Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas • Hacker News Board

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#301

Post by maerF0x0 » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 3:56 PM UTC

Danieru wrote: post #216

maerF0x0 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so here you're referring to moving a lot of energy w/o wires/transmission lines? Is that a commonly needed thing?

South Korea, Japan, China say hello. 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.

Right, but why rely on LNG when Nuclear sources could provide so much more energy and geo-political stability, and promising investment in other avenues (eg Thorium based) could make it even moreso?

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#302

Post by pydry » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 3:59 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #285

pydry wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> People are getting pumped storage and river dams mixed up. It seems mschuster91 also mixed them up. 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 duri…

A link to the three gorges dam wikipedia page says exactly nothing about the potential environmental impact of pumped storage but it does confirm that you are confusing the two technologies.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#303

Post by etiennebausson » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 4:06 PM UTC

> Our core innovation is the utilization of proven and well-understood industrial processes implemented within innovatively simple and cost-effective proprietary technology systems... So they invented nothing, and put a nice package around existing tech?

I can see the use-case when combined with intermittent energy generator (e.g. : solar), but I am not really convinced by the rate of return, when compared to similar tech that do not emit greenhouse gases in case of failure (liquid salt, heated sand, ...)

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#304

Post by kortex » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 4:26 PM UTC

regularfry wrote: post #279

jvanderbot wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a lot of interest in cracking methane to ethylene and hydrogen, both which are super useful in their own right. There's also the Fischer-Tropsch process which synthesises arbitrary linear alkane hydrocarbons. That requires more intermediate steps, to make syngas from methane and water.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#305

Post by lucisferre » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 4:26 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #116

pstrateman wrote: post #114

Did I miss it or does this not actually say what the cost of methane priced by them is? I see H2, DC power, and CO2 DAC, costs but no total.

Their whitepaper uses $10/kcf.

I have not done the math here in a long time, but as I understand it:

You could produce about 8KG of CH4 with 2KG of H2 and 6KG of C or 22KG of CO2.

At $250/MT would work out to about $5.50 and the 2kg of H2 would be $5 assuming $2.50/kg so lets say $10 for simplicity.

1kg of CH4 at STP is 1,396L (according to GPT since I'm lazy right now) which is about 50cf.

That's not even close to $10kcf (assuming that this means killo-cubic-feet which as a Canadian makes me cringe).

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#306

Post by cmrdporcupine » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 4:37 PM UTC

purple_ferret wrote: post #146

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...

In a similar vein, what if producing natural gas this way makes it cheap enough that companies choose to just vent it off when pursuing other fossil fuels.

Yes I think you're touching on the real potential problem here which is that natural gas is many times a byproduct of petroleum extraction, for which we found a use/market.

I grew up in Alberta and there were already gas flares all over the place in the forest at the various oil wells that dot the landscape in the foothills.

I hope the economics of this work out, but I worry it will either just lead to flaring at drill sites or would not be pursued because it can't compete on cost.

At the same time, if you're e.g. Germany and have a gas shortage, and now you can just make it domestically using excess renewable power, and not rely on LNG or Russia... Amazing.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#307

Post by kortex » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 4:41 PM UTC

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?

There's a big difference in scale between "burning hydrocarbons to heat and power much of the world" (which includes leakage from fossil fuel drilling) and "we make some methane to be almost completely consumed and there are some leaks".

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#308

Post by Moto7451 » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 4:46 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #198

Moto7451 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See the video I linked or the other commenters with references that Methane is a higher contributor to global warming than CO2 by 30x. It’s not about the carbon removed, it’s about the methane leaked.

Even granting that number (and the 2% loss above), Terraform still wins. It's just math, sorry. I mean, sure: this might be bad on balance. But it's starting from a position of overwhelming assumed advantage. You need to come to the table with analysis actually showing it's bad, and all you have is "it's only about twice as good and not 50x better".

Remember that “at least 2%” is what we know. We don’t know the real number because it’s self reported and reconnaissance show it’s over 2%. The EPA needs to actually audit and find the real values. It could be 3, 4, 5 percent, etc and work out just fine economically. LNG has a 5% overhead before you even ship it.

Working on the margins of climate improvement is not worthwhile when billions of dollars to change the means of production are on the line.

Also, this has nothing to do with this company. This is not their responsibility. They should definitely do what they’re doing, but it doesn’t solve the root problem here of leaking methane into the atmosphere.

The totality of leaked methane is not just the pipeline. There’s the last mile, LNG distribution, and accidents that are not part of that number.

Operating on “but it’s .5% better” is very shaky when past predictions of huge improvements in the climate, and then zero real oversight, is how we got here in the first place. See Obama term 1 embracing fracking vs Obama term 2 expressing concern vs Biden term 1 restricting further expansion due to the environmental impact.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#309

Post by bryanlarsen » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 4:48 PM UTC

lucisferre wrote: post #305

bryanlarsen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their whitepaper uses $10/kcf.

I have not done the math here in a long time, but as I understand it: You could produce about 8KG of CH4 with 2KG of H2 and 6KG of C or 22KG of CO2. At $250/MT would work out to about $5.50 and the 2kg of H2 would be $5 assuming $2.50/kg so lets say $10 for simplicity. 1kg of CH4 at STP is 1,396L (according to GPT since I'm lazy right now) which is about 50cf. That's not even close to $10kcf (assuming that this means…

Interesting, let me try:

A tonne of CO2 is 12/44 C, or 273kg. So let's call it $1/kg because 250 ~= 273.

A kg of CH4 is 12/16 C and 4/16 H, so a kg is $0.75 for C + $2.50/4 for H = ~$1.40/kg.

https://www.epa.gov/cmop/updated-coal-mine-methane-units-con... says 1000 cubic feet of methane is 19.26 kg. Call it 20 because we're doing it in our head.

$1.40 * 20 = $28 / kcf.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#310

Post by eutropia » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 5:05 PM UTC

sebstefan wrote: post #258

ein0p wrote: post #252

There's got to be a catch to all this. If there was no catch, this would be the hottest startup in the world by far.

I'm going to post my favorite graph, it's called the "MAC graph". It shows, in itemized investments, how much it will cost to reach net-zero emissions for the U.S. Instead of time, the X axis is how much you are willing to invest, in $/Ton of CO2 The types of investments are sorted by their respective cost ; the later they appear on the X axis, the lower their name is on the Y axis You can observe by yourself here th…

Two things:

1) Terraform is making Zero carbon fuels, not sequestering into the ground (the purple on the graph, not the orange)

2) I don't think it's accurate to say "each dollar invested" gets the same 100x results. The graph seems to show that wind, solar, nuclear, and electric all taper off in how much CO2 they offset. It looks once you are spending $100/T, you literally can't make any more of an impact with solar or wind. Once you get to spending $250/T (what it currently costs for Terraform to do it, for real), Zero carbon fuels looks like it has the same 1 GTon impact as onshore solar and wind combined.

Finally, "electricity and heat production" (i.e, what solar and wind can help with) accounts for just 25% of GHG emissions. Transportation and industry (excluding electricity used by industry) together account for more than 35% of emissions. Many industrial processes can't simply "use electricity". The only way to get emissions down is to provide a like-for-like substitute - no one can afford to completely redesign their factory or chemical plant, but they could probably afford to pay more for NG as prices for syngas fall to closer to FF NG. There is no silver bullet.

We need every single innovation available.