Stefano Passerini, Professor
Our society is facing a millennial challenge to slow down global warming below 2 °C in the long term.[1] Ambitious policy frameworks and policy intentions are a must to achieve this target. In fact, analyzing the status quo, International Energy Agency (IEA) concluded that the related carbon dioxide trajectories are not compatible with the climate targets, even if current policy commitments and pledges by governments are implemented.[2,3] The challenging issues are the limited use of renewables, merely considered for power generation, but only marginally addressing other carbon-intensive industrial sectors (e.g., cement, steel, smelting), and the practical reduction of CO2 emissions from the transport sector.
Reactive metal-based storage systems are a new alternative to support the clean energy transition. Herein, the cases of Al and Na are presented, both preliminarily fulfilling the constraints regarding sustainability, but employing two rather different processes. Both, the steam combustion of molten Al for H2 and heat production,[4,5] and a new rechargeable battery, which makes use of seawater and sodium as electrodes, show promising round-trip efficiencies.[6] The latter technology also allows CO2-trapping, desalination, Na metal, and chlorine production. It is argued that further research efforts are needed to verify the sustainability and ability of reactive metal-based technologies to compete with other storage technologies.
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References
[1] Report of the Conference of the Parties on its Twenty-First Session, held in Paris from 30 November to 13 December 2015, FCCC/CP/2015/10/ Add.1, United Nations Framework on Climate Change, United Nations, New York 2016.
[2] International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2016, International Energy Agency, Paris 2016.
[3] International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2019, International Energy Agency, Paris 2019.
[4] H. Ersoy, M. Baumann, L. Barelli, A. Ottaviano, L. Trombetti, M. Weil, S. Passerini, Adv. Mater. Technol. 2022, 2101400.
[5] L. Barelli, M. Baumann, G. Bidini, P. A. Ottaviano, R. V. Schneider, S. Passerini, L. Trombetti, Energy Technol. 2020, 8, 2000233.
[6] Y. Kim, M. Kuenzel, D. Steinle, X. Dong, G.-T. Kim, A. Varzi, S. Passerini, Energy Environ. Sci., 2022, 15, 2610.
So we have Stefano pasini online uho nice to see you uh he is professor at Kaz institute for technology and hhos Institute of om and he will present us reactive medals for the energy transition today h the floor is yours Stefano please go ahead whenever you
Ready okay I just want to make it clear that I’m no longer professor at K because I retired but I’m kind of senior fellow right now and with respect to the previous speaker I I’m always talking about electrochemical energy storage or similar kind but I’m more looking at the
Larger scale so what I will talk today about is the use of reactive metals which include many of the metals mentioned by the Rev speaker for energy storage but may be used in a different way so you know we have in Europe this big Target of the carbon izing
Completely um the the energy sector and uh in spite of many discussion I’m Italian so in Italy still there are a lot of concerns but actually renewable energy available in Europe are more than sufficient for the EU need the only real problem is that uh uh you know uh PV is
Usually stronger in winter when uh sorry in summer when is strongly more strong in winter but nonetheless there is not uh a full coverage along the year and what we have recently calculated you can go and look at the numbers in the sided Publications is that to be sure that we
Will have energy for next winter we need to store somewhere 1,270 ter hour this is for the entire European Union okay it’s a big number and this is based on the the Assumption the primary energy need the efficiency uh of of energy storage power power grid losses and so
On okay so what we really need in Europe is to establish a huge energy storage system right now we are using oil and gas whenever we need but this is not going to uh work in the future if we want to get rid of them I have to say
That more than 100 years ago a German scientist Oswald who watched got the Nobel priz propos this sentence which I really like it okay the path leading to the solution of the most difficult of all technological question the delivery of cheap energy bu be discovered by electrochemistry obviously I like it
Because I’m an electrochemist but anyway I mean electrochemistry and batteries you have seen the previous presentation are already doing very well practically uh you know they solve the transportation maybe right now the um range of EV is still limited to maybe 300 400 500 kilometers depending on the
Car but you know the technological development of batteries lithium ion batteries first of all and then maybe the new chemistries that are coming will solve the problem and this is already demonstrated I mean the first quarter 2023 Tesla Model y was the most sold car worldwide in August 23 already 20 new
Per of new cars in the EU were electric vehicles in September and this is something we should really consider more than 1 million EVS were produced in China and then there is a news I got this morning actually added to my presentation is that shell decide to close the hydrogen refueling station in
California after having closed those in the UK so this is a I would say a clear indication that batteries have solved the problem of Transportation they are also doing very good in terms of storage energy storage okay it’s a fast grow I mean in Germany I have the numbers for Germany the home
Storage capacity doubled in one year and it’s already accounted accounting to 30% of the German pump Dyer storage okay so in a couple of years there will be more energy stored in in in houses on lithium ion batteries mostly than in in the in the um German pump Hydro storage system
Okay nonetheless we are always talking about different numbers okay you see here we are talking about gigawatt hour but what I mentioned before were 1,270 terawatt hour these are orders of manone to D okay many order so money so conventional batteries cannot address this problem a few