[HN Gopher] Charm delivers Stripe's carbon removal purchase ahea...
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Charm delivers Stripe's carbon removal purchase ahead of schedule
Author : etxm
Score : 105 points
Date : 2021-04-20 13:49 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (charmindustrial.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (charmindustrial.com)
| wedn3sday wrote:
| This seems like such an ass-backwards approach. They're making
| oil and injecting it into the ground using and old oil well.
| Wouldnt it be way better to just pay Saudi Arabia/Norway to NOT
| to pump this much oil out of the ground?
| capableweb wrote:
| I don't really know the subject, think it's called "Carbon
| sequestration"? Your "making oil and injecting it into the
| ground" made me curious, and it does seem like a grand
| simplification of what's happening.
| juancampa wrote:
| I understand that the oil they are pumping in is not nearly as
| useful as the oil companies pump out
| pkrein wrote:
| This. Equivalent CO2, but bio-oil has 1/3 the energy content
| of crude oil.
| graeme wrote:
| This is in fact the central idiocy of oil burning: we will have
| to put it back into the ground, at great cost.
|
| However there is no good way to buy the rights to permanent
| sequestration of a given oil resource. It would, however, be
| optimal to tax oil burning from stored reserves.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Maybe they are already not pumping this much. Just discount it
| 20% from any number. It's free carbon removal by your proposal.
| They'd fleece you if you offer that payment to them lol. You'd
| never be able to track it
| yaacov wrote:
| The idea is to figure how to do this cheaply now so that in the
| future when we have abundant clean energy we can deploy it at
| scale
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Or better yet, tax the daylights out of oil so oil producers
| don't have incentive to produce? But as others mentioned, we
| can also pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
| PeterisP wrote:
| If you (probably in this case "you" means some government)
| actually tax the daylights out of oil, then your population
| will riot, remove you from power and reverse the tax before
| it has had any meaningful impact.
|
| "Gilets jaunes" riots two years ago were caused in part by a
| relatively minor fuel tax increase. Actually taxing oil so
| much as to significantly reduce its consumption would be a
| huge impact on population and cause much larger resistance,
| probably violent.
| kisamoto wrote:
| Yes, absolutely.
|
| These are not mutually exclusive events.
|
| We need to reduce our emissions and stop pumping oil out
| (develop clean alternatives).
|
| We need to remove the existing excess of emissions in our
| atmosphere to get down to more natural levels.
| evolve2k wrote:
| Having someone actively put oil "back in the ground",
| actually really helps the narrative and ongoingly highlights
| the hypocrisy you speak of. It's a next step.
| StavrosK wrote:
| How do you do that? Are you paying them to shut the pumps down
| for X hours? What if the rest of their demand remains constant?
| I don't see how this can possibly work.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| No, because the oil isn't fungible. We're getting high quality,
| grade-A organic, family-owned oil out of the ground and putting
| the bottom of the barrel sludge back in.
| bishnu wrote:
| I feel like the covid pandemic has definitively answered the
| question "What's better, government policy and collective
| action, or a small well-capitalized group implementing a
| technological solution?"
|
| Efforts like this are the only way we make a dent in climate
| change.
| londons_explore wrote:
| 416 tons of CO2e is what... The amount emitted by a single family
| in a few days?
|
| I reckon I could turn my thermostat back a few degrees and save
| that.
| teej wrote:
| Qatar is the highest in the world at 49 tons per capita per
| year. So you're off by a lot.
|
| That doesn't make 416 tons a lot by any stretch, but we are
| still early in the technology cycle for carbon
| removal/sequestration.
| ktta wrote:
| Your numbers are way off. ~7 tons of CO2 is what the average
| American family emits per _year_
| Klwohu wrote:
| Carbon removal seems like slapping a band aid on a sucking chest
| wound until the Chinese and Indian problems are dealt with.
| reissbaker wrote:
| To be fair the US is a bigger problem than India, and is only a
| smaller problem than China by virtue of having a far smaller
| population. The US is the second largest source of CO2
| emissions in the world, and per capita is higher than both of
| those countries.
|
| However, building these technologies may help everyone reduce
| net CO2 emissions.
| Klwohu wrote:
| The US is absolutely nowhere near India's carbon emissions,
| nor China's. And none of the famously popular proposals such
| as Paris even address it.
|
| It's cool, they already serve as our garbage dumps and
| contain the toxic waste that fuels your iPhone. Just saying
| the USA isn't anywhere near the peak of the problem.
| tito wrote:
| As someone working in carbon removal, this milestone is a big
| deal. Congrats to the Charm team on hitting this milestone!
|
| I hosted an interview at AirMiners with Shaun, Charm's Chief
| Scientist, last June right after they received the purchase order
| from Stripe here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk0k0ioXqkM
|
| The conversation included 3 of the other Stripe finalists (Vesta,
| Climeworks, and CarbonCure, who just won the Carbon XPRIZE), plus
| Ryan from Stripe.
|
| For those of you interested in more details, Charm has a blog
| post about their process here:
| https://charmindustrial.com/blog/2019/3/17/making-grass-flow...
|
| Congrats again, and cheers to many more.
| DivisionSol wrote:
| Random unverified search: 1ppm is 7.8x10^9. Just say 300ppm is
| reasonable. Currently 417ppm.
|
| 7.8x10^11 tonnes of Carbon to remove from the atmosphere to
| return to "normal" (Handwavy approximations)
|
| This was 4.16x10^2, in, let's just say 12 months.
|
| Assuming an absurd 100% increase in volume year over year...
| they'll drop the carbon ppm by 1 after... 24 years.
|
| Not meant to doom/gloom, just curious.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| In the 1980s it cost 100000 dollars to launch a kg low Earth
| orbit, today it's 1000. [1]
|
| In the 1970s solar cells cost 100 USD/Watt, today 0.2 USD/Watt.
| [2]
|
| These napkin calculations are fairly meaningless on those time
| scales with emerging technologies, 30 years is a long time. In
| fact they don't even hold for this year. They finished
| delivering 150 tons in January of this year and the rest in
| march so that'd be 300 tons in 3 months.
|
| [1] https://www.futuretimeline.net/data-trends/6.htm
|
| [2] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/evolution-
| of-...
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Does anyone know the rough cost per /tonne? I doubt Stripe is
| investing much.
|
| a 100% increase in volume doesn't sound ridiculous to me. zoom
| alone grew revenue over 100% in like a month - dumb example but
| there are lots of others. The triple, triple, double, double,
| double unicorn formula is widely marketed as another example.
|
| There would surely be scale efficiencies in all these
| techniques too?
|
| I think we are past catastrophe at this point and even with
| your math that sounds like more of a win than I would have
| guessed!
|
| We have spent Trillions in the last year on stimi. that could
| have been targeted for dual purpose... and especially the
| proposed infrastructure bill should be changed but that would
| be another longgg thread.
|
| Just trying to argue a point that even 'small' and maybe even
| not feasible at the moment ideas need to be actively pursued
| and scaled when they work, even if not as efficient as a HN
| engineer's dream we need to have basically an immediate all out
| war to fight climate catastrophe at this point.
|
| Do this on 1000 different ideas and spend much bigger much
| faster we might stand a chance..
| kisamoto wrote:
| Stripe bought 416 tons at $600/ton [0] and Shopify has
| committed $5million annually[1] to carbon removal (including
| Charm at what I presume is a similar price point)
|
| I am heavily bullish at the growth of carbon removal. Not as
| an excuse to continue emitting but as a growing awareness of
| necessity to restore more natural CO2 levels.
|
| * [0] https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-
| purchases * [1]
| https://www.shopify.com/about/environment/sustainability-
| fun...
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Thanks very interesting. I agree. And if we end up killing
| our civilation maybe we'll be burying new oil for some
| future peoples to get similar explosive growth from
| basically free energy - and hope they learn from our
| mistakes ;)
|
| Though seems like a tree can easily be more than a tonne
| and way cheaper than that. Even if worried about keeping
| the carbon in the forest could bury it too!
| mstipetic wrote:
| This video might be interesting to you
| https://youtu.be/GmWpFCjh0Fk
| shakezula wrote:
| It's truly the only way we'll be able to curve carbon
| emissions and CO2 ppms. We need a carbon tax now, to create
| a framework for companies to become accountable for their
| emissions.
| tango118 wrote:
| Okay, but under your assumptions they would reduce carbon
| concentration by >100 PPM after just 30 years, which actually
| sounds pretty good.
| [deleted]
| salmonfamine wrote:
| Depending on investment, greater than 100% growth is not
| necessarily absurd. The article is about the carbon capturing
| capability of a single, essentially PoC plant. Carbon
| Engineering is building a plant that will -- according to their
| own press release, anyway -- capture up to a megaton of carbon
| annually (https://carbonengineering.com/our-story/)
|
| Either way, it remains to be seen how effective carbon capture
| plants will be. A lot depends on investment and proving a
| business model. Renewables have the upper hand on fossil fuels
| now, because they solve a proven business problem, cheaper.
| Carbon capture companies have to prove that there's even a
| market for their services. Although, some would advocate for a
| Keynesian approach to building out mass DaC infrastructure
| funded directly from federal spending.
|
| Changing agricultural practices probably has a better outlook
| for carbon sequestration at the moment.
| pjfin123 wrote:
| Purchasing this type of carbon removal potentially has a massive
| second order effects if it helps encourage big unit cost
| reductions like what happened for solar. The Collinsons have
| talked a lot about creating the conditions for progress so I
| wonder how intentional this is.
| adamsvystun wrote:
| Let me try to offset the cynicism here.
|
| These are welcome news. Seems like a small company in short
| amount of time was able to develop and validate carbon removal.
| Stripe's commitment helped them do this, which is great. I wish
| them further successes in making the process cheaper and faster.
| shakezula wrote:
| I would love to see this model made feasible with a carbon tax,
| so that companies that couldn't meet a carbon goal could just
| buy their way down artificially or pay the government the
| taxes.
| whall6 wrote:
| > ' Research from Oxford, Stanford and Berkeley has found that
| 85% of nature-based carbon offsets sold today are not
| "additional"'
|
| I was imagining that this would be the case. I was reading about
| pine farms being paid to halt harvesting. My very first thought
| was "I wonder if it makes sense to buy forested land to make a
| profit." Clearly other people have already thought the same
| thing.
| andrewpk wrote:
| I know they make a point in reasoning "why not landfill?" but I
| have to wonder if "injecting our magic bio-oil deep underground"
| just sounded better to the VCs vs "we we just friggin' buried the
| corn husks."
| kisamoto wrote:
| On a serious note...that's not a bad idea. I will need to find
| out why that's the case (although I imagine it's something to
| do with the pyrolysis leaving a more stable and predictable
| carbon-rich mass rather than leaving the degradation to nature)
| quadrature wrote:
| they cover this here https://charmindustrial.com/faqs#bury-
| biomass
|
| "Others are working on this method. The landfills are
| expensive to dig, the geology is critically important, and we
| don't believe the capacity to be as scalable or as permanent
| as injecting carbon-containing liquid into deep geological
| storage. The conversion of biomass into bio-oil via pyrolysis
| results in a liquid form with a higher carbon density, and is
| more easily handled, transported, and injected into existing
| wells."
| boringg wrote:
| Which carbon registry and third party verifiers confirmed the
| removal? This marketing piece doesn't actually point to any
| project details / offset protocols / verifiers etc.
|
| FWIW believe in carbon offsets but have deep skepticism about
| geologic storage (go see Aliso canyon as an example of geologic
| storage gone awry).
| salmonfamine wrote:
| I've always wondered if we could find a way to shoot it into
| space.
| PhilipVinc wrote:
| Shooting the rocket would probably generate more CO2 then you
| are sending to space...
| gruez wrote:
| depends on the rocket fuel. hydrogen or hydrazine doesn't
| produce co2 on combustion.
| salmonfamine wrote:
| If we get to a world with hydrogen-fueled rockets, we'll
| probably have much bigger dreams than just carbon
| sequestration.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The Delta IV Heavy is already fueled purely with
| hydrogen:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV_Heavy
| PeterisP wrote:
| Still, you could burn that fuel in a power plant instead
| of e.g. natural gas, and that would offset much more CO2
| than what you can shoot into space. It's just not an
| efficient use of energy, and any large quantities energy
| saved or not generated has a pretty direct impact on the
| CO2 that we could not produce.
| mvzvm wrote:
| PR fluff piece?
| Judgmentality wrote:
| It's the corporate website, so yes.
| PradeetPatel wrote:
| If a corporation is doing something good, shouldn't they have
| the right to show it off to the rest of the world?
|
| It has been observed that this is a valid tactic to consolidate
| their reputation, and encourage others to follow in their
| footsteps.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| It's interesting to compare this (creating bio oil and injecting
| into the ground) to using ethanol in gas, which many people
| seemed to have concluded was/is a wasteful endeavor.
|
| It'd be funny if at some point they concluded, 'storing this is
| much less efficient than burning it as fuel. Let's just burn it
| instead of petroleum based oils!'
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| I don't fully understand you so I'm going to assume you meant a
| sequestration process that captures CO2 as bio oil. If we
| capture existing CO2 and then burn it again to produce CO2,
| that's just re-circulation (from an ecological pov; pollution
| is a different story). Growing new crops to then burn it very
| likely adds new CO2 - not per se, but because these crops
| would/could only replace existing crops - which simply moves
| elsewhere or trees/forestland and not result in afforestation.
|
| Also, if our goal is reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere, not just
| keep the balance, we need permanent sequestration.
| jmstriegel wrote:
| I'm excited for technologies like this to become available for
| regular individuals. I'm not sure what the current figure is, but
| in 2008 the average American was responsible for 20 tons of co2
| every year[1]. At $600/ton[2], that's roughly a $12,000/yr unpaid
| externality on the American lifestyle.
|
| It's likely that even with incredibly aggressive elimination of
| co2 waste, several economic sectors will continue to produce
| significant amounts of co2, and we'll need sequestration to make
| up the difference.
|
| [1]
| https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428120658.h...
|
| [2] https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases
| graeme wrote:
| Actually you can buy Carbon Sequestration through Climeworks
| right now. They're one of Stripe's other partners:
| https://www.climeworks.com/subscriptions
| darepublic wrote:
| Perhaps a naive question but what is the carbon overhead of
| the removal. And is that taken into consideration? edit: am I
| right in calculating that the average American citizen would
| need to purchase the 7 Eur plan 170+ times over to make
| themselves carbon neutral for a year
| [deleted]
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