The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

[LP]

That final point is the one I’ve been making repeatedly. You say there’s a market for catalysed byproducts of methane and that the market will absorb any amount produced. But that is exactly the Redcycle problem. Once you divorce production levels from market demand for byproducts, you’ll have a Redcycle oversupply which can’t be sustained.

You're assuming no change in the market, Redcycle's problem is that it ploughed ahead too fast, before there was a market to sell to or infrastructure to handle the product. They collected 300x the waste they could convert, they became a patsy waste repository for all the green councils to dump the unwanted rubbish at and get a pat on the back for recycling, another con! Now the same councils and politicians are trying to blame Redcycle for failing, I bet they bury the lot or a good portion of it and blame Redcycle for that as well!

You ponder why they aren't doing it already, it's a chicken and egg question, at the moment there are no hydrogen consuming resources to sell to, we already produce more hydrogen than we can store or use so it just floats out of the atmosphere. At the moment it's considered a waste just like some of the methane from certain mining operations, and that designation is a crime. It can be fertilizer, it can be pharmaceuticals, in fact it will be because if we ban / close much of the natural gas mining then those industries will be forced to look for the methane they use now from other sources.

Many of the leaks are coming from capped wells, not capped because they want to stop it leaching in the environment, capped because it has an intrinsic value, the capped mines are storage units not the waste repositories, it's a future resource and they know it. Another crime is that they are not required to do anything with it, they get richer everyday it stays in the ground, they get richer for doing nothing!

Hydrogen won't be a by-product, it'll be "the product."

CFCL wasn't just about natural gas, that is the marketing blurb, they had already developed stacks that used methane and hydrogen, when they folded they were developing a stack to capture and convert some harmful toxic gases. Natural gas was just the thing investors could understand, the place residential houses could get energy from by pipeline or bottle. A large chunk of the northern hemisphere industrial installations of the technology run on methane by-product from the dairy industry, as I have already mentioned. There were several sites using captured methane from geothermal processes, but I know that has a longevity issue due to sulphurous contaminants so they might no longer be running.