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Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

charmindustrial.com

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Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#21

Post by soco »

ed wrote: post #11

So the ELI5 is they burn crop waste, harvest the heat and bury the carbon-rich ash. This process is called BECCS. (Not totally right - see 'pkrein’s comment below.) The upper bound on capture is pretty good! Almost 70% of yearly CO2 emissions. > Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggests a potential range of negative emissions from BECCS of 0 to 22 gigatonnes per year [1] > Human activities emit over…

So out of the 30 gigatons of CO2, up to 22 are from biomass? That's way, way more than I would have thought...

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#22

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

rexreed wrote: post #17
pkrein wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initial testing was in San Francisco, where corn stover is relatively tricky to come by because corn is not widely grown in California, and agricultural residues cannot be brought into the state because of the bugs. Wheat straw was much easier to procure in-state. Since encountering the differences, we tracked down the rarer corn growers in California and now use corn stover for testing as well.

If corn stover is a critical importance to your business and business model, wouldn't it be more effective, efficient, and beneficial to your business to be where the critical resource and information and experience is? Basically why not move to Kansas instead of stay put in California?

Come on. No one wants to live in Kansas. And it's extremely difficult to build in a rural setting. You try prototyping an experimental cutting-edge technology in the middle of a corn field 2 hours from the nearest Home Depot or metal fabricator.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#23

Post by tclancy »

rexreed wrote: post #13
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m starting to believe the idea that long term zero percent rates have made MBAs in charge of almost everything completely careless to the historical realities of business where you have a product and process before investing tons into a system. It seems to me that with “endless free money” we miss things like “this one input stream will be a nightmare, let’s not do it”.

Absolutely agree. Also, how is this firm based in Silicon Valley / San Fran where the customers are primarily in the midwest? If they were serious about this problem, shouldn't they be where their customers or resources are? Building something in isolation and then "shipping" it to where it will be used seems very inefficient and they're clearly missing out on valuable on-the-ground information and experience. This s…

Wouldn’t the reverse question then be, why hasn’t someone in the Midwest done this already?

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#24

Post by pkrein »

rexreed wrote: post #13
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m starting to believe the idea that long term zero percent rates have made MBAs in charge of almost everything completely careless to the historical realities of business where you have a product and process before investing tons into a system. It seems to me that with “endless free money” we miss things like “this one input stream will be a nightmare, let’s not do it”.

Absolutely agree. Also, how is this firm based in Silicon Valley / San Fran where the customers are primarily in the midwest? If they were serious about this problem, shouldn't they be where their customers or resources are? Building something in isolation and then "shipping" it to where it will be used seems very inefficient and they're clearly missing out on valuable on-the-ground information and experience. This s…

Our customers are technology companies based in the Bay Area, check out the home page: https://charmindustrial.com

We delivered 90% of permanent carbon removals globally last year: https://twitter.com/charmindustrial/status/14511691760646430...

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#26

Post by coryrc »

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.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#27

Post by ComputerCat »

rexreed wrote: post #7
carbadtraingood wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They discuss a bit in the article, but the material they had prototyped with was very different than the material they tried to scale up with. It sounds like their scaled up plant accepted a wide variety of materials, but this one specific input stream slowed them down. So they weren't shut down while they figured this out, they just processed the material they knew they could process until they had a solution here.

Why would you prototype with a material that's substantially different from the real-world item? I read the article and this bit puzzled me. The differences clearly matter, and the $300M bankruptcy they reference in the article even makes that point.

Yeah it's definitely a bit peculiar. You'd think they could have done some more research into the makeup of the material they'd be processing, get a good understanding of the needs of the machinery...

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#28

Post by pkrein »

ed wrote: post #11

So the ELI5 is they burn crop waste, harvest the heat and bury the carbon-rich ash. This process is called BECCS. (Not totally right - see 'pkrein’s comment below.) The upper bound on capture is pretty good! Almost 70% of yearly CO2 emissions. > Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggests a potential range of negative emissions from BECCS of 0 to 22 gigatonnes per year [1] > Human activities emit over…

Actually we aren’t burning the biomass, we’re heating it without oxygen (pyrolysis) to create a transportable biomass intermediate called bio-oil. That bio-oil is rich in carbon, molasses-like consistency, and the overwhelming odor of barbecue sauce. Today we primarily pump that bbq sauce underground as carbon removal (Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage - BiCRS), but in the future it could be used for BECCS processes like you outline.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#29

Post by AlotOfReading »

rexreed wrote: post #17
pkrein wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initial testing was in San Francisco, where corn stover is relatively tricky to come by because corn is not widely grown in California, and agricultural residues cannot be brought into the state because of the bugs. Wheat straw was much easier to procure in-state. Since encountering the differences, we tracked down the rarer corn growers in California and now use corn stover for testing as well.

If corn stover is a critical importance to your business and business model, wouldn't it be more effective, efficient, and beneficial to your business to be where the critical resource and information and experience is? Basically why not move to Kansas instead of stay put in California?

Because Charm is being run as a VC tech startup rather than a traditional industrial company and there's a recent movement of trying to do ag-tech in the bay rather than places like the Midwest or even central valley. Probably doesn't hurt that the CEO/co-founder already lives in the bay.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#30

Post by bshipp »

rexreed wrote: post #17
pkrein wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initial testing was in San Francisco, where corn stover is relatively tricky to come by because corn is not widely grown in California, and agricultural residues cannot be brought into the state because of the bugs. Wheat straw was much easier to procure in-state. Since encountering the differences, we tracked down the rarer corn growers in California and now use corn stover for testing as well.

If corn stover is a critical importance to your business and business model, wouldn't it be more effective, efficient, and beneficial to your business to be where the critical resource and information and experience is? Basically why not move to Kansas instead of stay put in California?

I've worked in agriculture my entire life, and seven weeks is a pretty good turnaround for fixing these types of problems. the next batch of issues they're likely to encounter is handling product with variations in moisture content that further bungs the system. Then it will be incorporating new feedstock from other crops.

Agriculture is the intersection of industrial mechanization and biological systems. Unlike traditional manufacturing, flexibility and efficiency is learned over time as situations are encountered that exceed previously theorized boundaries/ranges.

I have a grower who used gigantic wood burners for heat instead of natural gas. When I walked through his boiler room I noticed a wheelbarrow full of nails and other fasteners. He said 90% of his labour and headaches with that system were dealing with steel chunks in the feed stream, something they barely accounted for beyond adding a magnet when they built the system. Not everything can be planned for in advance.

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