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It’s really heartening, albeit surprising, to see carbon removal on the list. It's heartening because carbon removal has to happen. It's surprising because, unlike afforestation or biochar, which produce useful products, there is a very small market for CO2. There is in fact no market for CO2 separated using direct air capture (DAC) because it costs an order of magnitude more to separate CO2 (>$300/T) than its value on the market ($15/T). (Ironically, the biggest market for CO2 is for enhanced oil recovery, which is exactly what it sounds like: it allows more oil to be extracted from oil wells.) So, the real question is, who is going to pay for it? The companies currently operating in this space (e.g. Climeworks, Carbon Engineering) are doing so at a massive loss. In the case of Climeworks, they are pumping the CO2 to a greenhouse. On the face of it, this seems great because the CO2 is being used, but the problem is that the plants would remove the same amount of CO2 from the atmosphere whether they were grown with captured CO2 or not (they might just grow a bit faster in the greenhouse). In fact, the energy required for the carbon capture process means that the carbon footprint of the plants grown in the greenhouse using captured CO2 is likely higher than if they were grown outdoors! For direct air capture to be economically and environmentally sound, there has to be a second step in the process where the CO2 is converted into a marketable product (so that the product displaces emissions). This means something like converting CO2 to plastic or fuel that would otherwise be produced using petrochemicals. Carbon Engineering recently announced that they are pursuing this. Of course, in addition to the technical challenge, they’ll have to get those fuels to be cost-competitive with current fossil fuels. The other thing to keep in mind is that CO2 emissions from man-made sources total 60 GT per year. To put this into perspective, the amount of oil produced globally per year is about 5 GT. Which industries are big enough to handle all of that matter? What is YC’s angle here? Is YC also considering carbon utilization companies? I personally feel like pursuing standalone direct air capture companies is a bit like putting the cart before the horse. |