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.