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.
None of these chemicals will be used in people's homes in any meaningful quantity. That's just not going to happen due to the conersion inefficiencies.
Right. The more efficient way to use methane to heat a home (vs. current furnaces) is to burn it in a CC power plant and heat the home with a heat pump.
I questioned if the gain from the heat pump really exceed the losses from generation and transmission.
It seems CC plants are 45-57% efficient, so let’s go with 50%. A gas furnace is from 80% to 95% depending how old it is.
The heat pump would need to be roughly 2x efficiency to break even. They can be 3x or higher (since they move heat around rather than generating it.) Your statement surprisingly checks out.
So obviously it makes zero sense to use electricity to create methane to then burn for heat. Reality is messy though, sometimes we do things inefficiently because there are other constraints. Being unable to afford to convert to a heat pump system, or being in a climate where it won’t work well.
The only way, from an efficiency point of view, that it would make sense to burn gas in a home for heating is with a gas-fired heat pump (or home cogeneration driving an electric heat pump, and also using the waste heat). But these have not been installed much, probably because of cost.
The waste heat from the combined cycle plant could also be used for district heating.
Highest efficiency CC plants are like 62% efficient (but that's on a LHV basis, which ignores latent heat of water of combustion.)
Yes, that would be more efficient, but there are so many edge cases where switching an existing home to use heat pumps is prohibitively difficult or expensive.
Maybe you have radiators that require higher temps than can be efficiently produced by heat pumps. Maybe you live in a place where the air gets too cold for air source heat pumps to be cost effective. Maybe you want to install ground source, but you live in a city and don't have a big enough yard. Maybe you have a big enough yard but local geological conditions aren't conducive to digging deep enough.
Not to mention all the people who just don't want to bother switching, or who don't have the money to switch, or prefer the reliability of the natural gas over the electrical grid, or...etc.
Or just look at the culture wars that are already starting over gas stoves, when nobody has even been required to get rid of their existing gas stove, and people are just talking about changing the rules for new construction.
There are just so many edge cases where it's hard to get people to switch off natural gas. If we can make green methane, all those problems are simultaneously solved with zero disruption to anyone's homes/lifestyles/etc.
Methane can be produced passively by digesting organic material in an anaerobic environment. Using electricity to synthesize methane is not a good use of electricity when bacteria do it much more efficiently.
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.
> Methanol production requires methane as a synthesis gas so it just adds another step.
That's not true.
Methanol can be made directly from CO2 and H2. This has been tried more than a decade ago: https://www.carbonrecycling.is/
They just opened a much larger plant with this technology in China.
There's currently a huge push in the shipping industry towards renewable methanol, and there are a bunch of companies investing in this space.
E-Methanol is okay as a carbon neutral fuel and solvent. At 50-60% efficiency it makes an excellent fuel to create from electricity. But it is still a long way from competing with battery and pumped hydro. It's fuel cell efficiency is only 30% with current technology after the 40-50% losses from the creating of the fuel itself. You can buy a lot of transmission wire at that price point.
All of these technologies illustrate how obscenely difficult it will be to put the carbon genie back in the bottle and what a miracle lithium chemistry batteries really are.
But I guess you can make a lot of methanol in summer and burn it in winter, storing it cheaply for months. Batteries so far seem maybe ok at balancing diurnal power generation / use patterns but not seasonal storage.
Yeah, it is definitely not a bad idea for heating fuel, feed chemical, racing fuel, jet fuel, etc... Just replacing the natural gas produced methanol would be nice. However, wind energy has high availability in the winter and batteries would make up for blizzards and shortfalls. Canada is having a lot of good results from wind energy. In addition, they make a ton of energy from hydroelectricity.
Every country is different, E-methanol may be a solution for a few places. However it is not something I would personally invest in.
For static applications, hydrogen can be easily stored underground. Energy is used to compress it, but that energy can be recovered by running it through an expander (and if the compression/expansion is done in stages to approximate isothermal compression, the round trip efficiency of this can be high.)
That's really neat! I've mostly seen explanations about Hydrogen as a vehicle fuel so I've never stumbled on cavern storage. It makes sense to use isothermal compression. Especially if you can recover the energy from decompressing the hydrogen using a turbo expander which would be obscenely difficult on a vehicle.
A turboexpander in a car would add an obscene amount of cost to an already expensive fuel cell vehicle. Also, it would be a fire and explosion hazard requiring a ton of maintenance.
That sounds completely unsubstantiated. Nothing involved here is that complicated or expensive. In fact, the whole thing should cost less than a comparable BEV given how little raw material you need. And if properly designed, it should be perfectly safe.
Pumped Hydro is a nice stopgap to help storage keep up with wind and solar. Batteries are still only a small percentage of our production numbers. We are still only just about 6GW which is about 0.2% of average totals. Current projections are showing about 860GW by 2030 which is about 25% of current average production. However production will need to increase significantly to offset current fossil fuel emissions.
We are reaching the point where solar and wind are so insanely cheap that it's raining soup. Everyone is scrambling to find a bigger bucket.
> There's got to be tens of trillions of dollars in deployed methane infrastructure
Highly doubt it is worth that much presently, so even if the investment was that large (which I doubt) we certainly aren't looking at walking away from that much presently.
The big reason to move away from methane is that gas delivery infrastructure is expensive to maintain, and nearly impossible to keep leak free. Reusing existing infrastructure implies investing in its maintenance, which may be more expensive than building new infrastructure for liquid fuel (which itself already exists).
Sure, but if we could reuse the coal infrastructure as part of a transition away from fossil fuels, why wouldn't we consider that?
Unlike methane, coal is mostly just used for power generation, and there's relatively little infrastructure associated with transporting it. Natural gas is used for furnaces, stoves, dryers, hot water heaters, etc. and there are millions of miles of pipes and associated infrastructure used to transport it directly to peoples' homes.
The complexity and cost for retrofitting hundreds of millions of homes and electrifying all the associated appliances is immense, not to mention all the backlash you get from people who love their gas stoves and grills. If we could just switch to generating renewable methane it would be a huge win in terms of logistical simplicity and would minimize disruption to peoples' day to day lives, which would probably make folks a lot more willing to accept it without putting up a huge fight.
> The complexity and cost for retrofitting hundreds of millions of homes and electrifying all the associated appliances is immense
This is overselling the difficulty. What you're saying is true, but you don't need to rip out functioning appliances. Appliances have a finite service lifetime; once they fail, replace them with electrified appliances. Already here in the year 2023, I wouldn't dream of building a house with a gas stove or gas heating. Induction stoves are just plain better than gas stoves, and heat pumps are cheaper than gas heating once you factor in that the gas-heated house will need a separate AC installation for cooling, whereas the heat-pump house won't. These days, methane doesn't make sense anywhere except at the power generation end, and power generation sources are fungible and can be gradually replaced on their own schedule.
Not really. The reason coal was so popular was because you didn't really need any specialized infrastructure. It is a solid you can just ship using the same trains and trucks you use for TVs and apples. So you're really only giving up the mines and power plants.
This seems to be arguing that the existence of natural gas pipe infrastructure is somehow a benefit of natural gas, rather than a downside. The pipes are an expense, to say nothing of the fact that even our best-maintained pipes are leaking 2% of their gas directly into the atmosphere per year (the worst are leaking double or triple that). A hunk of coal that falls off a truck doesn't contribute to emissions; a leaky methane pipe does, which can actually make natgas plants overall worse for emissions than coal.
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.
In the US, the share of power being generated by coal has fallen from 50% in 2005 to 20% in 2022. (In absolute terms, which is what really matters in an emissions context, it's fallen from 2T kwh to 0.75.) To phase out existing infrastructure just takes incentives and time (and 18 years isn't even that much time on the scale of infrastructure investments). The same can happen to methane infrastructure, especially since non-fossil alternatives are far more viable than they were when coal began to be phased out.
And the US has stopped building new coal fired power plants, so a decay to zero is just a matter of time (although it could and should be accelerated.)
The thing is: Most of that infrastructure is obsolete in any case.
These synthetic chemicals will play a role in industry and shipping, probably also in long-duration storage. But they won't be in widespread use like fossil gas today. They're just too inefficient.
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.
The relevant applications for hydrogen are ones where efficiency doesn't much matter (long term storage, rare event grid backup). What matters is minimizing capital cost, which probably means using combustion turbines, not fuel cells.
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.
>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
Legislated. Its easy to predict something if you write it into law resulting in shutdown of Nuclear power station (Diablo Canyon)
>The main driver deterring PG&E from seeking a 20-year operating licence extension is the 2015 renewable portfolio standard (RPS) of producing 50% of its electricity from qualified renewable energy sources by 2030. PG&E’s model for the future cost of operating Diablo Canyon indicated that the cost per kilowatt hour was going to almost double, since the company would be forced to lower the amount of power it could produce from the plant in order to meet the state’s requirement. Dropping the capacity factor from the current 92% to say 50% would virtually double the price per kilowatt hour since costs are largely fixed.
>The state law which effectively dictates that by 2030 Diablo Canyon should operate at lower capacity each year and buy in power from intermittent renewables has apparently sealed the fate of the plant.
California has 5 GW of grid batteries (I think that's 20 GWh of storage).
The peak demand today at CASIO is around 36 GW (interestingly, ERCOT's peak is much higher. Texas should invest in efficiency.)
The "duck curve" looks like it's already partially ameliorated by batteries, and not that much battery capacity will be needed to smooth it out entirely.
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?
That’s nonsensical, because you burn the methane and put the carbon right back into the atmosphere. It didn’t clean anything. It’s merely a carbon neutral form of chemical energy. H2, ammonia, methanol would be just as carbon neutral.
Well, it's there in the title of the article, so don't shoot me. If the premise of the article is bs, it doesn't make sense to discuss efficiency.
Is it nonsensical though? IDK, it seems somehow better than extracting the gas from the ground and adding it to the system. Also if there's another more complex chemical not for burning, that you can synthesize from the methane, it would be a net gain.
> 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...
3% of Natural Gas, not methane. Natural gas contains other gases, in particular ethane, which is the feedstock for making ethylene and then polyethylene.
US fracked gas is quite high in ethane.
Some of the natural gas used for plastics is to make heat, for example to drive ethylene crackers (which decompose ethane at high temperature). Methane could be burned for that.
There was a process for oxidative coupling of methane to make ethylene (a Bay Area startup named Siluria created it, using a cool phage-based combinatorial method to find structured catalysts) but I don't think it could compete with all that cheap natural ethane.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It also can make sense to add limestone (or other carbonates) to the ocean. As long as you don't make the ocean too alkaline, you get the following net reaction:
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.
Hydrogen can be stored underground just like methane can (and is). Also, the problems with hydrogen are overstated. The world economy does use many millions of tonnes of hydrogen each year, so the problems are demonstrably solvable.
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).
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.
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.
A possible solution is to make the hydrogen by electrolysis of brine. This can make hydrogen and chlorine (and alkali) instead of hydrogen and oxygen.
If the chlorine is released into the troposphere during the day, it is quickly photolysed (in about 10 minutes at noon) into chlorine radicals, which near instantly react with methane, extracting a hydrogen atom. It should be possible for this to more than make up for small leaks of methane (or to counteract other independent sources of methane).
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?
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.)
You assumed wrong. I was talking about history of nuclear's economics. It has failed to show good learning effects (that is, getting cheaper as more units are built.) If anything, it has shown negative learning effects -- getting more expensive as more units are built.
Contrast this to photovoltaics, which have declined in cost by something like a factor of 300 since they came on the market. PV has shown a robust learning rate of 20% cost reduction per doubling of cumulative production.
It should be no surprise that nuclear is sputtering to extinction with such poor cost trends. In contrast, all the competing technologies -- solar, wind, storage -- are showing excellent learning. So, it's only a matter of time until nuclear dies.
So it cheaper and faster to build, however I still see no solution for base loads and land usage, which as far as i can tell nuclear is a minute fraction of land usage as opposed to solar and specially wind. Some estimates put this at 1/400 for nuclear vs solar and 1/2000.vs wind where nuclear produces constant power supply as opposed to “renewables”.
So there seems to be natural bounds as to how much these can grow and how much land surface they take and thus damage.
Plus, we haven’t put as nearly as much time last 30 years coming up with better nuclear devices as we did in renewables.
So even if you are right about the current prices I don’t see that as a nuclear problem but populist problem, since people are scared of nuclear waste but seem to be ok with destroying the marine and land habitats.
Hey, let’s wait for another decade and see where it takes us.
Land usage is not a problem at all, if you do the arithmetic. That you bring this up tells me you're parroting anti-renewable talking points in bad faith rather than presenting reasoned objections.
As for base load, we can estimate the cost of covering for intermittency of renewables to produce synthetic baseload. It ends up cheaper than nuclear. A key part of this in some locations (such as Europe) is to use hydrogen in addition to batteries for storage.
> Plus, we haven’t put as nearly as much time last 30 years coming up with better nuclear devices as we did in renewables.
We've spent much longer than 30 years trying with nuclear. The first nuclear power plant on the grid was in the 1950s. Huge investment was made in civilian nuclear back in the day. If less is being invested now it's because nuclear has demonstrated it's unattractive, not because we didn't give it more than enough chances.
The "oh poor nuclear is just misunderstood" argument is common nuke bro defensive thinking. No, nuclear's problem is $$$. The people with money are negative on nuclear because they see scammers trying to sell them crap all the time (in nuclear's case, via grossly lowballed cost projections), and they've learned to say no.
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.
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.
Building the reactor is a small fraction of the total cost. People love to talk about small modular reactors as if that’s the only cost but they still need actual turbines to generate power, electrical equipment, cooling, pumps, complex high pressure plumbing, giant buildings, spent fuel ponds, etc so the reactor’s themselves are not even the full construction cost to get power let alone the actual lifetime cost.
Equipment breaks down so you need to maintain, repair, and eventually replace it. Which is a large reason why you need roughly 500 people per GWh to run the things even without any regulations. You need not raw ore but concentrated u235 in complex and expensive to build fuel rods etc. You need lot’s of land near an abundant water source to cool them which is exactly the kind of places people want to live. Even when it breaks you still need to decommission them.
And that’s ignoring the need for someone to take on the risk of failure. Even when the public isn’t harmed nuclear accidents destroy expensive equipment and are expected to clean up. Accidents on average cost several Billion per GW, you might find cheaper insurance but don’t bet on it without subsidies.
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.
Especially when the increases in regulatory requirements have been driven by experience, with actual accidents and with near misses that could have been serious accidents.
The solar stuff that's "in the future" can be estimated by extending the historical experience curve for PV. Doing that, solar delivers at below $0.01/kWh by the time it's fully rolled out.
Do you think people with money want to invest in nuclear power plants with that economic Sword of Damocles hanging over the technology?
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.
For example, Germany is pushing for solar and wind cos Siemens is producing those and its popular cos people somehow think there are no drawbacks to them… They could have operated their nuclear plants for at least another decade of there was political will for it…
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.
It would be perfectly fine if we just landfilled wind turbines and solar panels. It's not like silicon or fiberglass are rare. The whole recycling business here is more fetish than obstacle.
There are problems with recycling in general. For example, the overuse of plastics, with no sensible recycling plan means we have plastic garbage patch twice the size of Texas floating around in the Pacific Ocean.
These problems are generally not about recycling, but rather the willingness of governments to legislate sensible solutions.
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.
> I doubt that somehow, reason we are pushing wind and solar is cos people think it is “green” and “renewable” and are scared of nuclear.
This is utter nonsense. The reason wind and solar are being pushed is they are so much cheaper than nuclear (and this will remain true even at high renewable uptake when storage is required). This is widely understood; where did you get the bizarre incorrect belief that it was otherwise?
Nuclear was so out of the running in the US that many existing NPPs had to be shut down because they were cash flow negative. It wasn't worth running them even with the construction and financing costs completely written off. The remaining reactor at Three Mile Island, for example, had not made an operating profit for six years before it was shut down.
This was done due to environmental factors, not as a financial instrument.
> and are scared of nuclear.
That part is definitely true. After seeing that even a high-tech nation like Japan couldn't keep their nuclear reactors safe, nuclear was no longer seen as a viable option.
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.