Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

terraformindustries.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 331 posts

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#151

Post by martinald »

api wrote: post #95
tombert wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You beat me to it, because I was going to say the same thing; wouldn't it only be carbon neutral if you had some means of guaranteeing that there's no leaks? It seems like converting CO2 to methane could actually make things worse...

Methane has a much shorter atmospheric half life than CO2-- years as opposed to millennia. It does end up getting oxidized into CO2 and H2O, just not nearly as quickly as when it's burned. Leaks would happen to a small degree, but since a leak represents money drifting away there's a strong incentive to fix them. Methane leaks of any size are fairly easy to detect. There's been an effort to put up satellites for this…

Actually there's a project underway to build a 4000km HVDC line from Morocco to the UK: https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/

I thought it was a pipe dream but has got some fairly big backers now and does seem to be moving along.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#152

Post by rgmerk »

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…

Intermittent, yes. Expensive, no.

It's just not.

It's a bit more expensive in the US because, hey, protectionism, but solar panels are now by far the cheapest source of electricity on Earth if you don't care when that electricity is delivered, and cheaper again if you're happy to have it in the Sahara or northern Australia.

Solar power is now so cheap it is hard to conceive of any way nuclear power could ever compete against it where its advantages (24-hour all-year power) aren't relevant.

Terraform's secret sauce is that they are designing their equipment to be cheap so it doesn't matter that they're only utilising it maybe 30% of the time.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#153

Post by XorNot »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #85
spenczar5 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re missing density of storage. Gasoline and natural gas are in the region of 50 MJ/kg, while batteries are more like 10MJ/kg or lower. That 5x factor is what stops us from having electric airplanes.

I actually think the reason we don't have electric airplanes has to do with traction vs propulsion. Eg: spinning a jet engine to propel air backwards is very different than spinning a motor that is (through a series of solid objects) directly connect to the ground. and while a battery is only 1/5th density, the motors on a tesla deliver 3x the range per energy compared to a prius. (not true break even, but impressive…

No it's just energy density. Hydrocarbon fuels have more. There's also the benefit that getting lighter as you expend fuel increases range (batteries don't meaningfully change mass when they discharge).

Nothing about electric powertrains causes any problems here: it's just hydrocarbon fuel is more energy dense. It's not inconceivable you could build a hybrid electric aircraft if a suitably high power hydrocarbon fuel cell was developed, since removing the combustion stages from a jet engine would simplify the design considerably.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#154

Post by oaktowner »

rbliss wrote: post #11

Really exciting for Terraform to hit this mark. Hopefully true, and not an April 1st joke. Casey Handmer (founder) is a pretty interesting guy. He also helped with the initial analysis of the crackle on the Vesuvius challenge scrolls that contributed to the breakthrough of reading the first passages from the scrolls. See https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/08/05/reading-ancien... Highly recommend checking out mor…

Yeah, kind of a terrible day to publish something like that (through no fault of their own, of course!).

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#155

Post by ihumanable »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #136
julienchastang wrote: post #104

Their minimalist website is awesome: https://terraformindustries.com/ complete with plain text chemical equations. "Why does our website look like this? At TI we believe we can change the world by displacing fossil hydrocarbon production at global scale. Like our website, our machines are simple so we can build millions of them as quickly as possible. Our website embodies our cultural commitment to allocating resourc…

“Like our machines, our website looks awful on a phone.” Someone could’ve spent literally 5 minutes making this look reasonable on the world’s most popular web browsing device form facto, whilst still retaining the site’s retro virtue signalling aesthetic, AND it wouldn’t have taken away from their ‘core mission’ or whatever. If you don’t care, don’t have a website at all.

On my phone the website looks essentially identical to how it looks on my desktop browser.

Does it look different on yours. It's just a plaintext website with white text on a black background and it's fast to load and easy to read for me. What's wrong with it?

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#156

Post by outworlder »

pfdietz wrote: post #14

One can make natural gas from CO2 captured from air and with hydrogen electrolysed form water. But then one has to ask: why not just use hydrogen directly and skip the inefficiency and cost of direct air capture of CO2 and of making methane? If one is dead set on making a carbon-containing synfuel, why methane and not something more storable, like methanol or higher hydrocarbons? Or, why not use the hydrogen to deoxy…

> why not just use hydrogen directly and skip the inefficiency and cost of direct air capture of CO2 and of making methane?

Because hydrogen sucks. Specifically, storing it sucks.

You'll either compress or liquefy. That costs energy. It leaks and embrittles containers. One of the best ways of storing it in a stable manner is to combine with carbon atoms. Voila, natural gas.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#157

Post by XorNot »

pfdietz wrote: post #63
jfengel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Water is right there, but the hydrogen is really closely bound to the oxygen, and extremely hard to get out. It's considerably easier to get H2 out of methane. Unfortunately, that process also yields CO2, so it's not helping the greenhouse gas situation. Hydrogen proponents suggest a route where we start with "blue hydrogen" from natural gas. Then, when we've got a good H2 infrastructure going and a lot of excess ele…

There is this really dumb internet meme, that hydrogen is just there as a plot by the fossil fuel industry to keep selling fossil fuels. What this ignores is that hydrogen must still be made even in a post-fossil fuel economy. It's not optional. Production of ammonia requires hydrogen, and without ammonia-derived nitrogen fertilizer billions of people will starve. About half the nitrogen atoms in your body came from…

Natural gas was also pitched exactly this way in 2008 or so. There's now a mountain of natural gas infrastructure being built, the the US is a major exporter, and for some reason people think the industry is going to just "switch off" that infrastructure when asked to.

This is 30+ year design lifetime infrastructure. Investments were made on that basis: no one is going to turn off anything.

Which is the best argument in favor of otherwise ludicrously inefficient power-to-gas storage schemes: if you could, by some miracle, undercut fracking extraction, then at the very least you'd only have to bankrupt the well-operators - not the pipeline, export terminals etc.

But I'm extremely skeptical this is possible and it will be fought against dirtily (see the anti-wind power campaigners).

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#159

Post by outworlder »

avmich wrote: post #70
car wrote: post #43

How does this compare to using microbes to produce hydrocarbons from CO2 and other waste gases? (NB, not from atmospheric CO2) Here a recent article on the topic, specifically for making jet fuel, for an industry that would be impossible to electrify. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02136-z

It's interesting that aviation is said to be industry impossible to electrify, and at the same time we have electric airplanes for some time and keep developing the technology.

Which electric airplanes are you talking about, other than electric demonstrators?
Post reply on HN