What kind of opex costs are we looking at? How much would it cost, for example, to direct air capture the equivalent of the amount of CO2 produced from burning a barrel of oil? (Leaving sequestration costs aside for someone else to minimize of course)
Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
151–160 of 198 posts
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
burn or decompose same thing, trees are a buffer not a solution, unless you cut down, bury deep, then regrow.
cut diwn and use it for furniture and buildings. We could replace concrete with wood.
It’s a very inefficient (in time, and total carbon captured) way of doing it is the problem.
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Conceded. But with automated reporting from metering equipment, it would be easy to tell when it stopped working, and if that meant the money stopped, you would be motivated to get out there and get it going again.
We will need thousands of these things, all over the world. Maybe even millions.
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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…
Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels 100%, we still have too much carbon in the atmosphere no?
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hmm, off the top of my head I think that it takes as much energy to pump water down a 1-foot tube as it would for a 1000-foot tube. It's like rotating a long loop of chain on a pulley, but in three dimensions. One liter of water goes down the tube, one liter of water comes up around the tube. Both sides weigh equal amounts so there's no net force. Of course, overcoming inertia to get the water moving and keeping it m…
There is significant friction between the water and the tube that needs to be accounted for. The longer the tube, the more friction there is.
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, off the top of my head I think that it takes as much energy to pump water down a 1-foot tube as it would for a 1000-foot tube. It's like rotating a long loop of chain on a pulley, but in three dimensions. One liter of water goes down the tube, one liter of water comes up around the tube. Both sides weigh equal amounts so there's no net force. Of course, overcoming inertia to get the water moving and keeping it m…
There is significant friction between the water and the tube that needs to be accounted for. The longer the tube, the more friction there is.
But the bigger its cross section, and the slower the water inside moves, the less friction there is. A fabric tube 10 or 20 feet across would work as well as a pipe. It could stick up a few feet above the surface, and the pump just lift water over the edge into it.
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should build this! This is one of those "all of the above" moments.
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.
This is really well said. As a person who lived through the first dot-com boom, this feels a lot like the 90's. There are way more ideas than there are viable paths forward. But among these ideas, there's at least a handful of future giants.
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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 redu…
It’s hopeless.
Feel so powerless.
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#159It 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…
I'm not a marine or ocean expert, but won't pumping large amounts of surface water to benthic depths have a huge impact on the marine life, currents and so on?
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#160Trees.
We could simply plant trees.