“Renewable Natural Gas” Is the Ultimate Red Herring
There are three fossil fuels we must stop burning if we are to save our planet: coal, oil, and methane (aka “natural”) gas. Coal is declining precipitously. Scientists think we hit peak coal in 2013, and American use of coal has fallen by over 50% in the last 10 years (though, we need to quickly nail this coffin closed considering how dirty and polluting coal is). Oil is seeing the writing on the wall as major automakers commit to electric vehicles. Many think 2019 may have been the year we hit peak oil, and EVs are expected to make the internal combustion engine a “historical technology” by 2040. The faster we historicize petroleum, the better, so please buy that electric car or e-bike today.
Natural gas (aka methane) now comes into sight as the next fossil fuel we need to banish in the quest to rescue ourselves from the most catastrophic climate catastrophe. Burning methane is currently responsible for nearly 25% of all carbon emissions in the US, and its use is growing. Methane is also deeply embedded in many of our homes, and this will make it a challenge to extricate. We aren’t anywhere near hitting peak natural gas usage on our current trajectory.
But, as of recently, some American cities, mostly in California, have recognized the need to eliminate gas and slowly get us off the fossil sauce. In 2019, these leading cities did something that had never been done in the history of our species — they started banning future use of methane in new construction. The idea has been to stop digging a hole that we have to quickly climb out of, so they legislated that no new homes or buildings should be built with methane hookups. This will avoid costly retrofits later. The city-led ban began in California, has reached over 50 cities, and is spreading up the West Coast like a good kind of wildfire.
Enter “Renewable” Natural Gas
Any entrenched industry will fight with all its might not to disrupt revenue streams, regardless of the effects of their products on humanity (see: oxycontin and tobacco). So, it is to be expected that methane peddlers will spend the next crucial decades resisting efforts to ban their product. They’ll use lots of arguments to slow humanity’s inexorable push towards a fossil fuel future. The most ingenious/insidious one that we must quickly debunk is that their carbon polluting fuel is actually clean or has the potential to become so.
Enter, stage right, “renewable natural gas,” or RNG, a brilliant buzzword for a product that companies are counting on consumers to believe in, to continue with business mostly as usual. Renewable natural gas is methane that comes from biological sources like human and cow sewage or landfills. It differs from current methane, which is fracked from the earth’s interior, some of which escapes through pipes, while the rest is burned, adding to our dangerous warming blanket. RNG harnesses methane being created anyway and thus, doesn’t add new layers to our greenhouse problem. A group of nonprofits in my region just released an in-depth look at renewable natural gas and the numbers aren’t good.
How to Make Renewable Natural Gas — Anaerobic Digestion and Gasification
Before we can examine how much RNG our society will be able to realistically produce, let’s briefly talk about the two ways to make renewable natural gas. Even though, as we’ll shortly see, RNG won’t come remotely close to meeting our current gas demand, it still has the potential to be an important, lower-carbon tool in reducing the emissions of hard-to-decarbonize applications (like industry).
The first way to make RNG is through anaerobic digestion technology. This is a process where bacteria eat waste in an atmosphere that doesn’t contain oxygen (anaerobic). Sewage treatment plants and pig farms use this process. They gather fecal matter, bring bacteria to a specific temperature, do a lot of other magic in pipes, and out comes methane gas. Landfills are another source of this methane as wasted food and other fun stuff are eaten by bacteria underground and methane is created as a byproduct.
The second way to make RNG is through thermal gasification, which “uses energy to turn agriculture and commercial forest harvest residues” into something called Syngas. Syngas can then be converted to methane with more processing. According to a large survey by the State of Oregon, “There are currently no commercial-scale thermal gasification plants in the United States that convert biomass into methane. The existing plants produce syngas, which is burned and used to generate heat and electricity.” So thermal gasification is a potentially important, but unproven technology that should not make us believe that we can simply keep burning gas in our homes.
How Much Renewable Natural Gas Could We Conceivably Produce?
In the 2018 Oregon study cited above, (which had many gas industry officials involved in its writing) researchers looked at what we could optimistically hope for from RNG production. The numbers aren’t good. The potential for anaerobic digestion is 4.6% while the potential for thermal gasification is 17.5% of current natural gas usage in the state. So RNG could potentially cover 20% of the methane gas we use today, assuming significant investments in technology and distribution systems that do not exist today – in other words and not anytime soon.Think about it. We could work our tushies off over the next couple, crucial decades, to try to decarbonize natural gas pipes, while the planet is heating up and wildfire smoke is crossing our country coast to coast, and after crucial time and work, we’d still be using 80% fracked, fossil natural gas. If that’s not backing the wrong horse, then I don’t know what is.
Oregon’s numbers are similar to national numbers. Another study found that, nationally, we could hope for about 16% renewable natural gas, and again, this is far in the future and only if we invest heavily in RNG.
Compare that to electricity as a fuel, and you’ll see a stark difference. Right now, the national electric grid gets 20% of its power from renewables and 20% from nuclear, making electricity 40% carbon free. Biden wants to get to 100% by 2035. Oregon recently passed a law to get to 80% clean electricity by 2030 and 100% by 2040. Wind and solar are carbon neutral and are the cheapest and most installed forms of new energy generation. We have the roadmap and the tools to completely decarbonize electricity over the next 10–20 years and are doing so faster than anyone expected. Clean electricity is real, proven, happening and the horse we should be backing.
Electrifying our house and capping our natural gas pipe was one of the best things my family has done for the climate.
Other problems with renewable natural gas
There are other significant problems with renewable natural gas which are highlighted in depth in this brilliant article by Laura Feinstein and Eric de Place. Renewable natural gas isn’t even zero carbon. It is true that it often comes from existing sources of methane, but often those sources of methane could be avoided. Take landfills for example. When we toss food scraps into landfills it creates methane. We could capture that methane to make renewable natural gas or we could compost the food scraps like many cities and nations do, and avoid making that methane in the first place and get the benefits of richer, healthier soil in our communities. Relying on renewable natural gas could thus lock us into wasteful, inefficient practices when other options exist.
Another significant problem is that RNG costs a lot to make. A million BTUs of methane gas currently costs $3. The median cost for the equivalent amount of RNG is about 6 times that, at $18. Yipes! Imagine telling consumers that their gas bills are going to sextuple, and you’ll start to see how viable RNG is as a long term solution.
Scratch the surface, and it’s easy to see how RNG meets the classic definition of a red herring; “something that misleads and distracts us from a relevant or important question.” There won’t be very much of it, and it’s going to be very expensive. Let’s not get sidetracked from real climate solutions. When our local methane suppliers use the word “renewable” to keep pumping fossils into our homes, we need to understand that this is at best a stalling tactic and a greenwash to distract from the dangers of methane gas. Let’s stay focused on more realistic solutions for heating our homes and addressing the climate crisis like electrification.
I’ll be co-hosting a free webinar with Electrify Now on “The Future of Natural Gas” on Wednesday, September 22. Register and get more information here
Check out this in-depth report on methane gas released by a coalition of 62 organizations recently.
Related: Natural Gas Leaks Deadly For Trees (Video)
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Tesla has quietly removed the Cybertruck’s range extender from the options in its online configurator.
Does Tesla still plan to bring the product to market?
When Tesla unveiled the production version of the Cybertruck in late 2023, there were two main disappointments: the price and the range.
The tri-motor version, which was the most popular in reservation tallies, was supposed to have over 500 miles of range and start at $70,000.
Tesla now sells the tri-motor Cybertruck for $100,000 and only has a range of 320 miles.
As for the dual-motor Cybertruck, it was supposed to cost $50,000 and have over 300 miles of range. The reality is that it starts at $80,000, and it has 325 miles of range.
However, Tesla had devised a solution to bring the range closer to what it originally announced: a separate battery pack that sits in the truck’s bed. Tesla called it a “range extender.” It costs $16,000 and takes up a third of the Cybertruck’s bed.
Even though the Cybertruck has been in production for a year and a half at this point, the range extender has yet to launch.
Initially, Tesla said that it would come “early 2025”, but we reported that it was pushed to “mid-2025” late last year.
At the time, Tesla also reduced the range that the removable battery pack adds to the Cybertruck to “445+ miles” rather than “470+ miles” for the dual motor – a ~25-mile reduction in range.
Now, Tesla has removed the option from its online Cybertruck configurator. It used to take reservations for the range extender with a “$2,000 non-refundable deposit”, as seen on the image above, but now it’s not in the configurator at all at the time of writing.
It’s unclear if Tesla is not planning to launch the product anymore or if it is just pausing reservations.
In its specs page, Tesla still lists the achievable range of both versions of the Cybertruck with and without the range extender battery:
Electrek’s Take
I’m curious. Is it dead, or does Tesla just want to stop taking reservations for it?
At first, I was curious about the product even though I didn’t think it would make up for Tesla’s significant miss on Cybertruck specs.
However, after it was confirmed that it takes up 30% of your bed and that it needs to be installed and removed by Tesla at a service center, I think it’s pretty much dead on arrival at $16,000.
It’s going to be a product limited to only a few people at best. And now that’s if it makes it to market.
With the option being removed from the configurator, there’s no production timeline available. Again, the last one was “mid-2025”, which is soon.
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Environment
EcoFlow members can save up to 65% on power stations while supporting disaster relief during the 2025 Member’s Festival
Portable power station specialist EcoFlow is kicking off its third annual Member’s Festival this month and is offering a unique new rewards program to those who become EcoFlow members. The 2025 EcoFlow Member’s Festival will offer savings of up to 65% for its participating customers, and a portion of those funds will be allocated toward rescue power solutions for communities around the globe through the company’s “Power for All” fund.
EcoFlow remains one of the industry leaders in portable power solutions and continues to trek forward in its vision to power a new tech-driven, eco-conscious future. Per its website:
Our mission from day one is to provide smart and eco-friendly energy solutions for individuals, families, and society at large. We are, were, and will continue to be a reliable and trusted energy companion for users around the world.
To achieve such goals, EcoFlow has continued to expand its portfolio of sustainable energy solutions to its community members, including portable power stations, solar generators, and mountable solar panels. While EcoFlow is doing plenty to support its growing customer base, it has expanded its reach by giving back to disaster-affected communities by helping bolster global disaster response efforts the best way it knows how– with portable power solutions.
EcoFlow and its members look to provide “Power for All”
Since 2023, EcoFlow has collaborated with organizations worldwide as part of its “Power for All” mission. This initiative aims to ensure access to reliable and timely power to disaster-affected communities across the globe, including rescue agencies, affected hospitals, and shelters, to support rescue and recovery efforts.
This fund most recently provided aid for communities affected by the recent Los Angeles wildfires, assistance to the Special Forces Charitable Trust (SFCT) in North Carolina following severe hurricanes, and support for non-profits engaged in hurricane preparedness in Florida and the Gulf Coast. Per Jodi Burns, CEO of the Special Forces Charitable Trust:
In the wake of devastating storms in Western North Carolina, reliable power was a critical need for the families we serve. Thanks to EcoFlow’s generous donation of generators, we were able to provide immediate relief, ensuring these families and their communities had access to power when they needed it most. We are so impressed with EcoFlow’s commitment to disaster response through their ‘Power for All’ program. It has made a tangible impact, and we are deeply grateful for their support and partnership in helping these families recover and rebuild.
In 2024, the US experienced 27 weather and climate events, each causing losses exceeding $1 billion, marking the second-highest annual total on record, according to National Centers for Environmental Information. The increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters underscore the critical need for reliable and timely power solutions during emergencies, much like EcoFlow and its members are helping provide through the “Power For All” initiative.
To support new and existing EcoFlow members, the company is celebrating its third annual Member’s Festival throughout April to offer a do-not-miss discount on its products and donate a portion of all sales to the “Power for All” fund to provide rescue power to those in need in the future. Learn how it all works below.
Save big and give back during the 2025 Member’s Festival
As of April 1st, you can now sign up to become an EcoFlow member to participate in the company’s exclusive 2025 Member Festival.
As a member, you can earn “EcoFlow Power Points” by completing tasks like registration, referrals, and product purchases and tracking your individual efforts toward disaster preparedness and recovery.
Beginning April 4, EcoFlow members will also be able to take advantage of exclusive discounts of up to 65% off select portable power stations, including the DELTA Pro Ultra, DELTA Pro 3, DELTA 2 Max, DELTA 3 Plus, RIVER 3 Plus, and more. However, these sale prices only last through April 25, so you’ll want to move quickly!
Click here to learn more about EcoFlow’s “Power for All” campaign. To register for EcoFlow’s 2025 Member Festival in the US, visit the EcoFlow website. To register as a member in Canada, visit here.
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Tesla is losing another top talent: its long-time head of software, David Lau, has reportedly told co-workers that he is exiting the automaker.
Tesla changed how the entire auto industry looks at software.
Before Tesla, it was an afterthought; user interfaces were rudimentary, and you had to go to a dealership to get a software update on your systems.
When Tesla launched the Model S in 2012, it all changed. Your car would get better through software updates like your phone, the large center display was responsive with a UI that actually made sense and was closer to an iPad experience than a car.
Tesla also integrated its software into its retail experience, service, and manufacturing.
David Lau deserves a lot of the credit for that.
He joined Tesla in 2012 as a senior manager of firmware engineering and quickly rose through the ranks. By 2014, he was promoted to director of firmware engineering and system integration, and in 2017, he became Vice President of software.
Lau listed the responsibilities of his team on his LinkedIn:
- Vehicle Software:
- Firmware for the powertrain, traction/stability control, HV electronics, battery management, and body control systems
- UI software and underlying Embedded Linux platforms
- Navigation and routing
- iOS and Android Mobile apps
- Distributed Systems:
- Server-side software and infrastructure that provides telemetry, diagnostics, over-the-air updates, and configuration/lifecycle management
- Data engineering and analytics platforms that power technical and business insights for an increasingly diverse set of customers across the company
- Diagnostic tools and fleet management, Manufacturing and Automation:
- Automation controls (PLC, robot)
- Server-side manufacturing execution systems that power all of Tesla’s production operations
- Product Security and Red Team for software, services, and systems across Tesla
Bloomberg reported today that Lau told his team he is leaving Tesla. The report didn’t include reasons for his stepping down.
Electrek’s Take
Twelve years at any company is a great run. At Tesla, it’s heroic. Congrats, David, on a great run. You undoubtedly had a significant impact on Tesla and software advancements in the broader auto industry.
He is another significant loss for Tesla, which has been losing a lot of top talent following a big wave of layoffs around this time last year.
I wonder who will take over. Michael Rizkalla, senior director of software engineering and vehicle firmware, is one of the most senior software engineers after Lau. He has been at Tesla for 7 years, and Tesla likes to promote within rather than hire outsiders.
There are also a lot of senior software execs working on AI at Tesla. Musk has been favoring them lately and he could fold Lau’s responsibilities under them.
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