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Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers

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Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers

#61

Post by colonelcanoe »

Fiahil wrote: post #25

How does this compare to the most ancient carbon capture tech: Trees ? I know this sounds boring, but a single $M would allow to plant as much trees and they will capture carbon from the atmosphere, without any maintenance, for decades.

While this does not answer your question, which I find interesting, it seems pretty sensible that you'd want to explore this option even if you are planting lots of trees. Doubly so if it's viable as a business venture, since that's a strong signal that it's cost effective.

As jsantos511 said many times, we need more shots on goal!

Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers

#62

Post by jsantos511 »

ajb wrote: post #52
jsantos511 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike many traditional carbon capture chemicals, the one we are using are both non-volatile and stable when they come into contact with air and heat. This means that our chemicals will not float out of the top of a cooling tower with evaporating water and will instead stay in the water. After carbon capture happens in the cooling tower, we run the stream through a regeneration process to release the captured CO2 and…

Hmm good so far. Presumably there will be at least some losses, since the system is open to the atmosphere. So you'll need good evidence for how safe the chemicals are. (I appreciate you may not want to tell us what they are yet)

Yep - there will definitely be a few losses, specifically in cooling tower drift (water droplets blowing out the top) and blowdown (water being expelled from tower to improve water purity). Luckily, our chemicals are all found in every day uses and not shown to have adverse environmental impacts. We definitely need to do more testing on this front to continue to build up our datasets, but our specific chemicals were selected to enable safe and widespread usage in cooling towers around the world.

Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers

#63

Post by treis »

jsantos511 wrote: post #35
quantified wrote: post #31

What are the environmental effects of the chemical mix? How do you reclaim the chemicals from the cooling water?

Unlike many traditional carbon capture chemicals, the one we are using are both non-volatile and stable when they come into contact with air and heat. This means that our chemicals will not float out of the top of a cooling tower with evaporating water and will instead stay in the water. After carbon capture happens in the cooling tower, we run the stream through a regeneration process to release the captured CO2 and…

>regeneration process

Is there an energy input here?

Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers

#64

Post by URSpider94 »

graeme wrote: post #40
breischl wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused how this project related to jet fuel or displaces the production of oil products in general.

Oh sorry I read things too quickly. There had been a lot of discussions of what to do with things that still require co2 and can’t easily be electrified, jet fuel being the typical case. “Suck it from the sky and use that” has been one common proposal for how to handle those carbon holdouts. So my brain immediately leapt to that when drafting the comment. But as the OP says same logic applies to any carbon use. If yo…

CO2 in its native form is not extracted from the ground. It is almost always produced industrially as a byproduct of another industrial process, like alcohol fermentation or cement manufacture. The point other people are making is that these processes will continue because the main product is also valuable. Until this company gets sequestration working (which they claim to be working on), then this venture on its own won’t have much impact on CO2 emissions.

Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers

#65

Post by tekstar »

Fiahil wrote: post #25

How does this compare to the most ancient carbon capture tech: Trees ? I know this sounds boring, but a single $M would allow to plant as much trees and they will capture carbon from the atmosphere, without any maintenance, for decades.

Trees capture co2 into the biosphere, and when they do so it is temporary (~100 years by the time they've decomposed and released it back in to the atmosphere). Still, planting trees helps hold more co2 from the atmosphere and needs to be part of the solution. Especially if we can re-green areas that are currently barren, like deserts.

Proper sequestering, which I agree doesn't really exist yet, is to capture co2 back into the geosphere.

Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers

#67

Post by jsantos511 »

mattmaroon wrote: post #55
jsantos511 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the short-term, it seems very likely that if ethanol plants do not sell that ton of CO2, it will end up back in the atmosphere. In the long-run, we have the opportunity to clean those emissions up with either new technologies that can produce ethanol without huge emissions (of which many people are working on) and/or regulations requiring carbon capture at ethanol plants. But, we have to break the reliance on that…

Yeah I mean, clearly removing CO2 from the environment (provided were not burning fossil fuels to do it) can’t be bad. For now it seems like you’re just shuffling the source of the problem, but i I see what you mean about ethanol sans-CO2. Is that a realistic thing in the near term? If CO2 is all just a byproduct (I.e. nobody is producing it just to sell it) then it would seem that whatever source of it consumes the…

Ethanol sans-CO2 is definitely realistic, but the timing is what's up in the air (no pun intended). There are a few different teams that have developed materials that enable ethanol production from CO2 (!!!) and are starting to scale [1, 2 as examples].

We're still working on finalizing our comparisons of our process to current CO2 production processes. From what I can tell currently, our process requires significantly less capex ($100M quoted from a friend at a big gas supplier). Energy is a hard thing to compare apples-to-apples without accounting for all pieces of equipment in each process, but it does less moving parts than many ethanol plants require for CO2.

We are superior when it comes to transportation, however. Since cooling towers are scattered all throughout the country and even in urban areas, we can capture and distribute CO2 within the same city, cutting down transportation distances and associated CO2 emissions.

EDIT: just realized I forgot to include my sources!

[1]: https://scitechdaily.com/breakthrough-electrocatalyst-turns-...

[2]: https://www.energy.gov/articles/scientists-accidentally-turn...

Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers

#68

Post by jjcon »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #54

Might be a dumb question, but: how can this be possibly cheaper than planting trees?

I would guess because you can actually make money with this capture technique and reduce emissions - planting a tree for the sake of reducing emissions is nice but it doesn’t make money and therefor isn’t a market based solution

Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers

#69

Post by DennisP »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #54

Might be a dumb question, but: how can this be possibly cheaper than planting trees?

Planting trees is great but long-term it won't be enough, just based on land area available. We need to scale up other ways to sequester carbon too.

Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers

#70

Post by breck »

jsantos511 wrote: post #39
Fiahil wrote: post #25

How does this compare to the most ancient carbon capture tech: Trees ? I know this sounds boring, but a single $M would allow to plant as much trees and they will capture carbon from the atmosphere, without any maintenance, for decades.

To put it plainly: we need more trees. However, trees cannot get us all the way there. Trees are great for drawing down atmospheric carbon emissions in the short-term, but when trees decompose, they just release that carbon back into the atmosphere. Additionally, the landmass and water needed to sustain all these trees will require another solution to get all of the way to where we need to be with carbon removal.

Since its towers we're talking about, what about an ivy/clonal plant?

And can't you just bury the dead trees?

I also don't understand what the equation is. Is it something like this:

    CarbonCaptureRateToStopGlobalWarming = growTreesPlantsAndBuryDeadOnes(...params) + newTech(...params)
If so, what is the order of term 1 and the order of term 2? It seems to me that at the end of the day only 1 of these terms will matter (or maybe it's a hybrid?)
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