Topic:

Topic: Green Minerals

Latest

[Episode #236] – Zero Carbon Industry

Nov 6 2024

The energy transition is making good progress on several fronts. Renewables are displacing fossil fueled electricity generation. Heat pumps are decarbonizing space heating. Electric vehicles of all sizes are replacing oil-powered cars.

But the world's industrial decarbonization is really just getting started. Industry generates roughly one-third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, so solutions for this sector are critical for the energy transition.

We have made faster progress in decarbonizing electricity, transportation, and heating because it’s easier to replace a handful of dirty technologies with clean alternatives. Decarbonizing industry, however, is a far more complex task, involving thousands of materials, processes, and end products. That’s why they used to be called “hard-to-decarbonize” sectors.

Fortunately, there are clear starting points. More than half of industrial emissions come from steel, cement, and chemicals—which we know how to decarbonize. And there are solutions on the horizon for the rest of industry too.

In this conversation, Jeffrey Rissman, Senior Director of Industry at the San Francisco based think-tank Energy Innovation, walks us through each of the industrial sectors and the solutions for each one. Jeff is the author of a recent book titled Zero-Carbon Industry: Transformative Technologies and Policies to Achieve Sustainable Prosperity, and after listening to this episode, you’ll know just about everything you need to know about industrial decarbonization.

Guest:

Jeffrey Rissman is Senior Director of Industry at Energy Innovation, where he leads the company’s work on technologies and policies to eliminate industrial greenhouse gas emissions. He is the author of Zero-Carbon Industry: Transformative Technologies and Policies to Achieve Sustainable Prosperity (2024) and coauthor of Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy (2018). In 2024, Jeffrey was appointed by Sec. Jennifer Granholm to serve on the Department of Energy’s Industrial Technology Innovation Advisory Committee.

Jeff is also the creator of the Energy Policy Simulator, an open-source computer model that quantifies the effects of various energy and environmental policies in combination, predicting outputs such as fuel use, pollutant emissions, financial cost or savings, electric vehicle deployment, power sector structure, and more. Versions of the simulator have been developed for an ever-growing list of countries and regions, in partnership with in-country government agencies or NGOs, accounting for more than 60 percent of the world’s emissions.

Previously, Jeff worked on policies supporting R&D for clean energy and efficiency technologies for the American Energy Innovation Council, where he led a survey of 17 R&D leaders investigating trends, opportunities, and challenges to unleashing private sector energy R&D.

Jeff holds an M.S. in Environmental Sciences and Engineering and a Masters in City and Regional Planning, both from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was a Research Fellow for the University of North Carolina Institute for the Environment, where he studied aircraft emissions for the Federal Aviation Administration. Jeff also holds a B.A. in International Relations with honors from Stanford University.

On the Web: https://www.jeffreyrissman.com

Geek rating: 9

(more…)

[Episode #235] – China, India and Australia 2024 Update

Oct 16 2024

Mini Episode

The energy transition in China is a complex picture. China is both the world's largest annual greenhouse gas emitter and the largest market for electric vehicles. It’s the largest user of coal, and it deploys more wind and solar every year than the rest of the world combined. It’s both the largest worry in terms of rising CO2 concentrations, and the biggest hope for curbing emissions.

But in syndicated media, this complex reality tends to be boiled down to old tropes, generalized and unhelpful characterizations, and correct but irrelevant data, instead of any useful context and synthesis.

So you might be forgiven for not knowing that power sector emissions in China actually fell in the second quarter of 2024, and China’s CO2 emissions could be close to a peak in its CO2 emissions, which means the world probably is too.

The reporting on India and the rest of Southeast Asia is even worse, if not nonexistent.

So we are very pleased to welcome back Australian energy analyst Tim Buckley to the show. We sat down in person in Sydney for an hour and a half conversation about the trends and the data in all of those countries, as well as their trade relationships with Australia. And we begin to explore the potential for Australia to use its abundant and cheap wind and solar resources to produce green hydrogen, then use it to upgrade the ores and other materials that it exports to Asia and beyond.

After listening to this episode, we hope you’ll have a much better idea of the reality of the energy transition in Asia and Australia.

Guest:

Tim Buckley is the Founder and Director of Climate Energy Finance (CEF), a Sydney-based think tank established in 2022 that works pro-bono in the public interest on accelerating decarbonisation in line with the climate science.

Tim has 35 years of financial market experience covering the Australian, Asian and global equity markets and is a influential energy finance commentator. He has written more than 100 reports on the global energy transition, and the roles of finance and policy in accelerating critical decarbonisation trends.

Tim was previously the Australasian Director of the global Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, 2013-2021. Prior to this, Tim was a top-rated equity research analyst, including Head of Equity Research in Singapore at Deutsche Bank, Managing Director, Head of Equity Research at Citigroup for 17 years, and co-Managing Director of Arkx Investment Management P/L, a global listed clean energy investment start-up jointly owned with Westpac.

Tim started his career as a lecturer in Finance and Market Regulation at the University of Technology, Sydney before moving to Macquarie Group in 1988 to work in equity research. Tim has a Bachelor of Business majoring in Accounting and Finance from UTS (1985-87), the US SEC Series 7 (General Securities Representative Qualification Examination) and Series 24 (General Securities Principal Qualification Examination) qualifications.

On the Web: https://climateenergyfinance.org/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-buckley-0a654313/

Geek rating: 7

(more…)