Comment on We have brownouts in the summer and Kevin O'Leary wants a Data Center built here.
impairedimperator@lemmy.zip 1 day agoGas burns cleaner than coal, but almost nothing burns 100% clean. Nor is any fuel source 100% pure.
Hold a lighter up to some tinfoil. See the soot?
Zephyr@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I mean yeah but is it burning in such a way it’s actually impacting people’s wellbeing? Is it creating that much atmospheric pollution even with waste fume scrubbers? I cook with natural gas and it doesn’t leave soot. I’m not sure where you are but anywhere I’ve been lighters use butane and not natural gas.
impairedimperator@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Perfectly combusted butane only releases CO2 and water, too. The point of that experiment is showing nothing burns perfectly. Even 100% pure methane burning at 100% efficiency releases CO2, which has measurable toxicity in humans.
That being said, largery hydrocarbons will generally burn less perfectly then smaller ones. Methane has 1 carbon. Butane has four. Gasoline has 8-10, lower grade fuels have more, tars get to 20-30. Coal is a mixture of tars and hydrocarbons with even longer carbon chains.
Zephyr@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
So natural gas powerplants with sufficient exhaust scrubbers are having a substantial effect on atmospheric pollutants? I feel like we keep getting off of the main question here. Like to stoves and lighters and such. I get nothing burns perfectly clean but seems like just an engineering hurtle to me. With natural gas I’m typically more concerned about the hydro fracking aspect.
impairedimperator@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Yeah, sure. Of course, the phrase “sufficient exhaust scrubbers” is about as reasonable as “100% perfect combustion” in this context. Engineering or no.
CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Scrubbers cannot possibly capture all of it. It’s not just an engineering hurdle. It’s physics. Just like burning it can never be 100% efficient, scrubbing it cannot either.
Even if it were possible to somehow scrub 100% of the CO2 and other methane byproducts, it would be unbelievably expensive. Not only is it something that frankly shouldn’t even be focused on any more when we already have cheap, green, renewable energy, but do you expect the capitalist billionaires to care enough to pay for the new scrubbers (which, by the way, in this context, do not even exist?)