On April 7&8 I attended the Hydrogen Symposium at the Colorado School of Mines which had some excitement about the possibilities for Geologic H2 and for other use cases offered some frank admissions about the fact that H2 would have to overcome huge hurdles considering competing technologies that don't have these hurdles and don't stand still either. I got away with the impression that a) scientists just love (well funded) hard problems, and that b) O&G is only too happy to reap Biden's IRA billions to delay electrification while improving their technologies to burn stuff.
My fantasy episode: Debunking two oil and gas scams---hydrogen and carbon capture--in one fell swoop. Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you. And now I will share this with every energy minister I can find.
Romm's comment"There's only one way to make carbon-free hydrogen, and that is with carbon-free power." is not correct. Hydrogen can be produced via slow high temperature pyrolysis of biomass that produces gas with >40% H2 and solid elemental carbon, aka biochar. If the feedstock is fast-growing "for purpose" crops that remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and half of the carbon is sequestered in the biochar, the net result is carbon-negative hydrogen that can be produced at a significantly lower cost than electrolysis of water.
Romm's comment"There's only one way to make carbon-free hydrogen, and that is with carbon-free power." is not correct. Hydrogen can be produced via slow high temperature pyrolysis of biomass that produces gas with >40% H2 and solid elemental carbon, aka biochar. If the feedstock is fast-growing "for purpose" crops that remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and half of the carbon is sequestered in the biochar, the net result is carbon-negative hydrogen that can be produced at a significantly lower cost than electrolysis of water.
I generally believe the hydrogen hype to be mostly a smoke screen put up by the oil industry, whose real purpose is not even to sell hydrogen, but to sell oil. The idea is to argue to politicians that we should not spend money promoting electricity or pass regulations discouraging oil until the technology that will become oil's successor is more clear. That way, government is stuck spinning its wheels forever, while the world continues to burn more oil, making the oil companies richer.
The US makes 10 million tonnes of H2 each year, almost all of it with stream methane reforming. Globally that figure is about 100 million tonnes. Much of it to make what the world needs to survive (think fertilizer).
Joe a acknowledges the best use of any clean H2 is to backfill this current demand. So what's the best way to do that? Equipping this massive capacity with CCUS? Electrolysis?
What I learned from this episode is that the former is "stupid on its face" and the latter a poor use of renewables. No real insight into this issue that will remain salient even if Dave has his way and burns all the above facilites down and urinates on their remains.
I come to these episodes hoping to gain insight but too often get a pep rally for Team Electron that glazes over pressing questions that we will have to deal with in favor of confirming everyone's political priors and reveling in celebratory groupthink. Not the best use of an hour IMO.
This one is really cool, and I'm going to have to listen/read it a couple more times. Thanks for spending so much time on the aviation question and really drilling down to the core of the problem. If I'm interpreting right, and without trying to predict, we might wind up with transatlantic battery operated planes, but we'll have to wait for them to be integrated into the whole air frame, and that's a long ways away simply because new airframes happen on multi-decade time frames.
There's something I've been wondering off and on for while about efuels in regards to long haul flight that I think this pod addressed. IF you have a cost effective direct air capture, then it's cheaper to use that to offset burning jet fuel we get from the ground than it is to make efuel.
Or in other words, a prerequisite for efuel creates a direct competitor for efuel that will always be cheaper because it is a required step in a multistep process.
My personal take is that the eventual future of commercial flights will be battery power for short distances, traditional jet fuel for longer distances, and anything else is mostly a waste of time. The simple reason is that, even ignoring battery tech, alternative fuels are inherently more expensive than conventional fuels, so would require either large government subsidies or costly government mandates in order to be used.
Unlike climate measures such as solar, wind, or heat pumps that have real potential to lower people's energy costs in the long run, a policy of subsidy/mandate for SAF would amount of pure economic sacrifice for the sake of the climate, with no residual benefits. It doesn't even reduce local pollution much around airports, since a fuel that is chemically identical to jet fuel (the whole point of SAF) emits the same exhaust as jet fuel when burned; it's literally only purpose (with respect to climate change) is carbon accounting, where you get to claim that the carbon emitted by burning the fuel is offset by carbon removed by growing it.
And, there are good reasonable to be skeptical that SAF even has non-trivial climate benefits. After all, the crops growing the fuel take up space, and whatever else would have been growing there had the fuel crops not been planted, would have been removing carbon from the earth's atmosphere anyway. So, it is quite possible that SAF is effectively a policy which says that, by chopping down forests and planting fuel crops, that you get to claim credit for CO2 removed by the fuel crops that you wouldn't get with forest on the land, even if the fuel crops actually remove less carbon than the forest did. And, that's not even getting into all that fossil-fuel-powered energy required to extract, process, refine, and transport the fuel, once the crops have finished growing.
E-fuels, of course, is orders of magnitude worse, even compared to biofuels like SAF. Like said in the podcast, it's essentially trying to reverse entropy.
I'd be more optimistic about gobs of surplus renewable energy being exploited for synthetic aviation fuel production if all the existing energy surplus from Texas & Iowa wind farms wasn't already being sucked up by all the CryptoBro fraudsters who got kicked out of China in 2022.
Maybe our biggest problem in the US is that fossil energy is way too cheap because it's so heavily subsidized & it's externalities, like public health & abandon wells, are so universally discounted & ignored.
I live in a carbon bank. I call it the New North Washoe Forests Bank. Its base asset is the Avoided CO2 that it has captured since it started to grow out of the ruins of the Previous North Washoe Forests, which under the Previous Management (the Washoe people, whose occupation of this region was very very long, until about 1850 CE) held a great deal more Avoided CO2 than the New Forests do now.
The Previous Forests were also much more resilient to fire, which were a core part of the Previous Management's technology. Things are now changing in here in the Washoe country and in the Maidu and Nisenan lands to our west, but until we got to work the probability of the TAC value of any given portion of the forests reaching a low minimum over the next 10 years, because of catastrophic wildfire was very high.
The CO2 emitted by each one of the fires you all hear about (I live just outside the footprint of the 2021 Dixie Fire) is large. Dixie lost an estimated (CARB) 37.4 million TAC.
We really don't like it when the Bank burns up. We know that investments to reduce the "stem density" immediately reduces the expected TAC loss, and over the longer term continued restoration work allows the Forests Bank base asset to grow towards the values acheived under Prior Management.
We're spending TAC the whole time, to produce a greater EV(TAC). That's how Carbon Economics work.
This framework gets to the same answers in this article (Hydrogen is oversold, grow the grid, Team Electron!) , while providing a commercial framework (TAC optimization over a TAC-denominated financial system) to get these decisions out of the hands of the meme traders...
The economics of this are obvious to the general-equilibrium economists (Krugman recounts the tale of John Law and the invention by a renegade gambler of the partial-reserve monetary system, which makes me guess that he has run across the forests-as-reserve-bank proposition to support a TAC monetary system). Alas, we are as scarce as hen's teeth in the partial-equilibrium practice of , for example, power systems economics.
Team Electron really needs to get its collective head around general-equilibrium carbon economics.
"Geothermal" is very broad, even if you restrict it to the application of electric generation. Check the recent episode of Volts: "Catching up with enhanced geothermal" ( FEB 12, 2025 ). Obviously, Tim Latimer, CEO of Fervo, is an interested party, and is probably optimistic about things that are simply unknown. News to me, in the latest episode, is that Fervo has made the interesting choice of using organic Rankine cycle turbines.
The Biden DOE set a target of $45 per megawatt hour of geothermal electricity by 2035. IMO, that is super cheap, given the potential flexibility and availability of EGS.
I remain cautiously optimistic. Why some decision makers seem to be choosing Unknown A vs. Unknown B is kind of a mystery to me. I always have to wonder if I might be falling for something that is simply really good at self-promotion and fundraising.
Where can I order my Team Electron T-shirt!?
On April 7&8 I attended the Hydrogen Symposium at the Colorado School of Mines which had some excitement about the possibilities for Geologic H2 and for other use cases offered some frank admissions about the fact that H2 would have to overcome huge hurdles considering competing technologies that don't have these hurdles and don't stand still either. I got away with the impression that a) scientists just love (well funded) hard problems, and that b) O&G is only too happy to reap Biden's IRA billions to delay electrification while improving their technologies to burn stuff.
Forgot to mention: Joe's new book is on my desk but I haven't gotten past Saul Griffith's foreword yet.
My fantasy episode: Debunking two oil and gas scams---hydrogen and carbon capture--in one fell swoop. Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you. And now I will share this with every energy minister I can find.
For a short an hilarious takedown of CCUS there's no better source than "Honest Government" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8
Romm's comment"There's only one way to make carbon-free hydrogen, and that is with carbon-free power." is not correct. Hydrogen can be produced via slow high temperature pyrolysis of biomass that produces gas with >40% H2 and solid elemental carbon, aka biochar. If the feedstock is fast-growing "for purpose" crops that remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and half of the carbon is sequestered in the biochar, the net result is carbon-negative hydrogen that can be produced at a significantly lower cost than electrolysis of water.
Romm's comment"There's only one way to make carbon-free hydrogen, and that is with carbon-free power." is not correct. Hydrogen can be produced via slow high temperature pyrolysis of biomass that produces gas with >40% H2 and solid elemental carbon, aka biochar. If the feedstock is fast-growing "for purpose" crops that remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and half of the carbon is sequestered in the biochar, the net result is carbon-negative hydrogen that can be produced at a significantly lower cost than electrolysis of water.
I generally believe the hydrogen hype to be mostly a smoke screen put up by the oil industry, whose real purpose is not even to sell hydrogen, but to sell oil. The idea is to argue to politicians that we should not spend money promoting electricity or pass regulations discouraging oil until the technology that will become oil's successor is more clear. That way, government is stuck spinning its wheels forever, while the world continues to burn more oil, making the oil companies richer.
The US makes 10 million tonnes of H2 each year, almost all of it with stream methane reforming. Globally that figure is about 100 million tonnes. Much of it to make what the world needs to survive (think fertilizer).
Joe a acknowledges the best use of any clean H2 is to backfill this current demand. So what's the best way to do that? Equipping this massive capacity with CCUS? Electrolysis?
What I learned from this episode is that the former is "stupid on its face" and the latter a poor use of renewables. No real insight into this issue that will remain salient even if Dave has his way and burns all the above facilites down and urinates on their remains.
I come to these episodes hoping to gain insight but too often get a pep rally for Team Electron that glazes over pressing questions that we will have to deal with in favor of confirming everyone's political priors and reveling in celebratory groupthink. Not the best use of an hour IMO.
Great getting the old blogger gang back together
Great guest. Who knew Gene Wilder was so knowledgeable on the energy transition.
This one is really cool, and I'm going to have to listen/read it a couple more times. Thanks for spending so much time on the aviation question and really drilling down to the core of the problem. If I'm interpreting right, and without trying to predict, we might wind up with transatlantic battery operated planes, but we'll have to wait for them to be integrated into the whole air frame, and that's a long ways away simply because new airframes happen on multi-decade time frames.
There's something I've been wondering off and on for while about efuels in regards to long haul flight that I think this pod addressed. IF you have a cost effective direct air capture, then it's cheaper to use that to offset burning jet fuel we get from the ground than it is to make efuel.
Or in other words, a prerequisite for efuel creates a direct competitor for efuel that will always be cheaper because it is a required step in a multistep process.
Does that sound right to anyone else?
My personal take is that the eventual future of commercial flights will be battery power for short distances, traditional jet fuel for longer distances, and anything else is mostly a waste of time. The simple reason is that, even ignoring battery tech, alternative fuels are inherently more expensive than conventional fuels, so would require either large government subsidies or costly government mandates in order to be used.
Unlike climate measures such as solar, wind, or heat pumps that have real potential to lower people's energy costs in the long run, a policy of subsidy/mandate for SAF would amount of pure economic sacrifice for the sake of the climate, with no residual benefits. It doesn't even reduce local pollution much around airports, since a fuel that is chemically identical to jet fuel (the whole point of SAF) emits the same exhaust as jet fuel when burned; it's literally only purpose (with respect to climate change) is carbon accounting, where you get to claim that the carbon emitted by burning the fuel is offset by carbon removed by growing it.
And, there are good reasonable to be skeptical that SAF even has non-trivial climate benefits. After all, the crops growing the fuel take up space, and whatever else would have been growing there had the fuel crops not been planted, would have been removing carbon from the earth's atmosphere anyway. So, it is quite possible that SAF is effectively a policy which says that, by chopping down forests and planting fuel crops, that you get to claim credit for CO2 removed by the fuel crops that you wouldn't get with forest on the land, even if the fuel crops actually remove less carbon than the forest did. And, that's not even getting into all that fossil-fuel-powered energy required to extract, process, refine, and transport the fuel, once the crops have finished growing.
E-fuels, of course, is orders of magnitude worse, even compared to biofuels like SAF. Like said in the podcast, it's essentially trying to reverse entropy.
I'd be more optimistic about gobs of surplus renewable energy being exploited for synthetic aviation fuel production if all the existing energy surplus from Texas & Iowa wind farms wasn't already being sucked up by all the CryptoBro fraudsters who got kicked out of China in 2022.
Maybe our biggest problem in the US is that fossil energy is way too cheap because it's so heavily subsidized & it's externalities, like public health & abandon wells, are so universally discounted & ignored.
Great conversation. Team Electron!
I live in a carbon bank. I call it the New North Washoe Forests Bank. Its base asset is the Avoided CO2 that it has captured since it started to grow out of the ruins of the Previous North Washoe Forests, which under the Previous Management (the Washoe people, whose occupation of this region was very very long, until about 1850 CE) held a great deal more Avoided CO2 than the New Forests do now.
The Previous Forests were also much more resilient to fire, which were a core part of the Previous Management's technology. Things are now changing in here in the Washoe country and in the Maidu and Nisenan lands to our west, but until we got to work the probability of the TAC value of any given portion of the forests reaching a low minimum over the next 10 years, because of catastrophic wildfire was very high.
The CO2 emitted by each one of the fires you all hear about (I live just outside the footprint of the 2021 Dixie Fire) is large. Dixie lost an estimated (CARB) 37.4 million TAC.
We really don't like it when the Bank burns up. We know that investments to reduce the "stem density" immediately reduces the expected TAC loss, and over the longer term continued restoration work allows the Forests Bank base asset to grow towards the values acheived under Prior Management.
We're spending TAC the whole time, to produce a greater EV(TAC). That's how Carbon Economics work.
This framework gets to the same answers in this article (Hydrogen is oversold, grow the grid, Team Electron!) , while providing a commercial framework (TAC optimization over a TAC-denominated financial system) to get these decisions out of the hands of the meme traders...
The economics of this are obvious to the general-equilibrium economists (Krugman recounts the tale of John Law and the invention by a renegade gambler of the partial-reserve monetary system, which makes me guess that he has run across the forests-as-reserve-bank proposition to support a TAC monetary system). Alas, we are as scarce as hen's teeth in the partial-equilibrium practice of , for example, power systems economics.
Team Electron really needs to get its collective head around general-equilibrium carbon economics.
How about Geothermal generation. Of electric ?
"Geothermal" is very broad, even if you restrict it to the application of electric generation. Check the recent episode of Volts: "Catching up with enhanced geothermal" ( FEB 12, 2025 ). Obviously, Tim Latimer, CEO of Fervo, is an interested party, and is probably optimistic about things that are simply unknown. News to me, in the latest episode, is that Fervo has made the interesting choice of using organic Rankine cycle turbines.
The Biden DOE set a target of $45 per megawatt hour of geothermal electricity by 2035. IMO, that is super cheap, given the potential flexibility and availability of EGS.
I remain cautiously optimistic. Why some decision makers seem to be choosing Unknown A vs. Unknown B is kind of a mystery to me. I always have to wonder if I might be falling for something that is simply really good at self-promotion and fundraising.
Amazing topic and interview, David! Volts is my go to source for clean energy and tech related info! Top notch!!