We've talked about many aspects of the 21st-century energy transition. The complex network of human needs, the facts and figures about energy sources and new creation of ideas, policies, and pathways to make the transition efficient and cost-effective while maintaining the energy supply that everyone needs every day. There are lots of things to think about, so many things, in fact, that it's hard to know where to start. Let's look at some suggestions that everyone can embrace regardless of where and how they're involved with the energy transition. Whether you're a voter choosing your political representatives, an oil and gas worker maintaining today's energy supplies. Or an alternative energy or storage entrepreneur creating a new technology to support us in the future. Remember the many fundamental human needs encapsulated in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Access to abundant and affordable energy is one of these goals and perhaps the most fundamental, as we cannot accomplish any of the others without it. People in high-income nations must recognize that people in low to middle-income nations require abundant and affordable energy to have access to education, security, adequate health care, and to minimize environmental impacts. The 21st-century energy transition must be built on the needs and priorities of all nations, not just rich ones. Every energy source has positive and negative attributes. We must examine each energy project based on a measured scientific assessment of what it can contribute and what price we have to pay for their contribution. We realize that it has to balance many factors, energy delivery, security of supply, cost, resource availability, GHG emissions, pollution at the construction site along supply chains and at final delivery. We must avoid emotional characterizations, labeling energy sources simplistically as clean or dirty, obscures negative and positive qualities we must understand and may cause us to overlook the best opportunities. We have to bring constructive, flexible thinking and planning to each situation, because each situation is different and each may have a range of good solutions. We can build energy sources and storage only with what we have available. Solar energy might be the best energy generator in the Sahara, but not in the United Kingdom. Hydroelectricity is a wonderful energy source in Quebec and British Columbia, but not in the arid flat lands of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Everyone must realize that every new energy project takes time to plan and build. Big projects, nuclear, hydro, new oil fields, large wind and solar arrays are easily a decade or more in the making. New energy technology, like any technology, requires years, if not decades to progress from a great idea to a commercially successful project. Solar and wind generation are there, electric vehicles are almost there and small modular nuclear reactors are on the way. From a realistic and pragmatic point of view, it's logistically impossible to replace in a few short years the global energy infrastructure that has taken more than a century to build. The energy transition can proceed only by extracting resources and building new infrastructure, whether we extract oil and gas or extract critical minerals to build wind and solar generation and batteries. We're always either digging a hole or putting something up on land that stakeholders, people or communities value. Stakeholders have an interest in the lands we want to use. We need to work together with them and failure to do so is a source of expense, delay and even failure of energy projects. The economic and energy transition of Canada is underway and layered within that shift is a less prominent and understood social transition that will be a significant determining factor on whether we see Canada succeed as a global energy transition leader or not. This new energy and development era is characterized by affirmed indigenous title and rights that are framed by both provincial and federal courts and now play an important role in how the energy transition unfolds across Canada. For the last two decades, both the federal government and industry have been slow to fully understand and recognize the power and reality of indigenous title and rights as it relates to major projects across Canada. We now have a somewhat clear understanding of these rights, which has necessitated the leading evolutions of change. Three major evolutions in indigenous engagement driving the energy industry and transition. Indigenous partners must be considered and included within all stages of project development, including majority ownership opportunities. Indigenous communities, businesses, and talent cannot just be viewed as benefactors of projects through contracting, procurement and hiring, but must be viewed and considered as viable commercial project partners. Sharing the risk reward profile of each project with indigenous communities allows communities to build capacity and receive proportional ongoing benefits that traditionally have been made by corporations and project proponents. Regulatory frameworks that have guided indigenous consultation are outdated and generally viewed as unsatisfactory in obtaining indigenous consent. There is a great deal of distrust in indigenous communities of the regulatory process that uses the duty to consult, to extract consent from each community. Since there is no indigenous veto or projects, there is a perception than not all indigenous concerns are heard and addressed, and that the regulatory process is a checkbox exercise. The Canadian energy transition can change working relationships within indigenous communities, where consent is brought to the table when developing projects that work for each community together with industry before projects are announced. This approach will likely see more success in practice instead of having projects being sold to indigenous communities through the regulatory process. Full indigenous partnership can lead to a much smoother regulatory process with more certainty and more equitable distribution of benefits to both indigenous and local communities. Cumulative effects of regional and legacy development must be considered when assessing consultation requirements. The landmark Blueberry River decision issued in summer 2021 affirmed that cumulative effects of regional development projects, which may not affect indigenous communities individually, must be considered collectively over time and measured in such a way that acknowledges marginal impact from potentially many projects. The impacts of this decision are unknown, but industry must see this decision as one that will affect all future projects in Canada. Evolving stakeholder relationships demonstrate that we all labor under preconceptions, ill-founded assumptions, and conclusions reached long ago under different conditions. We need to constantly question our assumptions to ask ourselves whether they are still true and whether they should be limiting our search for the best solutions. Here are few examples. Managing nuclear waste is often cited as a major risk in bringing on more nuclear power. But the waste volumes are small, are currently well-managed, mostly on-site, and may even be recycled into different reactor configurations as we saw in the discussion of small modular reactors. Using food, agricultural, and forestry waste to create bio-fuels is a great concept as we are gaining useful energy from material that would naturally oxidize to create CO2 anyway. But is it really a good idea on a full life-cycle assessment basis to grow crops or harvest live timber to create fuels, we get a lot of emissions today, while it takes decades for regrowth to capture the carbon dioxide. The largest reductions of GHG emissions and pollution to date have resulted from gas for coal substitution, particularly in the United States. But some people oppose more gas for coal substitution as gas still creates some emissions. Rejecting the good because it's not perfect, is a common fallacy. Particularly when achieving perfect solutions is not realistically insight. Energy demand destruction. Doing more with less energy or in other words, increasing our energy efficiency is central to any viable energy transition pathway. We cannot even envision the energy supply capacity required to provide every human being in the world with the energy consumed by the average high-income nations citizen today. But some people today are engaged in energy supply destruction, trying to shut down current energy sources without first providing viable alternatives. The result is often more widespread energy poverty, as energy becomes more expensive and energy is sourced from providers with lower environmental and social standards. The energy crisis of 2022 is an excellent example. The capacity produce energy from oil and gas, coal and nuclear has been systematically degraded and destroyed in Europe and North America, leaving citizens vulnerable to energy shortages and skyrocketing prices as alternative energy sources have not materialized sufficiently. The energy transition demands, we think quantitatively, like engineers or scientists. We've learned that our energy goals must be supported by pathways in order to succeed. Those pathways depend on energy projects that require specific quantities of raw materials, financing and social and regulatory support. For example, engineering firm S and C level n, estimated that Canada would need to at least triple the amount of electricity it currently generates to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. All of this new-generation capacity would have to be zero emissions, which means we would have to build 115 large hydro projects comparable to Site C in Northeastern BC, or 114 large nuclear reactors, or 380 small modular reactors, or 20,000 large wind turbines, or finally, more than 400 gigawatts of new solar generation capacity. Of course, every one of these targets is completely unachievable for reasons around regulation, financing, and supply chains that we have examined in this course. But can we achieve the goal by building some of each of these, increasing energy efficiency, capturing carbon dioxide, and engaging new technologies that are only ideas now? That's a great question which will require a lot of discipline, quantitative thinking. Many governments and companies are making promises and commitments about creating future energy sources. Many of these are driven by perceptions of public expectations around GHG emissions without do consideration of key priorities like energy security and price. Few of them have engaged in quantitative thinking to map out a pathway to achieve their goals. Simon Todd illustrated this for us in his discussion of Ireland's energy trilemma. It's a good thing for governments to create intelligent policies that enable entrepreneurs and investors to create innovative solutions. But policies without pathways cannot guarantee success. Stating goals and commitments are only the beginning. If we want to achieve our goals, we have to take action and pay the price to make them happen. Whether that's years of training or years of innovation, financing, teamwork, and execution, and we have to measure the results to determine whether we're actually accomplishing our goals. Our focus should be on creating pathways, cognizant of all human needs with realistic timelines, solid plans for success, and reasonable measures of our progress. We'll accomplish great changes and an effective energy transition only if we continue to innovate. Here's Maggie Hanna again. Hello again everybody. Let's look at innovation in the energy space. The science and science fiction author Isaac Asimov said it best when he wrote, "It is change, continuing change, inevitable change that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be." Innovation plays a key role in how we shape the future and continue to adapt to our changing collective circumstances. One of the big challenges for humanities today is to preserve enough, intact environmental stability to support the human civilization and all of our relations into the future. We're being asked to change how we do things, to collaborate more, to cooperate with each other, to embrace the complexity of tasks, change our consumption habits, apply a new kind of system thinking, align policy with capital and markets, apply engineering rigor and support for innovators, and basically hold the highest interest of the whole, just like a nano-smidge higher than our own highest interests. It's only then that our own highest interests are actually best served. This next decade will be a game changer. The work I do as a technology scout support startup innovation companies in the energy space. Innovation is a major contributor to the systematic changes that we need to achieve the energy systems of the future. So many innovative things are already happening today. As examples, we're going to look at four of the companies that I am supporting and involved with. We can talk about also how they might change the world if they succeed. Let's start with Evolve Hydrogen. As a review, an electrolyzer uses electricity to split water into oxygen gas and hydrogen gas, producing green hydrogen if the electricity comes from low carbon emission sources. Today there are two main types of electrolyzers, the proton exchange membrane, or PEM, what has been around for 30 years and runs on deionized water, and the alkaline electrolyzer, which has been in use for about 100 years, requires potassium hydroxide added to the feedstock water in order to make it alkaline. These units have several issues including, the electrodes consist of really expensive noble metals like platinum, iridium, which get eaten up or consumed with use. Also, they're expensive, high capital expenditures, and the feedstock water must be pretreated, deionized water for PEM cells and alkaline water for alkaline cells. They need constant power input or they may shut down, and they're big industrial machines with large footprints. Evolve Hydrogen has invented an electrolyzer that is about the size of a coffee maker. The silver-colored domed units, second from the left is what it looks like. It has some very desirable characteristics. The entire unit will be manufactured on an injection molding machine, anywhere in the world, making it very cost-effective. It uses frontier polymers that can actually conduct electricity, so there's no metals in it to corrode. It can electrolyze a wide range of water compositions from tap water to seawater, and it is load-following. So it quickly responds to the amount of available power. If you use it with solar panels, for example, it makes more hydrogen when the sun is high in the sky and intense, but doesn't shut down when a cloud goes by. It's robust. We estimate probably about 64,000 hours of runtime, and it should be able to withstand ocean environments. The third figure from the left is the benchmark, and it is going to contain 16 evolve units. If one of the units is faulty, the rest will continue to work and the faulty one can be replaced. This Evolve technology is scalable, from a home-size single unit to a hydrogen filling station producing two tons of hydrogen a day just by adding more units. The polymer can be recycled up to two times to make new units as well. Here you see a single-cell unit creating clouds of hydrogen bubbles from regular water at low temperatures. Oxygen is separated and goes up the middle of the unit. A commercial Evolve unit is planned to have 37 cells and should produce about one and a half to three kg of hydrogen a day. Evolve hydrogen is currently at a technology readiness level of about 4.5, and is undertaking research on the process at the University of Calgary. A second issue. What if CO_2 was not viewed as a waste to be dealt with, but as a valuable material with which to build society? We talk about CCUS, carbon capture, utilization and storage, but we need more focus on utilization technology options. They actually use CO_2 as a feedstock for valuable materials. We're going to take a look at two technologies under development that do just that. One on the left makes CO_2 into a valuable industrial gases, and the one on the right makes CO_2 into solid-engineered carbon molecules. Now, CO_2 got its start at the University of Calgary and they invented a new solid oxide electrolysis cell or SOEC, which is a high-temperature electrolyzer using clean electricity to convert carbon dioxide and/or water into marketable gases and in a net negative carbon process. Depending on what you want out of it, it can make pure carbon monoxide or syngas. Syngas is a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, or pure hydrogen, or pure oxygen. All of these have many industrial uses these gases. CO_2 itself has deep technical bench strength. They have raised significant money and they have earned four patents, with three patents pending, and they're currently in the pre-commercial stage, but their timetable sees them move into commercial production, we hope by 2024 or 2025. Several companies are working on making CO_2 into solid carbon compounds called fullerenes, as I said. One company I'm working with wishes to remain under the radar for now, so I won't refer to them by name, but I can tell you what they can do. They have a technology, a carbon capture and reuse unit or CCRU that fits into a 40-foot container which can be bolted onto any industrial flue gas stack. It captures and converts over 90 percent of the CO_2 from any flue gas at any concentration. The power usage is constant regardless of the concentration of CO_2, so the cost of capture converting a ton of CO_2 decreases in direct proportion to the concentration of CO_2 in the flue gas stream. A process convert CO_2 into engineered carbon, which has many multiple uses, including advanced medical applications, advanced construction materials, new batteries, hydrogen storage, power transmission, and agriculture as well. The equipment is economic and has a small footprint, it's power efficient and cost-effective, it makes pure oxygen as a byproduct that can be vented back into the atmosphere, which is where it came from in the first place. One 40-foot container connected to a diesel flue gas stream can conceivably process as much CO_2 into oxygen as a forest of more than three million trees. This is very likely a game changer worldwide. You can imagine the benefits of keeping, like say, a natural gas power plant operating with super-low GHG emissions without the need for underground carbon sequestration. Technologies like this will allow us to take back our carbon empties. It'll make the carbon and CO_2 too valuable to be squandered by releasing it into the atmosphere. What are the implications of this technology for hydrogen? Well, long-distance transportation of hydrogen is currently problematic. Hydrogen carriers are imperfect, liquid hydrogen takes too much energy to liquefy, compressed hydrogen is more expensive to compress than other gases, and ammonia is highly toxic. What if engineered carbon technology made LNG or liquid natural gas, the hydrogen carrier of choice, how can that happen? Well, the LNG shipping industry is already huge and we do it really well. We know how to do it. Here we see the LNG supply chain modify to illustrate what the future might look like. First, we produce natural gas out of the ground, we process it, we put it into a pipeline to the coast, and at the coast we liquefy it and make LNG out of it, and then we ship that LNG to an overseas market where they use it to make blue hydrogen and bolting on a CCRU to take the resulting CO_2 to make fullerene. In addition, the CCRU might be bolted onto the exhaust system of the LNG tanker itself to decarbonize the transportation and make fullerenes on route to be sold at the destination to partially covered some of the shipping costs. Also, there could be no need for long-distance hydrogen pipelines anywhere. We would need only local hydrogen distribution networks. Well, why? Because we could use existing natural gas pipelines to supply blue hydrogen facilities fitted with CCRUs across the country, creating these local hydrogen hubs that will fill local hydrogen distribution gas grids. Bottom line is that engineered carbon technologies separate emissions from hydrocarbon burning. That's going to buy us some low emissions time which we desperately need while we put new energy systems into place. We would not have to mothball existing natural gas generation for power as we have done with coal generation facilities. Natural gas power plants can continue to operate until they age out, at which time, with any luck we will have deployed better energy systems to replace them. Lastly, let's look at a way to reduce methane emissions from landfills. When we throw something away, there is no a way. It all goes somewhere. Waste food scraps from our homes, industrial, kitchens and food production facilities end up in landfills where it is buried away from oxygen. This causes methanogenic bacteria to make methane instead of the aerobic bacteria to make CO_2. That methane escapes into the atmosphere. Methane from landfills worldwide is a really highly significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. Landfills also have the tendency to catch fire because of the methane that comes out of them. The top photo shows a landfill fire in Calgary in April 2022 as an example. Eco-Growth Environmental Inc. Is a Calgary based company which addresses the issue of landfill methane emissions. They dehydrate and sterilize food waste, converting it into this value-added products such like solid bio-fuels and also soil re-carbonizing material. Their medium-sized unit in the middle photo makes solid bio-fuel. That's the brown crumbly stuff on the right top picture. It's like 20 percent of the original volume and weight of the original waste. This material can be burned as is or made into traditional pellets for our pellet stoves. You see that in the middle right photo or briquettes bottom-right. Of course, the resulting heat, is almost carbon-neutral because the carbon originally came from the atmosphere and it goes back to the atmosphere. Alternative uses include soil rejuvenator to promote biological activity like bugs and microorganisms in the soil, but also adds carbon to the soils. The smallest of the three units is processes about 100 kilograms of food waste per day. It takes 18-20 hours to process a load and it runs on 220 volt power just like your dryer at home. Eco-Growth manufacturers and already sells their units to industrial kitchens in restaurants, nursing homes, hotels, prisons, and other large facilities. Or they also sell to smaller communities and also communities in remote settings wanting to maintain their pristine environment. To date, they have deployed successfully four units in Western Canada, one at the Chateau Lake Louise, an industrial scale kitchen in a pristine area. One is in Ucluelet, Vancouver Island. It's an example of a remote community. One is in Cremona, Alberta, and that's example of a town of 500 people just northwest of Calgary, where a 40-foot container, as in the photo on the right, sits beside the bottle depot there. Then they accept kitchen waste from the local residents. The fourth serves a 700 person camp in the Alsace in Northeastern Alberta. The takeaway here is that even though this seems like a local simple fix, it could be scaled globally to make bio-fuel and end food waste in landfills. It's commercially available today. Thanks Maggie, for those exciting examples of innovation that will be a big part of a successful energy transition. It's been a long haul and I want to finish off with one final thought. There are so many great ideas out there, but in order to be acted upon, they have to be communicated. Effective communication is a subject of entire courses, so we're not going to try to dig into it here. But I think this image makes the point that ideas have to go both ways. We can address the 21st-century energy transition without a lot of good communication.
