The Energy Transition is going too slowly. We have 26 years left, to decarbonise more than 37 Billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent annually – a number which may be higher due to recalculation of fugitive methane emissions from oil and gas exploration and extraction.

A lot of the very heavy emissions requiring abatement, including steel, port and marine, aviation and heavy road and rail transport requires enormous infrastructure upgrading or overhauling.

• There is a challenge. Some technologies like solar are continuing to advance, getting cheaper by ~20% every year.
• Other technologies are mature and not getting cheaper or more productivity even with large scale investment into them.
• If we deploy existing mature technologies for sectors which require heavy infrastructure, we risk locking in low-productivity high costs and uncompetitive outputs for decades to come
• If we don’t start the process of decarbonising our hard to abate sectors, then we lock-in enormous slabs of carbon emissions which require harder and more painful cuts in the mid 2030s and 2040s.
• This paradox in trying to go faster but also finding the best path forward is not one which is easily answered.
• There is a challenge. Some technologies like solar are continuing to advance, getting cheaper by ~20% every year.

Rux has spent several years discussing this paradox with several governments including on roundtables with architects of the US Inflation Reduction Act, with the leaders of maritime decarbonisation in Singapore, Australia and the UK, and with heavy rail and aviation experts in Australia, Germany, and the US. While answering this question is a moving target, we’ve established a set of principles which we’d like to share to inform Rux’s Mission Critical Approach.

Rux’s Mission Critical Approach starts with:

What is required for 2050?

• We must find solutions for ALL sectors and ALL industry verticals that are usable across DIVERSE geographies at a COST which works for ALL regions rich and poor.
• Solutions must not create new environmental problems for the future. This includes everything from toxic waste from dumped batteries which leak hazardous fluorinated electyrolytic compounds to razing rainforests to increase bioethanol production to feed the demand for bio-mass based “Sustainable Aviation Fuels”. This latter issue is particularly terrifying as rainforests, known to be operating as the lungs of the Earth and providing active carbon sinking, are already the target of extreme deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia. 360 environmental sustainable manufacturing, buy-back and processing of waste by all manufacturers globally, and net neutral or even net positive environmental approaches should be mandated otherwise we will create 20th Century style environmental crises but at ten times the speed and ten times the intensity of damage.
• We must throw EVERY technology at the challenge regardless of technology maturity, stage and sophistication, if it satisfies the Usability Principle potential for (1) and can clearly satisfy Environmental Production & Waste Principle (2).
  • This means we need low and high TRL investment. We need deep governmental investment in basic research (TRL 1 to 3 – concepts, theories) across all science and engineering fields. Industry funding can also help here, but if industries fund low TRL research this is extremely high risk, and should be matched with 3-6x leverage by government. We also need deep governmental investment in mid TRL commercialisation development, often referred to as the Valley of Death or the Ditch of Despair in tech circles – it’s where good ideas and technologies require an unknown amount of investment capital to test all aspects of the solution, not just performance but also all aspects of usability of fit within a systems of existing mature technologies and communities.
  • FInally we need much much much larger investment in – high TRL investment, or DEPLOYMENT investment. This includes everything from counterfactual comparisons of technology local comparative advantage to technology universal competitive advantage. And we need to repeat these counterfactual analyses every single year until and through 2050. We also need deployment support from industry end users.
    • We need to provide expert energy teams to companies and local governmental or NGO orgs to provide a map of solutions to aid in faster but also better decision making which is relevant to their activities, their geography, their existing workforce skills and assets and their access to nearby energy production assets, and to provide and assist in delivering subsidies to enable an appropriate transition.
    • For example, a large scale distillery may opt for:
      • Full electrification if it’s a new build where construction of building-scale heat pumps is financially feasible and where the distillery has access to nearby large scale electricity generation (e.g. solar / wind / geothermal / wave) capacity, and where electricity storage access is low cost (access to nearby pumped hydro, long duration hydrogen storage, access to environmentally friendly 100 hour batteries). Alternatively it may opt for:
      • A mix of direct electrification and hydrogen direct heat or hydrogen steam turbines where the distillery has been operating using methane as its primary source of industrial heat and is looking to utilise existing pipework, existing energy workforce skills, and may not be co-located nearby large scale solar and wind arrays (where upgrades to electricity transmission relies on third parties who have differing priorities).
      • There isn’t a single good answer here – each solution needs to meet the needs of the end user. Both solutions result in zero emissions. Both solutions have the capacity to be end-to-end the lowest cost option if each of the parameters are correctly optimised. And crucially the answer to the question may be different in 2027 than in 2035, as new technologies emerge, as infrastructure shifts. That doesn’t mean we don’t go, it means, we move with eyes wide open and we share as much data and knowledge with each other to maximise impact at the most granular level.
• Annual Comparative AND Competitive Counterfactual (CCC) Analysis is required to empower governmental and industrial decision makers make the most appropriate decisions for their communities and companies taking into full account of all the factors.
  • Interoperability, usability, utilisable existing assets and workforce, and super-system (end-to-end) productivity and cost, locally contextual environment specific concerns and local speed of deployment (regulatory, legislative, existing infrastructure) (comparative advantage)
  • Efficiency, cost, safety, sub-system performance, universal environmental and waste impact (competitiveness)
  • Funding comparative (location and industry context specific) and competitive (subsystem cost efficiency safety performance specific) advantages and disadvantages will empower energy consuming industrials and governments to make better decisions which fit their use cases, their contexts, their cultural and skill sets, their politics, and their existing embedded infrastructure.
• Knowledge Sharing is EVERYTHING. We cannot make decisions without knowing what’s out there. There are tens maybe hundreds of thousands of projects out there at various stages of development, across multiple geographies, and with varying levels of success. We all need to know about the successes as well as the failures. Importantly failures in one context may not be failure of that technology, it may just not be a good fit for that context, or that industry vertical, or perhaps the technology requires some tweaking or an extra 1-3 years of development before it can deliver scale impact.
  • Knowledge sharing is a culture. It requires mutual respect for proprietary IP ownership simultaneously held with a desire to share as much IP as possible without risking a specific business or research entity.
  • Knowledge sharing also requires a lot of funding as conferences, digital media and publication is labour intensive. This funding should be public as the gains from funding are a shared public good. In funding knowledge sharing, governments can inform themselves as well as arming industrials and NGOs with high veracity data to continually interrogate different solutions pathways. It’s an iterative process requiring as much visibility as possible. Governments should also view knowledge sharing funding as “platforming” their own country’s technology on the world stage – with direct economic impacts from successes accruing to countries which commercialise and building manufacturing / industrial capacity. Finally knowledge sharing builds crucial social and political capital required for CHANGE. Bringing communities across the line with fundamental shifts in energy use requires the spending of sociopoll

What is required for 2030 and 2040?

• Interoperability with existing infrastructure, existing assets and existing skills sets takes priority over technology “sub-system efficiency”.
  • For example, implementing hydrogen internal combustion engines or hydrogen steam turbines for heavy (40 tonne +) road movers and long distance rail trumps electrification (on range / payload performance) and trumps hydrogen fuel cells (on usability, interoperability and embedded asset costs) because
    • most heavy trucking and rail groups have mechanics and technical expertise in-house to repair and maintain these systems.
    • These skills are universal across the planet, including the most remote parts of Nepal, Central Africa and the Deep South of the United States.
    • H2 ICE and H2 / steam turbines also allow an extension of the lifespan of assets which may have otherwise had 30 or 40 years left in service. The cost of the transition is going to be so enormous, TENS OF TRILLIONS that we don’t want to trash assets just because a sub-system is non-operable with the existing asset. Saving cash on assets turnover IS PART OF ENERGY EFFICIENCY – and we need to capture this within our calculation of total energy efficiency when we’re looking at counterfactual analysis.
• In aviation the challenge is much worse. Not only do airlines have to place 20 to 30 years bets on aircraft, but they have also place those bets in consortia with their airport partners. Airlines are margin businesses so are taking the lowest possible cost pathway (buy credits and investing in bioethanol derived “Sustainable Aviation Fuels” which at best will save 30-50% of total aviation emissions if 100% of airlines adopted 100% bioethanol based SAFs in the world. It’s not good enough and will wreak havoc on rainforests globally, making the climate crisis worse.