jsantos511

De-risking all of these questions is currently one of our top priorities. We have an understanding of a handful of materials that are compatible with our system right now, and we are working to expand that list - and, just as valuably, remove items from that list.

Our chemist is leading these efforts, and she's got a ton of experience from getting her PhD/postdoc work at Yale's Center for Green Chemistry that is helping us properly vet these items out.

In the short-term, it seems very likely that if ethanol plants do not sell that ton of CO2, it will end up back in the atmosphere. In the long-run, we have the opportunity to clean those emissions up with either new technologies that can produce ethanol without huge emissions (of which many people are working on) and/or regulations requiring carbon capture at ethanol plants.

But, we have to break the reliance on that method of production for the CO2 industry to help push all of that along. If companies are still getting their CO2 as a waste product, it may make regulation or incentives for new tech harder in the future. Just like EV's are getting power from the grid which is, in some places, still heavily reliant on fossil fuels, switching to EV's is breaking the need for fossil fuels in the transportation itself. We need to do the same for the CO2 industry.

Carbon is dispersed from the atmosphere wherever it's created. This could be the smokestack of a power plant, a tailpipe of a car, or any other source of emissions. That CO2 floats up into the air and mingles with all the other gases in the atmosphere. Areas that are more highly concentrated with CO2 than others will "push" their CO2 into lesser-concentrated areas, driving up the concentration everywhere over a long-enough period of time.

Drawdown works in the opposite way. By reducing the concentration in a single area, the global concentration would work to equilibrate, so more CO2 would "fill the void", and if more drawdown keeps happening, than more CO2 will keep equilibrating and filling voids, and more capture will happen.

Emailed received! Will respond soon. Thanks!

There are two equally-needed levers we have to reverse climate change: the first is reducing current emissions, and the second is removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Removing emissions from smokestacks is critical to ensuring we can stop dumping waste into the sky, but we are at the point now where we need scalable, low-cost processes to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.

So, we need to definitely do what you're suggesting and capture all emissions from as many smokestacks as possible until we've fully transitioned to a clean grid. And, we also need to begin pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.

To put it plainly: we need more trees.

However, trees cannot get us all the way there. Trees are great for drawing down atmospheric carbon emissions in the short-term, but when trees decompose, they just release that carbon back into the atmosphere. Additionally, the landmass and water needed to sustain all these trees will require another solution to get all of the way to where we need to be with carbon removal.

Unlike many traditional carbon capture chemicals, the one we are using are both non-volatile and stable when they come into contact with air and heat. This means that our chemicals will not float out of the top of a cooling tower with evaporating water and will instead stay in the water.

After carbon capture happens in the cooling tower, we run the stream through a regeneration process to release the captured CO2 and to regenerate the starting carbon capture blend. The water is sent back through the tower, and round and round it goes.

Thanks for the tip on ammonia plants! Ammonia is one of the top sources of CO2 sold commercially, second to ethanol plants.

I have nothing but respect for what Carbon Engineering has done. In many ways, they opened people's eyes to what's possible when it comes to direct air carbon capture. The more people doing carbon capture, the better - we have 1T tons of CO2 to capture, and we need as many shots on goal as possible to get there!

Most commercial CO2 that is used in the market today is actually produced as a by-product of ethanol production: https://www.attisbiofuels.com/by-products/carbon-dioxide

Building new cooling towers would drive our costs up as we would have to pay for the capex of the towers in addition to the rest of the process. For now, we are trying to keep everything as low-cost as possible.

Cooling towers typically run outside since they sometimes have water evaporating out the top of them, but even if cooling towers were inside, this would still be a great solution. CO2 concentrations indoors are sometimes even higher than the ones outdoors, which may allow for even higher carbon capture amounts than outdoor systems would.

Yes, and it also gives us the chance to develop sequestration pathways in parallel to fine-tuning the technology. And, if companies can use cleaner sources of CO2 than ethanol offshoots, that would be a net good for the planet as well.

The US is home to over 2M cooling towers: https://www.nsf.org/news/road-map-improve-response-legionnai...

Using the numbers we've calculated with our first partner plant, we're expecting to be able to capture 0.5-1 ton/day with their 25 ton cooling tower. This is a very small tower - for perspective, UCSF operates a 5,400 ton cooling tower to operate their small electricity co-generation plant, and cooling towers at larger power plants can be even bigger than that.

Let's assume though that all 2M cooling towers in the US are the same size as our small 25 ton cooling tower. This equates to an opportunity to capture 730M tons of CO2 / year using really tiny versions of existing US infrastructure.

One day we may be producing jet fuel! For now, the same exact logic applies to CO2 production: every new ton consumed = a new ton in the sky. If businesses use reclaimed CO2 to run their process, no new tons end up in the sky due to their operations since it started in the sky in the first place.

I love the work that Stripe is doing with Stripe Climate. We have been in touch with them about their new applications. Regardless of how our application ends up, I am so excited for more businesses working on carbon removal to have the chance to get funding for the work they're doing. The world needs more shots on goal!

Thanks for your feedback and support!

Great observation - somewhere between most-to-all of the CO2 that goes into beer, food production, etc ends up back in the atmosphere. Our initial model is the first key step towards the additional solutions we're designing to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

The use of CO2 that is sourced from the atmosphere is better from an environmental perspective than the use of CO2 sourced from offshoots of an ethanol plant. In the current supply chain, each ton of CO2 that goes into a product results in a new ton being introduced into the atmosphere + any emissions required to purify and move that ton from the point of production to the point of consumption.

With CO2 produced from the atmosphere, no new tons are introduced to the atmosphere in the production of that same product, and the energy (aka emissions) required to capture that ton from the atmosphere are low since the cooling tower is already operating, so we don't need to use additional energy to perform the capture.

Direct CO2 sales is a much faster way to start having an environmental impact via direct air capture than doing combined capture + sequestration. Most new carbon sequestration projects take years to permit and construct, and this path allows us to perfect the technology of capturing carbon from the sky while working on these sequestration projects in parallel.

We also intend to convert CO2 into other useful products down the line that result in more permanent sequestration - we have some team members with expertise in green chemistry and electrochemical CO2 reduction, and we're already starting to think about how to achieve these things at scale.

Great question - the oil and gas industry is definitely responsible for a huge chunk of CO2 emissions, but they are not the ones that produce CO2 used commercially. Most CO2 that is used at breweries, restaurants, etc comes from ethanol plants: https://www.attisbiofuels.com/by-products/carbon-dioxide

From conversations we've had with CO2 buyers, the price for CO2 ranges from between $150-5,000 / ton depending on things like how much is being bought, length of time committed in a contract, etc.

We have tested this mixture out with the industrial prototype in our office, yes! We've shown our cooling tower is able to capture CO2 from the air, and we are able to regenerate and pressurize that CO2 into cylinders.