Saudi Arabia takes steps to lead the $700B global hydrogen market

 Sun-scorched expanses and steady Red Sea breezes make the northwest tip of Saudi Arabia prime real estate for what the kingdom hopes will become a global hub for green hydrogen.

As governments and industries seek less-polluting alternatives to hydrocarbons, the world’s biggest crude exporter doesn’t want to cede the burgeoning hydrogen business to China, Europe or Australia and lose a potentially massive source of income. So it’s building a $5 billion plant powered entirely by sun and wind that will be among the world’s biggest green hydrogen makers when it opens in the planned megacity of Neom in 2025

The task of turning a patch of desert the size of Belgium into a metropolis powered by renewable energy falls to Peter Terium, the former chie.f executive officer of RWE AG, Germany’s biggest utility, and clean-energy spinoff Innogy SE. His performance will help determine whether a country dependent on petrodollars can transition into a supplier of non-polluting fuels.

“There’s nothing I’ve ever seen or heard of this dimension or challenge,” Terium said. “I’ve been spending the last two years wrapping my mind around ‘from scratch,’ and now we’re very much in execution mode.”

Hydrogen is morphing from a niche power source — used in zeppelins, rockets and nuclear weapons — into big business, with the European Union alone committing $500 billion to scale up its infrastructure. Huge obstacles remain to the gas becoming a major part of the energy transition, and skeptics point to Saudi Arabia’s weak track record so far capitalizing on what should be a competitive edge in the renewables business, especially solar, where there are many plans but few operational projects.

But countries are jostling for position in a future global market, and hydrogen experts list the kingdom as one to watch.

The U.K. is hosting 10 projects to heat buildings with the gas, China is deploying fuel-cell buses and commercial vehicles, and Japan is planning to use the gas in steelmaking. U.S. presidential climate envoy John Kerry urged the domestic oil and gas industry to embrace hydrogen’s “huge opportunities.”

That should mean plenty of potential customers for the plant called Helios Green Fuels. Saudi Arabia is setting its sights on becoming the world’s largest supplier of hydrogen — a market that BloombergNEF estimates could be worth as much as $700 billion by 2050.

“You’re seeing a more diversified portfolio of energy exports that is more resilient,” said Shihab Elborai, a Dubai-based partner at consultant Strategy&. “It’s diversified against any uncertainties in the rate and timing of the energy transition.”

Blueprints are being drawn and strategies are being announced, but it’s still early days for the industry. Hydrogen is expensive to make without expelling greenhouse gases, difficult to store and highly combustible.

Green hydrogen is produced by using renewable energy rather than fossil fuels. The current cost of producing a kilogram is a little under $5, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.

Saudi Arabia possesses a competitive advantage in its perpetual sunshine and wind, and vast tracts of unused land. Helios’s costs likely will be among the lowest globally and could reach $1.50 per kilogram by 2030, according to BNEF. That’s cheaper than some hydrogen made from non-renewable sources today.

Competing on Cost

It’s more expensive to produce renewable energy in Europe, and the continent’s anticipated demand while implementing a Green Deal should exceed its own supply, Terium said. That $1 trillion-plus stimulus package will try to make the continent carbon-neutral.

“By no means will they be able to produce all the hydrogen themselves,” he said. “There’s just not enough North Sea or usable water for offshore wind.”

Terium, who is Dutch, joined Neom in 2018 to design its energy, water and food networks. His enthusiasm for technologies such as electric vehicles and digital networks wasn’t matched by Innogy’s investors, but it is by the backers of Neom.

The most important of those is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the 35-year-old de facto ruler, who envisions Neom as a zero-emissions exemplar helping transform society and the economy. The hydrogen plant is part of that vision. But while Neom’s $500 billion price tag prompts questions about whether it will go ahead exactly as planned, the hydrogen effort doesn’t depend on the megacity’s overall success.

There are other challenges, too: The country produces one-eighth of the world’s oil supply, but its operational renewables capacity is small by regional standards, and it’s starting from zero with green hydrogen.

The government is partnering with Acwa Power, a Riyadh, Saudi Arabia-based power developer partly owned by the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, and Air Products and Chemicals Inc., a $58 billion company based in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to build the green hydrogen plant.

The trio is splitting the costs of Helios, which will use 4 gigawatts of solar and wind power.

“As the first gigawatt plant, we will have an advantage in developing further innovation,” Terium said. “This is not going to be the end of the game.”

For starters, Helios will produce 650 tons of hydrogen a day by electrolysis – enough for conversion to 1.2 million tons per year of green ammonia. Air Products will buy all of that ammonia, which is easier to ship than liquid or gaseous hydrogen, and convert it back upon delivery to customers.

Enough green hydrogen will be produced to maintain about 20,000 city buses. There are about 3 million buses operating worldwide, and Air Products wants to be a mainstay in depots switching to hydrogen, said Simon Moore, vice president of investor relations.

“We’re not going to wait until this project comes on-stream in 2025 to think about additional capacity,” he said.

Fuel-cell vehicles could capture as much as 30% of bus-fleet volume globally by 2050, with growth coming primarily from China and the European Union, according to BNEF. Moore declined to identify Helios’s clients.

Hydrogen will cost more than polluting alternatives at first, but enough governments and businesses face stringent carbon targets that need the gas to meet them, Moore said. Thirteen nations have hydrogen strategies in place, and another 11 are preparing theirs, according to BNEF.

Germany said it needs “enormous” volumes of green hydrogen, and it hopes Saudi Arabia will be a supplier.

“The interest Saudi Arabia has had from investors leads us to believe that there is a sound economic case for hydrogen, even at current prices,” a spokesman for the Energy Ministry said.

At the same time, the government is trying to boost its own scant use of renewable energy. Currently, under 700 megawatts operate nationwide -- less than 2% of Spain’s installed capacity. The nation plans to meet half of its power needs from renewables by 2030 and has several projects under construction or soon to start.

Saudi Arabia also is one of the few countries regularly burning crude to make electricity. The highly polluting practice reached a four-year peak in August, and critics say the energy used by the Neom plant should be diverted into the national grid instead.

Yet the focus remains on exports. Petrostates stand to lose as much as $13 trillion by 2040 because of climate-change targets, and Saudi Arabia is among those expected to be most affected.

The hydrogen plant will produce 15,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day at most, hardly a match for the 9 million barrels of crude the kingdom pumps daily. Even so, finding a way to corner part of the clean-fuels market represents a necessary economic lifeline.

New research reveals how long it takes for cannabis impairment to subside

 New research has shown for the first time how long cannabis users are likely to be impaired and when it may be safe for them to drive.The findings, researchers and advocates say, strengthen the case for changes to drug-driving laws in much of Australia.

Researchers from the Lambert Initiative for Cannabinoid Therapeutics at the University of Sydney discovered users were impaired for between three and 10 hours after taking moderate to high doses of the intoxicating component of cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).

THC can be detected in the body for weeks after cannabis consumption, meaning users can face fines and loss of their licence, despite being unaffected by the drug.

The research, published in Neuroscience & Behavioural Reviews, analysed 80 scientific studies on the effect of THC on driving performance conducted over the past 20 years.

It found the exact level of impairment depended on the dose, whether the THC was taken orally or inhaled and how often the person used the drug, among other factors.

“Our analysis indicates that impairment may last up to 10 hours if high doses of THC are consumed orally," the study's lead researcher Danielle McCartney said.

"A more typical duration of impairment, however, is four hours, when lower doses of THC are consumed via smoking or vaporization and simpler tasks are undertaken."

The study also found regular cannabis users became less affected by THC than those who used cannabis occasionally.

Dr McCartney said people could be impaired for six or seven hours if higher doses of THC were inhaled and complex tasks, like driving, were assessed.

Her research is the first comprehensive meta-analysis to put a timeframe on impairment.

"Our evidence should hopefully help people to make informed decisions and policymakers to make policies that are evidence-based and tell people how long they should wait before driving," she said.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has approved 100,000 prescriptions for medicinal cannabis in Australia.

Academic director of the Lambert Initiative, Iain McGregor, said medicinal cannabis users were particularly interested to know when it was safe for them to drive, despite the law being clear on the issue.

"You got this massive amount of a prescription drug going into people who are told, 'You can't drive at all, you can't even have one molecule of THC in your system', which is, you know, just ridiculous," Professor McGregor said.

"THC can be detected in the body weeks after cannabis consumption while it is clear that impairment lasts for a much shorter period of time. Our legal frameworks probably need to catch up with that."

Former magistrate David Heilpern said the research showed laws around roadside drug testing needed to change.

Mr Heilpern retired early, partly due to his frustration at seeing so many medicinal cannabis patients lose their licence, and sometimes their livelihoods, after being caught driving with small amounts of THC in their system.

"We had a situation where people were taking their medicine as prescribed, they weren’t driving in any adverse way and yet they were losing their licence, being fined and getting a criminal record,' he said.

"I started driving home from work, thinking, I just can't do this.

iption but could not drive with even a detectable level.

He is part of the Cannabis Law Reform Alliance, which is advocating for the amendment to state laws, providing medicinal cannabis users a defence if they test positive to a roadside drug test.

The defence already exists in Tasmania and there are bills before parliament in Victoria and South Australia. NSW parliament rejected a bill on the issue in October.

"In NSW, we already have that law as it applies to morphine, Mr Heilpern said.

"If you have a detectable level of morphine in your system and you can show you have a prescription for it, then you have a defence.

"All we have to do is do that for cannabis. It’s a very simple amendment and it solves the problem."

Gino Vambaca, co-founder of Harm Reduction Australia, said Australia's laws punished people for past drug use, not for unsafe driving.

"It's not a road safety campaign anymore, it's a detect and penalise campaign," he said.

"We're not condoning people using drugs and driving, but what we’re saying is, there's no attempt by the police to even measure impairment.

"We’re having to say to people using medicinal cannabis: ‘Do you want to drive or do you want your pain relief, because you can't do both.’

"And that’s a horrible choice for them to have to make."

Source:abc.net

New International Standard to Measure Structural Properties of Graphene

 NPL, in collaboration with international partners, has developed an ISO/IEC standard, ISO/TS 21356-1:2021, for measuring the structural properties of graphene, typically sold as powders or in a liquid dispersion.

The ISO/IEC standard allows the supply chain to answer the question ‘what is my material?’ and is based on methods developed with The University of Manchester in the NPL Good Practice Guide 145.

Verified Quality Control Methods

In conjunction with the international ISO/IEC terminology standard led by NPL, ISO/TS 80004-13:2017, it will be possible for commercially available material to be correctly measured and labelled as graphene, few-layer graphene or graphite.

As the UK’s National Metrology Institute, NPL has been developing and standardizing the required metrologically-robust methods for the measurement of graphene and related 2D materials to enable industry to use these materials and realize novel and improved products across many application areas.

The continuation of the NPL-led standardization work within ISO TC229 (nanotechnologies) will allow the chemical properties of graphene related 2D materials to be determined, as well as the structural properties for different forms of graphene material, such as CVD-grown graphene.

This truly international effort to standardize the framework of measurements for graphene is described in more detail in Nature Reviews Physics, including further technical discussion on the new ISO graphene measurement standard.

Dr Andrew J Pollard, science area leader at NPL said, “It is exciting to see this new measurement standard now available for the growing graphene industry worldwide. Based on rigorous metrological research, this standard will allow companies to confidently compare technical datasheets for the first time and is the first step towards verified quality control methods.”

Dr Charles Clifford, senior research scientist at NPL said, “It is fantastic to see this international standard published after several years of development. To reach international consensus especially across the 37 member countries of ISO TC229 (nanotechnologies) is a testament both to the global interest in graphene and the importance of international cooperation.”

James Baker, CEO of Graphene@Manchester said, “Standardization is crucial for the commercialization of graphene in many different applications such as construction, water filtration, energy storage and aerospace. Through this international measurement standard, companies in the UK and beyond will be able to accelerate the uptake of this 21st Century material, now entering many significant markets.”

Source: NPL

Why Does Aviation Use Nautical Miles?

 Apart from pilots and sea captains, most of us use either the Imperial or the metric system when calculating how far we need to get to where we are going. However, aviation navigation has adopted the ways of its marine counterpart, as it also travels across distances great enough to cross several latitudal lines. Not to mention to save air traffic control a great deal of potential confusion when communicating with international pilots.

One sixtieth of a latitudal degree

As the term ‘nautical’ would imply, the usage is a crossover from seafaring navigation. The NM is based on the circumference of the Earth. For a weekend cruise on a sailboat or a short European domestic hop, the fact that we live on a sphere hurtling through space and wobbling around its own axis is not of great importance. Meanwhile, when traveling long great circle distances, you want to use a unit that is directly related to latitude and longitude.

Historically, one nautical mile was defined as one minute arc of latitude along any line of longitude. One latitude arc is, in turn, divided into 60 minutes, so one NM equals 1/60 of a latitudal degree. However, at the First International Extraordinary Hydrographic Conference in Monaco, in 1929, the international nautical mile was set to exactly 1,852 meters or 1.151 miles.

No set date to phase out non-SI units

In 1947, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) adopted a resolution to standardize the unit system across aviation. This introduced the International System of Units, known as SI from the ‘Système International d’Unités’, and was to be based on the metric system.

Meanwhile, the ICAO recognised that shifting measurements too quickly could mean chaos in the skies. And so it said that some non SI-units (such as the nautical mile and the knot) should be kept until the organisation could set a date for their termination. Such a date is yet to be set.

Even though aviation uses NM, you will still see aircraft speed presented in miles or kilometers per hour by their manufactureres. When aircraft changed their speed measurements to knots, manufacturers felt this made their planes seem slower. Knots are measurements on nautical miles per hour – one knot = one NM/h, giving a significantly lower number than miles or kilometers.

Three ways of measuring speed

Meanwhile, the aircraft’s actual speed when flying is measured in knots. Indicated Airspeed (IAS) is read directly from the airspeed indication instruments in the cockpit, connected to a pitot-static system. This measures the dynamic pressure of the air outside entering a pitot-tube.

True Airspeed (TAS), on the other hand, is the plane’s speed in relation to undisturbed air. Meanwhile, Groundspeed is the speed of an aircraft relative to the ground.

However, NM is not the distance measurement in aviation across the board. Cloud clearance is measured in statute miles or KM, and visibility can be measured in miles, or in meters.

New Biodegradable Polyurethane Derived from Fish Waste

 To make the new material, Kerton’s team started out with oil extracted from the remains of Atlantic salmon, after the fish were prepared for sale to consumers. “I find it interesting how we can make something useful, something that could even change the way plastics are made, from the garbage that people just throw out,” says Mikhailey Wheeler, a graduate student who is presenting the work at the meeting. Both Kerton and Wheeler are at Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada).

Demand for greener PU alternatives is growing. Previously, others have developed new polyurethanes using plant-derived oils to replace petroleum. However, these come with a drawback: The crops, often soybeans, that produce the oil require land that could otherwise be used to grow food.

Leftover fish struck Kerton as a promising alternative. Salmon farming is a major industry for coastal Newfoundland, where her university is located. After the fish are processed, leftover parts are often discarded, but sometimes oil is extracted from them. Kerton and her colleagues developed a process for converting this fish oil into a polyurethane-like polymer. First, they add oxygen to the unsaturated oil in a controlled way to form epoxides, molecules similar to those in epoxy resin. After reacting these epoxides with carbon dioxide, they link the resulting molecules together with nitrogen-containing amines to form the new material.

But does the plastic smell fishy? “When we start the process with the fish oil, there is a faint kind of fish smell, but as we go through the steps, that smell disappears,” Kerton says.

Kerton and her team described this method in a paper last August, and since then, Wheeler has been tweaking it. She has recently had some success swapping out the amine for amino acids, which simplifies the chemistry involved. And while the amine they used previously had to be derived from cashew nut shells, the amino acids already exist in nature. Wheeler’s preliminary results suggest that histidine and asparagine could fill in for the amine by linking together the polymer’s components.

Examining the Biodegradability of the Product

In other experiments, they have begun examining how readily the new material would likely break down once its useful life is over. Wheeler soaked pieces of it in water, and to speed up the degradation for some pieces, she added lipase, an enzyme capable of breaking down fats like those in the fish oil. Under a microscope, she later saw microbial growth on all of the samples, even those that had been in plain water, an encouraging sign that the new material might biodegrade readily, Wheeler says.

Kerton and Wheeler plan to continue testing the effects of using an amino acid in the synthesis and studying how amenable the material is to the microbial growth that could hasten its breakdown. They also intend to study its physical properties to see how it might potentially be used in real world applications, such as in packaging or fibers for clothing.

Source: ACS

New Optimized Method to Recycle CFRP Composites While Maintaining Strength

 Researchers from the University of Sydney’s School of Civil Engineering have developed an optimized method for recycling CFRP composites while maintaining 90 percent of their original strength.

Loss of Properties in Recycled Products

Until now, it has been difficult to continuously recycle products made of carbon fibers. Given that most recycling involves shredding, cutting or grinding, fibers are worn out, decreasing a future product’s viability.

“Globally and in Australia there has been a march towards better recycling processes, however there is often the belief that a material can be recycled an infinite number of times – this simply isn’t the case. Most recycling processes diminish mechanical or physical properties of materials,” said the study’s lead researcher Dr Ali Hadigheh.

This presents a huge challenge and threat to the environment, as it has led to the production of virgin carbon fibre which contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions.

Cost-effective Method for Recycling Carbon Fiber

To combat this issue and to support a true circular economy, scientists have developed an efficient and cost-effective method for recycling carbon fiber, which is present in tablets through to BMWs.

Scientists used a two phased, optimized process. The first step is called pyrolysis which breaks down a material using heat, but significantly chars the materials which prevents it from developing a good bond with a resin matrix. The second process, oxidation, uses high temperature to remove this char.

Pyrolysis and oxidation alone are not enough to preserve carbon fibers and these processes have existed for some time already. To ensure a high-quality recovery and economic efficiency, thermal decomposition of CFRPs need to be guided by analyzing the energy required to initiate a chemical reaction in the composite, and separate carbon fibers from the surrounding resin matrix.

Specific Parameters for Successful Method

“What makes our method so successful is that we have added specific parameters – such as temperature, heating rate, atmosphere or time spent being oxidized and heated – that preserve the functionality of carbon fiber.”

“We embarked on the project with the aim of producing high grade, low-cost structural materials made from recycled carbon fiber composites, for use in industries from aerospace and automotive through to sporting goods and renewable energy and construction.”

Source: University of Sydney

What was the first application of carbon fibers?

It's Story-Time

What was the first application of carbon fibers? It's not what you are thinking! 👀

Carbon fibers are older than you imagine! The first carbon fibers date back to 1860! In 1879, a certain guy named Thomas Edison chose carbon fibers to manufacture light bulb filaments. At that time, they were not petroleum-based. Instead, they were produced through the pyrolysis of cotton or bamboo filaments. These filaments were ''baked'' at high temperatures to cause carbonization to take place.

But why were they chosen? The answer is pretty straightforward and has nothing to do with high strength! At the time, Edison noticed that their high heat tolerance made them ideal electrical conductors. However, soon later tungsten took over as the light bulb filament of choice in the early 1900s, and carbon fiber became obsolete for the next 50 years or so. 

During the 1960s, a Japanese researcher named Akio Shindo, manage to manufacture carbon fibers using PAN as a precursor. This way, his team was able to achieve a filament that had ~55% carbon, using a much more cost-effective production method. This new technology allowed for the resurgence of carbon fibers, but this time, they were here to stay!