Stanford Study Supports Use Of Fire Bricks For Process Heat – CleanTechnica

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Mark Z. Jacobson is a professor of civil and environmental engineering for the Doerr School of Sustainability and School of Engineering at Stanford University. He is well known to CleanTechnica readers for his efforts to chart a course toward a future in which the energy needed to power human civilization is abundant, affordable, and renewable. He and his team at Stanford have created two amazing studies. One of them provides a detailed road map for how every state in the United States can transition to 100% renewable energy. Another provides the same detailed analysis for 139 countries around the world. Now he and his colleagues have published a new study that advocates for the use of fire bricks to store heat created by renewables.

Fire Bricks & Process Heat

The transition away from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy depends on energy storage solutions. The one most people are familiar with is batteries, which are great for storing electricity and releasing it on demand. But about 17% of all global emissions are attributable to burning fossil fuels to produce process heat, which is used in a myriad of commercial applications from baking bread to making cement, iron, and aluminum. Batteries are capable of storing electricity to make that process heat, but in this new study, published in the journal PNAS Nexus on July 10, 2024, Mark Jacobson and his colleague Daniel Sambor demonstrate that fire bricks can do the same job for about one-tenth the cost.

“By storing energy in the form closest to its end use, you reduce inefficiencies in energy conversion,” Sambor, a postdoctoral scholar in civil and environmental engineering, told TechXplore. “It’s often said in our field that ‘if you want hot showers, store hot water, and if you want cold drinks, store ice’; so this study can be summarized as ‘if you need heat for industry, store it in fire bricks.’” Jacobson added, “The difference between fire brick storage and battery storage is that the fire bricks store heat rather than electricity and are one tenth the cost of batteries. The materials are much simpler too. They are basically just the components of dirt.”

The technology involves assembling heat-absorbing bricks in an insulated container, where they can store heat generated by solar or wind power for later use at the temperatures required for industrial processes. The heat can then be released when needed by passing air through channels in the stacks of fire bricks, which allows cement, steel, glass, and paper factories to run on renewable energy even when wind and sunshine are unavailable. The bricks are made from the same materials as the insulating bricks that lined primitive kilns and ironmaking furnaces thousands of years ago. To optimize for heat storage instead of insulation, the materials are simply combined in different amounts.

An Analysis Of 149 Countries

The researchers set out to examine the impact of using fire bricks to store most industrial process heat in 149 countries in a hypothetical future where each country has transitioned to wind, geothermal, hydro power, and solar for all energy purposes. Those 149 countries are responsible for 99.75% of global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. “Ours is the first study to examine a large scale transition of renewable energy with fire bricks as part of the solution,” Jacobson said. “We found that fire bricks enable a faster and lower cost transition to renewables, and that helps everyone in terms of health, climate, jobs, and energy security.”

The team used computer models to compare costs, land needs, health impacts, and emissions involved in two scenarios for a hypothetical future where 149 countries in 2050 are using renewables for all energy purposes. In one scenario, fire bricks provide 90% of industrial process heat. In the other, there’s zero adoption of fire bricks or other forms of thermal energy storage for industrial processes. In the no fire brick scenario, the researchers assumed heat for industrial processes would come instead from electric furnaces, heaters, boilers, and heat pumps, with batteries used to store electricity for those technologies.

The researchers found the scenario with fire bricks could cut capital costs by $1.27 trillion across the 149 countries compared with the scenario with no fire brick storage, while reducing demand for energy from the grid and the need for energy storage capacity from batteries. Solutions for accelerating the transition to clean energy are also connected to human health. Previous research has shown that air pollution from burning fossil fuels causes millions of early deaths each year. “Every bit of combustion fuels we replace with electricity reduces that air pollution,” Jacobson said. “And because there is a limited amount of money to transition at a high speed, the lower the cost to the overall system, the faster we can implement it.”

Mark Jacobson has spent his career understanding air pollution and climate problems and developing energy plans for countries, states, and cities to solve these problems. But his focus on fire bricks is relatively new and is inspired by a desire to identify effective solutions that could be adopted quickly.

“Imagine if we propose an expensive and difficult method of transitioning to renewable electricity. We would have very few takers. But, if this will save money compared with a previous method, it will be implemented more rapidly,” he said. “What excites me is that the impact is very large, whereas a lot of technologies that I’ve looked at, they have marginal impacts. Here I can see a substantial benefit at low cost from multiple angles, from helping to reduce air pollution mortality to making it easier to transition the world to clean renewables.”

Just Say No To Nukes

In the past, Mark Jacobson has been criticized for ignoring nuclear power as one source of zero emissions energy. This study explains why. “Whereas some propose the use of nuclear reactors to provide electricity and heat for industry, newly planned nuclear is not included here for several reasons. First, newly planned nuclear reactors will unlikely compete with [other forms of renewable energy] because the time lag between planning and operation of a new conventional nuclear reactor today is 12 to 22 years — too long to help solve world climate and air pollution problems — versus 1 to 5 years for new wind and solar farms.

“Second, the levelized cost of newly planned conventional nuclear reactors is 3 to 14 times that of new onshore wind. Nuclear also faces several well known energy security risks. Small modular nuclear reactors are expected to face similar time lag, cost, and security risks. As such, nuclear is not considered further here.” Advocates for nuclear power will be distressed by Jacobson’s analysis, but who would want to pay 3 to 14 times more for something than necessary? From a strictly economic point of view, it’s hard to make a business case for nuclear.

The Takeaway

Recently we have reported on several companies that are seeking to commercialize fire bricks for heat storage. One is Electrified Thermal Solutions, an MIT spinoff that has found a way to make fire bricks that take the place of wires to conduct electricity and generate heat. Another is Rondo Energy, which has begun installing its fire brick thermal storage units in several locations around the world to provide process heat. What is interesting here is how technology that helped humans harness heat to create the Bronze Age is once again being used to further the clean energy revolution. Everything old is new again, it seems. And not a moment too soon.