Shell has a pencil problem

It took Napoleon 8 days to reinvent the pencil. Now Shell wants 80 years.

“That is why the operation of the free market is so essential” Milton Friedman announces to the camera, twiddling a pencil between his fingers, “not only to promote productive efficiency, but even more, to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world”.

Friedman’s humble pencil has long symbolized the ‘magic’ of free-market capitalism. 

For David Hone, chief climate advisor at Shell, the pencil is synecdoche for how difficult and slow the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables will be. In an article called The Pencil Problem, he breaks down the components of a pencil – wood, graphite, glue, paint, eraser, ferrule – and shows how each of these materials depend on fossil fuels, from their raw materials to manufacturing processes.

In their Sky 2050 Scenario, Shell predict that fossil fuels will still be pouring into products like pencils at the turn of the next century. They argue that very few people alive today will live to see ‘clean’ pencils.

Shell are right in one respect. Many of the parts of a pencil are traceable to fossil fuels. (This is true of most products, from plastics to food.) Even a single medium-sized tomato, as Vaclav Smil demonstrates, has an embedded energy cost of up to 10 tablespoons of diesel fuel.

But complex is not the same as impossible.

Shell says: “Some 14 billion pencils will be made this year, which in turn is why we have a fossil fuel problem”. 

It’s the pencil’s fault! And you, consumers! Stop using pencils and we’ll stop digging for fossil fuels.

Very apt, but for one thing: it’s already possible to make pencils without fossil fuels.

How? Let’s break it down.

Wood

It all starts in the forest.

Source: Faber-Castell

To make a pencil, first the trees must be harvested. Harvesting requires a duo of heavy forestry machinery.

First, a harvester cuts down the tree using its chainsaw head attachment. The tree is grabbed and severed by the rotating blades. Then the knives in the felling head get to work, stripping off the branches and snapping off the tree’s top, before bundling the trunks into piles.

Source: John Deere

Next, a forwarder picks up the trunks, shoves them in the log ‘bunk’ behind, and transports them to the sawmill. The forwarder is essentially a tractor with a large loading bench, up to eight wheels, and a long operating arm with a grappling hook.

Source: Wikipedia

In the sawmill, the logs are debarked, cut into slats, dried for 50 days, and then transported to the pencil factory for processing.

The fossil fuel bill of this process comes primarily from the energy needed to process and transport the timber between forest, sawmill, and factory, since these machines traditionally run on fossil fuels.

But the story of heavy forestry equipment is changing. Hybrid harvesters and forwarders are appearing on the market. They run on a battery which is recharged by a diesel combustion engine. One of the largest manufacturers of forestry equipment announced this July that all vehicles in production would run their engines using biodiesel, as an interim measure while they wait for fully electric machinery to come onto the market.

So while it’s true that freight trucking and other heavy machinery is lagging behind passenger vehicles in terms of electrification, there are new machine solutions in pilot phase that show great potential. The Ponsse EV1 forwarder is an example of this, an 15-tonne electric carrier concept released last year.

Source: Forestry Journal

As battery technology improves, fully electric forestry machines will likely be developed in the next few decades.

Forestry won’t need Shell for much longer.

Lead

Pencils have a shady past.

The oldest pencil in the world, found in a house built in 1630. Source: Faber-Castell

The pencil ‘lead’ is a mixture of graphite and clay. 

Graphite was first discovered in Europe in the early 1400s. It became crucial in war, for arms manufacturing, lining cannons and making musket ball moulds. By 1650, it was more valuable than gold. A smuggling industry was born and local people would scavenge scraps of the stuff from the mines, which they’d sell illegally. If they were caught, they were identified by the black smudges on their fingers – leading to the term black market.

Modern day pencil graphite was also a wartime invention.

The hero of this story is Nicolas-Jacques Conté, an officer in Napoleon’s army. Conté made his fortune as a portrait painter and only turned to inventing after the French Revolution (when aristocratic sitters were in short supply).

Conte lost his left eye in an explosion while experimenting with different varnishes.

During the Napoleonic wars, Napoleon asked Conté to come up with an alternative to English graphite. He worked quickly. In under eight days he had a solution.

Conté produced graphite ‘lead’ by mixing clay with finely powdered graphite and then baking it in a kiln. His graphite was cheaper, stronger and more consistent than English graphite. Napoleon praised him as ‘a universal man, with taste, understanding and genius’. 

So one man in one week changed the face of graphite production. And Conté’s mixture of graphite and clay is basically the same stuff in pencil leads today.

There are two options on the market for graphite: natural flake and synthetic.

The Chief Climate Scientist at Shell of course favors the latter, since it is based on petroleum coke. He describes how synthetic graphite can be very pure, over 99% carbon, “and it is used in manufactured products where extremely pure material is required, which includes pencils”.

Despite this, however, 80% of graphite used in Lithium-ion batteries is natural graphite! Why? Because synthetic graphite is significantly more expensive, often costing up to ten times more than natural graphite. It also produces 62% to 89% more greenhouse gasses. And the process takes months (see figure below).

Source: The Hague Center for Strategic Studies

Pencil graphite needn’t be as pure as the graphite required in batteries. So it’s doubtful that fossil-derived synthetic graphite will get used in pencils.

Mining and processing the graphite, however, has scaled up enormously since Napoleon’s time. China is the leading producer of graphite (in 2022 China produced 850,000 tons of graphite, a global market share of 79%). And because graphite is a critical mineral, pencils must compete for their share of it with car batteries, steel production, paint and lubricants.

So how can we get the fossil fuel out of graphite mining and refining?

Electrify both the kiln and the heavy equipment. That’s the conventional route to decarbonization. Companies such as Sandvik are developing electric mining equipment that is cooler, quieter, and cheaper than traditional diesel machines. Epiroc, a leading producer of heavy mining machinery, has two different electric loader designs, currently being deployed at the Onaping mine in Canada.

On the refining side, US-based Urbix has developed a processing method that significantly reduces energy intensity and environmental impact of refining graphite, using 10 times less energy to get the same product and only 6% of the harmful acids used by the conventional refining process.

But there are also next-generation possibilities that may bypass this altogether. When the French blockaded English graphite, Conte didn’t spend years searching for a graphite mine in France. Instead, he figured out a new way to make graphite.

Synthetic graphite of the future won’t necessarily come from petroleum. It might come from lignin (a biopolymer derived from plants). UCLA recently published a method to produce graphite by pyrolysis of methane, powered by solar energy, with no CO2 byproduct.

None of these solutions may end up in the commercial production of pencils. But if a one-eyed man in Napoleon's army can invent a new method of manufacturing graphite in eight days, then surely human ingenuity can deliver us an alternative this century.

Glue

After wood, comes glue.

Grooves are cut into the slats of wood. A thin layer of glue is added. Then pencil leads get slotted into the slats, slathered in more glue, and sandwiched together with another slat on top.

Source: Pencils.com

Shell points out that most wood glues are made from petroleum-derived plastics, usually polyvinyl acetate (PVA), which is derived from natural gas in a process that also uses natural gas to synthesize.

But fossil-derived glues are not the only option. 

There are scores of durable plant-based liquid glues that are already proven to work at sticking wood, using starches like corn, wheat and potato, or glucose and citric acid. Stora Enso, a Swedish company, already supplies bio-glue to Paged, the third largest producer of wooden chairs in the EU.

And the biggest wood glue users are piling in. Glue is responsible for 5% of IKEA’s total carbon emissions, used in beds and bookshelves and everything in between. They have targeted a reduction of 40% in fossil-based glues by 2030. 

This may require fundamental shifts in glue and application machinery. But change is already underway. One IKEA factory in Europe began using starch from corn in its large-scale production in March last year, running tests on other bio-glue options in parallel.

These alternatives have ethical issues, such as making sure that the starches used don’t divert resources from crops intended for food. 

But is it possible to stick the two halves of a pencil together without using fossil fuels? Absolutely.

Lacquer

Once the pencil has been shaped and cut, it is finished with lacquer or paint.

Fossil fuels lurk here, too, in the wood coatings and varnishes.

But bio-based alternatives are being swiftly developed. The application of linseed oil, pigments from wood waste, from fungi and cellulose fibers are all being investigated for their potential as commercial wood coatings.

Recently, lignin-based coatings were shown to outperform fossil coatings in terms of water repellency and stain resistance. These coatings are cheap and high-performing, showing great potential in the construction industry.

And if it’s good enough to protect buildings, it is likely able to protect pencils, too. 

(Or you can do away with the lacquer altogether.)

Ferrule

What’s a ferrule? The word comes from ‘ferrum’, meaning iron in Latin, and ‘viriola’, meaning ‘bracelet’. Ferrules are the metal bracelets that hold the eraser onto the pencil’s end.

But they’re usually made from aluminum, not iron.

Source: Christopher Payne, New York Times

Aluminum production is undoubtedly fossil intensive. Globally, it contributes around 2% to global greenhouse gas emissions – that’s around 1.1 billion tons of CO2.

Bad news for decarbonizing the ferrule.

But 72% of those greenhouse gas emissions come from electricity. So switching to renewable energy gets you nearly three-quarters of the way to zero-carbon aluminum. In fact, using renewables, particularly hydropower, is already price competitive with fossil based aluminum where it is available.

In 2021 in Europe, for instance, 94.5% of the power mix used by primary aluminum smelters came from renewables and hydropower. In North America it was 95.3%, Russia 93%, and South America 84.1%, according to International Aluminium.

However, the biggest producer of aluminum, China, still uses primarily coal – including 47 GW of inefficient ‘subcritical’ coal capacity. Recently, however, Chinese companies have relocated aluminum production to areas where hydro power and other renewable resources are abundant. Aluminium Corp of China Ltd (Chalco), for instance, recently moved 135,000 metric tons per annum of aluminum smelting to Yunnan Aluminium to take advantage of cheap hydropower.

And there’s another option. 

Aluminum is infinitely recyclable. Around 75% of the aluminum ever produced is still in use today. Much less electricity is needed to use scrap aluminum - only around 7%. So using aluminum more efficiently is another pathway to cleaner pencils.

Eraser

Erasers are known as rubbers in the UK. (It’s because you have to rub a bit to get rid of your mistakes.) But before rubbers came along in 1770, people used squished-up lumps of bread to erase wayward marks.

Rubber can be ‘natural’, from the rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis), or synthetic, derived from crude oil and other hydrocarbons. Around 70% of all rubber used today is synthetic.

Source: Bridgestone

One option for decarbonizing pencil erasers is to use natural rubber grown on low-quality, degraded land instead of clearing natural forests to plant rubber trees.

But some of the most significant breakthroughs in next-generation rubber come from car tire manufacturers. Goodyear, for instance, one of the world’s largest tire manufacturers, has a goal to introduce its first 100% sustainable tire by 2030. It’s making fast progress with a 90% sustainable demonstration tire that has already passed regulatory tests for road use.

Source: Chemistry World

Others have been experimenting with soybeans, dandelions, tomatoes, and moss for future rubber products, including pencil erasers.

The German government is funding research into extracting natural rubber from the roots of dandelions. Whether this will be the solution that winds up stuck on the ends of pencils is unclear.

But the momentum to find fossil alternatives to rubber is clearly growing.

Shell’s pencil problem

Shell argues that there is no hope for getting the fossil fuels out of pencils this century.

But the future is not a finished product. As D.H. Lawrence once pointed out, “Abide by that which is coming, not by that which has come”.

If it will take Shell over a century to decarbonise the pencil then Shell has some big problems looming.*

*With thanks to Steve H.