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Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

terraformindustries.wordpress.com

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Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#221

Post by XorNot »

pfdietz wrote: post #185
XorNot wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hydro…

The issue is that hydrogen makes no sense except for transportation fuel, where it also makes no sense. There are other options for stationary energy storage, and hydrogen is amongst the worst. i.e. if we can tolerate high losses, iron-air flow batteries are a much more reasonable option[1]

The thing is you pay for all of that pretty heavily - it's all more expensive with other drawbacks, but it's not nearly the complete pain that handling hydrogen is.

[1] https://essinc.com/iron-flow-chemistry/

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#222

Post by dylnuge »

basil-rash wrote: post #183
beachy wrote: post #137

Earlier 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,…

It's not akin to that at all. External recruiters are typically paid for placement (i.e. they get a commission paid on a hired employee after they're hired, typically 20–30% of base salary). There are good ones, but a non-trivial portion are just cold-email spamming everyone whose LinkedIn profile looks even remotely like it might match the jobs they're recruiting for and forwarding on anyone who replies.

For a company/hiring manager, one great candidate a month is far more valuable than a few dozen ones who aren't even close to matching the role. They're not saying "do the work for us", they're saying "if you want us to take your sourcing seriously, send us quality, not quantity."

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#224

Post by Taniwha »

realreality wrote: post #133
BWStearns wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't methane get reacted away in a relatively short (≈years) period of time?

Atmospheric methane oxidizes into CO2 and water vapor. Then the CO2 hangs around for much longer... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Natural_si...

yes eventually, but until it does it is a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#225

Post by guender »

rhelz wrote: post #127
mikeatlas wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their claim is that this method is still yet cheaper than drilling/fracking.

> Their claim is that this method is still yet cheaper than drilling/fracking. They claim the green way to go is converting hydrogen into methane....check out the link for a company claiming the green way to go is converting methane to hydrogen: https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/new-clean-energy-process-con... I rather suspect that taking an energy detour through methane either way is a red herring. I mean....the OP sa…

[dead]

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#226

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

rich_sasha wrote: post #109
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...

Natural gas is already stored in enormous quantities, and shipped around the world. Leakage appears to happen mostly in transit, or at poorly maintained installations. My guess is, it's a solvable problem.

> Natural gas is already stored in enormous quantities, and shipped around the world. Leakage appears to happen mostly in transit

And if you can make natural gas from solar that means there will be more sources of natural gas and thus less transit. Right?

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#227

Post by usrusr »

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?

Time travel. It's very expensive to move electricity into the future. Batteries are very cheap when you look at dollars per watt of onboarding/offboarding the one way time machine, but when you look at it dollars per Wh it does not look as rosy anymore. Still worthwhile for short hops. But for longer trips, you want to look at $/Whh and then batteries are atrociously expensive. Seasons are a thing and time travel is hard, even if it's only one way.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#228

Post by avmich »

outworlder wrote: post #159
avmich wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

An example of commercially used electric airplane today could be one of this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqF55MjU9jc , Green Flight Academy in Sweden, used to train pilots.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#229

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

CrazyStat wrote: post #218
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. 11.8 years is a halflife, not a "all the methane is gone after 11.8 years" lifetime. 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…

That was very well explained, thank you.

At 11.8 years it seemed like it would be worth considering because the total amount of anthropogenic CH4 would find equilibrium relatively soon, and that would be better, at some point, than continuing to emit new CO2 year after year.

But at 80 years... all of that infrastructure that the synthetic methane people are excited to reuse... It'll have been decommissioned by then anyway. We might as well just hold out for synthetic gasoline or double down on electric everything (both, probably).

(This is all assuming that the leak problem is unsolvable. Not sure about that.)

----

You seem to know quite a bit about this stuff, so I have an unrelated question:

Things are "simple" in this case because a degree of climate temperature increase provides a basis for comparison between different gasses. But sometimes I find myself thinking about tradeoffs between climate heating and other ecological harms. Like, I should probably get a dishwasher because they use less water than washing by hand, but what's the carbon footprint of manufacturing a new dishwasher?

I suppose you could still standardize on a degree of heating, but you'd need to figure out how much wasted fresh water is equivalently harmful to a degree of heating. That's always going to be subjective to some degree, but not all subjects are created equal. I'd much rather just let some ecologists build consensus around a number and then take that number myself as an axiom.

Does such a thing exist?

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#230

Post by basil-rash »

beachy wrote: post #212
basil-rash wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I don't think it's a fuck off message at all. That would be just "fuck off". Why encourage recruiters if you didn't want to deal with them? 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…

But if the recruiter has already gone through the work of vetting the candidate, why would the company not just talk to the candidate directly and “cut out the middleman”, so to speak? What guarantee does the recruiter have that providing the company this holy grail candidate will be met with anything more than “wow good eye, thanks!”
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