Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

If we're converting CO₂ that already exists in the atmosphere, how could it make things worse?

Isn't problem making new CO₂ from burning fossil fuels, not converting existing Co2 into other things?

Even if it all leaks out, you're still back at 0 essentially.

Methane has a much shorter atmospheric half life than CO2-- years as opposed to millennia. It does end up getting oxidized into CO2 and H2O, just not nearly as quickly as when it's burned.

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.

I'd be interested in a quantitative analysis here. Methane is much worse, but sunlight has broken most of it down after a decade or so. CO2 is comparatively forever.

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.

You are conflating carbon neutral with global warming neutral.

Solvable, probably. Has oversight and a commitment to fix the issue? Not yet.

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.

Solvable, yes, but at least in Europe it is currently dirtier than anthracite coal due to leakages in lifetime emissions. Solvable but not solved, and we really should be looking for solutions.

Natural gas is already stored in enormous quantities, and shipped around the world. Leakage appears to happen mostly in transit

And if you can make natural gas from solar that means there will be more sources of natural gas and thus less transit. Right?

It converts to more CO2, and is also worse than CO2 during the short time

Atmospheric methane oxidizes into CO2 and water vapor. Then the CO2 hangs around for much longer...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Natural_si...

No, that’s the problem. The GWPs usually quoted are over 20 years (GWP 81.2) and 100 years (27.9), but over 500 years it’s still around a GWP of 8.

Depends on your definition of a ‘long time’ but it’s not like it reaches the low single digits even after 500 years…

It kind of does, but calculating its actual lifetime or warming effect is tricky. This post explains it quite nicely: https://climateer.substack.com/p/methane-lifetime

Wouldn't putting the execs of these companies in jail be an easy legal solution?

Yes I think you're touching on the real potential problem here which is that natural gas is many times a byproduct of petroleum extraction, for which we found a use/market.

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.

In theory you can use any power source - hydroelectric, geothermal, nuclear, wind - but the benefit to solar is that you can fully utilize it when the sun is shining and store the output (compressed natural gas) for storage, transportation and use off-hours.

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)

That's basically what this is, minus the "worthless" part. That's the part you'd have to read past the headline to be sure of anyway.

Well it’s still carbon neutral though right

I believe the intent is to offset oil production with the methane. Somehow. Maybe making other hydrocarbons from it?

Climate town just did a piece on natural gas leaks and how its a much more serious problem that previously considered - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2oL4SFwkkw - certainly soured me a bit on natural gas in general, at least until there's better regulation in place.

Burning off excess methane is always going to be a problem that needs to be solved regardless. There are just too many small, remote sources that aren't likely to ever justify the cost of infrastructure build out to use on grid. For example, landfills are a big, distributed source of methane that aren't going away.

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).

Methane has a short half-life in the atmosphere, so its cumulative effect after a few decades is close to CO2 unless you're constantly outputting more, and that's assuming you're not burning it.

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.

There's a big difference in scale between "burning hydrocarbons to heat and power much of the world" (which includes leakage from fossil fuel drilling) and "we make some methane to be almost completely consumed and there are some leaks".

Ok, so here you're referring to moving a lot of energy w/o wires/transmission lines? Is that a commonly needed thing?

check climate town last video on youtube.

You could theoretically run jet engines on directly on methane (liquid or not) - though I am not sure how much work would be required to refit an existing one for this purpose. Methane is already used for running the turbo-pumps in rocket engines like SpaceX's Raptor or Relativity's Aeon-R.

Electricity/energy consumption of developing world is going to be at least twice today's value. Better this than coal

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.

I actually think the reason we don't have electric airplanes has to do with traction vs propulsion.

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)

10 MJ/kg is way overstated for batteries. Current Li-ion is around 1 MJ/kg (278 Wh/kg)

So the argument is take excess solar power turn it into a fuel for use at another time. It's another take on energy storage.

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'm guessing you mean high temperature + high energy (ie lots of watts). Cause lasers can do high temp rn, right?

- heating a zillion legacy homes using existing gas pipelines

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

No thermodynamics. Like usefulness. Electricity can be uses for a lot of things. a mass heated to 50c is not, relatively, as useful. Plus low temp waste heat is abundant eg: from computing, or refrigeration, or exhaust pipes of engines.

You can actually electrify much of metallurgy, and this is already happening. Things like cement kilns are much more difficult, on the other hand.

You repeat some of the anti-hydrogen memes. Hydrogen is actually quite storable, certainly much more easily stored than energy in batteries. The cost of underground storage caverns for hydrogen is two orders of magnitude cheaper than the cost of batteries storing the same energy.

But if the main problem with industry is that it leaks then maybe you do still have to reinvent it.

The economics of storing hydrogen for long periods is just fine, compared to the economics of storing energy in batteries for long periods.

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.

In the UK, our gas infrastructure actually used to be used for hydrogen[1], so a lot of it should still work if we were to switch back.

[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.

All those points are overstated.

It's quite hard to create heavy hydrocarbons in a controlled fashion. That company is already full of technical risks. Adding an extra optional one would be crazy.

That said, if not them, somebody will probably crack that one problem in time. But it's best done as an independent development.

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.

Are you serious?

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.

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.)

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

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?

man wtf does virtue signaling even mean anymore

On my phone the website looks essentially identical to how it looks on my desktop browser.

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?

using a phone to browse the web is really sad

Sometimes the children really are wrong.

Unstated benefit of the website is it repels the right people.

Who left you in charge?

I only looked at the linked article and the homepage so maybe diagrams and such look worse, but those pages look fabulous on phone to me. I wish more sites looked like this one.

To me that just sounds like “we don’t want to pay you anything but do all the work for us anyways”. Is it supposed to be some tongue in cheek way of saying “fuck off if you’re a recruiter we don’t give a shit”? Or are they instead asking for a historical example of a good hire you facilitated?

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”.

That sounds hilariously out of touch. Like "15 years experience required, rockstar developer, entry level position, passion not salary". No, you are not that special and I will send a "champion" to a much better employer, thanks.

what kind of natural gas?

They're capturing CO2 from the atmosphere, if they leak methane back out to the atmosphere that's much, much worse. Over a 20-year period, methane has ~80x the warming potential of CO2.

Being realistic, we're going to put any CO2 we manage to pull out of the atmosphere (if we can do it at cost at all) on a balance sheet.

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.

Keeping existing infrastructure is the whole beauty of it. Ships, pipelines, factories, supply chains that you can keep using if/until other technology replaces it.

Why the hatred buddy? Does anyone on Hackernews like technology anymore?

"Terraform stinks" seems to match both.

As compared to what, IaC-wise?

Natural gas doesn’t stink. It’s the additives that are there for exactly the reason to be able to smell it if there is a leak.

Hah, interesting problems but already have my hands+brain full working on problems in my main area of interest.

The best part about using nuclear for fuel generation is that you get to sidestep the biggest problem with nuclear - when you build a power plant you want to build it near people (who may object on safety grounds), but you can build a DAC fuel generator way out in the middle of nowhere.

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!

I have not done the math here in a long time, but as I understand it:

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).

I assume the whitepaper missed details of production that they have since had to account for.

I'm quite curious what their cost is today.

Which electric airplanes are you talking about, other than electric demonstrators?

There's never been any doubt that you can make a small, short-range battery electric airplane.

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.

In fact he started this company after looking into how they're going to make gas when they get to Mars

It makes something ring hollow then.

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. :)

Two things:

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.