Carbon removal is often conceived of as only separating greenhouse gases from ambient air. But what if it also creates other valuable products in the process? Should they still be selling carbon credits? Does this competition make it harder for carbon removal companies that can't produce additional value streams? What are the trade-offs here, and is financial additionality the right place to intervene if intervention is even necessary?
In this episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, Nori Cofounder Ross Kenyon interviews Eric Matzner, an alumnus of Carbon Removal Newsroom and Cofounder of Project Vesta who has a new venture leaving stealth mode called Metalplant. This is Metalplant's podcast debut!
This innovative project combines hyperaccumulator plants and enhanced rock weathering to extract nickel from soil and crushed rock while removing carbon from the air. Eric discusses the economics of co-producing nickel and carbon offsets, addressing the challenges of carbon removal scale-up, and his views on the importance of vertical integration in ensuring quality and cost control. The episode delves into Metalplant's initial operations in Albania, leveraging the country's rich olivine resources on non-arable land, and generating local employment.
Much of the conversation focuses on a possibly looming intellectual crisis in carbon removal: what does the industry do when it realizes that many of its methodologies are co-producing value besides carbon? Will it try to find a way to square that with conventional applications of financial additionality, or will they abandon or amend additionality to make sure co-producers aren't held down while the world desperately needs them to scale their operations?
So much to talk about, and there will almost certainly be more on this topic in the future!
Resources
Eric Matzner on Carbon Removal Newsroom back in 2019: "Project Vesta for olivine drawdown leaves stealth mode"
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to Reversing Climate Change Podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of Nori, which is a carbon removal marketplace based in Seattle, Washington. Today I have with me an alumnus, Eric Matzner, formerly of Project Vesta, now has a new project coming out of stealth. You just dropped this on my LinkedIn like a week ago. Eric, I was thinking of checking in with you, but I’m not surprised you had something outlandish up your sleeve.
Eric Matzner: Yeah, well, the name is Metal Plant. I’m not sure I haven’t disclosed that anywhere else yet. So you are the exclusive and first to hear that.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a cool name. How did you come to that name?
Eric Matzner: It’s a play on word for a metal production plant is a metal plant. And we use hyper accumulator plants to draw metals out of the soil while removing carbon dioxide through enhanced rock weathering.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I was really intrigued by your post, both because it’s quite visual. It’s neat to see a field of, of what I’m told are brassicas. So they have these like bright yellow flowers. Yeah.
Eric Matzner: If you’re in the video version, I have sitting in my background here is a full of flowers and they are actively sort of drawing the metal out. It’s in its own way, solar powered binification process of super low grade nickel, which, you know, in the enhanced weathering world, if you try to use olivine rock, the worry is about the nickel and sort of what about the nickel. So this company is an answer to that question, what about the nickel? And what’s pretty interesting, I guess, when you really kind of understand the value of the metals is that we are striving to push the price down of carbon to below $100 a ton, but nickel itself is usually around $20,000 a ton.
So it’s hundreds of times more valuable than the... Uh, carbon removals. So we use kind of the two of them together to make the process economically viable.
Ross Kenyon: I have so many questions about this and it’s been probably the thing I’ve thought the most about recently about co-production within carbon removal and what this does to financial additionality and how much should we care about that? Does it hamstring the growth of carbon removal? Is it a good thing, a bad thing? I don’t want to get into that just yet though, because I want to make sure people understand all of what you’re doing, the full steps, because there’s a combination of Several different things, which I think makes this really interesting.
I think a lot of carbon removal is pretty linear and pretty, it’s like a simple idea of the method, but there’s not like, okay, this is the part one and then part two, and there’s other revenue streams and how this all fits together into, I don’t feel like I see a lot of that yet. I’m seeing some DAC, the co-production of water and hydrogen, as we’ve spoken about. There are other places where like biochar might end up on fields or have some other sort of value that it’s providing, but I’m not seeing...
Yours has a vision that I haven’t seen as commonly.
Eric Matzner: Well, part of the idea is to be vertically integrated, to sort of control all the inputs and all the outputs all the way from the rock, including we have our own quarry containing billions of tonnes of very high grade, all of pure olivine and with some mix of serpentine in there as well, but also Uh, the distribution and, and sort of all the different areas when you have control, you’re able to innovate on them and you don’t have to worry about someone raising their prices on you and all that. We even lease our own land, run our own farms.
I have equipment, uh, on the books of, you know, binding repair and binding machines and, uh, every, everything to bailing and all the way up to.
Ross Kenyon: This is all, this is all great too, but go back to like, how do you just buy a quarry? That’s, that’s not a sentence that gets said to me that often.
Eric Matzner: Uh, yeah, it takes usually a lot of work, uh, to get a quarry produced. I mean, uh, to get it permitted and everything. Fortunately, I have a business partner, um, Sam Mouya, who is a local to our area where our project is in North Albania. And he, uh, and his family have spent a lot of time, uh, putting, securing these, these vast mineral resources. For example, in one area, they have a, There’s a transition between serpentine and olivine. There’s a chromium mine inside. And the chromium is like in podiform. So it’s like a big underground ball where the metals have kind of come together when it was still heated.
And so, but everything there, like the billions of tonnes of olivine sitting above it in these mountains are considered like overburdened. So we made originally made a deal with him sort of to just get the rock off for him with basically like a dollar per ton plus the cost. But as the team grew and the farming operations became more intense, he kind of stepped away from his family work and started and then joined the company and is now considered a co-founder. So that’s how you get a bunch of billions of tonnes of minerals under your control.
Ross Kenyon: It’s interesting that you mentioned vertical integration. That’s something that Nori believes in strongly. We think having a lot of control over what is in our marketplace can add a lot of value. If you can create enough trust, there are ways to really be a superpowered entity if you can do it well. Vertical integration, though, has not been super popular within the world of carbon removal. I think there’s a lot of disintegration that’s been favored. There’s a lot of service providers that are starting that want to do very narrow parts of the carbon removal lifecycle.
Though you told me several reasons that you thought vertical integration made a lot of sense, both here and elsewhere. Why are you betting on that? It also carries a huge amount of risk, too, like having all of those assets and liabilities on your personal balance sheet. There’s a lot of expertise that is needed within the company. There’s also reasons why people don’t do it for non-ideological reasons.
Eric Matzner: Yeah, there are some good reasons to avoid it. But in the long run, in order to get to something gigaton scale, every single partner is going to have to be reliable for increasingly more risk externally. Because if someone’s giving you their minerals for free right now because it’s a waste product, the moment that you start buying that and they see the value that you’re creating and the big contracts you get, they’re going to want their piece. The farmer whose land you’re using, they’re getting some nutrients if you’re using basalt and things like that.
But they’re going to want their piece. I think ultimately you’ll find yourself in a marketplace is already taking their piece, rightfully so. But if you’re only on one marketplace, you can be maybe like that. I think it’s just like being careful of the different aspects, but also meaning there’s no one to squeeze you on different aspects of the business so you can maintain your Costs and you can push them down. But I find personally where we’re able to innovate, if someone else was crushing our rocks, then we can’t change the process.
We can’t introduce new technology. We can’t grind specifically a certain way. For example, we’re pre-processing and removing some other parts of the minerals before they even make it to the field. So you cannot do that if you’re working with a partner who doesn’t want to invest or work with you. And won’t even give you access to their farm, for example, because of soil compaction and other things like that. When you don’t control the farm, you have to work within someone else’s seasonality, their different tasks that they’re doing. And if you’re not available, then you may not be able to come even measure or come put your rocks down.
So in that way, having the control and actually I consider our farms to be the world’s first dedicated enhanced weathering farms, even though we’re phyto mining with the plants for nickel, the Things that we really care about, like the soil pH, the amount of minerals when they’re disturbed, that’s all designed around the enhanced weathering process. And I don’t know of any other commercial farms that operate like that.
Ross Kenyon: I have so many questions, but we’re getting farther and farther away from the basics. And if we don’t set it now, audience is going to be scrambling to understand what even it is you’re doing. Can you walk us through it?
Eric Matzner: Yes. So for anyone who doesn’t know Enhanced Rock Weathering out there, I think Enhanced Rock Weathering 1. 0 would be sort of replacing, using minerals which have alkalinity in them from magnesium or calcium cations. So you need silicate minerals like basalt, olivine, serpentine, or otherwise to replace That would naturally weather in this long-term carbonate silicate cycle. I think the work we’ve done previously has helped get the word out on the long-term carbonate silicate cycle. But it’s basically like creating alkaline water, mineral water in a field and letting it kind of run off into the ocean where you have the generation of bicarbonate from these magnesium or calcium cations when they pair with the CO2 anion and kind of farm together.
That is sort of the, and travel by river through the water system to the ocean. That’s how enhanced weathering uses the long-term carbonate silicate cycle for carbon removal. So then we combine that, is that clear there? And then we combine that with phytomining, which is also known as agro-mining, which was a process of taking sort of plants that are able to take metal up into their tissue and then Certain processes to harvest the biomass and get the nickel out. And I’ll just give you a little background on this phytomining process.
It’s basically about 40 to 50 years ago, people were walking, a scientist was walking in New Caledonia, which is a French territory off the coast near Australia and New Zealand, and basically found a tree with a sap latex in it that was like between 10 and 30% pure nickel. And think of a maple tree, except they call the trees that bleed nickel. And so the trees have adapted, and most people believe, as a way to be sort of like a shield. As like someone might be poisonous, like a plant, animals generally and bugs can’t tolerate nickel.
And so it can be toxic, though like nickel is technically a very trace nutrient. But generally in the levels that you would find it in these plants, it could be toxic if you consume them. So as a defense mechanism, these plants have evolved this trait. And there’s a, even there’s a, you know, 500 to maybe 700 of these type of plants known, especially for nickel. And then within them is an even smaller class called hypernicolophores, which themselves become greater than 1% nickel. So the plant we have behind us is around between one and a little over 2% nickel by dry weight today.
Ross Kenyon: How much of the nickel is coming from the soil itself and how much of it is coming from material that you’re putting on the soil?
Eric Matzner: Yeah, that’s a great question. So as we are an early stage startup that we don’t want to risk any traditional soils, and as part of our process, we are operating on existing serpentine vertisols, like valleys and plateau and areas of soil, naturally composed of the minerals. Actually, the mountains surrounding our site are all made of silicate and we’re in the valley, so we call it Silicate Valley. Instead of Silicon Valley. And essentially, this soil has already contained levels of nickel that would be outlawed in any sort of way. If you were dumping or if this was like an industrial site, it would sort of be not tenable for food crops.
So this country was previously communist and they forced them to farm on all the land that was available. And so now the return on farming here that has little NPK, has zero calcium, You really need to spend a lot of money if you want to try to even make these soils arable. And then they’re still potentially adding metals into the food system. So we’re taking what’s considered non-arable land and turning it into active farmland, creating jobs and giving income to the owners who otherwise are getting around like 100 euros a year per hectare if they’re lucky.
So we pay like a multiple, maybe five times that or something. And we pay like three to four times. The rate of a job and really trying to create a whole system to bring the community in. And we have community engagement and we hire everybody local. And so we have a whole sort of jobs program around the implementation of this and turning this idle land into income for everybody in the area.
Ross Kenyon: I can only imagine that doing business in a place like Albania, even after the Anbarhoja years, and also being a non-aligned country during the Cold War too, I imagine they’re quite idiosyncratic. Are they as idiosyncratic as their linguistic origins? Is it hard for you to understand? It sounds like you have a native partner that maybe makes that easy, but... Yeah, we have a native partner.
Eric Matzner: I mean, Albanians are some of the hardest working people I’ve ever worked with. They sometimes have to slow them down because they’re like, wait, we need to check this or do this. They’re very industrious in that way. And to be honest, I met the prime minister here and we joked When I told him, you know, I feel more welcome in Albania as an American than I feel as an American in America in many places. Part of the history of which like Albanians all know American history, but very few Americans actually know the history of Albania being a country in the League of Nations or whatever.
In 1919, Woodrow Wilson Got them statehood. They’ve been part of the Ottoman Empire, and before that, they were even part of the Roman Empire. They’ve basically been between, and for those who haven’t looked at a map and don’t know where Albania is, if you look at the boot of Italy, there’s a little place called Bari on the back of Italy on the easternmost side. If you go right across the Aegean Sea there, you get Albania, which is, if you go down that peninsula, it’s Greece. Corfu is like across from Albania.
And it’s really an up and coming place. The South, the beach tourism is popping off a lot. So there’s a lot going on here. And I mean, it is a great, great place to work. And we’ve been welcomed on sort of every level of the country.
Ross Kenyon: The business practices and legal system is something that you feel like in economics, it’s called regime uncertainty. And sometimes there is concern about being in places that Maybe have laws that are different and could change. Do you feel any of that or do you feel pretty confident this is a good long-term place for carbon removal?
Eric Matzner: Well, look, there’s a lot of minerals here. It’s the home of this plant. Other researchers like Aida Bonny, for example, Professor Aida Bonny is a colleague of ours. She’s led the global research in biomass production. The plants from Albania Formerly named Alyssa Morali, renamed Odontera chalcitica, has been the prototypical species. So ours is like a northern version of this. So I do feel that the government and everything and the Legal structures are all good. I think the fact is, though, you cannot find a better site than this. I kind of joke sometimes that the story of El Dorado, of the area where it was a fabled city with stone.
I mean, literally here, the roads are made of aline and serpentine. Our wildflowers grow naturally on the sides of the road. You know when you’re getting to our territory because you can see these yellow flowers just popping up when they’re in bloom. So I think we definitely, you know, the U. S. company maintains the assets and owns these companies. The carbon removal is like sold in the USA. So realistically, everything is stable in that way, though we are looking at other sites like this in terms of serpentine soils plus a mineral resource.
And I’ve identified a number of them around the world, but everything so far is going very well here. And our focus is to try and make 10,000 hectares or more here. I’m trying to turn, our team is trying to turn the north of Albania into like the Valensol in France for lavender. There’s 10,000 hectares of purple flower. It’s a tourist attraction. Trying to actually make this a tourist attraction. So hopefully people will come visit. Instead of just going to the beaches, we’ll do the northern loop, hit the natural parks, hit the Albanian Alps, and then hike over there.
And then come take your photos and everything in our beautiful yellow endless fields.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s a nice vision. And I imagine it’s much simpler now that it’s been in the EU for a long time, too.
Eric Matzner: It’s not in the EU. It’s in NATO, but they’re in the ascension process.
Ross Kenyon: It’s still ongoing? I feel like when I was there...
Eric Matzner: It’s like a decade-long process. It’s called ascension. So you have to meet stuff. But the good news is it forces countries to modernize their laws and to standardize certain things. And they’re trying to make like a mini Schengen area here where you basically can travel between the different countries in the Balkans and then together they may all come in. But we’ll see what happens later.
Ross Kenyon: Are the plants that you’re using, is it similar to various types of remediation efforts that use chelation is how I say that, right? It’s one of those words that I’ve read but never said, I guess.
Eric Matzner: Yeah, I think that’s pretty close there. It’s similar. I mean, they put it in the biomass to sort of compartmentalize it within the tissues that would get eaten. When they’re producing the flower, it sends the nickel to the flowers, and that’s the time that we harvest it, actually. Because they don’t want their flowers eaten. And so basically, they mobilize a nickel to those tissues. That’s when we harvest them. And the process there, I don’t think we got into it because there’s all these aspects. But you recover the biomass. We grind it, bale it, grind it, dry it.
And then you use, there’s numerous techniques out there, but basically pyrolysis is a very easy one where you just remove the organic material and you’re left with sort of the, what they call bio ore, which is essentially like the nickel goes from like one third of a percent of 1% in the rocks, like 0. 3% in the rock. To 2% in the flower, 1% to 2% in the flower, then the ash or this bio ore is 15% to 30% nickel, which is now like the richest nickel ore in the world.
What’s happening with nickel is that the good sources of these sulfide ores We’re pretty much all depleted over the last century. So now they’re using materials called latericores or laterites, which are weathered tropical island soils. So now over 50% of the nickel in the world is coming from Indonesia, but they have to deforest it and go down to the serpentine where it’s like closer below to the source rock where it’s higher percentages. So at the top are soils that have sort of the metals have gone away. And so this is a big problem because they have to remove all the soil.
They have tailings piles. It floods the ocean. You can read stories about people not being able to fish because there’s so much sediment in there from the rain. It’s a big problem. And on top of that, the increase in purity of going from 1. 2% or 3%, which is where it’s economical for this type of material... Up to the 20 or 30, this increase, they use coal-fired power plants. So now each ton of nickel being produced is generating up to some places, say, 70 tonnes of CO2 per ton of nickel produced.
So it’s a huge problem in the clean energy transition to have nickel with such a carbon-intense footprint. So the product we’re creating is called, we have a pending trademark called negative nickel, which actually is a product that can negate the emissions by taking the weathered minerals CDR. So stoichiometrically, mineral per mineral, it’s around 300 tonnes of rock we have to break down to liberate one ton of nickel. And so then we basically can sell when you do net and everything, maybe around 200 tonnes of carbon negativity produced for each ton of nickel.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. That’s an extreme. So it goes from emitting 60 or 70 tonnes to remove it in 200.
Eric Matzner: Correct.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Is that just a scale or is that in the sort of smaller experimental early stage?
Eric Matzner: That is a bit more at scale. I mean, the efficiency increases as you go, but we’ve modeled all the way to megaton scale. And another reason our site is amazing is we have like renewable energy from a hydroelectric dam, but like at gigaton scale, that doesn’t, we will use more than all the energy output, for example, and we need a much larger sort of Area will be working. So we built in the production and the carbon footprint of solar panels themselves to make our own solar farms above our farms. And we could theoretically do this at greater than 70% efficiency, including bringing our own BYO, bring your own solar farm.
Bring your own energy source, which I think a lot of projects in the future will have to, will ultimately end up doing if the grid in their area is not clean and you want to make a clean energy project, it will be something you need to do.
Ross Kenyon: Is there a danger in working in this type of soil? Are there other types of heavy metals or not so nice minerals that are co-present?
Eric Matzner: Not really. I mean, we’ve tested for asbestiform materials in our minerals and haven’t found anything and passed all the tests. There’s technically like chromium present in the soils as well. As I mentioned, we’re pre-processing to remove that. That’s its own proprietary technology I can’t get into. But otherwise, maybe there’s like trace cobalt that over a very long time could add up. But there’s cobalt hyperaccumulators that you could co-crop with them. And we’re also trying to move away from monoculture as well. We have other crops that we plant into row. I think you can...
Maybe make out a little legume in there or something in the background. But we’re trying to use regenerative practices as much. And my co-founder, Laura Wasserson, she kind of leads up that side of the business. But really, we’re integrating so many parts of the businesses. It’s really like running three to six startups kind of in one. So it’s definitely pretty intense in that way.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s a risk. I mean, having that much complexity all stacked on top of each other. If you’re right, you’re really right. But if one part of it fails, it could threaten everything else. But I think it makes sense to stack all these things together. I think if you tried to isolate any one part of this, it probably wouldn’t have as much upside to it.
Eric Matzner: Yeah, I mean, for example, the greatest amount of money created in the process from the metal side is going from the low-grade ore to the high-grade ore. So if we just sold the bio ore to somebody, we would get a very low percentage. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And tax credits for electric vehicle subsidies, which by like 2027 or 2028, you have to have 70 to 80% of the value of the metals in your battery produced in the US or a free trade partner. So that’s actually the whole plan. That’s another way to Get around the risk of like the money in Albania.
It comes back. It transfer prices to our U. S. company. So everything maintains, you know, in the structurally to keep within the U. S. company. Even though the carbon’s removed in Albania, the certificates are sold from our U. S. entity.
Ross Kenyon: If I were a carbon removal supplier, I might be quaking my boots to hear things like this, where it sounds like you have a very valuable company Potentially valuable form of co-production of nickel coming out of this. You might have cobalt production in the future. Who knows what else is in your very unique mind, Eric? I’m sure there’s other schemes that are popping off. I know there are.
Eric Matzner: Give you minerals, free zero carbon energy and capital. And we are in the zone.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think there’s good reasons to be concerned about that. But I think also a lot of people who are focused on carbon removal, they’re focused as carbon being the principal product that they’re monetizing. But it almost sounds like under your scheme here, your scheme, aka your business, the point is more potentially to sell the nickel. If it’s $20,000 a ton and carbon, you’re eyeballing $100 a ton. How does that math add up?
Eric Matzner: How much carbon is I mean, I consider the entire company additional from the perspective of I founded to work on carbon removal and to solve the problems in the carbon removal world. And we’re a public benefit corporation. You have to submit a thing to the government when you file. And we said to remove as much carbon as possible and create valuable co-products in the process. So in that regard, carbon removal is core to our business. Yeah. But in some parts of the business, the carbon removal is shared along with the costs are shared along with the nickel production.
So when we grind, transport, the rock and quarry it, those costs are all shared with the nickel production and carbon removal aspects of the business. So depending the yields we can get from carbon and the yields we can get from nickel, It works out in different scenarios. If we’re low nickel yield, but high CDR, then we are a CDR driven business. If the nickel price goes up and our yields stay the same, we could become a nickel driven business. If the nickel yield goes up and the price goes up, then maybe at some point it could eclipse the carbon removal.
But if the carbon removal cost is where it is today, I believe an offset from Frontier for $57 million for 152,000 tonnes, To Lithos, congrats to them, by the way, is $371 a ton, then we are definitely a carbon business. So we’re not going to sell the carbon for $1, although theoretically we might be able to, but we’re trying to sell the market rate for carbon and the market rate for nickel and kind of not be... The market will sort of set the thing, but I will say from the nickel side and the mining, the mineral resource business, the intrinsic value of the minerals, then you can look at us as a mining, you know, metals company or something, because if every gigaton of minerals, which has a gigaton of capacity of carbon removal, At $100 a ton, that’s $100 billion of carbon removal revenue.
That’s 3 million tonnes, 3 megatons of nickel in there, which also, by the way, I will note is the total world production of nickel today about that. $20,000 a ton is worth only $60 billion. So per ton of rock, we are a carbon removal company for sure. The question is revenue-wise where that kind of changes, but we cannot extract the nickel from the fields. They have the first years of nickel We have to add a little bit more mineral constantly to replenish the soil nickel available pool. And that takes time to sort of move from mineral because the nickel is in the crystal lattice and the chromium is like free in the So you can’t extract it through other techniques without breaking down the rock, which happens to be what enhanced rock weathering is.
So there’s no way to run this business without doing enhanced weathering. And that’s part of the beauty of the structure of the company is that you can never be like, oh, we’re not going to do carbon removal anymore because you must break down the rock.
Ross Kenyon: Well, there are so many things in that you said that are not canon and carbon removal. The idea that me founding a company is just sort of de facto additional. I mean, that is true. But people are very obsessed with additionality being at the project level rather than at the company level, rather than being at the marketplace level. And it seems like maybe you think there’s been a wrong turn there.
Eric Matzner: Yeah, I mean, I was being a little freewheeling there, and definitely we should get into this more seriously, into the additionality question. I mean, tell me this, when was the last time you heard the moral hazard argument?
Ross Kenyon: You hear that all the time. It’s still out there, but less.
Eric Matzner: Yeah, because it’s very clear we must remove carbon, and it’s pointless to sort of remove carbon without taking into consideration the fact that we must Stop emitting carbon because it works against us. So no one I’ve ever met in the carbon removal world has been like, yeah, let’s keep producing oil. I’m here to make the oil companies a business case so they can keep on pumping. I’ve never met a single person in the thousands of people I’ve met in this field. So definitely there are oil companies out there. I personally don’t like to associate with them, but generally you have to look at the actual product.
I think you can’t just use additionality as this checkbox and you can’t use it as this black and white thing. Yes, if I am using captured carbon, pumping into a well, increasing the pressure in the well to get more oil out, essentially releasing more CO2, then yes, that is not additional. But what I’m doing is actually releasing more magnesium alkalinity using the revenue and the profits from the nickel to expand the crushing and the liberation of magnesium cation. I mean, I look at my job as how can I release cations in the most inexpensive way possible?
Because the real question of additionality is, will anyone else open up this mountain if it’s not me? And the answer likely here is, No, because this nickel is too low grade to mine economically in any other way. So this nickel production would not happen itself without carbon removal. So if you want to get into further additionality, the nickel being produced, lowering the price, stopping deforestation and making electric vehicles more viable themselves down the line also prevents the release of emissions because an electric car pays itself back much sooner and doesn’t require the ongoing mining and production of fossil fuels.
So right there, there’s an indirect way of additional net carbon lowered in the world based on nickel. If EVs are too expensive, their uptake goes down, right? So not only are we easing the transition, but there’s predicted shortages of these metals so we can help in that way. If a green steel company is going to exist, they need nickel and nickel is They’re going through all this work with electric arc furnaces and hydrogen-powered processes because stainless steel itself makes up a huge percentage of emissions. But inside the steel is nickel.
If you look up 304 stainless steel, it’s 8% to 10. 5% nickel. I think Wikipedia rounded up to 11% recently. But basically, let’s say 10% of steel and you have 70 tonnes of CO2. Right. Right. Right. So even if their production is zero carbon, what about the factory? You got to pay that off and that footprint over 25 years or wherever. Well, they could buy our trademark pending negative nickel and they could slowly remove that. We’ll see you next time. And still be able to meet the clean energy transition goals.
So is that additional? It’s additional nickel. It’s additional carbon removal that maybe some of the carbon removal would be more difficult economically. If the carbon price goes down, it might be more difficult for us to... If it went down to $50 a ton, it might be more difficult without the nickel. But I really feel like the entire project is about liberating magnesium for carbon removal. So...
Ross Kenyon: It’s the most roundabout way ever to make nickel. You specifically have said how difficult this process is with all these different steps. So it’s like, yeah, no one else would do it if they didn’t care about carbon removal.
Eric Matzner: So on the whole, I think looking at the carbon removal, the fact that these rocks would sit idle and they have been idle for 20, 30, 40 slash a billion years, you know, five, however old this, this is a Jurassic opiate. So hundreds of millions of years, they’ve been sitting there and without carbon removal aims, this rock would be inside with a single surface area that is not weathering at all on human timescale. So all minerals taken out of here are additional carbon removal that would not occur without us.
Ross Kenyon: It sounds like your principal intention is to attach this negative nickel as part of a specific product that your customers will buy and you’ll pass the carbon benefit on to them rather than monetizing it through carbon credits yourself. Are you going to split that in some way?
Eric Matzner: Yeah, great question. Yeah. So we also have trademarked hypernickel, which is hyperaccumulated nickel, which will be like a clean, either zero carbon or near it. And then you can buy that if that’s all you want. And when someone buys that, there’s carbon removal associated with it that we didn’t assign to the metal. Now you can buy that alone as well. But ideally, we will try to find partners and be like a sole source nickel supplier, at least from our side, as like we could have a handful of customers taking all our nickel production for the future.
But they would be able to negotiate. I think we’re going to definitely list some and get certified. We’d love to get some on Nori if there’s a protocol up to your standards, which we’re working on as well with some great partners. But that kind of process will allow us to have carbon removal, this hyper nickel and the negative nickel, which is both. So we should have some carbon to sell and some nickel alone at some point too.
Ross Kenyon: This question may not even make sense to you, but how much would it cost to do what you’re doing for carbon removal alone with no intention of ever monetizing the nickel?
Eric Matzner: The thing is, is you can’t really do that because the whole agro-mining chain, which is like the actual recovery of the metal and processing, it came about out of necessity because originally it was just phytoremediation. Let’s use these plants to clean up a site. And then guess what? Now you have a bunch of biomass. So you really can’t do this because we don’t want to build up the nickel in the soil above the baseline. So you really can’t. Use hyperaccumulators in weathering because if you don’t take the plants away, now the nickel they’ve drawn out of the crystal lattices and out of the minerals and out of the complexes in the soil, if they die on the surface, it’ll make it even more bioavailable.
So you actually could be making things worse if you don’t harvest and recover the biomass.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. I think that could conceivably... Solve at least some of the conventional additionality formulations and make that a little bit simpler for you to deal with. But I don’t know. I’m sort of the opinion that I think whatever systems we set up for scaling carbon removal, we should choose rules for VCM and for monetizing that allow for greatest reduction at the greatest speed of parts per million of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And I think trying to find like two... I am not sure that adding all this work of calculating the additionality questions here.
I’m trying to imagine someone coming in and doing a methodology for calculating how much of your production is additional and ferreting out how much of it is the nickel versus the carbon. In the sense that you just said, no, this probably wouldn’t happen at all. They might accept that answer, but they might choose some fractional answer that requires some very complicated protocol that gets applied to your businesses and your accounting. And it doesn’t actually necessarily... Result in more carbon being removed. In fact, it might have an economic cost that slows your scaling without adding a commensurate amount of quality or credibility.
Eric Matzner: Yeah, I mean, I’m open to anybody who wants to write a paper on the additionality of a process, creating co-products that don’t use the carbon removal, but drive carbon removal itself on the whole. I think it’s a new topic to discuss. I mean, this company was intentionally created to solve the nickel problem and enhance weathering. So again, it’s a carbon removal concept. I don’t understand. So is it your position to say we should penalize people that have figured out a way to profitably remove carbon? Even though there’s no re-emission of the carbon, they are producing other valuable products in the supply chain for the green energy transition that themselves negate complementary products that would create further emissions.
It’s not like I’m making something that is going to produce more carbon removal. I’m throughout the supply chain on both sides decarbonizing one product while producing a lot of alkalinity in the other one. Yeah. I don’t really, it’s hard for me to understand the argument, except if you’re being very unrealistic and very sort of picky about it.
Ross Kenyon: No, I agree with you. Companies that can co-produce carbon removal alongside other benefits, I think adds a robustness to the carbon removal industry in a way that is really needed. Being solely dependent upon VCM and carbon markets for your company’s only revenue stream, who knows what those credits are going to be worth in the future. And like any market asset are liable to fluctuate. Having other revenue streams that make you more robust and able to weather those times, I think is really important. I think the company that if you are able to scale both of these things at the same time, I think that’s a win for lots of reasons.
I think if you were to be made more profitable through carbon removal sales, that would encourage you to expand. It would encourage people to emulate you. And that would be a good thing on that for carbon removal in the earth. But some people are really concerned making sure that, well, is it all additional? And here’s all the things that we have to do. I’m like, can we just make these companies as profitable as possible here so that they will scale and have emulators? I think that’s the way to go.
Eric Matzner: I do think we need to look at these kind of models as a new thing. I mean, some top scientists in the field who looked at our project called it Enhanced Weathering 2. 0. So in that regard, the academic way 1. 0 is you go to a farmer, you replace lime with the basalt, you’re getting some nutrients and things. These, as I mentioned, are the only dedicated enhanced weathering farms where that is the main goal. I don’t optimize for nickel uptake. I optimize for carbon removal and the amount of minerals we can put down actually is a lot higher per hectare because one, our crops are tolerant to pH.
These things grow in 100% serpentine soils with no nutrients. So the pH level is way higher than corn, soy, or whatever wheat, whatever other places you might be using. And again, as we mentioned, we can put more and more passes at other times of the year. We’re not constrained by traditional farming because these are dedicated carbon removal farms. So with a phytomining crop there, a nickel recovering crop. So For me, I keep going back to the rock. If you look at the Ophiolite where we are, these mountains are covered in little shrubs and some places it’s just centimeters deep topsoil, but that’s enough to stop weathering and water infiltration of the solid rock.
We’re on video but also audio, but this is a piece of the olive and it’s completely solid. No water is getting in here until we... Break it out and break it up. So that is all additional magnesium, silicate, cation and silica rock and magnesium cations being liberated. I look at the liberation of cations before their geological time as additional. I don’t really understand how you can argue against that downstream, especially when there’s no increase in CO2 emissions coming in any other point that’s not subtracted from the net. Again, that’s clean energy, but the trucks today, we don’t have rechargeable trucks yet.
So we subtract that. So there is no... In net carbon removal, we’re taking into account the CO2 footprint we’re creating. And in nowhere do our processes create more carbon out in the production of our product. As I mentioned, if anything, our product at a lower price relative to the market rate of nickel would allow for more EVs and more cars. And maybe we can push the nickel price down and prevent seabed mining and prevent deforestation. And those are factors that should be taken into account as well. But we should be looking at these greater models in this generation of companies because we don’t know where the VCMs are going to be.
I agree with you completely there. And if we limit the companies, we can limit this field and it cannot make it past where we are today. And I wonder if the funding for companies when there’s so many competing technologies and even in individual verticals, there’s like 10 plus enhanced weathering companies, 10 plus DAT companies, mini ocean CDR companies, like How are we going to start to distinguish these companies and how are they going to all survive if they don’t have ways to make money? And you’re seeing this go in water treatment plants, right?
Where instead of using other alkaline minerals, they’re using their minerals. You’re seeing it in other areas. So I think we need to broaden our horizon of how these companies can be viable, adding benefits, co-benefits to the world while removing carbon. And the revenue from those co-benefits happens to Sort of compete for the carbon revenue, but those products are beneficial to the world. I think it’s still additional because they would not be liberating those minerals or introducing alkalinity or removing the carbon if not.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I think Grant Faber put this idea in my head in Air Miners. We were having a discussion about co-production and additionality, among other things. And he put out one danger to be concerned about co-production is that... Brad, if I’m mischaracterizing you, feel free to write back here. But say, for instance, this example you gave, but if you were able to monetize carbon removal for a dollar because your nickel operation was so profitable that internally subsidized the price of carbon removal, That could do a number of distorting things to the market, especially if that allowed it to scale.
It would crap out basically everyone else. No one could ever compete with you. And that would make us increasingly dependent upon a single technology in a space where we really need to get a thousand shots on goal, as the cliche goes. Is that something that concerns you about co-production? It’s the same as trade policy globally. If a government subsidizes technology and it competes with the mess of finance.
Eric Matzner: I mean, I mentioned that we’ll try and sell things at market rate. So I think obviously, you know, that is potentially, you know, a part of the process. But my goal is not to put other carbon removal companies out of business, but to help show how you can make viable businesses doing carbon removal. So if the market will pay the quote unquote market rate, nickel has a London Metals Exchange traded rate. You can look it up. You have to just make 99. 8% pure metal, and then you can put it in a warehouse that will get shipped on some random contract.
You never have to talk to a buyer. But ours is obviously a premium green nickel with a low potentially carbon negative footprint. So we’ll probably directly sell that. But again, we would peg things close or relative to the market rates. And whatever. To me, I don’t really care how the thousand goals are scored. I care about removing a trillion tonnes of carbon within our whole industry and stopping the catastrophic warming that’s coming, that’s in the pipeline. I am a believer of if we don’t remove the carbon, the carbon in the pipeline paper, that’s been very controversial, that we will be in a lot more trouble and it’s going to occur even faster.
So I’m happy to have these discussions because I think it’s important, but We need to be scoring a lot of goals. And the lower the price you go, the more, it doesn’t make sense of the analogy, but the more people will buy the removal. So I think we need to look at a market of like, A basket of technologies, a buckshot if you want to be more violent about it. They used to call it because they used to say, oh, you can’t say this is a silver bullet. That’s a thing you never hear anymore before.
Because when one idea would come along, this is a silver bullet for climate change. It’s the one thing that’s going to do everything. No one says that anymore.
Ross Kenyon: Moral hazards are gone. Silver bullet is gone.
Eric Matzner: And I’d like to say for informed additionality risk for doing good to not be something that stymies a thing. Would an investor say, oh, we’re not going to fund this massive scale carbon removal because they’re making money? It doesn’t make any sense in that way.
Ross Kenyon: It’s also fascinating that the silver bullet way of speaking had become less popular as belief in the occult has increased. You would have thought various vampire and werewolf defensive technologies, that would have worked. Yeah, it didn’t work that way.
Eric Matzner: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Eric, I’m fascinated that I have a lot of questions. I think what you’re doing is very cool. I just like the way of thinking too. I like thinking big. I think vertical integration done well makes a lot of sense. I mean, you gave an example. We can cut this if you didn’t want this on the show, but you had said that as soon as Olivine, like you wanted to corner the market on Olivine essentially before everyone else sniffed out this deal because as soon as someone figures it out, the supply of that is going to go way up in price or someone’s just going to buy and lock it down, right?
Eric Matzner: I mean, it wasn’t me trying to corner it. I was more concerned about others trying to corner it. We know in like the aluminum markets and finance companies bought the warehouses that store aluminum and would just drive trucks in circles, artificially increasing the price because the supply was, if there’s a loophole, if The aluminum was being moved that it wasn’t counting in the supply. So they would like delay the delivery or like move the deliveries around between their own warehouses. So I was worried that people would recognize the value of olivine and then like Make it expensive so that you couldn’t make under $100 per ton stuff.
There is a monopoly on olivine currently by one company out of Norway. So the idea is we need to sort of make sure that it’s available. I now have a network of other olivine providers that I’m aware of. So if anyone else needs olivine, that’s not mine. I’m happy to provide that. If you need olivine and a place to test your technology, also feel free to reach out. But You know, the idea is I’m trying to do this for the public good. And my last project Vesta, which is coastal olivine weathering, tried to make it a nonprofit.
And then people said, we have to make money removing carbon or at one scale. And the other people in the team wanted to turn into a for-profit entity, which I did not want to do. And that’s part of the reason I stepped back from there. So, and I retained zero equity today on that project for anyone curious, but they have placed olivine on the beaches. Um, and whatnot. So, you know, but this is a problem of if I do as a nonprofit, I can’t make money, then people want to make it a for-profit.
Now I’m trying to do in a way to make profitable carbon removal. And you’re telling me it’s not additional. So, uh, like, I don’t know what the, what the world wants, but I’m trying to cheaply remove a lot of carbon and, and provide valuable products that are necessary for the clean energy transition.
Ross Kenyon: I’m supportive. I wish you all success. I hope people listening to this podcast think beyond just carbon removal. They’re thinking about ways that they can transform other industries. These things can all work together. It makes your business more robust. You’re less dependent upon a single source of revenue, which is really important. How can people support what you’re doing? Where can people learn more? At the time of publishing this, will you be out of full stealth?
Eric Matzner: We will be out of stealth after two years, two and a half years, which is the most difficult thing because obviously I love telling people about what we’re up to. But we’re called Metal Plant. As we mentioned at the top, we’re at metalplant.com. We have the domain there so you can subscribe there. Find us on LinkedIn, X, and other networks. But generally, yeah, we should be out and about. If you’re interested in partnering or doing anything, feel free. And I’m always happy to help young entrepreneurs get into the carbon removal world and hopefully carbon removal plus valuable product world now.
But yeah, if you have any other questions, Ross, you want to rapid fire me, I’m happy to get those. But if you want to wind down as well, we can.
Ross Kenyon: I think we should wind down. Is there such a thing as rapid fire questions with us? I feel like everything you said, I’m like, I got three more.
Eric Matzner: I will do 10 word or less answers. Go.
Ross Kenyon: 10 word or less answers? God, I don’t even know that I’ve wrapped questions like that. No one’s ever done this to me before, Eric. What was your second best idea if you weren’t going to do a metal plant?
Eric Matzner: Oh, I mean, I have a whole slide deck of gigaton scale ideas I don’t have time for.
Ross Kenyon: That is a whole separate podcast probably of just running through your rejected ideas. I would love to hear all of those.
Eric Matzner: Some of them the world’s not ready for. We can’t build megastructures like double the size of the Burj Khalifa. So when the world is ready, we’ll know.
Ross Kenyon: I’m always ready for you, man.
Eric Matzner: Okay.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks so much for being here, Eric. Links to all those things are in the show notes. Thanks for hanging out.
Eric Matzner: Yeah, great. Appreciate it, Ross, as always. This podcast has been so instrumental in, I think, creating the carbon removal industry before it was really an industry. And I think I look back to 2019, 2020 times, and you were sort of a lighthouse out there. You, Air Miners, Open Air Collective, and obviously the Stripe Group did a lot, which became Frontier. So To all those early supporters and people who supported my prior projects and things, like if you’re ever missing a necklace or something, the Grain of Hopes, let me know. I do have other meteorite necklaces with this nickel, all of the necklace that gets you the latest and greatest.
But, you know, just always out there. I think you’ve been doing a great job supporting the community and I hope you continue to do so and wish you great success as well.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks, Eric. Thanks. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
