Airhive: Distributed Direct Air Capture

[Andrew Lockley]

https://airhive.earth/

Remove CO2 with your heat pump

Airhive’s direct air capture technology is placed next to your heat pump to remove CO2 from the passing air—helping you become climate neutral or meet your business’ net zero commitment 

For individuals

For organisations

Every heat pump can now do double duty in addressing climate change

Your heat pump is already reducing carbon emissions, now it can also remove carbon from the surrounding air

Our product sits next to your heat pump and removes CO2 from the air

The airflow created by your heat pump enables a natural, clean, and safe CO2 capture process. We come and collect the captured CO2. You sit back and safely remove tons of CO2 every year just by running your heat pump

[steve.rackley]

This is the second such "distributed" DAC venture I've seen with a "we come and collect the loaded sorbent" regeneration concept. I must say I'm hugely skeptical. 

Climeworks' basic unit is a 50 t/yr module with a roughly 5-hour cycle time (my understanding - please correct me if anyone has better data), so capturing 25-30 kgCO2/cycle. This unit is much smaller, let's be optimistic and assume 5 kgCO2/cycle. That means the "we collect periodically" is pretty much every day if a household can capture "tonnes per year". If removals are worth $200/tCO2 by the time this gets to scale, each sorbent pack would be collected, regenerated, and redistributed for $1 worth of CO2 (times whatever factor the LCA comes up with - which may include higher energy consumption on your heat pump fan!) It's hard to imagine a technician collecting more than 10 of these an hour, and (s)he will certainly not be on minimum wage!

Any optimists with a different view?

[Bruce Melton -- Austin, Texas]

Don't know what their angle is. Cheapo website, Whois is all redacted. Staff person Kasia Mikoluk is for real tho. Even if they could pick up the 25 pounds of CO2 that could fit in that unit every day, where is the infrastructure to do this? They have no physical location and are asking for waitlist from anyone in the world?

It's a fun concept though - My version of a personal sequestration machine (!): Load the unit up with calcium of some sort and out falls CaCO3 into a wheeled cart that one rolls to the curb every week with the recyclables. When the synlimestone is picked up, a Ca+ resource is left behind to replace what was depleted.

All (!) that is needed is a recyclables/garbage collection and landfilling system similar to what is provided by our local municipalities.

And all courtesy of your city government just costs $14.20 a month, just like garbage pickup, plus calcium, electricity, and water.

And yes, it would mess with AC/heat pump airflow dynamics. We really need that in Texas... So far, 24 of 26 days over 100 in July, 46 total this year. No end in site. Average 1900 to 1990 is 10.5 days per year, but the National Weather Service and all the local meteorologists say Austin's annual average number of 100-degree days is 29. Hmmm...

Check this out - Top billing, Truthout.org, a week ago Sunday Edition -

The National Weather Service Is Unwittingly Obscuring Reality of Global Warming
The National Weather Service’s 30-year averaging procedure not only masks warming, it understates it, too.
by Bruce Melton, Truthout July 17, 2022
https://truthout.org/articles/the-national-weather-service-is-unwittingly-obscuring-reality-of-global-warming/

B

Bruce Melton PE
Director, Climate Change Now Initiative, 501c3
President, Melton Engineering Services Austin
8103 Kirkham Drive
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[Jim Baird]

The Ocean’s Treasures and the Tech That Unlocks It.

Nicola Jones, 2018, Nature article The Information Factories projected data centers could be chewing about 20.9% of total electricity demand by 2030.

Since these centers produce copious amounts of heat that is detrimental to the electronics, between 2018 and 2019 Microsoft  successfully tested the reliability, practically and sustainably of under water data centers by placing a shipping-container-size unit about 36 meters below the seafloor off Scotland’s Orkney Islands.

What was overlooked by this experiment was the heat generated by these data centres is a microcosm of global warming, a source of energy that can be converted to work and can be readily shifted far deeper than 36 meters into the ocean.  

The devices that can do this on a global scale are scaled up iterations of the heat pipes used in personal computers, tablets, and phones. And just as the tiny heat pipes in our devices direct heat away from their CPUs, large heat pipes can shift surface into deep water, where it is no longer any kind of environmental threat. And in the process convert a portion of the heat into useful work.

Nicole Hemsoth says in her recent TheRegister article,  It takes an exascale supercomputer to drive carbon capture, “Here on Earth, we bury our problems and simulate our way out of them later.”

The problem is, we are looking at global warming as a problem rather than an opportunity. And as she points out carbon capture is nothing but an effort to bury the problem rather than capitalize it.

And the tech sector, rather than applying its own expertise to the problem, is complicit in this coverup.   

In Bill Gates book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, he grouped the sources of global emissions under five headings and identified the percentage CO₂ they contribute as: making things, 31%; power generation, 27%; growing things, 19%; travel, 16% and staying cool and warm, 7%.

To date we have focused on power generation, because it is the easiest of these to decarbonize, but all of them can be decarbonized by filling in the area behind a TG chevron with a green field powered by either hydrogen or electricity produced on the open ocean per the following graphics, which in Figure 1 shows a 1 gigawatt hydrogen plant and a 1 gigawatt greenfield in Figure 2.

These platforms harvest surface heat by passing millions of tonnes of water through their heat exchangers and besides producing power, growing things, proving transportation and heating and cooling, can be adapted to extract a portion of the 50 quadrillion tons of trace elements that are dissolved in solution per the following table.

Which shows a few of the vital resources available in the ocean, their terrestrial reserves and the multiples available in the ocean.   

To minimize the need for energy storage, it is better to use as much electricity as possible at the time of generation, which is what TG ocean derived electricity provides. As well as climate mitigation and the cheapest energy extant to service the information and communications sector, to say nothing of the rest of the planet.

Converting the heat of global warming to work solves the fossil fuel replacement problem.

Moving surface heat into deep water solves the global warming problem.

Both cool the ocean’s surface, which in turn solve a quarter of the atmospheric CO₂  emissions problem.

It is technically feasible to eliminate all the anthropogenically generated atmospheric CO₂ load in as little as 7 years. But this would cost $175 trillion  and lead to a rapid release of the heat and  CO₂ we have trapped we in the ocean. Which in the latter case is 60 times the atmospheric concentration.

Besides a system’s unavailability to do work, entropy is a measure of the molecular disorder, or randomness, of a system. So, in a system where you have 60 of something on one side of a boundary and 1 on the other. the 60 will tend to migrate into the singularity.  

The saying goes you can trap more flies with honey than with vinegar. With the analogy being costly CO₂ removal is a bitter pill to swallow, when you can instead be earning vast sums converting the problem into an opportunity.

The US supreme court recently ruled that imposing billions in compliance costs, raising retail electricity prices, requiring the retirement of dozens of coal plants, would eliminate tens of thousands of jobs.

Which is diametrically opposed to the truth and an anathema to true conservative orthodoxy.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/CarbonDioxideRemoval/b2701082-b89d-a598-cb27-2d9ea052357a%40earthlink.net.

[Dan Galpern]

Jim,

Presuming you are correct that "[t]he US supreme court recently ruled that imposing billions in compliance costs, raising retail electricity prices, requiring the retirement of dozens of coal plants, would eliminate tens of thousands of jobs." How is that "diametrically opposed to the truth and an anathema to true conservative orthodoxy"?

You must have inadvertently left something out of your argument here, or been writing ironically.

Dan

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/CarbonDioxideRemoval/085801d8a149%24fc6c9a50%24f545cef0%24%40gwmitigation.com.

[Jim Baird]

Dan, I believe that the cheapest energy available, that in turn mitigates every consequence of global warming and provides millions of jobs is TRUE conservative orthodoxy.  Rather than petroleum industry spin.

 

Jim

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/CarbonDioxideRemoval/CANNDMDpWoYX_TWuTNYtMa6SKx_0mWV27n3%3DqTP0UBv1Mj%2BjvsQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jim Baird]

I should have said fossil fuel industry, considering the Supreme Court ruling was with respect to coal, as I understand it.

 

Jim

 

From: carbondiox...@googlegroups.com On Behalf Of Dan Galpern

Sent: July 26, 2022 5:28 PM
To: Jim Baird <jim....@gwmitigation.com>

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/CarbonDioxideRemoval/CANNDMDpWoYX_TWuTNYtMa6SKx_0mWV27n3%3DqTP0UBv1Mj%2BjvsQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Robert Chris]

Jim

Maybe I am suffering from a case of being separated by a common language, but I am intrigued by what you mean by your one-liner below.  It seems to say that 'TRUE conservative orthodoxy' is the 'cheapest energy available'.  Can you join the dots for me so I can understand what this orthodoxy is, what it costs, whose selling it, whether there's a sufficient supply of it to drive the global economy, and how I can use it to power my heating and charge my mobile phone?

Regards

Robert Chris

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/CarbonDioxideRemoval/086f01d8a152%241d5d17a0%24581746e0%24%40gwmitigation.com.

[Dan Galpern]

Jim,

That is correct, but I might note here that the Supreme Court's June 30 decision, (see our West Virginia v EPA webinar archive here) was not necessarily the death knell for meaningful restrictions on the fossil fuel industry (or other major sources of GHG pollution) -- even if popular media accounts have implied as much. 

Specifically, the majority opinion determined that one specific provision (§111d) of one statute (the Clean Air Act) had not conveyed sufficient authority to the Environmental Protection Agency to have justified its 2015 Clean Power Plan (which sought to compel a shift in generation capacity from coal to renewables).

The Court also cautioned against novel agency interpretations of existing environmental (or other) law where one consequence is a major new disruption of one or more major industrial sectors (the major questions doctrine).

The West Virginia decision thus leaves open meaningful restrictions on GHG pollution from major sources under statutes that specifically require or authorize that to be done to preserve public health or  the environment. 

In the US, the federal Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) provides just that authority and specificity. It actually mandates that the Agency act, by rule (with public participation), where chemical substances or mixtures "present an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment." Authority in TSCA to impose restrictions -- to the point of prohibition -- extends to the production, use and disposal of such harmful substances. Indeed, EPA used this law to commence a phase out of CFCs in 1978, in part because of their global warming effect. 

TSCA can (and should) serve as the legal foundation for a decarbonization program (including phase out of continuing emissions and removal of legacy GHG pollution) since we have already manifestly overshot the safe level of atmospheric CO2 and other GHGs. 

To compel EPA to make that threshold determination -- that is, whether GHG emissions "present an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment" -- on June 16, I submitted our citizen's petition to EPA to Phase Out GHG Pollution to Restore a Stable and Healthy Climate. Individual petitioners include Dr. James Hansen and several other experts. 

Today, the Agency has just 49 more days to accept or reject the Petition (see countdown on that Petition page). 

The proper decision will kick-off a rulemaking, with full public participation required, wherein the agency can devise an adequate decarbonization program within reach of US law (including border tariffs on imports from jurisdictions without equivalently-stringent controls). 

As before, we invite every person on this list to Endorse that Petition and Sponsor our Campaign to get this done.

Dan

[Jim Baird]

Dan, I still believe the way to beat them is in the market place with cheaper energy.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/CarbonDioxideRemoval/CANNDMDrAN3hMtqqP1%2Biw5CN%2Bim-CX5Ep6m9-h9HB6Z32%2BOjx-w%40mail.gmail.com.

[David Hawkins]

A friendly reminder that no source of energy has a zero footprint.  Energy efficiency—meeting our needs with fewer joules — will minimize the planetary costs of energy use.  Like all options, it is not a silver bullet but it is the resource that delivers more, the more you use it.

Sent from my iPad

On Jul 27, 2022, at 11:20 AM, Jim Baird <jim....@gwmitigation.com> wrote:



Nicola Jones, 2018, Nature article The Information Factories projected data centers could be chewing about 20.9% of total electricity demand by 2030.

Since these centers produce copious amounts of heat that is detrimental to the electronics, between 2018 and 2019 Microsoft  successfully tested the reliability, practically and sustainably of under water data centers by placing a shipping-container-size unit about 36 meters below the seafloor off Scotland’s Orkney Islands.

What was overlooked by this experiment was the heat generated by these data centres is a microcosm of global warming, a source of energy that can be converted to work and can be readily shifted far deeper than 36 meters into the ocean.  

The devices that can do this on a global scale are scaled up iterations of the heat pipes used in personal computers, tablets, and phones. And just as the tiny heat pipes in our devices direct heat away from their CPUs, large heat pipes can shift surface into deep water, where it is no longer any kind of environmental threat. And in the process convert a portion of the heat into useful work.

Nicole Hemsoth says in her recent TheRegister article,  It takes an exascale supercomputer to drive carbon capture, “Here on Earth, we bury our problems and simulate our way out of them later.”

The problem is, we are looking at global warming as a problem rather than an opportunity. And as she points out carbon capture is nothing but an effort to bury the problem rather than capitalize it.

And the tech sector, rather than applying its own expertise to the problem, is complicit in this coverup.   

In Bill Gates book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, he grouped the sources of global emissions under five headings and identified the percentage CO₂ they contribute as: making things, 31%; power generation, 27%; growing things, 19%; travel, 16% and staying cool and warm, 7%.

To date we have focused on power generation, because it is the easiest of these to decarbonize, but all of them can be decarbonized by filling in the area behind a TG chevron with a green field powered by either hydrogen or electricity produced on the open ocean per the following graphics, which in Figure 1 shows a 1 gigawatt hydrogen plant and a 1 gigawatt greenfield in Figure 2.

These platforms harvest surface heat by passing millions of tonnes of water through their heat exchangers and besides producing power, growing things, proving transportation and heating and cooling, can be adapted to extract a portion of the 50 quadrillion tons of trace elements that are dissolved in solution per the following table.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/CarbonDioxideRemoval/08b401d8a1cc%246d7eb390%24487c1ab0%24%40gwmitigation.com.

[Jim Baird]

The problem is surface heat. Converting part to work and removing the balance to deep water eliminates the problem.