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Solar energy solves global warming

83 points by ph0rque 3y ago

bad_alloc 3y ago
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?
- stickyricky 3y ago
  > 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.
  - dgroshev 3y ago
    There is effectively unlimited amount of carbon in the form of limestone, at the very least.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    The air is the most limited source of carbon we have. There is probably more of it in coal, and certainly more in fossil fuels. But anyway, a huge part of the Earth's crust is composed of carbon-rich rocks. If we ever take the carbon from the air, it will be to regulate its amount. Taking it from rocks is much easier and requires a comparably tiny amount of infrastructure.
- Zandikar 3y ago
  > Am I missing something 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.
  - bad_alloc 3y ago
    > What's the waste? Any conversion from electrical to chemical energy is inherently lossy, and Methane would need to be burned later to release the energy. In general the less conversions needed, the better. > More available than the air? The air is 0.04% CO2, which in turn is mostly oxygen by weight. The biosphere is a much larger source and is self-recycling. > WHY of this seems pretty clear to me. I also got quite jaded and often see this at some attempt to save fossil-burning infrastructure, instead of truly adapting out energy use. For example maximizing use during the day and relying on a much smaller store in batteries, hydropower or heated salts at night. The premise of "energy anytime" might hurt us a lot.
rozal 3y ago
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V__ 3y ago
> 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Uses
- detourdog 3y ago
  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. A smaller amount of hydrogen is also produced.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Biogas is a mixture of methane and CO2. It's been discussed to separate out the CO2 (easy because it's at such a high concentration) and sequester it. This makes biogas net carbon negative. Alternately, hydrogen can be added to convert the CO2 into additional fuel. The downside is the large land area needed to make the biomass that gets digested. In a fossil fuel free future, carbon-containing waste streams will be valuable as feedstocks (for chemicals, for liquid fuels that cannot be electrified easily), so there will be competition for these streams.
- AdamTReineke 3y ago
  You can seequester the methane back in the ground if you are capturing more than is consumed.
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  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...
KineticLensman 3y ago
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.
owisd 3y ago
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.
pfdietz 3y ago
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.
- stickyricky 3y ago
  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).
  - hx8 3y ago
    1. Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas, so we should be limiting our emissions. 2. Methane lingers for decades. Short in planetary timelines. Long in human timelines.
  - feoren 3y ago
    If you turn 100kg of CO2 into Methane you get about 36kg. Methane is somewhere around 25x (potentially 31x) worse for global warming than CO2 by weight, so you end up with 909kg of "Carbon Dioxide equivalent", or CO2e. Let's say 2% of that leaks to atmosphere, and you burn the other 98%. Burning the 98% gets you back 98kg of CO2 (it's just the reverse process), plus 2% of that 909kg CO2e, and you end up with 116kg of CO2e, starting with 100kg. You've made global warming worse. In fact any percentage leaking back to atmosphere (and it will) makes the numbers look pretty bad. You need a significant portion going to plastics or some other sequestered use for this to actually be a net benefit.
    - jnwatson 3y ago
      Thank you. This is the calculation I was looking for. 2% leakage is very conservative. The amount of additional pipeline infrastructure necessary to achieve this at scale is daunting. It will have a lot of leaks.
_aleph2c_ 3y ago
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.
- Retric 3y ago
  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.
  - _aleph2c_ 3y ago
    Nuclear reactors are cheap. What is expensive is regulatory compliance, and regulatory boards changing the rules while the reactor is being constructed in place. A way around this is to buy a pre-fab reactor that has already made it through regulatory and was fabricated in a factory.
hannob 3y ago
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.
- msandford 3y ago
  Failing to understand the enormous amount of methane infrastructure (natural gas) and the utility of reusing it is also a mistake IMO. 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.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    There was just as much sunk cost into coal infrastructure, but that's not an argument against phasing out coal.
    - oh_sigh 3y ago
      Exactly - it is an argument for continuing to use coal, because we have valuable infrastructure even though we know how bad it is for the environment. Which explains why it is so hard to stop using coal.
Jamesmoorez 3y ago
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leach 3y ago
Isn’t nuclear more stable and efficient than solar? Why is it not regarded as a solution
- lisper 3y ago
  Things like this make people queasy about it: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-05/zaporizhzhia-nuclear-power-plant-explosives-sabotage-zelenskyy/102567506 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-05/zaporizhzhia-nuclear-... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/08/japan-fukushima-water-release-nuclear-plant/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/08/japan-fukush...
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  Because Zaporizhzhia is one artillery shell away from irradiating the Dniper River.
  - mirko22 3y ago
    That is completely untrue, one shell would not make a dent… but hey, it easier to spread FUD I guess… Nuclear weapons exist after all…
- jussij 3y ago
  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.
  - mirko22 3y ago
    And they will be there for half a century as opposed to wind turbines and solar panels which will have to be replaced and are hard to recycle…
    - 3y ago
tlb 3y ago
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.
mech987987 3y ago
Another mechanism promoted by the same trend the article mentions- corn ethanol yields increasing.
photochemsyn 3y ago
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.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  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.
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    Weathering rocks to absorb carbon makes a lot of sense. It doesn't require any new technology. The equipment can be powered by electricity and only run when there is excess power available. It should scale well, but does need large scale to make a difference.
zackmorris 3y ago
This is great, but also hopelessly naive for a very important reason. Check out this graph from the article: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3b31a8b0-c1bd-4d94-801d-4bbd0cf4b40e_1600x1130.png 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-story-of-jimmy-carters-white-house-solar-panels/ 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8Wk79i1gcg
goethes_kind 3y ago
Which is easier: 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.
- civilized 3y ago
  It's a great question! I'd like to think we have good answers or are hard at work on them, but I don't know where to find them.
- mirko22 3y ago
  Spending all that money on nuclear is easier, and in long term, better option along side with using wind and solar for daily spikes.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    This is completely wrong. Nuclear is more expensive. The optimal strategy going forward likely involves no new nuclear construction. Solar/wind and nuclear do not play well together. The former will push the latter completely out of the market unless nuclear becomes considerably cheaper (and that is a forlorn hope, given the history of the technology.)
    - mirko22 3y ago
      History if it working reliably and providing best base load power supply over 70years? And if you’re referring Chernobyl and Fukushima try seeing how many people die cos of burning coal… It might put things into perspective
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        History of it being expensive and having poor (or negative) learning effects. The coal point there is completely inane, as we were not discussing coal as an alternative.
KingMob 3y ago
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.
- psychlops 3y ago
  Seems a reasonable assumption given the history of every other economic system that existed.
mirko22 3y ago
Unless we deal with storage and energy production fluctuations solar will not solve anything…
DueDilligence 3y ago
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tastyfreeze 3y ago
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.

83 points by ph0rque 3y ago

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?

stickyricky 3y ago
> 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.
- dgroshev 3y ago
  There is effectively unlimited amount of carbon in the form of limestone, at the very least.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  The air is the most limited source of carbon we have. There is probably more of it in coal, and certainly more in fossil fuels. But anyway, a huge part of the Earth's crust is composed of carbon-rich rocks. If we ever take the carbon from the air, it will be to regulate its amount. Taking it from rocks is much easier and requires a comparably tiny amount of infrastructure.
Zandikar 3y ago
> Am I missing something 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.
- bad_alloc 3y ago
  > What's the waste? Any conversion from electrical to chemical energy is inherently lossy, and Methane would need to be burned later to release the energy. In general the less conversions needed, the better. > More available than the air? The air is 0.04% CO2, which in turn is mostly oxygen by weight. The biosphere is a much larger source and is self-recycling. > WHY of this seems pretty clear to me. I also got quite jaded and often see this at some attempt to save fossil-burning infrastructure, instead of truly adapting out energy use. For example maximizing use during the day and relying on a much smaller store in batteries, hydropower or heated salts at night. The premise of "energy anytime" might hurt us a lot.

rozal 3y ago

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V__ 3y ago

> 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Uses

detourdog 3y ago
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. A smaller amount of hydrogen is also produced.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Biogas is a mixture of methane and CO2. It's been discussed to separate out the CO2 (easy because it's at such a high concentration) and sequester it. This makes biogas net carbon negative. Alternately, hydrogen can be added to convert the CO2 into additional fuel. The downside is the large land area needed to make the biomass that gets digested. In a fossil fuel free future, carbon-containing waste streams will be valuable as feedstocks (for chemicals, for liquid fuels that cannot be electrified easily), so there will be competition for these streams.
AdamTReineke 3y ago
You can seequester the methane back in the ground if you are capturing more than is consumed.
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
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...

KineticLensman 3y ago

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.

owisd 3y ago

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.

pfdietz 3y ago

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.

stickyricky 3y ago
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).
- hx8 3y ago
  1. Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas, so we should be limiting our emissions. 2. Methane lingers for decades. Short in planetary timelines. Long in human timelines.
- feoren 3y ago
  If you turn 100kg of CO2 into Methane you get about 36kg. Methane is somewhere around 25x (potentially 31x) worse for global warming than CO2 by weight, so you end up with 909kg of "Carbon Dioxide equivalent", or CO2e. Let's say 2% of that leaks to atmosphere, and you burn the other 98%. Burning the 98% gets you back 98kg of CO2 (it's just the reverse process), plus 2% of that 909kg CO2e, and you end up with 116kg of CO2e, starting with 100kg. You've made global warming worse. In fact any percentage leaking back to atmosphere (and it will) makes the numbers look pretty bad. You need a significant portion going to plastics or some other sequestered use for this to actually be a net benefit.
  - jnwatson 3y ago
    Thank you. This is the calculation I was looking for. 2% leakage is very conservative. The amount of additional pipeline infrastructure necessary to achieve this at scale is daunting. It will have a lot of leaks.

_aleph2c_ 3y ago

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.

Retric 3y ago
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.
- _aleph2c_ 3y ago
  Nuclear reactors are cheap. What is expensive is regulatory compliance, and regulatory boards changing the rules while the reactor is being constructed in place. A way around this is to buy a pre-fab reactor that has already made it through regulatory and was fabricated in a factory.

hannob 3y ago

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.

msandford 3y ago
Failing to understand the enormous amount of methane infrastructure (natural gas) and the utility of reusing it is also a mistake IMO. 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.
- kibwen 3y ago
  There was just as much sunk cost into coal infrastructure, but that's not an argument against phasing out coal.
  - oh_sigh 3y ago
    Exactly - it is an argument for continuing to use coal, because we have valuable infrastructure even though we know how bad it is for the environment. Which explains why it is so hard to stop using coal.

Jamesmoorez 3y ago

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leach 3y ago

Isn’t nuclear more stable and efficient than solar? Why is it not regarded as a solution

lisper 3y ago
Things like this make people queasy about it: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-05/zaporizhzhia-nuclear-power-plant-explosives-sabotage-zelenskyy/102567506 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-05/zaporizhzhia-nuclear-... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/08/japan-fukushima-water-release-nuclear-plant/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/08/japan-fukush...
earthboundkid 3y ago
Because Zaporizhzhia is one artillery shell away from irradiating the Dniper River.
- mirko22 3y ago
  That is completely untrue, one shell would not make a dent… but hey, it easier to spread FUD I guess… Nuclear weapons exist after all…
jussij 3y ago
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.
- mirko22 3y ago
  And they will be there for half a century as opposed to wind turbines and solar panels which will have to be replaced and are hard to recycle…
  - 3y ago

tlb 3y ago

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.

mech987987 3y ago

Another mechanism promoted by the same trend the article mentions- corn ethanol yields increasing.

photochemsyn 3y ago

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.

pfdietz 3y ago
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.
- ianburrell 3y ago
  Weathering rocks to absorb carbon makes a lot of sense. It doesn't require any new technology. The equipment can be powered by electricity and only run when there is excess power available. It should scale well, but does need large scale to make a difference.

zackmorris 3y ago

This is great, but also hopelessly naive for a very important reason. Check out this graph from the article: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3b31a8b0-c1bd-4d94-801d-4bbd0cf4b40e_1600x1130.png 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-story-of-jimmy-carters-white-house-solar-panels/ 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8Wk79i1gcg

goethes_kind 3y ago

Which is easier: 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.

civilized 3y ago
It's a great question! I'd like to think we have good answers or are hard at work on them, but I don't know where to find them.
mirko22 3y ago
Spending all that money on nuclear is easier, and in long term, better option along side with using wind and solar for daily spikes.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  This is completely wrong. Nuclear is more expensive. The optimal strategy going forward likely involves no new nuclear construction. Solar/wind and nuclear do not play well together. The former will push the latter completely out of the market unless nuclear becomes considerably cheaper (and that is a forlorn hope, given the history of the technology.)
  - mirko22 3y ago
    History if it working reliably and providing best base load power supply over 70years? And if you’re referring Chernobyl and Fukushima try seeing how many people die cos of burning coal… It might put things into perspective
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      History of it being expensive and having poor (or negative) learning effects. The coal point there is completely inane, as we were not discussing coal as an alternative.

KingMob 3y ago

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.

psychlops 3y ago
Seems a reasonable assumption given the history of every other economic system that existed.

mirko22 3y ago

Unless we deal with storage and energy production fluctuations solar will not solve anything…

DueDilligence 3y ago

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tastyfreeze 3y ago

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.