Re:Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at i...
by idiotsecant on Thursday March 17, 2022 @04:12PM
(#30715401)
If you asked a pre-industrial person how in the world it would be possible to source, refine, and distribute enough crude oil to power the modern world they would quote some similarly breathless numbers. It's possible because there's a motivation to do it. Simple as that. If we had a similar level of motivation to sequester our excess carbon we could start planning to do that tomorrow and have it done within a decade or three. You can't sequester all the worlds carbon in one place, just like you don't pull it all out of the ground in one place. Big problems seem less so when you realize that solutions are usually distributed.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at i...
by markcyffka on Thursday March 17, 2022 @04:34PM
(#30715589)
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.