Very sobering article.
But startups are not about building a carbon concentration machine, they need money concentration machine. Thermodynamics don't apply directly here.
So you want to build a carbon capture company
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Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 corruptio…
It doesn't take a huge amount in the way of active suppression: hire a some of the brightest industrial chemists and pay them well to work on your stuff instead of untested, unprofitable algae technology. Other smart people will similarly work on financial derivatives or cost-per-click optimisation instead of money-losing algae.
It's not a conspiracy, it's just capitalism chasing returns.
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#23Tangential 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?
But are they carbon negative? I don't think so
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ou…
We could create mechanical replacement which works with sea water and doesn't require us to wait for a decade to get result and likely more optimized for just one task.
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#25He acknowledges helpfully at the outset that he's not a CCS expert. He's just posing questions by which you could evaluate whether a company is doing anything remarkable, isn't that correct? This isn't a proposal for a CCS company or anything -- more of a guide on how to poke holes in a proposal for such a company.
A side note, I had never heard of Casey Handmer before seeing this. I'm wondering how he appears to be a software developer at JPL but markets himself as some CEO-for-hire on only interesting problems...
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#26Here 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 th…
Long distance high voltage DC inter ties are a thing (there is one running from Washington to southern california), but very costly to build.
If you have a truly ridiculous amount of free or almost free photovoltaics somewhere, you could theoretically crack hydrogen from seawater and compress it into tanks, ship it elsewhere (using hydrogen powered ships, hopefully) to be run through giant proton exchange membrane fuel cells. Right now its economics are prohibitively bad. But do the math if the electricity to run the cracking process was far under 1 cent per kWh...
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#27Here 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 th…
Think about it for a moment. How far would you need to transmit power for this to be useful without storage, and from what longitudinal spread of locations?
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#28Here 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 th…
Another perhaps even cooler and not so unrealistic that people are actually working on it, is building the solar farms out in space and beaming the energy down to where it’s needed!
Edit: OK I looked it up again and there are two stages. The one that's having actual work done is beaming energy between two places on earth, but the space one is being "explored".
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/02/25/...
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#29Has 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.
> A plant is basically a self-healing, self-replicating CO2-capturing machine running off solar power and some chemicals.
Not in itself. When the plant dies, it rots and all the carbon goes back to the atmosphere by the action of fungi and bacteria.
Plants can function as the zeroth step in a carbon capture pipeline. The actual capture happens when the plant dies and you bury (or otherwise process) its tissue somewhere so that the carbon cannot go back to the biosphere.
Just growing plants and letting them die is purely carbon neutral.
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#30Here 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 th…
Think about it for a moment. How far would you need to transmit power for this to be useful without storage, and from what longitudinal spread of locations?
Implicit in my first comment is the transmission losses...