A summary of this newsletter was published on the MegaOnline web site of Pictet, the international fund manager.

1, Electric heavy trucks. Two of the world’s most important logistics companies made further commitments to the electrification of heavy transport. Maersk announced two orders in the US for heavy ‘Class 8’ trucks. It bought 300 vehicles from the Swedish start-up Einride for delivery in 2023-25 and a smaller order from Volvo of about 110 trucks planned to arrive in 2023 for short-haul journeys. Maersk North America said its ‘long-term goal is to move toward a fully electric trucking fleet’. Amazon said that it will have 9 DAF electric trucks in use in the UK by the end of this year. They will be charged by 360 kilowatt chargers at the company’s distribution depots, providing one of the fastest charging rates in the country. Amazon reiterated its commitment to achieving at least 50% decarbonisation of its UK transport by 2030. These orders, and others like them, strongly suggests that the logistics industry sees the future in pure battery vehicles, not fuel cell trucks.

2, Direct Air Capture (DAC). Much more money became available to develop the DAC industry. Although it admitted that its pioneering $15m Iceland plant had had reliability problems in the cold winter, Zurich-based Climeworks raised about $650m to invest in much larger carbon dioxide capture facilities. A consortium of US businesses led by payments company Stripe promised that $925m would be available to purchase carbon dioxide removal from DAC providers. The intention is to assure funders of DAC plants that customers will be available for the CO2. Also in the US, the Oxy venture 1PointFive, which is expected to build a 1 million tonne DAC plant in the next two years, sealed a deal with wood products company Weyerhaeuser to utilise CO2 storage space in geologic pores beneath a 12,000 hectare forest in Louisiana.

3, Circular electronics. German company Grover took in new investment of $300m to expand its electronics leasing business by buying more stock. Customers rent from a choice of over 3,000 items such as cameras, phones and computers for a monthly fee and are able to return the device at no cost at any point after the minimum rental period. When the goods return to Grover they are refurbished and then rented out again. At the end of life, the items are then fully recycled. Sales are growing strongly in the markets in which it operates around the world helped, the company says, by the tightening economic conditions in many countries. This ‘unicorn’ is probably the largest single circular business in the world today, operating in a sector in which only about 20% of goods have any form of second life.

4, Vertical agriculture. A disappointing moment for the fast-growing vertical agriculture industry as Paris-based Agricool ran out of money and was put into administration. Agricool grows strawberries and herbs in adapted shipping containers with LED lighting. It sold the products in local supermarkets. Container-based indoor farming can deliver very high quality products with low environmental impact but at costs much greater than conventional farming techniques. However other businesses around the world that operate urban vertical farms continue to grow. In London, for example, Crate to Plate continues to develop new urban indoor farms, aiming to grow salads and herbs within 15 minutes of everybody in the city. It announced a new venture to put a 2,500 square metre farm in the east of London and a smaller one to the south.

5, Methanol for shipping. The debate continues between those who favour synthetic methanol as the fuel for shipping and those backing ammonia. Methanol has edged ahead in recent weeks. In an important, but largely symbolic announcement, the port of Gothenburg, the largest in Scandinavia, said that it had obtained approval to store the liquid for use in vessels in the port. This will assist the port in attracting shipping able to use the fuel. Approvals for ammonia storage and use will be much more difficult to obtain because of the far greater risks. An Egyptian company promised to construct a factory that will produce 100,000 tonnes of synthetic methanol at the entrances to the Suez Canal using locally-made green hydrogen. It targets the site being operational by 2026. That should enable the business to provide methanol to the new Maersk dual-fuel container ships to be completed by that date.

6, Enhanced rock weathering (ERW). ERW is potential means of reducing atmospheric CO2. Silicate-based rocks, such as basalt, gradually react with carbon dioxide, permanently storing it in a stable form. Grinding the rocks finely and creating a much greater surface area increases the speed of the chemical reaction. Soil fertility is improved if the fine dust is spread on fields. Scientists have been pressing policy-makers to fund more research on how best to use ERW for carbon capture and fertility improvement purposes. An article/www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/950523 in Nature Geoscience by scientists at the University of Sheffield in the UK strengthened the case of ERW calculating that up to 10% of the country’s emissions could be offset by applying basalt dust to agricultural soils. A secondary advantage would be a reduction in the need for artificial fertilisers.

7, Sustainable aviation fuel. Cemex, the Mexican cement producer, will build a refinery to make synthetic kerosene at one of its plants in Germany. The process will collect CO2 from cement making and combine it with green hydrogen in the standard Fischer Tropsch reaction. Cemex is partnering with Sasol, the South African specialist in synthetic fuel and with Enertrag, a German renewables developer.

8, Power to gas. Companies on the Iberian peninsula are among the leaders in commercialising the large scale use of renewable electricity to make hydrogen and other zero carbon products such as ammonia. One recent new project at Sines on the coast of Portugal announced last month will make 50,000 tonnes of hydrogen and 500,000 tonne of ammonia from locally solar and wind power in a €1bn project. This is one of the many examples around the world of ‘hydrogen hubs’ at ports; hydrogen will be made centrally, some will be used locally and most exported in the form of ammonia. These hubs are not just being planned for Europe; a local renewable energy supplier and a Belgian electrolyser manufacturer plan a 2 gigawatt plant on the east coast of India, partly to replace natural gas imports.

9, The costs of carbon capture (CCS). Two of the oil majors said that they expected the market for carbon capture to be around $4 trillion by mid-century. Exxon Mobil upped its estimate of the CCS market to $4 trillion from half that level a year ago. Occidental put the figure at $3-5 trillion. These estimates are about 4% of current world GDP. Expenditure of this money would allow them to continue extracting fossil fuels much as at present. No other companies or institutions think this route will be lowest cost way of obtaining the world’s energy and getting to net zero.

10, Biochar. Net Zero, a French startup developing biochar production factories for tropical countries, won $1m from the X Prize, a competition funded by Elon Musk. Agricultural wastes are heated to very high temperatures in the absence of oxygen, leaving almost pure carbon. The carbon is stable for hundreds of years in soil. Two other biochar startups were also among the 15 winners, one in Kenya and one in the US. Biochar is identified as one of the most promising techniques for permanent carbon removal from the atmosphere and has the advantage of also improving acidic soils and reducing the need for fertilisation. The carbon content of biochar can be measured relatively accurately and easily, making it very suitable for carbon offsetting schemes.