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?
If you are talking about thermodynamics, chemical energy is exactly of the same grade as electricity.
Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas
211–220 of 331 posts
Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
To me it says "don't just shotgun me with every rando candidate you have - I'll give you one chance, make it count". It's exactly the sort of thing you might say to a pushy recruiter you met at the bar who wants in to your business. To succeed, they must a) have a good candidate and b) understand your business (so they know that candidate is right for you).
And I'd say there's an enormous difference between what a software engineer does (spend months or years designing and implementing a system that is for a single "customer") to what a recruiter does (spend 1 hours of conversations/emails in qualifying a candidate who can be shopped out to any of a number of customers.).
Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
#214For more, I'd recommend Jason Carman's recently released videos on Terraform: Overview and tour (~20min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NngCHTImH1g Deeper Interview (~40min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekEdq6PhC0Q
This is excellent and I highly recommend everybody watches both, starting with shorter one.
Casey, the CEO is super interesting and inspiring.
Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electricity (during sunlight hours) is not the highest grade of energy. California threw away ~32TWh of electricity last year, with renewables at only 19% penetration. You can't give power away at noon in April; this fact is a significant barrier to building new solar. (See "Learning is not enough" and other academic research on that topic.) We also use fossil fuels as feedstocks for fertilizers and plastics, so ther…
So the argument is take excess solar power turn it into a fuel for use at another time. It's another take on energy storage. Question for me is how do you make the business model work. Is it a bet that lower cost to produce or bank that carbon tax on traditional fuels makes it more cost competitive? Or in your case is it that downstream users are looking to clean up their supply chain so will look into a contract for…
Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Much of the world by population and gdp is a ship ride away from their major energy suppliers. Japan imports about half their LNG from Australia. Next largest is Qatar.
There are no power lines between Australia and Japan.
Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas
#217As 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…
Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> After about 60-70 years the lines cross Methane's global warming potential is estimated to be ten times CO2 after 500 years [1]. > and the impact of a tonne of methane released is less than a tonne of CO2 released at the same date. A ton of methane released into the atmosphere breaks down into 2.75 tons of CO2 [2]. There is no possible way that this statement can be true. [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/down…
Wow that table is over my head, I spent a fair bit of time trying to unwind the acronyms but I gave up. Can you help me understand how a gas with a lifetime of 11.8 years is having a different impact on the climate at 500 years than it did at say... 11.8 years? That's 488.2 years of being in the same state as where it started prior to the carbon capture that made the CH4.
2. Methane doesn't just warm the atmosphere up a little bit and then disappear with no side effects. In addition to carbon dioxide, methane decomposition creates ozone and water vapor, which are both greenhouse gases. The additional heating effects of these decomposition byproducts are also included in the global warming potential calculations.
3. We care about cumulative effects over time. GWP is "how much additional heat will the atmosphere absorb because of this gas over X amount of time", scaled relative to carbon dioxide (so CO2 always has a GWP of 1). Methane's GWP-20 is about 80, which means that if I release one ton of methane today, over the next 20 years it will absorb about as much heat as if I had released 80 tons of CO2 instead. The longer the time frame the less bad methane looks, because it mostly decomposes, but even over a 500 year time frame releasing 1 ton of methane absorbs as much additional heat as if you had released 10 tons of CO2 instead. GTP is similar to GWP except it's about how much global average temperatures will rise instead of how much heat is absorbed.
4. If you can create methane out of atmospheric CO2 for free, you can subtract 2.75 from each of the GWP numbers for methane (since you remove 2.75 tons of CO2 to create one ton of methane). This is essentially what the table is showing on the CH4-non fossil line (notice each of the GWPs on this line is 2.8 less than on the CH4-fossil line).
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Imagine I had a magical gas called timelockium. It is not a greenhouse gas (no radiative forcing), but after exactly 10 years it decomposes to an equal mass of CO2 with no other byproducts.
The GWP-10 for this gas would be zero: over the first ten years, releasing a ton of timelockium is equivalent (in terms of heat absorbed by the atmosphere) to releasing zero tons of CO2.
The GWP-20 for this gas would be 0.5: over the first twenty years, releasing a ton of timelockium is equivalent to releasing 0.5 tons of CO2. This is because it does nothing for the first ten years, and then for the next ten years it is just CO2 [1].
For longer time frames, the GWP of timelockium would approach 1. Over 500 years, emitting a ton of timelockium would be nearly equivalent (0.98) to emitting a ton of CO2.
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Now I have another magical gas, decayium. It is equivalent to CO2 for 10 years and then magically disappears. Again it has no other side effects or byproducts.
The GWP-10 of decayium would be 1--over the first 10 years it's identical to CO2. Over the next ten years it contributes nothing to warming, so the GWP-20 would be 0.5. For longer time frames the GWP of decayium would approach 0. the GWP-500 would be 0.02.
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Superdecayium is like decayium except much worse. It's equivalent to 100x as much CO2 for the first ten years and then magically disappears with no side effects or byproducts. The GWP-10 is 100. The GWP-20 is 50. The GWP-500 is 2.
This last scenario is more analogous to methane, except methane chemistry is much more complicated, with gradual decay and byproducts that are also greenhouse gases. Like superdecayium, methane's GWP decreases over longer time intervals, but even over 500 years it is still worse than an equivalent mass of CO2. ---
[1] For the sake of simplicity I'm ignoring CO2 dynamics here, assuming it's just static in the atmosphere.
Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electricity (during sunlight hours) is not the highest grade of energy. California threw away ~32TWh of electricity last year, with renewables at only 19% penetration. You can't give power away at noon in April; this fact is a significant barrier to building new solar. (See "Learning is not enough" and other academic research on that topic.) We also use fossil fuels as feedstocks for fertilizers and plastics, so ther…
So the argument is take excess solar power turn it into a fuel for use at another time. It's another take on energy storage. Question for me is how do you make the business model work. Is it a bet that lower cost to produce or bank that carbon tax on traditional fuels makes it more cost competitive? Or in your case is it that downstream users are looking to clean up their supply chain so will look into a contract for…
"I read internet usage was going up by 2300 percent a year, so I decided to try and find a business that would make sense in that context."
"Cheap and ubiquitous solar power is coming, what products does the world need in that context to move away from extracting fossil fuels?"
Like a lot of things, current technology probably isn't there yet. But philosophically, if you wait for tech to catch up with your vision of the future, you might find yourself behind.
Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas
#220I 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.
> 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. Sounds like you’ve answered your own question. Time for you to get to work on an end-to-end natural gas powered supply chain that can run on the natural gas they’re pulling out of thin air. Lots of fun problems for you to solve. A lifetime of fulfilling work ahead.