Klimawandel – Was wir tatsächlich tun können | 2/2 | WDR Doku
Okay, dear ones,
before we begin. Your attention, just a moment,
please. We have a new member today. May, would you like to
introduce yourself? – Yes, of course. Hi, my name is Mai.
(all) Hi May. And I like to go on vacation. Don’t worry, this isn’t
about flying shame. Or any shaming at all. I’m just saying we all know. We know we have to
do something about global warming. How do we know? There was this
incredibly good documentary. Where it was clarified where we got all the
scientific knowledge from
and where not only the consensus but also the disagreements
and uncertainties were summarized. Who was that from again? Here we do not focus on
the problem but solutions. Subtitle: WDR media group GmbH
on behalf of WDR Okay, when it comes to climate change
and solutions, the emphasis is on “-en”
, i.e. on solutions. Because we need many solutions. Here we want
to focus on one thing, namely, what is technically possible? Is it true that research and innovation will take us
out of this climate crisis
? Or is it all
just beautiful visions? By the way, that earlier was Caro, who was
on tour for you again this time.
Hello, I’m Caro
and I’m taking you on a search for the
best solutions to the climate problem. I visited companies that are already extracting the greenhouse gas
CO2 from the air. I was there where the mobility of
the future is being worked on. Full the UFO. I’ve been to companies that
want to turn the climate pollutant CO2 into raw material. For alternative fuel, for example, or the production
of chemicals. Hi.
– Welcome to the lab. Chemicals that are
needed for cosmetics, for example.
I was on a project on the Baltic Sea that could give the energy transition
a new boost. And of
course, I also looked at what I
can do personally for the climate. The Federal Environment Agency
has a CO2 calculator. You can see
how much CO2
you emit on average. Here you can enter information about different areas,
e.g. housing. I live alone
and have a small apartment. I use green electricity,
I calculated my annual consumption value. 550 kilowatt hours per year.
But I’m also very little at
home, that’s probably why. I can delete a vehicle here
because I don’t have a car of my own. I ride my bike a lot,
about 1,000 km a year. I can enter what I
‘ve flown in the last year. So just the flight is ruining everything for me now
. Because then I’m already
at 3 t. This year I didn’t fly at all
because of Corona. That’s why my record here is
very good. When it comes to my diet, I try
to make sure that I eat more sustainably. For example, I don’t buy meat and I harvest
from my garden. This is now a vegan dish. Good Appetite. Other consumption. I think my
purchasing behavior is average, whatever that means. Let’s get to my result,
I’m excited. I’m well
below the national average. The national average
is 11 t per year. And I’m at 6 here. However, our long-term carbon footprint needs to
be close to zero for us to limit the temperature rise. How to do that? Perhaps you are
not particularly surprised.
There are a lot of self-experiments on YouTube, but it’s always
frustrating, isn’t it? That’s why we
asked a few experts what the problem is.
You can influence the room
temperature. You can eat less meat,
you can use less electricity. But you cannot influence
how electricity is produced. There is little you can do to
influence which production technologies are used to provide the materials for
everyday use. Consumers alone can
not solve the climate problem. You also need
the producers for that, you need the big banks. That’s where investors are
needed, that’s where politics is needed. It takes
incredible coordination here. At the moment, the situation is still like this: We can influence a small part of
our greenhouse gas emissions by consistently changing our consumption behavior
.
But only a small part.
We don’t have a lot in our hands. Why? Well, we’re
still going to need steel. It’s just that
we consumers don’t decide how it’s produced. We will continue to
need concrete.
We, consumers, don’t decide how it is produced either. And yes, whether we like it or not. It will also be
flown further. Not only passengers but also cargo
is transported through the air. Even vegan food will initially be
transported by truck. However, we can’t talk our way out of it
either. Because, of course, companies also have to orientate themselves to the wishes of the customers in the long term
. The consumer certainly has power through his
individual consumption decisions. If everyone bought green electricity, we would have
already achieved the energy transition today.
But aren’t we already making progress in Germany
? Since 1990, our
greenhouse gas emissions have fallen
by around 36% in total up to 2019. But in industry and buildings, emissions have tended to stagnate, at least
in recent years. And especially when it comes to traffic,
next to nothing is happening. We have to become climate-neutral in the next
30 years, i.e. by 2050, i.e. get our
emissions down to zero, to stay below 2° global warming.
And not just in Germany,
but worldwide, where CO2
emissions are still increasing. If you also take into account
that industrialized countries like Germany have been polluting the world with CO2 for much longer
than developing countries. You can also see it differently,
that we have already used up a lot more of our CO2 quota
if, if things were to be fair, we should be at zero in this country by 2035
.
But let’s imagine
something crazy. Let’s imagine that the economy
would slam on the brakes. Nothing more with growth, but
just shut everything down. Ah, no, we just had that. Locked,
blacked out, superscripted. A country in a state of emergency. The economy
is at a standstill in many places. The auto industry
is frozen. Short-time work at Ford. The economy is groaning. But has it at least done
something for the climate? How much CO2 could we
save in 2020? Moment.
Drum roll.
* drum roll * 7%. 7.7%. If you’re now thinking, oh,
that doesn’t sound like much: It’s not. Because, as I said, we have
to be at zero by the middle of the century, which is already 30 years from now,
to stay below 2° global warming. And just to be clear:
Globally we are currently at about 1.1° warming compared
to the pre-industrial period. If we now talk about
whether we can achieve 2° warming in the next few decades
or at least 1.5°, that is
warmer than now in any case. This means that we cannot avoid global warming, only limit it, even if
we emit radically less. But why actually? I find the answer to that
in the Austrian Alps. On the Sonnblick observatory
at over 3,100 m altitude. Here Elke Ludewig
and her team measure the pure CO2 content
in the free atmosphere. Day after day,
even during the lockdown. We
didn’t notice that at all. This also has to do with the fact that CO2 is a very long-lived gas
in the atmosphere. If we are CO2-neutral
and all companies, industry, tourism and the like work
CO2-neutrally, the value
that we have now achieved will remain constant.
We don’t emit anymore,
so it stays there. And this value
takes a very long time to be reduced. All the CO2
that we have in the air now takes a very long time and
has very different processes to get out of the atmosphere again
. That means it has to be
tied into trees. The ocean may
still absorb something. Only then,
in the next 100 years, sometimes it can take 800 to 1,000
years, can this CO2 be
broken down from the atmosphere in this space? Only then do we see
a falling curve, so to speak, where we
achieve a reduction. 800 to 1,000 years. No wonder the pandemic
year is not so important. So the CO2 in the atmosphere
stays where it is for now. Even if we blow 7% less in a Corona year, we will still emit
something. Think of the atmosphere
as a bathtub with the water running into it. It’s still filling up
though. Even if you turn the tap off
a bit. Okay, sorry,
I didn’t want to talk about problems,
but solutions.
I just wanted to give a
very quick reminder of how strong the solutions need to be and that we need sustainable,
long-term change. But now: Let’s look at
various innovations and technologies. Caro. E-mobility is a huge topic. There are many start-ups, but the big manufacturers also
have to adapt. But how marketable will that be? I’m asking that today
at Sono Motors in Munich, they developed the first electric solar car
. The first to go into series production. Laurin Hahn
founded the start-up. Is that your good piece? What you see here are our
prototypes of the 1st solar vehicle to be mass produced. An electric car that
recharges itself independently from the sun.
How did you come up with the idea? We
asked ourselves the question, why isn’t the electric car
in the mainstream? Why doesn’t everyone
drive an electric car? The answer was price,
range, and charging infrastructure.
Everyone knows these 3 hurdles about electric cars. We asked ourselves: What should the perfect electric car
look like? The body is
covered with solar cells everywhere. The energy from this is
sufficient for about 30 km, i.e. for city traffic. For the rest, you need
battery power from the socket. Are they well protected? What if someone runs
into me on the side? First, they are flexible. So, you can
cushion a lot more crash impact than with a normal car. Where you immediately have scratches, etc. Of course, if you had an
accident, you can replace them. Do you feel like driving?
– Yes, in any case. I’ve never driven an electric
car.
I’m sitting in the back
because of Corona. Get it right. Full the UFO. Are we loading up here right now? That’s right, what you’re seeing right now
is the solar cells above me. You can see it from below and the
sun is charging the battery. The start-up has been around since 2016. What’s next? Prototypes are coming now,
these are the final prototypes. I’ll show you
what it looks like in production. We’re building it right now. I think we
can take masks off here again. What you see here
is the production in Sweden. The Sion, as her car is called,
is to be built in Sweden, in the former Saab factory. Tesla’s Elon Musk said that
prototyping is one thing, then going into production
is 10 to 100 times harder.
What makes you so sure
that you can do it?
What we’re doing is difficult. We work with partners,
we don’t do it ourselves. Tesla does it himself. We have it produced
by a partner who has been producing cars for 70 years. Former Saab factory. Leave the technology,
the development, to us. We then leave the production to
the experts in Sweden. I have to go there again. It works financially, too, because there
are other manufacturers too. E.g. Dyson, they have ten times as much,
they have invested 500 million. Now the whole thing is on hold
because they believe it will not be commercially
viable. That’s right, Dyson tried
to build a luxury car. Quite a lot of these new
EV startups build luxury cars. And I think that’s the wrong way, we won’t stop climate change with it either. It’s good for getting a
rethink in society. If we want sustainability, we have to make electric mobility
affordable for the general public.
How do you think
the world will look in 20 years? How will mobility change? I believe
it will change radically. We will push the car
further into the background. That’s why it will be more and more
about sharing. That means I will use many different
mobility solutions. And that’s what they’re working on
at Sono Motors, too. The 120 employees
not only developed the solar car, but also a mobility app that
is linked to the car. Your car should be one with
an integrated sharing function, Arif Chaudry,
mobility manager at Sono Motors, tells me. He wants to show me how it works
in downtown Munich. This is where Sono Motors carried out
one of its
car-sharing pilot projects with the residents of a larger apartment building. If you have to clean up somewhere with cars, it’s here. It’s crowded here. You can see that the only thing that gets in each other’s
way is the car.
We have this house here, there
are 12 parties.
6 parties took part in these 12 parties. One of them is Antonia. Hi. – Hi Antonia, howdy.
This is Carol. – Hi. That worked well. I was able to use the car
whenever I needed it. Because for me a car is
a commodity and doesn’t have that much
personal value. And I don’t
need it as a status symbol either, I need it to
get from A to B.
What was different about this app compared to existing car-sharing
apps such as DriveNow? Because it’s always the same car.
I know who else uses this. And then you also
do things like, of course, you take it to the
charging station more than a DriveNow car because you don’t care
who uses it afterward. People who know each other at least a
little and who meet in the hallway from time to time
pay attention to a common good. That’s very good because it brings
our costs down. We don’t have to put as many operating
costs into a car as other car-sharing services
do. So far the city.
But how is it in the country? There, too, the
Sono Motors team is testing whether its idea of modern mobility works
Andreas Fendt is a participant in
this pilot project. He shares the solar car with
a group of other hobby gardeners. Cheaper
than traditional sharing services, according to Sono Motors. I’m very curious to hear
what he says because I’m from the country myself. And without a car, which is always
available, is not easy.
We wanted to ask
how things are going with the pilot project. Great. So far a
few minor things. I saw
that there are 8 registered users but there are only 2, 3 active users. Do you know what could be causing this? Most
people signed up because they
needed a car once in a while. They don’t need them at the moment. Where are the hurdles
in the country? What do you learn
from your friends and acquaintances? People are used to having their car
or not having a car. And that’s kind of
the problem: I have to install an app now,
I have to register somewhere. So once the people are
in the pilots, is
Is it still too complicated for them? They say everything is super easy. Then it’s kind of a barrier, how you get people to
take part in car sharing, that you take these barriers
away from them so that they dare.
We have to think about
something else. Something is happening in e-mobility. But there are still many
open questions. Not just at Sono Motors. Let’s see
what the experts say about it. It must also be about
avoiding, shifting, and optimizing
traffic. A shift
largely to rail, public transport must be strengthened. However, we need a more detailed infrastructure
for loading, which is currently not available. It takes a lot of time to create
and it costs money. Nevertheless, the electric car is a good
and sensible step if it is embedded in a sensible climate
and transport policy. E-mobility
is probably not what many people imagine.
The batteries
are still too inefficient. Too many critical raw materials
are still required for production. In terms of both production
and disposal, the eco-balance still has room for
improvement, I would say. And there comes a point
that we will hear more often. Namely, the electricity for the e-cars
must of course be green electricity, i.e. come from renewable
energies. And 100%
if we want to be climate neutral. OK, next topic. Vacation is one
thing, I also eat meat, very rarely. Maybe once in Ja… I’m Mo… Be frank.
Here is a safe space. Once, once a day? Only once a day. One of the biggest
greenhouse gas emitters is cows. So, oh god, it’s
not the animals’ fault. Meat production,
especially beef. 12 kg of CO2 equivalents is needed for just one kilogram of
beef. But a lot is happening here too. In 2019,
only 5% of Germans stated that they were vegetarian and
1% vegan. But at least
every major fast food chain now has a vegan burger
made from plant protein. Another alternative:
clean meat. Laboratory meat
is grown in a Petri dish.
That’s the basic principle. Muscle stem
cells are taken from a live cow. These stem cells are
cultivated in a nutrient solution and multiply. The stem
cells then become muscle cells again. Muscle cells
become muscle fibers. And in the end, the
artificial meatball for the burger consists of muscle fibers. This burger from a Dutch
company was presented in 2013 and only cost 250,000 euros
. Well, there were also
development costs involved. The company is working on making
it cheaper, like other companies in Japan
, USA, Israel. And perhaps
it should also be said that for such an in-vitro production
in the laboratory, the animal serum is still required
for the nutrient solution of the cells. So
animals still have to die for it. Much less, but there are
now also approaches to making completely vegan laboratory meat.
So: is lab meat the future? From a supply-side perspective
, I would say a big advantage
with in vitro meat is you need a lot less land. Fewer pesticides,
fewer climate-damaging emissions. And this is where such
artificial meat, clean meat, can play a role. On the demand side,
among consumers, there is a bit of a question as to
whether in vitro meat will
get the acceptance it needs. If you look at
the latest polls, things don’t look all that good. Even if there is a
good way to reduce the costs at some point, the production of laboratory meat is
very energy-intensive. And then we would have
the same problem as before. The whole thing is only climate-neutral if the electricity comes from 100%
renewable energies. What would that look like then? So? All over? So far, around half
of the electricity in Germany comes from renewable energies, i.e.
from wind, solar, and hydropower.
The problem with renewables
isn’t that we can’t get enough energy out of
them. The problem is that the energy isn’t available when you want it because the sun isn’t always shining
or the wind isn’t always blowing. When they do, we need to
store the excess energy for later use. There are many approaches for these storage technologies
that also work in principle,
e.g. hydrogen. We’ll get to that in a moment. Being economical
at the same time is great art. But there are other ideas. The waves in the sea, for example. Watch out, the World Energy Council estimates
the energy potential of the waves worldwide at around one terawatt. That’s as much as 700
large nuclear power plants.
There are
just under 450 nuclear power plants worldwide. Companies like NEMOS from Duisburg
are trying to do this. The prototype off the coast
of Belgium works. Small yellow box, 2 times 8 m, later it should, of course, be
larger. However, we also have
the storage problem here, because wave energy
is not constant either. There are waves where I’m going right now,
but it’s
about a different innovation. I am at the Greifswalder Bodden
in the northeast of the country.
*music* Ah, hello. Warm welcome.
– Thanks very much. Hannah König heads
the wind and maritime technology department at the energy group EnBW
. It’s going on the water, to something
new, floating wind power. We take the boat to Nezzy,
that’s what they call the facility. What is so special about this wind turbine
compared to normal,
previous offshore systems? First the obvious. There
are 2 turbines on one foundation. This is the
absolute innovation right here. So far in the
offshore wind industry, when we
talk about classic structures, we call them Fixed
Foundations because they are rammed firmly into the
ground.
Here it is like this,
the support structure on which the wind turbines stand
floats in the water. It’s, as you can imagine,
like a boat. An anchor is simply
thrown out classically. It is less invasive and therefore
much better for flora and fauna. Okay, now it
doesn’t look that small. That’s already 18 m. Does that mean it will be over 200 m? That’s pretty impressive. It’s still a prototype. After further tests in China, floating wind power is to be used
where the water is too deep for conventional offshore wind turbines. I reckon that
could be the case by 2027, ’28. Okay, so in 2027, ’28, there could be
the first floating wind farms. Would that be economical? New technology
has to prove itself first. It is like things
that it is a bit more expensive at the beginning. Because there is still
no industrial supply chain, for example, and series
production has to be set up first. So a lot of
investments are necessary at the beginning.
What does it
take to advance renewable energies
more quickly in Germany? We need clear planning
and action premises, how should things continue in the next few
years? Up until now, politicians have
always paved the way. We’re not allowed to
expand as much as we want. But there are clear quotas that
are made available. We need planning security
over several decades, especially in the offshore wind sector. Floating wind power can only be one piece of the puzzle
in the energy transition.
But maybe soon
a very important one. But could one
even achieve the 100% turnaround with combined innovative strength? In principle, 100% renewable energy is technically and economically
feasible. But, it must also be said that
green electricity is becoming a scarce commodity. Because whatever we do, the electricity demand
will increase tremendously. Many of the resources
that we need for green energy and also for green
application technologies are
generated in other regions of the world.
Whether the copper is in Chile, lithium in Chile, or other raw materials
in Australia or China. There is no
absolutely clean energy. There is the only energy that
is cleaner
than other energy sources in terms of certain pollutants. That means saving energy much
more in the foreground so that we don’t have
to expand so much green electricity. That the old energy world, as we knew it, with a lot of wasted energy, is then also
in the new energy world. We have to do a lot more
to save energy. Roger that. Let’s think further. So far, all approaches have been about
how we avoid CO2.
That is right and important, but it is not enough on its own. Not I say,
but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We need to get at least some
of the CO2 out of the air back out there. The classic way
would be via photosynthesis, i.e. planting trees, which then
convert CO2 from the air into trees. But even there we are limited. We just need areas for it, which of course we
are not allowed to cut down again. But now watch out.
Why only trees that store CO2? Why not stones too? Yes. First things first, May. I’m in beautiful
Switzerland, namely in Hinwil. And now I’m climbing up a
garbage incinerator to be shown something
crazy. Because up here there is something
similar to vacuum cleaners for CO2.
Daniel Egger from Climeworks explains how they work. I have an appointment with him. Vacuum cleaner for CO2.
Can you say it like that? You can say that for sure. With these systems, we take the
CO2 out of the air. And that analogy
is certainly apt. How exactly does this work? It sounds so easy.
Is it easy? The box you see here on the
page, that’s what we call the CO2 collector.
And this collector
has a filter material. What we’re doing is we’re sucking in
the air from this side, through this opening, and we’re letting
the airflow through the filter. Then the CO2
is extracted from the air. If it’s that simple, why aren’t these devices on every corner? In the
air, we have about 400 ppm. That means
we have 400 parts of CO2 for every 1 million parts of air.
And that’s very, very little. And you can compare
that to looking for a needle in a haystack. Doing this on a large scale
is not easy. Of course, you can also
extract the CO2 directly where the concentration is higher,
for example at an industrial chimney. But what to do with it? We see one of our customers
over there. This is a greenhouse.
We have a small CO2 pipeline in this field, where we feed the CO2 directly
into the greenhouse in gaseous form.
That helps
the plants grow there. However
, Climeworks do not only deliver the extracted CO2 to the greenhouse. The CO2 then
goes down through pipes. There it is
stored in large tanks and then picked up by truck
and taken to Coca-Cola. ok, coke Has nothing to do with the
stone Mai spoke of either. And brown soda
and a few greenhouses alone won’t save the climate, of
course. But what do you do with the CO2
if you have no use for it? Is there no point
in pulling it out of the atmosphere because you don’t know where to put it? We have such a situation
in Iceland where we
store the CO2 in the ground.
I’d be happy to show you
what we’re doing there. I.e. this is the 2nd option. Not to use it further,
but to save it? Right, we’re here in Iceland,
near a geothermal power plant, where we get the energy
to run our facility. We also pass on the CO2
that we take out of the air to the
CarbFix geothermal power plant. Our CO2 is then dissolved in the
water, just like sparkling water. This is then
pumped into the ground in these systems here. And then in the ground, it reacts
with the rock. The CO2, we see that here
in this example, the white here was CO2. That reacted,
that turned to stone. I.e. this is normal stone now,
or that stone over there in Iceland, and these white particles,
that used to be CO2 in gaseous form and have now turned into rock and are now
stored in there forever? Exactly, with this
technology, we can lower the concentration of CO2
in the atmosphere again. Technically it all works.
And yet it still sticks. You had a goal.
And that was removing 1% of global CO2
from the atmosphere by 2025. You’ve moved away from that
a bit now. Why? Removing 1% from the atmosphere in such a short time
was probably too ambitious. We have learned
that we need all players to do this, be it politicians
or companies. But also the population,
who participate and make their contribution so that we
can solve this problem. And there are more ideas
with stones, namely with alkaline rocks
such as basalt. You could grate them finely and
sprinkle them on fields. Then the CO2 from the air would be converted into carbonic acid
in the water-rich soil
and bound in the stone.
Interesting idea,
but you would have to get the rock from quarries
and grind it up. That would
not only be damn expensive, but it would also
cost a lot of energy. And now we know what’s coming. This is only useful if the energy
comes from renewable sources. What do the experts say
about these CO2 capture methods? The underground storage potential for
CO2 is also limited, as long as it is
supposed to be safe. And so that’s always
an option to deal with the 5% of
the residual emissions. But we have to implement the 95% emission avoidance
beforehand with other technologies
. Because we
simply cannot avoid some emissions. That’s why we
have to compensate. But do
don’t expect too much from this option either, because the potential is limited. These are complex procedures. Getting rid of CO2 is becoming more expensive, you always have to
say that in fairness. Here in Dresden, a company is working
on another solution for using
or processing CO2. Why not take the CO2
out of the air and
make a fuel out of it, for example? One company has done that,
and here it is.
I’ll let
them explain to me how it works. The name of the company is Sunfire. It is one of the world leaders
in sustainable innovation. Some of the research areas
are top secret. Sunfire owns over 150 patents. I meet company founder Nils Aldag. Hello Mr. Aldag.
– Good morning. We’re not allowed hands,
but you’ll get this from me. Thank you very much. What do we do at Sunfire? We are developing a technology
with which you can make everything out of CO2 and water that we make out of fossil oil
or fossil natural gas today. This cell acts
like a kind of oxygen sieve. This means that if I pass CO2 and H2O
under this cell and apply electricity
from the sun or wind or sun and wind energy,
then I push the oxygen through this membrane
and generate “synthesis gas”. I can use the synthesis gas to
make everything that we now
produce from oil and natural gas. That means you first
tested it very small in the laboratory and then looked at it here on a larger
scale, like a pilot: Can it work?
– It is exactly like that.
In the first system, we stacked 60 of these cells
on top of each other. Today we probably put
30 times that into these containers. I.e. this is the pilot object.
– This is the pilot object. Ultimately, this is where you see
an electrolyzer in all its beauty. Thousands of these cells are contained
in such a system here. In there? – Exactly, they’re stacked on top of each other. In here,
at a temperature of 850°, water and CO2 are
processed into synthesis gas. Where do you get the CO2 from? The CO2 is
absorbed from the atmosphere, i.e.
Captured from the air
and then fed into our process. Ah, we know that from Climeworks. Air filters
pull CO2 out of the air. What can this electrolyzer do? On the one hand, it can produce this
platform molecule to produce fuel or even
food. But he can do
another very exciting thing. And you can
also produce hydrogen with this electrolyzer. Sorry for the
interruption, only briefly. A minute. Hydrogen
is a great source of energy. The federal government wants to invest billions in hydrogen
technologies. For example, you could use it to
produce steel without coal. And hydrogen
can be stored in tanks of any size for any length of time. The only waste product
is water. Great, no question. But where do I get hydrogen from
? From electrolysis of water,
i.e. from water and electricity. There we have the old song again.
All this is only useful
if it is green electricity. And since a lot of energy is lost when
converting green electricity into hydrogen, we still need a lot
of green electricity. From what we know today, it is very clear that we will need large amounts
of hydrogen for many industrial processes. For trucks,
for planes, for heat. So you could make the steel industry
CO2-free. In principle, this is all
technically possible. But here, too,
hydrogen is a scarce resource. Hydrogen is the champagne of
energy carriers. That’s how it should
be used. Very precious for the areas where
we have no other alternative. Say no electrical alternative
such as electromobility or heat pumps in buildings.
But only
where there is no other way. This took a little longer than
1 minute. Back to Carol. Exactly, hydrogen
is only one thing that Sunfire
wants to produce with CO2. What exactly is happening there? This is where the synthesis gas that we had
in the electrolyzer is then converted into fuel. To climate-neutral fuel.
E.g. for cars or airplanes. can I smell it
– Of course. – OK. Okay, doesn’t smell
like regular gasoline. Doesn’t smell good,
but it smells somehow, you smell,
there’s something chemical there. It’s not water.
We can guarantee that. This is the old energy world now. There you can see
the old natural gas storage facility of the city. We have the old world
here, the new world. Clean gases are produced here, which can then be converted
into fuel substitutes. Sunfire’s goal is
to make oil superfluous. It’s probably expensive too, isn’t it
? How much does 1 liter
currently cost in production? You can probably say
that fuel is between 2.50 euros and 3.50 euros
per liter today.
Perspectively, this fuel would be
between one euro and 1.50 euros per liter. You have to compare that
with a fossil fuel price of about 50 cents per liter. It is then taxed
and therefore more expensive. But we are prospectively 2
to 3 times higher than today’s price for petroleum-based products. In the end, it will be 2
to 3 times more expensive. And who should pay for all this?
Good question. Counter-question: Would
regular fuel be so cheap if all the consequential climate damage that we will all have to pay for at some point were included
in the price tag in full
? Wasn’t fossil energy
such as hard coal
subsidized by the state for decades? In a market economy, in particular, don’t things become
cheaper the more they are available? And the experts
say the following: climate change
and global warming are not free.
The consequences
are borne by someone. Those residing in coastal cities, those hit by heavy
rain events. And those who run into fresh water supply
problems. These costs must
be passed on to those who are causing the problem. I believe that one of
the really big challenges we have to face
in climate policy is that we now
actually have to bear the costs caused by
climate policy. In my view, this is
unavoidable. That’s one thing to understand. The other
thing is to pay the higher follow-up costs. Let’s take a look. There is currently no market for green fuel
like the one Sunfire wants to produce. But what about using CO2
to manufacture products that
are you already in demand today? Chemical industry. At first glance, a lot of smoke, and a lot of fossil energy consumption. I’m here in the chemical park in Marl. You have to
wear safety clothes here because you can already
see pipes and chimneys above me. The chemical industry
has a major CO2 problem. Today I want to
ask the chemical giant Evonik how they deal with it. Evonik emits a lot of CO2. In the future, however, the company wants
to use CO2 for the production of chemicals.
The project is called Rheticus,
and Siemens Energy is part of it. The federal government is funding the project
with millions. I’m going to Evonik’s lab now, so I have to put on
this lab coat. This is where the Rheticus project was
developed. This is a type of
chemical photosynthesis. The manager is Mr. Haas,
I’ll let him explain it to me now. Hi. Welcome to the lab.
– Many Thanks. Should I go in?
– Yes. So here you see the beginning
of artificial photosynthesis. Here we go back 3 billion years
in the history of the earth. At that time, nature
had not yet invented natural photosynthesis. The reason was that the Earth’s atmosphere was
very different than it is today. Because we have them in here.
In this tent. This process requires
bacteria that use CO2 as food, so to speak, to
produce other substances. What do you want to make? You
said nature makes leaves and trees through photosynthesis. What do you want to do?
No leaves and trees, right? We want to manufacture chemicals. And 3 billion years ago, nature
converted carbon dioxide.
It was already
in the atmosphere back then and synthesized chemicals. In those days, nature exhaled chemicals,
if you will. Today we breathe out CO2. Back then, nature
converted CO2, with hydrogen by the way,
into chemicals. And that’s what we want to do.
That’s what we want to produce. And what’s happening there?
– Yes. This is where the bacteria work
and produce chemicals such as butanol or hexanol. That’s what we’re focusing on right here. E.g. for what? I can’t
imagine that much of it. e.g. paint raw materials,
e.g. skin care products, care products, total. But also… …scents. There are many markets, and lubricants, in which these chemicals
are already used today.
Siemens Energy is responsible for the necessary energy. It comes from solar cells. Here in the
laboratory for the mini electrolyzer. And next door
a whole size bigger. So this is the bioreactor?
What we saw previously
in the laboratory, namely the manufacture of
the products are done here by a factor of 10,000.
Here we have billions and
billions of bacteria doing the work. Specialty chemicals
sound a bit niche. Is that something that is used a lot,
what do you need a lot? Can you
think of it more broadly? There are applications where these chemicals are
used extensively. We are initially
focusing on specialty chemicals. The reason is that we want to take step 1
with artificial photosynthesis. According to Thomas Haas, it will be
at least 5 years before this works on a large scale. Incidentally, we
only present individual examples here. As you can already see, there is no shortage of innovations that are already technically
possible today.
I want to introduce one more thing to you because it’s crazy. Namely SRM.
The whole thing is called solar radiation management. The idea came up
when a huge cloud
of billions and billions of sulfur particles, around 20 million tons, caused a volcanic eruption to cool the earth
by half a degree. We could do that
ourselves, the researchers thought. Since then, there has been the idea that
airplanes, for example, distribute sulfur particles in the stratosphere, which
then reflect the sun’s rays and thus stop or reverse further warming of
the earth.
Sounds like science fiction. But
this is exactly what is being researched at the renowned Harvard University. The project is called scope.
That’s how the experts see it. We don’t know the long-term consequences
at all. We know climate change
, CO2 emissions in the atmosphere are there
forever, for centuries. Do you then want to leave these technologies
in space for centuries? The question is, can
you get them out of the atmosphere again, and are
the effects on the earth the ones
that you considered and calculated in advance? However, the side effects of this are
so unknown that I would not base any climate protection
strategy on them today.
Many countries would
not offer and put up with that. This will result in considerable
conflicts, up to and including armed conflicts. That was obvious. Nevertheless, the scientists at Harvard want to
investigate how the particles behave. Because they think, well, if
things get tricky somewhere in the future
and you don’t know how else to help yourself,
then at least you have research on such drastic
but quick measures. Okay, but what if we don’t do
anything about climate change and instead
just prepare for it? So give up and adapt? I don’t
see any advantages here, I
only see disadvantages. In my opinion, this is
by far the most expensive option. Because
everything we have discussed now is still cheaper
than allowing climate change. I think it’s
worth fighting for every tenth of a degree. The “continue as before” variant
is not only the most expensive variant, it is also
the riskiest variant. It is
the most misanthropic variant.
Because if we let
unchecked climate change proceed
and that happens, it will lead to enormous upheavals. From extreme climate events
to extreme weather events. Entire regions of the world
are becoming uninhabitable, and nobody wants that. So there’s no question.
Despite all the costs
and efforts, not combating the progression of climate change is still by far
the worst solution. That is if one
can speak of a solution at all, in every respect, environmentally,
economically, and geopolitically.
But, I don’t
know about you, I was blown away by how
many smart and creative innovations there are that are already
technically working today. There is no such thing as a “super solution”
. We need to do a
lot of innovation and change at the same time,
and for the long term. To bundle all this, there are different
political measures. You need
an instrument box, so you need price instruments. The CO2 price
is one of them. In other words, pricing in negative environmental
and climate damage. But you also need
dos and don’ts. One
is technological regulation by banning anything,
by promoting something.
Or there are economic incentives
for pricing CO2. The price of carbon must,
in one way or another, reflect the consequences of climate change that we
allow. And how these costs are
billed in a socially just way is also an important
political question. But as you can see, it’s no longer about chemistry
or physics or engineering. Which technologies we
want to promote, which ones to ban, what incentives we want to set, and how exactly the CO2 price
should be structured. There has to be a political
debate about this. We wanted to provide facts for this important
discussion.
And now it’s your turn. What do you
think? Write in the comments. We are very excited
to read from you. Otherwise, if you would
like to support us, share and like this video. If
you haven’t seen it yet, here’s Part 1: What Does Climate Science
Know? And what not? Other than that,
all I have to say at this point is, on behalf of the whole team, thank you for
looking this far. Take care. Copyright WDR 2021.
