3 ms·

I wasn't sure that an air compressor is a good comparison, but I thought that a typical fan was also not a good comparison because the air it moves doesn't have

I wasn't sure that an air compressor is a good comparison, but I thought that a typical fan was also not a good comparison because the air it moves doesn't have much resistance to it. Presumably if you're trying to force air through a process that separates out CO2, there will be more back pressure than just blowing into the open air. Assuming, though, that the process could keep up with the air flow that 100 of those 30 inch fans could produce (if we imagine a shipping container being about 10 feet wide by 10 feet tall) then that's 1 million CFM, which is 50,000 times my original comparison, so only 400,000 units would be needed. To pick some more arbitrary numbers, if 100 factories were built, each producing one unit per week, that would take 4000 weeks or roughly 80 years. Feel free to consider more realistic numbers, which may lead to different conclusions.

chmod775 4y ago
They give the following numbers: 80 containers, 36000 tons of CO2/year, 90% efficiency. We also know that there's roughly 0.75g of CO2 in a m^3 of air. So we do some math, converting to a proper system of measurement and back to lalaland units using 907.2 kg in a US ton and 35.315 cubic feet in a m^3: 36000 [tons of CO2/year/80 containers] / 80 [containers] * 907.2 [kg/ton] * 1000 [grams/kg] / 0.75 [g/m^3] / 90% [efficiency] / (365 * 24 * 60) [minutes/year] * 35.315 [cubic feet/m^3] = 40636.4383562 [cubic feet / minute / container] So one of their containers filters about 40000 CFM at 90% efficiency. Was any of this helpful? Not at all. Just looking at tons of CO2 produced vs. captured would have given us the same picture, and that's the numbers we started with. > if 100 factories were built, each producing one unit per week That's a tiny amount at planet scale and also incredibly slow. Humanity builds around 150,000 cars every single day. Some factories crank out a thousand a day. And I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that a car is probably a more complex product.

chmod775 4y ago

They give the following numbers: 80 containers, 36000 tons of CO2/year, 90% efficiency. We also know that there's roughly 0.75g of CO2 in a m^3 of air. So we do some math, converting to a proper system of measurement and back to lalaland units using 907.2 kg in a US ton and 35.315 cubic feet in a m^3: 36000 [tons of CO2/year/80 containers] / 80 [containers] * 907.2 [kg/ton] * 1000 [grams/kg] / 0.75 [g/m^3] / 90% [efficiency] / (365 * 24 * 60) [minutes/year] * 35.315 [cubic feet/m^3] = 40636.4383562 [cubic feet / minute / container] So one of their containers filters about 40000 CFM at 90% efficiency. Was any of this helpful? Not at all. Just looking at tons of CO2 produced vs. captured would have given us the same picture, and that's the numbers we started with. > if 100 factories were built, each producing one unit per week That's a tiny amount at planet scale and also incredibly slow. Humanity builds around 150,000 cars every single day. Some factories crank out a thousand a day. And I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that a car is probably a more complex product.