[HN Gopher] Show HN: An API for CO2 Removal
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: An API for CO2 Removal
Hi all, We're Fabienne and Ewan of Climacrux. Today we're proud to
launch our latest project to try and make carbon dioxide removal as
accessible as possible: CDR Platform [1]. In short: it's an API to
connect to a portfolio of carbon removers. You can purchase from as
low as a single gram and select from both natural and technological
removal methods. Longer: A couple of years ago we launched an
alternative to carbon credits, Carbon Removed[2], designed for
individuals to buy and subscribe to CDR. But we always had the
nagging thought that there was more that could be done. CDR
Platform is our foundation for that - a simple API to get prices
and purchase (at the moment). Our plan is to become the Stripe of
the carbon removal ecosystem, seamlessly connecting the supply to
the demand. We'd love to hear your feedback. Do you see a use case
for this and would you use it? What features have we missed? Do you
understand what we're doing and if not, what's unclear? We'd love
to hear from you.[3] Many thanks and happy hacking, Climacrux.
P.s. If you are a carbon remover, send us your prices, life cycle
analysis and some more information about your removal timeline. Our
aim is to bring your services to a wider audience so you can focus
on reducing our CO2 levels. Thanks for your work! [1]
https://docs.cdrplatform.com [2] https://carbonremoved.com [3]
ewan@climacrux.com
Author : kisamoto
Score : 65 points
Date : 2022-11-10 18:37 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.cdrplatform.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.cdrplatform.com)
| noasaservice wrote:
| Reduce energy usage to reduce CO2. That means reduce internet
| calls, and reduce CPU utilization to do the thing.
|
| Strip the tracking crap out of your app.
|
| Reduce/eliminate all but the absolutely necessary API calls
| required.
|
| edit: To be honest, anything that causes bloat is what pushes the
| "get rid of current device and get newer device". And it's not 1
| app, but dozens over bad upgrades and bad features, tracking,
| monetization, etc.
|
| I don't just think of the CO2. I also think of all the industrial
| e-waste in silicon chip making, and the fact that their cradle-
| to-grave cycle is a "local landfill".
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _...and the fact that their cradle-to-grave cycle is a "local
| landfill"._
|
| If only. :( Open air pits in third world countries where the
| equipment is burned to recover the trace valuable elements from
| the ash is, sadly, a lot more likely.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| I wonder how many tons of CO2 were spent on the mid-term
| election cycle and associated media production / political
| tours / rallys / communications / junk mail / spam texts / ad
| campaigns.
| kisamoto wrote:
| It's a good point. We want to do a real deep dive into the
| emissions involved in all our products and do keep an eye on
| both our personal and service emissions.
|
| Tracking is mostly for fast error identification at this early
| stage and because we're looking to (dis-)prove this as an
| opportunity.
|
| Thanks for your thoughts.
|
| Side note: A good read to put the 'value' of carbon dioxide
| into perspective is 'How Bad are Bananas' by Mike Berners Lee.
| He tries to give the same 'gut feeling' to carbon as we have
| with money (e.g. Champagne is more expensive than soda).
| [deleted]
| lob_it wrote:
| The more negligent and incompetent methane emissions become, the
| more carbon credits will be devalued.
|
| Do you consider methane leaks as a 10 year investment plan? There
| is no tracing where the co2 came from once ch4 turns into co2
| (we've had methane leaks for decades). :)
|
| https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/gwp-star-better-way-mea...
|
| https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/MethaneMatters
|
| https://www.epa.gov/natural-gas-star-program/estimates-metha...
|
| The opportunities for fraud have already been proven.
|
| There is no money (gdp) in preventing methane leaks and we get
| the upside of higher temperatures and carbon credit manipulation.
|
| Carbon credits schemes profit from neglect. The "save the world
| types" just chased co2......
| RobotToaster wrote:
| GWAAS: greenwashing as a service.
| kisamoto wrote:
| Why do you perceive carbon removal as greenwashing?
| [deleted]
| drlobster wrote:
| Pure ideology
| [deleted]
| kisamoto wrote:
| But it's worth trying.
| vegcel wrote:
| I mean, if a consumer wants to round up to the nearest dollar
| on their online purchase of Tyson Frozen Pork Cutlets 8 Pcs
| (which most certainly has a calculable carbon footprint caused
| from deforestation) to plant some trees to offset that
| deforestation, why not?
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| This is awesome! I can't believe all of the negative comments
| about lowering the barrier to do something this important. We
| only have one earth, it is priceless because we cannot live
| without it, and we are really messing it up with massive amounts
| of CO2. It really doesn't matter much how expensive, difficult,
| or inefficient removing the CO2 is... it must be done, we have no
| other choice. Like any tech, it will get better over time when
| more and more money goes into it.
| Syonyk wrote:
| "It has to be done" isn't helped by "throwing money at schemes
| that don't do what they claim to do on the tin." Especially
| when, by people doing that, they feel that they've "solved the
| problem" and can go on consuming as they have been.
|
| To a certain group of people, "carbon offsets" are more or less
| the old church "indulgences" - permission to {sin, emit} with
| the consequences covered. And if that money is doing nothing
| but enriching some people in the middle while not actually
| doing anything useful ("We'll not cut down this forest... _that
| we we weren 't planning to cut down anyway_", or "Sure, we'll
| protect this land... _and go clearcut the next mile over
| because we don 't care where the ranch goes_"), it's worse than
| nothing - because you've now "granted permission to emit" while
| not actually offsetting anything.
|
| That's not how it should be, but it's certainly how a lot of
| people perceive it to be. "Oh, it's fine, it's carbon neutral,
| I have an offset subscription" vs having to actually face that
| their carbon emissions aren't being offset.
|
| So I don't think it's fair to say that people asking questions
| about "Is the money being paid doing what it's supposed to
| actually do?" are pro-carbon or something. There's a lot of
| outright fraud in that space, and an API that smooths the
| friction of larger fraud isn't something useful. If you're
| going the wrong way to your stated destination, going that
| wrong way _faster_ isn 't helpful.
|
| Now, can I have all your surplus money to put into solar farms
| somewhere? Don't ask if they're in coal heavy territory or
| somewhere with a bunch of nuclear /hydro, it doesn't matter,
| right? We have to do everything we possibly can!
|
| ... except the one thing that would make a difference, which is
| _consume radically less._
| Lariscus wrote:
| Carbon capture isn't real (as advertised). If you take green
| energy out of the supply to capture carbon, a carbon producing
| power plant will have to make up for it.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJslrTT-Yhc
| elil17 wrote:
| You can run carbon capture by burning natural gas and still
| capture more carbon than you release because compressed CO2 +
| H2O is a lower energy state than O2 + hydrocarbon compounds.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Wow, interesting
| abraae wrote:
| Is this true? Sounds exciting if so.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| It's true in a naive sense but the natural gas must also be
| extracted, refined, transported and the infrastructure to
| convert it into electricity and to perform the carbon
| capture must be built.
|
| So _yes_ carbon capture using fossil fuels isn 't outright
| impossible because of physics, but practically speaking
| it's not real because the rest of the chain lowers the
| already marginal efficiency.
| elil17 wrote:
| It's not really marginal efficiency. It's ~60% efficiency
| for a natural gas system, higher for a system with point-
| source capture on that natural gas. I'm not sure how
| exactly it pans out with the inefficiency of extraction
| but as I understand it those are fairly minor.
|
| That's not to say that I think DAC is a silver bullet or
| something - it's obviously not because the CAPEX costs
| are huge at the moment.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| Yeah for sure, you're right that I shouldn't have said
| marginal as the situation wrt natural gas is decent
| (though that is the best case fossil fuel). It's
| important to be accurate about these things.
| kisamoto wrote:
| Yes, we need to decarbonize.
|
| But that doesn't mean we can't also try to accelerate the
| removal of carbon from our atmosphere.
| knaekhoved wrote:
| Why? Carbon is awesome. Life is made out of it. I want more.
| Moissanite wrote:
| Eventually, sure - but in the short term, carbon removal is
| an inefficient way of allocating resources.
| kisamoto wrote:
| But we have to allocate some resources to start the
| development process now (and hopefully make it more
| efficient and effective).
| cookingrobot wrote:
| You have a machine that if you turn it on, it removes carbon
| from the air. But, to power it you release a greater amount
| of carbon into the air.
|
| Should you turn on the machine? No, you should leave it off.
|
| Only when your power sources are green should you turn on the
| machine.
| kisamoto wrote:
| The machines must result in more capture & storage than
| they produce - net negative emissions.
|
| For example, using a machine to heat waste biomass with
| fast pyrolysis turns the biomass into bio-oil. Bio-oil can
| then be pumped underground resulting in long-term, stable
| storage. The machine produced far fewer emissions than were
| captured naturally by the plants.
| elil17 wrote:
| No, carbon capture powered by fossil fuels releases less
| carbon than it captures. For direct air capture, it takes
| somewhere around 2,000 kWh to capture a ton of CO2 [1]. You
| can generate those 2,000 kWh using natural gas and release
| about 0.4 tons of CO2 (about 0.8 if you use coal). [2] You
| can be even more efficient by burning natural gas in the
| sorbent re-generator (avoiding inefficiencies of power
| generation and transmission).
|
| [1]: https://www.wri.org/insights/direct-air-capture-
| resource-con...
|
| [2]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-dioxide-
| emissions-...
| jfk13 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, do those figures account for the carbon
| released during manufacture of the carbon-capture and
| power-generation equipment you're using? Do they include
| the carbon emissions of extracting, refining, and
| delivering the fuels, as well as the emissions from
| actually using them?
| elil17 wrote:
| They don't, that's just my napkin math.
| kisamoto wrote:
| There have been some detalied life-cycle analysis of
| certain carbon capture methods/plants. As one of the most
| famous (& funded), Climeworks have had a third party
| study published to break this down[1]
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-00771-9
| [deleted]
| nebula8804 wrote:
| This is only potentially true up to the point where you reach
| 100% energy generation using zero emission sources.
| cagenut wrote:
| Your docs mention biochar but your main site and pricing don't.
|
| Also, everything seems to be phrased-for/aimed-at the buyer, do
| you intend to be a marketplace or to only work with some upstream
| supplier?
|
| [edit: nvm I found the 'removal partner' page. let me put it
| differently then: if i went and bought 100 acres, grew hemp or
| something on it, ran it through a giant biochar retort, and
| buried the resulting biochar >20cm deep... what would you give me
| for a ton?]
| kisamoto wrote:
| We're in talk with a couple of bio-char partners yet but I'm
| afraid you can't purchase it yet because we don't have one
| onboarded.
|
| It's mentioned as we see it as a meaningful removal method (and
| will hopefully have a partner soon!).
|
| At this stage our vision is primarily buyer focused to spread
| CDR integrations. We work directly with verified suppliers with
| the aim to help the buyer bring carbon removal to their
| business and their customers.
|
| In future this could evolve into a marketplace however we'd
| need to ensure the quality (permanence, additionality etc.) of
| the suppliers.
| edent wrote:
| I took a look at the website front page, but I couldn't see _how_
| CO2 is removed.
|
| Does the money go to planting trees? Lab diamonds? Coal buyback?
|
| I love the idea of offsetting my intensive compute use. But I'd
| like to know who is doing the removal and how they're doing it.
| neallindsay wrote:
| For the "How?" you need to click through to the "Removal
| partner" page that lists the companies that actually do the
| sequestration.
|
| https://docs.cdrplatform.com/docs/removal-partner
| kisamoto wrote:
| Good idea to have it on the front page.
|
| We do have more info on our partners and the relevant removal
| methods in the other docs[1] but I'll add some info to the
| homepage to make that clearer, faster. Thanks for the
| suggestion.
|
| [1] https://docs.cdrplatform.com/docs/removal-partner
| mritchie712 wrote:
| this[0] is one of the more interesting approaches I've seen. No
| idea if it's "safe", but seems logical.
|
| 0 - https://charmindustrial.com/
| erulabs wrote:
| Great idea, wishing you luck!
|
| While carbon removal today is inefficient, it's not set in stone
| to always be that way. For example, olivine is super interesting
| - one of the most abundant minerals on earth - it absorbs CO2
| from the atmosphere passively when ground down into small pieces.
| The Cascade Mtns in Washington state are full of the stuff and
| not far from the beach. The ocean grinds rocks into sand all day
| with zero carbon costs. With the right combination of luck and
| strategy, I don't see why some forms of carbon removal can't
| eventually be extremely cheap. It might be the greenest thing we
| can do to literally turn our beaches green!
|
| This is nice for folks like me who make business SaaS so we can
| add a nice line item "removes some carbon!" to the checkout list.
| I know to some, that's probably disgusting and cynical, but I
| _strongly_ prefer surrounding myself with optimists, so, it works
| for me!
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Personally I'd care about the quality of the schemes before
| learning the exact API. I had to navigate around to find some
| partial information, it would be nice to see a table of the
| schemes, their attributes, and their cost.
|
| Personally I don't like the inclusion of tree planting schemes
| and that greensand scheme because as long as unmeasurable and
| uncertain schemes like that are selling low cost credits there is
| not going to be a market for carbon removal, just a lot of
| corporations running ads congratulating themselves for being "net
| zero" while the planet burns.
| boringg wrote:
| I think this is the crux of the argument. API is great in
| concept but validating and verifying the underlying technology
| that is claiming CO2e reductions is by far the bigger and
| harder problem.
|
| Sorry if I'm being harsh here but its similar CO2e platform
| accounting companies -- theres a million of those and its low
| cost low effort low return for actual benefits (just putting
| money in the pockets of the middle men).
|
| I don't see how something like this is beneficial unless its
| essentially sending hot leads to technologies.
| acc_297 wrote:
| Yeah sad but true can confirm as a tree planter that has put
| more than 300,000 trees into the ground the last three years it
| is a carbon positive endeavour
| kisamoto wrote:
| Yup, will make the methods more present on the homepage so you
| don't have to click around.
|
| I understand your hesitation on tree planting and
| mineralization however it is optional if you choose to purchase
| these methods. Others prefer the more nature-based CO2 removal.
|
| We do value the quality of the schemes, only picking removal
| over dubious credits but we will aim to put more emphasis on
| this.
| xyst wrote:
| feels like putting a bucket under a waterfall to be honest. For
| what it's worth, tech behind it looks kind of cool.
|
| We need leaders around the world to move off of cheap energy (ie,
| oil and gas) and subsidize it for developing countries. We need
| strict penalties for producers and we need to get off of animal
| products.
| [deleted]
| husainfazel wrote:
| I wonder what the carbon cost of generating the certificates and
| sending/emailing them is?
| kisamoto wrote:
| We're working on that with the end goal of using our own API to
| remove the carbon footprint of them.
|
| Plus for customers where it's not relevant we'll offer a fully
| on-demand model where nothing is sent but available for
| generation through the customer account.
| [deleted]
| boplicity wrote:
| I've grown increasingly skeptical of carbon removal. It strikes
| me as incredibly inefficient; there are much easier and cheaper
| gains to be made by no longer removing carbon from the ground in
| the first place.
|
| Further: The Carbon Removed website claims that carbon is
| "permanently" removed from the atmosphere, and yet lists some of
| the carbon removal sources as "reforestation." This doesn't add
| up. Forests are part of the carbon cycle, and not a way to
| "permanently remove" carbon from the atmosphere.
|
| Overall, I very much doubt that our society will do enough to
| stop climate change from drastically changing our planet. I wish
| that I saw initiatives like this as a source of hope, but don't
| see much, if any evidence to support such hope.
| zaphar wrote:
| Given the existing headwinds I am skeptical we can make any
| progress without removal. The problems are a two hit combo of
| political will and technical limitations.
| tombakt wrote:
| I suspect that the end goal with this carbon credits scheme is
| almost entirely control and surveillance. The effectiveness of
| the stated intent doesn't matter from that perspective. Once
| the system is in place, then it is gradually expanded to the
| individual level and someone has to keep tabs on everyone's
| credit balances after all. Think KYC but for everything but a
| bit worse. Good luck ;)
| 8note wrote:
| There is only one way to permanently remove carbon from the
| atmosphere, and that's to launch it off the earth and onto a
| path where it could never make it back. Everything else will
| store carbon for a while, before eventually releasing it again
|
| A forest stores lots of carbon while it exists - there's cycles
| of trees dying and releasing carbon, and new trees taking their
| place absorbing carbon, but there is a steady state change in
| terms of carbon in the trees that currently exist. The carbon
| is only released by deforesting the area again
| ericd wrote:
| There are many things between forest and space launch. If you
| inject the CO2 underground at a reasonable rate, you can get
| it to bind to rock, chemically changing that rock. It might
| eventually find its way back to the atmosphere, but on
| geological timescales. If you sink kelp to the bottom of the
| ocean, that also effectively sequesters it.
| kisamoto wrote:
| Carbon removal is definitely not mututally exclusive to
| reducing emissions in the first place. Avoiding emissions is
| cheaper and easier than removing them. But realistically we
| can't stop emitting tomorrow and even if we could, we have an
| excess of emissions in the atmosphere to address.
|
| As for hope, it's a mixed message. On one hand we have more
| emissions than ever. On the other we have more awareness and
| action than ever. Personally I lean towards hope and want to
| give it as much of a chance as possible.
|
| We see net-zero as a bridge to a more sustainable future.
| Reduce emissions and remove the unavoidable.
| henearkr wrote:
| You may see a tree as an ephemeral carbon storage, but the
| forest is a much, much long term storage, that can be
| considered permanent (unless catastrophic fire).
|
| The forest, at each time point, contains many trees, growing
| ones, dying ones, decomposing ones, seeds, etc. But its overall
| solid carbon mass is strictly positive and larger than, say, a
| meadow, and if you have the right conditions it can be slowly
| growing year after year.
|
| So planting trees _is_ a way to store carbon, just not to be
| thought at the tree scale, more like at the forest scale.
|
| Edit: a lot of carbon is stored in the soil, too, especially in
| the thick humus of a healthy forest. Even if each individual
| component of the humus is decaying, disappearing and replaced
| by new fallen leaves etc, the humus layer itself is not going
| anywhere.
| ericd wrote:
| It's been a bit since I did a deep dive on this (thanks
| AirMiners), but my understanding is that we have to get to net
| zero _and_ sequester large amounts of carbon currently in the
| atmosphere to avoid some of the worse climate scenarios. It's
| not either /or. We're past the point where cutting to 0 in a
| decade or two yields acceptable outcomes. But to your point,
| sequestration is much more expensive than reduction, so cutting
| down new emissions is going to have to be the vast majority of
| the reduction.
|
| And yeah, forestry credits are really fraught with problems,
| but they're much, much cheaper than real sequestration, which
| is why stuff like this always offers them. There is some time-
| value of sequestration in the short term, though.
| kisamoto wrote:
| Yup, the latest IPCC report relies heavily on carbon capture
| in a lot of the predicted 'limitation' scenarios.
|
| We do not see carbon removal as an excuse to continue
| polluting or not reduce emissions. It's a "both" situation
| and we go even further to say we need many different kinds of
| removal as there isn't a "silver bullet" that will solve
| decades of burning fossil fuels.
|
| These will involve natural and technological methods to
| restore a bit of stability to the climate.
| [deleted]
| lispisok wrote:
| Yeah I don't buy carbon removal as a practical solution.
| Humanity spent over 100 years pulling concentrated carbon out
| of the ground as fast as we could and got a bunch of useful
| energy out of it. Now all that carbon we pulled out of the
| ground and dumped into the atmosphere is a stable trace gas.
| The thermodynamic hurdle to reverse what we've done is huge.
| The thermodynamics is not there, the economics is not there.
| jofer wrote:
| Keep in mind that the energy expended in C02 sequestration is
| concentration. It's easily soluble in water when injected and
| then is reactive to produce mineral precipitates. And that's
| only the geologic sequestration. There are multiple
| approaches, both biological, engineered, and geologic. Either
| way, the hard part is going from dispersed to concentrated in
| most cases (or for the biologic cases, actually keeping the
| result in the biosphere and not decaying into the
| atmosphere).
|
| You don't need to reverse the combustion reaction.
|
| You don't have to spend anywhere near as much energy as you
| gained from combustion to sequester it. You're not turning it
| back into bare carbon or into a hydrocarbon.
|
| You're breaking hydrogen - carbon bonds to gain energy during
| combustion. You're then sequestering C02 -- you don't need to
| chemically alter the C02. You do need to concentrate it, but
| in terms of thermodynamics, you get a large amount of energy
| from combustion and it takes less than that to concentrate
| the combustion products.
|
| In principle (but often not reality to the practicalities of
| concentrating a dispersed gas) combustion and then
| sequestration can be energy positive overall. The
| thermodynamics isn't quite what folks often assume.
| geysersam wrote:
| To be fair, we have never been more efficient at extracting
| carbon from the ground than now. The first 150 years we were
| terrible compared to today.
|
| 30 more years at this rate will double our total CO2
| emissions.
|
| We've already created a problem, but a small one compared to
| what will happen if we don't stop soon.
| kisamoto wrote:
| On the flip side, we're just starting the 100 years now
| trying to extract carbon dioxide out of the air as fast as we
| can to get a livable planet out of it.
|
| Granted we (as a species) have huge challenges ahead of us,
| but with collective effort it could be possible.
| mjhay wrote:
| Our CO2 output is _increasing_. Under the world 's current
| political/economic regime, we can't keep our CO2 output
| stable, let alone decrease it. If we lack the seriousness
| to do that, we definitely lack the ability to do the much
| harder task of removing what we've already put there.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Don't listen to the naysaying, it's a cool idea, thanks I'll be
| looking forward to using it.
| kisamoto wrote:
| Thank you so much!
|
| We know that carbon removal (and climate change in general) is
| a controversial topic so we really appreciate your kind words.
| Antieji wrote:
| simpsond wrote:
| How do you verify that the removal is done correctly /
| accurately? Is that based on trust with the partner doing the
| removal?
| adamjc wrote:
| Carbon capture is not a cost-effecient use of resources. You are
| using fossil fuels to generate power to capture carbon.
| kisamoto wrote:
| Renewables are used whenever possible.
|
| Even if fossil fuels are used the end result is captured carbon
| dioxide (net negative).
| danuker wrote:
| In any case it is strictly a better use of renewables to
| directly offset fossil fuel use for electricity, rather than
| allow greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, then capture it
| back.
|
| https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/the-amount-
| of...
|
| "Removing CO2 directly from the air requires almost as many
| joules as those produced by burning the fossil fuel in the
| first place"
| kisamoto wrote:
| If it were that binary - yes. But we also need to progress
| the efficiency of carbon capture. As the linked article
| states, "economies of scale and efficiency improvements
| would undoubtedly help" and we can only get there by
| continuing to develop carbon removal methods.
| danuker wrote:
| As long as the technology does more harm than good, we
| should not see it as a solution, nor even a component of
| the solution.
|
| Funding research for improving efficiency, maybe.
|
| But the main actionable policy NOW is detecting and
| reducing emissions. The US still subsidizes fossil fuel.
| [deleted]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-10 23:01 UTC)