DDE, Geoinformatics, and the Emerging Economies

Parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia do not have electricity for their citizens, or to develop strong economies. In 2016, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia had approximately 600 million and 200 million people respectively with no access to electricity, while in the developed world this figure was negligible. Where will the power for the emerging economies come from and how will we ensure that it is low carbon, available when it is needed, and affordable? This is the subject of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7; UN 2016), which aims to ‘ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy’. It also involves geoscience, geoscience data and is the subject of research through the Deep-time Digital Earth program of the International Union of Geological Sciences.

Fig. 1. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) and its relationship to other SDGs. Modified from Stephenson (2021)

Forecasts of how the world’s energy will be supplied are being produced all the time and are a useful way to think about how SDG7 might be achieved. A recent forecast by the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC 2020) is for 2050. Their 2050 forecast shows a big shift from fossil fuels to renewables electricity. The key for this shift is not the cost of renewable electricity, which is already (often) lower than new fossil fuel power station electricity, but the cost of balancing supply and demand due to intermittency.

The ETC forecast suggests that a lot of industries will be electrified by 2050, but that steel, chemicals and cement will need hydrogen and some fossil fuel for power. This use of fossil fuels will mean that carbon capture and storage will be needed to dispose of CO2 generated, but also to deal with CO2 produced by the manufacture of hydrogen. The forecast also suggests that transport will be dominated by battery electric vehicles, except shipping which will be powered by ammonia (a hydrogen carrier), and aircraft powered by low carbon biofuels. The key to electrification of cars will be batteries whose main ingredients are metals like lithium and cobalt from rocks.

For many of these technologies and new fuels predicted for 2050, geoscience is important because they rely in some way on the subsurface – the rocks under our feet – to make them work (Stephenson 2021). Carbon capture and storage – where CO2 is captured in industrial settings, piped to the subsurface and disposed of – relies on understanding geology intimately. Already, geologists who would have once been interested in working in oil and gas are thinking about careers in a new CCS industry and the data that will be needed. A variant on CCS called bioenergy and carbon capture and storage (BECCS) may be the only effective ‘negative emissions’ technology if we want to accelerate the race against global warming. Again, geoscience expertise, trained geologists and geoscience data will be needed for this technology.

In the case of the hydrogen economy – where hydrogen replaces coal, oil and gas as a fuel – geoscience is vital because huge increases in the use of hydrogen will require enormous amounts of hydrogen storage to deal with seasonal, and other variations, in demand. At present, this scale of storage is only feasible in salt rocks so we need geological data about the location and properties of salt rocks. Similarly, understanding of rocks under our cities will be needed if we want to harness geothermal to heat our homes, or perhaps in the tropical emerging economies to cool our homes. We may use rocks under cities in the future to store summer heat – or industrial heat – to be used in the winter when we need it more. We may use old coalmines in previously industrialised areas as a source for warm or cool water for air-conditioning homes and schools.

The mix of energy will be different in the emerging economies like Africa and the more developed world, for example in North America, Europe or China. Different countries have different natural resources, different industries, different heating and cooling requirements for houses, different amounts of space for development – and of course different geology. Some parts of the world have excellent rocks like sedimentary basins and deep saline aquifers suitable for carbon capture and storage. Others are well set up for geothermal because their rocks have high heat flow. Countries with hot climates may require lots of new low carbon technologies for air conditioning like cooling from the earth. Some countries are suited for hydroelectric power. Many emerging economies in Africa and Asia also have fossil fuels in abundance – for example oil and gas or coal – and may want to use them because they appear to be cheap and easy to use for development and economic growth.

But one thing that brings these technologies together is geology and geoinformatics. An analysis of the training and geological data needed for modern energy geoscience is shown in Table 1 for geothermal and renewables, energy storage and CCS. In general, the main skills needed will be rock volume characterisation and process understanding in order to establish the geological feasibility of different solutions to energy, decarbonisation and low carbon industry, all of which have a strong relationship to appropriate regional and site-specific geology, and the processes associated with that type of geology. For example in CCS the site-specific characterisation of rock masses is vital to understand feasibility of containment; similarly process understanding in relation to that rock mass is vital to understand long term change in the subsurface.

Table 1. Training and geological data needed for some types of modern energy geoscience Modified from Stephenson (2021)

Data will be needed in unprecedented amounts, to be managed to improve accessibility, but also to be amenable for analysis using machine learning and artificial intelligence. An example is CCS where data on sedimentological heterogeneity in sedimentary basins and saline aquifers will influence injectivity and CO2 trapping mechanisms. Heterogeneity in permeability (for example) may result in unpredictable results for CO2 injection. In some ways this is bad because unforeseen heterogeneity in a sandstone reservoir – for example sub-seismic impermeable layers – can reduce the expected injectivity of the formation. It can be good though because some heterogeneities – e.g. impermeable mudstone layers in a sandstone – act as barriers that slow down the buoyant rise of supercritical CO2 so that its residence time in the reservoir is increased. This can encourage solubility of the CO2 or even the formation of carbonates. This is very useful because it means that the CO2 is very securely stored or disposed of. So a balance of injectivity and heterogeneity is needed. This balance is mostly governed by original sedimentary environment which is partly governed by palaeogeography. DDE is developing ways to make better and better palaeogeography maps and ways in which these can be converted to palaeofacies maps and thence to permeability and rock properties maps. This will lead to the kind of modelling and simulation that will help the development of CCS worldwide but also other decarbonization technologies where an understanding of permeability is vital.

To learn more about DDE and its working and task groups contact the DDE Secretariat on secretariat@ddeworld.org

References

ETC 2020: https://www.energy-transitions.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Making-Mission-Possible-Full-Report.pdf

Stephenson M.H. 2021 Affordable and Clean Energy. In: Gill J.C., Smith M. (eds) Geosciences and the Sustainable Development Goals. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Springer, pp 159–182

UN 2016, SDG 7 : Goal 7: Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all — SDG Indicators (un.org)