why do people try to do carbon capture from the air when the concentration of CO2 is like 3 orders of magnitude higher in the ocean
Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
161–170 of 198 posts
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#162Whats 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.
so ~40 PWh just to keep up with the carbon emitted each year. a mere 1000x more than the global electrical output.
and we're still arguing about whether fission is good in the year of our lord 2022
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#163It 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…
Where did you learn about this idea? I've been trying to get up to speed on climate change solutions and I thought I heard just about everything but this is the first I've heard this solution and it sounds like it might make total sense. Are there companies developing these pump mills?
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why? There are ~8 billion humans to get stuff done — it’s not all on your shoulders. Even if only 1% of the world both can and will fix it, it’s still in the realm of stuff that can be fixed.
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should build this! This is one of those "all of the above" moments.
It could be profitable if you sold carbon credits. The pH and water volume may be measured accurately on the way through, precisely identifying exactly how much CO2 is being sequestered. I don't know how the carbon credit economy works. I would welcome enlightenment.
As I know there are some standards like https://www.goldstandard.org/ and https://verra.org/ . They audit the projects that claim to remove CO2 from the atmosphere worldwide and issue CO2 credits. These credits then can be sold to companies that want to offset their emissions. Usually OTC deals, sometimes involving brokers as well. There's also https://www.cblmarkets.net/ , which is one of the big marketplaces where such deals are happening.
I've heard deals with prices in the range of $0.5 to $5 per tonne CO2 equivalent. There's also a decentralized protocol that aims to move these credits onchain (https://toucan.earth/), their BCT (Base Carbon Tonne) token price is currently around $3.1.
As stated in the post, last year ~$1B worth of credits are sold. One McKinsey report expects it to be around $50B at 2030.
There are much more details of course, but these are the basics as I know.
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with plant based sequestration is that it is a net neutral proposition unless you can bury the plants. All the talk about forests being so great(and they are, just not as carbon sinks) ignores the complete lifecycle, which is only as negative as the sustained volume of the forest, assuming you started from just dirt. If that forest ever burns, it's all back in the atmosphere again.
> unless you can bury the plants. Maybe this is a naive question: but why not bury plants? We got into this mess by digging up long-buried plants, so why not literally reverse the process? With intentional effort, maybe this could be a viable solution? (Probably not -- but I'm curious why.)
No need to. Trees bury about half their biomass as roots. Then leaves and branches fall on the ground and bury older leaves and branches. Of course it's long and inefficient (because of fungus, bugs...) but plants do it without our input so we need to let them do their thing. Calling this process net neutral is a falsehood.
Of course it's not enough to balance human emissions. Sequestering carbon in fields, as pointed out, is a win-win solution which may do a large part in canceling emissions.
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#167Whats 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.
Where do you envision this energy to come from and in which timescale? would that be electricity only or a mix? Thank you.
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could we put them into pods and throw them at Mars so we start dumping Co2 on Mars for Musk's Mars Mushroom Mart! too grow.
Lovelock (of the Gaia Hypothesis) had the bright idea to put all the CFCs onto all the old ICBMs and launch them at Mars to kick start the greenhouse effect there.
Ah yes, this was all planned from the start, we actually need that CO2! Wait a second... wouldn't it be more efficient to transport solids and burn them on mars?
Okay, I only responded because of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. I watched a video about lovelock and Gaia Hypothesis yesterday.
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Yes but not too much that we can't just wait it out. It's not like the planet is a hot fireball right now. If you wanted to make the planet more hospitable to humans, you would most likely attempt to stop desertification and deforestation rather than attempt CO2 capture. Increased water retention will help with droughts more than a 1°C reduction in global temperatures.
Of course, we are going to see far more than a 1°C increase which is why it is worth doing.
Re: Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
#170Is 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.
Where are you getting all that CaO and why isn't it used by the construction industry instead of burning CaCO2 to get CaO? I am asking this because I might have to build a lime kiln and I would rather avoid that hassle if it is possible.