[speedybird]

How could it be that SpaceX is answerable only to the FAA and is immune to the EPA? Why is it on the FAA to regulate a well? I think the author of the article should work on including a bit more exposition and a bit less snark (if he actually intents to persuade people, anyway.)

Also I'm a bit confused why people are surprised the methane for these rockets will come from a well. Did people really think Elon Musk was going to stick a hose up a cow's ass to collect the methane?

[dpierce9]

This is from 2016: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/blog/eagle-ford-shale...

It suggests the FAA’s role is consideration of launch failure and safety on the proposed plant. FERC also evaluated the proposal. FERC doesn’t really do environmental reviews.

Here is a document from April which at the time said EPA had no comment on the draft environmental impact statement as part of an interagency process: https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/SAR%20-%2...

In short, it looks as if all the usual players are engaged here. While I suspect the FAA has considered the impact of Oil and gas infrastructure on flight paths and airports, I would guess their involvement in this kind of process is an extra layer, not a circumvention.

[speedybird]

This makes sense. If the EPA is slacking and rubber-stamping things, that warrants investigation and criticism. But I'm not buying the angle that the FAA should be expected to enforce the EPA's rules. That's what the EPA is for.

[criley2]

The EPA was utterly gutted over the past 4 years. The sad part is that it takes much longer to rebuild than it does to tear down. The EPA being unable or unwilling to enforce environmental protections is by design.

[reddog]

Utterly gutted? How do you figure?

The EPA headcount was 14,779 in 2016 and was 14,172 in 2020.

https://www.epa.gov/planandbudget/budget

[speedybird]

Supposing the EPA is gutted as you suggest (my sibling comment suggests otherwise), it surely still has more capability and expertise when it comes to environmental regulation than the FAA. I think expecting the FAA to act as a surrogate EPA is expecting too much.

[DennisP]

The ultimate plan is actually to make it from water and CO2 in the air, using the same tech they'll use to make methane on Mars for the return trip. They're just not there yet.

[lazide]

Sure, and I have a bridge to sell you.

The technology already exists. Fundamentally (damn laws of thermodynamics) it is also a energy negative process, and hence expensive. It is far cheaper to just frack and burn fossil fuels (where that energy expense was paid however many millions of years ago by someone else), than it is to expend the energy to reverse the process - even if they were getting nearly free energy.

[inglor_cz]

They will rely on the Sabatier process to produce fuel on other celestial bodies. And the corresponding technology must be tested first - why not in Boca Chica?

I don't think that anyone is trying to make the claim that SpaceX will use the Sabatier process to fuel Starships here on Earth right now routinely. As you say, gas is cheaper to buy here on Earth. But they still must have the technology mastered before they fly away from the low Earth orbit.

[lazide]

The process IS already mastered, depending on the bar you set?

This isn’t something unknown or theoretical.

[inglor_cz]

Yes, but you still need to design, assemble and test the particular equipment you want to use, unless you can do with off-the-shelf components.

And contemporary off-the-shelf components that perform the Sabatier process aren't probably meant to operate outside the Earth.

[SiempreViernes]

But this is merely testing, not any sort of large scale use of this equipment because, as you point out, they are not made to work on Earth.

[Fnords]

"you still need to design, assemble and test"

Not if NASA did that decades ago.

[politician]

Under STP and 1G, yes. Mars isn't at STP or 1G, so they can't assume that the Earth-standard machinery will work without modifications. This is a reasonable thing to experiment with.

[lazide]

Which I was referencing with ‘depending on the bar’, though it’s a well understood enough process that those variables are generally well understood.

Yet they aren’t, correct?

[DennisP]

Of course it's energy-negative, nobody is claiming otherwise. Powering that from renewables will cost more. But the cost of fuel is a very small percentage of launch cost, and if they're doing a lot of launches then being able to say they're carbon-neutral would be pretty helpful for public acceptance. Politics and regulation are much more dangerous to them than a little extra cost in fuel.

[Denvercoder9]

SpaceX wants to make a roundtrip to Mars, though. There's no fossil fuels on Mars.

[elif]

Yup and musk also argues in favor of a carbon tax. He is openly hopeful that the fundamental economics will be changed to make producing their own methane via Sabatier economical.

It is up to the controllers of incentive structures to change the fundamentals of commerce/ecology.

[lazide]

Pretty sure that would require something like a 5x cost increase in carbon, though I can’t find hard numbers anywhere easily. Do you have any pointers?

[elif]

If musk followed strict economics as implied by your premise, he would be launching disposable rockets with Boeing.

who knows what expense space X would be willing to shoulder to be sustainable... We are fortunate that it is still privately owned, and isn't legally obligated to pursue the financial interests of shareholders like all the other players in aerospace.

[gpm]

> Pretty sure that would require something like a 5x cost increase in carbon

5x over what? The US doesn't have a carbon tax does it?

[lazide]

And if it doesn’t make any economic sense to do it here, where it is super convenient, shipping it to Mars (with nothing of known value there to return or any known economic model that could make it worthwhile) to do it there is going to be worth it?

Not saying all human endeavor needs to have a healthy profit margin. SpaceX is a business however and besides doing it for the lulz, or getting a government contract, it doesn’t make much sense to try to spin up colonies or the like there. Everyone will starve and/or their US backers will go bankrupt pretty quick.

[MPSimmons]

> SpaceX is a business however

SpaceX has been described as a company with a Mars cult inside of it.

I think it's more fair to say that it's a Mars cult that has organized a company.

If you think that SpaceX won't do hydrocarbon generation on Mars, then you don't understand why SpaceX exists.

[DennisP]

If you want to go to Mars, it's way cheaper to get your return fuel from Mars instead of carrying it all the way to Mars from Earth. If you want to get your return fuel from Mars, then you have to make it, there aren't any convenient natural gas deposits that we know of.

This isn't an original SpaceX idea. Robert Zubrin pointed it out back in 1990 with his Mars Direct plan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct

[lazide]

For sure - my point is, that presumes there is enough volume or an economic need to make that sort of infrastructure investment worthwhile (not even dollars, but energetically). Getting the direct equipment let alone supporting equipment there is going to be very, very expensive in energy. For one trip back, or even 5, it’s unlikely to pay off unless there is some cool super miniaturization tech and we’re not in a hurry - and that assumes everything keeps working over multiple missions.

And if we have all that, getting a mobile lab there and sending back bits instead of physical chunks of things is even easier.

You’d also need to get chemical feedstocks and process them (namely to extract the hydrogen, which is not readily available in the Martian atmosphere but is in the soil in various amounts in minerals and small amounts of dispersed water and methane ice) which would be non-trivial and a huge hassle to get even on Earth where you can go outside and smack the machinery with a shovel or stick your arm in somewhere to unclog something.

The existing Mars rovers struggle sometimes with dust on solar panels, let alone a broken bolt in a crusher due to harder than expected rocks or the like.

Having done some basic mining and a lot of earth moving over the years, it’s an incredible pain in the ass.

It’s also rare you don’t periodically need a human getting hands on, and using every bit of dexterity and strength they have to fix something. Robotic tech is nowhere near good enough to do this remotely.

So at a small, very very very slow scale? Maybe?

There are a lot of cool thought problems from all this, and some cool potential solutions. My fav is Project Orion [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propu...]

And we’ll just have to see what happens.

[politician]

So you're just a typical No-Mars skeptic, got it.

[mhh__]

Is it possible that they are in for the money and the grand plan is just marketing even if they would do it if they could?

[zionic]

I also don’t see what all the fuss is about here.

SpaceX making a well to power the human colonization of mars is a drop in the bucket vs all the other wells in the state.

[groby_b]

The big deal is that the well is seemingly exempt from the regulation all other wells go through.

It doesn't matter what Musk does with the methane, what matters is that he's at best exploiting loopholes and at worst operating extrajudicially.

Also, SpaceX "powering the human colonization of Mars" is a pretty huge sip of the Kool Aid there. Given the founder's track record, it's about as believable as "fully self-driving cars in a year".

But, more importantly, it's irrelevant to the problem at hand, sidestepping the regulation process

[speedybird]

> "he's at best exploiting loopholes and at worst operating extrajudicially. [...] But, more importantly, it's irrelevant to the problem at hand, sidestepping the regulation process"

Again, the EPA exists, so where are they in this? What loophole is SpaceX using to skirt around the EPA?

[oceanplexian]

IMHO SpaceX should get an exemption for national security purposes (For the same reason the US Military doesn’t need to abide by the EPA). Access to space is in the national interest. I don’t think something that has an immeasurable impact on the climate is anywhere close to being more important.

[8note]

The EPA is also a national security concern. No need to defend space that you've already turned into a toxic wasteland

[speedybird]

> The EPA is also a national security concern.

I strongly agree, but not for the reason you give. Environmental destruction is likely to start more wars than it prevents...

[groby_b]

SpaceX can get a national security exemption the moment we nationalize them.

[toomuchtodo]

File a complaint with the Texas Railroad Commission and the US EPA, in all seriousness. If you need methane to escape the gravity well, follow the rules like everyone else in O&G.

[politician]

Well, apparently not everyone else [1]:

"The FTSE 250 group, which is the largest well owner in the US with over 61,000 in its portfolio, found itself on the defensive after a Bloomberg report said several wells owned by the company were leaking methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas."

[1] https://newsflash.one/2021/10/12/market-report-leaking-wells...

[DisjointedHunt]

That’s a serious accusation without evidence.

The document clearly states that Spacex has an application with the FAA for the use of the land as a Launch Site.

The subsidiary “Lone star mineral extraction” is an entity that purchased another company along with all their licenses for extraction rights in addition to seemingly applying for their own licenses.

I’d recommend you edit your comment to correct it. There is no sidestepping of regulations here, the regulations themselves cover different things and the article makes it sound like one set of regulations should cover these activities while clearly saying that it currently does not.

[fallingknife]

Given his track record? Who has a better one?

[FireBeyond]

How's FSD looking?

[smoldesu]

Well, what SpaceX is doing doesn't really matter. I can't just show up to Arkansas and say I'm fracking for oil to cure cancer and get hand-waved through. They're private entities, no matter what they're doing, and they're subject to the same scrutiny that everyone else puts up with.

[lazide]

That is ideally how it is supposed to work, but there are many examples of regulations being bypassed and other folks being stepped on to get a desired employer or a potentially lucrative investment into a place.

It doesn’t sound like it is happening here necessarily, but it does happen pretty frequently.

[ESGHound]

This is not true at all. Doubly not true when your program is subsidized by Federal dollars and takes place adjacent to protected federal lands.

The FAA is subject to NEPA review, and hence any SpaceX activity in this area must go through the same process as every other industrial activity that impacts federal interests.

[randy408]

Surely you know by now that Elon/SpaceX will get its fuel no matter what, even if it means trucking the fuel there, seems to me your best case scenario will increase net emissions.

Protecting the environment is not the point of this stunt, is it?

[smoldesu]

Well my cancer cure is subsidized by federal dollars, and our headquarters is right next to the post office. Can't we just start drilling already?

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

Ah yes, the "The ends justify the means" move.

[consumer451]

I was just thinking about this phrase in regards to Musk about ten minutes ago.

“The ends” are the most laudable things I can imagine: electrifying the world and colonizing other celestial bodies.

While I love the goals, I am afraid of what a mission-driven person might rationalize and do to achieve them.

[toomuchtodo]

The ends justify giving people like Musk wide latitude but keeping them in check when the negative externalities tip the scale away from the benefits.

[consumer451]

I certainly give Musk wide latitude even when he makes it difficult.

I was thinking more along the lines of how one in his position could drift in their perspective and values as they get distorted by the blinders of hyper mission focus.

[lazide]

Another thought to add here - he also gets paid very well in a very concrete way to LOOK like he is doing those things, and if he never gets in a spaceship but still enjoys the billions? Hard life.

[xyzzyz]

Yes, heaven forbids he drills 10,000th gas well in the US on his way.

[consumer451]

I was not thinking about gas wells at all. I have no opinion there except I thought we were doing the Sabatier reaction process to prep for Mars and be carbon negative.

[boringg]

I mean SpaceX is trying to colonize mars, if it doesn't manage to pull off this risky gambit we might as well make our only livable planet unlivable in the process. Seems like a good way to operate. At least we will have some cool space tech too.

[lazide]

There is currently no known way a Mars colony could be economically self sustaining or self contained. Literally zero.

So unless there is something truly magical up someone’s sleeve, we need to keep Earth workable for us for the foreseeable future. And I think that is a good thing.

[bserge]

Fuck Mars, all those asteroids are going to be way more valuable for Earth. Getting to them needs the same exact industry.

[lazide]

Also more energy efficient as no need to climb back out of a deep gravity well!