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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: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 30 2018, @05:54AM (2 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 30 2018, @05:54AM (#755516) Journal

    Those happened in 2014.
    If no progress was visible by today, either:
    - they were successful beyond their dreams (and the tech is used by NSA to crack encryption at Terahertz clock speed) or
    - there's nothing there, the technology failed to deliver the promises

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 30 2018, @05:23PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday October 30 2018, @05:23PM (#755715) Journal

    Those ITRS roadmaps that looked at stuff like Silicon-germanium, carbon nanotubes, etc. predicted that many of those technologies were 10-15 years from being realized. 4 years is fine. Tack on some extra time to account for people laughing at the idea of a return to "vacuum tubes".

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    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 30 2018, @09:33PM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 30 2018, @09:33PM (#755807) Journal

      So [xkcd.com], between 'we haven't finished inventing it yet' and 'It hasn't been conclusively proven it is impossible'.

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