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Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

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Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#71

Post by triceratops »

skeledrew wrote: post #55

I see this, and I like how it sounds on the surface. But I can't help but raise an eyebrow when I see "carbon neutral". Got me wondering how they'll be delivering the gas, if they won't be using trucks or building other infra that uses fossil fuel-consuming equipment. If they actually have resolved this end-to-end, super great! But otherwise, I feel like they're still ignoring crucial externalities.

You can run the trucks on liquified natural gas. Or run a natural gas power plant next to the Terraform module that can charge an electric truck's battery.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#72

Post by orthecreedence »

skeledrew wrote: post #55

I see this, and I like how it sounds on the surface. But I can't help but raise an eyebrow when I see "carbon neutral". Got me wondering how they'll be delivering the gas, if they won't be using trucks or building other infra that uses fossil fuel-consuming equipment. If they actually have resolved this end-to-end, super great! But otherwise, I feel like they're still ignoring crucial externalities.

One thing comes to mind: don't transport it. It's sitting right next to a solar power plant...one that shuts down at night. Why not store the gas locally and use it as a battery when the sun isn't shining?

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#73

Post by groby_b »

pfdietz wrote: post #33
groby_b wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we kinda know how to do natgas storage/transport/use at large scale, while we're not quite there on the hydrogen economy. Higher complexity hydrocarbons likely have higher synthesis costs, and if you want to enter the market, you probably want your pricing as competitive as possible. Same for the biomass approach. It is ultimately an approach striving for as much simplicity as possible. That's firmly baked in…

We use all that because natural gas is cheap. If hydrogen were cheaper than natural gas, we'd use that instead, at least for the industrial processes, and we'd switch away from combustion of a gas in the distributed residential/commercial applications.

And if wishes were horses... ;)

Kidding aside: That's the whole point. This is a project that can work without retooling infra all over the world. It's a drop-in replacement to get to carbon-neutral fuel.

This solves problems right now, with limited investment. This isn't about perfection. This is specifically about "works right now, cheap, no impact on the surrounding infrastructure".

(Also, strong doubts on "we'd use hydrogen instead", because storage is a beast. Until that's solved, there is no chance we'd use that)

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#74

Post by tyler569 »

rbliss wrote: post #34
samatman wrote: post #30

Last time I looked into this, Terraform's 1MW reactor can fill a normal LNG truck in 145 days of operation. Or if you prefer, 145 such reactors would be needed to fill one (1) LNG truck per day. The work they're doing will help prove out DAC, moving it further down the tech adoption curve, which is good. The task of making methane from the air should be performed with multi-GW nuclear reactors, which produce full pow…

Would love to see nuclear do this, but the challenges to getting nuclear built are myriad. Regulatory burdens, cost to build reactors, painfully slow learning rate for nuclear reactor design and buildout. Solar, while certainly not ideal, is comparatively trivial to build out. Functionally you buy and lay out cheap panels. Far smaller political challenges. Some friction around land use and interconnect, but compared…

The best part about using nuclear for fuel generation is that you get to sidestep the biggest problem with nuclear - when you build a power plant you want to build it near people (who may object on safety grounds), but you can build a DAC fuel generator way out in the middle of nowhere.

Even better, you could build your nuclear DAC fuel generator in an old natural gas field, where there's ready-made transportation infrastructure for your product to where it's needed!

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#75

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

Latty wrote: post #54
kartoffelmos wrote: post #37

How will this address methane leakage, which is a substantial source of athmospheric greenhouse gas emissions? Converting Co2 to methane is not carbon neutral if/when leaked...

This was my thought, methane is much worse than carbon when not burned, but just released. Any claims of carbon neutrality that rely on assuming perfect storage and transport without leakage are fantasy. If anything, when you are calling it "easily transportable" at the same time, as they do, you are actively misleading. You can't have both: it's either easily transportable and you are accepting a bunch of methane re…

I'd be interested in a quantitative analysis here. Methane is much worse, but sunlight has broken most of it down after a decade or so. CO2 is comparatively forever.

Presumably there's a point where the lines cross and leaking green methane is still a win. I guess it just comes down to where those lines cross and whether we deem that an acceptable goal.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#77

Post by gorjusborg »

willio58 wrote: post #58

While this is impressive to some degree I just today watched Climate Town’s “Natural Gas is Scamming America” ( https://youtu.be/K2oL4SFwkkw ) and the entire natural gas industry is tainted beyond belief for me now. It’s not like they were a positive thing in my view before, but on the whole natural gas seems to be just as if not more detrimental than coal for climate change mainly due to how much is leaked out but a…

If the natural gas is captured from the atmosphere, a spill will be bad, but no worse than before the capture happened, right?

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#78

Post by maerF0x0 »

megaman821 wrote: post #49
maerF0x0 wrote: post #38

What are some applications where its worth taking the highest grade energy (electricity) and turning it into a lower grade (eg liquid fuels), rather than electrifying the application? Electricity to motion is significantly more efficient per input energy than burning fuel->heat-> gaseous expansion->drive a piston->convert to rotation chain. What am I missing about this?

Seasonal storage of energy is likely only practical in fuel form. Also, there is no easy pathway to electricity to high temperature heat.

I'm guessing you mean high temperature + high energy (ie lots of watts). Cause lasers can do high temp rn, right?

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#79

Post by maerF0x0 »

yodelshady wrote: post #66
maerF0x0 wrote: post #38

What are some applications where its worth taking the highest grade energy (electricity) and turning it into a lower grade (eg liquid fuels), rather than electrifying the application? Electricity to motion is significantly more efficient per input energy than burning fuel->heat-> gaseous expansion->drive a piston->convert to rotation chain. What am I missing about this?

There are ships that move over one billion kWh of LNG around at a time. At $100 to store a kWh of electrical energy, along with approximately ten times the cost to account for structures that can support and move the extra weight (that's AFTER allowing for less energy demanded in total)... shall I leave this as exercise to the reader?

Ok, so here you're referring to moving a lot of energy w/o wires/transmission lines? Is that a commonly needed thing?

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#80

Post by CrazyStat »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #75
Latty wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my thought, methane is much worse than carbon when not burned, but just released. Any claims of carbon neutrality that rely on assuming perfect storage and transport without leakage are fantasy. If anything, when you are calling it "easily transportable" at the same time, as they do, you are actively misleading. You can't have both: it's either easily transportable and you are accepting a bunch of methane re…

I'd be interested in a quantitative analysis here. Methane is much worse, but sunlight has broken most of it down after a decade or so. CO2 is comparatively forever. Presumably there's a point where the lines cross and leaking green methane is still a win. I guess it just comes down to where those lines cross and whether we deem that an acceptable goal.

Sunlight breaks methane down into CO2, so I don’t think there’s much of a win there.
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