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Comment by jakozaur | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations!

Though I can't still wrap my head around it:

1. Terraform needs to produce hydrogen using electrolysis. Turning hydrogen into natural gas requires more equipment and energy.

2. Simultaneously, we transform natural gas into hydrogen through natural gas reforming. Currently, hydrogen is vital for fertilizers and refineries. This also uses energy and a lot of equipment.

So, before we produce synthetic natural gas, displacing hydrogen produced by fossil fuels with electrolytes should be more economical.

On top of that, fertilizers such as ammonia are way easier to ship worldwide than natural gas.

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Terraform believes that the decline in the cost of solar power will make their process profitable in 2027. Fertilizer & ammonia created using green hydrogen may be profitable earlier, lets say 2026.

Seems to me Terraform made the right call by going for the bigger market.

Edit. It looks like they're not ignoring fertilizer/ammonia either: "The company has ongoing discussions regarding prototyping or selling standalone electrolyzers as separate products"

> On top of that, fertilizers such as ammonia are way easier to ship worldwide than natural gas.

That's a big reason why Terraform is doing natgas. The cost of Natural Gas in most of the world is dominated by the cost of shipping. Terraform can produce locally and bypass shipping costs.

The only buyers for green hydrogen or natural gas today are companies where the 'greenness' of the fuel matters far more than the price.

They are happy to pay a 100x or even 1000x premium to have their CEO's car powered by green hydrogen.

As I understand it, the Terraform Industries idea is, roughly, to reduce the price.

Yeah, and there are several long used and relatively efficient ammonia generation methods for direct electrical conversion that uses nitrogen from the air and water with renewable electricity.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.5808...

The social benefit of such production, considered strictly, probably far exceeds methane. But methane costs more to ship, and displaces demand for Russian gas. Economics is hard.

Producing hydrogen using electricity will only be more economical than than steam reforming when natural gas, coal and oil all run out. I respect the choice to move away from fossil fuels but if you do the calculations on how much this will cost, people will start having second thoughts.

Producing hydrogen using electricity is proportional to the cost of electricity. If electricity is crazy cheap, so is electrically produced hydrogen. (At site of production; transporting hydrogen is also expensive).

Terraform is betting on the continuing cost reduction of solar.

I wonder how many people on this board decrying the cost effectiveness here are also invested heavily in cryptocurrency...

Displacing mined methane is an overwhelmingly better use of excess power.

When calculating the costs, you don’t get to just ignore the huge, expensive harms caused by releasing CO2 and methane into the atmosphere because they are inconvenient.

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