SaltWire’s Aaron Beswick wrote recently about the plan to turn Point Tupper into a green hydrogen hub without raising any questions about the viability of the scheme from a scientific perspective, and I suspect that’s how the coverage of this latest Strait Area mega-project is going to go.
Beswick spoke to Trent Vichie, the private equity guy whose newly formed company, EverWind, is behind the project, but didn’t press him on the “specifics” of the plan to build windfarms to generate electricity to extract hydrogen from water then turn the hydrogen into ammonia for shipping. Instead, we’re told there is nitrogen all around us in the air, followed by this fabulous bit of handwavium:
That’s where Vichie intends to get his nitrogen to combine in a series of processes powered by wind turbines with the hydrogen he’ll make from water.
If you read the Spectator‘s coverage of the issue, which involved speaking to former chemical engineer Paul Martin, co-founder of the Hydrogen Science Coalition, then you’ll know the process of creating hydrogen from water is extremely inefficient (and therefore expensive), that transporting hydrogen is difficult and that, according to Martin, hydrogen makes no sense as a fuel. Martin says lobbyists have been calling hydrogen the “Swiss Army Knife” of energy and the analogy is actually apt because:
…while a Swiss Army knife is handy in a pinch, it is rarely the optimal tool for any task relative to using the tools actually DESIGNED for those tasks. It also costs a lot relative to other knives, and takes up a lot of space in your pocket.
Martin allows that producing green hydrogen to turn into ammonia for fertilizer does make sense, although probably not in Nova Scotia, and he doubts hydrogen will be used for many of the purposes (fuel for ships, trains and big trucks) catalogued by former Cumberland-Colchester MP Bill Casey, who pops up in Beswick’s piece promoting the use of Bay of Fundy tidal power (which we have yet to successfully harness) as a source of green electricity for hydrogen production instead of as a source of green electricity to replace the fossil fuels that produce 60% of this province’s power.
Martin actually compares hydrogen to this particular Swiss Army Knife, the Wenger 16999 Giant which ” It costs $1400, weighs 7 pounds, and is a suboptimal tool for just about every purpose!”
This touches on one of Martin’s main points: the few situations in which hydrogen will be viable as a fuel are always described as “hard-to-decarbonize” sectors, like steel and cement-making. But why start with the difficult stuff instead of focusing on what he called the “low-hanging fruit?” Why not invest in renewable electricity for heating and transportation?
Why revive the dream of Nova Scotia becoming an energy-exporting province instead of focusing on “electrifying everything” here?
Follow the money
Part of the reason, which Beswick also fails to mention, is undoubtedly the federal tax incentive for green hydrogen. Why else would New York-based Vichie suddenly be prepared to put “somewhere in the order of a billion dollars” into a facility in Nova Scotia?
“We’re financed, it’s possible we bring partners in but right now we’ve got the money we need to get the project ready to construction,” said Vichie.
“We’ll either put the construction money in ourselves or, well that’s not something I’m so much worried about. A lot of people who want to buy products want to take equity in these projects.”
Close your eyes and squint and you’d swear you were listening to Barry Sheehy airily assuring us that securing the financing for the $1.5 billion Novaporte container terminal in Sydney was going to be the “easy” part. Vichie becomes even more Sheehy-esque when he says:
If we can demonstrate that it can be done here, that people are supportive in this area, [emphasis mine] then there’s a future … We have this really interesting asset that will allow us get to market faster, try and plant a green hydrogen flag.
He’s just moments away from advising us not to trash-talk the project at Tim Hortons.
To his credit, Beswick does introduce a litany of failed Strait area mega-projects near the end of his article but, unfortunately, he chooses to neutralize these with the assurance that Vichie “knows dollars and cents.”
In 2011 he co-founded Stonepeak, which by the time he retired from it last year at 46 years old, had raised and deployed more than $20 billion to build energy, transportation and communication infrastructure around North America.
Vichie knows how to make himself rich; that’s not comforting, that should make us all doubly wary.
The Hydrogen Science Coalition advises governments to “consult independent experts alongside the energy industry [and I would add “the finance industry”] who stand to benefit from these policies, on the development of a hydrogen sector.”
But, what the hell, you could just listen to the energy industry:
Both have Premier Tim Houston and former Cumberland-Colchester MP Bill Casey as backers.
“We have incredible potential here in Nova Scotia to be a leader in green hydro and green ammonia,” Houston told SaltWire on Friday.
“Our proximity to the Bay of Fundy. Our pretty phenomenal wind speeds. We have a lot of natural advantages… if you look out 10 years, Nova Scotia could be a real leader globally in the production of green hydrogen and green ammonia.”
Scent of a Sewer
Keeping to the theme of things that just smell bad, I was sitting in the living room of my home in Sydney’s North End recently, trying to figure out how to make a cushion cover (a story for another day) when I began to notice my house smelled faintly…stinky.
I got up and searched all over, beginning with the usual culprits—the fridge, the composting bin and the litter boxes. But the bin was empty, there wasn’t anything rotting in the fridge and even the litter boxes weren’t to blame.
I literally scoured the house from top to bottom trying to find the source of the scent and then I happened to step outside and I realized that a) what I was smelling seemed to be sewage and b) the smell was all over the North End.
In a serious reporter fail, I didn’t follow up on this once the smell had dissipated, but it returned a few days later and I noticed a Charlotte Street store owner complaining about it on Twitter, so I asked the CBRM about it and spokesperson Christina Lamey told me on Tuesday:
Last week our public works looked into all of our sites to see if any of our facilities or treatment plant operations were the source, but found nothing.
I haven’t smelled anything lately, but will continue to monitor the situation.
