Date: March 18, 2024

The Open NanoCarbon effort is CLOSED.

Thank you for your interest.

It's always hard to close projects. During a recent grant application, Shannon discovered ONC isn't poised to reach a climate-relevant scale (defined as greater than a gigatonne per year of carbon removal) in the near future. Given the current deployment rates of 3D printers, even if ONC captured the entire 3D market, it would still require home users to juggle tens of megatonnes of carbon yearly. Checking with some friends, even the thought of large B2B partnerships is highly unlikely to be able to compete with existing businesses based on existing B2B enhanced-weathering or biochar carbon removal.

Thank you to everyone who supported, helped, encouraged, and believed in me. Onward to a new path in continuing the decarbonization journey.

Sincerely,

~~sa

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Shannon A. Fiume

What was Open NanoCarbon?

A project to do open science to create open hardware that rapidly solidifies nanocarbons from atmospheric CO2.

The mission was to find the fastest way to create solid nanocarbons from atmospheric CO2. The projects will remove a portion of fossil fuel emitted carbon from the atmosphere and in turn positively affect the oceans while supplying nanocarbons as a consumable goods additive.

All resources will be or are open for the advancement and acceleration of Negative Emissions Technologies, climate science, and with the ultimate goal of accelerating climate restoration.

Why Solid Carbon?

Solid carbon is a useful commodity with a widely varying price that supports premium materials suitable for market entry by startups and makers. Solid carbon completely removes carbon from the global carbon cycle, allowing products to be made with carbon negative nanocarbons cradle to cradle.

What are Nanocarbons?

Nanocarbons, notably graphene, carbon nanotubes, and fullerenes, are single carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice yielding superlative electronics and structural properties. New materials made with nanocarbons can be made stronger, lighter, more conductive, withstand high heat, and have high optical clarity.

Fastest Way to Dissociate CO2?

At present, we don't know the fastest way to generate solid carbon (noncarbonate) in large volumes from the atmosphere. By investigating under-explored pathways of CO2 dissociation, we'll uncover efficiencies and leverage them in a large-volume high-throughput system.

Open Science?

Science is open when licensed to allow varying levels of sharing and reuse. All works by ONC are CC-BY open license, which allows complete sharing with attribution and total reuse, redistribution royalty-free. Zero cost to obtain the design and incorporate it into new works accelerates deployment. The device can then be exponentially deployed to any place on Earth.

Crowd Source Open Science?

By crowdsourcing science and engineering, we should be able to find solutions faster than working in isolation.

Current Project Status

The overall project is now closed.

Current News

The future is unwritten as we have a choice to do radically better than continuing as usual. Continuing as usual would lead to massive emissions and increases to carbon dioxide concentration globally, and in 2-11 years for an overshoot of 1.5ºC.

Prior Events

Novel, speculative highly-scaled carbon removal study on a reduced complexity model, showing a return to preindustrial temperatures by 2100 and updates to achieving net-zero for Anthropocene reversal. Poster presented at AGU23, 11-15 Dec. 2023

SJSU seminar co-presenter, slides are here.

Bay Area Youth Climate Summit, revised slides are here.

Bay Area Science Festival 2019, slides are here.

Bay Area Maker Faire 2019, slides are here.

Climate Tech Entrepreneurs Show & Tell hosted by ManyLabs, Y Combinator, and Open NanoCarbon and GCAS community platform event

International Conference on Negative CO2 Emissions

Poster Slides are here. The paper was open published here, and the revised here.

Bay Area Maker Faire 2018

ONC and nanocarbon slides.

1517 Assembly

1517's Assembly celebrated the fund's namesake, the quincentennial of Martin Luther 95 theses. My slides on entrepreneurship, higher education and science are here.