Is Aberdeen ready to let the fishing industry back in? It might have to.

The world around us is changing so rapidly that new opportunities are popping up now almost daily.  Innovation is the key of course.

Some of the stuff that appears in my inbox from all over the planet is just astonishing.   Investing in research – academic or otherwise – is or should be a top priority for any government that cares about the future of the country it runs.

But at the same time, what we, the UK, used to consider as major opportunities are now fading or have disappeared altogether often due to our own stupidity.

Some – such as shipbuilding - we made little effort to modernise or invest in and so deserved to lose despite there still being a huge market for ships of all sorts.

Others have or are being strangled by market conditions as we’re now experiencing with oil & gas  but there are even more that we’ve made little or no attempt to become involved in and I want to look at the latter a little closer.

With the Offshore Europe exhibition and conference coming up it may seem inappropriate to be writing about anything but oil & gas but I believe that there are plenty of people who now understand the severity of the downturn without me adding any more to the discussion than I have previously.

Inverness based economist Tony MacKay summed the situation up perfectly very recently when he said of the North Sea: "The industry's not expecting any significant increase in oil prices and I think we therefore have to accept that the boom in Aberdeen is over."  

A neat enough summary and one which I’d like to think would spark some reaction from those that continue to insist that what we’re experiencing is just another small dent in the industry’s timeline.

Moving on though I was surprised recently to learn that Inverurie – a town near where I live in Aberdeenshire – has 10,000 250W solar panels.

It’s apparently a record. No other region in Scotland comes close.   But then I thought how depressing it was that not one of those solar cells would have been manufactured in Scotland.
 

Other useful data published recently by Scottish Renewables suggests that throughout Scotland there are some 660,000 250W solar panels,  2,557 small wind  turbines, 204 hydro-electric schemes and three anaerobic digesters.

I’ll bet that little of that will have been manufactured in Scotland either, and of course those figures don’t include the huge number of big commercial wind turbines, all of which are imports.

Ever heard of the Hydrogen Office in Methil? It’s a demonstrator for a range of technologies using electricity generated by wind and solar to power a hydrogen electrolyser. The hydrogen produced will be stored and used as a fuel source for hybrid commercial vehicles (HCV) powered by fuel cells and diesel engines.

Whilst it astonishes and disappoints me that not one of the technologies being demonstrated there is manufactured in Scotland and most aren’t even manufactured in the UK, it reinforces my view that the decarbonising of the energy system is well on its way and that we simply can no longer afford to ignore it.

It also tells me that there is potentially a huge opportunity here for all those highly skilled and very talented engineering and science graduates, experienced managers and administrators, recent graduates and young technicians losing their jobs in the oil & gas  industry to do something different and – importantly – long term.

That is of course dependent on a number of things.  Firstly, the shouty flat earth oil industry will never die brigade being patted on the head and ignored and secondly developing a strategy that can be picked up and turned into viable and fundable businesses by entrepreneurs whether those funds come from public or private sources or indeed both.

Scotland, and particularly Aberdeen, has the skill sets to do all these things and lots more. However one thing that bemuses me somewhat is the apparent lack of university research activity particularly when it comes to genuine original thinking

Compared to some of the energy research going on in the US and Continental Europe, Scottish universities are just bit players.

Of course there’s been some good work done, for example, St Andrews fuel cells and Glasgow hydrogen production, although very little has been commercialised.

Despite being located at the heart of the energy industry even our local Aberdeen universities seem not to have really grasped the clean energy opportunity as comprehensively as they ought. Or, if they have then they’re poor at publicising it.

Make no mistake there are huge opportunities here and particularly in areas such as hydrogen production.

The Japanese are working on an idea I proposed a couple of years ago as a development exercise which would have used surplus energy from the planned Aberdeen offshore wind project of which Energy’s editor was a director and which remains stalled by the Trump organisation, to power a bank of offshore electrolysers to produce hydrogen which could be pumped ashore and stored either as ammonia or ammonia boron.

That could then be used to fuel conventional or gas turbine generators when wind power output is low. It could also be used to power fuel cell vehicles or even in a conventional internal combustion engine.

So, could we develop a design for small scale ammonia production plants?

As far as the electric vehicles themselves are concerned there’s a Norwegian company that builds a small, commuting EV.  Are we saying we couldn’t do something similar?  I think we could and a conversation recently with a former Smiths Electric Vehicles design engineer confirms that.  It’s not rocket science.  It’s good practical engineering and Aberdeen is good at that.

Add in things like “passive house” design and manufacturing, CO2 recycling into new products, synthetic biology and chemistry, algae oils, biofuels, fuel cells, use of simpler prototyping (eg 3D printing of fuel cell components), clean fuelled engines, more efficient generators and motors and even solar using techniques such as automated printing and you begin to see that our options are actually far larger than we might think.

What’s more, these are only scratching the surface of what’s possible.  There will be more technologies evolving as time goes on and we should be at the forefront of both discovering and commercialising these. What for example can be achieved using new material such as Graphene?

However, we need to accept that with some technologies we are unlikely now to become players in.  Wind energy technology in particular is a lost cause.  We threw that opportunity away in the 1980s when the electricity industry was privatised. 

No strategy, no vision, no ambition.  A wasted opportunity that could have led to a large scale high value manufacturing business such as the Danes have.  A business employing 17,000 people with a turnover of £4billion (5billion euros) would have been more than nice to have!

Wave technology is still being pursued – wrongly in my view – and as far as tidal is concerned we do now have at least one or two companies making some progress in developing small scale units.  However, the main tidal projects at the moment are using Austrian/Norwegian and American-built turbine systems.  It’s another sector we should be dominating but aren’t. 

I could write a list of technologies and ideas as long as my arm that we could be tackling in the Granite City and its hinterland if we had a mind to. 

So here’s an idea.  I’ve already suggested to Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce they should consider a “What does Aberdeen do next?”  conference/debate/seminar and it should embrace local interested parties including perhaps the universities as a means of drawing them into being an integral part of any strategy. 

The objectives should be to demonstrate that there is more to life than oil & gas and that we must begin that transition to another energy age now and not in another year or two. We need to talk about the opportunities that brings and we need to be radical. 

At the risk of being politically jumped on from a great height, having been following their technical progress I’d now even include the idea of Small Modular Reactors that use up all the waste fuel from large scale fission reactors.

Reading the engineering reviews these devices seem scalable between 10 and 30 megawatts and are amazingly efficient, apparently leaving almost negligible waste. They’re also “factory maintained” so you unplug them and send them back to the factory for overhaul and refuelling. 

There is no comparison possible between this technology and the old fission reactors built in Scotland. They’re as different as chalk and cheese and rejecting the idea because “they’re nuclear” would be ludicrous.  Oh and they can’t be used for nuclear weapon production either!

Be good wouldn’t it if Aberdeen became a centre for small scale nuclear engineering as well as other clean technology production?

We also need to get agencies such as Scottish Enterprise on board. Recently I was sent a copy of a SMART feasibility call offering funding of up to £100,000 to help develop an innovative and efficient mobile hydrogen refuelling infrastructure for Scotland's islands and remote communities.

It’s not saying it wants to develop the technology to refuel vehicles just come up with a plan to install refuellers none of which are of course manufactured in Scotland.

 I’m sorry but that’s simply not good enough.  With that attitude you’ll need to learn how to make fishing nets in Aberdeen because fishing might be all that’s left to do, if trawlers are allowed back in, once the oil opportunity has been screwed up.

(This article was first published in the Press & Journal "Energy" supplement on 7th Sept 2015)

©DickWinchester Sept 2015