The Ledger
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Friedmann: Gas with carbon capture beats nuclear cold in many markets
“In many markets, that's competitive with wind, solar, and batteries. In many markets, that just beats nuclear cold.”
Friedmann: New gas with full CCS costs $70–$100/MWh in the US
“In the U.S., assuming three dollars per million BTU for natural gas, on a new build, All costs. That means cost of capture, compression, transportation, storage, and permitting. You're looking at 70 to a hundred dollars a megawatt hour.”
Friedmann: Secretary Wright is proposing cuts to Congressionally approved clean energy programs
“We are seeing Secretary Wright propose a set of cuts to programs that were approved by Congress and approved by the prior DOE. In some cases, Congress, I mean the contracts have already been made, and this is part of the broader rescission around clean energy.…”
Friedmann: Congress is highly likely to preserve 45Q and 45V tax credits
“With respect to Forty-five-Q and other tax credits in the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act I give high odds That they will sustain, 45 Q, 45 V related projects.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
Friedmann: Retrofitting depreciated gas plants with CCS costs $40–$70/MWh
“I will add, if you retrofit an existing plant, it's cheaper, because assuming that plant has been fully depreciated, so you're retrofitting something that's in a utility off on the grid somewhere, the costs come in more like 40 to 70 dollars a megawatt hour.”
Friedmann: Section 45Q cuts gas CCS adder in half to $10–$15/MWh
“And that means you're looking at something like 20 to 25 to 30 dollars a megawatt hour is the adder in most markets. And 45 Q knocks off, say, half of that.”
Friedmann: Fluor, SLB, Shell, and Mitsubishi offer fully commercial 10Mt carbon capture
“There's a handful of companies that will today sell you a big facility with a performance guarantee and a wrapper, and they will sell you like up to ten million tons of capture a year. They will sell you big facilities. These are Fleur, Schlumberger Acker, She…”
Friedmann: 47 facilities globally capture 60 million tons of CO2 annually
“So we have something on the order of 47 facilities around the world that operating today that capture CO₂ and keep it out of the air and oceans for climate. Broadly, that's about sixty million tons a year.”
Friedmann: IPCC models show 90% of captured CO2 must go underground
“Out of the, say, six gigatons that the IPCC believes we're going to need to do, five and a half gigatons of that are going to be storage. It's something like 90%.”
Friedmann: CO2-to-concrete is an exothermic, gigaton-scale market
“So turning CO two into concrete is a gigaton market, and it's not nuts. It actually releases energy.”
Friedmann: Shipping liquefied hydrogen adds $3 per gallon equivalent compared to ammonia
“If you tried to liquefy hydrogen and ship that instead of ammonia, and then regasify it at the other end, that basically adds about three dollars a gallon gasoline equivalent compared to just moving ammonia around.”
Friedmann: Global ammonia trade will rely on ships, not pipelines
“There are not going to be huge amounts of ammonia pipelines going around the world. Like, we're not going to see that. The way that we use ammonia pipelines in the U.S. Today is sort of very unusual and bespoke for our purpose, but that's not the way that we'r…”
Friedmann: Oil and gas geology has 10 to 20 trillion tons of CO2 storage capacity
“We have something like 10 to 20 trillion tons of storage capacity in those kinds of rocks.”
Friedmann: Hundreds of companies convert CO2 into building materials
“Now there's hundreds of companies that turn CO₂ into those kinds of products.”
Friedmann: Advanced carbon materials like graphene sell for $100k per ton
“If you can actually turn CO two into those materials, they're hard to make, but boy, are they valuable. They're like a 100,000 dollars a ton.”
Friedmann: German pipeline opposition forces CO2 transport onto Rhine river barges
“We're seeing that happening right now in Europe, where basically, instead of doing pipelines, they're doing barges. They're putting CO₂ on boats and shipping it down the Rhine, and the reason why is because they can't get a pipeline through Germany. Like, Germ…”
Friedmann: The United States already has 10,000 miles of ammonia pipelines
“The fact that blew my brain is the United States has already 10,000 miles of ammonia pipeline in it.”
Friedmann: Carbon capture on ammonia synthesis achieves only 60% decarbonization
“A first useful consideration is should you just capture that CO₂ and store it, keep it out of the atmosphere? And in a bunch of places, that will be the fastest, cheapest way to decarbonize. That only typically gets you 60% decarbonization.”
Friedmann: Japan committed to buying low-carbon ammonia at a premium
“Basically, the government of Japan has said, we will buy low carbon ammonia at a premium, and we will use it to decarbonize our existing infrastructure.”
Friedmann: Jet A will remain the winning aviation fuel specification
“And I think it is going to continue to be the case that Jet A is going to be the winner, and synthetic fuels of all stripes still have to make Jet A.”
Friedmann: Injecting hydrogen into blast furnaces caps out at 20% decarbonization
“So if you take an existing blast furnace and put hydrogen into it, you can get about 20% decarbonization. Okay, that's worth doing, but you can't get 50% decarbonization with hydrogen.”
Friedmann: Distributed ammonia production will emerge over the next decade
“If you have distributed hydrogen production, you could very well have distributed ammonia production. And so these kinds of things are opportunities that we're going to see emerge over the next decade, and I'm excited to see that technology come to the field.”
Friedmann: Waste biomass usage could remove up to 5.5 billion tons CO2
“A study we did is on the order of two and a half to five and a half billion tons of CO₂ could be removed by just using that waste.”
Friedmann: Lancaster, California runs its municipal operations entirely on waste biomass
“City of Lancaster in California is running the entire city on waste biomass. They're putting it into a plasma gasifier, and they're running their trucks, and they're running their power systems, and they're running their heating entirely on waste biomass.”
Friedmann: 40 global CCS facilities capture 60M tons of CO2 annually
“And we have deployed CCS on some 40 facilities around the world. We're capturing around sixty million tons a year and injecting it underground.”
Friedmann: US CO2 pipelines are largely dedicated to enhanced oil recovery
“The 5000 miles of CO two pipelines in the United States are largely dedicated to that.”
Friedmann: EU Law Mandates 0.7% E-Fuels for Aviation by 2030
“0.7% of the fuels in Europe in 2030 are gonna be e-fuels for jets by law.”
Friedmann: SABIC in Saudi Arabia already recycles CO2 into urea fertilizer
“One of them is urea, which is a massive fertilizer market today. That is super cheap and easy to do, and in fact, there's a couple of big plants around the world that do that today. In Saudi Arabia, for example, SABIC, the chemical company there, has been taki…”
Friedmann: Tallgrass is repurposing a gas pipeline to transport Nebraska CO2 to Colorado
“One of them is, there was announcement just a couple of days ago, a portion of the summit pipeline, a company called Tallgrass, is going to capture CO₂ in Nebraska and store it in Colorado. They are repurposing an existing natural gas pipeline to do that.”
Friedmann: Global ammonia market is 180 million tons and $60 billion annually
“Today we make about a hundred and eighty million tons a year of ammonia worldwide.
And the total ammonia market is sixty billion dollars, which is shockingly small, actually.”
Friedmann: Around 200 global shipping terminals already handle ammonia transport
“There are already about 200 shipping terminals that, that, that ship ammonia to receiving terminals.
So there's already a big infrastructure to it.”
Friedmann: Moving 1M tons of ammonia in Galveston requires $500M in storage
“We did a study looking at an example in Galveston, Texas, and to move a million tons of ammonia a year, Like, five hundred million dollars was just for the storage facilities.”
Friedmann: California has 100 million dead trees suitable for biowaste use
“In California, because in part of climate change and other things, we have a hundred million dead trees, that's pretty concentrated bunch of dead trees, so you can actually think about how to use that.”
Friedmann: Central Valley food processing pre-aggregates large agricultural waste volumes
“In things like the Central Valley of California, again, we actually have a lot of concentrated agricultural wastes from where the food is processed, so the food may be gathered like almond pits or husks or something like that, but when they're processed, they'…”