One thing I'd like to mention: I don't think the the model about German renewables + storage is accurate. The German energy plan was always to mostly buffer through the European energy market. Such a German grid would rely on polish coal and french nuclear power for a while, but the argument would be that Poland then imports due to German overproduction and shuts down some plants, thus making Germany's grid carbon neutral on paper. Of course this doesn't work if everybody does it . While i do believe that underwriter certified nuclear would still be cheaper, the fair calculation would be just like your model but using European demand and wind curves.
You have a good point, but expanding the GKG model to all of Europe won't shift things in favor of green hydrogen. From a programming point of view, such an expansion would not be a big deal, but the current model's ignorance of transmission costs would become crippling. Disaggregating the model geographically is straightforward but then computation requirements explodes far beyond GKG's capability.
BTW, Is this really the way energiewende was sold to the Germans?
I am 24 years old, and I've never seen the volatility problem adequately adressed in the news/popular science media. Most Media in support of the energiewende just compared the electricity generation cost of green, volatile sources to the older existing ones (here you actually got solar less than 1ct vs some LCOE of nuclear or coal). Lets call this the "comparison lie". They never quantitatively adressed the volatility issue, usually you just had some expert saying "we'll build storage" and then list options hydroelectric storage or power to gas etc.
Then there was some fuzz about some popular economist who made the same criticism using essentially the same "naive" germany only GKG model:
While some points are valid, leaving out the european market and not considering battery + gas, only gas or battry kind of make his criticism weak.
However the scientific establishment is not to blame. If you look at the de facto Energiewende "Roadmap" to 2050 from the which has existed in more or less the same from for a decade from the Fraunhofer institute, they actually did all the european modelling and propose building lots of power to gas and a bit of other storage, but just at the end towards their goal in 2050. Until then, they plan to mostly buffer using the european electricity market. The scientific establishment never propagated the comparability lie, they just weren't louder than the media.
So the industry knows, but the public, my family and most people I know personally (some of which are climate activists) don't seem aware of this at all. Most of them are sold by believing the comparison lie and thus believe that renewables are the best option on every metric. Some members of the public now think that exiting nuclear was a mistake, because we are replacing them with coal right now (just temporarily of course) but even those people almost always miss the comparison lie.
I think that if solar gets really really really cheap, even the worst case of just producing Hydrogen at random times, storing it underground and then burning it in gas plants on demand might come in much cheaper than your 21ct/kwh (the german household pays 46ct USD per kwh right now btw) but a french decarbonization in 10 years or less safe and thus much cheaper nuclear would be an even better solution.
Today our friends in El Salvador have signed further agreements and policy changes with the iaea in Brussels.
The second message is directly from our man naive bukele
who had the vision to start this process of advanced nuclear powered by thorium energy,
and they chose thorium energy Alliance to help them develop their strategy for deployment last year 2023.
Jack recently wrote about a magical country that chooses to go and do nuclear on their own without being encumbered to the United States of America and the NRC.
and I told him that there was such a country and it's called El Salvador
In a few years El Salvador will reap the rewards for taking this Brave New Direction,
They are going to make all their own electricity, all their own ammonia, and they will make a significant amount of their own transportation fuel all from over 3,000 megawatts of advanced high temp molten salt nuclear.
and they will be the Dubai of Central America.
I'm glad we have had a small part in making that happen.
You'll be happy to know the color thing is dying out - real folks are now trying to just do a straight number grade - 1 to 100, 100% is "All Green", 1% would be something like hydrogen from Coal mined by child slaves . . . .
The biggest cost (by far) for pyrolysis is that over 1/3 of the energy content of the methane is left unused in the carbon.
If we have cheap enough natural gas that we can afford to toss away that much of the energy, it’s also going to be cheap enough that we can afford to get the energy for the pyrolysis from the natural gas in the first place.
I converted the MJ/mol numbers to kWh/kg, thinking that would be more familiar to most people. Hopefully I did not screw up.
The assumption here is we are after low CO2. If we burn some of the gas to do the pyrolysis, we are back in the SMR ballpark CO2 wise.
But youre right not burning the carbon is a substantial cost. And if we push the price of carbon black down below the value of carbon as a fuel, which we will if we are successful in making real inroads into fossil fueled hydrogen, we have a quandary. The best way out is a CO2 tax based on society's estimate of the social cost of atmospheric CO2.
I think you converted the values, but left the units as MJ.
If you are after low CO2, you would burn a bit of product H2 for the heat. If you have cheap enough CH4 to still produce affordable H2 even after the energy penalty, the cost range for nuclear to make sense to supply the heat (vs just use some H2 and save the complexity) is very narrow.
What I don't understand is, ok so the licensing in USA is crazy which is basically keeping the cost at the high watermark of other energy sources etc. But why are other nuclear nations acting the same way? There's at least France, Germany, UK, Korea, Japan, China, Russia, India, Canada, Pakistan, Sweden etc that have their own designs, right? Why don't any of them go another way of licensing?
1) Any sizable release is intolerable. 2) An omnipotent licensing authority can stop such a release. Therefore, we cant use a variant of the same system we use to regulate other hazardous activities. You might check out the other pieces listed in the Site Directory under Two Lies, such as Teller and the Two Lies.
I get that, but even I can see there's free money lying on the table why don't they? I mean yes they bought that two lies, but why don't any one of them just decide to take the free money on the table? It's not one or two but multiple countries there; and any other prospective country with a sizeable economy that has an energy deficit (Turkey for example, or Czechia with some nuclear infrastructure as well, or Argentina with a new president that might be swayed) can just put in friendly regulations and pull in nuclear companies. Maybe in fact, it's better to lobby in such countries instead of USA since it's easier to create pull in a smaller economy relatively? And once it's seen by the wider world that there indeed is free money on the table for the taking more countries can go for it?
Each country will have its own combination of reasons for not being the first to break from the herd, usually pulled from the following list:
1) The long shadow of the US. We can't afford to have the Americans unhappy with us. They protect us and give us aid. In some cases, they have already signed 123 Agreements with the US which cede a portion of their NPT rights. This shadow is getting shorter.
2) Special interests such as coal. Anti-nuke groups such as Greenpeace are surprisingly well-funded in some emerging countries. The media is likely to turn this into a big scary story if only to improve circulation and ratings.
3) We don't know anything about nuclear. We need the IAEA to teach us.
4) We must go thru the IAEA to get financing.
5) There's already a nuclear regulatory body in place. They are the local experts and their first priority is protecting their turf.
6) There's is no nuclear regulatory body, so let's set one up, create a bunch of cushy patronage jobs, and put my useless brother in law in charge. This new body quickly figures out what's in its interest.
7) If I'm the first to go the Underwriter Certification route, my political opponents will whip up a frenzy of radiation fear, and I will lose the next election.
If you dont sign a 123 Agreement, USA export controls make it difficult to impossible for an American vendor of say an MSR to sell his wares to a non-123 country, basically shutting out American vendors from those markets.
this is a horrible map! covers every country that might have independently create a sensible solution. more or less no country with a sizeable economy and tech infrastructure are left, seems like chile is the best bet.
One thing I'd like to mention: I don't think the the model about German renewables + storage is accurate. The German energy plan was always to mostly buffer through the European energy market. Such a German grid would rely on polish coal and french nuclear power for a while, but the argument would be that Poland then imports due to German overproduction and shuts down some plants, thus making Germany's grid carbon neutral on paper. Of course this doesn't work if everybody does it . While i do believe that underwriter certified nuclear would still be cheaper, the fair calculation would be just like your model but using European demand and wind curves.
Soje,
You have a good point, but expanding the GKG model to all of Europe won't shift things in favor of green hydrogen. From a programming point of view, such an expansion would not be a big deal, but the current model's ignorance of transmission costs would become crippling. Disaggregating the model geographically is straightforward but then computation requirements explodes far beyond GKG's capability.
BTW, Is this really the way energiewende was sold to the Germans?
I'll just tell you my personal experience:
I am 24 years old, and I've never seen the volatility problem adequately adressed in the news/popular science media. Most Media in support of the energiewende just compared the electricity generation cost of green, volatile sources to the older existing ones (here you actually got solar less than 1ct vs some LCOE of nuclear or coal). Lets call this the "comparison lie". They never quantitatively adressed the volatility issue, usually you just had some expert saying "we'll build storage" and then list options hydroelectric storage or power to gas etc.
Then there was some fuzz about some popular economist who made the same criticism using essentially the same "naive" germany only GKG model:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292117300995 (his Paper)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm9h0MJ2swo (A lecture about the paper)
While some points are valid, leaving out the european market and not considering battery + gas, only gas or battry kind of make his criticism weak.
However the scientific establishment is not to blame. If you look at the de facto Energiewende "Roadmap" to 2050 from the which has existed in more or less the same from for a decade from the Fraunhofer institute, they actually did all the european modelling and propose building lots of power to gas and a bit of other storage, but just at the end towards their goal in 2050. Until then, they plan to mostly buffer using the european electricity market. The scientific establishment never propagated the comparability lie, they just weren't louder than the media.
So the industry knows, but the public, my family and most people I know personally (some of which are climate activists) don't seem aware of this at all. Most of them are sold by believing the comparison lie and thus believe that renewables are the best option on every metric. Some members of the public now think that exiting nuclear was a mistake, because we are replacing them with coal right now (just temporarily of course) but even those people almost always miss the comparison lie.
I think that if solar gets really really really cheap, even the worst case of just producing Hydrogen at random times, storing it underground and then burning it in gas plants on demand might come in much cheaper than your 21ct/kwh (the german household pays 46ct USD per kwh right now btw) but a french decarbonization in 10 years or less safe and thus much cheaper nuclear would be an even better solution.
Great piece thanks Jack. I think you’re correct in saying Methane Pyrolysis will replace SMR production of Hydrogen.
For anyone interested in Methane Pyrolysis there’s a company down under called Hazer Group which uses iron ore as the catalyst with some nice results.
https://youtu.be/550rLiZkEj8
GREAT ARTICLE JACK - Always on point
ALSO:
my folks down in El Salvador just had another ceremony confirming their progress towards becoming a nuclear country,
second tweet is directly from president naib bukele
https://twitter.com/rafaelmgrossi/status/1771211319246508053?s=19
https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1771289908230959445?s=19
Dear Jack Devanney,
And all you great folk interested in new nuclear,
Today our friends in El Salvador have signed further agreements and policy changes with the iaea in Brussels.
The second message is directly from our man naive bukele
who had the vision to start this process of advanced nuclear powered by thorium energy,
and they chose thorium energy Alliance to help them develop their strategy for deployment last year 2023.
Jack recently wrote about a magical country that chooses to go and do nuclear on their own without being encumbered to the United States of America and the NRC.
and I told him that there was such a country and it's called El Salvador
In a few years El Salvador will reap the rewards for taking this Brave New Direction,
They are going to make all their own electricity, all their own ammonia, and they will make a significant amount of their own transportation fuel all from over 3,000 megawatts of advanced high temp molten salt nuclear.
and they will be the Dubai of Central America.
I'm glad we have had a small part in making that happen.
John Kutsch
Thoriumenergyalliance@gmail.com
You'll be happy to know the color thing is dying out - real folks are now trying to just do a straight number grade - 1 to 100, 100% is "All Green", 1% would be something like hydrogen from Coal mined by child slaves . . . .
Are the energies in kWh, not MJ?
The biggest cost (by far) for pyrolysis is that over 1/3 of the energy content of the methane is left unused in the carbon.
If we have cheap enough natural gas that we can afford to toss away that much of the energy, it’s also going to be cheap enough that we can afford to get the energy for the pyrolysis from the natural gas in the first place.
Jesse,
I converted the MJ/mol numbers to kWh/kg, thinking that would be more familiar to most people. Hopefully I did not screw up.
The assumption here is we are after low CO2. If we burn some of the gas to do the pyrolysis, we are back in the SMR ballpark CO2 wise.
But youre right not burning the carbon is a substantial cost. And if we push the price of carbon black down below the value of carbon as a fuel, which we will if we are successful in making real inroads into fossil fueled hydrogen, we have a quandary. The best way out is a CO2 tax based on society's estimate of the social cost of atmospheric CO2.
I think you converted the values, but left the units as MJ.
If you are after low CO2, you would burn a bit of product H2 for the heat. If you have cheap enough CH4 to still produce affordable H2 even after the energy penalty, the cost range for nuclear to make sense to supply the heat (vs just use some H2 and save the complexity) is very narrow.
But it needs very cheap CH4 either way.
What I don't understand is, ok so the licensing in USA is crazy which is basically keeping the cost at the high watermark of other energy sources etc. But why are other nuclear nations acting the same way? There's at least France, Germany, UK, Korea, Japan, China, Russia, India, Canada, Pakistan, Sweden etc that have their own designs, right? Why don't any of them go another way of licensing?
E
Because they've bought the Two Lies
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed-nuclear
1) Any sizable release is intolerable. 2) An omnipotent licensing authority can stop such a release. Therefore, we cant use a variant of the same system we use to regulate other hazardous activities. You might check out the other pieces listed in the Site Directory under Two Lies, such as Teller and the Two Lies.
I get that, but even I can see there's free money lying on the table why don't they? I mean yes they bought that two lies, but why don't any one of them just decide to take the free money on the table? It's not one or two but multiple countries there; and any other prospective country with a sizeable economy that has an energy deficit (Turkey for example, or Czechia with some nuclear infrastructure as well, or Argentina with a new president that might be swayed) can just put in friendly regulations and pull in nuclear companies. Maybe in fact, it's better to lobby in such countries instead of USA since it's easier to create pull in a smaller economy relatively? And once it's seen by the wider world that there indeed is free money on the table for the taking more countries can go for it?
Each country will have its own combination of reasons for not being the first to break from the herd, usually pulled from the following list:
1) The long shadow of the US. We can't afford to have the Americans unhappy with us. They protect us and give us aid. In some cases, they have already signed 123 Agreements with the US which cede a portion of their NPT rights. This shadow is getting shorter.
2) Special interests such as coal. Anti-nuke groups such as Greenpeace are surprisingly well-funded in some emerging countries. The media is likely to turn this into a big scary story if only to improve circulation and ratings.
3) We don't know anything about nuclear. We need the IAEA to teach us.
4) We must go thru the IAEA to get financing.
5) There's already a nuclear regulatory body in place. They are the local experts and their first priority is protecting their turf.
6) There's is no nuclear regulatory body, so let's set one up, create a bunch of cushy patronage jobs, and put my useless brother in law in charge. This new body quickly figures out what's in its interest.
7) If I'm the first to go the Underwriter Certification route, my political opponents will whip up a frenzy of radiation fear, and I will lose the next election.
which countries have already signed the 123 Agreements?
the more I read the more frustrated and hopeless I become
The US has 123 Agreements covering 47 countries.
https://energy.gov/nnsa/123-agreements-peaceful-cooperation
If you dont sign a 123 Agreement, USA export controls make it difficult to impossible for an American vendor of say an MSR to sell his wares to a non-123 country, basically shutting out American vendors from those markets.
this is a horrible map! covers every country that might have independently create a sensible solution. more or less no country with a sizeable economy and tech infrastructure are left, seems like chile is the best bet.