Yeah it would seem that if someone buys a ton of CO2 from you, then that’s just one more ton some ethanol production facility vents into the air instead of capturing and selling right? Are you saying that your method of producing a ton of CO2 uses less energy than theirs?
In the short-term, it seems very likely that if ethanol plants do not sell that ton of CO2, it will end up back in the atmosphere. In the long-run, we have the opportunity to clean those emissions up with either new technologies that can produce ethanol without huge emissions (of which many people are working on) and/or regulations requiring carbon capture at ethanol plants.
But, we have to break the reliance on that method of production for the CO2 industry to help push all of that along. If companies are still getting their CO2 as a waste product, it may make regulation or incentives for new tech harder in the future. Just like EV's are getting power from the grid which is, in some places, still heavily reliant on fossil fuels, switching to EV's is breaking the need for fossil fuels in the transportation itself. We need to do the same for the CO2 industry.
Yeah I mean, clearly removing CO2 from the environment (provided were not burning fossil fuels to do it) can’t be bad. For now it seems like you’re just shuffling the source of the problem, but i I see what you mean about ethanol sans-CO2. Is that a realistic thing in the near term?
If CO2 is all just a byproduct (I.e. nobody is producing it just to sell it) then it would seem that whatever source of it consumes the least energy from fossil fuels is the best from an environmental standpoint right?
So I guess my question is how does your solution stack up to current recapture in that regard?
Ethanol sans-CO2 is definitely realistic, but the timing is what's up in the air (no pun intended). There are a few different teams that have developed materials that enable ethanol production from CO2 (!!!) and are starting to scale [1, 2 as examples].
We're still working on finalizing our comparisons of our process to current CO2 production processes. From what I can tell currently, our process requires significantly less capex (<$1M) than installing CO2 production facilities onto an ethanol plant (>$100M quoted from a friend at a big gas supplier). Energy is a hard thing to compare apples-to-apples without accounting for all pieces of equipment in each process, but it does less moving parts than many ethanol plants require for CO2.
We are superior when it comes to transportation, however. Since cooling towers are scattered all throughout the country and even in urban areas, we can capture and distribute CO2 within the same city, cutting down transportation distances and associated CO2 emissions.
EDIT: just realized I forgot to include my sources!
