They must be assuming large increases in natural gas prices or large CO2 taxes.
I think it will be much easier to get the price/BTU of H2 down below the current price of natural gas than it would be to get synthetic methane down that cheap.
(If they are assuming large CO2 taxes then it's probably a better business model to just collect CO2 from the air and sequester it.)
they say $250/t in the article, but could you expand how you came to "A ton of natural gas requires 2.75 tons of CO2"? Where 1.75t of CO2 is disappearing in result?
Molecular weight of CO2: 44
One molecule of CO2 is needed to get the carbon atom to make one molecule of methane.
44/16 = 2.75
The 1.75t of CO2 that went missing is the oxygen, which obviously isn't in the methane.
They claim the green way to go is converting hydrogen into methane....check out the link for a company claiming the green way to go is converting methane to hydrogen:
https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/new-clean-energy-process-con...
I rather suspect that taking an energy detour through methane either way is a red herring. I mean....the OP says that their whole process is powered by solar energy. So they are presupposing that solar energy is going to be WAAAYYYY cheaper than methane. Why not just use the solar power directly?
Are you serious? Water is right there!
It's considerably easier to get H2 out of methane. Unfortunately, that process also yields CO2, so it's not helping the greenhouse gas situation.
Hydrogen proponents suggest a route where we start with "blue hydrogen" from natural gas. Then, when we've got a good H2 infrastructure going and a lot of excess electricity from solar, we can switch over to "green hydrogen" from water.
Skeptics point out that this is incredibly stupid, and that "hydrogen proponents" tend to be closely in bed with the fossil fuel industry. It looks an awful lot like an excuse to delay the elimination of fossil-fuel replacements like wind and solar.
What this ignores is that hydrogen must still be made even in a post-fossil fuel economy. It's not optional. Production of ammonia requires hydrogen, and without ammonia-derived nitrogen fertilizer billions of people will starve. About half the nitrogen atoms in your body came from synthetic ammonia.
The meme is really weird. In all other applications, we assume that fossil fuels will be displaced, by law and force if necessary. But somehow SMR will always be used to make hydrogen; the technology will somehow be immune to the forces that will be deployed against all other fossil fuel uses. It's really crazy when examined closely.
This is 30+ year design lifetime infrastructure. Investments were made on that basis: no one is going to turn off anything.
Which is the best argument in favor of otherwise ludicrously inefficient power-to-gas storage schemes: if you could, by some miracle, undercut fracking extraction, then at the very least you'd only have to bankrupt the well-operators - not the pipeline, export terminals etc.
But I'm extremely skeptical this is possible and it will be fought against dirtily (see the anti-wind power campaigners).
The thing is you pay for all of that pretty heavily - it's all more expensive with other drawbacks, but it's not nearly the complete pain that handling hydrogen is.
[1]https://www.solarpaces.org/why-solar-sulphur-cycle-ideal-sea...
On that relevant metric, hydrogen is very hard to beat, particularly if proper geology is available (salt formations for solution mined storage cavities). Costs less than $1/kWh are possible.
Artificially heated geothermal may be competitive on that metric, but its RTE is likely to be even lower.
There's an order of magnitude more companies and hype around those use cases than there are around actually important ones.
yes :-) Think about it: why did Saturn V use hydrogen and oxygen? Because burning hydrogen produces more energy by weight than any other chemical reaction.
If putting hydrogen and oxygen together releases the most energy, then splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen would also take the most energy. Any other chemical reaction which yielded H2 would take less energy.
And, given that methane is 80 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2 is, is it really a good idea to be manufacturing it? Inevitably there would be leakage, and it wouldn't take much to leak enough gas to more than compensate for any C02 sucked out of the air.