Amazing point. We need more trees, and we have a lot of corn, so if we needed less corns, we could have more trees! Love it.
It'll also be interesting to balance the use of that land for trees vs. solar/wind as well. We'll need to put a lot of land to use to generate electricity, and some of corn's space might be occupied by that instead.
Carbon taxes will absolutely help in solving this problem, and we hope regulation gets enacted to help incentivize people to think and act differently when it comes to their carbon emissions.
I'll look more into this - this isn't a solution I'm familiar with. Thanks for sharing, and thanks for your kind words and dedication to solving this problem.
I hear you and agree - reducing emissions is a very important thing to do, followed immediately by stopping all unnecessary power wasting (like with the windows + heating problem).
In the UN's most recent climate report [1], most of the pathways that are shown to avoid a 1.5°C global temperature rise involve both emissions reduction and carbon removal. Since the current technology portfolio is not anywhere near where it needs to be for any of their suggested pathways, we need new solutions (not just Noya's!) to be developed and scaled to give ourselves a shot of removing the amount of carbon required.
This is a great way to put it - this is our MVP, or our "Tesla Roadster", and it will be used to get us to a more permanent, scalable process for carbon removal.
Great question - the carbon cycle definitely needs to be thought about in this scenario.
The missing link here is in total embodied emissions that go into production of corn. There's data available to help piece together a comparison [1, 2], and I'd love to work through this and get back to you with what I find. At a high-level, CO2 production from corn isn't net-neutral because the production of a corn, and then ethanol from that corn, is a fairly carbon-intensive process in terms of the energy it requires. Our process doesn't require most of the transportation corn does, and since the cooling tower is already operating, we don't have to incur any additional costs to capture the CO2. Our main costs are in the energy required for regeneration, and depending on the facility we're at, we may even get that for free in the form of waste heat/steam.
If you want to send me an email at josh [at] noyalabs.com, we can talk more about this there!
Absolutely right. Many carbon capture systems that are installed on top of smokestacks have much higher concentrations of CO2 than the air does (~300x higher concentrations in smokestacks). Henry's Law states that as partial pressure of a gas goes up, its solubility in a given liquid also goes up [1]. So, if you have a smokestack with a higher concentration of CO2 available than what you can get in air, it's going to be easier to capture the same amount of CO2 bc more CO2 will want to dissolve in the liquid that it's dissolving in.
There are some cool ways that people are working on to concentrate CO2 using membranes, metal organic frameworks, and other things - we'd love to someday incorporate something like this at the front end of our process!
Couldn't agree with you more - the less we emit, the less critical the need for carbon removal technologies becomes.
We have two levers for reversing climate change: the first is reducing emissions, and the second is remove carbon from the atmosphere. Most of the pathways in the most recent UN climate report incorporate some amount of carbon removal to maintain global temperature rise below 1.5°C [1].
Humans have been hard at work for a while on our first lever, and we need many shots on goal with the second lever to give ourselves a chance at success.
Amazingly well thought out analysis - thank you. Completely agree that we will need a lot of shots on goal and many operations pulling carbon out of the air to deal with the size of this problem.
Our first commercial plant is estimated to capture ~1 ton CO2 / day, and that is with a very small tower. If all 2M towers in the US were the same size as our smallest one, we could capture 730M tons of CO2 / year, but we know that is a conservative assumption because many cooling towers are larger than the one we're starting with.
For example, one of the larger plants we've talked to runs a cooling tower that can capture ~44,000 tons of CO2 / year. This plant is a small power generation plant attached to a university, but let's assume it represents the cooling towers of all power plants.
There are 23,000 power plants in the US. Assuming they all have a cooling tower capable of capturing 44,000 tons of CO2 / year and all the rest of the cooling towers in the US are of the small size I mentioned above, our annual capture amount grows to:
[23,000 power plant towers * 44,000 tons/tower] + [1.9 other towers * 365 tons/tower] = 1.7B tons of CO2 captured / year with cooling towers.
Our estimate will get closer to the truth as we continue to understand the range of cooling tower sizes available on the market.
It's worth saying: for humans to meaningfully reverse climate change, we need many groups of people taking many shots on goal for us to be successful. I believe Noya has a critical technology that will play an important role in solving this problem, and I'm excited to be joined by many other amazing founders with fantastic technologies in this adventure.
US CO2 consumption is ~64M tons / year, so 730M tons >> current US production. Next step for managing CO2 production is geologic sequestration to ensure we have something to do with all the CO2 we capture!
The energy balance is going to be critical, I agree!
We are still working on finalizing all the inputs for this process, including regeneration amounts, amount of heat added, etc. Based on our early modeling, it seems the amount of heat generated from the capture will be negligible since the amount of CO2 moving through our system is much smaller than the amount of water available to provide cooling.
Our chemicals have anti-scaling properties, and we're working to understand corrosion across many different material types to ensure we don't cause more problems than we're solving.
It'll also be interesting to balance the use of that land for trees vs. solar/wind as well. We'll need to put a lot of land to use to generate electricity, and some of corn's space might be occupied by that instead.