Thampers Media is advocating for climate change and we are having a thrilling discussion with Placid Tchoffor Atongka, Ph.D., energy engineer from Chalmers University. He is also a senior climate and energy researcher with the Rise Research Institute of Sweden, AB.
According to him, politicizing the discourse hampers efforts in the fight against climate change. The researcher also states that the huge forest reserves on the African continent are a blessing but warns that drastic disruption in rainfall over a long period of time could be very devastating.
He argues that if care is not taken, climate change is going to be a major cause of deaths globally. Before we discussed the emergence of full battery electric vehicles, we touched on several climate-related change issues. From the laboratory where he and his team are developing technological solutions to curb greenhouse gas emissions, he first explains what project they are working on. Read on.
Thampers Media: You lead a team of researchers working on the development of technologies for carbon capture, utilization, and storage with industrial residues/wastes as feedstocks. Can we say you have achieved anything this far?
Placid Tchoffor Atongka, Ph.D.: Yes, we are on our way to achieving something big. Climate change is a global challenge and not something that will be solved in a day by a single country or person. The most important thing is that as the years go by, one should feel that one is making a substantial contribution to meeting the global goal of reaching zero-net emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2050. Our contribution to meet this global goal consists in the development of a technology that combines carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration from industrial processes, and sustainable waste management for a climate-safe and resource-efficient world.
Through a technology called mineral carbonation (MC), we use calcium (Ca) and magnesium (Mg)-containing industrial residues/wastes such as metallurgical slags, boiler ash, and mine tailings to sequestrate CO2 from industrial processes. In addition to achieving CO2 sequestration through this technology, valuable products such as precipitated calcium carbonate could be produced and used in other sectors of society such as building construction, pulp, paper, etc. Some of these residues/wastes contain valuable substances such as iron, aluminum, cobalt, etc that could be recovered as a side product from the MC process, purified, and used in other sectors thereby enhancing resource efficiency.
Cobalt for example is a critical metal that is used in many applications such as in rechargeable batteries, automobile airbags, gas turbine engines, etc. The availability of cobalt is very limited–nearly half of the global reserves of cobalt are found in the mines of DR Congo in Africa. The scarcity of cobalt could impede the development of new types of appliances. If one has an appliance in which cobalt has been used, and the cobalt is not recovered from it when the appliance reaches its end of life, society could end up in a situation wherein, the reserves of cobalt in mines in DR Congo and elsewhere are completely depleted. What’s the world going to do?
Thampers Media: Given the importance of this metal, is it not too scary to hear that the world may soon run short of the badly needed cobalt?
It is not scary. Rather it is a driving force for the world to shift from a linear economy to one that is circular. Basically, in a linear economy, whenever a product reaches its end of life, especially in developing countries, it is simply dumped. In a circular economy, when a product reaches its end of life, the product is either used in another application or the building blocks of the product are recovered and used in the production of similar products or other types of products. We must shift from a linear to a circular economy to enable resource efficiency.
Thampers Media: Back to your project that combines CO2 sequestration and waste management. If you compare what happens in other countries with the noticeable haphazard disposal of waste, it does seem like part of your research is to get resources out of any waste.
This project is funded by the Swedish Energy Agency and is focused on carbon capture, utilization, and storage, CCUS. The background to this project is that, in 2015, so many countries gathered in Paris to chart a common way forward that addresses the problems arising from climate change.
They came up with an agreement called the Paris Agreement that aims to limit the global mean temperature increase to well below 2° C above preindustrial levels and to pursue efforts to further limit it to 1.5°C. This has to do with anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 from the combustion of fossil fuels in vehicles or from industrial processes such as cement and steel production. The Paris agreement specifies that each country should take measures to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century.
As a forerunner, the Swedish Government set a goal to reach zero-net emission of greenhouse gases by 2045, and thereafter achieve net negative emissions. This means that all emitters of greenhouse gases such as industries in Sweden should work towards preventing the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Currently, in the European Union, there is a price for CO2 emission (referred to as CO2 emission allowance), and it is rising very fast thereby making it more and more expensive for companies that emit CO2.
In fact, the price for CO2 emission allowance in the EU rose by about 150 % over the past year, reaching an all-time high of nearly 1000 SEK/ton in early 2022. The fast-rising price of CO2 emission allowance puts significant pressure on companies that emit CO2 to look for solutions that can help them to capture and store this gas instead of emitting it into the atmosphere. That’s where our research and development project come in. We are now engaged in the development of technological solutions that can help these industries to capture CO2 from their processes, store and or use it in other applications. It could take some time before these technologies are widely deployed for CO2 sequestration, but we are making significant strides forward.
Thampers Media: Is it not dangerous to capture Co2 and store it somewhere?
CO2 that is captured and stored under ambient conditions as calcium or magnesium carbonate is not dangerous because these carbonates are thermodynamically stable under ambient conditions. It is unlikely for these carbonates to decompose under ambient conditions leading to the re-emission of the stored CO2 into the atmosphere. Even in the case wherein CO2 is captured and stored in geological formations such as old oil fields, there is usually a CO2 monitoring system put in place to see to it that the stored CO2 is not re-emitted back into the atmosphere.
Thampers Media: Is Sweden really making headway in this fight against climate change, and what about other developed countries.?
They are making significant strides forward. The Swedish government is funding a lot of initiatives aimed at meeting Sweden’s climate goal. I think compared to most developed countries; Sweden is doing a lot to fight climate change.
Thampers Media: What about developing countries, say in Africa? How would you assess what they are doing in the fight against climate change?
Despite contributing the least to climate change, Africa is considered the most vulnerable continent to climate change-related problems. For example, if one looks at the global agricultural sector, sub-Saharan Africa accounts for about 90–95 % of global rain-driven agriculture, and close to half of Africa’s workforce is employed in the agricultural sector. This implies that if a drastic disruption in rainfall occurs over a long period of time due to climate change, the effect could be very devastating for Africa.
Despite being the continent that is most vulnerable to climate change-related problems, the awareness of climate change is not as high in Africa as it is in Europe for example. Since climate change is a societal problem, I think that everyone needs to get some information or level of education about it. It is worth saying that some people that may be ignorant of climate change are living in a climate-friendly manner. For example, in many of the villages in Cameroon, it is commonplace to build houses with compressed earth blocks as the main material.
Globally, cement production which is a widely used material in building construction accounts for 8 % of all greenhouse gas emissions. Replacing some (would be difficult to replace all) of the cement used in building construction with alternative materials such as compressed earth blocks goes a long way to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings. Thus, a person that is living in a house built with compressed earth blocks as the main building material is living in a more climate-friendly house than a person whose house has cement as the main building material.
Mr. Solomon, one day, my son who is a grade one pupil here in Sweden came back from school, and I asked him what he learned that day. He replied that their teacher gave them a lecture on climate change and its related problems. Do you know when I first heard of climate change? It was when I was a bachelor’s student at the University of Buea in Cameroon, that was more than 20 years ago. I do not know whether secondary and high school students are taught about climate change nowadays. If you are not aware of a problem, how can you find a cost-efficient and sustainable solution for it? Education on climate change is a key element in finding cost-efficient and sustainable solutions to its related problems.
Thampers Media: There are also talks about using waste to generate electricity, can you elaborate on how that works.?.
Waste could be used to generate electricity through various processes. Examples of these processes include anaerobic digestion, combustion, and gasification. In the anaerobic digestion process, wet organic waste such as food waste, and animal waste decomposes to produce biogas – the main gas components are methane and CO2. This gas can be combusted in a gas engine to generate electricity. The gas can also be used as cooking gas or even upgraded to fuel for vehicles. All the people in developing countries who have pit toilets essentially produce biogas–at times unaware.
In China, people who own pit toilets have a way of collecting biogas from them for their personal use. In Sweden municipalities want residents to separate food waste from others to enable them to produce biogas from the waste–compost could also be produced as a byproduct for agricultural purposes. For dry organic waste, combustion and gasification could be applied to generate electricity. Regarding combustion, the waste is burnt at high temperatures (typically above 700°C). The generated heat is used to generate high-temperature steam.
Thereafter, the steam is expanded in a turbine to generate electricity. Regarding gasification, waste is heated at high temperatures (typically above 700°C) in oxygen-deficient air or in steam to produce combustible gases–e.g., hydrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide. These gases can later be combusted in gas engines to generate electricity. Most municipalities in Sweden produce part of their electricity from waste. The linear economy wherein end-of-life products are simply dumbed is something of the past for Sweden. The circular economy is what is being practiced here.
That is end-of-life products are either used in other applications or the entire product or parts of the product are recovered to make a new product that is like the old product or a completely different product. I used to work in Douala and see lots of plastic bags and containers lying everywhere. It is rare to find that in Sweden or some of these industrialized countries. They collect these things and reproduce new plastics or generate electricity and heat from them.
Thampers Media: Are we not going to get into a situation where climate change is going to be a major cause of deaths globally?
It is very clear that if each country in the world does not act, then we are going to get there. That’s for sure. It’s only people who don’t want to accept the reality that will say otherwise. I actually came across an article published on Bloomberg.com which stated that climate change is linked to 5 million deaths per year. As I earlier said, climate change is not a problem that can be solved by only one country or a group of countries. All countries in the world need to be engaged in finding solutions to climate change because it is a global problem with global consequences. There is no guarantee that CO2 emitted (e.g., from a car) in a specific country will remain in that country and cause climate change only in that country.
*Part two of our interview focuses on the emergence of Battery Eclectic Vehicles, BEVs one of the major efforts in the fight against climate change. Petroleum-producing countries may face serious economic challenges as you can read in the interview here.
Interviewed by Solomon Amabo
