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
Related Stories
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531346/can-sucking-co2-out-of-the-atmosphere-really-work/
Discusses the scientific and economic feasibility of using methods to actively capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Also the article discusses the possibility that carbon dioxide harvested from the atmosphere can be sold on the market competitively, and thus engage the private economy in countering man-made climate change.
I wonder if a consequence of profitable harvesting of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere might be that it could lead us into an ice-age.
In November, the Paris Climate Agreement goes into effect to reduce global carbon emissions. To achieve the set targets, experts say capturing and storing carbon must be part of the solution. Several projects throughout the world are trying to make that happen. Now, a study on one of those endeavors, reported in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters, has found that within two years, carbon dioxide (CO2) injected into basalt transformed into solid rock.
Lab studies on basalt have shown that the rock, which formed from lava millions of years ago and is found throughout the world, can rapidly convert CO2 into stable carbonate minerals. This evidence suggests that if CO2 could be locked into this solid form, it would be stowed away for good, unable to escape into the atmosphere. But what happens in the lab doesn't always reflect what happens in the field. One field project in Iceland injected CO2 pre-dissolved in water into a basalt formation, where it was successfully stored. And starting in 2009, researchers with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Montana-based Big Sky Carbon Sequestration Partnership undertook a pilot project in eastern Washington to inject 1,000 tons of pressurized liquid CO2 into a basalt formation.
After drilling a well in the Columbia River Basalt formation and testing its properties, the team injected CO2 into it in 2013. Core samples were extracted from the well two years later, and Pete McGrail and colleagues confirmed that the CO2 had indeed converted into the carbonate mineral ankerite, as the lab experiments had predicted. And because basalts are widely found in North America and throughout the world, the researchers suggest that the formations could help permanently sequester carbon on a large scale.
Similar results were found in Iceland.
Does injecting CO2 into rock really make more sense than not putting it into the atmosphere in the first place?
Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
The startup accelerator Y Combinator is known for supporting audacious companies in its popular three-month boot camp.
There's never been anything quite like Nectome, though.
Next week, at YC's "demo days," Nectome's cofounder, Robert McIntyre, is going to describe his technology for exquisitely preserving brains in microscopic detail using a high-tech embalming process. Then the MIT graduate will make his business pitch. As it says on his website: "What if we told you we could back up your mind?"
So yeah. Nectome is a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company. Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere.
This story has a grisly twist, though. For Nectome's procedure to work, it's essential that the brain be fresh. The company says its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive (though under general anesthesia).
The company has consulted with lawyers familiar with California's two-year-old End of Life Option Act, which permits doctor-assisted suicide for terminal patients, and believes its service will be legal. The product is "100 percent fatal," says McIntyre. "That is why we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies."
Sucking carbon dioxide from air is cheaper than scientists thought
Siphoning carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere could be more than an expensive last-ditch strategy for averting climate catastrophe. A detailed economic analysis published on 7 June suggests that the geoengineering technology is inching closer to commercial viability.
The study, in Joule, was written by researchers at Carbon Engineering in Calgary, Canada, which has been operating a pilot CO2-extraction plant in British Columbia since 2015. That plant — based on a concept called direct air capture — provided the basis for the economic analysis, which includes cost estimates from commercial vendors of all of the major components. Depending on a variety of design options and economic assumptions, the cost of pulling a tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere ranges between US$94 and $232. The last comprehensive analysis of the technology, conducted by the American Physical Society in 2011, estimated that it would cost $600 per tonne.
Carbon Engineering says that it published the paper to advance discussions about the cost and potential of the technology. "We're really trying to commercialize direct air capture in a serious way, and to do that, you have to have everybody in the supply chain on board," says David Keith, acting chief scientist at Carbon Engineering and a climate physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A Process for Capturing CO2 from the Atmosphere (DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2018.05.006) (DX)
Direct Air Capture of CO2 with Chemicals (2011)
Y Combinator to set up China arm with former Baidu executive Qi Lu as chief
American start-up incubator Y Combinator is setting up shop in China, with a new unit to be led by former Baidu chief operating officer Qi Lu.
Sam Altman, Y Combinator's president, said in a company announcement Wednesday that China had been "an important missing piece of our puzzle" when it came to sourcing new start-ups to take under its wing.
"We think that a significant percentage of the largest technology companies that are founded in the next decade — companies at the scale of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook — will be based in the U.S. and China," Altman said. "YC's greatest strength is our founder community and with the launch of YC China we believe we have a special opportunity to include many more Chinese founders in our global community."
Google's back in China. Now it's time to do a search for entrepreneurs.
Also at CNN.
See also: Y Combinator invests in a build-your-own mac and cheese restaurant
Related: The Basic Income Experiment by Y Combinator Draws Nearer
A Startup is Pitching a Mind-Uploading Service That is "100 Percent Fatal"
This Lab-Made Mineral Just Became a Key Candidate For Reducing CO2 in The Atmosphere
Scientists just worked out a way of rapidly producing a mineral capable of storing carbon dioxide (CO2) - giving us a potentially exciting option for dealing with our increasingly overcooked planet. Magnesite, which is a type of magnesium carbonate, forms when magnesium combines with carbonic acid - CO2 dissolved in water. If we can produce this mineral at a massive scale, it could safely store large amounts of carbon dioxide we simply don't need in our planet's atmosphere.
[...] Being able to make the mineral in the lab could be a major step forward in terms of how effective carbon sequestration might eventually be. "Using microspheres means that we were able to speed up magnesite formation by orders of magnitude," says [Ian] Power. "This process takes place at room temperature, meaning that magnesite production is extremely energy efficient."
[...] With a tonne of naturally-occurring magnesite able to capture around half a tonne of CO2, we're going to need a lot of magnesite, and somewhere to put it all as well. As with other carbon capture processes, it's not yet clear whether this will successfully scale up as much as it needs to. That said, these new discoveries mean lab-made magnesite could one day be helpful – it puts the mineral on the table as an option for further investigation.
Related: Negative Emission Strategy: Active Carbon Capture
Carbon Capture From Air Closer to Commercial Viability
NASA will pay you up to $750,000 to come up with a way to turn CO2 into other molecules on Mars
Missions to Mars will need to be as lean as possible, meaning that using any available resources on the Red Planet will be of utmost importance. With that in mind, NASA just announced the CO2 Conversion Challenge, which asks teams of scientists and inventors to come up with a way to turn CO2 into molecules that can be used to produce all manner of things. And there's big prize money on the line.
To start, NASA is asking teams to focus on converting CO2 to Glucose, but the language of the challenge suggests you can approach that goal from any angle you wish.
[...] Teams or individuals who want to participate will need to register by January 24, 2019, and then officially apply by February 28. Experts will review each plan and award up to $250,000 spread across up to five individuals or teams.
The next phase of the competition is still a bit light on details. NASA says it'll announce the rules and criteria once Phase 1 is complete, but the administration has revealed that it's ready to award up to $750,000 to the individual, team, or teams that can demonstrate that their system(s) work as intended and could be used by astronauts on Mars.
"Future planetary habitats on Mars will require a high degree of self-sufficiency," NASA explains. "This requires a concerted effort to both effectively recycle supplies brought from Earth and use local resources such as CO2, water and regolith to manufacture mission-relevant products. Human life support and habitation systems will treat wastewater to make drinking water, recover oxygen from CO2, convert solid wastes to useable products, grow food, and specially design equipment and packaging to allow reuse in alternate forms."
Would flooding the deserts help stop global warming?
Imagine flooding a desert half the size of the Sahara. Using 238 trillion gallons of desalinated ocean water to do the job. Creating millions of 1-acre-square micro-reservoirs to grow enough algae to gobble up all of Earth's climate-changing carbon dioxide. For an encore: How about spreading the water and fertilizer (the dead algae) to grow a vast new forest of oxygen-producing trees? A Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Y Combinator, unveiled the radical desert flooding plan as one of four "moonshot" scenarios that it hopes innovators will explore as potential remedies to catastrophic global warming. But would it work? And should it even be tried?
With unlimited capital and political will — both far from given — experts said the scheme would stand a chance of reducing dangerous greenhouse gas levels. But while they generally believe the climate crisis has become severe enough to push even extreme options onto the table, the experts cautioned against interventions that might create as many problems as they solve. "We do not want to have this be purely profit driven," said Greg Rau, a University of California, Santa Cruz climate scientist and part of the team that helped Y Combinator craft the request for proposals. "We are trying to benefit the planet, not just make money. So we need this kind of research and development first, but then oversight and governance over how any of this is deployed."
Climate Change: 'Magic Bullet' Carbon Solution Takes Big Step:
A technology that removes carbon dioxide from the air has received significant backing from major fossil fuel companies.
British Columbia-based Carbon Engineering has shown that it can extract CO2 in a cost-effective way.
It has now been boosted by $68m in new investment from Chevron, Occidental and coal giant BHP.
[...]CO2 is a powerful warming gas but there's not a lot of it in the atmosphere - for every million molecules of air, there are 410 of CO2.
While the CO2 is helping to drive temperatures up around the world, the comparatively low concentrations make it difficult to design efficient machines to remove the gas.
Carbon Engineering's process is all about sucking in air and exposing it to a chemical solution that concentrates the CO2. Further refinements mean the gas can be purified into a form that can be stored or utilised as a liquid fuel.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Megahard on Monday October 29 2018, @03:59PM
https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/about/contact-slac/ [stanford.edu]
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @04:03PM
I suspect the only "profitable" way to run such a "startup" would be to get some government to force taxpayers to fund it.
The only thing here that is man-made is the hysteria.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @04:07PM (12 children)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Some territory, yes. All this territory? Naaah.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @11:04PM
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)
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...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday October 29 2018, @06:45PM
Yeah, there seems to be a real edge to believing our entire first world is just straight banking on cost-efficient commercial fusion to bail us out and planning everything like its a certainty.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 29 2018, @10:45PM (4 children)
Make diamonds of it, then. Like zillion of tons of it, drive those beer drinkers out of business (grin)
Incidentally, I hear diamond makes a good material for space-hardened transistors [zdnet.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 30 2018, @05:37AM (3 children)
I'm still waiting on these:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/06/nasa-melds-vacuum-tube-tech-with-silicon-to-fill-the-terahertz-gap/ [arstechnica.com]
https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/introducing-the-vacuum-transistor-a-device-made-of-nothing [ieee.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 30 2018, @05:54AM (2 children)
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 30 2018, @05:23PM (1 child)
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".
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 30 2018, @09:33PM
So [xkcd.com], between 'we haven't finished inventing it yet' and 'It hasn't been conclusively proven it is impossible'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday October 29 2018, @04:09PM (10 children)
I have a system for completely organic and sustainable solar-powered carbon sequestration, available at an extremely low cost of under $0.10 per unit. They can be installed in a wide variety of locations all around the globe. This system is already in use across vast swaths of the US, Canada, Europe, and numerous other regions worldwide, too, so it's very proven technology.
OK, OK, I'm talking about trees.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Monday October 29 2018, @04:18PM (5 children)
Trees can die or catch fire and release that CO2 back into the air.
I do wonder about large scale tree farms where the trees are harvested and then buried in a deep, sealed pit.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday October 29 2018, @04:31PM (1 child)
Just what I was thinking. Growing plants is the easy part. Happens naturally all the time. The problem is stopping the vegetation from returning all that carbon to the air when it burns or rots.
As to dumping dead vegetation into the ground (perhaps coal mines would be appropriate?) the energy and effort needed to gather, transport and store the vegetation is the big hurdle. Really that sort of thing should be a last resort. I understand swamps and bogs are great at sequestering carbon. But maybe we're already past the point where natural sinks can handle it and we should employ active measures such as burying trees.
Wonder how much could be saved by cutting back on the lawn mowing? Let people let their yards grow lots more between mowings.
(Score: 1) by Michael on Monday October 29 2018, @08:24PM
Burning off the hydrogen-rich volatiles to leave charcoal would give you a bury-able substance which doesn't decay for centuries. It's also a phenomenal soil amendment for holding water and nutrients, which is likely to give extra carbon capture by increasing biomass in/on soil. Even in a relatively small and poorly insulated system, wood produces more combustable volatiles than are required to heat it to charcoal forming temperature. (A coffee can plastered with perlite and a wood gas burner directed back
Could probably sell charcoal packaged for gardeners and farmers. Make it out of wood, twigs, straw, husks, hulls, shells, cobs, chaff, pretty much anything dry and brownish.
Far as lawn mowing, seems like the carbon content should havea bit more than linear relationship to length. Older stalks get more woody, especially just before seeds form. Let it get that long and you'd create opportunity for extra wildlife, which probably should count towards the carbon content of an area.
(Score: 2) by captain_nifty on Monday October 29 2018, @06:16PM (1 child)
You missed a couple steps, Profit, being the most important.
1. Grow Trees
2. Make stuff out of trees
3. Sell wood Products
3a. Profit!
4. Collect old used goods and charge the customer for disposal
4a. Profit!
5. Bury wood deep underground
Semi serious question: Do landfills generate Carbon Credits?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @07:09PM
You forgot 5a,b,c; bribe legislators and get paid for burying wood too.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Monday October 29 2018, @07:12PM
Here's two solutions you haven't considered:
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Monday October 29 2018, @05:37PM (3 children)
Unfortunately when government gets involved that $0.10 tree is going to several thousand per tree, or at least this is the case for my local municipality.
1. You need to find a proposed location for the tree
2. You need to have a locator go out and make sure there are no ground wires or pipes that are going to be in the way as the tree grows
3. Pay a horticulturalist to assess the type of trees that are best suited for this area
4. Have a union crew come out and dig the hole and plant the tree
5. Long-term maintenance of the tree
6. Insurance so that if it dies randomly the company that sold you the tree has to provide another.
I wish I were kidding
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday October 29 2018, @06:34PM (2 children)
If what you say accurately reflects the norm, then it's probably a rare case where deregulation actually makes a lot of sense. There should still be environmental protections if it's an existing natural habitat, but on brownfield any trees are better than no trees with the exception of some of the more invasive non-native species.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Monday October 29 2018, @07:03PM (1 child)
I actually don't think this is a case where deregulation helps, and this is not the process for everyone who might want to install a tree, just if the muni tries to do it. Sorry for lack of clarity.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday October 29 2018, @08:12PM
Apology accepted :)
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @04:35PM (3 children)
"Troll"? Repost!
I suspect the only "profitable" way to run such a "startup" would be to get some government to force taxpayers to fund it.
The only thing here that is man-made is the hysteria.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @05:35PM (2 children)
That is the idea. Create a "perceived" problem and then "solve" it, getting paid both times.
There was a cruise ship, the Costa Concordia, which sank and the cost of recovery kept increasing. It became more than the cost to build the ship. You have to congratulate them at their genius. Getting paid to solve a problem in the most expensive way possible.
The carbon problem is only a "perceived problem" which does not exist in reality. Carbon dioxide is taken up by plants and without CO2, there would be no plants and we would all die as a result.
(Score: 4, Touché) by urza9814 on Monday October 29 2018, @07:10PM (1 child)
The drowning problem is only a "perceived problem" which does not exist in reality. Water is taken up by plants and animals and without water we would all die as a result.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @09:24PM
The 'Murrican exit from climate change treaties (teaties? hah!) also has something to do with solving the problem. A perceived problem is created by 'Murrican industries carbon-dioxiding the air and another sister company begins the cleanup process. Both get paid.
Create the problem.
Solve the said problem.
Get paid.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @06:51PM
"Comment Below Threshold"? I didn't write that!... Repost!
I suspect the only "profitable" way to run such a "startup" would be to get some government to force taxpayers to fund it.
The only thing here that is man-made is the hysteria.