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.

Yeah it would seem that if someone buys a ton of CO2 from you, then that’s just one more ton some ethanol production facility vents into the air instead of capturing and selling right? Are you saying that your method of producing a ton of CO2 uses less energy than theirs?

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.

Yeah I mean, clearly removing CO2 from the environment (provided were not burning fossil fuels to do it) can’t be bad. For now it seems like you’re just shuffling the source of the problem, but i I see what you mean about ethanol sans-CO2. Is that a realistic thing in the near term?

If CO2 is all just a byproduct (I.e. nobody is producing it just to sell it) then it would seem that whatever source of it consumes the least energy from fossil fuels is the best from an environmental standpoint right?

So I guess my question is how does your solution stack up to current recapture in that regard?

Ethanol sans-CO2 is definitely realistic, but the timing is what's up in the air (no pun intended). There are a few different teams that have developed materials that enable ethanol production from CO2 (!!!) and are starting to scale [1, 2 as examples].

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...

Awesome. Good answers. Thanks and good luck!

> 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.

I thought that most ethanol is made from fermentation of corn, sugar, or whatever, and the carbon in that process came from the atmosphere originally. So, environmentally whether you make CO2 as a byproduct of ethanol production from CO2-absorbing crops or you extract CO2 straight from the air, it seems essentially the same because in both cases the carbon came from the atmosphere originally. What am I missing?

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...

I’d argue another consideration is the land occupied by the corn - it’s the real constrained resource, not the corn growing on it, and were the demand for corn displaced by something else (like direct air co2 capture) then that same land could sequester carbon far more effectively with e.g. trees.

Amazing point. We need more trees, and we have a lot of corn, so if we needed less corns, we could have more trees! Love it.

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.

Yeah, that's a good point. Ethanol from corn in particular doesn't have a great reputation.

Feels to me like the intention of selling the gas is to offset operational costs until a carbon market for sequestering it underground becomes available?

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 more economic CO2 capture techniques I've heard of that actually do result in sequestrable product rely on having high concentrations of the stuff, much much higher than is available in the atmosphere. Having a method to concentrate CO2 could be a great initial step in being able to do more with it.

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!

Every new technology or company needs that first customer, first revenue stream, to get off the ground. Selling CO2 to beverage companies is the DAC "MVP". Sequestration is an independent problem that can be coupled to DAC later down the road when both are ramped.

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.

What is required is for a third party -- government or quasi-governmental agency -- to create a market by offering to purchase CO2 and sequester it. This would incentivize conversion of cooling towers. The offered price need not be as high as present users of CO2 pay, but merely high enough to prospectively amortize capture equipment over a reasonable time.

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!

Right now jet fuel comes from the ground, so we are actively adding to the atmospheric stock. This gives a way to leave that carbon stored and use what’s in the atmosphere instead.

And if they can extract it economically, governments or private actors can pay them to sequester some of the carbon instead.

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'm confused how this project related to jet fuel or displaces the production of oil products in general.

Oh sorry I read things too quickly. There had been a lot of discussions of what to do with things that still require co2 and can’t easily be electrified, jet fuel being the typical case. “Suck it from the sky and use that” has been one common proposal for how to handle those carbon holdouts.

So my brain immediately leapt to that when drafting the comment. But as the OP says same logic applies to any carbon use. If you can use co2 from the sky you don’t need to take it out of sequestration in the ground.

CO2 in its native form is not extracted from the ground. It is almost always produced industrially as a byproduct of another industrial process, like alcohol fermentation or cement manufacture. The point other people are making is that these processes will continue because the main product is also valuable. Until this company gets sequestration working (which they claim to be working on), then this venture on its own won’t have much impact on CO2 emissions.

I was about to post the same question. I wonder how Airgas gets their CO2.

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

Interesting, thanks!

I assume the cheapest way is to burn methane...