The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 1,579 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Bredariol: IEA estimates global flare combustion efficiency at 92%, not industry-claimed 98%
“We at the International Energy Agency estimate that the combustion efficiency of flares globally is at around 92%. That's a much lower number than what you might hear from the industry. They will often refer to 98%, but it's in line with several scientific stu…”
Johnson: Geologic hydrogen extraction costs should match natural gas extraction
“If you can find hydrogen under the ground, the reality is you should be able to produce it from a volumetric standpoint at a similar cost that we produce natural gas out of the ground.”
Johnson: Natural hydrogen fields require just 1-3 MWh input per ton
“Our best estimates for a natural hydrogen field is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of one to three megawatt hours of energy in to pull a ton of hydrogen out. So that's one to three megawatt hours of parasitic costs of, you know, running compressors and …”
Dell: No steel company is commercializing large-scale blast furnace carbon capture
“There's very little going on in the world of carbon capture in the steel industry right now. There are a there are no large-scale efforts to commercialize this technology. Like, there isn't a single steel company anywhere in the world that's like, we're gonna …”
Berdichevsky: Some US battery factory projects will get mothballed
“So I do think some of these projects are still, are not going to go forward at certain stages. You know, and that's kind of classic. A lot of times, you know, maybe half the announced projects end up getting built. The pipeline is way bigger than the demand to…”
Kann predicts US data center capacity will double by 2030.
“I'm on the oversight here. I'm betting that there will be more than 20 gigawatts of new data center capacity in the United States by then.”
Loo: Projections show ammonia will eventually be cheaper than e-methanol
“In the long term, if you look at the projections and the numbers, I think if costs were the driver, then the cost of ammonia is going to be cheaper than the cost of e-methanol.”
BYD's new hybrid technology delivers 2,100 kilometer range for under $15,000
“What they call the DM-F.O technology, which is an interesting technology in that it increased the fuel efficiency to around, like, 80 to 90 miles per gallon. And they made a lot of waves with this 2100 kilometer range claim, which has been verified by, you kno…”
Friedmann: Announced SAF plants cannot meet the 2027 global airline mandate
“If every Sustainable aviation fuel plant that had been announced were to be built, there would not be enough fuel for the twenty-twenty-seven target. Period.”
Grabow: US-built container ships cost five times more than international builds
“By the 19 thirties, it was up to a 50% premium for U.S. Built ships. By the 19 fifties, a U.S. Built ship was double the cost of one built abroad. By the 19 nineties, it was triple the cost of one built abroad, and today, a U.S. Built container ship is somewhe…”
Grabow: Zero Jones Act-Compliant LNG Tankers Exist in the United States
“We can't transport it by water to other parts of the United States because there are no LNG tankers that comply with the Jones Act.”
Steingart: Redwood, Ascend, and Li-Cycle rely on scrap exceeding 20%
“Currently, all three of these companies are living off of gigafactory scrap, which is exceptionally high, over, over 20%, as I understand it.”
Lubbershane: Utilities are postponing coal plant retirements due to load growth
“The first thing that utilities are planning to build to manage their entry into the gauntlet is they're planning to not retire their coal power plants on previously agreed upon or decided upon timelines.”
Mills: DOE will compromise on proposed transformer efficiency standard
“They asked for public, the Department of Energy asked for public comment, and I think there was enough out there and enough concern expressed that I suspect a compromise position is going to come out. I don't think what they had originally released will actual…”
Cantor: BYD surpassed Tesla in quarterly EV sales in Q4 2023
“BYD hit all their targets last year in terms of sales, and they've surpassed Tesla in terms of fully electric vehicles on a quarterly basis in Q four.”
Cantor: Only 4% of the $5B federal NEVI EV charging funds have been awarded
“And if you look at the infrastructure law with the five billion dollars as a part of the NEVI program, according to our charging infrastructure team, only four percent of those funds have been awarded to charging infrastructure operators.”
Orbuch: High-quality carbon removal offtakes rival legacy voluntary market size
“Most of the dollars that have gone into the sort of market for higher quality removals are forward offtakes, right? Shayle Kann: Right. Shayle Kann: I guess that's true. Ryan Orbuch: So the cash is spent when the removal is delivered. And like, if you add up a…”
Orbuch: Carbon credit registries face structural conflicts when paid by suppliers
“The methodology creation itself is often conflicted, where the supplier is paying the registry to create a methodology for them, which has some obvious issues. Or they're using some other one that some other supplier created.”
Nearly 60% of plant-based meat buyers are not substituting it for beef.
“What we hear from consumers is that about almost 60% of consumers who are buying plant-based meat are not substituting for beef. It's for a food other than beef, whether it's poultry, pork, seafood, eggs, non-meat, you know, pasta, pizza.”
Visioni: IMO 2020 sulfur cuts added roughly 0.05°C of global warming
“There's a few course estimates that, just based on Earth's sensitivity, say, suggested, says probably Alf, a 10th of a degree overall of increased warming.”
Vijendran: Central space solar beam will likely reach 200 watts per square meter
“Part of the beam, especially the central part of the beam, will likely be exceeding safety limits up to perhaps a couple of hundred watts per square meter.”
Vijendran: Full space solar system costs fell from $100B to $1B–$10B
“What was a hundred billion before, now you're looking at one to ten billion for a full system, depending on, on the scale you're looking at.”
Sylvera rates under a quarter of carbon credits in top three grades
“We would say of the credits on the market the minority have like a strong environmental integrity. So you'd maybe say around, well actually less than a quarter, we would rate in our top three grades. And now you would have very, very high degree of confidence …”
Lubershane: Form Energy's 100-hour battery will cost under a tenth of lithium-ion
“Form is on track to achieve a total installed cost. We're not talking about the cost of the materials here, but a total installed cost for a approximately a hundred hour battery system, which is basically a four day battery system that is in the ballpark of a …”
EPA rule mandates 90% CCS or 96% hydrogen for large gas units
“The basics are the really big plants, meaning 300 megawatt nameplate units or larger, running at 50% capacity factor or more, need to meet a Standard equal to carbon, 90% carbon capture by 2035, or 96% hydrogen co-firing by 2038.”
Hertz-Shargel: Many Bitcoin miners run even at $4,000/MWh power prices
“Some miners do have a price threshold which empirically is between 103 hundred dollars per megawatt hour but many have basically no threshold, and they will continue running up even into the thousands, up to 4000 dollars per per megawatt hour.”
Hertz-Shargel: Major Bitcoin mines are not signing offtake PPAs with new renewables
“So they are not signing new PPAs with new wind to as off takers to kind of make these plans happen. They're signing PPAs with retailers and utilities mostly conventional types of deals, such as being put on base interruptible rates. So, you know, it provides d…”
Jaffe: Treasury Classifies Constituent Materials as Minerals Subject to 50% Rule
“So I think what essentially what the guidance said was constituent materials, which is going to be any of these precursor steps up to the battery component itself, essentially falls under strategic minerals. As in the strategic minerals qualification. Now they…”
Lithium processed in China temporarily qualifies for EV tax credits
“If you are today shipping your spodumine to China to be made into lithium hydroxide then that's, if China does turn out to be a foreign entity of concern, that will disqualify that material for the tax credit. So right now, it is going to be qualified, but as …”
Replacing 209 of 210 US Coal Plants With Renewables Is Cheaper
“There is probably a recent report you probably saw that 209 out of the 210 coal plants that are operating currently in the U.S. Would be cheaper to shut them down and just invest in the capital cost of building renewable energy to replace them.”
Kugelmass: No entity has completed NRC licensing for under $1 billion
“In order to get a license, you have to submit a license application. It is at minimum, in the U.S., it's at minimum four years, ah, worth of work. No one has done it for less than one billion dollars. No one has spent less than one billion dollars in licensing…”
NRC added 1,200 pages of new regulations despite congressional streamlining mandate
“And they took all of the old regulations, the regulations that drive up the costs to ten billion, or to one billion dollars, make it take 10 years, and then they added 1200 pages of new regulations.”
Koch-Blank: Historical IPCC tables underestimated the climate impact of hydrogen leakage
“There has, I mean, if you go back in the tables that have been developed by the IPCC process and used in all the national inventories for hydrogen leakage, the number has been significantly lower than some of the recent research suggests.”
Sachs: Utilities base interconnection approvals on the worst-hour annual peak
“If you want to interconnect a battery or a solar panel or whatever to the utility today, they're going to look at the worst hour or when the most demand was on that line of the entire year and tell you if you're allowed to inject or not based on that.”
Friedmann: Ammonia power generation will be limited to select Asian economies
“I do think it's going to be unusual to It's going to be big in those economies, but not the rest of the world. India is not going to do this. The US is not going to do this. South Africa is not going to do this. They have other options. And so ammonia is a pow…”
Friedmann: Science is unsure if atmospheric ammonia increases or decreases net warming
“As we looked into this in our report, one of the things we discovered is that if ammonia gets in the air and atmosphere, we do not know today whether it makes greenhouse gas warming bigger or smaller. A lot of evidence suggests it improves greenhouse gas warmi…”
Waste-oil aviation fuels cannot scale to meet double-digit jet fuel demand
“Today's generation is based on waste oils, fats, and greases. As you mentioned, Shale, they compete with food crops. They don't have great greenhouse gas reduction. Oh, and by the way, they don't scale. We're just, there's no way we're going to get to, you kno…”
Chase: Global Polysilicon Shortage Will End in Early 2023
“We think that this, the polysilicon shortage, we strongly think will end maybe in the next three months, although I've been saying that for a while.”
Jenny Chase: Solar will be built for green hydrogen production by 2030
“And that's even before you start thinking about, are we going to build solar to make hydrogen? And I suspect that by 2030 we are, just because we've got no idea how else to manage the problems of intermittency and how to decarbonize steel and fertilizer.”
Reed: Non-ERCOT Texas avoided prolonged blackouts through grid interconnections
“And even the parts of Texas that were not run by ERCOT, especially, right, were experiencing this extreme weather, but did not have this massive multi-day blackout problem. Because they had so much more power available and were able to share it.”
Reed: Underground HVDC may cost only 1x to 2x of overhead lines
“There's some estimates out there that you might actually be closer to parity as opposed to the sort of five to 10 X that's normally cited. It could be closer to one to two X if you think about power over distance. So mile by mile you're more expensive, but gig…”
Slesserev: No-till farming can actually deplete soil carbon at deeper depths
“Basically shifting tillage regime it means that not only are you changing the biology of the system and the rate at which carbon Flows through it, but also changing the vertical distribution of carbon, because tilling soil mixes carbon, and it also influences …”
Beard: Drilling 70,000 geothermal wells yearly to 2050 meets global energy demand
“Current oil and gas well drilling capacity in the world, which is roughly, you know, 70,000 wells a year. We do that every year between now and 20 50. That meets global energy demand.”
Chay: Soil carbon protocols broadly lack measurement, permanence, and additionality
“We did a really interesting review of all of the protocols, so all of the crediting rules that are currently used to issue credits to soil carbon in collaboration with Jane Zelikova, and basically, you know, you have these PDF documents that, maybe you have mu…”
Chay: California depleted its 100-year forest carbon wildfire buffer in 10 years
“Yeah, it's not all the way gone, but we've, we have used up all of the credits that were meant to protect against forest fires for the next 100 years in the first 10 years of the program.”
Chay: Protocols issue carbon credits for farming practices started a decade ago
“A lot of these protocols allow people to get credits for practices they started a while ago, like maybe up to 10 years ago.”
Mukhopadhyay: 9-seat electric planes only get 150km range with current batteries
“With current battery technology, and including sort of the standard reserves that are required for flights, you would, you probably get about a 150 kilometers out of the nine seater aircraft, which is a lot less that's close to a hundred miles”
Mukhopadhyay: Electric aircraft can only address 0.1% of global passenger kilometers
“These electric aircraft in the end don't actually end up playing a significant role in terms of the global aviation market. We're talking about close to like .1% of the global aviation traffic can be serviced by these aircraft. Now that's in terms of sort of p…”