Here is the full transcript of John O’Donnell’s talk titled “Can A Simple Brick Be the Next Great Battery?” at TED conference.
Energy entrepreneur John O’Donnell’s talk, “Can A Simple Brick Be the Next Great Battery?”, explores the innovative use of bricks in reducing carbon emissions. He discusses how industrial heat, a significant contributor to CO2 emissions, can be decarbonized through electrification and the use of alternative materials.
O’Donnell highlights the economic and environmental benefits of using bricks and iron wire, which are cost-effective and abundant, for storing heat. He explains that bricks, when heated, can store as much energy as lithium-ion batteries but are significantly cheaper and more durable. The talk also delves into the challenges of even heat distribution in bricks and wires, and how his team overcame these with a radiant heat design.
O’Donnell’s vision is to use these heat-storing bricks in industrial processes, powered by renewable energy, to significantly cut down CO2 emissions. He concludes with a hopeful message about the potential of this technology to contribute to a decarbonized industry and a sustainable future.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Understanding the Potential of Bricks in CO2 Reduction
I get a deep sense of hope when I look at this brick. It’s going to spend the next 50 years of its life cutting CO2, and bricks like it are going to cut 15 percent of world CO2. So let’s talk about that, but first, we have to talk about fire. Fire warms us, heats our homes, cooks our food, and we also use it to make almost everything.
Industrial production, making stuff, uses more fossil fuel than any other part of the world economy. We burn coal, oil, and gas to make steel, calcined cement, cook baby food, make glass, fabric, everything. We don’t notice it in our daily lives, but industrial energy use is the largest part of the total world economy, and industrial heat is a quarter of world fossil-fuel use and world carbon emissions. Let me say that again — industrial heat is a quarter of world carbon pollution.
We need the stuff we make. We need to decarbonize our industry, not deindustrialize. How? If we had a new kind of fire, we could decarbonize today and avoid the time and costs associated with replacing our factories that run on heat. If we had clean heat, we could have the stuff that we use and a giant drop in world emissions.
The Shift to Electrification in Industrial Heat
But for decades, we’ve dreamed of burning hydrogen or capturing carbon to get clean heat, but costs and challenges continue to delay their deployment. The good news is today, there is a faster, cheaper way of doing it — electrification. Analysts now say that electrified industrial heat is the next trillion-dollar market. I agree, they’re right, because the ongoing cost-dropping in wind and solar — power costs now are dropping to the point that wind and solar cost less than the fuels our factories burn.
So we have the economic conditions to drive to scale. We also have the capacity to build at scale. Today, we have everything we need to build wind and solar at scale to repower industrial heat. Yes, it’s terawatts, it’s five times more wind and solar than is in the world today. But there is a solution. We have everything we need, except continuity.
Right? The wind blows and the sun shines only some of the time. Heavy industry needs heat all the time. So we need to store energy some of the time so we can have clean heat all the time. How? Most ways of storing electricity are too expensive or inefficient to use for industrial heat. But what if we just stored heat?
Innovations in Heat Storage
Storing electricity as heat can be simple and really low-cost. Teams around the world are now trying to build industrial heat batteries that store energy this way, using new materials, like liquid salts, liquid metals, and solid carbon. And some of these are going to work. They’ll take time, time to learn if they’re safe, time to learn how long they last, time to learn how to make a lot of something new. My colleagues at Rondo found a way to save time, to go faster, by using old materials that the world already makes in volume.
What were they? Here’s a hint — one of them was brick. The other was iron wire. Why brick? 200 years ago, the steel industry introduced a coal-saving technology. They started building blast stoves that store heat at thousands of degrees in thousands of tons of brick. Brick is basically made from dirt, and dirt is available at scale. When it’s red-hot, a brick stores as much energy as a lithium-ion battery, per pound, costs ten times less, lasts ten times longer.
Half a million tons of brick are storing heat at steel mills around the world, right now. Iron wire? A hundred years ago, a new alloy for heating elements, from toasters to industrial furnaces, was invented. It is made only of iron with a little chromium and aluminum. Today, that heating element is on your kitchen counter and in industrial furnaces and kilns around the world. Combining brick and wire could be really cost-effective.
Overcoming Challenges in Heat Storage Technology
We would know how to make a lot of it right away, but there are some challenges. If you overheat a brick on one side, if you don’t heat it evenly, it can crack. If you overheat just one spot on a wire, the wire may fail. We’ve finally found the way to do it. The way to combine these was to heat brick the way your toaster heats bread, the way the sun heats the Earth with radiant heat. It only took us 74 design revisions to find the solution, and hundreds of simulations.
But the key insight — heating brick with radiation. We built a 3D checkerboard of brick and open chambers. The chambers let radiant heat spread the heat evenly so electricity can heat thousands of tons of brick to thousands of degrees, safely and evenly.