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Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

terraformindustries.wordpress.com

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Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#271

Post by tsukurimashou »

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.

using a phone to browse the web is really sad

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#272

Post by danmaz74 »

cbsmith wrote: post #233
pydry wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries are good at smoothing out daily or even weekly variations but do not make any sense whatsoever for seasonal power storage. It's ridiculously cost ineffective to charge a battery in July only to discharge it in December. 60% roundtrip is cost effective if you're synthesizing when the sun is blazing and the wind is blowing hard and burning it when wind, solar and batteries have all tapped out. Thats especiall…

Is that more effective than the traditional, "store the energy as kinetic potential energy by pushing water uphill, so you can let it go down the hill later" approach.

It's not more effective where you have the right conditions for pumped storage, but those conditions aren't very common around the world.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#273

Post by pydry »

danmaz74 wrote: post #272
cbsmith wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that more effective than the traditional, "store the energy as kinetic potential energy by pushing water uphill, so you can let it go down the hill later" approach.

It's not more effective where you have the right conditions for pumped storage, but those conditions aren't very common around the world.

I'm curious about where you read this. I see this idea that pumped storage geography is rare pop up a lot on Hacker News but I don't know where it's coming from and it rarely seems to come with citations.

If you look at this map, you'll see that unlike, say, dam-appropriate geography, it's actually extremely common:

https://www.energytransitionpartnership.org/uploads/2023/05/...

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#274

Post by ben_w »

pydry wrote: post #140
mschuster91 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could also technically use this as a grid-battery, taking in excess grid energy when it is cheap and converting it into natural gas that can be run back through a gas peaking plant that spins up to meet peak demand. The loss in such a cycle is abysmal, alone from thermal loss (not to mention the loss during compression and decompression) - even straight fuel cells are at 60% round-trip, compared to batteries wi…

Batteries are good at smoothing out daily or even weekly variations but do not make any sense whatsoever for seasonal power storage. It's ridiculously cost ineffective to charge a battery in July only to discharge it in December. 60% roundtrip is cost effective if you're synthesizing when the sun is blazing and the wind is blowing hard and burning it when wind, solar and batteries have all tapped out. Thats especiall…

> It's ridiculously cost ineffective to charge a battery in July only to discharge it in December

Indeed.

This is why the cheapest solutions in most places are a mix of a mere few days off storage plus a target production level that is a little higher than you need on an average day in winter.

While this doesn't work above the arctic circle (you could do it with a power line somewhere sunnier or a synthetic fuel, and possibly also geothermal or nuclear etc., devil is in the details for all options) overproduction + 35-90 hours of batteries is sufficient for most people and places:

https://tonyseba.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/RethinkingEn...

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#275

Post by skrebbel »

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...

Put a terraformer next to every leak to suck it back out of the air!

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#276

Post by genman »

pydry wrote: post #273
danmaz74 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not more effective where you have the right conditions for pumped storage, but those conditions aren't very common around the world.

I'm curious about where you read this. I see this idea that pumped storage geography is rare pop up a lot on Hacker News but I don't know where it's coming from and it rarely seems to come with citations. If you look at this map, you'll see that unlike, say, dam-appropriate geography, it's actually extremely common: https://www.energytransitionpartnership.org/uploads/2023/05/...

Figure 2 doesn't agree with you. It's common but not geographically equally distributed.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#277

Post by beachy »

basil-rash wrote: post #230
beachy wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!”

That's not usually how business works. Many reasons, but talent is still hard to find and employers don't want to piss off someone who can find staff for them. And it's likely against the agreement the recruiter has with the candidate for the candidate to go direct to the employer.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#278

Post by mschuster91 »

pydry wrote: post #273
danmaz74 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not more effective where you have the right conditions for pumped storage, but those conditions aren't very common around the world.

I'm curious about where you read this. I see this idea that pumped storage geography is rare pop up a lot on Hacker News but I don't know where it's coming from and it rarely seems to come with citations. If you look at this map, you'll see that unlike, say, dam-appropriate geography, it's actually extremely common: https://www.energytransitionpartnership.org/uploads/2023/05/...

The problem is, the potential for buildouts of pumped hydro isn't that large any more. In Europe, most usable areas have been built out, and new projects are likely to be denied because anything involving creating dams or bodies of water with rapid differences in water level is incredibly devastating on nature and wildlife.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#279

Post by regularfry »

jvanderbot wrote: post #186
toddmorey wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If other hydrocarbons can be created in a form that's easy to sequester, that's useful.
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