chimere

Yard Stick PBC | Mechanical Engineer | On-site (Oakland, CA) | Full-time | https://useyardstick.com

We are a climate tech startup developing a dramatically cheaper sensor for measuring soil carbon. Soils have gigaton-scale sequestration potential but current measurement techniques are woefully expensive and inaccurate. We've derisked our technology and are now growing the team to productionize it. Join us!

Apply here: https://jobs.lever.co/yardstick/b6aecf87-1209-4e11-84b5-97a7...

Yard Stick PBC | Climate Tech Hardware | https://www.useyardstick.com/

At Yard Stick, we’re inventing a new method of soil carbon measurement. Affordable soil carbon measurement will unlock soils as the most scalable and affordable form of carbon sequestration (gigatons per year!). We’ve packaged decades of soil science research into a handheld soil probe which measures soil carbon quickly and accurately, while reducing the cost of measurement by 90% over existing methods.

Senior Electrical Engineer (HYBRID, Oakland): https://jobs.lever.co/yardstick/dacdda60-03f9-4f49-83b7-c8f7...

Senior Scientist, Chemometrics (REMOTE): https://jobs.lever.co/yardstick/5af9e656-753a-4d9c-b6b7-4feb...

Or email me to learn more! kevin at useyardstick.com

Primarily it's ranchers and farmers globally who want to get paid to add carbon to their soils by adopting more soil-friendly practices. This is a rapidly growing market as more companies are looking to offset their emissions. There's also a good deal of growers simply interested in learning about the climate impact of their practices, or soil researchers studying the carbon impact of various practices.

Current soil carbon measurement methods are very cost- and labor intensive, so our in-situ spectral probe will make these measurements much more accessible.

Yard Stick PBC | Lead Hardware Engineer, Senior Electrical Engineer | ONSITE / HYBRID (Oakland)

At Yard Stick, we value climate impact above all else. We help farmers get paid to fight climate change.

Removing CO2 from the atmosphere will be necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Among the possible methods for CO2 removal, sequestration in soils is widely seen as the most affordable and scalable, and comes with the valuable co-benefit of improving soil health. However, current methods for actually measuring increases in soil carbon are prohibitively expensive and frankly medieval. At Yard Stick, we’re inventing a new method of soil carbon measurement. We’ve packaged decades of soil science research into a handheld soil probe which reduces the cost of measurement by 90% over existing methods. Our probe combines a suite of cutting-edge sensors, a clever form factor, and advanced machine learning techniques.

I'm currently hiring for two positions on our hardware team!

- Lead Hardware Engineer: https://useyardstick.notion.site/Lead-Hardware-Engineer-c43c...

- Senior Electrical Engineer: https://useyardstick.notion.site/Senior-Electrical-Engineer-...

Or feel free to reach out if you just want to learn more! kevin@useyardstick.com

If you're interested in healthy soils, and particularly their enormous potential for carbon sequestration, consider joining my team at Yard Stick! We're building hardware that measures soil carbon in-situ, 90% cheaper than conventional methods. Currently hiring a few different hardware roles:

https://useyardstick.notion.site/useyardstick/Careers-at-Yar...

Interesting question - I'm not sure I know the answer but happy to speculate. Electrolysis certainly is a much tidier process than gasification, but everyone seems to assume it's powered by 100% renewable energy. What incentives exist to make H2 production decarbonize faster than the rest of the electricity grid? I'd expect electrolysis to only be fully carbon-neutral when the rest of the grid is, which will take some time.

On the other hand, our process is close to carbon neutral from day one (we've confirmed this with an external life cycle assessment), and will become significantly carbon negative when we begin sequestration. And as I mentioned elsewhere, sequestration is the primary mission and electrolysis is unremarkable at it :]

(Charm Co-founder here) Ultimately our goal is large-scale CO2 removal and sequestration with biomass. This process produces an excess of energy which we can sell in various forms to fund the process. We chose to start with Hydrogen simply because it's quite easy and has a large industrial market.

Also note that the largest use of hydrogen (~50%) is actually for ammonia production as fertilizer, which alone is responsible for 1-2% of global CO2e emissions. Decarbonizing that industry would be fantastic.

10-20 tons per day is commercial scale. The prototype in this article was much smaller - running around 0.3 t/day.

(Co-founder at Charm) Fair points. I'm not going to defend corn ethanol - our process yields 10x more saleable energy per acre than corn ethanol. The energy crop we're currently field trialing is similar to sugarcane, with extremely high yields (and our process uses the entire plant, unlike ethanol). Of course, energy crops are only required at large scale. At small scale, there's plenty of agricultural waste available for cheap, as you mentioned.

PV certainly wins on efficiency compared to crops, but it's also relatively expensive (an acre of PV vs an acre of perennial crops). Also PV is quite unremarkable at removing CO2 from the atmosphere :]

Certainly we considered it. The problem is that on this prototype system we were operating with a sealed hopper. Thus any gas injected into the hopper would travel through the system and dilute our output gas stream. Also any oxygen in the injected gas would result in combustion rather than gasification.

Also the USGS has this super cool map of potential CO2 storage in (under) the US: https://co2public.er.usgs.gov/viewer/

(Charm Co-founder here) Certainly - you're effectively describing biochar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar) which historically has been used as both an energy source and a soil amendment. Using it as a sequestration method has gained some attention recently, though I have reservations.

For one, biochar is typically produced in small, low-efficiency reactors without proper emissions control (though this is solvable). The bigger issue is the high energy content of biochar (~30MJ/kg). Simply burying all of this energy isn't economical - it makes much more sense to store carbon in its oxidized state, and sell the energy that's released in the process (in various forms - we're starting with Hydrogen).

(Charm co-founder here) I love that video! That fluidization phenomenon is commonly used in large-scale gasification or combustion processes, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluidized_bed_reactor

Charm Industrial [1] was recently mentioned on HN, with a novel approach to BECCS using grass to produce carbon-negative hydrogen. Grasses are the highest-yielding biomass per acre and thus the cheapest CO2 removal option. It also helps if you can make a profitable product from that biomass, like Charm is doing with hydrogen.

Not much info online, but we have a weekly climate newsletter [2], or you can ask me (cofounder)

[1] https://www.charmindustrial.com/about/

[2] https://charmindustrial.us18.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=aaf...

Perhaps you're thinking of Snake, built by Mark Setrakian? One of the most iconic battlebots ever. I could only find one video of him using the skeuomorphic controller [1], and a picture of him holding it [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVyMzo-D97A

[2] http://www.teamdelta.com/ax/markwwac.jpg

This is called film cooling, and SpaceX actually does use it on their second stage engine, the Merlin vacuum variant (MVac). You can see the beautiful exhaust plenum wrapping around the nozzle [1].

This isn't used for the regeneratively-cooled portion of the nozzle, but for the large radiatively-cooled nozzle extension, visible here [2].

[1] http://imgur.com/HvtBYIi

[2] https://i.stack.imgur.com/9qIFO.jpg

That's right. The most common polar orbits, sun synchronous orbits (SSO), are actually inclined at ~97 deg from the equator. This means that they're moving slightly opposite of the earth's rotation, requiring it to be more than cancelled out.

This means that polar launches benefit a bit from launching closer to the poles where the Earth's surface velocity is lower. However, in reality the difficult logistics of building an arctic launch site mean that this is rarely done.

How does one get involved in a climate R&D group? Any more info you can share?

You're correct. In addition, it's important to note that conjunction (collision) risk is proportional to spacecraft cross-sectional area. Thus, even with 100 of these small 10cm x 30cm spacecraft, they still pose less debris risk than a single satellite with a few square meters of solar panels (of which there are plenty already in orbit).

This launch was to 500km, and the Doves are around 150kg/m^2 (4.5kg / 0.03m^2). This puts their lifetime at around 5 years according to that linked plot.

For reference, Planet's earlier launches were to the ISS (400km) and lasted less than a year, which your plot agrees with.

This actually uses control moment gyroscopes [1] in a scissored-pair configuration, the subject of my undergrad thesis. These differ from standard gyroscopes in that they are gimballed to produce a reaction torque. They are actually most commonly used on large spacecraft for attitude control, so the comment about "technology from the ISS" is quite relevant.

However, the statement that there are "two for redundancy" is dubious. The torque from a control moment gyro is not produced in a constant vector - the torque vector rotates with the gyroscope as it is gimballed. Thus, if there was only one gyro, some component of its output torque would be aligned with the yaw axis, which would create some rather unpleasant and dangerous effects. The scissored-pair configuration is required to cancel out the yaw torque.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_moment_gyroscope

When I've heard Elon talk about this before, his idea is that people interested in moving to Mars would actually sell their house and Earthly possessions in order to pay for the ride. They won't be needing all that junk anymore anyway. Once you're prepared to sell all of your assets, then having a net worth of $500k is essentially the same as being able to afford $500k.