markcyffka

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.

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.

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.