YouSaid · the spoken record

Austin Vernon

lines on the record: 158
first: 2022-09-08
most recent: 2022-09-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You know, you're going to have a 50 mile veto, not like. A couple hundred mile veto, but eventually my dream VTOL application is like a nuclear powered quadcopter that carries like a container. So you can take the container directly from the factory in Vietnam or wherever directly to the people who are using it or the warehouse like in Arkansas or whatever.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in the past, you know, theoretically, liquid fuels are dense enough, but they're too complex, too expensive, because when you're turning heat energy into mechanical energy, it's just like a lot of weight and complexity comes with that. Like some of these old concepts, you know, you have like all these engines and all that. And so if you electrify them, it really changes the game. And so just now we have, because it's not just batteries, it's the motors, it's the inverters, are now getting dense enough and small enough to make sense. But it takes time to get this stuff through FAA for better or worse. It's like the technology hasn't been good enough long enough to get stuff through FAA. And there is some limitations, I think, right now they wouldn't, a lot of people want to use batteries. Like the batteries are just on the edge of good enough.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and it's the same for if you want to live in a small town that just happens to be, you know, now would be too far to commute to a city, but you could in the future.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's actually the opposite. If you have tunnels and if you have these alternative methods to cars, then you use cars less. And I think in many cities, they never made sense for cars anyway because they were built before cars. So in New York City, you're never going to move everyone around on a car unless you build tunnels. You could then. But even then, I think There's other technologies there that make a lot of sense. And I think people like walkable. So, you know, even though I live in a city that requires a car, like some of the hottest neighborhoods are walkable neighborhoods where the neighborhood is walkable itself and then you just like drive your car to wherever else you need. But it's like the car is like hidden within the neighborhood.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if physically the cities will look that much different, but their effective economic size will be much larger because, you know, you could live in, you know, like Cedar Rapids and, you know, commute to Minneapolis with some of these technologies. So your city and Cedar Rapids. But you don't have to work there. If you have a better job in Minneapolis, you could commute there three times a week or whatever it is, five days a week.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enormous amount of time erecting these tunnel supports that keep it from collapsing in themselves. So it's kind of counterintuitive. It's actually dramatically faster to bore and hard rock than is soft oil because the soft soil you spend so much time like non-productive time or in the hard rock you're just like blowing and going.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem that, like most of the tunneling isn't soft soil, and it just, it's really kind of like it's kind of like difficult to drill through soft soil because of the materials handling. So like when you first start drilling an oil well through this stuff, you actually have to limit your drilling speed and you don't even have to put any weight on the bit like just the pumping fluid around basically like jets out the fluid. So that's kind of what you're doing with the boring machine and the soft soil stuff. managing the spoils which is like you know like they have like mutt carts a lot of times i think maybe space trying to do a conveyor belt but you could also just make it a full liquid and pump it out like in the oil field you know we we carry our cuttings in mud and we pump it but yeah and then they have the other big challenges they have to keep the walls from caving in on them um so that's like there's like current boring machines and soft soil spin”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just one of those solutions that you're going to reduce the coordination costs across the whole economy and improve property rights. And so people should really try to build it.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think it's in that process is so people, it makes people so angry when you take their land that it's very expensive to maintain people because they will fight you until like literally the sheriff has to show up and haul them away. So if you can go around that with tunnels using existing right-of-way, it just makes that societal cost of doing some of this stuff significantly less expensive. And then it's the engineering challenge. And I think there's really an opportunity now there. Like boring companies, the famous, but recently I think there's a hacker news, another company that wants to do tunnels for electricity. And they have like this plasma boring machine concept. I mean, it's pretty, it seems pretty crazy right now. But”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, like disagree at the car to a certain extent where you're using not inner city car trips or less because cheap flying is going to be cheaper. And it's going to be more convenient to have the bots deliver your stuff. And the tunnels, I love the tunnels because I don't like taking people to land. With tunnels, you can run new roads and everything without imminent domaining and taking people's land away from them when they don't want to lose their land.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very nascent, but there's like some business models that are coming down from the NetJet style to a little more commercial. So it's kind of like, I think that they're trying to hit a price point that's similar to first class, but you get to avoid all the. Airport craziness. So I think, and I think I'm just kind of a believer in if that existed, people would get angry enough that they would loosen up a lot of the rules. It seems like impossible to change those rules now, but I think like the average person, it just cost them like no time because most people don't even fly very much.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so right now, if you think about Airbus, they have this super jumbo thing. I can't remember what that plane, its number was, but none of the airlines really loved it because it's too big. It's too hard to get everyone loaded and unloaded. And you really just hit diseconomies of scale. So the electric planes are likely to be just like tiny in comparison, like 10 passengers. So it's easier to load and unload and you're going to fly out a smaller airport. So, you know, you won't be going to this giant regional airport that's just has all the parking problems and all the security. You'll be driving to your neighborhood general aviation airport where there's like a small line to get through. And a lot of these small aircraft under certain situations even avoid some of the screening requirements because they're just not as dangerous. If you have a small plane, there's only so much damage you can do with it.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's what I mean. Like a lot of the extra energy uses that we talk about don't really require many batteries if any batteries at all. I mean, like the transportation, yes, you have like batteries in the But if you're going to have abundant nuclear electricity or abundant geothermal electricity, you still have to build all those electric vehicles. You still need the batteries for that. So the extra batteries that solar and wind require over geothermal, I think it ended up being pretty minimal. Maybe the way to think about it is, you know, if you can have solar farm that's going to give you $10 a megawatt hour electricity. You have to figure out how to utilize that. And if you do, then you'll be very rich and you'll beat the guy who's paying $40 a megawatt hour from the The more expensive traditional generators.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, all our batteries, the lithium they charge and discharge through the lithium ion going back and forth between the cathode and the anode, and it travels through a liquid. And the liquid is an electrolyte, which means ions can travel through it. So solid electrolytes are a little more challenging, kind of hard. So that's why we don't have them. So you get rid of the liquid and it's just like the ion has to travel through a solid instead. The promise is like it could be a much higher energy density and theoretically cheaper too just because it's like weighs less and stuff. But there's like all sorts of problems around they degrade faster or Batteries have six different areas that you have to hit the requirements in. If you miss one, then it's no good. So they're kind of hard to improve in that sense.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, the shortage is really nickel. In the very short term, lithium is kind of starting to become a shortage, but there's plenty of lithium. It won't be. So like the lithium iron phosphate or there's like a huge amount of substitution into right now because it's avoiding nickel. And it's not quite as good as some of the nickel chemistries, but for a lot of applications, it just doesn't matter. A lot of cars and everything like that. And you're going to have the aircraft and stuff paying the premium for the high energy density batteries. And eventually there are technologies that, you know, they just use less and less materials because they're just better batteries like some of these concepts around solid state. I'm not sure if those will come to fruition and if there'll be really that much better when they do come.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I was thinking more like grid storage, but yeah, like in the in the transportation, I mean, transportation is going to dominate battery demand. It's going to be like grid storage with like tiny in comparison. I think there's like, you're basically getting to the point where making batteries out of dirt because that's how you scale it. So if you're making batteries out of like carbon and iron and phosphate, there's like It's just how many battery factories you want to build. And there's plenty of lithium. It's just you have to build a lithium mines. I don't really see any hard limits there. Eventually once you build all the factories, then you're pretty much ready to go.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Growing crops or making methane for rocket full or making chemicals, like you can design these processes to run when the energy is available And so the batteries are really going to be. For keeping your air conditioner on, where you're willing to pay a lot of money. So I don't really see the batteries and storage as a limit.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the important thing to think about here is that our current energy is so expensive, especially electricity. It's quite with our energy resources, which are basically thermal. It's quite difficult to make electricity comparatively. And so what we use electricity for is stuff we really want to use electricity for. So it's hard to imagine that we're not going to turn our air conditioner off. We're going to run it. And so we're willing to pay a lot of money. for that electricity to run our air conditioner. Whereas like if you look at really closely at a lot of the use cases that use like tons of extra energy, they're much more flexible in how they use the energy. And there's not a whole lot of storage involved. If you're looking at”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then everyone will be better off because, like, right now, if you're a shipping company, you have real working capital problems because stuff sits on boat for like a month and you've got to finance that and do all this stuff. And then what if things change in the meantime? Oh, I don't really want that product anymore. So the air freight is just like an absolute Economic just like Booster. So if you could make that cheaper, it's really exciting. Uses way more energy.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You always think, oh, we can't do this with batteries. And then someone comes up with a more clever idea. So even if you have a 500 mile range limit for your freight plane, the freight doesn't care if you have to stop like every 500 miles to refuel or recharge. And you can go over land on almost all these routes. Like, you know, you could go up through Japan and the Aleutian Islands, or you could go overland from China to Europe. charge just wherever's convenient. If that electric plane has half the operating cost of the jet plane, the amount of freight you're moving. Airplanes will go way up and it'll go down on ships.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to shift a huge amount of goods from trains to trucks, and it's going to just have huge knock-on effects all across the economy, more specialization. There's a lot of products that you're just limited on your suppliers because the transportation is expensive. It reduces working capital because a lot of times it takes longer on trains. Similar stuff like smaller ships, more air freight. One thing that shocked me is ELIV was telling me about like how the elasticity of demand for air freight is just like insane. You decrease the cost a little bit. Demand goes to the roof. So I'm pretty sure there'll be some kind of”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're like, I can't even remember. It's like 10 times more efficient than a truck or something. They use just very little fuel. But if you're going to like, you know, the train doesn't come by all the time and like they may not hold to the schedule. You have to aggregate your product with the other stuff or your raw materials. And it adds a lot of cost to your production. Like, you know, Toyota production system runs on trucks, not trains. And for the reason is the truck is just like extremely flexible. Like it comes when you need it, it goes when you need it. And even then, you know, people still complain about truck drivers, but not showing up when you want them. So when you have cheaper energy, like this electrification automation of trucking,”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would argue the ultimate limit is like it's really human capital. And what a more abundant energy does is it allows you to redeploy human capital away from trying to figure out how to use scarce energy sources into just like. Just like, you know, you can waste some of it now. Or like, here's an example I love about trucking. So I love trucks. Not as big a fan of freight trains. The freight trains are extremely efficient. Like literally they get”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're just like energy starved, you know, they're transportation system sucks. You can't transport coal in. The hydropower, there's only so much of it may not be close to where their cities are. So if you start adding solar to the mix for them, and some of these other technologies, it could really be an incredible increase in energy availability for them. And they aren't even meeting the, I think we talk about that in the paper. We're like looking at doubling rich world use, but it would be like more like 10x for, you know, if you live in Africa”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if you just have independent energy, because not everyone has natural gas or the economic capability to extract natural gas using traditional processes. So if you can just build these natural gas factories where you're just using sunshine and water and air, then all of a sudden everyone has access to natural gas, even if you don't have any, you know, you weren't blessed with easily obtainable natural gas reserves. And I think there's really this whole story about the tyranny of geography here when it comes to energy is there are some countries that have like extreme electricity as per capita, but it's like Iceland and Norway where they have like crazy amounts of hydropower and then people build aluminum plants there and stuff like that. But then you have places like in Africa where they have no coal, very little gas. Thank you.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you just have diminishing returns. There's physical limits to how efficient things could be. And as you get closer to that efficiency limit, it's harder and harder and takes more and more effort. So there's some diminishing returns there where if you can just a perfect example where we were just talking about is oil is quite expensive and natural gas is expensive too. While oil is easy to transport, you know, you can produce it anywhere in the world and get it anywhere else pretty cheaply. Natural gas is extremely expensive to transport, but it's very useful fuel and for also like, you know, making fertilizer or anything else.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, yeah, if transactions are cheap, then you just have all you could automate it all and it just cost you a little bit of money each time and it'd be fine. But it was like $50. So not going to pay $50 to post a blog post.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They basically go directly to the content hash, but on DNS it's cheap to change. You can change it in one minute. So if like Ethereum fees got lower, I might switch back to that. But I don't want to eventually, and I think it will be. But if it's like one cent transactions, then it would be no big deal to just change the content hash every time you update your website.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was just like running it off a droplet and on digital ocean. And if you use the direct content hash, it works pretty well, even if you're like linking through your ENS name. But the problem is, of course, like when I was first doing this, like the fees on Ethereum were so high that I didn't want to change that link all the time. So I tried to use the pinning feature with like IPNS and like going through because Cloudflare does the ETH.link. Whatever your IPNS name is, and then they try to go find it. So the part that was breaking for me was like Cloudflare couldn't always find my server using IPNS. But if you switch to, so I still have an IP, it's still an IPFS, but if you like the service I'm using called Fleek.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then, like, you know, I wrote several, like I wrote posts basically to learn about it, I wrote posts about hash functions and private key cryptography. So then I could understand like the white papers and like actually, you know, what they're doing with the math and everything and the cryptography. And eventually I had this blog, so it's kind of like how spacesuit will travel, that blog will write. My first non crypto topic was on. brilliant how to build a cheaper house or you know like it's difficult to reduce like home construction costs and that kind of like you know like made it on hacker news and all that it's like oh maybe actually people want to read this stuff so so it's kind of been writing since then in my spare time”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh let's see, I was curious about cryptography in general, but specifically for blockchains. And so I wanted to be able to read the Bitcoin white paper and understand some of this IPFS. So I figured the best way to do it was... Thought people talk about like, oh, yeah, you should write blah. So I do like, oh, I'll create an IPFS blog. I did that and learned a lot. And it's not the most reliable blog when I was running it on my own droplet and everything. So thankfully I migrated to a service that has much more uptime than my own server.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've done several projects. I have one that's like a data service that is like oil and gas data service that's somewhat successful, has cut paying customers. But it's still relatively small.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now it is just me. I have a family of engineers. We're all engineers. So it's kind of like loosely supported right now by other people in my family as well. They're participating some. Yeah, basically, I just have to get, you know, I've already done a lot of the. Theoretical design work, I did just like a very cursory level to make sure it makes sense. And like, you know, the costs will be reasonable and stuff like that. So then now it's like working on the electrolyzer to basically meet the targets you need for Reliability Product concentration and energy costs and also then just like is it manufacturable because right now a lot of electrolyzers like they use in the in the labs like they're literally smaller than a postage stamp and they're very difficult to make so”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so not only if you try to, you know, so like what I was talking about, this is not quite consistent maybe with what I just said about harder to enter. But I think what happens is the scale starts increasing as you go on. So there's certain, even though this is easier to scale down, there's certain elements that are very much hard to scale. And then the organization Well, but you only need a few competitors to Basically, you'll end up with early on a few competitors that continue to grow against each other and limit the margins. And it'd be hard to be like the fifth 30 years down the line.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, maybe there's like with chemical plants, there's like a certain limitation where your physical limitations that can have a good places for chemical plants. You start getting hit by like transportation and all that. So you can't just produce all the chemical for the entire world in Texas and like transport it all around it wouldn't work. So you're talking about like a full globe spanning thing and then at that point, you know, if you're like building factories all over the world someone's going to Know, like, figure out what your intellectual property is and all that. So you would have to keep innovating, you know, to. Ahead of the competitors. And I think that would limit your, ultimately it's a commodity. So you're making commodities. You don't have the same kind of defensibility that other sectors do.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not quite a year. But yeah, I actually got this idea to work on it from writing my blog. So when I wrote the heating fuel posts, I didn't really know much about. There's another company in the space, Prometheus Fuels. I'm like, oh, this is an interesting idea. And then I got talking to a guy named Brian Helgman. And he's like, you should do this, but not like what Prometheus is doing. And so then I started looking into it and I liked it. I've been working on it since.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, if someone figures out how to build a really cheap electrolyzer, they just keep it as intellectual property, then it would be hard to rediscover that and compete with them.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always loved chemical engineering and I love working at the big processing plant because it's like kid in a candy store. If I had extra time, I'd just like walk around and look at the plant. So that was so cool. But the plant where I worked at, their uptime was like 99.7%. So if you wanted to change anything or do anything new, it terrified everyone. That's how they earn their bonuses was like run the plant. you know 100% up time all the time so that that just wasn't a good fit for me and also like you know so I thought always wanted like my own Chemical plant, but it's like billions of dollars to build plants, so it was like a pretty big step. So I think this new technology, like, you know, there's like a window where you might be able to build like smaller plants, you know, until it optimizes to be. Hard to enter again.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, sets a price ceiling on the price of oil, in whatever you can produce this for is like the ceiling now, which is like maybe the way I think about it.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then you can also just make ethylene straight in the electrolyzer There's kind of like there's mini paths. So, you know, which path wins is kind of like an interesting race to see.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the idea a lot of people are taking like a hybrid approach with carbon monoxide. So, this would be like 12 Co raise a lot of money to do this, have like a hundred employees or something. You can take that carbon monoxide and make hydrogen and then you have syngas to make liquid fuels. So like they want to make all sorts of chemicals, but one of the main volume ones would be like jet fuel. See, formic acid is like the small, it's the little fry of all these. It is additive and a lot of things like preserving hay for animals, stuff like that. Ethanol, you know, there's people that want to like, there's like this company that makes. Ethylene, which goes into plastics, it makes polyethylene, which is the most produced plastic. You can burn it like in your car, although I think ethanol is terrible vehicle fuel.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The inputs are electricity, water, and CO2, and the output is usually oxygen in whatever chemical you're trying to create is, along with some side reactions.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, like, so it just, I mean, it literally just looks like an electrolyzer. You're like, you have two sides, an anode and a cathode. And they're just smooth together like this because the electrical resistance, if you put them far apart, makes it uses up a lot of energy. So either you smush them together as close as you can. And then you're basically just like trading electrons back and forth. On one side, you're turning CO2 into a more complex molecule and on the other side, you're taking apart water. And so when you take apart the water, you kind of like balance out the equation, balances out your electrons and everything like that. I probably need to work on that, on that elevator pitch there, huh?”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, so the different products and different methods, so different crossovers, so like terraform ministries, they're shooting for like $10 a kill hour for electricity. But again, their process, it's simpler, a little less efficient than a lot of the other products are a little also have like better premiums, like just worth more per time than methane. So your crossover happens somewhere in between $10 and $20 a megawatt hour, which is, I mean, that's pretty right now solar. Maybe like 25, maybe it's a little higher because paint all prices have gone up in the last year. But I think the expectation is they'll come back down. And so getting down to like 15, when you start having crossovers for some of these products like ethanol or ethylene or methanol. It's not science fiction.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So that's where the electrolyzers, everything with electrochemistry is like a flat plate instead of a vessel. So it scales down so like I could have a pretty good idea of what my hundred square centimeter electrolyzer is going to do if I make it quite a bit bigger. You know, I have to worry about like. How my flow might interact in the larger one, and make sure the mixing is good. But it's pretty straightforward because you're just like making your flat plate a larger area. Whereas The scale is different than scaling a traditional chemical process.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A new refinery because they're so complex. So, yeah, so that's kind of where I am. I'm like more on the speculative edge. And it's not clear yet which products will be favorable for which approaches.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Methanation is like hydrogen, CO2 combine and make water and methane. Yeah, so their approach is like the more conservative, but if you add, if you do more in the electrolyzer, like I'm going to make the methane actually in the electrolyzer instead of adding this other process, you could potentially have a much simpler process that has less capex and scales downward better. You don't need traditional chemical engineering like heavily favor scaling so with the more like terraform processes, you know their plan is like absolutely ginormous factories you know these these can take a long time to build so like one of the things they're doing is you know they're having to fight like the the complexity that creeps into chemical engineering every every step of the way because if they don't they'll end up with a plant that takes 10 years to build and that's not their goal you know like it takes 10 years to build”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sector is how much are you going to do in the electrolyzer? So one company that I really like their approach, that is different than mine, is Terraform Industries, and they want to make methane, which is the main constituent natural gas. But they're just making hydrogen in their electrolyzer. And then they capture the CO2 and then put it into methanation reaction. So everything they're doing is already world scale, basically. Like, you know, we've had hydrogen electrolyzers power, fertilizer plants without provide them with the hydro that they need. Methanation happens in like all ammonia plants and several other examples. It's well known, very old.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's important to point out that right now I think if you added up all the CO2 electrolyzers in the world that you'd be measuring their output in kilograms per day and of course like the products I just mentioned we make millions of tons per day of. So there's like a massive scale up if it's going to have a wider impact. And so there's some debate. I think the debate for the whole electrofuels.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think just overall electrofuels right now are super underrated because you're about to get hopefully some very cheap electricity from solar or it could be Maybe some wind, possibly even if we get really lucky, some nuclear geothermal and It will make sense to make like liquid fuels or natural gas or something just from electricity and air essentially. So there's many, there's like a whole spectrum of ways to do this. So CO2 electrolysis is one of those in which it's basically you take Water, electricity, and CO2. And a catalyst, and then you make more complex molecules Carbon monoxide or formic acid or ethylene or ethanol or methane or methane, those are all options.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source