There's a lot of optimism in this article. Perhaps too much as it seems to gloss over some important details.
> Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas.
Then later it talks about how much desert there is, implying it's a great place for low-impact solar. How do the electricity and power come together and how much inefficiency is there in the wires or pipes? Presumably some of this water is likely to be sea water.
Presumably the sea water that would be needed to feed the hydrocarbon production along with the sea water from desalination (also discussed later) will have their own problems. "desalination toxic brine" has 177,000 hits on google.
It makes a lot more sense to transport the energy to the water than vice versa.
I don't agree with their plan to make synthetic hydrocarbons, but they are right about solar. In 50 years solar will be so ubiquitous and cheap that people will be horrified that we kept burning fossil fuels and building nuclear plants for so long.
But this way is carbon neutral. Every CO2 molecule you pump out, started out as a CO2 molecule you took from the air. There is no reason to dislike fossil fuels, if they no longer come from fossils. It's the releasing of carbon from millions of years ago that's creating the excess.
Capturing CO2 is not ‘energy cheap’ and therefore it is best when and where possible much of what we start capturing to rid it from the carbon cycle rather than re-introduce it.
I suspect those weren't included in the studies because they aren't grid scale yet.
Consider that "one of the biggest batteries in the world" stores 129 MWh, enough to sustain the US grid for one second.[1] (Of course, it can't discharge that quickly, so we really need four thousand of them to sustain the grid for one hour).
For comparison, the current capacity of pumped-storage hydroelectricity in the US is about 550GWh[2], the equivalent of about four thousand of those facilities. And we still don't have enough storage to replace nonrenewables with solar.
Batteries like that one won't reduce the actual price of energy storage here until Tesla builds thousands of installations in the US alone. And it would take hundreds of thousands worldwide (along with solar generation) to replace nonrenewable generation.
But it is a promising technology. If many are built quickly, and the reported financials prove accurate and scalable, we might have cheap grid-scale storage in ten or twenty years.
1: According to the US Energy Information administration, the US grid generates about 4 billion MWh per year.
2: "[In the United States] forty-three PSH plants with a total power capacity of 21.9 GW and estimated energy storage capacity of 553 GWh
accounted for 93% of utility-scale storage power capacity (GW) and more than 99% of electrical energy storage (GWh) in 2019."
You can easily run a grid on 60% renewables with essentially no storage at all. We have a long way to go before 60% of the world's primary power consumption is switched to renewables.
I see we're not discussing the same thing. I was talking about the cost of solar and storage, Germany uses more wind and a lot of biomass and hydro.
But I'm happy to discuss this too. That 50% figure is a peak (achieved when conditions were favorable) and ignores imported electricity.
According to [1], renewables accounted for 41% of power production in Germany in 2021, but only 16.1% of primary energy consumption.
AIUI, that difference comes from (a) imports and (b) the fact that primary energy consumption also includes heating and transport, two sectors that often aren't directly powered by electricity yet, but which must be before an economy can stop consuming non-renewable energy.
Making hydrocarbons for airplanes and maybe for cargo ships makes sense unless the power density of batteries increases dramatically. Creating hydrocarbons to put into commuter cars and trucks that traverse developed regions sounds like a bad idea.
I am sort of in a middle ground on this. Hydrocarbons are near magic in terms of their physical properties and electric, as it stands currently, have major problems replacing them in some situations (aviation/shipping).
I don't think we will entirely replace them, not unless there is some big innovation. Which could happen. I think it is going to be a combination of, mass uptake in renewables that come to about 1/2 or 1/4th of the total energy we use today, gains in efficiency from using electric rather than combustible heat engines, hydrocarbons in those few places it still makes sense - and most importantly - rational use of energy! Planned public transport instead of private vehicles for instance. Some stuff more in line with the sustainability and permaculture stuff that was being developed in the 1970's.
Your questions are loaded. You're doing the religious person thing of "Well you don't believe in Jesus, so what do you believe in?" Just because I don't believe synthetic hydrocarbons are a good idea doesn't mean I have to have a replacement.
Synthetic hydrocarbons may be the stepping stone civilisation needs, until a better way of storing renewable energy at grid scale is invented. If you don't like them for unspecified reasons, and don't propose a viable alternative, you're not contributing to the debate.
While desalination requires disposing of all the waterborne particulate, the water can sometimes be precious enough that we bear it. I heard a radio report yesterday [0] about how investing in desalination helped mitigate USA CA Catalina Island's direly depleted resivoir. That's not to say that brine treatment or disposal isn't costly, more that - so long as people are committed to living in dry areas and can afford to, they will pressure their local governments to keep the area habitable.
This comes up a lot when desalination is mentioned. Think of the pacific as a bucket of water. And desalinating all the water we ever need adds up to tiny fraction of a drop of water in comparison. Now the brine is an even tinier fraction of that drop that goes back in the bucket. What does it do to ppm counts of things like salt? Absolutely nothing whatsoever.
Yes, dumping concentrated brine in shallow waters causes issues for the local wild life. Simple solution: don't dump it there. For example, if you pump it out to deeper waters, you are not going to affect ppm counts of salt and other minerals in any meaningful or even measurable way. You couldn't even if you wanted to. It's just way too much water.
There's a reason why surfers in LA wear wet suits: the water there is cold because it has no chance to heat up by much. That's because the coast there isn't very shallow. About 1-2 miles from the coast, the bottom already drops to hundreds of feet. And there are some powerful currents that constantly mix things up. Ideal place to get rid of a relatively tiny amount of brine.
Brine disposal is a simple engineering problem. Probably you and I could come up with a dozen different ways to do it that would be perfectly acceptable. Of course there's a cost attached to those things. That's actually the main challenge. Pipes and pumps cost money.
> Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas.
Then later it talks about how much desert there is, implying it's a great place for low-impact solar. How do the electricity and power come together and how much inefficiency is there in the wires or pipes? Presumably some of this water is likely to be sea water.
Presumably the sea water that would be needed to feed the hydrocarbon production along with the sea water from desalination (also discussed later) will have their own problems. "desalination toxic brine" has 177,000 hits on google.