But what if synthetic natural gas actually works?
We’ve been insisting, over the decades, that anything that solves climate change solves climate change. Rather than the government’s usual insistence that only things that conform to their plan solve climate change. This is why we’ve been so insistent - over those decades - that the solution is to price the externality and then see what the market comes up with as that solution. Or, more likely, collection of partial solutions that add up to a complete one.
Another way to put much the same point is that dispatchable energy without CO2 emissions solves climate change. Therefore any method of gaining this works.
In doing so, Rivan claims it can produce power at less than £10/MWh ($13.50)
That is, shall we say, an ambitious claim. But it might even be true. The company is here (no, we have no financial interest in it), a more general description here.
Stripped of complexity the idea is much the same as that of Porsche with their synthetic petrol. (Also, here and here.) Produce hydrogen by electrolysis, the electricity coming from a renewables plant. Add in CO2 - can be air capture, could be process waste - stir and gain the hydrocarbon of your choice. Here it’s CH4, otherwise known as methane or natural gas. Which can then be fed into the standard gas distribution system for use by everyone as they wish. We get to use our current infrastructure without net emissions - we’re meeting Net Zero.
This meets all of the technical requirements for that net zero of course. Leaving us with only whether it meets the economic requirements of being the cheap way to do so. We’ve long muttered that it could in fact be that this is the cheap way to do it. Partly because some processes are hugely cheaper done using hydrocarbons - jet flight for example, or back a step, long distance and reasonably fast flying - and partly because conversion to a hydrocarbon becomes the battery of the system. We know how to store hydrocarbons, know how to turn on a system using them quickly, we can store over not just hours but years and so on. Is this cheaper than electrical batteries for example? No, we don’t know either but we’d suggest that the battery pack required to get all of Europe through a 3 week dunkelflaute is such that synthetic natural gas probably would be cheaper. Maybe.
Our point here is not, in fact, that this is the miracle one simple trick to solve climate change. We do not think there is one of those. We do think that the requirement is going to be a series of partial solutions here and there adding up to a totality. Exactly where planning does not, in fact, work and markets suitably incentivised do.
Our final observation is that assume - just assume for a moment - that this does all work, is economic. We predict that the usual suspects will start shrieking that no one can be allowed to do that because it’s not dealing with climate change in the right way. Which is exactly the problem we’ve all got with the usual suspects, right?
Tim Worstall