saying we need produce more waste to recycle car batteries is like saying we need more CO2 emissions to actually cause more climate change so no can pretend it does not exist.
lithium AA batteries are recycled, a 2000 lb battery is significantly more payoff.
actually the research on why electric car batteries are not being recycled is because every car is too proprietary and it costs too much infrastructure to change for each battery manufacturer. Lithium has a lot of value so recyclers want to get into battery recycling but have made it known they need standardized battery design/packaging standards to make that possible.
you can throw away the 5k of engine and drivetrain components, and then throw in 6k in electric motors, transaxles/transmissions and added copper wiring
From the vehicles I have actually built and weighed there is a much larger increase in weight than you are predicting.
You can see that 1/3 the range for the same weight, and this only gets worse as the vehicle gets heavier. For class 8 trucks wind drag is a very small percentage of the losses, rolling resistance from weight is the largest loses. So I don't think linear distance scaling you assume adds up.
Its going to be an interesting transition and we know that electric trucks will be great for some use cases but its going to take a mix of solutions, especially in countries where their grid infrastructure is no where near as robust as ours.
actually adding 15,000 lb of battery to the truck reduces its efficiency significantly. Imagine loosing 15k of payload when you only had 60k to begin with, your new payload of 45k means you have to drive the route 4 times compared to 3 times for a diesel truck with our device.
I encourage you to check out the draw down project ( https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions ), sort the list from largest impact and you will see " Managed Grazing" has the potential to have a 27% to 40% larger CO2 reduction than electric cars (scenario 1 - scenario 2 percentages). So keep the cattle just update the farming practices, ditch the electric car? Haha obviously not, we need a multi prong solution.
I'm pretty interest how carbon negative is greenwashing when there could actually be less carbon in the atmosphere, will be verified with a life cycle analysis, especially since we can fit on a truck that already exists so the truck manufacturing CO2 is already something that's been spent.
My trigger is when things are called zero emissions, because no electric car, solar panel, or windmill are zero emissions.
I'm surprised to hear this distinction. I've had my CDL for 15 years and worked on trucks for about a decade allover the east coast and found that when talking to the general public semi truck was the best way to talk about Class 8 trucks and calling them 'tractors' was always the worst.
I think the concern with capturing CO2 on this small scale is the network required to go pick it up. Still an interesting thought experiment and maybe that'll be a future market.
Hopefully we can convert home heating systems like yours to a biofuel soon to reduce the CO2 impact quickly.
they do not. At least so far we have not had a regulatory hurdle that requires hazmat. Mostly because the CO2 is not flammable nor toxic (unless in a confined space, but hard to imagine a semi truck being in a confined space while our device is storing CO2).
the market for CO2 as a raw commodity is pretty large and growing significantly!
I think your comment on the concrete capped price assumes that the price for producing CO2 does not increase. If current concrete produces CO2 (which it does produce a lot) and CO2 gets taxed, it makes concrete that sequesters CO2 very financially viable even if it cost more than the current concrete market price. Plus I know I would pay more for concrete that sequesters CO2 so maybe that's another competitive advantage that allows it to cost slightly more.
Plants are great and we love and support using our lands more effectively, but there is not enough land to store the CO2 that has been emitted over the last century from fossil fuels, and keep up with the increasing energy demand from population growth as well as developing nations. So plants cannot do this on their own.
There is such a large market for CO2 (and its growing!) that we can find users of the CO2 very near our storage tanks. For example one pilot program we are planning right now has a CO2 concrete producer only 6 miles away! Of course our CO2 hauling trucks will have our device and we will get better and better at leveraging existing infrastructure (pipe lines and trains) to transport CO2 efficiently.
there are lots of uses for concentrated CO2. A few current uses include dry ice (shipping vaccines or other medical supplies), green houses, concrete, beverage carbonization, pumping it under ground into depleted oil wells for permanent storage, and refrigeration cycles.
There are also a lot of technologies in progress to use CO2, such as turning it right back into synthetic fuels!
The list goes on and seems to be growing by the day.
We have 2 or more chambers, we are balancing the number of chambers so that a chamber is always adsorbing while the other one (or 2) is transitioning temperature or holding a hot cycle to regenerate.
We adsorb at ambient temperature so cooling the previously heated device is not too much energy, mostly just a fan, but there is some available cool refrigerant from our dehumidifier/heat pump cycle that removes moisture from the exhaust to help quickly drop the chamber temperature.
We can use the exhaust waste heat to start heating the bed that is going into the hot regen cycle, then we use the waste heat from our exhaust dehumidifier to get the bed the rest of the way to the target hot cycle temperature.
Its hard to explain in text, but you can see that we get to use the hot and cold cycles from the refrigerant cycle to do work for us simultaneously and take advantage of the heat in the exhaust itself!
For sure we want to capture CO2 from all the combustion engines in use, starting with the largest emitters puts trains and cargo ships next on the list.
Lots of work to do to adapt our technology to those markets, but we love inventing new technologies!
You are onto something! The video is a proof of concept, so it has the components and performs the adsorption and such but could not capture or store enough for a 600 mi drive cycle.
We are compressing the CO2 significantly, and currently working with tank manufactures to find the right balance between pressure, volume, and weight of the tank (goal is to store ~1800 lb of CO2).
If you want to do math like this for a living we are hiring! :)
very true, but that's what a life cycle analysis is used for. Take all the emissions from manufacturing, use, and end of life. For this reason there are no zero emissions technologies (solar panels, electric car, cloth bags, even human waste produces significant GHG emissions).
We will support independent sustainability research on our solution's life cycle analysis to verify if we can be carbon negative, and if not what changes can we make to get there.
some great points! We agree why let the CO2 out into the atmosphere and then try to grab it, lets grab it right at the source.
Biofuels like corn to ethanol might take too much land area, but the potential to get biofuels from algae or poop (yes poop is a great biofuel) require no additional land area and are very efficient. A biofuel research study at U of Michigan showed a biofuel process that produces -1 g/ gallon burned GHG emission effect. We don't pretend to know exactly how to scale up biofuels but luckily there is a lot of research in progress on this!
The other thing we could potentially do is convert the CO2 directly back into a fuel, so the offload and fueling station is completely done at the same truck stop!
Lastly we also agree that our technology does not allow society to exist exactly as it is now, we will always support reducing energy consumption where possible and better land use to let nature sink tons of CO2.
potentially yes that could be a market we expand to. We want to capture all the engine exhaust CO2 we can! So maybe trains as well.
There are different exhaust compositions for the engines on these different vehicles, in part because they use slightly different fuels. So there will be some research and work to do before jumping into the next market, but we love developing technology that has never existed before, we are so excited!!
lithium AA batteries are recycled, a 2000 lb battery is significantly more payoff.