title: "145. Clash of Titans (Barnard vs Martin) – Industrial Heat Redefined"
author: "Redefining Energy"
source_type: podcast
content_hash: ca2e9111299b9cab5366b17c3a664251e93f24d45fc1963a7f3bfdbcb24cbc6c
Today on villev Energy. Well, it's summer season and we still want to deliver you some quality material, so we bring back for you the best of our sister show called Redefining Energy Tech. And this is the merger of two episode of redeven Energy Tech episode twenty nine and thirty. Our host Michael Barnard invites our great friend Paul Martin for a very long and geeky conversation about innovative solution for industrial heat. Welcome back to Redefining Energy Tech with your host Michael Barnard. Help others find the stream of decarbonization insight by liking and subscribing. Hi, Welcome back to Redefining Energy Tech. I'm your host, Michael Bernard, and today I've got Paul Martin back. Father. Paul, as a client, was just sharing with me. And today we're not going to spend an hour and a half slamming hydrogen for energy. It may come up, I can't promise not. Today we're going to talk about industrial heat and specifically electrification of industrial heat in all its glory. I'll give the brief summary on Paul and then he can explain more. But Paul's been using electric heat for industrial processes professionally for decades building chemical, small, big, modular chemical engineering plants. These uses electricity until he doesn't have to because of business cases. So Paul, welcome back, and as always, tell the people who just don't know you yet why they should know you. Well, thanks for the introduction. I am a chemical engineer with about three decades of experience working largely in the chemical process development space, so designing for twenty six years designing and building pilot and demonstration scale plants for the world's new chemical process technologies and energy and chemicals and materials in primary metals and like. And where what's my qualification for today's discussion. Well, I have design and built and been involved in the design and construction of a great many process plants for every kind of process that you can think of. And in that history and those dozens and dozens of plants that I've been involved in, we used fire to make heat in exactly one of them, and all the others provided their heat by means of electricity or in one other case by means of electricity indirectly by virtue of doing work on the thing that we were trying to heat up. So basically, running a polymer material through an extruder that was designed to heat up as well as move it. So that's my experience, a long long list of projects where we used electricity for heat because at the pilot and demonstration scale fire is dangerous, it's complicated, and it doesn't save enough money by using a cheaper fuel versus more expensive electricity to merit the capital cost of using fire. So we don't use fire. But that doesn't mean the plants when they're built in scale don't use. Fire, that's correct. The reason we use fire in industry is that if we're going to make electricity using fire, it would be crazy to use that electricity to make heat, although we do do that. You know, in certain instances, certain applications, electric heating is still used where it makes sense, despite the fact that you know, we're going through this kind of ridiculous path of taking chemical energy from from petroleum or natural gas, converting it into heat, and then using that to make electricity, and then transmitting the electricity and then using electricity to make heat again in a resistance heater. It seems nuts, but we do that when it provides an effectiveness benefit. But of course, in the decarbonized future, we're not going to be burning chemical energy to make heat, and we're going to be starting with electricity, and it will be just as dumb to take electricity and use it to make a fuel which you then use to make heat instead of just using electricity to make heat, either directly or by heat pumping. So let's start with exergy one oh one. You know, sure talk about exergy and this subject just because most people don't get this yet. Sure, this is where Father Paul gets to preach a little bit against the sins sins against the laws of thermodynamics. So exergy is kind of a complicated topic and it's not taught very well even in university, but it's really simple to understand. Basically, Xergy is the potential of a unit of energy to do work, to provide mechanical energy, for instance, to move something around. And the exergy potential of a unit of energy varies depending on what it is. So the exergy potential of a unit of electricity is really high because we can convert electricity with high efficiency into whatever we want, whatever other form of energy we want with reasonably high efficiency. The unit that the exergy potential of a unit of heat depends on how hot it is and how cold the surroundings are. Depends on the difference in temperature between the hot place and the cold plaz So if I have a unit of heat energy at room temperature and I don't need to keep the room warm, in fact, I need to pump eat out of the room to keep it comfortable, that's it's got no exergy associated with it. It's it's in fact worse than worth worthless. And the analogy I like to use with respect to types of energy and their actually exergy potential is comparing them to currencies. So if I say that I have one hundred dollars, that's great, but it's not sufficient information. I haven't told you whether I have one hundred Jamaican dollars or a hundred Canadian dollars or a hundred American dollars. And the exergy potential of the unit of energy is just like that. It's you know these these Just because something is a unit of energy measured in jewels doesn't mean it's worth the same. Just like if I have a dollar and I don't tell you what kind of dollar I have, I don't necessarily convey to you how much value I have in my hand or my pocket. So, and the real cool thing about exergy is if you have exergy, pure exergy, like electricity, you can use it to do work. And the really cool thing about that fact is not only can you do useful work like moving things around, you can also use it to move heat around in the opposite direction to the way it normally flows. So you can pump heat out of your beer and use it to cook your eggs if you so desire. Now, you can't do that for free. You can't just switch the direction that heat flows spontaneously. You have to do work in order to pump the heat out of your eggs and use to cook your out of your beer and needs to cook your eggs. That doesn't happen spontaneously, And anybody who says that it does is committing a sin against the second law of thermodynamics. Shalt not sin against the second law. Second law is important. So one more thing to say, just to make it really clear. Electricity has hot exergy, but it also if you need heat, it also turns directly into this one unit of heat. Yeah yeah, well, I mean, but it's also ynamics does not prevent you Thermodynamics does not prevent you from converting pure exergy to pure heat with one hundred percent efficiency. Now, in practice, if you want really really high temperature heat thousands of degrees, the practicality of making that heat with devices that survive under those conditions do sometimes involve some losses, like electrical switch gear losses or making electromagnetic radiation of some other kind that doesn't end up as heat in your device or whatever. But you know, these losses tend to be fairly small. So, yeah, the worst you can do with the unit of exergy is turned into a unit of heat at any temperature you want, which is the thing that I think people miss. So let's start talking about temperatures of heat and chemical processes. So let's like, let's talk just about stuff below two hundred degrees. Now, you as a professional, Yeah, I'm not a professional in industrial engineering or chemical process engineering. I just respect it and understand it well enough that you don't hate me when I say stuff about it. I think that's the best way to describe Paul's opinion about my, you know, stem competence. He appreciates the fact that I try well. You try harder than most people, Michael. You do more more with less preparation than most people do. I can tell you that how do. You separate out under two undred degree as a professional? Well, it's it's actually there's actually two pieces to this, so there are applications. And this, by the way, is all of comfort heating, you know, the heating that we use in order to keep ourselves warm and cold climates. And a large fraction which varies from place to place, but somewhere on the order of about forty percent of the duels of industrial heating that are used are used at temperatures below two hundred degree see And why is two hundred degree see a magic number? Well, it kind of isn't. As I mentioned, there's two pieces to this. Piece. Number one is that the upper temperature, and that has to do with practicalities of moving heat around with heat pumps, which we'll talk about in a minute. But the other one that's actually more important is what we would refer to in a heat pumping situation as temperature lift. So obviously, heat naturally flows from hot things to cold things because the molecules in the hot thing cause the molecules and the cold thing to jiggle around faster, and heat is transferred that way, if you will. But if I want to take heat from something that's let's use an example. A perfect example would be let's say that I have a distillation that I'm running, so I want to boil something, cause it to form a vapor, and then contact that vapor with liquid that I condense at the top of a distillation column, and by the interaction of the vapor with the liquid cause things that boil at lower temperatures to leave with the condensate from the top of the column, and things with higher boiling points to stay in the bottom of the column. In that instance, every jewel, or almost every jewel that I put into the boiler at the bottom of that distillation column comes back out the condenser again, just at a lower temperature. Now, of course, we can't cause the heat that we're rejecting to cooling water generally in the condenser to jump up in temperature of its own core to be hot enough to heat up the boiler. But we can use work to pump heat from the condenser back into the boiler. And we can do that one of two ways. One way is by using a refrigerant and compressing it and then cooling that refrigerant and causing it to condense, and that's basically the process of refrigeration that we use in refrigerators and air conditioners and things like that, and that kind of a process tends to have an upper temperature limit of about two hundred degrees C on the hot side, because the hot stuff that comes out has to come out hotter than that from a compressor, and compressors are made out of materials of construction. At higher temperatures, those materials of constructions start to become troublesome. And also the working fluid, the thing that we're using, the refrigerant that we're using to do this compression and condensation and evaporation cycle, tends to there are more choices at lower pressures and so on, at lower temperatures than there are at higher temperatures. But the other way that we can do this is we can use the process fluid as the refrigerant. So in the case of the distillation column, what we can do is at the top of the column, instead of condensing the vapor, we can feed the vapor into a compressor and the compressor will then increase the pressure of that vapor and will not cause it to condense. In fact, it will always superheat that vapor. Even though the pressure is going up. It will put some energy into that vapor. That will result in the vapor being superheated, meaning it won't be ready to condense until it cools a bit. We can then take that hot vapor at higher pressure and put it into the boiler of our distillation column and use it to cause boiling. So as that vapor condenses that it's new higher pressure and hence higher temperature, it will transfer heat into the liquid in the reboiler and cause that liquid to form the vapor. Actually using the process fluid as the refrigerant, and we're doing this compression condensation and then evaporation cycle in order to pump heat around. And that has a name, a special name, and it's called it's called mechanical vapor recompression. And the nice thing about all of these schemes, whether they be using a refrigerant for conventional heat pumping or whether they use the process fluid as the refrigerant in mechanical vapor recompression, they give us what's referred to as a coefficient of performance. And what coefficient of performance means in simple terms, is it's how many jewels of heat I get to move from the cold place to the hot place in return for how many jewels of electrical energy that I feed. So, if, as an example, I feed one jewel of electricity to a heat pump, and in return for that one jewel of work, I get three jewels of heat to move from the cold place to the hot place, I have a coefficient of performance of three divided by one, which is three. And with mechanical vapory compression you can get depending on how high a difference there is between the hot place and the cold place, that temperature lift as they call it, you can get coefficients of performance that are very high, like five or more. So that's pretty cool, you know. Not very often can you with a straight face say that you have a process that has an efficiency if you want to call it that of five hundred percent, and not be a liar or a drifter or a thief or whatever. So, yeah, Anyway, low temperature processes, which make up about forty percent and in some places more than sixty percent of the jewels of heat that we move around, they tend to be within reach of heat pumping schemes, whether they be conventional heat pumps or mechanical vapory compression, and as a result, they're going to be very easy to electrify, meaning inexpensive to electrify in terms of operating cost relative However, that's relative to using electricity directly to make key, it's not relative to burning fuels. Because right now we have this giant atmosphere that we dump stuff into for free or nearly free, and we think that that's, you know, a good deal. Of course it's not. It's it's basically robbing, robbing Michael to pay Paul for instance, if you will the other way around. Well, actually, in this case, we're robbing ourselves and pretending that we're paying ourselves because we're basically ruining the climate for future generations by our stupidity. So at the end of the day, we've got to figure out the difference cost and value and do the right thing. And when we get around doing that, the good news is technology is going to be there to help us. So in this particular instance, for that chunk of heat below two hundred degrees C, and especially where heat is being rejected to a cooling medium and we need to put heat into something else and we can couple the two, whether they're on the same process like distillation, or they're in different processes. It's going to be actually quite easy, and it's routine chemical engineering. It's not difficult to do. The reason we don't do it is that burning stuff is cheap. Right, So now let's let's give some examples of because two things here. One is under two hundred degrees that's still steam forming, like water is boiling at those temperatures. Just so anybody who's missing that part of the conversation, this is celsius, not not fahrenheit, you know. And while we don't speak fahrenheit, no, and. While we're talking thermodynamics, we're not going to use the temperature scale thermodemics, Calvin, this is celsius. Let's statements boiling water. We're well above the point of boiling. One. And the second thing, though, tell us you've said distillation column, which in your mind you've probably built dozens of these, again for different things, but give some examples of distillation columns, like go from start with the oil and gas industry and. Well, no, no, let's let's start you know where where we really should start, which is making making whiskey or read your drink happens to be uh. Fermentation of whatever you're starting with gives you a mixture of water and ethanol and some other molecules, some of which are bad give you bad hangover, or may even make you go blind or worse, uh cause cancer and other things. So we want to separate that mixture, and we want to put the good stuff in a bottle and drink that, and we want the bad stuff to go away. And that separation process that's used is distillation. So we boil the liquid and the light vapors that come off first contain some nasty molecules. We condense those and throw those away, and then we start getting the good stuff and we collect those and we call that the hearts of the distillation. And then eventually we start getting stuff that starts to taste like cardboard or wet dog or things like that, and we call those the tails, and we might throw those into the next batch. Now that's a batch distillation. Most industrial processes don't do distillation distillations in batch. They do them continuously, so they will feed a mixture to the middle of a distillation column. They'll continuously boil stuff up at the bottom and continuously take stuff that doesn't boil away from the bottom, and then at various points up the column they will take off things of value, and they'll do that on a continuous basis. So an example of that is petroleum distillation, where we actually do well a number of distillations, but two primary ones. First we do we take crude oil and we de salt it, and then we distill it an atmospheric pressure. And the stuff that doesn't boil an atmospheric pressure we feed to a vacuum distillation column. We actually lower the pressure so that we can lower the boiling point of various species. And the very bottom of that column of the vacuum distillation column we call residuum or resid and that's the basically liquid tar the very bottom of the barrel that we used to feed to ships and we still use for road tar and roofing tar and things like that. So there are lots and lots of distillations in chemical plants that are separating valuable molecules from one another and separating feedstocks sorry products from feedstocks, or products from reaction mixtures and so on. They're used all over the place to use a tremendous amount of heat, and most of them reject their heat to a coolant medium. Now, in a chemical plant or petroleum refinery, we will we chemical engineers are fairly smart about using this hot stream to heat up another stream and hence cool down the hot thing that we don't want to be hot anymore. So we'll do cross exchange from place to place whenever that's practical, and we'll have a whole heat networks set up. And that's actually where the steam business comes from. You were talking about steam a minute ago. A lot of the reason that we use steam is as a way steam becomes kind of a currency for moving heat around. So it's used to allow us, for instance, to extract heat from one process and transfer it into another indirectly without the two streams having to come in contact with one another or even share the same space and heat exchange, or even though they're separated by metal from one another. So the steam acts as kind of a transport medium for that heat. And a lot of that steam use arises not because we really need steam, but because when you burn things, you always end up with this hot flu gas that you have to get rid of, and that hot flu gas in order to avoid throwing it away, you put it through coils and use it to make steam, or you put coils of boiling water in the flue gas in something called the heat recovery steam generator, and you use that to extract heat from that flu gas before it goes onto the atmosphere. So in a decarbonates future, a lot of the steam business that we're using right now will go away, and all of its nuisance and capital cost and operating cost and maintenance cost and corrosion and blah blah blah blah blah will go away. And honestly, any small plants that I built for many decades, that was one of the big reasons we used electric heating because we hated steam. Steam is a nightmare. It's a nuisance, and if you don't need to use it, you don't ease it. But let's just do some you know, basic thermodynamics education. Why does steam contain so much more heat than water? Well, I wouldn't say that. The way I'd say it is this. The nice thing about steam is that you can transfer a lot of heat at a constant temperature. So at a given pressure, water vapor condenses at a given temperature, and so if you start out with pure steam, you can reject heat from that steam and gradually form condensate until all of the steam is gone and the temperature won't change. And that what's referred to as as latent heat of vaporization or of condensation. If you think of it the other way, that's extremely valuable because it allows a small amount of matter moving around in order to transfer a very large amount of heat. If you want to do that with what we call sensible heat, which is, for instance, let's say we have water that we heat up to eighty degree seed and we let it drop back down to forty degree seed by heating other things up. We have to move a lot of matter around in order to deal with only that sensible heat. If we, for instance, instead have atmospheric pressure steam or better sell, you know, steaming about one one bar or one atmosphere above atmospheric pressure, and we condense that, we're moving an awful lot more heat with an awful lot less matter. And that's you know, that's a good thing. It makes It makes the carrying of heat from place to place more efficient. Yeah, Paul's problem is that he's forgotten more than most people have ever learned about their dynamics. So I'm going to step back to a really basic statement, something that escaped scientists for centuries, which is, when you heat water up, it gets to one hundred degrees celsius and then stops for a long time. More heat is poured into it until the phase change occurs. Right, So the same with when you freeze it. You get it down to a certain temperature and it just stays at zero celsius for a long time until ice crystals start to form, and so that stuff about that latent heat of vaporization. And Paul is waiting to correct me, I know, but when he's talking about the steam at one hundred degrees, steam just sits there and emits heat along for a long time as it slowly turns to water, and then the water gets cooler. But at that phase change boundaries, the temperature persists for a long time. So now do the different, better nuanced version of that, Paul, because people don't know. That that's you know, I think the second way you put it was a little clearer. So what doesn't happen is we don't put energy into water at one hundred degree see, and have nothing happen. And the temperature not go up. What does happen is once we're at one hundred degree see, if we're at atmospheric pressure, as we put heat in, that heat doesn't go into raising the temperature. It goes into boiling water and turning it into steam. So the temperature doesn't change, but the phase changes. So the water molecules that used to be bouncing around next to one another in a liquid are now bouncing around far apart from one another in a vapor phase. And until every drop of water is gone, the temperature is not going to increase. And the same is true on the reverse. If you take a cloud of steam and it's a constant, constant pressure, it will condense at constant temperature until all of the steam is gone and we have liquid if the pressure has helped constantly. So and this is the great thing about steam and well and in fact, there are lots of other things that we can use in place of water. I mean, we use water because water happens to have an incredible heat of vaporization, and it's also non toxic and abundant and very cheap. But we in the process industry, we use other molecules to transfer heat as vaporization energy and condization energy at higher temperatures with lower pressures as an example. So we'll use these molecules that Tao has formulated, certain formulations that they call dow therms, And there are various dow therms that are used as hot oils liquids that you just heat up and cool down and use the sensible heat. But there are other doo therms that you use for their vaporization and what they what that allows us to do is to go up to higher temperatures without going up to very high pressures. There is some hope, by the way, this two hundred degree see thing, it could easily be three hundred degree C. So you know, that's really a matter for innovation and changes to equipment and the use of different things like molecules like these dout terms as an example, instead of using instead of using things like water reaper or CO two or the like. And we can push that envelope a little bit, but we're not going to four hundred degree CE because the four hundred degree CE organic molecules start falling apart too quickly for us to like, let's. Talk about this because this is important, Like a lot of people say, well, that twtal degree heat. That stuff's all technology Retulips level six or seven. It's not really commercialized, it's not really here. How do you respond to people who say. That, Paul, Oh, my goodness, I'd say they just aren't paying attention. Is a difference between something that has a low technology readiness level because people haven't done it before, and something that has a low technology apparent technology readiness level because it doesn't have a market. So there's a huge difference between those two things. I mean, heat pumping is routine. Everybody's got a heat pump or several of them in their house already. They've got a refrigerator and a freezer, and they've got an air conditioner, and there's nothing magic about them there. You know, they serve a purpose and people more or less see the box and don't understand what's going on inside until they have to call the repair person to come fix it. But you know, heat pumping is, you know, the highest technology readiness level you can imagine. It's just do we use heat pumping in industry? Sure, we do, generally for cooling things, not for heating things. Why because burning stuff's cheap. If you can dump stuff to the atmosphere for free. When that paradigm shifts like a light switch. All kinds of operation is where people are boiling things, cooking things, drying things, et cetera, et cetera, will like a light switch, switch over from burning stuff to make that heat to using electricity to make that heat. In this kind of heat pumping way, those will happen first because they'll be cheaper. But once we get above that number to three hundred degree c and we're into difficulty with heat pumping. Now we're into lower efficiency approaches. By lower efficiency, I mean not better than one hundred percent. Yeah, But to be clear, interesting enough, from a pure thermodynamics perspective, I worked this out recently. Natural gas burning stuff isn't one hundred percent either because you have to extract it, process it, distribute it, and then there's you know, slippage methane, slippage of discovered and burning methane, you know, so it's not a one for one. Electricity is actually more efficient on a one to one basis. The efficiency of electricity turning to heat is hired and the efficiency end to end of the alternative. As long as we're not burning stuff to create the electricity in the. Yeah, and you know, and not to bore people. But there's an important little distinction here, and this is a problem that people run into. I find this problem even among among engineers, that we have two kinds of heat from burning stuff metrics that we use. One of them is called the higher heating value, and the other it's called the lower heating value. Like, oh, why do we have to have to And then of course we have two different names, and we'll call the higher heating value the gross heating value, and the lower heating value than net heating value. What a mess. The thing that's involved here is that in some cases we can ring every little bit of heat out of the burning, out of the product of the burning by condensedee, the water vapor that's formed when we burn methane, for instance, we get CO two and we get water vapor. If we can condense the water and produce water liquid, we get the heat of vaporization of that water back. And that's called when we get all of it. When you take the feed materials and we let them burn and then we cool everything down to twenty five degree C, the amount of heat that we get is what's called the gross or the higher heating value, because we've extracted every little bit, including that heat of conversation, and that's the right metric that we use when we're looking at comfort heating. So if you say that you have a natural gas boiler or water here, like the one in my house that has an annual fuel utilization efficiency of ninety five percent, that is relative to the higher heating value of the natural gas that's being fed. So for every jewel worth of higher heating value of natural gas that's fed to my boiler, I get zero point ninety five jewels of heat in my house. And that includes condensing and cooling down the water of combustion. But if I want to use fuel to heat up something to two or three hundred degree c, the heat of vaporization of the water is not accessible to me. It's gone, it's lost. And now what we do is instead of thinking about efficiencies in terms of in terms of the higher heating value, because in a sense, that's kind of not fair to the device that's saying, well, you didn't catch this thing that you couldn't possibly catch. We switch bases. You switch to the lower heating value, and that ignores the heat of vaporization of water as if we. Don't care about it. And the problem is that, you know, in energy terms, it's real energy. There's real energy in there, and it's lost. We're not using it because we can't recover it because we usingly eat the heat that we produce the two high temperature. So one has to be very careful when looking at efficiencies to say, well, was that calculated on the higher heating value or the lower heating value. And was the. One that we used at the beginning of the calculation the same as the one that we used at the end of the calculation, or do we switch bases between those two things? As I've seen people including engineers, screw that up and they draw wrong conclusions. So you're absolutely right. Natural gas takes energy to drill wells, to clean up the natural gas, to get it to pipeline spec to compress it, to transmit it across the long distances, to get it to somebody that needs it, dropping in pressure to the point where they start using it, and then most of that compression energy being wasted by the way, and then we burn it, and then a lot of the time we don't capture or the heat of vaporization or the heat of condensation of the product water. So we we lose in tons of energy. With electricity, it's easy, I mean, you feed it into a resistor, it makes heat. The hundred percent efficiency and the transmission losses are around the same as the transmission of natural gas. There both about ninety five percent efficient if you look at North America, so they're pretty similar. The notion that electricity is lossy to move around is not accurate. It's actually quite efficient to move around if you design the distribution system and the transmission system correctly, which we tend to do. So let's talk about a lot of people's favorite subject, food and industrial food preparation. What are the heats that are mostly seen there? And are they all in this range or are they mostly in this range? I mean there's so there's you know, there's some most of the heat is in the cooking range, so it's in the two hundred degree see type range, and some of the heat in food preparation is in the frying range. And there we're just going to use electricity directly to make heat, and we can produce any frying temperature we want. So when you look at you look at industrial heating. As I said, about forty percent round numbers is used below two hundred degree seed and that includes most of the food process in the industry. So yeah, I mean not all of it. People occasionally ask me, well, what am I going to do to you know, dry my chilis in the future, and. I'm yeah, and you know, I think maybe this would be an appropriate time to bring in another thing. We've been talking about energy. We've been talking about jewels. We haven't been talking about energy delivery rate, which we call power. We haven't been talking about jewels per second or watts. And one of the things that's a little bit challenging, and I say a little bit challenging, but in some cases it's very challenging, is that natural gas, as an example, it's very easy to deliver a very large heating power to an application. So I'm happy to be working with a startup that i'm an investor in an advisor to, and they're doing a lot of heating because what they're trying to do is to produce magnesium metal from seawater, and they have a laboratory, and their laboratory only has so many, so many amps of electrical service coming in and hence it can only deliver a certain number of kilowatts of power to the facility. And when you want to do something like, for instance, heat up a batch of metal to its melting point very quickly so that it doesn't hang around and have time to oxidize, you need a lot of power. You need a lot of killowat kilowatts of energy, and delivering that through a small electrical line is challenging. Delivering it through a comparatively small natural gas line isn't so challenging. In fact, you can have a barbecue cylinder and deliver you know, one hundred kilowatts of heat for a short period of time if that's what you want to do. And so sometimes heating applications are very high power, but very low in terms of the total number of jewels of energy that are delivered, and that becomes a bit of a problem for electrical energy. Well, I'll compare contrast. A week or two ago, I was looking at, you know, as I'm doing now professionally, the stunning drop in battery prices per kilo. YEP. Very important topic and one that I'm watching very carefully myself and with glee. By the way, as a battery Liman, I'm one of the. Billion battery option I am a battery optimists just like you are. I'm stunned by a battery user, yep. I'm stunned by the rate of chain of drop like we right now at the beginning of this year, we're under one hundred dollars per kill a lot hour, which was kind of expected for twenty thirty. C ATL has announced LFPs lithium phosphate lithium iron phosphate batteries at fifty six dollars per kill a lot hour in the quarter, and there's people selling them for forty seven dollars per kill a lot hour on the market. So we're at. Waves wholesale prices of raw cells. Yeah. Just to give you an idea to translate this into people have to understand that obviously, when you buy something wholesale, you're talking about buying large quantities of it. But you and I can buy because I just did a couple of months ago, we can buy lithium iron phosphate cells from China, including delivery for ninety US dollars per kilo what hour, because we bought some. We bought forty forty snalls two hundred and eighty a half hour bricks that are basically a kilowod hour or storage each and paid under ninety dollars per ninety dollars US per kilo. What hour of battery storage that those batteries represent, and that includes the rather expensive costs of shipping them from China to Canada door to door, including whatever tariffs are and taxes are charged along the way, and those batteries, and it's incredible what they their performance, what they will do, what they're guaranteed to do. The batteries that we bought have a guaranteed cycle life of six thousand cycles. And when you do the math on that. Up at the farm where I'm using my portion of that battery order, those batteries are returning every killood hour that I feed to them for about two and a half US cent for a kilo one hour plus whatever I want to pay myself an interest on my investment to buy them. That's ridiculous. How much cheaper does storage have to get than that? And by the way, it's getting cheaper a lot cheaper, And so. This becomes important. I love this wonderful. I know I'm stunned, but I did the math for heavy road transportation, one of the subjects I've spent a lot of time on in the past couple of years, and I just said, okay, well, it can take five years to get a five megawat connection for a truck stop, because that's infrastructural change. But at these price points, I can put a honk and big battery on there and it'll pay itself off in seventeen months, just with price arbitrage and nothing else, never mind the retail costs sale of electricity versus the other stuff, and that's for heating. I've got a good friend who took the majority of that battery order that we just made, and what he's actually doing. He has a solar installation on this which gives them really wonderful power spring and fall. But in the summer there's too much tree cover that shades his raefin in the winter he gets he gets snown on his panels and it's a bit annoying to get it back off again, and of course the solar intensity is quite low. But what he finds his battery most useful for is that because Ontario, where I live, built this huge fleet of nuclear power plants and also has all this run of river hydro power where there's no dam where you can store energy. There's just a weir in the water. You know, if there's excess water, it flows over it. Because we have these resources that you kind of can't turn off, or can't afford to turn off, we are given electricity, and I mean practically given electricity at very very cheap rates at night, and I'm using to charge my electric car and it's fantastic. It dropped my cost of driving to seventy cents per one hundred kils meters in terms of energy relative to my prius, which was costing me seven dollars and fifty cents for entergy elevators for energy. So that's great. But what my friend was interested in doing was storing some of that energy at night and using it during the day to run the rather large hard disc array that he has that he has to keep spinning all the time, which was costing a little bit of money. And so what he did is he bought fairly big battery and he has a system that looks at day ahead forecasting for whether it's going to be a sunny day or not, and does a number of calculations and then says, should I charge up the battery tonight on cheap electricity from the grid, or should I not and wait for solar to come in and fill the battery during the day and then I'll bleed that off at night. And so he just has a little home assistant with some code that in fact, I think he got AI to mostly write for him, and. Much better gold than I ever did. It does the calculations, and it looks at it and says, okay, well they hear all the factors. Who's the stated charge and the battery? Here are the electrical prices. It does a little bit of math. You know. He came up with an algorithm. The code was implemented to just control all the devices. Control is inverter, control is charge controller. And but let's move back from that customer. Well, it's fascinatingly nerdy. It doesn't talk about heat. So the big point here is, well, for some of this points where you need a lot of power in a short period of time, we can now put batteries in at a price point where it starts to make sense for some applications, but it doesn't help as much when you need five megawants twenty four to seven of heat or twenty megawants twenty four to seven for eat because you can't store it, you just need that. That's right. Return for the second half of my conversation on industrial heat with Paul Martin, chemical process engineer and chief guide at Spitfire Research. And there is actually a solution to this problem that doesn't involve electricity. So if we have very inexpensive electricity coming to us part of the day and we need heat all day every day, or if we need heat in big batches at high powers for short periods of time, but we have electricity coming to us over longer periods of time, either of those two situations can be solved with a bat and electrical battery, but they can also be solved with a heat battery. And there are several firms that are working on this. The one I'm most familiar with is Zentura because they're a customer of Mind and what they're doing is they are they will take electricity whenever it's available, and they use to heat up a pile of graphite blocks inside an inert apt sphere, and they recover the heat from these bricks, not by basically circulating a fluid around the bricks and taking it away by conduction. But they actually have the light, the infrared light from and the visible light from these bricks shine onto collectors that then can collect that energy either as heat or as a smaller amount of electricity, with the balance as heat. Now, the latter thing is kind of well, you know, efficiency of generating electricity from heat again, it's not a lot great, but you know, if you can do it and you can also make heat at the same time, why not. But the real benefit there is that you can either provide industry that needs heat on a steady basis with steady heat based on intermittent, inexpensive electricity, or you can draw huge amounts of energy from this pile of very hot objects to supply very large amounts of power heating power to a process that needs intense amounts of heat for short periods of time, and then charge them up more slowly from euro electrical supply. So it's a really cool idea, and the cost per unit of delivered energy stored ultimately, if it's done right, should be a lot cheaper if you store it as heat than if you store it as electrical energy in a battery. At least in the short term. Over the longer term, as a battery optimist, I think that sodium ion batteries are going to be super super cheap. And honestly, most of the other things that we use to store electrical energy, although they're fun and interesting to work on, most of them are in the door nail. So let's pull this apart a little bit, because how big is the pipe? Well, I had recent cause to look at the distribution network capacity factors from North America versus India recently because I'm a nerd and I needed to know something for some reason or other, and I went and found it. No need to apologize to another one. This is my entire life is people know, I'll ask me why I know all this stuff, and it's because, well, I'm a nerd. I just need to know. I need to know everything about climate change and its solutions. I can't help myself. But the distribution grid in the developed world is running around fifty to sixty percent capacity. What that means is that over a full year it could deliver one hundred units of energy that it only delivers fifty or sixty. That seems like a waste, except that we back to exactly what we're talking about. We need a lot of power at peak period times and a lot of energy at peak period of times. We don't need a lot in the middle of the night, for example, and increasingly we don't need it in the middle of the day because we've got the solar duck curves, and so the distribution grid is kind of like sitting there with these massive troughs and massive peaks in the course of any given day. And now as we get to these thermal storage for industrial and domestic comfort heat because you know, we can actually do that with hot water heaters or thermal climbs. Now heat pump into a big tank and then draw that heat down across harvest. Thermal does that, we can actually flatten the daily capacity factor and lift it. I'm projecting we're gonna end up with about an eighty to ninety percent capacity factor, and the daily capacity of the distribution grid for a region for electricity will be pretty flat. It'll just be we'll have evs charging at night, We'll have thermal batteries charging at night, We'll have grid storage batteries charging at night. Ditto during a duck curve and drawing down during peak curve. So it's going to get a really black curve. Yeah. I think when we when we run into infrastructure pinches, like if one thinks of it, you know, the kind of the size of the wire that we use to carry electricity from one place to another. One of the things that you've talked about that I think is really pertinent and important is that we can change the type of wire that we use and by so doing, increase the size of the effective size of the pipe, if you will, to carry electrons from place to place. But you're absolutely right, we right now are demand. Our demand and our supply don't match very well, and we don't pair them up with storage very much. What we do is we kind of have supply that we ramp up and down to match unpredictable demand. You know, when everybody gets up from the Super Bowl and goes to the bathroom at the same time, and all the pumps run to refill all the toilets. You know, we tend to enforce the notion in people's minds that electricity is just this thing that you get anytime that you plug something in or you flip a switch, as opposed to something that you have to think about and where I see some of this flattening happening is not through storage as much as being smarter about demand. And the example I use is, right now, if I were to put a load of laundry in the dryer, and I'm an electric dryer as opposed to going out and hanging on the line because I'm lazy, if I push the button on the dryer, the dryer will just start. The dryer doesn't know what electricity costs, then it doesn't care. I'm supposed to know, and I'm supposed to push the button at the right time. But in the future, when I push the button on the dryer, the dryer will say, I'm going to start drying this beloaded dumps when electricity gets cheap, unless you push this button again and tell me that you need your clothes dried right now, then I'll turn on and I'll use expensive electricity if you're really insistent. So a lot of this future demand demand supply matching will happen as a result of smart demand and just being smarter about demand. Some of it will happen through storage and so on, but we're well off our topic of heating. I think, as far as storage is concerned, that They're one of the things that kind of is thrown up as a not really a Nirvana fallacy argument against electric heating, but as a real problem that we have to contend with in cold climates is what the heck do we do with a massive amount of heat power, so the massive amount of heat energy per unit of time that we have to deliver on the very coldest night of the year. And that is a hard problem, and it's one that we can solve a bunch of dumb one that seem quite impractical, and that we could solve it in a bunch of smart ways if we were, you know, thinking about it more carefully, but frankly in cold climates, and especially in the coldest parts of cold climates, so for instance, northern Alberta in Canada. Honestly, the most practical solution is during those coldest months, we're probably going to still have to burn fuels, and we're probably going to burn fuels that we don't make from electricity. We're not likely to be burning hydrogen or things made from hydrogen. We're likely to just keep burning fossils for the foreseeable future during those periods. But it will make a lot more sense to manage those periods and make those periods very short, and then to have electricity do the heavy lifting the vast majority of the jewels. But that's comfort heating again. So let's get back to industrial leading. Jan Rose No is my next guest, and so next month is comfort heating chapter and verse. Let's get back to those higher things. So let's talk. About Yes, let's talk about the hot. What do we mean when we say hot? What are the gradations of hot? Sure? Sure, well everything from two hundred to about one thousand degrees CE. As far as electric heating is concerned, it's more or less the same. And basically what that means is that what we're going to do is take a jewel of electricity and turn it into a jewel of heat in a resistor. And finding resistors that will do a thousand degrees seed is not difficult. Now, you know, finding ones that will do eight hundred degree SE's a little easier than finding the ones that do the eight hundred to one thousand. But even still, there are materials, metallic materials, alloys that work really well with a thousand degrees see will heat things up to a thousand degrees se with proper design without too much difficulty. Now, sometimes heating things to those temperatures, regardless how you do it, is hard, and there are a few occasions where we can't just apply heat. We actually need fire. So I'll give you an example of One of the most obvious examples of that is cement clinkering. So when one makes cement, there are two processes. Just briefly needs the characteristics of fire. Correct. Yeah, so there are well, there are applications where you actually need a hot gas, you need a hot flue gas, and those are most easily supplied with fire, although you could do it another way. But when we're talking about cement clinkering, as I mentioned, there's two steps in cement making. Basically, the first one is cooking off the co two from limestone to make lime, and that's called calcigning. And then the next step is heating up the mixture of minerals in order to form the silicate materials that are necessary for cement, and that requires very high temperatures. And the way we make those very high temperatures is actually by having a flame inside a tube that's lined with bricks, and the bricks keep the metal tube that supports everything from getting hot, and the heat is transferred by radiation from the flame to not just the solid material it's rolling around inside the kiln, but to the bricks, which then transfer heat to the solid material that's rolling around inside the kiln. And so doing that electrically is possible, but it's challenging because you basically have to make what amounts to a flame, and there are ways to do it, but it's it's it's rough, it's it's kind of kind of difficult. But most heating, again, isn't some clinkering, most heating resistance heaters. It's interesting. I just spent a bunch of time a couple of weeks ago talking to a person whose firm does electric plasmas. Yeah right, it has the kind of it has the characteristics necessary for that. Now when we talk about technology readiness level, it's being done. There are cement clinker ovens that use electric plasma's electric flames, but they aren't just bog standard like heat pumps. They aren't bog standard like the stuff or under two hundred. It's not like you can go and get a big scaled one and get one hundred delivered for North America, you know, with an order it's like we're not there. And you know, there are a lot of people out there who think that the way that we do something right now is the only way that's possible to do it, and they're not really looking hard at the they're not really looking very hard at the overall project and what the best solution would be under a decarbonized context, and they're not thinking about it properly, and as a consequence of drawing conclusions that are just wrong. So where are going with us though? Is that you know from two hundred and two a thousand degree See, it's pretty straightforward. It's the correct deployment of the correct design of resistance heater that's largely going to be the solution that's used above a thousand degree CE. You're into kind of specialty stuff. Plasmas and arcs are related but not necessarily the same, and they're a method that can achieve very very high temperatures. Sometimes you don't need temperatures quite so high. If you have materials that are conductive, you can use inductive heating. Let's just talk about the most extreme. What's the temperature of an electric plasma? What's the temperature range for electric perks? Oh? My goodness, ten thousand degrees ce, fifteen thousand degrees ce. You know, a super temperature of the surface of the sun. Yes, exactly. I mean you're literally, when you're talking about a plasma, you're talking about a soup of nucle and electrons floating around, not connected to one another. You know. It's it's it's so violent that we really don't even have atoms anymore. We just have ions and electrons bouncing around, and the temperatures are absurdly high, and you can and you know, the very highest temperature stuff we can do that you cannot achieve by combustion, we do electrically. So that's yeah, I think that's a really important point that needs to be made. It doesn't mean, though, that using plasma is going to be a fun you know, something that you're going to do for fun and profit in all applications, because it does have some serious downsides. I've been involved in projects where plasma was used for very specific reasons because it allowed us to produce a very specific product under the right conditions, and controlling them is fun. I mean nerd fun. Give you an idea that there was there was a project that I was involved in that had a plasma, and we had to keep the plasma from getting onto the walls of the vessel. And the way that that was done was with an electromagnet that acted as a lenns in order to repel the plasma and force it and force it to be narrower than it wanted to be normally. And that electromagnet was one hundred kilowaks and this was a pilot plant, okay, And all of the energy that went into that electromagnet did not go into the product that was all lost, right, That was heat energy that was lost to conductors and so on to make this intense magnetic field. So when you get up to these high temperatures, these start to get efficiencies less than one hundred percent at converting electricity into the heat in the process that you want. Some of the heat goes elsewhere, like into an electromagnet, or into switch gear, or into microwaves that don't microwave generating equipment that does and do exactly what you want it to do, and some of it goes elsewhere and so on. So yeah, it. Should be clear, I care less because wind turbines and solar panels to plasma is so much more efficient than so many of the other stuff, especially because it doesn't heat the atmosphere. Yeah, yes, I mean you know, when you when you look at it in an overall from an overall effectiveness perspective, it's a no brainer. And the thing that I think a lot of people have, the box that's still stuck on their head about this issue or around this issue, is the notion that, you know, they seem to think that the piece of equipment, you know, even if it's a big, multi billion dollar plant, can't change or it can't change very much because that would cost a lot of money. And what they don't understand is what we engineers do is we optimize between capital costs, the costs of pieces of equipment and how they're arranged in space and how they're connected and controlled and all that sort of thing, and operating cost how much a cost to run them. And if I say to you, well, I can keep the equipment the same, but the operating cost is going to increase by a factor of ten, deal with it. You're going to fire me, and you should fire me because I'm a moron for giving you that advice. No, what we're going to do is We're going to change the capital plant so that the operating cost doesn't increase in this dramatic way, and it will pay back in a reasonable period of time. That will make people whose money is being invested feel good about it. And that's what's going to happen. And those plants that can't be modified because they're not economic for some reason or another, they're just going to be shut down. This is the way capitalism has always worked. The problem that we have, fundamental base level problem that we have is that while we permit the atmosphere to continue to be used as a sewer for all of the affluent from fossil burning, you have this illusion that we can do things with fire more cheaply than we can with electricity. When we remove that illusion from the market with carbon taxes or emission bands or accommodation, then all of a sudden, engineers ago, Aha, I'm not going to use fire anymore. Fire is dumb. I'm going to use electricity, and they'll figure out how to do it in a heartbeat. So I was looking at a study yesterday because I'm involved in editing the second edition of a book on super grid technologies and stuff, and I was looking at it just to study at the ARI Institute out of Switzerland, is done a more up to date stuff rather than the kind of the crappy nord House economic modeling around climate impacts. And it's ten to fifteen percent of GDP in twenty fifty with two or two point five degrees of warm that's the degree of economic impact. And so yeah, well there's no question it's mind blowing how expensive not having a stable climate can be on the earth. I mean, and not just in money, in lives and in human misery. So this is going to get priced. We're getting there. I spent a lot of time looking at carbon price and schemes globally and you know, stuff like that. But let's get back to industrial heat. So electric arc furnaces, what temperature ranges do they run it? And what are they used for? Well, the most popular use of an electric arc furnace is for steel making. Actually, the majority of steel making in North America is that uses the electric arc furnaces as opposed to blast furnaces, the method that's used primarily in places like China and India. So what we do is we start with we start with scrap scrap steel and we add iron that's been reduced by other methods, which by the way, can be decarbonized to that charge that's fed to the furnace, and then we basically stick stick big electrodes that are made out of graphite into that material and pass and an enormous current through it. And the result is the temperatures that are necessary to melt iron, I mean, seventeen hundred degree c plus and it's routinely young still every day. And the reason it's done is that it makes perfect sense when you're running mills that are not directly connected to a to a blast furnace, because you don't have giant quantities of raw iron ore coming in, but instead the majority of your feed stock is scrap steel, and it's more economical way to make steel, and it makes cleaner steel and steel with tighter tolerances and a lot of good stuff that we want. And it doesn't involve fire. It involves electricity. So that's the thing that a lot of people have in their head that's kind of backward they talk about the decarbon decarbonization is steel making, Well, steel makings pretty carbonized in a lot of the developed world already. It's iron making. It's reducing iron iron ore to iron metal. That's the part that we do mostly still with fossils, and we do it one of two ways. We do it last furnaces with coke, with coke that's made from coal, and we also do it in this process it's called the direct reduction of iron or DRI, where we use a synthesis gas that's made from natural gas. It's a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The cool thing is you can do DRI using pure hydrogen, but you have to add electric heating. But you also doing GR nine. Yeah, well, you can also do DRI with biomethane. Correct. You can do DRI just the way that we do it now, except not use fossil methane. We can use biomethane. And we can do blast furnace production using biochar as well. I mean, that's how we made most of the iron on Earth. For a long time, we did not use coal. We used we used charcoal, and you know, we can switch back to doing that again too. So anyways, there's a lot of these high temperature things if you think about them properly with a box on your head. Of fossil burning, there are ways to do it. Well. One of things I always love is I'm reading through another study about industrial heat or decarbonization, and in some way it says electric arc furnaces, and then later on it says, but of course for high temperature heat, we need to burn stuff. It's in the same document. Yeah, the same it's you know, and not to go off topic, but another thing that comes up in this is this whole notion that we need to burn stuff, not just because we need heat, and they have it in their head that the only way you get heat is by burning stuff, but we also need to burn stuff because otherwise, how are we going to get all these materials that we make out of petroleum and so on? And you know, I've written an article, a long, painful article, rather rude article that you can find of my LinkedIn profile, which talks about what we're really going to do in a decarbonized future to make materials and plastics and the like, and we're going to make them out of petroleum. We're just not going to do it by burning anything. Okay, it's the same thing. It's electric heating and so smart uses a chemistry and the right catalysts and so on, and it's actually it's kind of a no brainer. Honestly. It's really a matter of how much do you want to pay and the relative cost of burying CO two in the deep subsurface, which we know to be expensive and unlikely to get a whole lot cheaper in the future, versus making chemicals using electricity, which is another process that's fundamentally fraught with thermodynamic difficulties. So we're kind of between a rock and a hard place on part of the process. But it's only part of it, and it's manageable. It's really not a problem. So don't worry. You're not going to run out of chemicals and plastics in the decarbonized future. We'll have plenty of them. So let's talk about aluminum. What are the temperatures for aluminum and what's the process for illuminum. Yeah, aluminum is not all that hot. It's about nine hundred degree C on that or nine nine hundred and fifty degree C and it's done in a melt electrolysis, So most of the energy that goes in is not heat. Most of the energy that goes in is electricity directly, which is the process by which the aluminum oxide is reduced to aluminum, metal and oxygen. The one thing that we have to do with aluminum that's a little tricky is that in past electricity was expensive and fossil fuels were cheap. So what we did is we used on purpose carbon electrodes inside the melt electrolysis furnace and we deliberately burned them. So instead of producing oxygen at one electrode and aluminum at the other, we produced carbon monoxide at one electrode, or carbon dioxide at that electrode and aluminum at the other. And by so doing we reduce the amount of electricity that we consumed by about thirty percent, which was worth a lot of money. And these electrodes were, by the way, made out of the garbage from petroleum refiners. They're made out of a mixture of residuum and petroleum coke, both of which are junk, right, And so these plants have these huge facilities where they make these anodes out of pitch and coke which come in on railcars and so on. So we already know how to replace these electrodes with a ceramic electrode that conducts electricity that eliminates this carbon dioxide carbon monoxide business and eliminates all of the fluorocarbons that get generated by virtue of the fact that this process is happening in return for a little bit more electricity. Is a company called Elisis, which is a joint venture of Alcoa and another company. They have an operation that they're setting up in Quebec where there's hydroelectricity in plenty and lots of aluminum plants to test this on, and they're testing the decarbonization of aluminum. The thing about aluminum though, is that there's a step first that you have to do, which is you have to make alumina the feedstock for the melto electrolysis from box site, which is the ore, and that process has some heating steps which again are within the realm of possibility to do electrically. So decarbonizing alumina production from box site, I don't see that as a major problem. That's well within the reach of electrification. So we've only got ten or so minutes left. So let's there's probably five different heating technologies we didn't talk about so far. We started to talk about induction. So what I'd like you to do a minute each or two minutes each each of the technologies we haven't talked about, and what are their applications and roughly their temperature ranges. These are all electric, right, so sure, sure, yeah, Well let's start with induction. Induction only works on things that conduct electricity. It's a way to deliver high amounts of power to metallic materials and other things that conduct electricity, like graphite for instance. Temperature range can be very very high. I mean, you can heat things metals to white heat very quickly with an induction coil, but their efficiency is not very high, and the efficiency drops as the temperature goes up because you have to keep the electrode that actually does or the coil that does the induction heating. You have to keep that cool and so you reject some heat to that cooling water. And you also need switch gear in order to produce the high frequencies that are required in order to produce the induction. But it is it's widely used in industry. It's used, for instance, the heat up chunks of steel to high temperatures before they're forged, you know, before they're beaten into shape. Uh, So that's induction. Another one is microwaves, two quick things. Lots of people now have induction cook stoves in there. You're absolutely right, yeah, there you have a conductive thing, a conductive plate, and in fact it has to be magnetic because of the frequencies that are used. And you can basically do everything with an induction cook top that you can do with with gas fire without putting nitrogen oxides into your home and giving your children asthma. So here's what it's pretty wonderful. Here's my favorite example recently. You know those Chinese kitchens with the massive walks and the huge. Jets of gas. Well, yeah, now they've got induction versions of those. That's incredible. If you can do walk tossing uh cookery with induction, Basically cooking's taking care of so it's done. It's just a matter of deployment. Okay, that's induction. Next, microwaves. So microwaves work by exciting water molecules and some other some other atoms uh and groups of atoms in molecules. You can do all kinds of very interesting things with microwaves, including some really fascinating chemistry that happens as a result of you heating up the molecules themselves as opposed to heating up things that transfer heat, you know, like metal, things that transfer heat to the molecules themselves. So microwaves, for instance, can be used to make things like carbon black and acetylene from from methane and that's pretty cool because those molecules have uses of a non combustion nature in the carbonized future, so that's pretty interesting. And with biomethane which we can use for that purpose. Yeah, there's other that it looks like. An into the limitation, Yes, there are limitations. Then you know, they're not going to be these processes. They're not going to be a major source of hydrogen and decarbonized future, but they will be a source of potential source of decarbonized production of certain things. Uh. And microwaves are one method, and plasmas or another that are used to do those kinds of pyrolytic reactions. But microwaves are you know, they're also largely used in cooking and mineral processing and various other things. Pyrolysis expert recently told me it should be called thermolysis. Yeah, well, I mean pyrolysis, pyrolysis thermolysis that you know, really. The the. The terminology there has to do with how you interpret the Greek the Greek words that you start with, right, So pyrolysis means breaking things with fire, and thermolysis means breaking things with temperature, if you will, or with heat, and so yes, perhaps it would be more correctly called in the future thermolysis or thermolysis than pyrolysis. But that's getting pretty pretty geeky, I'm going to say. But this is a pretty geeky conversation. So well, in a sense, you could, ultimately, if you wanted to go on step back, you could call it electrolysis. You can call it electrolysism, though it's not really electrolists. Okay, so let's keep think of electros relyons moving around anyway. Else we got on here in reduction microwaves, we talked about plasma. Well, infrared is just basically transferring heat by by shining light infrared light on things from from hot things. It's really not an electric heating technology. It's kind of an application of heat transfer, if you will. We do use it in a lot of applications where we need to, uh, for instance, cure inks or or polymers or the light. And it's not limited by the way to infrared I mean we we can shine ultraviolet light on things, and we can shine other wavelengths, and in fact, we can irradiate things with other wavelengths of electro magnetic radiation. To do the things that we want to do. It's not all about heat. Sometimes it's about exciting molecules directly, making them jiggle, vibrate, rotate, or do whatever they're going to do in their own way. In a sense, it's kind of just an extension of microwaves, if you will. Right, man, I'm running out of additional ones. We've covered plasma covered arcs, we've covered induction covered microwaves. That covers there's, there's, there's, there's, there's direct omic heating. So so another example, Yeah, and the last one would be heating by doing work on something. So direct omic heating, as an example would be passing a current through, as an example, a liquid metal. So if you can find a way or through a pipe and just using the pipe to heat up the thing. If the pipe's made out of metal, you can just literally put an electrode on either end of a chunk of pipe and use the pipe as the resistor. So it's really another way to do resistance heating and and and you know, omic heating is used in a lot of applications where where you want to, for instance, melt something out of a pipe. You know, that's that's one example. And as far as doing work on something in order to heat it, the example that I gave the very beginning of our conversation was around heating up plastics. So when you have something that's really thick and viscous, sometimes getting heat into it by heating something, you know, heating a pipe, it's so difficult to move the material through the pipe that the heat transfer that results is very poor. You know, the outside of the thing gets hot, then that thermal conductivity isn't good enough to get the inside of the thing hot enough. So what we do instead is we basically use a mixer and we mix the thing. We put electrical energy into a motor and use the motor to move a mixer around, whether it be an extruder or an augur or a or a like, and by friction of the material against itself and against the walls of its container, we heat the thing up. And when you're using electricity, there's really nothing to say to not recommend that, you know, like I mean you it's just as efficient to heat up a polymer using work as it is he heated up with a resistance heater. There's no difference at all, and one of them is much more effective than the other. So guess which one we're going to use. So again, you know, it's all different ways. That's different ways to do the same job. My favorite example of that is my buddy's farm, Deep Sing, who's a neat engineer with ABB you know, is working on the electrification of bass massive new plant near Shanghai recently. So I was talking to him when he was there. He introduced me to this thing just basically just a drum with turbine blades in it that are turned at high speed. Right, This is this tribo mechanical heating. Yeah, so that's another thing. I was reading about that today, and honestly, I'm still a little bit mystified about how it can work at very high temperatures because the blades themselves, you know, even though we've developed blades that are capable of in jet engines and gas turbines and so on, that are people withstanding very high temperatures, when you're actually using the process to do heating it's at a certain point you're up into these super alloys and even they're not strong anymore, so you have to be What we do in engines is we actually pass cool gas through the turbine blades in order to keep the blades cooler than the thing that we're in, the gas that's being processed. It's kind of limited what you can do when you're when you're doing that process in order to heat something up. So, yeah, it's an interesting concept and one that is certainly worthy of further investigation. There's all sorts of clever things you can do, and if you need a hot gas, you certainly do not need to produce it by means of fire. Yeah, in this case, it was an olefin manufacturing where the you and Deeley worked an olephan manufacturing facilities. The specific approach this persists in the temperature range longer to maximize the generation of olefins, and my chemistry and from the matters are nowhere near sufficient to well. The really important thing in making olephans is that you want to hit the temperature that you want to hit, and then you want to very rapidly quench that mixture that you made in that hot place. So, because what you're trying to do is you're kind of trying to freeze a mixture that is away from its equilibrium. If you let it cool down slowly, you get wrong products, You get products that you don't desire. Back reactions happen, and the thing you put all this energy into making just falls apart again. So yeah, this combination of very precise controlled heating without hot surfaces that cause coking and charring and other things, followed by extremely rapid cooling and you can really get a wonderful yield out of a process like making oliphant. So yeah, lots of things that we can do better with heat with electric heating than we could ever do with fire. The last topic you've mentioned it we do a lot of stuff with heat from burning fossil fuels because it's cheap. But there's a whole and the first paradigm is, well, what are we going to burn? The first paradigm shift is what are we going to burn tomorrow to do the same thing that's clean. The second paradigm, though, is do we need to actually use heat at all to achieve the same outcome? So you mentioned that because if we start thinking differently there's different ways to achieve the same outcome. So give me your top three examples where it's not for something where we use heat today or tomorrow. You just don't think we're going to use heat at all. Well, I mean, one of the perfect example is hydrogen production. I mean, in the present, ninety nine percent of hydrogen is produced by heating up steam and reacting it with the fossil material in order to produce a sind gas. Make sure that you then react further through over catalysts in order to make hydrogen and CO two. In a decarbonized future, we're not going to do that. We're going to be electrolyizing water or steam and producing hydrogen that way. So that's one perfect example. So it's not really heat at play, it's electricity. Another example is magnesium production. So magnesium is extremely important metal. It's made in a similar process, or it can be made in a similar process to aluminum, and it's extraordinarily abundant, especially in seawater, so you can make this metal without mining, which is incredible. The thing is, though, that you can also make magnesium metal if labor is cheap and the atmosphere is a free sewer. You can make magnesium metal by a thermochemical process called the Pigeon process, and that's actually how substantially all the magnesium metal is made in the world right now in China, and we're aiming to fix that by switching back to electrochemical methods, greening up this metal and providing a superadditive benefit by lightweighting things that need to be light in order to be energy efficient. So that's another example, but I'm sure if we talked about it for a long time, we could think of lots of them. The third one that occurs to me is Boston Metals. Oh yeah, so I mean Boston Metals is it's a similar thought process to what's going on what we're dealing with magnesium, except they're trying to do the same thing with iron and other ores to get other metals like vanadium and the like. And you know, the thing about doing it doing molten oxide electrolysis for iron is that the temperatures are so incredibly high. What Boston Metals has done is absolutely incredible, But by their own admission, they're at least a decade away from commercial So you know, I'd wait until we actually had some chicken eggs before we think we're going to have chickens in that regard, I think we're a little premature to conclude that that's going to work out okay, but anyway we can be hopeful. There are also electrochemical methods at root temperature or at low temperatures that can be used to produce iron and other metals. So yeah, switching electricity for heat or for chemical reactions that happened at high temperatures is definitely due regards something we're going to do in the future. I'm spending. I'm spent. As I think I said recently, I've gotten to the point where I'm no longer completely incompetent at chemistry, but I know a lot more about what I don't know, and for electro chemistry, I know nowhere near that. They're just yeah, electric chemistry is really interesting, you know. Man. One of the things that blew my mind was just how important a small for action of a vault can be, and how what the equivalent is in thermal terms to a fraction of the volt. I mean, the difference between three volts and four volts DC is a difference of hundreds and hundreds of degrees celsius in terms of thermal reactions. So it's really interesting that whole different classes of reactions happen at four volts that don't happen at three volts, and reactions happen at three volts that don't happen at two volts and so on. Oh and yeah, it's fascinating. I know, won't get into specifics, but I see a lot of value propositions where we're going to start using electrochemical processes instead of processes as well out of heat in the future, and it'll just be a lot more efficient because we have to think differently about the problem. So first paradigm, get rid of the burner box, as you say. Second paradigm, say can we get to end without heat at all? And so, okay, Paul, you know the drill you've done. This's a couple. This is your open ended opportunity. You've already pitched a Mygreer or Magrithatha or Magretsa or whatever that. Yeah, we are the people. We are the people that make planets, planet makers. It's a very pitch. Yeah, so I'm not going to say give you the open ended, give you an open ended for anything else you want to tell. People, Well, I would just say that. I would just say that very briefly because I do have to run, But I'll just say that there are a lot of people out there who are motivated to tell you that electric heating is hard. I'm here to tell you from practical experience for decades and decades, it's not hard. It's just different. And the thing that's hard is the value proposition. And we as a society have to decide to create the value proposition. Once we've done so, people like me will go off and make it happen. It's not hard technically, it's not difficult economically. Right now, it is difficult. Excellent, Thank you, Paul. My guest today has been Paul Martin, founder and chief guy at Spitfire Research. Reach out to him for all your deeply nerdy chemistry, process engineering needs and consultation. If you're a venture capitalist or an investment fund who needs to know is something that really makes sense. Paul's one of the key guys to go to. Take care all and until next time. Thanks for listening. This has been redefining energy tech with your host Michael Barnard. If the insights from this episode we're valuable to you help Others find them by liking and subscribing