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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

Given the dilution problem, I’ve been wondering if a decentralized approach is ultimately better. Can we build some cheap system that people could just simply put on top of their homes and let the wind do the movement? Individually each system would remove little, but if enough participants were involved (perhaps it’s even government mandated to have), then the costs would be shared as would be the scale.

Would love thoughts.

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Great question. We believe it becomes an issue of storage, logistics, supply chains, transport, and so on. We approach it this way: if we build & install 1,000,000 decentralized car-sized capture systems that capture, say, 1 ton of CO2 a year, that is going to require 1,000,000 CO2 absorption/desorption systems (cost/energy/embedded CO2), 1,000,000 high-pressure compression systems (cost/energy/embedded CO2), as well as installation, delivery, system maintanance & repair, etc. Then we have to collect the CO2 when the decentralized units are full - again, not easy, since CO2 likes to leak when stored/transported under pressure. When deployed over a large geographic area, the problem gets more complex since it must be monitored & managed with many nodes in the system.

That's not to say a decentralized system can't be done. If someone can do it & it costs less than us, that's good for the world. But coming from years in the chemical manufacturing world, we believe that humans have learned a lot, especially over the past 2-3 centuries, how to build huge chemical production facilities that make (relatively) efficient use of power & resources to process ton-scale quantities of materials. We have experience in bulk-scale chemical facilities for other chemical processes, and know that when they work, they can work really well. So we believe that bulk industrial scale is the fastest/cheapest way for CO2 removal from air in a way that can be deployed fast enough & in an economically-sustainable way to meet existing/forecast demand for voluntary CO2 credits & eventually to tip the needle through large-scale deployment.

There was an art project a couple of years ago to clean up smog.

https://www.studioroosegaarde.net/project/smog-free-project

This would be equivalent to trees, where you then store the tree forever before it dies, and even assuming you can plant and then store those trees using 0 energy it really doesn't make much of a dent.

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