U.N. Chief’s Test: Shaming Without Naming the World’s Climate Delinquents

António Guterres told world leaders gathered in New York that their efforts to address the climate crisis had come up “abysmally short.”

Source: The New York Times | by Somini Sengupta

Sept 19, 2023 | updated 2:57 pm ET

The world’s top diplomat, António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, on Tuesday told world leaders their efforts to address the climate crisis had come up “abysmally short” and called on them to do what even climate-ambitious countries have been reluctant to do: stop expanding coal, oil and gas production.

“Every continent, every region and every country is feeling the heat, but I’m not sure all leaders are feeling that heat,” he said in his opening remarks to presidents and prime ministers assembled for their annual gathering in the General Assembly. “The fossil fuel age has failed.”

Mr. Guterres, now in his second and last term, has made climate action his centerpiece issue and has become unusually blunt in his language about the need to rein in the production of fossil fuels and not just focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from their use.

As always, he pointed to the world’s 20 largest economies for not moving fast enough. As always, he stopped short of calling on specific countries.

The 2015 Paris climate accord asks only that countries set voluntary targets to address climate pollution. The agreements that come out of annual climate negotiations routinely get watered down, because every country, including champions of coal, oil and gas, must agree on every word and comma.

The secretary general can cajole but not command, urge but not enforce. He doesn’t name specific countries, though nothing in the United Nations Charter prevents him from doing so.

Despite his exhortations, governments have only increased their fossil fuel subsidies, to a record $7 trillion in 2022. Few nations have concrete plans to move their economies away from fossil fuels, and many depend directly or indirectly on revenues from coal, oil and gas. The human toll of climate change continues to mount.

“He has interpreted his role as a sort of truth teller,” said Rachel Kyte, a former United Nations climate diplomat and a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “The powers available to him as secretary general are awesome but limited.”

A coal plant in Poland. More than 100 countries have asked to speak at the climate summit Mr. Guterres is hosting Wednesday.Credit...Kuba Stezycki/Reuters

On Wednesday, he is deploying a bit of a diplomatic wink-nod. At a Climate Ambition Summit he is hosting , he is giving the mic only to those countries that have done as he has urged, and only if they send a high-level leader, to show that they take the summit seriously. “A naming and shaming device that doesn’t actually require naming and shaming anyone,” Mr. Gowan said.

Diplomatic jockeying around who will get on the list has been intense. More than 100 countries sent in requests to speak, and Mr. Guterres’s aides have in turn requested more information to prove they deserve to be on the list. What have you done on coal phaseout, some have been asked. How much climate funding have you offered? Are you still issuing new oil and gas permits? And so on.

“It’s good to see Guterres trying to hold their feet to the fire,” said Mohamed Adow, a Kenyan activist.

U.N. General Assembly: Live Updates

Updated 

Sept. 19, 2023, 6:26 p.m. ET31 minutes ago

Mr. Guterres has waited until the last possible minute to make public the list of speakers.

Expect the awkward.

John Kerry, the United States climate envoy, is expected to attend but not speak. (Mr. Guterres is giving the mic only to high-level national leaders.) It’s unclear whether the head of the Chinese delegation this year, Vice President Han Zheng, will have a speaking role. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has secured the mic. Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, isn’t coming to the General Assembly conclave at all. Sultan al-Jaber, the head of the Emirati oil company, and host of the next climate talks, is scheduled to speak.

Mr. Guterres will also invite companies with what he calls “credible” targets to reduce their climate emissions to participate. Expect to count them with the fingers of one hand.

“If fossil fuel companies want to be part of the solution, they must lead the transition to renewable energy,” he said Tuesday.

Mr. Guterres, who had led the United Nations refugee agency for 10 years before being selected for the top job, didn’t always make climate change his centerpiece issue.

“What are the most critical steps to take soon?”

In fact, he didn’t talk about it when he was chosen to head the United Nations in 2016. Climate was seen as the signature issue of his predecessor, Ban Ki-moon, who shepherded through the Paris Agreement in 2015. Mr. Guterres spoke instead about the war in Syria, terrorism, and gender parity in the United Nations. (His choice disappointed those who had pressed for a woman to lead the world body for the first time in its 70-year history.)

In 2018 came a shift. At that year’s General Assembly, he called climate change “the defining issue of our time.” In 2019, he invited the climate activist Greta Thunberg to the General Assembly, whose raw anger at world leaders (“How dare you?” she railed at world leaders) spurred a social media clash with President Donald J. Trump, who was pulling the United States out of the Paris Accord.

Mr. Guterres, for his part, studiously avoided criticism of the United States by name.

By 2022, as oil companies were raking in record profits in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he amped up his language. “We need to hold fossil fuel companies and their enablers to account,” he told world leaders at the General Assembly. He called for a windfall-profit tax, urged countries to suspend subsidies for fossil fuels and appointed a committee to issue guidelines for private companies on what counts as “greenwashing.”

This year, he stepped into the contentious debate between those who want greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas projects captured and stored away, or “abated,” and those who want to keep oil and gas tucked in the ground altogether. “The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions. It’s fossil fuels, period,” Mr. Guterres said in June.

The reactions from the private sector are mixed, said Paul Simpson, a founder and former head of CDP, a nongovernmental group that works with companies to address their climate pollution. Some executives privately say Mr. Guterres is right to call for a swift phaseout of fossil fuels, while others note that most national governments still lack concrete energy transition plans, no matter what he says.

“The question really is, how effective is the United Nations?” Mr. Simpson said. “It has the ability to get governments to focus and plan. But the U.N. itself doesn’t have any teeth, so national governments and companies must act.”

Somini Sengupta is The Times’s international climate correspondent. She has also covered the Middle East, West Africa and South Asia and is the author of the book, “The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India’s Young”

Sodium comes to the battery world

Sodium-ion technology is ready, cheap, and safe, but can it oust lithium ion?

Source: Chemical & Engineering News | by Alex Scott

May 24, 2022 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 100, Issue 19

“What a time it is to be a battery chemist—on paper, some are even multimillionaires,” says Jerry Barker, chief scientist and founder of the battery firm Faradion and a chemist who has been discovering battery materials for decades.

Breakthroughs in lithium-ion battery technology are being registered almost daily. “I can’t keep up with it all,” Barker says. Gigafactories for making lithium-ion batteries are appearing with increasing frequency. It would take something extraordinary to knock Li-ion battery technology off its perch.

And yet lithium has a fundamental problem. Demand for the element is so great for applications including electric vehicles, portable electronic devices, and stationary energy units that lithium mining companies are struggling to keep up. “The price of lithium will stay high,” says Michael Sanders, senior adviser at the consulting firm Avicenne Energy, speaking at the International Battery Seminar & Exhibit in March. In addition, about 90% of the world’s supply of lithium is controlled by Chinese companies.

As a result, batteries based on sodium are gaining attention, especially from Western companies seeking a secure supply chain for battery materials. The Achilles’ heel of sodium-ion batteries is that they can store only about two-thirds of the energy of Li-ion batteries of equivalent size. Developers of Na-ion batteries say they are steadily increasing the energy density of their prototypes. None are commercial yet, but serious competition for lithium could soon be on the way.

“Price of lithium has gone to insane levels!” Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted April 8. “Tesla might actually have to get into the mining & refining directly at scale, unless costs improve. There is no shortage of the element itself, as lithium is almost everywhere on Earth, but pace of extraction/refinement is slow.” Musk pointed to data from the information service World of Statistics showing that the price of lithium hydroxide had risen to $78,032 per metric ton (t) from $6,800 in 2019.

“Price of lithium has gone to insane levels!”

Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla

Meanwhile, the price of sodium hydroxide, a common sodium-ion battery precursor, is below $800 per metric ton. While lithium must be extracted from rocks or brine, battery-grade sodium hydroxide is readily produced during the electrolytic conversion of salt into chlorine.

Cost is indeed a key differentiator between lithium and sodium ion, according to Chris Wright, executive chairman of Faradion, which is developing sodium-ion batteries.

“The bill of materials for a sodium-ion cell is about one-third cheaper than for an equivalent one made from lithium ion,” Wright says. Na-ion batteries also perform well at as low as –20 °C and are not at risk of thermal runaway, “unlike some Li-ion batteries, which have been known to catch fire,” he adds.

Rechargeable sodium-ion batteries are similar in construction to lithium-ion ones. During charging, Na ions move from a sodium- and iron-containing cathode through a liquid electrolyte and across a polymer barrier to a hard carbon anode. On discharge, the sodium ions return from the anode to the cathode.

Faradion’s batteries have an energy density of about 160 W h/kg, similar to that of older Li-ion batteries featuring a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cathode. At least for now, sodium ion’s relatively poor energy density precludes its use in fast electric vehicles and limits its applications largely to stationary energy markets.

Still, the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie forecast in a 2021 report that Na-ion batteries have the potential to mitigate some of the supply chain pressure on LFP and newer Li-ion batteries containing nickel, manganese, and cobalt. The firm forecast that production of Na-ion batteries will reach 20 GW h by 2030, up from pilot-scale production quantities today. Total battery production capacity in 2030 will be about 2,800 GW h, according to Avicenne’s Sanders.

Sodium ion’s lower energy density, which previously held back its use in batteries, may not be such an issue after all, Wright says. “People have realized that for many applications, a slightly lower energy density is not as commercially significant as was once thought,” he says.

LFP-based batteries, which were almost written off 8 or 9 years ago, are taking an increasingly large share of the market, Wright says. One reason is that newer, more energy-dense Li-ion cells have high heat output, which means they require more space for cooling, he says.

Through improvements in cell architecture and component engineering, Faradion and other developers of Na-ion batteries expect to improve the energy density of their batteries in the next few years. Faradion is targeting 190 W h/kg. “Our latest understanding shows sodium-ion’s performance in batteries could become better than we thought,” Barker says.

Executives at India’s Reliance Industries certainly think sodium-ion technology is well positioned to carve out a niche in the battery market. The industrial giant acquired Faradion in January for $135 million and has pledged to invest $35 million in the British firm to commercialize its technology. Reliance plans to build a Na-ion battery factory in Jamnagar, India, for applications such as slower electric vehicles, like rickshaws, and stationary power storage.

Faradion is not the only Na-ion company with near-term plans for commercial production. The California-based start-up Natron Energy unveiled plans earlier this month to open a facility in 2023 to produce 0.6 GW h of Na-ion batteries annually. Rather than build a plant from scratch, Natron has partnered with Clarios to convert a portion of that firm’s Li-ion battery plant in Michigan to sodium-ion technology.

Natron uses a sodium material based on the pigment Prussian blue for both its anode and cathode. The cathode is rich in iron, while the anode is rich in manganese. “The materials and the chemistry are where Natron innovates; the manufacturing techniques are all standard,” says Rob Rogan, Natron’s chief business officer.

The company has outsourced production of its Prussian blue compound to Arxada, Lonza’s former specialty chemical business. Arxada will make the material, including the precursor hydrogen cyanide, in Visp, Switzerland.

Natron batteries have an energy density of about 70 W h/kg—similar to that of lead-acid batteries and too low for most electric vehicles. “We have relatively low energy density but extremely high power density,” Rogan says. “What we’re finding is that as the world’s energy transitions, there are different battery technologies that are suited for certain applications. Our batteries are designed to deliver huge amounts of power over short durations.”

As a result, Rogan says, the batteries are suitable as auxiliary power for industrial applications such as data centers, a market that could be worth $30 billion annually by 2027.

Natron’s transition from lab to mass production has been a long time coming. The company was founded in 2012 on technology developed by CEO and cofounder Colin Wessells while earning his PhD at Stanford University. The company has raised about $120 million in funding and received $25 million in grants and support from Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, a US government agency.

Altris Energy also recently announced plans to build its first commercial Na-ion battery plant. The Swedish start-up secured $10.5 million in February, bringing its total funding to about $12 million.

Uppsala University postdoc Ronnie Mogensen and associate professors William Brant and Reza Younesi founded Altris in 2017. Their interest in sodium-ion technology was sparked by a study by Nobel laureate John B. Goodenough and colleagues about Prussian white’s potential as a cathode material in Na-ion batteries (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2015, DOI: 10.1021/ja510347s).

Altris’s Prussian white compound, an analog of Prussian blue that the firm has named Fennac, is composed primarily of iron and sodium. The company’s anode is made from hard carbon sourced from biomass, its electrolyte is fluorine-free, and its separator is derived from cellulose fiber. “Beyond the Fennac-based cathode, each and every one of the cell’s components are drastically improved compared to rival lithium-ion cells with regards to the sustainability of the materials used,” Altris says.

Altris has developed a Prussian white cathode material that contains sodium and iron.Before founding the firm, Mogensen and Younesi had selected Prussian white as a cathode material to suit a polymer electrolyte they had been developing. At the time, the only way to make Prussian white was in a pressurized boiler via a process that involved the formation of cyanide. “It was a potential cyanide bomb, so the university would not allow them to make it in any volume,” says Altris chief technology officer Tim Nordh. The two eventually developed a safer process that became the basis of the company, he says.

Altris’s battery cell has an energy density of about 150 W h/kg. “With this we are already in the LFP space.” With tweaks such as reducing the volume of electrolyte, increasing its energy density to 200 W h/kg “is not unreasonable,” Nordh says. Altris’s Fennac could still be years away from powering electric vehicles, Nordh says, as the qualifying tests for automotive batteries are extensive. The company is therefore initially seeking to market Fennac for use in stationary batteries.

In addition to using inexpensive starting materials, Altris expects to save money on solvent costs. Lithium-ion cathode production typically requires use of the solvent N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone, which the European Chemicals Agency classifies as a substance of very high concern. As a result, Li-ion cathode plants need sophisticated and costly drying rooms to recover solvents. Altris uses a water-based solvent to make its sodium-ion cathodes, Nordh says.Nordh is also happy to see that the energy density of a sodium-ion battery being developed by China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology, the world’s largest lithium-ion battery producer, “is about the same,” he says.

CATL declined to provide C&EN with information about its Na-ion battery technology, although the company disclosed last year that it expected to begin making commercial volumes in 2023. It reported previously that it had developed a Prussian white cathode with a porous hard-carbon anode.

The case for sodium would be even stronger if chemists could create a battery featuring a sodium metal anode. It would have an energy density beyond 230 W h/kg—enough to compete with today’s higher-performing Li-ion batteries.

One of the challenges of making such a battery is preventing the formation of the dendritic structures that can cause short circuits. Lithium metal battery developers such as QuantumScape and Factorial Energy say they have dendrites under control, but Nordh says the structures that can form in sodium metal batteries are bigger.

R&D for sodium metal batteries is in general far behind that for lithium metal batteries, but there is speculation that CATL is close to producing one. Success would constitute a major step forward in battery technology.

Meanwhile, sodium-ion battery developers are poised to begin moving from pilot- to commercial-scale production. Supply chain issues with lithium are the opening they have been waiting for. If sodium ion is going to steal market share from lithium ion, now is the time.

Turn Red Planet green with wind turbines to unlock new Mars missions: NASA

Scientists say research shows wind can take place alongside solar and nuclear as 'valuable' energy source to sustain life on Martian surface

Source: Recharge News | By Andrew Lee

Wind energy is “a valuable energy resource for future human missions to Mars” that could open new areas of the Red Planet for exploration, according to a team of scientists that urged more research into how turbines can support life under Martian conditions.

Once written off as a source of power due to conditions on Mars’ surface – where low atmospheric density results in wind forces typically 1% those seen on Earth – new research led by Victoria Hartwick of the NASA Ames Research Centre in California claims technological advances such as tapping low wind speeds and operating in extreme environments now “favour a Martian application”.

Wind turbines on Mars could prove particularly valuable as a complement to nuclear and solar energy, offering greater safety levels than the former and potentially able to function when the latter is engulfed in dust storms, say the researchers in a new paper published in Nature Astronomy that uses what’s claimed as “a state-of-the-art Mars global climate model”.

“We find that wind speeds at some proposed landing sites are sufficiently fast to provide a stand-alone or complementary energy source to solar or nuclear power,” said the scientists, adding that “wind power represents a stable, sustained energy resource across large portions of the Mars surface” that could help open up 13 new 'regions of interest' on the planet for human exploration.

Part of their calculations were based on power curve figures from an Enercon 33 turbine operating at the Ross Island wind farm in Antarctica as “an analogue site for present day Mars”.

Wind power represents a stable, sustained energy resource.

“We encourage additional study aimed at advancing wind turbine technology to operate efficiently under Mars conditions and to extract more power from Mars winds,” said the researchers.

They flagged a host of technical challenges that would need to be overcome, ranging from lightweight designs for transport to Mars to the need to operate in ultra-challenging temperature and dust conditions.