SHARED GREEN FUTURES
Technologies combining economic growth and decarbonization will totally transform the future of all the world's poor countries.
By Prem Shankar Jha
Today, even a child knows that the world is getting warmer and that we now have no control over the process of global warming. The question staring at us is how to extract energy from fossil fuels without destroying our planet in the process.
In just the last 25 years, the Earth's average temperature has gone up to 1.2 degrees centigrade higher than it was in 1900 AD.Now, oceans are also warming. And we have only used one third of the warming potential of the carbon dioxide that fossil fuels have released into the atmosphere. Whatever happens, we will not be able to keep it below about 1.7to 2 degrees centigrade before the end of this century.
At this moment, all the efforts that are being made, apart from being ineffective, are all concentrated in technologies that are available and doable only by the most advanced industrialized countries. The result is that while there is a perceptible slowing down of increase in the carbon emissions of the rich nations, and in fact, several have already reached a plateau, there is no slowing down of this kind possible in the developing countries. Clearly, there is a very sharp conflict between development and decarbonization.
Developing countries have limited amount of savings in the economy. Therefore, only limited capital can be used to move out of energy sources like coal and oil into new sources. Not surprisingly, two-thirds of the addition of carbon dioxide into the air come from developing countries today.
Affordable Energy
Solar and wind energy have been extensively developed in laboratories worldwide. But it's only between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of the total energy consumption of any country in the world.
What do you do with the other 70 per cent? The most important part of that is heat.Intense, concentrated heat is required in four major industries-steel, cement, transport fuels, and fertilizers. Today, all the efforts in the West focus on converting electricity from the sun and the wind into intense heat. And the whole idea, therefore, is to produce green hydrogen.
Green hydrogen today costs $4.85 per kg to produce. Can we, in the developing countries, afford something to replace coal? How do we replace coal with something that costs $4.85 at this moment and which, at the very best of estimates of increased efficiency, will still cost $1.60 in 2030? Every meeting of the Conference of Parties on the Kyoto Protocol turns into a fight.The developing countries say, you, the rich nations, have got the capital. You must transfer it to us. We cannot afford to lose out on our development.
This is a false conflict. The reality is that you can combine both growth and decarbonization. Because there is a third source, all energy is produced from just three elements– hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen.
Another source of energy is Biomass. Biomass is a combination of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.It takes two forms. The bulk of Biomass, about 40 per cent on an average, is lignin, which is pure carbon. The balance, 60 per cent, consists of two types of cellulose.One is hemicellulose, which is very complex and has elements of carbon in it, and pure cellulose, which is the last part, which is normally about one-fifth of the content of any biomass you have. So, if you ferment this, as in biogas plants, you can get the cellulose and much of the hemicellulose to break up, giving you methane.
But on the other hand, there is another technology that the West has studiously ignored because of the power of the fuel and transportation lobbies. This technology is biomass gasification, not fermentation, but gasification. Biomass gasification gives a fuel gas consisting of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which you can use for generating electricity. India has 1.4 billion tons of crop residues.The existing technologies can produce 1.5 billion tons of transport fuels out of 1.4 billion tons of Biomass. The greatest source of Biomass in India is rice straw. It has no other use as it has poor fodder quality, so people burn it or use it to thatch their huts. All the smog that engulfs the entire Northern India and Pakistan Punjab every winter is thanks to this burning of rice straw in paddy fields. The solution lies in setting up village level biomass gasifiers to process the waste straw. This will ensure guaranteed electricity for the village; we have 640,000 villages in India.
With guaranteed power, the rural economy will flourish. While we have a horticultural revolution in India, with 240 million tons of fruits and vegetables being produced, we don't have a single village cold storage. The produce must be disposed of in the market at the earliest before it rots, at whatever price the market gives. That is the kind of stranglehold the market has on the farmers, who remain poor.Self-controlled electricity ensures that the generated power takes over whenever the state power fails, and you can have inner cold storage. It allows every village to have cold storageand treble the income of the horticultural farmers.
The residue from biomass gasification, depending on the temperature, is between 20 per cent and 25 per cent in the form of biochar.Biochar is really a biological carbon. The biochar is, on an average, 90 per cent pure carbon, and it contains absolutely no sulphur. It is a perfect replacement for coking coal in steel plants, which is the single largest energy demand in the world today. It can also do that for cement plants.
But the most important thing about biochar is that it's a source of transport fuels. During World War II, Nazi Germany did not possess a single oil well. They made synthetic fuels from coal, of which Germany had plenty. The same technology can be used with biochar. In fact, biochar is a superior form of coal.
If the locus of future development can be moved from towns and cities to the countryside, the man-nature equilibrium will shift towards a stable state. With a minimum of 50 direct jobs per village, 11-month-a-year direct salary jobs in cold storages, in shredding and pelletizing plants, and in the biomass gasification plants per village, the rural employment problem will be largely taken care of.
