[HN Gopher] Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares
___________________________________________________________________
Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares
Author : pkrein
Score : 141 points
Date : 2022-07-14 14:39 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (charmindustrial.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (charmindustrial.com)
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > solid material handling in general, is a perennial problem
|
| Ugh! Yes. One one machine I worked on, this was one of our major
| issues. We had a subsystem whose job it was to get small plastic
| containers out of a bulk hopper, orient them correctly, and
| deposit them into a carriage all with a failure rate, IIRC, on
| the order of "no more than one unrecoverable jam every 10,000
| units."
|
| An "unrecoverable jam" was one that required human intervention
| to open the container and clear the jam by hand. Fun fact: tiny
| nonconductive plastic containers are very susceptible to static
| cling!
|
| This was my introduction to bulk material handling (I was the dev
| writing the code) and its associated patent minefield. Just about
| every good idea the very experienced mechanical engineer could
| think of was already patented. In the end we got it to work and
| met the spec, but not without a lot of hard work.
|
| At my previous job we had similar issues with paper. The company
| had an entire Paper Handling lab staffed with people constantly
| working on better ways of moving a sheet of paper from one place
| to another at speed. Paper might actually be worse because
| changing the humidity changes its properties quite a bit.
| pkrein wrote:
| If you or your friends are mechanical engineers, we're looking
| for great meche's with experience in thermal, fluids, combustion,
| ag processing and more. Would love to chat:
| https://charmindustrial.com/team or email in my profile.
| niklearnstodev wrote:
| Does Charm ever plan to be remote-friendly? Asking more for
| some talented friends living in a remote small town, though
| I've admired Charm from afar for some time.
| pkrein wrote:
| It's tough for building hardware, where the engineers own
| building their prototype systems. Likely other roles in
| sales, etc. would go remote sooner.
| niklearnstodev wrote:
| Entirely understandable, and a major driver in my
| transition from industrial automation to web software
| (though industrial hardware work is so rewarding!).
| ed wrote:
| So the ELI5 is they burn crop waste, harvest the heat and bury
| the carbon-rich ash. This process is called BECCS. (Not totally
| right - see 'pkrein's comment below.)
|
| The upper bound on capture is pretty good! Almost 70% of yearly
| CO2 emissions.
|
| > Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggests a
| potential range of negative emissions from BECCS of 0 to 22
| gigatonnes per year [1]
|
| > Human activities emit over 30 billion tons of CO2 (9 billion
| tons of fossil carbon) per year [2]
|
| 1 -
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_captur...
|
| 2 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide
| pkrein wrote:
| Actually we aren't burning the biomass, we're heating it
| without oxygen (pyrolysis) to create a transportable biomass
| intermediate called bio-oil. That bio-oil is rich in carbon,
| molasses-like consistency, and the overwhelming odor of
| barbecue sauce. Today we primarily pump that bbq sauce
| underground as carbon removal (Biomass Carbon Removal and
| Storage - BiCRS), but in the future it could be used for BECCS
| processes like you outline.
| dbcurtis wrote:
| How is this an overall improvement over leaving the corn
| stalks in the field to decompose and return nutrients to the
| soil? This process moves soil nutrients away from point of
| origin. (Serious question from former Iowa farm boy who still
| owns corn ground operated by others. Should I let my tenants
| ship stover away? I want to be a good steward of the soil. )
| pkrein wrote:
| The process separates the biomass carbon into bio-oil, and
| the NPK in the biomass separates into the biochar/ash (2%
| of the N, 70% of the P, >90% of the K). That biochar/ash
| goes back into the soil. So we recover most of the
| nutrients, plus you get biochar which improves soil carbon,
| water retention, microbial health, etc.
|
| https://charmindustrial.com/faq?question=how-do-you-
| sustaina...
| colechristensen wrote:
| Yes, but why is this better than leaving the biomass in
| the field and perhaps doing some soil building
| techniques?
|
| You also need to hire some farm kids or pay for some
| scholarships to get interns. Some of the problems you
| described solving over months would have been trivially
| solved by someone with farm experiences.
|
| You'd really benefit from going to farm auctions, finding
| one of these, taking it apart, and adapting the
| mechanisms to your purposes. https://youtu.be/aYv8aDRv998
| Fomite wrote:
| Yeah, the West Coast Ag School professor in me in
| flinching at some of this.
| pkrein wrote:
| Leaving the biomass on the field results in the CO2 going
| back into the atmosphere (~80% within 2 years):
| https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.4141/cjss2010-055#T0002
|
| By contrast, our process retains the nutrients, improves
| the soil health relative to the baseline of just leaving
| it, and you get permanent carbon removal.
|
| Yes, we're hiring for great mechanical engineers with
| experience in these areas ;) Lots to do!
| jonstewart wrote:
| How does removing the biomass improve soil health?
| lazide wrote:
| Biochar helps avoid soil compaction and dramatically
| improves productivity of the soil.
| pkrein wrote:
| Read two comments up. Biochar/ash made from the biomass
| goes into the soil.
| jonstewart wrote:
| So ideally one of your systems would be at the local
| elevator to make stover dropoff/biochar pickup easy? And
| then maybe someday combines would have a baler on them?
| And the biochar could go in a manure spreader for
| application?
|
| Is there waste heat/syngas coming off the pyrolysis
| (beyond what's needed for sustaining it)? If so, have you
| looked into applying that to grain drying?
| jonstewart wrote:
| (Another former Iowa farm boy) This is a CO2 sequestration
| process, and one still in development. The carbon in the
| corn stalks is obviously pretty neutral--it's the petroleum
| for tractors, drying, and fertilizer that are the CO2
| emissions problem.
|
| For soil health, I think you'd want your renter to go no-
| till (if isn't already). And then for emissions, look into
| putting solar panels wherever, seeing whether there are
| electric/heat pump dryers available (???) if you have
| drying bins, and encouraging renter to use biodiesel.
| carbadtraingood wrote:
| Decomposing biomass releases almost all its mass back as
| CO2 into the atmosphere, very little is sequestered.
|
| This approach removes carbon from the atmosphere
| permanently.
|
| It's also (probably) a net energy producer and it doesn't
| require creating massive piles of decomposing plant matter
| everywhere.
| goda90 wrote:
| This depends on the conditions the biomass is decomposing
| in. A lot of carbon can be captured in the soil if
| handled well. No till, no spray, cover crops, and managed
| grazing of the cover crops can create an environment
| where the soil is a carbon sink and a better base for
| future crops.
| carbadtraingood wrote:
| Yes. And also no. Practices like that are good, but the
| majority of your carbon sequestration will come in the
| form of the roots of plants. (This is part of why no till
| is good.)
|
| Getting surface vegetation to deposit carbon in the soil
| long term is trickier. You aren't wrong, but it's also
| not as simple as some folks believe. Just cutting the
| corn stalks and cobs and leaving them on a field won't
| put much carbon back in the soil.
| ciphol wrote:
| Possibly the bacteria which decompose the corn emit CO2 as
| they "burn" the corn for their food?
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| Whatever their answer they'll need to account for the fuel
| cost of the trip to a facility, lifecycle cost of the
| instrumentation, and fuel cost of a return trip for where
| ever the whatever is going to go.
|
| I can tell you right now having done experimental LCA
| previously, its not gonna pen out. The cost of moving
| massive amounts of 'stuff' to do 'something' with it when
| its an extremely low margin, low value add product; this
| will end up generating more CO2 than it sequesters.
|
| If you can't do it in place, you likely can't do it.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Couldn't the bio-oil generated by the process be used to
| power the transport and supply lines? Or don't the maths
| work out? I don't know any of the numbers here...
| dbcurtis wrote:
| Yes, that is my take. It only works economically if the
| soil nutrients come back to the field, and it costs no
| more (net) than adding a stalk chopper to the combine.
|
| Extra trips over the field burn fuel, and something needs
| to pay for the dollar cost of that (in added fertilizer
| value or something) not to mention the net carbon
| emissions of burning diesel to go over the field again.
| colechristensen wrote:
| You usually have to have entirely renewable generated
| electric powered processes in order to actually sink
| meaningful amounts of carbon.
|
| And even then, to actually sink carbon the correct thing
| to do would be to electrify the farm machinery for a much
| higher carbon ROI.
| rmccue wrote:
| This is pretty cool!
|
| Presumably it takes some amount of energy currently to run
| this process, so the "cost" of the carbon removal is energy
| usage currently. Would a BECCS process remove the need to use
| external energy altogether?
| ed wrote:
| Oh, this is your company! I heard you were working on this
| and thought dang way to go Peter.
|
| Are there companies buying bio-oil yet? If I understand
| correctly, I like that you're plugging into a larger system
| and applying engineering to make a piece of it more
| efficient. It's always easier to get bigger than it is to get
| smaller!
| bob29 wrote:
| How are you heating it? How are you powering all the
| chippers, blowers, conveyer belts, and other machinery? Along
| with the transportation of crop residue to your facility, how
| much carbon is re-emitted with your consumption of all these
| industrial products of the primarily fossil fueled powered
| energy system?
| carbadtraingood wrote:
| Pyrolysis is an energy positive reaction. It requires an
| initial heat input, but after getting started it produces
| more heat than it needs. That heat can be used to generate
| electricity or warm water.
| bob29 wrote:
| Pyrolysis is entirely endothermic - it requires applying
| heat to biomass. Pyrolysis yields a vapor that will
| combust in the presence of oxygen and release energy. The
| energy released in the combustion of pyrolysis products
| can be used to drive further pyrolysis. A "Top Lit
| Updraft Gasifier" is a simple apparatus to achieve this.
|
| Capturing the heat from pyrolysis in this way does
| however convert the pyrolysis vapor from hydrocarbon into
| combustion byproducts, namely C02. This company claims to
| be condensing all of these hydrocarbons, not combusting
| them.
|
| For a nice and understandable example of pure pyrolysis
| without combustion, there is this project [0] wherein an
| airtight vessel is loaded with biomass, heat/energy is
| applied with electrical resistive heating elements. The
| pyrolysis occurs and the resulting vapors are captured
| and stored as a low pressure vapor for later use in
| cooking or powering internal combustion engine.
|
| [0]https://www.patreon.com/posts/story-of-
| thing-i-61916621
| carbadtraingood wrote:
| Totally. I am currently experimenting with TLUDs for
| waste products from some forest land I own. I didn't
| realize they were also attempting to capture the gases
| from pyrolization rather than using them to continue the
| pyrolysis.
|
| In that case, you are totally correct, they'll need an
| input heat source.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Okay, I've got to ask: Does it actually _taste_ like BBQ
| sauce?
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| probably mostly tastes like carbon but you might notice a
| smokey aftertaste
| mcronce wrote:
| To be fair, the smokey flavor you get from barbeque is
| primarily carbon
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Yup I just assume bitterness would be front and center
| mnw21cam wrote:
| Neat idea.
|
| My main concern is about whether you're sealing all the plant
| nutrients deep underground too, or are they separated out at
| some stage?
|
| As a world, we're going to need to put all those nutrients
| back into the soil to be able to keep growing stuff.
| Particularly phosphorous has limited mineable stocks.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I'd guess the ash/gunk remaining from the pyrolysis would
| be a mixture of carbon, phosphorous, maybe some nitrogen.
| It'd probably make a decent fertilizer/soil amendment,
| particularly for degraded low-carbon soils.
| soco wrote:
| So out of the 30 gigatons of CO2, up to 22 are from biomass?
| That's way, way more than I would have thought...
| Imnimo wrote:
| I think the 22 is not how much is currently emitted from
| biomass, it's the upper bound on how much we could store if
| we replaced a bunch of energy generation with this process.
| philote wrote:
| I think the meaning is that out of the 30 gigatons of CO2, 22
| gigatons can be recaptured ("negative emissions").
| soco wrote:
| Right and that sounds like a lot to me. I hope they're
| right.
| twawaaay wrote:
| Honestly, all I am hearing is whining.
|
| There are so many ways to transport material up. Miners transport
| ROCKS, upwards, from kilometers beneath Earth surface. They then
| crush those rocks into fine powder to extract tiny specks of gold
| from it. Magic? I don't think so.
|
| So you chose a wrong tool for the job and are blaming corn?
|
| You moved from a lab to "real world" and are surprised it is not
| all nice, uniform and spherical?
|
| I love history of ASML. These guys faced a problem after a
| problem after a problem for like a decade just to get one process
| that everybody thought is impossible. Didn't give up. Didn't
| complain. Just focus on solving it.
| chris_wot wrote:
| I don't see any whining. They found an unexpected issue, worked
| the issue and solved it. How is any of that "whining"?
| jcpst wrote:
| The title "Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares" reminds me of this bit
| of pop culture where Rick and Morty land on a corn cob planet:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw-2KuHIYyo
| smm11 wrote:
| I recall that episode, but never understood why it was bad
| thing if there was a cob planet? Earth is water planet, or dirt
| planet, with everything destined to be dirt or whatever.
| andjd wrote:
| In their FAQ, they mention this statistic.
|
| > Every ton of biomass contains roughly 1.65 tons CO2.
|
| On it's surface this is impossible. Does this refer to CO2
| equivalents like Methane? It seems that for carbon specifically,
| the process (pyrolysis, transportation, etc) emits more than one
| ton of carbon for every ton of oil sequestered.
| hinkley wrote:
| Only 16% of the weight of CO2 is the carbon. Since we're
| concerned with the greenhouse effect of the molecule, that
| makes a bit of sense. But it also inflates both the rate of
| production and the value of capture so it could just as easily
| have been the other way.
| certifiedloud wrote:
| Conservation of mass need not apply.
| carbadtraingood wrote:
| It's the same way that burning 1 kilogram of gasoline
| produces more than 1 kilogram of CO2. Oxygen from the
| atmosphere gets bound to the carbon.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Of course the statement is a bit inaccurate, it should probably
| say "burning 1 ton of biomass generates roughly 1.65 tons of
| CO2"
|
| Oxygen is a good bit heavier than carbon, to the point that
| about 80% of the mass of CO2 is oxygen. Since burning fuel is
| generally about combining carbon and hydrogen in the fuel with
| atmospheric O2, producing CO2 and H2O respectively, you can get
| numbers like these even before accounting for high-impact gases
| like methane.
|
| Edit: and of course photosynthesis is essentially the same
| process in reverse, taking in CO2 and energy, adding water for
| the hydrogen and removing some oxygen (that gets vented to the
| atmosphere) to get energy-rich biomass.
| cmgbhm wrote:
| I like seeing the modern engineering write up here. Almost
| everytime I read green energy/ag stuff, it's either math latex or
| marketing copy. I assume it's because IP protection but
| problems/solution/problem is the kind of stuff that becomes good
| conversations
| camtarn wrote:
| Companies might also be reluctant to talk about the problems
| they're having, for PR reasons (from personal experience!)
|
| And yeah, it's absolutely a shame. I would similarly love to
| hear about more big engineering issues and subsequent
| solutions, even if they're fairly dumb issues.
| rexreed wrote:
| How do you get so far into a project before you even realize that
| you have such a show-stopper problem? Move fast / fail fast works
| with software because iteration times are quick and penalty per
| iteration is low. But just building stuff and hoping it works and
| then realizing major problems doesn't work so well with real-
| world stuff. Couldn't they have "workshopped" this with non-
| functional item to see what the real world roadblocks would have
| been before a deep investment?
|
| This is especially the case in high-risk unproven areas such as
| cleantech where the solution space is vast and potential problem
| areas significant. Any problem area can kill a project, so why
| are we progressing so fast to build first?
| coryrc wrote:
| I mean, you're wrong... it clearly worked out for them so far
| and it only took seven weeks to fix this issue. It's taken
| longer to ship completed commits at Google than that.
| rexreed wrote:
| Did it though? As far as I can tell they only have part of
| the problem worked out, and the rest of the problem may
| indeed be a show-stopper. How many more show-stoppers before
| they run into the same issues that bankrupted the $300M
| company? If you don't know what the show-stoppers are, then
| what is the best approach for plowing ahead anyways? Maybe
| sticking with wheat instead of corn?
| taneq wrote:
| Somehow you never quite get the real raw material when you ask
| for samples, no matter how careful you are.
|
| I worked on a system once upon a time that fed steel balls into
| a ball mill. We tested it thoroughly in the workshop with the
| same steel balls used on the customer's site, but when we went
| to commission it, it jammed non-stop.
|
| Turns out a hundred randomly selected balls won't contain most
| of the outliers that you'd get in even one tonne of balls, and
| when you're feeding 5 tonnes per hour, that's a lot of jams. We
| had balls with big craters in them, half-balls, balls with two
| halves offset by 50%, and everything in between. Not the kind
| of thing you could rely on rolling nicely.
|
| Also, of course, when you ask a mill ball manufacturer for a
| sample, they might be inclined to send you the very nicest
| examples they can find, because they think you might buy their
| product...
|
| Anyway, unless you're super careful about sourcing legitimate
| feed samples it's easy to think you're testing against the real
| product when you really aren't.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| I found your comment fascinating (and frustrating). Dealing
| with bad inputs on a web form can be tricky. Dealing with bad
| inputs made of steel seems like a lot more work =].
|
| What comes out of a steel ball mill? And why is steel made
| into (misshapen) balls before this process?
| carbadtraingood wrote:
| They discuss a bit in the article, but the material they had
| prototyped with was very different than the material they tried
| to scale up with.
|
| It sounds like their scaled up plant accepted a wide variety of
| materials, but this one specific input stream slowed them down.
|
| So they weren't shut down while they figured this out, they
| just processed the material they knew they could process until
| they had a solution here.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I'm starting to believe the idea that long term zero percent
| rates have made MBAs in charge of almost everything
| completely careless to the historical realities of business
| where you have a product and process before investing tons
| into a system.
|
| It seems to me that with "endless free money" we miss things
| like "this one input stream will be a nightmare, let's not do
| it".
| rexreed wrote:
| Absolutely agree. Also, how is this firm based in Silicon
| Valley / San Fran where the customers are primarily in the
| midwest? If they were serious about this problem, shouldn't
| they be where their customers or resources are? Building
| something in isolation and then "shipping" it to where it
| will be used seems very inefficient and they're clearly
| missing out on valuable on-the-ground information and
| experience. This seems more like a university research
| project than a serious concern?
| tclancy wrote:
| Wouldn't the reverse question then be, why hasn't someone
| in the Midwest done this already?
| sumtechguy wrote:
| They may have already used that material for something
| else?
| seunosewa wrote:
| Like animal feed. Or tilling it into the soil to increase
| organic matter.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are other companies working on similar things in
| the Midwest. It is a complex problem that farmers are
| very interested in because they see potential dollars.
|
| https://www.bioenergy-news.com/news/frontline-bioenergys-
| iow... https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2016/12/20/rapid
| pkrein wrote:
| Our customers are technology companies based in the Bay
| Area, check out the home page:
| https://charmindustrial.com
|
| We delivered 90% of permanent carbon removals globally
| last year: https://twitter.com/charmindustrial/status/145
| 11691760646430...
| rexreed wrote:
| Why would you prototype with a material that's substantially
| different from the real-world item? I read the article and
| this bit puzzled me. The differences clearly matter, and the
| $300M bankruptcy they reference in the article even makes
| that point.
| ComputerCat wrote:
| Yeah it's definitely a bit peculiar. You'd think they could
| have done some more research into the makeup of the
| material they'd be processing, get a good understanding of
| the needs of the machinery...
| truffdog wrote:
| Probably they want to handle wheat waste and corn waste
| long term. Seems like there should be plenty of both to go
| around
| liminvorous wrote:
| They want to be able to process both the material they
| prototyped with and the material they started with (straw)
| and the material they tried to scale up with (corn cobs),
| and probably any kind of plant matter that has less
| structural integrity than say, timber.
| pkrein wrote:
| Initial testing was in San Francisco, where corn stover is
| relatively tricky to come by because corn is not widely
| grown in California, and agricultural residues cannot be
| brought into the state because of the bugs. Wheat straw was
| much easier to procure in-state.
|
| Since encountering the differences, we tracked down the
| rarer corn growers in California and now use corn stover
| for testing as well.
| rexreed wrote:
| If corn stover is a critical importance to your business
| and business model, wouldn't it be more effective,
| efficient, and beneficial to your business to be where
| the critical resource and information and experience is?
| Basically why not move to Kansas instead of stay put in
| California?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Because Charm is being run as a VC tech startup rather
| than a traditional industrial company and there's a
| recent movement of trying to do ag-tech in the bay rather
| than places like the Midwest or even central valley.
| Probably doesn't hurt that the CEO/co-founder already
| lives in the bay.
| hinkley wrote:
| Why you wouldn't do ag tech in Chicago is beyond me.
| bshipp wrote:
| I've worked in agriculture my entire life, and seven
| weeks is a pretty good turnaround for fixing these types
| of problems. the next batch of issues they're likely to
| encounter is handling product with variations in moisture
| content that further bungs the system. Then it will be
| incorporating new feedstock from other crops.
|
| Agriculture is the intersection of industrial
| mechanization and biological systems. Unlike traditional
| manufacturing, flexibility and efficiency is learned over
| time as situations are encountered that exceed previously
| theorized boundaries/ranges.
|
| I have a grower who used gigantic wood burners for heat
| instead of natural gas. When I walked through his boiler
| room I noticed a wheelbarrow full of nails and other
| fasteners. He said 90% of his labour and headaches with
| that system were dealing with steel chunks in the feed
| stream, something they barely accounted for beyond adding
| a magnet when they built the system. Not everything can
| be planned for in advance.
| hinkley wrote:
| "Did he just tell me to go fuck myself?"
|
| "I believe he did, Bob."
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Come on. _No one_ wants to live in Kansas. And it 's
| extremely difficult to build in a rural setting. You try
| prototyping an experimental cutting-edge technology in
| the middle of a corn field 2 hours from the nearest Home
| Depot or metal fabricator.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> You try prototyping an experimental cutting-edge
| technology in the middle of a corn field 2 hours from the
| nearest Home Depot or metal fabricator.
|
| To be honest, to me it sounds like a dream job.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| The wikipedia page for Wichita, Kansas claims Boeing,
| Airbus, and Learjet among others operate design and
| manufacturing facilities there. You should be able to
| find a metal fabricator and a home depot.
| hinkley wrote:
| There are less drastic options than Kansas that would
| work fine. Chicago has an international airport.
| Indianapolis as well (though it's not listed in
| Wikipedia, which makes me wonder how complete that is).
| St Louis and Minneapolis are major hubs. Large airports
| besides those I'm less familiar with, but if you're
| planning to process corn waste what you need is rail
| access, not air. So then you can add a lot more of the
| midwest and still maybe be able to find Bulgogi for
| lunch. The Quad Cities, Peoria, Milwaukee, Des Moines,
| Omaha.
| krallja wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_International_
| Air... ?
| hinkley wrote:
| That's not a list of international airports, though. I'm
| unclear what page I was looking at now, but it only had
| about a dozen on it and IND was not one of them.
|
| Disconnected data is just information, not knowledge.
| krallja wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_air
| por... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airports
| _in_the_United... both list KIND
| rexreed wrote:
| John Deere might find that interesting. Now headquartered
| in Moline, IL (Iowa border), they started up and built
| their company exactly in the rural America (Grand Detour,
| IL), when Home Depot didn't even exist. Yes it was over
| 150 years ago, but there's nothing that prevents you from
| starting an agtech company where the resources are if
| they are in the midwest. The Kauffman Foundation, a major
| entrepreneurial resource is based in Kansas City, MO.
| 9dev wrote:
| If you rely on material that is scarce in one location
| but widely available in another, wouldn't it make sense
| to test where the material is abundant..?
| failrate wrote:
| They did.
|
| What do you think the article was about?
|
| Ordinarily, I do not reply to these kind of comments, but
| this article is receiving a lot of them along these
| lines. The comment breaks down to "Why did you not
| predict everything that could possibly go wrong before
| you started this new tech project?"
|
| I hope that it is clear that it would be impossible to
| identify every problem before field testing. Even in
| commercial manufacturing, you will run up against novel
| problems and have to engineer a solution onsite, even
| though we have had factories for about 250 years.
|
| When they start testing in a different state or country,
| they will discover a new crop that breaks their system
| and will go though this process once again. But now, they
| are more experienced, and it will probably be easier.
| [deleted]
| carbadtraingood wrote:
| Wheat straw is a common agricultural waste product across
| the US, and if they can solve processing that they still
| win. It's not that they tested A for a product that will
| only process B. They tested A for a product that will
| eventually process A and B and C and...
|
| Scaling up means testing with new inputs at scale. So now
| they've done that?
| alexpotato wrote:
| Interesting fact about those whole truck dumping systems:
|
| There is a small vent that you have to open at the front of the
| trailer BEFORE you raise it to dump out the contents.
|
| Failure to do so leads to a vacuum effect that can implode the
| trailer as the biomass pours out
|
| Source: friend of mine worked in the paper industry and this was
| a somewhat regular occurence
| selimnairb wrote:
| Alternate title: Why your biomass startup shouldn't be based in
| San Francisco.
| bequanna wrote:
| I'm having a tough time understanding how this makes sense.
|
| Is this even close to being financially viable if there is never
| any such thing as carbon credits?
|
| Put another way, are the people funding projects like this
| assuming there will be some kind of carbon credit system in place
| that will pay absurdly high prices to sequester carbon?
|
| Additionally, I suppose you will be compensating farmers for
| their corn stalk bales, but you can't take something OUT of a
| field long term without replacing. Those bales contain more than
| just carbon and the farmers will eventually have to amend the
| soil to compensate.
|
| Which, if we are then living in your sky-high carbon credit
| world, fertilizer (and everything else) pry got MUCH more
| expensive.
| pkrein wrote:
| Carbon purchasing already exists.
|
| Voluntary purchases like Frontier: https://frontierclimate.com/
| and many other corporate buyers.
|
| Regulatory cap-and-trade markets like CA ARB LCFS:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-carbon_fuel_standard
| NoGravitas wrote:
| > Is this even close to being financially viable if there is
| never any such thing as carbon credits?
|
| You're right as far as your comment goes -- it will probably
| never be financially viable to scale this up, and the companies
| funding the limited scale development are doing it purely for
| public relations purposes.
|
| What your comment misses, though, is that to survive the coming
| century, we are going to have to figure out, as a society, how
| to do things that _are not financially viable_. Financial
| viability is what got us into this mess in the first place.
|
| There's a quote attributed to Einstein that says, "We cannot
| solve today's problems using the same kind of thinking we used
| when we created them." The quote is disputed, but probably
| comes from a paraphrase of something he actually said in 1946
| in the context of the threat of nuclear warfare. It applies
| more generally to the multiple self-created existential threats
| humanity is currently facing, however.
| bequanna wrote:
| > ...how to do things that are not financially viable.
|
| I don't disagree with you, but if we go that route I have a
| pretty good idea what that will look like:
|
| 1. Wealthy people invest in carbon capture schemes like this.
|
| 2. Once there is sufficient wealth invested in #1, they've
| essentially created a solution looking for a market.
|
| 3. What does this mean? It is time to market the shit out of
| whatever existential problem your solution claims to solve.
| Market with fear, make solving this "problem" part of the
| national agenda. Get the hysteria to the point of: "We need
| to solve this AT ANY COST!" Oppose the approved messaging and
| you're an idiot, luddite or terrible person.
|
| 4. Combine the political will you are creating in #3 with
| aggressive lobbying for credit programs that make life more
| expensive for regular people and don't really accomplish
| anything. Conveniently, the new programs make the group in #1
| even more wealthy.
| carbadtraingood wrote:
| Pkrein, I see you posting here. I've got 200 acres of forest in
| Washington State and I'm long term interested in providing
| biomass for carbon sequestration, what can I be doing now to
| connect with companies like yours to help ensure those 200 acres
| are as carbon negative as possible?
| carbadtraingood wrote:
| Right now I'm experimenting with biochar production in small
| scale TLUDs, but I'm absolutely fascinated in scaling up.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This is some kind of
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_...
|
| ?
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| From my understanding, yes.
| pkrein wrote:
| Academia has started referring to our category as Biomass
| Carbon Removal and Storage, or BiCRS (pronounced like
| "bikers"):
|
| https://www.icef.go.jp/pdf/summary/roadmap/icef2020_roadmap....
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| I love this story. The lesson here is that the real world is
| messy and good engineers have to think on their feet. It also
| gives me hope that somehow humanity will actually solve climate
| change.
| jandrese wrote:
| I thought it was interesting how they were patting themselves
| on the back for getting a solution in place in "only 7 weeks".
| I guess because they aren't in real production yet the
| timelines can slip, but I have to wonder if they had consulted
| with a farmer they may have found a solution at the Tractor
| Supply the same day that would have left their operation
| running while the rest of the team did the work back in CA of
| tracking down and negotiating with suppliers for the final
| product.
|
| Farmers are often masters of mechanical improvisation because
| they have very narrow windows in which they can plant or
| harvest so breakdowns have to be fixed or worked around in just
| hours or at most a few days.
| fullstop wrote:
| I initially read the domain as "Charmin Industrial" which is an
| entirely different use of corn cobs, but also possibly fuel of
| nightmares.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| Interesting post.
|
| Is there a "mechanical engineering for dummies" educational path
| (Book? Software? Kit?) that would equip someone for doing like
| 90% of the mechanical design&prototyping work?
|
| Interesting point: "when you solve one bottleneck you find a new
| one somewhere else."
| mech987 wrote:
| "Shigley's Mechanical Engineering Design" is a great textbook
| if you want to learn the most you can with the fewest books
| about designing mechanical structures and moving parts from a
| strength perspective.
|
| Fluid flow/ thermo would be the other main academic area that
| this book wouldn't cover.
|
| There's a bunch more topics though that you build over years of
| intuition- manufacturability, design tradeoffs, etc.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| For quite a few years I looked into similar processes based
| fundamentally on biological photosynthesis, for example algal
| pool farms and similar approaches to generating hydrocarbons from
| biomass.
|
| At present, I think direct air capture of CO2 followed by
| reduction to methane and longer hydrocarbons using water-sourced
| H2 (all without going through the biological photosynthesis) is
| going to be the long-term winning technology. One main reason is
| control of the chemistry is a lot easier when you start with
| uniform small molecules (CO2 and H2) rather than trying to
| distill off and separate the products of pyrolysis of
| biomaterials (or even of crude fossil oil distillation and
| cracking, a similar process).
|
| This isn't to say that if you have a completely renewable energy
| based power system, that converting agricultural byproducts to
| useful materials like biomethane, biooil and fertilizer
| (phosphorous recovery in particular) isn't going to be a
| plausible approach in specific situations, and the resulting
| products could have niche markets.
|
| Now, if your goal is to remove CO2 permanently from the
| atmosphere, that's more difficult. Making materials like
| limestone (CaCO3) or perhaps carbon fiber is a better idea for
| that. Bricks of diamond would be even better, but that's a bit
| more sci-fi still - but possible. Air-captured diamonds would be
| a cool product.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I've thought a good target would be polluted lakes with algae
| problems or diverting part of rivers with agricultural runoff.
|
| Pump oxygen and whatever bottleneck nutrient in and harvest
| algae. You'll clean the excess nutrients out of the water and
| sink carbon at same time.
|
| Do this in the Mississippi River delta for maximum effect, do a
| pilot in a Minnesota lake first.
| bequanna wrote:
| So, this pilot would add more algae to a MN lake?
|
| I don't think you would ever get approval for something like
| this in a public lake. Maybe in some private, artificial
| pond?
| colechristensen wrote:
| The goal would be to farm and continually extract algae
| from the lake in just a section of it, presumably to
| increase the water quality in the rest of the lake.
|
| And there are something like 14,000 lakes in MN though many
| of them one might be tempted to call ponds :) no need to
| build an artificial one though, there are plenty.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| There was an Oxygen and Nitrogen (I think) injection project
| here in BC which was attempting to burn out phosphorous from
| silt during seasonal turnover of the water columns. I recall
| that it never showed a positive effect on the body of water,
| though occasionally it was negative. Lots of fish died at one
| point. After several years the measurements of P in the silt
| were hardly any lower, but still too high.
|
| I guess the trouble was only what to do with the algae. They
| expected it leave the lake, bringing the excess nutrients
| with it. How would you harvest it?
| colechristensen wrote:
| I'm sure someone could come up with an efficient harvesting
| / filtering strategy. Pick a species that fit the
| requirements.
|
| After harvesting do something similar to the process in the
| post. Dry it, pyrolyze, separate carbon goo from ash, bury
| one, use the other as fertilizer or another useful purpose.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| A good way to get rid of excess nutrients is to pick a
| water plant with ridiculous growth rates (for example,
| duckweed), harvest and compost it for use in agriculture.
| Compost will certainly remain in agricultural fields longer
| than chemical fertilizers do.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Yup, my whole idea is to find a body of water already
| suffering from overgrowth of one of these organisms, do
| what you can to accelerate that growth, and continually
| harvest it.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Pretty much every river in New Zealand needs help. Thanks
| Fonterra.
| bob29 wrote:
| I believe you would pump in CO2 (and any missing nutrients),
| not Oxygen. Algae culture requires CO2 and produces Oxygen.
| It also requires light.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algaculture#Growing_algae
| lostlogin wrote:
| If you like plants in your fish tank, pumping in CO2 has an
| amazing effect on them. Far more growth than pumping in
| air.
|
| There is some nice hardware for achieving it.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Are they actually CO2 concentrators or some variation of
| buying dry ice or compressed gas and injecting it?
| lostlogin wrote:
| I did it by running gas off fermentation (sugar and
| water) and it worked amazingly well.
|
| I'd have to refuel about once a week.
|
| Doing via CO2 bottle is the way I'd do it now and is how
| the impressive displays do it (for the ones I've seen).
| colechristensen wrote:
| I should have written air instead of oxygen, though plants
| still do respirate oxygen even though they're net positive
| oxygen producers.
| hinkley wrote:
| > Light and flexible pieces of wheat straw in San Francisco had
| easily been conveyed pneumatically from the tub grinder into the
| hammer mill.
|
| Okay, that is a very basic failure of engineering/imagination.
| I'm not saying shame is in order here, but several someone's
| should be made to feel uncomfortable over this cock-up. Including
| the hiring manager because they went for kids instead of people
| with experience.
|
| Why on earth would you assume you could move corn residues with
| air? Have you seen a corn field before? Have you touched corn?
| This is the other problem of moving engineering far away from the
| problem. SF only sees so many refugees from Iowa and Illinois.
| Most of those go to Chicago or Seattle.
|
| > But with some deeper searching, we found a great, off-the-shelf
| belt that would arrive quickly.
|
| Arrive quickly because the locals have been solving this exact
| problem for a hundred years. When you find an off the shelf
| solution for your problem, that's when a good engineer or
| software developer takes umbrage and considers whether they have
| a bad, bad case of NIH.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _Why on earth would you assume you could move corn residues
| with air?_
|
| From what the article describes later on, it appears the air
| pressure was actually generated by the tub grinder itself, not
| by any additional device.
|
| So the appeal of the original design might have been that no
| active conveyance solutions was needed at all: Because the
| grinder's air exhaust stream - which you get "for free" -
| already provides enough pressure to move the material up the
| pipe, as long as the material is light enough.
|
| That lets you greatly simplify the design, because now you can
| connect the grinder and the mill with a simple pipe and be
| done.
|
| For me it makes sense that they used the simplest possible
| solution that worked for their previous use cases. When trying
| to use their system with corn, they probably wanted to give
| their previous approach a try, before taking the time and
| effort of modifying the system.
|
| Edit: Got it wrong, both grinder and mill were creating the
| pressure. But the basic point is still correct I think. The
| choice was not air vs belt, it was "use the airflow that's
| there anyway" vs "build some active transport in addition to
| airflow".
| gammarator wrote:
| The tone of this comment is unduly negative, but I agree that
| they should be hiring folks with relevant experience. Ag
| mechanization is a well established degree, combine harvesters
| and augers exist, etc.
| hinkley wrote:
| We talk about this at least once a week here, usually in the
| scope of software, but it's a problem that exists in other
| domains (though VCs and us are constantly pushing for more
| businesses to run like software, which is nuts considering
| how not in order we know our own house to be).
|
| Ageism and cultishness are how you end up with simple
| oversights that anyone who has been around the block a few
| times would either prevent, or at least have enough self
| consciousness not to breathlessly talk about it in front of
| strangers.
|
| I think what we miss consistently about the VC model is that
| we make the 10:1 ratio about chance and betting big, but I
| suspect the dominant force there is that 4 times out of 5,
| experience will save you from doing something expensively
| stupid. However once in a while it's a clever generalist or
| someone who "doesn't know any better" that uncovers a major
| advancement that the experienced people are blind to. So less
| than half of those failures are not thinking outside of the
| box, and most of the rest are not even knowing there was a
| box to begin with.
|
| We tend to see this as an either or scenario. Throw a bunch
| of kids together or hire a bunch of cranky old men and women
| who say no all the time. That's a false dichotomy. Hire some
| of both, don't let the older ones steal all of the glory.
| colechristensen wrote:
| They just needed one farm kid who became an engineer.
|
| They talked about taking seven weeks to figure out a
| conveyor, put me in the middle of Kansas and I could have
| told you how to solve that problem in seven minutes, give
| me a truck she a credit card and i can buy you the parts in
| an hour.
|
| Bay Area engineering tends to be very sheltered, large
| groups of people with zero experience invading a domain.
| Sometimes it creates cool new solutions to old problems,
| other times it spends 100x the money on problems solved 100
| years ago (And does a worse job at it too)
|
| The real reason self driving cars will ultimately fail is
| they're being designed and tested in places like Palo Alto
| where it doesn't even rain half the year and a pothole is a
| thing of legend from lands far away.
| pkrein wrote:
| Want to come show us how it's done? :)
| colechristensen wrote:
| My email is my username @gmail.com I might be able to do
| some consulting.
| Raidion wrote:
| I think solving an "easy" problem is a good step on the
| way to a hard one, as long as the tool is set up to allow
| you to get out of a local maximum. Clearly there are
| locations where self driving is a smaller problem space
| than others, and I don't think it's bad to solve for
| those locations first.
|
| I don't think it would be a fail if self driving cars
| were able to only operate in sunny locations with good
| roads. The caveat is that the outcome shouldn't just be a
| "magic" ML model that can't be modified to handle rain or
| potholes, it should be a set of tooling that allows you
| to make ML models that solve a variety of problems.
| munk-a wrote:
| So build a covered test road for your initial trials -
| then unleash them on real road situations. I'd be much
| more ready to trust a self-driving car that was born and
| raised on Boston streets than one in the wide, luxurious
| and pristine SoCal streets.
|
| I'm not saying you need to teach your kid to swim by
| throwing them into the sea with weights tied around their
| ankles - you can ramp up to that... but you need to start
| exposing things to real world conditions pretty early on
| in development lest something, like a LIDAR censor close
| to the road surface in the front of the car, force you
| into a huge redesign when you discover that sheets of
| slush and road salt will liberally coat every front-
| facing surface of your vehicle driving in Boston in the
| winter.
| a_c wrote:
| On self driving car, I think we are solving all the
| problems caused by cars like air pollution and congestion
| with "better" car. First we have electric car, then we
| (will) have electric self driving car.
|
| Public transport seems boring enough that no one talks
| about. Is there anything foundamentally wrong with buses
| and trains (and bike too) compared with cars? While we
| moved pass the faster horse era, we are now searching for
| better cars.
| galdosdi wrote:
| 1) Public transport works today. True self driving is an
| unknown amount of time away, and IMHO it is a foolish
| mistake to assume it is definitely very soon or
| definitely very long before it works. It could be a year
| away or decades.
|
| 2) Even with self driving, there would be some efficiency
| gains from a bus, especially in places dense enough that
| there just isn't space for a car per person, like
| Manhattan. It would take adding something like 50 lanes
| of highway across the Hudson River to replace the
| capacity that trains currently provide for people to
| enter Manhattan from the mainland, IIRC. Neither
| electricity nor self driving in any way reduce the amount
| of space a car takes up. In fact self driving increases
| traffic by making it easier to go for a drive -- perhaps
| even send a car out for a 0 passenger cargo pickup trip.
|
| Public transit is here to stay.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >Is there anything foundamentally wrong with buses and
| trains
|
| It's slower, a round trip I could make in 30 minutes in a
| car would take careful scheduling and two hours on a bus.
| Sometimes it's cold outside and I'd have to walk half a
| mile to and from a bus stop. The local transit authority
| is experimenting with reducing the number of light rail
| cars so they'll be better covered by transit police in
| cars because violence is a problem. Once on BART I'm
| convinced somebody shit in a paper bag and left it in the
| middle of the car. Caltrain in rush hour would be a
| violation of the Geneva Convention if you made prisoners
| stand in such a cramped and unstable train for an hour at
| a time. I keep hearing about people getting stabbed by
| the local bus stop, 45 minutes after a friend visiting me
| came through the last time. A couple of months ago a dude
| died in the hospital after getting stabbed on a bus three
| blocks away from my apartment in a dispute over who got a
| cigarette left on the floor of the bus.
|
| I calculated total cost of ownership of my car and it was
| considerably less than taking public transit unless I
| used public transit _a lot_ , and any savings would be
| completely blown away by using Uber for just a couple of
| trips a month.
|
| There _are_ situations where public transit is a good
| thing, but it 's generally a dirty, crime-infested,
| unpleasant experience in America only good for people who
| are really excited about not having a car. I'm opposed to
| any measures that force public transit on people by
| making car ownership more difficult until _after_ they
| make public transit a safe, convenient, comfortable
| experience.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| The way to make PT work is for it to be faster than cars.
| People should choose it because it's faster/cheaper/more
| convenient, not because they have no alternative.
|
| You'll find this is typically the case in large cities
| that prioritise it appropriately - Between spending an
| hour in a car or on a train I'd choose the train every
| time.
| dublinben wrote:
| The real EV transportation revolution isn't electrifying
| cars, but micromobility like electric bikes, scooters,
| skateboards, etc. The fundamental inefficiency of trying
| to move a single person using two tons of machinery can
| never beat human scale transportation.
|
| This doesn't even get into the enormous throughput
| efficiency that proper transit can deliver over longer
| distances.
| lazide wrote:
| Which works fine when you're not trying to get through 6
| inches of slush, 100+ F temps, or dealing with daily
| monsoon rains.
|
| Which almost every part of the county except SF (pretty
| much) has to deal with some combination of regularly.
|
| In a dense urban environment? Sure maybe, as long as the
| sidewalks and streets aren't packed.
| bluGill wrote:
| I talk about public transit. I hate driving even though I
| do a lot of it (well not now that I work from home)
|
| Transit can be great, but most of it is so bad nobody
| sane would use it. Why would you risk waiting for a bus
| that only comes twice an hour when your car is sitting in
| your driveway waiting for you? Why would you take a bus
| when you can walk almost as fast?
|
| Both of those are very real problems that most transit
| has, and most people just ignore it.
| spc476 wrote:
| In my area (southeast Florida), trains: not enough rail.
| Both trains and buses: not often enough. Buses: not
| enough routes, too many transfers (from experience, what
| would take 20 minutes by car took 1.5 hours by bus).
| Bikes: even though we have bike lanes, we get drivers
| from _everywhere_ (tourist destination) and I wouldn 't
| want to risk my life.
| lazide wrote:
| Once public transit is at the frequency of Tokyo trains
| and familiarity of the back of your hand, it's often a no
| brainer.
|
| The problem is, until it hits that point it involves a
| LOT of planning and conforming to other peoples
| schedules.
|
| Which for many people (parents, folks going to and from a
| lot of different places) can dramatically decrease their
| ability to actually exist or do what they normally do.
|
| If it's in an environment where cars suck to
| drive/park/etc. (dense urban environments), then it
| quickly goes to public transit.
|
| But especially in the US, density is low, cars are easier
| than the alternative unless someone spends several
| trillions at least on some giant initiative (which they
| won't). So for most of the (physical) US, public transit
| makes no sense.
|
| There are areas on the border (SF Bay Area, a lot of
| outlying Seattle Metro, etc), and in those cases both
| options suck.
| hinkley wrote:
| Taken cynically, these full disclosure engineering
| stories are calculated to make the team seem human and
| trustworthy.
|
| How much do you want to bet that the real story is that
| one of them drove past a grain elevator and wondered if
| they make a portable version of that equipment, or one of
| the frustrated/amused locals didn't suggest it. Either
| directly or subconsciously. One of my coworkers has spent
| most of the last year sharing observations and ideas with
| the team that are things I pointed out three years ago. I
| don't know if he's giving me an overly subtle nod or he
| just doesn't know he's doing it. Like people who
| accidentally write a story/song they heard once.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Clearly they have almost the right idea but missing just
| a bit of domain knowledge which would make the process
| incredibly easier.
| corrral wrote:
| > One of my coworkers has spent most of the last year
| sharing observations and ideas with the team that are
| things I pointed out three years ago. I don't know if
| he's giving me an overly subtle nod or he just doesn't
| know he's doing it. Like people who accidentally write a
| story/song they heard once.
|
| I once suggested a product name in a meeting and everyone
| was like "eh" and then about five minutes later someone
| else (no, not a manager) suggested the exact same name to
| instant acclaim, and it was adopted. I don't _think_ she
| did it on purpose, so I wasn 't and am not mad about it,
| but it was odd.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| You have literally described how Tesla(and the other Musk
| companies) have made both an excellent and terrible product
| at the same time. A big chunk of the Musk skeptic community
| consist of experienced professionals from all the
| industries that Elon is involved in. They are constantly
| bashing his companies for not paying attention to what has
| already been accomplished. Musk has had many failures due
| to ignoring the previously made mistakes that people before
| him have already made.
|
| For example: Fit and finish, organizing your production
| process so you are not forced to build $50k cars in a tent
| in the parking lot, following proven practices for service
| etc.
|
| At the same time, teardowns of the cars are showing a lot
| of out of the box thinking that other incumbent automakers
| are not following. Things such as eliminating redundant
| systems with newer designs that can do multiple tasks,
| making parts modular enough such that you don't have to
| wait for a new model year to implement, the megacastings
| etc.
|
| In the end, Tesla has only survived because they had enough
| capital to make these new ideas stick and now others are
| starting to have to copy his company's accomplishments. So
| maybe as long as you have enough capital, then it may be
| worth to "relearn" everything that everyone else has
| learned because it may lead to asking "why" on some of the
| old ways of doing things.
| hinkley wrote:
| A similar story happened with digital cameras. A few of
| the film companies practically went out of business
| before the electronics got sorted out and what
| differentiated the good from the bad cameras circled back
| to the mechanical parts, which the incumbents had locked
| down ages ago. The pure digital play companies faded and
| some were acquired, and one day Nikon or Canon had the
| best DSLR system.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Thats unfortunate. What if there are certain aspects to
| existing cameras that are only there because a lesson was
| learned in the past but is no longer ideal in todays
| context. If there are no new comers that have the cash to
| burn to 're-evaluate' how everything is done today then
| we are missing out on potential innovations.
|
| This process is like re-factoring old code but in real
| life.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| This is mostly a cultural problem.
|
| Some professions will readily say "imma keep my mouth shut
| because this is not my area of expertise" whereas every
| software engineer is a subject matter on everything up to
| and including open ended and subjective questions that
| humans have been trying to conclusively answer all of
| history. (The various types of mechanical engineers are
| nearly as bad.)
|
| One could argue that the cultural problem is just a
| reflection of a demographics problem but I don't care
| enough about that aspect to make that argument.
|
| As an aside, the failure in TFA doesn't sound that
| dramatic. Seems like the age old tale of a customer running
| material handling equipment at the edge of it's comfortable
| range and an tech needing to be flown out to tell them
| where to slap vibrators on it or what other minor change
| needed to be made in order to make it work better. Yeah,
| they probably should have seen this coming and shipped a
| more flexible solution or at least have had shovel ready
| options that didn't involve flying engineers out but
| whatever, it's a prototype and this stuff happens.
| bluGill wrote:
| If you are in software you have to be an expert in some
| other domain. Sure there are a few os and compiler
| writers who can sit in pure software land (even they need
| to know some about hardware). Pretty much everything else
| is for some other domain and so you need to know it.
| hinkley wrote:
| I belatedly figured out that my whole style of learning
| is based entirely on model building and testing, similar
| to what scientists do when they are exploring a new
| phenomenon. I keep meaning to look around for research on
| whether this is common to all autodidacts, just one mode,
| or if I'm rare.
|
| The upshot of this is that I seem to be able to avoid the
| Expert Beginner trap and get into more of an Expert
| Journeyman, which is somewhat more useful and less
| dangerous. I'm often deputized to take over things I
| don't actually know all that well, because I'm seen as
| having some knack for playing twenty questions and then
| being able to improvise reasonably well without running
| back to the delegator every fifteen minutes, or setting
| the building on fire for fear of asking for clarification
| when it's warranted.
|
| I am also pretty mechanically inclined, took a lot of
| things apart and back together, including but not limited
| to bicycles I've subsequently taken above 40 mph (like
| cars, there are many kinds of defects that only show up
| at 2x "normal" speed, because forces tend to quadruple).
| Software people who know hardware of some sort are, at
| least in my experience, generally safer about trying to
| defy the laws of physics.
|
| But the danger with model testing is that I often sound
| like I know exactly what I'm talking about when I don't
| (and sound too similar when I actually am the expert, so
| people either trust me too much or not enough). I've
| played with various levels of wiggle words and uncertain
| phrasing to try to fix this, always with mixed results.
| Sometimes even stating it as an educated guess, based on
| X and Y, causes other people to agree that sounds
| perfectly correct even if it's not (one of the original
| definitions of a meme). Sometimes I avoid that trap of
| not believing my own model in my head, even if I don't
| let on, sometimes I don't. I should probably have more
| care about others aping my demeanor, but I tend to mentor
| anyone who is comfortable asking clarifying questions.
| It's the ones that want to fake it til they make it that
| I can't help.
|
| The danger is, as always, in believing your own PR.
| Questioning it constantly is paralyzing and exhausting,
| both for yourself and for observers (especially the
| exhausting part). Questioning it not at all is
| exquisitely dangerous.
| vondur wrote:
| I don't think it's that negative. They clearly should have
| brought in people with relevant experience in the field
| before implementing the system. How much money and time did
| they waste fixing their system to account for Corn Cobs?
| gumby wrote:
| This is such a great article, the summary of which is "I/O is
| hard", which every programmer surely knows (and if they don't,
| they haven't tried).
|
| Ok, it's a great article for other reasons too.
| jandrese wrote:
| Everything works great until the real world gets involved.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's a really cool article!
|
| I never gave much thought to this kind of thing.
| [deleted]
| draw_down wrote:
| I had the half-joking thought, I wish I didn't waste my life on
| software because this seems like actually enjoyable and
| satisfying engineering work.
|
| I don't really know if biomass is the best power source or
| whatever, but the problem of "get the biomass into the
| pyrolizer" is straightforward as can be.
| camtarn wrote:
| I transitioned from writing software for Amazon to writing
| software for prototype wave and tidal power devices. It's no
| silver bullet - every industry has its WTF moments - but
| overall I'd recommend it. It's cool as hell to be able to
| literally stand on top of something that you helped build :)
| whalesalad wrote:
| 10 tons of biomass per day seems like a really impressive number.
| marktangotango wrote:
| For comparison, a rail car can carry 120 tons of coal.
| bluGill wrote:
| For a farmer that works out to a bit less than 10 minutes of
| harvest. There are big it depends in the above, a high yielding
| wet corn crop might be a couple minutes, a poor yielding dry
| crop can be several hours. That is just the grain, most of the
| plant goes out the back of the combine. A quick search shows
| forage forage harvestors can do 400 tons per hour, I just took
| the first number a search found without checking details.
| [deleted]
| seunosewa wrote:
| I wonder if just buying crude oil and burying it isn't more cost
| effective than transporting bulky biomass which could have been
| fed to animals in order to put it through this complicated
| process of converting it to oil and burying it.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| How does that help clear the excess biomass produced by
| farming? The primary problem this solves isn't "carbon
| capture". It's great that it does, and it's what distinguishes
| it from other solutions in the same primary business: to help
| deal with the problem of harvest "waste".
|
| You can buy oil and pump it back in the ground, but now you
| _still_ need to solve the farming problem.
| seunosewa wrote:
| Corn and wheat post-harvest biomass is usually tilled into
| the ground to improve organic matter in the soil and return
| nutrients to the soil, or fed to cows and other ruminants by
| grazing or by cutting.
| pinot wrote:
| The point is to take carbon out of the cycle. Not mining
| petroleum would of course have the same effect but good
| luck getting people to do that.
| goda90 wrote:
| Burying crude oil would at best be carbon neutral, but most
| likely carbon positive. Burying biomass has the potential to be
| carbon negative if the processes are refined enough because
| it's capturing atmospheric carbon and putting it into the
| ground.
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