Makes sense considering the massive push for Hydrogen by Toyota and the Japanese government. A few months ago I posted a thread and a user wrote the most substantial, beautifully written,...
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Makes sense considering the massive push for Hydrogen by Toyota and the Japanese government. A few months ago I posted a thread and a user wrote the most substantial, beautifully written, explanation on why. I went to crosspost it here.... and the user deleted themselves. Sucks. But! Google had a cache of the page, and I was able to snag the comment.
Here is why Toyota (and Japan) are so focused on Hydrogen, and not EVs and batteries (and why I _now_ believe the same after some additional research.
[Err, sorry you activated my trap card and I am now obligated to brain dump my knowledge of Japan's hydrogen strategy on you. Source: I worked in a very closely related industry in Japan on a very relevant project that I can not discuss]
The fundamental issue behind all of this: Toyota's intransigence on battery electric, the push for hydrogen, etc is due to a huge elephant in the room that I don't see mentioned a lot in the west.
Japan's power grid.
If you're not aware, Japanese households receive 100v, and either 50hz or 60hz depending on which half of the country they're in. Here's an example image from the Wikipedia. As you can see, there is a huge partition to the west of Tokyo, the area in yellow.
The wikipedia article gives a great explanation, but one key point is that that 50/60hz split significantly hampers the ability to move power around the country as needed. The current capacity of the frequency convertors & HVDC lines, according to Wikipedia, is 1.2 GW. Compare that to the 1000ish TWh that Japan produces in a year. [EDIT: To their credit, cross-frequency capacity has increased and is supposedly at about 3GW now. As I noted in a lower comment, as of today Japan has rebounded and renewables represent about 200TWh of production!]
If we look at the Japanese Wikipedia Page for Japan's Energy Production we find some interesting info. Here's a more interesting graph that is in Japanese, so let me explain. This graph represents the amount of power in GW that each region produced in 2020, and the transmission capacity between them. Tokyo in yellow on the right, Chubu/Nagoya region in green on the bottom (home of Toyota and a lot of Japan's manufacturing base), Kansai/Osaka region in blue, Chuugoku and Kyuushuu on the left, and the islands of Shikoku on the bottom and Hokkaido on the top.
The colors represent electrical "regions", and the big red lines represent transmission volume with the bi-colored boxes representing maximum electrical capacity transferred between regions. So without significant upgrades to an already odd electrical system, or the even more expensive task of trying to convert it to say... 240V, the electrical grid in Japan hampers both adoption of electrical vehicles (extra load) and the adoption of renewables.
How do you transmit all that energy from the rural areas or from the ocean to power Tokyo, when you can't even reliably transmit 10% of the Tokyo region's power requirements from other regions?
Also, electricity is expensive and historically has relied almost entirely on imported fuel. See this graph also from Wikipedia showing a few key things.
First, notice that The 1973 Oil Crisis is where Japan starts divesting away from petroleum power, and into Natural Gas. However, Japan has no pipelines running to it, and no natural gas of its own really. Meaning that this is all LNG, Liquified Natural Gas [Note: This wikipedia article is one particular instance where I am frustrated by how focused it is on America, when America has historically had very little to do with the LNG market until recently]. LNG is condensed by super cooling it to about -162C, and transporting it at around 25kPa. As the Wikipedia article states,
"Natural gas was considered during the 20th century to be economically unimportant wherever gas-producing oil or gas fields were distant from gas pipelines or located in offshore locations where pipelines were not viable. In the past this usually meant that natural gas produced was typically flared, especially since unlike oil, no viable method for natural gas storage or transport existed other than compressed gas pipelines to end users of the same gas. This meant that natural gas markets were historically entirely local, and any production had to be consumed within the local or regional network.
Developments of production processes, cryogenic storage, and transportation effectively created the tools required to commercialize natural gas into a global market which now competes with other fuels. Furthermore, the development of LNG storage also introduced a reliability in networks which was previously thought impossible. Given that storage of other fuels is relatively easily secured using simple tanks, a supply for several months could be kept in storage. With the advent of large-scale cryogenic storage, it became possible to create long term gas storage reserves. These reserves of liquefied gas could be deployed at a moment's notice through regasification processes, and today are the main means for networks to handle local peak shaving requirements.
If we look at LNG Imports from the 90s to the 2010s, you might notice that green line looming menacingly at the top, consuming more LNG than all of the other lines combined. That line is Japan.
In 2017, according to wikipedia, Japan imported 83.5MT of LNG, more than the next two China (39MT) and South Korea (37.8MT) combined.
By 2011, Nuclear and Gas represented over roughly 600 TWh of Japan's ballpark ~1000 TWh generation. Now notice the dip in the yellow once the Fukushima disaster occurs.
In the 2010s, if you're Toyota's Board of Directors, looking at Japan's energy market and trying to calculate what would happen if you introduced electric cars en masse, you don't see a good picture in your home market. Notice how Coal and Petroleum immediately consumed half the generation, with almost entirely the balance made up by LNG outside of Japan's Hydro generation, which is not expandable for fear of disrupting the very lucrative and more importantly very traditional and historical hot spring resort industry.
So Hydro expansion is out, any extra electrical load you add to your power grid has to be covered by fossil fuels, and imported on top of that. And your grid can't even transmit renewable energy from your oceans and rural areas to the areas where it matters to the economy.
You can imagine very desperate officials from METI, Japan's Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry, making many visits to the major automakers and having meetings with a lot of hand wringing to encourage Honda, Nissan, Mazda, Toyota, Subaru, Daihatsu, Yamaha, Kawasaki etc to perhaps... not be so hasty in massively increasing load on the electrical grid please thank you very much.
When I moved into my first apartment in Japan in 2015, a two bedroom equivalent, I was astounded to discover that my apartment's mains power was on a 20A breaker. The mains. For the entire apartment. And remember, they're running 100V so that meant I could use about 2000w before I flipped the breaker.
Obviously, not every home in Japan is squeaking by on a 20A breaker. I learned later (once I could read my electric bill all the way), that you can pay more for a bigger breaker. But my point is, even in my apartment water heating was natural gas, Cookstove was gas, a lot of winter heating was gas, and no oven so only major load was the air conditioner.
There were also government initiatives to reduce power consumption while I was there, by asking businesses and homes to set their thermostats to 28C (82F) or higher during the summer, etc. There was one summer where we had to turn off AC in the office entirely to allow our machining centers to run without pushing us up into a higher load fee class as power was essentially rationed.
Anyways, if you are Corporate Japan (including the Japanese Government in this as well because they cooperate), full electric is the least viable seeming option in the 2010s, which is when Japan decided to go the route of hydrogen.
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So why hydrogen? Well they bet on it over a decade ago, this is just acceleration. Remember those portions I bolded about LNG from the quote above?
Here is a random article I found after getting frustrated at wikipedia basically glossing over all of Japan's involvement in LNG. Note that the LNG market has grown a lot of late, and that this article was written in 2014, but:
2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the first liquefied natural gas (LNG) export project. During the intervening years, Japanese companies have been central to establishing the LNG industry as a major source of global energy supply.
The Japanese companies were credit-worthy LNG buyers who gave both investors and banks the requisite comfort to invest in high-risk, capital-intensive LNG export projects. As the global LNG industry has developed, so too has the role of Japanese companies within that industry. Japan continues to perform its traditional role of LNG buyer consuming a third of the world's LNG in 26 regasification terminals. Japanese companies also now increasingly participate across the entire LNG supply chain.
They go on to say,
In the early 1960s air pollution in Japan led to enactment of environmental regulations, which stirred Japan's interest in importing LNG as a cleaner and more environmentally friendly fuel for power generation than coal and crude oil. Japanese power companies realized they could substantially reduce emissions by adopting LNG for power generation. However, many Japanese power companies, particularly in highly populated areas, were at that time only willing to switch to LNG if they received financial assistance from the Japanese government to cover the "high" capital costs. Non-power companies had expressed their interest in LNG as well.
On 6 March, 1967, the first Asian LNG sale and purchase agreement (LNG SPA) was signed for the sale of LNG produced by Phillips and Marathon Oil in Alaska to Tokyo Electric (75%) and Tokyo Gas (25%). The first delivery of Alaskan LNG to Tokyo Electric and Tokyo Gas occurred in November 1969.
Emphasis mine.
In 1970, Tokyo Electric, Tokyo Gas and Osaka Gas signed LNG SPAs with Shell, Mitsubishi and the Brunei government to underpin the development of the Brunei LNG project, the first LNG project in which Japanese companies participated in both export (Mitsubishi has a 45% interest) and import.
Note here that this is not Mitsubishi the car company. This is likely Mitsubishi Corporation, a huge trading company (known as 商社（しょうしゃ）or shousha in Japanese) and one of the Three Great Houses (御三家 ごさんけ gosanke) of the Mitsubishi Group:
The Mitsubishi Group is made up of about 40 individual companies without a controlling parent company. Each of the Mitsubishi companies owns substantial (but usually not controlling) portions of the shares of the others. ...by the 1990s, this practice was criticized (particularly by non-Japanese investors) as a possible violation of antitrust law. Since 1993, the Friday Conference has officially been held as a social function, and not for the purpose of discussing or coordinating business strategy.
Note that it's still held. Also notice the other two Great Houses, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, the 7th largest bank globally in terms of assets with $2.991 Trillion USD as of 2022-12-31, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, #23 global defense contractors in terms of defense revenue, but they also make: "MHI's products include aerospace and automotive components, air conditioners, elevators, forklift trucks, hydraulic equipment, printing machines, missiles, tanks,[3] power systems, ships, aircraft, railway systems, and space launch vehicles.
Mitsubishi is historically considered to be a Zaibatsu (財閥 ざいばつ ), or conglomerate of the Standard Oil variety (although the literal meaning is financial clique). That term does have a negative connotation, so they prefer Keiretsu (系列 けいれつ) which basically means the same thing.
For the Brunei deal, the article notes:
From the outset, Brunei LNG dwarfed projects of the prior decade through the sale of 3.7 MTPA from four liquefaction trains, requiring six new ships of 75,000 cm cargo capacity each.
To return to the article, let's skim the 70s and 80s and see how many first LNG terminals in various countries involved Japanese investment:
*"Japanese buyers also provided a market for Indonesian gas in the early 1970s."
In December 1973 Indonesia's Pertamina signed an LNG SPA for 8.18 MTPA with Chubu Electric, Kansai Electric, Osaka Gas, Kyushu Electric and Nippon Steel. [...] The complex financing of Indonesia's Arun and Bontang projects totaled $1.638 billion and involved considerable Japanese government support, including by a new Japanese entity, JILCO. The Japanese government made loans from the Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund to the Indonesian government and Pertamina. The Japanese government's Ex-Im Bank (JEXIM) and a group of associated commercial banks loaned the bulk of the project financing funds to JILCO, with 60% of these guaranteed by JNOC, a Japanese state-owned oil and gas company, and 40% guaranteed by the consortium of five major buyers, which had support from the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) in the form of overseas investment insurance. **JILCO then loaned money for project development to Pertamina. Payments for LNG from the five buyers were sent to a trustee in New York for disbursement. **
*In the early 1980s, Japanese buyers supported the development of the MLNG Satu export project, Malaysia's first LNG export project. JEXIM provided loans to Petronas and Mitsubishi, who were two of the project's four sponsors.
*In May 1985, five Japanese power companies and three Japanese gas companies signed LNG SPAs for the Northwest Shelf project, the first Western Australia export project.
Japan Australia LNG (MIMI) Pty Ltd, a joint venture between Mitsubishi and Mitsui, was one of the six project sponsors.
Remember when we talked about zaibatsu and keiretsu up above? Check the first sentence of wikipedia for Mitsui:
Mitsui Group (三井グループ, Mitsui Gurūpu) is one of the largest keiretsu in Japan and one of the largest corporate groups in the world. " The major companies of the group include Mitsui & Co. (general trading company), Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Nippon Paper Industries, Pokka Sapporo Holdings, Toray Industries (carbon fiber supplier plus 3M/Dow esque), Mitsui Chemicals, Isetan Mitsukoshi Holdings, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Holdings, Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines and Mitsui Fudosan.[1]
So Mitsui, like Mitsubishi, owns a bank, owns petrochemical companies, owns trading companies, owns shipbuilders, owns transport companies...
Shipping was provided by the sellers but included a "complicated arrangement... [whereby] Japanese ship owners chartered two ships into the NWS project and they became the sellers' ships, and both the ships were built in Japan."
*A number of Japanese companies were instrumental in bringing Qatar's Ras Laffan LNG project to life. The project sponsors were QGPC (70%) and Mobil (30%).
Mobil had established a close relationship with the Japanese trading house Nissho Iwai in relation to the marketing of LNG from Indonesia's Arun plant and Mobil quickly elected to bring in Nissho Iwai and other Japanese trading companies to assist in marketing of RasGas LNG. A separate class of shares was established for Nissho Iwai and Itochu, and Nissho Iwai and Itochu together provided QGPC with $864 million in loan commitments and other financial assistance in order to enable the state-owned company to meet its share of the RasGas project costs*.
*Qatargas was able, with the assistance of Mitsui, to secure an LNG SPA with Chubu Electric in May 1992.
Japanese financing supported the LNG plant; Japanese lender JEXIM supplied $1.6 billion via an intermediate financing company that was guaranteed by the two Japanese sponsors. While Japanese limitations on financing were satisfied since the borrower from JEXIM was a Japanese company, the funds were simultaneously lent on by the borrower to Qatargas. Although front-end engineering work had been completed in Houston by US construction contractor, MW Kellogg, the final EPC was awarded in May 1993 to Japanese contractor Chiyoda.
That's a lot of firsts. No need to look up all the bolded names, just notice the repeats.
Moving on,
During the 1980s and early 1990s, Japan also dominated the LNG vessel building business. Between 1993 and 1994 Japanese companies constructed 10 of the 13 LNG vessels built during this period. Japan has since been overtaken by both Korean and Chinese ship yards. Some Japanese LNG buyers have acquired substantial LNG vessel fleets for their FOB LNG sales into Japan.
Over the course of time Japanese LNG buyers and electric power companies recognized that there were benefits to extending their participation beyond LNG purchase to participation in LNG export projects. In this capacity they are sometimes described as "strategic investors." The perceived benefits include influence over the destination of LNG sales and the administration of the LNG SPAs from a seller's perspective, and generally managing project risks.
And wrapping up the 2000s,
A number of Japanese companies are involved in the Sakhalin 2 LNG project, which was developed from the mid-2000s. Nine of the 12 LNG buyers from Sakhalin 2 are Japanese. Chiyoda Corporation and Toyo Engineering Corporation were involved in the construction of the plant. Mitsui Sakhalin Holdings B.V. (a subsidiary of Mitsui) and Diamond Gas Sakhalin (a subsidiary of Mitsubishi) have a 12.5% and 10% interest, respectively, in the project company, Sakhalin Energy Invest Company.
In June 2008, Sakhalin Energy signed Russia's largest project finance deal, securing a loan of $5.3 billion from the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) and a consortium of international banks. JBIC provided $3.7 billion of the funds. The first cargo of LNG was delivered from Sakhalin in March 2009.
As we noted before, they also note the shift after Fukushima in 2011
On the buying side, Japanese demand for LNG rose sharply in the wake of the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant (NPP), which resulted in LNG being highlighted as a key alternative for meeting Japan's energy needs. Since September 2013, all of Japan's 48 viable nuclear reactors have been offline.
They go on to discuss US developments in LNG export capacity, and since this article was written in 2014 and the US didn't really start exporting LNG until 2016 we have an interesting little window into that. Let's look at the investors:
Of the US LNG export projects that have been granted non-FTA export licences the following have signed agreements with Japanese buyers:
*Freeport (Texas): Liquefaction tolling agreements with Osaka Gas and Chubu Electric (Train One) and Toshiba (Train 3);
*Dominion Cove Point (Maryland): Terminal service agreement with Sumitomo. Sumitomo and Kansai Electric Power have entered into a Heads of Agreement for the sale of LNG from Cove Point by Sumitomo; and
*Cameron LNG (Louisiana): Heads of Agreement with Tohoku Electric Power, and Toho Gas has signed a 20-year sale and purchase agreement with Mitsui for LNG produced at the Cameron LNG project. A Mitsubishi/Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha joint venture and Mitsui & Co are investors in Cameron LNG, each having a 16.6% interest, and have contracted for liquefaction capacity.
Long term LNG SPAs with Japanese buyers have also underpinned recent non-US LNG export projects including Indonesia's Donggi-Senoro (Chubu Electric 1.0 MTPA and Kyushu Electric 0.3 MTPA), and PNG LNG (TEPCO 1.8 MTPA and Osaka Gas 1.5 MTPA). In addition to long term LNG SPAs, Japanese companies are increasingly active in the growing global LNG spot market.
On the LNG export project development side, an increasing number of Japanese companies are taking an equity stake in LNG projects. Today the following Japanese companies own interests in existing LNG export projects:
*Inpex: Australia Darwin (11%), Indonesia Tangguh (7.8%);
*Itochu: Oman Train 1 (0.9%) and Train 2 (3%), Qatar Ras Laffan (R) 1: T1 & T2 (4%);
*JX Nippon: Indonesia Tangguh (13.5%);
*Kansai Electric: Australia Pluto (5%);
*LNG Japan: Qatar Ras Laffan (R) 1: T1 & T2 (3%), Indonesia Tangguh (7.4%);
*Marubeni: Equatorial Guinea (6.5%), Qatar Ras Laffan (Q) 1: T1 & T2 (7.5%) T3 (7.5%), Peru (10%);
*Mitsubishi: Oman Train 1 (2.8%) and Train 2 (3%), Australia Withnell Bay Trains 1-4 (8%) and Train 5 (8%), Brunei (25%), Indonesia Tangguh (9.9%), Indonesia Bintulu 1 (5%), 2 (15%) and 3 (5%), Sakhalin 2 (10%);
*Mitsui: Equatorial Guinea (8.5%), Abu Dhabi (15%), Oman Train 1 (2.8%), Qatar Ras Laffan (Q) 1: T1 & T2 (7.5%) T3 (7.5%), Ras Laffan (Q) 3: Train 1 (1.5%), Australia Withnell Bay Trains 1-4 (8%) and Train 5 (8%), Indonesia Tangguh (2.3%), Sakhalin 2 (12.5%);
*Osaka Gas: Oman (3%);
*Tokyo Electric Power: Australia Darwin (6%); and
*Tokyo Gas: Australia Darwin (3%), Australia Pluto (3%).
A number of Japanese companies have been instrumental in making many of the LNG export projects that are under construction a reality, particularly the new Australian projects. For example, on the West Coast of Australia Inpex is leading the Ichthys LNG project, which has entered the construction phase. The Australian subsidiaries of Tokyo Gas, Osaka Gas, Chubu Electric Power and Toho Gas are also project sponsors. Inpex's wholly owned subsidiary, INPEX Shipping Co, will own one LNG vessel via a joint venture with Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha, Ltd. JBIC is providing a loan of up to $5 billion to support the Ichthys project.
Finally, they mention Kawasaki. Again, not the motorcycle maker directly, but Kawasaki Heavy Industries. According to the zaibatsu wikipedia Kawasaki was only a "second tier zaibatsu" traditionally lol, but today they are a "Japanese public multinational corporation manufacturer of motorcycles, engines, heavy equipment, aerospace and defense equipment, rolling stock and ships, headquartered in Chūō, Kobe and Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It is also active in the production of industrial robots, gas turbines, pumps, boilers and other industrial products.
Kawasaki (KHI) also is heavily involved in Japan's space industry. Mitsubishi Heavy (MHI) builts the rockets and their engines. Notice that the LE-9 engine for the H3 rocket runs on liquid hydrogen. KHI builds the pressure vessels to store that liquid hydrogen. But where did they gain that know-how?
Let's look at KHI a press release from 2009
Since the delivery of its first underground LNG tank in 1982 a-nd aboveground tank in 1983, Kawasaki has outfitted Japan with every type of LNG tank on the market, including single/double/full containment tanks, in-pit tanks, as well as in-ground and underground membrane tanks. Kawasaki has also been involved in overseas LNG tank construction projects in Korea and Spain. To date, there are 26 Kawasaki-built LNG tanks in successful operation around the world.
KHI, MHI and IHI (another conglomerate that "produces and offers ships, space launch vehicles, aircraft engines, marine diesel engines, gas turbines, gas engines, railway systems, turbochargers for automobiles, plant engineering, industrial machinery, power station boilers and other facilities, suspension bridges and other structures.") were heavily involved in the design, construction, and maintenance of Japan's fleet of LNG terminals, storage facilities, and pressurized transport vessels.
Here Is an interesting article about Japan's LNG policy. If we look at the map further down the page, we can see Japan's natural gas infrastructure.
Notice how few pipelines there are. In part due to history, in part due to extremely mountainous terrain making interconnections extremely expensive, similar to electricity the LNG market is.. clustered. It's non-trivial to transport gas between terminals, and most pipeline networks focus on the main cities.
And finally, to round out that article,
Today you do not need to look far to see evidence of the far-reaching role of Japanese companies across the entire LNG supply chain. Japanese companies have used creative strategies to develop and adapt to the ever-changing and evolving global LNG industry. Recent examples include:
*The alliance between four large Japanese shipbuilders, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding and Imbari Shipbuilding, to bid to win orders to transport shale gas-based LNG from the US, notably the Cameron project;
*A joint venture between Japanese heavy machinery manufacturer IHI and a Chinese EPC contractor to supply LNG tanks for a floating storage and regasification unit;
*The integration of the thermal power system operations of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Hitachi to service the LNG industry;
*Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC), an Independent Administrative Institution of the Japanese government, has provided equity capital to support the development of the Wheatstone, PNG, and Ichthys projects which are under construction, and the proposed Mozambique LNG project; and
*Idemitsu Kosan and AltaGas formed a joint venture in 2013 to pursue LNG export opportunities from Canada to Japan.
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Ok, so let's summarize. TL;DR
Japan has:
*Busted electrical grid that will cost trillions to renovate, severely limiting your ability to mass deploy renewables to benefit industry and major population centers
*Heavy reliance and hundreds of billions of existing investment in behemoth networks to source, refine, and transport fossil fuels, in particular liquid natural gas
*LNG is a compressed, liquefied gas that required a lot of specialized research and engineering to create a supply chain capable of supporting it.
*The same companies that have spent the past 70 years investing hundreds of billions in developing and maintaining the LNG supply chain are very eager to not suddenly have literal trillions in stranded assets
*And yet there is no simple way, either through gas or electricity, to get energy in large quantities between urban centers in Japan
From that perspective, it makes 100% sense why Japan is betting so hard on hydrogen. It makes the most sense.
*You have literally hundreds of thousands of people already trained and a mature supply base to handle the international transport of volatile gases liquified at high pressure.
*You have urban centers that largely produce their own power independently of each other, and they get ALL of it from imports.
*You already have an robust system for distributing fuel in containerized form domestically (CNG tanks for suburban/rural gas supply, etc)
Of course, natural gas and hydrogen are not apples-to-apples in how they need to be stored, at all.
So 2010s Japan is sitting there thinking:
But if you can swap over your rural populace fairly pain free from propane tanks to hydrogen tanks for their heating (compared to rebuilding the entire electrical grid), repurpose your existing infrastructure and financial/trade networks for LNG slowly to transition them over to Hydrogen, keep your automotive industry going comparatively pain free by swapping to hydrogen rather than trying to figure out how to get chargers integrated literally everywhere on a creaky grid that can't handle its existing load
And most importantly, if you can keep all those major conglomerates with cross shareholdings profitable they won't destroy the economy.
In a way, what other option does Japan have? Hydrogen is the path of least resistance to a country that tries very desperately not to rock the boat.
I am astonished that a country that bootstrapped its economy, in large part, by cultivating an image as a consumer electronics powerhouse continues puttering along with such an anemic electrical...
I am astonished that a country that bootstrapped its economy, in large part, by cultivating an image as a consumer electronics powerhouse continues puttering along with such an anemic electrical grid.
And why the CNG fixation for baseload power? I assume they've soured on nuclear somewhat since Fukushima, but that wasn't that long ago. Did they stop building more nuclear before that? It seems like a handy solution to a lot of their problems, especially if they develop hydrogen battery technologies to smooth out consumption off the nuclear plants.
Also, the idea of plugging in a hydrogen canister to power water heaters and cooktops just strikes me as kind of funny. Reflexively I want to say dangerous, but when I think about it I realize it's not any more insane (probably less, actually) than carting methane and propane around in pressurized tanks.
Japan has recently begun renewing their interest in nuclear, its incredibly popular. Edit: But, also, they are attempting one of the biggest energy experiments I've ever seen and have been deeply...
TOKYO — Japan adopted a plan on Thursday (Dec, 2022) to extend the lifespan of nuclear reactors, replace the old and even build new ones, a major shift in a country scarred by the Fukushima disaster that once planned to phase out atomic power.
Under the new policy, Japan will maximize the use of existing reactors by restarting as many of them as possible and prolonging the operating life of aging ones beyond a 60-year limit. The government also pledged to develop next-generation reactors.
[...] Nuclear energy accounts for less than 7% of Japan's energy supply, and achieving the government's goal of raising that share to 20-22% by 2030 will require about 27 reactors, from the current 10 — a target some say is not achievable. The new policy also does not help address imminent supply shortages because reactors cannot be restarted quickly enough.
Japan is dropping a massive 330-ton turbine power generator onto the ocean floor just off the country’s coast in a bid to source theoretically limitless renewable energy.
Over the past decade, IHI Corporation has been developing “Kairyu,” a 100-kilowatt-class generator that can harness the power of ocean currents. In February, the Tokyo-based engineering firm successfully completed a 3 1/2-year-long test of the subsea turbine in the waters of southwestern Japan. You can expect to see it up-and-running sometime in the 2030s.
The company's latest prototype is called Kairyu and weighs in at 330 tons. Two counter-rotating turbine fans are connected by a massive fuselage, which allows the entire apparatus to float while anchored anchored to the sea floor, hovering between 100 and 160 feet below the surface.
There, it pulls energy from one of the world's strongest ocean currents, off the eastern coast of Japan, using it to spin its mighty turbines.
During demonstrations earlier this year, the company was able to generate around 100 kilowatts of stable power. During future tests, IHI Corp is hoping to generate two megawatts, with the hopes of kicking off commercial operations in the 2030s, Bloomberg reports.
I saw that paper the other day and he sort of ends up arguing the opposite of his own point. He assumes a steady 2% increase in energy consumption year over year for 1,000 years. I just don't see...
I saw that paper the other day and he sort of ends up arguing the opposite of his own point. He assumes a steady 2% increase in energy consumption year over year for 1,000 years. I just don't see that happening. I foresee human population starting to level off by the end of the century and declining after that. From there consumption requirements will start to scale down, first slowly, and then dramatically.
If that's the level of consumption we'd need I think we can be assured that it's functionally renewable for our purposes. I'm not even sure we could reasonably build that scale of tidal generation honestly. There are finite limits on how much copper and other materials we have available.
Yes, I don’t see it happening either. We’ve discussed exponential growth before. Instead of plotting exponential curves that far out, I assume it’s probably not going to be an exponential curve...
Yes, I don’t see it happening either. We’ve discussed exponential growth before. Instead of plotting exponential curves that far out, I assume it’s probably not going to be an exponential curve forever and it will turn into an S curve. So I vote to disbelieve.
A consequence is that there has to be a peak sometime. Predicting when is the problem.
I don’t believe in limitless exponential curves in the other direction either. Even Moore’s law has an end, and I suspect we’re fairly close to it. Other forms of energy conservation will have limits, too.
It’s difficult to predict timelines. It may be years or decades before the tidal turbines become practical, if the history of other energy technologies is any guide. Some good histories on Construction Physics: Why did we wait so long for Wind Power and How Did Solar Power Get Cheap?
"The biggest issue for ocean current turbines is whether they could produce a device that would generate power economically out of currents that are not particularly strong," Angus McCrone, marine energy analyst, told Bloomberg.
I think ultimately energy demand is going to be a function of population size. I really don't think it's spiritually or culturally sustainable to have modern, Western per-capita energy consumption...
A consequence is that there has to be a peak sometime. Predicting when is the problem.
I think ultimately energy demand is going to be a function of population size. I really don't think it's spiritually or culturally sustainable to have modern, Western per-capita energy consumption over the long term and we will, eventually, hit a point of "satiety" with consumption to where we start scaling down. It's just going to be a cultural transition that will happen over several generations.
So really, there's 3 peaks to worry about. One is the population peak, the point at which we start having long-term population decline instead of increases. Many parts of the world have already crossed this threshold and it seems to be correlated strongly with economic development that incentivizes higher investments in education, and expansion of women's rights and family planning resources.
Then secondarily there's a per capita consumption peak, where people's appetites for "stuff" starts to come down. I don't think anywhere has reached this yet aside from some very isolated pockets of Kibbutz style intentional communities. So it's hard to say what the dynamics around this would be. I expect it will have to do with when we come up against the third peak, which is energy production. At some point energy becomes more expensive and it becomes less and less reasonable to spend it on fast fashion and other useless baubles, so many of these low value production-outputs start to go away and people just start being thriftier.
The real question is, how productive the economy ends up in terms of being able to meet peoples' physical and spiritual needs adequately before some of those peaks hit. If we're able to secure food, healthcare, education, and generally dignified standard of living from everyone at a given level of economic production then it'll probably all be fine even if energy and population/labor constraints lead o anemic or stagnant economic growth. If we end up not having enough to provide that baseline it's gonna be lean times for many, basically forever, since there's no more demographic or fossil fuel dividend to keep improving standards of living with.
Here are the other main comments on the subject that were lost: Are they planning on "blue" hydrogen (steam reformation of hydrogen from LNG with capture of the resulting CO2), or "green" hydrogen...
Here are the other main comments on the subject that were lost:
Are they planning on "blue" hydrogen (steam reformation of hydrogen from LNG with capture of the resulting CO2), or "green" hydrogen (direct electrolysis of water with solar or other zero carbon power)?
. For reference, i'll post Japan's [power mix graph](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/Electricity_production_in_Japan.svg/1920px-Electricity_production_in_Japan.svg.png) here again
Japan sees hydrogen as a major way to decarbonize its economy while sustaining its industrial competitiveness. Hydrogen is among the 14 sectors identified under the Green Growth Strategy Through Achieving Carbon Neutrality in 2050 (announced in December 2020) that will be key for Japan's ability to meet the dual objectives. The Japanese government doubled down on hydrogen with an update to the green growth strategy, announced in June 2021 (PDF warning), that adds specific action plans to priority sectors.
Per the triennial Strategic Energy Plan, to be adopted by the cabinet later this fall, hydrogen and ammonia will make up 1 percent of both the primary energy mix and the electricity supply mix in 2030 to be consistent with the country's 46 percent greenhouse gas reduction target (against 2013 levels). Beyond its use in the electricity generation and transportation sectors, hydrogen is seen as key for decarbonizing industrial sectors, such as steelmaking and petrochemical production. In particular, Japan also has a technological edge in fuel cell technology. The country continues to invest in this technology and seeks to be a top global exporter.
Reducing the cost of hydrogen production is a major agenda. The work is underway to reduce the cost from about US$1 per cubic meter (Nm3) in 2017 to 30 cents/Nm3 by 2030 and about or below 20 cents/Nm3 by 2050.
While Japan sees reliance on hydrocarbon as inevitable in the short term, the country seeks for the long term to shift the source of hydrogen and fuel cells from fossil fuels like natural gas to renewable energy, including a growing volume of domestically sourced renewable energy.
Emphasis mine. Another key point from CSIS:
The development of hydrogen supply chains is a major agenda, and both the Japanese government and companies are undertaking various projects, including the development of maritime transport. For example, Japan's Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd. launched the world's first liquefied hydrogen vessel in 2019 and completed the world's first liquefied hydrogen receiving terminal in Japan in 2020. While Japan is currently focused on fossil fuel--based hydrogen supply chains, the country is also planning to establish a manufacturing technology base by 2030 to produce hydrogen from domestic renewable sources.
Japan wants to keep its technology options open and is investing in all carriers (i.e., liquified, methylcyclohexane [MCH], ammonia, and methanation) due to different advantages and the belief that it is too early to ascertain their long-term viability.
Basically, they're maintaining their relationship with current energy suppliers so they don't cut them off (no one likes stranded assets, and the average country supplying huge quantities of natural gas is usually a petrostate or a cartel so there are less... democratic concerns standing in the way of nationalization, trade law violations, etc if push really came to shove).
While simultaneously investing in CCS all along the supply chain (which in a few ways serves the dual benefit of helping to advance technology for hydrogen capture in the sense of preventing leaks, building more robust and efficient systems etc.), they're bootstrapping technology demonstrators and supply chain development with "grey" hydrogen. From their perspective, the alternative to grey hydrogen right now is straight natural gas or coal so it's less bad.
The goal is to help their suppliers develop methods for capture, liquification, conversion, transport, and storage. To an extent, they can re-tool existing pipelines but until you actually do it it's hard to tell what is viable and what isn't.
Ammonia is being explored as a storage/transport medium as well as fuel for ships, as it can be converted to LH2 or burned directly in modified thermal plants similar to LNG thermal plants.
But they're also aggressively advancing technology for distributed hydrogen production hubs using renewables.
One super cool demonstrator I saw was a remote hydrogen fueling station. It used on-site solar PV/wind to power the facility, and any energy that was unused was routed to a bank of electrolysis equipment that produces hydrogen out of any excess. That excess is slowly compressed and cooled into a large carbon fiber storage tank, and it essentially operates as a filling station where smaller portable tanks can be brought and filled up. They're basically using hydrogen as a battery for renewable energy that can be moved around like a propane tank and used wherever it's needed.
An aside: hydrogen molecules will leak out of metal tanks over time since hydrogen is such a small molecule. So a lot of development has been done in Carbon Fiber (CFRP) wrapped tanks to both reduce weight and decrease residual loss/leaks. Here is an article about aviation applications that discusses the CFRP tanks and the idea of a hydrogen tank distribution system in Europe, and a great discussion of the reasons why it needs to be CFRP.
Important note about that article above. It discusses Europe's efforts to start doing the long, difficult, expensive work of developing the supply chain and the technologies. As they note,
Hydrogen's viability as a fuel source --- regardless of industry --- depends on rapid development of a variety of transport, delivery and storage technologies that are young but fast-evolving. Commercializing these technologies will not be simple, but they are being addressed. Below is a summary of some work being done.
The article also notes a flurry of EU money being dumped into hydrogen in 2020.
Japan started putting money into commercializing hydrogen over 20 years ago. Here is a random article I found talking bout some of Toyota's early fuel cell hybrids, that notes:
The Toyota FCHV (fuel cell hybrid vehicle) is based upon years of hydrogen car development starting in 1992.
Anyways,
My understanding is that Japan's long term goal is to transition from grey to blue + CCS (which they see as overall net improvement of their combined CO2 contributions from their LNG supply chain), then eventually to green. Note in that power mix graph above, Japan had already rebounded up to around 20% of their energy being supplied by renewables.
"ok, sure, their position on hydrogen and electric vehicles totally makes sense to me". But why then don't they just come out and say that? Instead we get "studies" from Toyota which conclude that "well we can show why hybrids are actually better for the environment than battery electric", and other things to try to sell the environmental benefits of hydrogen while completely ignoring the actual source of it, etc etc.
Ok, going to try and probably fail to keep this short but here we go:
Of course, some of it is wanting to keep investors happy, not short-selling your existing strategy, etc etc. But let's explore some of the... Japanese reasons for it.
It largely comes back to Face, which i'll explore in several contexts. As in, saving face. It's not a concept that we think about very often in the west anymore, but for most asian cultures it's an essential factor in understanding why they do what they do. Wikipedia article on Face as a sociological concept here, but basically it comes down to.. honor.
From the Japanese perspective, they can't come out and say "Oh yeah sorry guys Japan's super backwards and fucked, if we make electric cars we'll nuke the power grid lol sry". But of course, that's obvious. Let's peel this onion.
Remember from my previous comment where I discussed zaibatsu and keiretsu, conglomerates of the asian variety (the Koreans have them too, called Chaebol. Samsung, Hyundai, Daewoo, Lotte, etc). As you might imagine, Toyota is also keiretsu (but not zaibatsu, in that they're less... oligarchical). Here's the Toyota Group. Let's look at some of the members.
#1 on the list is Aishin, but they're not interesting enough to discuss specifically so let's group them together. From the article: Affiliates or partially owned subsidiaries
Kyoho kai group -- Auto parts company -- 211 companies.
Kyouei kai group -- Logistic/facility company -- 123 companies.
Subaru Corporation, manufacturer of Subaru automobiles. (Toyota owns 20% and is the largest single shareholder in the company)
Mazda Motor Corporation (Toyota owns 5.05% of the company)
Suzuki Motor Corporation (Toyota owns 4.9% of the company)
Isuzu Motors Ltd. (Toyota owns 4.6% of the company)
Just a little reminder of the cross-shareholding straitjacket that is replicated in almost every Japanese industry that is historically a corporate version of "circle the wagons" out of fear of foreign takeovers (among many many other things), but notice that there basically over 350 affiliate companies across a broad spectrum of partial shareholding on one end to wholly owned subsidiary on the other. If you were to trace the history of these tie-ups you would find a trail of corpses very similar to that discussed above in regards to Japan's LNG financial crusades.
Actually that's a little unfair, here's a quick aside on Foreign Direct Investment that I will almost certainly end up writing entirely too much about.
I have a point with all of this, I swear.
Foreign Direct Investment: Japan vs US or China
To speak slightly in hyperbole to make the point come across, compared to:
The predatory and insidious Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) practices of the US (think South America banana republics, overthrowing democratically elected governments for oil companies, forcing World Bank loans and IMF austerity on third world countries that are choking on debt from US loans to fund extractive capitalist ventures, dumping literal megatonnes of free food aid on countries to the point where no one will buy food from farmers, etc etc) or
The insidious and predatory FDI of China (Belt and Road initiative, massive infrastructure projects in Africa and South Asia employing mostly Chinese workers and using Chinese materials to build Chinese roads and Chinese ports to sell Chinese goods, meaning Chinese profit and nothing for the locals, panda diplomacy and soft economic sanctions, fake moral panics and scandals to force foreign companies to exit China etc)
Japanese FDI is comparatively fairly above reproach. Of course there are myriad instances of unfair deals and just the insane disparities in capital and know-how, technology, political power, etc is enough that there are many books on the dark aspects of Corporate Japan. And of course, I am exclusively discussing Post-war Japan lol. Imperial Japan's Foreign Direct Investment strategy was a bit more... direct haha.
Although nerd that I am, I must say that the early actual FDI they did in Manchuria and a lot of the activities of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere if you dig into the details (and completely ignore the racist motivations and human cost) were fascinating (but not above reproach), but Imperial Japan was literally a fascist oligarchy at that time. There was a period somewhere during the 20s-30s that caused one US Diplomat to describe Japan as a "government run by assassination", and political power was very fragmented before the war and throughout. There were factions and some power circles in Japan with a genuine desire to uplift the rest of Asia as a defense against Western Colonialism...
Ahhh sorry tangent, for more info on that I recommend Dan Carlin's Supernova in the East podcast episodes from Hardcore History, absolutely amazingly cited and profoundly well told mixture of first hand accounts and amazing narration that is a really great primer for westerners looking to understand "What the fuck was Japan's problem during WW2".
short answer: a lot, but like most things if you really dive in there is a dizzying amount of depth and moving parts to it!
My point being: look at Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, look at Vietnam especially. They are all huge beneficiaries of Japanese investment in manufacturing, raw materials and resource processing, infrastructure like ports, roads, trains, technical assistance and know-how, training programs for workers in high skill industries, etc.
Source: I literally designed and implemented programs like this, and negotiated subsidies/offset for projects with local governments
In particular, trading companies and trading houses (商社 しょうしゃ shousha) have their tendrils spread far and wide in shareholdings, investments and funding, joint venture creation, mergers and acquisitions, etc. And they have trillions in productive assets in countries all over the world to secure, process, and deliver the raw materials Japan needs, market sell and service their goods as well as their factories and their automation and their machine tools.
Hell, I work in a facility in north America and almost all of our precision equipment is Japanese. Some of it is nepotism, but honestly? Half of it is we can't find local suppliers of sufficient quality. So we import Japanese engineers and technicians on short term stays to install and service their Japanese equipment for us. I led little nervous caravans of Japanese engineers and technicians through south east Asia to do the same thing, in my previous life, when my SE Asian customers simply could not find anyone with the technical know-how to repair their critical equipment in country.
Anyways, finally here is my point.
Remember above, Toyota Group had like what, 350 ish suppliers on the ownership spectrum?
How many employees do you think each of those 350 suppliers has?
How many employees does say, a supplier of conveyors or NC machines or (for a different industry) UV lithography equipment or photoresists or carbon fibre, etc.
For Japan, the majority of their manufacturing companies are Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs, or 中小企業 ちゅうしょうきぎょう chuushoukigyou), meaning less than 300 employees.
Here is a very Japanese government website showing exactly what I mean. (this data is from 2002)
SMEs employ 70% of Japanese employees, and account for 51.1% of all manufacturing shipments in terms of value. 60% of them also receive government subsidies officially, but in my experience that's likely closer to 100%
Almost all of those suppliers Toyota didn't bother to name are SMEs.
I know of one company that is sole supplier of equipment to their Overlord for a certain process, worldwide. They have 40 employees.
I knew of another company that was sole supplier of extremely precise parts for rockets and mission critical stuff, they had like 8 employees.
My favorite was this company that was about 50 employees, 80% of which were in their 60s or 70s, and this was the only company in JAPAN that was qualified to do the precise hand welding of parts for commercial and defense aircraft, parts that couldn't at that time be welded by machines with sufficient precision. One of my Japanese co-workers joked once that all it would take is one wave of the flu at the wrong time to completely halt production by wiping out all the old craftsmen at that company.
That's not the kind of thing you can easily replicate, as it's been built over decades. The Japanese really like to talk about Monozukuri, which is that sense of craftsmanship and valuing work, this random blog post discusses some of the various aspects of that.
This is another huge thorn in the electric advance, and honestly this is the core reason they have been hemming and hawing until about 2 years ago (which is when they actually decided to full speed ahead on electric although they didn't discuss it publicly).
If Toyota stops making internal combustion engines, and switches to electric, what do they no longer need?
The sole product that so many of their suppliers make. Engines, transmissions, all the various gears and valve bodies and radiators and hoses and... there are thousands of parts that will no longer be needed, nor the companies that make them. A lot of them can pivot, some of them can't. That's the march of progress, and all that, so it goes, blah blah blah we say.
Japan doesn't usually work that way. As I said before, they are a country that tries very desperately not to rock the boat.
Toyota Group has over 500 consolidated companies, and over 325,000 consolidated employees with another 70k unconsolidated, so lets say 400,000 people.
Then add Nissan, Honda, and their respective fiefdoms. Then Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, Subaru and their 3 supplier ecosystems, Then Sumitomo Chemical and Toray and Itochu for all the plastic, resin, rubber, synthetics, carbon fiber, etc not to mention the fluids, oils, hydraulics, etc etc.
Anyways, i'm sort of beating a dead horse here.
So, one big point of concern: Don't liquidate your entire supplier base, who also happen to be in a way your shareholders but also your subsidiaries but not entirely either, who are also explicitly backed by the Japanese government as a way to maintain core competencies.
(Example, when COVID hit the govt immediately stepped in and quietly subsidized 95% of all wages for my previous company to prevent loss of expertise. Months before any larger COVID assistance funds were available to general companies.)
Let me wrap it up with two concepts:
Nemawashi (根回し) (literally going around the root) Think of this as grassroots consensus building from bottom to top, but for corporate decision making. In short, before we say go, get everyone on the same page about the plan and think about everything that could happen, consider everyone's feedback, consider countermeasures and risk reduction efforts, then go.
This is how Japan works in a nutshell: slow consensus building and consideration, then when they say go it gets done very quickly.
Sōkaiya (総会屋) (general meeting extortionist) An absurd example of what I mean about face. From the article:
Sōkaiya (総会屋) (sometimes also translated as "corporate bouncers", "meeting-men", or "corporate blackmailers") are specialized racketeers unique to Japan, and often associated with the yakuza, who extort money from or blackmail companies by threatening to publicly humiliate companies and their management, usually in their annual meeting (総会, sōkai).
If a company does pay sōkaiya, the sōkaiya will work to prevent others from embarrassing the company, either through intimidation or by disrupting the meeting so they cannot be heard.
Sōkaiya originated in the late 19th century. At this time, the unlimited liability of the management put the managers' personal fortune at risk in case of rumors and scandals. Hence the management hired protection, called sōkaiya, to reduce the risk of such rumors. Even after the Japanese laws included a limited liability, hence reducing the personal risk to the managers, these sōkaiya continued to prosper, and were often used to quiet down otherwise difficult meetings. In that respect, they have even been compared to corporate lawyers in America.[1]
In 1984, the law made first steps to reduce the threat from sōkaiya by establishing a minimum number of holdings (¥50,000) in order to be allowed into the shareholder meeting, leading to a slow decline of the number of sōkaiya. In response to this, the sōkaiya formed fake uyoku dantai, announcing embarrassing company secrets, fictional or not, from loudspeakers mounted on trucks in order to extort money from companies.[1]
In 1994, Juntarō Suzuki, vice president of Fujifilm, was murdered by sōkaiya after he stopped paying these bribes.[2]
That's a great illustrative example of how much face pervades this culture. I don't think that soukaiya specifically are the issue, just an absurd example of the extreme lengths Japan goes to for image.
--
Wrapup:
Part of it is Japanese culture. Toyota, given their position, coming out and shitting on ICE in any way undermines the confidence of the extremely large and currently vital network of suppliers that keep their operations running. Imagine a giant boat comprised of hundreds of smaller rafts all bound together, each with a little propeller that moves the entire boat forward. If the captain starts making people nervous, everyone will panic. How many rafts sink or decouple before you are dead in the water?
Another part of it is... well Toyota is a very conservative company, is almost never a first mover, plays the long game, and hedges their bets.
They have been researching batteries for electric vehicles since the 1940s as they would tell it, although that's not really relevant here. This random article shows the point I want to make:
a Nikkei Asia study that also states the global solid-state [battery] scene is dominated by Japanese players, with South Korean companies following at some distance. The source notes that Toyota's lead comes thanks to the multitude of patents it holds, an impressive 1,331, followed by Panasonic with 445 patents and Idemitsu Kosan with 272 patents (mainly related to the metals that go into this type of batteries); Samsung is in fourth spot.
My personal view is that I think they were trying to leap-frog, and use solid state batteries for EVs while slowly hybridizing their entire powertrain to help develop and test out all of the power generation systems, improve battery manufacturing technology, and essentially they were trying to wait until it was profitable.
Toyota's latest investment in the battery plant brings the total to $5.9 billion.
The facility, its planned hub for developing and producing lithium-ion batteries, will have six battery production lines - four for hybrid electric vehicles and two for battery electric vehicles.
Seeking to solidify its foothold in the EV sector, Toyota has said it will introduce 10 new battery-powered vehicles, targeting sales of 1.5 million EVs a year by 2026.
One final aside, the last piece of the puzzle is merely human factors. Notice in that last article that the new Toyota CEO is the one speaking:
Replacing Akio Toyoda at the helm of the Japanese automotive giant, Koji Sato was appointed CEO on April 1
This is purely rumor, and I have no sources to back it up, but some suggest that the reason Akio Toyoda (the grandson of the original founder) was "promoted" to chairman was due to his personal intransigence at the shift to EV and for making the wrong call, so they promoted him into irrelevance while allowing him to save face.
It's a very Japanese way of admitting a mistake.
But mark my words, you'll see in 2-3 years what they've been working on and most of the media noise will immediately change their tune.
So does Japan not use split phase delivery of power where end users are getting 200V over two phases, like we use in North America? That's shocking to me, given how advanced Japan's electronics...
So does Japan not use split phase delivery of power where end users are getting 200V over two phases, like we use in North America? That's shocking to me, given how advanced Japan's electronics industries are.
Appears that they only use single phase, as does most of the world. Only NA and EU seem to use some form of split phase. Edit: This is a decent table showing the various voltage phases around the...
Appears that they only use single phase, as does most of the world. Only NA and EU seem to use some form of split phase.
Edit: This is a decent table showing the various voltage phases around the world, better than the one on Wikipedia.
While I'm not thrilled with how slow Toyota has been with supporting an all-electric lineup of vehicles, this is really cool and a step in a direction that more people (and companies) need to be...
While the Tri-gen plant, generating 2.3 megawatts of electricity—1.7 megawatts more than what the port typically uses—will completely cut the facility’s reliance on grid power, it will remain grid-connected. That’s because excess electricity not being used by the facility will be sold to Southern California Edison, under something called the California Bioenergy Market Adjustment (BioMAT) program, with enough to power almost 2,500 homes in the area annually.
Tri-gen will use agricultural methane to generate the electricity and produce up to 1,200 kg of hydrogen per day. The latter will go toward fueling Mirai vehicles as they come into port, and supplying fuel-cell-powered logistics systems and drayage trucks.
Toyota says that the fuel-cell plant will also generate 1,400 gallons of water per day, which will go toward washing cars at the port.
While I'm not thrilled with how slow Toyota has been with supporting an all-electric lineup of vehicles, this is really cool and a step in a direction that more people (and companies) need to be thinking about. This is a great way to offset emissions and profit from that offset. We need to be making more of our infrastructure more environmentally friendly and multi-purpose. I love that they're even taking the excess water and giving it a purpose. They've really thought of pretty much everything to make this port self-sufficient.
Toyota actually had a hydrogen generator at Pickathon, a music festival I went to earlier this year that prioritizes sustainability. Apparently it was powering multiple stages. I had no idea. I...
Toyota actually had a hydrogen generator at Pickathon, a music festival I went to earlier this year that prioritizes sustainability. Apparently it was powering multiple stages. I had no idea. I walked past the thing dozens of times and assumed it was just some big piece of promotional collateral, I didn't know it was actually, like, the thing.
Composting might also be a factor. My local utility captures their methane from composting/water treatment and uses it to power their collection vehicles.
Composting might also be a factor. My local utility captures their methane from composting/water treatment and uses it to power their collection vehicles.
This is amazing. Thank you posting this interesting news. Does burning methane come at a greenhouse effect cost or other environmental cost? If so, is it significantly lower than burning fossil fuels?
This is amazing. Thank you posting this interesting news.
Tri-gen will use agricultural methane to generate the electricity and produce up to 1,200 kg of hydrogen per day.
Does burning methane come at a greenhouse effect cost or other environmental cost? If so, is it significantly lower than burning fossil fuels?
Makes sense considering the massive push for Hydrogen by Toyota and the Japanese government. A few months ago I posted a thread and a user wrote the most substantial, beautifully written, explanation on why. I went to crosspost it here.... and the user deleted themselves. Sucks. But! Google had a cache of the page, and I was able to snag the comment.
Here is why Toyota (and Japan) are so focused on Hydrogen, and not EVs and batteries (and why I _now_ believe the same after some additional research.
[Err, sorry you activated my trap card and I am now obligated to brain dump my knowledge of Japan's hydrogen strategy on you. Source: I worked in a very closely related industry in Japan on a very relevant project that I can not discuss]
The fundamental issue behind all of this: Toyota's intransigence on battery electric, the push for hydrogen, etc is due to a huge elephant in the room that I don't see mentioned a lot in the west.
Japan's power grid.
If you're not aware, Japanese households receive 100v, and either 50hz or 60hz depending on which half of the country they're in. Here's an example image from the Wikipedia. As you can see, there is a huge partition to the west of Tokyo, the area in yellow.
The wikipedia article gives a great explanation, but one key point is that that 50/60hz split significantly hampers the ability to move power around the country as needed. The current capacity of the frequency convertors & HVDC lines, according to Wikipedia, is 1.2 GW. Compare that to the 1000ish TWh that Japan produces in a year. [EDIT: To their credit, cross-frequency capacity has increased and is supposedly at about 3GW now. As I noted in a lower comment, as of today Japan has rebounded and renewables represent about 200TWh of production!]
If we look at the Japanese Wikipedia Page for Japan's Energy Production we find some interesting info. Here's a more interesting graph that is in Japanese, so let me explain. This graph represents the amount of power in GW that each region produced in 2020, and the transmission capacity between them. Tokyo in yellow on the right, Chubu/Nagoya region in green on the bottom (home of Toyota and a lot of Japan's manufacturing base), Kansai/Osaka region in blue, Chuugoku and Kyuushuu on the left, and the islands of Shikoku on the bottom and Hokkaido on the top.
The colors represent electrical "regions", and the big red lines represent transmission volume with the bi-colored boxes representing maximum electrical capacity transferred between regions. So without significant upgrades to an already odd electrical system, or the even more expensive task of trying to convert it to say... 240V, the electrical grid in Japan hampers both adoption of electrical vehicles (extra load) and the adoption of renewables.
How do you transmit all that energy from the rural areas or from the ocean to power Tokyo, when you can't even reliably transmit 10% of the Tokyo region's power requirements from other regions?
Also, electricity is expensive and historically has relied almost entirely on imported fuel. See this graph also from Wikipedia showing a few key things.
First, notice that The 1973 Oil Crisis is where Japan starts divesting away from petroleum power, and into Natural Gas. However, Japan has no pipelines running to it, and no natural gas of its own really. Meaning that this is all LNG, Liquified Natural Gas [Note: This wikipedia article is one particular instance where I am frustrated by how focused it is on America, when America has historically had very little to do with the LNG market until recently]. LNG is condensed by super cooling it to about -162C, and transporting it at around 25kPa. As the Wikipedia article states,
If we look at LNG Imports from the 90s to the 2010s, you might notice that green line looming menacingly at the top, consuming more LNG than all of the other lines combined. That line is Japan.
In 2017, according to wikipedia, Japan imported 83.5MT of LNG, more than the next two China (39MT) and South Korea (37.8MT) combined.
By 2011, Nuclear and Gas represented over roughly 600 TWh of Japan's ballpark ~1000 TWh generation. Now notice the dip in the yellow once the Fukushima disaster occurs.
In the 2010s, if you're Toyota's Board of Directors, looking at Japan's energy market and trying to calculate what would happen if you introduced electric cars en masse, you don't see a good picture in your home market. Notice how Coal and Petroleum immediately consumed half the generation, with almost entirely the balance made up by LNG outside of Japan's Hydro generation, which is not expandable for fear of disrupting the very lucrative and more importantly very traditional and historical hot spring resort industry.
So Hydro expansion is out, any extra electrical load you add to your power grid has to be covered by fossil fuels, and imported on top of that. And your grid can't even transmit renewable energy from your oceans and rural areas to the areas where it matters to the economy.
You can imagine very desperate officials from METI, Japan's Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry, making many visits to the major automakers and having meetings with a lot of hand wringing to encourage Honda, Nissan, Mazda, Toyota, Subaru, Daihatsu, Yamaha, Kawasaki etc to perhaps... not be so hasty in massively increasing load on the electrical grid please thank you very much.
When I moved into my first apartment in Japan in 2015, a two bedroom equivalent, I was astounded to discover that my apartment's mains power was on a 20A breaker. The mains. For the entire apartment. And remember, they're running 100V so that meant I could use about 2000w before I flipped the breaker.
Obviously, not every home in Japan is squeaking by on a 20A breaker. I learned later (once I could read my electric bill all the way), that you can pay more for a bigger breaker. But my point is, even in my apartment water heating was natural gas, Cookstove was gas, a lot of winter heating was gas, and no oven so only major load was the air conditioner.
There were also government initiatives to reduce power consumption while I was there, by asking businesses and homes to set their thermostats to 28C (82F) or higher during the summer, etc. There was one summer where we had to turn off AC in the office entirely to allow our machining centers to run without pushing us up into a higher load fee class as power was essentially rationed.
Anyways, if you are Corporate Japan (including the Japanese Government in this as well because they cooperate), full electric is the least viable seeming option in the 2010s, which is when Japan decided to go the route of hydrogen.
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So why hydrogen? Well they bet on it over a decade ago, this is just acceleration. Remember those portions I bolded about LNG from the quote above?
Here is a random article I found after getting frustrated at wikipedia basically glossing over all of Japan's involvement in LNG. Note that the LNG market has grown a lot of late, and that this article was written in 2014, but:
They go on to say,
Emphasis mine.
Note here that this is not Mitsubishi the car company. This is likely Mitsubishi Corporation, a huge trading company (known as 商社（しょうしゃ）or shousha in Japanese) and one of the Three Great Houses (御三家 ごさんけ gosanke) of the Mitsubishi Group:
Note that it's still held. Also notice the other two Great Houses, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, the 7th largest bank globally in terms of assets with $2.991 Trillion USD as of 2022-12-31, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, #23 global defense contractors in terms of defense revenue, but they also make: "MHI's products include aerospace and automotive components, air conditioners, elevators, forklift trucks, hydraulic equipment, printing machines, missiles, tanks,[3] power systems, ships, aircraft, railway systems, and space launch vehicles.
Mitsubishi is historically considered to be a Zaibatsu (財閥 ざいばつ ), or conglomerate of the Standard Oil variety (although the literal meaning is financial clique). That term does have a negative connotation, so they prefer Keiretsu (系列 けいれつ) which basically means the same thing.
For the Brunei deal, the article notes:
To return to the article, let's skim the 70s and 80s and see how many first LNG terminals in various countries involved Japanese investment:
*"Japanese buyers also provided a market for Indonesian gas in the early 1970s."
Remember when we talked about zaibatsu and keiretsu up above? Check the first sentence of wikipedia for Mitsui:
So Mitsui, like Mitsubishi, owns a bank, owns petrochemical companies, owns trading companies, owns shipbuilders, owns transport companies...
*A number of Japanese companies were instrumental in bringing Qatar's Ras Laffan LNG project to life. The project sponsors were QGPC (70%) and Mobil (30%).
That's a lot of firsts. No need to look up all the bolded names, just notice the repeats.
Moving on,
And wrapping up the 2000s,
As we noted before, they also note the shift after Fukushima in 2011
They go on to discuss US developments in LNG export capacity, and since this article was written in 2014 and the US didn't really start exporting LNG until 2016 we have an interesting little window into that. Let's look at the investors:
Finally, they mention Kawasaki. Again, not the motorcycle maker directly, but Kawasaki Heavy Industries. According to the zaibatsu wikipedia Kawasaki was only a "second tier zaibatsu" traditionally lol, but today they are a "Japanese public multinational corporation manufacturer of motorcycles, engines, heavy equipment, aerospace and defense equipment, rolling stock and ships, headquartered in Chūō, Kobe and Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It is also active in the production of industrial robots, gas turbines, pumps, boilers and other industrial products.
Kawasaki (KHI) also is heavily involved in Japan's space industry. Mitsubishi Heavy (MHI) builts the rockets and their engines. Notice that the LE-9 engine for the H3 rocket runs on liquid hydrogen. KHI builds the pressure vessels to store that liquid hydrogen. But where did they gain that know-how?
Let's look at KHI a press release from 2009
KHI, MHI and IHI (another conglomerate that "produces and offers ships, space launch vehicles, aircraft engines, marine diesel engines, gas turbines, gas engines, railway systems, turbochargers for automobiles, plant engineering, industrial machinery, power station boilers and other facilities, suspension bridges and other structures.") were heavily involved in the design, construction, and maintenance of Japan's fleet of LNG terminals, storage facilities, and pressurized transport vessels.
Here Is an interesting article about Japan's LNG policy. If we look at the map further down the page, we can see Japan's natural gas infrastructure.
Notice how few pipelines there are. In part due to history, in part due to extremely mountainous terrain making interconnections extremely expensive, similar to electricity the LNG market is.. clustered. It's non-trivial to transport gas between terminals, and most pipeline networks focus on the main cities.
And finally, to round out that article,
--
Ok, so let's summarize.
TL;DR
Japan has:
*Busted electrical grid that will cost trillions to renovate, severely limiting your ability to mass deploy renewables to benefit industry and major population centers
*Heavy reliance and hundreds of billions of existing investment in behemoth networks to source, refine, and transport fossil fuels, in particular liquid natural gas
*LNG is a compressed, liquefied gas that required a lot of specialized research and engineering to create a supply chain capable of supporting it.
*The same companies that have spent the past 70 years investing hundreds of billions in developing and maintaining the LNG supply chain are very eager to not suddenly have literal trillions in stranded assets
*And yet there is no simple way, either through gas or electricity, to get energy in large quantities between urban centers in Japan
From that perspective, it makes 100% sense why Japan is betting so hard on hydrogen. It makes the most sense.
*You have literally hundreds of thousands of people already trained and a mature supply base to handle the international transport of volatile gases liquified at high pressure.
*You have urban centers that largely produce their own power independently of each other, and they get ALL of it from imports.
*You already have an robust system for distributing fuel in containerized form domestically (CNG tanks for suburban/rural gas supply, etc)
Of course, natural gas and hydrogen are not apples-to-apples in how they need to be stored, at all.
So 2010s Japan is sitting there thinking:
But if you can swap over your rural populace fairly pain free from propane tanks to hydrogen tanks for their heating (compared to rebuilding the entire electrical grid), repurpose your existing infrastructure and financial/trade networks for LNG slowly to transition them over to Hydrogen, keep your automotive industry going comparatively pain free by swapping to hydrogen rather than trying to figure out how to get chargers integrated literally everywhere on a creaky grid that can't handle its existing load
And most importantly, if you can keep all those major conglomerates with cross shareholdings profitable they won't destroy the economy.
In a way, what other option does Japan have? Hydrogen is the path of least resistance to a country that tries very desperately not to rock the boat.
This from a thread about how Japan is investing $107Bn over the next 15 years into hydrogen.
I dare ask, what other topic will you send me down a rabbit hole?
This was an interesting read, thanks!
Holy wall of text. That was amazing research. I didn't know any of that and it was a very interesting read. Thanks so much!
I am astonished that a country that bootstrapped its economy, in large part, by cultivating an image as a consumer electronics powerhouse continues puttering along with such an anemic electrical grid.
And why the CNG fixation for baseload power? I assume they've soured on nuclear somewhat since Fukushima, but that wasn't that long ago. Did they stop building more nuclear before that? It seems like a handy solution to a lot of their problems, especially if they develop hydrogen battery technologies to smooth out consumption off the nuclear plants.
Also, the idea of plugging in a hydrogen canister to power water heaters and cooktops just strikes me as kind of funny. Reflexively I want to say dangerous, but when I think about it I realize it's not any more insane (probably less, actually) than carting methane and propane around in pressurized tanks.
Japan has recently begun renewing their interest in nuclear, its incredibly popular.
Edit: But, also, they are attempting one of the biggest energy experiments I've ever seen and have been deeply interested in since reading the brief several years ago: Japan is testing a massive 300Tn turbine in the ocean, that could power the entire country
Via Futurism: Japan Tested a Giant Turbine That Generates Electricity Using Deep Ocean Currents, and the test went great
I saw that paper the other day and he sort of ends up arguing the opposite of his own point. He assumes a steady 2% increase in energy consumption year over year for 1,000 years. I just don't see that happening. I foresee human population starting to level off by the end of the century and declining after that. From there consumption requirements will start to scale down, first slowly, and then dramatically.
If that's the level of consumption we'd need I think we can be assured that it's functionally renewable for our purposes. I'm not even sure we could reasonably build that scale of tidal generation honestly. There are finite limits on how much copper and other materials we have available.
Yes, I don’t see it happening either. We’ve discussed exponential growth before. Instead of plotting exponential curves that far out, I assume it’s probably not going to be an exponential curve forever and it will turn into an S curve. So I vote to disbelieve.
A consequence is that there has to be a peak sometime. Predicting when is the problem.
I don’t believe in limitless exponential curves in the other direction either. Even Moore’s law has an end, and I suspect we’re fairly close to it. Other forms of energy conservation will have limits, too.
It’s difficult to predict timelines. It may be years or decades before the tidal turbines become practical, if the history of other energy technologies is any guide. Some good histories on Construction Physics: Why did we wait so long for Wind Power and How Did Solar Power Get Cheap?
I think ultimately energy demand is going to be a function of population size. I really don't think it's spiritually or culturally sustainable to have modern, Western per-capita energy consumption over the long term and we will, eventually, hit a point of "satiety" with consumption to where we start scaling down. It's just going to be a cultural transition that will happen over several generations.
So really, there's 3 peaks to worry about. One is the population peak, the point at which we start having long-term population decline instead of increases. Many parts of the world have already crossed this threshold and it seems to be correlated strongly with economic development that incentivizes higher investments in education, and expansion of women's rights and family planning resources.
Then secondarily there's a per capita consumption peak, where people's appetites for "stuff" starts to come down. I don't think anywhere has reached this yet aside from some very isolated pockets of Kibbutz style intentional communities. So it's hard to say what the dynamics around this would be. I expect it will have to do with when we come up against the third peak, which is energy production. At some point energy becomes more expensive and it becomes less and less reasonable to spend it on fast fashion and other useless baubles, so many of these low value production-outputs start to go away and people just start being thriftier.
The real question is, how productive the economy ends up in terms of being able to meet peoples' physical and spiritual needs adequately before some of those peaks hit. If we're able to secure food, healthcare, education, and generally dignified standard of living from everyone at a given level of economic production then it'll probably all be fine even if energy and population/labor constraints lead o anemic or stagnant economic growth. If we end up not having enough to provide that baseline it's gonna be lean times for many, basically forever, since there's no more demographic or fossil fuel dividend to keep improving standards of living with.
Here are the other main comments on the subject that were lost:
Are they planning on "blue" hydrogen (steam reformation of hydrogen from LNG with capture of the resulting CO2), or "green" hydrogen (direct electrolysis of water with solar or other zero carbon power)?
. For reference, i'll post Japan's [power mix graph](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/Electricity_production_in_Japan.svg/1920px-Electricity_production_in_Japan.svg.png) here againHere is an excellent overview of Japan's strategy. Their focus is on investing in all of the above, basically.
METI published Japan's 2020 Green Growth Strategy here.
And the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has a good analysis here from 2021.
CSIS sums it up well:
Emphasis mine. Another key point from CSIS:
Basically, they're maintaining their relationship with current energy suppliers so they don't cut them off (no one likes stranded assets, and the average country supplying huge quantities of natural gas is usually a petrostate or a cartel so there are less... democratic concerns standing in the way of nationalization, trade law violations, etc if push really came to shove).
While simultaneously investing in CCS all along the supply chain (which in a few ways serves the dual benefit of helping to advance technology for hydrogen capture in the sense of preventing leaks, building more robust and efficient systems etc.), they're bootstrapping technology demonstrators and supply chain development with "grey" hydrogen. From their perspective, the alternative to grey hydrogen right now is straight natural gas or coal so it's less bad.
The goal is to help their suppliers develop methods for capture, liquification, conversion, transport, and storage. To an extent, they can re-tool existing pipelines but until you actually do it it's hard to tell what is viable and what isn't.
Ammonia is being explored as a storage/transport medium as well as fuel for ships, as it can be converted to LH2 or burned directly in modified thermal plants similar to LNG thermal plants.
But they're also aggressively advancing technology for distributed hydrogen production hubs using renewables.
One super cool demonstrator I saw was a remote hydrogen fueling station. It used on-site solar PV/wind to power the facility, and any energy that was unused was routed to a bank of electrolysis equipment that produces hydrogen out of any excess. That excess is slowly compressed and cooled into a large carbon fiber storage tank, and it essentially operates as a filling station where smaller portable tanks can be brought and filled up. They're basically using hydrogen as a battery for renewable energy that can be moved around like a propane tank and used wherever it's needed.
An aside: hydrogen molecules will leak out of metal tanks over time since hydrogen is such a small molecule. So a lot of development has been done in Carbon Fiber (CFRP) wrapped tanks to both reduce weight and decrease residual loss/leaks. Here is an article about aviation applications that discusses the CFRP tanks and the idea of a hydrogen tank distribution system in Europe, and a great discussion of the reasons why it needs to be CFRP.
Important note about that article above. It discusses Europe's efforts to start doing the long, difficult, expensive work of developing the supply chain and the technologies. As they note,
The article also notes a flurry of EU money being dumped into hydrogen in 2020.
Japan started putting money into commercializing hydrogen over 20 years ago.
Here is a random article I found talking bout some of Toyota's early fuel cell hybrids, that notes:
Anyways,
My understanding is that Japan's long term goal is to transition from grey to blue + CCS (which they see as overall net improvement of their combined CO2 contributions from their LNG supply chain), then eventually to green. Note in that power mix graph above, Japan had already rebounded up to around 20% of their energy being supplied by renewables.
"ok, sure, their position on hydrogen and electric vehicles totally makes sense to me". But why then don't they just come out and say that? Instead we get "studies" from Toyota which conclude that "well we can show why hybrids are actually better for the environment than battery electric", and other things to try to sell the environmental benefits of hydrogen while completely ignoring the actual source of it, etc etc.
Ok, going to try and probably fail to keep this short but here we go:Of course, some of it is wanting to keep investors happy, not short-selling your existing strategy, etc etc. But let's explore some of the... Japanese reasons for it.
It largely comes back to Face, which i'll explore in several contexts. As in, saving face. It's not a concept that we think about very often in the west anymore, but for most asian cultures it's an essential factor in understanding why they do what they do. Wikipedia article on Face as a sociological concept here, but basically it comes down to.. honor.
From the Japanese perspective, they can't come out and say "Oh yeah sorry guys Japan's super backwards and fucked, if we make electric cars we'll nuke the power grid lol sry". But of course, that's obvious. Let's peel this onion.
Remember from my previous comment where I discussed zaibatsu and keiretsu, conglomerates of the asian variety (the Koreans have them too, called Chaebol. Samsung, Hyundai, Daewoo, Lotte, etc). As you might imagine, Toyota is also keiretsu (but not zaibatsu, in that they're less... oligarchical). Here's the Toyota Group. Let's look at some of the members.
#1 on the list is Aishin, but they're not interesting enough to discuss specifically so let's group them together. From the article:
Affiliates or partially owned subsidiaries
Kyoho kai group -- Auto parts company -- 211 companies.
Kyouei kai group -- Logistic/facility company -- 123 companies.
Subaru Corporation, manufacturer of Subaru automobiles. (Toyota owns 20% and is the largest single shareholder in the company)
Mazda Motor Corporation (Toyota owns 5.05% of the company)
Suzuki Motor Corporation (Toyota owns 4.9% of the company)
Isuzu Motors Ltd. (Toyota owns 4.6% of the company)
Just a little reminder of the cross-shareholding straitjacket that is replicated in almost every Japanese industry that is historically a corporate version of "circle the wagons" out of fear of foreign takeovers (among many many other things), but notice that there basically over 350 affiliate companies across a broad spectrum of partial shareholding on one end to wholly owned subsidiary on the other. If you were to trace the history of these tie-ups you would find a trail of corpses very similar to that discussed above in regards to Japan's LNG financial crusades.
Actually that's a little unfair, here's a quick aside on Foreign Direct Investment that I will almost certainly end up writing entirely too much about.
I have a point with all of this, I swear.
Foreign Direct Investment: Japan vs US or China
To speak slightly in hyperbole to make the point come across, compared to:
Japanese FDI is comparatively fairly above reproach. Of course there are myriad instances of unfair deals and just the insane disparities in capital and know-how, technology, political power, etc is enough that there are many books on the dark aspects of Corporate Japan. And of course, I am exclusively discussing Post-war Japan lol. Imperial Japan's Foreign Direct Investment strategy was a bit more... direct haha.
Although nerd that I am, I must say that the early actual FDI they did in Manchuria and a lot of the activities of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere if you dig into the details (and completely ignore the racist motivations and human cost) were fascinating (but not above reproach), but Imperial Japan was literally a fascist oligarchy at that time. There was a period somewhere during the 20s-30s that caused one US Diplomat to describe Japan as a "government run by assassination", and political power was very fragmented before the war and throughout. There were factions and some power circles in Japan with a genuine desire to uplift the rest of Asia as a defense against Western Colonialism...
Ahhh sorry tangent, for more info on that I recommend Dan Carlin's Supernova in the East podcast episodes from Hardcore History, absolutely amazingly cited and profoundly well told mixture of first hand accounts and amazing narration that is a really great primer for westerners looking to understand "What the fuck was Japan's problem during WW2".
short answer: a lot, but like most things if you really dive in there is a dizzying amount of depth and moving parts to it!
My point being: look at Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, look at Vietnam especially. They are all huge beneficiaries of Japanese investment in manufacturing, raw materials and resource processing, infrastructure like ports, roads, trains, technical assistance and know-how, training programs for workers in high skill industries, etc.
Source: I literally designed and implemented programs like this, and negotiated subsidies/offset for projects with local governments
In particular, trading companies and trading houses (商社 しょうしゃ shousha) have their tendrils spread far and wide in shareholdings, investments and funding, joint venture creation, mergers and acquisitions, etc. And they have trillions in productive assets in countries all over the world to secure, process, and deliver the raw materials Japan needs, market sell and service their goods as well as their factories and their automation and their machine tools.
Hell, I work in a facility in north America and almost all of our precision equipment is Japanese. Some of it is nepotism, but honestly? Half of it is we can't find local suppliers of sufficient quality. So we import Japanese engineers and technicians on short term stays to install and service their Japanese equipment for us. I led little nervous caravans of Japanese engineers and technicians through south east Asia to do the same thing, in my previous life, when my SE Asian customers simply could not find anyone with the technical know-how to repair their critical equipment in country.
Anyways, finally here is my point.
Remember above, Toyota Group had like what, 350 ish suppliers on the ownership spectrum?
How many employees do you think each of those 350 suppliers has?
How many employees does say, a supplier of conveyors or NC machines or (for a different industry) UV lithography equipment or photoresists or carbon fibre, etc.
For Japan, the majority of their manufacturing companies are Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs, or 中小企業 ちゅうしょうきぎょう chuushoukigyou), meaning less than 300 employees.
Here is a very Japanese government website showing exactly what I mean. (this data is from 2002)
SMEs employ 70% of Japanese employees, and account for 51.1% of all manufacturing shipments in terms of value.
60% of them also receive government subsidies officially, but in my experience that's likely closer to 100%
Almost all of those suppliers Toyota didn't bother to name are SMEs.
I know of one company that is sole supplier of equipment to their Overlord for a certain process, worldwide. They have 40 employees.
I knew of another company that was sole supplier of extremely precise parts for rockets and mission critical stuff, they had like 8 employees.
My favorite was this company that was about 50 employees, 80% of which were in their 60s or 70s, and this was the only company in JAPAN that was qualified to do the precise hand welding of parts for commercial and defense aircraft, parts that couldn't at that time be welded by machines with sufficient precision. One of my Japanese co-workers joked once that all it would take is one wave of the flu at the wrong time to completely halt production by wiping out all the old craftsmen at that company.
That's not the kind of thing you can easily replicate, as it's been built over decades. The Japanese really like to talk about Monozukuri, which is that sense of craftsmanship and valuing work, this random blog post discusses some of the various aspects of that.
This is another huge thorn in the electric advance, and honestly this is the core reason they have been hemming and hawing until about 2 years ago (which is when they actually decided to full speed ahead on electric although they didn't discuss it publicly).
If Toyota stops making internal combustion engines, and switches to electric, what do they no longer need?
The sole product that so many of their suppliers make. Engines, transmissions, all the various gears and valve bodies and radiators and hoses and... there are thousands of parts that will no longer be needed, nor the companies that make them. A lot of them can pivot, some of them can't. That's the march of progress, and all that, so it goes, blah blah blah we say.
Japan doesn't usually work that way. As I said before, they are a country that tries very desperately not to rock the boat.
Toyota Group has over 500 consolidated companies, and over 325,000 consolidated employees with another 70k unconsolidated, so lets say 400,000 people.
Then add Nissan, Honda, and their respective fiefdoms. Then Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, Subaru and their 3 supplier ecosystems, Then Sumitomo Chemical and Toray and Itochu for all the plastic, resin, rubber, synthetics, carbon fiber, etc not to mention the fluids, oils, hydraulics, etc etc.
Anyways, i'm sort of beating a dead horse here.
So, one big point of concern: Don't liquidate your entire supplier base, who also happen to be in a way your shareholders but also your subsidiaries but not entirely either, who are also explicitly backed by the Japanese government as a way to maintain core competencies.
(Example, when COVID hit the govt immediately stepped in and quietly subsidized 95% of all wages for my previous company to prevent loss of expertise. Months before any larger COVID assistance funds were available to general companies.)
Let me wrap it up with two concepts:
Nemawashi (根回し) (literally going around the root) Think of this as grassroots consensus building from bottom to top, but for corporate decision making. In short, before we say go, get everyone on the same page about the plan and think about everything that could happen, consider everyone's feedback, consider countermeasures and risk reduction efforts, then go.
This is how Japan works in a nutshell: slow consensus building and consideration, then when they say go it gets done very quickly.
Sōkaiya (総会屋) (general meeting extortionist) An absurd example of what I mean about face. From the article:
That's a great illustrative example of how much face pervades this culture. I don't think that soukaiya specifically are the issue, just an absurd example of the extreme lengths Japan goes to for image.
--
Wrapup:
Part of it is Japanese culture. Toyota, given their position, coming out and shitting on ICE in any way undermines the confidence of the extremely large and currently vital network of suppliers that keep their operations running. Imagine a giant boat comprised of hundreds of smaller rafts all bound together, each with a little propeller that moves the entire boat forward. If the captain starts making people nervous, everyone will panic. How many rafts sink or decouple before you are dead in the water?
Another part of it is... well Toyota is a very conservative company, is almost never a first mover, plays the long game, and hedges their bets.
They have been researching batteries for electric vehicles since the 1940s as they would tell it, although that's not really relevant here.
This random article shows the point I want to make:
My personal view is that I think they were trying to leap-frog, and use solid state batteries for EVs while slowly hybridizing their entire powertrain to help develop and test out all of the power generation systems, improve battery manufacturing technology, and essentially they were trying to wait until it was profitable.
Compared to Stellantis, Ford, GM etc who are dumping billions and billions into essentially dumping all of their suppliers and eviscerating their facilities for Internal Combustion engines and powertrain and betting the whole house on EVs and battery production with very little concern for long term supply chain resilience it seems,
In contrast Toyota is doing what it has always done:
Slowly advancing R&D
Securing governmental and trade concessions to prevent sudden disruptions to business
Building resilient supply chains
Building consensus with other conglomerates
Trying to build countermeasures for the semiconductor issue, of which EVs require significantly more than regular ICE vehicles
And trying to come out of the gate swinging after learning from their competitors failures
One final aside, the last piece of the puzzle is merely human factors. Notice in that last article that the new Toyota CEO is the one speaking:
This is purely rumor, and I have no sources to back it up, but some suggest that the reason Akio Toyoda (the grandson of the original founder) was "promoted" to chairman was due to his personal intransigence at the shift to EV and for making the wrong call, so they promoted him into irrelevance while allowing him to save face.
It's a very Japanese way of admitting a mistake.
But mark my words, you'll see in 2-3 years what they've been working on and most of the media noise will immediately change their tune.
I gave an exemplary tag, but I also want to say, wow, this is truly exemplary: this is the kind of writing that makes Tildes so uniquely great.
So does Japan not use split phase delivery of power where end users are getting 200V over two phases, like we use in North America? That's shocking to me, given how advanced Japan's electronics industries are.
Appears that they only use single phase, as does most of the world. Only NA and EU seem to use some form of split phase.
Edit: This is a decent table showing the various voltage phases around the world, better than the one on Wikipedia.
While I'm not thrilled with how slow Toyota has been with supporting an all-electric lineup of vehicles, this is really cool and a step in a direction that more people (and companies) need to be thinking about. This is a great way to offset emissions and profit from that offset. We need to be making more of our infrastructure more environmentally friendly and multi-purpose. I love that they're even taking the excess water and giving it a purpose. They've really thought of pretty much everything to make this port self-sufficient.
Toyota actually had a hydrogen generator at Pickathon, a music festival I went to earlier this year that prioritizes sustainability. Apparently it was powering multiple stages. I had no idea. I walked past the thing dozens of times and assumed it was just some big piece of promotional collateral, I didn't know it was actually, like, the thing.
Was it loud as you walked by it? I don't know much about fuel cells and how the work.
It's not a combustion engine, so it makes considerably less noise than a traditional car, but maybe a bit more than battery-powered cars.
Not at all. At least not loud enough to be heard over ambient forest noise.
Anyone here know how they collect agricultural methane? My guess would be from manure.
Composting might also be a factor. My local utility captures their methane from composting/water treatment and uses it to power their collection vehicles.
This is amazing. Thank you posting this interesting news.
Does burning methane come at a greenhouse effect cost or other environmental cost? If so, is it significantly lower than burning fossil fuels?