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Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

charmindustrial.com

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Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#111

Post by pkrein »

bequanna wrote: post #92

I’m having a tough time understanding how this makes sense. Is this even close to being financially viable if there is never any such thing as carbon credits? Put another way, are the people funding projects like this assuming there will be some kind of carbon credit system in place that will pay absurdly high prices to sequester carbon? Additionally, I suppose you will be compensating farmers for their corn stalk ba…

Carbon purchasing already exists.

Voluntary purchases like Frontier: https://frontierclimate.com/ and many other corporate buyers.

Regulatory cap-and-trade markets like CA ARB LCFS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-carbon_fuel_standard

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#112

Post by hinkley »

krallja wrote: post #75
hinkley wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are less drastic options than Kansas that would work fine. Chicago has an international airport. Indianapolis as well (though it’s not listed in Wikipedia, which makes me wonder how complete that is). St Louis and Minneapolis are major hubs. Large airports besides those I’m less familiar with, but if you’re planning to process corn waste what you need is rail access, not air. So then you can add a lot more of t…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_International_Air... ?

That’s not a list of international airports, though. I’m unclear what page I was looking at now, but it only had about a dozen on it and IND was not one of them.

Disconnected data is just information, not knowledge.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#113

Post by carbadtraingood »

carbadtraingood wrote: post #67

Pkrein, I see you posting here. I've got 200 acres of forest in Washington State and I'm long term interested in providing biomass for carbon sequestration, what can I be doing now to connect with companies like yours to help ensure those 200 acres are as carbon negative as possible?

Right now I'm experimenting with biochar production in small scale TLUDs, but I'm absolutely fascinated in scaling up.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#114

Post by hinkley »

colechristensen wrote: post #86
hinkley wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We talk about this at least once a week here, usually in the scope of software, but it’s a problem that exists in other domains (though VCs and us are constantly pushing for more businesses to run like software, which is nuts considering how not in order we know our own house to be). Ageism and cultishness are how you end up with simple oversights that anyone who has been around the block a few times would either pre…

They just needed one farm kid who became an engineer. They talked about taking seven weeks to figure out a conveyor, put me in the middle of Kansas and I could have told you how to solve that problem in seven minutes, give me a truck she a credit card and i can buy you the parts in an hour. Bay Area engineering tends to be very sheltered, large groups of people with zero experience invading a domain. Sometimes it cre…

Taken cynically, these full disclosure engineering stories are calculated to make the team seem human and trustworthy.

How much do you want to bet that the real story is that one of them drove past a grain elevator and wondered if they make a portable version of that equipment, or one of the frustrated/amused locals didn’t suggest it. Either directly or subconsciously. One of my coworkers has spent most of the last year sharing observations and ideas with the team that are things I pointed out three years ago. I don’t know if he’s giving me an overly subtle nod or he just doesn’t know he’s doing it. Like people who accidentally write a story/song they heard once.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#115

Post by NoGravitas »

bequanna wrote: post #92

I’m having a tough time understanding how this makes sense. Is this even close to being financially viable if there is never any such thing as carbon credits? Put another way, are the people funding projects like this assuming there will be some kind of carbon credit system in place that will pay absurdly high prices to sequester carbon? Additionally, I suppose you will be compensating farmers for their corn stalk ba…

> Is this even close to being financially viable if there is never any such thing as carbon credits?

You're right as far as your comment goes — it will probably never be financially viable to scale this up, and the companies funding the limited scale development are doing it purely for public relations purposes.

What your comment misses, though, is that to survive the coming century, we are going to have to figure out, as a society, how to do things that are not financially viable. Financial viability is what got us into this mess in the first place.

There's a quote attributed to Einstein that says, "We cannot solve today's problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." The quote is disputed, but probably comes from a paraphrase of something he actually said in 1946 in the context of the threat of nuclear warfare. It applies more generally to the multiple self-created existential threats humanity is currently facing, however.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#116

Post by colechristensen »

hinkley wrote: post #114
colechristensen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just needed one farm kid who became an engineer. They talked about taking seven weeks to figure out a conveyor, put me in the middle of Kansas and I could have told you how to solve that problem in seven minutes, give me a truck she a credit card and i can buy you the parts in an hour. Bay Area engineering tends to be very sheltered, large groups of people with zero experience invading a domain. Sometimes it cre…

Taken cynically, these full disclosure engineering stories are calculated to make the team seem human and trustworthy. How much do you want to bet that the real story is that one of them drove past a grain elevator and wondered if they make a portable version of that equipment, or one of the frustrated/amused locals didn’t suggest it. Either directly or subconsciously. One of my coworkers has spent most of the last y…

Clearly they have almost the right idea but missing just a bit of domain knowledge which would make the process incredibly easier.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#117

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #56
dbcurtis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this an overall improvement over leaving the corn stalks in the field to decompose and return nutrients to the soil? This process moves soil nutrients away from point of origin. (Serious question from former Iowa farm boy who still owns corn ground operated by others. Should I let my tenants ship stover away? I want to be a good steward of the soil. )

Whatever their answer they'll need to account for the fuel cost of the trip to a facility, lifecycle cost of the instrumentation, and fuel cost of a return trip for where ever the whatever is going to go. I can tell you right now having done experimental LCA previously, its not gonna pen out. The cost of moving massive amounts of 'stuff' to do 'something' with it when its an extremely low margin, low value add produc…

Couldn't the bio-oil generated by the process be used to power the transport and supply lines? Or don't the maths work out? I don't know any of the numbers here...

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#118

Post by rexreed »

coryrc wrote: post #26
rexreed wrote: post #4

How do you get so far into a project before you even realize that you have such a show-stopper problem? Move fast / fail fast works with software because iteration times are quick and penalty per iteration is low. But just building stuff and hoping it works and then realizing major problems doesn't work so well with real-world stuff. Couldn't they have "workshopped" this with non-functional item to see what the real…

I mean, you're wrong... it clearly worked out for them so far and it only took seven weeks to fix this issue. It's taken longer to ship completed commits at Google than that.

Did it though? As far as I can tell they only have part of the problem worked out, and the rest of the problem may indeed be a show-stopper. How many more show-stoppers before they run into the same issues that bankrupted the $300M company? If you don't know what the show-stoppers are, then what is the best approach for plowing ahead anyways? Maybe sticking with wheat instead of corn?

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#119

Post by twawaaay »

Honestly, all I am hearing is whining.

There are so many ways to transport material up. Miners transport ROCKS, upwards, from kilometers beneath Earth surface. They then crush those rocks into fine powder to extract tiny specks of gold from it. Magic? I don't think so.

So you chose a wrong tool for the job and are blaming corn?

You moved from a lab to "real world" and are surprised it is not all nice, uniform and spherical?

I love history of ASML. These guys faced a problem after a problem after a problem for like a decade just to get one process that everybody thought is impossible. Didn't give up. Didn't complain. Just focus on solving it.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#120

Post by bequanna »

NoGravitas wrote: post #115
bequanna wrote: post #92

I’m having a tough time understanding how this makes sense. Is this even close to being financially viable if there is never any such thing as carbon credits? Put another way, are the people funding projects like this assuming there will be some kind of carbon credit system in place that will pay absurdly high prices to sequester carbon? Additionally, I suppose you will be compensating farmers for their corn stalk ba…

> Is this even close to being financially viable if there is never any such thing as carbon credits? You're right as far as your comment goes — it will probably never be financially viable to scale this up, and the companies funding the limited scale development are doing it purely for public relations purposes. What your comment misses, though, is that to survive the coming century, we are going to have to figure ou…

> ...how to do things that are not financially viable.

I don't disagree with you, but if we go that route I have a pretty good idea what that will look like:

1. Wealthy people invest in carbon capture schemes like this.

2. Once there is sufficient wealth invested in #1, they've essentially created a solution looking for a market.

3. What does this mean? It is time to market the shit out of whatever existential problem your solution claims to solve. Market with fear, make solving this "problem" part of the national agenda. Get the hysteria to the point of: "We need to solve this AT ANY COST!" Oppose the approved messaging and you're an idiot, luddite or terrible person.

4. Combine the political will you are creating in #3 with aggressive lobbying for credit programs that make life more expensive for regular people and don't really accomplish anything. Conveniently, the new programs make the group in #1 even more wealthy.

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