The Wisdom Wall
7 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.
“biomass is pretty crappy energy, but pretty good carbon. So, At almost any reasonable carbon price, it is more valuable to remove the CO₂ than turn it into energy. That carbon removal is actually more valuable than most energy products.”
“If you think about it in terms of dollars per ton, natural gas is the most expensive. If you think about it in terms of dollars per megawatt hour, it's actually the least in the power sector.”
“Even though biomass is broadly distributed, bio-wastes are actually more concentrated, and so that creates an opportunity for us.”
“we've learned the top five things that the hyperscalers and people building data centers want is, in this order, speed, speed, speed, cost, and carbon. All of those are important, but speed is the thing that is driving a lot of this.”
“If there is no CO₂ transportation in storage, there is no project. Period. Plop. You can't make it work.”
“and in fact, if you have a natural gas plant that's running uncontrolled, carbon capture reduces the pollutant load.”
“To turn CO₂ into stuff usually takes energy or money. And so, in the same way we only recycle a fraction of our produced goods of any kind, whether it's glass or aluminum or paper or whatever, we also will only recycle a fraction of the CO₂.”