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!
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!
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).
Really exciting work!
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.