[HN Gopher] Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) - Capturing CO2 from air...
___________________________________________________________________
Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) - Capturing CO2 from air at industrial
scale
Hi HN, we are Sudip and Mark, founders of AirMyne
(https://www.airmyne.com, but there's nothing there yet). We're
building an industrial-scale process/plant to capture and remove
CO2 from air, so it can be piped to nearby sequestration facilities
and injected underground--a process that requires less energy and
capital equipment than other leading solutions. Companies spent
over $1B on CO2 offsets last year, sourced primarily from
landowners and project aggregators claiming to protect forested
lands. Over the past few years, interest in more permanent forms of
CO2 removal have led to the pilot-scale commercialization of novel
bio-oil/biochar/biomass, direct air capture, mineralization, and
ocean processes, but these are not yet available with sufficient
capacity to meet demand. There is no silver bullet, but we believe
removing CO2 from air with an industrial chemical process offers
the most realistic and scalable path forward. Capturing and
sequestering CO2 from air is a huge engineering challenge. The
dilute concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (~400ppm) means a
system operating at 100% capture efficiency would still need to
process 2500 tons of air to capture just 1 ton of CO2. Significant
energy is then required to release CO2 from the capture medium. On
top of that, compressing and injecting CO2 underground requires
controlling for gas leakages, dry ice blockages, and the corrosive
conditions created when concentrated CO2 comes in contact with
trace water vapor. Our approach goes back to the fundamentals of
acid/base chemistry. CO2 acts as an acid and will bind to a base,
whether in the liquid phase or on a solid surface. We have
developed a process to bring air in contact with a base substrate
that captures CO2 molecules while letting N2 and O2 molecules pass
through. After energy is applied, CO2 is desorbed from the
substrate for downstream treatment and compression. This reversible
process allows for a single stage "air in, CO2 out" system where 1
ton of substrate could capture >1000 tons of CO2 over its useful
lifetime. In the lab, we have demonstrated this approach at a
gram-level scale and believe the process offers favorable energy
use, planned capex/opex costs, and process complexity compared to
existing solutions. (We'd love to show you a video but can't do
that yet--the chemistry & physical embodiment of the system are
areas where we're developing core IP and that process still
involves some secrecy at this stage.) As we scale this process, we
are initiating discussions with other companies who can help us
inject captured CO2 deep underground so it can be sequestered for
geologic time scales. Sequestration technologies have improved
their compression and injection processes over the years, and an
emerging regulatory landscape is starting to take shape to
accelerate the deployment of CO2 injection wells and mineralization
projects in the US, the EU, and around the world. We intend to
colocate our CO2 capture near injection facilities to minimize
transport logistics. Sudip and I both come from industry. At
Honeywell, Sudip invented and scaled the low-global-warming
refrigerant 1234yf used in automotive air conditioning systems, as
well as a variety of products used to make displays, computer
chips, sensors, solar modules, and electrical components. I
invented formulations at BASF now widely used in the manufacture of
silicon carbide power electronics for EVs, solar inverters, and
other high power electric devices. We bring a systems engineering
perspective to the C02/climate problem--our focus is not only
developing, but also derisking and scaling industrial
systems/processes into a business case suitable for large
industrial stakeholders. Eliminating existing emissions is the
most urgent and important challenge we face to keep the climate
habitable, but removing CO2 from the atmosphere will likely be
needed too. Tackling this problem head-on opens up other
fascinating possibilities. By focusing on the "extreme user" case
of removing dilute CO2 from air, we might develop unique
innovations or insights applicable to the point-source capture of
more concentrated CO2 streams such as industrial flue gases. And
just as natural gas (methane) was a commercially useless molecule
until oil companies started capturing it and finding a use case, we
believe that if CO2 can be captured from air and made useful, it
could become the feedstock for an industry of similar scope and
scale. We are thrilled to launch as a YC W22 company - we couldn't
ask for a more forward-looking community of folks open to buying,
supporting, or otherwise engaging with climate solutions like ours.
Grateful for your time and happy to take your questions! We are at
hello@airmyne.com if you want to reach out. p.s. dang took out all
our footnotes but if you want references for any of the above,
please ask!
Author : markcyffka
Score : 124 points
Date : 2022-03-17 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
| Mizza wrote:
| What's your cost of capture per ton?
| Nainterceptor wrote:
| What's your energy cost of capture per ton ?*
| markcyffka wrote:
| Right now, it's >5MWh/ton using lab scale equipment. At 1
| million ton per year scale, we expect closer to 1-2MWh/ton.
| markcyffka wrote:
| Today at lab scale it is quite high at >$1000 ton. At the 1
| million ton per year scale, we expect our process to come in at
| <$100/ton.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| <$100/ton
|
| If you'll achieve that then this has to be done. France has a
| CO2 emissions of about 5ton per capita per year (which is
| pretty low for an industrial nation). But if we get all
| industrial countries into that ballpark or even lower, then
| we could just invest another $500 per person each year and
| are at net zero.
| markcyffka wrote:
| Thanks for the comment. Companies that are very action-
| oriented on slashing their emissions are already starting
| to look to CO2 removal projects as the next frontier to
| maximize their impact, now that the lowest-hanging
| emissions reductions are complete. Public sector entities
| (cities, states/provinces, countries) may be in the wings.
|
| We agree that eliminating CO2 emissions must be the primary
| & most urgent goal, while CO2 removal solutions like ours
| can be developed in parallel to meet immediate early market
| demand & prepare (e.g. get costs down, validate & improve
| the tech, get the regulations set up) for future
| deployment.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Obviously, if you achieve that it's a huge victory. Best of
| luck!
| markcyffka wrote:
| Thank you - we appreciate it!
| cinntaile wrote:
| So as long as CO2 certificates are more expensive than your
| solution, it makes sense to opt for your solution? Do you see
| any other scenario's where companies will want to use your
| solution? Is this the cost including storage?
|
| Does this use amines as well or is it a different chemical
| reaction?
| markcyffka wrote:
| Lots of good questions - thanks.
|
| As long as a) the total cost people are willing to pay for
| CO2 removal gives sufficient margins vs. the cost required
| to capture it, b) the end-to-end process actually removes
| substantially more CO2 than it emits, c) the resources
| allocated to pursue more CO2 removal makes sense vs. other
| uses (biased, but we think so), and d) the sequestration is
| done in a well-characterized & verifiable way, we think it
| makes sense.
|
| Many companies & stakeholders are working right now to
| define in what contexts CO2 removal makes sense for them.
| We have LOIs from multiple companies who want access to our
| CO2 removal capacity as soon as it becomes available.
|
| The CO2 captured from our process could be used for any
| number of applications if there is an economic/policy
| reason to pursue it. Fuels, fertilizers, and many other
| materials can use CO2 as a feedstock, and many startups are
| actively working on this problem from different angles.
| Startups are injecting atmospheric CO2 into concrete with
| great success. There is no reason we couldn't adjust our
| business model to divert CO2 captured with our process to
| these applications.
|
| Our <$100/ton cost projection includes storage. PNNL has
| some great public resources, including on Youtube, that go
| into more detail the total cost of storage.
|
| Can't comment on what chemistry we use, but amines are
| effective at capturing CO2 and have been used industrially
| for that purpose for decades.
| throwaway581294 wrote:
| Your process sounds similar to how CO2 is scrubbed from the
| submarine using AMINE, while I'm sure you can't speak to it yet,
| but is it a similar process?
| markcyffka wrote:
| You are right that amines are great at removing CO2 and other
| acid gases from input gas streams and has been used in
| submarines/natural gas/many other industries. Can't speak
| publicly to our process just yet!
| todd8 wrote:
| The numbers seem to indicate some challenges. This is just back
| of the envelope and this isn't my field so I may be
| misinterpreting the data, but it looks like extracting 1 million
| tons of CO2 per year has the following costs (at lab scale
| values):
|
| * > 1 Billion dollars
|
| * > 5 Million MWhr
|
| Assuming 200 Kg/MWhr of CO2 emissions produced by electrical
| generation (I believe the average carbon intensity in the USA is
| over 400 Kg/MWhr) the emissions produced (just for the
| electricity to do the extraction) is 1 Million Tons of CO2.
|
| Thus, it looks like with the _current_ estimates the process
| costs 1 Billion dollars and doesn 't reduce CO2 at all. Like
| ethanol, I wonder if this process will be worth it in the end. I
| don't know what raw materials it requires and how much CO2 is
| generated in their extraction and production. It's possible that
| your belief that at industrial scale the CO2 intensity and dollar
| cost will go down, but are you even accounting for the CO2 cost
| of manufacturing the facility, transportation of raw materials,
| etc.
| DennisP wrote:
| If you're setting this up at enough scale to matter, you're
| going to need more power than is available today anyway. As
| long as you're building new, it would make sense to build
| renewable or nuclear.
| markcyffka wrote:
| Great points. We are using lab scale equipment today, and as
| trained engineers we want to be conservative to any forecasts
| we share publicly since unrealistic claims will not help us or
| anyone in this space get to where we want to go. We have spent
| many months building models, demonstrating at a lab scale, &
| talking to experts to get their feedback, and now we see the
| most value will come from actually building our pilot plant to
| get a much clearer sense on the _real_ financial /energy costs
| & to identify which process parameters need the most focus.
|
| Coming from the chemical manufacturing world, we have (painful)
| experience modeling & planning for new processes & know that
| cost/energy models of new processes can only get us so far.
|
| That being said, we see a path forward for our process at scale
| and are motivated to make it a reality.
| baremetal wrote:
| Where is the energy coming from to sequester the CO2?
|
| I hope it won't be from fossil fuels.
| markcyffka wrote:
| Hi, great question, I hope we addressed it here from comment
| above:
|
| "Right now, there is an ongoing discussion between a huge
| variety of stakeholders -- CO2 removal startups/companies,
| academics, regulators, 3rd-party verification standard-setting
| bodies, etc. -- to figure out what kind of life cycle analyses
| (LCAs) are required at the planning stages, and what
| verification frameworks will be needed post-
| capture/sequestration stages, to ensure that CO2 removal from
| air is removing more CO2 than it emits. In many of these
| discussions, and in the studies/analyses which drive them,
| moving to cleaner sources of energy makes a lot more sense
| given the total CO2 removed vs. CO2 produced/embodied in the
| system.
|
| It is a complicated question and it really depends on what
| temperatures your process requires, where in the world you
| decide to build your removal system, if cleaner energy is
| available there (& at what cost), how you need to
| compress/store/transport the CO2 so it can be injected or
| converted into something else, and so on. Cleaner energy like
| geothermal, solar, nuclear, hydro, etc. are not always co-
| located near the best injection sites and there are questions
| of whether DAC is the best usage for cleaner energy resources
| vs. for general grid deployment.
|
| To make a very long story short, cleaner energy makes CO2
| removal a lot more sensible to pursue at scale, so that is
| where we are aiming as we think about the long-term system
| design."
| boringg wrote:
| Whats the energy cost per ton of CO2 removed?
| markcyffka wrote:
| Right now, it's >5MWh/ton using lab scale equipment. At 1
| million ton per year scale, we expect closer to 1-2MWh/ton.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Does that exclude the energy cost involved in injecting CO2
| into a reservoir? Also, what would be the energy cost of
| converting captured CO2 to a more stable form (CaCO3, aka
| limestone), or a commodity such as methanol?
| markcyffka wrote:
| The energy estimate includes the costs of compression &
| injection using some figures in publicly available
| resources that look at CO2 removal end-to-end. Co-locating
| the capture as close as possible to removal/injection site
| (e.g. minimizing transit logistics) helps to keep the
| energy & financial costs low.
|
| However at this stage, we are more focused on scaling our
| capture process so it can be integrated to
| injection/sequestration later on at a pilot plant scale.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| To put that in perspective, pure graphite or carbon
| (basically equivalent to anthracite) releases about 2.5 MWh
| of heat per ton of CO2 produced.
|
| Pure methane (if fully combusted) releases about 5.6 MWh of
| heat her ton of CO2 emitted.
|
| Oil is somewhere in between.
|
| In terms of electrical or mechanical (ie useful, low-entropy)
| energy produced per tonne of CO2 emitted, HHV efficiency
| typically 25-50%, so between 0.625 and 1.25 MWh/tonne of CO2
| per tonne of coal and 1.4-2.8MWh/tonneCO2 for methane.
| [deleted]
| _Nat_ wrote:
| That's >18 GJ/tonne, with a goal of 3.6 to 7.2 GJ/tonne,
| making it much less efficient than post-combustion capture
| (which I think tends to aim for <2 GJ/tonne now).
|
| Why not just do post-combustion capture if it's cheaper and
| more effective?
| markcyffka wrote:
| It should be done more but stronger tax & regulatory
| incentives are needed to encourage point-source polluters
| to adopt CO2 capture for emissions from industrial
| processes & energy production. It is very difficult to
| convince, say, a software company to pay for/subsidize the
| cleanup of another company's/utility's dirty process,
| because of the complex incentives & liabilities involved.
|
| (Would love for an entrepreneur to come up with a way to
| find a market solution to this matching problem -- AirMyne
| might want to bid to be the technology platform on which
| such a CO2 capture system is built!)
| chinathrow wrote:
| Whats the difference in your method to the one used by
| Climeworks?
| markcyffka wrote:
| We'd rather not speak to anyone else's technology, except to
| say that we support anyone working on CO2 removal & have only
| gratitude & respect to pioneers in this ecosystem, including
| Climeworks, who paved the way for CO2 removal to be a part of
| the larger climate conversation.
| dmux wrote:
| >We have developed a process to bring air in contact with a base
| substrate that captures CO2 molecules while letting N2 and O2
| molecules pass through. After energy is applied, CO2 is desorbed
| from the substrate for downstream treatment and compression.
|
| This sounds very similar to how Verdox[0] is approaching the
| problem. What sets your approach apart?
|
| [0] https://verdox.com/
| markcyffka wrote:
| Thanks for the question, we'd rather not speak to anyone else's
| technology, except to say that we support anyone working to
| advance CO2 removal [copied from comment below, trying to keep
| up with all the questions/discussion!]
| _Nat_ wrote:
| That's basically the default approach that's been used for >100
| years.
|
| [Patent
| US1783901A](https://patents.google.com/patent/US1783901A/en )
| (1930-ish) shows the basic closed-loop configuration that most
| folks build from.
|
| Gist is to sorb acid-gas (like CO2) into a basic-solvent (e.g.,
| aqueous monoethanolamine), then heat it up to release the acid-
| gas. Then the regenerated-solvent can be reused.
|
| Making the process closed-loop may've been more of a focus
| around 1930. Before that, I think there were some patents
| showing open-loop designs (this is, designs where the solvent
| isn't regenerated-and-reused).
| vagabund wrote:
| As I understand it, the most efficient, scalable, and long-term
| effective climate solution remains olivine carbonation as
| proposed by efforts like Project Vesta [0]. I take the point that
| any and all solutions should be explored at this time of critical
| importance, but there's a risk that sexier, more high tech
| approaches gain disproportionate momentum for reasons separate
| from the science. Is there an obvious explanation for why this or
| other geoengineering schemes haven't taken a leading role either
| in the discourse or implementation of carbon capture and
| sequestration?
|
| [0] https://www.vesta.earth/
| roldie wrote:
| Congrats on the launch and good luck!
|
| Whenever you're past the secrecy stage, I'd love to see a blog
| post or video to learn more about your approach.
| markcyffka wrote:
| We trained at big engineering companies so secrecy is our M.O.!
| For better or worse...
|
| We can & must show more to the community as we get to pilot
| scale. We know that people/society needs to see more physical
| examples CO2 removal to realize that it's possible. And it
| looks cool too!
| ganzuul wrote:
| I think you are completely mistaken in your endeavor. Please
| plant trees and care for the soil, since your scheme will never
| do anything for biodiversity. You are just trying to cut us all
| off from the source of life.
| moralestapia wrote:
| So, what are YOU doing for biodiversity ganzuul?
| ganzuul wrote:
| I keep the pollution that my workplace produces down and
| avoiding unnecessary consumerism & plastic packaging. Voting
| with my wallet for the green premium.
| markcyffka wrote:
| I appreciate your comment & we hope to convince you otherwise
| as we get more process data from getting to pilot scale &
| beyond. Biodiversity is already being harmed today by the
| droughts, fires, floods, human migration patterns, etc. caused
| by ongoing global warming due to anthropogenic CO2 in the
| atmosphere, and this harm may likely only get worse in the
| decades to come without the development of solutions that make
| an attempt to reverse things.
| markcyffka wrote:
| *deforestation due to climate-influenced movement of arable
| land e.g. desertification also harms biodiversity as well
| ganzuul wrote:
| Foreseeable economic constraints of incentive structures
| provide no capacity for handling a direct bypass of the
| natural process of life. The form of business you are
| creating short-circuits the ecosystem because the free market
| economy does not possess the intelligence that is built into
| the natural process.
|
| Please understand, this is not as simple as you think.
| [deleted]
| deegles wrote:
| Have you looked into technology to turn CO2 into a solid? Like
| here: https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/turning-co2-into-
| so...
|
| Also could the process be adapted to use sources of waste heat
| like from nuclear power, solar or geothermal?
| markcyffka wrote:
| We are exploring a number of conversion pathways, but our right
| now our focus is on capture, removal, and sequestration
| underground.
|
| The process could potentially use waste heat & that is
| something we are thinking about as we think about plant design,
| potential locations, and partners.
| gennarro wrote:
| Can someone explain the concept of a ton of air to me? Is the air
| measure as if it was compressed into a solid?
| markcyffka wrote:
| The relationship between pressure, volume, and temperature for
| 1 ton of air (mass) can be characterized reasonably well by the
| ideal gas law PV=nRT
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas_law
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Weight a container in a vacuum chamber. Then put the air inside
| it, seal and weight it again. It's enough air that the full
| container weights a ton more than empty.
|
| If you compress it, it keeps the same weight (to any reasonable
| precision), but you won't get it into a solid.
| nick238 wrote:
| The density of air is about 1.2 kilograms per cubic meter
| (water is 1000 kg/m3). So, it'd take about 830 cubic meters of
| air to make a ton (1 m x 1 m x 830), or a cube with each side
| of length 9.4 meters or about 30 feet.
|
| A ton is a ton, regardless of phase (solid, liquid, gas,
| feathers)
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| While I applaud your needed technologies, I was curious if you
| had any plans to foster relationships/partnerships with any
| "clean" (read cleaner) energy solutions to power your energy
| needs for carbon capture and sequestration?
| markcyffka wrote:
| Right now, there is an ongoing discussion between a huge
| variety of stakeholders -- CO2 removal startups/companies,
| academics, regulators, 3rd-party verification standard-setting
| bodies, etc. -- to figure out what kind of life cycle analyses
| (LCAs) are required at the planning stages, and what
| verification frameworks will be needed post-
| capture/sequestration stages, to ensure that CO2 removal from
| air is removing more CO2 than it emits.
|
| In many of these discussions, and in the studies/analyses which
| drive them, moving to cleaner sources of energy makes a lot
| more sense given the total CO2 removed vs. CO2
| produced/embodied in the system.
|
| It is a complicated question and it really depends on what
| temperatures your process requires, where in the world you
| decide to build your removal system, if cleaner energy is
| available there (& at what cost), how you need to
| compress/store/transport the CO2 so it can be injected or
| converted into something else, and so on. Cleaner energy like
| geothermal, solar, nuclear, hydro, etc. are not always co-
| located near the best injection sites and there are questions
| of whether DAC is the best usage for cleaner energy resources
| vs. for general grid deployment.
|
| To make a very long story short, cleaner energy makes CO2
| removal a lot more sensible to pursue at scale, so that is
| where we are aiming as we think about the long-term system
| design.
| goenka wrote:
| Probably stupid idea, but why don't you put your system at the
| end of a factory co2 output There you ll have more than 400ppm ?
| markcyffka wrote:
| Great question. We'd love to capture point-source CO2 from
| factory flue gas where it is orders of magnitude more
| concentrated (often >10%) than in air (~400ppm). And
| fundamentally, there is no reason our process cannot be applied
| for this type of CO2 capture. For now, we are choosing to focus
| on air for 2 reasons:
|
| 1) Market. Early buyers of CO2 credits are primarily looking to
| get very clean accounting of who gets credit for the CO2
| removed, and will pay a premium for anyone who can do it. If a
| buyer (say, a software company) pays for a polluting chemical
| factory or power plant to capture some of its emissions, it
| requires complex multi-party contracts & the incentives between
| the parties are often conflicting. That being said, point-
| source CO2 removal is absolutely needed & a huge
| opportunity/problem and more work is needed from a
| technology/policy side.
|
| 2) The "extreme user" case. If we give 100% focus to solving
| the more challenging problem of removing CO2 from air, we may
| gain learnings & knowledge that will translate to an improved
| point-source capture process, whether from an
| energy/efficiency/cost perspective.
| taken_every_ wrote:
| That's what most carbon capture tech seeks to do, this would be
| direct carbon capture from the air. You are completely correct
| in assuming this is highly inefficient. As long as we are still
| blasting new CO2 into the atmosphere, it will always be easier
| to capture it at the source. Direct air capture only becomes
| significant when we get access to enough clean energy to power
| the absurdly inefficient technology. Thermodynamically, even if
| you are capturing at max efficiency, it still sucks (something
| like 250kwh+ minimum to extract 1ton of CO2, not even close to
| reality). We need either abundant renewables or fusion/fission
| energy to make it viable.
| markcyffka wrote:
| Hi HN, we need to sign off for a bit & get back to building.
|
| So grateful for your questions & engagement.
|
| Be well & cheers - Mark & Sudip
| pcmaffey wrote:
| As you mentioned, I'd love to see the carbon that's captured from
| the air turned into something valuable like building materials.
| Or do something wild and have a worldwide monument building
| contest where captured carbon is used to make incredible
| sculptures and artworks.
|
| Injecting it underground is just turning waste into waste, which
| depends entirely on regulatory controls to become sustainable;
| though of course, developing an efficient process for capture is
| a hugely important step.
|
| I'm curious what the latest developments are on finding a use
| case for captured CO2?
| markcyffka wrote:
| Right now we're focused on getting our capture/removal process
| working at scale, but we are keeping a close eye on the use
| cases since that is a big part of the conversation. There are
| many great teams working on the usage problem right now & are
| excited to see where they take things.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Or do something wild and have a worldwide monument building
| contest where captured carbon is used to make incredible
| sculptures and artworks.
|
| I wondered about the scale here. In 2020 we emitted 34.81
| billion tons of CO2 from fossil fuels[1]. Now that's much more
| than what I can lift, or even imagine. So let's say we want to
| build Pyramid of Giza sized monuments out of that. The Pyramid
| of Giza weigh about 5.75 million tons[2].
|
| That means that if we want to soak all the yearly emission into
| monuments we need to find place for about 6000 Pyramid of Giza
| sized ones. That's a lot of monuments to go around. And then
| next year we repeat again. I'm not sure this will scale.
|
| > Injecting it underground is just turning waste into waste,
| [...]
|
| Yes? That's where the carbon was stored for hundreds of
| millions of years and it was fine there until one day humans
| figured out a way to get it out and spread it into the
| atmosphere. The problem is not that we have a moral objection
| to CO2 on principle. The problem is that it's screwing up the
| atmosphere.
|
| 1: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions 2:
| https://weightofstuff.com/how-much-does-the-pyramid-of-giza-...
| nagar1 wrote:
| why cant we use filter at the point of production and collect
| them as separate garbage ?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amine_gas_treating
| markcyffka wrote:
| Great question. Point source capture & removal/conversion
| solutions from flue emissions are desperately needed, as are
| tech/policy solutions to help eliminate emissions to begin
| with!
|
| For now, we are focusing on CO2 removal from air to align with
| market/"extreme user" angles, as described in some comments
| above.
| usrusr wrote:
| Why bother with 400ppm when there are so many, well, "burning
| sites" untapped?
|
| The intuitive counter-argument is that long term there shouldn't
| be any "burning sites" left and that capturing all burning sites
| would only ever get us to zero but not to negative emissions, but
| that's not true when you include burning sites that run on
| biological sources. Let plants deal with the 400ppm problem, use
| those plants as fuel, sequester where those plants are burnt.
| Negative emissions.
| markcyffka wrote:
| Thanks for the question, copying from an earlier comment which
| touches on similar point --
|
| "Great question. We'd love to capture point-source CO2 from
| factory flue gas where it is orders of magnitude more
| concentrated (often >10%) than in air (~400ppm). And
| fundamentally, there is no reason our process cannot be applied
| for this type of CO2 capture. For now, we are choosing to focus
| on air for 2 reasons:
|
| 1) Market. Early buyers of CO2 credits are primarily looking to
| get very clean accounting of who gets credit for the CO2
| removed, and will pay a premium for anyone who can do it. If a
| buyer (say, a software company) pays for a polluting chemical
| factory or power plant to capture some of its emissions, it
| requires complex multi-party contracts & the incentives between
| the parties are often conflicting. That being said, point-
| source CO2 removal is absolutely needed & a huge
| opportunity/problem and more work is needed from a
| technology/policy side.
|
| 2) The "extreme user" case. If we give 100% focus to solving
| the more challenging problem of removing CO2 from air, we may
| gain learnings & knowledge that will translate to an improved
| point-source capture process, whether from an
| energy/efficiency/cost perspective."
| usrusr wrote:
| Ah, ok.
|
| "We try to tackle the crazy problem because if we can almost
| do that we should be quite good at the reasonable ones"
| sounds like a communication problem unnecessarily attached to
| the physical one.
| sabertoothed wrote:
| I would love to see a page on your website where you compare
| yourselves (in a fair and transparent way) to the best plant that
| does the same thing. I am not knowledgeable in the field. But
| there will be some algae or mangroves that get CO2 out of the
| air.
|
| I would love to see that comparison. Incl. the aspect that the
| plant does not need to be repaired, multiplies on its own, etc.
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| The problem with plant based sequestration is that it is a net
| neutral proposition unless you can bury the plants. All the
| talk about forests being so great(and they are, just not as
| carbon sinks) ignores the complete lifecycle, which is only as
| negative as the sustained volume of the forest, assuming you
| started from just dirt. If that forest ever burns, it's all
| back in the atmosphere again.
| arbuge wrote:
| Of course there is always the possibility that things could
| burn but forests that burn do grow back eventually. Plant-
| based sequestration should not be written off. A planet
| covered by X% of forest vs Y% where X%>Y% has more
| sequestered carbon. If that X% is long-term stable, i.e. if
| the forests are preserved and curated on a long-term basis,
| then so is that carbon. Forests are also an enjoyable natural
| environment for humans, which is an added bonus.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| burn or decompose same thing, trees are a buffer not a
| solution, unless you cut down, bury deep, then regrow.
| webreac wrote:
| cut diwn and use it for furniture and buildings. We could
| replace concrete with wood.
| worik wrote:
| When we say "plant based sequestration" we are (I for one
| am) not talking forests. Carbon sequestration in forests is
| wilfully ignoring the economic and practical drawbacks:
|
| Forests only sequester carbon as they grow. After that they
| are carbon neutral. You end up with land that cannot be
| used for any economic purpose. (The creatures and plants
| that live in it have a value too, but that is not part of
| this argument).
|
| After that, at some point, in a year, ten years, a hundred
| years, the forest burns. And all the carbon is released.
|
| A pointless waste of time. We do it because we are obsessed
| with things we can count (one tree, two trees....) and
| fixated on the short term.
|
| There is a better way: https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc
| e/article/abs/pii/S00167...
|
| Increase depth of top soil all over our agricultural land.
| It increases productivity and sequesters carbon. But it has
| no profit centre and is hard to measure, and given our "big
| man" capitalist culture that is the problem.
|
| We really must stop producing CO2. That is the only answer
| that does not steal the future from our children
| AlanSE wrote:
| > Forests only sequester carbon as they grow. After that
| they are carbon neutral. You end up with land that cannot
| be used for any economic purpose. (The creatures and
| plants that live in it have a value too, but that is not
| part of this argument).
|
| I will be paraphrasing the science articles I have read
| lately...
|
| Planting new trees on bare land does not work to capture
| CO2. So if you deforest an area and then re-plant, you
| put a lot of extra CO2 into the atmosphere. Like 30% of
| the trees you harvest go into durable things (like
| houses) and the rest will decompose and release its
| carbon. After you leave the ground bare, it starts
| spewing CO2 from the soil. This is a major carbon source.
| New trees you plant will EVENTUALLY soak up more CO2, but
| canopy closure needs to happen before that can happen.
| Since the young trees are planted with considerable
| spacing, the soil CO2 source outpaces the tree CO2 sink
| for many years before the balance shifts.
|
| Mature forests throughout history probably did tend to be
| carbon neutral on average, yes. This is ignoring
| ecological changes... like... maybe forest conversion to
| other landscapes and fires were balanced by healthy
| forest uptake. I digress.
|
| These are not normal times, and CO2 concentration is very
| high. Because of that, old-growth or mature forests may
| be significant sinks of CO2. The best strategy for us to
| draw down more with forests is to leave as much mature
| forest untouched as we can.
| oliwary wrote:
| What about building houses and furniture with the wood?
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| That is typically only sequestering the carbon for 20-50
| years. In the end, the house is torn down, or the furniture
| burned. Very little lasts for more then a century, and
| basically nothing lasts for more than a millennia.
|
| Deep underground sequestration is the only viable strategy
| if your goal is total CO2 reduction in the atmosphere.
| worik wrote:
| > Deep underground sequestration is the only viable
| strategy if your goal is total CO2 reduction in the
| atmosphere.
|
| That is untrue. So untrue it seems like a deliberate lie.
|
| The only solution is to stop pumping CO2 in into the
| atmosphere.
|
| There are mitigations. Building huge machines to
| sequester relatively small amounts of carbon in
| underground chambers is probably a mitigation. It seems
| to me that there are better ways and these sorts of ideas
| are not worth the opportunity cost.
| dokein wrote:
| What if you develop an animal that eats the plants, and
| then when they die they are buried, such that after the
| decomposition process all that's left is a fossil? I
| don't see how that could go wrong unless someone digs up
| the fossils later on for use as a fuel, but that seems
| like such a ridiculous an unlikely scenario ha ha ha!
| sokoloff wrote:
| When the animal eats the carbon (as a food source), it
| combines the carbon with oxygen and exhales...
| samstave wrote:
| Or the animals turn out to be delicious and people start
| coking them.
| worik wrote:
| One of the things I really like about regenerative
| agriculture (there are so many things to like) is that it
| makes eating meat cool again.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It's not a terrible solution, but you need specific trees
| of specific thicknesses for it to be possible at all (and
| these aren't always the same trees best suited for rapid
| growth). Selecting the most carbon-intensive plants and
| then turning them into biochar is probably better for long-
| term sequestration.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| See
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
|
| and
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_.
| ..
| boplicity wrote:
| > unless you can bury the plants.
|
| Maybe this is a naive question: but why not bury plants? We
| got into this mess by digging up long-buried plants, so why
| not literally reverse the process? With intentional effort,
| maybe this could be a viable solution? (Probably not -- but
| I'm curious why.)
| worik wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_agriculture#Carb
| o...
|
| Possible. Practical. Increases productivity.
| senthil_rajasek wrote:
| This might be true of conventional crops like corn or soy but
| this article [1] implies kelp farming in oceans could
| sequester carbon from the atmosphere for a long time.
|
| "So the kelp will sink to the ocean bottom in the sediment,
| and become, essentially, part of the ocean floor..."
|
| 1.https://www.npr.org/2021/03/01/970670565/run-the-oil-
| industr...
| markcyffka wrote:
| Sorry to get to this question late. There is some good
| discussion below on the possibilities of bio-based and nature-
| based solutions. We see bio-based solutions as having a great
| advantage in the short term since the feedstocks are
| concentrated & the collection is fairly straightforward. But we
| believe that these technologies may have a hard time getting to
| bulk scale as land & logistics become a concern.
|
| Most likely, industrial/engineered solutions and nature-
| based/bio-based/ocean-based solutions will need several years
| to evaluate which paths are most viable. We wish everyone luck
| in this challenge for the world's sake!
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| Is there a risk that sequestered CO2 gets released later by
| accident?
|
| Have you looked into sequestering it into calcium carbonate? It's
| extremely stable and harmless to the environment. Just sink it to
| the bottom of the ocean with all the other sea shells.
| markcyffka wrote:
| In short, there is always that risk. We are exploring with
| partners how to minimize it.
|
| Subterranean mineralization is a fascinating path too and may
| help with some leakage concerns.
|
| We believe that CaCO3 can work in some small-scale contexts but
| it takes up a lot of volume/mass when done at industrial scale
| -- finding somewhere to put all the CaCO3 is a challenge, as is
| moving it there and avoiding negative impacts that come with
| it. Someone else in this thread made a good comment about this
| too.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbfix
| yodon wrote:
| I want to be excited about this, but it's capturing CO2 as CO2
| gas, not sequestering CO2 in a form that keeps it out of the
| atmosphere.
|
| If you pay a lot of money in process and power to pull CO2 out of
| the atmosphere or out of exhaust gases and then use it in
| chemical processes other than ones which sink the carbon into
| long lasting solid, liquid, or oceanic absorption form you're
| just burning money and power to make yourself feel good, you
| aren't actually denting the global climate change problem because
| all that CO2 will just end up back in the atmosphere once it's
| been used in the industrial processes.
|
| You also can't use storage of gaseous (or liquid) CO2 as a way to
| sequester climatically meaningful amounts of CO2. We've added
| around 600 billion tons of CO2 to that atmosphere since 2000. If
| we want to use sequestration to roll back the changes we've done
| to the atmosphere, we almost certainly need to sequester at least
| that much, if not more out of the atmosphere. Do a quick
| calculation on how big a set of storage tanks you need to hold
| that amount of gaseous or liquid CO2, and compare that volume to
| the volume of a mountain (or mountain range) near you. Then think
| about maintaining those tanks in perpetuity and you'll see why
| you have to get the CO2 stashed in solid or room temperature
| stable liquid form.
|
| I'm by no means critical or dismissive of this tech, it sounds
| great, but we're still a long way from pulling off the
| sequestration that's actually needed at the scale that's needed.
| worik wrote:
| I am dismissive of this tech. On the face of it.
|
| CO2 stored underground, at huge expense? What could possibly go
| wrong with that?
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Yeah. It kinda smells like fracking 2.0 to me in terms of
| what the potential unforeseen consequences could be... and
| look what happened there.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| > We're still a long way from pulling off the sequestration
| that's actually needed at the scale that's needed.
|
| How so? The simple fact that natural gas and oil still exists,
| when it comes from 100 million year old biomass, proves beyond
| a shadow of doubt that geological sequestration holds its
| integrity at geological timescales.
|
| We have also been injecting CO2 at a rate of 1 million tonnes
| per year at the Sleipner field in the North Sea since 1996, and
| extensive 3D timelapse seismography shows the CO2 is
| permanently trapped.
|
| Think about that - we have been demonstrating CO2 storage at
| scale since before the launch of the first Palm Pilot.
| yodon wrote:
| The existence of oil shows CO2 can be stored in solid or
| liquid form, but doesn't show we know how to convert CO2 into
| that stored form at scale or keep our hands off it once it's
| stored that way. It's easy to burn oil, it's hard to make it,
| and it's harder still to not burn it when you know it's
| readily available.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| CO2 is in the dense supercritical state at the temperature
| and pressure conditions in storage reservoirs. It's density
| is between 750 and 850 kg/m3 then (water is 1000). You just
| have to compress it and pump it down there, and it will
| stay like that.
|
| Honestly, the storage part is a solved problem from the
| feasibility side. The remaining challenges are mainly cost
| optimization, across all of capture, transport and storage.
|
| And the biggest hurdle is forcing businesses to actually
| pay for the currently externalized cost of CO2 emissions.
| yodon wrote:
| I agree with your thermodynamics, I'm just concerned
| about finding a volume big enough to store climatically
| meaningful amounts of CO2 in that form. 40 billion metric
| tons per year of CO2 in the form you describe is around
| 30 billion cubic meters, and you need to find that much
| storage volume every year just to keep things from
| getting worse. If you want to actually make a dent, like
| rolling things back to the year 2000 (which likely isn't
| enough, but is a real impact), that's more like 600
| billion metric tons or 450 billion cubic meters. That's
| roughly equivalent to 400 mountains 5000 feet tall. It's
| a huge volume of material we're talking about finding a
| place to store if we're actually trying to make a real
| dent in climate change.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| If you asked a pre-industrial person how in the world it
| would be possible to source, refine, and distribute
| enough crude oil to power the modern world they would
| quote some similarly breathless numbers. It's possible
| because there's a motivation to do it. Simple as that. If
| we had a similar level of motivation to sequester our
| excess carbon we could start planning to do that tomorrow
| and have it done within a decade or three. You can't
| sequester all the worlds carbon in one place, just like
| you don't pull it all out of the ground in one place. Big
| problems seem less so when you realize that solutions are
| usually distributed.
| markcyffka wrote:
| I don't have the sources or exact numbers on hand, but I
| remember reading that the world's extractive & production
| processes create something like ~4 billion tons of oil,
| ~4 billion tons of iron, ~x billion tons of cement, and
| ~50 billion tons of sand, _per year_. These industries
| developed over many years and as you note are distributed
| globally. With market demand and regulatory pressure, we
| believe achieving CO2 removal across different modalities
| at the giga-ton scale is possible in our lifetimes.
|
| That being said, we try to bring a conservative approach
| to our scaleup plan. The most immediate challenge is
| demonstrating CO2 removal at the megaton scale (1 million
| tons per year) to validate the process and meet short-
| term demand for voluntary offsets.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| For context, Global Natural Gas production is
| approximately 4,000 billion cubic meters _per year_.
|
| To sequester the world's carbon emissions, we would need
| to move and store <1% the volume per year.
| Robin_Message wrote:
| That's apples to oranges: we don't store anything like a
| year's worth of gas.
|
| And anyone in Europe can tell you that natural gas
| transfer and storage is far from a solved problem.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The idea is not to actively store it, but dump it
| somewhere where it will store itself.
|
| Europe is a great example of how we have the technology
| to transfer huge amounts of gas, and the challenges are
| largely politics and capital.
|
| Nordstream #1 moves 60 billion m3 of gas 1,200 km and
| cost ~$10 billion
| markcyffka wrote:
| We also got calculations that yielded literal mountains
| ranges of carbonate... That's not to say carbonate cannot
| be part of the solution, but maybe it is unlikely to be
| the only solution.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| This is sort of crazy. Presumably industry will use liquid CO2
| for the foreseeable future. Pulling it from the atmosphere
| instead of ground is a huge net benefit.
| yodon wrote:
| Most of the gasses we pull from the ground are byproducts of
| oil and natural gas production. We don't pull them from the
| ground because we want them on their own, we just go ahead
| and capture them because they are coming up with the stuff we
| want for fuel - they'll still continue to be captured (or
| worse vented to the atmosphere) as long as we're pulling
| those fuel sources from the ground.
|
| Industrial CO2 also mostly comes not from the ground but from
| other industrial processes.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| We use so much CO2 (on beverages, inert atmospheres,
| cooling devices, fire extinguishers, etc). Does all of it
| come as side-product of some industrial process? Or do we
| burn extra fuels to get it?
| markcyffka wrote:
| Most all of it comes as a side product. The amount of CO2
| used for the applications listed pales in comparison to
| the amount used for urea (fertilizer) production.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| What is different is that urea requires a power source
| that creates more CO2 than the chemical process uses. So
| you will certainly (as long as you are using fossil
| fuels) have a source available.
|
| Those things I mentioned buy their CO2 on the market. I
| have no idea where it comes from.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Huge amounts of CO2 can be injected into Saline Aquifers
|
| https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015WR01...
|
| Capturing CO2 from a power plant, biofuel factory, oil
| refinery, petrochemical plant or other point source and
| disposing of it underground is a developed technology. Very
| little of that is happening because the financial incentives
| aren't there and the financial incentives that do exist go to
| carbon sequestration schemes which are low-cost, low-quality
| and generally not measurable (pay us $ and we won't cut down
| these trees... for now, let's crush some rocks and apply sand
| to the beach and hope for the best, ...)
|
| With aquifer injection you can measure the gas going in but
| there are also questions such as: how long does the CO2 stay
| there? do you have seismic problems?
|
| This scheme is similar to aquifer injection but is more secure
| at the expense of requiring unusual rock formations and 25 tons
| of water for every ton of CO2 captured.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbfix
|
| I think it gets way too much press but assuming energy is
| available you can build a direct air capture in a place where
| you have reactive rocks and water.
| markcyffka wrote:
| We agree that saline aquifers are be a compelling strategy
| given the huge volumes available & measurement capabilities
| you mentioned. As verification standards emerge in the
| (currently nascent & somewhat fragmented) CO2 removal
| ecosystem, precise & accurate quantification is going to be a
| huge driver to differentiate the highest-quality CO2 removal
| solutions.
| samstave wrote:
| Thats only 6,250 gallons of water.. less than a single 10K
| water truck you've seen everywhere.
|
| THe question is how many tons does this plan to produce over
| what period?
| yodon wrote:
| If you want to delay the impact of climate change by 1 year
| by sequestering one year of of CO2 added to the environment
| through saline sequestration, that's about 40 billion 10K
| water trucks worth of storage, or about 40 Lake Tahoes
| turned into saline storage ponds, and you need to add that
| much storage capacity every year just to keep atmospheric
| CO2 from getting worse than it is (you're not yet to the
| scale of reducing atmospheric CO2 at this rate). The oceans
| have enough volume for this, but most other containers are
| too small to be meaningful.
| DennisP wrote:
| Inject CO2 into basalt formations, and over the course of a
| year or so it will turn into rock. There are already several
| pilot programs doing this, and it's very scalable.
|
| Other projects apply energy to turn the CO2 into liquid fuel.
| Of course that returns the CO2 to the atmosphere, but it'll be
| a long time before we electrify long-haul jets so it'd be great
| if their fuel were carbon-neutral.
| markcyffka wrote:
| There are a few startups exploring this and also PNNL is
| doing great public work on this topic as well.
| https://youtu.be/osXq-k84LpA?t=2177
| yodon wrote:
| Thanks, Mark - do you (or anyone else reading this) happen
| to know offhand any of the startups targeting this
| approach?
| markcyffka wrote:
| We don't claim to be experts on this subfield & this is
| may not be an exhaustive list, but Carbfix, 44.01, and
| the Solid Carbon coalition are some that come to mind to
| check out. We don't speak for those companies but just
| want to point out some areas to check out.
|
| https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1390435 <-- a non-
| commercial study on this topic.
|
| https://youtu.be/osXq-k84LpA?t=2177 <-- a webinar that
| addresses this topic
| subpar wrote:
| https://www.carbfix.com/
| yodon wrote:
| >Inject CO2 into basalt formations...
|
| Thanks for this comment - the calculations I'd been doing in
| the GP comment and elsewhere where pretty darn depressing and
| this approach you're mentioning is very exciting in that it
| bypasses the fundamental storage volume problems most other
| sequestration methods face by leveraging the interstitial
| spaces inside existing rock volumes, and also exciting in
| that it leverages undersea rock formations for even lower
| impact. Thanks for pointing me to this.
|
| For others interested in learning more you might hit [0] or
| [1].
|
| [0]https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/02/19/solid-carbon-
| ma...
|
| [1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-019-0011-8
| samstave wrote:
| Could we put them into pods and throw them at Mars so we start
| dumping Co2 on Mars for Musk's Mars Mushroom Mart! too grow.
| deadbeeves wrote:
| _Could_? Yes. It 'd probably be the most expensive way to get
| rid of CO2, though.
| worik wrote:
| > Could? Yes. It'd probably be the most expensive way to
| get rid of CO2, though.
|
| So? I in this context that is a plus not a minus!
| carapace wrote:
| Lovelock (of the Gaia Hypothesis) had the bright idea to put
| all the CFCs onto all the old ICBMs and launch them at Mars
| to kick start the greenhouse effect there.
| [deleted]
| hannob wrote:
| Do you have any policy regarding collaboration with the fossil
| fuel industry?
|
| (I'm asking because most past carbon capture projects are
| actually enhanced oil recovery projects, and the accounting they
| do for co2 avoided is... sometimes really creative. From what I'm
| aware Climeworks is not directly collaborating with the fossil
| fuel industry and does not do EOR, which I think is why they have
| a relatively good reputation.)
| markcyffka wrote:
| Thanks for the question. It's a tough & good one we want to
| take it directly as we can.
|
| At our early stage, we are focused on developing our capture
| technology & thinking carefully how to best partner with folks
| who can do sequestration.
|
| The fossil fuel companies know how to compress & inject gases
| underground at huge industrial scale. They, as well as the
| oilfield services companies that support them, have expertise
| that is difficult to access otherwise: they know how to build &
| monitor wells, find & characterize saline aquifers & other
| geologic formations where CO2 can be stored, and so on. Coming
| from our industrial background, we know that their expertise in
| these areas is not something we want to categorically ignore.
| Applications with the EPA for Class VI (non-EOR) wells are in
| the pipeline process around the US, and similar injection-only
| wells are being built/planned in other parts of the world and
| we are keeping a close eye on those developments. In addition,
| mineralization is a possible path too.
|
| I wish we could give a clearer answer. No doubt it's a complex
| question & we are thinking about it carefully in our planning.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| See
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_flooding
|
| Down in Texas there are places you can drill and get CO2 just
| like you drill for methane, oil, helium, etc. Since the late
| 1970s this has been a profitable business without anyone being
| paid for CO2 disposal.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Given the dilution problem, I've been wondering if a
| decentralized approach is ultimately better. Can we build some
| cheap system that people could just simply put on top of their
| homes and let the wind do the movement? Individually each system
| would remove little, but if enough participants were involved
| (perhaps it's even government mandated to have), then the costs
| would be shared as would be the scale.
|
| Would love thoughts.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| This would be equivalent to trees, where you then store the
| tree forever before it dies, and even assuming you can plant
| and then store those trees using 0 energy it really doesn't
| make much of a dent.
| markcyffka wrote:
| Great question. We believe it becomes an issue of storage,
| logistics, supply chains, transport, and so on. We approach it
| this way: if we build & install 1,000,000 decentralized car-
| sized capture systems that capture, say, 1 ton of CO2 a year,
| that is going to require 1,000,000 CO2 absorption/desorption
| systems (cost/energy/embedded CO2), 1,000,000 high-pressure
| compression systems (cost/energy/embedded CO2), as well as
| installation, delivery, system maintanance & repair, etc. Then
| we have to collect the CO2 when the decentralized units are
| full - again, not easy, since CO2 likes to leak when
| stored/transported under pressure. When deployed over a large
| geographic area, the problem gets more complex since it must be
| monitored & managed with many nodes in the system.
|
| That's not to say a decentralized system can't be done. If
| someone can do it & it costs less than us, that's good for the
| world. But coming from years in the chemical manufacturing
| world, we believe that humans have learned a lot, especially
| over the past 2-3 centuries, how to build huge chemical
| production facilities that make (relatively) efficient use of
| power & resources to process ton-scale quantities of materials.
| We have experience in bulk-scale chemical facilities for other
| chemical processes, and know that when they work, they can work
| really well. So we believe that bulk industrial scale is the
| fastest/cheapest way for CO2 removal from air in a way that can
| be deployed fast enough & in an economically-sustainable way to
| meet existing/forecast demand for voluntary CO2 credits &
| eventually to tip the needle through large-scale deployment.
| cinntaile wrote:
| There was an art project a couple of years ago to clean up
| smog.
|
| https://www.studioroosegaarde.net/project/smog-free-project
| matthewmcg wrote:
| "CO2 acts as an acid and will bind to a base, whether in the
| liquid phase or on a solid surface. We have developed a process
| to bring air in contact with a base substrate that captures CO2
| molecules while letting N2 and O2 molecules pass through"
|
| Interesting, and of course worth noting that many geological
| events have done exactly this when calcium bearing rock
| (chemically basic) is exposed and weathered, capturing carbon as
| calcium carbonate. See, e.g. the hypothesis that the uplift of
| the Himalayas contributed to a past ice age[1].
|
| One way to grasp the scale of the problem of sequestering our
| current level industrial emissions is to imagine assembling a
| calcium surface comparable to that of the Tibetan plateau. That's
| not to minimize the value of potential sequestration solutions
| here, which as you note will definitely need to be coupled with
| emissions reductions. Just that we need to, in effect "move
| mountains" to get this to work.
|
| [1] https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-
| abstrac...
| markcyffka wrote:
| Great point. Cheers.
| ncmncm wrote:
| It should be much more cost-effective to float wind turbines to
| pump surface water to benthic depths. Then, the whole ocean is
| your CO2 collection surface. You might also pump water from
| (lesser) depths to the surface to distribute over coral reefs to
| relieve both heat and pH. (Picture a line of these some miles
| seaward, all up and down the Great Barrier Reef.)
|
| The wind turbine nacelle could be substantially cheaper than in
| the typical electrical generating turbine, instead coupling
| mechanically or hydraulically to the water pump.
|
| Some people worry that this would saturate the deep ocean with
| CO2. A bit of calculation shows this is an idle concern: the
| shallow ocean is already being saturated with CO2, with
| immediately dire consequences, and there is overwhelmingly more
| deep ocean water than surface water. So long as atmospheric CO2
| falls off over the coming century, there would no long-term
| problem.
|
| Geoengineering that tackles the root problem, CO2, is
| fundamentally different from schemes that only (e.g.) try to
| block insolation. Other engineering is going on to tackle
| upstream CO2 emission, but we have a huge stock of CO2 already
| built up in the atmosphere that will need to be drawn down.
| secondbreakfast wrote:
| You should build this! This is one of those "all of the above"
| moments.
| ncmncm wrote:
| It could be profitable if you sold carbon credits. The pH and
| water volume may be measured accurately on the way through,
| precisely identifying exactly how much CO2 is being
| sequestered.
|
| I don't know how the carbon credit economy works. I would
| welcome enlightenment.
| markcyffka wrote:
| Today we see a moment when popular interest, need, capital,
| and talent are converging on a willingness to to try new
| things with a path to success. Who knows how long the window
| will last. We must try to advance any path that has some
| chance of succeeding and has a technically/commercially
| viable path forward.
| mNovak wrote:
| Not to derail the OP discussion; but, how does one go about
| pumping water to great depths? That sounds like it would
| require immense energy to do on any large scale. Also thinking
| of the maintenance on the presumably narrow vertical pipe going
| miles(?) below the ocean.
| pvarangot wrote:
| I think the problem with that approach is that it would be
| harder to establish a regulatory framework were you can get "I
| sequestered CO2 credits" if your pumps are out in the ocean and
| pumping the CO2 into deeper waters. The capturing facilities
| inland are easier to audit and regulate.
|
| So yeah maybe it's better for the planet but since it's harder
| to regulate it would be tricky to get funding to build that if
| the potential profit comes from the government intervening to
| set a price for the CO2 removal you are doing.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Pumped water volume and pH are easy to measure, precisely
| identifying how much CO2 is being sequestered. These could be
| reported continuously via satellite link.
|
| It doesn't cost any less to keep a wind turbine and pump
| still than to leave it running, so there will be no incentive
| to cheat.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I don't know anything specifically about wind turbine
| maintenance, but if its anything like everything else I
| know about, it probably does cost more to have 99% uptime
| than it does to have 80% uptime.
| gridspy wrote:
| Sounds like it would also directly cool surface water, by
| replacing it with very cold deep water.
|
| That cooling would directly reduce current average earth
| temperatures, in addition to the CO2 impact on long term
| heating / cooling.
| Kirinius wrote:
| Not sure in which measure this "cooling" (of oceans only)
| would have any impact on other parameters of global climate,
| but that's a project I'd be eager to work on anyways.
| joefigura wrote:
| This doesn't remove CO2 from the ocean, right? It instead mixes
| the ocean better to increase the total CO2 absorbed in the
| ocean, reducing atmospheric CO2?
|
| It sounds like a cool idea but is not really related to what
| AirMyne is trying to do! Lots of ideas are promising and people
| need to be working on all of them
| ncmncm wrote:
| AirMyne is trying to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and
| sequester it attached to rocks underground. Pumping surface
| water down sequesters surface water down deep that recently
| collected CO2 from the atmosphere, and exposes incrementally
| less-saturated surface water to collect more.
|
| The important difference is not how the CO2 is collected, or
| where it ends up. Ultimately, what matters is how much mass
| of CO2 is collected per unit cost, and how much CO2 is
| collected in total. I.e., how profitable is it, and how much
| difference does it really make? We need methods that can move
| CO2 out of the atmosphere by, ultimately, billions of tons
| per week.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| > After energy is applied, CO2 is desorbed from the substrate for
| downstream treatment and compression.
|
| Is this the most energy intensive part of the process? What kind
| of energy do you apply? (heat?)
| markcyffka wrote:
| You are absolutely correct that desorption is the energy-
| intensive step in many CO2 capture systems that have been
| publicly proposed. I can't get into the specifics, but keeping
| the desorption energy as low as possible is a major focus of
| our time/efforts as we design & scale our process.
| atultw wrote:
| This looks promising, best of luck.
|
| A lot of technologies to solve waste problems have been invented
| and launched, but very few get used at a large scale.
|
| Some questions:
|
| What do you see as the biggest roadblocks to adoption of your
| product? What makes AirMyne more attractive than the existing
| options? https://time.com/6125303/direct-air-carbon-capture-
| infrastru...
| markcyffka wrote:
| We think our solution will be faster to deploy than other
| solutions and operate at a lower total cost + energy usage. I
| know it's a vague answer, but our design is anchored in
| minimizing capex, minimizing process steps/complexity, and
| minimizing novelty in our supply chain as much as possible. We
| see that cost/energy/embodied CO2/speed to scale might be
| optimized by focusing on these areas, but we will also learn as
| we go.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-03-17 23:00 UTC)