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Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

While this is impressive to some degree I just today watched Climate Town’s “Natural Gas is Scamming America” (https://youtu.be/K2oL4SFwkkw) and the entire natural gas industry is tainted beyond belief for me now. It’s not like they were a positive thing in my view before, but on the whole natural gas seems to be just as if not more detrimental than coal for climate change mainly due to how much is leaked out but also how much energy it takes to ship natural gas to other countries. The idea of creating carbon neutral natural gas seems great, but can we maybe avoid holding energy in one of the most climate-change inducing gases out there?

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> but also how much energy it takes to ship natural gas to other countries.

Something like this would reduce the need to transport it to other countries, since you can manufacture it anywhere you want. Right now we're limited to where we can pull fossil fuels out of the ground, which means that it has to be transported from one place to another. That's not the case with atmospheric extraction.

I feel the same vibe too about this. If methane leak is an issue, H2 leakage will be a bigger issue. It's far more prone to leakage and far more corrosive.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01322-8

an interesting paper for you :)

If the natural gas is captured from the atmosphere, a spill will be bad, but no worse than before the capture happened, right?

They're capturing CO2 from the atmosphere, if they leak methane back out to the atmosphere that's much, much worse. Over a 20-year period, methane has ~80x the warming potential of CO2.

Being realistic, we're going to put any CO2 we manage to pull out of the atmosphere (if we can do it at cost at all) on a balance sheet.

We already do this in various places. For instance, if you dedicate land to growing a forest in Germany to offset your carbon emissions, it is added to the emission trade balance of the country no matter if you intend for it or not - you can't offset.

Hamburg Airport tried to do this as a publicity stunt, and only later noticed they're doing nothing for the CO2 bottom line.

what kind of natural gas?

This is important to consider. The video is mostly a commentary on how CO2 is being handled while the methane released from fracking is largely ignored when evaluating if a well is carbon neutral. The video also argues that methane is much worse for the environment as a whole than CO2. I'm sympathetic to the argument, but I have a hard time believing that climate scientists have not already taken this into account with their calculations _somewhere_. Maybe I'm wrong, but at this point, the US is so far gone down the fracking/natural gas hole, I'm afraid backing out of it is almost untenable.

The best we can hope for is better capture, storage, and utilization strategies. If we can find a way to create a machine similar to the Terraform Industries model, but focused on methane capture, perhaps we can reabsorb/store that as well.

Methane leakage have been first estimated by the gas industry actors first. With no incentive to work on those leakage (no regulation) and a strong incentive to be "green" (it grant you money and good PR which is money), numbers can't be trusted.

That's why there are demands for regulations only after scientist looked over the shoulder of industrials. At the end, scientists often only look at things, the don't decide about regulations and economy.

Backing out would require a lot of courage, but not doing it put a serious threat to the efforts of keeping the climate change at a not-too-catastrophic level.

Talking about terraform, in 2011 in germany they did test renewable powered methane production via electrolysis and Sabatier process. I can't find any news about it, but it's exactly what terraform is doing.

Terraform claim to produce H2 at less than 2.5$/kg, but I find different numbers when looking at scientific publications (it's between 4.8-7.5$/kg).[0]

They also claim to produce from "air", but C02 capture is really poor and it's better to capture it from industrial plants. But anyway, it's not a big problem.

An other problem is the water cost of electrolysis.

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01322-8

Indeed, and they claim it is "easily transportable": it seems to be the two are mutually exclusive, if you are going to shove it into the existing systems that leak methane habitually, it's horrific for climate change.

Green hydrogen and other "e-fuels" are an attempt to keep the gas industries infrastructure alive and relevant. If you see someone break down the math it makes zero sense, it just sounds nice.

Keeping existing infrastructure is the whole beauty of it. Ships, pipelines, factories, supply chains that you can keep using if/until other technology replaces it.

It would be - if the math added up. But it mostly ends up being lobby work to lengthen the lifespan of industry investments.

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