205 karma · joined December 23, 2017
It'll also be interesting to balance the use of that land for trees vs. solar/wind as well. We'll need to put a lot of land to use to generate electricity, and some of corn's space might be occupied by that instead.
I'll look more into this - this isn't a solution I'm familiar with. Thanks for sharing, and thanks for your kind words and dedication to solving this problem.
In the UN's most recent climate report [1], most of the pathways that are shown to avoid a 1.5°C global temperature rise involve both emissions reduction and carbon removal. Since the current technology portfolio is not anywhere near where it needs to be for any of their suggested pathways, we need new solutions (not just Noya's!) to be developed and scaled to give ourselves a shot of removing the amount of carbon required.
Stripe has become a huge leader in the space with Stripe Climate: https://stripe.com/climate
Microsoft is investing $1B into their Climate Innovation Fund to help them remove all of their historic carbon emissions by 2050: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-b...
Shopify is contributing $5M annually to remove CO2 from the air: https://www.shopify.com/about/environment/sustainability-fun...
And there are many other examples of big corporations stepping up to undo some of the damage done to the planet.
In the public sector, the state of CA operates the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which has creating a marketplace for carbon credits (hovering at ~$200/ton now): https://ww3.arb.ca.gov/fuels/lcfs/credit/lrtweeklycreditrepo...
But yes, more is beneficial and will be helpful. We need as many shots on goal as possible!
The missing link here is in total embodied emissions that go into production of corn. There's data available to help piece together a comparison [1, 2], and I'd love to work through this and get back to you with what I find. At a high-level, CO2 production from corn isn't net-neutral because the production of a corn, and then ethanol from that corn, is a fairly carbon-intensive process in terms of the energy it requires. Our process doesn't require most of the transportation corn does, and since the cooling tower is already operating, we don't have to incur any additional costs to capture the CO2. Our main costs are in the energy required for regeneration, and depending on the facility we're at, we may even get that for free in the form of waste heat/steam.
If you want to send me an email at josh [at] noyalabs.com, we can talk more about this there!
[1]: https://www.attisbiofuels.com/by-products/carbon-dioxide
[2]: https://watermark.silverchair.com/55-7-593.pdf?token=AQECAHi...
There are some cool ways that people are working on to concentrate CO2 using membranes, metal organic frameworks, and other things - we'd love to someday incorporate something like this at the front end of our process!
We have two levers for reversing climate change: the first is reducing emissions, and the second is remove carbon from the atmosphere. Most of the pathways in the most recent UN climate report incorporate some amount of carbon removal to maintain global temperature rise below 1.5°C [1].
Humans have been hard at work for a while on our first lever, and we need many shots on goal with the second lever to give ourselves a chance at success.
Our first commercial plant is estimated to capture ~1 ton CO2 / day, and that is with a very small tower. If all 2M towers in the US were the same size as our smallest one, we could capture 730M tons of CO2 / year, but we know that is a conservative assumption because many cooling towers are larger than the one we're starting with.
For example, one of the larger plants we've talked to runs a cooling tower that can capture ~44,000 tons of CO2 / year. This plant is a small power generation plant attached to a university, but let's assume it represents the cooling towers of all power plants.
There are 23,000 power plants in the US. Assuming they all have a cooling tower capable of capturing 44,000 tons of CO2 / year and all the rest of the cooling towers in the US are of the small size I mentioned above, our annual capture amount grows to:
[23,000 power plant towers * 44,000 tons/tower] + [1.9 other towers * 365 tons/tower] = 1.7B tons of CO2 captured / year with cooling towers.
Our estimate will get closer to the truth as we continue to understand the range of cooling tower sizes available on the market.
It's worth saying: for humans to meaningfully reverse climate change, we need many groups of people taking many shots on goal for us to be successful. I believe Noya has a critical technology that will play an important role in solving this problem, and I'm excited to be joined by many other amazing founders with fantastic technologies in this adventure.
We are still working on finalizing all the inputs for this process, including regeneration amounts, amount of heat added, etc. Based on our early modeling, it seems the amount of heat generated from the capture will be negligible since the amount of CO2 moving through our system is much smaller than the amount of water available to provide cooling.
Our chemicals have anti-scaling properties, and we're working to understand corrosion across many different material types to ensure we don't cause more problems than we're solving.
Trees are great at capturing CO2 from the sky, but they suffer from an impermanence issue. Trees capture CO2 for the duration of their lifespan, but when they die, they decompose and release that captured CO2 back into the atmosphere. They also require dedicated use of large swaths of land to get to significant capture amounts.
More info can be found at section 3.2 of this report: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9f
In the medium- to long-term, we're aiming to develop geologic sequestration pathways that will begin to draw-down atmospheric CO2 levels. This version of our process is like our "Tesla Roadster" - the product that is meant to fund the future development of harder, but more impactful, products. In our case, CO2 re-sale will fund the development of permanent sequestration pathways, and it will actually enable us to get to a point where we are able to scale projects that are permanently removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Carbon capture for resale is only our first step — our "Tesla Roadster" if you will. It's the thing that gets us the capital to build the harder stuff. On a 10-year scale, our roadmap looks like this:
1. Capture CO2 for re-sale 2. Sequester CO2 using geologic storage and other techniques such as mineralization 3. Utilize CO2 via conversion to other useful products
Each step gets progressively harder, but has a progressively higher impact on reducing emissions than the one before. When we do our jobs well, we will have saturated the CO2 market with reclaimed CO2, developed multiple sequestration pathways and projects, and developed clean conversion pathways for CO2 utilization.
[1]: https://www.iea.org/reports/putting-co2-to-use [2]: https://cdrprimer.org/read/chapter-1#sec-1-4
Re: liability, we accept responsibility for any damages made to the tower itself. If we break it, we buy it.
Re: downtime avoidance, we are doing our own internal testing to understand what types of materials (if any) are the riskiest with our process. Then, for any materials we may have found on a partner's cooling tower, we will replace them at the same time we install the process with a material that is going to be safer with our process while still meeting the original requirements that part may have had.
We've been in contact with a leading cooling tower manufacturer to explore potential partnerships, and we understand from them that the big risks we have to worry about do not happen overnight - we will be able to see them coming, and we can react accordingly.
We're still working on finalizing our comparisons of our process to current CO2 production processes. From what I can tell currently, our process requires significantly less capex (<$1M) than installing CO2 production facilities onto an ethanol plant (>$100M quoted from a friend at a big gas supplier). Energy is a hard thing to compare apples-to-apples without accounting for all pieces of equipment in each process, but it does less moving parts than many ethanol plants require for CO2.
We are superior when it comes to transportation, however. Since cooling towers are scattered all throughout the country and even in urban areas, we can capture and distribute CO2 within the same city, cutting down transportation distances and associated CO2 emissions.
EDIT: just realized I forgot to include my sources!
[1]: https://scitechdaily.com/breakthrough-electrocatalyst-turns-...
[2]: https://www.energy.gov/articles/scientists-accidentally-turn...
One suggestion I'd make to the math above: the concentration of CO2 in the air is a bit higher, at 415ppm per Scripps UCSD: https://www.co2.earth/
We need to remove somewhere between 100B-1T tons of CO2 from the air to get back to safe, non-planet-warming levels: https://nanransohoff.com/A-mental-model-for-combating-climat...