Comment by gustaf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gustaf | Hacker News Reader

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Y Combinator is actively looking for companies working on this. If you are working on this yoiu should consider applying.

https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#carbon

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/y-combinator-is...

I'm the YC partner who wrote the RFS and have been pushing this. I also went to the first conference of Negative Emissions in world (I think) in Gothenburg, Sweden last month.

It's clear that much of what is needed for this to work is coming together 1) Research on underground storage is in a great place 2) Climeworks and Carbon engineering + Klaus Lackner are the pioneering companies/researchers working on Direct-Air-capture and they've shown the technology works. 3) California recently/are currently implementing legislation that will allow companies up to $180 per ton carbon removed and sequestered. This should be more than enough to build a business doing this at scale. 4) Perhaps the most important timing question is the fast drop in energy costs driven by solar. Energy is the number once scaling cost-factor if you want to scale this up to have a material impact on the climate. Solar is the obvious choice here since there is barely any scaling costs once installed. California incentives also allows you place your installations anywhere in the world. Mojave desert would be a good place.

What is needed right now is you guys. We need entrepreneurs and founders who want to start companies building both Direct-Air-Capture technology and sequestration technologies. I've met many investors over the last 6 months are looking actively to invest in these projects.

If you are working on these technologies you can email me gustaf@ycombinator.com

Two other great resources here are

http://www.centerforcarbonremoval.org

http://www.airminers.org

I'm convinced that whoever will build the most cost-effective way to remove carbon from the air will both have a shot at a $100B+ market while saving the earth at the same time. What could be more motivating?

Do you have any interest in algae-based solutions? (Cf. my comment in this thread I just left: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17268103 )

I've done some crude experiments and "back-of-the-envelope" calculations and I think there's "something there". FWIW)

We have interest in anything where cost-efficient carbon removal is the goal.

We're not picking technologies at this point since no-one really knows. Personally, I'm more excited about Direct-air-capture than I am about bio-energy with carbon capture for a bunch of reasons. Storing carbon in oceans is also interesting. Whatever path we see as a truly scalable way (like, can you 10000x your prototype and get costs benefits for example)

Okay, cool. If I come up with anything I'll drop you a line.

I started looking at algae as a way to convert oceanic plastic garbage to something organic.

You can use Molten Salt Oxidation [1] to convert plastic to "synthesis gas" [2] then feed that through a water column to convert CO+H2O to CO2+H2, then recover the hydrogen for power and feed the carbon dioxide to algae tanks.

I was going to try feeding the algae to e.g. eisenia foetida compost worms [3] to make soil and then grow whatever in that. The basic idea was to turn oceanic plastic into biomass.

But then I learned that you can make plastic out of algae. In order to be able to scale the system (without capital) it should be designed to produce as much of its own structure (like a "reprap" self-replicating machine) as possible. The limiting factors should be CPUs and magnets (for motors.)

But this is predicated on being isolated in the middle of the ocean and not having access to capital. I can't evaluate the optimal way of using this stuff in the context of being close to the rest of the economy and with capital, as there are too many variables and I'm kind of ignorant and stupid. (In other words, in a hypothetical universe where someone gave me a big pile of money to try this, the first thing I would do is recuse myself in favor of someone who actually knew what they were doing.)

[1] An exothermic reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_oxidation

[2] "fuel gas mixture consisting primarily of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and very often some carbon dioxide" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_gas

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenia_fetida

It's called synthesis gas for a reason, if you have syngas, catalysts, and fricktons of energy you can do a lot of things, including making precursors for plastics through Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.

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