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Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

terraformindustries.wordpress.com

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Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#31

Post by pfdietz »

mikeatlas wrote: post #25
rhelz wrote: post #19

Fraking has made natural gas so cheap, I can't see these being used for anything but virtue signaling. They claim a breakthrough in converting hydrogen to natural gas, but natural gas is by far the cheapest source of H2. And, given that methane is 80 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2 is, is it really a good idea to be manufacturing it? Inevitably there would be leakage, and it wouldn't take much to leak…

Their claim is that this method is still yet cheaper than drilling/fracking.

The cost of natural gas on the Henry Hub is somewhere around $300/ton. A ton of natural gas requires 2.75 tons of CO2, so the cost of CO2 capture has to be well below $110/ton (and that ignores the cost of the hydrogen and the equipment for doing the methane synthesis.)

They must be assuming large increases in natural gas prices or large CO2 taxes.

I think it will be much easier to get the price/BTU of H2 down below the current price of natural gas than it would be to get synthetic methane down that cheap.

(If they are assuming large CO2 taxes then it's probably a better business model to just collect CO2 from the air and sequester it.)

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#32

Post by andrewla »

pfdietz wrote: post #14

One can make natural gas from CO2 captured from air and with hydrogen electrolysed form water. But then one has to ask: why not just use hydrogen directly and skip the inefficiency and cost of direct air capture of CO2 and of making methane? If one is dead set on making a carbon-containing synfuel, why methane and not something more storable, like methanol or higher hydrocarbons? Or, why not use the hydrogen to deoxy…

Other commenters have pointed out that hydrogen may not be feasible, but the other direction -- methanol or higher hydrocarbons, seems way more interesting. Storage and density are orders of magnitude easier, and since we're synthesizing it from atmospheric component we don't have to be concerned with contaminants, especially sulfur compounds, that plague higher hydrocarbon use.

Even better in a lot of ways would be to move to amorphous carbon; generating coal from atmospheric CO2 would be a huge win in transportability especially around safety and reliability dimensions.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#33

Post by pfdietz »

groby_b wrote: post #24
pfdietz wrote: post #14

One can make natural gas from CO2 captured from air and with hydrogen electrolysed form water. But then one has to ask: why not just use hydrogen directly and skip the inefficiency and cost of direct air capture of CO2 and of making methane? If one is dead set on making a carbon-containing synfuel, why methane and not something more storable, like methanol or higher hydrocarbons? Or, why not use the hydrogen to deoxy…

Because we kinda know how to do natgas storage/transport/use at large scale, while we're not quite there on the hydrogen economy. Higher complexity hydrocarbons likely have higher synthesis costs, and if you want to enter the market, you probably want your pricing as competitive as possible. Same for the biomass approach. It is ultimately an approach striving for as much simplicity as possible. That's firmly baked in…

We use all that because natural gas is cheap. If hydrogen were cheaper than natural gas, we'd use that instead, at least for the industrial processes, and we'd switch away from combustion of a gas in the distributed residential/commercial applications.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#34

Post by rbliss »

samatman wrote: post #30

Last time I looked into this, Terraform's 1MW reactor can fill a normal LNG truck in 145 days of operation. Or if you prefer, 145 such reactors would be needed to fill one (1) LNG truck per day. The work they're doing will help prove out DAC, moving it further down the tech adoption curve, which is good. The task of making methane from the air should be performed with multi-GW nuclear reactors, which produce full pow…

Would love to see nuclear do this, but the challenges to getting nuclear built are myriad. Regulatory burdens, cost to build reactors, painfully slow learning rate for nuclear reactor design and buildout.

Solar, while certainly not ideal, is comparatively trivial to build out. Functionally you buy and lay out cheap panels. Far smaller political challenges. Some friction around land use and interconnect, but compared to nuclear, orders of magnitude easier and the way forward seems clear with the existing political realities and economies of scale in action for solar panels.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#35

Post by jseliger »

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…

Other discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39896560

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#38

Post by maerF0x0 »

What are some applications where its worth taking the highest grade energy (electricity) and turning it into a lower grade (eg liquid fuels), rather than electrifying the application?

Electricity to motion is significantly more efficient per input energy than burning fuel->heat-> gaseous expansion->drive a piston->convert to rotation chain.

What am I missing about this?

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#39

Post by rdedev »

rhelz wrote: post #19

Fraking has made natural gas so cheap, I can't see these being used for anything but virtue signaling. They claim a breakthrough in converting hydrogen to natural gas, but natural gas is by far the cheapest source of H2. And, given that methane is 80 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2 is, is it really a good idea to be manufacturing it? Inevitably there would be leakage, and it wouldn't take much to leak…

The US is already extracting a lot of natural gas and leaking a ton of it. The main culprit of these leaks are those regulatory bodies who outsource their jobs onto the companies. Fund them better and enforce heftoer penalties and the issue of leaks can be minimized drastically

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#40

Post by jfengel »

alexb_ wrote: post #23
rhelz wrote: post #19

Fraking has made natural gas so cheap, I can't see these being used for anything but virtue signaling. They claim a breakthrough in converting hydrogen to natural gas, but natural gas is by far the cheapest source of H2. And, given that methane is 80 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2 is, is it really a good idea to be manufacturing it? Inevitably there would be leakage, and it wouldn't take much to leak…

> They claim a breakthrough in converting hydrogen to natural gas, but natural gas is by far the cheapest source of H2. Are you serious? Water is right there!

Water is right there, but the hydrogen is really closely bound to the oxygen, and extremely hard to get out.

It's considerably easier to get H2 out of methane. Unfortunately, that process also yields CO2, so it's not helping the greenhouse gas situation.

Hydrogen proponents suggest a route where we start with "blue hydrogen" from natural gas. Then, when we've got a good H2 infrastructure going and a lot of excess electricity from solar, we can switch over to "green hydrogen" from water.

Skeptics point out that this is incredibly stupid, and that "hydrogen proponents" tend to be closely in bed with the fossil fuel industry. It looks an awful lot like an excuse to delay the elimination of fossil-fuel replacements like wind and solar.

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