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

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

#101

Post by markcyffka » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 7:26 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #41

yodon wrote: post #35

I want to be excited about this, but it's capturing CO2 as CO2 gas, not sequestering CO2 in a form that keeps it out of the atmosphere. If you pay a lot of money in process and power to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere or out of exhaust gases and then use it in chemical processes other than ones which sink the carbon into long lasting solid, liquid, or oceanic absorption form you're just burning money and power to make…

Huge amounts of CO2 can be injected into Saline Aquifers https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015WR01... Capturing CO2 from a power plant, biofuel factory, oil refinery, petrochemical plant or other point source and disposing of it underground is a developed technology. Very little of that is happening because the financial incentives aren't there and the financial incentives that do exist go to carbo…

We agree that saline aquifers are be a compelling strategy given the huge volumes available & measurement capabilities you mentioned. As verification standards emerge in the (currently nascent & somewhat fragmented) CO2 removal ecosystem, precise & accurate quantification is going to be a huge driver to differentiate the highest-quality CO2 removal solutions.

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

#102

Post by worik » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 7:36 PM UTC

InvaderFizz wrote: post #33

oliwary wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about building houses and furniture with the wood?

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 ways and these sorts of ideas are not worth the opportunity cost.

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

#103

Post by worik » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 7:37 PM UTC

samstave wrote: post #49

dokein wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you develop an animal that eats the plants, and then when they die they are buried, such that after the decomposition process all that's left is a fossil? I don't see how that could go wrong unless someone digs up the fossils later on for use as a fuel, but that seems like such a ridiculous an unlikely scenario ha ha ha!

Or the animals turn out to be delicious and people start coking them.

One of the things I really like about regenerative agriculture (there are so many things to like) is that it makes eating meat cool again.

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

#104

Post by _Nat_ » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

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.

That's >18 GJ/tonne, with a goal of 3.6 to 7.2 GJ/tonne, making it much less efficient than post-combustion capture (which I think tends to aim for Why not just do post-combustion capture if it's cheaper and more effective?

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

#105

Post by markcyffka » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #20

markcyffka wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today at lab scale it is quite high at >$1000 ton. At the 1 million ton per year scale, we expect our process to come in at <$100/ton.

If you'll achieve that then this has to be done. France has a CO2 emissions of about 5ton per capita per year (which is pretty low for an industrial nation). But if we get all industrial countries into that ballpark or even lower, then we could just invest another $500 per person each year and are at net zero.

Thanks for the comment. Companies that are very action-oriented on slashing their emissions are already starting to look to CO2 removal projects as the next frontier to maximize their impact, now that the lowest-hanging emissions reductions are complete. Public sector entities (cities, states/provinces, countries) may be in the wings.

We agree that eliminating CO2 emissions must be the primary & most urgent goal, while CO2 removal solutions like ours can be developed in parallel to meet immediate early market demand & prepare (e.g. get costs down, validate & improve the tech, get the regulations set up) for future deployment.

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

#106

Post by AlanSE » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 8:01 PM UTC

worik wrote: post #96

arbuge wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there is always the possibility that things could burn but forests that burn do grow back eventually. Plant-based sequestration should not be written off. A planet covered by X% of forest vs Y% where X%>Y% has more sequestered carbon. If that X% is long-term stable, i.e. if the forests are preserved and curated on a long-term basis, then so is that carbon. Forests are also an enjoyable natural environment f…

When we say "plant based sequestration" we are (I for one am) not talking forests. Carbon sequestration in forests is wilfully ignoring the economic and practical drawbacks: Forests only sequester carbon as they grow. After that they are carbon neutral. You end up with land that cannot be used for any economic purpose. (The creatures and plants that live in it have a value too, but that is not part of this argument).…

> Forests only sequester carbon as they grow. After that they are carbon neutral. You end up with land that cannot be used for any economic purpose. (The creatures and plants that live in it have a value too, but that is not part of this argument).

I will be paraphrasing the science articles I have read lately...

Planting new trees on bare land does not work to capture CO2. So if you deforest an area and then re-plant, you put a lot of extra CO2 into the atmosphere. Like 30% of the trees you harvest go into durable things (like houses) and the rest will decompose and release its carbon. After you leave the ground bare, it starts spewing CO2 from the soil. This is a major carbon source. New trees you plant will EVENTUALLY soak up more CO2, but canopy closure needs to happen before that can happen. Since the young trees are planted with considerable spacing, the soil CO2 source outpaces the tree CO2 sink for many years before the balance shifts.

Mature forests throughout history probably did tend to be carbon neutral on average, yes. This is ignoring ecological changes... like... maybe forest conversion to other landscapes and fires were balanced by healthy forest uptake. I digress.

These are not normal times, and CO2 concentration is very high. Because of that, old-growth or mature forests may be significant sinks of CO2. The best strategy for us to draw down more with forests is to leave as much mature forest untouched as we can.

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

#107

Post by Robin_Message » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 8:01 PM UTC

s1artibartfast wrote: post #82

yodon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 2…

For context, Global Natural Gas production is approximately 4,000 billion cubic meters per year . To sequester the world's carbon emissions, we would need to move and store <1% the volume per year.

That's apples to oranges: we don't store anything like a year's worth of gas.

And anyone in Europe can tell you that natural gas transfer and storage is far from a solved problem.

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

#108

Post by matthewmcg » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 8:07 PM UTC

"CO2 acts as an acid and will bind to a base, whether in the liquid phase or on a solid surface. We have developed a process to bring air in contact with a base substrate that captures CO2 molecules while letting N2 and O2 molecules pass through"

Interesting, and of course worth noting that many geological events have done exactly this when calcium bearing rock (chemically basic) is exposed and weathered, capturing carbon as calcium carbonate. See, e.g. the hypothesis that the uplift of the Himalayas contributed to a past ice age[1].

One way to grasp the scale of the problem of sequestering our current level industrial emissions is to imagine assembling a calcium surface comparable to that of the Tibetan plateau. That's not to minimize the value of potential sequestration solutions here, which as you note will definitely need to be coupled with emissions reductions. Just that we need to, in effect "move mountains" to get this to work.

[1] https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstrac...

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

#109

Post by yodon » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 8:08 PM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #94

yodon wrote: post #35

I want to be excited about this, but it's capturing CO2 as CO2 gas, not sequestering CO2 in a form that keeps it out of the atmosphere. If you pay a lot of money in process and power to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere or out of exhaust gases and then use it in chemical processes other than ones which sink the carbon into long lasting solid, liquid, or oceanic absorption form you're just burning money and power to make…

Inject CO2 into basalt formations, and over the course of a year or so it will turn into rock. There are already several pilot programs doing this, and it's very scalable. Other projects apply energy to turn the CO2 into liquid fuel. Of course that returns the CO2 to the atmosphere, but it'll be a long time before we electrify long-haul jets so it'd be great if their fuel were carbon-neutral.

>Inject CO2 into basalt formations...

Thanks for this comment - the calculations I'd been doing in the GP comment and elsewhere where pretty darn depressing and this approach you're mentioning is very exciting in that it bypasses the fundamental storage volume problems most other sequestration methods face by leveraging the interstitial spaces inside existing rock volumes, and also exciting in that it leverages undersea rock formations for even lower impact. Thanks for pointing me to this.

For others interested in learning more you might hit [0] or [1].

[0]https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/02/19/solid-carbon-ma...

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-019-0011-8

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

#110

Post by yodon » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 8:09 PM UTC

markcyffka wrote: post #98

DennisP wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inject CO2 into basalt formations, and over the course of a year or so it will turn into rock. There are already several pilot programs doing this, and it's very scalable. Other projects apply energy to turn the CO2 into liquid fuel. Of course that returns the CO2 to the atmosphere, but it'll be a long time before we electrify long-haul jets so it'd be great if their fuel were carbon-neutral.

There are a few startups exploring this and also PNNL is doing great public work on this topic as well. https://youtu.be/osXq-k84LpA?t=2177

Thanks, Mark - do you (or anyone else reading this) happen to know offhand any of the startups targeting this approach?