[MUSIC]
Okay, let's start.
I'm sure all of us are aware of the ongoing climate crisis.
That's no surprise here.
And we as individuals can only do so much to counteract the problems,
as we all know, live with the big industries.
Hanno, here right beside me, climate scientist and a tea security researcher.
He will give us an overview of the challenges that those energy hungry
industries face and hopefully how they can be overcome.
Give it up for Hanno.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Yeah, hello, just a correction.
I'm not a climate scientist, but I'm like an journalist and
write a lot about these topics, so yeah.
Yeah, I want to talk about the climate crisis and what we can do about it.
And like as an intro, I want to show you this graph,
which is the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
And as you can see, it's going up.
And there's something important to understand here, and
that is it will keep going up as long as we add more CO2.
Even if we slow down in adding CO2, it will still go up, and it will go up slower.
So, and the conclusion from that is like reducing emissions is really not enough.
We need to essentially stop emissions, at least from CO2.
For other greenhouse gases, it's a bit more complicated.
But for CO2, it's really, if we keep adding CO2, then it's gonna get warmer, and
we will have more problems.
Therefore, essentially, we have to eliminate CO2 emissions everywhere,
except maybe a few we might be able to compensate, but
that's like really difficult and expensive.
So essentially, we need to look everywhere where there are CO2 emissions, and
we need to get rid of them.
And when we talk about CO2 emissions, of course,
we often talk about things like this.
This is a coal power plant.
This is very bad, and we should replace these with better types of energy,
like something like this.
And of course, I know there are complications with that.
We need storage, intermittency, etc.
That's not my topic today.
I'm aware of it.
But that's good to do that, but it's not enough.
Because it's not just about electricity.
We have many other sources of emissions.
And for example, we have productions, things like steel production,
cement production, paper, plastics, aluminum, glass,
aviation, shipping, agriculture, and a lot more.
And the interesting thing here, or this is for each of these pictures here,
I could tell you a story why it's really difficult to get rid of these emissions,
why we will need new technologies to tackle these emissions.
Unfortunately, I don't have enough hours to talk about all of them.
So I will just talk about two.
Yeah.
So the first thing I want to talk about is plastics.
I mean, we often talk about plastics when it's about waste handling or
microplastics, plastics pollution.
But the climate issues associated with plastics don't get talked about that much.
I think it's all because it's kind of a bit complicated, but
that's what I want to explain to you and what we could do about it.
So we have, for example, things like this.
This is a steam cracker, which is one of the major facilities
that produces chemicals that then are used to make plastics.
They have a lot of emissions themselves, but
there are other issues associated with it.
So if you look at this in a bit more detail, so we have these steam crackers.
And they run, at least in Europe, I have to say.
It's different depending on where in the world you are.
They run on something called NAFTA, which is made from oil.
So you have oil drilling somewhere.
You get oil out of the ground.
It's a fossil fuel.
Then you have an oil refinery,
which kind of splits up this oil into different fractions.
And you get the usual stuff like gasoline for cars or kerosene for planes.
And one product these oil refineries also make is NAFTA,
which is what plastics are usually made of.
This NAFTA is fed into these steam crackers.
They need a lot of energy themselves because they need a lot of heat.
It's around 800 degrees Celsius.
That heat is also provided by fossil fuels.
That is usually fossil gas.
And that produces a lot of CO2 because when we burn gas, of course,
that makes CO2.
What comes out of these steam crackers are mainly the so-called olefins,
ethylene, and propylene.
If there are any chemistry teachers in here,
there are a lot of more things that come out of these steam crackers.
I try to simplify it as much as possible.
But these are the two most important chemicals that are used to make plastics.
And then there are further steps.
But these steam crackers are actually the ones where most of the energy is used.
But we also have to think about something else.
And that is what happens with the plastics after they have been used.
I mean, most plastics is things like packaging.
It gets used maybe for a few weeks.
And then it goes into the trash.
And if you look at this on a world scale, then most of the plastics
end up in landfills.
Around 20%, 19% is estimated to go into waste incinerators.
So it is burned to generate energy.
Then there's this category mismanaged, which essentially means either
you throw plastics into nature or you burn it in your backyard.
That's not good, but that's what around 22% of plastics, what happens to it.
And then there's recycling, which is on a worldwide scale around 9%.
I should say here that this differs widely depending on where in the world
you look.
For example, here in Germany, landfills are forbidden,
and most of the plastics is burned for energy.
Now, maybe we wait till the train is stopping here.
So no matter what, all of these cause emissions in some form.
So if it's mismanaged, so of course if you burn plastics in your backyard,
you really shouldn't do that.
It's kind of illegal here.
It causes CO2, because if you burn something that is made from oil,
it causes CO2.
It also causes, of course, air pollution and other bad things.
But what you may not realize is if you throw plastics into the landscape,
it's not just a problem because it may harm nature or may cause microplastics,
but it can also cause emissions because these plastics can degrade,
particularly under sunlight, and they can form methane,
which is a highly active greenhouse gas, or ethylene,
which is, if you remember from earlier, one of the things that plastics is made of,
which is also a greenhouse gas.
Then landfills are also a source of methane emissions.
So one reason for that is that the same thing as if you throw it in nature,
if you have plastics and you have sunlight, then it may degrade.
But there's also an effect that in landfills,
usually they don't have just one type of waste,
but they have a mix of all kinds of things,
and the plastics can lead to the organic content of the landfill
to degrade into methane as well.
So, yeah, there it gets a bit complicated,
but also there are greenhouse gas emissions from landfills.
Then waste incinerators, or I don't know, in Germany,
you call them Müllverbrennungsanlage.
Sometimes they are called waste to energy plants.
Essentially, you're burning waste for energy.
These have actually the highest CO2 emissions from all these things.
And I kind of only really realized this when I researched this,
that because in Germany, landfills are forbidden,
and we're basically burning most of the waste,
which is...
And sometimes it's even...
Waste incinerators are sometimes even considered as a type of green or clean energy.
But they are the highest...
From the greenhouse gas emission perspective,
they are the highest emitting waste to treat waste plastics.
That's not to say we should go back to landfills.
Probably not, and probably we don't have the space anyway.
But it's an interesting thing to keep in mind.
Yeah, if you do recycling that has emissions from the energy,
this could be replaced by clean energy, and it's still kind of the best thing,
because you're not just doing something useful with the plastic,
then you're also replacing oil that is used for new plastics.
Instead, you're doing recycling.
So that's from all the not ideal options, it's the best.
But how should we think of these plastic end-of-life emissions?
And I really think the way we should think about this is that plastics are fossil fuels.
Like, they're made from oil, they contain carbon.
If you make new plastics, you add new carbon to the system,
and that will eventually be turned into some form of carbon emissions.
So really what we have to think about when we want to make plastics without carbon emissions,
we need to tackle two things.
We need to tackle the energy used to make plastics,
and we need to tackle the feedstock, like what these plastics are made of,
which is today usually oil or gas.
And for the energy, we could think about doing electrification.
Like, most of the energy needed is for heat,
and heat can be generated with electricity,
and then of course we have to worry about having enough clean electricity
and having that reliably and in enough quantities.
But it's a pathway one could go.
So BASF is currently building the world's first electric steam tracker furnace in Ludwigshafen.
They have announced last year that they started construction.
I expect that they will soon announce probably that they have finished it and will start it.
But that's currently the only one worldwide.
And if you look at the numbers, don't consider these as super exact,
because what they publish is...
I had to compare yearly capacities with hourly, but it's roughly around 1.8%.
So this is...
Yeah, it's a start, but it's still a long way to go.
This electric furnace needs around 6 megawatts of electricity.
And if you calculate that, how much capacity they have there,
and if you scale that up, that would be 350 megawatts,
which is... I mean, that's a lot of electricity, but it's not inconceivable.
Like, that's something you could imagine happening.
So yeah, electric steam cracking, it's in early stages,
but it appears that this is something that is kind of doable.
The real challenge is replacing these fossil fuel feedstocks, like what is in the plastics itself.
And then one option to do this is there are a range of technologies
that are sometimes called power-to-X or carbon capture and utilization.
What this means is that you're taking hydrogen, which you can make in a green way.
Today that's usually not happening, because today usually hydrogen is made from fossil gas,
and that wouldn't make sense.
But if we had green hydrogen in large quantities, and then we can take CO2,
and out of these two gases, we can make all kinds of hydrocarbons.
So that is what's usually called either power-to-X or carbon capture and utilization, or CCU.
One issue there is, okay, then we need CO2, and where does this come from?
You may say, yeah, that's easy, we take it from the next coal power plant.
But I mean, we want to get rid of these coal power plants,
and if we add the CO2 from the coal power plants in our plastics and then burn them later,
then we'll have the CO2 from the coal later, so that doesn't really make sense.
So in the medium term, you might use industrial sources that cannot be avoided yet,
but in the long run, you basically only have the option to either use biomass,
or you use the CO2 from waste, which I'll get to later, or you take it from the air.
Taking it from the air is really expensive and requires really a lot of energy.
Yeah, but these technologies in general require a lot of energy.
Just making all this hydrogen is a very energy-intensive process.
There has been a study a couple of years ago, which I'm citing here,
that had estimated if you convert the whole chemical industry to such processes
that take CO2 and hydrogen, then you would end up with something between 18 and 32 petawatt hours.
The wide range is depending on how optimistic you are about new technologies becoming available.
But just to compare that, the world electricity consumption today in total is 22 petawatt hours.
So you would roughly double the electricity consumption of the world
if you convert the chemical industry to these power-to-X or CCU processes.
And I also have some numbers for Germany here, like the German Chemical Industry Association.
They had a report a few years ago where they came to more than 600 terawatt hours
compared to, like, all of Germany uses 500 terawatt hours of electricity.
They have a newer report where they have somewhat lower numbers.
The main reason for that is that it's not really new technology or anything,
but it is that they have lower expectations for the growth of the German chemical industry.
And they looked at a few different technologies in that newer one,
and the low number, like the around 300, that would only be if you have very high amounts of recycling
and very high amounts of biomass on top.
So if you're mostly setting on these CCU power-to-X technologies,
then you end up with something like we would have to double the electricity production
and get the electricity production clean in the first place,
and of course that new electricity should also be clean.
So, yeah, then you may wonder, okay, can we make this more efficient,
and are there alternatives to this?
And now there are different types of these power-to-X technologies,
and yeah, I'll go a bit into that in more detail.
So this is like a slight modification from the picture earlier,
where we have the steam cracker that gets NAFTA from an oil refinery,
and then there's the technology which is called a Fischer-Dropsch synthesis.
This has originally been developed to make oil out of coal,
but it can also be used to make something like raw oil from hydrogen and CO2.
So, and then we would basically just have this first step replaced,
and the rest could roughly stay the same.
I mean, we probably wouldn't want to make gasoline from that.
I know in Germany there's a debate whether you should do that.
It makes no sense, and it's only a debate in Germany.
But for things like chemicals and also for things like kerosene for airplanes,
which we should probably reduce, but we will have airplanes in the future probably,
we might need to do this.
But there's another way to go about this,
and this is we'll have to look at China for this.
So in China, there's kind of a chemical industry that is based on coal.
Why? Because China does not have a lot of oil, and they have a lot of coal.
So there's a technology called coal gasification,
where you turn coal into something called syngas.
That is not clean at all. It causes a lot of emissions.
From there, you can go to methanol, which also causes a lot of emissions.
And then there's a technology called methanol to olefins,
which, as you might expect, turns methanol into olefins.
So these things where we make plastics from.
Now, you could imagine ignoring that thing on the left side
and replacing it with something else.
Green methanol is a facility in Iceland.
It has been running since 2008.
It was like the first green methanol facility.
They are located close to a geothermal plant,
which gives them heat cheap from the geothermal plant.
It gives them CO2 from the geothermal plant, which is not widely known,
but geothermal plants also cause CO2 emissions.
And they have cheap electricity, with which they produce hydrogen.
And so from the hydrogen and the CO2 and with the heat, they produce methanol.
So this is technology that is in principle available.
Still requires a lot of electricity, but it's something that exists.
So, yeah, we could imagine having the picture before,
but replace the left part, like we have green hydrogen, we have CO2.
We make green methanol.
Then we have this methanol to olefins process,
which, of course, we also have to power by renewable energy.
But that's also mostly process heat, and that's doable.
And then we have these gases from which we can make plastics.
Now, you may say, OK, how far is this?
And interesting enough, there's this company from Iceland
that I just showed you that had built this first green methanol plant.
They have entered a collaboration with a Chinese company
that is the biggest producer of these,
like the biggest operator of these methanol to olefin plants.
So this coal-based chemistry for plastics.
And they're starting to build a facility there
where they use this green methanol technology
to replace some of their methanol from coal.
Now, I should say there are a lot of caveats with this.
They are not using green hydrogen.
They are using hydrogen they get from other processes.
They are not using green electricity.
So it's not a full-scale chain of green production.
But still, this reduces emissions
because these emissions from coal gasification are so high.
And it's kind of interesting that...
I mean, if you would ask me what I think is the most interesting project
in decarbonization of the chemical industry,
I would say it's kind of this.
Like, there's nothing in Europe anywhere that's at this scale
and that combines these technologies
that could lead to a chemical industry
where we eventually may get along without fossil fuels.
So, yeah, we have two ways to go about this.
One would be we create NAFTA from this Fischer-Tropsch synthesis,
which we could call ENAFTA because we mostly use electricity.
And we have steam crackers, which we electrify.
Or we have green methanol,
and then we have this methanol to olefins process.
The methanol to olefins process is more efficient.
So that's the thing from China.
That's not me saying this,
but that is written in a document
that the German Chemical Industry Association published.
And they kind of have an incentive to say it the other way
because they have all these steam crackers.
So I kind of trust that that's accurate.
Yeah.
And, like, these steam crackers are amongst kind of the biggest
and most expensive facilities the chemical industry has.
So this is something to think about.
Like, we have...
It's probably not the technology to move forward with this.
Yeah.
What other options may there be?
So even if we have this more efficient process,
it still requires insane amounts of electricity
that are probably not plausible to have.
Of course, and I really like to stress this
every time I talk about whatever,
we could talk about using less plastics.
We should be aware of unintended consequences.
Like, for example, if we replace plastics with something
that is even more damaging to the climate,
then that would not be a good idea.
Like, usually it's probably not a good idea, for example,
to use glass instead of plastics.
There are also issues that reducing plastic waste
can harm, like, durability of food and things like that.
But in general, of course, if we can reduce plastics
without negative consequences, that's a good thing.
Then we could use biomass.
That's possible.
The problem with biomass is...
I mean, the good thing about biomass and bioenergy
is that we can basically replace all fossil fuels with biomass.
The problem is we don't have enough,
and if we start growing biomass for energy or other uses,
then that's usually not a good idea because then it needs land,
and that land would probably be better left to nature.
Some things like wetlands,
or, like, if we have leftover land to grow plants,
it's probably better to do renaturation or restoration of nature.
So we can use biomass, but we should consider biomass
produced in a reasonable way is probably limited.
Then, of course, there's recycling as an option.
As I said earlier, recycling rate currently is around 9% worldwide,
but differs widely.
There are countries that go, like, up to 20%.
Sometimes you will hear much higher numbers.
They are usually kind of cheating with how they're calculating it.
But, like, if we would get, like, most of the countries
to go to these upper levels of recycling,
that would already be a massive improvement.
The problem with recycling of plastics is that
you need relatively pure inputs to do that
because, like, you have different types of plastics,
and if you have a mixture of different plastics,
that cannot be recycled very well.
There's a set of technologies called chemical recycling,
sometimes also called advanced recycling,
which goes from the idea that instead of just melting plastics
and making new things out of it,
you could break it down into more basic chemicals
and then use these again to make new plastics.
There are two major technologies in that area.
One is called gasification, which is actually very similar
to the coal gasification I was talking about earlier.
The other one is called pyrolysis, which...
And an interesting aspect here is I also mentioned
earlier these two options with either steam crackers
or this methanol-based technology.
The gasification would be more compatible
with this methanol-based process,
and the pyrolysis, you would kind of want to have a mix
because you get something which is called pyrolysis oil,
which you could feed into a steam cracker,
and you get syngas, which you could make methanol from.
So, depending on which road you choose on these
power-to-x technologies, it may make sense to choose
a certain route of these recycling technologies as well,
or you choose an intelligent mixture of both.
These chemical recycling technologies
are also quite controversial,
and I think that's mainly because they have a bad history.
I don't know if anyone remembers Thermoselect?
That was like gasification technology.
It was built in Karlsruhe and was a big failure.
And there have been a number of projects
where these technologies have been tried,
and it seems relatively difficult to get them to work.
Still, I think if this would provide a way
to improve plastics recycling and recycle things
that we cannot recycle now,
it would probably be a good thing,
and it should really be the goal from the waste
to use as much as possible from the carbon inside the waste
to make new products.
But still, there will probably always be some waste
that we cannot recycle.
So, we will probably still burn some waste.
But some things you could think about there is like,
okay, we could take the CO2 and just store it underground,
which is like carbon capture and storage technology,
which you've probably heard of.
I'm not gonna go into detail of that.
That's also very controversial,
and there are a lot of things to say about it.
The other thing would be we could think about,
okay, we burn the waste, then we have CO2,
and we could use that CO2 for these processes
that we talked about earlier, where we need CO2
to make new things like these Power2X or CCU processes.
All of that is not so easy because when you burn waste,
you not just get CO2, you also get nitrogen,
and you get all kinds of other things
because waste contains all kinds of things.
If you burn it, it produces all kinds of things.
So, you need to separate that,
and this hasn't been done before.
Like, there's currently no CCS or CCU facility
on any waste incinerator anywhere.
There is one under construction in Oslo,
but they just stopped construction
because they ran out of money due to inflation
and cost increases.
There is a project announced in Zellermeles
where they want to use CO2 from a waste incinerator
for methanol production, which sounds interesting.
I haven't found a lot of info about that project yet,
but, yeah, I'd be happy if that works.
Yeah, so to summarize this part,
yeah, we can make the chemicals we need for plastics
from CO2 and hydrogen,
but that would require enormous amounts of clean energy.
This methanol to olefin technology,
which is today mostly used in China,
is probably more efficient than using the steam crackers
that the chemical industry uses today.
And using less plastics, using biomass,
using more recycling, and maybe using new technology
for recycling, all of that can help and can reduce
the amount we will need with these crazy amounts of energy.
Yeah, the second example I want to talk about is glass.
Glass, of course, yeah, I mean, you know what glass is.
We make bottles out of it, we make windows out of it.
Glass is produced in furnaces at very high temperatures
around 1,500 degrees.
It varies a bit depending on what type of glass,
but in that range,
and that is usually produced by fossil gas today.
Okay, so it's mainly heat.
Yeah, there are a few challenges with this.
One of it is these need to be interrupted,
operated without interruption.
So many of these glass companies were very concerned last year
when there was talk about,
okay, maybe we will have gas shortages
and some industries will be cut off gas.
That would basically mean you destroy a glass furnace
if you stop running it.
Like if you cut them off their energy supply there, that's it.
Now you may wonder, okay, we mainly need heat.
Can we use electricity and, of course,
in the long run, green electricity to run that?
But that's difficult.
And it's actually not so difficult
and it's actually not so hard to understand why.
So if you have a glass furnace, you have to imagine,
yeah, you're melting some stuff into glass at high temperatures
and you're heating it from all sides.
And like replacing the heat from the side
and from below with electric heaters,
that's kind of doable,
but then you also have a flame on top
and that is you need to heat it from all sides
so you get high quality glass and that it melts properly.
And from above, that is kind of where the challenge lies.
In 2008, a company in the US called Cameron Glass,
they said they can do this.
They can build a glass furnace purely electric.
They did it in an area where there was a lot of hydropower.
So this was kind of the first green glass production furnace.
I have to say, there are electric glass furnaces
that are like for special types of glass,
but they are kind of small
and they are not used for things like bottles or windows.
Like the big ones are a challenge.
So they tried this. It didn't work.
So the furnace was unable to heat the glass properly and evenly
and there was a major accident.
The molten glass leaked out. Luckily, no one got hurt,
but it was a multi-day incident where fire brigades had to come.
And this company filed for bankruptcy the year later.
And I had written an article about this,
like the question of how to decarbonize glass last year,
and I talked to a few people from the industry
and like everyone mentioned this thing.
They tried this with electricity
and that was kind of the incident for our industry
where we got scared of this.
But then you can ask,
"Okay, but can we maybe use mostly electricity and some gas?"
And that is what the industry is currently trying.
So there are two projects for hybrid glass furnaces,
and I'm happy to say this here,
because when I wrote about it last year,
what I had to write was, yeah, there was a project,
but it was cancelled because they didn't get the funding.
Now they got the funding from somewhere else.
This is the first one here on the list.
These are our next-gen furnace.
It's a glass company in Germany that they want to build.
I think they want to go 80% electric and 20% gas.
There's another very similar project in Czechia,
and they just got funding from the EU Innovation Fund,
which is a EU program for major decarbonization projects.
So these projects are on the way,
and they will hopefully be realized within the next couple of years.
Then, okay, we still have some gas left.
We could imagine, okay, maybe we can replace that leftover gas with green hydrogen.
That would be kind of the next step.
And if we have enough green hydrogen,
which by itself is a huge challenge,
then we could decarbonize the energy supply for glassmaking.
But there's still another problem, like even if we do that.
So what is glass actually made of?
So standard glass contains three main ingredients.
One is so-called silica.
That is not a problem.
The other two are limestone, which is chemically calcium carbonate, or CaCO3.
And the other is so-called soda, which is sodium carbonate, Na2CO3.
Some chemical formulas. I hope nobody is scared of that.
And these are called carbonates, and they contain carbon.
So what happens in the glass furnace?
If you heat these things up, they turn into other minerals.
So this calcium carbonate turns into calcium oxide, and that produces CO2.
The sodium carbonate turns into sodium oxide, and that also produces CO2.
And yeah, so the mineral inputs that are used to make glass,
they contain carbon, and this causes emissions.
And there's really no good solution for this.
Like, okay, we can do recycling.
Like, if we recycle more glass, then we already have these transformed chemicals,
and then we don't have these emissions.
But we will never have perfect recycling, so that can only go up to a certain point.
Yeah, also maybe carbon capture and storage.
I also asked the people from the glass industry.
They said they don't think that's really workable,
because if you wanted to carbon capture and storage,
you also need CO2 pipelines and things like that.
And these glass production facilities are relatively small,
and they're relatively distributed.
So that's kind of challenging if you want to get the CO2 and then store it somewhere.
Yeah, so to summarize the glass making, yeah,
making a fully electric glass furnace, that's difficult.
We may be able to have mostly electric hybrid furnaces
that run with green electricity and green hydrogen,
and that could decarbonize the energy supply.
But there's really no solution yet for these emissions from these minerals or carbonates.
Yeah.
More general conclusions from my talk.
And this is really the message I want to get across.
Like, if we want to fix climate change, or whatever you want to call it,
basically almost every industry needs to change.
They need to change their processes in major ways to avoid emissions.
And many of these are really in early stages.
Like, we have ideas how to do this.
Maybe we have pilots.
Maybe we have early stage developments.
But a lot of that has really not been tried in larger scales.
Yeah, that's what I just said.
Yeah, and that's also like a big message.
We will need a lot of green electricity to make that happen.
I mean, looking at it from a place like Germany,
we probably won't have all that green electricity.
We will also have to think about what can we import.
Like, if you think about these chemical productions,
maybe we can import green methanol and then...
Yeah, but that's really like...
We need enormous amounts of clean electricity,
and I think that's not really realized at the scale that it will be necessary.
I also have a small advertisement blog,
because earlier I said there are all these other things I could also talk about.
And of course you probably want me to talk about that.
I want to try doing talks like this, but for the internet on YouTube.
You can subscribe there.
And I also write a newsletter where I write about these things.
I've written, for example, about some steel decarbonization and cement and things like that.
Yeah, if you want to subscribe there, I also have flyers with the URLs,
so yeah, take that if you're interested.
And yeah, I think we have some time for questions.
Yes, thank you very much, Hannu, for that very insightful talk.
[Applause]
So yes, we have about six minutes for Q&A.
Do you have any questions? And please raise your arm.
We have a very friendly and highly visible angel who will bring a microphone.
Yes, please.
Hey, at the beginning you had the slide with many, many, many processes.
Yeah.
And you took two now out of them.
Which of them is the biggest one?
How is the percentage of the energy consumption?
Steel is the biggest from the amount of emissions.
Steel is like 12% if you add the electricity that you need for the steel,
and 7% if you only look at the steel plant itself.
Next question, please. Yes.
Yes, you said that a lot of clean energy is needed to do this decarbonization of the industry.
But what about mining? What about all the stuff we need to build all this clean energy?
Is that even possible?
The mining is not as much of a problem as people tend to think.
So what you need to realize is that if you look at mining today,
what we're mining is mostly coal and oil and gas.
So if we go to clean energy, we will mine a lot less.
We will mine different things.
We will need new mines in new locations.
All of that has challenges.
But there have been a few studies.
There isn't really any mineral or material where there's a major shortage
or where you couldn't imagine doing that mining.
And really I think this is an important message.
The amount of mining will be reduced if you go to clean energy.
Okay, back there, please.
Thanks for your talk. Thanks for your explanation.
My question is what about degrowth?
So is it really realistic to think that we can keep all the industry that we have
and we can just keep producing if we solve the problem of carbon emissions?
Yeah, thanks for the question.
I mean, you noticed that at some point I mentioned using less.
What about this degrowth question?
The way I think about it, so my problem is that often it seems these debates are
either you want degrowth or you want technology.
I think we should use all the technologies that make sense.
And then we should look at them and look at the things that are really difficult
and probably reduce those.
And to say it, I think the most difficult things are chemicals like plastics and aviation.
Like these are where you come to these really enormous amounts of energy needed.
And I think for aviation that's the most controversial one probably.
Are there any more questions?
Oh, yes, right in front here.
The microphone is running.
Yes, please.
If I've seen it right, you have green hydrogen in all of these processes, right?
In the ones I talked about, yeah.
So CO2 neutrality won't be happening without green hydrogen.
Where will this green hydrogen come from?
I mean, you mentioned that because we are in Germany.
In Germany we have a very specific party and they are talking about green hydrogen for cars.
Ignore that one for a second.
Yeah, it's a challenge.
I could give another talk on that.
So the issue with green hydrogen, I mean, first of all it requires a lot of energy.
So we could think about doing that somewhere where we have a lot of sun,
like in Australia or somewhere in Africa.
The other problem is transporting hydrogen is really difficult.
For example, I don't see shipping of hydrogen happen.
That just doesn't make sense from the amount of energy you lose with that.
And then you could come to this idea that maybe we should talk about where to produce what
and think about maybe we should make steel in Australia or in Africa.
But if you say that in Germany then someone shouts deindustrialisierung and then the debate gets difficult.
But I think we need to talk about this.
All right, there's another question right here in front.
Yeah, one very practical thing.
You said in a side note that it's probably better to use plastic bottles instead of glass bottles.
Could you elaborate a little bit on that?
I mean, we like ditch plastic bottles so we do glass bottles.
But what's it with when we have plastic bottles we reuse?
Yeah, I mean, reusing a bottle is always better, right?
It doesn't matter what it's made of.
I mean, producing glass requires more energy.
And then there's also like if you transport glass, it's heavier and then it also requires more energy.
And like both are difficult to decarbonize.
All right, if there are any more questions later, I'm sure you can find Hanu on the camp.
Let's give it up for him again, please. Thank you very much.
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