141–150 of 331 posts
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Even if it all leaks out, you're still back at 0 essentially.
No, because methane is worse than CO2. Anyway, replacing fossil methane with synthetic is strictly better so the leaks are irrelevant.
Should've just stopped here. Being synthetically produced doesn't magically make it not a potent greenhouse gas.
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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.
Solvable, probably. Has oversight and a commitment to fix the issue? Not yet. https://youtu.be/K2oL4SFwkkw?si=zbr_fr5TDK2EHT72 (Topical and recent take from a favorite YouTube channel of mine) The industry provided (self reported) estimates of linkage is a little over 1%. The realistic value is over 2% and is at the point that coal and natural gas are likely equally bad for the environment given our current infrastru…
Uh... yes it does? A fossil-fuel free fuel production process that loses 2% to the atmosphere is still fifty times lower-impact (when considering output energy -- obviously production costs are different) than one that pulls 100% out of the ground.
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Methane is a 30x stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. So if 4% of the converted methane leaked into the atmosphere, you would be worse off (from a climate heating perspective) than if you had done nothing. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/...
30x strong on what measurement? Per molecule? How much CO2 is Terraform Industries pulling from the atmosphere to create that 4% of methane that might be leaking?
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.
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...
Doesn't methane get reacted away in a relatively short (≈years) period of time?
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...
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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It looks good. I wish their headline was "natural gas from solar power" 'cause many things labeled "carbon neutral" wind-up being conventional petrochemicals plus some worthless "offsets" baloney.
In theory you can use any power source - hydroelectric, geothermal, nuclear, wind - but the benefit to solar is that you can fully utilize it when the sun is shining and store the output (compressed natural gas) for storage, transportation and use off-hours. 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 thro…
Prices are then very high when wind and solar is low - which happens to be when demand is the highest (cold weather snaps in winter which tend to result in very low windspeeds).
National Grid is already paying £1bn/yr to turn off wind farms when supply is too high (plus paying a fortune for new nat gas peakers, which are limited by law to run for 10 days a year max). It's projected that curtailment payments to wind farms will reach £4bn/yr.
While some of this will be rectified with more transmission capacity (there is a 4GW offshore HVDC link being built between scotland and england), if the claims of terraform are true and hold up at scale, I think this is the actual breakthrough people have been looking for.
These could be connected to substations near wind farms (which also happen to be near major gas interconnectors from the north sea) and generate when power prices were low or negative, which will be a large amount of the time. They'd then get paid not only for the arbitrage in gas prices but also they would be able to take (most/all) of the curtailment payments national grid is paying the wind farms.
To be clear batteries do not work particularly well for a market like the UK. Batteries work well for overnight storage of solar, they do not work well for northern climates like the UK that require weeks of storage of power to cover low renewable output in winter. That's not to say there isn't loads of batteries being constructed right now, there is, but it's to cover very short term movements in supply and demand - the much harder problem is covering days or weeks of low output.