Apoorv Sinha is the Founder and CEO of Carbon Upcycling Technologies (CUT), a Canadian cleantech startup that is turning CO2 waste into a profitable commodity. CUT’s proprietary technology manufactures CO2-enriched nanomaterials, improving the performance and value of concrete, polymers and adhesives, and energy storage products. CUT is a finalist for the Carbon XPRIZE, and Apoorv has been honored as a Clean 50 Emerging Leader.
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.
Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. My name is Alexsandra Guerra, co-founder and director of corporate development here at Nori. We are here in Toronto. We are attending the Collision tech event, which is my first big tech event. We were standing at our booth all day. I’m so happy and excited to be sitting down with these two wonderful gentlemen. My feet are tired. So tired. I also miss Ross. This is the first podcast we’ve done without Ross, so Ross, if you’re listening, we miss you. Come back, come to Toronto. I’ve said it wrong. I’ve been calling it Toronto the whole time. It’s actually Toronto.
Christophe Jospe: Toronto, the T is silent. Or T-Dot?
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, something like that. But anyway, it’s the Collision conference, essentially North America’s largest tech summit, and Nori was part of the AI for Earth transition track, which meant that we got a nice little stipend and flown over here and got free booth time and got to present to a lot of people. And thank you, Microsoft.
Christophe Jospe: Thank you, Microsoft.
Alexsandra Guerra: We really appreciate that. Hopefully you’re listening and thinking about ways to partner with Nori. But this is not about Nori. This is about Carbon Upcycling Technologies, and this is going to be a really fun podcast, because on our right over here, from the conference, we sort of got into the things that I love to geek out about, which is like honest carbon lifecycle accounting and not making claims that you can’t substantiate, and, all right, what’s actually going to scale quickly and what makes sense? And how do we not demonize the entire fossil fuel industry, but use some of their great minds and power to change for good?
So if you want to keep listening to that sort of banter and conversation, don’t hang up and don’t go anywhere. Hanging up. He’s got eyes that will hang up. Okay, we’re not going to cut that. But this is, that’s right, we’ve got Apoorv Sinha, the CEO of Carbon Upcycling Technologies. He’s a really great guy. He’s listened to some podcasts, I think, so he’s like, yeah, I want to get on that. Yes, we want you on that. So how about we start, Apoorv, with your story? How did you get to where you are? Why are you doing what you’re doing? Why are you here on this podcast today, other than giving me your jacket so that I wasn’t cold and cranky?
Apoorv Sinha: You’re welcome. Thank you so much. Hi guys, thanks Christophe and Alexsandra for hosting me. And I guess likewise, you know, we’re from the western part of Canada, so we don’t get a lot of chances to come out to Toronto and definitely don’t get to come out to tech conferences like Collision. So it’s been a really good experience the last couple of days, very serendipitous meetings. And overall I think why I’m here is probably because you’re the only other two people in the city that could geek out about climate change and the technical facets of that the way I’d like to.
But to give you an idea of the story, so I’m from India originally, moved around a lot and actually grew up in Kuwait. I moved out there when I was eight, so I’ve been, through my family, exposed to oil and gas my entire life, and that’s really where I thought I was going. And then went to Atlanta, to Georgia Tech, for my undergrad, moved out to Canada thereafter, like in 2010, right at the end of the mortgage crisis. And as luck would have it, somehow got two 60-year-olds in the oil patch to start a cleantech company with me in 2014. So it’s been an interesting ride.
And I think what’s been really encouraging is to see the level of awareness and the momentum and motivation that’s coming in with the newer generation. Like people, you know, basically in our age groups, and frankly, others as well, but there’s definitely kind of a growing tide around not just protesting climate change or protesting all these things that are happening from what we’ve done since the early 1800s, but actually taking tangible steps to address that and create a closed loop. So, pretty excited to talk about that a bit more and geek out.
Alexsandra Guerra: I love that. So before you took the stage at the Planet:Tech stage at Collision yesterday, Minister Catherine McKenna was on stage. She’s the Minister of Environment and Climate, right? That’s Canada. And I was kind of grumpy and like, all right, I don’t want to be in another tech conference, I just have been on the road. I think I’ve been in Canada, it feels like, all month, and I was just in Montreal. But she was just, I was just so grateful for her presence, because she was name-dropping things. Like, I think she might have even mentioned you guys, and other carbon capture or carbon solution providers. She said, this is the time, we have to act on climate now. And that made me feel really, I don’t know, welcomed. Like, so I went down and hunted her down behind stage.
Apoorv Sinha: She wouldn’t talk to me like she did with you, I guess.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, I did. Yes.
Apoorv Sinha: A tender moment.
Alexsandra Guerra: I thought you were going to say that. One of the things that you told me last night was like, she was like, it’s you guys, the technology providers, the entrepreneurs, who are going to get this right. You’re going to figure it out, right? And she’s like, we need you.
Apoorv Sinha: So, thank you, Minister McKenna, if you ever hear this, because that gave me the empowerment to say, okay, I really think we have a good idea and we just need to share that with you. So I went up to her, had a brief conversation, because her staff was rushing her away to a press conference.
Alexsandra Guerra: But anyways, the point is solution providers, and you are one of those solution providers. So I do agree with you, we need to, just, while protesting and bringing awareness is important, it is also very important to say, okay, well now what? You got us riled up and angry and wanting to act. How, what is the agency that we can take? So why don’t you tell us a little bit about Carbon Upcycling?
Apoorv Sinha: Yeah, no, and that’s an excellent point. I think one of the challenges, and I guess being trained as an engineer, you’re always taught to think about things in practical terms, and I think the idea is to be able to channel some of that movement and motivation towards something that’s actually productive and long-lasting, right? Like, you don’t just want to get worked up one day and lose that over a day or two. But basically what we’ve done is started the company in 2014 with the intent of basically taking pollution and creating the materials of tomorrow. So one of the things that we’ve said is using today’s pollution to make the materials of tomorrow.
And we think that the way to do that is not to take a traditional kind of logical pathway around how to tackle CO2. So, you know, to start the nerd-out session here, carbon dioxide is a very stable molecule, right? Like, it’s got two double bonds. From chemistry back in high school, you can remember a double bond is a covalent, ionic, actually, doesn’t matter by definition. I think, you know, there’s ions that are being transferred. But the challenge is the fact that everything that we burn becomes CO2 for a reason. Like, just like humans, nature takes the path of least resistance, and CO2 is the most stable thing we can produce from hydrocarbons.
And so since the 1820s, when the first locomotive and the first industrial engine was produced back in the UK, we’ve been burning coal. We’ve been burning wood even before that for thousands of years, and all of that has been in this uncontrolled loop, like feeding the atmosphere.
And so the challenge that we have now, and how people are looking at renewable energy as kind of being this godsend that’s going to solve all of this, is, I think what we need to keep in mind is the most efficient engines we make right now are less than 40 percent efficient. You need to essentially reverse all of the emissions from 1820 on with renewable energy that we’re going to produce between now and twenty one hundred. And some of the new IPCC reports say that even that won’t be enough. Like, we are already beyond, you know, just reducing those emissions. We have to actually remove some of the stuff that’s already out there.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, yeah, because also I don’t love it when people just talk about efficiency and like, oh, let’s improve the efficiency and get more out of the carbon we use. Well, yeah, that’s part of it, but it’s not the whole story, because you could be super efficient, but then everybody all of a sudden is burning everything. And then you still, like, if you scale up the magnitude but you’re more efficient with it, it doesn’t really solve the outcome, which is decreasing total CO2.
Apoorv Sinha: That’s right, right? And that can be the Jevons paradox, right? So if you get more efficient and actually can use more energy, then you’re going to, just like fuel economy in cars, like the more fuel-efficient cars get, the more we drive, the bigger engines we get, everyone now has an SUV instead of a small Ford Focus. Doesn’t change the outcome.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. Okay, so we’re eight minutes in and I have no idea what Carbon Upcycling Technologies does, but I want to zero in on a word, upcycling. That’s like the stepsister that we don’t talk about of recycling, but it seems like that’s core to what your technology is about.
Apoorv Sinha: Yeah, we’re hoping that, you know, upcycling has a Cinderella moment sometime in the future, but you’re right. I think essentially what we do is we fix carbon emissions into a solid product. So we need a second feedstock that’s cheaply and abundantly available. So we can take fly ash from coal power plants, from wood plants, incinerators, essentially that burn sawdust and pulp. We can take coal, petroleum coke. We can essentially put that into a reactor with CO2, activate that so that it acts as a sponge for the CO2.
And what we’ve shown over the last four or five years is that that activation and that gluing process, essentially chemical adsorption, [unclear], adsorption with a D, yes, that takes a lot less energy than reducing CO2, meaning converting it into something like syngas or a precursor for a biofuel or bioplastic. So from an energy standpoint, you’re not anymore kind of going back, you’re not trying to convert that CO2 back into a hydrocarbon, you’re rather just gluing it onto something else that’s really abundantly available.
And what we found through our work is that as this material adsorbs CO2, the actual physical characteristics of that material change. So it ends up becoming a nanomaterial, meaning instead of being somewhat similar to a strand of hair, which is about 10 microns, it’ll be a thousand times thinner than this, the thinnest kind of hair you might find, and at that level these things act differently. So these materials, once they get to that dimension, can be used in materials like plastics and concrete and coatings, even solar cells, and actually improve the performance of what they do.
And so this is what we see as almost like a cheat code, right? Like, we think that we don’t just have to look at carbon emissions as kind of a problem within itself. We need to combine that problem with the bigger problem of how efficient are we with our materials. And we think that by bridging that using this kind of a technology, we’re helping people make behaviourally kind of astute choices, and become more efficient day-to-day. And we’re helping remove carbon in the atmosphere, because it’s acting as a good ingredient for our technology.
Christophe Jospe: So I think I’m tracking, that makes sense. You’ve got some adsorption process. You’re able to make this new material to change the materials, that you can create new materials, right? And so, but you talked about individuals but also businesses. What exactly is your business model? What are you guys working on?
Apoorv Sinha: Yeah, so we are an industrial technology. Like, we think that the problem of carbon emissions is at least in part because of industrial emissions and scale-up, and so we think that the solution at least in some part has to be industrial. So we have basically a reactor, we have one up in the northwest of Calgary, whenever you guys brave the cold and come out there.
Alexsandra Guerra: No, you come out in July when it’s nice and warm. I just got cranky. I mentioned the jacket, that we were outside waiting for a Lyft and I got really cranky, guys. I’m from Miami. I don’t like the cold. I’m ready.
Apoorv Sinha: Canadians out here. It was actually kind of a lukewarm day.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, whatever. This is the girl from Miami.
Apoorv Sinha: Yeah. But yeah, like, you know, so we’ve got a unit right now up in Calgary which is literally about 20 feet long and about 7 feet in diameter. So it’s a large unit, and that can capture roughly 100 kg of CO2 a day and produce a tonne, or 1,000 kilos, of product. We’re competing in the Carbon XPRIZE and we’re scaling that up another seven times, so by the end of this year we’ll have something slightly bigger than that.
And essentially our business model is to show that this technology is de-risked enough that very, very large operators, like cement companies, infrastructure companies, companies that make plastics at scale, for example, can essentially say, look, we know that there is a stable source for this, this can scale viably for use around the world, and then license the technology to them so that they put this as part of their own operations or potentially become a vendor to them directly.
Alexsandra Guerra: So you were telling me a little bit yesterday about some process or pilot that you’re about to do with creating products. Can you talk about that?
Apoorv Sinha: Yeah. So at the Carbon Conversion Centre in Alberta we’re essentially scaling with the knowledge that there are a couple of concrete companies locally that have committed to using our product if we can churn out the scale that we’re currently anticipating. So the idea there is to show from start to finish that we’re taking carbon from a polluting source, like a natural gas power plant. We’re taking a slipstream off of that, converting that carbon directly into the solid form and then selling it to a local construction company so that they can use it in projects around the downtown core.
Alexsandra Guerra: What is that replacing of what they were currently using?
Apoorv Sinha: In this instance, our objective is to replace cement in concrete.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. What does that total decrease, just to give us, paint the broader picture here, the concrete that’s coming out of Carbon Upcycling that you guys are producing versus conventional concrete, is it sequestering carbon on net? If not, what is the carbon saved or avoided that we’re getting?
Apoorv Sinha: So cement currently on a global scale accounts for about eight percent of the global emissions. So, 34 gigatonnes, you’re talking about 8% of that coming from production and use of cement. There’s a lot of work recently that cement companies have done to look at secondary cementitious materials, so they call them SCMs. So these are other materials that you can use in place of cement and still get to something that serves a structural purpose. One of the key areas of interest is materials like fly ash. So when you burn coal, there are impurities in coal which are basically minerals that were intricately embedded in the carbon framework, and they don’t burn, they are very stable.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, exactly.
Apoorv Sinha: So they get collected in these silos, and then companies, concrete companies and sometimes brokers, will sell this fly ash to local construction companies. So what we have found is that we can use that fly ash as an adsorbent, or a sponge, for the CO2, and in turn improve the performance of that ash within the concrete mix. So to give you kind of a rule of thumb, what we’re saying is that based on the results that we’ve seen over 2018 with a couple of our partners, we could potentially reduce the carbon emissions associated with a cubic metre or cubic yard of concrete by up to 20% by using our technology in place of what they use currently.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. And 20% of eight percent of global emissions is significant. More than a drop in a bucket. And one of the things that I love about your approach is it’s not necessarily a do this because it’s good for the environment. It’s do this because it’s good for your bottom line. You’re getting a product which is more durable, longer-lasting, you’d be silly not to. Is that generally accurate?
Apoorv Sinha: We hope so. You know, every step of the way we have to keep proving those assumptions, but that’s definitely been our driver. I think that carbon policy writ large, like globally, has not gone far enough to really drive industrial players to change how they do business. So in the interim, till policy catches up, or if the global sentiment gets to a point where there is a carbon tax around the world or something like that, the onus is on the entrepreneur to make a business case for today. We can’t just keep waiting till twenty thirty and say that, you know, everyone’s going to be like Justin Trudeau and we’re going to have a carbon tax around the world, kind of thing. So from our perspective, we have to live in today, and we think that this is really the only way to gain and keep interest of some of the incumbents that dominate the industry.
Alexsandra Guerra: There are so many like little trails and paths that you have laid out for me, so I’m going to keep with the most common thread. The recent one was the politics side. Christiana Figueres was there at the event yesterday and she took stage. But before she took stage, I love that Collision did this, they have a really small, like intimate, open [unclear] in the middle of this exhibition, a circle of benches, and a Q&A stage. She came on and we got there early enough that we were able to, Christophe and I, sit there and then ask for the mic. Maybe three questions were asked, it was 30 minutes.
And the one that I asked her was, what is it that we can do, these entrepreneurs that are providing solutions and can act really quickly, really nimbly, how do we interact best with policymakers and the private sector, who move a little slower? Policymakers way slower than private sector, a little faster than that, and then you have these boots on the ground, entrepreneurs. How do we do that? And she painted this picture that I thought was helpful for me, interested in your take, Christophe, which is, okay, well, the Paris Agreement came out after the private sector was kind of saying, we need something more certain, we need to have something more concrete that we can act on, and then the politicians came together and worked on the Paris Agreement.
And now she said it’s a spiral that’s building up, so it might be coming back around again, which is, how did the entrepreneurs then work with the private sector, and then loop it back to the policymakers so that we build on our policies? So given that in mind, what might policy be in the next round that can enable you guys some more?
Apoorv Sinha: Really, right off the bat, and this is something that we thought about a bit, if every government said that 10% of their infrastructure spending or procurement was focused on solutions that have a net carbon benefit relative to what they use currently, that would be some of the most [unclear] practical, I guess, change that would really speed things up. Because there’s not enough capacity in the carbon utilization, or just in the green cleantech space in general, to even meet that demand. Like, that would still need a surge of activity. It would drive a lot of innovation and scale, but that would be enough that it would make a lot of these companies get past that startup level, get into the growth stage and become well-established companies in their own right.
Christophe Jospe: So it’s calculated. You know, you don’t have to change everything all at once. And this is actually something I really admire about the Rocky Mountain Institute, like the Amory Lovins crew is outstanding in how they talk about pragmatic, progressive changes, and how, you know, if you did ten percent one year and you just build compound interest on it.
Apoorv Sinha: So let’s say 10% of all the procurement that people do on construction had a component that they said requires a carbon negative solution or a carbon negative element. So if 10% of all roads in California, ten percent of all the construction projects that are publicly funded construction projects in Canada, suddenly we’re introducing carbon tech or, you know, some kind of green technology that would move the needle quite significantly, and then you can build on that every year. You know, nudge that forward. And, you know, it’s a risk, but it’s calculated, and it’s significant in terms of the market potential that it generates right away.
Christophe Jospe: I like where we’re going. I want to spiel out a little bit and respond to some of the things you’re saying, and then some of the things you were saying, Alexsandra. First, a quibble. I don’t like considering your technology carbon negative.
Alexsandra Guerra: Thank you so much, Christophe. I’m like holding myself back.
Christophe Jospe: Because it is reducing the flow of carbon to the atmosphere, but it’s not, when I think carbon negative, then I think taking it back out of the atmosphere. So this is a way to reduce, and to be quite honest, I hope it doesn’t catch on in the cement industry, because until the cement industry has found a way on net to get CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it in the product, I don’t consider it carbon negative. However, I do 100% commend everything that you’re doing as getting the pollutant out of the supply chain.
And so, on your policy, I’m so on board, because it’s like, what do we need to do to actually solve climate change? We need to reduce the flow of carbon to the atmosphere, we need to retain the carbon in the stocks where it is, and we need to remove the excess, and all of that can be done when we’re focused on actually reducing the pollutant. So it’s like, there’s these existing cement plants. People are always going to use cement. You know, we think of like, where does that 8% come from? A lot of it comes from making the clinker, right, which we didn’t even talk about, but you have to somehow get the lime out of the limestone, because that’s what binds all this together. There are interesting ideas around how to reduce the carbon there, and certainly [unclear].
The other direction where I wanted to go to is that, absolutely, like, things change slowly and things need to be proven at scale. And so you were at one point a bright-eyed PhD student at Georgia Tech.
Apoorv Sinha: I did my undergrad there, actually.
Christophe Jospe: As well? Cool. Okay, as well. Or wait.
Apoorv Sinha: So yeah, I actually quit my master’s. I haven’t actually done grad school.
Christophe Jospe: Master’s dropout, even better. You know, that’s a sign of like true dedication to working on solutions. But anyway, you were connected to things that happened at the lab scale, and then just scaling something up that works at a point one tonne a day scale, which is capturing a slipstream, which basically, for those who don’t know what a slipstream is, you’re connected to a power plant which is spewing out a bunch of pollution and you grab a bit of that and then figure out how to do things with it in order to make a viable product. And part of the learning along that way is, how can we do more of that?
But let’s throw some hard cold math out there. A typical coal-fired power plant emits 20,000 tonnes of CO2 a day, all right? And so, I guess this is a many part question, but I mean, it’s kind of in the spirit of, first of all, coal’s going to go away. Maybe it’s going away more quickly than we thought it would, and that’s great, because we need to get carbon out of the supply chain, and maybe find ways to do natural gas, maybe you find other metallurgical coal, which is, by the way, everyone who’s very pro-solar always forgets this, like, you need to burn coal to make solar, it’s metallurgical coal. So like, stop saying solar’s 100% carbon free. It isn’t. Okay, I’m just feeling it right now because it’s been a long day.
So you want to scale up, but if you’re dealing with a full, like, gigawatt-size coal-fired power plant, you have 80,000 tonnes needed to do something with, and so, is that even the right scale? Are you better off at cement plants? Are there variations of where all this fits? But it’s one of those questions like, how is this all going to fit, and is it as good as it seems to be or not?
Apoorv Sinha: Yeah, so I’m probably going to respond with this spiel of my own, but very firstly, I think the point that you made about the carbon negative piece, I don’t know if the right terminology would be to say carbon efficient, but I think it is very important, and this is actually a pet peeve of mine, in the sense that I think all of us in this small field, as it’s growing, need to come up with a terminology that we all agree on. Because I think the point you made is an excellent one. I do agree with you that this is not a carbon negative technology if you think about it from that technical standpoint.
However, when we’re going out and pitching and there’s a broad set of audience in the field, it sometimes dilutes the precision of the words that we use, and I think as a field, if we started to standardize that, that would be a service to everyone. So I commend you for correcting me on that. And I would say, you know, because it’s better than business as usual, maybe carbon efficient or something along those lines might be a better way to show where we fit.
Having said all that, I think, to get to your question about how do you tackle something of the scale of what a conventional coal power plant does, I’ll go back to something I’ve heard Amory Lovins say. I’m not sure if he’s taking it from something, but he says, when you can’t solve a problem within a box, you have to make the box bigger. And this might also be something Einstein said, actually. But one of the interesting things about that is, we do think that some of these point source emissions, in terms of just the carbon emissions at that specific area, geographically, spatially, is a really big problem, and probably the only way that you can get to a hundred percent reduction of that twenty thousand tonnes is by using electrochemical methods.
So you have to essentially reverse combustion, or reverse the oxidation of carbon, like you have to somehow go back to something like a fuel or something like that. And we think that that can only happen if there’s adoption of renewables at scale. So a much more practical target before, you know, renewables take over, if ever, is to shoot for a meaningful reduction in that 20,000 tonnes. So from our perspective, roughly speaking, there’s only about a tonne or so of fly ash produced for every 10 or 20 tonnes of CO2, depending on how efficient your process is and how contaminated your coal seam is, just geologically speaking. So the math in our case will never ever get even remotely close. Like, we’ll be at best maybe capturing 5,000 or 6,000 of that 20,000 tonnes a day with the adsorption system that we have.
What we’re saying though is that if that fly ash, once it captures, you know, ten, twenty, thirty percent of that CO2, is now going in and on the back end replacing something like cement, which has a carbon emission factor of 0.8 or 0.85 kg per kg of cement, now you’re getting a knock-on benefit that adds on to what you did on that 10. So from my perspective, I think, you know, a lot of how you answer a question is determined by how the question is asked. And we don’t think that the way to tackle 34 gigatonnes is to pinpoint every single place that has twenty thousand or a hundred thousand or a million tonnes of CO2. It’s to look at the entire society and say, where can we become more sustainable with our use of concrete?
Where can we be more useful with some of the daily materials that we use? Can we increase the life cycle so that instead of having to do something every day, we can do it every two days or three days? And taking that systemic approach is a much more effective way of creating change, and also a more equitable way, where everyone can play a part, in our opinion, or in my opinion. Because if we’re going to keep targeting specific areas and specific players that are, you know, they’re not around to emit. Like, you know, if a cement plant today could wave a magic wand and get rid of all their emissions, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t. Like, it doesn’t serve any purpose except to meet a demand that our own society has created.
And so instead of villainizing them and focusing on them, I think taking a systems kind of wide approach is probably a lot more effective. And one of the things that I guess from a tangible perspective, like, carbon efficient technologies are in general trying to facilitate, totally.
Christophe Jospe: Talk to us about manholes.
Apoorv Sinha: Yeah. So it’s.
Christophe Jospe: I just wanted to say, I kind of just softened my voice.
Apoorv Sinha: Yeah, I can’t follow that up, so I’ll stick to my normal voice. Yeah, so it’s been interesting for us, like the journey that we’ve taken. The nanomaterials that we’re making have a range of different applications, and one of the things I was told early on is, like, we’re basically a solution looking for a problem. And so through the Trade Commissioner’s Office that the Canadians run in Denver, we got connected to a company, an infrastructure company, that makes manholes and grease interceptors.
So these are tanks at the back of any fast food joint. You hit up at the back of the kitchen, under the sink, they’ll usually have a concrete or fiberglass tank that stores a lot of the oils and grease that came from the fryers and things like that. And these oils carry microbes that essentially create hydrogen sulfide and sulfuric acid, which can eat through concrete pretty radically, and very, very kind of in an accelerated fashion. So what this company was looking for is a cost-effective way to make these tanks last longer. They said that they were going out to a couple of these joints and the customer said, nah, you know, we don’t want to use concrete anymore, we’ll use something that’s four, five, seven times more expensive, but we know it lasts longer because it’s essentially corrosion-proof.
So the alternative that the concrete guys were looking for is some kind of a surface treatment, basically a paint that they could apply to their concrete tanks to provide a corrosion barrier. So through 2016 we worked with this company in Denver. They gave us a lot of market feedback, they gave us kind of these very stringent guidelines for what they would pay and how they want to apply it. And just in the fall of 2017, right before Halloween, we went down, we coated a couple of tanks. One of them got installed at a Red Lobster, another at a Dunkin’ Donuts on the opposite coast, [unclear] and one in Portland, and they started buying that product commercially since April of that year.
So it was kind of an interesting story, in the sense that we’ve got this carbon derived coating, which we call the Alpha Carbon product line, and it’s being used in some of the greasiest grease interceptors you might see in the world. Not the sexiest way to start making a stake for carbon tech and things like that, but it was practical. It’s being driven by economic kind of arguments. Like, you know, keep in mind, most of our work right now, incidentally, is in Miami, and Miami-Dade is not using us because, well, at least not currently, they’re not using us because we’re a carbon efficient solution, but rather because we’re cost-effective.
Like, we’re easy to apply. The customer or the contractor uses us whenever they can because there’s no VOCs, there’s no volatile organic compounds that can create toxic emissions for guys breathing this stuff. It’s cheap. It sets quickly, so they can be done with the job in four hours instead of having to take a full day on site.
So there’s a few of those practical advantages that are really kind of paving the way for this to get adopted. And, you know, one of the things I’ve been bugging Christophe about for the last four months is, how do we, going back to the point about government procurement and policymakers that you were talking about, Alexsandra, like, how do we get people to start adopting some of these kinds of solutions which are practical? Like, they’re already buying this stuff. How do we get them to use something and accelerate the path to becoming an approved product vendor, and, you know, getting on these exclusive lists that were kind of updated back in 2005?
Alexsandra Guerra: Well, I’ll tell you why Miami-Dade isn’t using it, because it’s not sexy. Just kidding. Haha. Love you guys. I just want to commend you, because what you just described, from entrepreneur to entrepreneur, like, you need to find the product market fit and then you need to scale from there. And absolutely, like, if you work in a government procurement office right now and you are looking at innovative ways to drive reductions in carbon across a jurisdiction, like, you should absolutely get in touch with Apoorv and Carbon Upcycling Technologies and take the risk. And figure out that manholes is just the beginning, and it seems like a first step in a multi-pronged approach of finding carbon efficient, carbon beneficial, maybe, we’ve played around with that, not sure, carbon reductive, I don’t know, not yet carbon negative, but whatever, carbon tech products. So my next question for you is, what comes after manholes?
Apoorv Sinha: What we’re hoping is the concrete itself. So the unit that we’re building out in Calgary, and we hope will be used ubiquitously around the world in five or ten years, is basically to replace cement with a secondary cementitious material, fly ash, actually, we’re talking about. We think that that’s a really exciting opportunity. We just came back from a Plug and Play venture event over in Stuttgart in Germany, where we met with a couple of car manufacturers there about some of the internal car parts that are made of plastic, and how do we get some of these carbon embedded additives like ours into some of those parts to reduce the footprint and potentially to improve performance as well?
So you know, really going back to the point that you were making, Christophe, about market pull, we can only kind of direct our sales to see where the wind’s blowing and use it. Well, so where this goes, if you’d asked me that question six months ago, I’d have said absolutely plastic, like, that’s where we’re going. And the winds have slowed down on that front for us in the last [unclear], like a line out of The Graduate. But I think what we’re trying to do is really just increase awareness and tap into some of the momentum that’s building in this space.
But ultimately what we want to do is show people tangible examples of carbon being sequestered into a real product. We think that that’s going to really initiate a whole bunch of conversations and creative thoughts that maybe aren’t that accessible today. And, you know, if that does spur some kind of momentum and conversations that could potentially go towards the upward spiral that you’re talking about, Alexsandra, like, we think that we need to make this accessible to people, we need to make it real. And that’s the biggest challenge in the climate change, or, you know, global warming kind of field writ large, is how do you make this an urgent problem, and how do you give them actionable things that they can do so that, you know, people don’t just feel powerless and go back to watching Netflix or something, right?
Alexsandra Guerra: I think it’s beautiful what you’re saying, because the way that I’m seeing it is, we have to think about carbon and atmospheric carbon from different approaches, right? There’s, okay, we just don’t emit, we stop emitting more. Then there’s, okay, we reuse it as much as we can, we upcycle, we extend the lifespan of that CO2 molecule or carbon molecule, right, because it goes from gaseous state to solid, and we just keep cycling through that. And then we also, for a period of time, to restore to healthy levels, maybe 300 parts per million, we would have to remove more than we’re reusing or emitting.
And this vision that we see at Nori is, like, yeah, we’re just going to get, and not Nori itself, but us as a species, smarter and more adaptive and more creative and innovative with how we’re managing our carbon stock in the atmosphere. And then someone gave me a really good question the other day, kind of poking me, but it was a good one, which is like, how do you know 300 parts per million is the right one? I don’t know. But like, well, it could be more, it could be that you’re right, who knows? Personally, I just believe we’ve got about a few decades of sequestration that we have to do before we can figure that out. But that would be a lovely problem to have, which is figuring out when do we stop, and what is the safe level of carbon dioxide that we’re, like, the thermostat that we’re setting for our atmosphere.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I had a similar experience in a Lyft, too, where the driver’s like, what if you remove all the carbon from the atmosphere? It’s like, that’s not going to happen.
Alexsandra Guerra: Well, that’s what we want. We need, it’s like oxygen and nitrogen, it’s in a balance, right? We need to make sure that it’s in the balance that we evolved to and that the planet has had before we started messing with it.
Christophe Jospe: We’ve brought up this quote before, but I want to say it again, because this guy is such a visionary, Buckminster Fuller, who at one point wrote, pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting. And I think that’s true to a lot of some of the efforts that people like you, who are on the good side of finding value from pollution and then converting that into things that sequester CO2. It’s not all rosy though, and that’s why life cycles are really important. Sometimes you might be doing something that actually consumes a boatload of energy and is adding all this additional load onto a grid where maybe you need to burn even more fossil fuels. So I’m just kind of laying the bait and we’ll see how much of it you take, Apoorv.
Alexsandra Guerra: But I’m starving. So, all right. Yeah, my go.
Christophe Jospe: Well, what matters when you’re doing life cycles on carbon accounting, when it really talks about like pollution to value? Like, what should one think about, and what are some of the best examples you can cite? Yourself is the best example. But what are some of the worst examples, too?
Apoorv Sinha: Yeah, I’m definitely not going to cite ourselves as a good or bad case. But what I will say is that generally speaking it’s not rocket science, right? Like, ultimately everything has a mass and energy balance, and ultimately what you want to show is that you’re somehow creating a valuable product without creating enough of a side by-product which is actually negating the positive impact of what you did. So you don’t want to solve cancer and cause Alzheimer’s, or, you know what I mean?
Christophe Jospe: Like, yeah, you can trade one problem for another. Look at the net benefit or the net harm.
Apoorv Sinha: Exactly. Yes. You have to look at the full picture, you have to be very, it’s just really hard to discern where that control volume is.
Christophe Jospe: So thank you. Very simple engineering [unclear].
Apoorv Sinha: You’re bringing back some bad memories from Tech right now.
Christophe Jospe: But all right, he dropped out for a reason.
Apoorv Sinha: Yeah. You know, you mentioned the ambition for dropping out. I think there’s other reasons, like supervisors and all that stuff as well. But I think generally speaking, one of the things that you want to look for is, what are the key assumptions that went into building a model, right? And so if people are making claims around the full use of renewable energy that has absolutely zero carbon equivalency associated with it, that’s good, but, you know, it’s not necessarily applicable in most jurisdictions around the world currently.
Now, over time, it was interesting actually at the Bloomberg conference in New York in April last year, I got to talk to Amory Lovins about this one-on-one. And I’ve been kind of having a fanboy thing for him for like years.
Christophe Jospe: And I saw him last week and I wasn’t going to say anything, but you’ve mentioned him like four times on this pod, guys. I love the guy, he’s a character, and he’s been pitching in the aviation space this like new sustainable aviation fuels, like offset credit that he is saying is truly additional.
Apoorv Sinha: So I don’t know much about that.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, we’re coming for you, Amory Lovins. That’s such a cool first name, by the way.
Christophe Jospe: It is. [unclear]
Apoorv Sinha: But in any case, I think, going back, yeah, what I was going to say is, in the current environment there is a possibility that, you know, if the trends keep growing and wind and solar and stuff gets adopted, there is going to be a lot of off-peak power. So there’s going to be a lot more capacity to produce at times that we’re not using it, and we can use that excess capacity towards technologies that really do need a carbon-free electricity source to make life cycle sense.
So for example, if you’re reversing combustion, so if you’re making a fuel out of CO2, you essentially need to put in all the energy that you got by burning the fuel in the first place, plus some more, because you’re not going to be 100% efficient, right? So the only way to close that loop is by using wind or solar or some kind of, maybe even nuclear, but you have to use an energy source that has no carbon emissions associated with it, and then reverse combustion, like, whatever it is, whether it’s at a car scale or an industrial 20,000 tonne coal power plant scale, right?
Christophe Jospe: And so, just to put that in layman’s terms a little bit more, what that means is, it’s not sunny all the time, it’s not windy all the time, and in the times where it is and there’s all this excess power on the grid, you can zap CO2 with electricity, which splits it into CO, and zap water, and that gets you H’s, and then you have the CO’s and H’s which are the building blocks to make liquid hydrocarbons. And you should activate those reactions when you have that excess power, to create this carbon neutral fuel. And if you don’t, then actually you’re pulling a whole bunch of extra energy onto the grid to make a carbon neutral fuel, and you may have been better off not making that carbon neutral fuel in the first place.
Apoorv Sinha: That’s probably the best way I’ve ever heard that said, that’s really well done. But, and yeah, I think the point is you can’t burn the fuel in an internal combustion engine or coal or gas power plant, and then somehow expect to reverse that using that same energy source that you just got that CO2 from. You catch it, reverse that and expect to be whole. There’s always losses, like efficiency isn’t perfect.
Christophe Jospe: Beautiful laws of thermodynamics.
Apoorv Sinha: Exactly. And, you know, it’s interesting because a lot of people talk about catalytic activity and catalysts. One of the analogies we’ve used in the past is, a catalyst is like an elevator replacing a stairwell. You’re still doing all the work to get up to that level, you’re just doing it faster, but it doesn’t make that, you know, second floor any closer to the first. So you’re still spending the same amount of energy, you’re just doing it faster.
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re getting there quicker. It’s an accelerator, like putting your pedal on the gas. It’s not necessarily making, you know, the conference center any closer to the Airbnb.
Christophe Jospe: I don’t love that analogy, because there’s like losses and inefficiencies and like how fast you speed. But yeah, I get you.
Apoorv Sinha: I get you, yeah. I’ll have to defer to Christophe for some better examples here, but the point that I’m making, I think, just going back to the life cycle piece, is that I think there is a need, especially given that carbon removal is only kind of a new term that’s beginning to be thrown around a bit more, like there’s more awareness about it now than there was even 12 months ago, and so there is a very, very urgent need in my opinion to create a bunch of standardization.
I mean, we talked about terminology earlier, and even more importantly I would say around, how do you draw those control volumes? Like, how do you draw a box around what this process does? You know, if you’re using a feedstock that needs supercritical CO2, like liquid CO2 that needs to be cooled and compressed and all this energy needs to be spent to get it to that level, versus a technology that doesn’t need that, there are distinctions there and they need to be clearly laid out, and there has to be almost a governing body or some kind of a resource that can look at these and compare them on an apples-to-apples basis.
And if we do that as a system, or an ecosystem writ large, I think that will put us in a much better position, both in terms of making meaningful change and doing things which are not like seemingly good but actually not doing that well, and then also getting us credibility with, you know, especially in the era of fake news and all that. Like, the last thing you want to do is go out there saying we’re going to solve climate change and two years later it’s like, man, like if someone had just done the LCA on that, that would have never flown, right?
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, I think this whole end of the conversation for me is resonating a lot, because last week when I was in Montreal and did a quick video.
Christophe Jospe: French accent.
Alexsandra Guerra: Well, thank you. Yeah, I studied when I was in college. Anyways, I did a quick little video for LinkedIn, I try to do these, great way to engage with people. And one of the speakers was talking on circularity, [unclear], and we did a quick video, and he talked about what Carbon Engineering does, essentially capturing carbon and creating jet fuels. And if I understand correctly, that would be a carbon negative technology.
Christophe Jospe: No, no, no. Because you’re taking carbon out of the atmosphere, you are taking hopefully hydropower, which it seems like they’re using. But yeah, they just actually, this will be old news by the time this podcast goes live, but they have a plant that’s going up in Texas. But that fuel, when they burn it, goes back into the atmosphere, so that’s just carbon neutral, carbon cycling. It’s still, they call it ultra low carbon fuels, because they also are using a natural gas-fired power plant. So I think they do a full honest life cycle.
Alexsandra Guerra: Anyway, I’m distracting. I’ll pull that back. So I got comments. The first comment I got was from Nikki from Origen Power, and she’s like, you know, be careful, because you could disparage the industry by saying that this is going to like actually impact. And at first, like, I’m saying, and I’m rereading this, I reached out to Nikki. Thanks Nikki for listening. And we chatted privately for a bit and she’s like, yeah, it depends on the energy source. So, so just exactly what you’re saying, and I’ve taken that lesson, lesson learned, and I probably should have asked, it’s hard when you’re doing a quick one-minute video. Maybe I’ll do it two or three minutes instead and say, okay, but you know, given certain context.
Because, you know, we talked about this all the time. We talk about vegetarian versus meat eating, and it’s not all the same, it’s not bad, it’s all good, it really depends. And so it depends on the energy source that you are using to supply that conversion of gaseous CO2 into this new fuel or new product. And so if it’s coming from a low carbon source, then yes, you might be getting the outcomes that you want, which is decreasing the total amount of CO2 that you’re emitting to create this product, or what have you. But everything needs context.
Apoorv Sinha: And apart from that piece that you just alluded to, I think the other thing that we were talking about in the Lyft right here was the importance of using those assumptions at one stage. So when you’re at the lab scale, the bench scale, right, and then as you scale, those assumptions need to reflect that scale as well. So you can’t just keep using the same assumptions that you used in a bench scale system in BC, where it is all hydro, right, and you can credibly say that’s all clean, when you’re scaling. And if that changes in context, as you said, the assumptions need to reflect that. And, you know, Carbon Engineering is actually an excellent example of people that do that. Ooh, they do that well, and they’ve been very transparent about it. And I think that’s a great lead for the rest of us to follow.
Alexsandra Guerra: You know, I think that is perfect. Like, we are closing the circle now, and that’s because we’re talking now on the meta level when it comes to constraints and lab scale, and these systems and outcomes. But it goes back to what you were saying in the beginning. Like, okay, well, now you’ve got these nanomaterials, and these nanomaterials, because they’re so small, you can treat them differently, you can use them in different ways. So really, just like in physics and politics, you have to look at the scale and have to reassess after certain kind of micro and macro boundaries are crossed and realize, okay, now it’s a whole other level. Quantum physics is a whole new realm, like, the laws of Newtonian physics don’t apply.
Apoorv Sinha: Yeah, we can’t solve a problem that’s been growing over 200 years in the next 30 by thinking about them the same way that we created those problems in the first place. Like, we have to think about them differently. And that means, I mean, you know, I used another Bucky Fuller quote there, is it?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, well, I’m glad you credited it, because I didn’t want to accuse you of plagiarizing.
Apoorv Sinha: But yeah, like, I think, you know, any of us that were like real time strategy players, like Age of Empires and stuff like that, kind of love that game.
Alexsandra Guerra: I used to.
Christophe Jospe: Ooh, a good throwback.
Apoorv Sinha: Yeah. And World of Warcraft and stuff too. But the thing is, one of the things you love in games like that is when you have a cheat code to pull on. And unfortunately, the place we’re at today, and, you know, you talked a little bit about kind of setting expectations earlier, right, like about how do you get policymakers and entrepreneurs and nations all on the same page. I think similar to the question that you asked about, like, what kind of stuff should we do and what are our options. You know, there are people out there that are still not convinced that climate change is real, or that it’s man-made.
I think ultimately we just have to say, look, change is good as long as it’s happening at a rate that we can keep up with. And so, regardless of whether it’s man-made or not, regardless of whether, you know, some of these erratic weather activities and climate activities are attributable to like human behaviour, I think we have to reach a consensus and say, things are changing way faster than we’re used to. So let’s become more resilient, let’s become smarter in what we do, and find consensus, like, instead of picking fights.
I mean, you know, one of the things that came to mind earlier when you talked about kind of that difference between carbon negative and carbon efficient, is I was thinking earlier, like, we had a chance, this was about 12 or 16 months ago, and Scott Pruitt was still heading up the EPA, and he came up to Canada and he wanted a few Canadian companies to pitch, and he said, nah, don’t talk about carbon, like that will never make it through the shortlist. And one of the things we told to Meredith, who runs Student Energy, Meredith Adler, she was seeking a few youth entrepreneurs, like under the age of 35, to go out and pitch, and I said, you know, I would challenge myself to be as convincing to Scott Pruitt as I would be to a Minister McKenna.
And I’m not saying that we would have, but I think in a sense we need some of that bridging right now. Like, we need people to say, these are practically good things to do, and you know, it’s not enough, but there has to be some consensus on it, on a fundamental kind of lowest common denominator basis, and then hopefully the progressive people can do more than that. But you know, we can’t just do it with a minority. Like, we need to get kind of a swelling, like almost to a tipping point, as Malcolm Gladwell would put it, before you accuse me of plagiarizing or anything like that.
Christophe Jospe: I would never. I totally agree, and I think we’re getting there. I think it will take a bit more time, but I do believe that all the disparate efforts are coming together. And if I were to have my druthers, I would say just focus on getting carbon out of the supply chain. Don’t let phony emission reduction certificates that have no underlying value trade. Destroy those things. The Kyoto Protocol didn’t really work. Neither did the Clean Development Mechanism. Yeah, I mean, good on you for like figuring out what didn’t work, United Nations, but it’s time to remove the excess CO2 from the atmosphere and stop the CO2 from getting into the atmosphere in the first place, and just focus on the climate math.
So, before I keep ranting on this subject, I’m going to pass it back to you, Apoorv. We’re getting to the end of the hour. If people are interested in Carbon Upcycling Technologies, they want to follow your progress, what can they do? What’s next?
Apoorv Sinha: Yeah, we just got a new website going, so we actually have something relatively presentable now, so you can check us out at www.carbonupcycling.com, all one word. It’s kind of like recycling but with ‘up’ instead of the ‘re’, should be easy to spell. And we’ve got a page as well, so you can follow us at Carbon Upcycling. But overall, I think one of the big things that’s happening for us right now is that ramp-up for the Carbon XPRIZE competition. So this is the XPRIZE Foundation out of L.A., is running something similar to the space XPRIZE challenge that a lot more people know about. And they’ve already selected the top 10 companies within the competition from all around the world, and they will be announcing the winners of that in June next year.
So we’re quite busy right now working in the relative cold of Calgary to scale up and build a unit that can show carbon going right from a flue stack all the way out to an end product. And yeah, if you guys are ever out near Calgary, [unclear] or anything like that, come check us out or hit us up. We’d be happy to host you.
Alexsandra Guerra: Thanks again for coming on, and see you next time.
Apoorv Sinha: Thank you.
