Microsoft-Backed Start-Up Heirloom Uses Limestone To Capture CO2 114
California-based startup Heirloom is using limestone to capture CO2 from the atmosphere to reduce carbon emissions and prevent the worst effects of global warming. CNBC reports: CO2 naturally occurs in limestone. Heirloom removes that CO2 by heating the limestone into a powder and stores the extracted CO2 underground. The remaining powder is then thirsty for more CO2. Heirloom spread that powder out on trays, with a robot determining location for maximum CO2 absorption. A process that naturally takes years is reduced to just three days. Once the powder is full, the process starts again.
Heirloom's approach is relatively cheap compared with other types of carbon capture and removal and highly scalable, which made it attractive to investors like Microsoft. "We identified that Heirloom's enhanced mineralization approach used widely available materials as passive airflow technologies, [which] means it has a potential to reach a low cost trajectory that's really been a challenge to this industry as a whole," said Brandon Middaugh, director of the climate innovation fund at Microsoft.
Heirloom says it plans to deploy its first site next year and aims to remove 1 billion tons of CO2 by 2035. It also sells carbon credits, which allow companies to offset their own CO2 emissions. Buyers include Microsoft, Stripe, Shopify and Klarna.
Heirloom's approach is relatively cheap compared with other types of carbon capture and removal and highly scalable, which made it attractive to investors like Microsoft. "We identified that Heirloom's enhanced mineralization approach used widely available materials as passive airflow technologies, [which] means it has a potential to reach a low cost trajectory that's really been a challenge to this industry as a whole," said Brandon Middaugh, director of the climate innovation fund at Microsoft.
Heirloom says it plans to deploy its first site next year and aims to remove 1 billion tons of CO2 by 2035. It also sells carbon credits, which allow companies to offset their own CO2 emissions. Buyers include Microsoft, Stripe, Shopify and Klarna.
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trees.
very little lime stone is needed.
and m$ could develop an a i app for this.
but i am curious to see how lime stone could be applied to the create the app
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m$
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trees.
Far too slow. Also planting trees successfully turns out to be surprisingly difficult. All the "plan a tree" things are essentially feel-good measures but to little to nothing to avert the crisis.
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On top of that, trees don't actually remove carbon from the atmosphere long-term. Once trees die, any carbon they stored gets emitted back into the atmosphere as they decay.
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Well, they do if you throw them in a landfill.
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Or if you use them to build something. There are a few tonnes of carbon which have been sequestered in the structure of my house for about half a century.
Re: Burn off the CO2 with coal (Score:3)
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we only have highly granular temperature data for the past 100 years. earth has been around for billions of years. as you go further back in time, our methods of determining temperature loses a lot of resolution. with that, how do you know we are not in a local minima or maxima wrt to temperature?
I'm sorry, how many human high tech civilizations before 1900?
That would be zero. So, it will kill us off, nothing more needs be known save that CO2 raises retained heat.
All else is irrelevant
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I get where you are going with your comment. And it's true: a significant fraction of coal mined today is used for iron smelting and steel production (so-called "met coal" or "coking coal"). But coal is not strictly necessary - all you need is a reducing agent that has a greater affinity
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hmm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Says 178 kJ/mol Mol of CaC03 is 40 + 12 + 48, 100 gm, but the reaction produces 44 gm of CO2. So to get a ton of CO2, 178 kJ/mol times 1000 kg/.044 kg/mol which is around 4 GJ per ton (unless I made a math error).
Verdox, the company developing https://news.mit.edu/2019/mit-... [mit.edu] says they can take CO2 out of air for 1 GJ/ton.
So this method uses 4 times as much energy.
Kindof uncomfortable calling this mineralisation (Score:3)
This sounds great.
I'm kindof uncomfortable calling this mineralisation because this is a mineralisation-DEmineralisation technique. It dilutes the definition of mineralisation as an alternative way to store carbon with probably greater resiliency to leaks.
It's akin to equating e.g. nuclear power to hydrogen -- one is an originating source of energy for humanity that can't store it and the other is a way of storing energy that doesn't not source it. Maybe using hydrogen as a mechanism to store and distribute nuclear power makes sense, but any comparison between them doesn't.
(Hydrogen fusion would be, but everybody calls that "fusion" and not "hydrogen"
Carbon farming (Score:2)
I'm kindof uncomfortable calling this mineralisation because this is a mineralisation-DEmineralisation technique.
Long long ago, the term would have been "carbon farming" done with "mineralators."
Re:Plant Some Trees (Score:5, Interesting)
It's like some of those tree planting companies don't understand how their own trees grow.
Re: Plant Some Trees (Score:1)
The companies do, the demand however is for trees as a metric of your personal morality.
The fact is that more trees now exist across the world than did just 300 years ago. The problem isnâ(TM)t the tree or CO2 for that matter, human CO2 is a trace chemical in the big scale of things. We should be worried about chemicals like lead, sulfur, arsenic and resins.
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human CO2 is a trace chemical in the big scale of things
Trace chemicals can have huge impacts. Trace amounts of polonium in your tea can kill you. Just like "trace amounts" of CO2 in the atmosphere can trap a fucking huge amount of energy.
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The contribution of CO2 has been largely debunked though
Only in the minds of a tiny percentage of people who don't want to see reality.
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The point is planting trees ISN'T as easy as people, especially computer nerds, think. It is not merely a matter of installing tree.exe and running it, as zenlessyank seems to think.
Re:Plant Some Trees (Score:5, Insightful)
Better plan would be to plant a fast growing annual or bi-annual crop instead of trees. Main goal is to get as much CO2 out of the air as fast as we can. Trees are great for stable low effort, long term capture but are too slow for current needs
IIRCC The right crop can produce 4 times the biomass per acre per year than the same area planted with trees. Something like Hemp, Jute, or Bamboo that have a high cellulose content would work best. Then convert the cellulose into charcoal using some carbon neutral heat source (some of the biomass, solar furnace, waste heat from a power plant, etc.). Then store the charcoal, make a slurry out of it and pump it into old oil wells or compress it into bricks and drop them into an undersea sub-duction zone or fill an old pit mine.
Pure charcoal is completely neutral so environmental contamination would not be an issue if it is handled correctly.
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Yes, I feel that it would be more efficient to pipe the CO2 into algae bioreactors to make biodiesel and ethanol.
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Something like Hemp, Jute, or Bamboo that have a high cellulose content would work best.
How much water would you need for an ongoing operation like this? Most places with abundant fresh water and a suitable climate for growing are already covered in vegetation.
Re:Plant Some Trees (Score:4, Insightful)
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Indeed, global emissions are around 36 billion tons, and they are aiming to remove 2.7% of that by 2035. That's a significant amount, although if it works then we really need to be scaling up much faster than that.
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Trees definitely can't do it. Bamboo might be able to, but where do you get the water? Same problem for hemp.
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This is not true. When the trees get old, or even when they drop their leaves, the material rots and releases some of it's carbon as CO2. But quite a bit of it gets broken down and turns into soil which over time deposits and gets thicker. Much of the carbon in the world is stored in soil. The wood lands most effective at this are those with complex ecosystems -- lots of different species of plants, but also animals, both big and small. Rain forest is constantly sequestering carbon. If you chop it down and
Re: Plant Some Trees (Score:2)
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This isn't complicated.
Planting trees that takes real effort and time. What's worse is planting trees won't put you in the news like this article. Have you ever seen the news report where/who planted the most trees last year?
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Antoine Moses?
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Another problem is that trees have to be watered and tended in order to survive. A depressingly large proportion of all the trees planted in a year don't make it more than a few months before dying.
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No hope for you then. Might as well kill off the trees we have. O wait.
Re:Plant Some Trees (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually it is. Trees initially consume a lot of CO2 but largely stop being CO2 sinks once matured emitting quite a lot of their captured energy back again through rot when they leaf. Additionally the process is slow. You'd need to plant a metric fuckton of trees to make even the tiniest dent, and it's a dent that will amount to nothing over the long term unless you address the underlying cause.
By all means plant trees. They are a great way to stabilise the ground, provide natural shade, cool cities, improve soil health, etc. But they aren't the solution to carbon problems.
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That is not true. As woodland matures, it sequesters more CO2 in soil, not less. Mature woodland, particularly ancient woodland, sequesters most of all.
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Not really. The process of "sequestering" does release a lot into the atmosphere, again a large portion of the CO2 goes into generating growth which in a mature forest leads to rot. While some CO2 ends up in the soil plenty is released into the atmosphere.
The *net* CO2 is still negative, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. However a mature forest doesn't sequester nearly as much as a growing one leading to its efficacy as a CO2 sink to decrease over time. So even *if* we could plant enough trees to avert clim
They stole my grand-grand...grand-grandpa's tech (Score:5, Interesting)
Heirloom removes that CO2 by heating the limestone into a powder and stores the extracted CO2 underground.
So they are making quicklime? Some tech bro's have come up with a process that everyone else new for thousands of years. Making quicklime requires a lot of heath, which traditionally was from burning charcoal or coal. How do they heat their limestone? We must be running out of original ideas for new tech scams. This is decidedly lower tech compared to crypto.
Re: They stole my grand-grand...grand-grandpa's te (Score:2)
Requires a lot of heat you said? (Score:2)
Nuclear power stations produce so much waste heat they must shutdown if they can't get rid of it. I'm sure they'd be happy to give that 24/7 stable stream of heat away for FREE and it wouldn't even impact their electric power generation. Win Win.
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They should try capturing some of that waste heat to make steam and use that steam to turn a dynamo.
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It also sells carbon credits
It's taking a page from the old ManBearPig playbook: Invent a "crisis" and then sell the "solution."
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Yeah, the other problem that gets no mention is about surface area. Because atmospheric CO2 is diffuse, you need to make contact with a lot of air in order to remove a lot of CO2. That's actually quite hard to do with any sort of mineralization approach. The trays these guys are showing in their videos would need to be absolutely everywhere in order to get anywhere near the kinds of numbers that they're throwing around.
As someone else pointed out, the thing that can most easily cover wide surface areas i
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It's a reasonable plan if they can e.g. use solar for heating (direct, not PV) or make use of excess energy when it is available (e.g. from wind farms).
Creating demand for renewable energy helps it get built faster. Obviously they are going to be getting paid to store this CO2 anyway, so they could just factor the cost of procuring that energy into what they charge. Longer term a lot of industrial processes are going to start following the availability of cheap energy, which keeps the power companies happy
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So they are making quicklime?
Yes. What's new about this is that they are capturing and sequestering the CO2 driven off the limestone, which is usually vented to atmosphere. From a technical perspective, remineralizing seems pointless when there is so much "dirty" quicklime production that could be displaced. But, economically, lacking a carbon tax, maybe reminerilizing and selling carbon credits is the only way they can make it viable.
Making quicklime requires a lot of heath,..
I read an interesting article lately (sorry I can't find the link) about efforts to convert this he
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I suspect that this company's entire IP portfolio is their website and a few Powerpoint slides. Maybe they have done some very small scale trials to confirm that the chemistry, which has been known for thousands of years, actually works. Grinding it into a power to increase surface area and hence reaction rate is also something long known.
This is all about greenwashing. No more, no less. If these companies were really interested in being green, they would be installing wind turbines and solar panels, but no
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I wonder where the heat comes from (Score:1)
Because if they use electricity for the heat then that is electricity that could be used to not produce the co2 in the first place.
And when you store co2 underground you store oxygen molecules underground. We need to find a way to separate the two, not just store it. Carbon and oxygen is useful, not waste we need or should deposit underground.
Re:I wonder where the heat comes from (Score:4, Insightful)
What they do is relocate the CO2: they produce at least as much CO2 as they extract with the quicklime (probably a lot more) but they produce all of it at one controlled spot where they can capture it all and store it underground.
Or said anothe way, instead of capturing CO2 and storing it near wherever it was captured, first they take on a "carbon debt" by making the quicklime and store all of that CO2 underground at one spot, then they ship the quicklime where it needs to decarbonize the atmosphere.
It's exactly like electric cars: they're just as polluting as normal cars, but the pollution has been moved off-site where it's more manageable.
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It's exactly like electric cars: they're just as polluting as normal cars,
No they aren't.
One of those comments I hope is a troll... (Score:2)
One of those comments I hope is a troll... because that this is earnest would be pretty depressing.
You seem to be missing the general concept that the amount of anything matters. How about I give you a penny and you give me $10,000? Sound good?
Yes, you cannot create and drive around an electric car with inherently zero CO2 emissions. I have no idea how you jump over the idea that the gas car might have many, many, many MORE emissions.
There are several reasons electric and hybrid are inherently more effi
Something that is never mentioned (Score:2)
As we burn fossil fuels , as well as the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere going up, the O2 concentration is going down. Ok, given its 21% its hardly noticable but if you work it out it would only take approx 20K years for us to use the lot up. Minute on a geological timescale though obviously everything including us would be dead long before then.
How much can be recycled? (Score:4, Interesting)
Scaling this up to a billion ton a year will lead to a lot of lime with degraded pore size and sulphur, which will require far more energy to recycle. I assume the cost is based on using virgin limestone until it's unusable.
How cost effective is this method if it actually has to be sustainable instead of producing mountains of unusable lime?
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It's at best another way to pass the buck, as you suggest. If it actually works at scale we wind up using it to excuse our pollution and then it all goes to shit later anyway when we reach peak accessible limestone. You know, after grinding down the last limestone monuments and natural wonders.
Re: How much can be recycled? (Score:2)
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Gypsum is calcium sulfate, different stuff.
The best carbon sequestration (Score:2)
Plastic bags. Use as many as possible and dump 'em in the landfill so they'll keep oil from becoming gasoline. Or do you rather the oil in the ground will be turned into fuel and then CO2.
Re: The best carbon sequestration (Score:2)
Missing info (Score:3)
Maybe I missed it in the article since I only gave it a quick read but I couldn't find any mention of where the energy needed to do all the carbon capturing and processing comes from.
anyone know how they intend to power it?
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anyone know how they intend to power it?
Fossil fuels of course. Every CO2 capture proposal is fundamentally about using more fossil fuels.
My question though: how secure is that CO2 that is pumped underground? If it leaks, the whole process will end up putting more CO2 in the atmosphere than was originally there.
Re:Missing info (Score:4, Interesting)
One seemingly efficient way of CO2 capture is to use volcanic rock such as basalt. When exposed to CO2, the calcium, sodium and magnesium in the stone react and capture the CO2 into stable molecules, as in this example in Iceland [france24.com]. Basalt is an extremely abundant rock, and the transformation already occurs in nature, only slowly. The CO2 should not be able to leak in this kind of scheme.
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Their website claims "using 100% renewable energy to decouple our system from fossil fuels." What do you know otherwise?
This is an obviously bullshit claim. They haven't explained where that renewable energy is coming from, so this is no more than a claim to greenwash the process.
As avandesande pointed out, why not use that renewable energy to smelt aluminium or any other use that would displace fossil fuels? Somewhere down the line, this process will cause increased use of fossil fuels.
The only way this makes sense is the one that they have not mentioned: using surplus renewable energy from variable renewable sources. Even
Re: Missing info (Score:2)
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Their website doesn't say, which is a bit of a concern. There is no reason why they couldn't use renewable energy for heating and pumping the released CO2. For heat the sun can be used directly via concentrators perhaps.
I wonder if... (Score:2)
...anyone doing free-air carbon capture (not scrubbing smokestacks) has looked up and noticed how big and how deep the sky is.
"Very scalable" is probably not nearly scalable enough to undo within a number of human lifetimes what we've done within a human lifetime.
Re: I wonder if... (Score:3)
Hmm ... CaCO3 + Heat - CaO + CO2 ... (Score:3, Informative)
So if one cooks LimeStone ( CaCO3 ) then one can make QuickLime ( CaO ) and Carbon Dioxide ( CO2 )
This is an essential ingredient in Concrete and we have known about it for Eons.
So, where does the initial CO2 go from the LimeStone ( CaCO3 ) to QuickLime ( CaO )
Reaction go ?
Hint: One CANNOT capture more CO2 in the secondary CaO + CO2 -> CaCO3 Reaction than one made initilly -- it is impossible.
Thermodynamics at work.
Sounds like the SnakeOil man has sold a Perpetual Motion Machine to MicroSoft to me.
-- kjh
Re: Hmm ... CaCO3 + Heat - CaO + CO2 ... (Score:2)
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Shush, the OP is showing us their ability to write simple chemical reactions. Be supportive, congratulate them on their achievement, *then* recommend sources of more information.
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If it's so easy to just "store the extracted CO2 underground" every fossil fuel power plant would already be doing this. There's no reason to fool around with the intermediate and energy-instensive step of cooking a bunch of limestone.
Riiiight (Score:5, Insightful)
So they force out CO2 happily stored in limestone using heat generated presumably by windmills and solar power (sorry, fossil fuel power stations you say?) to create quicklime, bury the CO2 somewhere and hope it doesn't leak, wait for the quicklime to absord more CO2 (very slowly) then rinse and repeat?
And no chemist ever thought of this already? Pull the other one.
This is a scam just looking for venture capital in order for some bros to blow it on cars, drugs and women then when its been shown its totally impractical they can just shrug and say "Hey, we tried!"
Ahh the ignorance of a climate change denier (Score:1)
(very slowly)
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Yeah, says them. You believe every funding hunting emission from every startup do you? Fancy buying a bridge?
This describes a lot of the world (Score:2)
This quote of yours is very accurate:
"This is a scam just looking for venture capital in order for some bros to blow it on cars, drugs and women then when its been shown its totally impractical they can just shrug and say "Hey, we tried!""
The key is that the scam needs to be such that fraud can't be applied, then "we tried" is perfectly acceptable. Climate remediation tech will almost always be a "we tried" situation (timeframe and results will vary).
Then there's things like Theranos. "We tried" isn't goi
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It's a scam to allow Microsoft to get free carbon credits to offset its huge datacenter CO2 production and get the related tax incentives for carbon neutrality.
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And no chemist ever thought of this already? Pull the other one.
What a chemist thinks of, what an engineer can realise, and what a capital provider is willing to fund are three wildly different things.
If you ask Chemists they have created 1000s of ways to solve climate change already.
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> wait for the quicklime to absord more CO2 (very slowly) then rinse and repeat?
From TFS: "A process that naturally takes years is reduced to just three days"
If you can't wait 3 days, then you may never find a solution to most of humankind's problems.
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As far as I remember, this was looked at by several companies in Europe, and got dropped as unworkable.
This is a scam just looking for venture capital in order for some bros to blow it on cars, drugs and women then when its been shown its totally impractical they can just shrug and say "Hey, we tried!"
Yep. Scam to separate the fools that still are under delusion the big catastrophe can be averted from their money. Actual state of things is that we may still avoid the very big catastrophe (end of civilization) is we act decisively in the next 10 or 20 years, but it does not look good at all. Same for the "extinction level" catastrophe, with a bit more time though.
Sigh. (Score:2)
So they heat up huge amounts of rocks and use that to move CO2 "underground".
That's not a solution to excess CO2, guys.
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Because it involves heating up lots of rocks to do so... so it's a net loss.
carbon capture is CA's prefered strategy (Score:2)
perpetual motion never dies (Score:2)
"Heirloom removes that CO2 by heating the limestone into a powder and stores the extracted CO2 underground. The remaining powder is then thirsty for more CO2." Unless the heating is "green"? In which case, why not just concentrate on expanding green energy that much faster instead of solving the problem that is continuing?
Reinvented the scrubber (Score:2)
Old technology is old.
Finally! (Score:2)
Finally, the silver bullet we have all been waiting for!!
Or Plant Some Trees - Or Stop Cutting Them Down (Score:2)