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Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale

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Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale

#71

Post by markcyffka »

multiplegeorges wrote: post #34

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.

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.

Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale

#72

Post by markcyffka »

throwaway581294 wrote: post #50

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?

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!

Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale

#73

Post by yodon »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #64
yodon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 sto…

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.

Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale

#75

Post by nick238 »

gennarro wrote: post #74

Can someone explain the concept of a ton of air to me? Is the air measure as if it was compressed into a solid?

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)

Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale

#76

Post by markcyffka »

todd8 wrote: post #70

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…

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.

Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale

#77

Post by markcyffka »

ganzuul wrote: post #54

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.

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.

Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale

#78

Post by photochemsyn »

markcyffka wrote: post #12
boringg wrote: post #6

Whats the energy cost per ton of CO2 removed?

Right now, it's >5MWh/ton using lab scale equipment. At 1 million ton per year scale, we expect closer to 1-2MWh/ton.

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?

Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale

#79

Post by marcosdumay »

yodon wrote: post #66
seizethecheese wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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?

Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale

#80

Post by markcyffka »

azinman2 wrote: post #25

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…

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.

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