Talk about a huge coincident. Earlier (two days ago, yesterday, I forget) I posted a note about "blue hydrogen" and North Dakota.
Now, this morning, this popped up on twitter: Saudi Aramco bets on blue hydrogen exports ramping up from 2030. Link here.
Saudi Aramco outlined plans to invest in blue hydrogen as the world
shifts away from dirtier forms of energy, but said it will take at least
until the end of this decade before a global market for the fuel is
developed.
“We’re going to have a large share” of the market for
blue hydrogen, Aramco’s chief technology officer, Ahmad Al-Khowaiter,
said in an interview on Sunday in Dhahran, eastern Saudi Arabia, where
the company’s based. “The scale up isn’t going to happen before 2030.
We’re not going to see large volumes of blue ammonia before then.”
Hydrogen
is seen as crucial to slowing climate change since it emits no harmful
greenhouse gases when burned. The blue form of the fuel is made from
natural gas, with the carbon emissions generated in the conversion
process being captured. The hydrogen is sometimes converted again into
ammonia to allow it to be transported more easily between continents.
The
state energy firm may end up spending roughly $1 billion on capturing
carbon for every 1 million tons of blue ammonia produced, Khowaiter
said. That would exclude the expense of producing the gas, he said.
********************************
Back to the Bakken
Active rigs:
$73.02
| 6/28/2021 | 06/28/2020 | 06/28/2019 | 06/28/2018 | 06/28/2017 |
|---|
| Active Rigs | 22 | 9 | 61 | 66 | 58 |
No wells coming off the confidential list.
RBN energy: why everyone is talking about renewable diesel, part 5.
Renewable diesel is a popular topic in the transportation fuel space,
and for good reason. For one, RD provides a lower-carbon,
renewable-based alternative to petroleum-based diesel; for another, it’s
a chemical twin of and therefore a “drop-in” replacement for ultra-low
sulfur diesel. But, most of all, there are the large financial
incentives provided by California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, the U.S.
Renewable Fuel Standard, the U.S. Biodiesel Tax Credit, and other
programs, which can make RD production highly profitable. Driven by
these factors, there’s a lot of renewable diesel production capacity
under construction or on the drawing board: everything from greenfield
projects to expansions of existing RD refineries to conversions of
old-school refineries so they can make RD. Today, we put the spotlight
on RD and discuss how it differs from biodiesel, how it’s produced, and
the new RD capacity coming online in North America.
Our blog series on low carbon fuel policies in the U.S. and Canada
has garnered a lot of attention. There’s no doubt about it, energy folks
want to learn all they can about alternative fuels, including the
impact that low carbon fuel standard (LCFS) programs could have on
refined products markets. To quickly recap what we’ve said so far, in Part 1
we provided an overview of various policies that have been adopted to
reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the transportation sector,
such as fuel economy standards, renewable blending requirements, zero
emission vehicle mandates, and LCFS programs in locations such as
California, Oregon, British Columbia, and Canada generally via its Clean
Fuel Standard.
In Part 2,
we focused on California’s LCFS, which was implemented in January 2011
and which grew out of a number of earlier efforts there to improve air
quality and, more recently, reduce GHG emissions. The LCFS assigns a
carbon intensity (CI) target value for petroleum-based gasoline and
diesel fuels, as well as their substitutes, such as ethanol, biodiesel,
and renewable diesel. (CI is an assessment of the GHG emissions
associated with producing, distributing, and consuming a fuel, and is
measured in grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per megajoule, or gCO2e/MJ.)
The LCFS then sets maximum CI limits on finished gasoline and diesel
fuel consumed in California each year on a gradually declining scale to
meet the 2030 goal of a 20% reduction in the carbon intensity of motor
fuels consumed in the state.
In Part 3,
we turned our attention to ethanol, the use of which in gasoline has
been prevalent for many years. Ethanol is a biofuel that is found in
nearly 98% of the gasoline purchased at retail stations in the U.S., in
most cases accounting for 10% of the gasoline at the pump. This
high-octane biofuel has grown in popularity around the world,
particularly over the last 20 years, due to regulations that require or
incentivize its use. As governments continue to evaluate regulations to
control GHG emissions, ethanol has been overshadowed by some other
biofuels lately, but it is expected to continue to play an important
role as a pathway for meeting low-carbon mandates. Last time, in Part 4,
we looked at biodiesel. We noted that while the incentives for
producing biodiesel are substantial, there are two big catches with the
fuel: a limited supply of feedstocks and properties limiting how much
can be blended with petroleum-based diesel.
And that’s a perfect segue to renewable diesel, which has no such
“blend wall” — and which has been receiving a lot of press the past
couple of years, including in the RBN blogosphere. In Playin’ by the Rules
in December 2019, we covered some of the basics behind RD and noted
that at the time about 2.9 billion gallons per year (gal/yr) of RD
production capacity was either in operation or under development in the
U.S. and Canada. Today, the amount of operating and planned RD capacity
is 7.2 billion gal/yr, or 2.5 times where we stood a year and a half
ago. Last July, in Green Grow the (Refineries),
we zeroed in on HollyFrontier’s plan to shut down its petroleum-based
Cheyenne, WY, refinery and convert it into an RD facility. Here we are
in the summer of 2021 and the excitement around RD has not waned — if
anything, the momentum toward low carbon transportation fuels in
general, and RD in particular, has accelerated.
Renewable diesel, like biodiesel, is a biomass-based fuel that can be
burned in diesel engines or used as home heating oil. However, there
are unique aspects of RD that have given it an edge over biodiesel as a
substitute for petroleum-based ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD. Renewable diesel meets or exceeds the fuel specifications of ULSD, thus
is considered a “drop-in” replacement, whereas biodiesel (from FAME, or
fatty acid methyl ester) is typically limited to blends of 5% (a
diesel/biodiesel blend known as B5) to 20% (a.k.a. B20). In fact, unlike
biodiesel, which has poor cold-flow properties and risk of
contaminants, RD generally has a higher cetane value (an octane-like
measurement of diesel and diesel alternatives) than ULSD, promotes more
complete combustion and higher engine efficiency, and has comparable or
better cold-flow properties than petroleum-based diesel.
Much more at the link.
