Material Efficiency and Circularity Goals to Achieve a Carbon-Neutral Society by 2050

[NNadir]

I was going to skip writing about the following paper but the Chinese decision to suspend export of lanthanide based magnets, in response to the orange Alzheimer's patient molding up the White House, inspired me to refer to it briefly. It is here:

Material Efficiency and Circularity Goals to Achieve a Carbon-Neutral Society by 2050 Sho Hata, Keisuke Nansai, Yosuke Shigetomi, Minami Kito, and Kenichi Nakajima Environmental Science & Technology 2025 59 (12), 6025-6036.

By the way, as I've made clear many times, I have no use for "by 2050" bullshit and wish that when I was younger, and more ignorant, I hadn't bought into equivalent "by 1990," "by 2000," "by 2010" ...and so on that was very popular in California when I lived there, and is still popular around the world to this day, often put forth by the assholes at, say, Greenpeace, and other places often in connection with nonsensical "studies."

As I remarked on viewing the film Unearth and participating in the Q&A afterward with the film's producers, I question, in particular, if so called "renewable energy" can really be considered "renewable" since its mass intensity (and land intensity) makes it rather odious in a purely environmental sense. It will never be as sustainable, as clean, as reliable as nuclear energy, opposition to nuclear energy being the only reason the expensive and miserably failed so called "renewable energy" was proposed.

Anyway, the paper is open sourced. Anyone can read it.

I'll excerpt a few parts in any case.

The Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) issued by the IPCC emphasized that to meet the climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement, it will be necessary to reach net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, that is, carbon neutrality, by 2050 in order to keep temperature rise within the 1.5° target. (1) However, the latest emission gap report (2) revealed that global GHG emissions increased by 1.2% from 2021 to 2022 to reach a record of 57.4 gigatons of CO2 equivalent (Gt CO2e), exceeding 2019 (pre-COVID-19 pandemic) levels. To meet the climate targets, countries will need to continually reassess their GHG emission reduction goals and effectively manage their emission levels. (3−5)

Material use is a significant trigger of GHG emissions, (6−8) with emissions from material production estimated to have accounted for a quarter of global emissions in 2015. (9) The troublesome point is that emissions for material production are difficult to electrify due to fuel consumption for oxidation–reduction and chemical reactions. Hence, the decarbonization of material use cannot be achieved solely by shifting power sources to renewable energy.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) was quick to release a roadmap for achieving global net-zero-emissions. (10,11) This report can be regarded as a case study illustrating the requirements for achieving a net-zero society based on the harnessing of innovative technologies. With specific regard to emissions from materials production, emission reductions in steel and cement will be accomplished through hydrogen and carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies, which, respectively, account for roughly 10 and 40% of total emission reductions from materials production. However, these are early-stage technologies still in the prototype development phase.

While it is believed by many that the decarbonization of materials production can be realized through the widespread introduction of innovative technologies, (10,11) such technologies not only face technical challenges but also suffer from a lack of thorough consideration of the economic policy instruments required to adopt such high-cost technologies. (12) In other words, it is quite possible that these technologies will not be widely available by 2050.

Other than relying on the development of innovative material technologies, the complementary way to mitigate the GHG emissions associated with material production is to manage material use, including the demand-side measures that can avoid unreasonably large requirements for negative emission technologies and have multiple cobenefits...

There's a lot of nice mathematics in the paper, and graphics. Interested parties are invited to look through the full paper.

The soothsaying - and let's be clear, soothsaying is to use the polite term, "bullshit" generally - ends up here with with "percent talk: "

The diffusion of innovative material decarbonization technologies will be essential for both the continuation of current material-intensive lifestyles in Japan and the promotion of carbon neutrality. Even if 100% of electricity generation is zero-emissions by 2050, GHG emissions will remain at approximately 63% of their 2015 level. Furthermore, even given a gradual reduction in the GHG emission intensity of material industries (an approximately 1.7% reduction per year from 2020) or a reduction in emission intensity to 50% of the 2015 level, achieving carbon neutrality remains a distant expectation with BaU material use levels (see Supporting Figure 1 in the SI). There is little doubt that the transformation of material flows and the curtailment of material use are imperative. This finding is consistent with decarbonization through reduced material use, as suggested by the literature on low demand and demand-side measures. (13,14) At the same time, this suggests that the choice of material decarbonization technologies will become more critical.

It is extremely unlikely, although it is technically feasible on the outside with a massive investment in nuclear energy far beyond the recently evoked tripling of nuclear infrastructure, that electricity will be 100% zero emissions "by 2050." There is no will to do so. I note that the massive mining trucks seen throughout the film Unearth are not solar and wind powered, nor, realistically, despite much delusional crap being handed out, can they be. In theory, but again, unlikely in practice, they might be run on thermally produced DME (dimethyl ether) by the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide with the hydrogen produced by thermochemical means. Still, mining sucks, and isn't "green," as the film makes clear.

Anthropogenic Chemical Carbon Cycle for a Sustainable Future George A. Olah, G. K. Surya Prakash, and Alain Goeppert Journal of the American Chemical Society 2011 133 (33), 12881-12898

Enjoy the coming week.