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Carbon Removal Technologies

• crispinb 8y ago
  For anyone who still clings to the weird, blinkered, narcissistic technofix superstition: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity-wiped-out-animals-since-1970-major-report-finds https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity... Climate breakdown is not a problem worth tackling in isolation, because it is merely one prominent symptom of a general catastrophe. Capitalism will not allow evolved complex systems to continue to exist, because they can either be extracted directly for short-term profit, or destroyed in side-effects (appearing costless to the brutish actuarial mind) of other profit-making activities. Our home (the so-called 'environment', a term we really should abandon) cannot survive our way of life. We have no other home (Mars fantasies aside). Ergo, our way of life must change.
• timka 8y ago
  According to 1st Geochange report (2010), anthropogenic factors don't play significant role in climate change http://geochange-report.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=83:summary&catid=35:1st-report&Itemid=113 http://geochange-report.org/index.php?option=com_content&vie...
• GreeniFi 8y ago
  We already have carbon removal technology. They’re called trees. [Edit] I’m not being facetious. 40% of emissions are as a result of poor land management. We’ll need all the technological help we can get, but if we can’t manage land as carbon stores - not sources, we’re not going to win this race.
  • tareqak 8y ago
    I guess trees could be planted more creatively. There is one particular situation where I think they should cut down / or move trees, and that is when trees are near power lines: it's basically a matter of time of when the tree falls down and the local power company has to fix the power line and the local population has to deal with the disruption in power. Maybe there is a good business in finding a good way to truly move old trees, so that we aren't forced to cut them down?
    • cure 8y ago
      Or you could just have the power lines under the ground. If they are low enough to be endangered by falling trees, they could perhaps go underground instead. No need to cut down trees or maintain buffer zones along power lines. No annual periods of days/weeks without power for affected areas.
      • toast0 8y ago
        Underground power can solve tree fall issues. But it is much more expensive, both initially, and when any repairs or new connections are needed. The number of repairs likely goes down, but time to repair goes way up. In some areas, soil conditions make it pretty much impossible. Trenching for the install may require more plant disturbance than would be needed to maintain nearby trees on a regular basis. Distributed generation and redudnant distribution can help reduce the impact as well. Everything costs money though.
  • throwaway5752 8y ago
    Trees hardly make anyone any money (absent a carbon credits/tax system).
    • bpicolo 8y ago
      Wood is 50-100 billion dollar business globally, it's not nothin. Plus, a bunch of trees are food sources.
      • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
        Isn't that tearing them down, not putting them up?
        • bpicolo 8y ago
          Lots of it, yeah, but tree farms are a thing too. That's a matter of cost in modern times though. Currently faster/cheaper to convince a government to let you chop down rainforests, but that won't always be true. Definitely curious how hard it would be to have drones plant trees in arid regions. Feels like I've seen some related projects before
        • lostapathy 8y ago
          Isn't that ok, though? If I build a building out of wood, or print a book in a library, that carbon is sequestered at least as long as the building or book exists.
          • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
            That's true, but you've netted zero on carbon. You need to put up more trees if you want to remove carbon. I mean, by all means tear em down, but you gotta keep putting them up.
            • eanzenberg 8y ago
              I think that's the point.. Grow more trees and use the wood and the tables and books that are created are carbon that used to be in the air.
  • mdorazio 8y ago
    This is covered in the "Where We Are Now" section at the bottom that explains BECCS. The issue is really cost - to remove carbon semi-permanently with trees you have to grow a lot of them, and then bury them deep enough that natural decay processes don't just put the carbon back into the environment. Basically you have to do the exact opposite of what we've been doing with coal and oil for over a century.
    • JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > Basically you have to do the exact opposite of what we've been doing with coal and oil for over a century There's a nugget of a story in the Carboniferous being the result of a civilisation trying, but failing, to sequester carbon by burying trees and plankton.
    • atupis 8y ago
      Why not build houses from trees that will take carbon out 100-200 years from cycle.
      • romed 8y ago
        Not just houses but any kind of building. There is an architectural movement called Mass Timber where the buildings are not just framed in wood but are virtually solid wood. It actually solves a lot of problems around building cavity thermodynamics, by eliminating the cavities. A large scale mass timber building sequesters a huge amount of carbon.
        • philipkglass 8y ago
          Carbon sequestration is a nice side benefit, but wood-into-durable-products can absorb only a small fraction of present anthropogenic CO2 emissions. We're emitting about 37 billion tonnes of CO2 per year at present (10 billion tonnes of carbon) and wood is about 50% carbon. To offset a quarter of human CO2 emissions, we'd need to turn about 5 billion tonnes of wood per year into long-lasting buildings and other manufactured objects. As of 2014, the world was producing about 0.8 billion tonnes of wood products that could be used in long lasting applications (sawnwood and wood paneling). https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://blog.forest2market.com/fao-report-highlights-resurgence-in-global-wood-production https://blog.forest2market.com/fao-report-highlights-resurge...
  • lowdest 8y ago
    Trees ultimately burn or rot, releasing a large portion of that carbon back into the atmosphere. Cutting them down and burying them to grow more would be ideal, but takes additional work. Someone want to engineer a tree with enormous, deep roots? Basically make the trees self-burying.
    • ceejayoz 8y ago
      > Trees ultimately burn or rot Not all at once, though, and new trees spring up pretty quick. If you're replacing unforested land with forested land, you're still storing substantial carbon. Cutting down / burning an existing forest to plant trees doesn't work, sure.
    • soperj 8y ago
      We're essentially doing just that when we use the wood for housing and other products and then eventually landfill, then you can plant more trees on that land.
    • hinkley 8y ago
      Too narrow a view. The tree already buries almost half of its biomass in the ground for you. And a lot of material goes through the food chain when the tree rots in situ. There's a big difference between regrown forest and converting prairie to forest and a lot of that has to do with quantity and quality of decaying matter on the forest floor. Dead trees are better than no trees.
    • noselasd 8y ago
      It's a buffer as long as there is a forest. Once you establish a forest where there previously was none, you have tied up a certain amount of carbon in all those tree trunk/root/branches. Sure, the individual trees will eventually die and release a lot, though far from all, carbon back again. But by then, new trees will grow and act as the storage buffer.
    • hannasanarion 8y ago
      Not if they're treated with preservatives and built into houses. Every wood-frame house and piece of wooden furniture is carbon sequestration.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • jeff18 8y ago
    This is mentioned on the website under "Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage".
  • Symmetry 8y ago
    Trees will only absorb 1 watt of hydrocarbon emissions per square meter, on average, even before considering the cost of burying the woods so the carbon isn't released when it rots.
    • crb002 8y ago
      Nuts. Literally. Breed oaks with acorns so dense they are like rocks.
  • pkhagah 8y ago
    At the timescale and costs needed to combat climate change, trees will be prohibitively expensive(land, fresh water) and slow. If reducing global carbon with plants was easy, governments wouldn't probably be complaining about protocols, solutions for almost 3 decades starting with Kyoto discussions. Can we stop mentioning planting trees as ultimate solution everytime carbon capture research comes up?
    • hyperbovine 8y ago
      > Can we stop mentioning planting trees as ultimate solution everytime carbon capture research comes up? Fine, but by the same token, the absence of progress on climate change is because there is no political will, not because it is hard. With enough adults in the room, we could have solved this problem 20 or 30 years ago at comparatively little cost.
    • andersha 8y ago
      We can manage grassland and savanah. Grasses exudate a lot of their sugars (carbon) into the ground feeding the microbes. Holistically managed grassing is all about timing the regrowth and recycling the nutrients and fibers through the cow. The prairies are amazing ecosystem pumping carbon into the ground when properly managed. The knowledge is available, but this ted talk only has 2 million views. https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI
  • gustaf 8y ago
    This is Gustaf from YC. I wrote the first Carbon Removal RFS. Planting tree is actually a great carbon removal technology. Unfortunately most forest owners in the world don't know or don't have incentive to care the about the carbon impact the forest have on the climate. Biggest reason forests are taken down is to grow cattle for beef. If you are working on a startup to reverse this we'd like to fund it too
    • ISL 8y ago
      If you'd like to fund trees, one could start buying land and start protecting trees. Spending that money on intensive lobbying and forest advocacy in rapidly-deforesting countries could have an impact, too. The trick, of course, is that neither of these techniques compound for the individual nor a startup. They are pure charity for the planet.
      • abledon 8y ago
        we need a black mirror-esque social credit score system where based on the individuals revenue, and what corporation they work for they have a 'tree quota' they need to fulfill. this could be hours volunteered at a global tree planting foundation, $$ donated to public works companies who plant the trees. I suppose if someone only made a small amount of $ and hid the rest behind their corporation , corporations would also have to be responsible in the system and donate $ to plant trees. website would be something like tree.global ... we need some way to tie all the world (or atleast continents) together under one government, a .global domain name or something. EDIT: after reading other comments on how trees arent the greatest solution, replace trees with the best option and tie it to a continent wide / global wide black mirror credit score system.
      • francisofascii 8y ago
        So does anyone know why this isn't happening more? Surely there are plenty of super wealthy tech titans, Hollywood stars, etc. that care about climate change. They could buy up rural land that is suitable for forestry and start planting trees, or prevent deforestation. Even small time donors could make an impact. Land in the US is cheap, right? What am I missing?
  • supercanuck 8y ago
    Trees don’t make money for Venture Capitalists.
  • crb002 8y ago
    This. We need USDA money going to tree genetics for carbon sequestration. Pat Schnabble at ISU would be amazing at this. He has already isolated genes to thicken cell walls. He also has a novel technique of using time-lapse video to isolate lines that maximize solar uptake by cooperating with neighbors on how they grow. Almost all grain productivity in the past 20 years has been on cooperative solar coverage, not per plant yield. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXiV1dTlRSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXiV1dTlRSU
  • theonemind 8y ago
    I once started thinking through what we would want out of some kind of ideal carbon sequestering device. I thought that for the scale of the problem, they would need to self-replicate, and run on some natural energy source, like solar power. Then, I realized I had just invented the tree.
    • intended 8y ago
      Haha, I had that same chain of thought. I’m sure we aren’t alone.
    • andersha 8y ago
      And animals, ecosystems!
  • Gatsky 8y ago
    Important to add that plants are the only carbon removal technology with a successful track record. As global warming devastates more of the biosphere, there will be perhaps less opposition to GMO plants engineered for maximum sequestration capacity. Also useful for Mars.
  • PeterisP 8y ago
    A set of forests that stays the same size, i.e. some trees fall down and rot or get cut down and burned while new trees sprout or get planted, so that the total amount of biomass in these forests is more or less stable long-term is not a carbon removal technology but simply a carbon store. To remove carbon, the amount of biomass needs to increase... so we essentially need to cut down trees and somehow store their carbon instead of releasing it back into air through decay or burning.
  • tgb 8y ago
    So this might be a dumb question, but if I landfill paper instead of recycling it, does it degrade? If not, is that a poor man's form of carbon sequestration? A cursory glance suggests this is correct [1], though you'd need to know a lot more to say that it was more carbon efficient than recycling. [1] http://www.allaboutbags.ca/degradeinlandfill.html http://www.allaboutbags.ca/degradeinlandfill.html
    • cheapsteak 8y ago
      Was the carbon not already sequestered when it was in the form of a tree?
      • tgb 8y ago
        I assume any serious paper production company replants the tree, so you start with a tree and end with a tree and landfilled paper.
        • TeMPOraL 8y ago
          Given strommen's statement about landfilled paper turning into methane, doesn't that mean paper manufacturing is basically a carbon dioxide->methane conversion operation?
          • tgb 8y ago
            Yes, the possibility I described was for if they did not biodegrade significantly. More reading makes it sound like they degrade in weeks, with a few exceptions.
      • mchannon 8y ago
        No, it wasn’t. Trees (esp. those suitable for paper) either burn or fall over and rot, both of which release most of the carbon they used to store. Fossil fuels used to be trees, and they were well sequestered. Paper would eventually become something similar when buried.
    • strommen 8y ago
  • andersha 8y ago
    We already have carbon removal development. It's called regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is about harvesting sunlight (free resource), utilizing plants photosynthesizing abilities. Plants are a part of a larger ecosystem including producers, consumers and decomposers. Plants exudate sugars feeding the soil microbial life, sugars from the photosynthesis where atmospheric carbon dioxide is converted into sugars. Large herbivores eat the grass, holistic grazing keeps the animals moving mimicking predators and the defensive herding mechanisms for efficient animal impact. The timed regrowth will let the plant photosynthesize more carbon dioxide, while the walking sun powered compost machine (cow) decomposes the organic matter and leaves it for further decomposition and utilization. We have huge areas where desertification is happening [1] because of wrong management. Holistic Grazing is a easy implemented, low tech, approach with great benefits for capital, social and ecological level. Regenerative agriculture is also covering land management in less brittle environments, field production, notill, utilizing plants, the soil community and the only truly free available resource sunlight. [1] https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI?t=157 https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI?t=157
• Jun8 8y ago
  This is awesome! Some people don't like having a Plan B along these lines because they think it distracts with the standard approach of emission reduction. In reality, for something this important (i.e. Keter level destruction event) we should pursue all threads simultaneously. "If we don't act soon, we'll end up in "Phase 3" and be too late for both of these strategies to work." In fact, let's at least start brainstorming about plans to deal with Phase 3, too. The topic of desert flooding has been thought about quite a bit, e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Sea and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project.
  • ergothus 8y ago
    It's been interesting to watch my own thinking evolve: 20 years ago: "I'm sure technology will figure out how to reduce emissions. Sequestering tech is neat, but will only take off if the end product is itself useful in bulk" 10 years ago: "Sequestering tech will take too long and has too many potential complications to rely on, we need to get serious about reduction." Now: "We're screwed and it's only a matter of how much people end up suffering. I'm very skeptical of sequestering tech, but we need anything that works"
  • soperj 8y ago
    >standard approach of emission reduction With how well that's been going, I'm wondering why they even need a plan b...
  • stephengillie 8y ago
    > Keter level For the curious: http://www.scp-wiki.net/object-classes http://www.scp-wiki.net/object-classes What Would Dr Bright Do?
  • gregcrv 8y ago
    Desert flooding even happened before by mistake in the US: It was not long before the Colorado River began to wreak havoc with its erratic flows. In autumn, the river would drop below the level of the canal inlet, and temporary brush diversion dams had to be constructed. In early 1905, heavy floods destroyed the headworks of the canal, and water began to flow uncontrolled down the canal towards the Salton Sink. On August 9, the entire flow of the Colorado swerved into the canal and began to flood the bottom of the Imperial Valley. In a desperate gamble to close the breach, crews of the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose tracks ran through the valley, attempted to dam the Colorado above the canal, only to see their work demolished by a flash flood.[197] It took seven attempts, more than $3 million, and two years for the railroad, the CDC, and the federal government to permanently block the breach and send the Colorado on its natural course to the gulf – but not before part of the Imperial Valley was flooded under a 45-mile-long (72 km) lake, today's Salton Sea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River
• rexpop 8y ago
  ...are stupid even to contemplate while we're still increasing carbon emissions. If you actually cared about the impact — and weren't just cynically cashing in on environmentalism's recapitulated caché — you'd be shorting big markets. The biggest threat to the world is unbridled capitalism, which VC's like you are incapable of abandoning. May as well ask a fish to bicycle. This post is a pitiable joke, whose highest purpose is to stand in a museum, one day, as a testament to how blindly we charged into the apocalypse. I only hope that museum's curated by our children, and not whatever species finds our remains. For a good, hard look at why I believe this, read Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything," and Peter Frase's "Four Futures." If you're daring enough, you can follow those with Nancy Isenberg's "White Trash," and Barbara Ehrenreich's "Dancing in the Streets" and "Witches, Midwives, & Nurses" for a deep look at how and how long we've been going wrong. If that all doesn't make you straight up suicidal (let alone quit maintaining your startup pyramid scheme), I have more reading suggestions for how to turn this ship around.
  • peacetreefrog 8y ago
    "... stupid to contemplate while we're still increasing carbon emissions." Ok, let us know your plan for reducing carbon emissions and when and how we can expect it to happen.
    • khrbrt 8y ago
      Easy. Stop subsidizing fossil fuel exploration, extraction, and movement (ie. pipelines). Make carbon emissions expensive, and you'll see them go down. Levy a revenue neutral carbon tax which anually redistributes to consumers the "average" tax per person. Stop subsidizing suburban sprawl. Build more high density housing near mass transit. Walkable neighborhoods and such. These are all obvious things we should have started decades ago.
      • tlb 8y ago
        Transportation is only 14% [0] of greenhouse gas emission, and passenger cars are about half of that. While driving less can help, even reducing it to zero won't prevent serious climate change. So we need other solutions as well. [0] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting-climate-change https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting-clima...
• WhompingWindows 8y ago
  Can we discuss space sunshades? Assuming the cost of getting freight to orbit goes down substantially as companies like SpaceX ramp up launches, what's the limiting parameter on some sort of sunshade over the north and/or south pole? Is it indeed the cost of launching the sunshade, or are there other factors at play which make the space sunshade unrealistic? What materials would be reflective and resilient and cost-effective to block the sun? Would polar blockers be enough to cool the planet as a whole and stop warming, or would multiple sunshades spread around the globe be better? Also, generally, what about increasing cloud cover in general? Wouldn't this reap a huge reward for cooling the planet? I know it doesn't remove gasses and prevent ocean acidification, however it may help with heat-related issues.
  • kanzure 8y ago
    My personal preference is an inflatable sun shield method like these 10,000 kilometer-wide objects: "Self-deployed, extremely large low mass space structures" http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/space/Self-deployed%20extremely%20large%20low%20mass%20space%20structures%20-%202007.pdf http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/space/Self-deployed%20extrem... I don't think people realize how a lot of these problems are solvable for only a few billion dollars... It's an engineering problem, mainly. Someone just spends the money and goes and fixes the problem.
    • jpfed 8y ago
      That's one great thing about sunshades- they can be implemented by just convincing a spacefaring billionaire or two instead of having to change policy / steer nation-states.
      • ryandrake 8y ago
        Unfortunately, you still need to convince the billionaire that the project will make him into a 10-billionaire, otherwise he’ll just keep it in the bank, or bathe in it or whatever rich people do with all the vast piles of money they are sitting on.
• mark_element 8y ago
  I'm quite impressed by this presentation. There is a tremendous amount of content here to excite some different audiences about opportunities for planet scale changes. I'm super concerned about externalities for any sort of geo-engineering, but we are going to get some externalities of the present course anyway.
• eaenki 8y ago
  That was an amazing read. The fun thing, is that I started the draft of a quite similar post a couple of weeks ago. That's a great example of definite optimism. The fact that the post mentions but doesn't expand on outer-space solutions it's a bummer.
• narrator 8y ago
  It seems global warming politic's main focus is to implement a global carbon tax in one form or another. Proceeds from the tax are administered by a supra-national government. That's how the Paris accord worked and very credible global warming authorities said was the only solution to global warming. Does this company have a business model of being the recipients of the global carbon tax?
  • JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > that's how the Paris accord worked No, it isn't. The Paris accord was a non-binding document that tried to put in place a framework for coming up with solutions.
    • narrator 8y ago
      Nationally defined contribution is a nice way of saying global carbon tax [1]. I mean sure the UN doesn't have a way to enforce the tax, but it's still a tax. Presumably this tax would wind up somewhere and someone, not the person who contributed it would spend it. This money spent would go to someone based on somebody's decision. Perhaps this company would be the recipient? There is so much pussyfooting around the whole issue of what the paris agreement was about due to politics. It's freaking underwear gnomes from South Park levels of hiding what's actually going on. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement#Nationally_determined_contributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement#Nationally_det...
• godzillabrennus 8y ago
  YC should be investing in Deep Isolation. http://deepisolation.com http://deepisolation.com
  • JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    You're being down voted because this is off topic. One, the threat from nuclear waste pales in comparison to that from climate change. Two, making nuclear energy more attractive reduces emissions. This article is about removing carbon from the atmosphere.
• dv_dt 8y ago
  The most impactful technology would be some sort of financial instrument to fund known and future carbon reduction techniques which could be implemented independently (or with the help) of governments.
• gingerbread-man 8y ago
  An obvious step towards reducing CO2 emissions in the US would be raising taxes on gasoline. Americans are driving ever larger and less fuel-efficient cars in part because gas prices have remained steady or fallen in real terms since the 70s. In fact, Ford announced a few months ago that they will stop selling passenger cars in the US (except the Mustang), to focus on more popular trucks and SUVs. But this is just about the least politically palatable policy imaginable. Democrats don't like it because it's a very regressive tax—the working poor across much of the country drive to work in older, less efficient cars. And besides being opposed to any "new taxes," the rural Republican base would be hit especially hard by this as well.
  • johnchristopher 8y ago
    > An obvious step towards reducing CO2 emissions in the US would be raising taxes on gasoline. It seems we are past the luxury of looking for incentives to reduce CO2 emissions. It's about reducing CO2 emissions right now, no proxy allowed, no IFTTT schemes. There might be a bare minimum amount of CO2 allowed, it's fixed. We could monetize that but it doesn't matter. We can't go beyond that amount.
    • gingerbread-man 8y ago
      > There might be a bare minimum amount of CO2 allowed, it's fixed. I'm not sure I understand, are you suggesting an individual "carbon-quota" as a more radical way of slashing emissions than the "incentives" of a carbon tax? Depending on the tax rate, a carbon tax could produce reasonably expeditious results.
      • johnchristopher 8y ago
        Yes, I was unclear, sorry. What I mean is: "There might physically be an amount of CO2 that can be released without compromising our ecosystem. That amount is fixed. We can't borrow on it and repay it later."
    • jseliger 8y ago
      More importantly, while the grandparent poster is right about carbon taxes (and I support them), they require coordinated political action that is not happening right now in the United States. Again: let me reiterate that I agree they should happen, but the current dominant political party does not support them. So the YC question is: What can be done outside of American politics?
• hughes 8y ago
  Getting really good at carbon capture (specifically direct air capture) could also have the side benefit of proving technologies that drive in-situ propellant production within the carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars. Similarly, this could drive a net carbon-neutral source of natural gas on Earth.
• zackmorris 8y ago
  I was just talking with my uncle a few days ago who has sailed around the Caribbean. He said there are meters-thick piles of what he thought was algae piling up on beaches. From a search: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/mysterious-masses-seaweed-assault-caribbean-islands https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/mysterious-masses-se... So looks like this is Sargassum (brown seaweed). I feel like any large-scale geoengineering to combat carbon will probably involve growing something like this over large areas in the middle of the ocean and then burying it. This would only be feasible if it scales by the square or cube. I'm thinking a genetically modified plant designed to grow in single stalks or sheets hundreds of miles long so that it can be wound up by some kind of continuous process. It could use a traditional coal power plant modified to burn some small portion (say 1%) of the plant itself. Sure there are side effects and unintended consequences from this but cut me some slack, it's only my first idea!
• brrt 8y ago
  Regarding the wonderfully sci-fi idea of flooding deserts, I raise you the seawater greenhouse company: https://seawatergreenhouse.com/ https://seawatergreenhouse.com/ - which have been at this game for a couple of years now. I've always been thinking - someone should give these guys money, and lots of it.
• lchengify 8y ago
  For anyone who is interested in the Energy Industry in general, including Carbon Capture (CCS), I would recommend "The Energy Gang" podcast as well as "The Interchange". The guys who run the podcast are not long on CCS as a savior for 1.5 degrees C, but they are incredibly knowledgable about the space and dive into a lot of technical, policy, and economic minutiae that you wouldn't think would exist. I never exactly knew how much mitigating something like peaker plant composition and more sophisticated demand response can affect existing CO2 emissions. Even things like the opinions of energy executives in the (very silo'd) regional utilities (Dominion Energy, Green Mountain Power, etc) can have a wide-reaching effect on the timeline of policy. I've listened to the whole run of each of the podcast and it's definitely got me more excited about the space. I'm glad YC is getting more aggressive.
  • gustaf 8y ago
    I love those podcasts. You should all listen to them. They are right that we have all the technologies we need to reach 1.5 degrees C. However we need massive acceleration of implementation of those technologies. Like a 10x improvement. We're not on track right now. The reason we need Carbon removal is because most IPCC forecast still assume a large % carbon removal. And it's going to be important for us to get back to 300ppm in atmosphere. The consequences to society of 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees are so massive and costly that we should anything that have a shot at avoiding it.
    • lchengify 8y ago
      Right, and thank you for calling out that CCS is only going to be part of the solution. Taking a wider lens, my honest opinion is I think it's going to have to be a combination of a "Cuban Missile Crisis" moment for our society, and some sort of Moore's law effect on PV or battery storage. Taking the analogy that Climate Change is the "Nuclear Arms Race" crisis of our generation, we haven't really had an event that has resonated with the populous to take an aggressive stance that blunts economics. It's shocking but true that the events of Super Storm Sandy (285 deaths), Katerina (1,833 deaths), and Puerto Rico/Maria (2,975 deaths) haven't been enough to really move the needle in the collective consciousness. It may a true disaster, on the order of Miami being rendered uninhabitable, in order for some entity above the state level to really instantiate something like a Carbon Tax. But once we get there, I think the bottom falling out of solar pricing between now and 2025 has enough of an economic incentive to get us to 10% renewables, whereas it gets de-risked enough for the "big money" (think: Fed-backed Capital Markets ala infrastructure spending) to come in and take over. It is true that PV manufacturing doesn't exactly map onto chip manufacturing (it's not about nano scape per se, it's more about layering absorbing levels in a way that allows full capture), but ultimately I am hopeful we can get there. Lastly ... solar is ultimately a empowering technology, in that anyone with land can use it. It's a perfect fit for a country where the laws were originally meant for a farming population (which is essentially what solar is). I think once a tipping point gets hit where gas prices stay between where they are now (maximum shale extraction cost) and ~$30 (when the Saudis start pumping), and solar goes below that, the discussion will be more around how many DC lines do we need to get electricity from the southwest to the rust belt, than whether renewables are what will save us from our energy troubles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy [2] https://cleantechnica.com/2012/07/07/double-sided-solar-cells-from-bsolar-produce-up-to-50-more-energy/ https://cleantechnica.com/2012/07/07/double-sided-solar-cell... [3] https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/29/us/puerto-rico-growing-death-toll/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/29/us/puerto-rico-growing-death-...
• guelo 8y ago
  An elephant in the room not being discussed here are the propaganda networks that are persuading voters and preventing any kind of government action on climate. Disrupting these propaganda businesses is another necessary angle of attack for preventing climate change catastrophe.
  • recusancy 8y ago
    Unfortunately there's no profit motive for this.
    • dv_dt 8y ago
      Of course there is, for companies with technology to reduce or reverse the carbon in our atmosphere there's a giant profit potential. This of course balanced by the interests of those protecting their current cash flows in established carbon releasing industries.
      • PeterisP 8y ago
        There's no innate profit potential for this technology. If the governments decide to pay lots and lots and lots of money to sequester carbon, then there's a giant profit potential for anyone who can do it. But note the "if" - as of now, there's no indication that they're going to do so; and if/when it comes to such an emergency that they will, they might as well nationalize (or 'globalize') that tech and implement the solutions at-cost without any meaningful profit for the owners of these technologies; if push comes to shove enough so that the major powers of the world will be willing to invest a nontrivial share of their GDP in fighting climate change, honoring international intelectual property agreements will be the least of their concerns.
        • dv_dt 8y ago
          > There's no innate profit potential for this technology. I don't know if that's true or not in the long term - not even first order. Wind turbines weren't innately profitable until at one point they became a low cost leader in power generation by some measures. Humanity may find a fairly low-power input catalyst that give us cheaper fuels than digging it up from miles underground, shipping it thousands more miles, refining it and shipping it hundreds of more miles. Right now, in this instant of technology, I'd agree on first order profitability. Second order systemically it's almost certainly a profit vs needing to rebuild so much civil infrastructure for hurricane resistance, new and expanding flood plains, fire resistance, farm droughts, etc.. or incurring all sorts of other health costs for fossil fuels infrastructure. The cost of acting to curb climate change is still cheaper than letting it all go chaotic.
• btilly 8y ago
  I would strongly suggest investigating the claims of http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/olivineagainstclimatechange23.pdf http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli... that after mining, milling, and then being spread in the ocean, olivine rocks weather quickly and take out CO2. The estimated costs of large scale CO2 sequestration this way are surprisingly reasonable, and the technology is already available. Also the various ocean technologies are going to run into the same environmental complaints as the idea of seeding otherwise barren areas of the ocean with missing metals, causing algae blooms that sink to the bottom. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iron-dumping-ocean-experiment-sparks-controversy/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iron-dumping-ocea... for a discussion of some of those. (And see https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/04/28/iron-fertilisation-of-the-oceans-produces-fish-and-sequesters-carbon-dioxide-so-why-do-environmentalists-oppose-it/#61cb86cb7419 https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/04/28/iron-fer... for a more laudatory article about this in the general press.) If you can deal with the regulatory concerns, the existing low-tech solution is one of the cheaper ways of removing CO2 that is known. Speaking personally, I understand the qualms of environmentalists but consider the possibility of local toxic algae blooms to be a less serious environmental disaster than the otherwise certain ocean acidification that will wipe out all shellfish species worldwide. Yeah, nobody wants to accept a bad outcome, but in this case I think it is better than the alternative.
  • sandworm101 8y ago
    >> I understand the qualms of environmentalists As one of those environmentalists, my qualm isn't so much that this may be dangerous but that carbon capture tech (and associated "carbon capture and storage") is often championed by people looking to delay implementation of technology and laws that limit carbon emissions. It is far more energy-efficient to curtail carbon emissions than try to capture it once emitted. The most efficient use of money is to do things like close coal power plants in favor of solar/wind. Once all the coal plants are gone, then is the time to focus on capture.
    • ttul 8y ago
      How about investing in lobbying? If $10B were sent to politicians, perhaps they’d implement a carbon tax? The future of the world is presently in the hands of pasty white men on Capitol Hill. Why not sequester their carbon (hot air) first?
• jf- 8y ago
  Here’s my crazy idea: nuclear powered high pressure differential centrifugation. Under centrifugal force fluids separate into bands based on mass. The same principle as oil and water separating under gravity. Use giant centrifuges to spin compressed air until it separates into bands, then extract the bands corresponding to greenhouse gasses. I don’t know the energy requirements for this or if there is a better way of doing it. But if you’re looking for blue sky thinking, that’s what I’ve got.
  • idoh 8y ago
    What do you do with the CO2 once you've isolated it?
    • rpowers 8y ago
      Feed it into a massive underground greenhouse?
    • jf- 8y ago
      Put it through a process to solidify it. You may be able to extract other useful gasses from the air to help with this. If the end result were stable, either put it in landfill or use it as fuel, so it becomes an energy reservoir. Then it’s closed loop, the energy is generated by nuclear and expressed via the expenditure of the manufactured fuel and subsequent recapture.
  • lchengify 8y ago
    Huh ... this is kind of a fun idea. Kicking this around a bit, it's similar to how you separate U235 from U238 for enriching Uranium. I wonder if you could back into the energy requirements from that process (assuming it isn't classified). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zippe-type_centrifuge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zippe-type_centrifuge
  • WhompingWindows 8y ago
    Liquids have differential densities which allows them to spread into layers. If you have "compressed air" that separates into bands, you're just talking about compressing the air into a liquid phase so it can then be extracted as above. The triple point of carbon dioxide is -57 C and 5.1 atm, so in other words you'd have to get colder and higher pressure than that to even produce the liquid. Then you'd have to spin it down while it's pressurized and cooled. Could you math it out from there and compare it to the Sabbatier reaction or to just plain old trees? I doubt you'll extract CO2 cost effectively that way.
• jasaloo 8y ago
  I'm encouraged by the full-scope approach this report takes, though I get very worried about technological fundamentalism, the idea that we might possibly engineer our way out of the worst effects of climate change. Don't get me wrong, we might, but do we really want the reality it gives us on the other side? Charles Eisenstein, a prescient thinker on this topic (and others), has advocated for our reconnection and renewed stewardship to/of the earth. That might sound a bit new-agey to some, but after reading his recent book, he made some compelling points: - mainstream environmentalism has taken a reductionist approach by almost solely dedicating itself to emissions reduction (it has also made the movement vulnerable to climate-change deniers, who are (at least partially) correct in that emissions cannot account for ALL of our environmental issues... e.g. bees dying off has likely nothing to do with carbon emissions, yet the culprit is often vaguely referred to by many activists as "climate change" which has become synonymous with "carbon emissions") - while reducing our emissions is unquestionably critical, we need to widen our focus to include the following, which are equally if not more important: restoring water cycles, considerate reforestation/halting deforestation, ending pesticide use (which is likely a primary driver of insect die-off, causing catastrophic disruptions in global food chains and biodiversity, both of which are critical to nature's ability to heal itself), and last but not least: - regenerative, no-till agriculture (versus till-intensive, soil-eroding industrialized agriculture) is an effective tool for restoring these systems, and it also acts a stunningly powerful carbon-sink (by some estimates, if my memory serves me correctly, we could reduce current emissions enormously by converting only 10% of our global industrialized, mono-crop farmland to regenerative, no-till farmland, which IMO is a small endeavor when compared to the tech-intensive and potentially world-altering prospects of massive carbon-sucking machines or injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to induce artificial cooling) For anyone interested, his recent book is "Climate: A new story." It was the most meditative and thought-provoking collection of ideas that I've read on the state of the environment and climate. It's also incredibly hopeful without being blindly optimistic. In fact, it's rooted in a deep sense of awareness, not just of the many existential ecological crises we face, but of the new mindset we must adopt if we are to truly heal our planet.
• all_usernames 8y ago
  I recently heard about Carbon Engineering, a B.C. Canada based firm that is extracting carbon from the atmosphere and making liquid fuel -- they call it "recycled fuel." Apparently it can be used in existing combustion engines. And it is already up and running. Something on the order of 10,000 of these industrial plants could get us carbon neutral rather quickly. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-company-says-it-is-sucking-carbon-from-air-making-fuel-1.4696817 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-company-...
  • chrisweekly 8y ago
    That is awesome.
  • gustaf 8y ago
    Carbon Engineering and Climeworks are two incredible companies working on Direct Air capture and Air-to-Fuel and we'd like to fund more companies like them. There are less than 5 companies worldwide that are serious about getting Direct Air Capture to scale. The world need more bets that that on such a promising technology
    • aoner 8y ago
      Hi Gustaf, I read earlier that you are more interested in Direct Air Capture technologies than others. Do you have any specific reasons? I think another way we could look at things is finding "cheap" forms of carbon that would have otherwise been burned/left to rot and reprocess those into building materials.
      • tempestn 8y ago
        Also other greenhouse gasses, like methane capture from landfills.
      • yazaddaruvala 8y ago
        I'm not Gustaf, but I'll try to answer this. The return on investment for a lot of Carbon capture/sequestering is not lucrative (or at least the business models are not yet apparent). The long term VC angle for air to fuel seems straight forward. - Mars alone will be a huge market for such technology. Driving a lot of demand 100-200 years out (if not a big market in 20-40 years). - Shanghai, et-al, need air filters. Now imagine a filter which also generates a sellable resource; fuel. I imagine that machine would sell quite well in those markets. - With the right level of efficiency, a new era of "sail" boats could be powered by reclaimed fuel from air. Imagine the market for a cargo/cruise ship leaving port with an empty fuel tank, and days later reaching the destination port with a full tank and its goods delivered. - With the right level of efficiency, this only improves the efficiency of coal plants. Burning coal for electricity but also reclaiming the CO2 for fuel.
• super-serial 8y ago
  I'm glad someone mentioned it above, because my favorite solution is still "advanced weathering" of rocks: http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/olivineagainstclimatechange23.pdf http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli... Just US $250 billion per year to offset ALL of humanity's carbon emissions. Yes I said ALL. It would cost less than the ongoing 'war on terror.' If I was rich I would be building autonomous mining robots so I could do it myself because I'm not confident governments will take action until it's too late.
  • throwaway5752 8y ago
    Don't you think that there's perhaps something wrong with a perfect solution presented with no drawbacks? Something like that screams, "incomplete knowledge of implementation or externalities"
    • super-serial 8y ago
      I just think it's the best out of all the options. Since it's a natural process I think it has less chance of unintended consequences compared to something like putting aerosols in the sky to block sunlight. Just like Elon Musk's plan to put humans on Mars there's going to be tons of problems, but it makes sense to start working on it now so we can come up with solutions.
  • bufbupa 8y ago
    It doesn't look like that math accounts for the energy/cost of crushing all of the olivine to the specified granularity? It might be 250 billion to get the raw material, but its going to cost a lot more to process and distribute it all...
• dsalzman 8y ago
  Would like to see YC address the economic incentive problem with carbon sequestering. How do you incentivize companies and individuals to capture C02? What lessons from the failed cap and trade systems can be adapted to a new "sequester and trade system"? Solving this problem would open up resources to this field. Right now we suffer from global bystander/freeloader syndrome. The cost of global warming is spread to thin/gradual across the global population.
• prolikewh0a 8y ago
  Stop polluting entirely and plant trees? All of these useless ideas above could be solved by getting rid of the endless growth required by capitalism, but nobody wants to give up their Alexa to save the entire population.
• clomond 8y ago
  I appreciate the focus here and applaud all progress and work related to any kind of carbon capture/sequestration technologies. These approaches are necessary and important. BUT I think it is too often overlooked that a fundamental prerequisite for making any meaningful progress in this area predicates on cheap, affordable, abundant "clean" energy. Anytime you talk about hydrolysis, desalination, or increasing concentrations of CO2 in a gas or a solution - each of those processes require non-trivial amounts of energy to do at scale and the limitations are often in the realm of physics. Ultimately, energy from somewhere is needed to break the bonds of the CO2 so it can bond to new inert compounds and that requires lots of energy.
  • sradu 8y ago
    Each proposed idea has a section related to energy requirements.
• astrodust 8y ago
  At the rate we're setting up for a future where the entire ocean blooms, dies, and we're left with nothing. Already jellyfish are taking over. We're killing off so many life forms we're essentially going back in time to the precambrian era. Instead of looking for "quick fixes" like iron seeding, which has just as much a chance of going awry as Australia importing cane toads to deal with their crop insects, let's just curtail CO2 emissions.
  • philipkglass 8y ago
    To stay below 2 degrees of warming via CO2 curtailment alone, serious curtailment would have had to start a generation ago. I wish that we had acted with urgency then, but we didn't. Now we need curtailment and active interventions.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • benchaney 8y ago
      Agreed. Many environmentalists like to argue that curtailment is the “proper” way to handle global warming. If the situation is half as dire as they are claiming it is, then that is simply not good enough.
      • Brakenshire 8y ago
        The problem is the existence of these techniques will be used to justify inaction elsewhere. They also do nothing to tackle acidification. And it’s not as if the world has been standing still over the last decades, huge progress has been made and many technologies are at the borderline of being economical or cheaper than the alternatives, and are continually falling in price. Once we push the boulder over the crest of the hill it will roll down unaided. The economy can change much quicker than we think.
        • philipkglass 8y ago
          Some of the active countermeasures contemplated, like ocean fertilization and accelerated olivine weathering, also tackle acidification if they work at scale. Solar radiation management does nothing to fix acidification though it can possibly interrupt feedback loops that would make acidification even worse. I agree that many technologies for replacing fossil usage have now achieved or are close to economic superiority, and that change can come very rapidly with economic superiority. But I also think that reaching this point has taken too long and now we will need active measures as well as emissions cuts.
• philwelch 8y ago
  I wonder why we can’t just extract CO2 and H2O from the atmosphere and recombine them back into hydrocarbons. Not only would this give us a closed-loop supply of hydrocarbons (meaning you could have things like airplanes) but you could just sequester the carbon by storing the hydrocarbons. The only problem is that it takes a lot of energy (more energy than we got from burning those hydrocarbons in the first place) but it would be great to solve the energy storage and carbon sequestration problems at once.
• microdrum 8y ago
  Ah, the irrelevance of YC has begun.
  • vkou 8y ago
    YC should instead focus on solving real problems, like how to democratize sharing pictures of dog-sitters over a blockchain.
• rb808 8y ago
  I really think CO2 should be scrubbed from the air, however how would you store them then? Ideally something like solid carbon - a black solid which you could then bury. Its a lot like using energy to make coal out of air and putting it back in the mine. But surely it makes sense to stop digging up coal in the first place.
• starpilot 8y ago
  Do carbon offset projects like Terrapass have any merit? I know it's not as good as selling my car and decking my life to planting trees, but is there any benefit at all?
• all_usernames 8y ago
  Anyone thinking about or considering working on these technologies owes it to themselves to read Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet. Whatever you may think of the author's various statements on Peak Oil etc., the book is a worthwhile meditation on two very different approaches to our current crises. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-the-prophet https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-...
  • aoner 8y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation. Could you explain a bit more in detail why you recommend reading it? I've read a lot of online resources (IPCC, wikipedia, different lectures on advanced weathering, pyrolysis/biochar etc) and have been looking to read a book related to the carbon dioxide problem.
    • kpennell 8y ago
      It's not about CO2. It explains where two major environmentalism schools of thought came from and how they approach the same problems differently.
• titojankowski 8y ago
  For an overview of 80+ startups working in carbon removal, check out AirMiners: http://www.airminers.org/explore http://www.airminers.org/explore
  • aoner 8y ago
    I'd second this. Great list. There's also this map with lots of carbon capture projects: https://www.thirdway.org/graphic/carbon-capture-projects-map https://www.thirdway.org/graphic/carbon-capture-projects-map
• chimere 8y ago
  Charm Industrial [1] was recently mentioned on HN, with a novel approach to BECCS using grass to produce carbon-negative hydrogen. Grasses are the highest-yielding biomass per acre and thus the cheapest CO2 removal option. It also helps if you can make a profitable product from that biomass, like Charm is doing with hydrogen. Not much info online, but we have a weekly climate newsletter [2], or you can ask me (cofounder) [1] https://www.charmindustrial.com/about/ https://www.charmindustrial.com/about/ [2] https://charmindustrial.us18.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=aafd4c7577e4bc2bfc20baa47&id=3e4a6db592 https://charmindustrial.us18.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=aaf...
• angel_j 8y ago
  Energy is needed to separate CO2 into carbon and oxygen. At the individual molecular scale, this can't be much. How many can I separate at once with my hands? If we invent a device that helps us to physically separate oxygen from carbon, humans and farm animals could do it. It would be like milling grain, or washing clothes. Idea: create filters which are big enough for carbon to pass through, but not oxygen. Then "squeeze" a bunch of air through, and wipe away the carbon on one side. Like a cheesecloth made of carbon nanotubes...
  • tcpekin 8y ago
    Fun idea - very back of the envelope math is if you could convert energy into strictly breaking CO2 bonds, the amount of energy it takes is 805 kJ/mol (from Google). WolframAlpha says this is roughly the caloric content of a biscuit, or 30 min of sports [1]. This would then separate 22.4 L or one mole of pure CO2. There are approximately 1E20 moles of CO2 in the atmosphere (very rough math)[2,3]. This could take a while, especially considering efficiency would probably be 10% of this idealized system. However, this filtering idea isn't bad, I don't know of any filter like this for splitting CO2, but something is almost certainly being worked on for just general sequestration of CO2 from other atmospheric gasses. [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=805+kJ https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=805+kJ [2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(5.148E18+kg)%2Fmolar+mass+of+CO2 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(5.148E18+kg)%2Fmolar+m... [3] https://micpohling.wordpress.com/2007/03/30/math-how-much-co2-by-weight-in-the-atmosphere/ https://micpohling.wordpress.com/2007/03/30/math-how-much-co...
    • angel_j 8y ago
      A biscuit! Breakfast 4 carbon credits... I saw a nanofilter that could remove salt from water. If you can puncture a material with ultra-violet lasers, the holes might be the right size to filter carbon; that is my guess, based on these results https://phys.org/news/2014-10-oxygen-molecules-carbon-dioxide.html https://phys.org/news/2014-10-oxygen-molecules-carbon-dioxid...
  • aoner 8y ago
    What if we would make such an advanced filter, and then make it mandatory in cars. That way cars would 'clean' the air. You'd need to find a process that scales though, so that the 'dirty' filters are processed in a way to get out the carbon and use it somewhere.
• danielharan 8y ago
  I'd like to propose a different scale removal, for anyone that may have the means to do it: home and office CO2 scrubbers. CO2 concentrations are higher indoors, and they're affecting our cognitive ability. Atmospheric concentrations are going to be high for human cognition, especially in dense urban areas. Better indoor ventilation will help, but if outdoor air already has higher than optimal CO2 concentrations, scrubbing that air is the only option left. Given the number of air changes needed (assuming 10X), a home unit would need to scrub CO2 from around 100,000 liters of air a day per person. Small-scale removal is likely much more expensive than industrial BECCS or other carbon capture technology - but the value proposition would be fresher air for healthier, smarter workplaces and homes. Sell me cartridges of enzymes, and take spent ones with bicarbonate for reconditioning, and I can feel like I'm helping the planet a bit while making my life nicer. https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-directly-affect-human-cognition-new-harvard-study-shows-2748e7378941/ https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-dire...
  • steve19 8y ago
    C02 in the atmosphere is going to need to increase by 2x-4x before cognition becomes a problem. Meanwhile indoors co2 jumps to these levels within hours of poor ventalation. I minuter the co2 in my office and vent when required.
    • danielharan 8y ago
      We're passed 400 ppm globally, and urban areas are much higher. Indoor air is often 1000 ppm - how many air changes do you need to get that down to a reasonable amount if your intake is around 450? 500? And do we know for sure that 500-1000 is fine for cognition?
• jwr 8y ago
  I'm very happy to see this new interest in saving our planet among the tech elites (this includes the recent post from Bill Gates). Maybe we are not all too stupid to save our planet...
• aidenn0 8y ago
  I'm worried that it's too late for carbon removal to prevent some of the worst effects (since no large scale carbon removal plan can be implemented overnight) and we need to look into more short-term ways of reducing warming such as albedo modification. Or in the terms on this page, we need a Plan C. [edit] They actually do list this, I didn't notice at first since it's not a carbon removal technology.
  • aoner 8y ago
    I think the IPCC does have some scenerio's where there is an overshoot but that can be 'recovered' using carbon removal tech. You can find some graphs on these projections here: https://chemconnections.org/Global%20Warming/After%20Paris-Science-1018.2016.full.pdf https://chemconnections.org/Global%20Warming/After%20Paris-S... (second page)
• ArtWomb 8y ago
  Artificial photosynthesis. Basic idea is a nanoscale metal-organic "hack" of common bacteria systems to develop efficient pathways for the conversion of sunlight and CO2 into useful fuels. Massive search and simulation required to find ideal candidates. Which could then be incorporated directly into carbon emission sources such as factories and power plants. One recent example is hybridizing M. thermoacetica with "magic" Au22 nanoclusters https://chemistry.berkeley.edu/news/harvesting-solar-fuels-through-bacterium%E2%80%99s-unusual-appetite-gold https://chemistry.berkeley.edu/news/harvesting-solar-fuels-t...
• nanomonkey 8y ago
  All Power Labs, a company that makes biomass gasifiers, has estimates for the amount of carbon their technology can sequester (http://www.allpowerlabs.com/carbon http://www.allpowerlabs.com/carbon). This appears to be the most viable process forward, as not only can one create a ton of electricity, hot water and air, but also biochar which sequesters carbon in the soil in a beneficial way for an estimated 10k years. (full disclosure, I'm an ex employee). Equally exciting are the biomass gasifiers that utilize Stirling engines, such as those made by Microgen (http://www.microgen-engine.com/ http://www.microgen-engine.com/) as they are external combustion engines which are quieter and have better runtimes and maintenance cycles.
  • jasonlaramburu 8y ago
    Isn't the challenge that biomass gasification systems require fairly pure feedstock (ie cubes of hardwood)? Has anyone succeeded in developing a feedstock-agnostic gasification system?
    • aoner 8y ago
      Yes I think this is one of the bigger problems of these systems. So for example, let's say you've created a device that only accepts rice husk and your device pays itself off in 10 years. Now suddenly your neighboring country is subsidizing the gasification of rice husk. This means that the prices of rice husk increase and you're expected ROI is suddenly changed. This makes investing in these types of devices difficult and unattractive.
    • nanomonkey 8y ago
      There are more agnostic systems, like fluidized bed gasifiers, but they generally create tar rich gas, which can gum up an internal combustion engine. That's why external combustion engines (Stirling or Steam) are so desirable as the pistons and internal moving parts don't come in contact with the flame front.
• pdonis 8y ago
  I know this is going to get downvoted but I have to say it: the problem is not CO2, the problem is CO2 alarmism. The models on which the IPCC predictions of doom are based do not match the data. Even the IPCC admits that in the AR5. The actual data says that CO2-driven warming is not enough to worry about. (Not to mention that the prediction of doom also depends on economic models which are even worse at matching data than the climate ones are.) We should not be spending the valuable resource of startup founders on this problem. We should be spending it on creating enough wealth to bring everyone in the world out of poverty and giving them the tools to adapt to whatever happens in the future, including changes in climate.
  • egd 8y ago
    Sources?
    • pdonis 8y ago
      For a start, see the first graph here: https://judithcurry.com/2016/04/05/comparing-models-with-observations/ https://judithcurry.com/2016/04/05/comparing-models-with-obs... Some other relevant posts from the same blog: https://judithcurry.com/2017/09/26/are-climate-models-overstating-warming/ https://judithcurry.com/2017/09/26/are-climate-models-overst... https://judithcurry.com/2018/09/17/a-test-of-the-tropical-200-300-mb-warming-rate-in-climate-models/ https://judithcurry.com/2018/09/17/a-test-of-the-tropical-20...
      • sxcurry 8y ago
        For the curious, here's a website that thoroughly debunks Judith Curry's "science" : https://www.skepticalscience.com/Judith_Curry_arg.htm https://www.skepticalscience.com/Judith_Curry_arg.htm
    • pdonis 8y ago
      For the IPCC AR5, the Summary for Policymakers of the WG1 report is linked here: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/ http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/ The key items are on p. 16: first, that the "likely" range of equilibrium climate sensitivity is 1.5 - 4.5 C (which is the same as the first report in 1990--we have learned nothing in 28 years), and second, the footnote at the bottom of the page: "No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies". First, this raises the question: if there is lack of agreement, how did they even come up with the "likely" range? How can they say anything at all? And second, since the climate sensitivity is a key input to the models, how can the models possibly be valid?
• canercandan 8y ago
  What about changing our diets? > Animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the combined exhaust from all transportation [1] Are you will to fund any product ideas that will be willing to encourage a paradigm shift/or smooth shift with regards to a more eco and animal fríendly lifestyle? [1] http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/ http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/
  • sydd 8y ago
    Or to lower emissions instead of building stuff that causes emissions? There are soo many possibilities to do it.
• xchaotic 8y ago
  Like any sane person, I totally accept the global warming is real and most likely mostly man made. But rather than fighting that change which is already underway, can we not adapt to the higher temperatures and entropy? I appreciate that there's lots of side effects that we see as disastrous, but generally warmer = better for life in many parts of the earth. Most likely the positive outcomes of global warming do not outweight the negatives, but it looks like relatively very little attention is paid to what is most natural course of action - adaptation.
  • moultano 8y ago
    We will have to adapt, even if we mobilize to remake the entire energy economy. It is too late to prevent a lot of warming from occurring. If we do nothing however, we are headed for things we cannot adapt to. The worst case is not rising seas and famine, the worst case is the Permian-Triassic Extinction.
  • Boxxed 8y ago
    We can't adapt to an ecological collapse. It's not the few degrees of extra warmth we worry about, it's how major extinction events will threaten nearly everything.
  • aoner 8y ago
    I think one of the bigger problems of global warming will be mass migrations and less arable land and probably a ton of other big problems. How would you deal with those problems? Do you have any ideas on that (serious question)? And what do you think the biggest problems would be and how would we adapt to those?
  • weliveindetail 8y ago
    The problem with +2° is, that we will be at +5° soon after. Phase III is an irreversible chain reaction.
• jasonlaramburu 8y ago
  The post mentions the significant logistical challenges associated with moving large quantities of biomass and biochar. What about a mobile biochar production system? ie a device that could be delivered to a farm and towed through the field to convert waste biomass in-situ into biochar and till it directly into soil?
  • nanomonkey 8y ago
    Tilling the soil actually releases quite a bit of CO2, some of the best practices are "no till" methods. But to your point, biochar retorts can and should be used at the source of the biomass, instead of burning fossil fuels to transport the biomass to a dedicated facility. Many small scale gasifier generators are designed to do just that. The problem with all solid fuels is that material handling is difficult (you need to chip wood to the correct size and shape to have it feed through a machine effectively, this gets more complicated when you're trying to process corn cobs, sugar cane bagasse, and fruit pits also), not to mention that the fuel needs to be the proper dryness to burn without producing excessive tar. Then there is the problem with the PAH (Poly Aromatic Hydrocarbons) that are produced, and their carcinogenic on any of your workers...not to mention any other toxic chemicals that may be produced out of your smoke stack when using mixed fuels. All this boils down to details that have to be worked out in a mobile unit.
    • jasonlaramburu 8y ago
      How can you get biochar into the soil without tilling?
      • nanomonkey 8y ago
        Layering biochar mixed with compost on top of existing soil, and/or putting other biomass on top of that (Lasagne gardening, or no-till farming). The bugs and worms in the soil will move it around. You can also drop it in when you plant (digging or double digging).
• chutiyapanti 8y ago
  Hey, let me play the devil's advocate here and say that these are nothing but knee jerk reactions. Call me cynical or pessimistic, but the time has already passed. Maybe we should focus on saving as much as we can. Funding a few companies may be the right thing to do, but shouldn't it have been ten years ago. Or were the smartest people on the planet were hoping that it would all just go away. It's already too late. Sorry, but you have to invest in saving as many people as possible. Unfortunately, the politicians would never understand that. Its actually funny. After decades of dystopian future being manifested in the literature and movies, we have come to believe that's it's all just another science fiction movie or a conspiracy theory. We are heading towards a earth altering event, and we can't stop it. Save yourself.
  • jf- 8y ago
    What a lovely message. Thanks for that.
    • chutiyapanti 8y ago
      You are most welcome
• devy 8y ago
  Besides CO2, Caron removal should also target other greenhouse gas with much higher potency like Methane/CH4 [1], which is the central point of why livestock is a big cause of global warming in Gate's Note about Climate Change Quiz. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane [2]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Climate-change-quiz https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Climate-change-quiz
• akshatrathi 8y ago
  I wrote a series on carbon capture technologies: https://qz.com/re/the-race-to-zero-emissions/ https://qz.com/re/the-race-to-zero-emissions/ What I took away most was that carbon removal is now firmly a part of mitigating climate change. It's part of "Plan A" but also there is so much from the previous "Plan A" that will still need to work on. There are a number of carbon-capture technologies on current emissions that need to be deployed from power plants to cement factories.
  • aoner 8y ago
    Yes according to the latest IPCC report ( http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ ) in the 1.5 degree scenario we need to deploy bio-energy combined with carbon capture storage on large scale. Carbon removal tech will become indispensable and is definitely part of "Plan A". Some scenerios rely more on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, while others rely more on afforestation, which are the two carbon-removal methods most often included in the IPCC reports. Trade-offs with other sustainability objectives occur mostly through increased land, energy, water and investment demand. There is another scenario were we might not need a lot of bioenergy with carbon capture storage and that would be if we would decorbonise at an incredible fast rate (starting now) and planted a lot of trees. I'm not seeing that happening anytime soon though.
• polymath21 8y ago
  For a great in depth but still understandable look at the race to zero emissions, including carbon capture technologies, I highly recommend this series from Quartz: https://qz.com/on/race-to-zero-emissions/ https://qz.com/on/race-to-zero-emissions/
• beatpanda 8y ago
  Just came here to say: 1) Thank you for doing this 2) You should have been doing this 10 years ago because it was exactly as obvious then that this kind of acceleration of investment was necessary, and YC sank millions of dollars into social media bullshit in the intervening period instead.
• dereke 8y ago
  I've been watching waay too many youtube videos about reforestation, agriculture and land management recently and I think I've learned a little from it (links at the end). We no longer have the number of massive herds of animals that used to roam the plains/savannahs grazing, pooing and to a lesser extent escaping from predators. This has meant that the grasslands are no longer trampled on and "fertilised". This has caused the grasses to die back, the soil to degrade, to not hold water and to turn to desert. (see the sahara, the outback, parts of china and the usa). Subsequently we've tried to be really careful with the land and not over graze it etc. which tends to have the opposite effect than what is desired. Now I also looked into reforestation because I thought trees were the answer. Grow trees sequester carbon etc. But it turns out the cost of doing this £/$ and water (desalination) would actually be outweighed by both the albido effect (green trees absorb more sunlight than deserts that reflect it back) and that trees don't really grow fast enough to have the impact required. Getting back to the grasslands, it turns out that when you intensively drive a herd over grasslands the grass initially dies back but the root system expands, the plant grows quickly and sequesters carbon into the ground. It actually builds soil and traps carbon and it does it faster than previously thought. The ground is also more permeable to water so when big storms come it actually soaks up the water for later use rather than it running off and causing floods, erosion etc. Also grass is lighter (colour) than trees so the albido effect is not so bad. This is just my understanding of one part of the problem. This is what I think may be a solution to that: We need to change the way we manage livestock. Probably change legislation so they can't be kept indoors or feed grains (I think that is a big methane contributor as well). We should have grazing plans for entire countries that manage existing land well and restore broken land. We should stop eating them because we need a big herd to restore the land and we probably need to employ a lot of people to drive the herds (yeeha). Grazing plans are simple, illiterate people seem to cope fine with them. We've got the technology to scale this and in the west we probably have the maps/surveys etc. to make this relative straight forward. Whatever ends up being the solution to these problems we need to make government act. Historically the best way to do that has been non violent direct action. As we are at crisis point now (5yrs until the arctic has melted based on current melt) it is really our final option. You may be interested in joining the Extinction Rebellion to make this happen. My interest grew from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI But this video has a lot more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7pI7IYaJLI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7pI7IYaJLI Why growing trees in the sahara won't work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfo8XHGFAIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfo8XHGFAIQ And this is long but has a lot of detail about holistically managing livestock and the effect on soil structure etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HmoAIykljk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HmoAIykljk Finally the Extinction Rebellion - https://extinctionrebellion.org https://extinctionrebellion.org
• peacetreefrog 8y ago
  Good. More and more, reducing GHG gas emissions politically or through any sort of international agreement looks like a pipe dream. I think Kyoto is a good example. Take (liberal and environmentally enlightened) Canada -- their Kyoto target was 6% reduction (compared to 1990 levels) in emissions by 2012. Did they come close to meeting it? No, instead they were on track to be 25% over their 1990 emissions and dropped out in 2011 in order to avoid paying billions in fines. It's even more depressing when you consider that even if Kyoto HAD been fully implemented (by every country), it wouldn't have done enough actually stop global warming. IMO, basically any political/collective effort is doomed to fail, even if the alternative is disaster. It's going to take something like this -- carbon/albedo reduction/capture technologies that can be implemented by smaller groups of people (not nation states) and probably will be if things get really bad.
  • christophclarke 8y ago
    The issue with the Kyoto Protocols (and most multilateral agreements) is that there is no recourse from the international community for leaving the agreement. The only enforcement is for members, and there is no penalty against not being a member or real economic benefits for being a member. There is a place for international agreements, but only if structured properly and flexible enough to change with the timescale they are meant to mature in.
  • rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
    Would you also suggest to give up all kinds of nuclear weapons non-proliferation agreements because the NPT isn't 100% successful?
• Diggity 8y ago
  Are there any crowd funding efforts out there for carbon removal?
• adamrezich 8y ago
  Anyone else find it weird when people talk about "carbon removal" instead of "CO2 removal?" Maybe it's just me but "carbon removal" evokes "eradication of life" in a sci-fi way
  • p1mrx 8y ago
    The significant atmospheric carbon is in the form of CO₂ and CH₄, which are both greenhouse gases. If we "just" removed the carbon, we'd be left with O₂ and H₂, which are mostly harmless.
• orliesaurus 8y ago
  If anyone's reading this. I'm really passionate about this crossing of tech and environmental issues & awareness. I have a tiny carbon footprint myself, I am super conscious about everything: no car/no emissions/ tiny electricity and water bills compared to everyone else in the city/food&waste minimization etc If anyone needs a developer and/or marketing engineer with a passion for automation (think very advanced Zapier) hit me up because I'd rather work with you than working for the next "Crypto currency company". Look at my profile for how to contact me!
• NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  The only viable carbon removal technology yet identified is leaving it in the ground. This isn't a smart-arse answer given every additional gallon of oil dug or gas fracked makes the problem worse, the oil industry hasn't yet accepted defeat, and politics still promotes and subsidises fossil. How then to take that problem out of the realm of political corruption (lobbying) even faster? We know what to do. Slightly facetiously, simply copy Orkney, we know how, and the cost. Save a little oil for chemicals and plastics that cannot be replaced. Yet we don't. Lobbying and politics is the problem.
  • Triesault 8y ago
    > The only viable carbon removal technology yet identified is leaving it in the ground. The article discusses this point in the second paragraph. > We're now in "Phase 2" and stopping climate change requires both emission reduction and removing CO2 from the atmosphere. "Phase 2" is occurring faster and hotter than we thought. If we don't act soon, we'll end up in "Phase 3" and be too late for both of these strategies to work.
    • NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      That is far from discussing. Do you think the political part of the problem will magically go away if there is a viable phase 3 technology that does not contribute more carbon than it captures? Do you think the politicians will permit it to be used at scale when they have done all possible to slow renewables?
  • questionasked 8y ago
    This. 100 companies are responsible for 70% of the worlds emissions. Yes, carbon capture tech is needed, but you're missing the point if you think its the _only_ thing thats needed.
• samstave 8y ago
  For flooding of the deserts, id like to determine the size and power requirements for a renewably powered valve-pumping section that will work in series to pump water along the required route.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• ilove_banh_mi 8y ago
  Note that phytoplankton accounts for 50% of photosynthesis on the planet, already capturing 50 GtC/year.
• csense 8y ago
  The ocean phytoplankton technology sounds like it has the potential to screw the planet up worse than the climate change issues it's trying to solve. Massive, self-replicating system of genetically engineered bacteria? I'm certainly no marine biologist, but I'm pretty sure phytoplankton are a super important part of the world's ecosystem. Suddenly massively increasing the number of them that exist in the open ocean seems like it would wreak havoc on the world's ecological balance.
  • akie 8y ago
    Yes, thank you for pointing this out. Biological systems are huge
  • akie 8y ago
    Yes, thank you for pointing this out. Biological systems are huge & interconnected, and changing one component will invariably affect the others — probably in unforeseen ways.
  • memmcgee 8y ago
    You're correct in that assumption. Plankton blooms are already damaging the climate in many ways.
• aezell 8y ago
  This scientism approach to what is a problem of crumbling connections to our selves will get us nowhere. Instead of having the best minds of our generation flailing away at marginal gains within a flawed hypothesis, maybe we should embrace the Earth as the whole biological system that it is. These approaches are fixing the bruised elbow while the heart is laid bare and shooting spurts of blood onto the floor.
• intended 8y ago
  Desert flooding is out - long time back an article on solar energy in the desert pointed out that the desert isn’t dead. It’s an ecosystem in its own right with specialised creatures that live there. Plus it’s not like the people in the Sahara are going to be happy that a bunch of people decide that their nation should be flooded. Remember we can’t convince Brazillians to stop ranchers from decimating the rainforest. Also that added water, if it is stable, will result in ,ore growth and human presence, adding to the heat engine. (Assuming people in the region don’t drain it for irrigation almost immediately )
• gibsonf1 8y ago
  Given that every global warming/climate change prediction has been wrong so far, why would it make sense to believe the same political entity making predictions now? If you plug in the data from 10 years ago into any climate model, the prediction for now is wildly wrong. A more prudent approach, in terms of believing that a prediction for the future may happen, would be to plug the data from a decade or more ago into a model and see if it accurately predicts now. If not, reject that model, try to do a root source analysis to find out what's actually happening, and try again.
• memmcgee 8y ago
  I highly doubt capitalism is going to save us from climate change considering it has largely driven the problem.
• ilove_banh_mi 8y ago
  Any plan to massively capture CO2 should take into account that removing too much CO2 from the atmosphere would cause a mass extinction of land-based plant life if CO2 levels fall below 150 ppm.
• kumarski 8y ago
  Some of my notes on why carbon sequestration is a no-go for civilization to achieve lithospheric homeostasis.....: 5 Billion Cubic Meters of Oil are produced Annually by humanity. 30Bn Tons of CO2 generated. 60% is un-sequesterable because it is small and/or mobile. 40% is sequestrable and large scale/stationary. 12 Billion Cubic Meters of CO2 are thus sequestrable. You must liquefy CO2 before putting it into the ground. 50% -70% efficiency in converting it to a liquid that we can shove into the ground. 6 to 8.4 Billion Cubic Meters of Liquefied CO2 are thus Sequestrable. Shoving 6 to 8.4 billion cubic meters of liquefied CO2 into ground is no small matter. Think about it this way, humanity built an entire industry focused on an annual extraction of 5Bn Cubic Meters of Oil over a time span of 100+ years with refineries and complex processes spanning multiple countries, geographies, regulations, wars, and land rights. Also, who’s going to buy sequestered carbon? The reality is that something like this will require spinning up an entire Trillion dollar market.
  • seizethecheese 8y ago
    > The reality is that something like this will require spinning up an entire Trillion dollar market. You’re right. This is unlikely, but if you think there’s even a remote chance, the scale will be so huge that betting on startups working on this tech could still pay off.
  • biglenny 8y ago
    I don't think anyone in their right minds believes that fighting CC is going to be a profitable venture at all. The point is it will take co-operation and investment by governments worldwide. It's also important to note that the geological formations necessary for sequestering CO2 are a lot more common than those required to _potentially_ be stores of crude. In addition to all this, countries around the world will have to be willing to take an economic hit, something I'm worried the biggest polluters won't do (China/India in particular). This makes me wonder if it is futile for developed nations to be stifling their own economies with carbon taxes because China, India, and Africa don't keep up. In any case, we probably will be far off the IPCC recommendations and will have to resort to geoengineering.
    • 8y ago
• crispinb 8y ago
  This is just symptom-chasing. Growth ideology in general, and capitalism in particular, are incompatible with the continued existence of a living planet. The problem space of replacing complex living systems with crude technological ones will be explored fully by these crazed systems in all possible directions even if/when this one symptom (climate breakdown) is countered with a narrow technofix. The first crucial question is whether catastrophic damage to Earth's ecosystems is biologically inevitable given human cognitive capacities. Given a satisfactory answer to that (which I think unlikely), the next question is: how can we displace the cancerous ideology of limitless growth? These are obviously more challenging issues, requiring the recruitment of a far broader range of human capacities and knowledge than dangerous & blinkered technological capitalists can offer.
• intended 8y ago
  Goddamit no >About 10% of the world's surface is desert, which is cheap, uninhabited, unproductive land that is drenched in some of the most powerful solar radiation on the planet. Land doesn’t have to be productive to be protected. Deserts are ecosystems, and this kind of “changing the wild forest frontier to mans will!” thinking is how we landed up without forests in the first place! From desert hare, to toads that come out once a year when it rains, to cactii, snakes, insects, and many other creatures - deserts are filled with living creatures. Is this stewardship of the planet or just ensuring habitability for humans?
• olvar_ 8y ago
  Could this endeavour be detrimental to the environment? (Please read my whole reasoning before calling me a Climate Change Denier or something like that) I understand that humans are changing the Earth's environment, but with this we need to acknowledge that other organisms are doing it too. In particular plants have been taking CO2 from the atmosphere for ages and continue to do so. If you look at CO2 concentrations for long periods of time, you'll find that the levels of today are not very different from what has happened cyclically for hundreds of thousands of years. The difference may be on the fact that now we are adding an extra influx of CO2 to the atmosphere, but in doing so we may be balancing greater concentrations of water vapour, which is a much more efficient greenhouse gas. If doubling the concentration of CO2 increases the temperature of the atmosphere, in say one degree, to gain another degree you'll need to double the concentration of CO2 again, so the effect of concentration of CO2 on temperature is logarithmic. Water vapour is much more efficient and by decreasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere we may increase the amount of water. This is because of how photosynthesis (and agriculture) works. A plant breathes air in through small pores on their leaves called stomata. Doing so allows water to evaporate through those same pores. If the concentration of CO2 in the air is low, the plant will need to evaporate more water to absorb the same amount of CO2. On the other hand, if the plant doesn't have enough water to evaporate, it will close its stomata and the result will be lower growth and poor yield, simply because of the lack of carbon. Since nowadays many agricultural plots are using water from aquifers and other underground sources, we are actually putting into the environment much more water than would have been without agriculture. If we decrease the amount of CO2 we may push even further the plant's need for water and produce more water vapour, pushing even further the warming, since water is much more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. We may be fighting against the wrong enemy. And in doing so punishing unfairly the poorest of the world, who rely on fossil fuel for energy and those who will be the most affected when crop yields start falling and the water available becomes insufficient. I haven't been able to find a global warming model that incorporates this effect, but if someone made it this far into this comment and knows of any model that does, I'll be very grateful to hear from it. If someone related to this project reads this, please discuss it. It may be a mute point because some reason that I don't know, but it may very well be an important one.
• caf 8y ago
  On the Electro-Geo-Chemistry page, there is an error here: A 500 MW renewable energy power plant dedicated to negative-emissions H2 could therefore consume and store nearly 8 million tonnes of CO2 per day while generating a little more than 2 million kWh in the form of H2 As both the math and later text makes clear, such a plant would store ~21,600 tonnes of CO₂ per day - or 8 million tonnes per year. The 2 million kWh generated looks more like a daily figure but doesn't match up with the daily figure elsewhere in the article (it has 6 million kWh / day equivalent of H₂ generated for a similar sized plant) - it was probably supposed to be 2 billion kWh / year?
• louprado 8y ago
  "It's time to invest and avidly pursue a new wave of technological solutions to this problem - including those that are risky, unproven, even unlikely to work". I had a recent crackpot idea that falls into the "unlikely to work" category since my background is not chemistry. Given that a modern automobile's tailpipe emissions are mostly C02 + H20, those molecules can be converted into ethylene (C2H2) using known efficient electro-catalytic processes. The conversion of ethylene gas to a polyethylene (plastic) is well known and has the added benefit of being exothermic. The end goal is for my car to output a lump of plastic I can drop into the recycling bin instead of CO2. But my gut tells me that: 1) There is no way to speed up the reactions to keep up with the 80 liters per second of tailpipe exhaust (~40rps * 2.0 liter engine) without this system being impractically large and/or requiring energy intensive compressors. 2) No one, including me, wants to drive around with a tank of hydrogen and a tank of ethylene gas. But still, it might be fun to hack on something like this assuming I can do it safely. If anyone has any feedback, or has experience making polyethylene, I would be grateful for feedback even if it is negative. Thanks.
  • ageofwant 8y ago
    That is interesting. Perhaps more applicable to large industrial CO2 emitters like fossil fuel power plants.
  • philipkglass 8y ago
    There's an even worse third constraint: 3) The energy content of the hydrogen tank needs to be greater than the energy content of the fuel tank. And if you were going to add such a huge hydrogen tank to the car, and keep it filled, it would be simpler to use the hydrogen itself as fuel. Many people have indeed proposed hydrogen powered cars. Hydrogen powered cars in turn don't look like they have a very bright future because battery electric vehicles are reaching mass production first, and because batteries are more energetically efficient than storing/transforming energy via hydrogen.
  • thereisnospork 8y ago
    The short answer is that while that reaction works in a beaker, it is too slow, inefficient and fragile. Plus there's also the thermodynamic perpetual motion machine in using the energy from a combustion reaction to reverse that combustion reaction. Basically you'd need a second car worth of engine to generate the electricity to convert 1/3ish of the co2 from the first engine to ethylene (the rest winds up as methane, ethane, and CO.). Plus storage, maintenance and misc. There are a few reviews by Hori that are more or less the gold standard on the chemistry if you want to read more. Unfortunately the literature is full of fud though.
• EGreg 8y ago
  Finally! I want to invest in YC batches just for this. Didn’t care to invest before.
• ghosthamlet 8y ago
  I think discard/reduce most of the non life-essential technology is more important than inventing new technologies, than opening countless startups.
• ciconia 8y ago
  Whatever the solution is to global warming and the looming ecological crisis, I don't believe it lies in more technology. The only viable solution in my opinion is for people to realise that our planet's resources are finite and that we need to accept this fact. AS others here have stated, moving from a growth-based economy to a sustainable one is the only way forward. Sustainability and technological startups are diametrically opposed.
  • m_mueller 8y ago
    I think we cannot stop now. Current CO2 levels plus the momentum in world economy is such that we need to actively digg out in order to survive. Becoming progress averse now would be disastrous since even with the highest affordable tech we live far from sustainable.
    • rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
      Redefine progress then. Taking care of your environment is not being progress averse, especially if your survival depends on the health of your ecosystem.
  • ghosthamlet 8y ago
    If world will end next week, we should just stop global growth, stop all the unnecessary human events, stop all the unnecessary producing, go home with families, only do the most necessary things. For earth, for human beings, for ourself, it will be enough and worth.
  • neolefty 8y ago
    That's a fundamental debate that is worth having! On the other side of the argument: US economic growth has decoupled from CO2 output in the last few years — industrial output & productivity has risen steadily while CO2 emissions have remained basically flat. Scenarios I can see: 1. Reduce our economy by a factor of 10-100 — probably our population as well. Only way that can happen quickly is a catastrophe unparalleled in history. 2. Improve our technology to be carbon-neutral, retain the same population, maybe even improve our standard of living in the process. The question is: is 2. possible? If it is, I prefer it. If it isn't, that really sucks, and there's merit to the anti-natalist strategy. I happen to think it is possible though — technology and policy and effort can get us to a sustainable energy economy.
• theuttick 8y ago
  I am a structural engineer of moderate capability. I have developed an engineering platform as a startup. If anyone is serous about doing one of these projects, I would love to speak with you about helping and about using my platform to design anything you need.
• makewavesnotwar 8y ago
  So I would love to get some feedback from this group on my takeaway from what I've learned of global warming. The general consensus seems to be that gasses like carbon dioxide and methane heat cause an increase in global warming. I don't dispute that, but out of fun a few years ago on earth day I started crunching some numbers regarding our direct thermal pollution. In the US our current consumption of gasoline alone is as 142.98 billion gallons per year[0]. At an average of 120,429 BTUs per gallon [1] that puts the US at ~17.219 quadrillion BTUs a year (in gasoline consumption alone) Does this matter? Well at that scale we're talking about a Hiroshima Nuclear Bomb level event (15 Kilotons of TNT or ~60 Billion BTUs) every 0.54 minutes all day every day in this country when just considering American consumption of gasoline alone. If volcanoes are your thing, Mt. Saint Helens produced 24 megatons of thermal energy in its 6 years of eruptive activity. The US on the other hand produces the thermal equivalent of that every ~2.1 days... and again, that's just gasoline. Most of our heat comes from gas which is converted directly to thermal energy. And then we have coal power... Regardless of how "clean" you make it. We're talking about burning things to create energy so the basic law of the conservation of energy comes into play. And as hot air rises, it doesn't just magically become cooler... it dissipates that energy until it reaches an equilibrium. Thereby transferring energy into the geosphere. And then when you explode things like natural gas or coal use, it's sometimes being used to heat, but even when it's being used to cool, we're not getting 1-to-1 efficiency. Air conditioners output more heat than they dissipate. And if people use ACs more as atmospheric heat increases, we're talking about a positive feedback loop without even taking into account the thermal pollution of creating the energy by burning stuff in the first place. (Even nuclear plants tend to use ocean water for cooling - thereby directly heating the oceans) I'm not saying carbon dioxide and methane aren't potentially catastrophic, but I don't think it makes sense to discount our direct thermal pollution as a potential cause. I only based figures in my argument on US gasoline consumption. That's a minor piece of the global energy pie. Either way, reducing personal wattage through efficiency and reduced use seem to be pretty productive in terms of reducing my personal thermal impact so it seems like a step in the right direction whether thermal pollution is directly related to global warming or not. [0] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=23&t=10 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=23&t=10 [1]https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=about_energy_units https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=about_ene...
• skookumchuck 8y ago
  Or we could just plant trees. Lots of them. Give people a small tax deduction per acre of forest on their property.
• monkpit 8y ago
  I feel like this would make a really interesting sim video game. Start with a certain amount of capital, research and build, and try to save the world from carbon :)
• giarc 8y ago
  Is anyone aware of measures of public acceptance of carbon removal vs carbon reduction (emit less)? My thoughts are that people may be more willing to invest in carbon removal as it allows them to continue to live their same life. They see it as "I can continue to pollute since we can just remove the CO2." Similar to how some people may view eating and dieting... "I can eat bad now, I'll just go on a diet later."
  • marcell 8y ago
    I think all the carbon removal solutions assume some sort of carbon tax for them to be viable. Otherwise carbon removal is a process with some cost and zero benefit for the individual. So to answer your question, the popularity of carbon removal will probably be about the same as the popularity of a carbon tax.
• hamilyon2 8y ago
  We need a video game where all global planetary effects are simulated. Like civilization or alpha centauri but with plot twist regarding global warming. Our children will finally get it.
• wuschel 8y ago
  > The question then becomes, whether we can create new genetic chemistries that are not based on DNA, but some new genetic polymer? Is this article a PR piece? I am a bit annoyed by the lack of reflection in this naive approach to develop xeno-biology and let it loose in our (only) planetary habitat. If it were the only statement of the kind in the sub-articles, it would be fine. There is, however, a strong disregard for second/third systems effects. Radical approaches alone do not cut it, they have to 'fit'. Not that it is easy to do in the first place, but please think about the ecosystem as a whole. It is hard to take these type of statements seriously - but this is YC here, an outlet with a lot of media impact. Please communicate a responsible call for action.
• singularity2001 8y ago
  Iron fertilization! 1 kg of iron can fix 83000 kg of carbon dioxide and turn it into biomass. The idea is that you give algae the one ingredient to growth which is very sparse in the oceans yet over-abundant on land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization "Give me a half a tanker of iron and I will give you another ice age"
  • aiCeivi9 8y ago
    It is also great tool to turn oceans into oxygen-free death zones.
• rogergr3 8y ago
  Hi, there's a lot of interest comments in this thread, we have found, in our own experience, is that now we have a much create of push at all levels than we used to from individuals to governments even though the latest is still being to slow. We believe that the future looks much better in brighten, that we are still on time to move from phase 2 back to (the improbable) phase 0 and we are working to make this happen and will continue until the job is done. :D We believe though there is still a lot to be done, and not just in CO2 capture, but in air pollution in general. Here's the website: http://http://www.pureairindustries.com/ http://http://www.pureairindustries.com/
• cwkoss 8y ago
  I'm curious about pickled compost of fast-growing grass to avoid CO2 release by keeping it anarobic so it produces lactic acid instead during fermentation. An acre of lawn grass can sequester several tons of CO2 each year. I bet properly managed, you could achieve 10x that by optimizing growth cycle. If we could harvest and store it without releasing it, might turn into a useful agricultural product: bokashi. My napkin math puts it as needing within orders of magnitude of acres used for US corn production for the 40 Gt/yr target, but does not account for energy use. Also, more wood construction? Wood is 50% carbon, but because CO2 is only ~1/3 carbon by weight, every pound of wood represents ~1.5 pounds of carbon out of the atmosphere. If can grow, harvest and use ~13 billion tons of wood a year, that wood satisfy yearly 40gt target. Seems like forests can grow roughly a ton of wood per acre. If we can redirect wood waste (sawdust/chips) to livestock operations efficiently, the material could be used as bedding to absorb waste and then be buried/composted for agricultural use. Less CO2 release and counteract soil depletion, so subsequent generations of plants will grow yet more vigorously. Mixture of factors is likely best solution. I think Joel Salatin could probably save the planet if we let him.
• phyller 8y ago
  > Genetically engineered phytoplankton might be used to photosynthetically convert CO2 into an ultra-stable carbon sequestration medium If you downvote this please leave a note with what is wrong with my logic. This is so wildly irresponsible. Every time I hear of these mega projects to remove CO2 I get scared. Let's try to think about this coolly and logically for a minute. Our planet is used to change. Our ecosystem is ready to deal with change, and CO2, and heat. It takes a lot of hyperventilating to even imagine a way in which global warming destroys life on Earth. Worst case scenario is stronger weather, higher oceans, and change of ecosystems. Maybe we get forests in Antarctica again. Maybe North America becomes one big desert. Or a jungle. Life adapts. The biggest existential climate threat is a permanent ice age. Our planet has been slowly sequestering carbon for eons. The ice ages last longer than the warm periods. All of human history has been in a warm period. You want to genetically engineer little organisms that we can in no way control, to remove carbon from our atmosphere? Sounds like a great way to kill everything on the face of the earth and turn our giant spinning miracle into just a big ice ball. Just one team needs to do it one time, take that decision into their own hands. Think of hurricanes becoming routine in some parts of the world. Then think of literal miles of ice, flexing the tectonic plates as they crush everything beneath them, creeping towards the equator. I'm not going to even address the other ideas right now. We have a small fraction of the understanding and intelligence to be making these kinds of decisions. Just my opinion, but the best thing we can do for now is stop adding carbon to the air, and learn more about this world we live in.
  • krick 8y ago
    I hope they will never succeed, but the mere idea that it is technologically possible for a relatively small group of people to create something uncontrollable, able to destroy the whole our biome is scary.
• marauder016 8y ago
  I'm surprised by the hype around for-profit direct-air capture (DAC) companies because, unlike afforestation or biochar, which produce useful products, there is a very small market for CO2. Somewhat ironically, the biggest market for CO2 is for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), which is exactly what it sounds like: it allows for more oil to be extracted from oil wells. There is in fact no market for CO2 separated using DAC because it costs an order of magnitude more to separate CO2 (>$100/T) than its value on the market (max $15/T). So, the real question is, who is going to pay for it? The companies currently operating in this space (e.g. Climeworks, Carbon Engineering) are doing so at a massive loss. In the case of Climeworks, they are pumping the CO2 to a greenhouse.[0] I don’t think DAC alone can ever make sense, there has to be a second step in the process where the CO2 is converted into a marketable product, so that product displaces emissions. This means something like converting CO2 to plastic or fuel that would otherwise be produced using petrochemicals. Carbon Engineering recently announced that they are pursuing this. Of course, in addition to two technical breakthroughs that need to occur (cheap CO2 separation from air and cheap CO2 conversion to fuel), they will somehow have to get those fuels to be cost-competitive with current fossil fuels. The thing to keep in mind is that CO2 emissions from man-made sources total 60 GT per year (pa). And eventually all 60 GT must be removed every year. To put this into perspective, the amount of oil produced globally by weight is about 5 GT p.a. The amount of CO2 produced is truly enormous. The market for CO2 for EOR is about 80 Mtpa (around 1000x less than CO2 emissions)[1]. EOR actually makes some sense as we will be using oil for some time, the carbon footprint of EOR-extracted oil is lower than conventional oil. At the end of the day, CO2 capture, especially DAC, seems more like something that is run at a loss for public benefit, like public transit, not as a for-profit enterprise. [0] On the face of it, this seems great because the CO2 is being used, but the problem is that the plants would remove the same amount of CO2 from the atmosphere whether they were grown with captured CO2 or not (they might just grow a bit faster in the greenhouse). In fact, the energy required for the carbon capture process means that the carbon footprint of the plants grown in the greenhouse using captured CO2 is likely higher than if they were grown outdoors! [1] https://hub.globalccsinstitute.com/publications/global-status-ccs-2012/market-and-price-co2 https://hub.globalccsinstitute.com/publications/global-statu...
• lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  I do understand the direction of travel here (and notwithstanding the idea that most geo-engineering and other "solutions" seem to carry James Bond Villan levels of unintended consequences) what I feel is missing is tackling the elephant in the room. The article says it clearly "It's a collective action problem the world has been unable to solve" Well, can we place a call out for investment in innovative solutions to collective action. Can we fix democracy - both where it lives but could do better and where it does not live at all? I don't accept that "Social Media" already does this. We need more In short - Let's have investment and innovation in the democracy and freedom space (as well as) in the carbon sequestration space.
• hantusk 8y ago
  Cheap energy is the enabler for several of the solutions proposed among the comments. I really see nuclear energy as the solution. The nuclear reactions are emission free, and the emissions in the supply chain to drive the reactions have very low emissions compared to other sources of energy.
• chimprich 8y ago
  Just because you like them, should that trump significant threats to the environment or or civilisation? I rather like spending money, but I know I only have a certain budget. Consequently I only spend what money is available rather than only depending on how much I want things. I feel we should look at the environment in the same way; decide our carbon budget, and work within what's possible according to that, rather than start with what is palatable to the individual and working backwards. Keeping our environment habitable seems like something we have to do rather than a nice-to-have.
• drewmassey 8y ago
  I work at a startup that is using AI to reduce emissions in industrial and data center contexts. I like the big sky approach of this post but so much savings / reduction is an execution question. We are hiring so DM me if you would like to learn more!
• markvdb 8y ago
  According to the World Bank[0], the US produces 75% more CO² per $1000 of economic output than the EU. The US should be able to reduce that inefficiency delta to just over 5% by cutting CO² emissions by 40% without any impact on luxury whatsoever. This alone would cut worldwide CO² emissions by about 5.73%. [0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KD.GD https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KD.GD
• deleted 8y ago
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