How do you plan on dealing with CO2 after the CO2 market is saturated? There's gotta be more CO2 that's capturable than people use for industrial processes and soda.
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
#72This sounds like a relatively neat idea to capture CO2 for resale, but I can't see this will have any meaningful impact on the global levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers
#73How do you deal with the liability of potential damage to the cooling tower that you do not own (or damage to the down-stream processes that rely on the cooling if it were to fail)?
Avoiding the second part of your question is where a huge chunk of our efforts are going right now.
Re: liability, we accept responsibility for any damages made to the tower itself. If we break it, we buy it.
Re: downtime avoidance, we are doing our own internal testing to understand what types of materials (if any) are the riskiest with our process. Then, for any materials we may have found on a partner's cooling tower, we will replace them at the same time we install the process with a material that is going to be safer with our process while still meeting the original requirements that part may have had.
We've been in contact with a leading cooling tower manufacturer to explore potential partnerships, and we understand from them that the big risks we have to worry about do not happen overnight - we will be able to see them coming, and we can react accordingly.
Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers
#74Earlier 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…
>regeneration process Is there an energy input here?
There must be. Thermodynamics tells us that cyclic processes don’t happen without energy input. Beyond that, gathering and compressing the CO2 will require energy.
The hope would be that you could build enough renewable energy capacity to power this process.
Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers
#75How much CO2 are you actually pulling out of the air? I've read a bit about other carbon capture companies and Carbon Eng. is claiming 1M tons/year with the new facility they're building.
The US is home to over 2M cooling towers: https://www.nsf.org/news/road-map-improve-response-legionnai... Using the numbers we've calculated with our first partner plant, we're expecting to be able to capture 0.5-1 ton/day with their 25 ton cooling tower. This is a very small tower - for perspective, UCSF operates a 5,400 ton cooling tower to operate their small electricity co-generation plant, and cooling towers at…
What percent of current US CO2 production is 730M tons?
Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers
#76Great idea but I feel the key to making it a viable endeavour would be a Carbon tax that makes it worthwhile
Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers
#77I love this. I started laughing when I read the description. I laughed because a Harvard physicist (funded by people like Bill Gates) had the same idea to use cooling towers for their DAC project in Carbon Engineering (linked in your post). But as you say, it is still expensive. They are bragging that their design took hundred of man years! And then you two guys come in with the idea that in hindsight seems completel…
If it's the startup I'm thinking of, they've done most of their work on the downstream process of converting CO2 to useful things, rather than focusing on capture. The energy used in capture of CO2 is only a fraction of the cost of changing CO2 into a sequesterable form or fuel form.
That said, this is a really great idea, as heat pumps will be increasingly used for all sorts of temperature management. Cutting 10% off of costs by using somebody else's fans could be great, as long as hauling the CO2 filters off and replacing them is cheap.
Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers
#78What about the energy balance? If your capture is exothermic you will warm up the cooling water and your client will not have enough cooling for their process. When you regenerate, do you need to add energy? How much CO2 is generated by the energy you need?. If you have to add heat to regenerate, how do you now cool the water back down to the temperature required by your client? Most industrial cooling systems use carbon steel pipes, shells and tubesand, although many heat exchangers will be stainless steel especially if they are plate type. Chemicals are added to prevent scale and to inhibit corrosion. You CO2 capture chemical needs to be comparable.
Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers
#79[deleted]
Re: Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers
#80How do you plan on dealing with CO2 after the CO2 market is saturated? There's gotta be more CO2 that's capturable than people use for industrial processes and soda.
You're absolutely right - there is much more CO2 in the sky than what the global CO2 markets can absorb. For scale: the US CO2 market consumes ~64M tons per year of CO2 [1]. We need to be capturing at least 1B tons per year of CO2 to get to net-neutral [2].
Carbon capture for resale is only our first step — our "Tesla Roadster" if you will. It's the thing that gets us the capital to build the harder stuff. On a 10-year scale, our roadmap looks like this:
1. Capture CO2 for re-sale 2. Sequester CO2 using geologic storage and other techniques such as mineralization 3. Utilize CO2 via conversion to other useful products
Each step gets progressively harder, but has a progressively higher impact on reducing emissions than the one before. When we do our jobs well, we will have saturated the CO2 market with reclaimed CO2, developed multiple sequestration pathways and projects, and developed clean conversion pathways for CO2 utilization.
[1]: https://www.iea.org/reports/putting-co2-to-use [2]: https://cdrprimer.org/read/chapter-1#sec-1-4