Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers

Re:Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 usin... by joe_the_user on Monday February 15, 2021 @04:31PM (#26147723)

So, this link gives CO2 emitted into the atmosphere by humans in 2019 as weighing as 43.1 * 10^12 metric tonnes - 43.1 billion tons [1].

Now, the third of you links, describing your plant, talks about capturing one metric tone of CO2 per years. If you could scale this plant up to 1000 times in the capturing ability, you would then need one million of these plants scatter across the globe to capture a billion metric tonnes (about 2% of human emissions say).

I'm doubtful the commercial demand for CO2 would pay or that governments would be willing to pay for this (not to mention the need for energy).

Which is to say you seem describe atom sized drop in an ocean-sized bucket. Is any reason to think this could meaningfully "reverse climate change"?

[1] https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/climate-change/glo...

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Re:Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 usin... by jsantos511 on Monday February 15, 2021 @05:17PM (#26148262)

Amazingly well thought out analysis - thank you. Completely agree that we will need a lot of shots on goal and many operations pulling carbon out of the air to deal with the size of this problem.

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.

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