This episode features Professor Mark Jacobson of Stanford University, who has focused his career on understanding air pollution and climate problems and developing renewable energy solutions. Jacobson criticizes carbon capture technology, arguing it increases CO2 emissions and air pollution, and is primarily used to justify continued fossil fuel development. He advocates for a transition to 100% renewable energy, which could reduce world energy demand by 54% and eliminate a significant number of air pollution-related deaths.
Jacobson highlights the inefficiency and high costs of carbon capture compared to renewable energy solutions, which offer greater health, environmental, and economic benefits. He also addresses concerns about the mining required for renewable technologies, noting that it is significantly less than that for fossil fuels. The transition to renewables is feasible and beneficial, particularly in resource-rich countries like Canada. Jenny adds that ecological services need to be restored to genuinely reduce carbon emissions and address water and land contamination and degradation, with renewable and battery technology deployment. Want this, fellow Canadian, as the alternative is clearly a lie.
Introduction to Stanford University Professor Mark Jacobson
Jenny (00:05):
Welcome to The Gravity Well Podcast with me, Jenny Yeremiy. I host The Gravity Well to celebrate and share the stories of people looking to empower others with the knowledge and skills required to reestablish stability in our communities. My mission is to work through heavy issues in conversation and process in order to lighten the load. I acknowledge that I live on the traditional territories of Treaty 7 and Metis districts 5 and 6. The treaties and self-governance agreements established by indigenous peoples are created to honour the laws of the land, maintain balance with nature, and give back to uphold reciprocal relationships. This knowledge and intention are what guide The Gravity Well conversations. I ask for genuine dialogue, real hearts, and openness to different perspectives. This is your invitation to find common ground with me. Positions taken by participants either individually or collectively do not necessarily represent those of The Gravity Well. This podcast is dedicated to the natural world, our children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and all future generations. The Gravity Well is on YouTube and streaming wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you see and hear, remember to like and subscribe.
Good afternoon, everyone. Today’s interview is very meaningful to me. I’ve mentioned on several occasions now that I worked as a geophysicist and liability expert in the oil and gas industry in Alberta for over 20 years. I worked in the office next to the individual who is credited with the birth of the Pathways Alliance. The Pathways Alliance is a project intended to offer mitigation for CO2 emissions to justify future fossil fuel development in Canada. It’s the biggest project of its kind in terms of concept and justifies things like LNG and Oil Sands development plans. On that note, I am thrilled to be having a discussion with Professor Mark Jacobson today of Stanford University. Welcome to the stage, Mark.
Mark (02:12):
Hi, Jenny. Thanks for having me on.
Jenny (02:14):
Yeah, thank you so much. As I was saying off stage, I have to go through an extensive introduction of Mark, bear with me, Mark as I do so. Mark Jacobson has been a professor at Stanford University since 1994. His research has crossed two fields, atmospheric science and energy. Mark’s career has focused on better understanding air pollution and climate problems, and developing large scale clean renewable energy solutions to them. He’s developed and applied three computer models: atmosphere, biosphere and ocean, and has used their simulations to understand air pollution, weather, climate, and renewable energy systems. He’s developed roadmap maps to transitions in countries, states, and cities towards a hundred percent clean renewable energy. Mark has also published 191 peer reviewed journals and articles. He’s given over 800 talks. He founded and has directed the Atmospheric Energy Program at Stanford. He’s published seven books. Four of those are related to atmospheric work, and the last three are related to his energy work. And based on all of this, Mark is ranked as number six in terms of publication since 1980. Wow. Thank you so much, Mark, for taking the time to be with me today.
Mark (03:32):
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Jenny (03:34):
Yeah, if you don’t mind, actually, I didn’t mention off stage, but I’d love to hear a little bit of what brought you into this work. What’s been your journey to this? A lot of people will say it’s just a love of nature or whatever. What brought you into the climate field? Can you say?
Mark (03:50):
Well, when I was a kid, when I was playing tennis, I travelled to Los Angeles and San Diego, and especially in San Diego, the air pollution was so bad. I thought, why should people live like this? I wanted to solve that problem ever since then. And I focused my studies and my research on doing that. For the last 36 years as a scientist, I’ve been trying to understand and solve large scale air pollution and climate problems through clean renewable energy. Part of my work has been to understand the problems. That’s where computer model development came in. And then overlapping the last 25 years now, I’ve been trying to solve the problems. When you’re looking at solutions, I mean, I first look at carbon capture back in 2008, and nothing’s really changed since then except it’s been implemented. Trying the policies, trying to implement it have been expanded a bit, but no actual benefit because as I’ll talk about, carbon capture only increases carbon dioxide. It should be called carbon release, not carbon capture. No kidding.
Jenny (05:01):
Yeah. I was saying to you, I also have had exposure since that time about, actually, I worked two fields in Canada that doing what we called CO2 flooding at the time. That’s what we would call carbon capture utilization and storage, I suppose. But we would see breakthrough, what we would call breakthrough from one well to another instantly, almost within a week. To me, the idea of capturing this carbon and sequestering it long-term is not a practical solution. Rather, the site cleanup and storage or cleanup and closure of sites would do both things. Well, actually three things, as you were mentioning with the water system, the land system, and the air pollution all in one. Anyway, that’s how I came into this work as well, Mark. Let’s start with why are we talking about carbon capture and storage? If you can just remind people what was the intention of this technology to do in terms of justifying new fossil fuel development, let’s say?
The Justification for Carbon Capture and Storage (Hint: there isn’t one)
Mark (06:04):
Well, the justification was that, well, really it’s fossil fuel companies wanted to keep their fuels moving, being sold. And because of all the policies that were being put in place, they had to come up with a way to keep doing that and also pretend to keep selling fossil fuels, but then pretend as if they’re actually helping to solve the problem. They came up with this idea carbon capture, where you add equipment to, let’s say a coal plant to where the carbon dioxide emitted from the coal plant gets absorbed and then basically captured as a gas, and then that CO2 is compressed and put in a pipeline and then piped somewhere. In theory, they were saying most of it would be piped for storage and be put underground and stored forever. In reality, 82% of all their carbon captured worldwide to date has been used to just drill for more oil through what’s called enhanced oil recovery, where the carbon dioxide is piped to a nearby oil field. The CO2 is then mixed with the oil, it bonds with the oil, makes the oil less dense, more of it floats to the surface faster. And for every ton of carbon dioxide, you get a couple more barrels of oil.
Even if you’re just that process alone, by the way, 30 to 40% of the CO2 captured during this enhanced oil recovery process is released right back to the air during the enhanced oil recovery process. And then the additional barrels of oil you get, depending on whether they replace existing oil or their new oil, there’s 20 to 80% more of the CO2 gets released to the air by burning this oil. You end up with 50 to 130% of the CO2 captured just going back to the air just from enhanced oil recovery, which I, again, 82% of all the CO2, that’s what happens to it. Right there, you’re having no benefit. And that’s not even the worst part of it, which we’ll probably talk about later. I’m just saying right off the get go, it’s a useless technology that is only designed to keep the fossil fuel industry going. There’s no benefit whatsoever to humankind.
Jenny (08:33):
Right. Thank you so much. Yeah, we would call that tertiary production. That’s what we refer to it in the industry is when you’ve got, you can do just regular primary production and then you can do water flood production, which is what we’d call secondary enhanced and then enhanced, sorry, being the third that CO2 injection, whether you’re doing natural gas flooding or CO2 flooding or Yeah, that’s basically the two that I’ve been involved in. But yeah, and like I said, in all of those cases, you’re right, I’ve only been involved in where we’re using it to produce more production. We’re not actually using it to store it and be able to know that that’s being stored long-term. And the other thing, if we can, since we have a little time, I want to talk a bit about the impacts of CO2 and other, let’s call it contaminants in the natural gas system, which causes actual risks to pipelines, et cetera, from erosion. And there needs to be, or yeah, corrosion I should be saying in those pipelines based on these additives, if you will.
Mark (09:43):
Well, with the carbon capture, the things they add a whole set of new pipelines. And for example, there was a proposal to add carbon capture equipment to ethanol refineries in the upper Midwest in the US to a few dozen ethanol refineries. And then once they capture that CO2, what do they do with it? Well, they were going to build like 2,500 miles of pipelines, CO2 pipelines, just to carry the CO2 to some in North Dakota. And first of all, aside from the fact that you’ve got to build these pipelines, you’ve got to invade people’s land to put the pipelines in, and farmers don’t want pipelines in. It is like an invasive thing. They have to go through thousands or hundreds to thousands of individual homeowners and landowners to try to get them to agree to put a pipeline. And if they don’t want to agree, then they’re trying to get a forced court order to do this.
It’s really an invasive process too, and it’s just crisscrossing this pretty landscape with these pipelines, and then you need more energy. I mean, the main problem with carbon capture, aside from the fact that most of it’s used for enhanced oil recovery, which is just ridiculous in the first place, is that it increases CO2 and air pollution and fossil mining and fossil infrastructure and worsens people’s health and increases cost of energy for everybody. You might ask, well, how does capturing carbon increase carbon dioxide? Well, it’s really simple. You need energy to run capture equipment and to run the CO2 through pipelines and compress it. And it’s so much energy. It’s about 25% of the energy of a coal plant is needed to add carbon capture to a coal plant. So that means if you add carbon capture to a coal plant, you need 25% more coal.
And when you have 25% more coal, you’re burned 25% more coal, and you have 25% more air pollution. Right away you have more air pollution and you have more mining of coal, and the cost of this equipment is high and it’s going to be passed on to customers. For example, there was only one coal plant in the US where carbon capture was added, and that was in Thompson, Texas called the Petra Nova Project, and that cost 1 billion for the carbon capture equipment. And what did they do to provide the energy for the capture equipment for the coal plant? They built a gas plant to run the capture equipment for the coal plant. You have to imagine how ridiculous this is. They not only built a gas plant next door to the coal plant, then they have to build pipelines to pipe the gas.
They have to mine the gas. There’s leaks of methane. They’re burning gas while they’re to produce electricity for the running, the capture equipment. None of that CO2 is captured by the way, just gets released to the air. None of the methane that is captured, none of the coal mining emissions are captured, including leaked methane, including the combustion emissions. You have all this pollution continuing and you have more pollution now because you’re burning gas now and mining the gas, and you have the CO2 that’s being emitted, and plus the methane equivalent of CO2 that’s being emitted is right there virtually the same as the CO2 that’s captured. You’re really doing nothing. In fact, some people say, well, why not just use wind or solar to run the capture equivalent? Then you’re not emitting anything. Well fact you’re up or you are emitting because that’s the best case.
Let’s say you use wind or solar, that means that the wind or solar cannot replace the coal plant. If you have wind or solar to run carbon capture equipment, why wouldn’t you use that wind and solar just to replace the coal plants in the first place? It turns out that you can eliminate more CO2 by using the exact same amount of wind or solar that would run the capture equipment just to replace a portion of the coal plant, and you’ll reduce more CO2. By not using that wind or solar to replace the coal plant, you’re actually then increasing CO2 because you’re using it for a lower carbon purpose. And plus, if you use wind or solar to replace the coal plant, you eliminate the air pollution from the coal plant. Whereas if you use carbon capture equipment, you just keep that air pollution from the coal plant. If you use wind and solar to replace the coal plant, you eliminate the mining of coal. If you use carbon capture, you maintain the mining of the coal.
And then if you use wind and solar and eliminate the coal plant, wind and solar are now cheaper than coal. You reduce your cost. If you use carbon capture, you not only have to pay for the wind and solar on top of the coal plant, but you have to pay for the capture equipment. In this plant in Thompson, Texas, it costs 1 billion to add the gas plant and the carbon capture equipment to the coal plant. Who pays that $1 billion? Well, and by the way, this plant was shut after three years because there was so many. And all the CO2 that I was captured was sent for enhanced oil recovery, by the way. Who pays over three years that billion dollars? Well, it’s rate payers, and who pays the highest fraction of their income for electricity? It’s low income rate payers. It’s low income rate payers that are saddled with these huge bills for carbon capture equipment and the pipelines and the energy requirements for it. It’s just a complete ridiculous scam. I mean, it’s a scam that pretending as if they’re doing something
Jenny (15:38):
Right. Yeah. I heard it’s justifying demand because you’re expanding and therefore you need this demand. It’s increasing mining. It’s not actually getting all the emissions. The other thing, I don’t know if you like this analogy, but I’ve been saying, you’re having people increase smoking and you’re just capturing the secondhand smoke. I think that’s a fair analogy. Yes.
Mark (16:04):
Yeah, that’s one way to put it. Yeah.
Natural Gas is Worse than Coal
Jenny (16:07):
And then to justify. If you could expand a little bit on the gas piece, because like I said, I’m a geophysicist and I feel like sometimes it’s easy to lose the plot in the lies that are spread around. For example, I remember talking about this natural gas transition. One of the things that’s talked a lot about in Canada is LNG is a clean energy, not clean, sorry, green energy solution. To me, when I think back on it now, as you were just describing, we have all of this leakage between, well, first of all, you have to actually drill the wells, and then you have a bunch of emissions that are associated with that. Then you have leakage from the wells themselves. You have leakage from the pipelines, you have leakage from the transport systems. And the only place where you’re actually potentially capturing emissions is from the stack itself at those facilities, correct?
Mark (16:59):
Yeah. Well, when you have gas or coal or oil, you’re mining and especially gas, which has mostly methane, it’s like 90% methane, and methane is like the third leading cause of global warming. But per unit mass, it’s actually on a 20 year timescale. It’s like over 80 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide. The average methane. It’s not only leaks, it’s forced emissions. I mean, the word leaks is kind of a misnomer. I mean, there are leaks, but they’re also gas companies will release methane intentionally or gas intentionally into the air, either through flaring or just releases to relieve pressure on the pipelines anyway, the average leakage rate across all types of gas mining is around three and a half percent, and it’s up some places up to nine, 10%. Other places it might be 2%, but it’s like on average it’s around three point half percent.
(17:59):
And that’s a lot of methane that’s coming out and never going to be captured. And you need, if you’re using gas, for example, to run capture equipment through by creating electricity or something, then you’re going to be mining more gas, and you’re going to have more leaks, and you’re not capturing that. That just goes into the equation of why this is useless. It’s not actually helping anything. And the CO2 that is captured, first of all, the industry claims, oh, they get 95% capture rates of the CO2, and that just has never occurred anywhere. In reality, the real life, in theory, with perfect conditions, you could get 95%, but all real projects across all capture types is the range is 10 to 80%. The capture rate, it’s because sometimes they capture equipment is off, sometimes it’s down. Sometimes they can’t move the CO2, they turn it, they don’t actually capture anything for a while.
(18:57):
And a lot of them, half of them are less than 50%. You have really low capture rates. First of all, not high capture rates, lots of huge amounts of leaks upstream that are never accounted for, big energy penalty to run the capture equipment. But again, in the best case, you’re using renewables. You don’t even have these mining. In the best case of using renewables, you are preventing the renewables from replacing a coal or gas plant. And by doing that, you actually then increase CO2. You’re always increasing CO2. Carbon capture always increases CO2, no matter what they’re capturing from the stack, because they’re pretending as if the energy they’re using couldn’t be used better for something else.
(19:42):
And it’s like when you just draw your boundaries very narrowly, you get one result that you then try to advertise, but that’s not actually what’s happening. In reality, what’s happening is now you can’t use that wind or solar to replace fossil fuel source. It’s the same thing with direct air capture. When you’re using clean renewable energy to power, direct air capture, you’re just creating a new demand for energy that would otherwise not be there. Now you’re just making more demand on the grid, and then now you can’t use that electricity, that renewable electricity to replace a fossil source. You have to now need some more. If you don’t have, because there’s limited amount of renewables available, you just have to start burning more fossil fuels to replace the renewables that you’re using for your capture equipment.
The Primary Energy Fallacy: a 38% reduction in world energy demand.
Jenny (20:26):
Right? Yeah. Just quit smoking altogether. Right. I’m going to go back to you were talking about, it’s called the primary energy fallacy where people assume that we, it’s this, the amount of energy we’re using today is the equivalent of what we need in the future versus what if we switch to a renewable? Maybe if we can get into, let’s say we killed this. We think this should be abandoned technology, what should we be doing instead, Mark, what does the renewable transition look like? You’ve talked about a 38% decrease in world demand based on an renewable transition. I don’t know what that number means in the context of where we’re at in this conversation, but if you could just expand on how we would reduce energy demand if we were to move in another way, please.
Mark (21:16):
Yeah. Well, we developed plans for states and countries and provinces to transition to a hundred percent renewables across all energy sectors. The idea is simple. You electrify as much as you can and provide the electricity with wind, water, solar, which is really wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, and the electrification process itself, you can eliminate about 38% of world energy demand because like an electric vehicle uses one fourth, the energy as a gasoline vehicle to go the same distance, but averaged overall energy sectors. That’s about a 20% reduction of demand. Electric heat pumps use 75% less energy than combustion heating and electric conduction cooktops use 60% less energy than gas to do the same thing. When you average across all energy sectors, that’s another 14% reduction of demand. If you electrify industry, that’s another 4% or so, you’re up to 38%. But then, well, actually it’s a little more than that then.
(22:21):
But then there’s another 11% of all energy worldwide is used just to mine transport and refined fossil fuels in uranium. And we don’t need to do that if we have wind and solar and geothermal hydro because those are renewable resources where the wind comes right to the turbine, solar comes right to the panel, water comes right to the reservoir, geothermal gets replenished by heat from deep in the earth. We can eliminate another 11% of energy worldwide, and then we can, on top of that, we can get end use energy efficiency improvements beyond business as usual for a few more percent. We can actually get a 54% or reduction of world power demand just by electrifying and providing the electricity with wind, water, and solar. That’s without people changing their habits.
(23:09):
The fuel under the fossil fuel paradigm where they use carbon capture, well, you don’t get any of that 54% reduction because you keep burning fuels, inefficient fuels. You keep using gasoline, you keep using gas heating for buildings, you still burn coal and oil for industry, and you still mine transport and refine fossil fuels and uranium. You barely get any change of your energy, but you then increase your energy needs because you need to run the capture equipment. You need 25% more energy than you did for electricity generation. Your energy demand in fact goes up. It doesn’t go down 54%, it actually goes up. Again, this is like the fossil fuel industry wants to trick you into thinking that they’re doing something useful when they’re just preventing you from doing something efficient, and this is really dangerous. And then you can really see the opportunity cost here, because then when you electrify provide the electricity with wind, water, and solar, you are eliminating the air pollution deaths from the fossil fuels.
(24:21):
And worldwide, they’re about seven and a half million premature deaths from air pollution, from fossil and bioenergy fuels. And we could eliminate like 90% of those deaths just by transitioning to clean renewable energy. And same thing with global warming agents. You can eliminate them just by electrifying providing the electricity with clean renewable energy, whereas you’re hardly reducing CO2 with carbon capture. When you compare those two scenarios, which we did in a paper recently, where you compare the scenarios of electrifying providing the electricity with wind, water, solar versus not electrifying, but just using carbon capture or direct air capture, what you find is the social cost is about nine to 12 times higher of going the carbon capture route than wind, water, and solar. A lot of that’s due to the air pollution, health cost. A lot of it’s due to the higher carbon emissions from carbon capture, direct air capture, and the rest is due to the higher energy costs from carbon capture, direct air capture. On the order of a factor of 10 higher costs, and that’s no matter how you slice it, you get factor of 10 higher costs. Yeah, if you want to keep paying higher social costs, dying more, having more damage to the climate, having more damage to your environment and paying higher bills, electricity, heat, everything, bills, yeah, go for that carbon capture, it’s just a scam. It’s a greenwashing scam that does nothing but raise costs for everybody.
Jenny (25:59):
Yes. Thank you. That was great. I heard, well, I mean, this is an increase of nine to 12 times magnitude of harm essentially to people versus something that would half the harm by more than half the harm that we’re experiencing in terms of our pocketbooks, but also in terms of the impact in air quality and land degradation and water stability, let’s say. The one thing I wanted you to expand on, if you don’t mind, is when people make the argument of, oh, well, but then you’re just mining a whole other industry to be able to justify this transition. That’s the argument in the industry is that there’s this whole mining aspect for renewables and for the electrical transport system, let’s say, which is just not attainable, et cetera. I’ve seen the numbers that this system uses 5% of the material usage that the fossil fuel system does. Can you elaborate on that point, please?
Addressing the disinformation around renewable (vs. fossil fuel) mining
Mark (27:01):
Yeah. Well, fossil fuels use orders of magnitude. I mean, you have to mine fossil fuels every day for eternity to keep using fossil fuels because in the case of wind, solar, et cetera, wind comes right to the turbine, solar comes right to the panel, you eliminate fuel binding altogether. Whereas the main mining from fossil fuels is fuel mining, which is done every single day, and it’s just orders of magnitude, larger mining for fuel. Now, when you have renewables, yeah, you have to do some mining one time at the beginning, like for lithium, for batteries, for example. But first of all, batteries, you put ‘em in a car once and that car is now they’re going 20, 25 years and then they get recycled. The lithium, you can recycle a hundred percent of the components up to a hundred percent, but say 97 to a hundred percent of the components in a lithium battery can be recycled, and they are being recycled now, and they will be more in the future.
(27:58):
That same lithium can be reused in 20 years, 25 years for another car or for stationary battery storage. And whereas meanwhile that if you’re going the fossil fuel route, you’d be mining gasoline every day for those 25 years plus the next 25 years plus the next 25 years. You have one time mining versus continuous mining. Basically over a hundred year period to drive, if you converted all the vehicles in the world to lithium-ion vehicles, this includes passenger vehicles and trucks and buses, you’re going to be mining 10,000 to a hundred thousand times less fueled over that a hundred year period versus for mining fossil fuels for fossil fuel vehicles. It’s, its like a speck that you couldn’t even see in a sea of dots of how small the mining is compared to the mining you need for fossil fuels. In the US we drill 50,000.
(29:05):
Well, actually in the Great plains of both the US and Canada, we drill 50,000 new oil and gas wells every year. In the US we have a million active oil and gas wells and 4 million abandoned ones. And the fossil fuel industry occupies about almost 1.2% of all US land. The ethanol industry for corn is another 1.24% of land. We’re close to 2.4% of US land is used just for energy with fossil fuels and ethanol. If you electrify everything, provide the electricity from clean renewable sources, we’d need on the order of 1% of us land. We’d reduce land use if we go to the wind water, solar route versus keeping with fossil fuels. And you have to keep growing that fossil fuel land every year because you need more fossil fuels. A lot of that’s land is not only for the mines, but for the pipelines.
(29:58):
There’s millions of miles of pipelines crossing the US for fossil fuels and hundreds of thousands of gas stations. You need to keep growing the land needed for fossil fuels, whereas with renewables, there’s a little bit of growth, but it’s much slower because it’s really one time mining and one time infrastructure, and then it slowly grows as population increases. It’s not a comparison. There’s just in terms of health benefits, in terms of climate benefits, in terms of cost benefits, in terms of reduced land use, and also in terms of jobs worldwide, we estimate over 25 million more full-time jobs produced versus lost when we go wind water, solar versus a fossil fuel economy.
Jenny (30:45):
That was fantastic, Mark. Yeah, thank you. It’s so fascinating. Again, these stories all seem to weave together in terms of it is a lie to say that we need this carbon capture and storage, let’s say, to justify additional production. And you think of all the reduction in all of these areas. Like you said, I’m picturing all of these ships going across the oceans daily to provide this constant source of fuel versus you do a delivery of solar panels and wind turbines, and your ongoing shipping system is, I’ve heard that the global supply chain system is changing rapidly right now because of this massive demand shift in material movement. Can you speak to that at all, or are you familiar with
Mark (31:47):
I can’t really say much about it. I haven’t looked into that issue too much.
What does renewable deployment look like?
Jenny (31:51):
Okay. If you wouldn’t mind just expanding a little bit on what does a renewable deployment look like? You mentioned you’ve been in countries and cities, and can you speak to, I’m in Calgary, Alberta where there is, I would say we’re, I don’t know what we are right now. I want to say we’re 80% fossil fuel dependent or something like that in our electrical system. I think maybe it’s not as bad as that anymore. I’m not sure. But what does a transition look like just in terms of renewable deployment? How do you go about doing that work for
Mark (32:27):
Jurisdiction? Well, in Canada it’s pretty easy because you have so much land and so much resource. In the south of Canada, there’s a bunch of solar, especially in the summer. In fact, there’s a community, Drake’s Landing that for a couple decades. There are homes where there’s solar collectors on the garages of homes that would take heat from the sun store it underground and soil for up to six months. You have long summer days and you can store that solar heat for up to six months and then use that heat to provide a hundred percent of home heating in the winter. That’s a district heating system. You can use sun, not only for heat, but also electricity generation as well. But there’s, there’s solar in the south, there’s wind pretty much everywhere, but the selected places, there’s hydro in a lot of places in Canada. There’s enhanced geothermal everywhere, which is a new commercial technology where you can just dig down into the earth. If you dig deep enough, you get high enough temperatures to heat the heat water that then provides electricity because you can use a turbine to generate electricity with high enough temperature, heat when you evaporate a fluid. And so now you can do that anywhere. You’ve got hydro, you’ve got geothermal, you’ve got wind, you’ve got solar, and it’s combine that with battery storage for electricity. You already have hydro storage and a lot of hydroelectric dams.
(33:59):
Then there’s heat storage and there’s cold storage, but you require electrification of buildings, electrification of transportation, electrification of industry. That’s what it looks like. Electrifying, going to electric vehicles, going to electric homes, going to electric industry, providing the electricity from clean renewable sources, which there’s plenty of in Canada, we’ve done a plan for Canada and actually several plans for Canada, and they all are, it’s one of the easiest countries to transition from a technical and economic point of view.
Key Takeaways: Reclamation and Renewable Deployment
Jenny (34:30):
Fascinating. Yeah, I was thinking about all of these oil and gas sites that are powered by a solar and battery system today, and thinking about how those could be redeployed, like you’re saying, those are generally mobile sites as well. Anyway, I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of very easy things that could happen. In fact, I’m almost convinced that we have all the solar and battery technology we need, if not more, where I live, if we just looked to it and deployed it properly. Thank you so much for that. I’d like to, if you don’t mind, just explore a little bit with you because of my experience and site cleanup enclosure, when you’re talking about landmass, for example, you talked about how if we just reduced, went away from both fossil fuel and ethanol types of energy use towards renewables, let’s say a third of the land would be used.
(35:25):
And I look at that as an opportunity to potentially use some of these contaminated lands as another potential deployment of solar and then be able to keep, because they would be tied into the electrical system already. I guess what I’m saying is I see an opportunity to be doing renewable deployment in marriage with site cleanup en closure, and I look at, as somebody, as an industry professional would love to see, instead of drilling a well, we are abandoning wells. Instead of putting in a new pipeline, we’re removing a pipeline. Instead of deploying new facilities, we’re removing them and et cetera, et cetera. Instead of mapping reservoirs, we’d be mapping contamination plumes. These are the types of activities I see in terms of jobs. When you talk about jobs and those opportunities and that, what if any work or thoughts do you have in that space, Mark, about trying to marry those two activities together in terms of reducing the footprint from fossil fuels while deploying renewables?
Mark (36:29):
Yeah, there’s a lot of places that we can put renewables that don’t take up new useful land. Aside from just putting solar on rooftops, but you don’t need new land or putting solar on agricultural fields where you can combine agriculture and solar in what’s called agrovoltaics, where you space the solar out. You can put wind and solar on degraded land. Contaminated land, and you can reduce even the land use of wind and solar by putting solar, combining it with wind at the same place. There’s wind. You don’t take any land on the ground with wind. They’re just a pole in the ground. But you do have what’s called spacing area, and people equate spacing area while you’re just occupying all that land where you’re not, you’re actually allowing farmers to grow their crops underneath, or you’re still open space or grazing land or ranch land, or if you’re offshore, there’s no land at all. But you could combine solar and wind and battery storage at the same location. And then when you do that, you provide more stable power because wind and solar are complimentary in nature. When the wind’s not blowing, the sun is off and shining during the day and vice versa.
(37:41):
And by combining the two, you actually get smoother overall output, especially if you add batteries, then you can smoothen the output even more. Yeah, there’s a lot of opportunities in taking these degraded fossil fuel lands and turning them into renewable energy fields. And you can even add geothermal in there too, because that doesn’t take that much land either, especially if they want to keep drilling, just drill for geothermal, and that’s a better drilling.
Jenny (38:10):
It is, yeah. But I’ve seen that industry a little bit. I think there’s some potential in the regulations that would help make that industry more attractive. I think if anything, there’s been some handcuffing happening between that deployment versus drilling for new fossil fuels and also for renewables. Our province did a whole, what’s interesting to be considered almost like a removal of landowners rights when it comes to renewable deployment versus where they’re forced to receive fossil fuel development on their lands. They can’t pursue a renewables. It’s pretty remarkable despite the handcuffs that this technology is finally making its way that technology, I mean, solar, wind, and batteries and renewable, other renewable sources. Thank you so much for all of this, mark. This has been tremendous. Is there anything in this conversation that you’d like to add? I’m just going to close with that. Thank you for reminding folks why carbon capture and storage is not a legitimate solution. It actually increases emissions. It doesn’t address the primary problem, which is methane emissions, and it is justifying a growing energy demand world in a situation where there is an opportunity to half it and also provide some social and environmental justice along the way. Anything else you’d like to add that I missed in this?
Mark (39:43):
No, I just suggest we keep our eye on the ball and focus on what works and not ignore these greenwashing planes about carbon capture, direct air capture, also blue hydrogen electro fuels. These are all constructs of the fossil fuel industry. We just want to focus on clean, renewable energy, electrification. That’s what works. We don’t have much time. Let’s just do that and we will get solved these problems together.
Jenny (40:09):
Yeah. Thank you so much. It’s because of people like you that I’m aware and working on this with you. Thank you for spending some time with me this afternoon, mark.
Mark (40:17):
Yeah, happy to.
Jenny (40:19):
Thank you. Take care for now.
Mark (40:20):
Thanks.
