When Malaysia and Indonesia overtook West Africa in producing palm oil due to an "efficient" focus on large scale plantations, we decried it as another sign of Africa's regression, and in Nigeria's specific case, a sign of petro-dollar's damaging impact on a previously robust agro-economy.
The unit economics around this are by no means perfect but the BIG point here that should probably be in all caps is that fact that the thermal process is displaced by the use of electricity. We could argue on what is used to generate said electricity, but that is beside the point since this innovation opens up many more possibilities than are stated here. We could also argue about the comparative cost of produced energy vs conventional fossil, but lets not forget that those same arguments were used during the early commercialization of solar energy.
In my opinion, the conversion process should stop at the creation of alcohols which can then be used as additives in E-85 gasoline for example, or in other chemical applications that have a less direct and immediate carbon impact on the environment.
I also think this innovation has a larger impact if it were used to bring existing generators of emissions closer to being carbon neutral. It also reduces the burden of being cost efficient on Day 1 since the carbon intensity of large emission generators is already a cost they'd be glad to mitigate or get rid of (esp if the process generates a valuable by-product). Imagine power plant stack exhausts channeled through this technology, or if were miniaturized and made a standard part of every fossil fuel combustion engine...we could all be buying gasoline and selling ethanol before you can say Prometheus.
>I also think this innovation has a larger impact if it were used to bring existing generators of emissions closer to being carbon neutral. It also reduces the burden of being cost efficient on Day 1 since the carbon intensity of large emission generators is already a cost they'd be glad to mitigate or get rid of
I can't follow this argument. What exactly are you proposing? His process still has a ~50% efficiency-loss, so even using all energy generated from fossil generators would only mitigate a maximum of 50% emissions (even ignoring all other efficiency losses here). And that obviously would be stupid. That energy is generated for a purpose.
The whole point of his process is to use solar/renewable/carbonfree energy to reverse carbon emissions. It would always be more efficient to just use less electricity/energy in other situations.
In its base form this technology is mining a resource - carbon. Would you rather mine in areas of low or high atmospheric intensity? Would you rather capture it where you fund the whole operation yourself, or where someone else (existing polluters) is willing to pay you to take it out of the air because there is a regulatory cost to them putting said carbon in the air?
Maybe i should have been clearer. I wasn't suggesting using the energy from a fossil plant to power this, but co-locating it to areas where there might be more environmental and cost incentives to do so.
As i said in my earlier post, arguments on cost/efficiency are beside the point. The huge deal here is the use of electricity (of any form including all the advances to come in the future...solar cells in space, nuclear fusion etc), to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. One can now envision a future (regardless of cost or efficiency today) where we can sustainably keep the earth whole.
I imagine the only places you can realistic install this technology is next to hydro dams/large wind farms where you can get very cheap electricity at certain times, and there are likely no hydrocarbon plants in these areas.
I'm not sure it's reasonable to install this in a coal plant and try to source cheap solar from hundreds of miles away to power it (if that were possible, why would the coal plant be active? It can't compete with the energy you're using to scrub it)
So we bleed energy off a hydrocarbon fueled generator system that produces CO2, to power a machine for capturing CO2 to create hydrocarbon fuels. That seems a little pointless.
The advantage of this system is you can use excess renewable energy sources to mitigate hydrocarbon energy generators. If you are running a hydrocarbon powered system, don't use energy to power this capture system at the same time. That's madness. Better to use that energy to reduce your use of hydrocarbons in the first place.
>Imagine power plant stack exhausts channeled through this technology
What's I'm saying is, if you have spare energy available to power the converter, you're better off reducing the hydrocarbon power plant output and replacing that output with your 'spare' energy supply. Doing so would be dramatically more efficient.
The only case this doesn't apply is if there is no way to substitute your spare available energy for the output of the hydrocarbon plant, but I can't think of such a situation, at industrial scale, off the top of my head.
Ok, I understand where you're coming from, and its a logical argument. However, a lot of fossil generators (esp coal) are baseload plants that stay running for system reliability. They might stay running during off-peak hours when the output is barely needed, just to ensure availability during on-peak hours. In those cases, you can't tweak output to match variable renewable energy output.
If this new process is working at scale, it has huge potential. I just wonder whether this process is covered by a patent or not. Might be a huge risk if not. If so, I wouldn't be surprised when the new process is named after the inventor. Much like the Haber-Bosch process.
You should sit with your other co-founder(s) and present your current predicament just as you've done here. Your subsequent conversation should be weighing the cost (to the startup) of you leaving to go back to back to big tech vs. you staying and cutting back on your time commitment/responsibilities to where you find some balance. Hopefully, you all have a good enough relationship where you can be open, direct and honest with each other on how palatable a compromise is to all parties.
You should consider and be ready to address questions like how long is the cut back on commitment going to last, how will it affect whatever targets/milestones you guys have on the drawing board, will it impact your equity in the startup?
The guilt is a natural feeling, but you shouldn't let that stop you from ultimately doing what is right. If there is no balance to be found and you have to choose between your family and your startup, leave...just don't do it without giving your co-founder(s) an opportunity to chime in. I would encourage any valuable team member (or co-founder) in your position to take whatever time they needed, and even consider a temporary hire to offload work in the interim.
You may find your co-founders say, "We have a good runway. Let's increase your salary temporarily / issue you a bonus to help offset the increased expenditures. Is there a way for us to adjust our hours to better accommodate your needs? How do we take more off your plate so you can focus on your family, and only work on the most important things for the business with the time remaining?"
FWIW- This is also why finding the right co-founders matters a lot. Having deep trust with your co-founders so that you can have these types of difficult conversations matters a lot.
I applaud any attempt to make open source work worthwhile to those who might not be able to continue spending the time on it without such a stipend/reward/incentive (whatever you want to call it). However, i have to admit that once capital is introduced into an altruistic equation, it has a way of murking things up. Successful initiatives will ultimately be those that allow people so inclined to continue doing open source work, rather than incentivizing potentially needless open source activity from opportunists.
Personally, I would like to see an honor or certificated system "giving pledge" that rewards impactful open source projects...especially those that are not initiated/backed by a corporation. Think of it as a sort of B-Corp (O-Corp anybody?) where a tiny sliver of value (equity/revenue/profit/annual fixed amount) is allocated to the open source libraries on which that business is built. How the money is used is another debate entirely, so is the handling of commercialized open source projects.
A very good candidate for something like this would be d3.js.
Putting Travis to the side, nobody cares about the privacy of the two ladies in the video who have been involuntarily dragged into national news? (i assume nobody asked their consent to publish the video)
Holistic Progress = Undefined.