Comments by "Jasper Mooren" (@jaspermooren5883) on "Climate Town" channel.

Yeah I don't understand why gas companies aren't willing to deal with the leakages. You'd think that they have some pretty big incentives to not waste their own commodity all the time? I mean I get that you can't really expect gas companies to give a fuck about the environment, but I would have expected gas companies to care about money, and it feels like the largest waste of money ever to just let huge amounts of gas leak everywhere. It would also be super easy to detect. All you have to do is measure how much gas is going into the pipeline and how much is coming out at the end. If it's less, there has to be a leak.
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There's another massive reason for large LNG sales towards the EU and it's Putin: Russia has been a huge producer for natural gas for decades and has pipelines running to Europe. The big problem is that a large part of Europe is very dependant on natural gas specifically. Most homes only have the infrastructure for gas heating available, which mainly happened due to the extremely low price of Russian gas and the relatively clean energy compared to turning oil or coal into electricity to then heat your home with (which has significantly more inefficiencies, rather than just burning the gas at home). Without gas imports, most people in northern Europe would literally freeze to death. Now why Putin? Well, for obvious reasons the EU isn't super keen on sending 100s of billions of Euros to the Russian government anymore. But we still have the infrastructure we have, so are dependent on other sources of natural gas, but since there are no pipelines to the US because theres an ocean in the way, it's all LNG.
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@Steror batteries are just not a solution for grid stabilisation. To get to a capacity that is even remotely close to that of a whole country for hours, you're looking at more batteries that currently exist in the entire world. The climate impact for making that many batteries would be an absolute disaster. Hydro power and hydrogen can be a very valid strategy though.
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@plainText384 yeah it was recent news that finally gas is no longer pumped in Groningen (due to hazards with earthquakes due to creating a massive empty hole under the earth), so in fact 100% of gas imports from the Netherlands to Germany are LNG at this point.
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Well, the main reason actually was geopolitical. The European strategy was to make Russia the junkie by making them completely economically dependent on Europe. Obviously that horrifically backfired, because the EU assumed that the economy and you know, your own population not living in abject poverty, is something Putin even remotely cares about. It turns out Putin does not give a fuck and is willing to not just destroy Ukraine but also his own country just to realise his imperial ambitions.
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@josephfisher426 yeah, you can just use the amount of hydro power you need. So as long as you keep the water high you effectively store that energy as potential energy. Hydropower is extremely flexible. Up to a certain limit you can basically create as much power as you want. The amount of water up stream is usually more of a power limit than the actual dynamos in the dam. So by keeping most water upstream during the day when solar power is running stuff you can push more water through creating more power during the night. In extreme cases you can even do what they are doing in the UK, spending power to pump water upstream and using a hydro dam to regenerate that power in the night (or really whenever you need it). The losses are actually suprisingly low and it's a pretty good mass energy storage solution. You of course still need a pretty big hill and 2 artificial lakes to do it, but it's definitely possible. But if you have the geography for a hydro dam anyway that's of course better.
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@PamSesheta Civil war just means that civilians have declared war against the nation, thus creating an internal conflict. It has nothing to do with civility. Most civil wars are far from civilised.
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@NeonNijahn technically, natural gas is organic. Methane is an organic compound chemically speaking, lol.
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@MayaPosch there's actually a good reason to do this, and it's heavy industry. It's impossible to get the temperatures required to produce steel for example with electricity, since to do that you'd be melting the electric heating itself. Right now they run on methane gas, which is hot enough, but hydrogen would also work. So a clean energy solution is to produce hydrogen from clean electricity to then burn that hydrogen to create the extreme temperatures required. If the point is creating heat anyway, burning hydrogen is not actually that inefficient even. So it's also a good option for other industries that require loads of heat, particularly if these industries, which most do, run through the night when solar production is near 0. Additionally, hydrogen is actually one of the best solutions currently available for clean energy storage on a large scale. Germany is already overproducing clean energy on good days (they are literally wasting energy on purpose because the grid would otherwise overload every summer), so the literally free energy could be used to create hydrogen to turn into electricity at night. Is it inefficient? Yes, but anything that's more than 0% efficiency is a win at this point. Batteries are just an absolute no go for anything of the size of the electrical demands of a nation and hydropower requires specific geography that is not available everywhere (which is a way better energy storage solution if the geography allows for it). I firmly believe that hydrogen can actually be very important in the clean energy mix for this exact reason. Also hydrogen is actually fairly cheap to not run 24/7, yeah it increases the investment cost of the plant, but its operating cost are near 0 when not in use, so hydrogen production is actually very well suited to balance the load on an electrical grid. If we want to get through windless nights, we either need a globalised grid of extremely high voltage to transport electricity across the world (which would also have serious efficiency losses), or we need storage. And hydrogen is just one of the better storage solutions for energy available on the scale you need to store the demand of an entire nation for over 16 hours straight (sundown till sunrise in the middle of winter).
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@MayaPosch electric arc furnaces are very inefficient though, and at night you somehow need to get that power from some form of energy storage anyway. Hydrogen is considered by most to be a much more viable alternative (its a big topic currently in the Netherlands, since there's a very large steel facility that has been in the news a ton recently), as well as electric arcs causing large amounts of pollution. You might save some greenhouse gas emissions, but the surrounding neighborhoods definitely aren't going to be happy getting cancer from all the pollutants that are released in electric arc furnaces, while hydrogen requires relatively minimal adjustments compared to a gas furnace (which is what they currently are), and are much cleaner.
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The hot dog turning into fish and chips was some excelent comedy.
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@logitech4873 problem is that they have a relatively low maximum capacity and is a relatively new invention (from the last couple decades, and most homes are way older than that). The Netherlands there are indeed plans to replace most gas furnaces at home into heat pumps (even to make it mandatory, but that is politically contentious). But it's not possible anywhere, due to the relatively low maximum capacity. So badly isolated homes it's not possible. For example I live in a monumental building from the early 19th century, and in the winter with a heat pump you wouldn't be able to heat it to a reasonable level. Additionally heat pumps are way more expensive and gas used to be significantly cheaper than electricity. So the financial incentives absolutely weren't there, so people had to spend a lot of their personal money just for environmental reasons, and literally anywhere in the world that doesn't happen a lot. It is only really since we are importing LNG instead of the super cheap Russian gas (so since the beginning of the war in Ukraine) that heat pumps have become economically viable in the Netherlands.
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@logitech4873 well problem is that I'm legally not allowed to improve it. Since it would require replacing the windows (which is by far the biggest reason the house is badly insulated), which have a monumental status. But yeah that is the exception to the rule. Like I said, the government is pushing people to disconnect from the gas network, and most new houses are built without a gas connection. However the situation with Russia was rather acute, and people still have to change. You can't just change infrastructure like that in a few months for over 10 million homes. In fact demand for heat pumps is so high that there are waiting lists for months to get them installed, and prices have spiked. Also Norway has insanely cheap electricity and much more expensive gas. Until recently a lot of gas was pumped in the Netherlands, so until recently heating your house with electricity was about 4-5x as expensive as doing so with gas And the efficiency of heat pumps has increased quite a bit over the last few years. It wasn't as effective of a solution until a few years ago. At least not when you're getting that electricity from gas anyway. Norway is a special case having the perfect geography for hydropower and has been running almost exclusively on hydropower for decades, which is the cheapest and one of the cleanest forms of energy possible. But the Netherlands is famously flat, and therefore has exactly 0 hydro dams.
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@Stuie444 repairs might be expensive, but I really don't see how monitoring is expensive. All you do is put a barometer at a bunch of places in the pipelines. If you get an unexpected pressure differential between point A and B, you've got a leak. I really have no clue what the hell you need helicopters or bulldozers for when repairing a pipeline. You just need to drive there with a van and maybe a drone with a fancy camera to find the exact spot of the leak. But that's costs in the 1000s, at most 10.000s, not millions. Now having to shut off the pipeline (although you would expect enough redundancy in the network that you can just reroute and use a different pipeline) and flush the system, yeah I can see that that is the real cost, since you really don't want to start welding close to a leaking pipeline full or methane .
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This is so crazy, as a Dutch person I'm pretty sure we never had such things. Unless they were really well disguised, but I'm pretty sure that it is literally illegal here in The Netherlands.
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