency increased or decreased? We have improved our energy efficiency a lot. But has the total amount of carbon emissions increased or decreased? Due to the rapid development of our economy and production level, our carbon emissions have increased even more in the first 10 years. I remember that China's oil consumption in 2000 was about 2.0 billion tons, in 2010 it was about 400 million tons, and by last year it was nearly 750 million tons. China's coal consumption was 1.38 billion tons in 2000 and nearly 4 billion tons in 2020. And in many of the new industrial categories, energy efficiency has been greatly improved and emissions have been reduced.
I do energy, and you can see the changes in society as a whole from the data changes in energy. Before we joined the WTO, there was a very important figure, China's coal production is about 1.3 billion tons, basically self-produced and sold, exports a little, but very little. As a result, in just 13 years to 2013, it soared from about 1.3 billion tons to about 3.9 billion tons, which is a daily volume, and of course accompanied by carbon emissions. How should this be interpreted? The only interpretation is that china has joined the WTO, and the world's market has opened up to China. Of course, our large amount of real estate construction during this period was also a factor. The consumption of coal indicates the consumption of electricity, and the consumption of electricity indicates the degree of industrialization. Energy efficiency has certainly improved a lot during this period, but energy efficiency alone will not solve the problem of carbon neutrality. Therefore, improving energy efficiency is an important means of carbon reduction, but as long as fossil energy is still used, the contribution of energy efficiency to carbon neutrality is also very limited, improving energy efficiency is indeed the lowest cost way to reduce carbon emissions, and it is also the most important priority, but there is a realistic consideration that can not rely on energy efficiency improvement alone to achieve carbon neutrality.
The sixth misconception is that electric vehicles can reduce carbon emissions. Some time ago, I talked about the "History and Future of Electric Vehicles and Hydrogen Energy" in the NetEase Open Class, and there were about 100,000 people across the country watching, and many leaders discussed this problem with me after reading it: Why do we want to develop electric vehicles? Quite simply, mainly because China doesn't have enough oil, we import 73% of our oil; there are environmental problems such as smog.
We don't have enough oil, and we hope that the super power generation capacity we have built is good, so it is beneficial to develop electric vehicles. There are 8,760 hours a year, but we have built too many thermal power plants, and in order to let everyone have food, many thermal power plants actually generate less than 4,000 hours of electricity per year, which is a huge waste of assets. And after all, electric vehicles can reduce local pollution, such as the use of electricity in the eastern region is often sent in the western Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and other places, pollution in the west, not in the eastern region. However, in the perspective of carbon emission analysis of the whole life cycle, electric vehicles take into account the emissions in the battery production process, if most of the electricity in the grid is still thermal power, electric vehicles have a very limited impact on carbon reduction and global climate change.
Why can't electric vehicles completely solve the problem of carbon neutrality? Only after China's energy structure is completely changed can electric vehicles be regarded as clean energy and carbon neutral. If the energy structure does not change, if the grid is mainly coal power, then the expansion of electric vehicles to reduce carbon emissions contribution is very limited, you can do this to know. Electric vehicles can only be considered clean energy when the energy structure and the majority of the power grid are composed of renewable energy.
Everyone has been talking about a question, saying that how to solve the problem of energy security after the Strait of Malacca is sealed? But this thing you have to think carefully about, relying on the power grid can not be solved. Because the grid is the most vulnerable thing in modern warfare. Oil can be distributed everywhere and stored in tens of thousands of points, one oil depot is destroyed, and the others can be used. However, as long as the power distribution center of a city's power grid is destroyed, it is easy to cause a large-scale power outage.
Sometimes, energy policies and carbon policies can't do something high-cost regardless of cost because they assume that war will happen and others beat me. First, the occurrence of the traditional model of war is a small probability event; second, in the real wartime, many problems are determined by a country's comprehensive capabilities such as sea control and air supremacy, rather than relying on electric vehicles to solve problems.
02Why did electric vehicles fail to beat fuel vehicles in the first hundred years?
The concept of electric vehicles is not new, more than 100 years ago, such as 1912, in the streets of New York, London, Paris, and Los Angeles, there were far more electric cars running than fuel vehicles. (Figure 1)
Figure 1 Edison poses with his electric car in 1912.
The battle between electric cars and fuel vehicles didn't just start today. In 1912, a group of scientists led by Edison felt that electric vehicles could dominate the world in the future. The automobile companies represented by Ford are taking the route of fuel vehicles. Electric vehicles have almost disappeared since the 1930s, and today fuel vehicles still occupy an absolute dominant position.
Why were there more electric cars than fuel vehicles a hundred years ago? Because lead-acid batteries predate the invention of the internal combustion engine more than twenty years ago. With a lead-acid battery, and then an engine, it is the car driven by the golf course today, and the car body on it is a car. Today's golf courses drive the same cars that Edison drove a hundred years ago, so electric vehicles are not completely new technologies, and the core of its innovation over the years is in batteries and electronic control systems.
So, why didn't electric vehicles compete for fuel vehicles in the first hundred years? What was the fundamental reason for the world's choice of fuel vehicles in the first 100 years? I don't predict the future here, but only use data to tell the history, and explain a few reasons to you.
The first reason is that we who do energy have a concept called volumetric energy density. Cars have ballast steel plates, ships have ballast water, this energy is slightly heavier on cars, ships have little impact, but the fuel tank can not be infinite. Assuming that our fuel tank is 1 cubic meter, the energy density contained in each energy source determines the distance the car can run.
The energy density of lead-acid batteries invented more than 100 years ago is 90 kWh / m3, and human beings have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and more than 100 years of exploration, and the battery energy density is now Tesla's battery, BYD's blade battery, that is, 260 kWh / cubic meter. The energy density of gasoline is 8600 kWh/m3 and diesel is 9600 kWh/m3. The methanol liquid to be mentioned later is 4300 kWh/m3, which is much larger than the battery.
The second reason is that liquids are the best carriers for energy storage. Liquid energy has a very good feature, can be piped on land, can be transported across the sea very cheaply, and can be stored for a long time at room temperature and pressure.
Shortly after I came to Shenzhen in 2016, at an energy seminar, I asked a question to many friends in the energy industry and academia, at that time, driving and refueling in Shenzhen for a long time was about 7 yuan a liter, assuming that this gasoline was pulled from the houston refinery to the Shenzhen Yantian Port and then to the gas station, how much is the freight of this liter? I let a lot of friends who are engaged in energy guess, some people guess it is half (3 pieces 5), even some people guess 5 pieces, some people guess 1 piece, I said the real answer is less than 7 cents. When I said 7 cents, no one believed me, but I figured it out. Today's large tankers can pull 300,000 tons of a large ship, which is about 400 million liters of gasoline (converted into about 360 million liters of crude oil). The advantage of liquids is that they can be loaded on a ship using pumps and pipes, without the need for labor. When you get to the dock in Shenzhen, after the pipeline is connected, you can use the pump to hit the tank, and you don't need to work. The road costs the ship's oil money and depreciation, 400 million liters, if a liter of a dime is 40 million yuan, but running a boat can not use so much oil money. That's why there are only a few places in the world that produce oil, but it's easy to refuel and drive around any corner. Therefore, liquids have many benefits in transportation and can be stored for a long time. Highly alcoholic beverages (such as Scottish spirit vodka, Chinese Erguotou, Moutai, etc.) are no problem to store for 50 years, but neither electricity nor gas can be stored for a long time. The common high-altitude wine is also an alcoholic liquid, and this example shows that there are no problems with the transportation and long-term storage of liquid fuels.
These most basic concepts need to be clear to everyone, which is why I went to canada's towns near the North Pole in winter to see, there is no power grid, natural gas network, many villages and towns only have a gas station, a can of gasoline, a can of diesel can be pulled over to meet daily life. In the most remote corners of the world, as long as there is a road, pulling it can be stored for a long time, pulling a tank, a month or two is enough, but the electricity and natural gas pipeline network is not so easy to lay. This is the advantage of liquid energy. Human beings always choose what is economically optimized, not who likes what, but what is the cheapest and most convenient.
Third, why is the first assembly line of mankind the assembly line of Ford? Internal combustion engines are mechanical things, and it is very expensive to build one, but when the design is finalized, when 1 million units are built in an assembly line every year, the cost of each one will be greatly reduced. In 1913, as soon as Ford's assembly line went into mass production, it reduced American cars from $4,700 to $380, making cars affordable for every blue-collar worker.
However, the difference in electric vehicles is that each battery needs a certain amount of nickel, cobalt, lithium, and various metals such as copper on the car. After the expansion of production capacity, the cost of each unit will decrease, but the decline is not much, unlike mechanical stainless steel, how much to produce, the more it is built, the lower the cost, and the material cost is very small. The material cost of electric vehicles accounts for the majority, and the processing cost is not the mainstream, so the use of assembly lines can be reduced, but there can be no fundamental reduction.
China's electric vehicles increased from 517,000 at the end of 2016 to 794,000 in the first quarter of 2018, an increase of 280,000 units, compared to 1/1,1000 of the annual production of the entire auto market at that time, but the price of cobalt and lithium tracked around the world in the same period rose to four times and two times, respectively. This situation tells us that if the technology does not break through, do not reduce the amount of cobalt and lithium, the more materials are made, the more expensive the material. When the price of cobalt quadruples and the price of lithium doubles, no company in the world claims to be profitable by recycling cobalt and lithium from batteries, which in turn tells us that the recycling technology of batteries has yet to be broken.
The recent increase in the price of many raw materials is due to quantitative easing on the one hand, and the original supply and demand relationship of these metals has changed on the other hand. The original supply and demand relationship is very stable, because the amount of cobalt and nickel used in industry is very limited. Now suddenly there are so many new car-making forces, the relationship between supply and demand has changed. When the relationship between supply and demand changes, the price will definitely not be said to increase proportionally, such as 100 people in the world, but there are only 99 bottles of mineral water, and the last bottle of mineral water must not rise to 1.1 times, but the price that the last person cannot afford.
At today's prices, the cost of electric vehicles is actually in everyone's mind. I listed that each car requires 53.2 kg of copper, 8.9 kg of lithium, 39.9 kg of nickel, 24.5 kg of manganese, 13.3 kg of cobalt, 66.3 kg of graphite, 0.5 kg of rare earths, and 0.3 kg of others. Recently, lithium iron phosphate batteries have come out, and the amount of cobalt can be reduced, but the biggest problem is that its performance is not good when the temperature is low in winter. Therefore, at today's price, the cost of an internal combustion engine of the best BMW and Mercedes-Benz is about $2300, and the cost of Tesla's battery is about $20,000. For an industry to develop, it must be able to mass-produce on a large scale, and the larger the scale, the cheaper it is. That's why the first assembly line for humanity was ford's assembly line. None of this is accidental. These problems are not clear to the public, but they are clear in the industry. Now the capital market is very hot, but once the subsidy policy stops, whether it can make money is cold and warm.
Figure 2 On May 13, 2018, Premier Li Keqiang visited Toyota Hydrogen Fuel Vehicles of Japan.
Anyone who cares about the car has probably seen this photo (Figure 2). On May 13, 2018, Premier Li Keqiang visited Toyota Motor Corporation and speculated about hydrogen energy on the Internet, saying that the real future of electric vehicles is hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, not electric vehicles. Hydrogen energy has its advantages, high power generation efficiency, can reduce dependence on oil, emit water vapor, and the cost can come down after large-scale mass production. Although the fuel cell also uses precious metals, its precious metal recovery technology is relatively mature. And these years of research and development have made the amount of precious metal materials reduced, which is its advantage.
Now our batteries are cascade utilization, today's electric vehicles have been used for 5 to 7 years, and the decommissioned power batteries are used as energy storage power sources, such as energy storage under 5G base stations, which may be delayed for another one or two decades. But energy storage batteries have a lifespan, there are many chemicals that are harmful to nature, it is impossible to use indefinitely, and it still needs to be recycled after one or two decades. If it is not recycled, when millions or even tens of millions of batteries are distributed in The land of China, if they are allowed to leak, it will be an environmental disaster.
The concept of energy life cycle analysis is very important, we have done more than a hundred lines of "oil well to wheel" or "mine to wheel" analysis, to know that 40% of China's energy is in Xinjiang, how to transport energy, this is a complex system.
At GE, I spent millions of dollars with many PhDs doing models of energy life cycle analysis studies, how much carbon emissions are at each step, how efficient they are, and finally speaking in numbers. After returning home, I spent a lot of money to bring this methodology into the country, and launched the "Energy Life Cycle Analysis" project in cooperation with the largest EPC companies and national laboratories in the United States at the Low Carbon Institute to cultivate talents in this area from scratch. This kind of soft topic is difficult to get large financial support in China, but it is very important because it is necessary to use "data decision-making". The team led by Academician Xie Kechang, former vice president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, including Dr. Tian Yajun of the Institute of Low Carbon, is committed to promoting this work, and making up for the shortcomings of this piece is a very meaningful and valuable work. Because the real decision-making finally depends on the data, the researchers spend a lot of time to build the mathematical model little by little, and constantly adjust, and finally be able to compare with the real data, constantly correct the model parameters, and finally use the predicted numbers of these models to make future decisions, which is called "data decision-driven decision making", which is a culture we want to promote. Just like carbon neutrality, in the future, we must also do a good job of carbon neutral data collection from various channels, from oil wells, mines, natural gas wells to wheels, to light bulbs, etc., the whole life cycle analysis of each step, the establishment of models, after the model analysis, everyone speaks with numbers.
Electric vehicles encounter these problems, does not mean not to develop electric vehicles and battery technology, battery technology research and development is always important, not only the industry in promoting the development of a variety of advanced battery technology, our Southern University of Science and Technology Professor Zhao Yusheng, Professor Deng Yonghong and other teams have been working hard to innovate research and development in this regard, and have made leading progress. But one thing I would like to say is that electrification and networking are not necessarily related. The internal combustion engine is driven as long as the battery is large enough for a better computer. Now some people say that we must engage in networking and intelligence, so we must engage in electric energy, and this sentence is only half right. How much computing power does a smartphone have today? Networking may require the computing power of dozens of mobile phones, which is also the problem of several batteries. But if you need this computing power, do you have to change the drive to electric? In fact, now a relatively good Mercedes-Benz car, as long as there is a sufficient battery, there is a motor power generation can also be networked, intelligent. Therefore, there is no inevitable connection between intelligence, networking and electrification.
03Why hydrogen vehicles have not yet been industrialized?
Hydrogen energy is not new at all, as early as the sixties of the last century, when Apollo landed on the moon, it was with liquid hydrogen liquid oxygen to the sky, hydrogen energy generated electricity for instruments, the water produced by astronauts to drink.
I used to work at the United Technologies (UTC)-Shell joint venture, and for many years the fuel cells of all spacecraft in the United States were produced by United Technologies (UTC). From the 1990s to around 2005 and 2006, the United States spent tens of billions of dollars on fuel cell research and development. I remember President George W. Bush said in his State of the Union address in 2003 that he would announce a plan where the U.S. Department of Energy would spend $1.2 billion on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and 15 years later every American would be running a car with water vapor emitted from the back. However, by now, the world's fuel cells (vehicles) may add up to more than 30,000, and the United States has less than 10,000. Last year, the world sold only more than 1,900 hydrogen energy vehicles, and Toyota did not sell many. President George W. Bush has spent a lot of money on national strategies with technologies that have not yet made a real breakthrough, and although he has trained a large number of scientists and researchers during this period, the promotion of industry and the environment have changed very little.
Why are fuel cell vehicles, which is what we call hydrogen vehicles, not industrialized? The most fundamental reason is that hydrogen is not suitable as an energy carrier that you and I share. Many people have a misunderstanding in this area, and even some media have rendered that "hydrogen is the ultimate energy of mankind", which is not rigorous. Hydrogen is not a primary energy source, but a secondary energy source, or rather a carrier of energy. The world has coal fields, oil fields, natural gas fields, but no hydrogen fields. Hydrogen, like electricity and methanol, is made from other energy sources, but as a carrier, hydrogen does not have the advantages of the liquid energy mentioned above in terms of energy density, pipeline and cross-sea transportation, and long-term storage.
Hydrogen is not suitable for mass energy carriers, mainly because there are several aspects that people cannot change through research and development. First, hydrogen is the substance with the smallest volumetric energy density, and our requirement is that the larger the volumetric energy density, the better. Many people have made a conceptual misunderstanding that hydrogen is the most energy dense, which is half right. If in terms of kilograms (mass energy density), the energy density of hydrogen is the largest. However, for car pressure and ships with ballast water, the problem of weighing a little is not big, but the fuel tank volume cannot be too large, and it should be about every cubic meter, and the kilogram is of little significance. If the same energy concept is switched, its volumetric energy density is minimal (Figure 3). In order to increase the energy density of the volume, the pressure had to be increased. At present, the hydrogen storage tanks in all hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are 350 and 700 kg of atmospheric pressure. Hydrogen storage tanks must be made very thick if they take stainless steel designs, because the pressure is too high. Anyone who has studied science and engineering knows that high-pressure equipment with a pressure of 700 kilograms is not so easy to produce.
Figure 3: Energy density of various types of energy sources
Second, there will be a problem with hydrogen high pressure, hydrogen is the smallest molecule in the periodic table, the smallest molecule means the most prone to leakage, long-term storage is the problem.
Third, hydrogen in the open air has no problem, we did this experiment in the United States more than 20 years ago, a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, its hydrogen storage tank for safety is generally placed at the end, ordinary rifle a shot is impenetrable, with a super strong rifle through, because the hydrogen is very light, just like a hydrogen balloon, a fire dragon rushed to the sky, the temperature of the cab can not rise so high at once, people have enough time to escape.
However, in an enclosed space, hydrogen can have a huge problem. Hydrogen is the gas with the widest explosive range, which can range from 4% to 74%. Less than 4% is safe, and more than 74% only catch fire and do not explode. But in the wide range of 4% to 74%, it explodes when it encounters Mars.
Now in these cities, especially in Shenzhen, more than 90% of cars are parked in the enclosed space of the underground garage. When a large number of hydrogen energy vehicles enter the underground garage, if a car leaks, it will create a huge danger. Although this is a small probability event, but when the amount of use is large, there are always problems such as component aging, even if the hydrogen storage tank is safe, valves, pipelines, etc. also have a certain probability of aging, or driving without paying attention to the impact. Once the leak encounters Mars, the electric spark will explode, causing other cars to explode, and a building may be destroyed. Therefore, in the enclosed space, the use of hydrogen should be very careful.
Because of the explosive nature of hydrogen, vehicles transporting hydrogen beyond a certain range are now not allowed to pass through the tunnel, what if the tunnel is blown up? Of course, whether it will be possible to build hydrogen pipelines in the future is another question.
Also because of the explosive nature of hydrogen, the construction of hydrogen refueling stations should be particularly careful, and a certain safe distance is required around. Now the north, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen are full of gas stations, but the land price is so expensive, where to find so many places to rebuild hydrogen refueling stations?
Because of these problems, although hydrogen energy is hot right now, be cautious. These properties of hydrogen determine that it is not suitable as an energy carrier. So, when people say "hydrogen is the ultimate energy source for human beings," a lot of things are specious.
Before the epidemic, several comrades of the Ministry of Science and Technology may have heard that I have been the chairman of several sessions of the National Hydrogen Energy and Fuel Cell Summit and have been a director of the International Hydrogen Energy Association for more than twenty years, brought a few experts to Shenzhen to investigate, we talked for an afternoon, and then I wrote a simple report on some of the current situation, problems and solutions of hydrogen energy, and then they put it into the front page of science and technology daily.
Hydrogen production is easy, but it is difficult to store and transport hydrogen. In fact, the use of hydrogen in the world is very extensive, China's hydrogen production capacity has reached more than 30 million tons / year, today we use every gram of fertilizer is made of hydrogen. There are so many fertilizer plants and refineries in the world that require a lot of hydrogen, but at present, there is no fertilizer plant or refinery that relies on solar and wind energy to produce hydrogen and chemical fertilizers. What is the reason? Too expensive, if it is cheap, these fertilizer plants, refineries have long changed to solar energy, wind energy to produce hydrogen.
There is now a market of tens of millions of tons of hydrogen in the world every year, and hydrogen is the most expensive to supply to refineries, and there are large gas companies on the side of each refinery. It is not impossible to use wind and solar energy to produce hydrogen, but there is not enough economic attractiveness at present. If this is profitable, I believe that many entrepreneurs have long begun to take wind energy and solar energy to produce hydrogen.
Hydrogen is not without advantages, it can also be done, how to do it? It has something to do with our carbon neutrality.
04Why is methanol probably the best hydrogen storage carrier?
If you really want to achieve carbon neutrality in the future, and solar energy and wind energy can sell carbon taxes, you can combine wind energy, solar energy and coal to produce cheaper methanol, hydrogen production through on-board methanol and integration with fuel cell systems, which is more efficient than direct combustion engines. This route is possible in the future. All I can say is that it is possible, not guaranteed, and largely depends on various policy adjustments and carbon taxes. If the carbon tax goes up, the line has an economy.
The reaction of 1 L of methanol and water can release 143 grams of hydrogen. Hydrogen storage is either compressed or condensed. Even if it is condensed, 1 L of liquid hydrogen is only 72 grams, and the hydrogen yield of 1 L of methanol and water reaction is twice that of 1 L of liquid hydrogen.
Why is it possible for this technology to do this? Twenty years ago, the world's first fuel cell car, which was converted into hydrogen online from gasoline, was built by some engineers led by Nissan and Shell.
There is a small story, when Toyota, Honda, GM's high-pressure hydrogen fuel cells have been built, Nissan found that it was backward, so he found Shell, and found us, saying can we build a car, adding gasoline, gasoline in the car and water, and air reaction to hydrogen, and then push the fuel cell, so that the fuel cell efficiency is high, but also can not use hydrogen refueling station.
Why wasn't methanol done at the time? Because the shale gas revolution had not yet taken place, natural gas was very expensive at the time, and the cost of natural gas to methanol abroad was too high. In 2005, if we predicted a shale gas revolution, we would not have spent $2.8 billion on zero-pollution thermal power plants. But technology is unpredictable. The shale gas revolution suddenly led to the sudden discovery of natural gas that could not be used up for hundreds of years, and also caused natural gas to plummet from $17/million B&B units to $1.50, and then flattened to about $3.
At a time when natural gas prices are so high, methanol is not economical. Therefore, at that time, our company considered using oil and said whether it could produce hydrogen from gasoline on the car. When the boss came to me, I said that the project definitely didn't make money. But he told me that when I did the Apollo moon landing, I didn't think of making money at all, but in fact, the technology we developed on the Apollo moon landing was later used in various fields, and now Nissan gives us money, as long as the technology is done to the limit, it can finally be useful in other fields. I said, as long as we don't measure me by making money, it's good that we push our technology to the limit. Later, within a few years, we built the first fuel cell vehicle converted from gasoline to hydrogen.
With this technology to accumulate, methanol to hydrogen is much easier than gasoline conversion, because on the one hand, methanol is much cleaner and has no sulfur; on the other hand, gasoline conversion needs more than 850 degrees, and methanol and water can react more than 200 degrees.
Why am I mentioning methanol on this line? Methanol can be produced from coal and natural gas, and in the future, it can be produced by reacting hydrogen from solar energy with CO2, or solar energy can catalyze carbon dioxide and water to make methanol, which will become green methanol. Academician Li Can of the Dalian Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and our Southern University of Science and Technology are doing research and development of green methanol, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has built a demonstration plant of 1,000 tons in Lanzhou. At present, China's methanol production capacity is the highest in the world, about 80 million tons. In addition, the shale gas revolution allowed the world to discover natural gas that could not be used up for more than 100 years. There is natural gas that cannot be used for more than 100 years, and there is methanol that cannot be used for more than 100 years. In the future, if the carbon tax really goes up, we can also use wind and solar energy to produce hydrogen, so that the methanol produced will be completely green methanol.
But the world does not need to pursue absolute zero carbon, and the international often mentioned zero carbon emissions are usually "Near Zero" and "Net Zero". When talking about carbon neutrality, it must be emphasized that too much carbon in this world is not good, but anyone who pursues absolute zero carbon is unscientific, because the food we eat, plant growth and photosynthesis all need carbon dioxide. If China's economy is shifted from the coal economy to the natural gas economy or the methanol economy, it can reduce carbon by 67%, then basically carbon neutrality can be achieved. Therefore, China is talking about "carbon neutrality", and foreign countries are talking about "net zero emissions", that is, while emitting carbon, there are other technologies or measures to achieve emission balance to a certain level.
I personally feel that from the perspective of China's natural energy endowment and industrial base, China has a very mature coal-to-methanol technology, but it is necessary to produce a lot of carbon dioxide, because it is necessary to supplement hydrogen to achieve the carbon-to-hydrogen ratio required for methanol synthesis, but the conversion of carbon monoxide into hydrogen through water gas conversion will emit carbon dioxide at the same time. If that part of the hydrogen can be made in the west with solar energy and wind energy, while by-product oxygen for coal gasification, can solve a lot of emission problems; coal-to-methanol factory, air cryogenic separation of oxygen air separation device is the largest investment, this investment in the future can be saved can do solar electrolysis water device production oxygen and hydrogen for coal to methanol, so that coal into methanol without emitting carbon dioxide, and then use methanol as an energy carrier can achieve carbon reduction of more than 60%. This could be a more realistic carbon neutral route for the future. To put it bluntly, it is to use existing infrastructure to store solar energy in the form of methanol liquid; this is another way to store solar energy in the future of wind energy.
In this way, although wind energy and solar energy are a little more expensive, coal is very cheap, and the cost can be controlled when the two are neutralized. Hydrogen and carbon dioxide to make green methanol currently have certain cost barriers, and now it is possible to directly use existing coal or even inferior coal to make methanol. Methanol is a carrier, and the carrier of liquid is much more scientific than that of gas and electric carrier. Because, although electricity is good to transport but not easy to store, hydrogen is neither good to transport, nor good to store, only liquid is more convenient.
Hydrogen is cheap today, but once compressed to a few hundred kilograms of atmospheric pressure, the cost goes up. Zhangjiakou Winter Olympics to do hydrogen energy demonstration, the state subsidies a lot of funds, and the goal in the next few years to reach 30 yuan / kg hydrogen price. But if methanol is used in the car, buy methanol at today's market price, and the cost per kilogram of hydrogen is only 15 yuan.
Therefore, on the one hand, the cost of methanol to hydrogen production is low; on the other hand, methanol is liquid at room temperature and pressure, and methanol stations can be modified with existing liquid gas stations. For general gas stations, in recent years, it may be 6 tanks, which will be replaced by 1 methanol tank, 5 gasoline and diesel tanks in the early stage, and then 2 methanol tanks and 4 gasoline tanks in the next ten years. In this way, the entire energy transition does not need to spend many trillions to build hydrogen refueling stations and charging piles.
A simple estimate of the layout cost, according to the gas station 450 vehicles / day charging capacity, charging station 24 vehicles / day charging capacity, small hydrogen refueling capacity of 30 vehicles / day to measure, assuming that all 10,000 seats, methanol need about 2 billion US dollars, charging stations need about 83 billion US dollars, hydrogen refueling stations about 1.4 trillion US dollars, and this 1.4 trillion has not yet considered the factor of land price.
I don't think we're going to destroy the liquid fuel infrastructure that's spent trillions and rebuild hydrogen refueling stations and charging piles, there's no need. If the oil carbon emission is too high, it can be replaced by a green liquid, and we can convert solar and wind energy into liquid storage, which changes the concept of energy storage, the original how many trillion yuan we spent in many years is to study the storage of electricity, but the storage of electricity for a hundred years can not dry a pumped water storage, this line and then to a billion research and development funds, the probability of success is ten thousandth, one thousandth.
Batteries are very important for small devices such as mobile phones, but it is very prudent to rely on batteries to store large energy. Recently, the state has also paid great attention to the use of large power stations that use cascades to stop, because safety is an issue.
The biggest problems with electric vehicles and fuel cells are the land cost of infrastructure and the problem of winter battery life. Now the land in our city is very expensive, and many people build a charging station in the suburbs in order to get state subsidies, but if you buy a car and drive back and forth for an hour to get to the charging station or hydrogen refueling station, will you buy it? At present, the utilization rate of public charging piles that have been built in China is only about 4% on average, of which Beijing and Shanghai, which have the most charging piles, have a utilization rate of only 1.8% and 1.5%. Electric vehicles have mileage anxiety and winter can not meet the heating, to the winter a cold may lie down, to know that 80% of the world's major developed cities are located in the north latitude of more than 25 degrees, New York, London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, Beijing, Toronto, these cities are winter places, if a car can only drive in the summer winter can not drive, will you buy? It turned out that I was in Beijing, in order to study this, I specifically looked for an electric taxi to sit in, and after getting on the car, I found that the driver was wearing a military coat and cotton boots in the winter, and did not dare to turn on the heating. I said turn on the heating, and the driver said he didn't dare. Because the heating is not turned on, he can only run more than 100 kilometers, if the heating is turned on, there will be no electricity immediately, and he will not make money at all.
If wind, solar and coal were combined to convert to methanol, it would be easier for me to always have 50 liters of methanol on my car. Today, buy an electric car in Shenzhen, even Guangzhou does not dare to run a trip. Running there without power does not know where to charge, even if you can find a charging pile, you may have to wait for an hour, and fast charging is very damaging to the battery. What to do? We are now looking for ways to empower electric vehicles. Anyway, go home at night and park, you install a relatively small slow charging device next to the parking space, a few hundred dollars on the line. You fill it, but the car is always loaded with 50L of methanol, which is equivalent to filling your phone when you go to bed at night, and also bring a charging treasure. When there is no electricity, you can use the methanol and water on the car to produce hydrogen and use hydrogen to generate electricity. In this way, there is no need to build so many charging stations and hydrogen refueling stations, and the methanol and water reaction only needs more than 200 degrees, and its waste heat can maintain the battery at the optimal temperature, and also solve the problem of the mileage of electric vehicles in winter.
05 Where is the culprit of smog?
There is also a carbon-neutral route, which is related to smog.
All these years, I've been studying smog. I have a first-hand experience of smog. We may not feel it if we have been living in Beijing, but my family is in Southern California, and after returning to China in the early years, every time after coming from Los Angeles to Beijing, that strong contrast makes me feel that I must control the smog in China.
Haze consists of primary particles and secondary particles. The particles emitted directly from the exhaust gases of fossil fuels such as diesel fuels are "Primary Particulates", which account for about 24% of the total smog. The biggest contributor to smog is that "Secondary Particulates" account for about 50% of its total. "Secondary particles" are particles formed by aerosol reactions with ammonia and VOCs in the air after the gaseous pollutants (such as NOx, SOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the exhaust gas of fossil fuels enter the atmosphere. Nitrogen oxides become nitric acid when they meet water in the sky, and sulfur oxides become sulfuric acid when they meet water. If we do not use chemical fertilizers, we can only form acid rain and not smog. However, the large number of fertilizers released a certain scale of ammonia into the atmosphere, ammonia is alkaline in the atmosphere, acid-base neutralization of solid fine particles such as ammonium nitrate salt, ammonium sulfate, etc., which are the main source of PM2.5. The hair is about 70 microns, the resolution of the naked eye is about 60 microns, and a PM2.5 particle is invisible and untouchable, but when countless PM2.5s are suspended in the sky, they can cover the sky.
In the past two years, the country has spent trillions of dollars on desulfurization and denitrification, and has made great progress, but there is still smog in the winter, and an important factor is that the use of chemical fertilizers and ammonia emissions have not received enough attention. The emission of fertilizer is the emission of ammonia.
Fertilizer has its problems and drawbacks, it is no problem to use it for one year, two years, three years, five years, but after thirty years and fifty years, the problem comes. In the early years, ammonium nitrate, ammonium phosphate strong acid weak alkali, ammonia is absorbed, acid remains in the soil, causing land acidification, killing bacteria in the soil, causing a large area of land compaction.
In addition, vegetables grown from the soil after thirty or fifty years of using chemical fertilizers look big and thick-skinned, but they have no taste when they eat them. What is the reason? Because what determines the nutrition and taste of food is the content of trace elements and minerals in the soil about half a meter deep of the growing crop. There are many minerals in the soil that are insoluble in water, but when acid is encountered, acid leaching will occur, and after thirty or fifty years of immersion, when these trace minerals in the half-meter-deep soil are gone, the food cannot remain unchanged.
Compare the corn in 1960 with the corn in 2013. In 1960, it was purely natural growth, and in 2013, it was a fertilizer that was large, looking big and full, but the calcium content fell by 78% per 100 grams. The heavy use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides by human beings has led to a continuous decline in trace elements in the soil, accompanied by an increase in asthma, heart disease, cancer and other diseases.
After China's reform and opening up in 1978, it began to use chemical fertilizers in large quantities, and by about 2011, fertilizer production capacity was close to the peak. During this period, China's grain production increased by 87%, but the use of chemical fertilizers increased to 682%. Each tonne of grain production requires 0.1 tonnes of fertilizer. In 2017, the total sown area of crops in China was 160 million hectares, and the average chemical fertilizer application intensity was 352 kg/ha, compared with 751, 724, 707 and 611 kg/ha in Fujian, Hainan, Beijing, Guangdong and other provinces and cities, respectively, while the international warning line value was 225 kg/ha (the world average was 120 kg/ha).
In fact, with millions to tens of millions of years, the substance is not extinguished, and the precious trace elements and minerals in the soil are preserved in the form of coal. The combustible part of coal is basically formed by photosynthetic carbon dioxide; where does the non-combustible part come from? It is the precious minerals and trace elements absorbed by the roots of the tree in ancient times. But these things cannot be burned by fire, and after more than a thousand degrees they form glass-like glazed tiles.
Figure 4 Microeminer separation technology
Now we have a core technology (Figure 4) is to grind the flammable non-combustible parts of the coal in the water, and the light color underneath is the most valuable thing in the soil, but it cannot be directly added, and it must go through a series of microbial processes to finally form the best soil conditioner. Inferior coal in the upper layer can be used to make methanol, so that the cost of methanol can also be reduced. It's interlocking.
Why start with smog? Because this small particle is like smog, the specific gravity after filtering down is much heavier than air, it is suspended in the air at 2.5 microns and will not fall, unless it rains, because when the particle size is so small, gravity can not play a role, but the surface force is at work.
So since it can't get down when it's suspended into the air, let's let it suspend into the water to create a fuel similar to "black milk." Milk appears to be liquid on the surface, but under the microscope is actually tens of microns of nitrogen particles suspended in water. We suspend micron-sized coal particles, pure carbon particles, in water, and then design a boiler so that it burns cleaner than natural gas. We can even use vaporizers directly to make methanol, which is cleaner and cheaper than today's ship oil, and at the same time solve China's coal transportation problem.
On the highways of Ordos, Lüliang, Yulin and other places, many large trucks pull coal, and the pollution is very heavy. At present, the place where we store coal is about 1500-2000 meters above sea level, and the place where coal is transported, such as Shenzhen, is only a few tens of meters above sea level, so that building a pipeline will flow by itself.
Ten years ago, I said that China's smog cars have contributed but definitely not the main one, and that to control the smog, we must first clean up the coal and then burn it; at that time, a group of people who promoted electric vehicles said that to control the smog, they had to turn cars into electric vehicles. But last year, during the epidemic, many places were locked down, which gave me the opportunity to do a big experiment, at that time, all of China's cars, including electric vehicles, were parked for more than two months, but there were still many smog days in Beijing, Taiyuan, Xi'an, Harbin and Zhengzhou. Why? Mainly due to the problem of home heating in the winter when fighting the epidemic, China's natural gas is not enough, and in the winter, the northern countryside heating still has to burn coal.
At that time, I did this technology with the mentality of controlling smog, and now it is industrialized, the factory has begun to operate, and a lot of farmland experiments have been done, and the effect is better than we thought.
06 Realistic carbon neutrality path
In this way, we can talk about several realistic paths to carbon neutrality.
The first is to achieve a low-carbon energy system through the combination of existing coal chemical industry and renewable energy. On the one hand, the existing coal-to-methanol can achieve nearly zero carbon emissions, on the other hand, it is prepared by electrolyzing water by solar, wind and nuclear energy, and the synthesis gas is not transformed by water vapor, so that the coal-to-methanol plant is not emitting CO2; then use methanol to replace gasoline and diesel driving, or methanol and water online hydrogen production power generation to promote fuel cell vehicles or as charging treasures for electric vehicles; this can greatly reduce the CO2 emissions of the transportation industry, and can also partially solve the problem of Insufficient Oil in China. Because solar wind energy electrolyzed water can produce both the hydrogen needed to prepare methanol and the oxygen needed for coal gasification to methanol; and our micro-mine separation technology can use cheap inferior coal combined with solar energy to make methanol, and the cost will be competitive in the context of carbon neutrality. In this way, China's powerful solar and wind power generation capacity is released, and wind and solar energy are stored in the form of methanol liquid; it is another energy storage strategy worth exploring, so that solar energy and wind energy can vigorously develop carbon reduction. (Figure 5)
Figure 5 Another way of energy storage: green hydrogen and oxygen are prepared by electrolyzing water by solar, wind and nuclear energy, and the synthesis gas is prepared without water vapor transformation, and methanol is prepared without CO2 emissions.
The second is the use of carbon neutral technology in the coal field - micro-mine separation technology. Before coal is burned, combustibles and minerals containing pollutants are separated, low-cost liquid fuels + soil conditioners are prepared, coal pollution, fertilizer abuse and soil ecology problems are solved at the source, and high value-added chemicals such as methanol and hydrogen are produced at low cost.
Because the traditional way of using coal to burn carbon dioxide emissions produces 10% carbon, not only is it a waste of energy but it has now become solid waste, and the fly ash of power plants throughout Inner Mongolia has become a disaster. After separation, the fuel should be made as fuel, the soil should be made into soil, after the diversion, carbon dioxide is released here, and more forests grow up to suck carbon dioxide back, which can completely achieve carbon neutrality. (Figure 6)
Figure 6 Illustration of the effect of micro-ore separation technology
When CSF production reaches 250,000 tons, we emit about 695,000 tons of carbon emissions per year, which can be about 208,000 tons according to the area of treatment, and under the condition of application of SRA, we can suck back 487,000 tons, 619,000 tons, or even 749,000 tons. (See table below)
This is a more realistic path to carbon neutrality, and it does not require that high cost, and it can be done with a little money.
Third, to achieve the comprehensive development of photovoltaic and agriculture, the photovoltaic and agriculture, animal husbandry, water resources utilization and desert governance at the same time, to achieve the combination of photovoltaic and desert governance, and photovoltaic and agricultural joint carbon reduction.
There is a shortage of water in the west, and the water leaks as soon as it is poured, so we can use very water-retaining materials. But the west to retain water, the sun or can not grow out, what to do? With solar panels, the volatilization underneath is reduced, and things can be planted. Solar energy has one of the biggest benefits, is to regularly flush this board, with power generation, you can spend a little money to take PVC pipes to contact the Yellow River water in the past, every few weeks to the photovoltaic panels flushing, at the same time, water resources are precious, flushed water we can also use to drip irrigation crops. In this way, while generating electricity, you can also turn the bottom all green, become better, and then move the solar panels for a few hundred meters, and the land can be treated. (Figure 7)
Figure 7 The use of soil conditioners for the separation of by-products from micro-minerals enables the comprehensive development of photovoltaics with agriculture and desert management
Fourth, the comprehensive utilization of peak-valley electricity and thermal energy storage. Thermal power plants cannot be stopped in the middle of the night. At present, China's thermal power plants in the range of 12 o'clock in the middle of the night to 6 o'clock in the morning, although they are still emitting a lot of CO2, but the electricity generated is not used, it is wasted. What to do? Electricity is not easy to store, can be stored in the form of heat, the use of distributed heat storage module, in the valley electricity period to store electricity in the form of heat, and then in the need for heating or air conditioning, so that 1/4 or even 1/3 of the time of electricity is not wasted, can greatly reduce CO2 emissions, to achieve real coal to electricity, and then with the rooftop photovoltaic strategy and county economy, further reduce power consumption. Energy is not only electric energy, the domestic energy storage field for electricity storage more attention, but in fact, most of the energy from the consumer side is used in the field of thermal energy, heat storage technology is also needs us to pay attention to and develop. (Figure 8)
Figure 8 Realistic carbon neutrality path 4: Comprehensive utilization of peak-valley electricity and thermal energy storage
Fifth, use renewable energy to produce methanol, and then do distributed power generation. Methanol hydrogen distributed energy can be used to replace all scenarios using diesel engines, and complement the multi-energy of unstable renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic and wind energy. Using methanol liquid as a carrier of solar energy and wind energy, methanol and water hydrogen re-power generation instead of diesel generators for distributed combined heat and power generation, combined with rooftop photovoltaic and heat storage and heat pump technology in the vast rural areas to replace coal, not only low-carbon, environmental protection and carbon reduction. (Figure 9)
Figure 9 Realistic carbon neutrality pathway 5: Distributed energy cogeneration based on green methanol hydrogen energy
Finally, with a conclusion and outlook, in the context of the era of "carbon peaking and carbon neutrality", it is necessary to clarify some misunderstandings, while recognizing the development logic of technology and finding a realistic development path, I summarized the above carbon neutrality here for your reference.
Thank you!
July 2021 in Shenzhen
The article is selected from the WeChat public account "School of Innovation and Entrepreneurship of Southern University of Science and Technology", August 11, 2021
● Publishing | CITIC Publishing Group
● Author | Wang Huiyao, Miao Green
Book Introduction
"I Say China to the World" is published by CITIC Publishing Group based on the important research results of "China's External Narrative and Reshaping of Discourse Power under the New World Pattern" by Wang Huiyao, Director of the Globalization Think Tank (CCG), and Miao Lu, Secretary-General. It is reported that the book tells the story of the globalization think tank in recent years, based on the Munk Debate, the Munich Security Conference, the Paris Peace Forum, the Davos Forum and other well-known international stages, with the well-known people in the political, business and academic circles of various countries to talk about the international current situation and future trends, respond to the concerns and doubts of all parties about China, interpret China's development model, reduce the misunderstanding of the outside world about China, through multi-level, multi-subject, diversified, multi-channel international exchanges and dissemination, and tell the times of China from a global perspective. A vivid story that actively portrays a credible, lovely and respectable image of China. At the same time, based on the changes in the international situation and the new pattern of global communication, this book provides an in-depth and simple analysis of how China should carry out foreign exchanges and dissemination work, how to innovate external propaganda methods to tell the Chinese story well, and so on.
● More...
Many experts commented on "I Say China to the World": China is no longer speechless in the international public opinion field
⊙ read President Xi Jinping's reply, and they said so
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⊙ CCG Dialogue with John Thornton, Rui Xiaojian, Adam Person: How can China and the United States break the deadlock and promote bilateral relations to the better?
⊙ Susan. Thornton, Chen Qizong, Wang Huiyao Dialogue: Where China-US Relations Are Going, Global Anti-Epidemic and Tracing the Origin of the Virus
⊙ Building a Resilient Globalization – The 7th China and Globalization Forum focuses on openness, integration and international cooperation
⊙ the "China New Narrative" seminar provides suggestions for strengthening international communication and building a community with a shared future for mankind
⊙ The latest Global Economic Prospects released in China CCG and the World Bank jointly interpreted online
⊙ How to achieve discourse breakthrough in the new international public opinion environment
⊙ Text + Video | Wang Huiyao talked with Han Sen, a famous historian at Yale University: Millennium globalization originated in China's Song Dynasty
⊙ CCG Dialogue Nobel Laureate in Economics: Globalization is threatened domestically, and countries need to deal with their own domestic affairs
⊙ Opportunities and Challenges for China in Addressing Global Climate Change - CCG holds a seminar on "Climate Change"
⊙ What are the future prospects for the WTO? They said that the CCG Seminar on the 20th anniversary of China's accession to the WTO was successfully held
⊙ Think Tank strives to | CCG Publishes and Discusses New Work "Globalization: Standing at a New Crossroads" Online
⊙ Transcript + Video | Martin Wolff, chief commentator of the Financial Times, spoke with Wang Huiyao: I believe in globalization and our shared management of the planet
⊙ Harvard University's "China Pass" Tony Sage Dialogue Wang Huiyao: Sino-US competition will occur in some areas, but the field of reciprocity will continue to develop
⊙ Joseph Nye, the proposer of Harvard University's "soft power," spoke with Wang Huiyao: The idea of a new Cold War between China and the United States is a misreading of history
⊙ Climate Summit, ccg hosted a conference to discuss climate change, a common human challenge
⊙ Bilingual video + transcript | Graham Allison, the proposer of the "Thucydides Trap," spoke to Wang Huiyao
⊙ Author of "The World is Flat" in conversation with CCG founder Wang Huiyao: The world is faster, deeper, more integrated, more open and more fragile than ever
⊙ CCG held an open day with the participation of ambassadors and envoys from more than 40 countries
⊙ CCG Released "China Study Abroad Development Report (2020~2021)"
⊙ Mu'an will be the first to ask! CCG Secretary-General dialogues with UN Secretary-General
⊙ CCG rose another 12 places in the 2020 list of the world's top 100 think tanks
⊙ The international situation has changed, and ccg has recently exchanged notes with envoys from various countries in China
⊙ Video | "Focus Interview" - The "Chinese Answer" of the Times Question
⊙ CCG Report | China and the United States in the Biden Era: Trends and Responses
⊙ The CPTPP report of the global think tank was selected as the annual excellent achievement of the CTTI source think tank
⊙ Send a copy of the audio calendar, please pay attention to check it
⊙ CCG New Year's Greetings | Bid farewell to the extraordinary 2020 cohesion hope and open up the way forward
⊙ The International Young Leaders Dialogue Project is launched!
⊙ Representatives of sixty countries attended the CCG Ambassadors' Roundtable
⊙ 2020 The 5th China Global Think Tank Innovation Annual Conference was held
⊙ The 6th China and Globalization Forum 2020 was successfully held
⊙ the "International Federation of Talent Organizations (AGTO)" was founded at the 3rd Paris Peace Forum
⊙ The Collaborative Network of Social Think Tanks Initiates Strengthening Cooperation among Social Think Tanks plays a greater role
⊙ CCG Director Wang Huiyao was interviewed by the New York Times at the Athens Democracy Forum
⊙ CCG Director Wang Huiyao talked with the ambassadors of 25 countries to China about China's economy after the epidemic
⊙ The China Service Trade Fair Expanded Opening-up and Enterprise Globalization Forum was successfully held
⊙ [Full Video] An online thematic forum to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the signing of the UN Charter was held
⊙ three appearances, why debate and dialogue on this stage are so important
⊙ more than 30 online seminars of CCG
⊙ Globalization Think Tank (CCG) report/journal read online
⊙ CCG ten years to sharpen a sword, only to compete for the world's top 100
⊙ CCG's visit to the United States to carry out more than 20 activities of "people-to-people diplomacy": a think tank voice at a key point in time