jsantos511
Joined 9 years ago
Karma
205
Submissions
49
Member since
Dec 23
Recent submissions
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Not actively raising now, but would love to chat! josh [at] noyalabs.com
Comment · 5 years ago
Hey Tito! Thanks for the support - great seeing you here!
Comment · 5 years ago
Thanks for your support!
Comment · 5 years ago
Carbon taxes will absolutely help in solving this problem, and we hope regulation gets enacted to help incentivize people to think and act differently when it comes to their carbon emissions.
Comment · 5 years ago
Sorry for the big delay in getting back to you!
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.
Comment · 5 years ago
Thanks for bringing up the idea! We've been in contact with Maher and Karim already. Love what they're working on.
Comment · 5 years ago
thanks for the kind words!
Comment · 5 years ago
I hear you and agree - reducing emissions is a very important thing to do, followed immediately by stopping all unnecessary power wasting (like with the windows + heating 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.
Comment · 5 years ago
This is a great way to put it - this is our MVP, or our "Tesla Roadster", and it will be used to get us to a more permanent, scalable process for carbon removal.
Comment · 5 years ago
There are some companies that are paying people to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but yes, we absolutely need more of them.
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!
Comment · 5 years ago
Great question - the carbon cycle definitely needs to be thought about in this scenario.
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...
Comment · 5 years ago
Thanks for sharing - this is definitely on our radar!
Comment · 5 years ago
Absolutely right. Many carbon capture systems that are installed on top of smokestacks have much higher concentrations of CO2 than the air does (~300x higher concentrations in smokestacks). Henry's Law states that as partial pressure of a gas goes up, its solubility in a given liquid also goes up [1]. So, if you have a smokestack with a higher concentration of CO2 available than what you can get in air, it's going to be easier to capture the same amount of CO2 bc more CO2 will want to dissolve in the liquid that it's dissolving in.
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!
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.