281–290 of 331 posts
Really exciting for Terraform to hit this mark. Hopefully true, and not an April 1st joke. Casey Handmer (founder) is a pretty interesting guy. He also helped with the initial analysis of the crackle on the Vesuvius challenge scrolls that contributed to the breakthrough of reading the first passages from the scrolls. See https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/08/05/reading-ancien... Highly recommend checking out mor…
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The economics of storing hydrogen for long periods is just fine, compared to the economics of storing energy in batteries for long periods.
> compared to the economics of storing energy in batteries for long periods Which doesn't say much, since practically nobody is doing that.
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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/...
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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/...
I'll admit that I wasn't talking about potential green-field sites not linked to rivers or existing reservoirs, as described in your link. How many of the sites they identified as viable with their algorithm would actually be economically, socially and environmentally viable is a big question though. Not saying some of these sites can come to fruition, but for sure the capex and lead time for this kind of projects is…
Yes, the capex and lead times on one of these things can be huge, but it's comes out ahead of nuclear power on those fronts.
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I'll admit that I wasn't talking about potential green-field sites not linked to rivers or existing reservoirs, as described in your link. How many of the sites they identified as viable with their algorithm would actually be economically, socially and environmentally viable is a big question though. Not saying some of these sites can come to fruition, but for sure the capex and lead time for this kind of projects is…
I guess that answers my question. People are getting pumped storage and river dams mixed up. It seems mschuster91 also mixed them up. Yes, the capex and lead times on one of these things can be huge, but it's comes out ahead of nuclear power on those fronts.
The environmental impact is bad for both.
River dams break fish crossings, the dammed up area gets flooded and wipes out nature as well as archeological artifacts and the dams are at constant risk of damage - especially in a war, see Ukraine for multiple examples, but also due to maintenance neglect, negligence during construction and natural disasters like earthquakes. In the worst cases such as China's Three Gorges dam, millions of people were displaced as well [1].
Pumped storage can come in two variants, either as an associate to ordinary river dams (so they inherit their issues), or as greenfield construction, where they have the same impact on the flooded are, with the additional impact of countless animals dying during pump and empty cycles.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Displacement_...
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“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.
On my phone the website looks essentially identical to how it looks on my desktop browser. Does it look different on yours. It's just a plaintext website with white text on a black background and it's fast to load and easy to read for me. What's wrong with it?
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…
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“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.
man wtf does virtue signaling even mean anymore
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what kind of natural gas?
This is important to consider. The video is mostly a commentary on how CO2 is being handled while the methane released from fracking is largely ignored when evaluating if a well is carbon neutral. The video also argues that methane is much worse for the environment as a whole than CO2. I'm sympathetic to the argument, but I have a hard time believing that climate scientists have not already taken this into account wi…
That's why there are demands for regulations only after scientist looked over the shoulder of industrials. At the end, scientists often only look at things, the don't decide about regulations and economy.
Backing out would require a lot of courage, but not doing it put a serious threat to the efforts of keeping the climate change at a not-too-catastrophic level.
Talking about terraform, in 2011 in germany they did test renewable powered methane production via electrolysis and Sabatier process. I can't find any news about it, but it's exactly what terraform is doing.
Terraform claim to produce H2 at less than 2.5$/kg, but I find different numbers when looking at scientific publications (it's between 4.8-7.5$/kg).[0]
They also claim to produce from "air", but C02 capture is really poor and it's better to capture it from industrial plants. But anyway, it's not a big problem.
An other problem is the water cost of electrolysis.
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01322-8
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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…