Engineer demos how SpaceX is building fracked well gas plant

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

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.

Sounds like the same shit as nuclear power plant regulations. As a civilization or even a species, we'll "safety" our way into extinction.

EPA definitely has a dog in the fight, especially considering that a 250 megawatt power plant would be a literal "major stationary source" under the clean air act

You need water to your east (because you can't fly over people for safety reasons), for a really long way. As in launches from texas have to dodge Florida, Cuba and all the other islands over there.

You need very low population density (because rocket launches and landings require large exclusion zones).

You need to be in the US, because of export restrictions.

You want to be as far south as possible, for efficiency reasons (to get as much kinetic energy from the earths rotation as possible).

You are looking at this launch site, attempting to acquire a lot of land on Florida's coast (not really feasible anymore, it's all occupied), or launching from tiny islands/ocean platforms which will have the exact same fresh water issues.

The core of this particular argument is the following:

> Think about it like this. We have 3 variables:

> 1. Inlet Gas Flow rate (measured by mmscf/d but easily convertible to pounds methane equiv.)

> 2. The VOC content mass % of the inlet stream

> 3. The Loss Rate through leaks in valves, fittings, etc. This is the fraction of the total inlet stream is lost to the air

> We simply multiply these three items together to get:

> 4. The VOC emission rate in tons per year (US short tons are EPA standard)

> Since we know #4 (The PEA told us), we know #2 (Pipeline Quality Gas is always <0.1% VOCs, and usually lower), and #3 is a range (with modern cryo plants at the lower end), we can simply go backwards to calculate implied flow rate

#1 is what this post is trying to calculate, to see what is or isn't reasonable.

#4 is the PEA: https://www.faa.gov/space/stakeholder_engagement/spacex_star...

And is basically the starting point of all calculations. Just Ctrl-F "45.8", the number that ESG_Hound uses in his excel-spreadsheet. That gets you to page 44, the number seems to check out. This post is trying to answer the question: when they wrote this PEA, what assumptions did the engineers make?

#3 is a reasonable assumption that doesn't change much.

The last variable is #2: which has two paths:

1. 99.9% pure pipeline methane -- When we plug in 99.9% pure methane into the calculations, the numbers are absurd. This is a "disproof by absurdity". So we know it can't be 99.9% methane from standard pipelines.

2. Maybe its "raw" methane from a well (varies from 3% to 10%). -- When plugging in these numbers, we calculate a 4.77% VOC rate, which suggests that all the calculations in the PEA were done __ASSUMING__ raw methane.

Now sure, our model isn't going to be the same model as whoever prepared this PEA. but we're probably going to be "within the same magnitude". Calculations, when done independently, will rhyme.

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It seems like a simple argument to me. What part of the discussion are people getting tripped up on?

When using 99.9% pure methane, the amount of Mega-scf of natural gas goes completely out of whack with any reasonable excel-sheet formula. As such, 99.9% pipeline methane cannot be the source of SpaceX's methane (at least, not with the assumptions listed in the PEA).

Does anyone have a problem with any of the assumed numbers? #1, #2, #3 or #4?

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So the QED is: SpaceX, when they wrote this PEA, assumed they'd be using raw, untreated natural gas straight from a well. Why would they make this assumption? Is SpaceX planning to set up a pre-treatment natural gas plant inside of Starbase?

It baffles me that this is so often repeated when it is quite clearly inaccurate if you just think about it for a second.

First of all, you don't "trim" a forest the size of many small countries. This isn't a city park. It would take every man, woman, and child's sum efforts to 'landscape' even a fraction of the forests in the PNW. That's like saying that the reason the sea is rising is that nobody is running an ice cube maker to refreeze the ice caps.

But to speak to the real origination of this point - resource extraction for the benefit of those who control the cable news narrative: You don't prevent forest fires by logging. That is an old meme from the resource extraction industry - not only does it not prevent wildfires, it also destroys biodiversity of the ecosystems where old, diverse growth is replaced with pine stands.

Forest fires are required for the natural lifecycle of a forest - there are species that cannot reproduce without a forest fire. Not only small brush type plants that thrive in the absence of overgrowth but also the largest organisms in the forest- the trees themselves! Vast areas of the PNW are dominated by so-called 'serotinous cone' deciduous trees whose cones will lay dormant for years, coated in a thick plastic-like resin layer that only allows the cone to release seeds after the resin is melted away by forest fire (when the chances of successfully growing are highest)

Forests require fires to be healthy. A big part of why wildfires are so bad now is that we haven't let them happen for so long because there are more and more people moving into the areas that previously experienced healthy burns. This lead practices to try to prevent fires from happening. Meanwhile, brush built up year after year after year and eventually the fires that do happen are orders of magnitude worse. Climate change and the resulting temperatures and changes in the 'moisture battery' throughout the year are also massive contributors, but that is a whole other post.

If Greta Thunberg flew on a commercial airplane somewhere far away, she'd be accused of being a hyprocate, so she uses a sailboat to cross a freaking ocean when she wants to.

This may be tribalism purity from the part of conservatives, but that's always going to be the reaction from the "opposite" side in this kind of situations because that's the obvious human response. This is not silly logic, this is how humans behave and if you refuse to believe your eyes when you see this again and again, you're the one being silly.

I do understand being emotional about the environment and a desire to preserve it in the presence of people and the activities that we have to do to survive. So I understand being emotional about an administration rolling back EPA restrictions on coal power waste water release[2] (for example).

Analogy: I don't understand a co-worker being "mad" at you for driving 10 miles to the office because they ride their bike that same distance and are therefore doing more for the environment than you are. Proud of their own efforts? Sure. Mad because not everyone can do what they do? No, I don't understand that.

[1] https://www.texasobserver.org/methane-abandoned-oil-wells/

[2] https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/trump-epa-rol...

This does make sense, but it is odd that the existing gas market is not sufficient.

Reusable rockets are a huge progress in space research. People long thought them outright impossible or impractical. And aside from SpaceX, no one has them yet.

ESA's model of throwing away the entire Ariane at each launch is the very opposite of sustainable. It is an expensive waste of money propped up by French military interests.

(Not that the ULA, the Russians or the Chinese do something different.)

Second, there are approximately 100,000 airline flights per day worldwide; American Airlines alone flies 5,000 per day. Even 1,000 rocket launches per year would be equivalent to 5 days of traditional flights.

People disagree with the climate concern not because "Elon Musk is involved" - it is because critics are focused on the wrong thing. There are far more climate destructive practices with far less benefit to the good of mankind. All those 100,000 flights per day? That only accounts for about 2% of carbon emissions. A SpaceX launch, to use your figures, accounts for 0.00005%.

So why focus on this extraordinarily tiny fraction of climate impact? Is it because it's Elon? Because rockets look big and thus wasteful?

What about the incredibly important climate monitoring satellites they'll lift, or benefits like GPS, global internet, potential breakthroughs in space manufacturing, astronomy, or physics? Or even just the hope and excitement about the future that many feel in the face of otherwise depressing news everywhere. The massive size and lift capacity of the Starship (100 tons to orbit, 8m wide by 20m high or so) will transform activities in low earth orbit and beyond.

And I'll close by saying, yes I think Elon has earned a little slack - he has done more than most people on the planet to reduce global emissions. Tesla, Solar City (now Tesla solar), battery technology (which has been a massive impediment to clean energy storage), future electric long-haul trucks, and the supercharger network (to make extended travel on electric vehicles possible) all have reduced emissions tremendously - probably far more than the additional carbon from rocket launches (though I haven't done the math).

So that's my $0.02, anyway.