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

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

#61

Post by yodon »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #56
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…

> We're still a long way from pulling off the sequestration that's actually needed at the scale that's needed. How so? The simple fact that natural gas and oil still exists, when it comes from 100 million year old biomass, proves beyond a shadow of doubt that geological sequestration holds its integrity at geological timescales. We have also been injecting CO2 at a rate of 1 million tonnes per year at the Sleipner fi…

The existence of oil shows CO2 can be stored in solid or liquid form, but doesn't show we know how to convert CO2 into that stored form at scale or keep our hands off it once it's stored that way. It's easy to burn oil, it's hard to make it, and it's harder still to not burn it when you know it's readily available.

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

#62

Post by ganzuul »

moralestapia wrote: post #55
ganzuul wrote: post #54

I think you are completely mistaken in your endeavor. Please plant trees and care for the soil, since your scheme will never do anything for biodiversity. You are just trying to cut us all off from the source of life.

So, what are YOU doing for biodiversity ganzuul?

I keep the pollution that my workplace produces down and avoiding unnecessary consumerism & plastic packaging. Voting with my wallet for the green premium.

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

#63

Post by gameswithgo »

arbuge wrote: post #39
InvaderFizz wrote: post #29

Earlier 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.

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…

burn or decompose same thing, trees are a buffer not a solution, unless you cut down, bury deep, then regrow.

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

#64

Post by semi-extrinsic »

yodon wrote: post #61
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're still a long way from pulling off the sequestration that's actually needed at the scale that's needed. How so? The simple fact that natural gas and oil still exists, when it comes from 100 million year old biomass, proves beyond a shadow of doubt that geological sequestration holds its integrity at geological timescales. We have also been injecting CO2 at a rate of 1 million tonnes per year at the Sleipner fi…

The existence of oil shows CO2 can be stored in solid or liquid form, but doesn't show we know how to convert CO2 into that stored form at scale or keep our hands off it once it's stored that way. It's easy to burn oil, it's hard to make it, and it's harder still to not burn it when you know it's readily available.

CO2 is in the dense supercritical state at the temperature and pressure conditions in storage reservoirs. It's density is between 750 and 850 kg/m3 then (water is 1000). You just have to compress it and pump it down there, and it will stay like that.

Honestly, the storage part is a solved problem from the feasibility side. The remaining challenges are mainly cost optimization, across all of capture, transport and storage.

And the biggest hurdle is forcing businesses to actually pay for the currently externalized cost of CO2 emissions.

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

#65

Post by seizethecheese »

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…

This is sort of crazy. Presumably industry will use liquid CO2 for the foreseeable future. Pulling it from the atmosphere instead of ground is a huge net benefit.

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

#66

Post by yodon »

seizethecheese wrote: post #65
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…

This is sort of crazy. Presumably industry will use liquid CO2 for the foreseeable future. Pulling it from the atmosphere instead of ground is a huge net benefit.

Most of the gasses we pull from the ground are byproducts of oil and natural gas production. We don't pull them from the ground because we want them on their own, we just go ahead and capture them because they are coming up with the stuff we want for fuel - they'll still continue to be captured (or worse vented to the atmosphere) as long as we're pulling those fuel sources from the ground.

Industrial CO2 also mostly comes not from the ground but from other industrial processes.

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

#67

Post by markcyffka »

atultw wrote: post #27

This looks promising, best of luck. A lot of technologies to solve waste problems have been invented and launched, but very few get used at a large scale. Some questions: What do you see as the biggest roadblocks to adoption of your product? What makes AirMyne more attractive than the existing options? https://time.com/6125303/direct-air-carbon-capture-infrastru...

We think our solution will be faster to deploy than other solutions and operate at a lower total cost + energy usage. I know it's a vague answer, but our design is anchored in minimizing capex, minimizing process steps/complexity, and minimizing novelty in our supply chain as much as possible. We see that cost/energy/embodied CO2/speed to scale might be optimized by focusing on these areas, but we will also learn as we go.

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

#68

Post by senthil_rajasek »

InvaderFizz wrote: post #29
sabertoothed wrote: post #23

I would love to see a page on your website where you compare yourselves (in a fair and transparent way) to the best plant that does the same thing. I am not knowledgeable in the field. But there will be some algae or mangroves that get CO2 out of the air. I would love to see that comparison. Incl. the aspect that the plant does not need to be repaired, multiplies on its own, etc.

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.

This might be true of conventional crops like corn or soy but this article [1] implies kelp farming in oceans could sequester carbon from the atmosphere for a long time.

"So the kelp will sink to the ocean bottom in the sediment, and become, essentially, part of the ocean floor..."

1.https://www.npr.org/2021/03/01/970670565/run-the-oil-industr...

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

#69

Post by cinntaile »

azinman2 wrote: post #25

Given the dilution problem, I’ve been wondering if a decentralized approach is ultimately better. Can we build some cheap system that people could just simply put on top of their homes and let the wind do the movement? Individually each system would remove little, but if enough participants were involved (perhaps it’s even government mandated to have), then the costs would be shared as would be the scale. Would love…

There was an art project a couple of years ago to clean up smog.

https://www.studioroosegaarde.net/project/smog-free-project

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

#70

Post by todd8 »

The numbers seem to indicate some challenges. This is just back of the envelope and this isn't my field so I may be misinterpreting the data, but it looks like extracting 1 million tons of CO2 per year has the following costs (at lab scale values):

* > 1 Billion dollars

* > 5 Million MWhr

Assuming 200 Kg/MWhr of CO2 emissions produced by electrical generation (I believe the average carbon intensity in the USA is over 400 Kg/MWhr) the emissions produced (just for the electricity to do the extraction) is 1 Million Tons of CO2.

Thus, it looks like with the current estimates the process costs 1 Billion dollars and doesn't reduce CO2 at all. Like ethanol, I wonder if this process will be worth it in the end. I don't know what raw materials it requires and how much CO2 is generated in their extraction and production. It's possible that your belief that at industrial scale the CO2 intensity and dollar cost will go down, but are you even accounting for the CO2 cost of manufacturing the facility, transportation of raw materials, etc.

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