Okay, that is a very basic failure of engineering/imagination. I’m not saying shame is in order here, but several someone’s should be made to feel uncomfortable over this cock-up. Including the hiring manager because they went for kids instead of people with experience.
Why on earth would you assume you could move corn residues with air? Have you seen a corn field before? Have you touched corn? This is the other problem of moving engineering far away from the problem. SF only sees so many refugees from Iowa and Illinois. Most of those go to Chicago or Seattle.
> But with some deeper searching, we found a great, off-the-shelf belt that would arrive quickly.
Arrive quickly because the locals have been solving this exact problem for a hundred years. When you find an off the shelf solution for your problem, that’s when a good engineer or software developer takes umbrage and considers whether they have a bad, bad case of NIH.
Ageism and cultishness are how you end up with simple oversights that anyone who has been around the block a few times would either prevent, or at least have enough self consciousness not to breathlessly talk about it in front of strangers.
I think what we miss consistently about the VC model is that we make the 10:1 ratio about chance and betting big, but I suspect the dominant force there is that 4 times out of 5, experience will save you from doing something expensively stupid. However once in a while it’s a clever generalist or someone who “doesn’t know any better” that uncovers a major advancement that the experienced people are blind to. So less than half of those failures are not thinking outside of the box, and most of the rest are not even knowing there was a box to begin with.
We tend to see this as an either or scenario. Throw a bunch of kids together or hire a bunch of cranky old men and women who say no all the time. That’s a false dichotomy. Hire some of both, don’t let the older ones steal all of the glory.
From what the article describes later on, it appears the air pressure was actually generated by the tub grinder itself, not by any additional device.
So the appeal of the original design might have been that no active conveyance solutions was needed at all: Because the grinder's air exhaust stream - which you get "for free" - already provides enough pressure to move the material up the pipe, as long as the material is light enough.
That lets you greatly simplify the design, because now you can connect the grinder and the mill with a simple pipe and be done.
For me it makes sense that they used the simplest possible solution that worked for their previous use cases. When trying to use their system with corn, they probably wanted to give their previous approach a try, before taking the time and effort of modifying the system.
Edit: Got it wrong, both grinder and mill were creating the pressure. But the basic point is still correct I think. The choice was not air vs belt, it was "use the airflow that's there anyway" vs "build some active transport in addition to airflow".
At present, I think direct air capture of CO2 followed by reduction to methane and longer hydrocarbons using water-sourced H2 (all without going through the biological photosynthesis) is going to be the long-term winning technology. One main reason is control of the chemistry is a lot easier when you start with uniform small molecules (CO2 and H2) rather than trying to distill off and separate the products of pyrolysis of biomaterials (or even of crude fossil oil distillation and cracking, a similar process).
This isn't to say that if you have a completely renewable energy based power system, that converting agricultural byproducts to useful materials like biomethane, biooil and fertilizer (phosphorous recovery in particular) isn't going to be a plausible approach in specific situations, and the resulting products could have niche markets.
Now, if your goal is to remove CO2 permanently from the atmosphere, that's more difficult. Making materials like limestone (CaCO3) or perhaps carbon fiber is a better idea for that. Bricks of diamond would be even better, but that's a bit more sci-fi still - but possible. Air-captured diamonds would be a cool product.
Pump oxygen and whatever bottleneck nutrient in and harvest algae. You’ll clean the excess nutrients out of the water and sink carbon at same time.
Do this in the Mississippi River delta for maximum effect, do a pilot in a Minnesota lake first.
I guess the trouble was only what to do with the algae. They expected it leave the lake, bringing the excess nutrients with it. How would you harvest it?
Wolffia is the fastest growing plant on the planet and can double in size in a day. It's small, so it would work well as fuel for biomass reactors, the carbon char would be mostly derived from atmospheric carbon, resulting in a net negative, you can grow fish in the water underneath it, and it itself is edible and eaten already in many parts of the world where it grows naturally.
Further, it likes the slightly acidic water that bubbling CO2 into the water would create and it specifically oxygenates the water it floats in by stripping oxygen from CO2 during photosynthesis.
The downside is that no one has figured out the full process for continuously farming Wolffia yet, but if you solve that you can solve many other problems and create a multiple stream of income business out of taking carbon out of the air. (Biomass reactor fuel, plant food source for humans and animals, fish food source & selling carbon credits)
I don’t think you would ever get approval for something like this in a public lake. Maybe in some private, artificial pond?
The upper bound on capture is pretty good! Almost 70% of yearly CO2 emissions.
> Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggests a potential range of negative emissions from BECCS of 0 to 22 gigatonnes per year [1]
> Human activities emit over 30 billion tons of CO2 (9 billion tons of fossil carbon) per year [2]
1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_captur...
My main concern is about whether you're sealing all the plant nutrients deep underground too, or are they separated out at some stage?
As a world, we're going to need to put all those nutrients back into the soil to be able to keep growing stuff. Particularly phosphorous has limited mineable stocks.
Are there companies buying bio-oil yet? If I understand correctly, I like that you’re plugging into a larger system and applying engineering to make a piece of it more efficient. It’s always easier to get bigger than it is to get smaller!
Presumably it takes some amount of energy currently to run this process, so the "cost" of the carbon removal is energy usage currently. Would a BECCS process remove the need to use external energy altogether?
Is this even close to being financially viable if there is never any such thing as carbon credits?
Put another way, are the people funding projects like this assuming there will be some kind of carbon credit system in place that will pay absurdly high prices to sequester carbon?
Additionally, I suppose you will be compensating farmers for their corn stalk bales, but you can’t take something OUT of a field long term without replacing. Those bales contain more than just carbon and the farmers will eventually have to amend the soil to compensate.
Which, if we are then living in your sky-high carbon credit world, fertilizer (and everything else) pry got MUCH more expensive.
You're right as far as your comment goes — it will probably never be financially viable to scale this up, and the companies funding the limited scale development are doing it purely for public relations purposes.
What your comment misses, though, is that to survive the coming century, we are going to have to figure out, as a society, how to do things that are not financially viable. Financial viability is what got us into this mess in the first place.
There's a quote attributed to Einstein that says, "We cannot solve today's problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." The quote is disputed, but probably comes from a paraphrase of something he actually said in 1946 in the context of the threat of nuclear warfare. It applies more generally to the multiple self-created existential threats humanity is currently facing, however.
I don't disagree with you, but if we go that route I have a pretty good idea what that will look like:
1. Wealthy people invest in carbon capture schemes like this.
2. Once there is sufficient wealth invested in #1, they've essentially created a solution looking for a market.
3. What does this mean? It is time to market the shit out of whatever existential problem your solution claims to solve. Market with fear, make solving this "problem" part of the national agenda. Get the hysteria to the point of: "We need to solve this AT ANY COST!" Oppose the approved messaging and you're an idiot, luddite or terrible person.
4. Combine the political will you are creating in #3 with aggressive lobbying for credit programs that make life more expensive for regular people and don't really accomplish anything. Conveniently, the new programs make the group in #1 even more wealthy.
Voluntary purchases like Frontier: https://frontierclimate.com/ and many other corporate buyers.
Regulatory cap-and-trade markets like CA ARB LCFS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-carbon_fuel_standard
> Every ton of biomass contains roughly 1.65 tons CO₂.
On it's surface this is impossible. Does this refer to CO₂ equivalents like Methane? It seems that for carbon specifically, the process (pyrolysis, transportation, etc) emits more than one ton of carbon for every ton of oil sequestered.
Oxygen is a good bit heavier than carbon, to the point that about 80% of the mass of CO₂ is oxygen. Since burning fuel is generally about combining carbon and hydrogen in the fuel with atmospheric O₂, producing CO₂ and H₂O respectively, you can get numbers like these even before accounting for high-impact gases like methane.
Edit: and of course photosynthesis is essentially the same process in reverse, taking in CO₂ and energy, adding water for the hydrogen and removing some oxygen (that gets vented to the atmosphere) to get energy-rich biomass.
There is a small vent that you have to open at the front of the trailer BEFORE you raise it to dump out the contents.
Failure to do so leads to a vacuum effect that can implode the trailer as the biomass pours out
Source: friend of mine worked in the paper industry and this was a somewhat regular occurence
Ugh! Yes. One one machine I worked on, this was one of our major issues. We had a subsystem whose job it was to get small plastic containers out of a bulk hopper, orient them correctly, and deposit them into a carriage all with a failure rate, IIRC, on the order of "no more than one unrecoverable jam every 10,000 units."
An "unrecoverable jam" was one that required human intervention to open the container and clear the jam by hand. Fun fact: tiny nonconductive plastic containers are very susceptible to static cling!
This was my introduction to bulk material handling (I was the dev writing the code) and its associated patent minefield. Just about every good idea the very experienced mechanical engineer could think of was already patented. In the end we got it to work and met the spec, but not without a lot of hard work.
At my previous job we had similar issues with paper. The company had an entire Paper Handling lab staffed with people constantly working on better ways of moving a sheet of paper from one place to another at speed. Paper might actually be worse because changing the humidity changes its properties quite a bit.
And yeah, it's absolutely a shame. I would similarly love to hear about more big engineering issues and subsequent solutions, even if they're fairly dumb issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_...
?
https://www.icef.go.jp/pdf/summary/roadmap/icef2020_roadmap....
Is there a "mechanical engineering for dummies" educational path (Book? Software? Kit?) that would equip someone for doing like 90% of the mechanical design&prototyping work?
Interesting point: "when you solve one bottleneck you find a new one somewhere else."
Fluid flow/ thermo would be the other main academic area that this book wouldn't cover.
There's a bunch more topics though that you build over years of intuition- manufacturability, design tradeoffs, etc.
There are so many ways to transport material up. Miners transport ROCKS, upwards, from kilometers beneath Earth surface. They then crush those rocks into fine powder to extract tiny specks of gold from it. Magic? I don't think so.
So you chose a wrong tool for the job and are blaming corn?
You moved from a lab to "real world" and are surprised it is not all nice, uniform and spherical?
I love history of ASML. These guys faced a problem after a problem after a problem for like a decade just to get one process that everybody thought is impossible. Didn't give up. Didn't complain. Just focus on solving it.
Farmers are often masters of mechanical improvisation because they have very narrow windows in which they can plant or harvest so breakdowns have to be fixed or worked around in just hours or at most a few days.
You can buy oil and pump it back in the ground, but now you still need to solve the farming problem.
That and it would do nothing to remove CO2 or Methane from the atmosphere, so even the process of getting the oil to bury would be carbon positive in the first place.
Ok, it’s a great article for other reasons too.
This is especially the case in high-risk unproven areas such as cleantech where the solution space is vast and potential problem areas significant. Any problem area can kill a project, so why are we progressing so fast to build first?
I worked on a system once upon a time that fed steel balls into a ball mill. We tested it thoroughly in the workshop with the same steel balls used on the customer's site, but when we went to commission it, it jammed non-stop.
Turns out a hundred randomly selected balls won't contain most of the outliers that you'd get in even one tonne of balls, and when you're feeding 5 tonnes per hour, that's a lot of jams. We had balls with big craters in them, half-balls, balls with two halves offset by 50%, and everything in between. Not the kind of thing you could rely on rolling nicely.
Also, of course, when you ask a mill ball manufacturer for a sample, they might be inclined to send you the very nicest examples they can find, because they think you might buy their product...
Anyway, unless you're super careful about sourcing legitimate feed samples it's easy to think you're testing against the real product when you really aren't.
What comes out of a steel ball mill? And why is steel made into (misshapen) balls before this process?
It sounds like their scaled up plant accepted a wide variety of materials, but this one specific input stream slowed them down.
So they weren't shut down while they figured this out, they just processed the material they knew they could process until they had a solution here.
It seems to me that with “endless free money” we miss things like “this one input stream will be a nightmare, let’s not do it”.
I never gave much thought to this kind of thing.
