Dr. Friedmann joins Ross and Christophe to define his role as a carbon wrangler and why it’s important, walking us through the current climate math and sharing his insight on reframing carbon in the atmosphere as a resource to be mined. They discuss the best approach to inspiring progress around climate change, the fundamentals of carbon capture and storage, and the differences among offsets, onsets and insets.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: 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 Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Say hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon, here with Christophe Jospe 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. Christophe, why don’t you introduce our guest here?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, we’re sitting in a very trendy WeWork. Always nice, kombucha on tap. Yeah, I’ll stop there. Who’s sitting across from us is Dr. Julio Friedmann. Julio is the CEO of Carbon Wrangler and a distinguished fellow of the Energy Futures Initiative, and he was also formerly the PDAS — let me see if I can get that — the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary 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 commercial direct air capture plant opening, at Climeworks. The words coming out of his mouth were bold and audacious and seemed completely aligned with things that I cared about. 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 get a little bit of your background, Julio. Where did this all start? How did you get to being a carbon wrangler?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: 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 Marrakesh, 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.
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] We’re going to make fun of you if you use acronyms, so you can have this: conference of the parties.
Dr. Julio Friedmann: 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 communications 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 geoscientist, I’ve worked in government, I’ve worked in academia, I’ve worked in business, worked at a national lab, I’ve been in the Obama administration too. And the guiding star in 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 — they take things from where they’re not supposed to be and put them where they’re supposed to be.
Ross Kenyon: Do you often say yeehaw at the wrong moment sometimes?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: I never say yeehaw ever, but I lived in Houston long enough to know that the plural of y’all is all y’all.
Ross Kenyon: 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.
Dr. Julio Friedmann: The Western wear shirt was a gift from my wife. 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, buy a shirt, hit the rodeo. It’s always the second weekend of June.
Ross Kenyon: Is the tourist board paying you?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: I’m always in, probably showing up if I can.
Ross Kenyon: Wrangle carbon at the rodeo — that sounds like a fun rodeo. So, okay: carbon wrangling. Can we define it in a sentence?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: We’re keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and also pulling it back at the same time.
Ross Kenyon: Yes. So why does that matter?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: 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. We’re maybe on a 2.7-degree trajectory, maybe 3.5. It ain’t looking good. And in order to get to a two-degree trajectory, we simply have to do a lot 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 gigatonnes.
And for your audience, that’s not going to the store and buying a gigatonne of carrots. You don’t necessarily know how to evaluate a gigatonne. A gigatonne is twice the weight of all the people on Earth, so it’s a big number. And a gigatonne is the amount of oil and gas that Exxon, Shell and BP move in a year. It’s a huge volume of material. The entire oil and gas industry is 10 gigatonnes of stuff. In order for us to get to a stabilization trajectory, we’ve got to drop our current emissions by 15 gigatonnes 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 pulling CO2 out of the air, and that’s got to start now. 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.
Christophe Jospe: Awesome. Yeah. So there’s a lot of work ahead. We clearly needed to get started with this whole effort yesterday, but as you said, the second best time to plant a tree is right now.
Ross Kenyon: A lot of idioms coming out.
Dr. Julio Friedmann: Yeah, a lot of good ones.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, good ones. And so we’re talking about the climate math, and just to put this in perspective: the world puts how many gigatonnes each year into the atmosphere from fossil-based, in greenhouse gas equivalent?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: It’s 53 gigatonnes 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 — 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’ve got lots of options, we’ve got lots of technologies fielded. In the industrial sector we’ve got nothing. We’ve 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 emitting 53 billion tonnes a year. And at that level we run out of one and a half degrees in six years, we run out of two degrees in 20 years. We just overshoot. And so that’s why carbon removal has moved forward as an obvious and important idea.
Christophe Jospe: Is the focus on removal, too, that in many of these cases maybe it isn’t worth decarbonizing, or maybe it’s just not economically feasible, and you’re hoping that the technology for removing carbon after the fact might actually be easier or cheaper or better? Is that part of the focus, or part of the hope?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: 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 and the less suffering we’re purchasing in the future.
Ross Kenyon: 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?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: What’s interesting is, 10 years ago it was a persona non grata topic. Ten years ago everybody was saying we can’t even talk about adaptation, it’s 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 cat’s out of the bag, the horse is out of the stable, everybody’s like, oh crap, we actually have the sea level rise, the heat waves, the superstorms, 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 an ecosystem-sustained world — it’s the math. Put some money into it, start the work, don’t talk to me about whether it’s a moral hazard or not. Get on with it, we’ve got things to do.
Ross Kenyon: Are you unpopular because of this, or do people like this? Are they starting to now?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: What I find is that most people like this. There are some groups which you could call on the far left, or you could 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 problem is the first step.
Ross Kenyon: We’re going so deep in the idioms and metaphors. I love it.
Christophe Jospe: And 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, 53 billion tonnes of garbage into the street every year, and we need to stop that and negate that. So I’m going through your 12-step program and I admit, okay, we have a problem. What’s next?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: What’s next, basically, 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 EVs, 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 use to describe this is essentially a weight-loss metaphor. We need to do a combination of 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. 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, 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 rock is made out of carbon too. My clothes are made out of carbon. I’m made out of carbon. Carbon’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s pollution if it’s dosed 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 the carbon is not supposed to be in the atmosphere at that dose, at that concentration, then you’ve 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 lode to be mined. 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 sky mining as a human undertaking, to do well by doing good. And that’s actually where carbon wrangling is heading.
Ross Kenyon: And it’s not too good to be true?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: No. So I have to, obligatorily, say the thing: you have a chance right now where people can make money doing the right thing. You have selfish means turning into prosocial ends, and this is one that you want to harness.
Ross Kenyon: This is what we love too. We think, like, if people can make money off of this, this is actually like the beginning of it. Whereas the old way — like, when I grew up, environmentalism was 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?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: Yeah, I’ve learned a couple of things over the course of my career, 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. Instead, 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 fearmongering. 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 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, sometimes even by proxy — not so much, that doesn’t 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. This is just not something that the United States can do, and those countries have their own emissions roads to hoe. 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 decarbonize in a way that works for their countries. Absent that, we’ve just got more debt in the future. We’ve got more carbon to remove every year.
Christophe Jospe: So with the token and cryptocurrency space, there’s been a crazy gold rush this 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 of years?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: I think a number of groups are going to go after that, and of course Nori is already going after that. Nori is a 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 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. 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, those sorts of things. So there’s an industry out there that could look to carbon removal as another opportunity and seek to franchise into that space.
Christophe Jospe: 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 at 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’d 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 mineral — I can’t burn the mineral, it’s a rock. It’s still there and it’s more permanent. And so maybe 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 insets versus offsets. Could you explain that to our listeners?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: Absolutely. And you sort of hit it on the head, that this is a market which is forming and being explored, and this, like any other new market — we don’t necessarily know who 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, onsets and insets. Offsets, a lot of people are familiar with these. These are traded actually by the European trading scheme, they’re validated by conventional carbon validators.
Ross Kenyon: What are you defining here, for our listeners who are maybe new?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: I was just about to do that.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, sorry.
Dr. Julio Friedmann: Yeah, [unclear] 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, created a 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 whatever, 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 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 counterfactual philosophy that goes into the offset markets, and the people who work in that space are 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 two other kinds of actions and transactions in order to get there. One of them’s onsets, the other insets.
And basically I’ve split the landscape: onsets into something that’s going on the surface of the Earth, and insets, that’s going into a product or into the surface of the Earth, underground. The best example for insets that I can come up with is the project in Reykjavik, where Climeworks and Reykjavik Energy are capturing CO2 from the air, putting it two miles underground, and it mineralizes 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’ve 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, afforestation 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 onsets and insets 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.
Ross Kenyon: I’m stuck at the dairy lagoon. That’s got to be the most disgusting term I’ve ever heard in my entire life.
Dr. Julio Friedmann: Welcome to my world.
Ross Kenyon: You’ve ruined me. Okay, go ahead.
Christophe Jospe: I think one key distinction also in the offset market, just to geek out a little bit, is they treat an offset as one tonne of CO2e, 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 tonne of CO2 you’re now responsible to pull that tonne 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 a reservoir on the surface of the Earth, or a sink underneath the Earth in your inset, which I really like, to distinguish.
How Nori is looking around these issues: we think of it in terms of a tonne as a tonne as a tonne, 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. [unclear], you look like you want to add in something?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I just think of those three categories that Julio explained — we’re interested in the insets and the onsets, but not the offsets, right? We don’t want to use that word other than on this podcast.
Dr. Julio Friedmann: Well, okay, well that was part of the reason I sought 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 same thing as what we do in carbon removal.
Ross Kenyon: You mean like the co-benefits are actually the primary benefit sometimes, and it’s part of the reason why people invest in it?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: 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 wanted, because right now the stuff’s all tossed together in a heap. And if you would rather have a red Lego or a blue Lego or a white Lego, you know, you couldn’t do that in the existing market. You 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 ACR, 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.
Ross Kenyon: 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: insets and onsets.
So you’re a physicist, and you’ve—
Dr. Julio Friedmann: Take that back. [unclear] I’m a geologist by training.
Ross Kenyon: Excuse me, I didn’t do my homework then. For some reason I thought— Okay, Mr. Geologist.
Christophe Jospe: Well, so, you thought a lot about ways to store carbon when you were the PDAS, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary. PDAS. [unclear] Excuse you. And you mentioned one technology that you like, which is in Reykjavik, which Climeworks is using, and you started talking about carbon capture and storage, which I think there’s a lot of miscomprehension around, or 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’s CCUS? If the carbon goes back out into the atmosphere, is that still carbon wrangling? Does it help a little bit? Does it get us somewhere?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: So it is carbon wrangling, but again, I’ll unpack that for you. So I follow the terminology and the sensibility of Bill McDonough, who is a great thinker and 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 and a great guy, and he cares about language a lot. And he wrote a paper about two years ago 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 store it underground indefinitely, but I also think about things like energy efficiency and conservation, which are also un-emitted. They’re not emitting 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 too. So if you take CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into a fuel, and then that fuel is used and 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 pull 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 have assessed 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 fuels, and if they could have a truly decarbonized fuel, even to sell at a premium, they’d be interested. And so most of them have in-house R&D programs, many of them have acquired a stake or equity in a handful of these companies. So there’s interesting stuff. The third is the strict carbon removal — it’s 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 it 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 examples. Suppose you pull CO2 out of the air, turn it into concrete. It’s going to be around for a while. Concrete lasts. We’ve got 2,000-year-old concrete, we’ve got 5,000-year-old concrete. We know that the stuff can and does stay around. And in fact the concrete that is made from CO2 or cured with CO2 is actually better. The concrete is heavier, it lasts longer, it’s stronger, it is less prone to corrosion, all these kinds of things. You can also turn carbon dioxide into things like carbon nanotubes, plastics, carbon composites, which are durable carbon, and that carbon also lasts a very long time. So it acts 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.
Christophe Jospe: So, Julio, 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 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 too, a 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 three: what is a nanotube? What is it?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: This is an obscure tech terminology. It’s not that obscure. A Boeing 787 Dreamliner is made of carbon composites and carbon nanotubes. The thing is that carbon nanotubes actually sell for a pretty high price. They sell for between $20,000 and $100,000 a tonne. So if you can make the stuff out of carbon dioxide, look, you’ve 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’ve 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 either carbon negative, or much, much lower in its footprint leading to carbon negative, and that requires some analysis, some scholarship, some work.
The groups around the world that do this now 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, it’s easy to throw brickbats at it. [unclear] 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. 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 you’re harnessing this abundant distributed clean energy and using it for the purpose of manufacturing new stuff, ideally with a carbon negative footprint.
And the reason why you haven’t done that so far is sort of two things. One, the technology has actually evolved very recently. Only over the past couple of years do these devices actually exist and work, and the companies will offer you something with a guarantee and, you know, a price. You couldn’t do that five years ago, it just wasn’t an option. Thankfully, again, the second best time to plant a tree is now. A lot of these guys planted their trees five to ten 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’s signed, now that the climate math is obvious, now that we’ve got to start doing these things, there is a potential market value which has not yet been assessed. And that’s where a lot of companies are going to either succeed or break their spears. They’re going to see whether or not there’s enough market pull for this. In the case of something like cement, that’s a big market. We move 55 billion tonnes of concrete every year. It’s a huge mass of stuff. If you can get any amount of CO2 into that, that actually can deliver gigatonnes of abatement. And in the case of something like carbon fiber, it’s the 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 a tonne, down to $10,000 a tonne or $5,000 a tonne, at that point you can start swapping it in for other stuff. Instead of making your car out of steel, you can probably think about making it out of carbon fiber. You can certainly think about building your building out of carbon fiber, and it will change the landscape of architecture 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.
Ross Kenyon: Preach.
Dr. Julio Friedmann: 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. It doesn’t have to do those things, or fall down in the forest and not tell anyone about it.
Ross Kenyon: Precisely.
Dr. Julio Friedmann: So these boxes that capture CO2 from the atmosphere, that companies like Climeworks put out — those do the work of 8,000 trees today. Like, I can’t plant it for nothing and grow it for nothing, it costs money to build and so forth, but it does the work of 8,000 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 efficiently 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.
Christophe Jospe: So you’re talking about suitcases and boxes, and I really like those sizes 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, and 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 you’re building something that’s modular and can scale much more quickly. And one of the thoughts that came from my 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?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: Yeah, exactly. And you know, Klaus’s 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 scale, 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. At some point or another it doesn’t work for everything.
And a combination of containerization, and people shipping stuff in containers all over the world — that whole ecosystem is built — with that, plus things like 3D printing and modular manufacturing of all kinds of stuff, has 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, hey, we’ve 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 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 pulling CO2 out of the air, having a natural gas pipeline or power pipeline going to their house, turning that carbon dioxide into fertilizer for their farm, turning it into plastic, printing out their dinner plates on 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. It’s actually entirely within the scope of where we could be technologically and societally within 10, 15 years, and that is one of the reasons I get up in the morning, is to make that transaction happen.
Christophe Jospe: And is that the new carbon economy?
Dr. Julio Friedmann: The new carbon economy is all about doing a 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 monetizing afforestation in a way in which ecosystem services and natural capital are things that can be cashed in. And those are also things that other people are working on, 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 haul around garbage, and they provide an environmental service to people for a price. So there will be companies that do that as well. And the companies 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.
Christophe Jospe: 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 carbon 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.
Ross Kenyon: 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.
Dr. Julio Friedmann: My pleasure. Thank you guys for having me, and best of luck with your exceptional new enterprise.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you.
