Greenify 95: Nuclear, Green Steel & Nickel
January 27, 2023
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📌 Fact of the week
Global warming is directly impacting supply chains and consumption: the Panama Canal is experiencing a severe drought, which led to a bottleneck of cargo ships
Hottest news of the week…
Regulation 🗃 – The UK’s nuclear issues
What happened: Earlier in January, the UK government had been quite vocal on its ambitions to increase nuclear penetration in the country. Concretely, the British government aims to speed up action on new nuclear projects by introducing a time frame requiring an investment decision every five years from 2030 to 2044, as well as aiming to install 24GW of nuclear capacity by 2050, vs existing capacity at 6GW today. While targets are encouraging though, some companies are having a tough time to make their projects work…⛔
Zoom out: French utility company EDF has, once again, delayed the start date on its 3.2-gigawatt (GW) Hinkley Point C reactor in the UK. The reactor is now set to start in 2029. The project has already been delayed four times and is now estimated to cost between £31 billion and £34 billion. Labour availability, materials shortage, inflation and stricter regulation requirements on construction imposed by the British government were cited as the reasons for the further delay.💸
Business 💰 – H2 Green Steel
What happened: H2 Green Steel, a Swedish start-up trying to decarbonize steel making, has secured €6.5 billion in debt to finance its fist-of-a-kind plant in Boden, North Sweden. The company is yet to take a Final Investment Decision (FID), which should arrive soon, but in the meantime it has secured the money to go ahead. The plant should become operational by 2027, but the green steel is already sold out to major customers like Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Scania!
Zoom out: Steel making is extremely bad for the environment, accounting for an impressive ~7% of global emissions! H2 Green Steel is trying to decarbonize steel making by substituting coal with green hydrogen to decarbonize the extraction of iron from iron ore, and is powering the furnaces with renewables. H2GS’ overall process emits ~40kg of CO2 per tons of steel compared to the ~1800kg of traditional steelmaking!
Innovation 💡 - Minnesota’s nickel bet
What happened: The MIT Download zooms in on a very interesting mining discovery in Minnesota. In fact, Talon Metals has uncovered in Minnesota one of America’s densest nickel deposits and now it wants to begin tunneling deep into the rock to extract hundreds of thousands of metric tons of it. The reason this matters is because nickel is used to make batteries in electric vehicles. Tesla, for instance, has already agreed to purchase tens of thousands of metric tons of the metal from this mine. 🔋
Zoom out: The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) signed in August 2022 is arguably the largest scheme globally when it comes to subsidies towards “green” industries. According to the MIT Download, the products generated with the raw nickel that would flow from this one mining project could theoretically net more than $26 billion in subsidies, just through federal tax credits. 💸
Deep dives of the week…
Chart of the week - Nickel in EVs
According to Bloomberg, nickel is the metal which will see the largest demand growth as electric vehicles replace internal combustion engine powered cars. To ensure electric vehicles remain affordable, available supply of these metals is key. We discuss above how a nickel mine in Minnesota could support battery technology.
Source: Bloomberg
Deal of the week - Direct Ocean Capture (DOC)!
Captura, a company which we have already talked about in previous Greenify editions is finally booming (only thanks to Greenify’s endorsement)! Captura is a spin out from the California Technology Institute which has developed a proprietary technology to capture the CO2 in the sea. The company has just raised ~€20 million to commercialize its technology from investors like ENI Next and Maersk Growth.
What’s so cool about this start-up?
The ocean is rich of CO2, as it naturally draws down ~30% of the global CO2 emissions. Captura has developed a technology to capture the CO2 by doing the following steps:
Some sea water is extracted and renewable electricity is used to split the salt and the water into an acid and an alkali base, in a process called electrodialysis.
The acid base is then used to extract the CO2, which can then be stored permanently or reused.
The acidic decarbonized water will be released back in the sea and restored by adding the Alkali base.
This decarbonized water will now be naturally ready to absorb the missing CO2, creating an interesting CO2 capture cycle!
👋 See you next Friday, for the best sum up of this coming week!
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