Our current cost per tonne is in the same order of magnitude when including the carbon value from the European ETS. The key success criteria for making large plants profitable will be connecting to cheap electricity at <$50/MWh we're in the black

How "flexible" is the production? I mean during peak-sunny hours the price of electricity is well below that mark in some regions of europe? And would it e.g. make sense to scale up in a very sunny region & produce your own power? Last question: Do you need electrical power or heat? If latter, would a more efficient thermo-solar power plant make sense? Best of Luck! :)

> And would it e.g. make sense to scale up in a very sunny region & produce your own power?

It’s an interesting point. The most sunny region might be not the target market. Then you need to factor in the CO2 emissions arising from the transport to consumers.

Cement has the advantage of being a small fraction of the weight and volume of the finished product. You source your water, sand and gravel closer to the work site but ship in your cement, I think you’re still in pretty good shape from an overall footprint standpoint.

Of course they are now electrolytically strip mining the entire ocean floor…

True and interesting point - but if you're able to produce as cheaply to "push out" dirty competitors and still have a net saving when including transport, it would still make sense I suppose. Also, there are always relatively close sun intensive regions near major customers: mongolia / tibet china, north africa europe & middle east, the US has its own deserts...

also, transport is a minor fraction compared to the net saving

Absolutely, CO2 emissions from transport isn't much of an issue compared with the saving. Hopefully someone like Remora will crack that problem anyhow. We'll most likely need to build our plants closer to where the market is though, to limit the financial cost of transportation

This kind of scale would require establishing factories all over the world. Every feasible region in every developed country.

Yep! It'll be quite a journey to get there

Thanks! ABsolutely, looking at optimizing time of day we operate will be important. As grids become more dominated by renewables a solution like ours will be able to help stabilize acting as a electricity sink when the wind is blowing too hard or the sun too strong, taking advantage of lower power prices at these times

What electricity sources have you identified as acceptable for this? Proximity of e.g. hydro to an ocean seems like a small set of sites. :) A naive glance suggests that solar capacity factor of 25% is going to put that particular source out of your budget.

One fortunate aspect of electricity is that it's easy and efficient - on the order of 2-6% losses due to transmission for hundreds of miles - to transport.

Whether your country has invested in renewable sources like hydro plants and associated high-voltage, long-distance transmission lines is what matters. The geography of whether hydro plant is near the coast or not is of less importance than whether it exists or not!

There's quite a lot of wind power available at sea.

Convenient that ;)

+1

Can you handle intermittency in your power, or do you need to run continuously? What capacity factor do you assume in your cost model?

That's actually the trickiest part of the engineering, but we've managed to make it directly compatible with the an intermittent energy source like solar and wind

What is the current price of carbon credits in the ETS? I am from the USA / am dumb, so don’t know how to find it

Also good read for everyone: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Introducing-the-Green-Prem...

The World Bank has a great resource here which lists out pricing for emissions trading systems (ETS) and carbon tax by country.[0] (Map & Data > Price > Type of Instrument). Highest carbon taxes are $100+ / ton (Sweden, Switzerland, Lichenstein), high initial value for trade is about $50 (EU, Switzerland).

We are a bit behind in the US in credits or taxes, we are now treating the social cost at $51, but not using that for tax or trade policy.[1]

There's one more number that is useful to get a numerical sense of the costs: $258 / ton, an estimate of the actual cost to society. [2]

[0] https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/map_data [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cost-of-carbon-po... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24487-w

That estimate of cost to society should tell us something when contrasted with the actual prices being levied right now. Hopefully we'll get closer to that number eventually!

Hopefully the US does this: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/05/06/proposed-45q-ta...

Haha gotcha, European ETS is on a bit of a tear at the minute. Has risen to ~$70/tonne CO2

You should come to Quebec (Canada). The electricity is cheap and 99% from renewables. https://www.hydroquebec.com/business/customer-space/rates/

Make crypto mining illegal. Boom! Do something useful with the energy instead, like cut carbon dioxide.

Cheap green electricity at less than 50 $/MWh should not be a problem, most PPAs are already getting signed at costs substantially lower than that.

Will you be able to complete on cost without carbon credits, at scale?

We're competitive at scale. This does require us to hit our CAPEX targets and to capitalize on cheap renewable sources of electricity that are becoming prevalent