Cleantech innovators are responding to the world’s energy needs with ways to help industries cut energy, water and raw material use and reduce their carbon footprint
Cleantech innovators are responding to the world’s energy needs with ways to help industries cut energy, water and raw material use and reduce their carbon footprintAccording to the International Energy Agency, global energy demand will grow by an average of 1.6% per year to 2030 – an overall increase of 45% on today’s consumption. Consultancy McKinsey warns of an equally worrying scenario for water use. Its 2009 Charting Our Water Future report finds that competing demands for scarce water resources may lead to a 40% supply shortage by 2030.
These, and the growing consumption of basic raw materials, represent challenges to a world with a rapidly expanding population, raising the question of how industry can meet the surging demand for resources sustainably.
Renewables ready to roll
The IEA has a Blue Map scenario that charts a halving in global energy-related carbon emissions by 2050 (compared with 2005 levels) and is consistent with a long-term temperature rise of 2-3C, a level likely to render some countries uninhabitable.
Its scenario for halving emissions shows renewable sources and nuclear dominating global power supply by 2050. Renewables would rise to 51% of total global energy provision from 18% today, with nuclear forming 24% and fossil fuel sources fitted with carbon capture and storage (CCS) 17%.
Despite these forecasts, direct government spending in most developed economies with large fossil fuel supplies is stubbornly fixated on CCS, while fossil fuel subsidies dwarf those for renewables.
There are still only five large-scale commercially operated CCS projects globally – unchanged from 2008 – and these are all on natural gas or enhanced oil recovery processes, not coal-fired power stations.
In earlier reports when focusing on how many CCS-fitted coal-fired power plants were needed to deliver meaningful emissions reductions by 2050, the IEA suggested that something like 6,000 CCS plants each capturing a million tonnes a year would be required. “We haven’t even got one yet,” says Prof Stefaan Simons, director of University College London’s centre for CO2 technology and one of the world’s leading experts in low-carbon technologies.
Lean and green
And, as well as keeping a keen eye on energy use and carbon emissions, companies are being forced to make efficiency savings in the buildings and industrial facilities they own, and to make better use of water, raw materials and secondary inputs, such as industrial chemicals.
Greg Neichin of San Francisco-based venture capital research and advisory firm Cleantech Group says cleantech innovations are being rapidly deployed around the world to cut the use of energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Investment is not confined to the sometimes niche, risky venture-capital sector. “A lot of the investment seems to be made not so much in the VC world but by companies themselves and some of their larger equipment suppliers and vendors,” Neichin says.
Importantly, demand for cleantech is being driven without a carbon market mechanism in place to kick-start investment.
“Most, if not all, of the momentum in energy efficiency investment, whether for the buildings or for industrial processes, is being driven by pure economics. A lot of these investments in plant efficiencies or building retrofits are economic no-brainers – they display almost instant payback periods,” Neichin says.
One of the most significant resources government and companies can tap is the billions of kilowatt-hours that they waste through lost energy.
A 2007 UN report – Realising the Potential of Energy Efficiency – urged G8 nations to increase their rate of energy efficiency improvement to 2.5% per year, double the global average.
This would allow the world to hold carbon dioxide concentrations below 550 parts per million and avoid $3tn worth of new generation. It would, the UN says, eliminate the same amount of energy supplied by 2,000 coal-fired power plants.
The importance of energy-efficient buildings in the drive for a low-carbon and energy-frugal economy is indisputable. Over the past year, global carbon emissions would have been 715m tonnes lower through simply improving the energy efficiency of existing buildings and appliances, according to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
On the green road
To hold atmospheric carbon below its prescribed range, the IEA sees biofuels, electricity and hydrogen together forming 50% of transport fuel use in 2050, replacing gasoline and diesel.
But in July this year, the body warned that much more effort was needed to lift research and development, demonstration and deployment funding as well as coordination to cut the costs of advanced technologies.
The agency sees biofuel demand for light-duty internal combustion engine vehicles starting to decline after 2030, amid a shift towards electricity and hydrogen fuels. But biofuels use rises rapidly for trucks, ships and aircraft through to 2050, replacing petroleum fuels. This in itself may or may not prove to be sustainable.