Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale

198 pointsby markcyffka4 anni fa192 comments

Hi HN, we are Sudip and Mark, founders of AirMyne (https://www.airmyne.com, but there’s nothing there yet). We’re building an industrial-scale process/plant to capture and remove CO2 from air, so it can be piped to nearby sequestration facilities and injected underground—a process that requires less energy and capital equipment than other leading solutions.

Companies spent over $1B on CO2 offsets last year, sourced primarily from landowners and project aggregators claiming to protect forested lands. Over the past few years, interest in more permanent forms of CO2 removal have led to the pilot-scale commercialization of novel bio-oil/biochar/biomass, direct air capture, mineralization, and ocean processes, but these are not yet available with sufficient capacity to meet demand. There is no silver bullet, but we believe removing CO2 from air with an industrial chemical process offers the most realistic and scalable path forward.

Capturing and sequestering CO2 from air is a huge engineering challenge. The dilute concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (~400ppm) means a system operating at 100% capture efficiency would still need to process 2500 tons of air to capture just 1 ton of CO2. Significant energy is then required to release CO2 from the capture medium. On top of that, compressing and injecting CO2 underground requires controlling for gas leakages, dry ice blockages, and the corrosive conditions created when concentrated CO2 comes in contact with trace water vapor.

Our approach goes back to the fundamentals of acid/base chemistry. CO2 acts as an acid and will bind to a base, whether in the liquid phase or on a solid surface. We have developed a process to bring air in contact with a base substrate that captures CO2 molecules while letting N2 and O2 molecules pass through. After energy is applied, CO2 is desorbed from the substrate for downstream treatment and compression. This reversible process allows for a single stage “air in, CO2 out” system where 1 ton of substrate could capture >1000 tons of CO2 over its useful lifetime.

In the lab, we have demonstrated this approach at a gram-level scale and believe the process offers favorable energy use, planned capex/opex costs, and process complexity compared to existing solutions. (We’d love to show you a video but can’t do that yet—the chemistry & physical embodiment of the system are areas where we’re developing core IP and that process still involves some secrecy at this stage.)

As we scale this process, we are initiating discussions with other companies who can help us inject captured CO2 deep underground so it can be sequestered for geologic time scales. Sequestration technologies have improved their compression and injection processes over the years, and an emerging regulatory landscape is starting to take shape to accelerate the deployment of CO2 injection wells and mineralization projects in the US, the EU, and around the world. We intend to colocate our CO2 capture near injection facilities to minimize transport logistics.

Sudip and I both come from industry. At Honeywell, Sudip invented and scaled the low-global-warming refrigerant 1234yf used in automotive air conditioning systems, as well as a variety of products used to make displays, computer chips, sensors, solar modules, and electrical components. I invented formulations at BASF now widely used in the manufacture of silicon carbide power electronics for EVs, solar inverters, and other high power electric devices. We bring a systems engineering perspective to the C02/climate problem—our focus is not only developing, but also derisking and scaling industrial systems/processes into a business case suitable for large industrial stakeholders.

Eliminating existing emissions is the most urgent and important challenge we face to keep the climate habitable, but removing CO2 from the atmosphere will likely be needed too. Tackling this problem head-on opens up other fascinating possibilities. By focusing on the “extreme user” case of removing dilute CO2 from air, we might develop unique innovations or insights applicable to the point-source capture of more concentrated CO2 streams such as industrial flue gases. And just as natural gas (methane) was a commercially useless molecule until oil companies started capturing it and finding a use case, we believe that if CO2 can be captured from air and made useful, it could become the feedstock for an industry of similar scope and scale.

We are thrilled to launch as a YC W22 company - we couldn’t ask for a more forward-looking community of folks open to buying, supporting, or otherwise engaging with climate solutions like ours. Grateful for your time and happy to take your questions! We are at [email protected] if you want to reach out.

p.s. dang took out all our footnotes but if you want references for any of the above, please ask!

197 comments

yodon4 anni fa

I want to be excited about this, but it's capturing CO2 as CO2 gas, not sequestering CO2 in a form that keeps it out of the atmosphere.

If you pay a lot of money in process and power to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere or out of exhaust gases and then use it in chemical processes other than ones which sink the carbon into long lasting solid, liquid, or oceanic absorption form you're just burning money and power to make yourself feel good, you aren't actually denting the global climate change problem because all that CO2 will just end up back in the atmosphere once it's been used in the industrial processes.

You also can't use storage of gaseous (or liquid) CO2 as a way to sequester climatically meaningful amounts of CO2. We've added around 600 billion tons of CO2 to that atmosphere since 2000. If we want to use sequestration to roll back the changes we've done to the atmosphere, we almost certainly need to sequester at least that much, if not more out of the atmosphere. Do a quick calculation on how big a set of storage tanks you need to hold that amount of gaseous or liquid CO2, and compare that volume to the volume of a mountain (or mountain range) near you. Then think about maintaining those tanks in perpetuity and you'll see why you have to get the CO2 stashed in solid or room temperature stable liquid form.

I'm by no means critical or dismissive of this tech, it sounds great, but we're still a long way from pulling off the sequestration that's actually needed at the scale that's needed.

PaulHoule4 anni fa

Huge amounts of CO2 can be injected into Saline Aquifers

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015WR01...

Capturing CO2 from a power plant, biofuel factory, oil refinery, petrochemical plant or other point source and disposing of it underground is a developed technology. Very little of that is happening because the financial incentives aren't there and the financial incentives that do exist go to carbon sequestration schemes which are low-cost, low-quality and generally not measurable (pay us $ and we won't cut down these trees... for now, let's crush some rocks and apply sand to the beach and hope for the best, ...)

With aquifer injection you can measure the gas going in but there are also questions such as: how long does the CO2 stay there? do you have seismic problems?

This scheme is similar to aquifer injection but is more secure at the expense of requiring unusual rock formations and 25 tons of water for every ton of CO2 captured.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbfix

I think it gets way too much press but assuming energy is available you can build a direct air capture in a place where you have reactive rocks and water.