[carbonguy]

As a "carbon industry" observer, this is pretty exciting news. I've had my eye on Terraform Industries for a while and love what they're doing; they're one of the few groups that actually seem to understand the implications of what it will take to shift to a carbon-neutral economy, and their core insight about the economics of atmospheric fuel synthesis is one of those "obvious when you hear it" ideas: solar electricity is trending ever-cheaper, so rather than trying to maximize efficiency in an expensive piece of kit you can make cheap 'inefficient' equipment and get lower overall costs, which in turn unlocks scale.

Their recent post on "Terraformer Environmental Calculus" is a great read, if you are interested in this space: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2024/02/06/terrafo...

Congratulations to the team!

[joe_the_user]

It looks good.

I wish their headline was "natural gas from solar power" 'cause many things labeled "carbon neutral" wind-up being conventional petrochemicals plus some worthless "offsets" baloney.

[tgtweak]

In theory you can use any power source - hydroelectric, geothermal, nuclear, wind - but the benefit to solar is that you can fully utilize it when the sun is shining and store the output (compressed natural gas) for storage, transportation and use off-hours.

You could also technically use this as a grid-battery, taking in excess grid energy when it is cheap and converting it into natural gas that can be run back through a gas peaking plant that spins up to meet peak demand. You could also look into SOFC fuel cell plants [1] to convert the stored natural gas into electricity at 60% and heat at 30% (the heat is high temperature which is good for cogeneration or as a direct heat source). There would need to be some very large spreads in margin on those to make up for the fact you're likely double-dipping on inefficiencies when going from electricity in -> natgas production -> storage -> generation -> electricity out.

On that same note though - in some free and open energy markets it is not unheard of to buy at <$10/MWh during excess production periods and sell at >$200/MWh at peak on-demand - plenty of margin for arbitrage there - as the tesla megapack facilities have demonstrated in Australia. In comparison a 4MWh megapack facility (2MW in/2MW out) is priced at $1.9M before installation [2]

[1]https://assets.bosch.com/media/en/global/stories/sofc/solid-...

[2]https://twitter.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1643488856946122754...

(updated for M/Mega - thanks)

[martinald]

Yes exactly. In the UK power is becoming increasingly negative in pricing when there is high wind + solar output. This is actually increasingly alarmingly rapidly (and there is 3-5GW of offshore wind, plus loads of utility scale solar coming online).

Prices are then very high when wind and solar is low - which happens to be when demand is the highest (cold weather snaps in winter which tend to result in very low windspeeds).

National Grid is already paying £1bn/yr to turn off wind farms when supply is too high (plus paying a fortune for new nat gas peakers, which are limited by law to run for 10 days a year max). It's projected that curtailment payments to wind farms will reach £4bn/yr.

While some of this will be rectified with more transmission capacity (there is a 4GW offshore HVDC link being built between scotland and england), if the claims of terraform are true and hold up at scale, I think this is the actual breakthrough people have been looking for.

These could be connected to substations near wind farms (which also happen to be near major gas interconnectors from the north sea) and generate when power prices were low or negative, which will be a large amount of the time. They'd then get paid not only for the arbitrage in gas prices but also they would be able to take (most/all) of the curtailment payments national grid is paying the wind farms.

To be clear batteries do not work particularly well for a market like the UK. Batteries work well for overnight storage of solar, they do not work well for northern climates like the UK that require weeks of storage of power to cover low renewable output in winter. That's not to say there isn't loads of batteries being constructed right now, there is, but it's to cover very short term movements in supply and demand - the much harder problem is covering days or weeks of low output.

[arrowsmith]

I don't get it, why does it cost billions to turn the wind farms off? Why isn't it free?

[japanuspus]

Because some of the windfarms still run on legacy contracts where they were incentivized by a guaranteed selling price for the power they produce. They are reimbursed for the loss of income they suffer due to curtailment.

[throwaway2562]

Correct. The UK regulator (Ofgem) and thus UK consumers are being taken for a ride by windfarmers, who made these deals a precondition of building farms.

We will be paying them £2.5bn a year to not generate electricity by 2030

https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/examining-challeng...

‘A wholly unsatisfactory state of affairs’ indeed

https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/372-why-are-unsubsidised-win...

[mschuster91]

> You could also technically use this as a grid-battery, taking in excess grid energy when it is cheap and converting it into natural gas that can be run back through a gas peaking plant that spins up to meet peak demand.

The loss in such a cycle is abysmal, alone from thermal loss (not to mention the loss during compression and decompression) - even straight fuel cells are at 60% round-trip, compared to batteries with >>90% efficiency.

[pydry]

Batteries are good at smoothing out daily or even weekly variations but do not make any sense whatsoever for seasonal power storage.

It's ridiculously cost ineffective to charge a battery in July only to discharge it in December.

60% roundtrip is cost effective if you're synthesizing when the sun is blazing and the wind is blowing hard and burning it when wind, solar and batteries have all tapped out.

Thats especially so if the equipment has low capex which it seems like this does. Unlike batteries that makes it cost effective to overbuild and idle it most of the year.

[ben_w]

> It's ridiculously cost ineffective to charge a battery in July only to discharge it in December

Indeed.

This is why the cheapest solutions in most places are a mix of a mere few days off storage plus a target production level that is a little higher than you need on an average day in winter.

While this doesn't work above the arctic circle (you could do it with a power line somewhere sunnier or a synthetic fuel, and possibly also geothermal or nuclear etc., devil is in the details for all options) overproduction + 35-90 hours of batteries is sufficient for most people and places:

https://tonyseba.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/RethinkingEn...

[cbsmith]

Is that more effective than the traditional, "store the energy as kinetic potential energy by pushing water uphill, so you can let it go down the hill later" approach.

[pydry]

For storing energy cheaply for months at a time and transporting it across large distances, yes.

Pumped storage has ~90% roundtrip efficiency, good at storing energy for days or weeks but maxes out easily. The energy density of water pushed uphill is very low.

I think we should be pushing a lot more water uphill, but I see it as an alternative to or competitor to grid-scale batteries and a complement to syngas.

Syngas production will probably be most useful if built next door to a wind or solar farm and used to siphon off energy which is currently curtailed when the grid is maxed out.

It can then be easily stored in enormous quantities and easily transported by ship to anywhere in the world that needs it.

[danmaz74]

It's not more effective where you have the right conditions for pumped storage, but those conditions aren't very common around the world.

[_Microft]

> On that same note though - in some free and open energy markets it is not unheard of to buy at <$10/mWh during excess production periods and sell at >$200/mWh at peak on-demand - plenty of margin for arbitrage there - as the tesla megapack facilities have demonstrated in Australia. In comparison a 4mWh megapack facility (2MW in/2MW out) is priced at $1.9M before installation [2]

m means milli, M is mega.

[cbsmith]

That's basically what this is, minus the "worthless" part. That's the part you'd have to read past the headline to be sure of anyway.

[toddmorey]

I really wonder about unintended consequences. It's exciting to be able to store solar as methane because we can "plug" this new synthetic methane easily into existing infrastructure. (But we have to get better at leak management!)

However, you almost always go through huge underground methane pockets when drilling for oil. So oil drilling stations vent / flare methane when they can't "off site" it, like when natural gas pipelines are at capacity. In those moments, the price of methane actually drops below zero--I've seen it at -$1.20 per MMBtu as recently as this year! Essentially you are paying someone to get rid of the stuff for you.

So... if we flood the market with new, cost-effective synthetic methane... will companies just flare more of it as we drill for oil?

[rndmize]

Climate town just did a piece on natural gas leaks and how its a much more serious problem that previously considered - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2oL4SFwkkw - certainly soured me a bit on natural gas in general, at least until there's better regulation in place.

[jvanderbot]

I believe the intent is to offset oil production with the methane. Somehow. Maybe making other hydrocarbons from it?

[regularfry]

If other hydrocarbons can be created in a form that's easy to sequester, that's useful.

[kortex]

There's a lot of interest in cracking methane to ethylene and hydrogen, both which are super useful in their own right. There's also the Fischer-Tropsch process which synthesises arbitrary linear alkane hydrocarbons. That requires more intermediate steps, to make syngas from methane and water.

[anonporridge]

Burning off excess methane is always going to be a problem that needs to be solved regardless. There are just too many small, remote sources that aren't likely to ever justify the cost of infrastructure build out to use on grid. For example, landfills are a big, distributed source of methane that aren't going away.

Bitcoin miners are the most commonly touted solution here, because you can drop in small modules of generators+miners with no infrastructure other than a satellite link.

Funny enough, with carbon accounting rules giving huge incentives for efficiently burning waste methane, a small percentage of the bitcoin mining network doing this could actually make bitcoin the only carbon negative industry on the planet (from a carbon accounting perspective, not literally).

[throwaway4220]

Well it’s still carbon neutral though right

[_aavaa_]

Carbon molecules yes. But methane was a significantly higher (80x) greenhouse gas potential than CO2. So it's definitely not neutral in that regard.

[NortySpock]

Right, but the point is, once this costs nearly-the-same as methane extracted from the ground, it's not worth it to pull methane out of the ground! We'd stop having an incentive to add more CO2 to the atmosphere!

We'd be able to get to net-zero carbon / methane emissions without having to substantially change our living conditions. Cities or states would "just" bottle up some liquid methane for the winter months (or summer months) and seasonal energy usage changes become much easier to manage. (I'm aware that would involve creating more infrastructure.)

Sounds great to me.

[toddmorey]

Yes but the issue is we almost always encounter & have to remove lots of natural underground methane to get to the oil below it.

If the oil drills lose incentive to sell the methane off, they just burn it on site as waste. Horrible I know.

So synthetic methane also needs to reduce crude oil demand I’m thinking.

[cbsmith]

I don't think it does, though that would be great. Burning the methane on site as waste is still significantly better than releasing it into the air (converting methane to mostly CO2 is still better than not doing it).

This technology doesn't need to solve global warming. Even if it just buys us some more time, it is fantastic news.

[8note]

But we could maybe burn coal for less total climate change impact than leaking and burning methane

[_aavaa_]

> once this costs nearly-the-same as methane

Problem #1 is finding people to pay for it until then.

Problem #2 is that this will make fore expensive energy at the end, efficiency being one problem and capital cost of those idle gas turbines being another. We'll have to wait and see if these ever plan any role beyond a demonstration project or two, but I'm skeptical it'll compete on price.

[groby_b]

It's an excellent way forward because it's not only carbon-neutral, it can also "fall back" to pure CO2 capture should we ever get a decent enough grid & storage mechanisms to afford that.

Really exciting work!

[jseliger]

Other discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39896560

[throwaway_5753]

What is going on with the section numbering in that blog and infographic? Super interested in the content I can't focus when we start with section 7 then jump to 9 then 13 then back to 8.

[jvanderbot]

This all strikes me as a nice opening to an apocalypse movie. Pulling CO2 and upgrading to methane - wouldn't that amplify GHG effects?

[strken]

Methane has a short half-life in the atmosphere, so its cumulative effect after a few decades is close to CO2 unless you're constantly outputting more, and that's assuming you're not burning it.

In the case where you're making methane from atmospheric CO2 and then burning it, it's just returning the same CO2 back, which per the article is carbon neutral.

[CorrectHorseBat]

More like a few centuries, methane's global warming potential after 500 years (GWP-500) is still 7.95.

The issue with burning is that methane can leak during transport.

[strken]

I stand corrected: did the maths wrong. Centuries it is.

[kortex]

There's a big difference in scale between "burning hydrocarbons to heat and power much of the world" (which includes leakage from fossil fuel drilling) and "we make some methane to be almost completely consumed and there are some leaks".