7 ms·

I'm very excited about this. Happy to answer any questions about Carbon Removal Technologies or Cellular Agriculture and Clean Meat

by gustaf 9y ago

durkie 9y ago
Oh man I would love to be involved in this. Have you had people apply to YC already with ideas in these areas? I'm not familiar with any in the YC portfolio, so they must not have made it. Can you speak to any technical shortcomings of ideas you've already seen (aside from the general cost/scale issues mentioned on the site)? I'm surprised that people keep trying to direct-air-capture. I was under the impression that the carbon content (as carbonates) in seawater was much higher than in the atmosphere. I believe the navy has had some initial success in transforming marine carbonates in to petroleum products, which they will probably use as fuel, but I can't wait for the day when we have reverse oil wells pumping carbon back in to the ground..
- gustaf 9y ago
  >Have you had people apply to YC already with ideas in these areas? Yes but we would love to see a lot more. We know there are lots of researchers working on this but not enough of them are starting companies. >Can you speak to any technical shortcomings of ideas you've already seen (aside from the general cost/scale issues mentioned on the site)? Here is a great overview of current technologies: http://www.centerforcarbonremoval.org/what-is-carbon-removal/ http://www.centerforcarbonremoval.org/what-is-carbon-removal...
- titojankowski 9y ago
  This may be useful to figuring out how to get involved -- here's an index we made of all the existing carbon removal startups and companies: http://airminers.org http://airminers.org
Gravityloss 9y ago
I'm surprised you think carbon removal from the atmosphere is relevant. Just from a physics perspective, a dollar invested into substituting coal burning is likely to be many orders of magnitude more effective than first burning the coal to CO2, diluting it to 400 parts per million in the atmosphere, concentrating that CO2 back to some high percentage, maybe turn it CO2 to some higher density form of carbon again etc. Every step requires a lot of effort, capital and energy. The best way to store carbon is coal. And it's already there, in the ground.
- durkie 9y ago
  I think the transition to near 100% renewable technologies is a foregone conclusion at this point: the economics of carbon-based fuels basically don't make sense any more, and it's just a matter of transitioning away. Natural gas has already basically killed coal and that transition is well under way, and renewables+batteries are now starting to eclipse natural gas peaker plants, transportation, etc. But there's still 200 years of carbon emissions in the atmosphere to deal with.
  - dbmikus 9y ago
    Yeah, but if you're going for most bang for your buck, improving and making accessible renewable tech is still better value. I also think you'll have an easier route to profitability with alternative fuel over carbon removal. Ultimately, I think carbon removal will be a necessary technology if we want to maintain a similar climate to what we have now, but it's farther out there. Would be awesome to see something come out though!
- gustaf 9y ago
  We don't want to encourage carbon removal as a way to continue burning fossil fuels - we want to solve climate change. Solving climate change requires carbon removal to hit 1.5C degree goal. We need to remove carbon from the atmosphere and we need to get good at it and do it cheaply. Here is a good primer gohttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/can-carbon-dioxide-removal-save-the-world https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/can-carbon-dio...
  - philwelch 9y ago
    Although "cheap energy" eventually gets around that. If you had extremely cheap energy, e.g. fusion, you could literally turn atmospheric CO2 and water back into hydrocarbons, and once you've reduced atmospheric CO2 enough, you could run a closed-loop process where you recycle enough hydrocarbons out of the air and water to balance out what's burned for fuel. It makes sense to do this if hydrocarbons are still more energy-dense than batteries, for instance. If we end up inventing fusion power before we invent an electric jet airliner, for instance.
titojankowski 9y ago
Woohoo, congrats Gustaf! Index of startups and technologies for mining carbon from the air: http://airminers.org http://airminers.org We built Air Miners to catalog what exists so hackers can find the gaps in carbon removal and build new solutions :)
wcchandler 9y ago
Feel free to answer any of the following! Thanks! - Any interest in funding commercial permaculture setups? - Any interest in small-scale mushroom farmers? - Any interest in aquaculture/closed-loop systems that focuses on reducing, reusing, and recycling nutrients and other resources (carbon obvious included)? - Interest in non-profits that reclaim abandoned warehouses in urban areas, rehab and function as sustainable greenhouses and employ the "non-employable"? - What is the position on marijuana and cannabis cultivation? + if the focus is on epigentics? + if the focus is on DNA fingerprinting / identification? + non-sales, research only, mapping the genetics to cannabinoid expressions? + if 100% of profits (minus investor cuts) are funneled back into YC projects? - I've already submitted my application but my answers weren't catered to the RFS. Should I bother editing it to draw focus on the fact that my company addresses the RFS or should I leave the answers a bit more generic? e.g. "How far along are you?" yielded a response focused on business operations, not the technology and its associated R&D which relates to the RFS
davidrpmorris 9y ago
It’s really heartening, albeit surprising, to see carbon removal on the list. It's heartening because carbon removal has to happen. It's surprising because, unlike afforestation or biochar, which produce useful products, there is a very small market for CO2. There is in fact no market for CO2 separated using direct air capture (DAC) because it costs an order of magnitude more to separate CO2 (>$300/T) than its value on the market ($15/T). (Ironically, the biggest market for CO2 is for enhanced oil recovery, which is exactly what it sounds like: it allows more oil to be extracted from oil wells.) So, the real question is, who is going to pay for it? The companies currently operating in this space (e.g. Climeworks, Carbon Engineering) are doing so at a massive loss. In the case of Climeworks, they are pumping the CO2 to a greenhouse. On the face of it, this seems great because the CO2 is being used, but the problem is that the plants would remove the same amount of CO2 from the atmosphere whether they were grown with captured CO2 or not (they might just grow a bit faster in the greenhouse). In fact, the energy required for the carbon capture process means that the carbon footprint of the plants grown in the greenhouse using captured CO2 is likely higher than if they were grown outdoors! For direct air capture to be economically and environmentally sound, there has to be a second step in the process where the CO2 is converted into a marketable product (so that the product displaces emissions). This means something like converting CO2 to plastic or fuel that would otherwise be produced using petrochemicals. Carbon Engineering recently announced that they are pursuing this. Of course, in addition to the technical challenge, they’ll have to get those fuels to be cost-competitive with current fossil fuels. The other thing to keep in mind is that CO2 emissions from man-made sources total 60 GT per year. To put this into perspective, the amount of oil produced globally per year is about 5 GT. Which industries are big enough to handle all of that matter? What is YC’s angle here? Is YC also considering carbon utilization companies? I personally feel like pursuing standalone direct air capture companies is a bit like putting the cart before the horse.
- davidrpmorris 9y ago
  Of course, direct air removal/carbon capture could just be run at a loss by governments as a public utility, but it's not as cut-and-dried as something like public transit, which provides a tangible service.
jasonlaramburu 9y ago
Do you see biochar as a viable solution for carbon sequestration? If so, at what scale (small farm, industrial ag, consumer gardener)?
- titojankowski 9y ago
  Here's a few biochar companies you might find interesting: http://www.biocharsolutions.com/ http://www.biocharsolutions.com/ https://www.biocarbontech.com/ https://www.biocarbontech.com/ http://blackcarbon.dk/ http://blackcarbon.dk/ https://www.carboculture.com/ https://www.carboculture.com/ http://fullcirclebiochar.com/ http://fullcirclebiochar.com/ (list is from AirMiners, index of companies mining carbon from the air, plus lots of other sequestration tech: http://airminers.org http://airminers.org)
  - jasonlaramburu 9y ago
    The tricky thing is that most (possibly all) of these cos are basically dormant. None has production-ready tech.
    - titojankowski 9y ago
      Interesting! How are you evaluating "dormant"? Curious to know, their sites look fairly active to me, perhaps I missed something.
- gustaf 9y ago
  Yes absolutely. I think that is one of the most promising solutions next to direct-air-capture
  - marauder016 9y ago
    Have you checked out Drawdown [0]? Biochar was #72 out of 80 solutions for magnitude of emissions reduction by 2050 emissions. I haven't gone through their numbers, but they found that biochar could displace only 0.81 GT of CO2 equivalent between now and 2050. Compare that to recycled paper (0.90 GT) [1]. [0] http://www.drawdown.org/the-book/ http://www.drawdown.org/the-book/ [1] http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank
cryptoz 9y ago
Regarding Carbon Removal Technologies, the RFS states > Other approaches to geoengineering to counteract the effects of climate change could have potential as well. What safeguards does YC have in place to help a company do this without starting unintended consequences and maybe accidentally making the problem worse? A large body of evidence suggests that humans and businesses, overall, do not get a good grasp on how their actions will cascade 20-30-100 years into the future. Does YC have a plan or opinion at least on how to reduce the likelihood of your startups wreaking uncertain havoc on the other side of the world while engaging in geoengineering? Edit: I'm not allowed to reply on HN any more I guess, but here is my response to the comment below. My comment was specifically not about carbon removal, but the "Other approaches to geoengineering to counteract the effects of climate change could have potential as well", specifically not talking about carbon removal.
- Siecje 9y ago
  Something most people don't realize is that creating something like a solar panel adds carbon to the atmosphere.
  - ScottBurson 9y ago
    Manufacturing a solar panel does have carbon impact, but the amount of that impact, relative to the total amount of energy it produces over its lifetime, is an order of magnitude smaller than that of coal, and several times smaller than even natural gas. Ref.: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn268.pdf http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn268.pdf
- gustaf 9y ago
  There is a really great article from New Yorker last year that I'd recommend: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/can-carbon-dioxide-removal-save-the-world https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/can-carbon-dio... Carbon removal technologies are not going to bring us another ice-age. We need to remove hundreds of billions of tons of Carbon from the atmosphere in order to avoid catastrophic global warming. That is the major risk today and it's very apparent. Problem is that carbon removal technologies aren't good enough or cheap enough to do that.

I'm very excited about this. Happy to answer any questions about Carbon Removal Technologies or Cellular Agriculture and Clean Meat

by gustaf 9y ago

I'm very excited about this. Happy to answer any questions about Carbon Removal Technologies or Cellular Agriculture and Clean Meat

durkie 9y ago

Oh man I would love to be involved in this. Have you had people apply to YC already with ideas in these areas? I'm not familiar with any in the YC portfolio, so they must not have made it. Can you speak to any technical shortcomings of ideas you've already seen (aside from the general cost/scale issues mentioned on the site)? I'm surprised that people keep trying to direct-air-capture. I was under the impression that the carbon content (as carbonates) in seawater was much higher than in the atmosphere. I believe the navy has had some initial success in transforming marine carbonates in to petroleum products, which they will probably use as fuel, but I can't wait for the day when we have reverse oil wells pumping carbon back in to the ground..

gustaf 9y ago
>Have you had people apply to YC already with ideas in these areas? Yes but we would love to see a lot more. We know there are lots of researchers working on this but not enough of them are starting companies. >Can you speak to any technical shortcomings of ideas you've already seen (aside from the general cost/scale issues mentioned on the site)? Here is a great overview of current technologies: http://www.centerforcarbonremoval.org/what-is-carbon-removal/ http://www.centerforcarbonremoval.org/what-is-carbon-removal...
titojankowski 9y ago
This may be useful to figuring out how to get involved -- here's an index we made of all the existing carbon removal startups and companies: http://airminers.org http://airminers.org

Gravityloss 9y ago

I'm surprised you think carbon removal from the atmosphere is relevant. Just from a physics perspective, a dollar invested into substituting coal burning is likely to be many orders of magnitude more effective than first burning the coal to CO2, diluting it to 400 parts per million in the atmosphere, concentrating that CO2 back to some high percentage, maybe turn it CO2 to some higher density form of carbon again etc. Every step requires a lot of effort, capital and energy. The best way to store carbon is coal. And it's already there, in the ground.

durkie 9y ago
I think the transition to near 100% renewable technologies is a foregone conclusion at this point: the economics of carbon-based fuels basically don't make sense any more, and it's just a matter of transitioning away. Natural gas has already basically killed coal and that transition is well under way, and renewables+batteries are now starting to eclipse natural gas peaker plants, transportation, etc. But there's still 200 years of carbon emissions in the atmosphere to deal with.
- dbmikus 9y ago
  Yeah, but if you're going for most bang for your buck, improving and making accessible renewable tech is still better value. I also think you'll have an easier route to profitability with alternative fuel over carbon removal. Ultimately, I think carbon removal will be a necessary technology if we want to maintain a similar climate to what we have now, but it's farther out there. Would be awesome to see something come out though!
gustaf 9y ago
We don't want to encourage carbon removal as a way to continue burning fossil fuels - we want to solve climate change. Solving climate change requires carbon removal to hit 1.5C degree goal. We need to remove carbon from the atmosphere and we need to get good at it and do it cheaply. Here is a good primer gohttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/can-carbon-dioxide-removal-save-the-world https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/can-carbon-dio...
- philwelch 9y ago
  Although "cheap energy" eventually gets around that. If you had extremely cheap energy, e.g. fusion, you could literally turn atmospheric CO2 and water back into hydrocarbons, and once you've reduced atmospheric CO2 enough, you could run a closed-loop process where you recycle enough hydrocarbons out of the air and water to balance out what's burned for fuel. It makes sense to do this if hydrocarbons are still more energy-dense than batteries, for instance. If we end up inventing fusion power before we invent an electric jet airliner, for instance.

titojankowski 9y ago

Woohoo, congrats Gustaf! Index of startups and technologies for mining carbon from the air: http://airminers.org http://airminers.org We built Air Miners to catalog what exists so hackers can find the gaps in carbon removal and build new solutions :)

wcchandler 9y ago

Feel free to answer any of the following! Thanks! - Any interest in funding commercial permaculture setups? - Any interest in small-scale mushroom farmers? - Any interest in aquaculture/closed-loop systems that focuses on reducing, reusing, and recycling nutrients and other resources (carbon obvious included)? - Interest in non-profits that reclaim abandoned warehouses in urban areas, rehab and function as sustainable greenhouses and employ the "non-employable"? - What is the position on marijuana and cannabis cultivation? + if the focus is on epigentics? + if the focus is on DNA fingerprinting / identification? + non-sales, research only, mapping the genetics to cannabinoid expressions? + if 100% of profits (minus investor cuts) are funneled back into YC projects? - I've already submitted my application but my answers weren't catered to the RFS. Should I bother editing it to draw focus on the fact that my company addresses the RFS or should I leave the answers a bit more generic? e.g. "How far along are you?" yielded a response focused on business operations, not the technology and its associated R&D which relates to the RFS

davidrpmorris 9y ago

It’s really heartening, albeit surprising, to see carbon removal on the list. It's heartening because carbon removal has to happen. It's surprising because, unlike afforestation or biochar, which produce useful products, there is a very small market for CO2. There is in fact no market for CO2 separated using direct air capture (DAC) because it costs an order of magnitude more to separate CO2 (>$300/T) than its value on the market ($15/T). (Ironically, the biggest market for CO2 is for enhanced oil recovery, which is exactly what it sounds like: it allows more oil to be extracted from oil wells.) So, the real question is, who is going to pay for it? The companies currently operating in this space (e.g. Climeworks, Carbon Engineering) are doing so at a massive loss. In the case of Climeworks, they are pumping the CO2 to a greenhouse. On the face of it, this seems great because the CO2 is being used, but the problem is that the plants would remove the same amount of CO2 from the atmosphere whether they were grown with captured CO2 or not (they might just grow a bit faster in the greenhouse). In fact, the energy required for the carbon capture process means that the carbon footprint of the plants grown in the greenhouse using captured CO2 is likely higher than if they were grown outdoors! For direct air capture to be economically and environmentally sound, there has to be a second step in the process where the CO2 is converted into a marketable product (so that the product displaces emissions). This means something like converting CO2 to plastic or fuel that would otherwise be produced using petrochemicals. Carbon Engineering recently announced that they are pursuing this. Of course, in addition to the technical challenge, they’ll have to get those fuels to be cost-competitive with current fossil fuels. The other thing to keep in mind is that CO2 emissions from man-made sources total 60 GT per year. To put this into perspective, the amount of oil produced globally per year is about 5 GT. Which industries are big enough to handle all of that matter? What is YC’s angle here? Is YC also considering carbon utilization companies? I personally feel like pursuing standalone direct air capture companies is a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

davidrpmorris 9y ago
Of course, direct air removal/carbon capture could just be run at a loss by governments as a public utility, but it's not as cut-and-dried as something like public transit, which provides a tangible service.

jasonlaramburu 9y ago

Do you see biochar as a viable solution for carbon sequestration? If so, at what scale (small farm, industrial ag, consumer gardener)?

titojankowski 9y ago
Here's a few biochar companies you might find interesting: http://www.biocharsolutions.com/ http://www.biocharsolutions.com/ https://www.biocarbontech.com/ https://www.biocarbontech.com/ http://blackcarbon.dk/ http://blackcarbon.dk/ https://www.carboculture.com/ https://www.carboculture.com/ http://fullcirclebiochar.com/ http://fullcirclebiochar.com/ (list is from AirMiners, index of companies mining carbon from the air, plus lots of other sequestration tech: http://airminers.org http://airminers.org)
- jasonlaramburu 9y ago
  The tricky thing is that most (possibly all) of these cos are basically dormant. None has production-ready tech.
  - titojankowski 9y ago
    Interesting! How are you evaluating "dormant"? Curious to know, their sites look fairly active to me, perhaps I missed something.
gustaf 9y ago
Yes absolutely. I think that is one of the most promising solutions next to direct-air-capture
- marauder016 9y ago
  Have you checked out Drawdown [0]? Biochar was #72 out of 80 solutions for magnitude of emissions reduction by 2050 emissions. I haven't gone through their numbers, but they found that biochar could displace only 0.81 GT of CO2 equivalent between now and 2050. Compare that to recycled paper (0.90 GT) [1]. [0] http://www.drawdown.org/the-book/ http://www.drawdown.org/the-book/ [1] http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

cryptoz 9y ago

Regarding Carbon Removal Technologies, the RFS states > Other approaches to geoengineering to counteract the effects of climate change could have potential as well. What safeguards does YC have in place to help a company do this without starting unintended consequences and maybe accidentally making the problem worse? A large body of evidence suggests that humans and businesses, overall, do not get a good grasp on how their actions will cascade 20-30-100 years into the future. Does YC have a plan or opinion at least on how to reduce the likelihood of your startups wreaking uncertain havoc on the other side of the world while engaging in geoengineering? Edit: I'm not allowed to reply on HN any more I guess, but here is my response to the comment below. My comment was specifically not about carbon removal, but the "Other approaches to geoengineering to counteract the effects of climate change could have potential as well", specifically not talking about carbon removal.

Siecje 9y ago
Something most people don't realize is that creating something like a solar panel adds carbon to the atmosphere.
- ScottBurson 9y ago
  Manufacturing a solar panel does have carbon impact, but the amount of that impact, relative to the total amount of energy it produces over its lifetime, is an order of magnitude smaller than that of coal, and several times smaller than even natural gas. Ref.: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn268.pdf http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn268.pdf
gustaf 9y ago
There is a really great article from New Yorker last year that I'd recommend: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/can-carbon-dioxide-removal-save-the-world https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/can-carbon-dio... Carbon removal technologies are not going to bring us another ice-age. We need to remove hundreds of billions of tons of Carbon from the atmosphere in order to avoid catastrophic global warming. That is the major risk today and it's very apparent. Problem is that carbon removal technologies aren't good enough or cheap enough to do that.