[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) - Direct air capture of CO2...
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Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) - Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling
towers
Hello HN! I'm Josh, one of the co-founders of Noya
(https://noyalabs.com). Noya is designing a cheaper process to
capture CO2 directly from the atmosphere. We do this by
retrofitting industrial cooling towers owned and operated by other
companies to perform carbon capture. We then sell the captured CO2
to companies that need it, and pay a piece of the proceeds to the
companies that own the cooling towers. As the wildfires in
California became worse and worse, my co-founder (and roommate at
the time) Daniel and I became increasingly concerned that we
weren't doing enough to be a part of the solution. The more that
climate catastrophes became the norm, the more we became obsessed
with one seemingly-simple question: If climate change is caused by
having too much CO2 in the sky... can't we just reverse it by
yanking CO2 out of the sky? Humans have known how to scrub CO2 out
of gas mixtures for almost a century [1]; but, we haven't been able
to widely apply this type of tech to scrubbing CO2 from the air
because of its high cost. For example, one popular direct air
capture project is estimated to capture 1M tons of CO2/year [2],
but has an estimated equipment cost of $700M and all-in costs of
~$1.1B [3]. The single largest component of this cost is in the
piece of equipment called the air contactor -- the big wall of fans
you see in the image linked above -- which clocks in at $212M by
itself. Yet fundamentally, all that air contactors do is put air
into contact with something that captures CO2, whether it's an
aqueous capture solution or some sort of solid sorbent. These
costs felt astronomical to Daniel and I, so we set out with the
singular focus to reduce the costs of carbon capture by reducing
the costs of the air contactor. But no matter how we thought about
it, we couldn't get around the fact that to capture meaningful
amounts of CO2, you need to move massive amounts of air since CO2
is very dilute in the atmosphere (0.04% by volume). Looking at the
existing solutions, we began to understand why it makes sense to
build something equally massive: so you can go after economies of
scale. As Daniel and I were feeling stuck late one night, he got a
call from his dad. They started talking about the refrigeration
facility Daniel's dad runs in Venezuela (where Daniel's from), and
they started talking about the cooling towers at the facility.
Cooling towers move air and water into contact with each other to
provide cooling to industrial processes (descriptive video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXaK8_F8dn0). As Daniel listened to
his dad, Daniel realized that if we could just add the blend of
CO2-absorbing chemicals we had been developing into the water his
dad's cooling tower used, we could use it as an air contactor and
achieve CO2 capture at the same time the cooling tower was cooling
its processes. This eliminates the need to build millions of
dollars worth of dedicated equipment to pluck CO2 from the sky.
Our cooling-tower-based carbon capture process works as follows: we
add our chemical carbon capture blend into a cooling tower's water,
we connect the tower to some pieces of downstream processing
equipment to regenerate the captured CO2, and then we pressurize
the CO2 into cylinders for sale as "reclaimed CO2" to companies
that need it. All of this is installed onto a cooling tower that
another company already owns and operates. In exchange for letting
us install this process on their towers, we will cover the cost of
installation, and the companies will get a piece of the revenue
generated through the sale of their CO2. We're well on our way
towards making this process a reality. We've partnered with a local
farm to install our process in their cooling towers, and we've just
produced CO2 using our industrial-scale prototype. We're excited
for the opportunity to reverse climate change and ensure we have a
future on this planet that is good. Please let us know what
questions, concerns, or feedback you have about what we're building
- I'll be here all day! [1]:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/325/5948/1652 [2]:
https://blogs-images.forbes.com/jamesconca/files/2019/10/1-a...
[3]:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
Author : jsantos511
Score : 219 points
Date : 2021-02-15 16:53 UTC (6 hours ago)
| pletsch wrote:
| How 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.
| jsantos511 wrote:
| 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 larger power plants can be even bigger than that.
|
| Let's assume though that all 2M cooling towers in the US are
| the same size as our small 25 ton cooling tower. This equates
| to an opportunity to capture 730M tons of CO2 / year using
| really tiny versions of existing US infrastructure.
| networkimprov wrote:
| What percent of current US CO2 production is 730M tons?
| jsantos511 wrote:
| US CO2 consumption is ~64M tons / year, so 730M tons >>
| current US production. Next step for managing CO2
| production is geologic sequestration to ensure we have
| something to do with all the CO2 we capture!
| cma wrote:
| ~5 billion metric tons is what we emit.
| rwmurrayVT wrote:
| 64M tons was their answer in another comment.
| pletsch wrote:
| That's great. The market for C02 is already there and cooling
| towers exist everywhere. I have a gut feeling this could be
| licensed to the large players for their new builds, even if
| the co2 is just used onsite.
| hahahahe wrote:
| Just a very noob question here. When carbon is released into the
| atmosphere where and how does it disperse? Can we expect it to
| gradually concentrate in lower elevations or in certain
| geographical traps?
| jsantos511 wrote:
| Carbon is dispersed from the atmosphere wherever it's created.
| This could be the smokestack of a power plant, a tailpipe of a
| car, or any other source of emissions. That CO2 floats up into
| the air and mingles with all the other gases in the atmosphere.
| Areas that are more highly concentrated with CO2 than others
| will "push" their CO2 into lesser-concentrated areas, driving
| up the concentration everywhere over a long-enough period of
| time.
|
| Drawdown works in the opposite way. By reducing the
| concentration in a single area, the global concentration would
| work to equilibrate, so more CO2 would "fill the void", and if
| more drawdown keeps happening, than more CO2 will keep
| equilibrating and filling voids, and more capture will happen.
| [deleted]
| lopuhin wrote:
| How large is the CO2 market relative to the amount of CO2
| currently injected into the atmosphere?
| jsantos511 wrote:
| The US currently consumes ~64M tons of CO2 / year:
| https://www.iea.org/reports/putting-co2-to-use
|
| We need to remove somewhere between 100B-1T tons of CO2 from
| the air to get back to safe, non-planet-warming levels:
| https://nanransohoff.com/A-mental-model-for-combating-climat...
| abhv wrote:
| Quick math:
|
| Density of air at sea level: 1225 g/m^3
|
| C02: 0.0383% by volume (383 ppmv) corresponds to 0.0582% by
| weight.
|
| Ergo, 1m^3 of air has 0.713 g of C02 in it.
|
| Ergo pulling 1 metric ton (10^6 grams) of C02 per day requires
| processing AT LEAST : 10^6/ .713 = 1.4m m^3 of air per day or 16
| m^3 of air per second!
|
| (That would assume 100% capture)
|
| I _was_ skeptical that 1 cooling tower generates this much flow,
| but the example in [1] suggests 17*10^6 ft^3 /minute, or roughly
| 8000 m^3/sec.
|
| Thus, as long as your capture chemical has 2% efficiency, it
| seems reasonable.
|
| [1] https://www.power-eng.com/emissions/cooling-tower-heat-
| trans...
|
| [EDITED after I detected an error in my math]
|
| The amazing observation for me is that evaporative cooling towers
| process A LOT OF AIR per second.
| danans wrote:
| > Ergo pulling 1 metric ton (10^6 grams) of C02 per day
|
| The CO2 footprint per capita in the United States is 15 metric
| tons [1], so at 300M population, that's 4.5e9 metric tons of
| CO2 per year.
|
| At 1 metric ton CO2 removed per day per tower, we would need
| 4.5e9/365 = 12.3M such cooling towers. Even if the efficiency
| increased 2 orders of magnitude it is still not enough, and I
| doubt there is a need for even 123,000 cooling towers.
|
| None of this is to say that it shouldn't be pursued as a
| business opportunity to sell CO2 to commercial customers.
|
| But realistically, given the scale of the CO2 problem, we still
| need to dramatically reduce the amount of CO2 we are emitting
| per capita as a primary measure, with any carbon capture as
| secondary.
|
| 1.
| https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...
| jsantos511 wrote:
| Couldn't agree with you more - the less we emit, the less
| critical the need for carbon removal technologies becomes.
|
| We have two levers for reversing climate change: the first is
| reducing emissions, and the second is remove carbon from the
| atmosphere. Most of the pathways in the most recent UN
| climate report incorporate some amount of carbon removal to
| maintain global temperature rise below 1.5degC [1].
|
| Humans have been hard at work for a while on our first lever,
| and we need many shots on goal with the second lever to give
| ourselves a chance at success.
|
| [1]: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-4/
| jsantos511 wrote:
| We had a similar observation and related feelings -- cooling
| towers move, quite literally, tons of air every day.
|
| One suggestion I'd make to the math above: the concentration of
| CO2 in the air is a bit higher, at 415ppm per Scripps UCSD:
| https://www.co2.earth/
| jokoon wrote:
| I'm confused, isn't the price of co2 very low? I would guess the
| oil and gas industry have a lot of co2 to spare.
|
| Have you tested this process and mixture?
| jsantos511 wrote:
| Great question - the oil and gas industry is definitely
| responsible for a huge chunk of CO2 emissions, but they are not
| the ones that produce CO2 used commercially. Most CO2 that is
| used at breweries, restaurants, etc comes from ethanol plants:
| https://www.attisbiofuels.com/by-products/carbon-dioxide
|
| From conversations we've had with CO2 buyers, the price for CO2
| ranges from between $150-5,000 / ton depending on things like
| how much is being bought, length of time committed in a
| contract, etc.
|
| We have tested this mixture out with the industrial prototype
| in our office, yes! We've shown our cooling tower is able to
| capture CO2 from the air, and we are able to regenerate and
| pressurize that CO2 into cylinders.
| jokoon wrote:
| Cant edit. Also, would it be effective to build new cooling
| towers? Our doors it work only where there's a source of co2?
| jsantos511 wrote:
| Building new cooling towers would drive our costs up as we
| would have to pay for the capex of the towers in addition to
| the rest of the process. For now, we are trying to keep
| everything as low-cost as possible.
|
| Cooling towers typically run outside since they sometimes
| have water evaporating out the top of them, but even if
| cooling towers were inside, this would still be a great
| solution. CO2 concentrations indoors are sometimes even
| higher than the ones outdoors, which may allow for even
| higher carbon capture amounts than outdoor systems would.
| la6471 wrote:
| Good luck with your venture. You may also partner with Tesla
|
| https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk
| jsantos511 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing - this is definitely on our radar!
| blaufast wrote:
| Have you considered raising funds for these projects on a
| platform like RaiseGreen? I know plenty of people who would love
| to invest, myself included, but can't afford the investment
| alone.
| jsantos511 wrote:
| Thanks for the willingness to support! We have not looked into
| this yet, but we definitely will.
| phtrivier wrote:
| Without asking you to reveal too much about your literal "secret
| sauce", do you already have an estimate for the price per liter
| of your "chemical carbon capture blend" ? Are we talking liters /
| tons to operate for a standard year ? Do you have specific IP /
| RD needed for the production ?
|
| Good luck anyway !
| julienfr112 wrote:
| That's a wonderfull idea !
| jsantos511 wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback and support!
| Fiahil wrote:
| 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.
| colonelcanoe wrote:
| 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!
| jsantos511 wrote:
| 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.
| breck wrote:
| 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?)
| ip26 wrote:
| Nobody has figured out a roadmap to get to done using only
| term 1. But we know it will help, and make other things
| better in the meantime, so it's always worth doing.
| Meanwhile, term 2 is unsolved but probably the only way to
| get back to 350ppm.
| ping_pong wrote:
| > when trees decompose, they just release that carbon back
| into the atmosphere
|
| 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.
| imtringued wrote:
| I don't know about trees but bamboo sounds like a good
| candidate.
| tekstar wrote:
| 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.
| antipaul wrote:
| Great story! All the best!
| avernon wrote:
| I 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 completely obvious, use all the cooling towers already out
| there! The most start up thing ever.
|
| I used to be an engineer at an ammonia plant. Many of them
| already capture and sell CO2 from their process. So they have the
| infrastructure to compress and sell CO2 already on site. The
| plant I worked at was in Augusta, GA. Might be worth checking out
| ammonia plants as a growth market.
| carbonguy wrote:
| I'm no engineer; that said, I think you're being slightly
| unfair to the Carbon Engineering folks, as paper [3] that OP
| linked states that CE's design reflects "reflects roughly 100
| person-years of development." That doesn't strike me as
| outrageous in this context (30 people working for ~40 months?),
| although I'll grant I don't have a ton of perspective on
| industrial process development.
|
| That said, OP's idea does have merit. avernon, I think you hit
| the nail on the head with your comment downthread regarding the
| main concern being avoiding disruption to existing plant
| processes where this kind of tech might be installed - I would
| be worried specifically about how radically raising the pH of
| cooling process water would affect mineral deposition, for
| example, but then that in turn would surely depend on how a
| given plant had set up its cooling system to begin with.
|
| Nevertheless, it seems very likely that this idea could in
| itself knock about $4/t off of the cost of CO2 relative to the
| CE estimate ($212M saved for their air contactor design
| amortized over 30Mt of CO2 captured during a CE plant lifetime)
| which in the best case is around 5% of the cost of the CO2
| capture.
| avernon wrote:
| Since you are piggybacking on their system, you'd save on
| peripheral equipment costs and operating costs, too. The
| subsystems surrounding these cooling water systems are
| immense. They need river/lake access for water, giant pumps
| to feed the makeup water into the system, giant fans running
| all the time, and even larger pumps to circulate the cooling
| water after. There is a lot of nickel and dime
| complexity/cost in things like water purification. I'd be
| shocked if it only knocked 5% of the cost off.
|
| Plus many facilities have surplus low pressure steam you
| could use to regenerate your fluid.
| jsantos511 wrote:
| 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 possible
| to get there!
| avernon wrote:
| 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 no chance to have their plant disrupted or equipment
| damaged by more corrosive CW.
| jsantos511 wrote:
| Makes sense - thanks for the recommendation!
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| If you're not injecting the CO2 underground in a stable form, how
| does this reverse climate change? It sounds like it's simply a
| cheaper option in some circumstances for sourcing CO2 from the
| air (compared to traditional solutions by Airgas). Not to take
| away from your efforts! I think this is a fine improvement to CO2
| process needs if you can replace more expensive air extraction
| techniques, but it doesn't contribute to improving climate change
| without sequestering the harvested atmospheric CO2.
| sulam wrote:
| The more economic CO2 capture techniques I've heard of that
| actually do result in sequestrable product rely on having high
| concentrations of the stuff, much much higher than is available
| in the atmosphere. Having a method to concentrate CO2 could be
| a great initial step in being able to do more with it.
| jsantos511 wrote:
| Absolutely right. Many carbon capture systems that are
| installed on top of smokestacks have much higher
| concentrations of CO2 than the air does (~300x higher
| concentrations in smokestacks). Henry's Law states that as
| partial pressure of a gas goes up, its solubility in a given
| liquid also goes up [1]. So, if you have a smokestack with a
| higher concentration of CO2 available than what you can get
| in air, it's going to be easier to capture the same amount of
| CO2 bc more CO2 will want to dissolve in the liquid that it's
| dissolving in.
|
| There are some cool ways that people are working on to
| concentrate CO2 using membranes, metal organic frameworks,
| and other things - we'd love to someday incorporate something
| like this at the front end of our process!
| dclusin wrote:
| Feels to me like the intention of selling the gas is to offset
| operational costs until a carbon market for sequestering it
| underground becomes available?
| jsantos511 wrote:
| Yes, and it also gives us the chance to develop sequestration
| pathways in parallel to fine-tuning the technology. And, if
| companies can use cleaner sources of CO2 than ethanol
| offshoots, that would be a net good for the planet as well.
| graeme wrote:
| Right now jet fuel comes from the ground, so we are actively
| adding to the atmospheric stock. This gives a way to leave that
| carbon stored and use what's in the atmosphere instead.
|
| And if they can extract it economically, governments or private
| actors can pay them to sequester some of the carbon instead.
| jsantos511 wrote:
| One day we may be producing jet fuel! For now, the same exact
| logic applies to CO2 production: every new ton consumed = a
| new ton in the sky. If businesses use reclaimed CO2 to run
| their process, no new tons end up in the sky due to their
| operations since it started in the sky in the first place.
| [deleted]
| breischl wrote:
| I'm confused how this project related to jet fuel or
| displaces the production of oil products in general.
| graeme wrote:
| 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 you can use co2 from the sky you don't need
| to take it out of sequestration in the ground.
| URSpider94 wrote:
| 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.
| ajhurliman wrote:
| I was about to post the same question. I wonder how Airgas gets
| their CO2.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I assume the cheapest way is to burn methane...
| jsantos511 wrote:
| Most commercial CO2 that is used in the market today is
| actually produced as a by-product of ethanol production:
| https://www.attisbiofuels.com/by-products/carbon-dioxide
| ajhurliman wrote:
| Interesting, thanks!
| jsantos511 wrote:
| Great observation - somewhere between most-to-all of the CO2
| that goes into beer, food production, etc ends up back in the
| atmosphere. Our initial model is the first key step towards the
| additional solutions we're designing to remove carbon from the
| atmosphere.
|
| The use of CO2 that is sourced from the atmosphere is better
| from an environmental perspective than the use of CO2 sourced
| from offshoots of an ethanol plant. In the current supply
| chain, each ton of CO2 that goes into a product results in a
| new ton being introduced into the atmosphere + any emissions
| required to purify and move that ton from the point of
| production to the point of consumption.
|
| With CO2 produced from the atmosphere, no new tons are
| introduced to the atmosphere in the production of that same
| product, and the energy (aka emissions) required to capture
| that ton from the atmosphere are low since the cooling tower is
| already operating, so we don't need to use additional energy to
| perform the capture.
|
| Direct CO2 sales is a much faster way to start having an
| environmental impact via direct air capture than doing combined
| capture + sequestration. Most new carbon sequestration projects
| take years to permit and construct, and this path allows us to
| perfect the technology of capturing carbon from the sky while
| working on these sequestration projects in parallel.
|
| We also intend to convert CO2 into other useful products down
| the line that result in more permanent sequestration - we have
| some team members with expertise in green chemistry and
| electrochemical CO2 reduction, and we're already starting to
| think about how to achieve these things at scale.
| [deleted]
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Yeah it would seem that if someone buys a ton of CO2 from
| you, then that's just one more ton some ethanol production
| facility vents into the air instead of capturing and selling
| right? Are you saying that your method of producing a ton of
| CO2 uses less energy than theirs?
| jsantos511 wrote:
| 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 method of
| production for the CO2 industry to help push all of that
| along. If companies are still getting their CO2 as a waste
| product, it may make regulation or incentives for new tech
| harder in the future. Just like EV's are getting power from
| the grid which is, in some places, still heavily reliant on
| fossil fuels, switching to EV's is breaking the need for
| fossil fuels in the transportation itself. We need to do
| the same for the CO2 industry.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| 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 least energy from fossil fuels
| is the best from an environmental standpoint right?
|
| So I guess my question is how does your solution stack up
| to current recapture in that regard?
| jsantos511 wrote:
| 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 (<$1M) than installing CO2 production
| facilities onto an ethanol plant (>$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...
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Awesome. Good answers. Thanks and good luck!
| elihu wrote:
| > The use of CO2 that is sourced from the atmosphere is
| better from an environmental perspective than the use of CO2
| sourced from offshoots of an ethanol plant.
|
| I thought that most ethanol is made from fermentation of
| corn, sugar, or whatever, and the carbon in that process came
| from the atmosphere originally. So, environmentally whether
| you make CO2 as a byproduct of ethanol production from
| CO2-absorbing crops or you extract CO2 straight from the air,
| it seems essentially the same because in both cases the
| carbon came from the atmosphere originally. What am I
| missing?
| ip26 wrote:
| Every new technology or company needs that first customer,
| first revenue stream, to get off the ground. Selling CO2 to
| beverage companies is the DAC "MVP". Sequestration is an
| independent problem that can be coupled to DAC later down the
| road when both are ramped.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Might be a dumb question, but: how can this be possibly cheaper
| than planting trees?
| DennisP wrote:
| 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.
| shafyy wrote:
| Keep in mind that planting trees != planting trees. It's much
| more important to let natural vegetation grow on land than to
| plant random trees. For that, the most important thing we need
| to do is to reclaim land. Currently, 45% of land is used for
| livestock agriculture. You see what I'm getting at :-)
| pegas1 wrote:
| Even better, faster and more efficient than planting trees is
| increasing organic content of the soil. The soil has higher
| agricultural quality, can hold much more water and the capture
| is long-term, as long as the soil quality is kept. And you do
| not need new acreage, you imrove existing. The problem is: you
| have to stop using fungicides and herbicides and better
| pesticides too. At the state of the current ag, this can be
| done for many many yeas.
| jsantos511 wrote:
| The short answer is that we absolutely need more trees than we
| currently have, but trees alone won't be able to get us there.
|
| 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
| monopoledance wrote:
| I don't think this is the complete picture. In an intact old
| forest, a lot of bio-matter doesn't decompose in time, but
| rather gets buried in the anaerobic zone. In a healthy forest
| the first few centimeter soil are so biologically active just
| about 30cm down there is very little oxygen left to house
| much life. That's also why murder victims don't decompose
| very fast, when the murderer buried them deep in forest soil.
|
| Granted this still depends on the forest's life, but it is
| beyond an individual tree's lifecycle.
| ip26 wrote:
| I think it's pretty easy to see, though, that restoring the
| world's forests to their condition circa 1700 will not get
| us to 1700 CO2 levels, as we have added some 1.5T tons of
| fossil carbon to the mix since then.
| jjcon wrote:
| 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
| ping_pong wrote:
| This is exactly my question as well. There's no way it's
| cheaper than planting trees and is probably orders of magnitude
| less efficient. And the plants itself must be producing an
| enormous amount of waste of pollution itself.
| criddell wrote:
| > There's no way it's cheaper than planting trees and is
| probably orders of magnitude less efficient.
|
| Do your cost and efficiency calculation include the
| opportunity cost of letting land sit "idle"?
| woeirua wrote:
| How do you prevent scale build up, corrosion, etc from the
| chemicals that you're introducing into the water? For the most
| part, these towers probably aren't designed to deal with
| sustained high concentrations of some of these chemicals. If you
| can solve that problem, then I think you'll make it. If you can't
| then this will be DOA if you have to replace a lot of the
| hardware every X years.
| jsantos511 wrote:
| De-risking all of these questions is currently one of our top
| priorities. We have an understanding of a handful of materials
| that are compatible with our system right now, and we are
| working to expand that list - and, just as valuably, remove
| items from that list.
|
| Our chemist is leading these efforts, and she's got a ton of
| experience from getting her PhD/postdoc work at Yale's Center
| for Green Chemistry that is helping us properly vet these items
| out.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Interesting stuff. Curious to see what kind of solvents
| you're looking at, and whether you will need to think about
| mitigating aerosol or nitramine emissions.
| graeme wrote:
| Huh, smart idea to piggyback off existing infrastructure. Have
| you contacted Stripe Climate? They are directing money from
| stripe businesses to fund carbon removal, and they just put out a
| call for new companies to contact them.
|
| Believe I saw it within past 7-10 days on Patrick Collison's
| twitter. Here's the link. Has details and an application:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/orbuch/status/1359926307149148162
|
| Btw for anyone with a business using stripe: stripe climate is
| now open for anyone worldwide. I set it up to contribute 1% of my
| revenues. And it should be deductible as a marketing expense:
| Stripe let's you out it on your checkout, invoice and receipt.
| The founder of Nomadlist found it increased his conversions.
| Haven't tested it personally but plausibly it's actually profit
| generating.
|
| Probably the most impactful climate decision you can make with
| your business, takes 30 seconds to set up, and may boost your
| revenue.
|
| https://stripe.com/climate
| jsantos511 wrote:
| I _love_ the work that Stripe is doing with Stripe Climate. We
| have been in touch with them about their new applications.
| Regardless of how our application ends up, I am so excited for
| more businesses working on carbon removal to have the chance to
| get funding for the work they 're doing. The world needs more
| shots on goal!
| codecamper wrote:
| 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 & so are some of you guys... go talk with him! Maybe
| it could be used inside your towers as a way to more efficiently
| capture the co2?
|
| Thanks for doing what you all are doing btw. We desperately need
| a solution.
| jfk13 wrote:
| What do you anticipate will happen if we make cyanobacteria
| "immune to their natural predator", leading to their unchecked
| proliferation...?
| ahstilde wrote:
| 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.
| jsantos511 wrote:
| 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
| retube wrote:
| 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.
| jsantos511 wrote:
| Totally agree - in the short-term, it's highly likely that
| emissions will continue as they have.
|
| 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.
| quantified wrote:
| What are the environmental effects of the chemical mix? How do
| you reclaim the chemicals from the cooling water?
| jsantos511 wrote:
| 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 to regenerate the starting carbon capture blend. The
| water is sent back through the tower, and round and round it
| goes.
| ajb wrote:
| 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)
| jsantos511 wrote:
| 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.
| treis wrote:
| >regeneration process
|
| Is there an energy input here?
| URSpider94 wrote:
| 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.
| jsantos511 wrote:
| There is an energy input here. The temperatures required to
| regenerate the CO2 from our captured solution are low
| enough to be produced using renewables, and this is what
| we're planning on doing.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| How 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)?
| jsantos511 wrote:
| 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.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| So, this link gives CO2 emitted into the atmosphere by humans in
| 2019 as weighing as 43.1 * 10^12 metric tonnes - 43.1 billion
| tons [1].
|
| Now, the third of you links, describing your plant, talks about
| capturing one metric tone of CO2 per years. If you could scale
| this plant up to 1000 times in the capturing ability, you would
| then need one million of these plants scatter across the globe to
| capture a billion metric tonnes (about 2% of human emissions
| say).
|
| I'm doubtful the commercial demand for CO2 would pay or that
| governments would be willing to pay for this (not to mention the
| need for energy).
|
| Which is to say you seem describe atom sized drop in an ocean-
| sized bucket. Is any reason to think this could _meaningfully_
| "reverse climate change"?
|
| [1] https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/climate-
| change/glo...
| jsantos511 wrote:
| Amazingly well thought out analysis - thank you. Completely
| agree that we will need a lot of shots on goal and many
| operations pulling carbon out of the air to deal with the size
| of this problem.
|
| Our first commercial plant is estimated to capture ~1 ton CO2 /
| day, and that is with a very small tower. If all 2M towers in
| the US were the same size as our smallest one, we could capture
| 730M tons of CO2 / year, but we know that is a conservative
| assumption because many cooling towers are larger than the one
| we're starting with.
|
| For example, one of the larger plants we've talked to runs a
| cooling tower that can capture ~44,000 tons of CO2 / year. This
| plant is a small power generation plant attached to a
| university, but let's assume it represents the cooling towers
| of all power plants.
|
| There are 23,000 power plants in the US. Assuming they all have
| a cooling tower capable of capturing 44,000 tons of CO2 / year
| and all the rest of the cooling towers in the US are of the
| small size I mentioned above, our annual capture amount grows
| to:
|
| [23,000 power plant towers * 44,000 tons/tower] + [1.9 other
| towers * 365 tons/tower] = 1.7B tons of CO2 captured / year
| with cooling towers.
|
| Our estimate will get closer to the truth as we continue to
| understand the range of cooling tower sizes available on the
| market.
|
| It's worth saying: for humans to meaningfully reverse climate
| change, we need many groups of people taking many shots on goal
| for us to be successful. I believe Noya has a critical
| technology that will play an important role in solving this
| problem, and I'm excited to be joined by many other amazing
| founders with fantastic technologies in this adventure.
| baybal2 wrote:
| I want to warn readers, and people not aware of high school
| physics.
|
| Capturing CO2 is one thing, but doing anything with it later
| completely different.
|
| Just capturing CO2 does not involve returning the energy debt of
| carbon-oxygen bond, but doing anything with it later does, and
| usually many times the electric energy gained from combustion.
|
| In other words, making anything useful out of it will require you
| to expend many, many times more hydrocarbon energy than if you
| didn't, or just synthesized directly.
|
| Anybody claiming the opposite have either never finished a high
| school, or is an utter fraud, and, unfortunately,the number of
| such has been skyrocketing recently, pampered by windfall of
| environmental grants, and investments signed off by equally
| ignorant, or corrupt people.
| bmm6o wrote:
| Yes, but presumably the buyers know what they can do with the
| CO2. I do think that knowing what happens next is important if
| you're interested in reducing atmospheric CO2.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Great idea but I feel the key to making it a viable endeavour
| would be a Carbon tax that makes it worthwhile
| GiftCard22 wrote:
| The 12 Best Jobs for Dog Lovers (https://bit.ly/MONY23GIFT)
| Geee wrote:
| Have you thought about applying for the $100M XPRIZE?
| https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk
| jsantos511 wrote:
| Oh yes - definitely on our radar!
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Using existing cooling towers to capture atmospheric CO2 seems
| like a much better idea than using energy to otherwise pump
| tonnes of air through a process. However, I can't help wonder
| whether it is better than capturing the exhaust emissions
| (primarily CO2 and H20) directly from the exhaust gasses, before
| they are released to the atmosphere.
| jsantos511 wrote:
| There are two equally-needed levers we have to reverse climate
| change: the first is reducing current emissions, and the second
| is removing carbon from the atmosphere.
|
| Removing emissions from smokestacks is critical to ensuring we
| can stop dumping waste into the sky, but we are at the point
| now where we need scalable, low-cost processes to pull carbon
| out of the atmosphere.
|
| So, we need to definitely do what you're suggesting and capture
| all emissions from as many smokestacks as possible until we've
| fully transitioned to a clean grid. And, we also need to begin
| pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time to reply. I'm still not convinced
| that pulling atmospheric carbon out of the air makes sense
| until practically all smokestack emissions are captured at
| source. Something like putting the heating on while all the
| windows are open.
|
| I wish you guys luck though, hopefully you can carve out a
| niche market which will mean carbon capture technologies are
| ready when the time comes.
| woeirua wrote:
| DAC will be needed for the foreseeable future because there are
| some applications still where hydrocarbons are just unbeatable.
| In particular, large-scale marine and air transportation are
| just not feasible yet with anything other than some kind of
| hydrocarbon based fuel. That might not be the case forever, but
| it is for now. Eventually the goal will be to use DAC to
| synthesize hydrocarbon based fuels, thereby making them
| completely carbon neutral.
| kensouris wrote:
| What 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.
| jsantos511 wrote:
| The energy balance is going to be critical, I agree!
|
| We are still working on finalizing all the inputs for this
| process, including regeneration amounts, amount of heat added,
| etc. Based on our early modeling, it seems the amount of heat
| generated from the capture will be negligible since the amount
| of CO2 moving through our system is much smaller than the
| amount of water available to provide cooling.
|
| Our chemicals have anti-scaling properties, and we're working
| to understand corrosion across many different material types to
| ensure we don't cause more problems than we're solving.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| umvi wrote:
| We definitely need more innovation like this. Pressurized CO2
| canisters may not be the most efficient (from a density
| standpoint) way to capture carbon, since you are capturing oxygen
| too and it's being stored as a gas, but hey, it's a start. We can
| iterate from there.
| ip26 wrote:
| It's a multi-step process. Collect CO2. Convert it to something
| else. Store it.
|
| This startup is currently focused on improving the first step.
| You have to collect the CO2 before you can do something with
| it.
| mgiannavola wrote:
| Hey Josh,
|
| I'm a photographer working on a story about American innovation.
| I just shot you an email through the Noya website.
|
| Hope to be in touch. Best Marco
| jsantos511 wrote:
| Emailed received! Will respond soon. Thanks!
| jacklolo wrote:
| The 12 Best Jobs for Dog lLovers
|
| https://bit.ly/MONY23GIFT
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