Oh fuck it, thread time.

Inspired in a way by a certain long discussion by a well known Sci-fi author about the announcement of a Nuclear powered container ship from China. I wanna talk about "technology won't save us" When it comes to climate change.

"Technology won't save us" is the usual refrain when someone mentions Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). CCS is often touted by the fossil fuel industry as a way of us being able to keep burning dinosaurs. Continue our lives unchanged...

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so we can continue the lifestyles to which we have become accustomed. Alas, for all the talk of CCS in the last couple of decades, it's never come to pass. At least not at a large scale, not capturing 100% of emissions from that which it is fitted. And it doesn't work on mobile emitters like trucks and ships. CCS is a bit like a disability dongle, but for fossil fuel companies.

BUT, and here comes the but. There are some technologies, which we are going to need if we are to have a hope...

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of surviving climate change. So in this thread I want to talk about some of those technologies, and how far away they are from being reality.

To start with, I wanna talk about ammonia. Currently ammonia production accounts for about 1.8% of global emissions. Which is about the same as shipping globally. It's made by taking Methane in natural gas, splitting that to make hydrogen, and CO2. The CO2 is dumped, and the hydrogen is combined with Nitrogen. Ammonia is however critical...

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to our society. It's used primarily for fertiliser production, as well as a feed stock for various industrial processes. It can also be used to creation greenhouse gas emission free electricity via fuel cells. Those fuel cells could be used on ships... or trains... As long as the ammonia is produced without needing fossil fuels, it's a good way of powering things where Batteries don't scale.

Ammonia can be produced electrochemically, using just nitrogen (from air), & hydrogen (from h20)

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Proof of concepts are there, we just need to scale it up. It's a great way to use surplus energy from renewables, or for renewables constructed in places with lots of sun, but few people. It's safer and easier to transport than hydrogen. It's an technology we are going go need to develop.

Next up. Steel. Those who remember my recent epic thread on the subject will know that steel is really important to our world. But it also accounts for about 7% of global emissions.

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@quixoticgeek For folks interested in the science, or in sources to convince skeptics that overhauling our ammonia production is possible, an approach that looks really promising is described in this paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg2371

@dalias @quixoticgeek And we could also get vastly more efficient at how we use fertilizer. Real time sensing of how much of it the crops need and when, instead of carpet bombing the fields with stuff that mostly ends uppolluting the waterways. A rare example of an IoT thing that actually seems to solve a problem that existed before the solution 😉

@twobiscuits @dalias oh yes. There's lots of room for "smart farming". But given that the vast majority of crops worldwide are grown by small scale subsistence farmers, I'm loath to promote such things as a panacea. We're seen the impact GM crops have had on the likes of India. It's not good.