Mark Jacobson, of Stanford and the Solutions Project, has added another technology to his WWS (wind, water, sun) recipe for net zero. He doubles down on the “no new technology needed” theme by a delightful encomium to Bronze Age inventors: fire bricks. https://cleantechnica.com/2024/08/05/stanford-study-supports-use-of-fire-bricks-for-process-heat/ These are simply clay bricks of specific compositions fired at high temperatures to vitrify them. They have been used for centuries to line kilns, blast furnaces and other environments where you need high temperatures. Jacobson‘s proposal is to use them for storing heat to run industrial processes, added and removed by simple air fans. The raw materials are abundant, the technology is brain-dead simple, and the bricks last a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_brick
Wikipedia gives the originator of modern fire bricks as William Weston Young in the Neath Valley of Wales, in 1822. Of course he was just systematizing a practice going back 3,000 years, to the very beginning of metallurgy in the Bronze Age. China had blast furnaces under the Han dynasty. We should add the kiln to the very short list of truly revolutionary inventions, for without sustained high temperatures – hotter than achievable in an open fire - the smelting of metals is SFIK impossible.
You have to hand it to the Neolithic metallurgists. What they invented was not in the least an incremental development of stone tools, but something entirely new, with a lot of moving parts. First they had to find copper ore, and work out how to smelt it to make cooking pots, jewellery and mirrors – copper is too soft for weapons and sickles. Then they had to find tin ore, which is uncommon, and required long-distance trade to the few mines. Tin by itself is not very useful, though you can improve copper cooking pots by lining them with tin, and make better mirrors. Finally they needed some very long-shot experiments alloying copper and tin. Miraculously, what you get is bronze: a superb metal, very hard, resistant to corrosion, taking a sharp edge, and indefinitely recyclable. Bronze is still, in spite of the high cost, the material of choice today for ships’ propellers and large cast sculptures. The introduction of bronze was not an unmixed blessing. The superiority of bronze weapons and armour promoted the rise of a caste of professional warriors, like Homer’s Achilles and his Myrmidon followers, against whom peasants armed with stone weapons stood no chance. We are still living with the after-effects of this social revolution into hierarchy, which has outlasted several changes in the technology of conflict, from bronze spears to cheaper steel to warships, guns and planes. Early furnaces were very inefficient and gobbled up vast quantities of wood, which bronze axes made easier to cut, leaning to the mass deforestation of Mediterranean hillsides lamented by Plato (Critias 111).
A footnote: bronze statues from antiquity are rare, compared to marble ones, and most of them come from shipwrecks. The reason is that a bronze sculpture in a city, unlike a marble one, is a standing invitation to recyclers in need of weapons or wanting to honour a new leader or divinity. The sea floor is much safer.
Lignin and cellulose together make up almost all of the ingredients of wood, but versatile cellulose gets all the love. It interestingly forms tubes through which a plant’s vital fluids circulate, especially water and sugars. Bacteria, fungi, and animals can eat cellulose, which humans can exploit for biofuels. Lignin just sits there, a brown glue holding plants together, offering he negative virtues of hardness, stiffness and resistance to attack. It is no use in paper-making, so 100mt of the stuff is produced every year, treated as nearly worthless, and simply burnt as a cheap fuel for sawmills and paper mills. A team of American researchers at NREL have a clever idea to tweak lignin into a form where it can replace synthetic epoxy in the small but operational niche of high-spec epoxy concrete. https://cleantechnica.com/2024/08/05/nrel-researchers-pave-the-way-for-carbon-negative-concrete/ The press release is light on details, but a quick search on Google Scholar (+lignin +epoxy +concrete) suggests that processed lignin is an active subfield of materials science.
The one snag I can see is that 100mt is not a big number in the global cement industry, which makes 4 bn tons a year of the stuff. Even if all the available lignin were diverted into the quasi-epoxy substitute, it would barely dent the cement emissions problem. Still, a million tons here, a million tons there, and pretty soon you are talking real cuts.
"We demand more mutually beneficial market transactions between consenting adults that do not create any untaxed/unsubsidized negative/positive externalities (with some exceptions for transactions in addictive substances and services) and for some of the income generated from those mutually beneficial transactions taxed with a progressive consumption taxes and the revenues used for redistribution and for purchase of public goods whose expenditures pass an NPV>0 test when inputs and outputs are valued at Pigou tax/subsidy inclusive prices!"
Two nice items of green tech news today.
Mark Jacobson, of Stanford and the Solutions Project, has added another technology to his WWS (wind, water, sun) recipe for net zero. He doubles down on the “no new technology needed” theme by a delightful encomium to Bronze Age inventors: fire bricks. https://cleantechnica.com/2024/08/05/stanford-study-supports-use-of-fire-bricks-for-process-heat/ These are simply clay bricks of specific compositions fired at high temperatures to vitrify them. They have been used for centuries to line kilns, blast furnaces and other environments where you need high temperatures. Jacobson‘s proposal is to use them for storing heat to run industrial processes, added and removed by simple air fans. The raw materials are abundant, the technology is brain-dead simple, and the bricks last a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_brick
Wikipedia gives the originator of modern fire bricks as William Weston Young in the Neath Valley of Wales, in 1822. Of course he was just systematizing a practice going back 3,000 years, to the very beginning of metallurgy in the Bronze Age. China had blast furnaces under the Han dynasty. We should add the kiln to the very short list of truly revolutionary inventions, for without sustained high temperatures – hotter than achievable in an open fire - the smelting of metals is SFIK impossible.
You have to hand it to the Neolithic metallurgists. What they invented was not in the least an incremental development of stone tools, but something entirely new, with a lot of moving parts. First they had to find copper ore, and work out how to smelt it to make cooking pots, jewellery and mirrors – copper is too soft for weapons and sickles. Then they had to find tin ore, which is uncommon, and required long-distance trade to the few mines. Tin by itself is not very useful, though you can improve copper cooking pots by lining them with tin, and make better mirrors. Finally they needed some very long-shot experiments alloying copper and tin. Miraculously, what you get is bronze: a superb metal, very hard, resistant to corrosion, taking a sharp edge, and indefinitely recyclable. Bronze is still, in spite of the high cost, the material of choice today for ships’ propellers and large cast sculptures. The introduction of bronze was not an unmixed blessing. The superiority of bronze weapons and armour promoted the rise of a caste of professional warriors, like Homer’s Achilles and his Myrmidon followers, against whom peasants armed with stone weapons stood no chance. We are still living with the after-effects of this social revolution into hierarchy, which has outlasted several changes in the technology of conflict, from bronze spears to cheaper steel to warships, guns and planes. Early furnaces were very inefficient and gobbled up vast quantities of wood, which bronze axes made easier to cut, leaning to the mass deforestation of Mediterranean hillsides lamented by Plato (Critias 111).
A footnote: bronze statues from antiquity are rare, compared to marble ones, and most of them come from shipwrecks. The reason is that a bronze sculpture in a city, unlike a marble one, is a standing invitation to recyclers in need of weapons or wanting to honour a new leader or divinity. The sea floor is much safer.
Lignin and cellulose together make up almost all of the ingredients of wood, but versatile cellulose gets all the love. It interestingly forms tubes through which a plant’s vital fluids circulate, especially water and sugars. Bacteria, fungi, and animals can eat cellulose, which humans can exploit for biofuels. Lignin just sits there, a brown glue holding plants together, offering he negative virtues of hardness, stiffness and resistance to attack. It is no use in paper-making, so 100mt of the stuff is produced every year, treated as nearly worthless, and simply burnt as a cheap fuel for sawmills and paper mills. A team of American researchers at NREL have a clever idea to tweak lignin into a form where it can replace synthetic epoxy in the small but operational niche of high-spec epoxy concrete. https://cleantechnica.com/2024/08/05/nrel-researchers-pave-the-way-for-carbon-negative-concrete/ The press release is light on details, but a quick search on Google Scholar (+lignin +epoxy +concrete) suggests that processed lignin is an active subfield of materials science.
The one snag I can see is that 100mt is not a big number in the global cement industry, which makes 4 bn tons a year of the stuff. Even if all the available lignin were diverted into the quasi-epoxy substitute, it would barely dent the cement emissions problem. Still, a million tons here, a million tons there, and pretty soon you are talking real cuts.
My "Neo-Social Democracy" manifesto: :)
"We demand more mutually beneficial market transactions between consenting adults that do not create any untaxed/unsubsidized negative/positive externalities (with some exceptions for transactions in addictive substances and services) and for some of the income generated from those mutually beneficial transactions taxed with a progressive consumption taxes and the revenues used for redistribution and for purchase of public goods whose expenditures pass an NPV>0 test when inputs and outputs are valued at Pigou tax/subsidy inclusive prices!"