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Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

terraformindustries.wordpress.com

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Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#181

Post by _aavaa_ »

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…

It's a meme because most of the people peddling hydrogen as a solution don't look at replacing existing uses of hydrogen (e.g. ammonia or as a process chemical) but instead try to sell it for dead on arrival ideas like fuel cell cars, blending in the natural gas pipelines, or burning it directly in homes for heat.

There's an order of magnitude more companies and hype around those use cases than there are around actually important ones.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#182

Post by _aavaa_ »

jfengel wrote: post #40
alexb_ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They claim a breakthrough in converting hydrogen to natural gas, but natural gas is by far the cheapest source of H2. Are you serious? Water is right there!

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…

Skeptics also point out that the blue part of blue hydrogen is carbon capture and storage, and nobody seems to be willing to pay for the extra cost of that.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#183

Post by basil-rash »

beachy wrote: post #137
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…

I particularly love this: > Are you an excellent recruiter? We get a lot of inbounds. To help us qualify your ability to match our needs, please send us your strongest candidate, a singular champion, as an exemplar of your talent hunting skill. After a lifetime of doing HR software this sparks thoughts about a scoreboard/ranking system for agencies with exactly this kind of "you've got one chance - don't blow it" sce…

To me that just sounds like “we don’t want to pay you anything but do all the work for us anyways”. Is it supposed to be some tongue in cheek way of saying “fuck off if you’re a recruiter we don’t give a shit”? Or are they instead asking for a historical example of a good hire you facilitated?

It’s akin to saying “Oh you’re a systems software engineer? Prove it by designing and implementing our entire system for us, we won’t pay you for it, we just want to know you can do it”.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#184

Post by pfdietz »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #181
pfdietz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a meme because most of the people peddling hydrogen as a solution don't look at replacing existing uses of hydrogen (e.g. ammonia or as a process chemical) but instead try to sell it for dead on arrival ideas like fuel cell cars, blending in the natural gas pipelines, or burning it directly in homes for heat. There's an order of magnitude more companies and hype around those use cases than there are around actua…

The important word is "just". In this meme, all uses of hydrogen are tarred with this brush.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#185

Post by pfdietz »

XorNot wrote: post #157
pfdietz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Power-to-hydrogen is often attacked for being inefficient, but the alternative presented by the anti-hydrogen people for dealing with seasonal variations and long dark-calm periods is to just overbuild solar and wind massively -- in which case, most of the time power from these is just being curtailed. Apparently using this excess power with 0% efficiency is preferable to using it with nonzero efficiency making hydrogen.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#186

Post by jvanderbot »

toddmorey wrote: post #178
carbonguy wrote: post #15

As a "carbon industry" observer, this is pretty exciting news. I've had my eye on Terraform Industries for a while and love what they're doing; they're one of the few groups that actually seem to understand the implications of what it will take to shift to a carbon-neutral economy, and their core insight about the economics of atmospheric fuel synthesis is one of those "obvious when you hear it" ideas: solar electric…

I really wonder about unintended consequences. It's exciting to be able to store solar as methane because we can "plug" this new synthetic methane easily into existing infrastructure. (But we have to get better at leak management!) However, you almost always go through huge underground methane pockets when drilling for oil. So oil drilling stations vent / flare methane when they can't "off site" it, like when natural…

I believe the intent is to offset oil production with the methane. Somehow. Maybe making other hydrocarbons from it?

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#187

Post by pfdietz »

outworlder wrote: post #156
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.

You repeat some of the anti-hydrogen memes. Hydrogen is actually quite storable, certainly much more easily stored than energy in batteries. The cost of underground storage caverns for hydrogen is two orders of magnitude cheaper than the cost of batteries storing the same energy.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#188

Post by TechnoTopian »

If the CO2 concentrator could be minimized, it would make an excellent addition to HVAC systems - would minimize the need for outside fresh air if you could just capture the CO2 exhaust from human occupants and expel that. Could even have houses and offices with sub-atmospheric CO2 concentrations!

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#189

Post by orr94 »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #53
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?

The only way a technology like this will help get us to carbon zero is using it in places where there is not much hope of replacing electricity. While small elective airplanes have been demonstrated, it doesn't seem like we will be able to build, in the next couple of decades, large electric airplanes that can substantially replace current fuel powered ones. This would require the additional step of converting methan…

> I personally think, in practice technology like this will only delay getting to net zero, because the existence of this will disincentivize investments in electrification. I recall Sun Tzu's claim that a force completely surrounded will fight fiercely, but if you give a way out, it will look to escape or retreat.

I think you’re misapplying Sun Tzu’s lesson. An attempt to completely and immediately replace the fossil fuel industry will be met with fierce resistance, and thus be more likely to fail. Whereas a more gradual approach (like carbon neutral-ish green hydrogen) gives much of the industry around fossil fuels an opportunity to survive longer, and perhaps gives you a better chance of success.

Is this actually true? Maybe, maybe not. But that would seem to be the implication of Sun Tzu’s strategy.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#190

Post by NortySpock »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #180
throwaway4220 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it’s still carbon neutral though right

Carbon molecules yes. But methane was a significantly higher (80x) greenhouse gas potential than CO2. So it's definitely not neutral in that regard.

Right, but the point is, once this costs nearly-the-same as methane extracted from the ground, it's not worth it to pull methane out of the ground! We'd stop having an incentive to add more CO2 to the atmosphere!

We'd be able to get to net-zero carbon / methane emissions without having to substantially change our living conditions. Cities or states would "just" bottle up some liquid methane for the winter months (or summer months) and seasonal energy usage changes become much easier to manage. (I'm aware that would involve creating more infrastructure.)

Sounds great to me.

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