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 1,873 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
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.”
Russia withheld European gas supplies months before the invasion of Ukraine
“Russia was actually not booking more capacity in order to send gas to the market. So we had the impression that they were a little bit withholding, you know, gas supplies.”
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…”
Inflation Reduction Act erases green premiums across most heavy industrial sectors
“In all of our different sectors now, cement, steel maybe not aviation fuels entirely, in almost all of our sectors, it is now as inexpensive to build the clean alternative as it is the dirty one, thanks to the IRA.”
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: No perovskite lab product can last ten years in the field
“You still don't have a perovskite lab product that would really last 10 years in the field. And bear in mind that silicon solar modules are under warranty for 25 years, and a lot of developers are talking about forty-year lifetimes being assumed these days.”
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: External Transmission Can Support Under 1% of ERCOT Load
“And then ERCOT is incredibly isolated. So there's one or two ERCOT has some minimal Back to back and some minimal AC at sort of very low voltage, but incredibly isolated. I think less than one percent of their load or something is available via transmission. C…”
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…”
Mukhopadhyay: Non-CO2 aircraft impacts like contrails cause twice the warming of CO2
“They say that current research suggests that the impact, the non CO two impacts, which includes these contrail formation can be twice as much as the impact from CO two alone.”
Jaffe: Battery industry will nearly double every year for 5–6 years
“The industry is literally increasing by almost doubling every year. And we'll continue to do that for the next five or six years and doubling off of a huge base now.”
Friedmann: Waste Biomass Is Sufficient to Scale SAF Without Hitting Limits
“We do need huge volumes of biomass to make huge volumes of sustainable aviation fuel. But in point of fact, there is way more waste biomass than that. So we're not going to hit the limit just on sustainable aviation fuel.”
Orbuch: The Clean Air Act caused net warming by reducing reflective aerosols
“The Clean Air Act was pretty meaningfully net warming for Earth, right? Like, it was an objectively good thing, obviously. Like, it saved probably millions of lives. It protected, you know, millions of people, and especially vulnerable communities from really …”
Orbuch: Forest carbon protocols completely ignore albedo effects that negate carbon storage
“No freaking forest carbon protocol accounts for albedo. And in some cases, it's, like, enough to almost undo the carbon storage provided by the forest.”
Shah: Developers finding US sites with sub-$35/MWh power 90% of the year
“They are finding many, many, many locations across this country where you can average less than 35 dollars a megawatt hour for 90% plus of the hours of the year on the LMP.”
Shah: Green ammonia is profitable today without any government subsidies
“Such that you know, I think green ammonia, you know, today is quite profitable without any subsidies at all even at today's cost of hydrogen, right?”
Shah: Non-lithium battery chemistries will reach commercial scale within five years
“I think we're actually five years away from all of those technologies being available at scale to the marketplace.”
House: Nickel prices will drop below $30 per kilogram by April 2024
“These prices will not, I would bet against nickels being at 30 dollars a kilogram two years from now, because two years ago it was less than 20, and there were plenty of good opportunities, good projects out there, new projects that would work at 20.”
Bataille: Over 90% of captured CO2 must be permanently stored, not utilized
“The numbers I typically see is we will utilize less than 10% of it. Most of it has to go into deep storage, be it depleted oil and gas reservoirs with tight overseal, or into deep saline aquifers. Like, the vast majority has to go into permanent storage withou…”
Bataille: Permian methane leak rates make natural gas as dirty as coal
“In places like the Permian where, you know, the number is seven percent, then eight percent, then nine percent, those are tragically high fugitive, fugitive, fugitive levels. You might as well be doing coal.”
Jenkins: Gazprom kept its European gas storage assets exceptionally low pre-invasion
“Gazprom, the Russian gas company, owns a lot of storage assets for natural gas in Europe, and if you look at the storage volumes for Gazprom-owned storage assets in Europe, they were much lower than the average for other assets at the time, so it's almost as i…”
Schroeder: EVs have fewer fires per vehicle than ICE cars
“There are still a lot fewer of them on a per EV basis than there are internal combustion engine vehicle fires on a per ICE basis.”
Schroeder: Flow batteries match lithium-ion costs at 8 to 10 hours
“And usually you get something that looks like lithium ion cost when you're getting around eight to 10 hours.”
DeWitt: Nuclear requires the least materials per lifetime gigawatt-hour
“And when you look at that, nuclear by far requires the least of all energy sources available to us today. And it's a significant difference in advantage.”
DeWitt: Fast reactors can reduce nuclear waste storage timelines to centuries
“Fast reactors in particular have some neat attributes where they can not just use this fuel efficiently, but they can use waste from other reactors and themselves quite efficiently and economically so, right? That's been one of the big hangups and holdups for …”
Shah: All 15 US carbon black plants face EPA consent decrees
“And there's 15 major plants in the United States. All of them are under EPA, Department of Justice consent decrees. As of 2013, none of them had had Sox and Nox scrubbers on them, so the people who lived in those communities nearby were breathing in some of th…”
Hsu predicts someone will achieve fusion scientific breakeven during the 2020s
“If I were a betting person, I would say yes. I think somebody will achieve scientific break-even this decade, and possibly more than one.”
Lubershain: Home Gas Appliances With Upstream Leaks Are Worse Than Coal
“If you are to burn natural gas in in an appliance in a home, for example, like a home boiler or in, in, in an oven And you take that two and a half percent leak rate upstream as a given, then it's actually even a little bit worse in the next 20 years from a gl…”
Rutherford: Crop-based aviation biofuels can emit more lifecycle CO2 than fossil fuel
“You can actually produce sustainable aviation fuels that on a life cycle basis emit more carbon dioxide than the base jet fuel.”
Rutherford: Electric aviation is limited to flights of 300 kilometers or less
“But by our analysis, you know, it's really a market for commuter flights, and for flights of, you know, 300 kilometers or less for the foreseeable future, just because of the underlying mass penalties of the technology.”
Wang: Electrochemical aluminum conversion outperforms combustion efficiency without NOx emissions
“You can really design electrochemical systems that are incredibly cost-effective and capable, and ultimately able to convert that energy from its raw thermodynamic form in aluminum out to electricity with far higher efficiency than combustion, without any of t…”
Wang: Aluminum fuel is twice as energy-dense by volume as diesel
“In fact, is from a volume basis, about twice as energy dense as diesel on an as-converted basis. So come at the amount of electricity you're getting out per, you know, liter per gallon of fuel. And then even on a weight basis, you are a little bit better than …”
Wang: Voya achieves 100 MW per acre, quadrupling diesel density
“Per in terms of megawatts per acre, the power density, how much power you can pack in per acre, we are approximately a hundred megawatts per acre in our high density configuration, which is about four times higher than a diesel generator installation”
Wong: SCE projects up to 10,000 monthly energization requests taking 30-45 days
“I think when we public study that we did with SCE, I think they are projecting like up to 10,000 of these energization requests per month, and each one of them takes like 30 to 45 days.”
Wong: Transmission interconnection studies take 6-9 months and cost $250K
“I think most utilities are talking about six to nine months to perform one of those studies, and it's a one-time, right, so risk of restudies will compound that, and it does cost internal utility, typically a hundred, A couple of 100,000 dollars. The typical b…”