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So you want to build a carbon capture company

caseyhandmer.wordpress.com

11–20 of 180 posts

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#11

Tangential thought; aren't compressed gas companies who bottle CO2/Nitrogen etc. technically carbon capturing? Surely they have optimised their industrial processes, which could be repurposed into a large storage unit rather than a cast iron gas bottle?

As the author points out: they are. But you have to look at the CO2 emitted for compressing that gas and creating the containers and so on.

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#12
As someone currently dabbling in the space, this is great reality checklist for a majority of research papers (and, unfortunately, a large majority on commercial endeavours, too) on the topic. The author makes a solid delivery on his outset promise.

It just might help to shed some light on something akin to the blockchain/machine learning hypecycle bubbles amongst startups.

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#13

Has the author heard of photosynthesis? He is making valid point that we would need more energy to capture but we have lot of energy we could use in daytime near equator. Fossil fuel are burnt just because they are easy to work with and could produce energy all the time, but we have lot of solar energy that is wasted.

Okay, so we build out massive renewable capacity. Wouldn't that energy be better used directly, than to run inefficient carbon capture equipment while other people keep pumping the stuff into the atmosphere? Wouldn't that system basically be using the atmosphere as a really crappy battery, where the efficiency is shit and we still have to keep digging up oil to make it work? Yeah, renewables are peaky, but surely there are better ways of solving that problem?

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#14
post #4

I have an idea about genetically modifying algae to continuously synthesize and excrete cellulose or similar. In theory would only need sunlight and water to operate, and cellulose could sink to the bottom and collected. Anyone knows if this has been explored?

Why wouldn't you use wild type algae, they are already quite efficient in producing biomass?

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#15

As someone currently dabbling in the space, this is great reality checklist for a majority of research papers (and, unfortunately, a large majority on commercial endeavours, too) on the topic. The author makes a solid delivery on his outset promise. It just might help to shed some light on something akin to the blockchain/machine learning hypecycle bubbles amongst startups.

This checklist would (with a few minor adaptations) also work great for many other types of "so you want to start an X company". Very thorough indeed.

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#16
post #4

I have an idea about genetically modifying algae to continuously synthesize and excrete cellulose or similar. In theory would only need sunlight and water to operate, and cellulose could sink to the bottom and collected. Anyone knows if this has been explored?

Algae biofuel has definitely been a thing that people have tried over and over again and it hasn’t happened after a few decades so presumably there is some issue with commercialization. Wikipedia claims algae has very high water requirements (>600L of water for 1L of fuel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel

Im proposing a conspiracy theory here, but the basically all of the world's most profitable companies are involved in fossil fuel production. They definitely have an incentive to not want this technology to thrive and their leaders have a lot of influence and money.

The retort to this theory would be that a company with a lot of resources could simply invest in the new technology.

But with the level of lazy corruption in the world it seems possible that these entities might be suppressing the technology somehow.

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#17

Tangential thought; aren't compressed gas companies who bottle CO2/Nitrogen etc. technically carbon capturing? Surely they have optimised their industrial processes, which could be repurposed into a large storage unit rather than a cast iron gas bottle?

Isn't all that co2 re-released relatively quickly? It gets fizzed and burped right back into the air.

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#18
post #8

Has the author heard of photosynthesis? He is making valid point that we would need more energy to capture but we have lot of energy we could use in daytime near equator. Fossil fuel are burnt just because they are easy to work with and could produce energy all the time, but we have lot of solar energy that is wasted.

A plant is basically a self-healing, self-replicating CO2-capturing machine running off solar power and some chemicals.

They also need massive amounts of water when planted at scale and die after anything between 1-100 years (some hardwood trees live longer but capture carbon relatively slowly compared to faster growing plants), after which they release the carbon back into the ecosystem. Energy efficiency of photosynthesis is also really low.

Just planting a lot of plants and expecting they will efficiently capture a lot of carbon out of the air is going to lead to disappointment.

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#19
Here is a untested idea, probably unworkable.

Solar has a problem that consumers tend to need more energy during the night. So the solution is to pipe electricity from somewhere east so everyone's electricity is piped in from say a location east where its still light.

I got the idea when I heard Singapore wants to run a cable to Australia to get solar because they are too small for renewables.

If if could work for those planners it might work elsewhere. People are talking about pumped hydro as batteries, that's good for storage but this is more of a on demand system.

Cool idea, probably unrealistic.

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#20
Norway have been doing CC since 1996 from natural gas and pumping the CO2 back into the well. The first commercial reservoir (Northern light project) for pumping CO2 back into old oil wells will open in 2024. The drilling is finished and the capacity is estimated to 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year for this first project. There is not any capacity left now for new contracts, but they are planning for additional wells.

https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/environment-and-technology/...

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