Curious what people think about the idea of synthetic hydrocarbons? It is a seemingly obvious idea that I hadn't heard about until recently, as long as you can use energy efficiently to create the synthetic hydrocarbons.
Prometheus Fuels is another, they have been on HN previously :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31264388
They have a cool website :
There are some companies that want to use nuclear power , Valar Atomics is one :
The cost estimates seem to be 4-10 times as expensive as fossil fuels.
Importantly, this cost is expected to decrease precipitously as the cost of solar energy declines exponentially and as the the conversion technology continues to improve through iteration and economies of scale.
So if you’re fine turning all the equipment off most the of time you can get really cheap power, but having a 1 billion dollar facility including its workforce doing nothing 70% of the time is expensive. On the flip side if you want 24/7 operation you end up with much higher per kWh rates.
We work normally only about 33% of a day.
If you wanted to have a refueling airport in the middle of the ocean, you could put up a bunch of renewable energy generation (expensive!), use that energy to produce jet fuel (this handwaves a lot / might not be feasible as stated), sell jet fuel that you haven't had to transport
Similarly, while our global logistics are incredible, some of the cost of oil etc is that we need good systems for transporting it (pipelines, ships). Instead, imagine producing it on location.
Finally, my favorite model for new technologies (not really useful if you believe the Weinersmith "A city on Mars" thesis) is: will this technology be useful on Mars or the moon?
Eg Hyperloop makes much more sense if you already are operating in a vacuum
From that lens, I think technology like this is pretty useful to create.
Likewise, Casey's idea (Terraform Industries) requires solar energy to convert air and water to natural gas. It'll cost 10x the price of the gas Qatar & Saudi Arabia pump out of the ground essentially for free. These technologies won't be viable until humanity is pressed harder and prices (for food or fuel) climb.
Given your confidence, I assume you are aware of efficiency bottlenecks and their associated fundamental thermodynamic limits.
What do you believe is the bottleneck, and what thermodynamic principle limits it?
At renewable farm scale everyone has read about negative pricing etc, so it seems there will always be a niche to profit from.
How can you predict in advance the capex investment cost in advance of future developments?
Pumping up fossil fuel certainly comes with costs (even when excluding moral and future costs), think of employees, securing facilities against attack, etc.
Given Western divestment from Russian fossil fuels, on non-economic grounds, why couldn't we similarly some day divest from fossil fuels?
> It'll cost 10x the price of the gas Qatar & Saudi Arabia pump out of the ground essentially for free.
What a bizarre statement, 10x 0 = 0.
If you want to educate people how you believe electroreduction of CO2 to be a dead end, please give scientific and economic evidence that renewable fuels could never become cheaper than sourcing and or distributing fossil fuels.
There are a number of acknowledged assumptions in that model and other potential problems that may make their thesis incorrect, but you have raised none of them so far nor directly refuted the thesis.
For every molecule of CH4 TI creates, they're pulling a molecule of C02 out of the atmosphere to do it. When you burn a CH4 molecule from a Saudi well, you're moving carbon from the ground into the atmosphere.
The touted advantage is that instead of market-driven electrification of multiple sectors you only need one big silver bullet technology, however these are futile systems that actually reduce the total amount of energy available to society (vs electrification which does the opposite). And since the pricing signals are messed up by subsidies you can't invest in the economically optimal amount of energy efficiency. This is precisely the opposite of the sort of activity we might want to subsidize.
Handmer has some great writing on space subjects, but on this we're going to disagree.
For vertical farming, the question at the limit shouldn't be comparing solar and a farmer directly using sun, it should be: can we vertical farm on land that was unsuitable for farming? Is the cost of land increasing while the cost of solar decreases?
But in a solar world, heavy industry will be at those places with the best solar resource. If you live in a renewable energy armpit, like say the eastern parts of Europe, your heavy industry is out of luck.
armpit? What is that supposed to mean exactly? (I consider myself a near native English speaker...) A bad place to be in I suppose, but never heard this phasing.
The actual answer to this is "target" monetary inflation. That is, increasing the money supply at a slightly faster rate than the increase in productivity makes prices rise at a fixed pace.
<https://chrt.fm/track/993DGA/media.transistor.fm/bec9beab/c9...> (MP3)
