Carbon Commentary newsletter

1, Industrial heat pumps. Chemicals major BASF started work on a 50 MW heat pump that will provide approximately 190 degree steam for the production of formic acid at its Ludwigshafen factory. The initial heat for the pump will come from the cooling system of a steam cracking plant on the same site. BASF says the heat pump will reduce the emissions from the formic acid process by 98%, or 100,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. This is one of the largest heat pumps in the world, generating a temperature that is also at the top end of what is currently possible in a large installation.

2, Wind to hydrogen. Four projects took steps to use wind energy directly for ammonia and hydrogen production. In Nova Scotia, Canada, EverWind said it had applied for a 432 MW farm to supply electricity to a hydrogen and ammonia plant located on the coast which will export its output. In Japan, a much smaller scheme was announced that is intended to link wind farms with an electrolysis centre that will then supply hydrogen to a plant that reheats steel. A demonstrator scheme off the coast of Wales moved forward, intending to use electrolysers on a 10-15 MW floating wind turbine. Netherlands-based SwitcH2 said it had commissioned ABB to do much of the design for its floating hydrogen and ammonia vessel to be installed off the Portugese coast. Making hydrogen when grids are constrained offers a potential route to using 100% of a turbine’s output.

3, Data centre heat production. Expressed at its simplest, data centres turn electricity into heat. So the obvious way of heating homes is to transport that heat into buildings. Or, as in the case of the pilot scheme proposed by electricity distributor UK Power Networks, put micro data centres actually in the home. UKPN is using innovative technology from Thermify to provide low cost heat to at least 100 homes in England in an initial trial. In Geneva, a data centre operator said it would use a different approach, inserting 40 degree heat from a data centre into a heat pump and then directly into the local district heating network.

4, Carbon Capture. Carbon Centric opened its carbon capture plant at a waste incinerator in Norway, planning to extract about 10,000 tonnes a year of CO2. This is one of the first full–scale CO2 capture plants from a waste incinerator in the world. The company has previously claimed that the Shell Cansolv technology which is used at this plant can capture 90% of the carbon dioxide in the exhaust stream. (Other CCS projects have rarely achieved 50%). The ‘food-grade’ CO2 from the incinerator will reused rather than stored but the company’s next project, a much larger 32,000 tonne plant, will transport the gas permanently to Norway’s Northern Lights undersea storage.

5, Solar to hydrogen. Increasing interest is focused on the direct use of concentrated sunlight to make hydrogen. Madrid-based Hysun raised €3m cash from Equinor and other investors to build a full-scale prototype that employs a unique mixture of solar energy concentration and a metal catalyst that splits water. Although a long way from full commercialisation, this technology could produce a step change in the cost of hydrogen. The company proposes an eventual figure of $1/kg for a plant size of 9,000 tonnes a year, a fraction of the quoted cost for green hydrogen today.

6, Solar. PV provided 39% of all Californian power in the first half of 2025, up from 33% in the previous year. Fossil fuels only provided 26%, down from 32% in 2024. The rise in solar electricity was partly made possible by a 75% rise in battery storage. (It doesn’t seem a long time since California was having serious problems coping with midday solar peaks!) Globally, the International Energy Agency wrote that solar would represent 80% of the increase in renewables by 2030. Its figures suggest growth of about 3,500 GW of capacity for solar between 2025 and 2030, compared to a total installed amount of about 2,200 GW at the end of 2024. But overall the IEA forecasted a slight reduction in its expectations for global renewable installations as a result of changes in US policy and subsidy reductions in China.

7, Wave energy. Progress in capturing the energy in waves has been held back by the need for heavy and durable steel structures. Swedish company CorPower uses a much lighter approach that mimics the beating of a heart. It claims a five times lower weight per unit of power delivered. Over the summer it received a €40m grant to assist in building a farm of its innovative devices off the coast of northern Portugal. In recently produced analysis it argues that adding wave power to wind and solar will significantly cut the need for other renewables, reduce storage needs by 40% and cutting the Levelised Cost of Energy. However the numbers come from northern Scotland, an unrepresentatively favourable location. This is a technology that has taken a long time to take off and isn’t fully proven yet in commercial applications but nevertheless looks a plausible supplement to other renewables in high wave height locations. (Thanks to Rowland Elliott)

8, Metal organic frameworks (MOF). This year’s Nobel prize for chemistry went to researchers who developed the first MOFs. These are structures that contain tiny internal holes that can capture and store gases and liquids. One of the principal potential uses may be in carbon dioxide extraction. The CO2 is held by the MOF and then driven off by the application of heat so that it can be then stored. The crucial advantage of using MOFs compared to the standard amine chemistry is the far lower need for energy for disassociating the CO2, the largest single cost associated with conventional CCS. MOFs also still work effectively in conditions of high humidity, meaning the exhaust streams do not need to have their water extracted. One UK company working on the use of MOFs estimates a total cost of operation of $31 a tonne of CO2, a small fraction of the current cost of amine-based approaches such as that used by Climeworks.

9, Biofuels add to emissions. Respected think-tank Transport and Environment (T+E) released a study arguing that biofuels add significantly to world emissions because they cause ‘indirect land clearance and deforestation’. It suggests that biofuels result in 16% more GHGs than oil. In addition, biofuels manufacture requires 32 million hectares of land, about the area of Italy, and this is expected to rise to 52 million hectares by 2030. Currently this global area supplies about 4% of total transport fuel needs. If instead of making liquid fuels, the land was devoted to solar panels, only about 1 million hectares to generate the same amount of energy would be needed, about 3% of the current requirement. And because EVs are so much more energy efficient, the electricity produced would power about 1/3 of the world’s cars. (To be clear, this does not mean 1/3 of global vehicles, just cars).

10, Future electricity storage needs. Late August to mid- September saw high winds and good sun in Great Britain. Making the assumption that the country would achieve its ambitious 2030 targets for renewables, I looked at how much storage would be required to store all the clean electricity that would have been generated over this short period by the much larger amounts of wind and solar in 2030. Using the network operator’s figures for electricity use over the four weeks, I calculated that Great Britain would have generated at least 8 TWh of excess power, or roughly 10 days national consumption, and that was assuming all other sources of electricity were turned off, bar nuclear. Today’s installed grid batteries would have only been able to hold about 0.1% of this total, showing the urgent logic to develop very large scale storage.

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