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Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

terraformindustries.wordpress.com

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Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#201

Post by [deleted] »

wolfram74 wrote: post #193
zdragnar wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is irrelevant if the input carbon was atmosphere sourced anyway.

no, it isn't. Over the course of a few decades, a kilogram of methane has the greenhouse impact of ~50 kilograms of CO2 because of the different absorption modes methane has that CO2 doesn't. If terraform leaks more than a few percent of their product into the atmosphere from carelessness (who cares about tracking such a low value commodity?) Then this is worse than just leaving the CO2 in the atmosphere. I really wi…

[deleted]

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#204

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

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

I think that kind of technology does work, but scale up has been incredibly challenging. Let alone doing it profitably. Farming microbes in a nutrient rich slurry is continually fighting contamination from foreign species. The most interest has been in photosynthesizing varieties where delivering light throughout the vessel becomes impossible due to the required organism density.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#205

Post by strken »

jvanderbot wrote: post #194
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…

This all strikes me as a nice opening to an apocalypse movie. Pulling CO2 and upgrading to methane - wouldn't that amplify GHG effects?

Methane has a short half-life in the atmosphere, so its cumulative effect after a few decades is close to CO2 unless you're constantly outputting more, and that's assuming you're not burning it.

In the case where you're making methane from atmospheric CO2 and then burning it, it's just returning the same CO2 back, which per the article is carbon neutral.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#206

Post by hackerlight »

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.

Unstated benefit of the website is it repels the right people.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#207

Post by _aavaa_ »

pfdietz wrote: post #184
_aavaa_ wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alright, people get overzealous by painting 100% of the projects that way when only 90% of them deserve it.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#208

Post by _aavaa_ »

NortySpock wrote: post #190
_aavaa_ wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> once this costs nearly-the-same as methane

Problem #1 is finding people to pay for it until then.

Problem #2 is that this will make fore expensive energy at the end, efficiency being one problem and capital cost of those idle gas turbines being another. We'll have to wait and see if these ever plan any role beyond a demonstration project or two, but I'm skeptical it'll compete on price.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#209

Post by marcosdumay »

andrewla wrote: post #32
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…

Other commenters have pointed out that hydrogen may not be feasible, but the other direction -- methanol or higher hydrocarbons, seems way more interesting. Storage and density are orders of magnitude easier, and since we're synthesizing it from atmospheric component we don't have to be concerned with contaminants, especially sulfur compounds, that plague higher hydrocarbon use. Even better in a lot of ways would be…

It's quite hard to create heavy hydrocarbons in a controlled fashion. That company is already full of technical risks. Adding an extra optional one would be crazy.

That said, if not them, somebody will probably crack that one problem in time. But it's best done as an independent development.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#210

Post by toddmorey »

NortySpock wrote: post #190
_aavaa_ wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes but the issue is we almost always encounter & have to remove lots of natural underground methane to get to the oil below it.

If the oil drills lose incentive to sell the methane off, they just burn it on site as waste. Horrible I know.

So synthetic methane also needs to reduce crude oil demand I’m thinking.

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