$11M Raised For Massive Field Of Carbon-Sucking Silos In Central Wyoming

A plan to locate a massive field of silos that suck carbon dioxide out of the air is planned somewhere in central Wyoming, and $11 million has been raised so far.

An illustration of what an "orchard" of silos to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and sequester it underground in central Wyoming could look like. (Spiritus Technologies)

A venture capitalist with a pedigree in the startup world and a scientist who has a background in materials research on sensitive military projects have teamed up to figure out a new way of sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and storing it in underground caverns in central Wyoming.

The backers won’t disclose where exactly they want to locate their first direct air carbon facility, but they’ve raised roughly $11 million to design and demonstrate 10-foot-wide, 15-foot-high cylindrical-shaped silos that will capture the carbon dioxide.

They expect to build hundreds of the silos across the countryside, perhaps raising hundreds of millions of dollars to build them.

“The capital investment will be significant,” said Spiritus Technologies CEO Charles Cadieu, a venture capitalist who has a track record of successfully building companies and selling them to larger corporate clients that fold them into their portfolios.

The silos, filled with carbon dioxide-absorbing balls the size of baseballs, will be built on a few hundred acres of private land.

Wyoming’s tornado-like winds will do the heavy lifting, which is to blow the carbon dioxide into the balls drilled with needle-like tubes to collect the gas.

Everything is automated on the inside of the Spiritus silos, with the lung-absorbant balls being held on trays that can be moved along on a conveyor belt from the silos to low-heat furnaces where they are stripped of carbon dioxide, then compressed into a liquid form and pumped into underground formations.

The balls, which are made of a proprietary sorbent technology, are returned to the silos to begin the process all over again.

Cadieu said that Spiritus hopes to apply for permitting on the project “very soon” with the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality’s Industrial Siting Council. The project, called Orchard One, will bring hundreds of jobs to Wyoming and will begin carbon removal in 2026.

When completed, the project will be capable of capturing and sequestering in underground geologic caverns up to 2 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually, Cadieu said. This amounts to roughly the emissions from 340,000 gas-powered pickups driven in a year.

Many direct air carbon companies use big industrial-sized fans to pull air into their carbon removal systems, but Spiritus Technologies, a public benefits corporation registered in New Mexico near the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos weapons laboratory that researches and designs nuclear weapons, has a different approach.

In this case, wind will blow through the silos, which are filled with “thousands and thousands” of the balls that they call “fruit.”

In the descriptions of their invention, it’s necessary to understand the organization of an orchard.

For instance, each of Spiritus’s silos is called a tree, with 100 trees equaling a grove, with 10 groves equaling an orchard — which is the entire direct air carbon project, Cadieu explained.

“Nature is the best designer of everything,” said Matt Lee, Cadieu’s partner at Spiritus and a materials engineering expert at Los Alamos Labs and who formerly helped work on the DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility, a potentially world-changing breakthrough for fusion energy and a key initial step in a quest for clean energy.

In 2013, for instance, Cadieu sold his image-recognition startup IQ Engines to Yahoo! to improve the search engine’s Flickr photo organization and search business.

And last year, Cadieu was behind the sale of artificial intelligence-enabled ultrasound guidance software company Caption Health to GE Healthcare

Over the years, Cadieu has raised more than $75 million for his startups from deep-pocketed headliners like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Khosla Ventures, whose successful investments have included DoorDash, an online food ordering and delivery service; Impossible Foods, a maker of plant-based substitutes for meat; and OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research organization.

Spiritus plans to earn money by receiving carbon removal credits from big corporations that need to offset their carbon footprint.

Spiritus has lined up the pre-sale of carbon removal credits to a group of businesses, including Frontier Climate Management LLC, a consortium of big social media companies looking to buy carbon removal credits, San Francisco-based Watershed Technology Inc. and Terraset, a Colorado-based nonprofit that buys carbon removal credits.

Carbon removal credits are measurable, verifiable emission reductions from certified climate action projects, like the one proposed in Wyoming. These projects reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions.

This is the second major development in as many weeks in Wyoming for the direct air carbon industry.

Earlier this month, Los Angeles-based CarbonCapture Inc. raised $80 million from well-heeled investors to build what is considered the world’s largest direct air capture of carbon dioxide and storage project in southwestern Wyoming.

Construction of the project on private land held by ranchers in Sweetwater County could begin before the end of the year.

“Plants will begin to die....followed by us.”

Easy trigger...The oceans are at equilibrium with the atmosphere via the carbonate,bicarbonate cycle. All of our food plants are C4 plants, corn,rice,wheat,barley,rye are all.grasses and every one evolved between glacial.cycles in CO2 of 150ppm to 180ppm we are at 400 ppm plus today. The oceans will compensate for any drawdown of CO2 until they release the amount absorbed over the last 500 years or so it will take equivalent time to release all that extra CO2 so the ppm of the atmosphere regardless of how much humans could take out will not drop for centuries time tables.

CO2 is a valuable chemical if you have CO2 water and electricity in surplus you can make all kinds of liquid or gas hydrocarbons with it, some are edible such as glucose, or ethanol. Both have been made with 70+% electricity to product faraday efficiency. The wind is always blowing somewhere on the great plains at night when grid demand is low where you would normally curtail that power send it to electrolytic cells and make ethanol with it. then drive a clean burning MCCI engine on that ethanol cleaner and cheaper then diesel fuel ask Clearflame to mod your diesel engine they have the peer reviewed results to show their modified engines are so clean they meet the most strict gasoline engine standards not in effect yet no diesel fueled engine comes close to being as clean. Cummins has zero,zero,zero.engines that run on ethanol or synthetic natural gas as well. Zero NOx,zero SOx ,zero particulate matter emissions. No need to change anything but the fuel system and the heads on either mod. If you have access to 2 to 4 cents per kWh power and $50 a tonne of CO2 you can beat the cost per mile of fuel for diesel at $4 per gallon.

It’s foolish to throw away perfectly good CO2 when it’s valuable to a number of industries. Colorado is a pot growing state greenhouses are in the 1000ppm levels for maximum growth rates. Truck some over for them. The Raton basin is ripe for tertiary oil recovery with CO2 flood also next door in Colorado.

Anyone who comes up with a way to get CO2 by the tonne at anything less than $50 is going to make billions just from the chemicals industry alone. Long term only synthetic fuels and nuclear,solar,wind electricity will fill where resource depletion leaves voids. Having a economic means of getting the carbon molecules needed to make synthetic hydrocarbons is a win for the species. This group using wind and gravity to drive the capture process is promising. Seawater holds 150 times the CO2 than air so if someone comes up with ocean current balls the recover rates could huge and more important cheap.

“Wyoming is also constructing a whole bunch of nuclear power plants

There are safer ways to do this, but will these new nukers design safely or what?”

Wyoming is getting America’s first commercial sodium cooled fast reactor with molten salt storage for load following and peaker plant operations. This design cannot meltdown with metallic fuels the doppler effect of higher fuel temps slow the nuclear reactions aka negative temperature cof. The fuel is also in a huge tank of molten sodium that has passive cooling to the ground and argon cover vault it cannot boil it’s thermal mass is too high for decay heat to boil it.

This new gen4 reactor also has a molten salt loop between it’s thermal plant and it’s secondary and primary sodium loops so water can never reach the secondary sodium loop. Molten sodium fluoride salts are not explosive or flammable with molten sodium as the fluoride is already fully oxidized with sodium. The molten salt tanks allow the reactor to be run at 100% output 24/7 and bank the excess heat when the grid demand is low and then run steam peak turbines when demand is high the Duck Curve as it’s known in the power industry. This means a 300megawatt reactor can run as a 500 megawatt peaker plant for 6 hours or more depending on how large the salt tanks are. Reactors are fueled on a schedule.regardless of how many effective full power days they run it in that fueling interval. It’s most economic therefore to run a reactor flat out 24/7 if the grid won’t take all the output store some for when it can. This particular plant is being built on a former coal plant site so the peer transformers and grid connections cooling lake ect is being repurposed. It’s a Bill Gates Foundation project. Fast reactors are the future only they can use all the energy in uranium PWR only use 0.7% and should have been banned as soon as the USA proved the IFR tech in the 1970s but Jimmy Carter that traitor killed our reprocessing tech and you have to reprocess fast reactor fuels.

Thanks, the chicoms have a pebble bed reactor. The design is solid, melt down proof and uses virtually indestructible TRISO fuel. The downfall is TRISO fuels are so full of carbon they cannot run in a fast spectrum which means you are only able to burn U235,PU239/241 and always at a conversion ratio less than one so never a breeder reactor.

There is only 8 million tonnes of under $300 uranium resources using that in once through even pebble beds is a crime against future generations. To burn out a planetary resource in a couple generations is morally wrong no matter how you look at it.

The TRISO fuel being nearly indestructible is also very difficult to reprocess it to recover the 96% fuel remaining once you burn it once in a thermal spectrum reactor. The carbon molecules in the fuel also capture neutrons and become radioactive C14 which cannot be released to the biosphere.

To reprocess TRISO fuel you have the oxidize aka burn off the silicon carbide and pyro carbon layers in the process releasing large amounts of radioactive carbon dioxide which must then be sequestered for at least 6 halflives or you have to reduce.The CO2 back to solid C and gas O2 then still sequester for 6 halflives the solid carbon. Because of this all TRISO and BISO (Pu239+U238) fuels are only ever going to be once through fuels with the pebbles themselves in repository form.

It’s foolish to throw away 99% of the mined uranium energy potential in a once through fuel cycle it should be a crime against humanity to do so. The only reactors that have a future are fast spectrum with full reprocessing to close the fuel cycle , use every bit of uranium energy potential and only put fission products into geological storage which need less than 1000 years to decay to mined uranium levels the bench mark for biosphere contact.

The only caveat is should the Japanese perfect seawater uranium harvesting on a scale of millions of tonnes per year then and only then will once through fuels be sustainable as the oceans have billions of tonnes of uranium and more every year comes from river runoff so much so that humans could never deplete the oceans uranium ppm levels.

There is the issue uranium is only 2 par per million in seawater you cannot pump water and harvest it the energy needed to pump the water exceeds the energy in the uranium you could harvest even in fast reactors that are 100 times better than thermal spectrum reactors in fuel to energy. Only ocean currents can bring enough water past your capture device to make the EROI positive. The scale of the capture resins needed to get one tonne of uranium in 180 days in the ocean is measured in hectares and humans would need millions of tonnes per year to feed once through fuel cycle and the 6000+ new reactors to bring 6 billion people out of energy poverty and up to even EU middle class levels of consumption.

Using fast spectrum reactors like the one going into WY reduces that fuel need by 100 times and can use every gram of the already mined depleted uranium when started with reprocessed Pu239 from PWR spent fuel.PWR spent fuel is not waste it’s a huge plutonium mine with 100 times the energy in it vs what was given from the PWR reactor output. There is 1000 years worth of depleted uranium resources just sitting in storage of the enrichment plants worldwide. Adding 6000 new reactors drops that number by a factor of 5 still 200 years, now your 8 million tonnes of uranium resources lasts a multiple millennium with 7000+ fast reactors running flat 24/7 world wide making electricity peak times and synthetic fuels,chemicals and hydrogen in the duck’s back.

A fast reactor can have a CR of 1.4 that means for every Kg of fissile material you put in 1.4 Kg comes out this is the essence of breeding and the only way to expand a reactor fleet to global proportions.

Once you have many FR and high CR you can divert some of the fissile material to small portable sealed long life 10 yr plus thermal spectrum reactors which by definition consume fissile material. Think ships, remote village micro grids, small islands with desal, Arctic communities with desal and district heating. Places that cannot afford a large fast spectrum reactor and you want a sealed system which is well understood in the thermal spectrum reactors you put in 20%’fissile and a burnable neutron poison and you have a 20 year lifespan as you burn down from 20% to 2% fissile.

Sure small fast reactors can be made the USSR sent some to space that’s how small you can make them they need fueling regularly as their CR cannot be above 1 at small core scales neutron leakage set the minimum size of a breeder core with a CR of 1.1 or greater. If you have to use 20% fissile fuels at the small scale already it makes sense to go long sealed core lifespan vs very small dense cores and much less total mass but yearly or 18 month fuel cycles. The only reason to use fast spectrum small cores is where mass is the dominate factor, deep space, aircraft come to mind. Toshiba has the 4S “small” fast reactor it’s building sized and has a CR of 0.9 so not a breeder its core is too.small. Compare that to the space TOPAZ reactors fast cores the size of a ten pound can it’s CR is well under .6 so no better than your avg PWR but one hundredth the size of a equal output thermal spectrum reactor. Small core shrinks everything around it in a logarithmic spiral of size.

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