Ruminations on updating the two cultures debate in the context of climate change

Ink mixing with water

Aweh dearly beloved fellow Ruminants & Groupies in day 563 of Re-Modified Lock Down Level 1 and with alcohol.

Period as a semi-retired pensioner: 184 days

I know that over the last few months I have been yammering on about climate change quite a lot. For those of you bored with this topic skip this week’s submission. It is however one of the defining issues of our age and I will argue that it is an issue we are handling very badly. I don’t think that this is a particularly controversial statement, but I think that my views on why we are handling it badly are not mainstream.

At the outset I wish to discard the topic of climate change denial (that could be the subject of a future blog). My interest is on the big picture thinking around how we get from the current reality to a net zero carbon world and how we as a species are handling this very badly.

In framing some thinking about this I want to revive and modify the two cultures concept of the British scientist and author C.P. Snow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures. He published an essay in 1956 and the relevant excerpt from this essay is as follows:

“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice, I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, what do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So, the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had”.

When this was written the British notion of a highly educated person was of someone who studied literature and the classics and scientists, and engineers were looked down on. Things have changed since the 1950’s but not the fact that the scientific and economic literacy of most educated people is very poor.

 The problem of transitioning to a net zero world is a multi-disciplinary engineering challenge larger in scale than anything humanity has ever tackled.  When dealing with energy thermodynamics is an important and relevant discipline. Both the first (conservation of energy) and second laws of thermodynamics are relevant and particularly the second. The second law of thermodynamics is one of the fundamental laws of the universe. Einstein had this to say about thermodynamics:

“[Thermodynamics is] the only physical theory of universal content concerning which I am convinced that, within the framework of the applicability of its basic concepts, it will never be overthrown.”

The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy in a closed system can never decrease and that in spontaneous processes it increases.  For people who have not had a good scientific education and studied thermodynamics in particular this statement is meaningless gibberish. I am forever grateful to Professor Bill Harris who taught the 3^rd year thermodynamics course I attended in 1982. I have been trying to wrap my mind around the 2^nd law ever since.

I lead a sufficiently sad and pathetic existence that I think about the 2^nd law a lot. While Prof Harris emphasised a rigorous and mathematical approach to thermodynamics this is not helpful to a lay person in terms of explaining what it means. In the simplest terms natural processes spontaneously occur in a certain direction and cannot be reversed without putting in energy and work.

So, to provide a simple example imagine the following. Imagine I took a litre of water soluble ink and threw it into the ocean. Over time the ink would mix with all the water in the ocean and be uniformly distributed throughout the ocean. This will occur spontaneously. Imagine, now, that I asked you to unmix the ink and to recover the litre of ink from the ocean. Easy to throw the litre of ink into the ocean but extremely difficult to get it back. Could you, do it? Yes, theoretically you can. You will need a process which will treat all the water in the ocean which can extract the ink. There are many potential process options. If you used distillation, you would literally have to boil the ocean. Could you devise a better process? Yes, you could and a marvellously engineered molecular sieve or membrane could be much more efficient than distillation, but you would still need to process the entire ocean.

Let us further suppose that this ink was so uniquely toxic that it threatened all life on the planet. Our very existence depended on recovering that litre of ink. I suspect that even if we sacrificed everything and lived on bread and water and devoted 95% of global GDP to this crucial endeavour we would fail (miserably). It would be better for us all to go to hospice and contemplate our demise. Alternatively, we could just have one last giant piss-up. Or then again perhaps fight for a place on Elon Musk’s one way ticket to Mars.

Today, according to the IEA, we are pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere at the rate of about 32 billion tons per annum (tpa). To contextualise this number the global (basic) chemical market is about 0.52 billion tpa. We plan to reduce this number to zero by 2050 and sometime before then start the unmixing process using direct air capture (DAC).  This is an act of thermodynamic lunacy.

Let’s say we wanted to reduce the atmospheric CO₂ concentration from 400 ppm to 300 ppm and a wonderful process with a 100% recovery rate has been devised. You would need to process a quarter of the earth’s atmosphere.  So how much is that? About 5.5 quadrillion tons. https://www.britannica.com/story/how-much-does-earths-atmosphere-weigh. So you would need to process 1.38 quadrillion tons to recover 550 billion tons of CO₂. If you did this over 20 years you would need to process about 69 trillion tpa of air to recover 27.5 billion tpa of CO₂. If, theoretically and optimistically, DAC costs can reach $150/ton CO₂ https://www.wri.org/insights/direct-air-capture-resource-considerations-and-costs-carbon-removal the DAC cost would be $4.1 trillion pa. If you factored an additional (optimistic) carbon sequestration cost of $60/ton you would need an additional $1.65 trillion pa. The total cost would be $5.8 trillion pa. This is close to 7% of current global GDP and 40% larger than the current global chemical industry and larger than the oil and gas industry. This is also a pure cost with no economic benefit but of course the (priceless?) benefit of reversing climate change.  Fighting thermodynamics is a costly business. Could this happen? Make up your own mind. Perhaps 20 years is too ambitious, and the annual cost could be halved if it were done over 40 years.

Today I have just touched on one aspect of the net zero conversion process being direct air capture (DAC), but DAC is just one part of the plans to reach net zero. There is the complete conversion to renewable electricity and the installation of enormous amounts of electricity storage potentially using technology that has not been invented yet. Then there is the idea that we would use CO₂ recovered via DAC as a carbon source for the chemical industry and some hydrocarbon fuels. Once again thermodynamics will have a thing or two to say about that. Spoiler alert, it will not be cheap. Using CO₂  as a carbon source is also an act of thermodynamic lunacy and this inevitably turns into high costs. Technology improvements will not allow you to defeat thermodynamics.

The two cultures of the 21^st century are those who gloss over the big picture science of getting to net zero and reducing CO₂ in the atmosphere and preach with righteous indignation and moral certainty to the world that renewable energy is cheap and abundant. Their understanding of thermodynamics is sketchy to non-existent. Theoretically possible but enormously expensive schemes are proposed. Then there are the proper scientists and engineers who analyse this properly using science and economics and they scratch their heads. Of course, many engineers are practical beasts of burden and if someone pays them to do a study, they will happily do it. This could include me.

Traditional oil and gas companies like, Chevron, are discouraged from further investments in oil and gas and so they are decarbonising, paying dividends, and betting on green hydrogen. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/15/chevron-ceo-mike-wirth-on-the-oil-giants-lower-carbon-investments.html. They see renewable electricity as a low return business. One thing for certain though is that a potential transition to green hydrogen will take many decades. If oil and gas are starved of capital expect significant volatility in their prices. Nothing new there but it would be very interesting to see how people will react if there is a sharp spike in the oil price. Could we see $200/bbl? https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/oil-gas/someone-is-betting-that-oil-will-soar-to-a-record-200-a-barrel. If that happens, I wonder whether the commitment to no new oil and gas investments will waiver.

The only comprehensive book that I know about that attempts to evaluate the whole decarbonisation picture scientifically and economically is the free book, “Without the hot Air” by the British physicist David Mackay in 2008.  https://www.withouthotair.com/.  Unfortunately, David MacKay has since died, and the book has not been updated. Some aspects of the book are out of date regarding efficiencies of some technologies and the costs of things like PV cells have come down. The physics is timeless. Dear readers if you know of a better treatment, I would like to read it.

Is it actually feasible and possible to get to net zero by 2050? We are starting to behave as if it is. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. Thermodynamics will have the last word.

Regards

Bruce