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Might be a dumb question, but: how can this be possibly cheaper than planting trees?
This 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.
In the medium- to long-term, we're aiming to develop geologic sequestration pathways that will begin to draw-down atmospheric CO2 levels. This version of our process is like our "Tesla Roadster" - the product that is meant to fund the future development of harder, but more impactful, products. In our case, CO2 re-sale will fund the development of permanent sequestration pathways, and it will actually enable us to get to a point where we are able to scale projects that are permanently removing carbon from the atmosphere.
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.
This is false and extremely deceptive. When trees die they don't just release all the CO2 they collected back into the atmosphere over the course of their lifetime. How much CO2 and pollution will your towers produce during its production, while it is being run (it must use some sort of electricity) and when it is eventually dismantled? I assume you, it will be a lot more pollution than anything that a tree would create.
Trees are the answer to CO2 capture. Period. End of sentence. It's cheaper and far more effective to plant trees and pay to stop deforestation than these ludicrous plans to supposedly capture CO2 from the atmosphere.
Might be a dumb question, but: how can this be possibly cheaper than planting trees?
Trees are great at capturing CO2 from the sky, but they suffer from an impermanence issue. Trees capture CO2 for the duration of their lifespan, but when they die, they decompose and release that captured CO2 back into the atmosphere. They also require dedicated use of large swaths of land to get to significant capture amounts.
More info can be found at section 3.2 of this report: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9f
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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?
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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?
Might be a dumb question, but: how can this be possibly cheaper than planting trees?
Have you heard about George Church's idea? He says it's possible to modify the dna of cyanobacteria so that they become immune to their natural predator: the cyanophage. Apparently cyanobacteria consume an incredible amount of CO2 every year, but then right away release it again after the cyanophage kills them. Seems like a potentially workable idea, but I have not heard him give the details anywhere. He is at MIT &…
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Thanks for the tip on ammonia plants! Ammonia is one of the top sources of CO2 sold commercially, second to ethanol plants. I have nothing but respect for what Carbon Engineering has done. In many ways, they opened people's eyes to what's possible when it comes to direct air carbon capture. The more people doing carbon capture, the better - we have 1T tons of CO2 to capture, and we need as many shots on goal as possi…
I think most process engineers at an ammonia plant would be interested to hear about it because it is an elegant solution. I'd focus any pitch on working with them to make sure your process will not interfere with their process. The people that run these plants are highly incentivized based on run time and they run them at 99.9% type uptimes. They'll think its cool and good for PR as long it they feel like there is n…