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I recently heard about Carbon Engineering, a B.C. Canada based firm that is extracting carbon from the atmosphere and making liquid fuel -- they call it "recycl

I recently heard about Carbon Engineering, a B.C. Canada based firm that is extracting carbon from the atmosphere and making liquid fuel -- they call it "recycled fuel." Apparently it can be used in existing combustion engines. And it is already up and running. Something on the order of 10,000 of these industrial plants could get us carbon neutral rather quickly. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-company-says-it-is-sucking-carbon-from-air-making-fuel-1.4696817 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-company-...

chrisweekly 8y ago
That is awesome.
gustaf 8y ago
Carbon Engineering and Climeworks are two incredible companies working on Direct Air capture and Air-to-Fuel and we'd like to fund more companies like them. There are less than 5 companies worldwide that are serious about getting Direct Air Capture to scale. The world need more bets that that on such a promising technology
- aoner 8y ago
  Hi Gustaf, I read earlier that you are more interested in Direct Air Capture technologies than others. Do you have any specific reasons? I think another way we could look at things is finding "cheap" forms of carbon that would have otherwise been burned/left to rot and reprocess those into building materials.
  - tempestn 8y ago
    Also other greenhouse gasses, like methane capture from landfills.
  - yazaddaruvala 8y ago
    I'm not Gustaf, but I'll try to answer this. The return on investment for a lot of Carbon capture/sequestering is not lucrative (or at least the business models are not yet apparent). The long term VC angle for air to fuel seems straight forward. - Mars alone will be a huge market for such technology. Driving a lot of demand 100-200 years out (if not a big market in 20-40 years). - Shanghai, et-al, need air filters. Now imagine a filter which also generates a sellable resource; fuel. I imagine that machine would sell quite well in those markets. - With the right level of efficiency, a new era of "sail" boats could be powered by reclaimed fuel from air. Imagine the market for a cargo/cruise ship leaving port with an empty fuel tank, and days later reaching the destination port with a full tank and its goods delivered. - With the right level of efficiency, this only improves the efficiency of coal plants. Burning coal for electricity but also reclaiming the CO2 for fuel.
    - Xixi 8y ago
      I don't see how you could make a "sail" boat powered by reclaimed fuel from air, as there is no fuel in the air. You will need a source of energy to convert the CO2 to fuel. In nature the most common (to my knowledge) CO2 -> fuel process is called photosynthesis, and is powered by the sun. CO2 -> fuel consumes energy (that is stored in the fuel). Fuel -> CO2 releases it.
      - yazaddaruvala 8y ago
        Sorry, in the case of "sail" boats, I worded it poorly before. Wind turbine-like "sails" could act as a propulsion source when the wind direction is correct, and generate energy and funnel the air into the CO2 -> fuel machine when the direction of wind is non-optimal for propulsion. I agree in all of the cases I mentioned there would always need to be some energy source.
  - gustaf 8y ago
    The reason I'm so interested in Direct Air Capture is: - It's primarily a tech solution which allows for scale. If you build one Machine you can build a million. It won't actually require very much space, it need access to cheap energy and abilities to store/sequester the CO2 captured. - Technology have the benefit that can be optimized and optimized and optimized to the point where the cost is not very high. The less tech the less changes for optimization - There is a big risk many countries won't meet their responsibility. Getting wealthy democracies onboard is hard enough. We need a scalable way to solve this that doesn't require everyone to help because they prob won't after all - Any negative emission solution that requires a large land-mass will create other problems (dealing with land-owners etc).
- dharma1 8y ago
  If Carbon Engineering can really scale (and they can reduce costs to below $100 / tonne of CO2) - why not just pour money into them?
  - gustaf 8y ago
    People are. But that's just one bet. There are lots of components in the ecosystem needed to make everything succeed
- state_less 8y ago
  You could put compressors next to windmills so that on days there is too much wind, you could start up the compressors and make dry ice, liquid nitrogen or some liquid air feed stock. Cheap energy seems like the key ingredient. The compressor equipment to do the task seems within reach. One could reverse the process and feed the air (de)compressor gas to make energy on low wind days. I'd be interested to know what the round trip efficiency could be. You could optionally use the compressed products as feed stock in some other industry. Perhaps use blocks of CO2 to make methane or a room temperature liquid gas.
  - gustaf 8y ago
    Yes, you are correct. Cheap energy is the main input to Direct-Air-Capture. Overflow energy from Solar and Wind is a great source of that.
    - state_less 8y ago
      Yes, solar seems like it will continue to drop in price and you'd probably want to leverage that savings too. A mass produced portable compressor unit could also be neat. Something for around the home. A 1kw to 3kw unit could be nice to make dry ice. You practically need to have AC if you want to work in Florida or other tropical climate. There is a big market for AC combined with solar in the U.S. since folks want AC and a good chunk probably also want to use solar. Given that you want cooling at night, a solar powered dry ice maker might be able to compete with solar + battery + AC. The panels can feed directly into the compressor to make the night's dry ice rather than storing the energy in a battery and running the compressor at night. The bonus is that any efficiency gains in the dry ice maker could be applied to processes further down stream that make methane or heavier hydrocarbons. You get a solar cooling solution and something that could be helpful when bootstrapping synth gas production. Here are some small high pressure projects / products: Liquid nitrogen https://makezine.com/2010/06/07/diy-liquid-nitrogen-generator/ https://makezine.com/2010/06/07/diy-liquid-nitrogen-generato... Shoebox compressor https://www.shoeboxcompressor.com/ https://www.shoeboxcompressor.com/ Not sure how you'd separate the CO2 out of the liquid air though.
- dereke 8y ago
  One of the things I find interesting about Carbon Engineerings process is that it requires a lot of heat to separate the captured carbon from the fluid (I forget what the fluid is called). Last I heard they were using natural gas for this (with more carbon capture tech attached). I wonder if they have considered using concentrated solar as the heat source instead? The temps are pretty high and obviously there is no carbon capture needed so it might be a cheaper way of doing it. Also you already build those plants out in the desert so you probably have a lot of cheap land available to put the units nearby.
carapace 8y ago
But doesn't the carbon just go back into the atmosphere when the fuel is used?
- loeg 8y ago
  Yes. It reduces emissions but does not sequester carbon (unless you bury it and don't burn it).
  - philwelch 8y ago
    You could just "bury it and don't burn it". The US already has a Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Assuming that you can recycle something close enough to the original petroleum, you could even process the recycled fuel into durable petroleum products instead of consumable ones (lubricants, plastics, etc.) Or you could sell it to SpaceX and have them ship it all to Mars, so someone can use it to fuel their Mars rovers and terraform Mars.
    - loeg 8y ago
      Yes, ignoring economic incentives, they could just bury it. (Due to similar incentives, Chevron and BP aren't leaving oil sequestered in the ground.) Shipping petroleum from Earth's surface to Mars is almost certainly prohibitively expensive.
      - philwelch 8y ago
        You could get environmentalists or governments to pay you to bury it. Carbon offsets already exist anyway. You can't avoid public policy when it comes to solving climate change, but if you can bury reserves of atmospherically-extracted hydrocarbons in the ground, that's an easy budget line item and not a massive fight that requires coordination among literally every industrialized nation. I'm only being half-facetious about shipping the stuff to Mars; eventually, we're going to want to terraform Mars, and creating a greenhouse effect is going to be part of that. Or you could make lubricants, plastics, vaseline...
loeg 8y ago
That helps with reducing emissions (modulo inefficiency) but since we're already past the point where that was sufficient, we still need to sequester additional carbon without burning it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
biglenny 8y ago
Carbon Engineering should be focusing on capture and sequestration, not this synthesized fuel BS. Air-To-fuel is not and will never be their moneymaker. The synthesized fuel is not in demand and probably was thought of by a board member who heard of the word "value add" for the first time. The ONLY in-demand product of CCapture is the CO2 itself - whether it's the gov. who pays for it to be sequestered or an O&G company who pays for it to be used in enhanced recovery. Even the O&G demand is insignificant compared to the amount of money they'll get in sequestration contracts from the government, or by proxy, the FF producers who'll be required to implement them on site. It's important to note CCS is required to meet emissions targets - so I hope CE doesn't get distracted with less important/profitable goals.
peterlk 8y ago
> Carbon Engineering's fuel costs about 25 per cent more than gasoline made from oil Seriously?! If this is actually true, sign me up. I will absolutely pay a 25% fuel tax to make the world a better place and also not have to give oil companies more money
- DuskStar 8y ago
  Yeah, if that's the case - if we can make petroleum products from CO2 and power for only a 25% premium (hell, a 100% premium) over current prices, that's incredible. That's not (just) an environmental breakthrough, it's a MASSIVE geopolitical change. All of a sudden, the pricing power of oil exporting countries disappears - there's an infinitely scalable replacement waiting in the wings. Hell, can you imagine how much the US Navy would pay to produce jet fuel on board carriers (nuclear power!) and eliminate a need for underway replenishment? And for that reason I really have to assume that it's standard science reporting, and some wires have been crossed along the way.
  - carry_bit 8y ago
    > can you imagine how much the US Navy would pay to produce jet fuel on board carriers (nuclear power!) and eliminate a need for underway replenishment? They're already working on that too.
neolefty 8y ago
Reading the article: It's not carbon-neutral — just better than gasoline: > Because the plant currently uses some natural gas, by the time the fuel it produces has been burned it has released a half-tonne of carbon dioxide for every tonne removed from the air. That gives it a carbon footprint 70 per cent lower than a fossil fuel, he said. So where exactly is the energy coming from? I don't see any mention of renewable sources in that article. Is it somehow combining methane and CO2 to get larger hydrocarbons?
skookumchuck 8y ago
Wood gassification does that already.

chrisweekly 8y ago

That is awesome.

gustaf 8y ago

Carbon Engineering and Climeworks are two incredible companies working on Direct Air capture and Air-to-Fuel and we'd like to fund more companies like them. There are less than 5 companies worldwide that are serious about getting Direct Air Capture to scale. The world need more bets that that on such a promising technology

aoner 8y ago
Hi Gustaf, I read earlier that you are more interested in Direct Air Capture technologies than others. Do you have any specific reasons? I think another way we could look at things is finding "cheap" forms of carbon that would have otherwise been burned/left to rot and reprocess those into building materials.
- tempestn 8y ago
  Also other greenhouse gasses, like methane capture from landfills.
- yazaddaruvala 8y ago
  I'm not Gustaf, but I'll try to answer this. The return on investment for a lot of Carbon capture/sequestering is not lucrative (or at least the business models are not yet apparent). The long term VC angle for air to fuel seems straight forward. - Mars alone will be a huge market for such technology. Driving a lot of demand 100-200 years out (if not a big market in 20-40 years). - Shanghai, et-al, need air filters. Now imagine a filter which also generates a sellable resource; fuel. I imagine that machine would sell quite well in those markets. - With the right level of efficiency, a new era of "sail" boats could be powered by reclaimed fuel from air. Imagine the market for a cargo/cruise ship leaving port with an empty fuel tank, and days later reaching the destination port with a full tank and its goods delivered. - With the right level of efficiency, this only improves the efficiency of coal plants. Burning coal for electricity but also reclaiming the CO2 for fuel.
  - Xixi 8y ago
    I don't see how you could make a "sail" boat powered by reclaimed fuel from air, as there is no fuel in the air. You will need a source of energy to convert the CO2 to fuel. In nature the most common (to my knowledge) CO2 -> fuel process is called photosynthesis, and is powered by the sun. CO2 -> fuel consumes energy (that is stored in the fuel). Fuel -> CO2 releases it.
    - yazaddaruvala 8y ago
      Sorry, in the case of "sail" boats, I worded it poorly before. Wind turbine-like "sails" could act as a propulsion source when the wind direction is correct, and generate energy and funnel the air into the CO2 -> fuel machine when the direction of wind is non-optimal for propulsion. I agree in all of the cases I mentioned there would always need to be some energy source.
- gustaf 8y ago
  The reason I'm so interested in Direct Air Capture is: - It's primarily a tech solution which allows for scale. If you build one Machine you can build a million. It won't actually require very much space, it need access to cheap energy and abilities to store/sequester the CO2 captured. - Technology have the benefit that can be optimized and optimized and optimized to the point where the cost is not very high. The less tech the less changes for optimization - There is a big risk many countries won't meet their responsibility. Getting wealthy democracies onboard is hard enough. We need a scalable way to solve this that doesn't require everyone to help because they prob won't after all - Any negative emission solution that requires a large land-mass will create other problems (dealing with land-owners etc).
dharma1 8y ago
If Carbon Engineering can really scale (and they can reduce costs to below $100 / tonne of CO2) - why not just pour money into them?
- gustaf 8y ago
  People are. But that's just one bet. There are lots of components in the ecosystem needed to make everything succeed
state_less 8y ago
You could put compressors next to windmills so that on days there is too much wind, you could start up the compressors and make dry ice, liquid nitrogen or some liquid air feed stock. Cheap energy seems like the key ingredient. The compressor equipment to do the task seems within reach. One could reverse the process and feed the air (de)compressor gas to make energy on low wind days. I'd be interested to know what the round trip efficiency could be. You could optionally use the compressed products as feed stock in some other industry. Perhaps use blocks of CO2 to make methane or a room temperature liquid gas.
- gustaf 8y ago
  Yes, you are correct. Cheap energy is the main input to Direct-Air-Capture. Overflow energy from Solar and Wind is a great source of that.
  - state_less 8y ago
    Yes, solar seems like it will continue to drop in price and you'd probably want to leverage that savings too. A mass produced portable compressor unit could also be neat. Something for around the home. A 1kw to 3kw unit could be nice to make dry ice. You practically need to have AC if you want to work in Florida or other tropical climate. There is a big market for AC combined with solar in the U.S. since folks want AC and a good chunk probably also want to use solar. Given that you want cooling at night, a solar powered dry ice maker might be able to compete with solar + battery + AC. The panels can feed directly into the compressor to make the night's dry ice rather than storing the energy in a battery and running the compressor at night. The bonus is that any efficiency gains in the dry ice maker could be applied to processes further down stream that make methane or heavier hydrocarbons. You get a solar cooling solution and something that could be helpful when bootstrapping synth gas production. Here are some small high pressure projects / products: Liquid nitrogen https://makezine.com/2010/06/07/diy-liquid-nitrogen-generator/ https://makezine.com/2010/06/07/diy-liquid-nitrogen-generato... Shoebox compressor https://www.shoeboxcompressor.com/ https://www.shoeboxcompressor.com/ Not sure how you'd separate the CO2 out of the liquid air though.
dereke 8y ago
One of the things I find interesting about Carbon Engineerings process is that it requires a lot of heat to separate the captured carbon from the fluid (I forget what the fluid is called). Last I heard they were using natural gas for this (with more carbon capture tech attached). I wonder if they have considered using concentrated solar as the heat source instead? The temps are pretty high and obviously there is no carbon capture needed so it might be a cheaper way of doing it. Also you already build those plants out in the desert so you probably have a lot of cheap land available to put the units nearby.

carapace 8y ago

But doesn't the carbon just go back into the atmosphere when the fuel is used?

loeg 8y ago
Yes. It reduces emissions but does not sequester carbon (unless you bury it and don't burn it).
- philwelch 8y ago
  You could just "bury it and don't burn it". The US already has a Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Assuming that you can recycle something close enough to the original petroleum, you could even process the recycled fuel into durable petroleum products instead of consumable ones (lubricants, plastics, etc.) Or you could sell it to SpaceX and have them ship it all to Mars, so someone can use it to fuel their Mars rovers and terraform Mars.
  - loeg 8y ago
    Yes, ignoring economic incentives, they could just bury it. (Due to similar incentives, Chevron and BP aren't leaving oil sequestered in the ground.) Shipping petroleum from Earth's surface to Mars is almost certainly prohibitively expensive.
    - philwelch 8y ago
      You could get environmentalists or governments to pay you to bury it. Carbon offsets already exist anyway. You can't avoid public policy when it comes to solving climate change, but if you can bury reserves of atmospherically-extracted hydrocarbons in the ground, that's an easy budget line item and not a massive fight that requires coordination among literally every industrialized nation. I'm only being half-facetious about shipping the stuff to Mars; eventually, we're going to want to terraform Mars, and creating a greenhouse effect is going to be part of that. Or you could make lubricants, plastics, vaseline...

loeg 8y ago

That helps with reducing emissions (modulo inefficiency) but since we're already past the point where that was sufficient, we still need to sequester additional carbon without burning it.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

biglenny 8y ago

Carbon Engineering should be focusing on capture and sequestration, not this synthesized fuel BS. Air-To-fuel is not and will never be their moneymaker. The synthesized fuel is not in demand and probably was thought of by a board member who heard of the word "value add" for the first time. The ONLY in-demand product of CCapture is the CO2 itself - whether it's the gov. who pays for it to be sequestered or an O&G company who pays for it to be used in enhanced recovery. Even the O&G demand is insignificant compared to the amount of money they'll get in sequestration contracts from the government, or by proxy, the FF producers who'll be required to implement them on site. It's important to note CCS is required to meet emissions targets - so I hope CE doesn't get distracted with less important/profitable goals.

peterlk 8y ago

> Carbon Engineering's fuel costs about 25 per cent more than gasoline made from oil Seriously?! If this is actually true, sign me up. I will absolutely pay a 25% fuel tax to make the world a better place and also not have to give oil companies more money

DuskStar 8y ago
Yeah, if that's the case - if we can make petroleum products from CO2 and power for only a 25% premium (hell, a 100% premium) over current prices, that's incredible. That's not (just) an environmental breakthrough, it's a MASSIVE geopolitical change. All of a sudden, the pricing power of oil exporting countries disappears - there's an infinitely scalable replacement waiting in the wings. Hell, can you imagine how much the US Navy would pay to produce jet fuel on board carriers (nuclear power!) and eliminate a need for underway replenishment? And for that reason I really have to assume that it's standard science reporting, and some wires have been crossed along the way.
- carry_bit 8y ago
  > can you imagine how much the US Navy would pay to produce jet fuel on board carriers (nuclear power!) and eliminate a need for underway replenishment? They're already working on that too.

neolefty 8y ago

Reading the article: It's not carbon-neutral — just better than gasoline: > Because the plant currently uses some natural gas, by the time the fuel it produces has been burned it has released a half-tonne of carbon dioxide for every tonne removed from the air. That gives it a carbon footprint 70 per cent lower than a fossil fuel, he said. So where exactly is the energy coming from? I don't see any mention of renewable sources in that article. Is it somehow combining methane and CO2 to get larger hydrocarbons?

skookumchuck 8y ago

Wood gassification does that already.