What does a utopian second-generation Direct Air Capture (DAC) system look like, and how does it differ from what we have now?
In this engaging episode of Reversing Climate Change, Ross and Siobhan have a very frank and honest discussion with Sampo Tukiainen, a farmer, apiarist, meditator, rifleman and the CEO of C-Fix, a second-generation #directaircapture company that wants to do it all. After a brief intro to #DAC, they discuss the energy consumption of current facilities, and how second-generation technology offers potential energy savings compared to the energy-intensive first-generation methods.
Would DAC with co-benefits be unstoppable? Probably. Sampo imagines a DAC facility that also addresses water scarcity, provides agricultural resources, and stores carbon dioxide onsite. Learn how Sampo balances his CDR career with his passion for farming, riflery, meditation and family. Hear his frank thoughts on the challenges of building a CDR company when there is conflict.
By the end of the episode, listeners gain a deeper understanding of the possibilities offered by second-generation DAC and the importance of incorporating co-benefits into the system.
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: 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 with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon and I’m one of the cofounders of Nori and the creative editor there, and we are a carbon removal marketplace based in Seattle. Did I already say that? Siobhan, did I say that twice?
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: No, this is the first time.
Ross Kenyon: Here, alerting our listeners — that’s Siobhan Montoya-Lavender from Thanks a Ton and Nori’s meme crew. Hey, Shiv.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Hey, everybody.
Ross Kenyon: All right. Apologies to our wonderful guest, Sampo Tukiainen, who’s calling in with us from Finland today, and he is the CEO of C-Fix, and he’s going to be talking to us today about first generation and second generation direct air capture, which is a topic I want to sink my teeth into, because I think I might be stuck in first gen, and I might be stuck with all the preconceived notions I have about first-gen DAC and what it means and what it’s going to look like. And so I’m excited to hear about what the future is going to look like. Let’s be forward facing here.
Before we start that, Sampo, I want to poke at that, because do people even like that term, I imagine? If you’re a quote-unquote first-gen DAC supplier, you’re probably like, this is simply pejorative, right? It’s framing them as the old way, the Old Guard, they’re out of touch, they’re doing technology that is inappropriately scaled. So is this even a model that you like using? Or, I guess, if you’re second gen you probably do. Do you like it?
Sampo Tukiainen: Well, you know, you know, one has to have some edge, you know, to [unclear] people, you know, who are on the fence. But it’s not about that, and obviously the whole space and the whole industry is so young and is moving so fast that people are not, not, like, ready for second generation yet. [unclear] If there are genuine, you know, accommodations in a leapfrog, you’re going to be shaking your head, get off my lawn, you know. And we haven’t really, really even, you know, seen what the first gen can do.
So, so, you know, but, you know, I guess it’s just a — it’s a marketing term. But but also, you know, it’s a real term in the sense that I think second generation is often when, you know, you’ve come across — I mean, you’ve solved and come, you know, kind of gotten around some of the, you know, early stage and first generation problems. And, and yeah, I think we have. I think we have done, in a lot of areas. So, so I think it’s justified.
Ross Kenyon: You know, I think our listeners are pretty familiar with the term direct air capture, but just briefly summarize: what does it mean to be a direct air capture method? What does that entail?
Sampo Tukiainen: Well, direct air capture means that you are removing CO2, or capturing it, from ambient air, which is, you know, like we know, it’s kind of a dilute solution or mixture, and typically that is seen as just the removal component. But I think, you know, in the, in the kind of, you know, second generation, we’re going to see that, you know, you can actually integrate storage with the direct air capture component. So that’s one of the things that sets us apart from first gen, because it actually comes with integrated storage.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Is that necessary for it to be second generation? Is it mostly about co-locating removal and storage? Is that the main differentiator between first and second gen?
Sampo Tukiainen: Well, no, no. I kind of touched it a little early, but now it’s time. Yeah. Well, I guess no. Well, direct air capture, you know, typically it just produces a gas of CO2, you know, and then, you know, you have to couple it with some sort of a storage solution like, you know, Carbfix or 44.01 or something like that. And, well, you know, here too, you know, it’s kind of coupled with the storage solution. But basically, I don’t want to go, like, too deep into the kind of stuff that is proprietary, because, you know, we haven’t filed our IP yet, but I can talk on a broad level.
And basically, you have a, you have a, you know, a process, and, you know, what we do is similar to, you know, Capture6 and Ebb Carbon and a lot of companies that build on the chlor-alkali, you know, process and splitting salt effectively. But this is not an open cycle process, in the sense that we are not constantly taking in new salt and, you know, splitting that, and then, you know, let’s say dump the alkaline component into the ocean, or, you know, in the desert somewhere, and then the acid, you know, has to be neutralized somehow or disposed of.
So this is basically — we are, you know, basically killing two birds with one stone, and in the same process, you know. That is, you know, the process used to capture the carbon dioxide from the air is used to dissolve magnesium out of rock, you know, that is then combined, you know, in this process, and the product is a CO2, but it’s a crystalline magnesium carbonate. And the biggest difference about this is that the reaction is instantaneous. So it happens, you know, at the plant immediately, and it’s, you know, very easy to verify and record, and also trace crystalline material.
Plus, you know, I think the business model is a little more flexible in the sense that we’re not just — because the plant is actually putting out a physical product. So for a million tonne plant per annum, say, for the sake of argument, you put out about two million tons of magnesium carbonate a year, of which half of the mass is carbon dioxide. So, so, you know, you have kind of a more diversified business model. You’re not just dependent on selling CDR to the, you know, to the quite few buyers that are actually in the game at the moment, like that we all know, like Shopify and Microsoft and Stripe or Frontier and—
Ross Kenyon: So let’s do this. Wait, let me interrupt. Let’s do a mental, like a verbal whiteboard. So if I was going to be taught, like, what DAC is, what its history has been and where it’s going — so the first column on the left here of our verbal whiteboard would be direct air capture, the machines we’ve all seen, right? We’ve all seen pictures of these turbine-like machines that are sucking in air. We know they’re going through some sort of — then it’s just touching on a sorbent, and then it’s being stored, I assume temporarily, at those facilities prior to a more permanent storage, which would be injection underground, or perhaps it’s being utilized, it’s going into materials.
So am I correct in thinking that’s kind of the DAC as we all know it? Like the original DAC is saying we’re going to suck it out with these turbines, we’re going to store it, and then we’re going to inject it or use it. And so that DAC in my mind is still just getting off the ground. Would you say that’s correct? Like, we’re seeing, you know, obviously Climeworks is the OG in the industry, and now we have CarbonCapture with their new Project Bison coming out. So is that all kind of the DAC as we know it? And then what would separate second generation DAC? Is it this coupling? Is it the idea of storing on site? Illustrate that a little bit for us.
Sampo Tukiainen: Well, yeah, all those things. I’m trying to hold them all in my head. But yeah, I guess, you know, like, I’m not going to name specific processes, but let’s say, when you talk about sorbent, for example, the sorbent is a big, big thing of the whole equation, because, you know, you might have to make the sorbent, you know, synthetically, and it might take a lot of energy, and it might actually have, let’s say, bioavailable nitrogen in it. And if you were to deploy something like that at a gigaton scale, then you would inevitably leach a massive amount of nitrogen into the environment, for example, which is already a big problem because of eutrophication.
And then, I mean, amine-based sorbents, for example, they are — you have to make them synthetically and they are one of the most energy intensive, intensive chemicals out there today. So I, I think, you know, alkaline and alkaline earth metals clearly are, you know, an interesting option there. But at the same time, being what I like to call myself, a seasoned process engineer, or, you know, having been involved there for a long time, I wouldn’t typically want to have a process with — let’s see if I can avoid it, you know — too much solid material handling, for example, because solid material handling is something that is expensive, requires a lot of investment, takes a lot of hardware, and it’s prone to failure.
It’s typically, you know, if you look at a biomass plant, for example, then the materials handling is typically where you get the hiccups. And so, so there are a lot of things you can do better. You know, I would like to say that this process that we’re doing doesn’t have a single moving part. I mean, let alone the turbine or the propeller at the top of the structure. And of course, here, you know, when you’re talking about something like this, you have two things: you have the core process, and then you have the concept that you build around that core process, and how you couple it, you know, with the environment, for example.
And I think, you know, one of the challenges with first-gen direct air capture — and, you know, yeah, challenges — is that it’s consuming a lot of resources. It takes a lot of energy, electricity, thermal energy. It takes a lot of water and chemicals.
Ross Kenyon: And is this a strike against it that people always bring up? That’s the common argument against DAC: it’s energy intensive. And so, in terms of scale — so if that’s, like, the kind of typical scale of energy consumption, what are you looking at for second gen in terms of energy? Just compare — and it doesn’t have to be an exact, you know, wattage, but in terms of scale.
Sampo Tukiainen: Well, we do some things, you know. We recycle the energy internally in this process, so, you know, but it still, it does take a lot of energy. I would say it takes, depending on how much energy you recycle internally, some of the hydrogen that the electrolyzers put out, you would be looking at 1,400 to 2,200 kilowatt hours per ton of CO2 removed. But that does include the storage component. So, you know, you save a lot in the, you know, compressing and, you know, pipelines, or, you know, ships, or cooling, you know, whatever you do down the line, or injection — you might have to inject it, you know, against a substantially high pressure, you know, much higher than the CO2 pressure itself.
But what I wanted to say, you know, the other thing that sets it apart — and it’s been kind of used as a club against DAC — is that it’s kind of, you know, it isn’t really tangible, or something that people can see. And, and, you know, it doesn’t really offer anything to the local community. Let’s say that if you build one of these massive plants, and you’re pretty much going to have them in tens of thousands of cities or villages or the countryside. So there should be something tangible, a benefit that, you know, the local population or the society gets from that.
I think, you know, that can have co-benefits. And if you look at our process, for example, water is one thing. Instead of using water, we actually condense a lot of water, because we control the relative humidity and temperature, and the temperature differences between, you know, different flows and the air. And so then, instead of drawing it up, we’re actually condensing a lot of water. But the source of that water is sea water, and we’re evaporating some of that and then condensing it back. So there’s a small river coming out of that plant.
And actually, you know, again, if you look at the million tonnes per annum plant, that would be about 1,600 tons, or cubic meters, of water every hour coming out of that plant. So it’s actually a small stream that you can row a boat in, you know, basically.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: And that would be saltwater desalinized and then leaving the facility in a stream of fresh water that could then be available for use.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, yeah, it’s distilled water that is being evaporated from seawater and then condensed in the contactor. You know, once again, this is a direct air capture plant, so it does have a contactor where you bring the sorbent into contact with the air. But the air that reaches the contactor is very humid, and the contactor is cooled, it’s ice cold. So all that humidity condenses into the, in the contactor, and you’re actually able to harvest that, as you know, for drinking or irrigation.
And the other thing, you know, what I’m talking about, the concept that we’re building around the actual technology is, you know, obviously solar. Solar is the kind of most scalable form of energy, and kind of large-scale plants are based on solar. Or, initially, you can do it anywhere where you have low-carbon electricity and there’s not a shortage of it, like in Finland, right? Today we have negatively priced energy, which is nice, and it’s been negatively priced for a couple of days now, so very nice. But even during daytime hours, it’s negatively priced. Yeah, and the last few days it has been so, which is, you know, nice, because I paid a thousand, you know, per kilowatt hour, or something like that, per megawatt-hour last winter, and then last spring, a year ago, it was just just crazy, you know?
So, so yeah, what I was going to say is that the other thing is this magnesium carbonate. So if you’re in the desert, let’s say somewhere, and these plants will be built in the desert, so there’s not a lot of market nearby necessarily, big cities, where you want to haul this kind of cheap bulk product. So magnesium carbonate is actually, you know, when you take it out it’s like little rocks, and you can, you can make pellets out of it, for example, or you can clink it.
Ross Kenyon: For us — I heard it on LinkedIn, if you can, so our listeners can hear.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, it does sure have a satisfying sound. It does have this kind of a glass-like sound, or a surround sound, like a surround, you know. My, my laptop is all covered with the carbonate here.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t hear anything, so you just got it dirty for no reason.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah. Sorry. I’ll follow, I’ll record it for, you know, however you post.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, but I’m only assuming [unclear] singing bowl here for us.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, I’m actually, yeah, it’s once it’s, once it’s, like, really crystallized, it is like, you know, kind of a solid structure. And, you know, that’s when it starts to have the sound like that.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: It’s interesting. Talk to me about building with it, not to get ahead. But so we have — we’re talking about co-benefits, second gen DAC. We have the potential of, listen up, California, where water is scarce and salt water is abundant. We have the potential of, you know, having this stream of fresh water coming out of the plant. You mentioned on your website that this is something that you can build with. This is a material that could be used as a building additive.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, you can press it into bricks as it is, and it doesn’t need a binder, and it has a hardness that’s comparable to limestone. So on the Mohs scale it’s three to four. So limestone is, you know, if you visit European cities, then most of the old cities are built out of limestone. It’s a very good material. I mean, it’s easy to carve and cut to size. But this is different, you know, you have the same hardness, it’s bright white, you know, so if you build something out of that in the desert area, then, you know, it’s kind of, you know, good for the climate, because it reflects a lot of solar energy back.
And yeah, you can use it in a lot of ways. You can use it to build houses or roads, or coral reefs. You know, you don’t just want to dump it in the ocean, you want to make bricks out of it and then dump a pile of bricks on which the corals can, you know, start building up. So, but it’s a question of whether there’s a market or not, and it’s a cheap bulk product.
And I have to go back a little bit, because I was talking about the more diverse business model, you know, that we have. And, you know, instead of selling just the CORC, or the CO2 removal certificate, to the software companies and internet companies and others, we wouldn’t. So we’re actually, it is more diverse. You can actually sell it as carbon negative. Like, I used to be in biochar at Carbofex, and, you know, when we were selling biochar, typically you would sell the CORC separately from the physical product, and then you would tell the buyer of the carbon that they cannot make any carbon negativity claims, or, you know, that this is, you know—
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: To reduce double counting.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, exactly. So, but we had some clients that wanted to, you know, kind of buy the carbon negative product, so that we would staple all the certificates onto the bags, you know, figuratively speaking.
And magnesium carbonate is similar to that sort of thing. It doesn’t, you know — it’s not as intense as, you know, with three, you know, kg per kg of CO2 equivalent. I mean, one kg of biochar had three kg CO2 equivalent. So magnesium carbonate only has about fifty-three percent CO2, but it’s negative. And, you know, we don’t need to sell the CORC. We can just sell it as a carbon negative filler, or a carbon negative, you know, construction material. Fillers are used in a lot of different industrial products, and limestone is typically, you know, and silica and carbon black and things like that are, you know, typically fillers.
So the point is that, you know, companies are able to make carbon negative or carbon neutral products, you know, once they kind of recycle as much as possible and all their energy is renewable, but there’s still a little bit of carbon footprint left. The only thing you can do is you can use a carbon negative component to kind of, you know, offset the carbon footprint, and we can, we can do that. So it’s not just the CDR market, it’s also the industrial product market and the kind of filler use. So it’s more diverse—
Ross Kenyon: Questions, Siobhan? Looks like you want to get one in.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Mostly just want to tell you to stay in your lane. If DAC starts having co-benefits, what’s going to happen to everyone else, man? Can you just, can you just back off?
Ross Kenyon: And just — that’s what I was gonna say. I was gonna say, how could you make DAC unstoppable? Give it co-benefits.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah. No, it has to be, and for people to buy into it and, you know, you know, not have the not-in-my-backyard attitude, then it’s got to have, you know, something good. And, you know, this concept, you know, it’s solar powered. Or so, around the plant, which is by the sea, on the desert, you’re going to have a big array of solar panels, probably like 500 hectares of them, you know, several hundreds of acres, a thousand acres at least, at least.
So you’re actually going to be able to grow, grow food and stuff under the panels, because it just provides a little bit of shade. These are cadmium telluride panels, so basically thin film, and most of the light gets through. So instead of, you know, making the land, you know, useless, you actually, you know, make it arable in a way. And then, you know, the last thing is that, you know, you’re going to build these plants carbon negative from scratch. So once again, you know, by using carbon negative materials like biochar.
And if we go into the DAC side, you know, the contactor — once again, you know, when you’re moving massive amounts of air, you want to have passive, you know, systems, or, you know, low velocities and laminar, laminar flows, which is that, you know, there’s no turbulence. So, so in effect, you know, you want to have an easy breathing system. It’s like sucking when you’re trying to breathe through a straw, you know, you’re changing the same amount of air but you’re doing a lot of work, because, you know, there’s a small opening. So you have to make all the passages big so that, you know, the flow flows through easily. And that means that they’re going to be big, you know. That’s the downside of it.
So these structures are going to be huge, and just to put it into perspective, a one megaton plant is going to have a diameter of 630 meters and a circumference of two kilometers. And you know the contactor, you know, kind of frontal area where the air flows into the contactor — the dimensions are, they’re two kilometers by 110 meters. So it’s a massive structure, and, you know, you’re going to have plates on which your contact solution, your sorbent, is flowing, and then the air is flowing between those plates, and you’re hoping that it’s going to react with the sorbent.
So, you know, these are mega structures, and it means that there’s going to be about 400,000 tons of material, recycled plastic and biochar, needed, you know, to make those contactor plates. But the good thing is that you’re already carbon negative when you start, and you can probably sell some, some, you know, certificates already when you’re, when you’re building it.
Ross Kenyon: So, so, you know, you’ve got it all figured out. I thought the future of direct air capture was going to be modular. This is the future that somehow I had internalized at some point, and the fact that there’s going to be even more colossal structures built than previously is potentially unexpected to listeners, as well as to myself. Is that, is that still on the table? Or does the economy of scale work way better than the modular approach? I know there’s intersections between these two paradigms, but I think, you know what I’m getting at.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, I think it’s going to be modular, but it’s still going to be huge.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there you go. You didn’t need lots of other words.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah. I mean, you know, here too, I’m thinking about what is the kind of trajectory, or how do we go from, you know, being in a lab making a few handfuls of that product, you know, to making, you know, two million tons of it a year? And it goes up, you know, in steps. First you do something that does a kilogram an hour, then it’s a ton per day, and then probably looking at 2,000 tons a year, and then you go to a module, which might be like 10,000 tons a year, and then you prove out the module. And then, if that module is already big enough and, you know, you’re kind of reaping some of the economies of scale with that, then, you know, you can just stack them, or, or, you know, yeah, stack them until [unclear].
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: You know, when you frame it that way, kind of in this year-by-year process, it sounds achievable. But, you know, when you describe this massive facility, we’re going to have solar panels and crops growing under them and outflows of fresh water, it sounds very utopian. But what are, what are the big hurdles you’re already thinking they’re going to come up against? Is it just policy-based? Is it just acceptance and understanding of the process? What are the big hurdles?
Sampo Tukiainen: Well, I try to work around all the hurdles, like, you know, as far as possible. And, you know, one of them I’m getting around is, like, you know, the storage component. And, you know, or let’s say that if you have a hydrochloric acid disposal problem, then what the hurdle is is, like, okay, well, like, you’re talking about disposing waste, and waste sounds bad to people, and that normally gets them up on the barricades. And, you know, so it’s better if you can make a product of some sort, and nobody has anything against making products, especially if they’re carbon negative and, you know, just cleanable and all that. So, sorry, I lost my train of thought there.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: It’s okay. So you’re talking about building around the hurdles and making—
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, it’s something that people do want.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: It sounds so geographically like there’s going to be a big bottleneck. And what do you think would be — I mean, so I used to work in major utility developments for Caltrans, for PG&E, and a lot of these, you know, facilities we build take a lot of land, and I was always out there doing the environmental component, right? And so if you want to build a new transmission line or whatnot, you’re taking up new space. And on the one hand you’re like, oh, this is in the Southern California desert, there’s nothing there. Obviously we know that not to be entirely the case, that there’s, there’s quite a bit there.
And so what would the impact be of doing this truly at scale? Are there, are there enough sufficient siting locations within desert ecosystems that also are — I assume they have to be somewhat adjacent to the actual sea so that they can have not too far of transmission of salt water. Or am I incorrect in assuming that?
Sampo Tukiainen: Well, probably in most cases you do have rock salt formations and that sort of thing, salt domes, so you could be tapping into those. But then again, if you want to do ocean alkalinity enhancement, then you’d have to be by the sea, you know.
Ross Kenyon: Wait a minute, you’d be doing DAC and you’d have [unclear] of freshwater and you’d be doing ocean alkalinity enhancement.
Sampo Tukiainen: No, I mean, sorry, I just — if you ask that, you know, [unclear] — if they used salt, they’d need the proximity to the ocean. But we don’t need proximity to those, because of the salt, because it’s a closed loop. So we’re using the same salt over and over again. We’re breaking it down and then, you know, starting all over again.
But, and yeah, if you’re in the desert and you’re solar powered, then you need to be by the sea because of the cooling and the fresh water, you know, the water management, or the water balance. But if you’re in a cooler climate, then, then basically what you really need is a cooling source, and you need to be able to create a large enough temperature difference in your system so that you actually get condensation. So, so, and it doesn’t always have to be a water producing system. It could be, as long as it doesn’t dry up.
But, you know, making one of these plants acceptable, you know, you kind of have got to have the local social benefits, or the benefits for the local people. And, and yeah, I think, you know, it sounds utopian, but I prefer utopian over dystopian. And, you know, I think I just see a lot of things, you know, come together, and we just have to put the first one together, so I think people will be inspired and they want to replicate that and go to scale.
You know, I think it’s easier, you know, in this case you only need 1,000 plants, you know, that are 630 meters in diameter, plus the solar arrays, you know, around that. So it’s not, you know, space or land that is constricting the thing. I think it’s more, you know, when you have more projects, like with biochar, you would have to build a hundred thousand plants, probably, to reach the gigaton capacity. So how are you going to finance all those, and the kind of time and energy that goes into those projects? Just developing those projects is enormous.
So I think a million tons, you know, ten years down the line is going to be your module, and then, then, you know, some, some places you might see, you know, several million tons in a plant, if you have a good location. And there’s plenty of coastal deserts in the world where the land is cheap. There’s very little people. If there are people, then they are kind of stricken by drought and climate change, and they need, you know, a break, basically. So, so this, you know, plan could offer one.
Ross Kenyon: It seems like we’ve talked about this in previous shows, but it seems like the Arabian Peninsula, probably a prime candidate for something like this. There’s water, they’re going to lose out on oil and gas pretty soon, or at some point they will. This might be one of those replacement industries that could, could be quite beneficial, maybe turn someone who might otherwise dig their heels in into an ally of the future of carbon removal.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah. There’s, like, you know, in South America there’s the Atacama, and then you have, maybe, being coastal desert, you have, you know, Algeria and Morocco, which is really dry, and the Mediterranean is really dry all over, and Australia, India and the Arabian Peninsula. [unclear] is, you know, enormous solar potential, and we’ve seen, we’ve seen some really cheap solar power come from that region. You know, it’s like, some of the contracts are point nine cents per kilowatt hour for new, new large-scale solar.
Ross Kenyon: Have you been following the news about fusion that’s come out in the last month or so?
Sampo Tukiainen: I’ve been keeping an active eye on fusion for 20 years, and I’m trying all the time, though. Well, yeah, you know, I’d love it, you know, just bring it and, you know, we’ll put it to use. And I doubt it’s going to be cheap initially, you know, but, but yeah, I welcome it. You know, I’d love to see fusion, and I would do fusion, or be in fusion myself, if I, you know, wasn’t doing this.
Ross Kenyon: How would fusion change the location of DAC 2.0, or would it impact it at all?
Sampo Tukiainen: Well, it just means that you don’t, you’re not kind of tied to high solar potential areas, so you could basically build it anywhere in a cooler or darker climate, like, you know, in the Nordics.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: And just curiously, I’m somebody who hasn’t been following the fusion discussion — what’s the footprint of fusion power plants?
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, I think they’re comparable to fission plants at this point. I mean, the — but yeah, I have, I know of a few different, you know, new fusion processes, but, but, you know, I’m not going to be able to comment on, you know, what. But yeah, I think one of the arguments for nuclear is that, you know, it takes, it has a small footprint.
Ross Kenyon: We’re going to do a show on this at some point. There’s just too much stuff happening, and I’m already seeing the gears turning both inside Nori, and I’ve seen it elsewhere too, of linking up high energy intensity carbon removal that is currently not LCA worthy. But if it’s abundant and cheap clean energy like fusion, maybe that changes the equation on some of these things. Maybe there’s a learning curve to it and we just use it all up doing silly things. That’s also possible.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, no. I’ve been playing with those thoughts for a long time. Then, what if we had, you know, abundant cheap clean energy, you know, that you wouldn’t have to feel bad about using, and you could just, you know, it wouldn’t be a limitation, you know.
Ross Kenyon: I think someone who’s at the top of their field like this, having them on, and then asking them the equivalent of, like, being stoned on your freshman dorm couch, be like, what if abundant energy cost nothing, we could save the world? Like, I love that guy slash hate it. But it’s apparently what I did.
Sampo Tukiainen: You know, there’s nothing wrong with, you know, speculating and playing, playing with thoughts, you know. Sometimes, you know, you know, you might see things.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: No, I agree. I think it’s good to kind of have your brain into a rubber band that goes out into that expansive potential reality, as long as, you know, coming back at, like, okay, well, now that I played with that idea, what’s the reality of it, you know? But I do think that, you know, in general in climate solutions and carbon removal specifically, I like the idea of playing with what’s possible. I think, you know, Tito Jankowski of AirMiners talks about that a lot, about, like, just imagine what could be possible, and I think that is a positive exercise. Just, just playing in general, I think it can be kind of helpful.
Maybe I’m — this is self-aggrandizing, because we play a lot with the Nori meme lab, and we play, we bring [unclear], we bring kind of some delight into the, into the industry, and so maybe it’s self-aggrandizing. But I do think there’s a role for bringing in kind of this imagining what it could be, and poking fun at ourselves. So that when we poke fun at ourselves, we can sometimes find the true holes in our ideas.
Sampo Tukiainen: You know, I think engineers typically, they are kind of shy, you know, when it comes to being very creative or, you know, imagining things. They don’t, you know, typically then, the, you know, imagination, you know. People, they, you know, hard math and physics and, you know, that sort of stuff. And I, you know, personally, I think of myself more as a, well, kind of an artist. I do play the guitar. But, but, you know, not so much an engineer, because I really need to be inspired, and I need to be in the right kind of mood and mode, you know, to be able to do something and give my, give my best.
And I have a lot of engineering friends that, you know, they just crunch, you know, crunch away. And, you know, they can go from one task to the next one with, you know, one minute orientation period in between. And I’m like, you know, well, it’s like, could you be farther from my disposition? Probably not.
Ross Kenyon: I think we’ve talked about this on the podcast. I often like going into brainstorming meetings or pitch meetings with the worst idea possible, and being the person to throw out the crappiest idea, because then that loosens up other people to throw out the, like, half-baked idea or quarter-baked idea. And oftentimes the best stuff comes out of someone who’s like, this is terrible, but what about this? And you’re like, that plus this, boom, we just made something that was great out of nothing, because people felt comfortable sharing an idea that was not really that polished. So, yeah, I think creativity can do a lot. But then again, I’m also biased because I want job security.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: But it’s true, I think. Absolutely.
Sampo Tukiainen: And you know, I mean, there’s that, there’s a risk of, you know, getting, you know, labeled as the village nutter, you know, more or less. But I, you know, I don’t shun that, you know. I’m always, you know, if there’s a, you know, I like to play with thoughts, you know, and it’s, you know, easy to measure yourself and your friends, you know, go down these imaginary, imaginary paths.
Ross Kenyon: Do you have anything like that right now, something that is really not ready for prime time, but it’s something that you’re thinking a lot about? Carbon removal related, or, you know, do we need to put that parameter on it? Well, so what do you want to share? You clearly have something ready.
Sampo Tukiainen: My bees did really well last winter and the honey, honey harvest is looking good, and I’m going to get my cows back in a little bit. They’ve been away for the winter because I was in California for months, and so it’s been, you know, a few months away from them now, and I love them dearly. So it’s going to be nice to get them back here.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: And you’re a farmer too? You do all these things, and then you also farm?
Sampo Tukiainen: Well, farming is a source of creativity and kind of recreation, and, you know, so it’s kind of a, you know, you’ve got to have physical exercise, and you’ve got to have, you know, I think I do shooting too. I’m not a gun enthusiast, but I do it for a reason, because I get kind of a feeling of success and achievement, you know, because in my line of work, sometimes you have to work for 10 to 20 years before you actually get anywhere. And you know, look at me, carbon removal is the thing now, but it wasn’t a thing 20 years ago.
And so you know, sometimes, you know, when you hit a steel target you hear a nice clean [unclear]. And my brain is kind of wired — no, because I used to play, you know, I was in the ’80s and with a lot of video games, so it caused my brain to be wired so that I need that, you know, fairly rapid feedback. And that gives me — I figured out why does this feel so good, and, you know, because it’s like playing, playing a game, instant feedback and indication.
So farming too, you know, you get, you get to see things and you kind of connect to the rhythm of nature, and, and you know, it’s nice, and then you get feelings of success and you kind of connect. And it’s also good for kind of, you know, quieting down, cooling off a little bit sometimes too.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Is that how you got into biochar? The farming led to biochar, or did biochar lead you to farming? Tell us a little bit about your backstory and how you went from somewhere — there’s farming in there, but then there was the success with Carbofex, and then why you chose to quit biochar basically and pivot into DAC. A lot of questions.
Sampo Tukiainen: I was in — wasn’t the first time I got involved with charcoal was in 1996, or even a few years before. That’s when I built — we were one of the largest producers of charcoal in Finland that year, when I was in high school in 1996. Yeah. In 1998 I joined the army, so I was out of that for, for some time. But then I came back and I started working on gasification, well, from, from, you know, the better part of 2000, from 2001 until 2004. Yeah, even on from ’99 to 2009, more or less. And then I got into pyrolysis.
And we came up with the idea of biocoal, which is kind of an established term today, but it was our trademark back then. And, you know, the idea was that, you know, you take biomass and you convert it into kind of a drop-in fuel for coal-fired power plants, and, you know, that way, you know, allow to reduce emissions. But that was too windy, and there was the financial crisis, and, you know, it was heavily kind of involved with all these energy schemes, which, you know, you don’t really want to be, you want to be at arm’s length from, you know, if you want to, you know, build something.
And so we already knew how to make biochar then, and we had the same machine we used at Carbofex, we built in 2009. And ever since we thought the whole process, like, what are we going to do with biochar so that we could make money or have a business around it? What was the business model going to look like? And in 2015, 2016, you know, I had some ideas that were refined, and I saw a few openings, like growing media — you know, we’re going to go, we’re going to go after perlite. And so then we took the old machine and, you know, broke it up again, and it kind of, you know, refurbished it a little bit, and then we started Carbofex, and that was 2016, and we did pretty good.
You know, we got the, we did the, you know, first methodology for biochar with Puro, and we brought in a lot of, you know, biochar companies to Puro at the time. And, you know, we were also the market leaders in Sweden, pretty much, and in Europe in biochar. And for a long time we led the CDR [unclear], or led, or kind of, you know, we’re in the, in the top three or top five still, four thousand tons, you know, delivered CDR.
Ross Kenyon: So, you know, today, did you get sick of success there?
Sampo Tukiainen: Well, no, actually, if you know, it’s a tragic story. I didn’t leave voluntarily. My founding partner threw me out, because we had — he now owned like half of the company, I was down to 27 or something like that, and it’s a long story. I was going to bring in a couple of climate investors, you know, in 2021, but there was, you know, a late-night [unclear], and ultimately those guys were out, and a few other guys were in. And by six months down the line, they’re asking me why I’m not selling any machines. I’m like, you know, why are you asking me why we’re not selling machines? We’re not supposed to sell the machines, we’re developing CDR projects, and, you know, that is the way to scale biochar and pyrolysis and CDR in particular. But they had not bought into that plan, you know, that we had, you know, created with the investors that I wanted to have.
And basically, you know, it just went downhill from there. You know, there was all kinds of — and in the end, in the end of last summer, we had a terrible [unclear] meeting, you know. Probably, you know, we didn’t really, you know, these guys were, you know, I didn’t really get to know them, it came through the other guy. But in the end, you know, they wanted to go all into the hardware business. They thought that now is the time to sell hardware, and they thought that since we had this, you know, Russian offensive into Ukraine and the energy crisis, you know, it was, it was really like, you know, big last summer. So they thought that nobody’s going to be interested in CDR, because we’ve got [unclear]. And I’m like, well, you know, I don’t think so.
And then they wanted to go all in into a huge project, you know, that we’ve been trying to make happen for, for two, three years, but we didn’t really find a way to make it work for everybody, and the risk would have been on us. And it would have been kind of open book cost plus 10% and all the risk on us. I saw what my role would have been, you know, for the next two-three years, you know, and I couldn’t go down that road. So in the end, you know, they fired me, and that was in the end of, beginning of August. So it’s ten months almost. And they really, you know, didn’t think that we were going anywhere, and they didn’t think that, you know, that is what we should have been doing.
And I’ve seen a lot of, you know, equipment business, and I’ve seen a lot of projects, and I’m still kind of very, very adamant that the right way to go is to develop a few projects of your own, you know. Maybe then three, four years down the line, even three, you could, you could sell them to third parties too. But it’s good to have a couple of, you know, plants of your own and a solid reference base before, you know, you possibly run into a difficult client or difficult project.
And these projects are often difficult, because the clients often, you know, they don’t use the feedstock that they tell you that they’re going to use, and then when it doesn’t work they’re going to blame you, and then you don’t get the money, and then, you know, you end up, you know, going back and forth and trying to fix a problem that is not yours. And, you know, kind of, you know, burned myself out, you know, in that kind of business a long time ago. So, so my body tells me, you know, don’t go, don’t go there.
Ross Kenyon: Is it a big bottleneck for biochar, still, that there is not a large-scale manufacturer of kilns or other devices, right? I’ve heard people say this. I don’t know to what degree it’s true, but that is a bottleneck right at the moment.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, yeah. Some of the equipment suppliers are, are, you know, in short supply. I mean, they can make enough of those machines, and there’s a long lead time, probably could be two years with some, some companies.
Ross Kenyon: Whatever, though — if you weren’t enjoying your work, or the relationships weren’t right, or the vertical you’re interested in serving [unclear], I think you’re probably better off just moving on and finding something that you are passionate about. And whenever you sell what you’re working on now and become fabulously wealthy, and then you move on to fusion, and then you solve that — and then what’s next for you, Sampo? Seems like the world is your oyster right now. We’re just, we’re just building him up. We’ve never been so complimentary on a show ever.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: I also just appreciate — I appreciate your candor, because I feel like I’ve been, I feel like with any, you know, here we are on a podcast. I appreciate your candor because I think within CDR and climate in general, we don’t talk enough, enough about the conflicts that can arise within the startup ecosystem. And I think it is a very supportive sector, like much more than other startups, that our founders, there’s a lot of support. But at the same time, you know, I’m part of various different groups where we meet weekly to talk founders and the struggles and the conflicts that arise, and the people want to go in different directions, and I just think we don’t acknowledge that enough, the community. And so it’s great to just hear you speak frankly about your challenges and how you’re recovering from them.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, I’ve had to take a little breather after that, because obviously, you know, it was a, it was a huge — I put everything, you know, pretty much on the line, and six years, and a lot of my kids grew up in that time. And also, you know, it took financial sacrifices too, you know, initially. So, so, you know, but, but yeah, you know, it’s an old rule of thumb, you know, you’ve got to do what you, you know, like, and, you know, what you’re good at. And, you know, if people don’t appreciate your talent, then you take your talent elsewhere and, you know, sell it to somebody else, or, you know, make your own fortune. And, well, that’s what I’ve pretty much been doing. I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: And, you know, you have to wake up early to tend to your bees and your cows. I feel like that would be the calming, the calming outlet for high stress climate tech work.
Sampo Tukiainen: I’m also, you know, a devoted yogi, and I do meditate two hours a day, and I’m a vegan. I’ve been on a vegetarian diet, diet, since 1998.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: And I’m going to call you out then for your kill two birds with one stone comment, because I learned from my — I’m a lifelong vegetarian, and my mother would always say, no, no, Siobhan, you feed two birds with one stone, which was to be the cheesiest, most deplorable turn of phrase, you know, defying animal cruelty. But, but I remember it to this day, so when someone says that, in my head I think, two birds with one stone.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, I normally don’t use violent metaphors or, you know, things like that, but it’s, you know, just, yeah, what I had, you know, at the moment. Oh God, I’m sorry.
Ross Kenyon: No, no. I was just, I was just, I was just trying to figure out if it was from the King James Bible or from Shakespeare. That’s always the game when there’s a weird old idiom. I’m like, which of these two is it from? It’s one of the two.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, Shakespeare is pretty much, you know, everywhere. And I was surprised myself.
Ross Kenyon: Once again, if you read the King James, like the gospels, and you read Hamlet, you’re like, cool, this is like 75 of the most commonly used idioms that are still in use.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yes, all [unclear]. He had to, you know, he was good with the word and good with the, with the pen, no doubt.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. And honestly, this is, this is outside of the remit of this podcast, but I’m doing it now.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah. And you know, I’m kind of a collector of phrases, you know, my friends were, you know, coming after me some time, some point, because I was just, you know, using a metaphor, you know, after a metaphor, or a phrase after a phrase, and it gets irritating after, after a little while, you know, because you’re just [unclear] every time you open your mouth. There’s this, speaking in metaphor.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah. Well, do you — I’m not [unclear]. How do you fit two hours a day of meditation? And I ask that, is that CDR adjacent? Because should we all be doing two hours of meditation as we build our CDR solutions?
Sampo Tukiainen: Well, my guru tells me that businessmen should do four hours of meditation a day, because, you know, the mind is racing, and you should do one hour at midday, or, you know, early afternoon as well, just to, you know, keep the reins. But you do it early in the morning and do it late in the evening. And, you know, the Buddha has said that, you know, the best time to practice your mind is between 4 and 7 in the morning. So, you know, ideally do it then, or then around 12:00 midnight is also good, unless if you need to be in bed, you can do it earlier.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: No, I’m not kidding when I said I was, like, proud when I got up to 15 minutes. So you’re really putting me to shame here.
Sampo Tukiainen: No, I’m not shaming anybody, you know. The thing is that I had a hard time sitting five minutes initially, and I was breaking a sweat, you know, just as soon as the thought of sitting down or doing, you know, asanas or anything like that, you know, it just, you know, immediately I started sweating, and I don’t know how it created that kind of reaction in my, in my body. But you know, first you do five minutes, you do 10 minutes, and little by little you grow into it, and after 20 years you can’t eat or sleep if you don’t do meditation. So quite often, you know, if I’m late in the morning, it’s because I meditated too long. So, you know, it’s, it’s just hard to let go sometimes.
Ross Kenyon: I was mostly just going to ask, are you, with all of your other ridiculous experiences here and achievements, are you also Simo Häyhä?
Sampo Tukiainen: Well, I was the best shot, best shooter in my regiment. I still have, like, a golden, golden medal, but that’s, that’s nothing. I mean, Finns are typically pretty good, pretty handy with rifles, and most of the males have, you know, gone to the military and served, served some time, and everybody knows how to handle a rifle. But actually, I’m a competitive shooter. I do cowboy action shooting.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: So there are so many layers. I feel like we’re peeling back the mineralized carbon layers and finding out more.
Ross Kenyon: You can put [unclear], Siobhan, but he’s like the most celebrated sniper of all time, in the Winter War against the Soviets during World War Two. It was like — I’m just looking at Wikipedia — it’s like 500.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, that was a confirmed kill count, but, you know, the unconfirmed could be double, you know. Yeah. And yeah, here. He always said that, well, I just did the job that was given to me as good as I could. And, you know, it’s, I mean, matter-of-fact Nordic nature.
I have to show you this. I’ve got a little dent in my finger, because I did so much shotgunning last Sunday, and we were shooting at a barrel, and the, the task was to kind of flip it over, you know, with the shotgun, so that you shoot it once, it kind of goes a little bit, and then you have to shoot it again quickly so that it would topple over. And I had to do it a lot of times. But then it was kind of a stage, you know, [unclear] of action, [unclear], but cowboy action right there. Yeah, yeah. And I have two cows, and I can actually call myself a cowboy, a true cowboy. But I don’t have my 10-gallon cowboy hat, you know, just, you know, within reach.
Ross Kenyon: Ah, that’s too bad. Like, friends with Julio Friedmann, the Wrangler.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah. He’s got a stage charisma. He knows what he’s talking about. You have to respect that.
Ross Kenyon: He’s the only person I know who has, like, a dedicated carbon removal persona in that kind of way. I love you too. I am the Carbon Wrangler, and that is who I am. And what, what is this you’re showing? You see, you’re going down. Oh, it’s [unclear] Wrangler speak.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, that’s what I’m on the phone. That’s what you can see.
Ross Kenyon: This is, you know, sadly it is not from Shakespeare or from the King James. That’s, that’s always my heuristic, don’t have to guess. I’m just like, [unclear], it’s pretty good, you know, take the bull by the horns. And that’s the — you’ll never be a bull, I guess. I was trying to make, make it sound Shakespearean. All I came up with was hostile, wrangled nine carbon. But I was, like, just waiting for the next carbon removal meme. And, you know, see, we’ve got some good ones.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Have to make one for — we’ll have to make one for this show. I had some ideas that landed in my brain during this, so I’ll make some and tag you. Ready? One on, like, the co-benefits of DAC, and make fun of that.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, me, you know, paddling my canoe down the proverbial stream coming out of my DAC plant, and, you know, going down to the, to the village, you know, to the farm.
Ross Kenyon: What budgets do you think we’re working with over here? How do you think we do it? We take a crappy image that’s already been used and we stick text on it.
Sampo Tukiainen: Well, that works. Keep doing it. I love it. Yeah, I laugh out loud sometimes, you know, when I see the carbon removal memes, something like every— And I am glad.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Because sometimes you get notes too, that are — people will say, like, well, these are really quite niche, these carbon removal memes. They’re like, well, yeah, there’s plenty of more generic environmental meme pages out there. They don’t need more of those, but carbon removal as a community, we need those.
Sampo Tukiainen: Well, I need those. And, you know, it’s just like sometimes, you know, I think, you know, I really like when you, when you live and breathe, you know, that trade, then, you know, a lot of those things are so real to you. And, and you know, sometimes it just really hits, hits, you know, this choir. And like I said, I laugh out loud sometimes, and I applaud you.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Thank you, and keep you in mind. [unclear] It’s like a customer discovery call all of a sudden, and now we need to figure out, okay, this effect — I’m glad to be able to be complimentary, you know.
Sampo Tukiainen: Thank you. [unclear] and it’s making you laugh.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: I think that’s an important thing to do.
Ross Kenyon: Well, yeah, wrap — yeah, we’re good. Let’s wrap it up. I think we’re good. I think we went all the way from DAC to farming to cowboy shooting. So Julio makes an appearance, that’s always fun.
Sampo Tukiainen: Yeah, yeah, I’ll take note. I’ll challenge Julio, you know, to a shooting match anytime.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s beyond the remit of his persona. I don’t know that there’s a lot of target shooting, obscure target shooting competitions in his daily life.
Sampo Tukiainen: No, but that’s how we dress. That’s how we dress when we go to the, you know, cowboy action, you know.
Ross Kenyon: I should hope so. I should hope so. 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.
