Liu Ke, Dean of School of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Southern University of Science and Technology, foreign academician of Australian Academy of Engineering
"The key to carbon reduction lies in changing the energy mix, and green methanol, which stores wind and solar energy in liquid form, will become one of the most reasonable energy solutions. With green methanol, the internal combustion engine can become a green energy power and achieve low carbon emissions. More importantly, if a large scale energy system using green methanol as a feedstock is used, less than a fifth of the carbon emissions of today's coal economy can be achieved, solving China's electricity, transportation, heating and cooling problems." Liu Ke, dean of the School of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Southern University of Science and Technology and a foreign academician of the Australian Academy of Engineering, said at the 19th Annual Conference of Caijing 2022: Forecasting and Strategy on Nov 28.
Liu Ke believes that, first of all, our national energy storage capacity needs to be further improved, and it is impossible to predict how many years it will take to achieve.
Second, the root of carbon reduction lies in solving the problem of energy structure. Green methanol stored in liquid form of wind and solar energy will become the most reasonable energy solution. With green methanol, an internal combustion engine that burns methanol is a green energy-driven power. More importantly, if the energy system using green methanol as raw material is widely used, it can achieve less than one fifth of the carbon emissions of the current coal economy, and solve the problems of electricity, transportation, heating and cooling in China.
Finally, much of the hype about "zero carbon" is wrong. The world can't have too much carbon dioxide, but the oxygen you and I breathe and the food we eat come from carbon dioxide, formed by photosynthesis in plants. A certain amount of carbon dioxide is normal. Change today's coal/oil economy to a green economy and China's carbon neutral problem is solved.
The following is part of the transcript:
Liu Ke: Thank you. It's nice to meet Dadi and Junfeng on the Internet. Today, I would like to talk with you about the realistic path to carbon neutrality. First, I would like to share with you some real figures. Currently, China's annual carbon emissions are 10.3 billion tons, divided by 1.4 billion people. And no matter what product you produce, it's going to consume less than 7.5 tons. We're driving and using electricity every day, so you can save a lot of carbon emissions by saving a little bit. It is true that solar power is cheap now, and wind power is cheap now, but before 2019, after more than 40 years of development, China's wind and solar power could be exported to the east equivalent to 192 million tons of standard coal, accounting for only 12 percent of coal electricity. Limited by the requirements of power grid stability, the power grid can only transport a certain amount of unstable energy, and the rest of the unstable energy supply, the power grid will not transport. Wind and solar power only generate 20 percent of the year. What about the other 80 percent? So it depends on energy storage? Battery storage has been researched for hundreds of years since 1959, and trillions of yuan has been spent. However, the cheapest large-scale storage is pumped storage, which has existed for more than 100 years, but pumped storage is not built everywhere. If a technology has not been revolutionary for 100 years, then today we need to consider changing the track. Some time ago, I attended a meeting and someone suggested that the problem of electricity storage had been solved, but I said it had not been solved. Why? The reality today is that the world's annual production of batteries doesn't store enough power for a day in winter. Technology is unpredictable, and I can't predict how many years it will take.
Secondly, everyone is talking about carbon reduction, and now some people are talking about converting carbon dioxide into different products. As I mentioned earlier, a person's annual carbon emissions are about 7.5 tons, and a family of three is about 22 tons. And to produce what, a family can consume 22 tons a year? Twenty-two tons of product is not enough for a family to consume in a year. Today 87 percent of the world's oil is burned, and only 13.3 percent produces all the fossil products that you and I use. And by converting carbon dioxide into other substances, if it can make money, not to say no contribution to carbon reduction, but a drop in the bucket.
For the current use of CCS, CCUS technology to capture a large amount of carbon dioxide for reuse or storage, the role is limited. A dozen years ago at GE, we spent $2.8 billion to build a net zero emission IGCC coal-fired power plant, and hundreds of PHDS worked on it for years. The conclusion was that it was better to go nuclear than CCS or CCUS. Nuclear power was fine at the time, but after Fukushima the cost per kilowatt of nuclear power went up too much because of safety improvements.
Reducing carbon emissions through energy efficiency is useful, but it is hardly a fundamental solution to carbon neutrality. Increasing energy efficiency first is always the cheapest and highest priority way to reduce carbon emissions. But there is an important figure worth paying attention to. In 2001, after more than 100 years of industrialization, our country's coal production was only 1.3 billion tons, but in 2013, it soared to 3.9 billion tons in just 13 years. I often read economics in terms of energy. Why did the first 100 years of industrialization, the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, and the reform and opening up in 1978, but our country soared by three times in nearly a decade? An important factor was China's accession to the WTO in 2001, which opened the world market to China and made China the world's factory. Of course, our massive real estate construction during this period was also a factor. Real estate is built with steel and cement, a process that consumes a lot of energy.
If the energy structure does not change, the contribution of electric vehicles to carbon reduction is very limited, among which the more important factor is energy density. For cars, ships, aircraft and other mobile vehicles, the most important thing for energy storage is that the tank cannot be infinite. If the tank is both 1 cubic meter, hydrogen is the smallest at 3.2 KWH per cubic meter, natural gas only 10 KWH, and the lead-acid battery 90 KWH. Second, there is production capacity to consider. At first it was expensive to produce one. When the assembly lines opened in 1913, they could churn out 1m engines a year, with the most expensive costing $300 each. Electric cars, however, are different. Battery, the core component of electric vehicle, is affected by a variety of manufacturing materials and limited reserves and mining. Production in assembly line can reduce a certain amount of costs, but it is limited. Finally, the problem of battery recycling has not been completely solved. Mass use of electric vehicles, millions of batteries will be distributed throughout China. If the batteries are not recycled, they will pollute the soil and pollute the water. Some people think that recycling batteries as energy storage power stations can solve the problem of waste batteries, but recently the National Development and Reform Commission has called off many projects of waste battery energy storage power stations, and there are still many problems. So I think electric cars can be developed, but battery recycling must be considered from the production date, otherwise it is better to develop cautiously.
Faced with the current problem of carbon neutrality in our country, how to do? We asked another question, could wind and solar energy be stored in liquid form, green methanol? Methanol is a good hydrogen storage carrier, which can solve the problem of hydrogen storage and transportation. In our country, methanol produced from coal to methanol has a capacity of 90 million tons, equivalent to a quarter of the capacity of gasoline. But the fatal problem with coal-to-methanol is that each ton of methanol requires about 3.5 tons of carbon dioxide.
What to do? A good way to do this is to use light and wind power to electrolysis water to produce green hydrogen and green oxygen. Oxygen and hydrogen are the two most expensive things a coal-to-methanol plant produces. Oxygen from water electrolysis is degasification coal to produce carbon monoxide, and methanol is synthesized together with hydrogen from electrolysis. More than 66% of the energy of methanol produced from coal and solar energy comes from renewable energy. With green methanol, first of all, methanol internal combustion engines like Li Shufu's produced by Geely have become green energy sources. The methanol diesel locomotive technology produced by Geely and others has been quite mature. Today, buses and operation vehicles in a dozen cities such as Xi 'an and Guiyang all use methanol as fuel and have been running for several years without any problems. Under the requirement of double carbon, since there is still a certain bottleneck of electric storage and energy storage in the future, it can be the surplus and cheap wind energy solar electrolytic water to produce hydrogen and oxygen, and only use a little carbon to convert solar energy and wind energy into green liquid for use. Liquid is the best energy carrier for human beings. China's energy distribution features production in the west and energy use in the east. The west, where there is coal, sun and wind, is about 1,500 meters above sea level. The west-east gas pipeline for oil and gas transportation has been completed. And the most expensive pipeline repair is land acquisition and project approval. If the west-east pipeline were already in place, methanol would have an energy density of 4,300 KWH per cubic meter of volume, while natural gas would have a density of only 10 KWH per cubic meter. Liquid methanol can be transported with a diameter much smaller than the existing west-east gas pipeline, and the energy transfer is several times that of natural gas. In addition, the elevation difference between the east and west is conducive to the transport of liquids to the east. Green methanol can then be used in methanol diesel engines. In the future, it can be a green methanol-electric hybrid, just like BYD's Tang, whose fuel consumption is only a few liters per hundred kilometers. The use of green methanol-electric hybrid, the car's carbon emissions will be significantly reduced.
When the fuel cell costs are cheap enough, the car is decorated with green methanol, which is produced online through on-board methanol reforming. The hydrogen is generated by the fuel cell, and the electricity is used to power the car. Furthermore, it can support the development of three generations of diesel locomotive, electric vehicle and hydrogen fuel cell vehicle by transforming the existing generation of liquid infrastructure -- gas station into methanol filling station. I don't think humans are going to throw away the multibillion-dollar liquid facilities that have been built. How expensive is the land price per mu of Guangshen North? The hydrogenation station covers an area larger than the current Sinopec gas station. Where to find so many places to build hydrogenation stations in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou? The use of methanol as the fuel of transportation vehicles can make good use of the existing fuel filling equipment. For example, one tank in the existing gas station can be transformed into a green methanol storage tank first, while the other five tanks are still gasoline. In a few years, relevant oil tanks can be gradually replaced into green methanol storage tanks according to the demand, and the infrastructure has been slowly developed. Despite the high demand for hydrogen energy, there is not a single hydrogenation station in Shenzhen. China's wind and solar energy is very cheap, how we can convert wind and solar energy into a green liquid, which is also an important path of carbon neutrality, we need to consider.
The other thing is, I talked a little bit about carbon neutrality in transportation, and we've been working on distributed generation for years. At present, there are more than 40 5G base stations on top of mountains in Guangdong Province that use methanol-water reforming to produce hydrogen as a power supply system. The technology has been in use for several years, is very stable, and is quite mature. Why do you do that? Because it's expensive to get to the top of a hill and get to a base station via a mains cable. A 2.5kw green methanol distributed energy supply system is enough to meet the electricity demand of a villa. Half a truckload of methanol every few months meets its electricity needs. This device generates electricity using only methanol and water. The way it works is methanol and water produce hydrogen at more than 200 degrees Celsius, hydrogen at 80 degrees Celsius and air are passed through the fuel cell to generate electricity. Its power generation efficiency is 2-3 times higher than combustion power generation efficiency, and more than 200 degrees of residual heat in the reaction chamber can be heating in winter, can be cooling in summer. Compare this system with the carbon emissions of coal in China today. To build a thermal power plant in western China, only over 300,000 calories of 1 million calories of coal are sent to the user in the form of electricity, of which over 600,000 calories are dissipated in the form of heat. While electricity can be transported over great distances through the grid, heat cannot be transported over great distances. Methanol can be efficiently transported through pipelines, and the system's waste heat can be used for heating in winter and cooling in summer. Thus, assuming such an energy system, China could solve its power, transportation, and heating and cooling problems with less than a fifth of the carbon emissions of today's coal economy. In particular, if we replace petroleum with green methanol, it can help solve the problems of energy economy and energy security in China. Now that the dollar and gold have long since decoupled, the dollar's prop has been oil. Today, the cost of methanol from coal is half that of gasoline, while methanol from renewable energy sources such as wind and solar energy may be slightly more expensive than coal, but not much more expensive, and coal can be made of inferior coal as related raw materials, further reducing the cost. As a result, green methanol does not cost more per million kcal than gasoline.
In addition, we have also done to achieve a technology, before burning the coal in the water to grind fine, separate the combustible non-combustible, combustible coal is formed by light and action, non-combustible is from the ancient earth of nutrients, can be used to control the land, salt alkaline land, desert. Therefore, we propose the coal industry's first carbon neutral concept. Traditional coal-fired power generation produces a lot of ash and carbon dioxide emissions after burning coal directly. So today coal ash disaster in thermal power plants. This is what we humans have been wrong about coal for thousands of years. The combustible and non-combustible coal should be separated, and the nutrient-rich minerals from the ancient earth should be separated and returned to the land or used to cure the desert. The carbon dioxide emitted by burning coal can be stored back by promoting plant growth. This can also reduce carbon emissions. Now in the west, through the combination of solar energy and desert treatment, sand-fixing plants are planted under the solar panels, and then the solar panels generate electricity, and the plants under the good growth, green up. From this point of view, carbon neutrality is the whole big energy structure adjustment problem.
Therefore, it is necessary for the social system to innovate and change, and more importantly, it is necessary for the government, the industry, the university and the research institute to interact positively to truly link the government, the industry, the university and the research institute together. The two most missing are entrepreneurial scientists and scientific entrepreneurs, and we want to work with entrepreneurial scientists and scientific entrepreneurs to drive carbon neutral progress and get us carbon neutral.
Finally, a lot of people say "zero carbon," but "zero carbon" is wrong. The world can't have too much carbon dioxide, but the oxygen you and I breathe and the food we eat require carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. So you have to have a certain amount of carbon dioxide. By changing today's coal/oil economy to a green economy, China's carbon neutral problem can be solved and the cost is manageable, not as expensive as storing electricity. That's the end of my speech. Thank you.