energy Tag

Aviation has yet to end its 70-year addiction to the highly polluting hydrocarbon cocktail known as jet fuel, but several initiatives are propelling the industry towards a cleaner future. These are focused on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), liquid hydrogen and electric power, both pure and hybrid.

SAFs can be obtained from a range of renewable sources – for example, forestry waste, used cooking oil, food packaging and even disposable coffee cups that would otherwise be destined for landfill. Since much of the renewable biomass used in its production absorbs carbon from the atmosphere, SAF has “the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80% compared to conventional jet fuel” , according to Shell.

Many airlines have committed to adopting SAF. For example, BA’s owner, International Airlines Group, has pledged to fuel 10% of its flights with this fuel by 2030. In May, it took delivery of a batch of SAF produced at the Lincolnshire refinery from the American oil company Phillips 66. to add to the pipeline infrastructure that supplies airports in the United Kingdom.

Similarly, United Airlines has agreed to buy up to 52.5 million gallons of SAF from Finnish refiner Neste over three years to power its services from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport.

United Airlines’ Director of Sustainability, Lauren Riley, reports that “customer demand to limit their in-flight emissions is growing exponentially. This agreement means that customers flying from Amsterdam and potentially other airports will be partners in our sustainability efforts.

The search for a sustainable alternative

Despite these headline examples, more concerted action is still needed to ensure industry-wide adoption, according to Simon Burr, director of engineering and technology for Rolls-Royce’s civil aerospace arm. Barriers to the widespread use of SAF remain, he says. Chief among them is its current lack of “availability, scalability, and affordability.” We therefore need global action in forums such as the General Assembly of the International Civil Aviation Organization. It is vital that governments agree on a long-term decarbonization goal.

Promoting the use of SAF is a key part of Rolls-Royce’s sustainability strategy. The company has successfully tested several of its engines for fuel compatibility. Its next-generation engine demonstrator, UltraFan, is expected to undergo similar testing.

“Through rigorous testing, we know our engines can run on SAF,” says Burr, who adds that, if production can be scaled up enough, “adoption will improve affordability and create an environment where more airlines will be able to adopt SAF as part of their own flight to net zero.

Liquid hydrogen is another cleaner alternative to kerosene that has appeared on the industry radar. The UK government is injecting £27.2million into a program led by GKN Aerospace to develop a hydrogen propulsion system for small planes that could be scaled up. The H2Gear project aims to enable flights by 2026, using a system that converts hydrogen into electricity using a fuel cell system. The process does not emit CO_{of them}.

Partners in the initiative include Aeristech, Intelligent Energy and the universities of Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle, while easyJet will provide information on operational requirements and options for flight demonstrations.

“Technology is a key driver in achieving our decarbonisation goals, with hydrogen propulsion being a frontrunner for short-haul airlines like ours,” says easyJet Director of Flight Operations David Morgan. His airline is optimistic that it “could start flying customers on aircraft powered by hydrogen combustion, hydrogen-electricity or a hybrid of the two by the mid to late 2030s. “.

Make old machines green

While the arrival of new hydrogen planes will create a new category of cleaner air travel, another approach is to retrofit existing planes with the technology.

ZeroAvia’s HyFlyer II project is developing hydrogen engines for demonstration on a 19-seater plane that it hopes will fly next year. The Anglo-American company will work with the Canadian group MHIRJ Aviation to design and equip regional jets (planes designed to carry less than 100 people on short-haul flights) with a 600 kW powertrain.

At the World Economic Forum’s annual summit in Davos in May, ZeroAvia Founder and CEO Val Miftakhov said the hundreds of regional flights that take place daily across North America “can and should be zero emissions as well before the end of this decade. This agreement is a giant step in the supply of hydrogen electric engines to the regional aircraft segment. »

The company has obtained experimental aviation safety certificates for its prototype aircraft from UK and US airworthiness authorities, passed significant flight tests and established partnerships with original equipment manufacturers and global airlines. It is on track to start commercial operations in 2024.

ZeroAvia is also developing a 5 MW modular powertrain for 40- to 80-seat turboprop aircraft – a project with backers such as Alaska Air and United Airlines.

As urban road networks struggle to accommodate commuter traffic, the only way is up. This is the rationale for the evolution of a new category in aviation: advanced air mobility – a mix of urban air mobility (flying taxis) and commuter aircraft.

“These planes will introduce all-electric, quieter and more efficient flight, which will allow us to significantly reduce journey times,” says Matheu Parr, customer commercial director at Rolls-Royce.

The company plans to introduce all-electric and hybrid-electric engines for the service by the mid-2020s. For this, it uses next-generation demonstration aircraft, including the Spirit of Innovation. Powered by a 400kW unit, it can claim to be the world’s fastest all-electric vehicle, having topped 387mph in a test flight.

Rolls-Royce has also worked with manufacturers Tecnam and Rotax to complete flight testing of a hybrid-electric aircraft powered by parallel-hybrid propulsion – a technology that could be applied to larger planes.

The data from the tests is already applied in the urban air mobility market. A Rolls-Royce unit has been chosen by Vertical Aerospace for its all-electric VX4 aircraft, designed to carry one pilot and four passengers, emission-free, for 100 miles at 200 mph. The Bristol-based company aims to achieve certification of the VX4 in 2025 and has secured conditional orders and pre-order options for up to 1,350 planes from players including American Airlines and Virgin Atlantic.

Electric aircraft versus sustainable aviation fuel

Regardless of which alternative energy source becomes the predominant choice, one certainty is that tomorrow’s skies will feature a wider range of vehicle types. This represents an opportunity for disruptors to shape the future of energy-efficient propulsion technology.

Bedford-based SME Blue Bear Systems Research is leading a seven-member consortium developing “a quiet, efficient, high-power-density propulsion module with zero tailpipe emissions.” The design can be adjusted for general aviation aircraft, large cargo drones, air taxis and regional planes.

Co-funded by the government program of the Institute of Aerospace Technology, the Integrated Flight Control, Energy Storage and Propulsion Technologies for Electric Aircraft (Inception) project focuses on optimizing the conversion of electrical energy into thrust.

The project began in January 2021 and production of the completed design is underway, with wind tunnel testing expected to begin shortly. The plan is to install the module on an aircraft platform, aiming for airworthiness certification in 2026.

The industry needs to place more faith in disruptive new entrants if it is to have a greener future, says Blue Bear CEO Dr Yoge Patel.

“The UK is one of the most inventive countries, attracting a lot of investment – and Blue Bear has had excellent government support,” she says. “But how do you get that brand credibility when you’re a startup?”

The next big challenge, once you have a foothold in aviation, is staying in the game, says Patel. And the third is to grow your business, whether organically or through investments, without losing the culture of innovation that “keeps you sharp, keeps you from getting complacent, and keeps you from being focused.” on the processes.

His company, for example, “set out to become an agile systems integrator. It was also important to create an agile culture and not be dependent on any of the big companies”.

Vertical integration was crucial for the Inception project. In addition to producing the engine, Blue Bear also provides all the testing and evaluation infrastructure.

“We are not dependent on a third party for this. We also do our own certification and assurance,” says Patel. “We have verticals that we’ve brought together to allow us to move from an idea to delivering flight-tested products.”

This level of control is unusual for an SME. And, while this has given the company freedom, there is one crucial factor over which it has no control: regulating the next generation of energy-efficient engines that will serve many forms of aviation, potentially sharing the same airspace.

“Rules and procedures are going to change,” says Patel. “The way the industry provides evidence of airworthiness must also change if we are to do it faster and more thoroughly. With funding, it’s an absolute hurdle.

In April, a report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that international trade agreements could hamper government-led decarbonization projects.

He cited the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) – a legally binding pact protecting investments in activities such as oil and gas extraction, coal mining and petroleum refining – as the most egregious case, largely because several claims filed under the ECT had been “settled in favor of foreign investors” at the expense of “much-needed climate action”.

The 1994 treaty, which entered into force in 1998, has 53 signatories, including the UK and the EU. Its original purpose was to protect Western companies investing in the newly independent former Soviet states, but the scope of the ECT has expanded to include countries such as Cyprus, Jordan and Yemen.

“Its main goal was to promote energy security where investors were unsure of going to new places because there was a chance that their assets would be expropriated or nationalized,” says Boston University researcher Rachel Thrasher. Global Development Policy Center.

Aside from its “historical neo-colonial background,” as Audrey Changoe, business activist at Friends of the Earth Europe puts it, the biggest problem with the treaty is a mechanism called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) system. This allows energy companies to sue foreign governments in arbitration tribunals.

“It’s done behind closed doors,” she said. “The documents are not publicly available and many of the arbitrators are corporate lawyers, even though a lot of taxpayers’ money is at stake. This is a huge problem for transparency and democracy.

Climate was neither high on the global political agenda nor particularly relevant to the ECT in the mid-1990s, but that has changed in recent years. When the Slovenian government asked British energy company Ascent Resources to conduct an environmental impact assessment to obtain a fracking license, for example, the company refused and filed a €120 million compensation claim. (£103m) under ISDS in 2020. At the start of this year, Slovenia backed down and cleared all small-scale fracking projects. The weakening of environmental legislation by a state for fear of having to pay large sums of money is an example of what is now called “regulatory chill”.

Claims filed under ISDS can run into the billions, which is money that could be used for the green energy transition. After the Dutch government revealed plans to shut down all coal-fired power plants in the Netherlands by 2030. German energy companies RWE and Uniper sued in 2020 for 1.4 billion euros and 1 billion euros respectively to compensate them for their imminent loss of business there.

Changoe notes that governments “are phasing out fossil fuels due to pressure from civil society. Dutch citizens actually sued their own government in 2015 for failing to protect them from the climate crisis. a democratic process that big fossil fuel companies seek to undermine.

The UK government’s exposure to ECT litigation risk is also significant. According to research by Thrasher and his Boston colleagues in work published in Science, if Westminster were to cancel all projects that do not fit the International Energy Agency’s path to net zero, it would make the UK liable for any claims for ECT compensation. totaling £9.4 billion.

The mere threat of such litigation can often lead to regulatory chill. In 2017, for example, the Canadian company Vermilion Energy indicated that it would sue the French government if it accepted its proposals to end oil and gas extraction by 2040. Subsequently, the French minister of the Environment, Nicolas Hulot, has considerably watered down his plans. I resigned in frustration the following year, complaining that corporate interests had too much power in shaping environmental policy.

Thrasher notes that some law firms are even advising their clients to restructure their business so that they can use the ISDS system. This practice cannot realistically be considered to be in line with the spirit of the treaty and it “seems underhanded”, she says.

The problem of ISDS liability is compounded by the presence of a so-called sunset clause, which allows companies to continue to file claims against any government that leaves the treaty for up to a decade afterwards. This means that a country cannot expect to escape unscathed. For example, Italy abandoned the TCE in 2016 and banned gas drilling along its coastline, but the country was still being sued by British company Rockhopper Exploration a year later.

The European Commission is working to modernize the ECT and bring it into line with the UN’s Paris agreement on climate change, but Changoe does not hold out much hope for a satisfactory solution. Any reform must be approved unanimously – and some member states still want to protect the fossil fuel industry. Bearing in mind that the sunset clause could be neutralized if countries decide to abandon the treaty en masse, she believes that the best solution might be for governments to withdraw from it at the same time.

Changoe is concerned that the ECT secretariat is seeking new members and trying to bring oil-producing countries in the southern hemisphere – including Bangladesh, Colombia and Nigeria – into the fold. This outcome, she predicts, would “lock developing countries back into this spiral of fossil fuels.”

Thrasher points out that poor signers aren’t often sued, because it’s usually not worth it. “Middle-income countries are being sued the most, according to ISDS dispute data,” she says. “They lose about half the time, while high-income countries lose about a quarter of the time.”

Regarding treaty reform, Thrasher says lawmakers could ensure that environmental concerns take precedence over ECT claims or even scrap ISDS, which she describes as “a departure from what is generally permitted by the international law”.

Ultimately, other forces may play a role in deterring companies from suing countries trying to decarbonise. Given the explosion of interest in ESG principles among the investment community and the rest of the world, could the risk of bad publicity be enough to give the most far-sighted companies pause?

“If public opinion compels them to behave better and has a chilling effect on them carrying this kind of business,” Thrasher says, “that would be a favorable outcome.”

On the night of June 16, 2020, the United Kingdom achieved a remarkable achievement. While not a spectacular headline-grabbing feat, Guinness Book of Records-Worried guy, it was much more transcendental. The country had reached the end of a streak of 67 days, 22 hours and 55 minutes in which it had met all its energy needs without using coal, something it had not achieved for almost 140 years.

Although the first Covid lockdown undoubtedly played its part in drastically reducing the nation’s energy consumption during that period, this was an important milestone. With the race to net zero on people’s minds, it served as a timely reminder of the International Energy Agency’s forecast that renewable energy will become the largest source of electricity generation worldwide by 2025.

The target has The fundamental technical problem must be solved before the UK can achieve its clean energy revolution. The problem is that renewable energy supply can’t always match demand, so all the surplus megawatts generated by the country’s many solar and wind farms must be stored somewhere until they’re needed.

In the spring of 2021, a possible solution to this problem could be found at an industrial site in the port of Leith, Edinburgh. The 15m tall steel lattice tower looked very at ease in its surroundings, but he was not there to unload cargo from the ships in the harbor. She was there to store green electricity.

This so-called gravity battery was a scaled-down prototype created by Gravitricity, a Scottish startup that aimed to find out what a full-size version could accomplish.

“The purpose of this demonstrator was to test our technology in a real environment, verify response speed, and confirm our model,” explains Jill Macpherson, the company’s senior test and simulation engineer. “It allowed us to measure the performance of a real networked system, compare it to expectations, and learn technical lessons at little cost.”

The system worked by using excess electricity generated by solar panels to drive motors that lifted a pair of 25-tonne weights on steel cables to the top of the tower. In effect, it converted the sun’s energy into gravitational potential energy. When the weights were allowed to fall (at a highly controlled rate), this turned the motors into generators that fed electricity back into the grid.

“The demonstrator was rated at 250kW, enough to power around 750 homes, albeit for a very short time,” says Macpherson. “But it confirmed that we can deliver full power in less than a second, which is valuable for operators who need to balance the network on a second-by-second basis. It can also deliver large quantities more slowly, so it’s very flexible.”

In this way, the gravity battery can store much of the solar energy that is generated during the day, when household demand is relatively low, and then release it at night, when consumption peaks.

According to an assessment carried out by researchers at Imperial College London before the pandemic, Gravitricity’s system offers energy storage at a cost of £137 per MWh averaged over 25 years. That’s less than half the cost of a comparable setup with lithium-ion batteries: £293 per MWh, an estimate that doesn’t take into account the ethical and environmental costs incurred in producing them.

The Leith prototype also offered several encouraging indications about the likely longevity of a full-scale version. Gravitricity estimates that its system could last 10 times longer than an equivalent lithium-ion battery.

“In the demonstrator, we proved that we could control the system to extend the life of certain components,” says Macpherson. “For example, we test control methods to reduce peak forces and maximize the number of lifting cycles the cable can tolerate. The system is also designed so that components can be easily replaced, so there is a real chance it will have an operational lifespan of decades.”

Gravitricity plans to use abandoned mine shafts, hundreds of meters deep, that would be repurposed to house large-scale batteries.

The irony of the idea that old coal mines can help supply the nation with renewable energy is not lost on company CEO Charlie Blair.

“Large-scale energy stores in old mines can make good use of existing infrastructure and create jobs exactly in those areas where they are most needed,” he says. “The emotional aspect of this is also important. Entire communities once worked in the mines and are generally very happy to see them being used to store renewable energy.”

There is also the possibility that the batteries become lodged in modular buildings, each with thousands of pesos, with the design of each building corresponding to a specific energy demand of the network to which it is connected. A tall, skinny tower could provide a lot of power in a relatively short time, for example. But, if the footprint of that building were increased, the period during which that energy could be released would also be lengthened.

These structures could be built in many more places than, say, pumped hydro systems, which require much more land and are restricted to stretches of upland with abundant water supplies.

With enough forethought, there is even an opportunity to incorporate gravity batteries into the design of new tower blocks.

“There is also great potential to improve storage capacity by increasing the density of the material being lifted,” says Asmae Berrada, professor of energy at the International University of Rabat, Morocco. “It could even be made from recycled materials, which would significantly reduce the cost of the system. We are currently building a prototype using scrap steel, for example.”

The prospects for this rapidly developing technology look promising. At a time when we are desperate for certainty in our quest for a clean energy-powered future, what could be more reassuring than having a supply that is primed and ready to launch on demand? After all, what goes up must come down.

Feeds today on the chat platform United RussiaRussia’s Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade has revealed the steps the country is taking to regulate cryptocurrency mining. He talked about the development of blockchain technology and the regulation of digital financial assets.

Mining: an energy activity.

Although mining activity is in the gray zone, the extraction of crypto would consume more of them% of Russia’s total electricity. This is a consumption that gives way to the energy appropriation of total consumption for agriculture. Incidentally, negotiations to legalize cryptocurrency mining in Russia began after a proposal to ban all cryptocurrency activity in the country a This is published in a report by the country’s central bank.

Russian Prime Minister, Michael Mishustin, to reveal that the government and the Central Bank agree on banning cryptocurrency as legal tender. This despite mining activity being discussed.

According Chpak, cryptocurrencies are currently in a gray area. Also, their high power consumption makes them worthy of being considered as an industrial activity. according to him, “The mining industry is recognized, regulated and integrated into industrial activity”.

Bonus: Anchor protocol vulnerability allows a user to easily access $800,000.

Cancellation of the amnesty promise for minors from crypto

A draft law “On mining in the Russian Federation” was submitted to the State Duma in April. In general, the text of the bill has not changed. However, some paragraphs were found to be missing. The bill requires all users of crypto and the country’s miners register. In addition, it is registered entities that can obtain the ministries. An amnesty program has been put in place to allow registered minors to clear customs.

Less than a month later, the crypto-mining bill was redone. The new bill saw several missing key points in the first draft. According to the document, the paragraphs on the establishment of a mining register for registered users and the promise of amnesty for registered users. Furthermore, the“Lack of mining registration” means that there are standard procedures for business registration. The promise of amnesty to this abandoned, because it could “eventually cost the federal budget”.

Read also: This is the success point of a “graduated approach” for the issuance of a CBDC in 2022-23.