16 ms·

Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

161 points by pkrein 4y ago

PaulHoule 4y ago
This is some kind of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_... ?
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  From my understanding, yes.
- pkrein 4y ago
  Academia has started referring to our category as Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage, or BiCRS (pronounced like “bikers”): https://www.icef.go.jp/pdf/summary/roadmap/icef2020_roadmap.pdf https://www.icef.go.jp/pdf/summary/roadmap/icef2020_roadmap....
rexreed 4y ago
How do you get so far into a project before you even realize that you have such a show-stopper problem? Move fast / fail fast works with software because iteration times are quick and penalty per iteration is low. But just building stuff and hoping it works and then realizing major problems doesn't work so well with real-world stuff. Couldn't they have "workshopped" this with non-functional item to see what the real world roadblocks would have been before a deep investment? This is especially the case in high-risk unproven areas such as cleantech where the solution space is vast and potential problem areas significant. Any problem area can kill a project, so why are we progressing so fast to build first?
- carbadtraingood 4y ago
  They discuss a bit in the article, but the material they had prototyped with was very different than the material they tried to scale up with. It sounds like their scaled up plant accepted a wide variety of materials, but this one specific input stream slowed them down. So they weren't shut down while they figured this out, they just processed the material they knew they could process until they had a solution here.
  - rexreed 4y ago
    Why would you prototype with a material that's substantially different from the real-world item? I read the article and this bit puzzled me. The differences clearly matter, and the $300M bankruptcy they reference in the article even makes that point.
    - truffdog 4y ago
      Probably they want to handle wheat waste and corn waste long term. Seems like there should be plenty of both to go around
    - liminvorous 4y ago
      They want to be able to process both the material they prototyped with and the material they started with (straw) and the material they tried to scale up with (corn cobs), and probably any kind of plant matter that has less structural integrity than say, timber.
    - pkrein 4y ago
      Initial testing was in San Francisco, where corn stover is relatively tricky to come by because corn is not widely grown in California, and agricultural residues cannot be brought into the state because of the bugs. Wheat straw was much easier to procure in-state. Since encountering the differences, we tracked down the rarer corn growers in California and now use corn stover for testing as well.
      - rexreed 4y ago
        If corn stover is a critical importance to your business and business model, wouldn't it be more effective, efficient, and beneficial to your business to be where the critical resource and information and experience is? Basically why not move to Kansas instead of stay put in California?
        0xbadcafebee 4y ago
        Come on. No one wants to live in Kansas. And it's extremely difficult to build in a rural setting. You try prototyping an experimental cutting-edge technology in the middle of a corn field 2 hours from the nearest Home Depot or metal fabricator.
- taneq 4y ago
  Somehow you never quite get the real raw material when you ask for samples, no matter how careful you are. I worked on a system once upon a time that fed steel balls into a ball mill. We tested it thoroughly in the workshop with the same steel balls used on the customer's site, but when we went to commission it, it jammed non-stop. Turns out a hundred randomly selected balls won't contain most of the outliers that you'd get in even one tonne of balls, and when you're feeding 5 tonnes per hour, that's a lot of jams. We had balls with big craters in them, half-balls, balls with two halves offset by 50%, and everything in between. Not the kind of thing you could rely on rolling nicely. Also, of course, when you ask a mill ball manufacturer for a sample, they might be inclined to send you the very nicest examples they can find, because they think you might buy their product... Anyway, unless you're super careful about sourcing legitimate feed samples it's easy to think you're testing against the real product when you really aren't.
  - orthecreedence 4y ago
    I found your comment fascinating (and frustrating). Dealing with bad inputs on a web form can be tricky. Dealing with bad inputs made of steel seems like a lot more work =]. What comes out of a steel ball mill? And why is steel made into (misshapen) balls before this process?
    - taneq 4y ago
      Oops, I meant to come back to this but stuff happened. It certainly was a lot of work to get it halfway reliable. I think they were working on adding a vibrating motor to keep things moving even if they weren't rolling - while I was there they just had a guy poke it with a bit of rebar every time things hitched up. A ball mill is used to grind things into paste, usually for further processing. In this specific case it was a SAG mill (https://www.mogroup.com/portfolio/sag-mills/ https://www.mogroup.com/portfolio/sag-mills/) and it was frikkin' huge, powered by a 10MW electric motor. It ground up ore-containing rocks from a mine which were then processed to produce lead and zinc. The balls roll around in the mill and help to grind up the ore, which I guess works better if they're round, which they will be before long due to wear and tear no matter what shape they go in. They come out as tiny ball bearings. It was quite an interesting project!
- coryrc 4y ago
  I mean, you're wrong... it clearly worked out for them so far and it only took seven weeks to fix this issue. It's taken longer to ship completed commits at Google than that.
  - rexreed 4y ago
    Did it though? As far as I can tell they only have part of the problem worked out, and the rest of the problem may indeed be a show-stopper. How many more show-stoppers before they run into the same issues that bankrupted the $300M company? If you don't know what the show-stoppers are, then what is the best approach for plowing ahead anyways? Maybe sticking with wheat instead of corn?
fullstop 4y ago
I initially read the domain as "Charmin Industrial" which is an entirely different use of corn cobs, but also possibly fuel of nightmares.
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ed 4y ago
So the ELI5 is they burn crop waste, harvest the heat and bury the carbon-rich ash. This process is called BECCS. (Not totally right - see 'pkrein’s comment below.) The upper bound on capture is pretty good! Almost 70% of yearly CO2 emissions. > Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggests a potential range of negative emissions from BECCS of 0 to 22 gigatonnes per year [1] > Human activities emit over 30 billion tons of CO2 (9 billion tons of fossil carbon) per year [2] 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_captur... 2 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide
- soco 4y ago
  So out of the 30 gigatons of CO2, up to 22 are from biomass? That's way, way more than I would have thought...
  - Imnimo 4y ago
    I think the 22 is not how much is currently emitted from biomass, it's the upper bound on how much we could store if we replaced a bunch of energy generation with this process.
  - philote 4y ago
    I think the meaning is that out of the 30 gigatons of CO2, 22 gigatons can be recaptured ("negative emissions").
    - soco 4y ago
      Right and that sounds like a lot to me. I hope they're right.
- pkrein 4y ago
  Actually we aren’t burning the biomass, we’re heating it without oxygen (pyrolysis) to create a transportable biomass intermediate called bio-oil. That bio-oil is rich in carbon, molasses-like consistency, and the overwhelming odor of barbecue sauce. Today we primarily pump that bbq sauce underground as carbon removal (Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage - BiCRS), but in the future it could be used for BECCS processes like you outline.
thimkerbell 4y ago
Interesting post. Is there a "mechanical engineering for dummies" educational path (Book? Software? Kit?) that would equip someone for doing like 90% of the mechanical design&prototyping work? Interesting point: "when you solve one bottleneck you find a new one somewhere else."
- mech987 4y ago
  "Shigley's Mechanical Engineering Design" is a great textbook if you want to learn the most you can with the fewest books about designing mechanical structures and moving parts from a strength perspective. Fluid flow/ thermo would be the other main academic area that this book wouldn't cover. There's a bunch more topics though that you build over years of intuition- manufacturability, design tradeoffs, etc.
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- draw_down 4y ago
  I had the half-joking thought, I wish I didn’t waste my life on software because this seems like actually enjoyable and satisfying engineering work. I don’t really know if biomass is the best power source or whatever, but the problem of “get the biomass into the pyrolizer” is straightforward as can be.
  - camtarn 4y ago
    I transitioned from writing software for Amazon to writing software for prototype wave and tidal power devices. It's no silver bullet - every industry has its WTF moments - but overall I'd recommend it. It's cool as hell to be able to literally stand on top of something that you helped build :)
jcpst 4y ago
The title "Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares" reminds me of this bit of pop culture where Rick and Morty land on a corn cob planet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw-2KuHIYyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw-2KuHIYyo
- smm11 4y ago
  I recall that episode, but never understood why it was bad thing if there was a cob planet? Earth is water planet, or dirt planet, with everything destined to be dirt or whatever.
  - JetAlone 4y ago
    Everything from the mountains down to the atomic structure is on a cob. Maybe you'd end up having Junji Ito tier body horror as they eat and breathe in more cob particles. We'd get Summer on a cob, and Jerry on a cob. Maybe the planet has a god on a cob who will punish them in eternity on the cob, for breaking the laws on the cob, of this world on a cob. Whatever the case, Rick's not willing to take a risk on the cob - as far as he's concerned, there's not so much as one kernel of truth in any criticism of that decision.
andjd 4y ago
In their FAQ, they mention this statistic. > Every ton of biomass contains roughly 1.65 tons CO₂. On it's surface this is impossible. Does this refer to CO₂ equivalents like Methane? It seems that for carbon specifically, the process (pyrolysis, transportation, etc) emits more than one ton of carbon for every ton of oil sequestered.
- certifiedloud 4y ago
  Conservation of mass need not apply.
  - carbadtraingood 4y ago
    It's the same way that burning 1 kilogram of gasoline produces more than 1 kilogram of CO2. Oxygen from the atmosphere gets bound to the carbon.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Of course the statement is a bit inaccurate, it should probably say "burning 1 ton of biomass generates roughly 1.65 tons of CO₂" Oxygen is a good bit heavier than carbon, to the point that about 80% of the mass of CO₂ is oxygen. Since burning fuel is generally about combining carbon and hydrogen in the fuel with atmospheric O₂, producing CO₂ and H₂O respectively, you can get numbers like these even before accounting for high-impact gases like methane. Edit: and of course photosynthesis is essentially the same process in reverse, taking in CO₂ and energy, adding water for the hydrogen and removing some oxygen (that gets vented to the atmosphere) to get energy-rich biomass.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Only 16% of the weight of CO2 is the carbon. Since we’re concerned with the greenhouse effect of the molecule, that makes a bit of sense. But it also inflates both the rate of production and the value of capture so it could just as easily have been the other way.
joshmarinacci 4y ago
I love this story. The lesson here is that the real world is messy and good engineers have to think on their feet. It also gives me hope that somehow humanity will actually solve climate change.
- jandrese 4y ago
  I thought it was interesting how they were patting themselves on the back for getting a solution in place in "only 7 weeks". I guess because they aren't in real production yet the timelines can slip, but I have to wonder if they had consulted with a farmer they may have found a solution at the Tractor Supply the same day that would have left their operation running while the rest of the team did the work back in CA of tracking down and negotiating with suppliers for the final product. Farmers are often masters of mechanical improvisation because they have very narrow windows in which they can plant or harvest so breakdowns have to be fixed or worked around in just hours or at most a few days.
hinkley 4y ago
> Light and flexible pieces of wheat straw in San Francisco had easily been conveyed pneumatically from the tub grinder into the hammer mill. Okay, that is a very basic failure of engineering/imagination. I’m not saying shame is in order here, but several someone’s should be made to feel uncomfortable over this cock-up. Including the hiring manager because they went for kids instead of people with experience. Why on earth would you assume you could move corn residues with air? Have you seen a corn field before? Have you touched corn? This is the other problem of moving engineering far away from the problem. SF only sees so many refugees from Iowa and Illinois. Most of those go to Chicago or Seattle. > But with some deeper searching, we found a great, off-the-shelf belt that would arrive quickly. Arrive quickly because the locals have been solving this exact problem for a hundred years. When you find an off the shelf solution for your problem, that’s when a good engineer or software developer takes umbrage and considers whether they have a bad, bad case of NIH.
- gammarator 4y ago
  The tone of this comment is unduly negative, but I agree that they should be hiring folks with relevant experience. Ag mechanization is a well established degree, combine harvesters and augers exist, etc.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    We talk about this at least once a week here, usually in the scope of software, but it’s a problem that exists in other domains (though VCs and us are constantly pushing for more businesses to run like software, which is nuts considering how not in order we know our own house to be). Ageism and cultishness are how you end up with simple oversights that anyone who has been around the block a few times would either prevent, or at least have enough self consciousness not to breathlessly talk about it in front of strangers. I think what we miss consistently about the VC model is that we make the 10:1 ratio about chance and betting big, but I suspect the dominant force there is that 4 times out of 5, experience will save you from doing something expensively stupid. However once in a while it’s a clever generalist or someone who “doesn’t know any better” that uncovers a major advancement that the experienced people are blind to. So less than half of those failures are not thinking outside of the box, and most of the rest are not even knowing there was a box to begin with. We tend to see this as an either or scenario. Throw a bunch of kids together or hire a bunch of cranky old men and women who say no all the time. That’s a false dichotomy. Hire some of both, don’t let the older ones steal all of the glory.
whalesalad 4y ago
10 tons of biomass per day seems like a really impressive number.
- marktangotango 4y ago
  For comparison, a rail car can carry 120 tons of coal.
- bluGill 4y ago
  For a farmer that works out to a bit less than 10 minutes of harvest. There are big it depends in the above, a high yielding wet corn crop might be a couple minutes, a poor yielding dry crop can be several hours. That is just the grain, most of the plant goes out the back of the combine. A quick search shows forage forage harvestors can do 400 tons per hour, I just took the first number a search found without checking details.
seunosewa 4y ago
I wonder if just buying crude oil and burying it isn't more cost effective than transporting bulky biomass which could have been fed to animals in order to put it through this complicated process of converting it to oil and burying it.
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  How does that help clear the excess biomass produced by farming? The primary problem this solves isn't "carbon capture". It's great that it does, and it's what distinguishes it from other solutions in the same primary business: to help deal with the problem of harvest "waste". You can buy oil and pump it back in the ground, but now you still need to solve the farming problem.
  - seunosewa 4y ago
    Corn and wheat post-harvest biomass is usually tilled into the ground to improve organic matter in the soil and return nutrients to the soil, or fed to cows and other ruminants by grazing or by cutting.
    - pinot 4y ago
      The point is to take carbon out of the cycle. Not mining petroleum would of course have the same effect but good luck getting people to do that.
      - seunosewa 4y ago
        In both cases you're burying a product of photosynthesis that would have been converted back to carbon dioxide through combustion or respiration. You're taking carbon out of the cycle. It doesn't matter whether the carbon was fixed millions of years ago or a couple of months ago. Carbon is carbon.
        TheRealPomax 4y ago
        Funny how oil and corn aren't just carbon though. Almost as if thinking in terms of CO2 only is intentionally ignoring the actual fuels involved.
carbadtraingood 4y ago
Pkrein, I see you posting here. I've got 200 acres of forest in Washington State and I'm long term interested in providing biomass for carbon sequestration, what can I be doing now to connect with companies like yours to help ensure those 200 acres are as carbon negative as possible?
- carbadtraingood 4y ago
  Right now I'm experimenting with biochar production in small scale TLUDs, but I'm absolutely fascinated in scaling up.
photochemsyn 4y ago
For quite a few years I looked into similar processes based fundamentally on biological photosynthesis, for example algal pool farms and similar approaches to generating hydrocarbons from biomass. At present, I think direct air capture of CO2 followed by reduction to methane and longer hydrocarbons using water-sourced H2 (all without going through the biological photosynthesis) is going to be the long-term winning technology. One main reason is control of the chemistry is a lot easier when you start with uniform small molecules (CO2 and H2) rather than trying to distill off and separate the products of pyrolysis of biomaterials (or even of crude fossil oil distillation and cracking, a similar process). This isn't to say that if you have a completely renewable energy based power system, that converting agricultural byproducts to useful materials like biomethane, biooil and fertilizer (phosphorous recovery in particular) isn't going to be a plausible approach in specific situations, and the resulting products could have niche markets. Now, if your goal is to remove CO2 permanently from the atmosphere, that's more difficult. Making materials like limestone (CaCO3) or perhaps carbon fiber is a better idea for that. Bricks of diamond would be even better, but that's a bit more sci-fi still - but possible. Air-captured diamonds would be a cool product.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  I’ve thought a good target would be polluted lakes with algae problems or diverting part of rivers with agricultural runoff. Pump oxygen and whatever bottleneck nutrient in and harvest algae. You’ll clean the excess nutrients out of the water and sink carbon at same time. Do this in the Mississippi River delta for maximum effect, do a pilot in a Minnesota lake first.
  - bequanna 4y ago
    So, this pilot would add more algae to a MN lake? I don’t think you would ever get approval for something like this in a public lake. Maybe in some private, artificial pond?
    - colechristensen 4y ago
      The goal would be to farm and continually extract algae from the lake in just a section of it, presumably to increase the water quality in the rest of the lake. And there are something like 14,000 lakes in MN though many of them one might be tempted to call ponds :) no need to build an artificial one though, there are plenty.
alexpotato 4y ago
Interesting fact about those whole truck dumping systems: There is a small vent that you have to open at the front of the trailer BEFORE you raise it to dump out the contents. Failure to do so leads to a vacuum effect that can implode the trailer as the biomass pours out Source: friend of mine worked in the paper industry and this was a somewhat regular occurence
cmgbhm 4y ago
I like seeing the modern engineering write up here. Almost everytime I read green energy/ag stuff, it’s either math latex or marketing copy. I assume it’s because IP protection but problems/solution/problem is the kind of stuff that becomes good conversations
- camtarn 4y ago
  Companies might also be reluctant to talk about the problems they're having, for PR reasons (from personal experience!) And yeah, it's absolutely a shame. I would similarly love to hear about more big engineering issues and subsequent solutions, even if they're fairly dumb issues.
bequanna 4y ago
I’m having a tough time understanding how this makes sense. Is this even close to being financially viable if there is never any such thing as carbon credits? Put another way, are the people funding projects like this assuming there will be some kind of carbon credit system in place that will pay absurdly high prices to sequester carbon? Additionally, I suppose you will be compensating farmers for their corn stalk bales, but you can’t take something OUT of a field long term without replacing. Those bales contain more than just carbon and the farmers will eventually have to amend the soil to compensate. Which, if we are then living in your sky-high carbon credit world, fertilizer (and everything else) pry got MUCH more expensive.
- pkrein 4y ago
  Carbon purchasing already exists. Voluntary purchases like Frontier: https://frontierclimate.com/ https://frontierclimate.com/ and many other corporate buyers. Regulatory cap-and-trade markets like CA ARB LCFS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-carbon_fuel_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-carbon_fuel_standard
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  > Is this even close to being financially viable if there is never any such thing as carbon credits? You're right as far as your comment goes — it will probably never be financially viable to scale this up, and the companies funding the limited scale development are doing it purely for public relations purposes. What your comment misses, though, is that to survive the coming century, we are going to have to figure out, as a society, how to do things that are not financially viable. Financial viability is what got us into this mess in the first place. There's a quote attributed to Einstein that says, "We cannot solve today's problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." The quote is disputed, but probably comes from a paraphrase of something he actually said in 1946 in the context of the threat of nuclear warfare. It applies more generally to the multiple self-created existential threats humanity is currently facing, however.
  - bequanna 4y ago
    > ...how to do things that are not financially viable. I don't disagree with you, but if we go that route I have a pretty good idea what that will look like: 1. Wealthy people invest in carbon capture schemes like this. 2. Once there is sufficient wealth invested in #1, they've essentially created a solution looking for a market. 3. What does this mean? It is time to market the shit out of whatever existential problem your solution claims to solve. Market with fear, make solving this "problem" part of the national agenda. Get the hysteria to the point of: "We need to solve this AT ANY COST!" Oppose the approved messaging and you're an idiot, luddite or terrible person. 4. Combine the political will you are creating in #3 with aggressive lobbying for credit programs that make life more expensive for regular people and don't really accomplish anything. Conveniently, the new programs make the group in #1 even more wealthy.
pkrein 4y ago
If you or your friends are mechanical engineers, we're looking for great meche's with experience in thermal, fluids, combustion, ag processing and more. Would love to chat: https://charmindustrial.com/team https://charmindustrial.com/team or email in my profile.
- niklearnstodev 4y ago
  Does Charm ever plan to be remote-friendly? Asking more for some talented friends living in a remote small town, though I've admired Charm from afar for some time.
  - pkrein 4y ago
    It's tough for building hardware, where the engineers own building their prototype systems. Likely other roles in sales, etc. would go remote sooner.
    - niklearnstodev 4y ago
      Entirely understandable, and a major driver in my transition from industrial automation to web software (though industrial hardware work is so rewarding!).
gumby 4y ago
This is such a great article, the summary of which is “I/O is hard”, which every programmer surely knows (and if they don’t, they haven’t tried). Ok, it’s a great article for other reasons too.
- jandrese 4y ago
  Everything works great until the real world gets involved.
  - gumby 4y ago
    Also that pure functional code? “Side effects: can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em”. And that’s all inside the machine.
twawaaay 4y ago
Honestly, all I am hearing is whining. There are so many ways to transport material up. Miners transport ROCKS, upwards, from kilometers beneath Earth surface. They then crush those rocks into fine powder to extract tiny specks of gold from it. Magic? I don't think so. So you chose a wrong tool for the job and are blaming corn? You moved from a lab to "real world" and are surprised it is not all nice, uniform and spherical? I love history of ASML. These guys faced a problem after a problem after a problem for like a decade just to get one process that everybody thought is impossible. Didn't give up. Didn't complain. Just focus on solving it.
- chris_wot 4y ago
  I don't see any whining. They found an unexpected issue, worked the issue and solved it. How is any of that "whining"?
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
That's a really cool article! I never gave much thought to this kind of thing.
HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
> solid material handling in general, is a perennial problem Ugh! Yes. One one machine I worked on, this was one of our major issues. We had a subsystem whose job it was to get small plastic containers out of a bulk hopper, orient them correctly, and deposit them into a carriage all with a failure rate, IIRC, on the order of "no more than one unrecoverable jam every 10,000 units." An "unrecoverable jam" was one that required human intervention to open the container and clear the jam by hand. Fun fact: tiny nonconductive plastic containers are very susceptible to static cling! This was my introduction to bulk material handling (I was the dev writing the code) and its associated patent minefield. Just about every good idea the very experienced mechanical engineer could think of was already patented. In the end we got it to work and met the spec, but not without a lot of hard work. At my previous job we had similar issues with paper. The company had an entire Paper Handling lab staffed with people constantly working on better ways of moving a sheet of paper from one place to another at speed. Paper might actually be worse because changing the humidity changes its properties quite a bit.
avidphantasm 4y ago
Alternate title: Why your biomass startup shouldn’t be based in San Francisco.
jessaustin 4y ago
This may not be generally practical, but just to get a prototype working I'm surprised they didn't employ gravity. The vacuum wasn't strong enough to lift the cob debris up 5-10' to the top of the hammer mill, but it certainly could have pulled it out of the bottom of an elevated tub grinder and down to a lower hammer mill.

161 points by pkrein 4y ago

This is some kind of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_... ?

nibbleshifter 4y ago
From my understanding, yes.
pkrein 4y ago
Academia has started referring to our category as Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage, or BiCRS (pronounced like “bikers”): https://www.icef.go.jp/pdf/summary/roadmap/icef2020_roadmap.pdf https://www.icef.go.jp/pdf/summary/roadmap/icef2020_roadmap....

rexreed 4y ago

How do you get so far into a project before you even realize that you have such a show-stopper problem? Move fast / fail fast works with software because iteration times are quick and penalty per iteration is low. But just building stuff and hoping it works and then realizing major problems doesn't work so well with real-world stuff. Couldn't they have "workshopped" this with non-functional item to see what the real world roadblocks would have been before a deep investment? This is especially the case in high-risk unproven areas such as cleantech where the solution space is vast and potential problem areas significant. Any problem area can kill a project, so why are we progressing so fast to build first?

carbadtraingood 4y ago
They discuss a bit in the article, but the material they had prototyped with was very different than the material they tried to scale up with. It sounds like their scaled up plant accepted a wide variety of materials, but this one specific input stream slowed them down. So they weren't shut down while they figured this out, they just processed the material they knew they could process until they had a solution here.
- rexreed 4y ago
  Why would you prototype with a material that's substantially different from the real-world item? I read the article and this bit puzzled me. The differences clearly matter, and the $300M bankruptcy they reference in the article even makes that point.
  - truffdog 4y ago
    Probably they want to handle wheat waste and corn waste long term. Seems like there should be plenty of both to go around
  - liminvorous 4y ago
    They want to be able to process both the material they prototyped with and the material they started with (straw) and the material they tried to scale up with (corn cobs), and probably any kind of plant matter that has less structural integrity than say, timber.
  - pkrein 4y ago
    Initial testing was in San Francisco, where corn stover is relatively tricky to come by because corn is not widely grown in California, and agricultural residues cannot be brought into the state because of the bugs. Wheat straw was much easier to procure in-state. Since encountering the differences, we tracked down the rarer corn growers in California and now use corn stover for testing as well.
    - rexreed 4y ago
      If corn stover is a critical importance to your business and business model, wouldn't it be more effective, efficient, and beneficial to your business to be where the critical resource and information and experience is? Basically why not move to Kansas instead of stay put in California?
      - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
        Come on. No one wants to live in Kansas. And it's extremely difficult to build in a rural setting. You try prototyping an experimental cutting-edge technology in the middle of a corn field 2 hours from the nearest Home Depot or metal fabricator.
taneq 4y ago
Somehow you never quite get the real raw material when you ask for samples, no matter how careful you are. I worked on a system once upon a time that fed steel balls into a ball mill. We tested it thoroughly in the workshop with the same steel balls used on the customer's site, but when we went to commission it, it jammed non-stop. Turns out a hundred randomly selected balls won't contain most of the outliers that you'd get in even one tonne of balls, and when you're feeding 5 tonnes per hour, that's a lot of jams. We had balls with big craters in them, half-balls, balls with two halves offset by 50%, and everything in between. Not the kind of thing you could rely on rolling nicely. Also, of course, when you ask a mill ball manufacturer for a sample, they might be inclined to send you the very nicest examples they can find, because they think you might buy their product... Anyway, unless you're super careful about sourcing legitimate feed samples it's easy to think you're testing against the real product when you really aren't.
- orthecreedence 4y ago
  I found your comment fascinating (and frustrating). Dealing with bad inputs on a web form can be tricky. Dealing with bad inputs made of steel seems like a lot more work =]. What comes out of a steel ball mill? And why is steel made into (misshapen) balls before this process?
  - taneq 4y ago
    Oops, I meant to come back to this but stuff happened. It certainly was a lot of work to get it halfway reliable. I think they were working on adding a vibrating motor to keep things moving even if they weren't rolling - while I was there they just had a guy poke it with a bit of rebar every time things hitched up. A ball mill is used to grind things into paste, usually for further processing. In this specific case it was a SAG mill (https://www.mogroup.com/portfolio/sag-mills/ https://www.mogroup.com/portfolio/sag-mills/) and it was frikkin' huge, powered by a 10MW electric motor. It ground up ore-containing rocks from a mine which were then processed to produce lead and zinc. The balls roll around in the mill and help to grind up the ore, which I guess works better if they're round, which they will be before long due to wear and tear no matter what shape they go in. They come out as tiny ball bearings. It was quite an interesting project!
coryrc 4y ago
I mean, you're wrong... it clearly worked out for them so far and it only took seven weeks to fix this issue. It's taken longer to ship completed commits at Google than that.
- rexreed 4y ago
  Did it though? As far as I can tell they only have part of the problem worked out, and the rest of the problem may indeed be a show-stopper. How many more show-stoppers before they run into the same issues that bankrupted the $300M company? If you don't know what the show-stoppers are, then what is the best approach for plowing ahead anyways? Maybe sticking with wheat instead of corn?

fullstop 4y ago

I initially read the domain as "Charmin Industrial" which is an entirely different use of corn cobs, but also possibly fuel of nightmares.

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ed 4y ago

So the ELI5 is they burn crop waste, harvest the heat and bury the carbon-rich ash. This process is called BECCS. (Not totally right - see 'pkrein’s comment below.) The upper bound on capture is pretty good! Almost 70% of yearly CO2 emissions. > Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggests a potential range of negative emissions from BECCS of 0 to 22 gigatonnes per year [1] > Human activities emit over 30 billion tons of CO2 (9 billion tons of fossil carbon) per year [2] 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_captur... 2 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide

soco 4y ago
So out of the 30 gigatons of CO2, up to 22 are from biomass? That's way, way more than I would have thought...
- Imnimo 4y ago
  I think the 22 is not how much is currently emitted from biomass, it's the upper bound on how much we could store if we replaced a bunch of energy generation with this process.
- philote 4y ago
  I think the meaning is that out of the 30 gigatons of CO2, 22 gigatons can be recaptured ("negative emissions").
  - soco 4y ago
    Right and that sounds like a lot to me. I hope they're right.
pkrein 4y ago
Actually we aren’t burning the biomass, we’re heating it without oxygen (pyrolysis) to create a transportable biomass intermediate called bio-oil. That bio-oil is rich in carbon, molasses-like consistency, and the overwhelming odor of barbecue sauce. Today we primarily pump that bbq sauce underground as carbon removal (Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage - BiCRS), but in the future it could be used for BECCS processes like you outline.

thimkerbell 4y ago

Interesting post. Is there a "mechanical engineering for dummies" educational path (Book? Software? Kit?) that would equip someone for doing like 90% of the mechanical design&prototyping work? Interesting point: "when you solve one bottleneck you find a new one somewhere else."

mech987 4y ago
"Shigley's Mechanical Engineering Design" is a great textbook if you want to learn the most you can with the fewest books about designing mechanical structures and moving parts from a strength perspective. Fluid flow/ thermo would be the other main academic area that this book wouldn't cover. There's a bunch more topics though that you build over years of intuition- manufacturability, design tradeoffs, etc.

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draw_down 4y ago
I had the half-joking thought, I wish I didn’t waste my life on software because this seems like actually enjoyable and satisfying engineering work. I don’t really know if biomass is the best power source or whatever, but the problem of “get the biomass into the pyrolizer” is straightforward as can be.
- camtarn 4y ago
  I transitioned from writing software for Amazon to writing software for prototype wave and tidal power devices. It's no silver bullet - every industry has its WTF moments - but overall I'd recommend it. It's cool as hell to be able to literally stand on top of something that you helped build :)

jcpst 4y ago

The title "Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares" reminds me of this bit of pop culture where Rick and Morty land on a corn cob planet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw-2KuHIYyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw-2KuHIYyo

smm11 4y ago
I recall that episode, but never understood why it was bad thing if there was a cob planet? Earth is water planet, or dirt planet, with everything destined to be dirt or whatever.
- JetAlone 4y ago
  Everything from the mountains down to the atomic structure is on a cob. Maybe you'd end up having Junji Ito tier body horror as they eat and breathe in more cob particles. We'd get Summer on a cob, and Jerry on a cob. Maybe the planet has a god on a cob who will punish them in eternity on the cob, for breaking the laws on the cob, of this world on a cob. Whatever the case, Rick's not willing to take a risk on the cob - as far as he's concerned, there's not so much as one kernel of truth in any criticism of that decision.

andjd 4y ago

In their FAQ, they mention this statistic. > Every ton of biomass contains roughly 1.65 tons CO₂. On it's surface this is impossible. Does this refer to CO₂ equivalents like Methane? It seems that for carbon specifically, the process (pyrolysis, transportation, etc) emits more than one ton of carbon for every ton of oil sequestered.

certifiedloud 4y ago
Conservation of mass need not apply.
- carbadtraingood 4y ago
  It's the same way that burning 1 kilogram of gasoline produces more than 1 kilogram of CO2. Oxygen from the atmosphere gets bound to the carbon.
wongarsu 4y ago
Of course the statement is a bit inaccurate, it should probably say "burning 1 ton of biomass generates roughly 1.65 tons of CO₂" Oxygen is a good bit heavier than carbon, to the point that about 80% of the mass of CO₂ is oxygen. Since burning fuel is generally about combining carbon and hydrogen in the fuel with atmospheric O₂, producing CO₂ and H₂O respectively, you can get numbers like these even before accounting for high-impact gases like methane. Edit: and of course photosynthesis is essentially the same process in reverse, taking in CO₂ and energy, adding water for the hydrogen and removing some oxygen (that gets vented to the atmosphere) to get energy-rich biomass.
hinkley 4y ago
Only 16% of the weight of CO2 is the carbon. Since we’re concerned with the greenhouse effect of the molecule, that makes a bit of sense. But it also inflates both the rate of production and the value of capture so it could just as easily have been the other way.

joshmarinacci 4y ago

I love this story. The lesson here is that the real world is messy and good engineers have to think on their feet. It also gives me hope that somehow humanity will actually solve climate change.

jandrese 4y ago
I thought it was interesting how they were patting themselves on the back for getting a solution in place in "only 7 weeks". I guess because they aren't in real production yet the timelines can slip, but I have to wonder if they had consulted with a farmer they may have found a solution at the Tractor Supply the same day that would have left their operation running while the rest of the team did the work back in CA of tracking down and negotiating with suppliers for the final product. Farmers are often masters of mechanical improvisation because they have very narrow windows in which they can plant or harvest so breakdowns have to be fixed or worked around in just hours or at most a few days.

hinkley 4y ago

> Light and flexible pieces of wheat straw in San Francisco had easily been conveyed pneumatically from the tub grinder into the hammer mill. Okay, that is a very basic failure of engineering/imagination. I’m not saying shame is in order here, but several someone’s should be made to feel uncomfortable over this cock-up. Including the hiring manager because they went for kids instead of people with experience. Why on earth would you assume you could move corn residues with air? Have you seen a corn field before? Have you touched corn? This is the other problem of moving engineering far away from the problem. SF only sees so many refugees from Iowa and Illinois. Most of those go to Chicago or Seattle. > But with some deeper searching, we found a great, off-the-shelf belt that would arrive quickly. Arrive quickly because the locals have been solving this exact problem for a hundred years. When you find an off the shelf solution for your problem, that’s when a good engineer or software developer takes umbrage and considers whether they have a bad, bad case of NIH.

gammarator 4y ago
The tone of this comment is unduly negative, but I agree that they should be hiring folks with relevant experience. Ag mechanization is a well established degree, combine harvesters and augers exist, etc.
- hinkley 4y ago
  We talk about this at least once a week here, usually in the scope of software, but it’s a problem that exists in other domains (though VCs and us are constantly pushing for more businesses to run like software, which is nuts considering how not in order we know our own house to be). Ageism and cultishness are how you end up with simple oversights that anyone who has been around the block a few times would either prevent, or at least have enough self consciousness not to breathlessly talk about it in front of strangers. I think what we miss consistently about the VC model is that we make the 10:1 ratio about chance and betting big, but I suspect the dominant force there is that 4 times out of 5, experience will save you from doing something expensively stupid. However once in a while it’s a clever generalist or someone who “doesn’t know any better” that uncovers a major advancement that the experienced people are blind to. So less than half of those failures are not thinking outside of the box, and most of the rest are not even knowing there was a box to begin with. We tend to see this as an either or scenario. Throw a bunch of kids together or hire a bunch of cranky old men and women who say no all the time. That’s a false dichotomy. Hire some of both, don’t let the older ones steal all of the glory.

whalesalad 4y ago

10 tons of biomass per day seems like a really impressive number.

marktangotango 4y ago
For comparison, a rail car can carry 120 tons of coal.
bluGill 4y ago
For a farmer that works out to a bit less than 10 minutes of harvest. There are big it depends in the above, a high yielding wet corn crop might be a couple minutes, a poor yielding dry crop can be several hours. That is just the grain, most of the plant goes out the back of the combine. A quick search shows forage forage harvestors can do 400 tons per hour, I just took the first number a search found without checking details.

seunosewa 4y ago

I wonder if just buying crude oil and burying it isn't more cost effective than transporting bulky biomass which could have been fed to animals in order to put it through this complicated process of converting it to oil and burying it.

TheRealPomax 4y ago
How does that help clear the excess biomass produced by farming? The primary problem this solves isn't "carbon capture". It's great that it does, and it's what distinguishes it from other solutions in the same primary business: to help deal with the problem of harvest "waste". You can buy oil and pump it back in the ground, but now you still need to solve the farming problem.
- seunosewa 4y ago
  Corn and wheat post-harvest biomass is usually tilled into the ground to improve organic matter in the soil and return nutrients to the soil, or fed to cows and other ruminants by grazing or by cutting.
  - pinot 4y ago
    The point is to take carbon out of the cycle. Not mining petroleum would of course have the same effect but good luck getting people to do that.
    - seunosewa 4y ago
      In both cases you're burying a product of photosynthesis that would have been converted back to carbon dioxide through combustion or respiration. You're taking carbon out of the cycle. It doesn't matter whether the carbon was fixed millions of years ago or a couple of months ago. Carbon is carbon.
      - TheRealPomax 4y ago
        Funny how oil and corn aren't just carbon though. Almost as if thinking in terms of CO2 only is intentionally ignoring the actual fuels involved.

carbadtraingood 4y ago

Pkrein, I see you posting here. I've got 200 acres of forest in Washington State and I'm long term interested in providing biomass for carbon sequestration, what can I be doing now to connect with companies like yours to help ensure those 200 acres are as carbon negative as possible?

carbadtraingood 4y ago
Right now I'm experimenting with biochar production in small scale TLUDs, but I'm absolutely fascinated in scaling up.

photochemsyn 4y ago

For quite a few years I looked into similar processes based fundamentally on biological photosynthesis, for example algal pool farms and similar approaches to generating hydrocarbons from biomass. At present, I think direct air capture of CO2 followed by reduction to methane and longer hydrocarbons using water-sourced H2 (all without going through the biological photosynthesis) is going to be the long-term winning technology. One main reason is control of the chemistry is a lot easier when you start with uniform small molecules (CO2 and H2) rather than trying to distill off and separate the products of pyrolysis of biomaterials (or even of crude fossil oil distillation and cracking, a similar process). This isn't to say that if you have a completely renewable energy based power system, that converting agricultural byproducts to useful materials like biomethane, biooil and fertilizer (phosphorous recovery in particular) isn't going to be a plausible approach in specific situations, and the resulting products could have niche markets. Now, if your goal is to remove CO2 permanently from the atmosphere, that's more difficult. Making materials like limestone (CaCO3) or perhaps carbon fiber is a better idea for that. Bricks of diamond would be even better, but that's a bit more sci-fi still - but possible. Air-captured diamonds would be a cool product.

colechristensen 4y ago
I’ve thought a good target would be polluted lakes with algae problems or diverting part of rivers with agricultural runoff. Pump oxygen and whatever bottleneck nutrient in and harvest algae. You’ll clean the excess nutrients out of the water and sink carbon at same time. Do this in the Mississippi River delta for maximum effect, do a pilot in a Minnesota lake first.
- bequanna 4y ago
  So, this pilot would add more algae to a MN lake? I don’t think you would ever get approval for something like this in a public lake. Maybe in some private, artificial pond?
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    The goal would be to farm and continually extract algae from the lake in just a section of it, presumably to increase the water quality in the rest of the lake. And there are something like 14,000 lakes in MN though many of them one might be tempted to call ponds :) no need to build an artificial one though, there are plenty.

alexpotato 4y ago

Interesting fact about those whole truck dumping systems: There is a small vent that you have to open at the front of the trailer BEFORE you raise it to dump out the contents. Failure to do so leads to a vacuum effect that can implode the trailer as the biomass pours out Source: friend of mine worked in the paper industry and this was a somewhat regular occurence

cmgbhm 4y ago

I like seeing the modern engineering write up here. Almost everytime I read green energy/ag stuff, it’s either math latex or marketing copy. I assume it’s because IP protection but problems/solution/problem is the kind of stuff that becomes good conversations

camtarn 4y ago
Companies might also be reluctant to talk about the problems they're having, for PR reasons (from personal experience!) And yeah, it's absolutely a shame. I would similarly love to hear about more big engineering issues and subsequent solutions, even if they're fairly dumb issues.

bequanna 4y ago

I’m having a tough time understanding how this makes sense. Is this even close to being financially viable if there is never any such thing as carbon credits? Put another way, are the people funding projects like this assuming there will be some kind of carbon credit system in place that will pay absurdly high prices to sequester carbon? Additionally, I suppose you will be compensating farmers for their corn stalk bales, but you can’t take something OUT of a field long term without replacing. Those bales contain more than just carbon and the farmers will eventually have to amend the soil to compensate. Which, if we are then living in your sky-high carbon credit world, fertilizer (and everything else) pry got MUCH more expensive.

pkrein 4y ago
Carbon purchasing already exists. Voluntary purchases like Frontier: https://frontierclimate.com/ https://frontierclimate.com/ and many other corporate buyers. Regulatory cap-and-trade markets like CA ARB LCFS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-carbon_fuel_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-carbon_fuel_standard
NoGravitas 4y ago
> Is this even close to being financially viable if there is never any such thing as carbon credits? You're right as far as your comment goes — it will probably never be financially viable to scale this up, and the companies funding the limited scale development are doing it purely for public relations purposes. What your comment misses, though, is that to survive the coming century, we are going to have to figure out, as a society, how to do things that are not financially viable. Financial viability is what got us into this mess in the first place. There's a quote attributed to Einstein that says, "We cannot solve today's problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." The quote is disputed, but probably comes from a paraphrase of something he actually said in 1946 in the context of the threat of nuclear warfare. It applies more generally to the multiple self-created existential threats humanity is currently facing, however.
- bequanna 4y ago
  > ...how to do things that are not financially viable. I don't disagree with you, but if we go that route I have a pretty good idea what that will look like: 1. Wealthy people invest in carbon capture schemes like this. 2. Once there is sufficient wealth invested in #1, they've essentially created a solution looking for a market. 3. What does this mean? It is time to market the shit out of whatever existential problem your solution claims to solve. Market with fear, make solving this "problem" part of the national agenda. Get the hysteria to the point of: "We need to solve this AT ANY COST!" Oppose the approved messaging and you're an idiot, luddite or terrible person. 4. Combine the political will you are creating in #3 with aggressive lobbying for credit programs that make life more expensive for regular people and don't really accomplish anything. Conveniently, the new programs make the group in #1 even more wealthy.

pkrein 4y ago

If you or your friends are mechanical engineers, we're looking for great meche's with experience in thermal, fluids, combustion, ag processing and more. Would love to chat: https://charmindustrial.com/team https://charmindustrial.com/team or email in my profile.

niklearnstodev 4y ago
Does Charm ever plan to be remote-friendly? Asking more for some talented friends living in a remote small town, though I've admired Charm from afar for some time.
- pkrein 4y ago
  It's tough for building hardware, where the engineers own building their prototype systems. Likely other roles in sales, etc. would go remote sooner.
  - niklearnstodev 4y ago
    Entirely understandable, and a major driver in my transition from industrial automation to web software (though industrial hardware work is so rewarding!).

gumby 4y ago

This is such a great article, the summary of which is “I/O is hard”, which every programmer surely knows (and if they don’t, they haven’t tried). Ok, it’s a great article for other reasons too.

jandrese 4y ago
Everything works great until the real world gets involved.
- gumby 4y ago
  Also that pure functional code? “Side effects: can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em”. And that’s all inside the machine.

twawaaay 4y ago

Honestly, all I am hearing is whining. There are so many ways to transport material up. Miners transport ROCKS, upwards, from kilometers beneath Earth surface. They then crush those rocks into fine powder to extract tiny specks of gold from it. Magic? I don't think so. So you chose a wrong tool for the job and are blaming corn? You moved from a lab to "real world" and are surprised it is not all nice, uniform and spherical? I love history of ASML. These guys faced a problem after a problem after a problem for like a decade just to get one process that everybody thought is impossible. Didn't give up. Didn't complain. Just focus on solving it.

chris_wot 4y ago
I don't see any whining. They found an unexpected issue, worked the issue and solved it. How is any of that "whining"?

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

That's a really cool article! I never gave much thought to this kind of thing.

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago

> solid material handling in general, is a perennial problem Ugh! Yes. One one machine I worked on, this was one of our major issues. We had a subsystem whose job it was to get small plastic containers out of a bulk hopper, orient them correctly, and deposit them into a carriage all with a failure rate, IIRC, on the order of "no more than one unrecoverable jam every 10,000 units." An "unrecoverable jam" was one that required human intervention to open the container and clear the jam by hand. Fun fact: tiny nonconductive plastic containers are very susceptible to static cling! This was my introduction to bulk material handling (I was the dev writing the code) and its associated patent minefield. Just about every good idea the very experienced mechanical engineer could think of was already patented. In the end we got it to work and met the spec, but not without a lot of hard work. At my previous job we had similar issues with paper. The company had an entire Paper Handling lab staffed with people constantly working on better ways of moving a sheet of paper from one place to another at speed. Paper might actually be worse because changing the humidity changes its properties quite a bit.

avidphantasm 4y ago

Alternate title: Why your biomass startup shouldn’t be based in San Francisco.

jessaustin 4y ago

This may not be generally practical, but just to get a prototype working I'm surprised they didn't employ gravity. The vacuum wasn't strong enough to lift the cob debris up 5-10' to the top of the hammer mill, but it certainly could have pulled it out of the bottom of an elevated tub grinder and down to a lower hammer mill.