Direct air capture (DAC) is growing in popularity around the world, and it is an important tool for reducing CO2 in the atmosphere.
But 30% of all the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted to date is stored in the ocean.
So, what can we do to sequester CO2 from ocean water? Is the technology similar to that of direct air capture? How does the process work?
Steve Oldham is former CEO of DAC pioneer Carbon Engineering and current CEO of Captura, a startup working to capture carbon dioxide from our oceans at scale.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Steve joins Ross and cohost Radhika Moolgavkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at Nori, to explain what he believes may make direct ocean capture cheaper and easier than DAC.
Steve discusses how the natural equilibrium between the ocean and the atmosphere provides an opportunity for carbon removal and describes how his team evaluates candidate sites with a focus on existing oil and gas infrastructure.
Listen in for Steve’s insight on the greatest challenges facing carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and learn how Captura’s signature electrodialysis process captures CO2 while attempting to avoid disrupting the ocean.
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Resources
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act
California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard
Frontier’s Carbon Removal Initiative
Net-Zero Emissions Procurement by 2050
CE’s Partnership with Occidental
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 the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of Nori and the creative editor there. I have a colleague of mine from Nori, Radhika Mugavkar, Nori’s head of supply and methodology, and also host of Carbon Removal Newsroom on the show with me today. Hey, Radhika.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Hi Ross, nice to be back. It’s been a while.
Ross Kenyon: When was the last time we did this? I feel like it has been a decent amount of time.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I cannot remember. You’ve got me too busy doing carbon removal newsroom. How many podcasts can I do in a week?
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know. I feel like some people will do 16 to 20 hours. You got to keep up with Joe Rogan.
Radhika Moolgavkar: That’s right. If Onori would only pay me to just do that.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know that I have enough to say to even fill that time, even if they were paying me for it. How could you possibly speak that much and have anything worth contributing? I don’t think I could do it.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All fair questions.
Ross Kenyon: All fair questions. Anyways, today we have with us Steve Oldham, CEO of Captura and formerly the CEO of Carbon Engineering. Hey, Steve, what a pedigree. Radek and I were just admiring what a career you’ve had, seemingly unique in carbon removal too.
Steve Oldham: Well, thank you. I actually think my predecessor at Carbon Engineering has a similar profile because he joined Carbon Capture in Pasadena after being CEO of Carbon Engineering. So I think both myself and Adrian Corliss have done a couple of these carbon removal companies. So not completely unique.
Ross Kenyon: Do you see much continuity between carbon engineering and Captura, where carbon engineering is, for those who don’t know, one of the oldest and most advanced direct air capture outfits out there, and then Captura is doing direct ocean capture. So to a naive like me, there’s continuity, but is there as much as I suppose there is?
Steve Oldham: Yes and no. The technology is very different. The Advantage of ocean capture is you have to touch a lot of air to capture a lot of CO2. And so if you’re in the direct air capture industry, like carbon engineering, you have to build air contactors to touch air. You have to have absorbents to absorb the CO2. Capture uses the ocean to do both of those two things. So the technology base is different. For us, it’s more how can we use the ocean with no negative side effects? Because the ocean is enormous.
It’s available and it’s completely free. A little bit of a difference in the technology approach, a little bit of a difference in the way, hopefully, carbon credits are generated from the technology. But a lot of similarities. I mean, fundamentally, both direct air capture and direct ocean capture are trying to do the same thing, trying to help the planet by removing CO2 from the air.
Ross Kenyon: Radhika, is it lazy podcasting to just tell Steve to go and answer his own questions he just set up?
Radhika Moolgavkar: I mean, when the guest does such a great job, why would we get in the way? I think, you know, but before we let Steve continue, I do have a question of my own. I’m curious, like what drew you to Captura after, you know, carbon engineering is really Really accelerating and finding its footing. And what drew you to go to another startup and one in oceans, particularly?
Steve Oldham: Yeah, it’s a good question. You know, when I joined CE, I’ll say CE instead of carbon engineering just because of familiarity. When I joined CE, the company was quite small too, about 15 to 20 people. And we just about got the first pilot working. And at that stage, we were a long way away from the carbon removal business. The visibility of carbon removal or the necessity for it was really not there. The IPCC had not yet reported the need for carbon removal. There was no infrastructure bill. There was no inflation bill.
There was no 45Q for direct air capture or no LCFS, low carbon fuel standard. So it was sort of a very different picture. Doing myself is taking a company from concept through to deployment. So having done that at Carbon Engineering, along came Captura, and it was sort of a great opportunity to start at a different company with a different technology, but with all the advancements that carbon removal has had over the previous three to four years, the recognition of its importance, the support, companies like Frontier doing early-stage carbon removal contracts, sort of the support network, if you like, is significantly more advanced than it was when I joined Carbon Engineering in 2018.
So yeah, I know I like the technology. I like the idea of using the ocean. It’s enormous, available and free. It’s a logical way to try and look at carbon removal.
Ross Kenyon: I, as a lay person, someone in an adjacent field, I conceptualize ocean-based CDR as being ocean alkalinity enhancement and then direct ocean capture. Is that a correct framing or have I bifurcated this too heavily and there’s more to it?
Steve Oldham: Yeah, I think nobody knows the answer to that yet because it’s a relatively early stage field. For us, we don’t see ourselves as ocean alkalinity enhancement because we don’t change the alkalinity of the ocean. So I think ocean alkalinity enhancement is generally seen as a subset of ocean capture. We think we’re relatively unique. Our technology pulls CO2 out of ocean water. So the natural equilibrium between the ocean and the atmosphere, which is Henry’s law, then creates a drawdown of atmospheric CO2 to make up for the CO2 that we took out.
So what I think is interesting in our solution, and frankly, I think good for the ocean, is we’re using the ocean to capture CO2, but we’re not adding to the CO2 levels inside the ocean. And of course, that brings a problem of ocean acidification, which is bad for marine life. I think nobody’s quite decided what all the right definitions are and what all the right names are. But the way that I look at it, our focus is use the ocean to remove CO2, but don’t put more CO2 into the ocean in the process.
Ross Kenyon: For those who maybe don’t have a background in understanding climate science broadly or newer to how oceans and atmosphere interact, my understanding as a layperson is that there’s an equilibration that happens between the ocean and the atmosphere such that as you are removing carbon dioxide from the ocean and storing it in some way over time, I’m not sure how long this cycle is, but the atmosphere is going to store more carbon dioxide in the ocean to replace what you have taken out. Is that broadly correct?
Steve Oldham: Yeah, so the ocean has stored about 30% of all the CO2 that we’ve emitted to date. So from a climate perspective, that’s good because that’s less CO2 into the atmosphere. From a marine perspective, it’s bad. It leads to ocean acidification. So that equilibrium between the ocean and the atmosphere provides an opportunity for carbon removal. If you can create more drawdown in the ocean, Without adding to acidification, now you can use the ocean as this enormous tool for drawing down CO2. So fundamentally, for the chemists in the audience, it’s Henry’s Law that’s being applied here, which is this equilibrium associated with ocean and air.
Ross Kenyon: Is carbon dioxide in the ocean less diffuse than it is in ambient air? Or is it just the free energy potential of like hydrodynamics sloshing around that makes us cheaper or easier to interact with? Why oceans and not the atmosphere? Are oceans just easier in general for carbon removal and people are focused on the air because they like cool machines? What’s happening there?
Steve Oldham: I mean, yeah, great question. And perhaps a little bit more nuanced than your summary. So let me give it a try. If you’re doing direct air capture from the air, you have to build a machine to touch a lot of air. And at 420-ish parts per million, it has to be a big machine. You have to move a lot of air. And then you have to absorb into something. And then once you’ve absorbed into something, you either have to replace that something or you have to regenerate it. So that’s kind of, if you like, the high level characteristic of direct air capture.
For direct ocean capture using our type of solution, the ocean replaces the air contactor and the absorbent. And then you have the advantage that CO2 in the ocean is about 50 times more dense in volume than it is in the air. So we have to move ocean water. But we move 50 times less to capture the same amount of CO2, and we’ve avoided the costs of air contactors, absorbance. We also have no byproducts. So our system uses just ocean water and energy, nothing else, and no byproducts. So that gives you sort of a different cost equation, and we think will make ocean capture pretty competitive.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Steve, so not to get too deep into the science, but I have to say the one part that I was not quite following and would love a little more depth of explanation around is you said you draw down the CO2, but you don’t add to the alkalinity. So what is happening in that process? Where is the alkalinity going? Because, you know, that’s the natural process. How are you separating it out?
Steve Oldham: Yeah, so fundamentally the way our process works, we draw in seawater. We do some filtering to a small percentage of that seawater so we can treat it. And basically think of that as taking the seawater and converting it into brine, just pure saltwater. Then we take that brine and we run it through a process called electrodialysis. And that’s where the Capturer IP comes from. It was originally developed at Caltech in California and it’s licensed to Capturer. Electrodialysis dissociates the salt and the water into an acid and the base. So we then take that acid and we feed it into the water as it flows through our plant.
What that does is it acidifies the water as it flows through the plant, not in the ocean itself, but as it flows through the plant. And that creates a natural reaction with the bicarbonate in the ocean water and the CO2 bubbles out. Think of it as being a little like if you leave your kind of Coke or Pepsi on the side over time, it goes flat because the CO2 is absorbed back into the atmosphere again. That’s Henry’s law in a very simple form. We accelerate that process by using a stripper and a vacuum pump.
And so now the water that we have is acidic cell, but it’s decarbonized. But remember when we split in the electrobialysis, we split into an acid and a base. So basically we re-add in the base. And by doing so, you re-neutralize the water back to almost the same pH. It’s slightly more alkali, which is going the right way. Better to be slightly more alkali and slightly more acid. And then that’s the decarbonized ocean water that we then put onto the surface layer of the ocean. It reacts with the atmosphere and draws down CO2 from the atmosphere.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Does your technology, this technology require certain depths of ocean water? I mean, you know, other types of ocean CDR. We talk about how, you know, the depth of the kelp sinking and things like that. But from what the way you’re describing it, it sounds like it can be done at nearly any depth in the ocean and nearly any location. Yeah.
Steve Oldham: Yeah, so what’s important for us is the decarbonized water that we discharge from our plant needs to stay on the shallow ocean layer. Because if it went into the deep ocean, the deep ocean doesn’t interact with the atmosphere. And consequently, we decarbonize the ocean, which is not a bad thing from an alkalinity perspective. But what we didn’t do was remove CO2 from the atmosphere. So we choose a location where the shallow ocean and the deep ocean don’t interact. And that’s actually the vast majority of the ocean. They kind of operate like this, the shallow ocean layer and the deep ocean layer.
So we choose those locations. There’s plenty of them. And then that way our discharge water stays on the surface of the ocean, 50 to 100 meters, reacts with the atmosphere, draws down the CO2. So our solution has, I think, a benefit in we’re not requiring a change to the natural interaction between the shallow and the deep ocean, as long as we put our plants where shallow ocean currents prevail.
Ross Kenyon: Beyond the physical requirements of where to site these facilities, how much of your work depends upon maritime law and property rights in the ocean?
Steve Oldham: So yes, you’re quite correct. So the ocean is actually, from a permitting perspective, it’s not straightforward. Because depending upon how far out you go from the coast, you have different permitting authorities as you head further and further out until, as you point out, once you get into the middle of the ocean, if you like, Then you’re in a scenario where it’s international waters. So what I look at here is, I mean, there’s work for us to do in this for sure. But this process has been figured out by people like, for example, the oil and gas industry with oil and gas platforms that are out there in the ocean today.
And in fact, one of our key targets, if you like, we want to put our technology on oil and gas platforms as they become decommissioned. So when you look at the freezing, we could put a million tonnes of carbon capture per year on an oil and gas platform. You multiply that by the number of oil and gas platforms that are out there and you end up with quite a large number. And of course, from an energy company perspective, if you have a platform and its field becomes depleted or no longer economical, not only are you sat on a candidate sequestration site, but you’re also, you have a stranded asset on your books.
So we see it as an opportunity to put our technology onto the oil and gas platform instead and convert fossil fuel extracting oil and gas platform and convert it into a CO2 sequestering climate-friendly device.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Steve, that actually was one of my questions when I was looking at your website. The size of the platform looked pretty significant. So would you say that it’s, obviously, it’s about the technology fits on an oil and gas platform. Is that the approximate size?
Steve Oldham: It’s completely modular, which is one of the great things about this technology. So at the lower end of scale, we’re actually already talking to desalination plants because, of course, they have an outflow of brine. And brine is saltwater, which is the inflow to our process. So we’re talking about putting our captura devices at the back end of desalination plants and brine to capture carbon. So at the small end, then that’s probably 10,000 tonnes per desalination plant of carbon capture per year. At the larger scale, yeah, about a million tonnes fits on an oil and gas platform, but the technology is modular.
You basically go to whatever size you want. If you do look on our website, which is captureacorp.com, you’ll see graphic designers put together a sort of a futuristic picture of what a dedicated capture of a platform could look like, which combines renewable energy via solar, With the capture of technology, it looks really cool. But my business target first would be, let’s use the existing ocean-based infrastructure wherever possible. Another example, by the way, is on a platform, the technology is stationary and we move the water through the system. So what if you looked at it the other way around?
Is there anything that moves through the ocean and the platform’s moving, not the water? And of course, the answer is, yeah, every ship on the planet. So we’re able to utilize the flow of ocean water through a ship. Then each of those ships could become a carbon capture device too using this type of technology. So that’s kind of a cool future idea. And the technology is modular. But yeah, near term focus for us, desalination plants, power utilities that use water for cooling, and then oil and gas platforms.
Ross Kenyon: What do you do with the CO2 once you’ve isolated it and captured it?
Steve Oldham: Yeah, so my mindset’s very similar to the one I had at Carbon Engineering. Our job is capture of CO2. We want to produce the best tools to be able to do that. So then we’ll partner with people who want to build a plant and use the CO2 for making a fuel, synthetic fuel. For example, in Europe, that’s a large market area. Sequestration, produce carbon credits, products such as chemicals or carbon fiber. So we’re flexible. The weakness of ocean capture is in the name. You have to be bound on the ocean.
So that is, if you like, a logistical challenge from a CO2 perspective. For sequestration, I think there’s plenty of offshore sequestration sites. But for product making, like for example, making a fuel, you’d probably have to put our plants on the shore or right next to the shore. So that’s the side, if you like, of ocean-based capture. It may be cheaper than direct air capture, but it doesn’t have the location flexibility that direct air capture has.
Ross Kenyon: Do the marine ocean and gas fields right now have similar geology to like the saline reservoirs that they talk about for land-based direct air capture and then storage in the lithosphere? Can you just run that system in reverse or is the chemistry and geology of it substantially different?
Steve Oldham: No, it’s at the sort of level that certainly I understand and possibly you understand too, it’s broadly the same fundamental concept. It’s not as far advanced as onshore sequestration. But for example, Equinor in Norway, Chevron in the Gulf of Mexico are already starting the process of doing offshore sequestration underneath the ocean. And of course, that’s where they’re extracting from, extracting fossil fuels from today. So you’ve kind of got the infrastructure, if you like, that’s already accessing those underground fields. And if they’re suitable for sequestration, great. It’s a good place.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Steve, I, you know, I’m curious as a person who is talking to lots of different startups in the space, Oceans has really, I think probably we would all agree, exploded in the last few, like last six months. It went from just a couple of companies to all sorts out there. And it’s really exciting. But I’m wondering when you’re out there talking about Captura and winning the X prides and doing all those cool things. How do you differentiate yourselves from other Ocean CDR companies and sort of discuss your value proposition out there?
Steve Oldham: Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing to say, and I hope I’ve consistently said this throughout my career in carbon removal is we need every tool. I’m not interested in suggesting anybody else’s technology is not the right answer. We need every single tool that we have because they all have different pros and cons and we need all the tools in the toolbox here. In terms of differentiating, it comes down to what I said earlier on, the fact that from an ocean capture perspective, we essentially leave the ocean untouched. We don’t add anything to it.
We don’t change the currents of the ocean. We produce a stream of CO2 and that’s measurable and utilisable if you want to make a product. And we have no byproducts, no absorbance, just ocean water and renewable electricity. So I think our system is... Elegant in terms of its solution and non-disruptive to the ocean, which is essential. I don’t think the body of knowledge on the ocean is wide enough for any of us to feel confident that we can change the characteristics of the ocean to address climate change and it won’t have some knock-on effects somewhere else.
So I think the differentiation we have is by not enhancing alkalinity, by not adding anything to the ocean, by not disrupting currents. I think our solution is elegant and hopefully simple.
Radhika Moolgavkar: It’s very cool. It’s really interesting to hear you talk about it for sure and get more in depth. You know, another thing that I’m curious about from somebody who’s had such a long history within the CDR space is what you think the single kind of largest challenge for ramping up CDR and then Ocean CDR specifically. Love your opinion on that.
Steve Oldham: Yeah, I think, I mean, let me go into categories. The first category is convincing the financial community that carbon removal is a market that is financeable. We all know that the financial community likes to see percentage of market share, evidence of what price points exist in the market, all these types of things. And then you position your product as differentiated within that market. Well, carbon removal is not a market today. There’s a very, very small amount of companies who are doing fantastic work by being early adopters. But there’s not a market you can go and compare.
So the financial community scratches their head and says, I just, I don’t know what this market size is going to be. And I don’t know what the price point is going to be. And the only way we can fix that is by more customers entering the market. I’m a big supporter of the initiative in the US, for example, to make a federal carbon procurement strategy where when procurement is done by government, it has a net zero or a carbon benefit calculation built into it. I think that will generate demand. So that’s the first one, the financeability of the market, and hence the first plants.
It remains very challenging. And I tell investors all the time, the world’s going to net zero, look at the size of the market, but it’s not there today. So that’s number one. Number two is the one that Ross mentioned earlier on, which is for ocean capture in particular, The issue of permitting, which of course is a mechanism that’s there to ensure ocean health is protected. So it’s wider than just the process of getting a permit. It’s also demonstrating to the ocean community that your solution is not harmful. So I think for ocean capture, that’s a big focus.
So for us over the next 12 months, we’re going to keep developing the technology, we’re going to run our pilot systems, do all those good things. We’re going to look at the cost of scaling up and what a full system would look like. But we also have to work on convincing more customers to create a market. And also secondly, demonstrating that we are non-harmful and hence we should be getting permits.
Ross Kenyon: Seems so optimistic that you didn’t name MRV as one of your main challenges, especially we’ve been watching the struggles of kelp in the last month or so, just getting hammered for not being as verifiable as one’s thought, or there’s a lot of science that still needs to be done. But it sounds like maybe you don’t think that’s as big a concern for your particular methodology.
Steve Oldham: So I think what I would say is it shouldn’t be a concern. It doesn’t mean it isn’t. But it shouldn’t be. And the reason is we produce a stream of measurable CO2, just like direct air capture does. However, we have this medium of the ocean in between us and the atmosphere. So the direct air capture guys have it easy. They can say, hey, look, I captured this CO2. It must have come from the atmosphere. Where else would it have come from? Therefore, give me the carbon credits. We have to show that Henry’s law makes the chemistry possible.
Blindingly obvious. I was having this conversation with somebody earlier on today, and they basically said, yeah, I mean, any chemists and scientists would tell you that the chemistry in your process is obvious. Of course, if you take CO2 out of the ocean, the ocean pulls it out of the air, obviously. But it doesn’t necessarily help me with governments, with 45Q tax credits, with customers, because I don’t have that correlation. So the guys who are looking at kelp have it a little bit harder because they don’t produce extreme measurable CO2. So where I think our company should be able to get to is working with the science community to validate our assertion that A ton of CO2 out of the ocean produces a ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
And that’s done through analysis, through basic chemistry. And then I measure the CO2 out of the ocean water, and that’s what I get carbon credits for. Because the removal from the air, night follows day, every time.
Ross Kenyon: Which stage of deployment are you at right now? And how much does it cost at whatever scale you’re at to remove a ton from the ocean? And then we also have to factor in that storage is not being accounted for right now, I’m sure in this number. And then where do you expect it to get to? And of course, this is a non-binding. I would like to know what you think is actually possible.
Steve Oldham: Yeah, so first of all, what stage are we up to? We’re probably, I’d say, TRL level six. So one of the things I like about the capture of technology is the smarts are all in the electrodialysis. That really drives the performance of the system. And electrodialysis units are about this big, which means they are cheap to test, to break.
Ross Kenyon: It’s literally like a ball in your hand, right? Yeah. Sorry, of course, I forgot I was on the podcast. Not to be a pedant, but I needed to do that.
Steve Oldham: Thank you. So, you know, we’re able to test and rapidly evaluate the various pieces of technology that we use. So our first system is just started ocean trials last week down in Newport Beach in California. The ocean trials are great. We’ve been testing in the lab in Pasadena. And for those of you less familiar with the geography, Pasadena is not on the coasts. So our team was kind of driving and carrying buckets of water back from the ocean and making false seawater to test. But now we’re testing with ocean water and that’s going well.
The next step for us is 100 times scale up. And then to put that system into a desalination plant and we’re talking to some candidate desalination plants for that. Because they produce a stream of brine, it’s a great place for us to be. And then we want to go to another scale up to at least 1,000 tonnes, which would make us eligible for the final XPRIZE, which is in 2025. In terms of cost, the cost model is pretty robust. We’ve done a detailed techno-economic analysis. You’re probably familiar with that. To be in the XPRIZE and to have won a milestone award, you have to produce a pretty detailed TEA, techno-economic analysis.
So we’ve done that. It shows that our cost of installing the technology on an oil and gas platform at about a million tonnes will be substantially less than $100 a tonne. The steps we need to take to get there are actually not that bad. It’s not that much of a stretch. We calculate that if you took our current generation of electrodialysis and put that at a megaton scale on an oil and gas platform, you’d be just slightly over $100 a tonne. So that’s pretty competitive. And it comes down to those three fundamentals I described earlier on.
No absorbents, no byproducts, no air contactors to build. And then your energy use is lower because you have to move a lot less water. I attended the DOE Carbon Moonshot a couple of weeks ago. And of course, the DOE is targeting to get to $100 or less by 2032. So we want to beat them to it.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Steve, I’m curious, as you’re thinking through your candidate sites, how do you, because you said permitting is probably the single biggest challenge. So how do you do that evaluation to think about which sites are within jurisdictions that are going to be more friendly to this, more open to this? And I assume you also have to pair it with the analysis of the energy cost or the type of energy that you’re using because it should be renewable. So how are you guys approaching that evaluation?
Steve Oldham: Yeah, so if you think about the perfect, the Nirvana site, it would have renewable energy, easily available. It would have sequestration right there. It would have a shallow ocean current, as I described earlier on, and a 20-day permitting process, shall we say. So that would be the perfect site. Anybody knows any of those, don’t hesitate to give me a shout. In terms of the variables, energy costs... is not as big a driver as you would think. Because of the inherent cost savings of our approach using the ocean, then even if energy costs 2x what we’re currently thinking, doesn’t move the cost per tonne that much.
Renewable energy cost is less of a factor. Obviously, having renewable energy versus traditional fossil fuel-based energy, that makes a big difference. In terms of permitting, yeah, part of the attraction for desalination plants and oil and gas platforms is those already have significant permits in place. If we can demonstrate that our impact is no worse than the impact of those on the ocean and we fall within the current permits, that’s obviously a big win. So we’re actively looking at that right now and working with the people who are familiar with permitting those things.
It’s kind of similar to, I remember when I started at Carbon Engineering, we started looking at permitting direct air capture plants. And you go to various government departments and they’re all pointing different directions and say, yes, I don’t think that’s us. You have to go somewhere else. So I think we will experience a little bit of that, which again is a reason to focus on existing infrastructure because somebody permitted them. So we’ll see. One thing about this technology is the ocean water doesn’t matter what temperature it is, what the current speed is.
Basically, as long as it’s got salt in it, which of course ocean water does, we can use it for our process. So, you know, we have quite a significant sort of target area to go and chase.
Ross Kenyon: One thing I love about this approach, and it’s been a while since we’ve talked about this, but I love the natural momentum for oil and gas companies with stranded assets like platforms in the ocean that they will be held liable for until they probably take them down. I’m also thinking about desalination. I associate so strongly with the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula and Israel, and especially with those oil producing countries that are going to, they’re already trying to make moves to account for a post fossil fuel world. And they already have so much desalinization there.
Surely you’re already looking into this, right? You’re offering them a natural way to get in on the early side of this economy.
Steve Oldham: Yeah, no, it is a very natural fit for those regions, for sure. Of course, abundant renewable energy, for example, potential as well in those areas. I’ve had my share of criticism of carbon engineering for working with the oil and gas community. At the carbon engineering, I led the discussions and the negotiations that led to our CE’s agreement with Oxy. That’s been a tremendous agreement for carbon engineering. Personally, I’d like to think of myself as a pragmatic environmentalist. I’m very focused on the big picture of trying to solve climate change, but I’m also pragmatic.
And there is a lot of skills and a lot of access and knowledge that is in that industry that, if engaged correctly and with the right motivations, can significantly help drive us towards addressing the impact of fossil fuels. I hope to work with the energy sector again with Captura because, as you said, Ross, it’s sort of a natural, logical thing to As they have their oil and gas platforms that cease to become useful for them, either by the energy transition or just pure economics, why not convert them into devices that can help eliminate the carbon footprints of the past?
Ross Kenyon: I love stuff like that. I don’t find that people have been searching for as many of those lately, or maybe I just haven’t been seeing them. But this is the first time in a while I’ve been able to scratch that itch. So I don’t know that I have a follow up on that, except kudos. I hope it works. And I also hope if you could turn an enemy into a friend, like surely that’s better than sending them to the guillotine. Like I think some people might prefer. So I hope you’re right.
And I wish you well on that.
Steve Oldham: Yeah, I mean, I’ve met lots of people in the oil and gas sector. There’s many, many fantastic people with great skills and very passionate about helping address climate. So yeah, if you can use that in the right way, I think it’s very powerful. So hopefully we’ll be able to do that.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Steve, what do you see in the next five years for you guys? I like to ask the big time horizon question, which in CDR seems to be five years right now. Most people have been around that even that long. So where do you see Captura in five years and what are your hopes and dreams for the company?
Steve Oldham: So the deployment plan for us, we want to follow a licensing business model. We want to license that technology to partners so that many, many people can build plants using this technology in parallel around the world. So we have some work to do to demonstrate the technology works as we’ve described. We have some work to do to demonstrate that it can be scaled up and affordable price point. And we’re a bunch of scientists and research people at Captura. We’re not engineers who know how to put things at sea and how to do massive pumping of water and filtering.
But there’s a lot of people out there who do. So we’re going to work with them to get comfort in what’s the cost of a full system while we continue to improve the core technology. So we do that through the next, let’s say, year. And then here’s what I’d like to happen. And this, we were fortunate at Carbon Engineering because Occidental saw the potential the technology and decided to help drive. I would like to be at a point in a year, two years, where a major partner is starting to build the first plant of significant size, whether that’s on an online guest platform or a series of desalination plants, I don’t know.
So I’d like to be starting to move into commercial operations in one to two years, and then more plants will follow. Just the natural dynamic here is I really will wait for the first one to work at large commercial scale, and then we’ll look to build more. So that’s what I’d like to do. But then I took a step back and you asked the big picture level, and I realized how woefully inadequate that is when you compare it with the sheer quantity of CO2 And what all the scientists tell us that the carbon removal industry has to do.
So the challenge of kind of following the traditional development path for companies like ours, bringing technology into the marketplace, the challenge is that it’s woefully inadequate compared to what needs to be done the climate level. So we can’t fix that. It can only be fixed by the financial community stepping up. The infrastructure community stepping up. Government putting in the right sticks and carrots to create the behavioral changes required. The public saying enough is enough. This is a high priority. We need to do more on climate. And what I hope shows like yours and others do is they demonstrate to the public that there are solutions.
Climate is not an insolvable problem. We can fix it if we want to. But the drive is not there enough. So there are many companies, like you said earlier on, that are starting to develop technologies. Fantastic. But the rate of deployment is woefully inadequate.
Ross Kenyon: It’s nice to have that reminder of just how early we are too. Because even since Nori started five years ago, carbon removal went from feeling like a little bit out of the fringes of geoengineering and being like a little bit suspect into becoming like a much more mainstream phenomenon. But even still, like so many of these methodologies are nascent. Things that were invented this year are being funded for the first time. MRV for many of these are not there. Methodologies are not even published. Some are just a twinkle in someone’s eye listening right now and they’re not even at bench scale yet.
So the amount of money that’s going into this, we get excited about a billion dollars going in through Frontier, which is simultaneously amazing, but also small potatoes for what actually needs to be done. And that’s nothing against Frontier whatsoever. It’s super important, but also compared to climate crisis as a whole, is it anywhere close to what we need? No. But hopefully that’s not the case a year from now, three years from now, five years from now. I guess that’s probably akin to what you’re saying.
Steve Oldham: Yeah, and my point is it’s a lot more than companies like ours coming up with the technology ideas. I am yet to see the change in the mindset of, for example, the infrastructure industry. Say, let’s start putting our dollars into this type of technology. I think the recent US legislation and the bills that are passing there, the European initiatives in climate, I hope those things will create the change. But we all know this, right? For startups, the hardest period of time is going from your pilot to first commercial deployment. That’s where you need deployment assistance.
So I think collectively, the problem of R&D assistance, Is just about solved. There is now lots of smart people going into carbon removal. There’s government funding available. The awareness of the problem is attracting brilliant minds, and that’s great. But the challenge that we haven’t solved yet is great. How do we build the first? And that’s where maybe government-funded Curement, 45Q, the legislation that’s in the Inflation Act is great. That’s the next challenge, getting to deployment.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I really appreciate your time, Steve. This is fascinating. It’s very exciting for me. I love the chemistry because it’s so simple and obvious. We just had an oceanography PhD start with us, and he basically has said the same thing to you as you did. The chemistry is just a chemistry, Radhika. It doesn’t. If it happens, that is just the way it works. It’s kind of hard to believe, but I believe you.
Steve Oldham: I know, but you go take that to a financial person. I know. How do I know? How do I know you’re going to get a carbon credit? And so, yeah, it is that part’s a challenge. My view on the how do you get to deployment, by the way, is actually regulation. I think regulation is the best thing because commercial companies move quicker than government every time. So if let’s make this up, there was a regulation that if you’re dealing with government in a state or federal level, then you have to eliminate your carbon footprint permanently.
And that is going to come in by 2030. Now, every single company that does business with the government, every single company has got to come up with a plan. And you phase it in. You don’t just say overnight, obviously. So you have to eliminate 20%, 30%, 40%. The low carbon fuel standard ratcheted up over time. That creates a market. And what will happen is the entrepreneurial story, all the boardrooms and the senior managers will go out there and say, what’s the best way for me to solve this problem quickly and at lowest cost?
And they’ll just get on with it. When government tries to choose technologies or support different ones, it just takes longer. And so let industry do it. But they’re not going to do it because they’re, if you like, good guys. They’re going to do it because they’re regulated. And they have to do it. Otherwise, their business is going to be under threat. So in my view, that’s the right way. I think there are many companies that are doing the right thing and starting to look at that carbon footprint. And that’s fantastic.
But there’s many companies that aren’t. But regulation, you can’t win a contract with the government unless you do this.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Put the guardrails in place and then let the private sector really iterate on it.
Steve Oldham: Yeah, that’s the fastest route and will lead to the best innovation in my mind. And then government’s job is to ensure that everybody’s doing it right. Put the regulation in place and then monitor compliance. That’s where I think government should be. So that would be my vote if I was president of the world, but I’m not, so we’ll stick with where we are.
Ross Kenyon: Radhika, thank you so much for co-hosting with me. It’s a pleasure to have you back on Reversing Climate Change.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Always, Ross, anytime.
Ross Kenyon: And links are in the show notes to everything we talked about into all of Steve’s work. But also, if you want to check out Radica’s podcast, Carbon Removal Newsroom, link is in the show notes as well. And you totally should. Steve, thank you also for being here. That was very informative. I feel like I should be doing a lot more dedicated carbon removal company shows. And thanks for validating that. That was fantastic.
Steve Oldham: Well, it’s a pleasure. And thank you for having me on and thank you for your interest. It’s critical that the message gets out there that carbon removal is possible and can make a big impact. So I appreciate your interest for sure.
Ross Kenyon: Absolutely. And if you like what we’re doing here, share this with a friend, give us a great rating and review on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Thanks so much for listening and have a lovely day. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
