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"Our plants require less land than other techniques. E.g., on a land area of 0.42 acres, our Orca plant can remove 4,000 tons of CO₂ from the air every year, wh

"Our plants require less land than other techniques. E.g., on a land area of 0.42 acres, our Orca plant can remove 4,000 tons of CO₂ from the air every year, which is almost 1,000 times more effective than trees. The same land would host around 220 trees with an estimated capacity of 22kg each" How much land, in solar panels for example, is required to power this? Also what's the carbon waste that this generates? Is there a synergistic use for it?

themanmaran 3y ago
> Also what's the carbon waste that this generates? Is there a synergistic use for it? I've wondered the same about these carbon capture plants. Is this literally just elemental carbon in some kind of dust/sand at the end of the day? Could this be a raw material input for carbon fiber production?
- A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  Elemental carbon is a valuable industrial material -- and even low-quality carbon, like "carbon black" soot, ain't cheap! Nah, separating carbon from oxygen in CO2 and CO is too expensive and energetically demanding. To simplify things a little bit, what they do here is inject CO2 into water at high pressure, which results in highly acidic H2CO3. They then pump H2CO3 into basalt rock, which chemically reacts with the acid -- in fact, it is partially dissolved. Then there's a second stage reaction between the partially-dissolved basalt and the remnant HCO3-, and it recrystallizes as carbonate minerals, e.g. FeCO3 or CaCO3. So they're turning CO2 into a liquid acid, and then injecting it into rock where it reacts with basalt and crystallizes as carbonates.
  - themanmaran 3y ago
    Great explanation that I've never seen on any of these carbon capture sites. Thanks.
shipman05 3y ago
> How much land, in solar panels for example, is required to power this? It says "The CO₂ can then be safely and permanently stored underground by our storage partners — Carbfix in Iceland." So my assumption was that the collectors are located there as well and using Iceland's abundant geothermal electricity.
- usrusr 3y ago
  In other words: it definitely will not scale.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    But it looks good on a pitch deck. I just wonder if it cannot be combined with those particle emitting start-up that wantsbto creat artifical clouds. Both ideas sound like they are ment to be combined in the same company just before an ICO or a SPAC.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  I remember watching something about Carbfix on TV: they inject the CO2 into underground magma and it is then incorporated in the rock formation (carbonate rocks?) So, yes, it would make sense to use local geothermal electricity or even to produce it at the same time as the CO2 injection process if that's possible.
nabla9 3y ago
>The energy usage: We're committed to driving down energy consumption as much as possible. We only use renewable energy, energy-from-waste, or other waste heat to power our plants. They make it impossible to do the math. Energy consumption, lifetime capital cost per ton, are what make or break this scheme.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Unit economics are so unsexy, they died with e-scooter rentals and fresh food deliveries.
candiddevmike 3y ago
How much carbon is produced by the transportation and storage of the carbon that is captured? I want to see their carbon math for the whole process (including electricity) to prove this is all truly carbon neutral, seems like something that should be front and center on their website but they only vaguely discuss the carbon footprint of the plants. Having a business saying their product is carbon negative when the actual end to end process isn't seems par for the course, especially one with VC backing...
- thinkcontext 3y ago
  There is no transportation, they site the plant where they are going to store it. That's one of the advantages of capturing from the atmosphere.
usrusr 3y ago
And the land for the solar panels that substitute the energy you'd harvest from the trees while turning them into highly concentrated CO2 for storage. And the land for the batteries you'd have to add to achieve the same dispatchability as the burn trees (or faster-growing plants!) and work on that CO2 alternative. DAC is a joke.
Mizza 3y ago
For context, 4000 tons of CO2 is roughly the emissions of a full 777 flying from San Francisco to London and back twice.
- pilaf 3y ago
  That doesn't sound right, 4000 tons is more than 10 times the maximum takeoff weight of a 777.
  - jackweirdy 3y ago
    It looks about right to me (I used https://www.atmosfair.de/en/offset/flight/ https://www.atmosfair.de/en/offset/flight/) It’s about 850 US tons per full leg * 4 legs to make up the two round trips (388 pax in a -300ER)
  - alhw 3y ago
    Jet fuel is comprised mostly of hydrocarbons with 8 to 16 C atoms, and a large fraction of these hydrocarbons are straight-chain alkanes. Combustion of dodecane (a C12 straight-chain alkane) makes 12 CO2 molecules. A 747 jet consumes about 4 L of jet fuel per second when in flight. Based on the density and molecular weight of dodecane and the stoichiometry of its combustion reaction, you'd arrive at something like 0.01 ton of CO2 emitted per second of flight time. 4000 tons is a good estimate. Back of the envelope...
    - mabbo 3y ago
      Ah, so you're saying (if I'm reading this correctly) that the plane only carries the carbon portion of the CO2, and the oxygen comes from the air itself. That's how it's emitting more CO2 then it's fuel mass. Is that right?
      - Tuxer 3y ago
        Correct. Fuel is around 16/36th of the CO2 mass it emit when being burnt. A 777 carries around 120 tons of fuel for a SF/LON flight, so that's around 300 tons of emissions per flight.
yodelshady 3y ago
It's such an easy, relevant question to ask that it boggles the mind that investors don't have their own engineers to ask it. I know you're money people not tech, but how do you know you're not being ripped off if you can't check figures that basic? Anyway, apparently 3 MWh/tonne is a not-unrealistic claim, so they're only demanding 1.5 MW (on average, though if solar-powered it would make sense to oversize) and a km2 of solar panels could reasonably generate 50-100 MW on average (this is conservative for most places, though not for Iceland). A km2 of tress, by their calculations, gets 1,000 tonnes, so DAC comes out ahead, although you're right to observe that trees do have a synergistic use for the carbon they capture.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  Welcome to planet Earth. If you can do napkin math, and bother to do it, you can be an extremely successful in engineering domains, because almost everyone else is completely useless.
  - maigret 3y ago
    Napkin math is an underestimated skill indeed.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Early investors, it seems, don't care. All they care about is whether or not they can sell their shares to some greater idiot down the line. Heck, those money people don't even care about money questions. Examples of non-existing due dilligence include: WeWork, Theranos, Nikola, FTX. Just from top of my head.
z3t4 3y ago
Plants/trees waste product is oxygen. And plants only need water and sun. Plants can also reproduce themselves. What we should concentrate on is to make artificial systems that get water to areas where it doesn't rain.
mchannon 3y ago
1000 kWh/ton (found it on google): 166 kW/ton in a sunny place: 1000 square meters/ton in a sunny place: 4 million square meters = ~1000 acres of PV to power. One unit. Yeah, that’s going to happen. /s “We’re too ashamed of our energy requirements to post them on our page and are well aware they’re dooming this technology until cold fusion comes out” is what I read between the lines on their fluff page.
- stavros 3y ago
  1000 kWh/ton to sequester, and how many tons per kWh to generate? EDIT: Apparently, one ton of CO2 is released by 1000 kWh of electricity: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 So you have a coal plant generating energy and emitting CO2 just for this factory next to it to capture all that CO2 again. Seems more efficient to just not run the coal factory. It seems like this idea will be worthwhile when the last coal factory closes.
  - cogman10 3y ago
    It'll always be more efficient not to emit carbon. Imagine you have a teaspoon of salt and a cup of water. Adding salt into the water is dead simple and requires little energy. Now how hard is it to remove that teaspoon of salt? That's effectively what's happening with the atmosphere.
- wolfram74 3y ago
  two comments: they claim to sequester 1000 tons (1e6 kg) vs 22kg, so the sequestration space difference is on the order of 200000 difference. They may include the solar panel area in their stated efficiency calculation. Secondly, the solar panels are a bit more liquid than a comparable area of trees, when industrial demand is high, you can route it there, when it's low, it can be working on sequestration. There are some advantages there. Especially considering the atmosphere is fairly homogeneous, but soil in proper condition for forests is less so.
- adammarples 3y ago
  Their plant is in Iceland and runs on geothermal
jvanderbot 3y ago
A better use of CO2 is generating fuel, I suggest. https://terraformindustries.com/ https://terraformindustries.com/
hef19898 3y ago
4000 tons of CO2 removal per year is at best a proof of concept. If it was one of the industrial giants, with the muscle and budget to scale it and the sales channels to sell it, I would be more optimistic about that. But than I became so jaded regarding start-ups, especially "ddep" tech ones, lately that I tend to see even more negatively than I already do in general.
tenthirtyam 3y ago
Ummm, seems to me that 0.42 acres of trees would sequester a lot more that 22kg of CO2 per year. Let me guesstimate from my typical annual hedge clipping - we have a (appx) 1.5m wide hedge that is (appx) 120m long equal to (appx.) 180m^2=0.044 acres. The annual clipping produces 10 hefty bags (the big bags used to carry e.g. 1 ton of gravel or stones), so maybe a total of 300-400kg for my hedge. Multiply by ten for 0.42 acres, yields about 3000-4000kg. Sanity check anyone?
- silisili 3y ago
  Unless it was edited...that sentence says 22kg per year each. So it's 22*220.

themanmaran 3y ago

> Also what's the carbon waste that this generates? Is there a synergistic use for it? I've wondered the same about these carbon capture plants. Is this literally just elemental carbon in some kind of dust/sand at the end of the day? Could this be a raw material input for carbon fiber production?

A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
Elemental carbon is a valuable industrial material -- and even low-quality carbon, like "carbon black" soot, ain't cheap! Nah, separating carbon from oxygen in CO2 and CO is too expensive and energetically demanding. To simplify things a little bit, what they do here is inject CO2 into water at high pressure, which results in highly acidic H2CO3. They then pump H2CO3 into basalt rock, which chemically reacts with the acid -- in fact, it is partially dissolved. Then there's a second stage reaction between the partially-dissolved basalt and the remnant HCO3-, and it recrystallizes as carbonate minerals, e.g. FeCO3 or CaCO3. So they're turning CO2 into a liquid acid, and then injecting it into rock where it reacts with basalt and crystallizes as carbonates.
- themanmaran 3y ago
  Great explanation that I've never seen on any of these carbon capture sites. Thanks.

shipman05 3y ago

> How much land, in solar panels for example, is required to power this? It says "The CO₂ can then be safely and permanently stored underground by our storage partners — Carbfix in Iceland." So my assumption was that the collectors are located there as well and using Iceland's abundant geothermal electricity.

usrusr 3y ago
In other words: it definitely will not scale.
- hef19898 3y ago
  But it looks good on a pitch deck. I just wonder if it cannot be combined with those particle emitting start-up that wantsbto creat artifical clouds. Both ideas sound like they are ment to be combined in the same company just before an ICO or a SPAC.
mytailorisrich 3y ago
I remember watching something about Carbfix on TV: they inject the CO2 into underground magma and it is then incorporated in the rock formation (carbonate rocks?) So, yes, it would make sense to use local geothermal electricity or even to produce it at the same time as the CO2 injection process if that's possible.

nabla9 3y ago

>The energy usage: We're committed to driving down energy consumption as much as possible. We only use renewable energy, energy-from-waste, or other waste heat to power our plants. They make it impossible to do the math. Energy consumption, lifetime capital cost per ton, are what make or break this scheme.

hef19898 3y ago
Unit economics are so unsexy, they died with e-scooter rentals and fresh food deliveries.

candiddevmike 3y ago

How much carbon is produced by the transportation and storage of the carbon that is captured? I want to see their carbon math for the whole process (including electricity) to prove this is all truly carbon neutral, seems like something that should be front and center on their website but they only vaguely discuss the carbon footprint of the plants. Having a business saying their product is carbon negative when the actual end to end process isn't seems par for the course, especially one with VC backing...

thinkcontext 3y ago
There is no transportation, they site the plant where they are going to store it. That's one of the advantages of capturing from the atmosphere.

usrusr 3y ago

And the land for the solar panels that substitute the energy you'd harvest from the trees while turning them into highly concentrated CO2 for storage. And the land for the batteries you'd have to add to achieve the same dispatchability as the burn trees (or faster-growing plants!) and work on that CO2 alternative. DAC is a joke.

Mizza 3y ago

For context, 4000 tons of CO2 is roughly the emissions of a full 777 flying from San Francisco to London and back twice.

pilaf 3y ago
That doesn't sound right, 4000 tons is more than 10 times the maximum takeoff weight of a 777.
- jackweirdy 3y ago
  It looks about right to me (I used https://www.atmosfair.de/en/offset/flight/ https://www.atmosfair.de/en/offset/flight/) It’s about 850 US tons per full leg * 4 legs to make up the two round trips (388 pax in a -300ER)
- alhw 3y ago
  Jet fuel is comprised mostly of hydrocarbons with 8 to 16 C atoms, and a large fraction of these hydrocarbons are straight-chain alkanes. Combustion of dodecane (a C12 straight-chain alkane) makes 12 CO2 molecules. A 747 jet consumes about 4 L of jet fuel per second when in flight. Based on the density and molecular weight of dodecane and the stoichiometry of its combustion reaction, you'd arrive at something like 0.01 ton of CO2 emitted per second of flight time. 4000 tons is a good estimate. Back of the envelope...
  - mabbo 3y ago
    Ah, so you're saying (if I'm reading this correctly) that the plane only carries the carbon portion of the CO2, and the oxygen comes from the air itself. That's how it's emitting more CO2 then it's fuel mass. Is that right?
    - Tuxer 3y ago
      Correct. Fuel is around 16/36th of the CO2 mass it emit when being burnt. A 777 carries around 120 tons of fuel for a SF/LON flight, so that's around 300 tons of emissions per flight.

yodelshady 3y ago

It's such an easy, relevant question to ask that it boggles the mind that investors don't have their own engineers to ask it. I know you're money people not tech, but how do you know you're not being ripped off if you can't check figures that basic? Anyway, apparently 3 MWh/tonne is a not-unrealistic claim, so they're only demanding 1.5 MW (on average, though if solar-powered it would make sense to oversize) and a km2 of solar panels could reasonably generate 50-100 MW on average (this is conservative for most places, though not for Iceland). A km2 of tress, by their calculations, gets 1,000 tonnes, so DAC comes out ahead, although you're right to observe that trees do have a synergistic use for the carbon they capture.

jackmott42 3y ago
Welcome to planet Earth. If you can do napkin math, and bother to do it, you can be an extremely successful in engineering domains, because almost everyone else is completely useless.
- maigret 3y ago
  Napkin math is an underestimated skill indeed.
hef19898 3y ago
Early investors, it seems, don't care. All they care about is whether or not they can sell their shares to some greater idiot down the line. Heck, those money people don't even care about money questions. Examples of non-existing due dilligence include: WeWork, Theranos, Nikola, FTX. Just from top of my head.

z3t4 3y ago

Plants/trees waste product is oxygen. And plants only need water and sun. Plants can also reproduce themselves. What we should concentrate on is to make artificial systems that get water to areas where it doesn't rain.

mchannon 3y ago

1000 kWh/ton (found it on google): 166 kW/ton in a sunny place: 1000 square meters/ton in a sunny place: 4 million square meters = ~1000 acres of PV to power. One unit. Yeah, that’s going to happen. /s “We’re too ashamed of our energy requirements to post them on our page and are well aware they’re dooming this technology until cold fusion comes out” is what I read between the lines on their fluff page.

stavros 3y ago
1000 kWh/ton to sequester, and how many tons per kWh to generate? EDIT: Apparently, one ton of CO2 is released by 1000 kWh of electricity: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 So you have a coal plant generating energy and emitting CO2 just for this factory next to it to capture all that CO2 again. Seems more efficient to just not run the coal factory. It seems like this idea will be worthwhile when the last coal factory closes.
- cogman10 3y ago
  It'll always be more efficient not to emit carbon. Imagine you have a teaspoon of salt and a cup of water. Adding salt into the water is dead simple and requires little energy. Now how hard is it to remove that teaspoon of salt? That's effectively what's happening with the atmosphere.
wolfram74 3y ago
two comments: they claim to sequester 1000 tons (1e6 kg) vs 22kg, so the sequestration space difference is on the order of 200000 difference. They may include the solar panel area in their stated efficiency calculation. Secondly, the solar panels are a bit more liquid than a comparable area of trees, when industrial demand is high, you can route it there, when it's low, it can be working on sequestration. There are some advantages there. Especially considering the atmosphere is fairly homogeneous, but soil in proper condition for forests is less so.
adammarples 3y ago
Their plant is in Iceland and runs on geothermal

jvanderbot 3y ago

A better use of CO2 is generating fuel, I suggest. https://terraformindustries.com/ https://terraformindustries.com/

hef19898 3y ago

4000 tons of CO2 removal per year is at best a proof of concept. If it was one of the industrial giants, with the muscle and budget to scale it and the sales channels to sell it, I would be more optimistic about that. But than I became so jaded regarding start-ups, especially "ddep" tech ones, lately that I tend to see even more negatively than I already do in general.

tenthirtyam 3y ago

Ummm, seems to me that 0.42 acres of trees would sequester a lot more that 22kg of CO2 per year. Let me guesstimate from my typical annual hedge clipping - we have a (appx) 1.5m wide hedge that is (appx) 120m long equal to (appx.) 180m^2=0.044 acres. The annual clipping produces 10 hefty bags (the big bags used to carry e.g. 1 ton of gravel or stones), so maybe a total of 300-400kg for my hedge. Multiply by ten for 0.42 acres, yields about 3000-4000kg. Sanity check anyone?

silisili 3y ago
Unless it was edited...that sentence says 22kg per year each. So it's 22*220.