Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas
terraformindustries.wordpress.com
terraformindustries.wordpress.com
Their recent post on "Terraformer Environmental Calculus" is a great read, if you are interested in this space: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2024/02/06/terrafo...
Congratulations to the team!
Really exciting work!
I wish their headline was "natural gas from solar power" 'cause many things labeled "carbon neutral" wind-up being conventional petrochemicals plus some worthless "offsets" baloney.
You could also technically use this as a grid-battery, taking in excess grid energy when it is cheap and converting it into natural gas that can be run back through a gas peaking plant that spins up to meet peak demand. You could also look into SOFC fuel cell plants [1] to convert the stored natural gas into electricity at 60% and heat at 30% (the heat is high temperature which is good for cogeneration or as a direct heat source). There would need to be some very large spreads in margin on those to make up for the fact you're likely double-dipping on inefficiencies when going from electricity in -> natgas production -> storage -> generation -> electricity out.
On that same note though - in some free and open energy markets it is not unheard of to buy at <$10/MWh during excess production periods and sell at >$200/MWh at peak on-demand - plenty of margin for arbitrage there - as the tesla megapack facilities have demonstrated in Australia. In comparison a 4MWh megapack facility (2MW in/2MW out) is priced at $1.9M before installation [2]
[1]https://assets.bosch.com/media/en/global/stories/sofc/solid-...
[2]https://twitter.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1643488856946122754...
(updated for M/Mega - thanks)
m means milli, M is mega.
The loss in such a cycle is abysmal, alone from thermal loss (not to mention the loss during compression and decompression) - even straight fuel cells are at 60% round-trip, compared to batteries with >>90% efficiency.
It's ridiculously cost ineffective to charge a battery in July only to discharge it in December.
60% roundtrip is cost effective if you're synthesizing when the sun is blazing and the wind is blowing hard and burning it when wind, solar and batteries have all tapped out.
Thats especially so if the equipment has low capex which it seems like this does. Unlike batteries that makes it cost effective to overbuild and idle it most of the year.
Pumped storage has ~90% roundtrip efficiency, good at storing energy for days or weeks but maxes out easily. The energy density of water pushed uphill is very low.
I think we should be pushing a lot more water uphill, but I see it as an alternative to or competitor to grid-scale batteries and a complement to syngas.
Syngas production will probably be most useful if built next door to a wind or solar farm and used to siphon off energy which is currently curtailed when the grid is maxed out.
It can then be easily stored in enormous quantities and easily transported by ship to anywhere in the world that needs it.
If you look at this map, you'll see that unlike, say, dam-appropriate geography, it's actually extremely common:
https://www.energytransitionpartnership.org/uploads/2023/05/...
Yes, the capex and lead times on one of these things can be huge, but it's comes out ahead of nuclear power on those fronts.
The environmental impact is bad for both.
River dams break fish crossings, the dammed up area gets flooded and wipes out nature as well as archeological artifacts and the dams are at constant risk of damage - especially in a war, see Ukraine for multiple examples, but also due to maintenance neglect, negligence during construction and natural disasters like earthquakes. In the worst cases such as China's Three Gorges dam, millions of people were displaced as well [1].
Pumped storage can come in two variants, either as an associate to ordinary river dams (so they inherit their issues), or as greenfield construction, where they have the same impact on the flooded are, with the additional impact of countless animals dying during pump and empty cycles.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Displacement_...
They do not: https://www.energy.gov/eere/water/articles/lower-environment...
(this is the second citation to a relevant scientific study in this thread. the first one was also mine)
This is getting to seem a bit like those screeds I see about wind farms killing all the birds from nuclear, oil and gas people who see it as a threat.
Indeed.
This is why the cheapest solutions in most places are a mix of a mere few days off storage plus a target production level that is a little higher than you need on an average day in winter.
While this doesn't work above the arctic circle (you could do it with a power line somewhere sunnier or a synthetic fuel, and possibly also geothermal or nuclear etc., devil is in the details for all options) overproduction + 35-90 hours of batteries is sufficient for most people and places:
https://tonyseba.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/RethinkingEn...
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 windspeeds).
National Grid is already paying £1bn/yr to turn off wind farms when supply is too high (plus paying a fortune for new nat gas peakers, which are limited by law to run for 10 days a year max). It's projected that curtailment payments to wind farms will reach £4bn/yr.
While some of this will be rectified with more transmission capacity (there is a 4GW offshore HVDC link being built between scotland and england), if the claims of terraform are true and hold up at scale, I think this is the actual breakthrough people have been looking for.
These could be connected to substations near wind farms (which also happen to be near major gas interconnectors from the north sea) and generate when power prices were low or negative, which will be a large amount of the time. They'd then get paid not only for the arbitrage in gas prices but also they would be able to take (most/all) of the curtailment payments national grid is paying the wind farms.
To be clear batteries do not work particularly well for a market like the UK. Batteries work well for overnight storage of solar, they do not work well for northern climates like the UK that require weeks of storage of power to cover low renewable output in winter. That's not to say there isn't loads of batteries being constructed right now, there is, but it's to cover very short term movements in supply and demand - the much harder problem is covering days or weeks of low output.
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...
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 gas pipelines are at capacity. In those moments, the price of methane actually drops below zero--I've seen it at -$1.20 per MMBtu as recently as this year! Essentially you are paying someone to get rid of the stuff for you.
So... if we flood the market with new, cost-effective synthetic methane... will companies just flare more of it as we drill for oil?
We'd be able to get to net-zero carbon / methane emissions without having to substantially change our living conditions. Cities or states would "just" bottle up some liquid methane for the winter months (or summer months) and seasonal energy usage changes become much easier to manage. (I'm aware that would involve creating more infrastructure.)
Sounds great to me.
Problem #1 is finding people to pay for it until then.
Problem #2 is that this will make fore expensive energy at the end, efficiency being one problem and capital cost of those idle gas turbines being another. We'll have to wait and see if these ever plan any role beyond a demonstration project or two, but I'm skeptical it'll compete on price.
If the oil drills lose incentive to sell the methane off, they just burn it on site as waste. Horrible I know.
So synthetic methane also needs to reduce crude oil demand I’m thinking.
This technology doesn't need to solve global warming. Even if it just buys us some more time, it is fantastic news.
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...
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).
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.
The issue with burning is that methane can leak during transport.
"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 resources where they solve the most important problems."
Someone could’ve spent literally 5 minutes making this look reasonable on the world’s most popular web browsing device form facto, whilst still retaining the site’s retro virtue signalling aesthetic, AND it wouldn’t have taken away from their ‘core mission’ or whatever.
If you don’t care, don’t have a website at all.
Does it look different on yours. It's just a plaintext website with white text on a black background and it's fast to load and easy to read for me. What's wrong with it?
> 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" scenario. Maybe once you've provided 5 great candidates you're allowed a dud or two.
It’s akin to saying “Oh you’re a systems software engineer? Prove it by designing and implementing our entire system for us, we won’t pay you for it, we just want to know you can do it”.
To me it says "don't just shotgun me with every rando candidate you have - I'll give you one chance, make it count". It's exactly the sort of thing you might say to a pushy recruiter you met at the bar who wants in to your business. To succeed, they must a) have a good candidate and b) understand your business (so they know that candidate is right for you).
And I'd say there's an enormous difference between what a software engineer does (spend months or years designing and implementing a system that is for a single "customer") to what a recruiter does (spend 1 hours of conversations/emails in qualifying a candidate who can be shopped out to any of a number of customers.).
For a company/hiring manager, one great candidate a month is far more valuable than a few dozen ones who aren't even close to matching the role. They're not saying "do the work for us", they're saying "if you want us to take your sourcing seriously, send us quality, not quantity."
But you know what, http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
They already have a style element in there. The whole thing becomes readable by just adding a width property. Much better when centered. Done.
Highly recommend checking out more articles on the Terraform Industries blog and Casey's personal blog.
Overview and tour (~20min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NngCHTImH1g
Deeper Interview (~40min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekEdq6PhC0Q
This is excellent and I highly recommend everybody watches both, starting with shorter one.
Casey, the CEO is super interesting and inspiring.
Isn't problem making new CO₂ from burning fossil fuels, not converting existing Co2 into other things?
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/...
Well we're super fucked then because I've read that all the freaking / coal seam gas infra leaks million of tons of methane every year.
How much CO2 is Terraform Industries pulling from the atmosphere to create that 4% of methane that might be leaking?
By CO2 equivalence in the context of greenhouse gas potential [1]. And, the 30X factor is only valid if you look over scales of atmospheric persistence of 100yrs. If you look at scales of 10years (the amount of time methane persists, the GHG potential strength a over 80X.
Liquid (Cryogenic) natural gas tankers and storage emit "boiloff" gas. Some of this can be burned in the 'dual fuel' propulsion engines when combined with a small amount of diesel "pilot" fuel, but not all and I'm uncertain at what quantity. Even engines that burn NG gave methane "leak by" that escapes into the atmosphere. It's not great, and no, nobody is enforcing containment via satellites at the LNG shipping level (despite a comment to the company trary above).
Hydrogen production is a much better option for dense energy storage option.
1.) https://climatechangeconnection.org/emissions/co2-equivalent...
Should've just stopped here. Being synthetically produced doesn't magically make it not a potent greenhouse gas.
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 purpose.
If using this technology helps us to phase out fossil fuels, it would be a huge net win. This could effectively let us repurpose all our existing natural gas storage, transport, and generation infrastructure into a battery to store surplus renewable or off-peak nuclear energy.
This could also allow renewable energy to be shipped as LNG, allowing the gigantic amounts of solar power in places like the Sahara to be harnessed and exported. The only other way to do this is extremely long distance superconducting or incredibly high voltage transmission lines that would probably be more expensive and very vulnerable.
This is true of existing natural gas infrastructure, and yet...
Let some cheap gas in the atmosphere or invest in costly detection systems and qualified workforce ?
I thought it was a pipe dream but has got some fairly big backers now and does seem to be moving along.
If anything, when you are calling it "easily transportable" at the same time, as they do, you are actively misleading. You can't have both: it's either easily transportable and you are accepting a bunch of methane released (and thus terrible for climate change), or it's carbon neutral and you are baking in the cost of making sure it doesn't leak in transport/storage (and thus not easily transportable). They are having their cake and eating it too by claiming both.
Presumably there's a point where the lines cross and leaking green methane is still a win. I guess it just comes down to where those lines cross and whether we deem that an acceptable goal.
Methane's global warming potential is estimated to be ten times CO2 after 500 years [1].
> and the impact of a tonne of methane released is less than a tonne of CO2 released at the same date.
A ton of methane released into the atmosphere breaks down into 2.75 tons of CO2 [2]. There is no possible way that this statement can be true.
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6..., Table 7.15 (page 1017)
[2] Simple stoichiometry: CH4 (weighing ~16 g/mol) breaks down into CO2 (weighing ~44 g/mol) at a 1:1 ratio. 44/16 is 2.75.
Can you help me understand how a gas with a lifetime of 11.8 years is having a different impact on the climate at 500 years than it did at say... 11.8 years? That's 488.2 years of being in the same state as where it started prior to the carbon capture that made the CH4.
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 calculations.
3. We care about cumulative effects over time. GWP is "how much additional heat will the atmosphere absorb because of this gas over X amount of time", scaled relative to carbon dioxide (so CO2 always has a GWP of 1). Methane's GWP-20 is about 80, which means that if I release one ton of methane today, over the next 20 years it will absorb about as much heat as if I had released 80 tons of CO2 instead. The longer the time frame the less bad methane looks, because it mostly decomposes, but even over a 500 year time frame releasing 1 ton of methane absorbs as much additional heat as if you had released 10 tons of CO2 instead. GTP is similar to GWP except it's about how much global average temperatures will rise instead of how much heat is absorbed.
4. If you can create methane out of atmospheric CO2 for free, you can subtract 2.75 from each of the GWP numbers for methane (since you remove 2.75 tons of CO2 to create one ton of methane). This is essentially what the table is showing on the CH4-non fossil line (notice each of the GWPs on this line is 2.8 less than on the CH4-fossil line).
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Imagine I had a magical gas called timelockium. It is not a greenhouse gas (no radiative forcing), but after exactly 10 years it decomposes to an equal mass of CO2 with no other byproducts.
The GWP-10 for this gas would be zero: over the first ten years, releasing a ton of timelockium is equivalent (in terms of heat absorbed by the atmosphere) to releasing zero tons of CO2.
The GWP-20 for this gas would be 0.5: over the first twenty years, releasing a ton of timelockium is equivalent to releasing 0.5 tons of CO2. This is because it does nothing for the first ten years, and then for the next ten years it is just CO2 [1].
For longer time frames, the GWP of timelockium would approach 1. Over 500 years, emitting a ton of timelockium would be nearly equivalent (0.98) to emitting a ton of CO2.
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Now I have another magical gas, decayium. It is equivalent to CO2 for 10 years and then magically disappears. Again it has no other side effects or byproducts.
The GWP-10 of decayium would be 1--over the first 10 years it's identical to CO2. Over the next ten years it contributes nothing to warming, so the GWP-20 would be 0.5. For longer time frames the GWP of decayium would approach 0. the GWP-500 would be 0.02.
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Superdecayium is like decayium except much worse. It's equivalent to 100x as much CO2 for the first ten years and then magically disappears with no side effects or byproducts. The GWP-10 is 100. The GWP-20 is 50. The GWP-500 is 2.
This last scenario is more analogous to methane, except methane chemistry is much more complicated, with gradual decay and byproducts that are also greenhouse gases. Like superdecayium, methane's GWP decreases over longer time intervals, but even over 500 years it is still worse than an equivalent mass of CO2. ---
[1] For the sake of simplicity I'm ignoring CO2 dynamics here, assuming it's just static in the atmosphere.
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 anyway. We might as well just hold out for synthetic gasoline or double down on electric everything (both, probably).
(This is all assuming that the leak problem is unsolvable. Not sure about that.)
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You seem to know quite a bit about this stuff, so I have an unrelated question:
Things are "simple" in this case because a degree of climate temperature increase provides a basis for comparison between different gasses. But sometimes I find myself thinking about tradeoffs between climate heating and other ecological harms. Like, I should probably get a dishwasher because they use less water than washing by hand, but what's the carbon footprint of manufacturing a new dishwasher?
I suppose you could still standardize on a degree of heating, but you'd need to figure out how much wasted fresh water is equivalently harmful to a degree of heating. That's always going to be subjective to some degree, but not all subjects are created equal. I'd much rather just let some ecologists build consensus around a number and then take that number myself as an axiom.
Does such a thing exist?
Not everything all at once, no. But given just two things, I figure there's a community of experts somewhere (maybe nearby even) that can balance them better than I can. I'd like a better way of somehow tapping into that.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20150116044523/https://www.see.e...
If we all switched to still-leaky synthetic methane today, things would continue getting worse only until the atmospheric breakdown rate equalled the leak rate. That's still a decade of things getting worse, but it's possible that the alternatives are even more problematic.
I'm not saying it's the right or wrong path, I haven't done that analysis, I'm just saying that approaches to it could use a bit more pragmatism.
Video link: https://youtu.be/K2oL4SFwkkw
https://youtu.be/K2oL4SFwkkw?si=zbr_fr5TDK2EHT72 (Topical and recent take from a favorite YouTube channel of mine)
The industry provided (self reported) estimates of linkage is a little over 1%. The realistic value is over 2% and is at the point that coal and natural gas are likely equally bad for the environment given our current infrastructure.
Carbon neutral is a useful feature but doesn’t solve that problem.
I will say I am a fan of carbon neutral methane in place of the efforts to move to hydrogen combustion (this is a thing) and hydrogen for fuel cells since there isn’t a commercially viable carbon neutral version of that yet.
Making existing methane infrastructure cleaner and less leaky is better, in my mind, in the path to solar/wind/nuclear electrification than trying to capture the emissions of coal or retool petroleum infrastructure into hydrogen.
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.
Uh... yes it does? A fossil-fuel free fuel production process that loses 2% to the atmosphere is still fifty times lower-impact (when considering output energy -- obviously production costs are different) than one that pulls 100% out of the ground.
I mean, sure: this might be bad on balance. But it's starting from a position of overwhelming assumed advantage. You need to come to the table with analysis actually showing it's bad, and all you have is "it's only about twice as good and not 50x better".
Working on the margins of climate improvement is not worthwhile when billions of dollars to change the means of production are on the line.
Also, this has nothing to do with this company. This is not their responsibility. They should definitely do what they’re doing, but it doesn’t solve the root problem here of leaking methane into the atmosphere.
The totality of leaked methane is not just the pipeline. There’s the last mile, LNG distribution, and accidents that are not part of that number.
Operating on “but it’s .5% better” is very shaky when past predictions of huge improvements in the climate, and then zero real oversight, is how we got here in the first place. See Obama term 1 embracing fracking vs Obama term 2 expressing concern vs Biden term 1 restricting further expansion due to the environmental impact.
And if you can make natural gas from solar that means there will be more sources of natural gas and thus less transit. Right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Natural_si...
Depends on your definition of a ‘long time’ but it’s not like it reaches the low single digits even after 500 years…
-The hydrogen half is still a great way to make hydrogen for industrial processes
-The methane can be used on site of production for organic chem feedstocks
-Many new rockets are using methane as their fuel, using it at point of origin instead of transporting through leaky pipelines and trucks.
Any analysis along these lines would be reassuring that this isn't going to be a net-negative, climate wise.
I grew up in Alberta and there were already gas flares all over the place in the forest at the various oil wells that dot the landscape in the foothills.
I hope the economics of this work out, but I worry it will either just lead to flaring at drill sites or would not be pursued because it can't compete on cost.
At the same time, if you're e.g. Germany and have a gas shortage, and now you can just make it domestically using excess renewable power, and not rely on LNG or Russia... Amazing.
Broadly speaking, one key reason is that we've already got the infrastructure in place for using methane (and other hydrocarbons) whereas we do not have this for hydrogen.
Another point is that this really isn't an either-or proposition: if people want hydrogen, then the Terraform electrolyzer can in principle provide it.
[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.
Unless of course that actually took it below atmospheric pressure so all the forces went in the opposite direction.
You can effectively short circuit the existing fossil fuel industry and pull the hydrocarbons from the air instead of the ground to stay carbon neutral. No need to re-invent industry.
On the supply side, you could use things like methane sniffing satellites (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00600-z) to find cases of extraction and tax (at first) or arrest (eventually) those participating in it.
At least that’s the idea.
It escapes easily from any container you put it in and causes hydrogen embrittlement for any metal you try to use to contain it.
Apparently it can be stored in abandoned salt mines and we probably will use them for that eventually but you dont always have one of those handy.
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 their culture, too - see their home page :)
Kidding aside: That's the whole point. This is a project that can work without retooling infra all over the world. It's a drop-in replacement to get to carbon-neutral fuel.
This solves problems right now, with limited investment. This isn't about perfection. This is specifically about "works right now, cheap, no impact on the surrounding infrastructure".
(Also, strong doubts on "we'd use hydrogen instead", because storage is a beast. Until that's solved, there is no chance we'd use that)
The fossil fuel uses that are the most difficult to displace involve liquid fuels for transportation; natural gas has limited use there.
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.
That said, if not them, somebody will probably crack that one problem in time. But it's best done as an independent development.
Making methane is the cheapest way to get a transportable, useful output (hydrogen is notoriously difficult to move around, methane is a lot easier, and of course propane etc is a lot easier still).
Because hydrogen sucks. Specifically, storing it sucks.
You'll either compress or liquefy. That costs energy. It leaks and embrittles containers. One of the best ways of storing it in a stable manner is to combine with carbon atoms. Voila, natural gas.
More seriously, I'm sure hydrogen will make a valuable contribution to the stationary grid-level energy storage situation. I'm not convinced about other applications.
Most hydrogen produced today is used onsite to produce something else for this reason. Moving it around just adds cost and complexity.
Terraform seems to have made some progress with hydrolizers. But before people start popping champagne bottles, their synthetic gas still is an order of magnitude more expensive than natural gas. So, the value proposition of replacing one of the cheapest (but dirty) fuels with a clean alternative that is much more expensive is limited. And of course the process of using the captured carbon, releases all of it back to the atmosphere. For most use cases, switching to synthetic gas would push those use cases into the deeply unprofitable region. I.e. you'd be considering many other alternatives before committing to that.
Green hydrogen at the price levels they are citing is ballpark getting to a stage where it could replace grey hydrogen and be worth the extra cost just to clean up existing uses of hydrogen. So, things like fertilizer production and other chemical processes. It's still more expensive but the difference could be bridged with subsidies and incentives.
Which doesn't say much, since practically nobody is doing that.
No it's not. their projections are for $10/kcf.
As compared to what, IaC-wise?
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?
Then, lack of the long long cable to the nearest socket.
Eg: spinning a jet engine to propel air backwards is very different than spinning a motor that is (through a series of solid objects) directly connect to the ground.
and while a battery is only 1/5th density, the motors on a tesla deliver 3x the range per energy compared to a prius. (not true break even, but impressive that one of the most efficient hybrid ICE cannot compare KWh for KWh to a battery + electric)
Nothing about electric powertrains causes any problems here: it's just hydrocarbon fuel is more energy dense. It's not inconceivable you could build a hybrid electric aircraft if a suitably high power hydrocarbon fuel cell was developed, since removing the combustion stages from a jet engine would simplify the design considerably.
This would require the additional step of converting methane to jet fuel, but that is also a technology under development.
That said, I personally think, in practice technology like this will only delay getting to net zero, because the existence of this will disincentivize investments in electrification. I recall Sun Tzu's claim that a force completely surrounded will fight fiercely, but if you give a way out, it will look to escape or retreat.
I think you’re misapplying Sun Tzu’s lesson. An attempt to completely and immediately replace the fossil fuel industry will be met with fierce resistance, and thus be more likely to fail. Whereas a more gradual approach (like carbon neutral-ish green hydrogen) gives much of the industry around fossil fuels an opportunity to survive longer, and perhaps gives you a better chance of success.
Is this actually true? Maybe, maybe not. But that would seem to be the implication of Sun Tzu’s strategy.
Instead of letting excess capacity go to waste, you use it to create chemical fuel, which can be used either just as storage to be later burned in a peaker plant, or you can use it as fuel in mobile settings (trucks, planes, ships, etc) where energy density is important.
We also use fossil fuels as feedstocks for fertilizers and plastics, so there are very important power-to-X applications which don't involve inefficient combustion.
Something like Terraform would probably have to exist in order to transition away from fossil fuels.
(Source: I'm CEO at a startup with a very different take on the same problem.)
Question for me is how do you make the business model work. Is it a bet that lower cost to produce or bank that carbon tax on traditional fuels makes it more cost competitive? Or in your case is it that downstream users are looking to clean up their supply chain so will look into a contract for that benefit?
To your point everything can't be electricity or alternatively fuels have different use cases. And it's certainly important to have a diversity of power sources especially as fuel has different attributes then electricity.
"I read internet usage was going up by 2300 percent a year, so I decided to try and find a business that would make sense in that context."
"Cheap and ubiquitous solar power is coming, what products does the world need in that context to move away from extracting fossil fuels?"
Like a lot of things, current technology probably isn't there yet. But philosophically, if you wait for tech to catch up with your vision of the future, you might find yourself behind.
At $100 to store a kWh of electrical energy, along with approximately ten times the cost to account for structures that can support and move the extra weight (that's AFTER allowing for less energy demanded in total)... shall I leave this as exercise to the reader?
Much of the world by population and gdp is a ship ride away from their major energy suppliers. Japan imports about half their LNG from Australia. Next largest is Qatar.
There are no power lines between Australia and Japan.
A quick google suggests both possibilities that solar and nuclear are each cheaper depending on how big of a picture you're looking. (Capital, construction, storage for solar cause nuclear can run at night, storage for 25000 years for the waste etc).
Still, if moving a lot of (potential) heat energy from point to point is the goal, Uranium still seems to be the move compared to so many tankers of LNG -- just to burn it. Nuclear plants put off a ton of waste heat energy, and it can be at a very high temperature too (if designed and desired).
- running all the existing fertilizer and other chemical plants
- gas peakers/backups for resiliency. Gas storage is much cheaper than batteries.
Even if all new construction is electric, we have decades of infrastructure built around gas. Replacing the furnace in every German house with a heat pump just isn't going to happen in 10 years.
They dont have electricity to heat with?
> - running all the existing fertilizer and other chemical plants
This takes hydrogen gas from the nat gas, why not just use the electricity for hydrolysis
I think other commenters have said it well. It's really just a storage mechanism. Waste daytime solar for use at non-peak solar production
My point isn't efficiency, but the size of the installed plant. I fully expect new infrastructure will use more electricity. But we have accumulated trillions of dollars of infrastructure using natural gas over more than a century. There is absolutely no way we are going to replace it all in 10 years.
We already do this in various places. For instance, if you dedicate land to growing a forest in Germany to offset your carbon emissions, it is added to the emission trade balance of the country no matter if you intend for it or not - you can't offset.
Hamburg Airport tried to do this as a publicity stunt, and only later noticed they're doing nothing for the CO2 bottom line.
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.
That's why there are demands for regulations only after scientist looked over the shoulder of industrials. At the end, scientists often only look at things, the don't decide about regulations and economy.
Backing out would require a lot of courage, but not doing it put a serious threat to the efforts of keeping the climate change at a not-too-catastrophic level.
Talking about terraform, in 2011 in germany they did test renewable powered methane production via electrolysis and Sabatier process. I can't find any news about it, but it's exactly what terraform is doing.
Terraform claim to produce H2 at less than 2.5$/kg, but I find different numbers when looking at scientific publications (it's between 4.8-7.5$/kg).[0]
They also claim to produce from "air", but C02 capture is really poor and it's better to capture it from industrial plants. But anyway, it's not a big problem.
An other problem is the water cost of electrolysis.
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01322-8
Something like this would reduce the need to transport it to other countries, since you can manufacture it anywhere you want. Right now we're limited to where we can pull fossil fuels out of the ground, which means that it has to be transported from one place to another. That's not the case with atmospheric extraction.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01322-8
an interesting paper for you :)
I see H2, DC power, and CO2 DAC, costs but no total.
I'm quite curious what their cost is today.
You could produce about 8KG of CH4 with 2KG of H2 and 6KG of C or 22KG of CO2.
At $250/MT would work out to about $5.50 and the 2kg of H2 would be $5 assuming $2.50/kg so lets say $10 for simplicity.
1kg of CH4 at STP is 1,396L (according to GPT since I'm lazy right now) which is about 50cf.
That's not even close to $10kcf (assuming that this means killo-cubic-feet which as a Canadian makes me cringe).
A tonne of CO2 is 12/44 C, or 273kg. So let's call it $1/kg because 250 ~= 273.
A kg of CH4 is 12/16 C and 4/16 H, so a kg is $0.75 for C + $2.50/4 for H = ~$1.40/kg.
https://www.epa.gov/cmop/updated-coal-mine-methane-units-con... says 1000 cubic feet of methane is 19.26 kg. Call it 20 because we're doing it in our head.
$1.40 * 20 = $28 / kcf.
So it was 400cf or 0.4kcf for $10, so yeah you are right. That's actually not terribly far off their white paper actually. It's not as good as current market prices $12/kcf but it is not so far off, particularly if you consider potential subsidies for capturing carbon.
Thanks for that.
Both processes are directly proportional to the cost of electricity and heat so assuming the thesis of decreasing solar costs holds true, it's a question of when not if.
Sounds like you’ve answered your own question.
Time for you to get to work on an end-to-end natural gas powered supply chain that can run on the natural gas they’re pulling out of thin air.
Lots of fun problems for you to solve. A lifetime of fulfilling work ahead.
"time to terraform" by Big Bear and the Sierra Serenaders
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 power 90% of the time they exist, and which can use heat instead of electrolysis to free hydrogen, which is more energetically efficient. The use of an extensive and intermittent power source which only produces electricity is a severe limitation here.
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.
Even better, you could build your nuclear DAC fuel generator in an old natural gas field, where there's ready-made transportation infrastructure for your product to where it's needed!
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 fuel has no benefits it's just a loss compared to using the electricity directly. Also, nuclear electricity is never free but always very expensive because you need a large amount of very highly educated people and expensive infrastructure to deal with it.
>you can build a DAC fuel generator way out in the middle of nowhere.
If things go very badly with a nuclear reactor, there's no such thing as a "middle of nowhere" that's far enough away. The fallout from Chernobyl made certain foods as far away as the arctic circle unsuitable for human consumption.
I don't think that's correct. The costs of handling spent fuel is ongoing for an unknown amount of time. Eventually the running costs add up.
The main storage site in the UK (which admittedly does more than just store waste) costs around USD 3 billion per year, basically as much as building a new nuclear plant every 5 years.
Then you have unforeseen events that can drastically change the calculations. Like the Asse II mine in Germany where a storage site started leaking and has to be relocated at an estimated cost of at least 3.7 billion euro over the coming decades. After that is completed, the relocated waste will continue to cost money to handle as well.
Such cost are generally NOT included, or has a fraction of the true liability included, in the cost estimates of nuclear power.
When you take such things into account it quickly becomes clear that nuclear is not nearly as cheap as many have been lead to believe, but instead very expensive and very heavily subsidized.
Consider also that even if it were cheap, it is strategically (both in a military sense and for reliability) a bad idea to have few large power plants instead of many smaller ones. The most recent nuclear reactor in the EU has had several emergency stops already and causes severe stress on the grid since it provides such a large percentage of the total power.
Having a geographically diverse set of solar and wind plants combined with local batteries, gas generators and small peak-handling gas plants has to be a better solution than nuclear power. More resilient, cheaper and faster to build, easier to maintain, not to mention a much more predictable total cost.
It's just not.
It's a bit more expensive in the US because, hey, protectionism, but solar panels are now by far the cheapest source of electricity on Earth if you don't care when that electricity is delivered, and cheaper again if you're happy to have it in the Sahara or northern Australia.
Solar power is now so cheap it is hard to conceive of any way nuclear power could ever compete against it where its advantages (24-hour all-year power) aren't relevant.
Terraform's secret sauce is that they are designing their equipment to be cheap so it doesn't matter that they're only utilising it maybe 30% of the time.
2) Does this also pave the way for more permanent CO2 cleanup of the atmosphere?
3) Since they have really economical extraction of H2, could they just ramp down the CO2 extraction and instead buy in CO2 emitted from industrial processes? I'm not sure if this is an interesting suggestion or not, since the CO2 goes into the atmosphere either way, but at least we would be getting two usages out of it.
Basically infinite energy with clean water as a byproduct, and all signs point to it being financially viable compared even to fossil fuels. It's like a dream. I can't wait to see a bunch of companies being successful in this area.
I can see the use-case when combined with intermittent energy generator (e.g. : solar), but I am not really convinced by the rate of return, when compared to similar tech that do not emit greenhouse gases in case of failure (liquid salt, heated sand, ...)
It can be more but by how much? To me, the consumer, "renewable hydrocarbons" is worth a pretty substantial premium, but they're not enthusiastic to tell me what that is or where they think it's headed.
When I can run 'terrform plan' on my entire infra without using a billion joules of energy, I'll chip in
Here a recent article on the topic, specifically for making jet fuel, for an industry that would be impossible to electrify.
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.
A $100,000 base cost for the entire system is unbelievably cheap!
To put that in context, you could offset the entire worlds CO2 emissions for just $35 trillion worth of these! That might sound like a lot, but it's technically achievable, being half the USA federal budget for 10 years.
The energy requirements also aren't impossible, about 350TW of power, easily less than a 100km x 100km square of solar panels. (Admittedly, this is several times more expensive than the Terraform installations, but we need power anyway and will be getting more efficient at solar panel manufacture)
Interestingly, this also puts an upper bound on a reasonable CO2 tax of $1000/ton or around £1.8 per litre of petrol, so lovers of fossil fuels and flying can still drive on the track or go for a flight on weekends.
Instead of time, the X axis is how much you are willing to invest, in $/Ton of CO2
The types of investments are sorted by their respective cost ; the later they appear on the X axis, the lower their name is on the Y axis
You can observe by yourself here that direct carbon capture is all the way to the bottom of the list
https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/2021-07/MACgraph_sim...
Each dollar invested in Terraform would net you 100x the results if you invested it in wind, solar, nuclear, electric vehicles or heat pumps
Here's Hank Green talking about this
1) Terraform is making Zero carbon fuels, not sequestering into the ground (the purple on the graph, not the orange)
2) I don't think it's accurate to say "each dollar invested" gets the same 100x results. The graph seems to show that wind, solar, nuclear, and electric all taper off in how much CO2 they offset. It looks once you are spending $100/T, you literally can't make any more of an impact with solar or wind. Once you get to spending $250/T (what it currently costs for Terraform to do it, for real), Zero carbon fuels looks like it has the same 1 GTon impact as onshore solar and wind combined.
Finally, "electricity and heat production" (i.e, what solar and wind can help with) accounts for just 25% of GHG emissions. Transportation and industry (excluding electricity used by industry) together account for more than 35% of emissions. Many industrial processes can't simply "use electricity". The only way to get emissions down is to provide a like-for-like substitute - no one can afford to completely redesign their factory or chemical plant, but they could probably afford to pay more for NG as prices for syngas fall to closer to FF NG. There is no silver bullet.
We need every single innovation available.
Forget the DAC and natural gas, how are they generating green H2 for so cheap?
I ain't saying it ain't true, but I await their next press release.
Why do the whole high and mightly we're using ASCII thing, then to throw me to WordPress. Certainly a bit of HTML with a few inline images fit the overall goal better.
That said, I wish them the best, and I hope that they dominate their market. :)
I hope someone will put some research on it. This is usual human aproach. Lets fix one thing, worry about consequences later.
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 enough gas to more than compensate for any C02 sucked out of the air.
Are you serious? Water is right there!
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.
What this ignores is that hydrogen must still be made even in a post-fossil fuel economy. It's not optional. Production of ammonia requires hydrogen, and without ammonia-derived nitrogen fertilizer billions of people will starve. About half the nitrogen atoms in your body came from synthetic ammonia.
The meme is really weird. In all other applications, we assume that fossil fuels will be displaced, by law and force if necessary. But somehow SMR will always be used to make hydrogen; the technology will somehow be immune to the forces that will be deployed against all other fossil fuel uses. It's really crazy when examined closely.
This is 30+ year design lifetime infrastructure. Investments were made on that basis: no one is going to turn off anything.
Which is the best argument in favor of otherwise ludicrously inefficient power-to-gas storage schemes: if you could, by some miracle, undercut fracking extraction, then at the very least you'd only have to bankrupt the well-operators - not the pipeline, export terminals etc.
But I'm extremely skeptical this is possible and it will be fought against dirtily (see the anti-wind power campaigners).
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 complete pain that handling hydrogen is.
[1]https://www.solarpaces.org/why-solar-sulphur-cycle-ideal-sea...
On that relevant metric, hydrogen is very hard to beat, particularly if proper geology is available (salt formations for solution mined storage cavities). Costs less than $1/kWh are possible.
Artificially heated geothermal may be competitive on that metric, but its RTE is likely to be even lower.
There's an order of magnitude more companies and hype around those use cases than there are around actually important ones.
yes :-) Think about it: why did Saturn V use hydrogen and oxygen? Because burning hydrogen produces more energy by weight than any other chemical reaction.
If putting hydrogen and oxygen together releases the most energy, then splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen would also take the most energy. Any other chemical reaction which yielded H2 would take less energy.
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.)
they say $250/t in the article, but could you expand how you came to "A ton of natural gas requires 2.75 tons of CO2"? Where 1.75t of CO2 is disappearing in result?
Molecular weight of CO2: 44
One molecule of CO2 is needed to get the carbon atom to make one molecule of methane.
44/16 = 2.75
The 1.75t of CO2 that went missing is the oxygen, which obviously isn't in the methane.
They claim the green way to go is converting hydrogen into methane....check out the link for a company claiming the green way to go is converting methane to hydrogen:
https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/new-clean-energy-process-con...
I rather suspect that taking an energy detour through methane either way is a red herring. I mean....the OP says that their whole process is powered by solar energy. So they are presupposing that solar energy is going to be WAAAYYYY cheaper than methane. Why not just use the solar power directly?