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Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

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Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#291

Post by CrazyStat »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #229
CrazyStat wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. 11.8 years is a halflife, not a "all the methane is gone after 11.8 years" lifetime. 2. Methane doesn't just warm the atmosphere up a little bit and then disappear with no side effects. In addition to carbon dioxide, methane decomposition creates ozone and water vapor, which are both greenhouse gases. The additional heating effects of these decomposition byproducts are also included in the global warming potential…

That was very well explained, thank you. At 11.8 years it seemed like it would be worth considering because the total amount of anthropogenic CH4 would find equilibrium relatively soon, and that would be better, at some point, than continuing to emit new CO2 year after year. But at 80 years... all of that infrastructure that the synthetic methane people are excited to reuse... It'll have been decommissioned by then a…

Not that I’m aware of. Those kinds of decisions are different depending on where you are, too; some places need to worry about conserving fresh water much more than others, for example. I don’t think there’s a meaningful way to reduce everything to a single dimension.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#292

Post by ajb »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #167
ajb wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK, our gas infrastructure actually used to be used for hydrogen[1], so a lot of it should still work if we were to switch back. [1] Actually "town gas" which was a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. But I imagine not including the CO would not be a problem.

Neglecting the CO will absolutely be a problem. The material properties required for handling hydrogen are very different than those for other gasses, especially methane. Increasing the concentration of hydrogen significantly increases the difficulty.

But if the pressure of hydrogen was the same as the partial pressure of hydrogen before, wouldn't it be the same? I mean, if the materials could stand that partial pressure, why wouldn't they be able to stand that pressure in the absence of CO?

Unless of course that actually took it below atmospheric pressure so all the forces went in the opposite direction.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#294

Post by cassepipe »

Moto7451 wrote: post #196
imbusy111 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a bunch of new methane monitoring satellites, so it is very observable and enforceable.

I agree we can do it. It just has to be done. Aka give the EPA some teeth and require actual monitoring and enforcement rather than a self reported fantasy.

Exactly. Sure we can do it but the better question is are there any incentives to do any of it ?

The fact that there isn't and that we would have to create one through some sort of government policy should be worrying, especially now that we know that enforcement is in general the government asking a branch of industry to self-regulate... and that's exactly what's happening right now with the natural gas industry and its leaks.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#295

Post by cassepipe »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #132
api wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Methane has a much shorter atmospheric half life than CO2-- years as opposed to millennia. It does end up getting oxidized into CO2 and H2O, just not nearly as quickly as when it's burned. Leaks would happen to a small degree, but since a leak represents money drifting away there's a strong incentive to fix them. Methane leaks of any size are fairly easy to detect. There's been an effort to put up satellites for this…

>Leaks would happen to a small degree, but since a leak represents money drifting away there's a strong incentive to fix them. This is true of existing natural gas infrastructure, and yet...

This must mean there isn't a strong incentive to fix them.

Let some cheap gas in the atmosphere or invest in costly detection systems and qualified workforce ?

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#296

Post by NortySpock »

yetihehe wrote: post #240
cbsmith wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it does, though that would be great. Burning the methane on site as waste is still significantly better than releasing it into the air (converting methane to mostly CO2 is still better than not doing it). This technology doesn't need to solve global warming. Even if it just buys us some more time, it is fantastic news.

If you could get that methane and use it for something productive, what would you propose? I'm looking for ideas, some process that has relatively easy to transport equipment (no expensive big buildings which have to be demolished when oil field is depleted), energy intensive and makes some valuable product with that energy. If someone has any wild/interesting ideas in this space, I'd like to hear it.

Methane and its siblings (methanol, ethanol, ethane) are used as a basic feedstock for more advanced chemical processes, like plastic synthesis, or drugs, or plenty of other organic compounds.

Obviously the easiest one is "store, then burn it for energy", but it seems to me, with this technology, that methane or propane powered vehicles might see lower fuel costs. This process would just make them carbon neutral.

https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/27789/conversi...

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#298

Post by anonporridge »

toddmorey wrote: post #178
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…

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…

Burning off excess methane is always going to be a problem that needs to be solved regardless. There are just too many small, remote sources that aren't likely to ever justify the cost of infrastructure build out to use on grid. For example, landfills are a big, distributed source of methane that aren't going away.

Bitcoin miners are the most commonly touted solution here, because you can drop in small modules of generators+miners with no infrastructure other than a satellite link.

Funny enough, with carbon accounting rules giving huge incentives for efficiently burning waste methane, a small percentage of the bitcoin mining network doing this could actually make bitcoin the only carbon negative industry on the planet (from a carbon accounting perspective, not literally).

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#299

Post by lofenfew »

Kon5ole wrote: post #251
tyler569 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best part about using nuclear for fuel generation is that you get to sidestep the biggest problem with nuclear - when you build a power plant you want to build it near people (who may object on safety grounds), but you can build a DAC fuel generator way out in the middle of nowhere. Even better, you could build your nuclear DAC fuel generator in an old natural gas field, where there's ready-made transportation in…

>The best part about using nuclear for fuel generation The main point of this operation is to utilize free surplus energy from solar and wind to store fuel for days where solar and wind can't produce enough. Free-as-in-beer surplus, since the energy would otherwise be wasted or sold at negative prices, like what we have been seeing lately in certain markets. Nuclear can always produce electricity, so converting to fu…

Nuclear can always produce electricity, but spinning plants up and down takes time. More importantly, a nuclear plant has a design lifetime, and most of the cost comes from building the plant in the first place, not from the fuel. It therefore costs a lot of money to let a nuclear plant sit idle. Furthermore, building a small nuclear plant is almost as expensive as building a large one, because of the regulatory hurdles and the effort needed to design it. So not building a nuclear plant as big as you possibly can has a cost as well. The difficulty is that you then need a consumer capable of using all that excess power, which necessitates putting it next to large population centers, who are likely to complain about the risk of nuclear. Being able to build a large reactor out in the middle of nowhere, and be able to rely on always having a consumer for its power even if at a very low price would make it much more viable.
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