Over the last few weeks I've had the opportunity to read through about 90 applications to AirMiners Launchpad, and meet with 27 of those teams one-on-on.
One big opportunity I see for teams is to clearly map of your process/system, energy in, energy out, material in material out. If you don't have that level of detail, I'm assuming it doesn't exist, and your idea is still in the ideation phase. I made a video about this, discussing this issue and how teams can work it out.
This type of evaluation is sometimes called a Techno Economic Assessment (TEA). And for a long time, it was tricky for teams to make progress on their own doing this kind of analytical work.
One of the newest resources available to do this is the Assess CCUS website put together by the Global CO2 Initiative at the University of Michigan. It's a new resource that just launched to help teams getting this level of detail about your system. Props to the team there including Volker Sick and Grant Faber working hard to create it!
The other way to develop a map of your system is to talk with other founders. See what kind of process diagrams they've created, ask them what it took to get there. Any carbon removal company that's taking off has spreadsheets of data and models about their process, so even if you're just getting started why not start now?
Next week I’ll be talking more of what I’m learning from talking with early stage companies and how we can get to gigaton scale carbon faster.
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