markcyffka

Great point & not so often talked about. Something like 230Mton of CO2 are used each year, a little more than half goes straight to urea production. By contrast only about 10% goes to the food/bev, medical, and other applications we are more familiar with on a day-to-day basis.

plot showing the breakdown with some gov't sources. --> https://www.iea.org/reports/putting-co2-to-use

Hi HN, we need to sign off for a bit & get back to building.

So grateful for your questions & engagement.

Be well & cheers - Mark & Sudip

Sorry to get to this question late. There is some good discussion below on the possibilities of bio-based and nature-based solutions. We see bio-based solutions as having a great advantage in the short term since the feedstocks are concentrated & the collection is fairly straightforward. But we believe that these technologies may have a hard time getting to bulk scale as land & logistics become a concern.

Most likely, industrial/engineered solutions and nature-based/bio-based/ocean-based solutions will need several years to evaluate which paths are most viable. We wish everyone luck in this challenge for the world's sake!

Thanks for the question, copying from an earlier comment which touches on similar point --

"Great question. We'd love to capture point-source CO2 from factory flue gas where it is orders of magnitude more concentrated (often >10%) than in air (~400ppm). And fundamentally, there is no reason our process cannot be applied for this type of CO2 capture. For now, we are choosing to focus on air for 2 reasons:

1) Market. Early buyers of CO2 credits are primarily looking to get very clean accounting of who gets credit for the CO2 removed, and will pay a premium for anyone who can do it. If a buyer (say, a software company) pays for a polluting chemical factory or power plant to capture some of its emissions, it requires complex multi-party contracts & the incentives between the parties are often conflicting. That being said, point-source CO2 removal is absolutely needed & a huge opportunity/problem and more work is needed from a technology/policy side.

2) The "extreme user" case. If we give 100% focus to solving the more challenging problem of removing CO2 from air, we may gain learnings & knowledge that will translate to an improved point-source capture process, whether from an energy/efficiency/cost perspective."

*deforestation due to climate-influenced movement of arable land e.g. desertification also harms biodiversity as well

Today we see a moment when popular interest, need, capital, and talent are converging on a willingness to to try new things with a path to success. Who knows how long the window will last. We must try to advance any path that has some chance of succeeding and has a technically/commercially viable path forward.

Great point. Cheers.

We don't claim to be experts on this subfield & this is may not be an exhaustive list, but Carbfix, 44.01, and the Solid Carbon coalition are some that come to mind to check out. We don't speak for those companies but just want to point out some areas to check out.

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1390435 <-- a non-commercial study on this topic.

https://youtu.be/osXq-k84LpA?t=2177 <-- a webinar that addresses this topic

I don't have the sources or exact numbers on hand, but I remember reading that the world's extractive & production processes create something like ~4 billion tons of oil, ~4 billion tons of iron, ~x billion tons of cement, and ~50 billion tons of sand, per year. These industries developed over many years and as you note are distributed globally. With market demand and regulatory pressure, we believe achieving CO2 removal across different modalities at the giga-ton scale is possible in our lifetimes.

That being said, we try to bring a conservative approach to our scaleup plan. The most immediate challenge is demonstrating CO2 removal at the megaton scale (1 million tons per year) to validate the process and meet short-term demand for voluntary offsets.

It should be done more but stronger tax & regulatory incentives are needed to encourage point-source polluters to adopt CO2 capture for emissions from industrial processes & energy production. It is very difficult to convince, say, a software company to pay for/subsidize the cleanup of another company's/utility's dirty process, because of the complex incentives & liabilities involved.

(Would love for an entrepreneur to come up with a way to find a market solution to this matching problem -- AirMyne might want to bid to be the technology platform on which such a CO2 capture system is built!)

The energy estimate includes the costs of compression & injection using some figures in publicly available resources that look at CO2 removal end-to-end. Co-locating the capture as close as possible to removal/injection site (e.g. minimizing transit logistics) helps to keep the energy & financial costs low.

However at this stage, we are more focused on scaling our capture process so it can be integrated to injection/sequestration later on at a pilot plant scale.

The relationship between pressure, volume, and temperature for 1 ton of air (mass) can be characterized reasonably well by the ideal gas law PV=nRT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas_law

Hi, great question, I hope we addressed it here from comment above:

"Right now, there is an ongoing discussion between a huge variety of stakeholders -- CO2 removal startups/companies, academics, regulators, 3rd-party verification standard-setting bodies, etc. -- to figure out what kind of life cycle analyses (LCAs) are required at the planning stages, and what verification frameworks will be needed post-capture/sequestration stages, to ensure that CO2 removal from air is removing more CO2 than it emits. In many of these discussions, and in the studies/analyses which drive them, moving to cleaner sources of energy makes a lot more sense given the total CO2 removed vs. CO2 produced/embodied in the system.

It is a complicated question and it really depends on what temperatures your process requires, where in the world you decide to build your removal system, if cleaner energy is available there (& at what cost), how you need to compress/store/transport the CO2 so it can be injected or converted into something else, and so on. Cleaner energy like geothermal, solar, nuclear, hydro, etc. are not always co-located near the best injection sites and there are questions of whether DAC is the best usage for cleaner energy resources vs. for general grid deployment.

To make a very long story short, cleaner energy makes CO2 removal a lot more sensible to pursue at scale, so that is where we are aiming as we think about the long-term system design."

Thanks for the comment. Companies that are very action-oriented on slashing their emissions are already starting to look to CO2 removal projects as the next frontier to maximize their impact, now that the lowest-hanging emissions reductions are complete. Public sector entities (cities, states/provinces, countries) may be in the wings.

We agree that eliminating CO2 emissions must be the primary & most urgent goal, while CO2 removal solutions like ours can be developed in parallel to meet immediate early market demand & prepare (e.g. get costs down, validate & improve the tech, get the regulations set up) for future deployment.

We agree that saline aquifers are be a compelling strategy given the huge volumes available & measurement capabilities you mentioned. As verification standards emerge in the (currently nascent & somewhat fragmented) CO2 removal ecosystem, precise & accurate quantification is going to be a huge driver to differentiate the highest-quality CO2 removal solutions.

There are a few startups exploring this and also PNNL is doing great public work on this topic as well. https://youtu.be/osXq-k84LpA?t=2177

Most all of it comes as a side product. The amount of CO2 used for the applications listed pales in comparison to the amount used for urea (fertilizer) production.

Thanks for the question, we'd rather not speak to anyone else's technology, except to say that we support anyone working to advance CO2 removal [copied from comment below, trying to keep up with all the questions/discussion!]

Thanks for the question. It's a tough & good one we want to take it directly as we can.

At our early stage, we are focused on developing our capture technology & thinking carefully how to best partner with folks who can do sequestration.

The fossil fuel companies know how to compress & inject gases underground at huge industrial scale. They, as well as the oilfield services companies that support them, have expertise that is difficult to access otherwise: they know how to build & monitor wells, find & characterize saline aquifers & other geologic formations where CO2 can be stored, and so on. Coming from our industrial background, we know that their expertise in these areas is not something we want to categorically ignore. Applications with the EPA for Class VI (non-EOR) wells are in the pipeline process around the US, and similar injection-only wells are being built/planned in other parts of the world and we are keeping a close eye on those developments. In addition, mineralization is a possible path too.

I wish we could give a clearer answer. No doubt it's a complex question & we are thinking about it carefully in our planning.

We also got calculations that yielded literal mountains ranges of carbonate... That's not to say carbonate cannot be part of the solution, but maybe it is unlikely to be the only solution.

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.

I appreciate your comment & we hope to convince you otherwise as we get more process data from getting to pilot scale & beyond. Biodiversity is already being harmed today by the droughts, fires, floods, human migration patterns, etc. caused by ongoing global warming due to anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere, and this harm may likely only get worse in the decades to come without the development of solutions that make an attempt to reverse things.

Great points. We are using lab scale equipment today, and as trained engineers we want to be conservative to any forecasts we share publicly since unrealistic claims will not help us or anyone in this space get to where we want to go. We have spent many months building models, demonstrating at a lab scale, & talking to experts to get their feedback, and now we see the most value will come from actually building our pilot plant to get a much clearer sense on the real financial/energy costs & to identify which process parameters need the most focus.

Coming from the chemical manufacturing world, we have (painful) experience modeling & planning for new processes & know that cost/energy models of new processes can only get us so far.

That being said, we see a path forward for our process at scale and are motivated to make it a reality.

You are right that amines are great at removing CO2 and other acid gases from input gas streams and has been used in submarines/natural gas/many other industries. Can't speak publicly to our process just yet!

In short, there is always that risk. We are exploring with partners how to minimize it.

Subterranean mineralization is a fascinating path too and may help with some leakage concerns.

We believe that CaCO3 can work in some small-scale contexts but it takes up a lot of volume/mass when done at industrial scale -- finding somewhere to put all the CaCO3 is a challenge, as is moving it there and avoiding negative impacts that come with it. Someone else in this thread made a good comment about this too.

We think our solution will be faster to deploy than other solutions and operate at a lower total cost + energy usage. I know it's a vague answer, but our design is anchored in minimizing capex, minimizing process steps/complexity, and minimizing novelty in our supply chain as much as possible. We see that cost/energy/embodied CO2/speed to scale might be optimized by focusing on these areas, but we will also learn as we go.

We are exploring a number of conversion pathways, but our right now our focus is on capture, removal, and sequestration underground.

The process could potentially use waste heat & that is something we are thinking about as we think about plant design, potential locations, and partners.

Right now we're focused on getting our capture/removal process working at scale, but we are keeping a close eye on the use cases since that is a big part of the conversation. There are many great teams working on the usage problem right now & are excited to see where they take things.

Lots of good questions - thanks.

As long as a) the total cost people are willing to pay for CO2 removal gives sufficient margins vs. the cost required to capture it, b) the end-to-end process actually removes substantially more CO2 than it emits, c) the resources allocated to pursue more CO2 removal makes sense vs. other uses (biased, but we think so), and d) the sequestration is done in a well-characterized & verifiable way, we think it makes sense.

Many companies & stakeholders are working right now to define in what contexts CO2 removal makes sense for them. We have LOIs from multiple companies who want access to our CO2 removal capacity as soon as it becomes available.

The CO2 captured from our process could be used for any number of applications if there is an economic/policy reason to pursue it. Fuels, fertilizers, and many other materials can use CO2 as a feedstock, and many startups are actively working on this problem from different angles. Startups are injecting atmospheric CO2 into concrete with great success. There is no reason we couldn't adjust our business model to divert CO2 captured with our process to these applications.

Our <$100/ton cost projection includes storage. PNNL has some great public resources, including on Youtube, that go into more detail the total cost of storage.

Can't comment on what chemistry we use, but amines are effective at capturing CO2 and have been used industrially for that purpose for decades.

We trained at big engineering companies so secrecy is our M.O.! For better or worse...

We can & must show more to the community as we get to pilot scale. We know that people/society needs to see more physical examples CO2 removal to realize that it's possible. And it looks cool too!