Comment by estimator7292 6 hours ago
I'm a hardline no-fossi-fuels ever kind of guy and yes, this is clean energy.
If you collect the pollutants before emitting them and turn them into stable products, you aren't polluting.
Ergo, clean.
There will be more atomic C in the upper layers of the Earth if you dig deep and pump out natural gas.
How long will the C atoms in those "stable product" stay there?
Burning wood is clean energy: it does not increase the number of atomic C in the upper layers. Natural gas is not, unless you find a way to store those C.
This also produces carbon nanotubes, which they claim can be used in construction.
Given that construction currently uses a huge amount of concrete, and given that concrete emits huge amounts of CO2[1], if this could partially replace concrete in construction, it might actually be clean. At least compared to what we're doing now.
I doubt foundations are going to be made out of carbon nanotubes, but they might be useful for the structure (columns, beams, etc.).
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[1] "4-8% of total global CO2" according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre...
> Except natural gas is a hydrocarbon, isn't it?
Why is that disqualifying?
The problem is combustion’s emission of sequestered carbon. If you don’t have that you don’t have this problem.
The problems with natural gas are definitely not confined to combustion. Methane leakage is a huge problem.
That and if you just encourage more exploration, and it's cheaper to just burn the stuff anyways, guess what happens in the price conscious free market?
> ignoring the dirty processing problem
You concluded it’s processed dirtily at the source based on that premise (“which means”). If you’re independently asserting that, you’d have a point.
Resource extraction is pretty much never a clean process. That gas came from somewhere.