Launch HN: AirMyne (YC W22) – Capturing CO2 from air at industrial scale
I want to be excited about this, but it's capturing CO2 as CO2 gas, not sequestering CO2 in a form that keeps it out of the atmosphere.<p>If you pay a lot of money in process and power to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere or out of exhaust gases and then use it in chemical processes other than ones which sink the carbon into long lasting solid, liquid, or oceanic absorption form you're just burning money and power to make yourself feel good, you aren't actually denting the global climate change problem because all that CO2 will just end up back in the atmosphere once it's been used in the industrial processes.<p>You also can't use storage of gaseous (or liquid) CO2 as a way to sequester climatically meaningful amounts of CO2. We've added around 600 billion tons of CO2 to that atmosphere since 2000. If we want to use sequestration to roll back the changes we've done to the atmosphere, we almost certainly need to sequester at least that much, if not more out of the atmosphere. Do a quick calculation on how big a set of storage tanks you need to hold that amount of gaseous or liquid CO2, and compare that volume to the volume of a mountain (or mountain range) near you. Then think about maintaining those tanks in perpetuity and you'll see why you have to get the CO2 stashed in solid or room temperature stable liquid form.<p>I'm by no means critical or dismissive of this tech, it sounds great, but we're still a long way from pulling off the sequestration that's actually needed at the scale that's needed.