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Comment by goodSteveramos | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why the Saudis aren't spending their billions to develop synthetic fuels and direct air capture. Their cloudless desert is a great place to put solar panels to power synthetic fuel plants and they already have the refineries and shipping facilities to distribute carbon neutral fuels.

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> Their cloudless desert is a great place to put solar panels

Extremely high temperatures reduce efficiency. Extremely low temperatures at night mean high stress from thermal cycling. The desert is full of dust which reduces efficiency.

Finally, the desert is not just a mass of sand, it's a full on ecosystem that experiences impacts from laying large farms on top of it.

Sounds like it would be good for solar thermal plants then. Also, burning fossil fuels will destroy a much larger ecosystem: earth. I think we can compromise a bit here. Besides, how many plants would really be needed to disturb the desert eco system? It's a fairly large area.

To put it another way sand is not a good PCM material for example in green houses they use calcium chloride and sodium sulfate decahydrate to absorb heat during day and then give off that stored heat at night.

Sand is operating in reverse as it absorbing heat near freezing and releasing it as temps get above freezing...

Sorry I did have quite a bit of physics once upon a time..

I was with you 100% until this point:

> it's a full on ecosystem that experiences impacts from laying large farms on top of it.

You think that the Saudi government, with the extremist clerics holding a knife to their throats, their citizenry on life-long unemployment welfare, with their drive to continue to make climate change worse, who spill oil on the sand and billow smoke into their skies, give one tiny iota of a shit about a delicate desert ecosystem?

The point is you can’t rely on the desert to simply be sunny.

If you screw up the ecosystem, the result is haze, mist, and other obstacles to solar power, not to mention animal and human interference.

From what I understand, Saudi oil produces less carbon than other types of oil. So the Saudis are expecting they will be among the last to shut down - which a reasonable assumption.

Otherwise you would be shutting down a lower carbon fuel in favor of higher carbon fuel.

Oil is more than fuel. We have to solve a lot more problems than fuel before we can stop pumping oil.

They plan to produce synthetic fuel by 2025

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-25/aramco-pl...

It's also spending $270 billion by 2030 on low-carbon energy initiatives

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Saudi-Ara...

Edit: typo. billion, not trillion

> It's also spending $270 trillion by 2030 on low-carbon energy initiatives

Article says $270 billion, not trillion

Woops, typo. Thanks. Edited

We're talking about a nation that burns unrefined crude oil for power generation:

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Saudi-Ara...

Several years ago an acquaintance who worked in the oil industry joked about how he was saving the planet by taking a job in Saudi Arabia to develop their nonexistent fracking industry. He said the long-term effect would be helping them stop burning crude for their electricity needs, by pivoting to natural gas.

I learned of this several years ago and thought it was a joke. But no, apparently this is a real thing. There is a whole industrial science around preventing the turbines from getting gummed up from the fact that raw crude is burned in them.

They could do even better than that: they could plant trees. They could build natural gas power plants that would provide the electricity to desalinate water and pump it to the desert, and create artificial oases. I didn't run the numbers, but I'm quite sure that would be carbon negative by a wide margin. This way they continue doing what they know best (extract fossil fuels from the ground) and also beautify their landscape, and help humanity, and maybe even collect some carbon credits from the rest of the world.

> build natural gas power plants that would provide the electricity to desalinate water

They are (with solar). Look at the Al Khafji Plant in Saudi's Vision 2030 [0]

It takes time to build this stuff. The old guard was much more pro-oil and status quo than MBS, and he only finished purging them by 2018-19. It'll take a decade for their projects to start popping up.

[0] - https://www.vision2030.gov.sa/en/projects/alkhafji/

That is probably the worst and most carbon intensive way to plant some trees ever

> aren't spending their billions to develop synthetic fuels and direct air capture

They are late in the PE/VC game.

Abu Dhabi - the Emirates they controls the UAE - has been very active in investing in Hydrogen Energy and Solar, which makes more sense in an industrial setting.

They've been very active in investing billions in Hydrogen tech in India via Tata Power, Reliance, and Adani in conjunction with Japanese companies [0][1][2]

Saudi only started dipping their toes in the space after MBZ took MBS under his wing and mentored him about the Abu Dhabi way [3]

[0] - https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/finance-giant...

[1] - https://www.offshore-energy.biz/uae-and-india-to-collaborate...

[2] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/simranvaswani/2022/04/11/adani-...

[3] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/frenemies-saudi-crown-prince-mb...

I have to assume they're doing both at the same time with how much money they've got to burn.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/09/aramco-siemens-energy-launch...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-25/aramco-pl...

> synthetic fuels

These exports would be competitive within only a short shipping radius. North Africa is closer to Europe; China has its interior; on the top-10 list I only see India, Pakistan and possibly Turkey [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_imp...

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