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Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - Mav - 02-05-2023
And yet you don’t deal with the fact that the creation of methane byproduct isn’t calibrated to the level needed to satisfy demand; instead it will be proportional to the entire amount of hydrogen produced by the process you admire. It’s unlikely that demand for methane will be exactly equal to the methane byproduct and you haven’t provided any grounds to believe there won’t be excess supply. We’ve seen that already with the Red Cycle plastics fiasco. Where the collection of problematic material is divorced from the ability of businesses to convert it into another product, you end up with a storage problem.
And this all assumes that the existing production of methane will cease. But that’s optimistic. It’s not as though oil production in various countries was shut down in favour of importing oil from countries which could produce it more cheaply. The US has been hellbent on reaching oil self-sufficiency and if its own mining operations create methane gas byproduct that’s captured and used, that’s going to continue unabated. Can you imagine Australia telling the US Govt to cut the production of methane because we’re producing more blue hydrogen? Good luck with that …
If there’s an excess, one would expect the rate of excess supply to be constant or increasing as more blue hydrogen is produced. That will mean ever increasing amounts of methane to eliminate.
Of course, governments will try to find ways to convert the methane into something useful, if only to justify the continued use of blue hydrogen processes. Again, look at the Red Cycle program. It was wonderful PR for Woolies and Coles and governments that were subsidising the program that all their plastic packaging was converted into park benches and the like rather than being dumped in landfill but there was a practical limit that undercut that messaging. As the low-hanging fruit is exhausted, funding new uses for methane would become a subsidy with the taxpayer footing the bill. There are practical limits to how much methane can be used in this way.
So what will happen with the excess? Are there really enough empty spaces underground to store massive amounts of methane along with massive amounts of carbon dioxide? Is there no end to that magic? Can we build huge containers for it? Or do we burn the methane and then bury the carbon dioxide in the endless natural storage compartments below the surface.
Maybe we could just make sure the EPA is looking the other way when there are accidental releases of methane by the blue hydrogen producers or when CCS fails. After all, too much regulation would be bad for business.
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - LP - 02-05-2023
(02-05-2023, 04:49 AM)Mav date Wrote:And yet you don’t deal with the fact that the creation of methane byproduct isn’t calibrated to the level needed to satisfy demand; instead it will be proportional to the entire amount of hydrogen produced by the process you admire. It’s unlikely that demand for methane will be exactly equal to the methane byproduct and you haven’t provided any grounds to believe there won’t be excess supply.The demand for hydrogen won't be 100% exclusive meet by gasification methods which are just a bridge to hydrogen production via seawater electrolysis. Gasification probably can't even meet a significant fraction of the demand needed, just as Solar PV alone cannot possible meet base load demands.
Only renewables alarmists paint gasification by-products as the reason to ban the hydrogen economy.
Methane is going to be need from somewhere, it is never going to 'cease', the percentage of methane produced by hydrogen production through gasification will only provide a fraction of the methane needed for modern economies, so it's likely some gasification might be needed to help bridge the gap as mining of fossil fuels gets scaled back, but that will take decades as there are many more products produced by mining than fuels. They may even run gasification facilities to produce methane along with other heavy gases with hydrogen as the by-product.
It's completely naivé to imagine methane will cease, it's as naivé as people thinking logging will cease, or gold mining will cease, or cars will cease, or planes will cease. It's just used as an argument in renewables / climate debate because the public is oblivious to what methane is needed to produce other than burning it as a fuel.
btw. The formula for methane is CH[sub]4[/sub], there is no O in there!
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - Mav - 02-05-2023
When methane burns in air there’s a fair bit of O available to produce carbon dioxide. In fact, AFAIK it won’t burn unless oxygen is present.
If blue hydrogen is going to be a little niche market, why bother with it? Why would industry be willing to invest considerable funds into improving the technology and setting up the infrastructure if it won’t be scaled up dramatically? Just look at the blue hydrogen facility in the Latrobe Valley. It will need to implement a large scale CCS to deal with the greenhouse gas emissions and that is a Herculean undertaking. The hydrogen will then be transported to the Port of Hastings where another facility will convert it into liquid ammonia, whereupon it will be shipped offshore in special pressurised tankers. And you’re telling me that will just be a little operation which won’t create large quantities of methane which, when aggregated with similar facilities around the world, won’t make much of dent in methane demand?
In particular, it’s odd that you would bang on about how hydrogen should be widely used in transportation as well as fuelling power-hungry industries but then claim byproducts would be minimal because hydrogen won’t be a major source of energy.
Investment in blue hydrogen doesn’t seem to me to be a transient operation which will melt away when green hydrogen comes on line. It might if we were talking about some global operation where optimal environmental outcomes were more important than making money. But there’s no global operation. Operators of blue hydrogen facilities will defend their patch to the death (of the planet, if necessary). The Latrobe Valley plant is there because of access to coal and presumably disused mines which might be sites for carbon capture. Neither is of any benefit to a plant that will create green hydrogen. Instead, green hydrogen plants would be sited close to water. That blue hydrogen plant would just be another disused building. It’s not too hard to imagine blue hydrogen operators would try to kill off competition from green hydrogen operators. That would involve trying to tie up government funding and challenging the scientific and business cases presented by those new entrants. That’s the same sort of thing that we see the fossil fuel industry doing already. And in the case of the Latrobe Valley plant, the Victorian Government (no matter whether it’s Labor or Liberal) may side with the blue hydrogen suppliers as they monetise Victoria’s coal supplies and create employment in an area that depended on coal-fired power generation.
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Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - LP - 02-05-2023
(02-05-2023, 08:39 AM)Mav date Wrote:When methane burns in air there’s a fair bit of O available to produce carbon dioxide. In fact, AFAIK it won’t burn unless oxygen is presentSo are you volunteering to light it, you'd do that just to prove your point?
I think the most common way methane reduces in the environment without some biology being involved is catalysis, and the end result is mostly methanol, acetic acid and a little CO[sub]2[/sub] on the side. But I hear you correctly noting, methanol and acetic acid are heavier than air, well at least that is how the scientists think Titan exists!
btw., Having had a quick chat with some boffins this morning to confirm my suspicions, I can relay that the catalysis of methane occurs in an anaerobic environment, forming methanol, formic acid, acetic acid, all useful chemicals used in industry and food production often with hydrogen as a by-product.
Scientists and engineers busy designing process that mimic what nature has been doing for millions of years, producing waste hydrogen that burns up in the air producing water, evil bastards aren't they causing all those floods!
Quote:anaerobic
1.
relating to or requiring an absence of free oxygen.
"anaerobic bacteria"
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - Mav - 02-05-2023
I’m guessing you know that the garbage dumps collecting methane propose to burn it as fuel to provide power. As you know, that’s an aerobic process.
Quote:Aerobic
relating to, involving, or requiring free oxygen.
"simple aerobic bacteria"
And it’s wonderful that science has methods to break down methane. But real world economics has a way of spoiling things. What would be the cost of catalysis on the industrial scale needed to deal with the methane produced in the production of blue hydrogen? And again, would there be sufficient demand for this new industrial scale production of end products aggregated across the world? Surely the latter question impacts the former as sale of the end products would underpin viability. And how much power would be required for the large-scale catalysis process? After all, the fact blue hydrogen requires less power to produce than green hydrogen production requires is one of its selling points. But when we add in the power required to process the byproducts, maybe that pro turns into a con. Maybe blue hydrogen would then be a con?
By the way, science also gives us the ability to split carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen. In theory, we could deal with this byproduct of blue hydrogen production. But the power required to achieve this in order to produce power makes it impractical. So let’s focus on practicality rather than theory.
Maybe rather than trying to cut the Gordion knot by searching for ways to minimise the impact of greenhouse byproducts, we should simplify the problem by producing green hydrogen. As you’ve already noted, hydrogen will only meet a tiny fraction of the world’s energy needs, so let’s not get tied up in knots over it.
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - Mav - 02-05-2023
Here’s an interesting idea to cut emissions in the steel industry without needing to create new plants:
https://www.freethink.com/energy/decarbonizing-steel.
As noted in the article, it might work on paper but it hasn’t been tested in the real world. Still, an 88% reduction in emissions is very interesting.
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - LP - 02-06-2023
(02-05-2023, 10:53 PM)Mav date Wrote:And it’s wonderful that science has methods to break down methane. But real world economics has a way of spoiling things. What would be the cost of catalysis on the industrial scale needed to deal with the methane produced in the production of blue hydrogen?It's not a new process or new venture, the conversion of methane is already being done, it's just that the source is mining, and it turns out methane is so easy to capture farmers can already do it and get a return, so I doubt big industry will have a problem.
Your point about cracking CO[sub]2[/sub] is correct, which is why it's much more efficient to crack methane (CH[sub]4[/sub]), methane conversion / cracking is a much lower energy process, the catalysts are longer lasting and it produces more hydrogen. Although there has been progress in developing new catalysts and reusable MOF frameworks to capture CO[sub]2[/sub] from industrial emissions and release it in a controlled manner. In particular a new sand based filtering solution that absorbs CO[sub]2[/sub] and then releases it when gently heated. The gentle heating is key, there are many solutions to absorb CO[sub]2[/sub] but they require a massive amount of energy to release it. fwiw., It has to be released to make economic sense, so that the catalyst / framework isn't single use, so enters CCS into the debate again.
Really the renewables alarmism around methane is displaced, it's a finger in the dyke moment, and the renewables sector would be better focussed on cleaning up their own act and sourcing rare earths and precious metals from sustainable reservoirs. (There is a reason why people like Twiggy Forrest and BHP are so keen on Solar PV, Solar PV needs the stuff they dig!)
At one of the facilities I visit we had to get past protestors barricading the gates because the plant emitted nitrogen. Nitrogen is also a greenhouse gas and makes up roughly 70% of our atmosphere. The protest was pointless, the nitrogen used in most industrial processing comes out of the air, what isn't converted to something like nitrides, fertiliser or explosives goes back to the air. We consume nitrogen we don't make it, but it's so abundant humans will barely make a dent in the ecospheres supply by the time the Sun consumes the Earth!
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - Professer E - 02-06-2023
LP is correct. REE mining, and particularly processing, is close to the dirtiest activity on the plant. Horrendous for the environment. The tailings from processing alone rival waste from a nuclear facility.
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - LP - 02-06-2023
(02-06-2023, 01:35 AM)Professer E date Wrote:LP is correct. REE mining, and particularly processing, is close to the dirtiest activity on the plant. Horrendous for the environment. The tailings from processing alone rival waste from a nuclear facility.The public protest against mining, boost Solar PV, and oppose nuclear.
But the Rare Earth mining produces as much radioactive waste as coal mining or burning. For radiation it's not the volume of waste that is the problem, but the fact that it gets concentrated by the refining process.
The volume of other waste becomes an issue because rare earths are well, ............ rare, DuH! There are projects now trying to develop uses for much of the waste, but the economics of the effort looks grim.
Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread - Mav - 02-07-2023
Research shows oil field flaring emits nearly five times more methane than expected, npr.org.
Quote: Flares, or fires lit at oil and gas wells to burn off excess gas that cannot be transported and sold, are a common sight at oil fields around the world. Some are even visible from space.
But a new study published in the journal Science Thursday found that the process is not eliminating nearly as much methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide, as assumed.
"Our findings indicate that flaring is responsible for five times more methane entering the atmosphere than we previously thought," says Genevieve Plant, lead author and assistant research scientist at the University of Michigan.
Methane, the main component of natural gas, is also a byproduct of oil drilling. Flaring is a way to convert unsellable gas into compounds such as carbon dioxide, which still cause global warming but are less harmful in the near-term. Flares are designed to eliminate at least 98% of the methane that passes through them, and that is the default amount used when estimating the emissions they create.
![[Image: ap486259156356-bf8462146b820a20b86ad556e...0-c85.webp]](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/09/29/ap486259156356-bf8462146b820a20b86ad556e0db4b442d18c6fd-s1600-c85.webp)
Well, well, well … very interesting. Who would have thought that excess methane would be burnt off? Aerobically.