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A comment on The four-horse race to decarbonise steel. Parent comment

Re:The four-horse race to decarbonise steel by m348e912 on Monday April 10, 2023 @07:26AM (#35511124)
>> In fact it's so much cheaper that it's even more economic to use solar/wind to synthesize natural gas and burn that to generate electricity.

Interesting. Never heard of this being done in practice before, do you have references of what you're referring to?

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Re:The four-horse race to decarbonise steel by pydry on Monday April 10, 2023 @07:31AM (#35511155)
https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...

It's not done in practice because we don't actually have that much spare renewable energy capacity. Whenever renewables power 90%+ of current usage it tends to hit the news. It's not common. 100%+ is pretty much unheard of.

Pretty much every MWh generated by green energy these days is just a MWh of natural gas extracted from the earth that is not burned.

This is a hypothetical solution to solar and wind routinely overproducing what batteries and pumped storage can keep up with.

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Re:The four-horse race to decarbonise steel by ZeroGravitas on Monday April 10, 2023 @10:08AM (#35512485)
No one will do this at scale until we stop burning fossil gas.

But as a technology it exists. The early outputs will be for things that can't be replaced with cheap renewable generated electricity, like e-fuels for spacecraft, which Tesla is doing in Texas.

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