Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers
I'm Josh, one of the co-founders of Noya (https://noyalabs.com). Noya is designing a cheaper process to capture CO2 directly from the atmosphere. We do this by retrofitting industrial cooling towers owned and operated by other companies to perform carbon capture. We then sell the captured CO2 to companies that need it, and pay a piece of the proceeds to the companies that own the cooling towers.
As the wildfires in California became worse and worse, my co-founder (and roommate at the time) Daniel and I became increasingly concerned that we weren't doing enough to be a part of the solution. The more that climate catastrophes became the norm, the more we became obsessed with one seemingly-simple question:
If climate change is caused by having too much CO2 in the sky... can't we just reverse it by yanking CO2 out of the sky?
Humans have known how to scrub CO2 out of gas mixtures for almost a century [1]; but, we haven't been able to widely apply this type of tech to scrubbing CO2 from the air because of its high cost. For example, one popular direct air capture project is estimated to capture 1M tons of CO2/year [2], but has an estimated equipment cost of $700M and all-in costs of ~$1.1B [3]. The single largest component of this cost is in the piece of equipment called the air contactor — the big wall of fans you see in the image linked above — which clocks in at $212M by itself. Yet fundamentally, all that air contactors do is put air into contact with something that captures CO2, whether it's an aqueous capture solution or some sort of solid sorbent.
These costs felt astronomical to Daniel and I, so we set out with the singular focus to reduce the costs of carbon capture by reducing the costs of the air contactor. But no matter how we thought about it, we couldn’t get around the fact that to capture meaningful amounts of CO2, you need to move massive amounts of air since CO2 is very dilute in the atmosphere (0.04% by volume). Looking at the existing solutions, we began to understand why it makes sense to build something equally massive: so you can go after economies of scale.
As Daniel and I were feeling stuck late one night, he got a call from his dad. They started talking about the refrigeration facility Daniel’s dad runs in Venezuela (where Daniel's from), and they started talking about the cooling towers at the facility. Cooling towers move air and water into contact with each other to provide cooling to industrial processes (descriptive video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXaK8_F8dn0). As Daniel listened to his dad, Daniel realized that if we could just add the blend of CO2-absorbing chemicals we had been developing into the water his dad’s cooling tower used, we could use it as an air contactor and achieve CO2 capture at the same time the cooling tower was cooling its processes. This eliminates the need to build millions of dollars worth of dedicated equipment to pluck CO2 from the sky.
Our cooling-tower-based carbon capture process works as follows: we add our chemical carbon capture blend into a cooling tower's water, we connect the tower to some pieces of downstream processing equipment to regenerate the captured CO2, and then we pressurize the CO2 into cylinders for sale as "reclaimed CO2" to companies that need it. All of this is installed onto a cooling tower that another company already owns and operates. In exchange for letting us install this process on their towers, we will cover the cost of installation, and the companies will get a piece of the revenue generated through the sale of their CO2.
We’re well on our way towards making this process a reality. We’ve partnered with a local farm to install our process in their cooling towers, and we've just produced CO2 using our industrial-scale prototype.
We're excited for the opportuni...
168 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadHave you tested this process and mixture?
From conversations we've had with CO2 buyers, the price for CO2 ranges from between $150-5,000 / ton depending on things like how much is being bought, length of time committed in a contract, etc.
We have tested this mixture out with the industrial prototype in our office, yes! We've shown our cooling tower is able to capture CO2 from the air, and we are able to regenerate and pressurize that CO2 into cylinders.
Cooling towers typically run outside since they sometimes have water evaporating out the top of them, but even if cooling towers were inside, this would still be a great solution. CO2 concentrations indoors are sometimes even higher than the ones outdoors, which may allow for even higher carbon capture amounts than outdoor systems would.
And if they can extract it economically, governments or private actors can pay them to sequester some of the carbon instead.
So my brain immediately leapt to that when drafting the comment. But as the OP says same logic applies to any carbon use. If you can use co2 from the sky you don’t need to take it out of sequestration in the ground.
The use of CO2 that is sourced from the atmosphere is better from an environmental perspective than the use of CO2 sourced from offshoots of an ethanol plant. In the current supply chain, each ton of CO2 that goes into a product results in a new ton being introduced into the atmosphere + any emissions required to purify and move that ton from the point of production to the point of consumption.
With CO2 produced from the atmosphere, no new tons are introduced to the atmosphere in the production of that same product, and the energy (aka emissions) required to capture that ton from the atmosphere are low since the cooling tower is already operating, so we don't need to use additional energy to perform the capture.
Direct CO2 sales is a much faster way to start having an environmental impact via direct air capture than doing combined capture + sequestration. Most new carbon sequestration projects take years to permit and construct, and this path allows us to perfect the technology of capturing carbon from the sky while working on these sequestration projects in parallel.
We also intend to convert CO2 into other useful products down the line that result in more permanent sequestration - we have some team members with expertise in green chemistry and electrochemical CO2 reduction, and we're already starting to think about how to achieve these things at scale.
But, we have to break the reliance on that method of production for the CO2 industry to help push all of that along. If companies are still getting their CO2 as a waste product, it may make regulation or incentives for new tech harder in the future. Just like EV's are getting power from the grid which is, in some places, still heavily reliant on fossil fuels, switching to EV's is breaking the need for fossil fuels in the transportation itself. We need to do the same for the CO2 industry.
If CO2 is all just a byproduct (I.e. nobody is producing it just to sell it) then it would seem that whatever source of it consumes the least energy from fossil fuels is the best from an environmental standpoint right?
So I guess my question is how does your solution stack up to current recapture in that regard?
We're still working on finalizing our comparisons of our process to current CO2 production processes. From what I can tell currently, our process requires significantly less capex (<$1M) than installing CO2 production facilities onto an ethanol plant (>$100M quoted from a friend at a big gas supplier). Energy is a hard thing to compare apples-to-apples without accounting for all pieces of equipment in each process, but it does less moving parts than many ethanol plants require for CO2.
We are superior when it comes to transportation, however. Since cooling towers are scattered all throughout the country and even in urban areas, we can capture and distribute CO2 within the same city, cutting down transportation distances and associated CO2 emissions.
EDIT: just realized I forgot to include my sources!
[1]: https://scitechdaily.com/breakthrough-electrocatalyst-turns-...
[2]: https://www.energy.gov/articles/scientists-accidentally-turn...
I thought that most ethanol is made from fermentation of corn, sugar, or whatever, and the carbon in that process came from the atmosphere originally. So, environmentally whether you make CO2 as a byproduct of ethanol production from CO2-absorbing crops or you extract CO2 straight from the air, it seems essentially the same because in both cases the carbon came from the atmosphere originally. What am I missing?
The missing link here is in total embodied emissions that go into production of corn. There's data available to help piece together a comparison [1, 2], and I'd love to work through this and get back to you with what I find. At a high-level, CO2 production from corn isn't net-neutral because the production of a corn, and then ethanol from that corn, is a fairly carbon-intensive process in terms of the energy it requires. Our process doesn't require most of the transportation corn does, and since the cooling tower is already operating, we don't have to incur any additional costs to capture the CO2. Our main costs are in the energy required for regeneration, and depending on the facility we're at, we may even get that for free in the form of waste heat/steam.
If you want to send me an email at josh [at] noyalabs.com, we can talk more about this there!
[1]: https://www.attisbiofuels.com/by-products/carbon-dioxide
[2]: https://watermark.silverchair.com/55-7-593.pdf?token=AQECAHi...
It'll also be interesting to balance the use of that land for trees vs. solar/wind as well. We'll need to put a lot of land to use to generate electricity, and some of corn's space might be occupied by that instead.
There are some cool ways that people are working on to concentrate CO2 using membranes, metal organic frameworks, and other things - we'd love to someday incorporate something like this at the front end of our process!
Stripe has become a huge leader in the space with Stripe Climate: https://stripe.com/climate
Microsoft is investing $1B into their Climate Innovation Fund to help them remove all of their historic carbon emissions by 2050: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-b...
Shopify is contributing $5M annually to remove CO2 from the air: https://www.shopify.com/about/environment/sustainability-fun...
And there are many other examples of big corporations stepping up to undo some of the damage done to the planet.
In the public sector, the state of CA operates the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which has creating a marketplace for carbon credits (hovering at ~$200/ton now): https://ww3.arb.ca.gov/fuels/lcfs/credit/lrtweeklycreditrepo...
But yes, more is beneficial and will be helpful. We need as many shots on goal as possible!
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
Using the numbers we've calculated with our first partner plant, we're expecting to be able to capture 0.5-1 ton/day with their 25 ton cooling tower. This is a very small tower - for perspective, UCSF operates a 5,400 ton cooling tower to operate their small electricity co-generation plant, and cooling towers at larger power plants can be even bigger than that.
Let's assume though that all 2M cooling towers in the US are the same size as our small 25 ton cooling tower. This equates to an opportunity to capture 730M tons of CO2 / year using really tiny versions of existing US infrastructure.
Drawdown works in the opposite way. By reducing the concentration in a single area, the global concentration would work to equilibrate, so more CO2 would "fill the void", and if more drawdown keeps happening, than more CO2 will keep equilibrating and filling voids, and more capture will happen.
We need to remove somewhere between 100B-1T tons of CO2 from the air to get back to safe, non-planet-warming levels: https://nanransohoff.com/A-mental-model-for-combating-climat...
Good luck anyway !
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.
However, trees cannot get us all the way there. Trees are great for drawing down atmospheric carbon emissions in the short-term, but when trees decompose, they just release that carbon back into the atmosphere. Additionally, the landmass and water needed to sustain all these trees will require another solution to get all of the way to where we need to be with carbon removal.
And can't you just bury the dead trees?
I also don't understand what the equation is. Is it something like this:
If so, what is the order of term 1 and the order of term 2? It seems to me that at the end of the day only 1 of these terms will matter (or maybe it's a hybrid?)This is false and extremely deceptive. When trees die they don't just release all the CO2 they collected back into the atmosphere over the course of their lifetime. How much CO2 and pollution will your towers produce during its production, while it is being run (it must use some sort of electricity) and when it is eventually dismantled? I assume you, it will be a lot more pollution than anything that a tree would create.
Trees are the answer to CO2 capture. Period. End of sentence. It's cheaper and far more effective to plant trees and pay to stop deforestation than these ludicrous plans to supposedly capture CO2 from the atmosphere.
Dying trees and wildfire is especially problematic in Boreal forests in Alaska and Canada[3]. Managing Boreal forests as a carbon sinks is going to be difficult with climate change. In Canada million acre fires are normal as the species composition is susceptible to stand clearing fires and fire intensity can be high resulting in the ecosystem being an atmospheric carbon producing source. Conversely, Redwood forests even at maturity increase their capacity as carbon sinks and are highly resistant to catastrophic fire.[4] So, species composition, soil, and fire influence on whether or not decomposing trees are a carbon sink or source.
Building on the model presented earlier:
CarbonCaptureRateToStopGlobalWarming = growTreesPlantsAndBuryDeadOnes(...params) + newTech(...params)
Replace growTreesPlantsAndBuryDeadOnes with growing fire resistant species that sequester carbon in the soil/biomass at high rates. For example, Redwoods in coastal CA and Oregon.
[1] https://www.firescience.gov/projects/briefs/03-1-1-06_fsbrie... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00167... [3] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-10-3638-5_... [4] https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=26107
As jsantos511 said many times, we need more shots on goal!
If I want to go ahead, and plant trees, there's no way for me, as an individual, to claim a bit of that money.
I think that's an issue.
Proper sequestering, which I agree doesn't really exist yet, is to capture co2 back into the geosphere.
It just takes land.
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.
I have nothing but respect for what Carbon Engineering has done. In many ways, they opened people's eyes to what's possible when it comes to direct air carbon capture. The more people doing carbon capture, the better - we have 1T tons of CO2 to capture, and we need as many shots on goal as possible to get there!
That said, this is a really great idea, as heat pumps will be increasingly used for all sorts of temperature management. Cutting 10% off of costs by using somebody else's fans could be great, as long as hauling the CO2 filters off and replacing them is cheap.
That said, OP's idea does have merit. avernon, I think you hit the nail on the head with your comment downthread regarding the main concern being avoiding disruption to existing plant processes where this kind of tech might be installed - I would be worried specifically about how radically raising the pH of cooling process water would affect mineral deposition, for example, but then that in turn would surely depend on how a given plant had set up its cooling system to begin with.
Nevertheless, it seems very likely that this idea could in itself knock about $4/t off of the cost of CO2 relative to the CE estimate ($212M saved for their air contactor design amortized over 30Mt of CO2 captured during a CE plant lifetime) which in the best case is around 5% of the cost of the CO2 capture.
Plus many facilities have surplus low pressure steam you could use to regenerate your fluid.
After carbon capture happens in the cooling tower, we run the stream through a regeneration process to release the captured CO2 and to regenerate the starting carbon capture blend. The water is sent back through the tower, and round and round it goes.
Is there an energy input here?
The hope would be that you could build enough renewable energy capacity to power this process.
Removing emissions from smokestacks is critical to ensuring we can stop dumping waste into the sky, but we are at the point now where we need scalable, low-cost processes to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
So, we need to definitely do what you're suggesting and capture all emissions from as many smokestacks as possible until we've fully transitioned to a clean grid. And, we also need to begin pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.
I wish you guys luck though, hopefully you can carve out a niche market which will mean carbon capture technologies are ready when the time comes.
In the UN's most recent climate report [1], most of the pathways that are shown to avoid a 1.5°C global temperature rise involve both emissions reduction and carbon removal. Since the current technology portfolio is not anywhere near where it needs to be for any of their suggested pathways, we need new solutions (not just Noya's!) to be developed and scaled to give ourselves a shot of removing the amount of carbon required.
[1]: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-2/
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
Our chemist is leading these efforts, and she's got a ton of experience from getting her PhD/postdoc work at Yale's Center for Green Chemistry that is helping us properly vet these items out.
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.
Yes, I have the same question for Dr. Church. How does he plan to control their population? Maybe something like this:
https://news.mit.edu/2015/kill-switches-shut-down-engineered...
Doesn't matter what eats them, after digestion, the CO2 is back in the atmosphere.
If you actually want to do this, you can't just leave them in the wild, you have to breed them in massive quantity and bury them. Same as growing a tree and burying it.
I'll look more into this - this isn't a solution I'm familiar with. Thanks for sharing, and thanks for your kind words and dedication to solving this problem.
Would be awesome if you all just looked him up & went to talk with him.
He represents the "what bio can do" part of the equation. And bio does quite a lot already.
In the case this one isn't, the release of genetic modifications into the wild will be a debt our children have to pay, the way we are paying for our ancestors use of CO2.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2018.0000...
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.
One suggestion I'd make to the math above: the concentration of CO2 in the air is a bit higher, at 415ppm per Scripps UCSD: https://www.co2.earth/
The CO2 footprint per capita in the United States is 15 metric tons [1], so at 300M population, that's 4.5e9 metric tons of CO2 per year.
At 1 metric ton CO2 removed per day per tower, we would need 4.5e9/365 = 12.3M such cooling towers. Even if the efficiency increased 2 orders of magnitude it is still not enough, and I doubt there is a need for even 123,000 cooling towers.
None of this is to say that it shouldn't be pursued as a business opportunity to sell CO2 to commercial customers.
But realistically, given the scale of the CO2 problem, we still need to dramatically reduce the amount of CO2 we are emitting per capita as a primary measure, with any carbon capture as secondary.
1. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...
We have two levers for reversing climate change: the first is reducing emissions, and the second is remove carbon from the atmosphere. Most of the pathways in the most recent UN climate report incorporate some amount of carbon removal to maintain global temperature rise below 1.5°C [1].
Humans have been hard at work for a while on our first lever, and we need many shots on goal with the second lever to give ourselves a chance at success.
[1]: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-4/
Agreed, and best of luck with your efforts!
Which is why the primary way to deal with the CO2 problem isn't capture, but by reducing the amount emitted in the first place, via renewables + storage, more and better mass transit, EVs replacing ICEVs, heat pumps replacing furnaces, etc.
Compared to the CO2 reduction potential o
Do your cost and efficiency calculation include the opportunity cost of letting land sit "idle"?
Trees are great at capturing CO2 from the sky, but they suffer from an impermanence issue. Trees capture CO2 for the duration of their lifespan, but when they die, they decompose and release that captured CO2 back into the atmosphere. They also require dedicated use of large swaths of land to get to significant capture amounts.
More info can be found at section 3.2 of this report: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9f
Granted this still depends on the forest's life, but it is beyond an individual tree's lifecycle.
This startup is currently focused on improving the first step. You have to collect the CO2 before you can do something with it.
Re: liability, we accept responsibility for any damages made to the tower itself. If we break it, we buy it.
Re: downtime avoidance, we are doing our own internal testing to understand what types of materials (if any) are the riskiest with our process. Then, for any materials we may have found on a partner's cooling tower, we will replace them at the same time we install the process with a material that is going to be safer with our process while still meeting the original requirements that part may have had.
We've been in contact with a leading cooling tower manufacturer to explore potential partnerships, and we understand from them that the big risks we have to worry about do not happen overnight - we will be able to see them coming, and we can react accordingly.
Carbon capture for resale is only our first step — our "Tesla Roadster" if you will. It's the thing that gets us the capital to build the harder stuff. On a 10-year scale, our roadmap looks like this:
1. Capture CO2 for re-sale 2. Sequester CO2 using geologic storage and other techniques such as mineralization 3. Utilize CO2 via conversion to other useful products
Each step gets progressively harder, but has a progressively higher impact on reducing emissions than the one before. When we do our jobs well, we will have saturated the CO2 market with reclaimed CO2, developed multiple sequestration pathways and projects, and developed clean conversion pathways for CO2 utilization.
[1]: https://www.iea.org/reports/putting-co2-to-use [2]: https://cdrprimer.org/read/chapter-1#sec-1-4
In the medium- to long-term, we're aiming to develop geologic sequestration pathways that will begin to draw-down atmospheric CO2 levels. This version of our process is like our "Tesla Roadster" - the product that is meant to fund the future development of harder, but more impactful, products. In our case, CO2 re-sale will fund the development of permanent sequestration pathways, and it will actually enable us to get to a point where we are able to scale projects that are permanently removing carbon from the atmosphere.