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What I found cool about the synthetic natural gas, is that Europe already has really good seasonal storage of natural gas. Hence the infrastructure is available
by rocqua 4y ago
What I found cool about the synthetic natural gas, is that Europe already has really good seasonal storage of natural gas. Hence the infrastructure is available for summer-time generation of gas using solar abundance that we use in winter for heating.
To my mind, it is seasonal load shifting that is Europe's long term energy problem. Winter energy demand has a bottom that needs to be met. We used to ensure this by stockpiling on seasonal scales. Without stockpiling, and with intermittent production, things will get hairy in winter.
Put differently, you can turn up a gas plant, but you can't turn up a windmill or a solar panel. That scares me.
Batteries and similar technologies are great for daily variation, but their cost per capacity does not allow for practical seasonal storage. For this I imagine we need cheap bulk storage, and can accept low efficiency because we can fill the stockpile with the cheapest excess power.
- throwaways85989 4y agoI think methanol is even a better storage candidate. https://phys.org/news/2022-06-holy-grail-catalysisturning-methane-methanol.html https://phys.org/news/2022-06-holy-grail-catalysisturning-me...
- bufferoverflow 4y agoMethanol is very nasty though. If it leaks, it leaves you blind or dead.
- lutorm 4y agoLeaking natural gas tends to leave you exploded, too...
- krageon 4y agoMethanol can also explode (and set things on fire). In terms of a fire hazard they're both very bad.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- whazor 4y agoThere are natural gas leaks on a regular basis here in Europe. It only explodes with a fire source. People smell the gas leak and inform the fire station.
- lstodd 4y agoOnly if it's doped. Pure methane is odorless.
- whoooooo123 4y agoIs it ever not doped though? At what point in the process do they put the smell in?
- tblt 4y agoAt the distribution point, usually. Some gas networks intended for industrial use don't contain the chemical that makes gas smell as that gas is an input in a chemical process, not burnt for heat.
- bufferoverflow 4y agoLeaking methane rises, so it's not a huge problem. We have natural methane leaks all over.
- rocqua 4y agoI believe most natural gas floats though, right?
- rocqua 4y agoAre season-level storage facilities already in existence though? The great thing about natural gas is that Europe already has the storage (and distribution) infrastructure. It would be a waste not to reuse that infra.
- threatripper 4y agoIf we produce considerably more electricity than we can use it becomes essentially free energy at those times. Then it could make sense to convert it into gas instead of extracting gas from the earth. Until then the extracted gas will be cheaper and overall more efficient. Local availability of natural gas can be a problem at times, tough.
- future_i_snow 4y agoNorthern Africa has a huge opportunity here - build infra that produces hydrogen gas year round, and then export it to Europe. The Sahara Desert is 8_600_000 km², which I imagine is _very sunny_ all year round.
- throwtheacctawy 4y ago