When considering synthetic chemicals made from solar energy, methane is probably one of the last you should consider.
Making any type of chemical energy carrier comes with substantial losses, so whenever you can, using electricity directly is better.
If you absolutely need a chemical energy carrier, the first one you will look at is hydrogen, because it's the simplest and you avoid all the direct air capture or other CO2 sourcing issue.
If H2 does not work due to its low volumetric energy density, the next one to consider is ammonia. It has a higher energy density, but it also has some downsides. It's very toxic, it does not burn very well, and burning it causes nasty side products like NOx and N2O.
Then there's methanol. In case you want a hydrocarbon, that's almost always better than methane. It's a liquid, which is a huge advantage in ease of handling. Transporting and storing it is a lot easier compared to any type of gas.
Methane has the big disadvantage that it's itself a potent greenhouse gas. (Btw, hydrogen also is an indirect greenhouse gas, although not as strong as methane.) The only thing methane has in its favor is existing infrastructure, but it's a weak argument compared to the other downsides.
the first one you will look at is hydrogen, because it's the simplest
Simplest chemically != simplest to use in practice. There are already millions of miles of natural gas pipelines leading directly to peoples' homes, and those pipelines cannot be used with hydrogen (not to mention all the appliances they feed).
Renewable methane is a dead simple drop-in replacement for natural gas. None of the other alternatives you mentioned share that property, and I think you're seriously under-weighting the importance of it.
The problem with hydrogen is the storage. Although electrolysis and other methods of generating hydrogen are fairly efficient, the cost to compress it is obscene. Sabatier production of Methane is comparable, however we already have infrastructure to use Methane and storage is a solved problem.
Methanol production requires methane as a synthesis gas so it just adds another step. Plant based methanol has all the same problems as ethanol. Until we are running electrified tractors and equipment we will probably be carbon positive when producing methanol. There are a few processes which are using waste from coal and concrete plants, but they are unlikely to scale enough to make Methane unnecessary.
Currently the best way to store surplus electricity are batteries and pumped hydro.
Once thing that's missing (from both the article here, and for example the whole hydrogen discussion in Germany) is the round-trip efficiency.
Now the author of the article would likely argue that with prices dropping as fast as they do, a 60% efficiency is just a few years delay away from being economically efficient. (A quick search came up with a 68% efficiency for fuel cells and "80% - 95%" for electrolysis, putting the whole thing at 54%-65%)
But I can't help but think we'll come up with something a bit more efficient, because that'll be more viable sooner, and more profitable in the long run.
I've been following Terraform Industries for a while, and it does strike me as obvious that H2 will be the preferred form of energy storage medium in the long run, not just an intermediate species.
Depending on the conditions, if you're doing day-night energy storage, then you would like to fill up the H2 tank and then burn it when demand ramps up.
The only role I see for methane is when your H2 tank is already filled up but your solar panels are still producing. This is not just possible, but deterministically required whenever solar gets deployed enough for seasonal storage to be necessary.
Right now California is something like 35% solar + wind energy, and the "duck curve" is nearly maxing out. This was predicted in extreme specificity 20 years ago, as >30% and you get stuff like zeroed-out energy prices during the day. We have not solved the day-night (daily) energy storage problem, which only requires storing energy for a matter of hours.
When you go to something like 60% renewables, then even crazier stuff happens. Overproduction during sunny times goes bananas and (assuming daily storage is solved, which it isn't) seasonal issues start to arise. I don't think H2 will ever work for seasonal storage, although I think it's fine for multi-day storage scenarios. It's not theoretically impossible, I just compare to the equivalent that we have for natural gas and realize you would need MANY TIMES that level of investment to save the same amount of energy in H2. Plus, fossil fuel gas producers are mostly at a constant level, whereas solar production outright needs summer-to-winter storage.
What I don't buy is that these units will be disconnected from the grid and be economical by their gas products. No way, no how. What you want is to run the chemicals plant with low-voltage solar power locally, and trade-off with the grid as is economical.
Making any type of chemical energy carrier comes with substantial losses
The goal presented in the article seems to be cleaning the atmosphere, not generating chemicals. So H2 and ammonia would be irrelevant. And it's not so much about maximazing efficiency as not losing too much.
The alternative should be other carbon-based chemicals, as useful as methane, needed in huge volumes and with a practical process of extraction using solar panels. Is there something like that?
Also, is there another product with the same characteristics with methane as a starting point?
> In the future, we will still have CO2 credits.
But instead of allowing companies to release CO2 into the air… Credits might allow companies to capture co2.
The article then goes on to explain that solar + co2 capture results in methane. But isn't this at best co2 neutral? Since nearly all use-cases for methane would release the co2 again and would make the credits' comparison pointless?
Besides that, will methane actually be needed in the future? Looking at the common uses [1], it's mostly used for fuel and hydrogen generation. Both things, which solar, can be used for directly without the conversion loses of using methane as an intermediate step.
You can similarly make diamond from atmospheric CO2 (very energy intensive however), which is a pretty stable material.
Hydrogen itself is very difficult to store and transport, but it's critical for things like making steel without fossil fuels and for ammonia fertilizer production. Currently it's all made via steam reforming of natural gas at the industrial point of use, so if you can make methane from air and water, you don't have to rebuild all that infrastructure.
It's implausible to expect much effect on reducing global warming, however, at best we'll be able to stabilize atmospheric CO2 (assuming we don't run into major natural positive feedbacks from permafrost melt and shallow marine sediment outgassing, anyway). Any such speculation is also predicated on elimination of fossil fuels from the energy mix, which doesn't seem to be likely for decades at best.
I think they mention it further down, but some fraction of methane isn't burned but turned into things like plastic and other industrial chemicals.
> And not all of it will be re-released into the atmosphere. As we saw in the Ocean Farming article, some of it will sink in the oceans13
. Even today, 3% of methane is not burned, but used in other ways like plastics production, thus leaving the carbon cycle altogether...
Anaerobic digestion produces methane. The thinking is recently produced carbon and will be presumably immediately re-absorbed by the surrounding plants in the next growing season. This acting as carbon balanced energy source.
This article assumed carbon capture from the air to form methane will risk depleting CO2 from the atmosphere. This methane is supposed to be used as an energy storage medium.
...wat? The proposed process is extremely wasteful and almost any other carbon source is much more available, nevermind other forms of energy storage. This might be reasonable on Mars, but why would we ever want to convert solar power to Methane on a scale that changes the atmosphere? Am I missing something?
> almost any other carbon source is much more available
Two things: the author addresses this by saying these other sources will become more scarce in the future (undeniably true as they're non-renewable however who knows how the economics of this will actually shape up).
The second thing I'll say is that despite the availability of alternatives there are externalities to burning it (i.e. climate change). Air extraction may be less efficient but that inefficiency may be worth it to A) prevent continued CO2 pollution and B) reverse existing CO2 pollution.
Considering reading your comment gave me whiplash after reading the article, one of us is.
> extremely wasteful
What's the waste?
> almost any other carbon source is much more available
More available than the air?
> on a scale that changes the atmosphere
Because we're filling the air ground and water with carbon and nitrous oxide poisons from burning more and more fossil fuels extracted out of the ground when instead we could use solar to recycle carbon emissions back into fossil fuels without (allegedly) a net increase in atmospheric CO2.
Ignoring the carbon cycle, this still has benefit though, as this solves a HUGE logistical problem with a lot of renewables, and that's storage and transport of energy. Being able to store your electrical potential at standard temperatures and pressures in a fluid form that is cost effective to transport or store is massive in it's own right.
Now, I'm not saying what they claim is as easy, viable, clean, efficient, scalable, and or otherwise possible. It may or may not be, I'm not qualified to make that distinction, it's not my area of expertise. The devil is in the details of course and I've become quite jaded and cynical of such high minded claims by nascent technologoies, but if we assume the process works more or less as they say, the WHY of this seems pretty clear to me.
If you're going to try to use solar power to reduce the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, the only endpoints that make much sense are carbon fiber and diamond. Things like limestone require a counterion like calcium or magnesium for each captured carbon atom, which is hard to come by.
Routes to carbon fiber and diamond pass through methane, which is also the input for the vast majority of petrochemical processes (including at-use-point generation of hydrogen via steam reforming), so the main thing to do is set up industrial scale solar-powered methane plants that use water and atmospheric CO2 as their feedstocks, generating natural gas which can then be piped or shipped as LNG to where they're needed as either an energy source for electricity generation (in which case the carbon returns to the atmosphere as CO2) or as a synthetic feedstock for everything from methanol to dyes to plastics and, carbon fiber and diamond as long-term stable storage products (with uses in say construction etc.). Diamond Age, here we come.
As far as the rationale for using solar/wind electricity to do this, that should be obvious, you're converting an intermittent/seasonal power source into stored chemical energy, just as biological photosynthesis does. That stored energy can then be used as needed, during winter months and so on. Of course batteries make more sense for storing solar power for use at night (hourly), but chemical fuels are better for months-long storage or for long-distance transport of energy, e.g. you can make methane in North Africa / Middle East and then ship it to Finland in the winter.
If you really wanted to, you could also run this process with electricity from nuclear power but the way technology is going, using wind/solar is going to be about 10X cheaper at the inputs end. Regardless, this approach would allow for the complete elimination of fossil fuels from the energy mix, which is the only plausible way to stop global warming.
Counterions like magnesium are quite abundant. After all, this is how CO2 will be drawn down if we do nothing (but it will take hundreds of thousands of years.)
There has been much work on exploiting the more reactive silicates, like olivine, to fix CO2. The volumes of rock involved are large, but there's a lot of silicates out there.
A problem with making methane is some will leak, and in the short to medium term methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas.
A step before making methane is making hydrogen. If you can get away with just using hydrogen, it will be more efficient than going through the extra steps to make methane.
Isn't the problem with hydrogen that it's harder to store? I thought it was a big problem. Keeping it from leaking out of storage vessels and pipes because the molecule is so small.
Doesn't methane break down in the atmosphere relatively quickly? I think the goal of this proposal is to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. Producing hydrogen doesn't contribute to that goal (which isn't to say its a bad idea only that the hydrogen production facilities can exist independently of this proposal).
There's a useful principle of focusing on the big picture items first, moving off non-renewable methane by doing the easiest thing that works. Hydrogen is at least marginally cleaner than methane, but if it's cheaper to change methane supplies than rebuild an industrial plant, that's still most of the win!
Methane might not be the best thing to make in a CO2 capture plant. Methane has an especially high greenhouse effect, and it seems to leak when transported around for fuel. And it's not a good fuel for the applications where grid energy or batteries don't work, like aviation.
It'd might be better to turn CO2 + H2O into a longer-chain hydrocarbon suitable for jet or diesel engines.
1. Build solar and wind, anywhere across the globe to 4x overcapacity, and then use power-to-gas technology to store the energy into synthetic hydrocarbons, which can be plugged directly into our current infrastructure.
2. Reinvent the whole of society to run on lithium batteries.
Lithium batteries are used mainly in transportation. And we're already shifting towards them, because they're just plain better.
If we were to start over from scratch, the whole notion of covering the landscape with chemical dispensers would be considered absurd: smelly, toxic, and inconvenient. Why wouldn't you just go home and plug your car into your house? Why have a car with thousands of precision moving parts when you can just have a battery on an oversized skateboard?
We already have electric distribution infrastructure. It needs to be upgraded, but not created from scratch. The only thing that needs large lithium batteries is vehicles. You can use different chemistries for stable objects like the grid itself, or your house -- which is a nice bonus, in that you can run your house even when the infrastructure is down.
And then you can let a whole separate parallel energy infrastructure degrade and vanish. No more gas pipelines or gasoline tankers as we gradually get rid of the dependencies on them. It's not "current infrastructure" forever: it has to be maintained. If we're going to do maintenance anyway, why not put it into the existing electric grid rather than both that and the fossil fuel system?
The nice thing about methane is that it's not too energy dense, so you can sell it to your population like gasoline. You may not want to give the population mini-nukes or vacuum energy generation from EVOs.
We don't need to use solar panels though, we already have exceedingly cheap energy generation in the form of nuclear power. We also have inexpensive ways of transmuting the nuclear waste.
We don't really have a environmental problem, we have a regulatory problem; it is impossible to develop any of this new technology because we have made it infinitely expensive by law. We have also made non-technical environmentalism the height of fashion, and now its used as the spiritual engine for the political-left. For those of you who are concerned that this process is net neutral, there is nothing stopping us from using a similar process to pull the carbon out of the C02 and use it for construction, or to just bury it.
The key to a better future is to reconsider our attitudes toward energy innovation and to remove the activists from our regulatory boards and to re-write our laws to make it possible to innovate and build. We teach our kids that they are doomed, maybe we should encourage them to study nuclear and plasma engineering instead.
You have to transport the energy you're generating from nuclear, and the US is a massive country with tons of sprawl. Solar doesn't need a grid. Sure it's not 24/7—besides making better batteries we can use less energy. That's political suicide to mention in this country though so we keep kicking the can down to the next generation. At some point humans will be forced to make do with less, but for now it's all a gravy train.
The key to a better future is to stop letting the boards of ExxonChevronShell completely own energy policy. Their own research surfaced the problem over half a century ago and their immediate reaction was to bury it and fund studies that downplayed it. In other countries it would be called corruption, but we call it lobbying.
I don't know what this "non-technical" environmentalism means, but have you ever stopped to consider that people are capable of opposing nuclear for reasons that aren't technologic? Almost all currently existing nuclear power generation in the US is privatized. Private companies only have a responsibility to the shareholders. Maybe such short-term optimization with something capable of long-term consequences doesn't sit right with people?
Sure enough we have spent 40 years following the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and have yet to build a proper, isolated location in which to store spent nuclear fuel. We store 88,000 metric tons of the stuff on-site at various reactors and the amount is increasing. France, Canada, and the Nordic countries are all further along that process than us despite our head-start. Two US generations have already kicked the can down the road for nuclear waste management, so I'm not sure "removing activists" will let "boards innovate and build".
Unsubsidized nuclear power is unfortunately really expensive everywhere independent from regulation and runs into the same problem from the opposite direction. You don’t save much money when you turn it off but energy demand isn’t constant so nuclear gets even more expensive per kWh the longer it sits idle. Worse you need to take them offline for long periods as in weeks for maintenance, refueling, etc.
Locally you can have a lot of nuclear like France, but only when you can import and export power to low nuclear countries/regions. Batteries can also smooth demand, but if you’re just filling batteries then solar is a lot cheaper. People talk about unreliable Solar, but you can build 4x as generation per year solar power for less than building nuclear. At 4x overcapacity or even 1.5x solar is suddenly vastly more reliable.
The problem with nuclear is that there is no cheap form factor of nuclear reactors available right here and now, it's all "in the future...". Current NPP designs have painfully high CAPEX, way more so than solar.
And just slashing regulatory requirements to make it cheaper strikes me as unwise.
TFA glibly asserts that the biggest cost of producing methane in this way is the energy required, and then states that the reduction in the cost of solar energy means that the described process could break even. It would be really good to see some actual numbers here, apart from those relating to the cost of solar, for the infrastructure and other things that are barely mentioned.
Nice! Synthesizing fuel is something I think about whenever I study power generation. Ideally, the synthesized fuel doesn't require cryogenic storage to store large quantities. The less energy that storage requires the better for fuel ubiquity. I dream of a fuel generating device that is utilized to dump excess generated power. Currently off grid power generation dumps load as heat. The heat is often used to heat water or a room but occasionally dumped in atmosphere.
Methane synthesis is the first step in a whole chain of high energy synthesis. The two most important economically are longer hydrocarbons (ethane, propane) and ethylene which is the base for poly-ethylene plastics.
But, for synthesis the electricity has to be essentially free to be economical. These chemical pathways require a lot of energy. I would probably use methanogens to create methane from organic waste then use excess electricity for higher order synthesis.
When you’re manufacturing natural gas from solar the pre-existing network of gas pipelines alleviate the intermittency problem with solar because you can store energy as methane in an existing system that’s already designed for seasonal volumes of energy storage.
The world was set to do everything we're doing today in the 80s. Except that the powers that be decided to extract every last dollar from fossil fuels, regardless of consequences like global warming. Decades of government subsidies for everything except solar and wind followed, creating a long tail of glacially slow price reductions for renewables. So we accept evolution and reject revolution because we can't see the strings controlling the marionette. <- writing this on a site dedicated to hacking around barriers is especially painful
I wrote about stuff like heat pumps and carbon capture in long emails to my friends in the 2000s, complete with prices and sources. Then had to wait 20 long years for the world to manifest those ideas in its own time. Which hinged on political close calls like Obama's reelection, which provided a brief safety net for electric car manufacturers among other things, and almost didn't happen. It took almost no time for his successor the former president to impose a 30% tariff on solar panels in 2018 in a last-ditch attempt to block us from cancelling our power bills.
The real challenge we're facing is that the wealthy of the world could have solved this yesterday for a relatively paltry investment but chose not to. The proof of that is in their continued downplaying of such causes as they play hard with rockets, Twitter, etc. This is the tragedy of the commons at scale. Similar to the problem of parents choosing for the good of their children individually but not collectively. In other words, unstoppable without a cultural awakening.
Another article that presumes capitalism will somehow put an end to global warming, when capitalism got us into this. The article spends all this time describing the economic benefits, which won't mean a damn thing when we're fighting wars over water and starving en masse from crop failures.
Capitalism has had 40 years to do something climate disruption, and instead, the hottest average days ever recorded all occurred in the last week.
Because it's currently much more expensive than solar and wind, even when you factor in the costs of dealing with intermittency.
Even if public perception weren't an obstacle, and even if you didn't have to deal with waste storage, and even if building nuclear plants wasn't a glacially slow process, it just doesn't make economic sense to focus on nuclear anymore.
Nuclear power plants seem to take a long time to get right, which means they end up being very expensive.
As an example, consider the new Olkiluoto-3 nuclear plant built in Finland. That reactor was commission just a few months ago, but its build was 12 years behind schedule. The delay to that project saw the original 3 billion Euro price tag more than triple with a final cost closer to 11 billion.
What do you mean by "efficient"? Engineering efficiency? They use different inputs, so comparing that is meaningless. Economic efficiency? No, they're much less economically efficient. That's why so much more solar (and wind) are being installed now instead of nuclear.
hannob|2 years ago
Making any type of chemical energy carrier comes with substantial losses, so whenever you can, using electricity directly is better.
If you absolutely need a chemical energy carrier, the first one you will look at is hydrogen, because it's the simplest and you avoid all the direct air capture or other CO2 sourcing issue.
If H2 does not work due to its low volumetric energy density, the next one to consider is ammonia. It has a higher energy density, but it also has some downsides. It's very toxic, it does not burn very well, and burning it causes nasty side products like NOx and N2O.
Then there's methanol. In case you want a hydrocarbon, that's almost always better than methane. It's a liquid, which is a huge advantage in ease of handling. Transporting and storing it is a lot easier compared to any type of gas.
Methane has the big disadvantage that it's itself a potent greenhouse gas. (Btw, hydrogen also is an indirect greenhouse gas, although not as strong as methane.) The only thing methane has in its favor is existing infrastructure, but it's a weak argument compared to the other downsides.
NickM|2 years ago
Simplest chemically != simplest to use in practice. There are already millions of miles of natural gas pipelines leading directly to peoples' homes, and those pipelines cannot be used with hydrogen (not to mention all the appliances they feed).
Renewable methane is a dead simple drop-in replacement for natural gas. None of the other alternatives you mentioned share that property, and I think you're seriously under-weighting the importance of it.
foxyv|2 years ago
Methanol production requires methane as a synthesis gas so it just adds another step. Plant based methanol has all the same problems as ethanol. Until we are running electrified tractors and equipment we will probably be carbon positive when producing methanol. There are a few processes which are using waste from coal and concrete plants, but they are unlikely to scale enough to make Methane unnecessary.
Currently the best way to store surplus electricity are batteries and pumped hydro.
msandford|2 years ago
There's got to be tens of trillions of dollars in deployed methane infrastructure. To suggest that's a weak argument is baffling. Economics are real.
perlgeek|2 years ago
Now the author of the article would likely argue that with prices dropping as fast as they do, a 60% efficiency is just a few years delay away from being economically efficient. (A quick search came up with a 68% efficiency for fuel cells and "80% - 95%" for electrolysis, putting the whole thing at 54%-65%)
But I can't help but think we'll come up with something a bit more efficient, because that'll be more viable sooner, and more profitable in the long run.
AlanSE|2 years ago
Depending on the conditions, if you're doing day-night energy storage, then you would like to fill up the H2 tank and then burn it when demand ramps up.
The only role I see for methane is when your H2 tank is already filled up but your solar panels are still producing. This is not just possible, but deterministically required whenever solar gets deployed enough for seasonal storage to be necessary.
Right now California is something like 35% solar + wind energy, and the "duck curve" is nearly maxing out. This was predicted in extreme specificity 20 years ago, as >30% and you get stuff like zeroed-out energy prices during the day. We have not solved the day-night (daily) energy storage problem, which only requires storing energy for a matter of hours.
When you go to something like 60% renewables, then even crazier stuff happens. Overproduction during sunny times goes bananas and (assuming daily storage is solved, which it isn't) seasonal issues start to arise. I don't think H2 will ever work for seasonal storage, although I think it's fine for multi-day storage scenarios. It's not theoretically impossible, I just compare to the equivalent that we have for natural gas and realize you would need MANY TIMES that level of investment to save the same amount of energy in H2. Plus, fossil fuel gas producers are mostly at a constant level, whereas solar production outright needs summer-to-winter storage.
What I don't buy is that these units will be disconnected from the grid and be economical by their gas products. No way, no how. What you want is to run the chemicals plant with low-voltage solar power locally, and trade-off with the grid as is economical.
narag|2 years ago
The goal presented in the article seems to be cleaning the atmosphere, not generating chemicals. So H2 and ammonia would be irrelevant. And it's not so much about maximazing efficiency as not losing too much.
The alternative should be other carbon-based chemicals, as useful as methane, needed in huge volumes and with a practical process of extraction using solar panels. Is there something like that?
Also, is there another product with the same characteristics with methane as a starting point?
V__|2 years ago
The article then goes on to explain that solar + co2 capture results in methane. But isn't this at best co2 neutral? Since nearly all use-cases for methane would release the co2 again and would make the credits' comparison pointless?
Besides that, will methane actually be needed in the future? Looking at the common uses [1], it's mostly used for fuel and hydrogen generation. Both things, which solar, can be used for directly without the conversion loses of using methane as an intermediate step.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Uses
photochemsyn|2 years ago
https://arpa-e.energy.gov/technologies/projects/carbon-fiber...
You can similarly make diamond from atmospheric CO2 (very energy intensive however), which is a pretty stable material.
Hydrogen itself is very difficult to store and transport, but it's critical for things like making steel without fossil fuels and for ammonia fertilizer production. Currently it's all made via steam reforming of natural gas at the industrial point of use, so if you can make methane from air and water, you don't have to rebuild all that infrastructure.
It's implausible to expect much effect on reducing global warming, however, at best we'll be able to stabilize atmospheric CO2 (assuming we don't run into major natural positive feedbacks from permafrost melt and shallow marine sediment outgassing, anyway). Any such speculation is also predicated on elimination of fossil fuels from the energy mix, which doesn't seem to be likely for decades at best.
ZeroGravitas|2 years ago
> And not all of it will be re-released into the atmosphere. As we saw in the Ocean Farming article, some of it will sink in the oceans13 . Even today, 3% of methane is not burned, but used in other ways like plastics production, thus leaving the carbon cycle altogether...
detourdog|2 years ago
A smaller amount of hydrogen is also produced.
AdamTReineke|2 years ago
bad_alloc|2 years ago
...wat? The proposed process is extremely wasteful and almost any other carbon source is much more available, nevermind other forms of energy storage. This might be reasonable on Mars, but why would we ever want to convert solar power to Methane on a scale that changes the atmosphere? Am I missing something?
stickyricky|2 years ago
Two things: the author addresses this by saying these other sources will become more scarce in the future (undeniably true as they're non-renewable however who knows how the economics of this will actually shape up).
The second thing I'll say is that despite the availability of alternatives there are externalities to burning it (i.e. climate change). Air extraction may be less efficient but that inefficiency may be worth it to A) prevent continued CO2 pollution and B) reverse existing CO2 pollution.
Zandikar|2 years ago
Considering reading your comment gave me whiplash after reading the article, one of us is.
> extremely wasteful
What's the waste?
> almost any other carbon source is much more available
More available than the air?
> on a scale that changes the atmosphere
Because we're filling the air ground and water with carbon and nitrous oxide poisons from burning more and more fossil fuels extracted out of the ground when instead we could use solar to recycle carbon emissions back into fossil fuels without (allegedly) a net increase in atmospheric CO2.
Ignoring the carbon cycle, this still has benefit though, as this solves a HUGE logistical problem with a lot of renewables, and that's storage and transport of energy. Being able to store your electrical potential at standard temperatures and pressures in a fluid form that is cost effective to transport or store is massive in it's own right.
Now, I'm not saying what they claim is as easy, viable, clean, efficient, scalable, and or otherwise possible. It may or may not be, I'm not qualified to make that distinction, it's not my area of expertise. The devil is in the details of course and I've become quite jaded and cynical of such high minded claims by nascent technologoies, but if we assume the process works more or less as they say, the WHY of this seems pretty clear to me.
photochemsyn|2 years ago
Routes to carbon fiber and diamond pass through methane, which is also the input for the vast majority of petrochemical processes (including at-use-point generation of hydrogen via steam reforming), so the main thing to do is set up industrial scale solar-powered methane plants that use water and atmospheric CO2 as their feedstocks, generating natural gas which can then be piped or shipped as LNG to where they're needed as either an energy source for electricity generation (in which case the carbon returns to the atmosphere as CO2) or as a synthetic feedstock for everything from methanol to dyes to plastics and, carbon fiber and diamond as long-term stable storage products (with uses in say construction etc.). Diamond Age, here we come.
As far as the rationale for using solar/wind electricity to do this, that should be obvious, you're converting an intermittent/seasonal power source into stored chemical energy, just as biological photosynthesis does. That stored energy can then be used as needed, during winter months and so on. Of course batteries make more sense for storing solar power for use at night (hourly), but chemical fuels are better for months-long storage or for long-distance transport of energy, e.g. you can make methane in North Africa / Middle East and then ship it to Finland in the winter.
If you really wanted to, you could also run this process with electricity from nuclear power but the way technology is going, using wind/solar is going to be about 10X cheaper at the inputs end. Regardless, this approach would allow for the complete elimination of fossil fuels from the energy mix, which is the only plausible way to stop global warming.
pfdietz|2 years ago
There has been much work on exploiting the more reactive silicates, like olivine, to fix CO2. The volumes of rock involved are large, but there's a lot of silicates out there.
pfdietz|2 years ago
A step before making methane is making hydrogen. If you can get away with just using hydrogen, it will be more efficient than going through the extra steps to make methane.
AdamTReineke|2 years ago
stickyricky|2 years ago
Veedrac|2 years ago
tlb|2 years ago
It'd might be better to turn CO2 + H2O into a longer-chain hydrocarbon suitable for jet or diesel engines.
goethes_kind|2 years ago
1. Build solar and wind, anywhere across the globe to 4x overcapacity, and then use power-to-gas technology to store the energy into synthetic hydrocarbons, which can be plugged directly into our current infrastructure.
2. Reinvent the whole of society to run on lithium batteries.
jfengel|2 years ago
If we were to start over from scratch, the whole notion of covering the landscape with chemical dispensers would be considered absurd: smelly, toxic, and inconvenient. Why wouldn't you just go home and plug your car into your house? Why have a car with thousands of precision moving parts when you can just have a battery on an oversized skateboard?
We already have electric distribution infrastructure. It needs to be upgraded, but not created from scratch. The only thing that needs large lithium batteries is vehicles. You can use different chemistries for stable objects like the grid itself, or your house -- which is a nice bonus, in that you can run your house even when the infrastructure is down.
And then you can let a whole separate parallel energy infrastructure degrade and vanish. No more gas pipelines or gasoline tankers as we gradually get rid of the dependencies on them. It's not "current infrastructure" forever: it has to be maintained. If we're going to do maintenance anyway, why not put it into the existing electric grid rather than both that and the fossil fuel system?
mirko22|2 years ago
civilized|2 years ago
_aleph2c_|2 years ago
We don't need to use solar panels though, we already have exceedingly cheap energy generation in the form of nuclear power. We also have inexpensive ways of transmuting the nuclear waste.
We don't really have a environmental problem, we have a regulatory problem; it is impossible to develop any of this new technology because we have made it infinitely expensive by law. We have also made non-technical environmentalism the height of fashion, and now its used as the spiritual engine for the political-left. For those of you who are concerned that this process is net neutral, there is nothing stopping us from using a similar process to pull the carbon out of the C02 and use it for construction, or to just bury it.
The key to a better future is to reconsider our attitudes toward energy innovation and to remove the activists from our regulatory boards and to re-write our laws to make it possible to innovate and build. We teach our kids that they are doomed, maybe we should encourage them to study nuclear and plasma engineering instead.
drekk|2 years ago
The key to a better future is to stop letting the boards of ExxonChevronShell completely own energy policy. Their own research surfaced the problem over half a century ago and their immediate reaction was to bury it and fund studies that downplayed it. In other countries it would be called corruption, but we call it lobbying.
I don't know what this "non-technical" environmentalism means, but have you ever stopped to consider that people are capable of opposing nuclear for reasons that aren't technologic? Almost all currently existing nuclear power generation in the US is privatized. Private companies only have a responsibility to the shareholders. Maybe such short-term optimization with something capable of long-term consequences doesn't sit right with people?
Sure enough we have spent 40 years following the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and have yet to build a proper, isolated location in which to store spent nuclear fuel. We store 88,000 metric tons of the stuff on-site at various reactors and the amount is increasing. France, Canada, and the Nordic countries are all further along that process than us despite our head-start. Two US generations have already kicked the can down the road for nuclear waste management, so I'm not sure "removing activists" will let "boards innovate and build".
Retric|2 years ago
Locally you can have a lot of nuclear like France, but only when you can import and export power to low nuclear countries/regions. Batteries can also smooth demand, but if you’re just filling batteries then solar is a lot cheaper. People talk about unreliable Solar, but you can build 4x as generation per year solar power for less than building nuclear. At 4x overcapacity or even 1.5x solar is suddenly vastly more reliable.
iSnow|2 years ago
And just slashing regulatory requirements to make it cheaper strikes me as unwise.
KineticLensman|2 years ago
tastyfreeze|2 years ago
Methane synthesis is the first step in a whole chain of high energy synthesis. The two most important economically are longer hydrocarbons (ethane, propane) and ethylene which is the base for poly-ethylene plastics.
But, for synthesis the electricity has to be essentially free to be economical. These chemical pathways require a lot of energy. I would probably use methanogens to create methane from organic waste then use excess electricity for higher order synthesis.
owisd|2 years ago
zackmorris|2 years ago
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
Note the trend line intersecting with the x axis in 1980. Now this:
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/02/the-forgotten-sto...
The world was set to do everything we're doing today in the 80s. Except that the powers that be decided to extract every last dollar from fossil fuels, regardless of consequences like global warming. Decades of government subsidies for everything except solar and wind followed, creating a long tail of glacially slow price reductions for renewables. So we accept evolution and reject revolution because we can't see the strings controlling the marionette. <- writing this on a site dedicated to hacking around barriers is especially painful
I wrote about stuff like heat pumps and carbon capture in long emails to my friends in the 2000s, complete with prices and sources. Then had to wait 20 long years for the world to manifest those ideas in its own time. Which hinged on political close calls like Obama's reelection, which provided a brief safety net for electric car manufacturers among other things, and almost didn't happen. It took almost no time for his successor the former president to impose a 30% tariff on solar panels in 2018 in a last-ditch attempt to block us from cancelling our power bills.
The real challenge we're facing is that the wealthy of the world could have solved this yesterday for a relatively paltry investment but chose not to. The proof of that is in their continued downplaying of such causes as they play hard with rockets, Twitter, etc. This is the tragedy of the commons at scale. Similar to the problem of parents choosing for the good of their children individually but not collectively. In other words, unstoppable without a cultural awakening.
But I applaud the author's efforts.
Edit: just a little "proof" from Naked Gun 2 1/2, released in 1991 when this was already common knowledge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8Wk79i1gcg
KingMob|2 years ago
Capitalism has had 40 years to do something climate disruption, and instead, the hottest average days ever recorded all occurred in the last week.
psychlops|2 years ago
leach|2 years ago
Why is it not regarded as a solution
NickM|2 years ago
Even if public perception weren't an obstacle, and even if you didn't have to deal with waste storage, and even if building nuclear plants wasn't a glacially slow process, it just doesn't make economic sense to focus on nuclear anymore.
jussij|2 years ago
As an example, consider the new Olkiluoto-3 nuclear plant built in Finland. That reactor was commission just a few months ago, but its build was 12 years behind schedule. The delay to that project saw the original 3 billion Euro price tag more than triple with a final cost closer to 11 billion.
lisper|2 years ago
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-05/zaporizhzhia-nuclear-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/08/japan-fukush...
pfdietz|2 years ago
earthboundkid|2 years ago
mirko22|2 years ago
mech987987|2 years ago
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Jamesmoorez|2 years ago
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DueDilligence|2 years ago
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rozal|2 years ago
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