Some important caveats on the methodology, including what was put in and left out and why🧵 x.com/ThomasHochman/…
To start, the goal of this exercise is to get a relative view of public funding for various energy sources. I am including coal, oil, and gas in the next version.
I welcome all feedback and know that people will give it since everyone feels some sort of way about the numbers!
I purposefully took the public funding angle with R&D, tax credits, state incentives, NEM, grants/loans, loan guarantees, ZECS/mandates for a full view of how much public money has been allocated to different resources rather than using the word "subsidy"...
Subsidy has all sorts of connotations in the policy world and people feel all sorts of ways about what counts and doesn't count as a subsidy.
A clear example of this is with the Price Anderson act which insitute an indemnity insurance pool for nuclear companies...
narrowly defining this as a subsidy doesn't provide the full picture, and so I've included it as a toggle-able option
Furthermore some of this data is sparse, or difficult to piece together, so I have some confidence scores baked into the charts section
On net metering, I evaluated several studies that have looked at the cost-shift of that policy, and there is a separate tab that outlines the differences in those studies
In the methodology section, you can see where I pulled the data from and the relative certainity of which the numbers can be substantiated
Also in the methodology section a whole table on what wasn't included, and why, alongside estimates on what their addition would do to totals and the uncertainty around those estimates
The methodology section also includes gaps and known exclusions. I'm going to work through these to find better data sources and/or a way to incorporate them with higher confidence.
I welcome any and all feedback on where I'm off or where I can find data to help make this a more accurate view.
The goal here is to get a holisitic view of the relative amounts of public funding for various energy sources. I'm including fossil fuels in the next version!
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Did you grow up wanting to be a carbon middle manager? Do you love The Climate (tm)?
I've got jobs for you
Here's a thread of positions from policy, to comms, to engineering and everything else I could find! 🧵👇
Starting with policy, because that's what I do and know the best!
@GreatPlainsInst is one of the most effective policy and advocacy organizations in the US, and they work on everything! betterenergy.org/careers/
@CascadeClimate is a newcomer to the NGO world but @DaiEllis and @johnlsanchez8 are building an org to stand the test of time, and permanently remove Co2 from the atmosphere.
This $35M dollar program is set up in a gated prize format, meaning if you make it through the first gate, called Phase 1, you move on to be eligible for next phase.
Prizes decrease in number and increase in size. 3 phases in total.
A recent report from IEEFA on the Sleipner and Snøhvit CO2 storage fields left much to be desired from a technical and rhetorical stand-point, it's a long one I'm sorry 👇here we go:
Let's look at the "Key Findings" of this analysis. These are certainly a lot of words, my interest in the use of phrases like "may not" "cast doubt" "expect the unexpected" "not without material ongoing risk"
Let's juxtapose this with a retrospective paper on Sleipner
As you can see from the conclusion section of the paper below, it paints a very different picture from the IEEFA "analysis"
Starting off the article with a bang, we see "relatively untested technology" to describe CO2 storage which is strange since we've been doing it for decades with 300M+/tons and no leaks
We don't pump CO2 "into a cavern" we pump it into a porous and permeable rock, like a sponge
"Can choke people unconscious. Or worse" is, I suppose this is literally true but given the safety record of CO2 storage and the regulatory regime associated with injection, highly highly unlikely.
I'm not entirely sure why this line is in the piece, if but to invoke fear.
Mineralization, or mineral trapping, has become a catch-all term in carbon removal. However this one term can mean several technologies or processes depending on the method. A general overview 🧵
Mineralization, in the CDR context, is the reaction that moves CO2 from the fluid state (dissolved in water, supercritical, gaseous) into a solid state carbonate.
It can be lumped into one of two, broad, categories:
1. In-situ 2. Ex Situ
In-situ mineralization occurs in the subsurface, thus "in" situ
This process is currently being done by @CarbFix in Iceland, and by @4401earth in Oman. It can involve injecting CO2 dissolved in water, called a seltzer @lacroixwater, into mafic and ultra mafic geologic formations
Recognizing that there are numerous steps involved in moving an innovation from idea to marketable product, the DAC Prizes are split into three separate but connected programs:
Pre-Commercial Energy Program for Innovation Clusters (EPIC) Prize awards cash prizes to regional incubator teams that submit creative and impactful plans to support entrepreneurs and innovators in the DAC space and create meaningful community engagement.