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It’s perfectly feasible to capture carbon from a natural gas refinery producing liquid H2 and sequester it safely. Doing that safely and consistently is going t

It’s perfectly feasible to capture carbon from a natural gas refinery producing liquid H2 and sequester it safely. Doing that safely and consistently is going to be an engineering challenge, but so are the advances in battery technology and the need to scale lithium production in clean, safe ways that batteries would require. If anyone’s done the work on which approach is better, I’d be interested to see it.

AtlasBarfed 7y ago
Perhaps, but the refining companies would much rather lobby the US Senate to ignore Global Warming treaties, it's their modus operandi. If you want to get off of carbon, you have to get away from the people making trillions off of carbon.
- philwelch 7y ago
  You make an interesting point but I think it actually works the opposite way from what you think. If the only alternative to oil and gas is battery-electric power, oil and gas companies will use their political power to obstruct climate change mitigation altogether. If there’s an alternative that not only includes them as partners but opens up new lines of business for them (eg carbon capture and sequestering), then they will apply their political power in favor of that alternative out of self-preservation. Of course, the kind of argument you’re making doesn’t really seem to stem from trying to solve the problem in the first place—it stems from viewing the world in terms of conspiracy theories and making black-and-white judgments of who are the good guys who deserve to be supported and who are the bad guys who deserve to be destroyed. But even then, if you have enough power to achieve your fantasies of destroying the oil and gas companies, you also have the power to force them to move into the hydrogen and carbon-capture-and-sequestration industry.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    I think what's going to happen, is happening is governments that have no stake in the oil economy are going to head for the exits. Oil producing countries are powerful but not powerful enough to stop that from happening.

AtlasBarfed 7y ago

Perhaps, but the refining companies would much rather lobby the US Senate to ignore Global Warming treaties, it's their modus operandi. If you want to get off of carbon, you have to get away from the people making trillions off of carbon.

philwelch 7y ago
You make an interesting point but I think it actually works the opposite way from what you think. If the only alternative to oil and gas is battery-electric power, oil and gas companies will use their political power to obstruct climate change mitigation altogether. If there’s an alternative that not only includes them as partners but opens up new lines of business for them (eg carbon capture and sequestering), then they will apply their political power in favor of that alternative out of self-preservation. Of course, the kind of argument you’re making doesn’t really seem to stem from trying to solve the problem in the first place—it stems from viewing the world in terms of conspiracy theories and making black-and-white judgments of who are the good guys who deserve to be supported and who are the bad guys who deserve to be destroyed. But even then, if you have enough power to achieve your fantasies of destroying the oil and gas companies, you also have the power to force them to move into the hydrogen and carbon-capture-and-sequestration industry.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  I think what's going to happen, is happening is governments that have no stake in the oil economy are going to head for the exits. Oil producing countries are powerful but not powerful enough to stop that from happening.