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Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

terraformindustries.wordpress.com

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Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#241

Post by japanuspus »

arrowsmith wrote: post #238
martinald wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes exactly. In the UK power is becoming increasingly negative in pricing when there is high wind + solar output. This is actually increasingly alarmingly rapidly (and there is 3-5GW of offshore wind, plus loads of utility scale solar coming online). 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 wind…

I don't get it, why does it cost billions to turn the wind farms off? Why isn't it free?

Because some of the windfarms still run on legacy contracts where they were incentivized by a guaranteed selling price for the power they produce. They are reimbursed for the loss of income they suffer due to curtailment.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#242

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

strken wrote: post #205
jvanderbot wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This all strikes me as a nice opening to an apocalypse movie. Pulling CO2 and upgrading to methane - wouldn't that amplify GHG effects?

Methane has a short half-life in the atmosphere, so its cumulative effect after a few decades is close to CO2 unless you're constantly outputting more, and that's assuming you're not burning it. In the case where you're making methane from atmospheric CO2 and then burning it, it's just returning the same CO2 back, which per the article is carbon neutral.

More like a few centuries, methane's global warming potential after 500 years (GWP-500) is still 7.95.

The issue with burning is that methane can leak during transport.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#243

Post by yurishimo »

logtempo wrote: post #176
gorjusborg wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the natural gas is captured from the atmosphere, a spill will be bad, but no worse than before the capture happened, right?

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 with their calculations _somewhere_. Maybe I'm wrong, but at this point, the US is so far gone down the fracking/natural gas hole, I'm afraid backing out of it is almost untenable.

The best we can hope for is better capture, storage, and utilization strategies. If we can find a way to create a machine similar to the Terraform Industries model, but focused on methane capture, perhaps we can reabsorb/store that as well.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#244

Post by boxed »

rstat1 wrote: post #141
wmf wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because methane is worse than CO2. Anyway, replacing fossil methane with synthetic is strictly better so the leaks are irrelevant.

>>No, because methane is worse than CO2. Should've just stopped here. Being synthetically produced doesn't magically make it not a potent greenhouse gas.

The big source of methane is cows anyway. This system needs to scale to ridiculous levels to come even close to all the cows.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#245

Post by diffeomorphism »

beachy wrote: post #137
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…

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…

That sounds hilariously out of touch. Like "15 years experience required, rockstar developer, entry level position, passion not salary". No, you are not that special and I will send a "champion" to a much better employer, thanks.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#247

Post by throwaway2562 »

japanuspus wrote: post #241
arrowsmith wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it, why does it cost billions to turn the wind farms off? Why isn't it free?

Because some of the windfarms still run on legacy contracts where they were incentivized by a guaranteed selling price for the power they produce. They are reimbursed for the loss of income they suffer due to curtailment.

Correct. The UK regulator (Ofgem) and thus UK consumers are being taken for a ride by windfarmers, who made these deals a precondition of building farms.

We will be paying them £2.5bn a year to not generate electricity by 2030

https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/examining-challeng...

‘A wholly unsatisfactory state of affairs’ indeed

https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/372-why-are-unsubsidised-win...

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#248

Post by rgmerk »

avmich wrote: post #70
car wrote: post #43

How does this compare to using microbes to produce hydrocarbons from CO2 and other waste gases? (NB, not from atmospheric CO2) Here a recent article on the topic, specifically for making jet fuel, for an industry that would be impossible to electrify. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02136-z

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.

There's never been any doubt that you can make a small, short-range battery electric airplane.

We will probably be able to make short-range battery electric and fuel cell airliners.

There is no prospect whatsoever of making an intercontinental battery electric airliner; there is no plausible battery chemistry with enough energy density to give you sufficient range. There are slightly better prospects of hydrogen-powered intercontinental airliners, but even that is very challenging given how bulky the hydrogen propellant required will be.

The only realistic medium-term prospect appears to be sustainable aviation fuel, though I wonder if future generations might one day have a crack at nuclear aviation.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#249

Post by elproxy »

XorNot wrote: post #221
pfdietz wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

Yup, or things like sulphur thermal storage[1]. Also, hydrogen is pushed heavily by the fossil fuel industry, as it will provide another out for all their methane reserves (via steam reforming).

[1]https://www.solarpaces.org/why-solar-sulphur-cycle-ideal-sea...

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#250

Post by strken »

CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #242
strken wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Methane has a short half-life in the atmosphere, so its cumulative effect after a few decades is close to CO2 unless you're constantly outputting more, and that's assuming you're not burning it. In the case where you're making methane from atmospheric CO2 and then burning it, it's just returning the same CO2 back, which per the article is carbon neutral.

More like a few centuries, methane's global warming potential after 500 years (GWP-500) is still 7.95. The issue with burning is that methane can leak during transport.

I stand corrected: did the maths wrong. Centuries it is.
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