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posted by chromas on Monday October 29 2018, @03:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-mean-besides-trees? dept.

Silicon Valley's largest accelerator is looking for carbon-sucking technologies — including one that could become 'the largest infrastructure project ever'

Earlier this week, Y Combinator, which has backed companies like Airbnb and Reddit, put out a request for startups working on technology that can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

"It's time to invest and avidly pursue a new wave of technological solutions to this problem — including those that are risky, unproven, even unlikely to work," Y Combinator's website says.

Y Combinator is looking for startups working on four approaches that they acknowledge "straddle the border between very difficult to science fiction" — genetically engineering phytoplankton to turn CO2 into a storage-ready form of carbon, speeding up a natural process in which rocks react with CO2, creating cell-free enzymes that can process carbon, and flooding Earth's deserts to create oases.

Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, acknowledged that these ideas are "moonshots," but said that he wants to take an expansive approach to the issue.

Related: Negative Emission Strategy: Active Carbon Capture
Storing Carbon Dioxide Underground by Turning It Into Rock
A Startup is Pitching a Mind-Uploading Service That is "100 Percent Fatal"
Carbon Capture From Air Closer to Commercial Viability
Y Combinator Spreads to China
Lab-Made Magnesite could be Used for CO2 Capture
NASA Announces CO2 Conversion Challenge, With Up to $750k Awards


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @04:07PM (12 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @04:07PM (#755159)

    After they collect the carbon, they can sell it as fuel.

    The economics of this is a joke. First of all you have a Tragedy of the Commons. Cleaning up the commons is a thankless task. Who will be taxed or otherwise forced to fund this boondoggle? Second of all you have an energy problem. You're essentially saying that you disagree with thermodynamics. Third of all you have all sorts of resource inputs needed to make this work, and the prices of those resources will spike if you try to treat the whole damn atmosphere of the entire planet.

    Hey, I have an idea. Start with some small practice problems. Stop hurricanes. Terraform Mars and Venus.

  • (Score: 2) by Snow on Monday October 29 2018, @04:15PM (4 children)

    by Snow (1601) on Monday October 29 2018, @04:15PM (#755163) Journal

    What a shortsighted view.

    It looks like initial funding is done by private investors. If there are successes and they require additional funding to scale up, then that could and should be funded by taxing carbon emissions.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @05:12PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @05:12PM (#755204)

      You know how you figure out what society needs or wants, what the requisite resources should cost, who should be paying for it all, and how complex flows of resources should be sustained in the long run (even without people realizing that they're working together)? Capitalism.

      The problem here is a lack of property rights. That's what you're actually concerned about: Externalities; the Tragedy of the Commons. What we need is better defined ownership, not additional arbitrary-and-capricious command-and-control by a well-armed group of jackboots (hey, I thought monopolies are supposed to be a bad idea, especially monopolies who gain power through do-as-I-say coercion rather than do-as-we-previously-agreed cooperation).

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @08:16PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @08:16PM (#755328)

        Yes, yes, and this is why we need to kill all men and move forward with that angelic contract system thingie. I thought we'd covered all this territory before.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @10:34PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @10:34PM (#755388)

          Some territory, yes. All this territory? Naaah.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @11:04PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @11:04PM (#755403)

            Well, what else is left to explore? Dazzle me with your superior intellect!

  • (Score: 2) by Virindi on Monday October 29 2018, @04:27PM (6 children)

    by Virindi (3484) on Monday October 29 2018, @04:27PM (#755171)

    Capturing carbon and selling it as fuel would be great...if you had some enormous energy supply to do it. Obviously putting fuel molecules "back together" would take more energy than was originally produced by burning them. The real problem is not thermodynamics but efficiency. Unless a very high efficiency method is found/used to do this, we are talking about a very lossy system.

    It may be that 'inefficient' fuels (assuming a world where the cost of hydrocarbons include removing the carbon from the atmosphere) are still preferable for some uses because of their energy density (for instance, for aircraft) but if governments subsidize a reconversion process, then the market cannot properly choose the most efficient fuel type for an application. Instead, the scale will be tilted towards hydrocarbon fuels.

    This is kinda the problem with all 'carbon credit' systems implemented up to this point: credits are doled out based on some political formula, rather than designing the system to enforce a closed loop of atmospheric carbon. That is, rather than everyone pay the real cleanup cost for their pollution, those with favor pay little and everyone else overpays.

    In a proper system, the price of every gallon of fuel sold would include the market price of cleaning up after it. It is easy to see how under this type of credit system, removing carbon from the air and reselling it as fuel becomes a much less attractive business model compared to mere sequestration. Which should be the case since reselling the resulting products as fuel guarantees they will need to be cleaned up again...