You're listening to the reversing climate change podcast
by Nori. The world's first carbon removal
Marketplace, here are your hosts, Ross, Kenyon and
Christoph jospeh, say hello and welcome to the reversing climate
change podcast with Nori. I'm Ross, Kenyan here, with
Kristoff, Joss Bay and producer Paul.
We are now in Oakland California.
We all flew over here, had some troubles with our flights.
On many of them. Got delayed.
We made it. Just in time christop.
Why don't you introduce Our Guest here?
Yeah we're sitting in a very trendy.
We work always nice to kombucha on tap.
Yeah I stopped there. What's that sitting across from
us is dr. Julio Friedman Julio is the CEO
of carbon Wrangler and a distinguished fellow of Energy,
Futures initiative and he was also formerly the pedis.
Let me see if I can get that. The principal Deputy assistant
secretary, Terry of the office of fossil energy at the
department of energy, which is a pretty cool place to be when
you're working in the Obama Administration, trying to really
move the needle. So I remember first seeing Julio
in May May 31st 2017, he was actually talking at the world's
first. Direct air capture commercial,
plant opening at climb works. The words coming out of his
mouth were bold and audacious and seemed completely aligned
with things that I cared about. Out.
So I remember exchanging cards and he was very kind to follow
up with me and stay in touch, and here we are.
Let's give a little bit of your background, uh, Julio.
Let's where did this all, start. How did you get to being a
carbon Wrangler? The short version of the, long
story starts at cop, 22. It was right after the election
and a lot of people were wandering around my Rakesh, you
know, flapping, like, wet hens going.
Oh, what do we do? Now, the sky is falling.
All is doom and cop, 22 is kind of dead.
Tory, start cop. We're going to make fun of you
if you use acronyms so you can have this conference of the
parties. Thank you, cop, 22 and I was in
an airless room after airless room.
Listening to park and bark talks and it was just not a very good
vibe in contrast, there was an event taking place outside of
Marrakesh referred to affectionately as the do Fest
because that's what doers do. They go to the do Fest?
It was a tremendous experience. It was full of Art and
Entrepreneurship. You know, people doing
environmental work and communication.
Ian's experts and designers and scientists, it was just totally
thrilling and the focus of the do Fest was if the government
can't be counted on to deliver the goods we're going to have to
roll up our sleeves and get more active.
And at the end of that whole experience, I had an epiphany
and I said, that's what I do. I'm a carbon Wrangler, I have
trained as a geoscientists, I've worked in government of work in
Academia. I've worked in business worked
at a National Lab. I've been in Obama
administration to point D in The Guiding star and all of that is
How do you keep carbon out of the atmosphere how do you take
it out once it's there. And that's what Wranglers do is
they take things from where they're not supposed to be and
put them where they're supposed to be.
Do you often say Yeehaw the wrong moment sometimes?
I am never say Yeehaw ever but I lived in Houston long enough to
know that the plural of y'all is all y'all and so you can't see
it right now. But Julio actually has a bolo
tie and a cowboy hat on. He's really going for this
Wrangler. Look, the Western Wear shirt was
a gift from My wife's. What can I say?
We've got a great story, Livermore, Livermore,
California, is Rodeo country. We've got one of the oldest
rodeos there. I encourage you all to come out
to Bachman's, Western Wear Store, buy some boots by shirt.
Hit the rodeo. It's always the second weekend
of June, the tourist board paying you or I'm always in
probably showing up if I can Wrangle carbon at this video,
that sounds like a fun road it so okay.
Carbon wrangling can we Define it in a sentence and we're
sleeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and Also pulling
it back at the same time. Yes.
So and why does that matter? It's clear from the climate
math, that we have a very tough road to hoe.
If you believe in climate science, if you Embrace climate
science, you have to embrace climate math and the math is
unforgiving and harsh. We are not on a two-degree
trajectory, even with Paris agreements.
Were maybe on a 2.7 degree trajectory may be 3.5, it ain't
looking good. And in order to get a two-degree
trajectory, we simply have to do a lot more.
More. We have to do a lot more
abatement and we have to do Beyond abatement.
The math shows that 87 percent of the ipcc models require
carbon removal by mid-century and they require carbon removal
from the air and oceans at Mammoth scales at the scale of
tens of Giga tons and for your audience, that's not going to
the store and buying a giga ton of carrots.
You don't necessarily know how to evaluate gigaton.
A gigaton is twice the weight of all the people on Earth.
So it's a big number and a gigaton is The amount of oil and
gas that Exxon shell and BP move in a year is a huge volume of
material. The entire oil and gas industry.
Is 10 Giga, tons of stuff in order for us to get to a
stabilization. Trajectory we got to drop our
current emissions by 15 giga. Tons in 12 years, that's two
Senate Cycles. That's before my kids have kids,
we need an industry that is bigger than the whole oil and
gas industry, pull in CO2 out of the air.
And that's got a start about then the second best time to
plant a tree is now. And so I voted with my feet and
thought I need to figure out how to get these Technologies
deployed awesome. Aw yeah.
So there's a lot of work ahead. We clearly needed to get started
with this whole effort yesterday, but as you said that
the second time best time to plant a tree is right now.
A lot of idioms coming out. Yeah.
A lot of good ones. Yeah.
Good ones. And so we're talking about the
climate math and just to put this in perspective, the world
puts how many Giga tons each year into the atmosphere from
fossil based in my greenhouse gas equivalent.
Is 53 Giga, tons a year about 75% of that is energy sector and
fossil fuels. The other 25% is land use.
It's part of the reason why we need carbon removal.
Is that actually if you zeroed out all the fossil energy you'd
still be stuffed, there's parts of the system that are hard to
scrub. We're doing great on the power
sector. That's terrific.
We got lots of options. We've got lots of Technologies,
fielded in the industrial sector.
We got nothing, we got carbon capture and storage, and that's
it. And for the land use sector,
we've got even less than that. We haven't figured out how to
stop chopping down trees. We keep doing that.
We haven't figured out how to not use ammonia based
fertilizers or nitrogen based fertilizers.
So the nitrous emissions from those are a mammoth contribution
to greenhouse gas emissions. We don't know how to decarbonize
planes. We don't know how to decarbonize
boats. We don't know how to decarbonize
cooking and our gas stoves. There's all kinds of things
where we just have a long way to go and that buys climate debt.
We are building climate debt every year.
So if all future, green energy all Your energy deployed had no
carbon emissions, we would still be admitting fifty three billion
tons a year and at that level we run out of one and a half
degrees. It's six years we run out of 2
degrees in 20 years we just overshoot.
And so that's why carbon removal has moved forward as an obvious
and important idea. But focus on removal to is that
in many of these cases maybe it isn't worth decarbonizing or
maybe it's just not economically feasible when you're hoping that
the technology for removing carbon after the effect might
actually be easier. Our cheaper better is that part
of the focus or part of the hope.
That's not really how I think about it.
I think about it as we have to do all things in Spades, we have
to Triple down on everything we're already doing and do more.
So we have to continue with mitigation as much of it as we
can get as fast as we can get. We also know that's not going to
be enough. So we need to create a new
Enterprise that does carbon removal on top of that.
And then after that it still might not be enough.
There's some mixture of mitigation adaptation Suffering.
The more mitigation we do the more carbon removal.
We do the less adaptation in the less suffering were purchasing
in the future. I know it isn't popular for
people that work in the environmental field to even talk
about adaptation but I mean you brought it up so is it okay in
these circles to talk about that?
What's interesting is 10 years ago.
It was a persona non grata topic 10 years ago, everybody was
saying we can't even talk about adaptation as a moral hazard.
If we even acknowledge that we have to do some adaptation, then
we might Not do as much mitigation as we need to do so
fast forward. 10 years, guess what?
The cats out of the bag? The horse out of the stable,
everybody's like, oh crap. We actually have the sea level
rise. The heat waves, the Super
Storms, all these things. So now we need to start spending
on adaptation as well, and the reason I go through all that
discussion, is because carbon removal is just getting the
treatment now that adaptation got ten years ago.
People are saying we can't even talk about carbon removal.
It might reduce our need for mitigation.
Hey, math is math. If you can do arithmetic, you
can figure this out. And if you know that we need to
do carbon removal to get to a stable just transition to get to
as ecosystem sustained world. It's the math, put some money
into it, start the work, don't talk to me whether it's a moral
hazard or not, get on with it we got things to do a popular
because of this or is this people like this?
Are they starting to now though what I find is that most people
like this, there are some groups which you could call on the far
left or you Good call on the far-right who don't like this
discussion but I don't want to live my life on both ends of the
dumbbell. I want to live my life, doing
the work that needs to get done and, you know, just like any
other 12-step program, acknowledging the problems the
first step, we're going. So deep in the idioms and
metaphors. I love it.
And that I was going to ask a different question.
But let's unpack this 12-step program.
So you admit you have a problem and it seems like our problem as
a whole is that we've put this CO2.
Which let's call it garbage. We put this garbage out into the
street freely and there's no price that we have to pay for
the garbage. And now there's all this excess
garbage that already, maybe we can quibble on the numbers but
let's say 750 billion tonnes which is too much.
We want to pull it back and we're putting whatever fifty,
three billion tons of garbage into the street every year.
And we need to stop that and negate that.
So I'm going through your 12-step problem and I admit.
Okay, we have a problem. What's next?
Thanks.
Polly is a bunch of stuff we're already doing plus carbon
wrangling, which is why I'm here.
I suppose the stuff we're already doing is we need to
actually go farther on a lot of the stuff we already know how to
do, we need to go farther on solar.
We need to go farther on wind. We need to go farther on
efficiency. We need to go farther on V's
need to go farther on nuclear. We need to go farther on
conventional capture and storage when you do all that stuff and a
bunch of it. The metaphor, I used to describe
this as essentially a weight-loss metaphor.
We need to do a combination. Should have changing your diet
and exercise and eating less. And all those things that I
talked about. Fill that boat, then comes the
part where you have to clean up your room afterwards or even if
you manage to lose weight, you're not out of the water
because you created a mess. It is strictly speaking, carbon
pollution. In fact, is a carbon itself, is
not a bad thing. Everything in this building
that's not made out of steel or glass, or rock is made out of
carbon. In fact, some of the rocks made
out of carbon to my clothes are made out of carbon.
I made it a carbon. It's not a carbons necessarily a
bad thing, but it's pollution if it's Dost in the wrong place and
that's the problem. We have gasoline is great in the
gas tank. It's terrible in my water.
It's a pollution in one place. It's not in the other.
So the question is, if there's carbon is not supposed to be in
the atmosphere at that dose at that concentration, then you got
to clean it up. So I think of the sky in one of
a couple of different ways. I think of it as a massive
Superfund Site to be cleaned up. Alternatively, you think of it
as a massive load to be mind. It's actually now increasingly
seen as a resource that can be harvested for gain that.
Change of thought that reframing of the problem is, in part,
going to create new companies, new Industries, new Enterprises.
That we are only just starting to imagine.
It's a new kind of white space thinking about skymining as a
human undertaking to do well by doing good.
And that's actually where carbon wrangling is heading.
And it's not too good to be true.
No. So I had to obligatory really
say, the thing. You have a chance right now
where people can make money doing the right thing.
You have selfish means turning into Oh, social ends and this is
on that you want to harness. This is what we love to.
We think like if people can make money off of this, this is
actually like the beginning of it wears like the old way.
Like, when I grew up environmentalism was like a lot
of finger-wagging and scolding. I don't really think that's
going to lead to anything that positive.
I feel like we've kind of already maxed that out.
Is there anyone left to go with that?
Yeah, I've learned a couple of things over the course of my
career and working in government and so forth.
One of the things I learned is that you don't make progress
telling people why they're stupid, that just is a dead end.
And said you have to tell people why there's hope and good things
to do. It's a much more useful approach
of our time. There's only so much progress,
you can make with fear mongering at some point.
People are like paralyzed, you actually have to give them
useful positive actions. And if they can make money in
the process, all the better because that unleashes markets
and that creates positive feedbacks.
And in the system that are very, very important.
One of the other things that I learned is that the United
States government does not make policy in other countries.
We are one of 197 to sometimes even by proxy, not so much, the
some work so well. Well yeah, we can't make policy
in China. We can't make policy in India.
We can't make policy in Germany. We just don't this is not
something that the United States can do and those countries have
their own emissions roads to ho. And so, again, if you can
provide them with a technology, if you can provide them with
markets, if you can provide them, the opportunity, they can
choose to polarize positive in a way that works for their
countries absent. That we're just got more debt in
the future. We've got more carbon to remove
every year, so with the Octane and cryptocurrency space.
There's been a crazy Gold Rush as last year.
I'm not sure to what degree you followed it.
But is there going to be a carbon removal Gold Rush coming
up in the next couple years? I think a number of groups are
going to go after that and of course Nori is already going
after that Nori is cryptocurrency.
Founded on the basic premise of carbon removal as a product.
I think we're probably going to see more offerings like that
whether or not those are substantial or sensible
Investments, I wouldn't vouchsafe, but I do think that
we're going to start taking more shots on net.
And that people are in the cryptocurrency.
Space are going to look for opportunities to do that.
For me, based on my experience. A requirement of that success
will be validation. That it'll be very hard to
transact in the carbon space. If the carbon transaction itself
is not validated, that actually is either a hurdle to be
overcome or an opportunity to engage more people.
There are people out there who already do carbon trading carbon
certification, lose, those sorts of things.
So there's an industry out there that could look to carbon
removal. Another opportunity and seek to
franchise into that space. Well, thanks for calling us out
Julio. Yep.
We're going for the gold rush. And I mean I kind of see part of
what we're doing is not certainly mining for gold but
rather trying to build the Levi's jeans and the shovels so
that gold mining can occur and a quicker scale and hoping that
others actually might copy what we're doing because that would
make progress happen more quickly.
We like to say if someone were to look at Nori's design and
completely copy certain elements more shots on net.
Our goal here is to reverse climate change and one of the
ways that we're going about doing that is by building
methodologies, in an open and transparent platform.
So that the carbon accounting can indeed improve as more data,
goes through there and people can trust that what's happening,
which from our perspective is getting the math on the negative
carbon emissions, right? That's actually occurring.
We're at kind of like to go into how you see these various
Accounting, metrics all adding up.
So we can talk about removing carbon and then putting it in
biomass, or we can talk about removing carbon and putting it
in a mineral. And when, that biomass Burns, it
goes back into the atmosphere. Well, when I burn the minute, I
can't bear the middle. It's a rock.
It's still there and it's more permanent and so, maybe what is
the carbon that's been wrangled in the mineral has a higher
value or there's a premium that someone might want to pay?
And I remember one of the Articles we can link to this
that you wrote was all about insects versus offsets.
Could you explain that to our listeners?
Absolutely. And you sort of hit it on the
head that this is a market which is forming and being explored in
this like any other New Market, we don't necessarily know what
the customers are. We don't necessarily know how
much people will pay. There's a bunch of stuff, we
don't know, but these markets are coming forward and I tried
to break the landscape out into three segments offsets on sets.
And in sets off sets, a lot of people are familiar with these
are traded actually by the European trading scheme, they're
validated by conventional carbon validators.
What are you Defining here for our listeners are.
Maybe new was just about to do that.
So we're over. Yeah.
Cyrus ruined ruined my flow. So that's quite all right.
But the punch line is these are mechanisms that were set up
maybe 20 years ago by the United Nations under Kyoto.
So things like redd+ things like the clean development mechanism,
creative context in which a lot of offsets could be traded.
The thing about most offsets is most offsets don't actually
deliver carbon abatement at all a few do.
If you go to a Dairy Lagoon and capture the methane and destroy
it or Or whatever. Then then actually that
qualifies as a carbon reduction for real, but a lot of them are
not that they're often things. Like we're going to build a
solar panels and solar power plants in Africa, and that will
mean that they won't build a coal-fired power plant in the
future. So there's a lot of counter
factual philosophy that goes into the offset markets and the
people who work in those space or familiar with the challenges
and problems associated with that.
The punch line is, if you care about carbon, you need to do
something in addition to It offsets are great, they preserve
biodiversity they help native indigenous peoples.
They deliver clean water. There's all kinds of things that
they deliver, but the carbon is not the big thing.
So we need to do to other kinds of actions and transactions in
order to get there, one of them's on sets together in sets
and basically, I've split the landscape and onsets into
something that's going on the surface of the Earth and
insights. That's going into a product or
into the surface of the Earth underground.
The best example for insights that I can come up.
With is the project in Reykjavik.
We're climb works and wreak havoc.
Energy are capturing CO2 from the air, putting it to Miles
underground, and it mineralize has in less than two years.
Great. That is as robust a transaction
as you can make, you know, exactly how much CO2 goes in.
You got a meter on it. It's monitored underground.
You show and validate scientifically.
It turns into a mineral awesome that is very different than some
counterfactual exercise around potential emissions deployment
in the future and its consequences should be valued in
the market differently. Same With onsets, onsets are
things like putting biochar into soils soil, carbon farming, a
forestation or reforestation. These things are all places
where you're taking the carbon out of the atmosphere and
putting them on the surface of the Earth, both on sets and in
sets are easier to measure than offsets in terms of the real
carbon abatement. So, as a consequence, they
should have a higher market value.
In terms of the actual carbon whether or not that happens
remains to be seen, but that's my conceit.
I'm stuck at the dairy Lagoon, that's got to be the most
Disgusting term I've ever heard in my entire life.
Welcome, to My World. You've ruined me.
Okay! Go ahead.
I think one key distinction also in the offset Market just to
geek out a little bit. Is they treat an offset as one
ton of CO2 e, which means CO2, sequestered just as much as CO2
produced just as much as CO2 replaced.
They're all the same and when you treat them all the same, the
math, and the way to incentivize those, Actions gets a little bit
tricky. Whereas if you can now say if
you've emitted a ton of CO2, you're now responsible to pull
that ton of CO2 back. And the only way you can create
that is through putting it in some kind of a sink, whether
that's a sink in reservoir, on the surface of the Earth, or a
sink in the underneath the Earth and you're in set, which I
really like that to distinguish. How Nora is looking around these
issues, we think of it, in terms of a ton as a ton, as a ton, but
there are different levels of risk around.
Impermanence and we can upgrade on how much CO2 has been stored
based on the data that goes through.
All you look like you want to add in something?
Yeah I just think of those three categories that Julio explained
we're interested in the insects and the onsets but not the
offsets right? We don't want to use that word
other than on this podcast. Well okay well that was part of
the reason I fought to come up with these terms to describe
them because even though offsets have a terrific value for real
on the surface of the Earth in people's lives, it's not the
Thing is what we do in carbon removal.
You mean like the co-benefits are actually the primary benefit
sometimes and it's part of the reason why people invest in it.
They actually want to provide energy access to people around
the world or they want to sustain biodiversity in at-risk.
Ecosystems all of, that's great but the carbon accounting of
those is fraught. And oftentimes, it's not clear
there's any carbon benefit at all.
So I wanted to create sort of a clear distinction between these
things specifically so that investors in their own minds
could decide what it is, they They wanted because right now,
the stuffs all tossed together in a heap.
And if you would rather have a red Lego or a blue Lego or white
Lego, you know, you couldn't do that in the existing Market,
actually have to call them different things, call them out,
and then create mechanisms by which those transactions can
happen. And what's interesting is the
carbon Traders are starting to get into this space, so groups,
like, ACL, or gold standard, or any of these carbon certifiers
are starting to differentiate their products Just a little bit
and that's a step in the right direction.
We should do this too, because whenever we explain this to a
new person, we always get into this offset game because it's
the only point of reference anyone ever has for this and it
is incorrect or isn't really what we're focusing on.
So we use this term and then have to like immediately
undermine it. We just start using this
terminology or something very similar in sets and on sets here
physicist and you've take that back, you are at rest, I'm a
geology. All training, excuse me, I
didn't do my homework then for some reason, I thought.
Okay, mr. Geologist well, so So, and you
thought a lot about ways to store carbon when you were the
podesta, the principal Deputy assistant secretary pedis, he
does excuse you, and you mentioned one technology that
you like, which is in Reykjavik, which climb works is using, and
you ought started talking about carbon capture and storage,
which I think there's a lot of missed comprehension around her,
not understanding of what that even means or how that works.
Could you kind of go into the Technologies a little bit on CCS
what's carbon capture and Storage?
What cc us? If the carbon goes back out into
the atmosphere, is that still carbon wrangling?
It does it help a little bit, does it get us somewhere?
So it is carbon wrangling but again all Impact that for you.
So I follow the terminology in the sensibility of Bill
McDonough who is a great thinker in a great designer.
He's an architect, he helped design the International Space
Station. He built all of these sort of
buildings that are covered with trees and green roofs.
He's just a great great thinker in a great guy and he cares
about language a lot and he wrote a paper.
About two years ago where he said, which is called.
Carbon is not the enemy, it's published in nature and he
basically said there's three different things and you should
think about them as different things.
One of them is get the fugitive emissions stuff that shouldn't
be in the atmosphere stop doing that so I consider carbon
wrangling not just to be carbon capture and storage where you
capture from a point source and prevent that CO2 from heading to
the atmosphere and then sort of storing it underground
indefinitely. But I also think about things
like Energy Efficiency and conservation or also unadmitted.
They're not admitting what would normally be going into the
atmosphere? That's going after the fugitive
emissions. He then says, we need to create
a circular economy in the atmosphere.
And the same way that we recycle all these other sort of things,
we should be recycling carbon in the atmosphere to.
So if you take CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into a
fuel and then that fuel is used in the CO2, goes back in the
atmosphere. That's the circular economy and
we do that a little bit. Now with things like ethanol and
so forth. But he posited and I am working
on a much more robust transaction where you're using
devices to pulse it. CO2 out of the air using other
devices to upgrade them into fuels.
And then that actually is much closer to sort of a truly carbon
neutral fuel cycle and groups like The International Energy
agency of assess how much fuel that ultimately displaces in the
market, not surprisingly, pretty much all the oil and gas majors
are working on this. They're working on the CO2 to
fuel conversion piece because they sell feels.
And if they could have a truly decarbonized fuel, even to sell
at a premium, they be interested.
And so most of them have in-house R&D programs, many of
them have For acquired a stake or equity, and handful of these
companies. So there's interesting stuff,
the third is the strict carbon removal its restoration, pulling
CO2 out of the air and oceans and putting it back into the
Earth's surface or the Deep subsurface where it belongs.
So it's repatriating that carbon you're not doing it for the
purpose of making a product you're doing for the purpose of
just keeping it out of the air and oceans but there's a handful
of uses that actually do. Keep it out of the air and
oceans and you can create a value product.
Concrete is one of the most obvious example suppose.
CO2 out of the air, turn it into concrete.
It's going to be around for a while concrete.
Last, we got 2,000 year old concrete, we got 5000 year old
concrete, like we know that the stuff can and does stay around.
And in fact the concrete is made from CO2 or cured with CO2 is
actually better. Concrete is heavier it, last
longer it's stronger. It is less prone to corrosion,
all these kinds of things. You can also turn carbon dioxide
into things that carbon nanotubes Plastics Carbon
Composites, which are durable carbon.
And that carbon also lasts a very long time.
So, it act both in the context of carbon removal and
essentially, some long-lived repository or storage of carbon
in something like a tire, or a building or some other thing.
So who lie, you've brought up a number of great Pathways to do
carbon wrangling. I want to pick up on the last
one that you just talked about, which is producing carbon
nanotubes. So here, you're saying that you
can take a pollution as a feedstock and turn it into a
valuable product that will Replace something which was
otherwise carbon-intensive and it's a better product to
Stronger product and the world should just use it.
That brings to mind two questions.
One, why aren't we doing that today?
If it's such a good idea and two is that truly better for the
environment or are you doing certain energy calculations
outside of the full lifecycle accounting that might make it
look worse than it actually is and I3?
What is a nanotube, what it is? This is this is an obscure Tech
terminology. It's not that obscure its In a
Boeing 787 Dreamliner is made of Carbon Composites.
And carbon, nanotubes the thing is that carbon nanotubes
actually sell for pretty high price to sell for between 20,000
and 100,000 dollars a ton. So you can make the stuff out of
carbon dioxide. Look, you got a pretty valuable
product to sell. You asked a lot of stuff so let
me try to go after it for starters.
If you're really doing this for climate benefit, and as far as
I'm concerned, you got to be doing it for climate benefit.
Then you need to do what's called life cycle analysis.
You have to show that you're actually being that.
Carbon negative or much, much lower.
In its footprint leading to carbon negative and that
requires some analysis, some scholarships, some work, the
groups, around the world that do this.
Now are just woke, they are just starting to do this work for
real in terms of assessing and understanding what the real life
cycle looks like for all this stuff and if you don't have that
easy to throw brickbats at it and just it was just really a
different. But what's also interesting is
we have moved into an age of global energy, abundance every
year you can buy more clean energy for a buck Here you can
buy more Renewable Power. There's better efficiency.
All these things you're getting more productivity and more
energy bang for the buck every single year.
That abundance is what's going to drive this new carbon economy
in which your harnessing this abundant distributed clean
energy, and using it for the purpose of manufacturing, new
stuff, ideally, with the carbon negative footprint.
And the reason why you haven't done that so far, it's sort of
two things. One, the technology is actually
evolved very recently only over the past couple of years, do
these devices actually exist in Work and the companies will
offer you something with a guarantee and you know, a price
you couldn't do that. Five years ago, just wasn't an
option. Thankfully, again, the second
best time to start a tree is now a lot of these guys planted
their trees 5 to 10 years ago. A lot of these companies got
busy a while ago and have been working in this space to develop
products and develop offerings and all these kinds of things.
But the other thing is now that the Paris agreement signed now,
the climate math is obvious now that we got to start doing these
things, there is a potential market value, which has not yet
been CEST. And that's where a lot of
companies are going to either succeed or brake their Spears.
They're going to see whether or not there's enough market pulled
for this, in the case of something like cement, that's a
big Market. We move 55 billion, tons of
concrete, every year is a huge mass of stuff.
If you can get any amount of CO2 into that, like that actually
can deliver Giga, tons of abatement.
And the case of something like carbon fiber is exact opposite
super high value product. Super small volumes, you're not
going to save the Earth by creating carbon fiber.
At least not today but if you can get the price low enough, if
you can get it below, 20,000 dollars or time down to ten
thousand dollars a ton of five thousand dollars a ton.
At that point, you can start swapping it in for other stuff.
Instead of making your car out of steel, you can properly,
think about making it out of carbon fiber, you can throw
certain think about your being your building out of carbon
fiber and it will change the landscape of architectures
someday in the future. All these things are out there
and for me the reason I do what I do the way I do it is that the
technology always gets better, the technology.
It always gets better. Hear it say it with me brother
the technology gets better preach, right?
So a solar panel now is thousands of times more
efficient than a tree. It just is it's better at energy
conversion because it doesn't have to do things like reproduce
itself or transpire oxygen doesn't have to do those.
Things are fall down in the forest and not tell anyone about
it precisely. So these boxes that capture CO2
from the atmosphere that companies like climate Works.
Put out those, do the work of And trees today.
Like I can't plant it for nothing and grow it for nothing.
It cost money to build and so forth, but it doesn't work of
eight thousand trees today. That's just going to get better
in the same way. There's a company here in the
Bay Area called Opus 12. It's one of a bunch of companies
that turns CO2 into stuff, they have a suitcase sized, reverse
fuel, cell stack that suitcase does 32,000 trees worth of work
in that suitcase. It's just got much higher energy
density, much higher performance and it's not a knock on trees.
Trees are great. We love trees.
If you want to get into the business of scaling up and doing
this as a company, or as an Enterprise, or entering a market
or something like that, you can't wait 60 years for a tree
to grow. You can do it today much more
efficiency already with devices that exist and those devices are
just going to get cheaper. They're going to improve their
performance and they're going to create more options where people
can invest. So you're talking about
suitcases and boxes and I really like those size of units because
what it tells me is it's not going to cost me all that much
on the capital expenditure side to make the first one, which
means to make the next one. I can make it cheaper.
In the next one after that I can make it cheaper.
And then we're suddenly talking about cost curves and economies
of scale and mass production where instead of building a
large industrial plant your building something that's
modular and can scale much more quickly.
And one of the thoughts that came from old advisor, Klaus
lackner is to think about putting units in shipping.
Containers because that enables units to go anywhere and be
mass-produced and go around the world.
Is that kind of what you're talking about and costs come
down or is yeah exactly. And you know classes 2009 paper
on modular. Chemical conversion.
Technology is fabulous. It's a classic and part of the
reason it's so great. Is it showed that the cost
curves for economies of scale in mass production are exactly the
same? I mean, exactly the same as the
cost curves for physical scale up.
And many times people thought, the only way to get cost,
Reductions was to physically, increase your skill, bigger and
bigger until you had this. Mammoth IG farben, kind of plant
and the chemicals industry kind of did that forever and it
worked really well for them. But in fact, mass production
works just as well. There's a reason we don't drive
around in cars that hold 10,000 people in them.
It's like at some point or another like it doesn't work for
everything and a combination of containerization and people
shipping stuff in containers all over the world.
In that whole ecosystem is built with that plus things like 3D
printing and modular man. Production of all kinds of
stuff. Had people reimagining, this
whole Enterprise. So now in fact, it is entirely
where this industry is the carbon capture industry.
The CO2 use industry, carbon removal industry, pretty much.
Everybody is starting with a hey, we got to go modular and
the advantage that has is twofold one.
It means that the rate at which you innovate is high, just like
the rate of innovation in wind and solar.
It was high because you could build a little device and test
it out. And so the innovation, Rate in
carbon Ville, these days is very fast on that same born modular
kind of sensibility. The other thing you pointed to,
you don't actually have to write a billion dollar check to figure
out whether your idea works or not.
You can get into that game for a much smaller Capital which means
again, the rate of innovation, the acceleration to Market is
much faster for these Technologies and that opens a
whole Vista that we have only begun to imagine.
You can actually imagine now a farmer in Edmonton Alberta pull
in CO2 out of the air. Having a natural gas pipeline or
power pipeline going to their house, turn in that carbon
dioxide into fertilizer for their Farm.
Turning into plastic printing out their dinner plates.
So the 3D printer in the backyard and for that matter,
doing the soil carbon farming that they could do on their land
and then transacting all of that through the blockchain, you can
actually imagine that now and it's not nuts.
Yeah, it's actually entirely within the scope of where we
could be technologically in societally within 10, 15 years
and that It is one of the reasons I get up in the morning
is to make that transaction happen.
And is that the new carbon economy, the new carbon economy
is all about doing combination of carbon removal and carbon to
value. And sometimes that value is you
make carbon nanotubes and you sell them, imagine a new
manufacturing base that's distributed and creates jobs
that are local and stuff like that.
Using that kind of new carbon economy sensibility.
But it also I think is things like increased Farm yields by
putting soil and carbon and getting better growth.
It is things like monetize. Being a forestation in a way in
which ecosystem services and natural capital or things that
can be cashed in. And those are also things that
other people are working. And we're just starting to see
the edge of that. But if you're not actually
adding real commercial value to the world, it's much harder to
make your go of it. Even in the context of carbon
capture and storage, which is fundamentally about reducing
carbon fluxes to the environment.
You can imagine companies in the future that serve a role like
Waste Management. Waste management is a huge
Fortune, 500 company, all they do is called around garbage and
they An environmental service to people for a price.
So there will be companies that do that as well.
And the company is that figure out how to do that fast and
cheap and robustly where they can do the carbon accounting for
real. Those guys are going to make it
in the market. That's what we would like Nori
to eventually be too, is just a prototype that people can copy
for ecosystem services in an open source kind of way like,
Nori isn't just about Karma removal.
I think you could use a lot of this technology for other
ecosystem services, but I think we're wrapping it up now.
I think we're getting pretty close to the end.
Well. We got here.
You have a rodeo at the dairy Lagoon to get to so we can call
it. Thanks for being with us Julio
that was very informative and fun.
My pleasure. Thank you guys for having me and
best of luck with your exceptional new Enterprise.
Thank you.