The Net Zero Reality.

Can Societiy’s Essentials be made ‘Green’?

H. A. G. Longstaff

THERE NOW SEEMS TO BE A GLOBAL CONSENSUS around Net Zero by 2050 (2060 in China’s case and 2070 in India’s case, to give emerging markets a longer period to reduce emissions). In Australia, we have that aim, with the additional near-term challenge of a 43 percent reduction on 2005 levels by 2030.

The media’s focus is absolutely on power generation: phasing out coal, reducing gas, and moving predominantly to wind and solar. There are real challenges with this, but that is not what I want to write about today. 

Canadian polymath Vaclav Smil, in his excellent 2022 book ‘How the World Really Works’, makes it clear that energy is about much more than electricity generation. The amount of energy available to humans has tripled since the 19th century, and an average Earthling has at their disposal about 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century. This has been the foundation of both our quality of life, and the earth’s stunning population increase. 

He says that the world we have is built on four things for which there is no apparent net zero solution proven at scale: fertiliser, plastic, concrete and steel. The world now produces annually about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, nearly 400 million tons of plastics, and 180 million tons of ammonia. Global production of these four materials claims 17 percent of the world’s primary energy supply and 25 percent of all CO2 emissions. 

Looking at the elements …

Historically, the world’s primary fertiliser was dung, both human and animal. However, in 1909, German chemist Fritz Haber succeeded in synthesising ammonia from natural gas. This innovation not only facilitated the production of high explosives used in World War One but also led to an extraordinary expansion in nitrogenous fertiliser production. To put this in context, if average crop yields had remained at 1900 levels, the crop harvest in the year 2000 would have required nearly four times more land. This would have meant cultivating nearly half of all ice-free continent, instead of under 15 percent of the total land area required today. Without nitrogen fertilisers, we could not secure enough food for the diets of nearly 45 percent of the world’s population. Yet, aside from the theoretical potential of ‘green’ hydrogen, there is currently no net-zero alternative for fertiliser.

Plastic: Plastic is everywhere in our lives. Your iPhone. Your lunch wraps. The car you drove to school in. They’re ubiquitous, and they’re produced from crude oil. Again, no net zero alternative.

Cement: Modern cities are built from concrete, as are bridges, tunnels, roads, dams, runways, and ports. China now produces more than half of the world’s cement, and in recent years, it has manufactured in just two years as much cement as the United States did throughout the entire 20th century. Cement uses enormous amounts of gas in the kilning process for which there is no net zero alternative.

Steel: No other metal is as affordably strong as steel. The buildings we sit in, live in, the car we use to come to school and the plane we use to go on holidays all have steel at their foundation. Currently, steel production requires enormous amounts of gas (to fuel smelters) and metallurgical coal (to bond carbon with iron ore), and while green hydrogen may be an answer, this is not yet proven even at a small scale.

These four materials, so unlike in their properties and qualities, share three common traits: they are not readily replaceable by other materials (certainly not in the near future or on a global scale); we will need much more of them in the future; and their mass-scale production depends heavily on the combustion of fossil fuels, making them major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, the unfolding transition to renewable energies will demand huge amounts of steel, concrete and plastics … just look at what’s in a Tesla or a wind turbine.

Time to be thinking about a lot more than wind farms and solar panels.