It’s more about the how and why.

How: CCS pumps liquefied or pressurized gas into an exhausted oil or saline reservoir. These reservoirs didn’t hold pressurized gas before, so it’s difficult (if not impossible) to prove they won’t leak. In the Decatur case, about 8 kilotons of CO2 and saltwater either found or created a crack in the reservoir, exactly as critics predicted. Locals are worried about groundwater contamination.

Why: CCS is largely unregulated in the US, and the companies interested in it are ones with awful environmental track records – ADM is no exception there. To claim the 45Q tax credit, they only need to store the CO2 for 3 years. Why would they care about preventing leaks if they already got their payout? Doing shoddy work is in their best interest.

Does this event prove that underground CCS is literally impossible? Of course not. But feasibility isn’t a pass/fail test, it’s judged by factors like cost and risk. This event proves the approach isn’t foolproof and the companies aren’t trustworthy. So it’s high time we stop acting like they are.

Youtube videos often gloss over the details for the sake of uninhibited futurism.

Large-scale hydrogen electrolysis has a cost of around 55kWh/kg, and when you combust the H2 directly you get about 39kWh/kg back. Without compression/transport, using H2 as a heating fuel is 71% efficient.

H2 is usually compressed for transport. Compression of 1 kg of H2 to 700 bar costs about 5kWh of additional electricity. I’ll spare you the calcs, but truck transport is under 1kWh/kg H2. This reduces our efficiency to 39kWh/61kWh or 64%.

Converting H2 to ammonia takes the place of the compressor and truck. 2 mols of ammonia burn for 162kcal, less than the 204kcal you’d get from 3 mols of H2. The Haber-Bosch process reduces output to 31kWh per kg of H2 put in. This reduces out efficiency to 31kWh/55kWh or 56%.

With currently-proven cracking technology, it costs around 23kcal/mol of ammonia, reducing overall efficiency to about 55%. It is more effective to burn ammonia directly than to convert it into H2 and burn the H2.

Using ammonia as a transport medium removes a bunch of technical problems, but it introduces new ones. It’s corrosive, it’s toxic, it burns eyes/lungs/skin, and it wastes more energy than you’d think.

Yes. Discontinued for 2024. They’ll revamp it at some unspecified point in the future, for some unspecified price point.

The lack of competitive minivans, hatchbacks, coupes, long-bed trucks, and station wagons really hurts uptake. While crossovers are all the rage for the average consumer, EV adopters trend away from the average, and having a wide selection can make a huge difference when it comes to overcoming the price barrier or difference in capability.

Case in point, I’ve seen motorheads swear they’d never touch an EV with less than 500 miles of range, only to recant the moment they saw a Honda E.

I’m gonna post this link to a former comment of mine, since this subject comes up a lot. Neither EVs nor public transit is a magic bullet.

The efficiency of public transit depends on ridership; nowhere in the world does it actually achieve 100% occupancy for more than a few minutes at a time, and nothing is more wasteful than a train running a circuit with only one passenger. At least by my calculations, it would take an average occupancy rate increase of 1.6x (for electric light rail) to 2.4x (for electric busses) over pre-pandemic levels for US public transit to reach parity with EVs, both in terms of electricity per passenger mile and tons of raw material per capita (such as steel, aluminum, copper, glass, and plastic). We’d need higher occupancy than the trains in Europe and the busses in Taiwan. Whether or not that’s geographically possible in North America is an open question.

Ebikes are great, no question there, but thanks to parasitic drain in cheap chargers, they use 1/3rd the energy a typical EV does (kWh per passenger-mile, adjusted for occupancy but not speed), when they should use only 1/10th. That’s a problem I expect to see solved in the next year or so, but it’s a great reminder that nothing runs on magic.

As I say in the linked comment, public transit has critical advantages in the fields of urbanism and human-centric city design. I like trains and busses, and I vote for them every chance I get, it just bothers me when people conflate these advantages with environmental impact.

They didn’t make it weird in any way really.

My dude, they were so dedicated to making it weird that they gave it no glove compartment.

The Chevy Bolt is no longer in production.

I will say this about Biden: the dude’s downright sneaky. It seems to be his administration’s main strategy to publicly walk back a major agenda point, let right-wingers celebrate, and then after the media hype (and potential for right-wing backlash) dies out, quietly split it up into smaller programs that get pushed further than the original agenda ever could.

• He blocked the rail strike, but then went back and ensured the unions got their sick leave anyway.
• He approved historic oil projects, but then went back and curtailed more oil production than he ever approved.
• He let Senator Manchin gut EV tax credits, but then spread that money out in the IRA and IIJA with green infrastructure funding so comprehensive that it has international attention.
• He’s been criticized for being soft on China’s military (by the right) and emissions (by the left), but the CHIPS Act and FABS Act and ban(s) on chip and tooling exports have all but eliminated China’s greatest source of geopolitical leverage: their nascent monopoly on electronics.
• The SCOTUS struck down student loan forgiveness, but Biden went back and forgave more, this time splitting it into multiple smaller programs that are harder to stop.

So yeah, it seems on-brand that the Biden administration would push for LNG exports after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and then go back later and curtail them instead.

Gives me these kinda vibes.

Swept area and wind speed increase exponentially with size and height. So a single 5kW wind turbine will almost always be more cost effective than five 1kW wind turbines.

As others have said, without the height of a utility-grade turbine, you’ll need to study the wind on your property to find where the wind is strongest and most consistent so you don’t put a turbine in a dead spot. If your property is adjacent to an open field, that’s probably a good place to start.

If I didn’t just talk you out of consumer-grade turbines, I’d suggest checking out these guys: https://windandsolar.com/wind-turbine-generators/

And their Youtube channel, where they explain why their turbines are the way they are: https://m.youtube.com/user/MissouriWindandSolar

And as always, Energy Sage has great advice: https://www.energysage.com/about-clean-energy/wind/small-wind-turbines-overview/

MIT’s estimate of about $73/MWh for renewable+transmission is low. It appropriately estimates amortization costs, but purchasing from a transmission operator will always come with a markup. Not much (utilities don’t usually behave like corporations), but enough to be significant.

MIT’s price for renewable+storage at $135/MWh seems high, too. Lazard calculates LCOE for wind+storage at $42-114/MWh and for solar+storage at $46-102/MWh.

I’m still a big fan of HV transmission, as it enables renewable generation to take advantage of cheap land and/or terrain advantages (high wind speed in the Midwest, concentrated solar in the South, geothermal in the West). But I think we’ll still see a lot of local utilities just get batteries and call it a day.