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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Terraform Industries actually created synthetic methane from sunlight, water, and air⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

We have the excess electricity already, but I’m not yet at the legally required amount of solar panels.

At work we are investing in energy storage, both batteries and heat storage and looking for more solutions.

For any but the largest commercial solar/wind providers, batteries and heat storage (or cold storage actually too!) are the best uses of overproduction of electricity. Batteries at your location are 90%+ efficient round trip, meaning for every 1kWh you shove into the battery, even after all the conversion and storage costs, you’ll be able to get 900Wh or more out of the battery when you have a use for it. Many PV tied batteries are upwards of 97% efficient even!

Heat storage is another great use, whether in water (to mitigate need for new energy expenditure to heat water for use), or in thermal batteries for space heating. Although the biggest downside to thermal batteries are their size. If you’ve got spare space then they can be effective in a home or business.

I’m looking at hydrogen, because it’s known tech and I dream of finding a way to use it in a more stable chemical form for storage.

I did the same looking at Hydrogen, and its pretty bleak. Not only is creating hydrogen safely (from electrolysis) difficult, but storage is a nightmare. Any kind of gaseous storage is incredibly difficult because of how small a molecule H2 is, and if you’re storage is inside a building that leakage creates explosion risks.

The safest way I saw to store and consume hydrogen is absorbed into a metal hydride. The problem there is that fillers (because of pressure) are expensive $2k for the cheapest one I saw, and you need many metal hydride cylinders to store any appreciable amount of hydrogen. So they end up being large, heavy and bulky or relatively little energy storage.

For home use, a regular lithium battery is so much more efficient and safe.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Terraform Industries actually created synthetic methane from sunlight, water, and air⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
What it looks like this company is building would be partially compatible with that approach.

For the Haber-Bosch process needs input H2 (plus the atmospheric Nitrogen). 33% of what this company is building is an electrolyser. Further, the Sabatier reactor they’re using (another 33% of their process) could possibly be swapped out for a Haber-Bosch reactor.

I don’t know enough about the environmental conditions needed for handling ammonia vs methane to understand if there are any “gotchas” to creating ammonia in situ.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Terraform Industries actually created synthetic methane from sunlight, water, and air⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
What are the other options you see for the excess electricity that would be more feasible than this methane approach?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Terraform Industries actually created synthetic methane from sunlight, water, and air⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
This has the same problem as CO2 capture technologies, that is the relatively low CO2 concentration in the air.

You’re correct that the CO2 concentration in atmospheric air is low: 0.04%. Consider the following:
- Each molecule of C02 has a single carbon atom.
- Each molecule of methane also has a single carbon atom.
- So we could say that atmospheric air has 0.04% of methane production capacity.
I would agree with you this would be a waste of time if the goal was CO2 sequestration, but it isn’t. The goal is to use otherwise 100% wasted electricity to produce something useful that can be stored long term that there is a market for, in this case methane.

The only way to make this even remotely feasible

What is your definition of “feasible” here? Economically compared to fossil based methane? Volume of production?

… are end of pipe solutions where you directly capture the exhaust of a fossile fuel combustion process. But that in turn is at best a temporary band aid.

The company agrees with you. They called out that being able to direct capture pure CO2 from an industrial application would be ideal, but as they also concluded, thats not where the excess electricity is that is really the primary economic driver of this technique.

⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Terraform Industries actually created synthetic methane from sunlight, water, and air⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

Now, what ever happened to regularly riding horses around?

Besides the issue with horse excrement, other issues occurred (Hayden, 2016):

Dead horses often clogged city streets;
In New York City in 1880, 15,000 horses died on the streets, or 41 dead horses a day (which had to be removed);
Some place to stable the 100,000+ horses that operated within New York, and food to feed them;
On a per capita basis, 19th century horse-drawn vehicle accident rates were similar to those of the automobile in the 20th century.

source

⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Terraform Industries actually created synthetic methane from sunlight, water, and air⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

Guess you’ve never heard of a fistulated cow before, they can totally connect tubing or pipes to cows to harvest methane straight out of their intestines.

And the cost for fistulating each cow? And how much methane will such a cow produce? How contaminated will the methane be? What methods would be required to refine it to pipeline grade? Further, can you feed a cow with the output overproduction of a PV solar panel?

This is what I meant when I said cows wouldn’t be economically viable sources of methane from electricity. If you think cows are they, then I won’t stop you though.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Terraform Industries actually created synthetic methane from sunlight, water, and air⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Confused, how is this useful?

There are many MANY useful applications of carbon neutral methane. The most beneficial and obvious to me are:
- Useful method of storing excess generated solar and wind power
- Entire industries, markets, and infrastructure already existing for the storage, transportation, and consumption of methane
You can get methane out of a cow’s ass all day long

You cannot get pipeline grade methane out of cows ass, and even if you could, you wouldn’t have the technology to capture it for use in the marketplace in any quantity that would be cost effective against fossil fuel based methane. As in, even if you could (and you can’t), it would cost so much that no one would buy it and instead just pull more out of the ground. The solution proposed here is on the path to being worth skipping the fossil fuel route for methane and using this instead.

and methane is a greenhouse gas,

So is the CO2 that is being used as the feedstock to create the methane. This would be reducing atmospheric CO2, which I hope you would agree is a useful element when directly combating climate change from C02 emissions.

I thought we wanted less methane, not more.

This wouldn’t be producing net more methane. The market is already consuming all of methane it demands. This would replace some of the supply that is currently being fulfilled by carbon positive fossil fuel sources.
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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Power Prices Can Go Negative and What It Means⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I didn’t see anything in the article at all regarding speculation or futures markets of electricity with the one exception being a mention of some industrial operators signing long term contracts to buy oversupply.