Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by secondbreakfast 1551 days ago
You should build this! This is one of those "all of the above" moments.
2 comments

Today we see a moment when popular interest, need, capital, and talent are converging on a willingness to to try new things with a path to success. Who knows how long the window will last. We must try to advance any path that has some chance of succeeding and has a technically/commercially viable path forward.
This is really well said. As a person who lived through the first dot-com boom, this feels a lot like the 90's. There are way more ideas than there are viable paths forward. But among these ideas, there's at least a handful of future giants.
It could be profitable if you sold carbon credits. The pH and water volume may be measured accurately on the way through, precisely identifying exactly how much CO2 is being sequestered.

I don't know how the carbon credit economy works. I would welcome enlightenment.

As I know there are some standards like https://www.goldstandard.org/ and https://verra.org/ . They audit the projects that claim to remove CO2 from the atmosphere worldwide and issue CO2 credits. These credits then can be sold to companies that want to offset their emissions. Usually OTC deals, sometimes involving brokers as well. There's also https://www.cblmarkets.net/ , which is one of the big marketplaces where such deals are happening.

I've heard deals with prices in the range of $0.5 to $5 per tonne CO2 equivalent. There's also a decentralized protocol that aims to move these credits onchain (https://toucan.earth/), their BCT (Base Carbon Tonne) token price is currently around $3.1.

As stated in the post, last year ~$1B worth of credits are sold. One McKinsey report expects it to be around $50B at 2030.

There are much more details of course, but these are the basics as I know.