If Monkton disappeared quite a few skeptics would be happier, me included.
Anyway in more interesting news, someone is developing a method of burning natural gas
without CO2 emissions.
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They're looking to do that by making methane (CH4), the main compound in natural gas, into straight hydrogen and carbon. The hydrogen can then be burned as a fuel - in a fuel cell, a combustion engine, a boiler, anything you like - and the resulting exhaust will be harmless water rather than possibly planet-busting CO2.
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It's not all peachy clean of course
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Even if successful, the Flüssigmetallblasensäulenreaktor would no doubt face some objections. Hydrogen, though dense with energy compared to other green-energy storage media such as batteries, is nonetheless inconvenient and dangerous (hence, expensive) compared to fossil fuel. Methane itself is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and even relatively small leakages of it during natural gas production, refining etc might be seen as a problem. It isn't yet clear how much energy will be used up in the process of turning methane into hydrogen, but this will plainly be non-trivial as metal has to be kept molten for it to happen.
But there is at least some prospect here of powering the human race with very low carbon emissions - not just the few per cent of its needs met by electricity, but just about everything - using potentially abundant natural gas rather than cripplingly expensive, sharply limited renewables or politically contentious nuclear means.
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