> Light and flexible pieces of wheat straw in San Francisco had easily been conveyed pneumatically from the tub grinder into the hammer mill.
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.
The tone of this comment is unduly negative, but I agree that they should be hiring folks with relevant experience. Ag mechanization is a well established degree, combine harvesters and augers exist, etc.
We talk about this at least once a week here, usually in the scope of software, but it’s a problem that exists in other domains (though VCs and us are constantly pushing for more businesses to run like software, which is nuts considering how not in order we know our own house to be).
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.
They just needed one farm kid who became an engineer.
They talked about taking seven weeks to figure out a conveyor, put me in the middle of Kansas and I could have told you how to solve that problem in seven minutes, give me a truck she a credit card and i can buy you the parts in an hour.
Bay Area engineering tends to be very sheltered, large groups of people with zero experience invading a domain. Sometimes it creates cool new solutions to old problems, other times it spends 100x the money on problems solved 100 years ago (And does a worse job at it too)
The real reason self driving cars will ultimately fail is they’re being designed and tested in places like Palo Alto where it doesn’t even rain half the year and a pothole is a thing of legend from lands far away.
On self driving car, I think we are solving all the problems caused by cars like air pollution and congestion with "better" car. First we have electric car, then we (will) have electric self driving car.
Public transport seems boring enough that no one talks about. Is there anything foundamentally wrong with buses and trains (and bike too) compared with cars? While we moved pass the faster horse era, we are now searching for better cars.
Once public transit is at the frequency of Tokyo trains and familiarity of the back of your hand, it’s often a no brainer.
The problem is, until it hits that point it involves a LOT of planning and conforming to other peoples schedules.
Which for many people (parents, folks going to and from a lot of different places) can dramatically decrease their ability to actually exist or do what they normally do.
If it’s in an environment where cars suck to drive/park/etc. (dense urban environments), then it quickly goes to public transit.
But especially in the US, density is low, cars are easier than the alternative unless someone spends several trillions at least on some giant initiative (which they won’t). So for most of the (physical) US, public transit makes no sense.
There are areas on the border (SF Bay Area, a lot of outlying Seattle Metro, etc), and in those cases both options suck.
The real EV transportation revolution isn't electrifying cars, but micromobility like electric bikes, scooters, skateboards, etc. The fundamental inefficiency of trying to move a single person using two tons of machinery can never beat human scale transportation.
This doesn't even get into the enormous throughput efficiency that proper transit can deliver over longer distances.
>Is there anything foundamentally wrong with buses and trains
It's slower, a round trip I could make in 30 minutes in a car would take careful scheduling and two hours on a bus. Sometimes it's cold outside and I'd have to walk half a mile to and from a bus stop. The local transit authority is experimenting with reducing the number of light rail cars so they'll be better covered by transit police in cars because violence is a problem. Once on BART I'm convinced somebody shit in a paper bag and left it in the middle of the car. Caltrain in rush hour would be a violation of the Geneva Convention if you made prisoners stand in such a cramped and unstable train for an hour at a time. I keep hearing about people getting stabbed by the local bus stop, 45 minutes after a friend visiting me came through the last time. A couple of months ago a dude died in the hospital after getting stabbed on a bus three blocks away from my apartment in a dispute over who got a cigarette left on the floor of the bus.
I calculated total cost of ownership of my car and it was considerably less than taking public transit unless I used public transit a lot, and any savings would be completely blown away by using Uber for just a couple of trips a month.
There are situations where public transit is a good thing, but it's generally a dirty, crime-infested, unpleasant experience in America only good for people who are really excited about not having a car. I'm opposed to any measures that force public transit on people by making car ownership more difficult until after they make public transit a safe, convenient, comfortable experience.
The way to make PT work is for it to be faster than cars. People should choose it because it’s faster/cheaper/more convenient, not because they have no alternative.
You’ll find this is typically the case in large cities that prioritise it appropriately - Between spending an hour in a car or on a train I’d choose the train every time.
In my area (southeast Florida), trains: not enough rail. Both trains and buses: not often enough. Buses: not enough routes, too many transfers (from experience, what would take 20 minutes by car took 1.5 hours by bus). Bikes: even though we have bike lanes, we get drivers from everywhere (tourist destination) and I wouldn't want to risk my life.
1) Public transport works today. True self driving is an unknown amount of time away, and IMHO it is a foolish mistake to assume it is definitely very soon or definitely very long before it works. It could be a year away or decades.
2) Even with self driving, there would be some efficiency gains from a bus, especially in places dense enough that there just isn't space for a car per person, like Manhattan. It would take adding something like 50 lanes of highway across the Hudson River to replace the capacity that trains currently provide for people to enter Manhattan from the mainland, IIRC. Neither electricity nor self driving in any way reduce the amount of space a car takes up. In fact self driving increases traffic by making it easier to go for a drive -- perhaps even send a car out for a 0 passenger cargo pickup trip.
I can agree with your general time scales on self driving. Just today in SF I watched firsthand a "Cruise" self driving car completely wig out when faced with a double parked car (pointed in the same direction as the "Cruise") and oncoming traffic on the opposite side of the street.
When it decided to make its manuever (on coming traffic briefly stopped to allow the car to drive around the double parked vehicle) the car made erratic micro turns and short hard braking action (pushing the nose of the car down) once it entered the (stopped) on coming traffic lane. The occupants were definitely thrashed around a bit.
The attempt was not pretty and definitely not even close to human level proficeny.
A typical manuever one has to make these days in the Bay with street parking eliminated in many busy restaurant / cafe corridors.
I talk about public transit. I hate driving even though I do a lot of it (well not now that I work from home)
Transit can be great, but most of it is so bad nobody sane would use it. Why would you risk waiting for a bus that only comes twice an hour when your car is sitting in your driveway waiting for you? Why would you take a bus when you can walk almost as fast?
Both of those are very real problems that most transit has, and most people just ignore it.
Taken cynically, these full disclosure engineering stories are calculated to make the team seem human and trustworthy.
How much do you want to bet that the real story is that one of them drove past a grain elevator and wondered if they make a portable version of that equipment, or one of the frustrated/amused locals didn’t suggest it. Either directly or subconsciously. One of my coworkers has spent most of the last year sharing observations and ideas with the team that are things I pointed out three years ago. I don’t know if he’s giving me an overly subtle nod or he just doesn’t know he’s doing it. Like people who accidentally write a story/song they heard once.
> One of my coworkers has spent most of the last year sharing observations and ideas with the team that are things I pointed out three years ago. I don’t know if he’s giving me an overly subtle nod or he just doesn’t know he’s doing it. Like people who accidentally write a story/song they heard once.
I once suggested a product name in a meeting and everyone was like "eh" and then about five minutes later someone else (no, not a manager) suggested the exact same name to instant acclaim, and it was adopted. I don't think she did it on purpose, so I wasn't and am not mad about it, but it was odd.
If the room reads right I’ll occasionally do that as a joke, but I have heard too many stories of people who do it for real (one of the reasons I try to make it a joke).
I think solving an "easy" problem is a good step on the way to a hard one, as long as the tool is set up to allow you to get out of a local maximum. Clearly there are locations where self driving is a smaller problem space than others, and I don't think it's bad to solve for those locations first.
I don't think it would be a fail if self driving cars were able to only operate in sunny locations with good roads. The caveat is that the outcome shouldn't just be a "magic" ML model that can't be modified to handle rain or potholes, it should be a set of tooling that allows you to make ML models that solve a variety of problems.
So build a covered test road for your initial trials - then unleash them on real road situations. I'd be much more ready to trust a self-driving car that was born and raised on Boston streets than one in the wide, luxurious and pristine SoCal streets.
I'm not saying you need to teach your kid to swim by throwing them into the sea with weights tied around their ankles - you can ramp up to that... but you need to start exposing things to real world conditions pretty early on in development lest something, like a LIDAR censor close to the road surface in the front of the car, force you into a huge redesign when you discover that sheets of slush and road salt will liberally coat every front-facing surface of your vehicle driving in Boston in the winter.
You have literally described how Tesla(and the other Musk companies) have made both an excellent and terrible product at the same time. A big chunk of the Musk skeptic community consist of experienced professionals from all the industries that Elon is involved in. They are constantly bashing his companies for not paying attention to what has already been accomplished. Musk has had many failures due to ignoring the previously made mistakes that people before him have already made.
For example: Fit and finish, organizing your production process so you are not forced to build $50k cars in a tent in the parking lot, following proven practices for service etc.
At the same time, teardowns of the cars are showing a lot of out of the box thinking that other incumbent automakers are not following. Things such as eliminating redundant systems with newer designs that can do multiple tasks, making parts modular enough such that you don't have to wait for a new model year to implement, the megacastings etc.
In the end, Tesla has only survived because they had enough capital to make these new ideas stick and now others are starting to have to copy his company's accomplishments. So maybe as long as you have enough capital, then it may be worth to "relearn" everything that everyone else has learned because it may lead to asking "why" on some of the old ways of doing things.
A similar story happened with digital cameras. A few of the film companies practically went out of business before the electronics got sorted out and what differentiated the good from the bad cameras circled back to the mechanical parts, which the incumbents had locked down ages ago. The pure digital play companies faded and some were acquired, and one day Nikon or Canon had the best DSLR system.
Thats unfortunate. What if there are certain aspects to existing cameras that are only there because a lesson was learned in the past but is no longer ideal in todays context. If there are no new comers that have the cash to burn to 're-evaluate' how everything is done today then we are missing out on potential innovations.
This process is like re-factoring old code but in real life.
Some professions will readily say "imma keep my mouth shut because this is not my area of expertise" whereas every software engineer is a subject matter on everything up to and including open ended and subjective questions that humans have been trying to conclusively answer all of history. (The various types of mechanical engineers are nearly as bad.)
One could argue that the cultural problem is just a reflection of a demographics problem but I don't care enough about that aspect to make that argument.
As an aside, the failure in TFA doesn't sound that dramatic. Seems like the age old tale of a customer running material handling equipment at the edge of it's comfortable range and an tech needing to be flown out to tell them where to slap vibrators on it or what other minor change needed to be made in order to make it work better. Yeah, they probably should have seen this coming and shipped a more flexible solution or at least have had shovel ready options that didn't involve flying engineers out but whatever, it's a prototype and this stuff happens.
I belatedly figured out that my whole style of learning is based entirely on model building and testing, similar to what scientists do when they are exploring a new phenomenon. I keep meaning to look around for research on whether this is common to all autodidacts, just one mode, or if I’m rare.
The upshot of this is that I seem to be able to avoid the Expert Beginner trap and get into more of an Expert Journeyman, which is somewhat more useful and less dangerous. I’m often deputized to take over things I don’t actually know all that well, because I’m seen as having some knack for playing twenty questions and then being able to improvise reasonably well without running back to the delegator every fifteen minutes, or setting the building on fire for fear of asking for clarification when it’s warranted.
I am also pretty mechanically inclined, took a lot of things apart and back together, including but not limited to bicycles I’ve subsequently taken above 40 mph (like cars, there are many kinds of defects that only show up at 2x “normal” speed, because forces tend to quadruple). Software people who know hardware of some sort are, at least in my experience, generally safer about trying to defy the laws of physics.
But the danger with model testing is that I often sound like I know exactly what I’m talking about when I don’t (and sound too similar when I actually am the expert, so people either trust me too much or not enough). I’ve played with various levels of wiggle words and uncertain phrasing to try to fix this, always with mixed results. Sometimes even stating it as an educated guess, based on X and Y, causes other people to agree that sounds perfectly correct even if it’s not (one of the original definitions of a meme). Sometimes I avoid that trap of not believing my own model in my head, even if I don’t let on, sometimes I don’t. I should probably have more care about others aping my demeanor, but I tend to mentor anyone who is comfortable asking clarifying questions. It’s the ones that want to fake it til they make it that I can’t help.
The danger is, as always, in believing your own PR. Questioning it constantly is paralyzing and exhausting, both for yourself and for observers (especially the exhausting part). Questioning it not at all is exquisitely dangerous.
If you are in software you have to be an expert in some other domain. Sure there are a few os and compiler writers who can sit in pure software land (even they need to know some about hardware). Pretty much everything else is for some other domain and so you need to know it.
Everything in moderation. I do occasionally argue to let someone change something that doesn’t really need to be changed because it makes them happy. If they’re happy they’ll stay longer, or at least be less cranky the next time some random top-tier bullshit happens. Throw stress at someone whose fun you’ve completely sucked away and see how far that gets you.
The trick is to find something they can fiddle with without ruining everyone else’s fun in the process. Sometimes that’s easy, sometimes it’s a riddle.
I don't think it's that negative. They clearly should have brought in people with relevant experience in the field before implementing the system. How much money and time did they waste fixing their system to account for Corn Cobs?
> Why on earth would you assume you could move corn residues with air?
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".
For quite a few years I looked into similar processes based fundamentally on biological photosynthesis, for example algal pool farms and similar approaches to generating hydrocarbons from biomass.
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.
There was an Oxygen and Nitrogen (I think) injection project here in BC which was attempting to burn out phosphorous from silt during seasonal turnover of the water columns. I recall that it never showed a positive effect on the body of water, though occasionally it was negative. Lots of fish died at one point. After several years the measurements of P in the silt were hardly any lower, but still too high.
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?
A good way to get rid of excess nutrients is to pick a water plant with ridiculous growth rates (for example, duckweed), harvest and compost it for use in agriculture. Compost will certainly remain in agricultural fields longer than chemical fertilizers do.
Composted materials also help hold moisture in place!
The trouble is that distributing compost is extremely expensive and it doesn’t release into the soil quickly.
You can truck out tons of dry fertilizer and irrigate with it, getting immediate results through a system you already have on farms. Your nutrient to dollar ratio is far better (in the short term).
You might know this already. My main intent of mentioning that is that I suspect that way of thinking is actually totally misguided. The externalities seem to be far too severe, and damage to soils seems unsustainable as well. I have a feeling if we sucked up the cost of distribution and application of natural fertilizers, in the not-so-long term we might actually see major turn around on several issues related to crops and fertilizer run off.
There is plenty of evidence for it, but the scale of fertilizer needed is insane. No idea how we’d make that shift. Dry fertilizers are incredibly dense forms of nutrients, and they’re so easy to get from factory to plant.
US universities have published a lot of research showing natural fertilizers do yield good crops with better disease resistance, but any farm using them would need to put more money and time into fertilizing and could expect smaller yields. If everyone plays that game, okay… But if a farmer independently decides to, they need to find a market willing to pay more. That’s exceedingly rare.
We need to collectively value this investment, otherwise it’s very hard for farmers to afford the shift. At least, this is based on my limited hobby gardening/researching understanding. Someone in agriculture would know better.
Yup, my whole idea is to find a body of water already suffering from overgrowth of one of these organisms, do what you can to accelerate that growth, and continually harvest it.
I’m sure someone could come up with an efficient harvesting / filtering strategy. Pick a species that fit the requirements.
After harvesting do something similar to the process in the post. Dry it, pyrolyze, separate carbon goo from ash, bury one, use the other as fertilizer or another useful purpose.
Even better, bubble CO2 rich air into freshwater vats of Wolffia.
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)
The goal would be to farm and continually extract algae from the lake in just a section of it, presumably to increase the water quality in the rest of the lake.
And there are something like 14,000 lakes in MN though many of them one might be tempted to call ponds :) no need to build an artificial one though, there are plenty.
So the ELI5 is they burn crop waste, harvest the heat and bury the carbon-rich ash. This process is called BECCS. (Not totally right - see 'pkrein’s comment below.)
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]
Actually we aren’t burning the biomass, we’re heating it without oxygen (pyrolysis) to create a transportable biomass intermediate called bio-oil. That bio-oil is rich in carbon, molasses-like consistency, and the overwhelming odor of barbecue sauce. Today we primarily pump that bbq sauce underground as carbon removal (Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage - BiCRS), but in the future it could be used for BECCS processes like you outline.
How is this an overall improvement over leaving the corn stalks in the field to decompose and return nutrients to the soil? This process moves soil nutrients away from point of origin. (Serious question from former Iowa farm boy who still owns corn ground operated by others. Should I let my tenants ship stover away? I want to be a good steward of the soil. )
The process separates the biomass carbon into bio-oil, and the NPK in the biomass separates into the biochar/ash (2% of the N, 70% of the P, >90% of the K). That biochar/ash goes back into the soil. So we recover most of the nutrients, plus you get biochar which improves soil carbon, water retention, microbial health, etc.
Yes, but why is this better than leaving the biomass in the field and perhaps doing some soil building techniques?
You also need to hire some farm kids or pay for some scholarships to get interns. Some of the problems you described solving over months would have been trivially solved by someone with farm experiences.
You’d really benefit from going to farm auctions, finding one of these, taking it apart, and adapting the mechanisms to your purposes. https://youtu.be/aYv8aDRv998
By contrast, our process retains the nutrients, improves the soil health relative to the baseline of just leaving it, and you get permanent carbon removal.
Yes, we're hiring for great mechanical engineers with experience in these areas ;) Lots to do!
I just did a quick search on impact of biochar on corn yield and the research seems mixed, at best. It seems to have the most impact on poor soil, but little impact on yield in good soil (e.g., the corn belt). A public benefit may be reduction of nitrate leaching—-so applied at scale that could help the Gulf. Water retention can be improved, too; it’d be interesting to see whether there’s impact on yield in drought years.
So ideally one of your systems would be at the local elevator to make stover dropoff/biochar pickup easy? And then maybe someday combines would have a baler on them? And the biochar could go in a manure spreader for application?
Is there waste heat/syngas coming off the pyrolysis (beyond what's needed for sustaining it)? If so, have you looked into applying that to grain drying?
Whatever their answer they'll need to account for the fuel cost of the trip to a facility, lifecycle cost of the instrumentation, and fuel cost of a return trip for where ever the whatever is going to go.
I can tell you right now having done experimental LCA previously, its not gonna pen out. The cost of moving massive amounts of 'stuff' to do 'something' with it when its an extremely low margin, low value add product; this will end up generating more CO2 than it sequesters.
If you can't do it in place, you likely can't do it.
Couldn't the bio-oil generated by the process be used to power the transport and supply lines? Or don't the maths work out? I don't know any of the numbers here...
Yes, I understand that, but I thought that most of the CO2 is bound to the ash that's supposed to be buried underground? So there would be a net reduction of CO2, even if the bio-oil was burned?
Yes, that is my take. It only works economically if the soil nutrients come back to the field, and it costs no more (net) than adding a stalk chopper to the combine.
Extra trips over the field burn fuel, and something needs to pay for the dollar cost of that (in added fertilizer value or something) not to mention the net carbon emissions of burning diesel to go over the field again.
(Another former Iowa farm boy)
This is a CO2 sequestration process, and one still in development. The carbon in the corn stalks is obviously pretty neutral—it’s the petroleum for tractors, drying, and fertilizer that are the CO2 emissions problem.
For soil health, I think you’d want your renter to go no-till (if isn’t already). And then for emissions, look into putting solar panels wherever, seeing whether there are electric/heat pump dryers available (???) if you have drying bins, and encouraging renter to use biodiesel.
This depends on the conditions the biomass is decomposing in. A lot of carbon can be captured in the soil if handled well. No till, no spray, cover crops, and managed grazing of the cover crops can create an environment where the soil is a carbon sink and a better base for future crops.
Yes. And also no. Practices like that are good, but the majority of your carbon sequestration will come in the form of the roots of plants. (This is part of why no till is good.)
Getting surface vegetation to deposit carbon in the soil long term is trickier. You aren't wrong, but it's also not as simple as some folks believe. Just cutting the corn stalks and cobs and leaving them on a field won't put much carbon back in the soil.
How are you heating it? How are you powering all the chippers, blowers, conveyer belts, and other machinery? Along with the transportation of crop residue to your facility, how much carbon is re-emitted with your consumption of all these industrial products of the primarily fossil fueled powered energy system?
Pyrolysis is an energy positive reaction. It requires an initial heat input, but after getting started it produces more heat than it needs. That heat can be used to generate electricity or warm water.
Pyrolysis is entirely endothermic - it requires applying heat to biomass. Pyrolysis yields a vapor that will combust in the presence of oxygen and release energy.
The energy released in the combustion of pyrolysis products can be used to drive further pyrolysis. A "Top Lit Updraft Gasifier" is a simple apparatus to achieve this.
Capturing the heat from pyrolysis in this way does however convert the pyrolysis vapor from hydrocarbon into combustion byproducts, namely C02. This company claims to be condensing all of these hydrocarbons, not combusting them.
For a nice and understandable example of pure pyrolysis without combustion, there is this project [0] wherein an airtight vessel is loaded with biomass, heat/energy is applied with electrical resistive heating elements. The pyrolysis occurs and the resulting vapors are captured and stored as a low pressure vapor for later use in cooking or powering internal combustion engine.
Pyrolysis could in theory be done with concentrated solar thermal energy. The issues would be:
-- How much mirror area [heat] would be needed?
-- Mirror geometry: Troughs may lend themselves to continuous processing and gas recovery a bit better than central point concentrators but they provide less heat potential.
-- Can the economics work if you only process when the sun shines?
Totally. I am currently experimenting with TLUDs for waste products from some forest land I own. I didn't realize they were also attempting to capture the gases from pyrolization rather than using them to continue the pyrolysis.
In that case, you are totally correct, they'll need an input heat source.
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.
I'd guess the ash/gunk remaining from the pyrolysis would be a mixture of carbon, phosphorous, maybe some nitrogen. It'd probably make a decent fertilizer/soil amendment, particularly for degraded low-carbon soils.
Oh, this is your company! I heard you were working on this and thought dang way to go Peter.
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?
I think the 22 is not how much is currently emitted from biomass, it's the upper bound on how much we could store if we replaced a bunch of energy generation with this process.
I’m having a tough time understanding how this makes sense.
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.
> Is this even close to being financially viable if there is never any such thing as carbon credits?
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.
> ...how to do things that are not financially viable.
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.
> 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.
Of course the statement is a bit inaccurate, it should probably say "burning 1 ton of biomass generates roughly 1.65 tons of CO₂"
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.
Only 16% of the weight of CO2 is the carbon. Since we’re concerned with the greenhouse effect of the molecule, that makes a bit of sense. But it also inflates both the rate of production and the value of capture so it could just as easily have been the other way.
If you or your friends are mechanical engineers, we're looking for great meche's with experience in thermal, fluids, combustion, ag processing and more. Would love to chat: https://charmindustrial.com/team or email in my profile.
Does Charm ever plan to be remote-friendly? Asking more for some talented friends living in a remote small town, though I've admired Charm from afar for some time.
Entirely understandable, and a major driver in my transition from industrial automation to web software (though industrial hardware work is so rewarding!).
> solid material handling in general, is a perennial problem
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.
I recall that episode, but never understood why it was bad thing if there was a cob planet? Earth is water planet, or dirt planet, with everything destined to be dirt or whatever.
Everything from the mountains down to the atomic structure is on a cob. Maybe you'd end up having Junji Ito tier body horror as they eat and breathe in more cob particles. We'd get Summer on a cob, and Jerry on a cob. Maybe the planet has a god on a cob who will punish them in eternity on the cob, for breaking the laws on the cob, of this world on a cob. Whatever the case, Rick's not willing to take a risk on the cob - as far as he's concerned, there's not so much as one kernel of truth in any criticism of that decision.
Pkrein, I see you posting here. I've got 200 acres of forest in Washington State and I'm long term interested in providing biomass for carbon sequestration, what can I be doing now to connect with companies like yours to help ensure those 200 acres are as carbon negative as possible?
I like seeing the modern engineering write up here. Almost everytime I read green energy/ag stuff, it’s either math latex or marketing copy. I assume it’s because IP protection but problems/solution/problem is the kind of stuff that becomes good conversations
Companies might also be reluctant to talk about the problems they're having, for PR reasons (from personal experience!)
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.
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."
"Shigley's Mechanical Engineering Design" is a great textbook if you want to learn the most you can with the fewest books about designing mechanical structures and moving parts from a strength perspective.
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.
I love this story. The lesson here is that the real world is messy and good engineers have to think on their feet. It also gives me hope that somehow humanity will actually solve climate change.
I thought it was interesting how they were patting themselves on the back for getting a solution in place in "only 7 weeks". I guess because they aren't in real production yet the timelines can slip, but I have to wonder if they had consulted with a farmer they may have found a solution at the Tractor Supply the same day that would have left their operation running while the rest of the team did the work back in CA of tracking down and negotiating with suppliers for the final product.
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.
This may not be generally practical, but just to get a prototype working I'm surprised they didn't employ gravity. The vacuum wasn't strong enough to lift the cob debris up 5-10' to the top of the hammer mill, but it certainly could have pulled it out of the bottom of an elevated tub grinder and down to a lower hammer mill.
I wonder if just buying crude oil and burying it isn't more cost effective than transporting bulky biomass which could have been fed to animals in order to put it through this complicated process of converting it to oil and burying it.
Burying crude oil would at best be carbon neutral, but most likely carbon positive. Burying biomass has the potential to be carbon negative if the processes are refined enough because it's capturing atmospheric carbon and putting it into the ground.
How does that help clear the excess biomass produced by farming? The primary problem this solves isn't "carbon capture". It's great that it does, and it's what distinguishes it from other solutions in the same primary business: to help deal with the problem of harvest "waste".
You can buy oil and pump it back in the ground, but now you still need to solve the farming problem.
Corn and wheat post-harvest biomass is usually tilled into the ground to improve organic matter in the soil and return nutrients to the soil, or fed to cows and other ruminants by grazing or by cutting.
In both cases you're burying a product of photosynthesis that would have been converted back to carbon dioxide through combustion or respiration. You're taking carbon out of the cycle. It doesn't matter whether the carbon was fixed millions of years ago or a couple of months ago. Carbon is carbon.
Except that now you have created a pending ecological disaster should the containers of crude oil break out of whatever vat you're storing them in and seep into the local water tables.
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.
How do you get so far into a project before you even realize that you have such a show-stopper problem? Move fast / fail fast works with software because iteration times are quick and penalty per iteration is low. But just building stuff and hoping it works and then realizing major problems doesn't work so well with real-world stuff. Couldn't they have "workshopped" this with non-functional item to see what the real world roadblocks would have been before a deep investment?
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?
Somehow you never quite get the real raw material when you ask for samples, no matter how careful you are.
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.
I found your comment fascinating (and frustrating). Dealing with bad inputs on a web form can be tricky. Dealing with bad inputs made of steel seems like a lot more work =].
What comes out of a steel ball mill? And why is steel made into (misshapen) balls before this process?
Oops, I meant to come back to this but stuff happened. It certainly was a lot of work to get it halfway reliable. I think they were working on adding a vibrating motor to keep things moving even if they weren't rolling - while I was there they just had a guy poke it with a bit of rebar every time things hitched up.
A ball mill is used to grind things into paste, usually for further processing. In this specific case it was a SAG mill (https://www.mogroup.com/portfolio/sag-mills/) and it was frikkin' huge, powered by a 10MW electric motor. It ground up ore-containing rocks from a mine which were then processed to produce lead and zinc. The balls roll around in the mill and help to grind up the ore, which I guess works better if they're round, which they will be before long due to wear and tear no matter what shape they go in. They come out as tiny ball bearings. It was quite an interesting project!
I mean, you're wrong... it clearly worked out for them so far and it only took seven weeks to fix this issue. It's taken longer to ship completed commits at Google than that.
Did it though? As far as I can tell they only have part of the problem worked out, and the rest of the problem may indeed be a show-stopper. How many more show-stoppers before they run into the same issues that bankrupted the $300M company? If you don't know what the show-stoppers are, then what is the best approach for plowing ahead anyways? Maybe sticking with wheat instead of corn?
Why would you prototype with a material that's substantially different from the real-world item? I read the article and this bit puzzled me. The differences clearly matter, and the $300M bankruptcy they reference in the article even makes that point.
Initial testing was in San Francisco, where corn stover is relatively tricky to come by because corn is not widely grown in California, and agricultural residues cannot be brought into the state because of the bugs. Wheat straw was much easier to procure in-state.
Since encountering the differences, we tracked down the rarer corn growers in California and now use corn stover for testing as well.
If corn stover is a critical importance to your business and business model, wouldn't it be more effective, efficient, and beneficial to your business to be where the critical resource and information and experience is? Basically why not move to Kansas instead of stay put in California?
I've worked in agriculture my entire life, and seven weeks is a pretty good turnaround for fixing these types of problems. the next batch of issues they're likely to encounter is handling product with variations in moisture content that further bungs the system. Then it will be incorporating new feedstock from other crops.
Agriculture is the intersection of industrial mechanization and biological systems. Unlike traditional manufacturing, flexibility and efficiency is learned over time as situations are encountered that exceed previously theorized boundaries/ranges.
I have a grower who used gigantic wood burners for heat instead of natural gas. When I walked through his boiler room I noticed a wheelbarrow full of nails and other fasteners. He said 90% of his labour and headaches with that system were dealing with steel chunks in the feed stream, something they barely accounted for beyond adding a magnet when they built the system. Not everything can be planned for in advance.
Because Charm is being run as a VC tech startup rather than a traditional industrial company and there's a recent movement of trying to do ag-tech in the bay rather than places like the Midwest or even central valley. Probably doesn't hurt that the CEO/co-founder already lives in the bay.
Come on. No one wants to live in Kansas. And it's extremely difficult to build in a rural setting. You try prototyping an experimental cutting-edge technology in the middle of a corn field 2 hours from the nearest Home Depot or metal fabricator.
There are less drastic options than Kansas that would work fine. Chicago has an international airport. Indianapolis as well (though it’s not listed in Wikipedia, which makes me wonder how complete that is). St Louis and Minneapolis are major hubs. Large airports besides those I’m less familiar with, but if you’re planning to process corn waste what you need is rail access, not air. So then you can add a lot more of the midwest and still maybe be able to find Bulgogi for lunch. The Quad Cities, Peoria, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Omaha.
That’s not a list of international airports, though. I’m unclear what page I was looking at now, but it only had about a dozen on it and IND was not one of them.
Disconnected data is just information, not knowledge.
The wikipedia page for Wichita, Kansas claims Boeing, Airbus, and Learjet among others operate design and manufacturing facilities there. You should be able to find a metal fabricator and a home depot.
John Deere might find that interesting. Now headquartered in Moline, IL (Iowa border), they started up and built their company exactly in the rural America (Grand Detour, IL), when Home Depot didn't even exist. Yes it was over 150 years ago, but there's nothing that prevents you from starting an agtech company where the resources are if they are in the midwest. The Kauffman Foundation, a major entrepreneurial resource is based in Kansas City, MO.
Oh for heaven’s sake. You can find a whole bunch of talented mech e’s and ag e’s all over the corn belt that already live there and like it. John Deere in Waterloo is just one name of many. My nephew works at Ag Leader (he’s an EE). There is a lot of ag engineering talent in the midwest, it is silly to try to recruit it here in Sili Valley.
This is like the joke about the drunk looking for his car keys under the street light because the light is better than whete he dropped them.
If you rely on material that is scarce in one location but widely available in another, wouldn't it make sense to test where the material is abundant..?
Ordinarily, I do not reply to these kind of comments, but this article is receiving a lot of them along these lines. The comment breaks down to "Why did you not predict everything that could possibly go wrong before you started this new tech project?"
I hope that it is clear that it would be impossible to identify every problem before field testing. Even in commercial manufacturing, you will run up against novel problems and have to engineer a solution onsite, even though we have had factories for about 250 years.
When they start testing in a different state or country, they will discover a new crop that breaks their system and will go though this process once again. But now, they are more experienced, and it will probably be easier.
Wheat straw is a common agricultural waste product across the US, and if they can solve processing that they still win. It's not that they tested A for a product that will only process B. They tested A for a product that will eventually process A and B and C and...
Scaling up means testing with new inputs at scale. So now they've done that?
They want to be able to process both the material they prototyped with and the material they started with (straw) and the material they tried to scale up with (corn cobs), and probably any kind of plant matter that has less structural integrity than say, timber.
Yeah it's definitely a bit peculiar. You'd think they could have done some more research into the makeup of the material they'd be processing, get a good understanding of the needs of the machinery...
I’m starting to believe the idea that long term zero percent rates have made MBAs in charge of almost everything completely careless to the historical realities of business where you have a product and process before investing tons into a system.
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”.
Absolutely agree. Also, how is this firm based in Silicon Valley / San Fran where the customers are primarily in the midwest? If they were serious about this problem, shouldn't they be where their customers or resources are? Building something in isolation and then "shipping" it to where it will be used seems very inefficient and they're clearly missing out on valuable on-the-ground information and experience. This seems more like a university research project than a serious concern?
There are other companies working on similar things in the Midwest. It is a complex problem that farmers are very interested in because they see potential dollars.
For a farmer that works out to a bit less than 10 minutes of harvest. There are big it depends in the above, a high yielding wet corn crop might be a couple minutes, a poor yielding dry crop can be several hours. That is just the grain, most of the plant goes out the back of the combine. A quick search shows forage forage harvestors can do 400 tons per hour, I just took the first number a search found without checking details.
I had the half-joking thought, I wish I didn’t waste my life on software because this seems like actually enjoyable and satisfying engineering work.
I don’t really know if biomass is the best power source or whatever, but the problem of “get the biomass into the pyrolizer” is straightforward as can be.
I transitioned from writing software for Amazon to writing software for prototype wave and tidal power devices. It's no silver bullet - every industry has its WTF moments - but overall I'd recommend it. It's cool as hell to be able to literally stand on top of something that you helped build :)
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.