I love this. I started laughing when I read the description. I laughed because a Harvard physicist (funded by people like Bill Gates) had the same idea to use cooling towers for their DAC project in Carbon Engineering (linked in your post). But as you say, it is still expensive. They are bragging that their design took hundred of man years!

And then you two guys come in with the idea that in hindsight seems completely obvious, use all the cooling towers already out there! The most start up thing ever.

I used to be an engineer at an ammonia plant. Many of them already capture and sell CO2 from their process. So they have the infrastructure to compress and sell CO2 already on site. The plant I worked at was in Augusta, GA. Might be worth checking out ammonia plants as a growth market.

Huh, smart idea to piggyback off existing infrastructure. Have you contacted Stripe Climate? They are directing money from stripe businesses to fund carbon removal, and they just put out a call for new companies to contact them.

Believe I saw it within past 7-10 days on Patrick Collison’s twitter. Here’s the link. Has details and an application: https://mobile.twitter.com/orbuch/status/1359926307149148162

Btw for anyone with a business using stripe: stripe climate is now open for anyone worldwide. I set it up to contribute 1% of my revenues. And it should be deductible as a marketing expense: Stripe let’s you out it on your checkout, invoice and receipt. The founder of Nomadlist found it increased his conversions. Haven’t tested it personally but plausibly it’s actually profit generating.

Probably the most impactful climate decision you can make with your business, takes 30 seconds to set up, and may boost your revenue.

https://stripe.com/climate

If you're not injecting the CO2 underground in a stable form, how does this reverse climate change? It sounds like it's simply a cheaper option in some circumstances for sourcing CO2 from the air (compared to traditional solutions by Airgas). Not to take away from your efforts! I think this is a fine improvement to CO2 process needs if you can replace more expensive air extraction techniques, but it doesn't contribute to improving climate change without sequestering the harvested atmospheric CO2.

Quick math:

Density of air at sea level: 1225 g/m^3

C02: 0.0383% by volume (383 ppmv) corresponds to 0.0582% by weight.

Ergo, 1m^3 of air has 0.713 g of C02 in it.

Ergo pulling 1 metric ton (10^6 grams) of C02 per day requires processing AT LEAST : 10^6/ .713 = 1.4m m^3 of air per day or 16 m^3 of air per second!

(That would assume 100% capture)

I was skeptical that 1 cooling tower generates this much flow, but the example in [1] suggests 17*10^6 ft^3/minute, or roughly 8000 m^3/sec.

Thus, as long as your capture chemical has 2% efficiency, it seems reasonable.

[1] https://www.power-eng.com/emissions/cooling-tower-heat-trans...

[EDITED after I detected an error in my math]

The amazing observation for me is that evaporative cooling towers process A LOT OF AIR per second.

What about the energy balance? If your capture is exothermic you will warm up the cooling water and your client will not have enough cooling for their process. When you regenerate, do you need to add energy? How much CO2 is generated by the energy you need?. If you have to add heat to regenerate, how do you now cool the water back down to the temperature required by your client? Most industrial cooling systems use carbon steel pipes, shells and tubesand, although many heat exchangers will be stainless steel especially if they are plate type. Chemicals are added to prevent scale and to inhibit corrosion. You CO2 capture chemical needs to be comparable.

How do you prevent scale build up, corrosion, etc from the chemicals that you're introducing into the water? For the most part, these towers probably aren't designed to deal with sustained high concentrations of some of these chemicals. If you can solve that problem, then I think you'll make it. If you can't then this will be DOA if you have to replace a lot of the hardware every X years.

How does this compare to the most ancient carbon capture tech: Trees ?

I know this sounds boring, but a single $M would allow to plant as much trees and they will capture carbon from the atmosphere, without any maintenance, for decades.

How much CO2 are you actually pulling out of the air? I've read a bit about other carbon capture companies and Carbon Eng. is claiming 1M tons/year with the new facility they're building.

Using existing cooling towers to capture atmospheric CO2 seems like a much better idea than using energy to otherwise pump tonnes of air through a process. However, I can't help wonder whether it is better than capturing the exhaust emissions (primarily CO2 and H20) directly from the exhaust gasses, before they are released to the atmosphere.

Cooling tower "drift" is an air emissions PM2.5 permit matter in California. What is drift / carryover of the unsaturated and saturated material? Typically it happens associated with entrained water droplets; that's why e.g. salt water can't be used (among other reasons). More to the point, what fraction of the total capture energy are you eliminating? If you're changing evaporative efficiency in a forced-draft tower, you're incurring additional fan power or worse, increased fuel use in the process for which cooling is taking place. How do those balance against the fan power of a separate capture unit? But maybe the biggest matter: in other capture technologies, the heat of dissociation/regeneration and the compressor power to deliver to sequestration are very large. What change to the total energy budget are you proposing? When you're at scale, what fraction of total capture needed could be delivered this way?

Does putting CO2 in a bottle keep any CO2 out of the air for as long as a month? Removal times of hundreds of years are required for the capture process to contribute to climate.

I'm confused, isn't the price of co2 very low? I would guess the oil and gas industry have a lot of co2 to spare.

Have you tested this process and mixture?

Might be a dumb question, but: how can this be possibly cheaper than planting trees?

Have you heard about George Church's idea?

He says it's possible to modify the dna of cyanobacteria so that they become immune to their natural predator: the cyanophage.

Apparently cyanobacteria consume an incredible amount of CO2 every year, but then right away release it again after the cyanophage kills them.

Seems like a potentially workable idea, but I have not heard him give the details anywhere.

He is at MIT & so are some of you guys... go talk with him! Maybe it could be used inside your towers as a way to more efficiently capture the co2?

Thanks for doing what you all are doing btw. We desperately need a solution.

How do you plan on dealing with CO2 after the CO2 market is saturated? There's gotta be more CO2 that's capturable than people use for industrial processes and soda.

So, this link gives CO2 emitted into the atmosphere by humans in 2019 as weighing as 43.1 * 10^12 metric tonnes - 43.1 billion tons [1].

Now, the third of you links, describing your plant, talks about capturing one metric tone of CO2 per years. If you could scale this plant up to 1000 times in the capturing ability, you would then need one million of these plants scatter across the globe to capture a billion metric tonnes (about 2% of human emissions say).

I'm doubtful the commercial demand for CO2 would pay or that governments would be willing to pay for this (not to mention the need for energy).

Which is to say you seem describe atom sized drop in an ocean-sized bucket. Is any reason to think this could meaningfully "reverse climate change"?

[1] https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/climate-change/glo...

So if I understand this correctly you are adding this tech to existing cooling towers?

I don't see this answered on the page, but: what cooling towers do you have in mind? I don't have any statistics at hand, but my guess would be most cooling towers are coal power plants and other fossil fuel infrastructure. This seems problematic as you're creating an incentive to keep fossil fuel infrastructure.

Also industrial heat and heat in general is in itself something that needs to be decarbonized and one of the best options here is to re-use "waste heat". So ideally even if you have non-fossil processes with cooling towers you'll likely want to change that.

(Also from what I'm aware of carbon capture itself is something that needs a lot of heat and existing projects tend to want to use waste heat.)

What are the environmental effects of the chemical mix? How do you reclaim the chemicals from the cooling water?

We definitely need more innovation like this. Pressurized CO2 canisters may not be the most efficient (from a density standpoint) way to capture carbon, since you are capturing oxygen too and it's being stored as a gas, but hey, it's a start. We can iterate from there.

Thank you for working for our climate -- best of luck!

It seems you're after a more efficient method of collecting CO2, not a long-term storage method for CO2. I think the messaging may get muddled, people may believe you're attempting to lower atmospheric CO2, not just save some energy in CO2 production. To that end, how much CO2 would you actually be "preventing" from this action, and how does it compare to the top-ranked solutions needed on drawdown.org? When it comes to climate, I want the MOST EFFECTIVE solutions, and I don't know if this is low-hanging fruit relative to refrigeration management, diet, transportation, installing renewables, etc.

Hey Josh,

I'm a photographer working on a story about American innovation. I just shot you an email through the Noya website.

Hope to be in touch. Best Marco

Without asking you to reveal too much about your literal "secret sauce", do you already have an estimate for the price per liter of your "chemical carbon capture blend" ? Are we talking liters / tons to operate for a standard year ? Do you have specific IP / RD needed for the production ?

Good luck anyway !

How do cooling towers compare with clean rooms and datacenters, which both have huge ventilation mechanisms?

I guess it probably makes sense to focus on cooling towers first, as there are more of these ? That said, I think some datacenter providers (scaleway?) strive to reach carbon-neutrality.

There was (is?) Prometheus, YC W19 start-up with similar mission. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240

You may want to talk to the Infinite Cooling team out of MIT too. They do water reclamation on top of cooling towers to reduce water usage. Could be a nice channel partnership between you all! Happy to make the connect.

Just a very noob question here. When carbon is released into the atmosphere where and how does it disperse? Can we expect it to gradually concentrate in lower elevations or in certain geographical traps?

Have you thought about applying for the $100M XPRIZE? https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk

Have you considered raising funds for these projects on a platform like RaiseGreen? I know plenty of people who would love to invest, myself included, but can’t afford the investment alone.

How do you deal with the liability of potential damage to the cooling tower that you do not own (or damage to the down-stream processes that rely on the cooling if it were to fail)?

This sounds like a relatively neat idea to capture CO2 for resale, but I can't see this will have any meaningful impact on the global levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

serendipity is awesome, and imagine a conversation with dad triggering it! Double awesome!!

How large is the CO2 market relative to the amount of CO2 currently injected into the atmosphere?

I wonder what it would take to reduce the captured CO2 to elemental carbon.

Great story! All the best!

Surely if you aren't sequestering the CO2 somewhere, but instead releasing back again later, you are having a net negative effect, as your equipment has running costs (paid for with fossil fuels).

I love this. Good work, keep it up!

That's a wonderfull idea !

Great idea but I feel the key to making it a viable endeavour would be a Carbon tax that makes it worthwhile

Good luck with your venture. You may also partner with Tesla

https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk

Can I invest??

Congrats to the team! See you over at AirMiners :) http://airminers.org

I want to warn readers, and people not aware of high school physics.

Capturing CO2 is one thing, but doing anything with it later completely different.

Just capturing CO2 does not involve returning the energy debt of carbon-oxygen bond, but doing anything with it later does, and usually many times the electric energy gained from combustion.

In other words, making anything useful out of it will require you to expend many, many times more hydrocarbon energy than if you didn't, or just synthesized directly.

Anybody claiming the opposite have either never finished a high school, or is an utter fraud, and, unfortunately,the number of such has been skyrocketing recently, pampered by windfall of environmental grants, and investments signed off by equally ignorant, or corrupt people.