Speaker 1: Pushkin, How did spend in your childhood in Southeast India?
Speaker 1: Ef fact that we think about climate change.
Speaker 2: The place where I grew up, you know, just had
Speaker 2: to have had their path. When things got dry, they
Speaker 2: got really dry, and when things got wet, they got
Speaker 2: really wet. You know, the monster's got more and more extreme.
Speaker 2: The droughts got more and more extreme over time. And
Speaker 2: it's a pretty normal thing to show up to school
Speaker 2: one day and your friend just like doesn't come to
Speaker 2: school for like six months at a time because they're
Speaker 2: helping their parents recover from a flood that happened in
Speaker 2: months ago. And it's a pretty common thing for me.
Speaker 2: You know, I didn't know it was climate change growing up, honestly,
Speaker 2: Like it was just like a thing that happened.
Speaker 1: It was just climate.
Speaker 2: That's what nature was, and things just got worse and
Speaker 2: worse every year, and that's just how things are. As
Speaker 2: I grew up and started learning a lot more, and
Speaker 2: it started connecting the dots. What I realized was that
Speaker 2: the folks who are facing the worst impacts of climate
Speaker 2: change are the ones who are least educated about it
Speaker 2: and then the most vulnerable to it already. And I
Speaker 2: think That's what I think gives me a lot of
Speaker 2: motivation and drive that fundamentally, this problem is an unfair
Speaker 2: one where it's created and where the impacts are most felt.
Speaker 2: People ask me like, how did you decide to work
Speaker 2: on climate? How did you decide specifically to work on
Speaker 2: carbon removal? But for me, it was a no brainer.
Speaker 2: Of course I'm going to work on this, and of
Speaker 2: course this is the most scalable way to solve the problem.
Speaker 2: Being an engineer myself, like building these cost models so forth,
Speaker 2: it's like it's actually possible. So why didn't we actually
Speaker 2: go about doing it? It was just a matter of
Speaker 2: putting together right team and right partners and going on
Speaker 2: the journey.
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem? The
Speaker 1: show where I talk to people who are trying to
Speaker 1: make technological progress. My guest today is Shashank Samala Sschank
Speaker 1: is the co founder and CEO of Airloom. Shashank's problem
Speaker 1: is this, can you use crushed up rocks, specifically limestone,
Speaker 1: to permanently suck carbon out of the atmosphere? And crucially
Speaker 1: can you do it for one hundred dollars per ton
Speaker 1: of carbon? To that end Heirloom has built a pilot
Speaker 1: plant in California near its headquarters, and is currently working
Speaker 1: on a much larger plant in Louisiana. By the way,
Speaker 1: I learned about Shoshank from my conversation a few weeks
Speaker 1: ago with Nan Ransahoff. If you missed that one and
Speaker 1: want to hear more about carbon removal, you might want
Speaker 1: to check that out. Shachank began his career in manufacturing.
Speaker 1: He wasn't an environmental scientist or a geologist, so to
Speaker 1: start I asked him about rocks.
Speaker 2: We love rocks. I've dedicated my life to rocks.
Speaker 1: When did you discover rocks?
Speaker 2: When I realized that carbon capture is like the thing
Speaker 2: to do, Not everyone has realized it yet, but like
Speaker 2: people will. In that journey, I started just reading papers
Speaker 2: and books at night, and you know, it was basically,
Speaker 2: what are the natural things that I already doing this? It's
Speaker 2: biomass and rocks.
Speaker 1: Basically plants and rocks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: When you start looking at this, it does seem like
Speaker 1: there's sort of three very crudely kind of modes. Right,
Speaker 1: people are using fans, plants, and rocks, right, Yeah, Why
Speaker 1: did you wind up ruling out fans and plants.
Speaker 2: So that's a great question. I think at the beginning,
Speaker 2: when I first got started, I wasn't married to any approach.
Speaker 2: I come from a manufacturing background. I was making electronics
Speaker 2: for satellites and robots and so forth, and you know,
Speaker 2: manufacturing is superkin margins and you have to understand where
Speaker 2: your costs are. And for me, when I first started
Speaker 2: looking at this problem, it was very clear that at
Speaker 2: the end of the day, what matters has cost costs
Speaker 2: pertanos two. You know, it's not like we're designing an
Speaker 2: amazingly beautiful car for people to drive around. All the
Speaker 2: matters is how many molecules of CO two in the
Speaker 2: air are and how cost effectively you remove it, how.
Speaker 1: Many molecules of CO two per dollar you can get exactly.
Speaker 2: So I was just so obsessed about, like, you know,
Speaker 2: what is the absolute simplest way you can solve this problem.
Speaker 2: And there's a bunch of other folks who are using
Speaker 2: synthetic ways to you know, using fans and so forth
Speaker 2: to pull carbon, And I think the best way to
Speaker 2: approach an engineering problem is just like what is the
Speaker 2: bare minimum you need and then add complexity from there.
Speaker 1: So why does this idea of like cheapest absolute bare minimum,
Speaker 1: why does that lead you to rocks?
Speaker 2: Rocks basically have a couple of principles, right, Like, if
Speaker 2: you start with the idea that you need CO two
Speaker 2: to be permanently sequestered so you know it doesn't decomposs
Speaker 2: back into the atmosphere, you need a sponge With rocks,
Speaker 2: it's the CO two only goes one way and it
Speaker 2: doesn't respire back you, so it doesn't decompos and they're
Speaker 2: super cheap. Earth has already spent billions of years creating
Speaker 2: this sort of crystal instruction in this geochemical mineral that
Speaker 2: is thirsty for CO two, and it helped balance the
Speaker 2: CO two in the atmosphere, So it already paid this
Speaker 2: energy penalty to make this rock that is super abundant
Speaker 2: and cheap. So the mineral the view using it's you know,
Speaker 2: thirty to forty bucks a ton, and we can reuse
Speaker 2: it over and over again. So you know, if you
Speaker 2: can reuse it s a hundred cycles, you can get
Speaker 2: the cost per ton for the rock down to twenty
Speaker 2: thirty cents.
Speaker 1: So you land on limestone. Right, you haven't said limestone,
Speaker 1: but you're talking about limes. Ztone, tell me about limestone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So limestone is this amazingly beautiful chemical. It's a
Speaker 2: naturally occurring mineral. There is four percent of the Earth's
Speaker 2: crust is made up of limestone, and the chemical formula
Speaker 2: for it is calcium carbonate, and Earth produced a lot
Speaker 2: of this over you know, billions of years to partly
Speaker 2: to help balance the CO two in the atmosphere. It's
Speaker 2: like if you're a rock climber, it's a chalk that is,
Speaker 2: it's a carbonate limestone. It's it's incredibly abundant, basically looks
Speaker 2: like white powder.
Speaker 1: So that's limestone. It has carbon dioxide in it already,
Speaker 1: so it's already done the thing you want to do
Speaker 1: Exactly when you're figuring out what's going to be your
Speaker 1: play for air capture, like how do you get to
Speaker 1: where you wind up? Like you see that limestone has
Speaker 1: already done this thing. Limestone already has the carbon, but
Speaker 1: that's not what you want, Like you want to capture
Speaker 1: more carbon exactly.
Speaker 2: I think carbon removal and directory capture. It's all a
Speaker 2: energy optimization play. Yeah, how do you spend as little
Speaker 2: energy as possible to remove a bunch of cooto molecules
Speaker 2: from the air, and you know, and there's a lot
Speaker 2: of different directions, a lot of different philosophies on how
Speaker 2: you approach this problem. And our thesis was, you need
Speaker 2: a sponge to remove the CO two, and there's an
Speaker 2: energy that goes into capturing the YOU two, and there's
Speaker 2: an energy that goes into releasing that CO two so
Speaker 2: that we can capture more CO two with that sponge.
Speaker 1: Right, you got to capture the CO two from the air,
Speaker 1: and then you've got to do something with it to
Speaker 1: basically stick it in the ground for ten thousand years exactly.
Speaker 1: So it's a two step process. There's capture and storage. Right.
Speaker 1: All the different angles are doing some version of that, right,
Speaker 1: those two step process exactly.
Speaker 2: It's a capture and a release, capture and regeneration. And
Speaker 2: the whole play is how do you minimize energy in
Speaker 2: both of those steps.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because the energy basically winds up being cost, right,
Speaker 1: like the cost the key input ends up being energy.
Speaker 2: Exactly right, exactly right. It's you know, whether it's in
Speaker 2: the form of capital equipment, whether it's in the form
Speaker 2: of literal electrons going in, it's energy. At the end
Speaker 2: of the day. Is the thing to optimize around, and
Speaker 2: so for us when we looked around, that was not
Speaker 2: a PhD in material science when I started this, right, like,
Speaker 2: I come from a manufacturing background, and I literally just
Speaker 2: like picked up my chemistry books from high school and
Speaker 2: reread them to you know, first getting started and basically like,
Speaker 2: if this is the framework and you're trying to optimize
Speaker 2: energy on both sides, first you start with the capture step. Okay,
Speaker 2: well what already does this naturally? Right? And there's a
Speaker 2: bunch of carbonates, calcin carbonate, machnicin carbonate, and so forth.
Speaker 2: And we ended up with calcin carbonate limestone because it
Speaker 2: needs the lowest amount of energy to capture CO two, okay,
Speaker 2: just thermodynamically, and it's thermodynamically favored. It's so thirsty for
Speaker 2: COO two, Like if you figure out a way to
Speaker 2: break it to release that COO two and you put
Speaker 2: that on your desk, it just starts gobbling up COO
Speaker 2: two molecules whether you like it or not.
Speaker 1: So it's very energy favorable for step one exactly capture,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't want to release it once it has
Speaker 1: it right as you put it out. There's two steps.
Speaker 2: There's two steps.
Speaker 1: Now you've got this limestone full of carbon, but you
Speaker 1: got to get it to release it. And it does
Speaker 1: seem like for you that's the hard part. That's certainly
Speaker 1: the energy intensive part.
Speaker 2: That is certainly the energy intensive part. Not just for us,
Speaker 2: it's actually basically everyone else.
Speaker 1: Oh you mean, for all of the carbon capture and removal.
Speaker 1: It's actually the release is the hard part.
Speaker 2: The release is the most energy intensive part. And when
Speaker 2: we first picked limestone, we liked the way of releasing
Speaker 2: CO two in the second step because cement industry already
Speaker 2: does this, cement and lime industry. They take limestone, they
Speaker 2: break it into calcium oxide CO two put the cootwo
Speaker 2: into the air, but they take the calcium oxide, put
Speaker 2: a bunch of other stuff to it, and turn it
Speaker 2: into cement.
Speaker 1: And just to be clear, like let's just pause there,
Speaker 1: because this is a giant global industry that in fact
Speaker 1: is a huge emitter for this reason, right fact, the
Speaker 1: key input to cement is limestone. And the basic thing
Speaker 1: you do when you're making cement is you put limestone
Speaker 1: in a kiln, make it very hot, and you just
Speaker 1: burn off the CO two and then you're left with lime,
Speaker 1: which is whatever, it's calcium oxide something. Yeah, So there
Speaker 1: is a question I have there, which is like, there's
Speaker 1: already a giant global industry of people doing this. Yes,
Speaker 1: would it not be more efficient to just capture that
Speaker 1: CO two that they're already releasing literally today in great
Speaker 1: quantities and stick that in the ground.
Speaker 2: We should absolutely do that, And there's many companies already
Speaker 2: doing that as well. And that's that's called points source capture,
Speaker 2: So where you're essentially avoiding emissions from a cement plant
Speaker 2: or national gas power plan fitting the CO two into.
Speaker 1: The air, and then you get to sell the cement, right.
Speaker 1: I feel like the economics there are much more favorable.
Speaker 2: Well, you're selling cement, but it's actually an added cost
Speaker 2: to capture that CO two.
Speaker 1: Right, sure, So I mean ideally you could sell the
Speaker 1: cement and sell the carbon capture and removal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a different technical method. It's it's points source capture,
Speaker 2: and there's a bunch of folks already working on it.
Speaker 2: What we're focused on is removing COEO two that's already
Speaker 2: in the air.
Speaker 1: Are you assuming that like in X years ten or something,
Speaker 1: everybody making cement's going to do that? Anyways? And you
Speaker 1: want to do a marginal benefit.
Speaker 2: So if you look across four thousands CEM in plants
Speaker 2: that already exist on the planet, there's a bunch of
Speaker 2: other infrastructure that needs to be in place for points
Speaker 2: source capture to happen. There's a bunch of cemen plants
Speaker 2: that are close to where energy is cheap and underground
Speaker 2: storage is available, where they can do points source capture,
Speaker 2: and we should absolutely do it. But there's also many
Speaker 2: many cimon plants, thousands of cimon plants that are not
Speaker 2: near where a COE to underground storage is available or
Speaker 2: energy is not available. To actually capture that CO two
Speaker 2: from from the flue gas that it would be very expensive.
Speaker 2: You would have to transport that CO two hundreds of
Speaker 2: miles away and that costs a lot of money, and
Speaker 2: effectively it becomes a cost benefit analysis where it could
Speaker 2: actually be cheaper to remove the CO two than putting
Speaker 2: a point source capture on top of it.
Speaker 1: So okay, so that's why not do it with cement
Speaker 1: or not just do it with cement exactly. So you
Speaker 1: have this idea, what are the obvious problems with it?
Speaker 1: When you come up with the idea, what are the like, oh,
Speaker 1: here's why it's going to be difficult.
Speaker 2: Here's why it's going to be difficult. So I think
Speaker 2: at the beginning, you know, when before the start started,
Speaker 2: and I think people knew that rocks can capture CO two,
Speaker 2: but the problem was it was too slow. You know, geochemically, naturally,
Speaker 2: it would take maybe six months or a year to
Speaker 2: fully saturate itself with CO two in the air. So
Speaker 2: if you put that on your desk, it would take
Speaker 2: that long. And if you put that into a cost model,
Speaker 2: you pretty quickly realize that there's just no way this
Speaker 2: can get to one hundred bucks a ton long term.
Speaker 1: Just because you've got to have like essentially a factory,
Speaker 1: and all that's happening at your factory is rock is
Speaker 1: sitting there for a year exactly.
Speaker 2: You need gobs and gobs of limestone, yea, And I
Speaker 2: mean think of you know, thousands of scure kilometers to
Speaker 2: capture you.
Speaker 1: Know, not gonna work.
Speaker 2: It's not gonna work. So, you know, it was pretty
Speaker 2: clear from the beginning that this thing needs to be
Speaker 2: at least ten times faster, if not more. And at
Speaker 2: the beginning, we're not sure whether this is even possible.
Speaker 2: And you know, we just had a few scientists just
Speaker 2: playing around with a few different things, and they figured
Speaker 2: out how to basically give it superpowers to pull carbon
Speaker 2: from the air faster. And over the last been seven years,
Speaker 2: where you know, we started at six months, and we
Speaker 2: first went to you know, three months, and then you know,
Speaker 2: it went down to a month, and then it went
Speaker 2: down to two weeks and five days and four days.
Speaker 2: We're way down below that today. And what's been interesting
Speaker 2: is people will always ask me, why is this so
Speaker 2: important for you to cycle time? And it's so important
Speaker 2: because the difference between ten days and five days is
Speaker 2: for the same amount of capital equipment, I can get
Speaker 2: two x to through put right, and the costs come
Speaker 2: down just dramatically. So that's been our biggest lever and
Speaker 2: it's been amazing. Every twelve to eighteen months we figured
Speaker 2: out a way to make it about two ks faster.
Speaker 2: I think that's where a lot of optimism comes from
Speaker 2: for cost reduction.
Speaker 1: Is there one particular improvement that would be interesting to
Speaker 1: talk about, one particular thing you figured out or your
Speaker 1: team figured out to go faster.
Speaker 2: There's about fifteen to twenty different parameters internally, you know,
Speaker 2: there's like particle size, particle size distribution, the porosity of
Speaker 2: the particle, the surface area of each particle.
Speaker 1: So these are just physical traits. You sort of mash
Speaker 1: up the rock in different ways, grind it up one
Speaker 1: way or grind it up another way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we actually grind it up only once at
Speaker 2: the beginning, when we first get the feed stock from
Speaker 2: the mine. But how you run the process, you know
Speaker 2: what temperature and what residents time you have in the oven.
Speaker 2: You know, it's sort of like when you're baking cookies
Speaker 2: in an oven, right, Like there's a few levers you have,
Speaker 2: and it actually turns out they have a big implication
Speaker 2: on how the physical properties of these things are.
Speaker 1: But it's not chemical. You're not like adding chemical inputs.
Speaker 1: You're just monking with the limestone in different ways to
Speaker 1: get you know, a magnitude of it's.
Speaker 2: Pretty insane, Like it's the science is a lot more complicated.
Speaker 2: But there's a specific parameter space that the nature really
Speaker 2: loves limestone to be in, and we're constantly experimenting with
Speaker 2: how you get into that tight space.
Speaker 1: When you say nature loves that, you mean that makes
Speaker 1: it particularly eager to absorb carbon dioxide.
Speaker 2: Exactly Yeah, humidity. For example, we love humidity. It actually
Speaker 2: forms a thin layer of water on top of lime
Speaker 2: and it makes it even more thirsty for COO two,
Speaker 2: And all these things kind of work together. And our
Speaker 2: technology is all about how do you keep this rock
Speaker 2: in that tight space so we can capture you know,
Speaker 2: CO two about one hundred times faster.
Speaker 1: That tight possibility space, that tight space of possible, and.
Speaker 2: As cheaply as possible. Right, Like, we're not adding chemicals,
Speaker 2: we're not adding catalysts, just a bunch of rocks sitting
Speaker 2: on trace.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the facility. So you built this facility
Speaker 1: in Tracy, California, right east of San Francisco. That's sort
Speaker 1: of a pilot plant. Let's talk about that as a
Speaker 1: way to understand the process. What does it look like
Speaker 1: if I drive up there? Like, how big is it?
Speaker 1: What does it look like?
Speaker 2: So you drive up there and the first thing you
Speaker 2: see is that there's a big box and the box
Speaker 2: is basically, you know, it's a semi open building.
Speaker 1: Like the size of Costco or something. When you say
Speaker 1: big box, like how big are you talking?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's this specific one is probably a quarter size
Speaker 2: of a Costco. And once you go in, you will
Speaker 2: see these tall stocks of trays. Imagine very large baking trays,
Speaker 2: stock multiple stories.
Speaker 1: How many stories? How tall?
Speaker 2: So this specific one is about forty feet tall, a
Speaker 2: couple hundred trays stacked all the way to the top.
Speaker 2: And if you come closer to each tray, you'll start
Speaker 2: seeing kind of like a large white cookie crumbled sitting
Speaker 2: on a tray, and.
Speaker 1: It looks like it's just sitting there, but actually it's
Speaker 1: absorbing carbon dioxide out of the air exactly.
Speaker 2: And what's cool is when you so you start out with,
Speaker 2: you know, a bunch of white powder, and there's a
Speaker 2: small amount of water that basically makes it cohesive, and
Speaker 2: over time it's actually growing, just like growing like a cookie, right,
Speaker 2: And as it's growing, it forms all these cracks and
Speaker 2: it crumbles and so forth, and all that extra mass
Speaker 2: is COO two. The only thing that captures is CO
Speaker 2: two from the air.
Speaker 1: And so at this point, how long does that process take?
Speaker 1: It takes a day or something.
Speaker 2: It takes a few days. The ones upcoming are much faster,
Speaker 2: So I'll keep that under the rest.
Speaker 1: So then you have your big cookie full of carbon dioxide.
Speaker 1: What do you do with it?
Speaker 2: After a few days. We don't wait until one hundred
Speaker 2: percent saturation. We wait until eighty five ninety percent, and
Speaker 2: then we bring it over to a hot kiln. And
Speaker 2: this kiln is running. You know, it's electric, it's renewable
Speaker 2: energy powered, so.
Speaker 1: It's super high, right, what is it like, nine hundred
Speaker 1: degrees celsius or exactly right? Wildly hot? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Basically, you're exposing this material for ten to fifteen seconds
Speaker 2: to very high temperature, and it's decomposing. It's releasing the
Speaker 2: CO two that it captured from the air, and now
Speaker 2: you essentially have high purity CO two coming out of
Speaker 2: the kiln. We compress it and in the case of
Speaker 2: the Tracy facility, we store it in concrete, but in
Speaker 2: the future facilities it's either going underground or it's used
Speaker 2: for synthetic fuels and so forth. The line that comes
Speaker 2: off of it, it's ready to capture more CO two.
Speaker 2: So we're sending it back into the tray, expose it
Speaker 2: to the air, capture more CO two, Wait a few days,
Speaker 2: put it back in the kilnt and the cycle repeats
Speaker 2: over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: Heating get kiln to nine hundred degrees See is wildly
Speaker 1: energy intensive, right, And obviously for your project, you're not
Speaker 1: going to burn fossil fuel to do that. But is
Speaker 1: that in terms of the cost of the whole thing,
Speaker 1: Is that the expensive part?
Speaker 2: That's the expensive part, Yes, And I think the one
Speaker 2: thing to realize is that the cement industry does this
Speaker 2: incredibly efficiently. Obviously they use cold natural gas and so forth,
Speaker 2: and you know, they've had decades of learning around how
Speaker 2: to do this efficiently so that you know, there's all
Speaker 2: sorts of heat exchange and heat recovery, and what we're
Speaker 2: doing right now is basically learning from that industry to
Speaker 2: incorporate that heat recovery so that the energy is as
Speaker 2: low as possible. I often think about, you know, what
Speaker 2: is the energy that's required for us to hit one
Speaker 2: hundred dollars per ton And we will talk about why
Speaker 2: hundred dollars per ton in a minute for that project,
Speaker 2: about two mega wat hours pertennaco two And if we
Speaker 2: adopted everything the cement industry alreadopted like, we could be
Speaker 2: a lot lower than two mega what hours. So you're
Speaker 2: not breaking physics in terms of the energy required to
Speaker 2: get to that. So you know, for us, the main
Speaker 2: goal is to make it as energy efficient as possible,
Speaker 2: recover heat, reuse the heat, and so forth, so that
Speaker 2: you're not losing that heat to the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: So you're saying you just have to be as efficient
Speaker 1: as a industrial cement plant.
Speaker 2: Is that what you're saying exactly?
Speaker 1: I feel like it's harder than that.
Speaker 2: Sound Well, it's harder because folks have not done this
Speaker 2: yet for an electric kiln.
Speaker 1: I see, there's a reason fossil fuel is awesome, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's incredibly efficient way to generate heat. It has one
Speaker 1: notable downside which you're trying to fix. How many mega
Speaker 1: wade hours per ton does it take you? Now?
Speaker 2: It takes us maybe I want to say three ish
Speaker 2: mega white hours.
Speaker 1: Okay, you got to get a third out of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, A lot of it is just heat recovery, right,
Speaker 2: Like how the cement kilns have done it is they have,
Speaker 2: you know, multiple decades of experience just figuring out how
Speaker 2: to reuse the heat. And for us just doing that
Speaker 2: with an electrical system with fossil fuel, you know, what
Speaker 2: you're doing is you're spending a bunch of energy burning
Speaker 2: that fuel that you don't get back with electrical it's renewable, right,
Speaker 2: Like once you put in the energy, you can actually
Speaker 2: use those electrical heating elements over and over again, so
Speaker 2: overall thermal efficiency is actually higher. So that's actually what
Speaker 2: makes me so excited that like we're getting closer and
Speaker 2: closer to what's actually possible.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in just a minute. Tell me what
Speaker 1: you're working on in Louisiana.
Speaker 2: We're building Project Cypress and this is a director capture
Speaker 2: hub that is funded by the Department of Energy and
Speaker 2: US along with our partner Client Works and BTEL. We're
Speaker 2: building a hub.
Speaker 1: Clim Works is fans, right, using fans to do air capture.
Speaker 1: They've they've been working in Iceland, right. And Battel is
Speaker 1: like a big what are they like an oil field
Speaker 1: services coming to their big like industrial firm. Am I
Speaker 1: thinking of the right company.
Speaker 2: Battel is a engineering and procurement and their government contractor
Speaker 2: they're the hub owner and they're the ones interfacing with
Speaker 2: the government because this is a public private partnership.
Speaker 1: So how big is the thing you're building there, Like,
Speaker 1: what's it going to look like?
Speaker 2: It's multiple phases and it's going to scale up to
Speaker 2: about a megaton one million tons of CO two removed
Speaker 2: over the multiple phases of the project.
Speaker 1: What you said about a million tons per year, right,
Speaker 1: that's per year, and so that's like a big natural
Speaker 1: gas power plant. That's about what that is, right, order
Speaker 1: of magnitude.
Speaker 2: In terms of coog omitted, it's about it's a very
Speaker 2: large national gas.
Speaker 1: Power maybe two maybe two x. Or are there something
Speaker 1: like a thousand of those in the country five hundred
Speaker 1: one thousand.
Speaker 2: Right now, depending on you. Yeah, at least a thousand
Speaker 2: across the world. There's yeah, multiple thousands.
Speaker 1: When I was sort of figuring out that math, I
Speaker 1: was praying for the interview, like I got disheartened, to
Speaker 1: be honest, Like I was like, Oh, here's the great,
Speaker 1: big one, and the government is supporting it and putting
Speaker 1: in hundreds of millions of dollars. Right, that's the order
Speaker 1: of magnitude for this project. And it's like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: it's just like one two little power plants and there's
Speaker 1: like a thousand of them. I don't know, it just
Speaker 1: felt so small when I did that math. Do you
Speaker 1: feel that way?
Speaker 2: Like how does it play for you if you just
Speaker 2: take a step back and think about the climate problem? Right?
Speaker 2: Like it's you know, if you're emitting fifty billion tons
Speaker 2: of CO two into the air every year, you know, agriculture, automotive, shipping, airplanes,
Speaker 2: all sorts of things are emitting SEO two oil and gas.
Speaker 1: Plants fifty billion, fifty thousand million, we're talking about one
Speaker 1: million and then this is fifty thousand million.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know us about one hundred hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty years of infrastructure. So, you know, I think when
Speaker 2: we think about building a carbon and mobile industry, that
Speaker 2: is essentially reversing that and removing that. You know, right now,
Speaker 2: what we're focused on is creating a blueprint, creating a
Speaker 2: template that we can emulate. We can if you make
Speaker 2: this so cheap, right, if you make this so cheap
Speaker 2: such that it's an economic no brainer and it uses
Speaker 2: materials that are very abundant and scalable, and you can
Speaker 2: emulate this all across the world, then I think making
Speaker 2: this a blueprint and showing that it is scalable, that's
Speaker 2: really the first goal of what we're trying to do.
Speaker 2: And this is not dissimilar to the first utility solar
Speaker 2: plant that was built in two thousand and nine twenty
Speaker 2: ten in the US where it took us multiple years
Speaker 2: and lots of government subsidies. But once we build that,
Speaker 2: now we're building them every week.
Speaker 1: Yeah, solar is a good model of like an incredibly
Speaker 1: fast ramp, right. And it is amazing when you look
Speaker 1: at those estimates from like big credible government organizations over
Speaker 1: the last fifteen years of how big is solar going
Speaker 1: to be? Like every year they underestimate what's going to
Speaker 1: happen the next year. Right, The line keeps getting steeper,
Speaker 1: So I guess that's a good model. Right, And that
Speaker 1: is a model of just like it just got so cheap, right,
Speaker 1: because it's so simple.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just so simple. There's so many things we
Speaker 2: can learn from solar. One is the cost floor and
Speaker 2: the abundance of materials that went into making these solar
Speaker 2: panels and silicon basically sand is the raw material for
Speaker 2: making those solar panels. And the cost floor for the
Speaker 2: solar panel is so cheap that the more you make them,
Speaker 2: the cheaper it got. And the second thing that we
Speaker 2: can learn from it is the adoption really started taking
Speaker 2: off in ways that humans found it very hard to predict.
Speaker 2: Is grid parity. Once the cost became as cheap or
Speaker 2: cheaper than the cost of electricity from other sources in
Speaker 2: the grid. It was an economic no brainer to all
Speaker 2: of his deploy because it was always the cheapest thing
Speaker 2: for us. How do you translate that into a director
Speaker 2: capture one, you know, use abandoned materials, use cheap materials.
Speaker 2: Whereas you the more you deploy, the more you learn,
Speaker 2: the cheaper it gets. So if you're doing that with
Speaker 2: limestone and you're seeing those learning rates every year, And
Speaker 2: the second thing is, you know what is that cost?
Speaker 2: Where does that real adoption come in? And you know,
Speaker 2: for us, we think that's probably around two fifty three
Speaker 2: hundred dollars per ton. And that's where it really starts
Speaker 2: to say, okay, like removing carbon starts to be an
Speaker 2: economically cheaper thing to do than say other types of
Speaker 2: hard to decarbonized methods. And that's when you start turning
Speaker 2: the flywheel to further reduce the costs down to one
Speaker 2: hundred dollars per ton.
Speaker 1: I mean, there is a problem that you have that
Speaker 1: director capture has that solar doesn't, right, which is people
Speaker 1: are paying for electric power already, and if I pay
Speaker 1: for electricity, I get electricity. And there is this basic
Speaker 1: public goods problem with direct air capture, which is I
Speaker 1: pay for direct air capture, everybody gets the benefit of it,
Speaker 1: and I get literally like one five billionth of the
Speaker 1: benefit of it. Right, So that is a profound problem.
Speaker 1: How does that look to you? How are we going
Speaker 1: to deal with that one?
Speaker 2: So the way to think about public goods generally, and
Speaker 2: at the end of the day, there needs to be
Speaker 2: a price on carbon in some way, shape or another,
Speaker 2: and different economies approach the problem differently.
Speaker 1: A price on carbon imposed by the gum Like the
Speaker 1: government has to pass a law that says if you emit,
Speaker 1: you have to pay a tax, or there's a cap
Speaker 1: and trade or something exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you're seeing this. United Kingdom's emissions trading scheme
Speaker 2: just started to incorporate carbon removal into their cap and
Speaker 2: trade scheme.
Speaker 1: Is that good for you? Does that mean companies in
Speaker 1: the UK can come to you and pay you to
Speaker 1: stick carbon in the ground and get the credit they need.
Speaker 2: That's a direction that they're going. So economies across the
Speaker 2: world are coming up with schemes where carbon removal is
Speaker 2: integrated into how they think about broader climate mitigation. Carbon
Speaker 2: will be priced one wayship or another. And for us,
Speaker 2: what that means is that while those markets are coming
Speaker 2: online and getting more robust, or do we get off
Speaker 2: the ground. And you know that's where Frontier and Microsoft.
Speaker 2: You know, these folks have been incredibly catalytic.
Speaker 1: Basically companies, companies that are paying for director capture now exactly.
Speaker 2: I often compare them to you know what Germany did
Speaker 2: to solar in two thousand and six. You know, they essentially,
Speaker 2: you know, catalyzed the demand and helped bring down the cost.
Speaker 1: They created a subsidy, right, the government created a big
Speaker 1: subsidy that was sort of the birth of the modern
Speaker 1: solar power movement.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Tell me about what's happening politically in the US for
Speaker 1: a director capture.
Speaker 2: Director capture is an interesting one politically because we've generally
Speaker 2: found pretty good bipartisan support for it. I think the
Speaker 2: best way to put is forty five Q. Forty five
Speaker 2: Q is a tax credit. It's one hundred and eighty
Speaker 2: dollars per ton that the government payss for every time
Speaker 2: a CO two vise a questor underground.
Speaker 1: Which is a lot. That's a really significant subsidy.
Speaker 2: Essentially, it's huge, it's essentially the US putting a price
Speaker 2: on carbon for director capture. Right, So before the IRA
Speaker 2: it was fifty and IRA increased to one eighty. And
Speaker 2: the most recent one, Big Beautiful Bill has preserved it
Speaker 2: and it actually enhanced it.
Speaker 1: That is surprising, I think on a certain level. Right.
Speaker 1: I mean, clearly many of the sort of energy transition
Speaker 1: climate change subsidies from the IRA were reduced or eliminated
Speaker 1: in the Big Beautiful Bill and the bill that just passed.
Speaker 1: Why did director capture subsidies survive when others got eliminated?
Speaker 2: I think generally the way to think about DAK is
Speaker 2: you're producing COEOTO molecules from the air and you can
Speaker 2: use THEOTO molecules support underground for removals, or you can
Speaker 2: use THEOTO molecules to make synthetic fuels for ships and planes.
Speaker 1: You can also use them to get more oil out
Speaker 1: of the ground. Right, this is the thing some people
Speaker 1: do with them.
Speaker 2: This is a thing that some people do. Yeah. So
Speaker 2: I think what the technology is a platform. What it
Speaker 2: gave for boths in the aisle are it's both a
Speaker 2: climate and mitigation tool, and it contributes to us being
Speaker 2: able to produce a lot more energy.
Speaker 1: Uh, huh.
Speaker 2: You know, in this case, you know synthetic fuels like
Speaker 2: clean energy, so you.
Speaker 1: Can tell the sort of energy dominance story. It's kind
Speaker 1: of a drill baby, drill story if you want it
Speaker 1: to be well.
Speaker 2: In this case, I think there are ways to make
Speaker 2: low carbon synthetic fuels. And as you know, you've signed
Speaker 2: a partnership with United.
Speaker 1: Well talk about that with United Airlines. So talk about
Speaker 1: that partnership.
Speaker 2: It's a strategic partnership where they're both investor in the
Speaker 2: company and an off take agreement for the future. It's
Speaker 2: five hundred thousand tons of CO two that they have
Speaker 2: an option to either choose to store underground or utilize
Speaker 2: it to make low carbon synthetic fuels, sustainable aviation fuels
Speaker 2: to run their planes.
Speaker 1: And so in that ladder universe, it's sort of turning
Speaker 1: airplane fuel into a circular economy. Like they fly the
Speaker 1: plane and that emits CO two and then you capture
Speaker 1: CO two and turn it into more fuel. That's the
Speaker 1: model there. I mean, the political valance of director capture
Speaker 1: is really interesting. An oil company owns the biggest director
Speaker 1: capture facility in the US, right, and then on this
Speaker 1: sort of relatively far left, you have director capture skepticism, right,
Speaker 1: People who are like it just will give people permission
Speaker 1: to keep burning fossil fuels and not transition fast enough.
Speaker 2: As you know, the problem is just so so massive
Speaker 2: that I think the argument of this will only continue
Speaker 2: what we're doing. It's hard to see much of many
Speaker 2: lakes to it because at the end of the day,
Speaker 2: we need to reduce as much as possible, Like you know,
Speaker 2: first we need to reduce emissions in all sorts of
Speaker 2: different things, and anything that we cannot reduce we should remove.
Speaker 2: And unfortunately, the slower we reduce, the slower we decarbonize,
Speaker 2: the bigger and the bigger gap that we have. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that we're you know, the removal gap just gets bigger
Speaker 2: and bigger. And that's what's happening right now.
Speaker 1: Why did you get into the director capture business?
Speaker 2: I think a couple of reasons. One is the size
Speaker 2: of the problem was so massive, and the number of
Speaker 2: people working on it as rigorously and with the right
Speaker 2: approach that I thought was right was just limited. When
Speaker 2: first Guards started.
Speaker 1: You looked at what people were doing in carbon removal,
Speaker 1: and what did you think.
Speaker 2: I thought either they were not as scalable or they
Speaker 2: would be too expensive.
Speaker 1: You thought you could do better.
Speaker 2: I could do better. So I mean, at the end
Speaker 2: of the day, like hopefully there will be fifty hundred companies,
Speaker 2: massive companies, just like there's fifty two hundred basket of
Speaker 2: oil and companies that remove carbon. Each have a different approach.
Speaker 2: And I think what attracted me to director capture also
Speaker 2: is just the level of impact you can have. I
Speaker 2: mean technically, you know, because the abundance of limestone is
Speaker 2: so hi, the impact is infinitively scalable. Right, There's not
Speaker 2: many solutions you can say you can scale it up
Speaker 2: to hundreds of gigatons.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of gigatons would be carbon negative as a world
Speaker 1: if it were.
Speaker 2: That big, right, right, And we need to do that
Speaker 2: this century. First, the goal is to get to net
Speaker 2: zero as a society, hopefully by twenty fifty. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: IPCC predicts that from twenty fifty to twenty one hundred
Speaker 2: we are in the negative territory.
Speaker 1: So we're net negative, sucking more carbon dioxide out of
Speaker 1: the air than we are emitting. Yeah, do you think
Speaker 1: that'll happen? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I mean I think I take my cues from solar
Speaker 2: and wind.
Speaker 1: You want solar more than wind, right, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you want solar more than wind for sure. I
Speaker 2: think once you get to a cost that is societally
Speaker 2: acceptable and affordable, it will take a life of its
Speaker 2: own in terms of its scale. And obviously you want
Speaker 2: the you know, carbon markets, compliance markets to incorporate the
Speaker 2: price of carbon across the world as well. But I
Speaker 2: think there's a flywheel there as well. You know, as
Speaker 2: you deploy more, it gets cheaper. And I think that
Speaker 2: it will happen because you know, there is a future
Speaker 2: that we can create, a future of abundance where you know,
Speaker 2: we can have all the intelligence we want, we can have,
Speaker 2: you know, all the things that we want, and we
Speaker 2: can take care of the planet provided that it is affordable.
Speaker 2: That's why this one hundred dollars per ten I think
Speaker 2: is so important. Where I do think at that point,
Speaker 2: the closer we get there, the faster it scales up.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a minute with the liking round. Okay,
Speaker 1: I want to ask you some lightning round questions. Now,
Speaker 1: what was one thing that was really striking to you
Speaker 1: when you were in eighth grade and you moved from
Speaker 1: Southeast India to Maine.
Speaker 2: Man, so many things. Let me think about that for
Speaker 2: a sec. Yeah, there was a lot of culture shock,
Speaker 2: academic shock, language shock for a twelve year old kid
Speaker 2: to be dropped into bangor Maine coming from India. It
Speaker 2: was very interesting. To make it simple, but I think,
Speaker 2: you know, one thing that I found, which I'm actually
Speaker 2: grateful for, the way that the education system in India
Speaker 2: grew up was very much like memory based. I think
Speaker 2: what I really appreciated moving to the US at that
Speaker 2: age is sort of that flip in to thinking of
Speaker 2: being a lot more analytical, a lot more vigorous, which
Speaker 2: I just found a lot more natural.
Speaker 1: I heard you say in another interview that companies fail
Speaker 1: because they stop having difficult conversations, and so I'm curious,
Speaker 1: what is a recent difficult conversation that you had at work? Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know, one of our main principles is radical honesty.
Speaker 2: It's one of our three main principles, and for so
Speaker 2: many reasons, it's the right thing to do. Right. It's
Speaker 2: you know, pursuing physics, pursuing truth, pursuing merit, and you know,
Speaker 2: how do you create a culture where it's vulnerable and
Speaker 2: open and safe to have honest and difficult conversations and
Speaker 2: once you get it, it's it's really amazing. For example,
Speaker 2: yesterday I was given feedback by one of my reports
Speaker 2: around asking a individual contributor for their time working on
Speaker 2: a project without working with the manager on exactly the
Speaker 2: scope of it.
Speaker 1: So somebody who was like, hey, don't ask this person
Speaker 1: to do this thing without asking their manager if they
Speaker 1: have time in surance?
Speaker 2: Right, pretty straightforward, right, you know, because the manager has
Speaker 2: understanding of the fool and doing the scope and a
Speaker 2: lot of the times, like this type of feedback is like, ah,
Speaker 2: I don't know if this is worth talking to the
Speaker 2: CEO out right, but like this person fall safe enough
Speaker 2: to share with me, and I was so proud of
Speaker 2: it that it's like, man, thank you for sharing this.
Speaker 2: I could have just spent an extra minute thinking about
Speaker 2: how to approach that conversation and then this person fell
Speaker 2: safe enough to do it. And one thing I'd tell
Speaker 2: other founders is, you know there isn't inherently that power dynamic.
Speaker 2: You know, the emperor has no clothes, right, Like, how
Speaker 2: do you create a culture, how do you create a
Speaker 2: bi directional feedback loop between leaders and folks working on
Speaker 2: the problem at the core every day.
Speaker 1: Shashank Samala is the co founder and CEO of Airloom.
Speaker 1: Please email us at problem at pushkin dot fm. We
Speaker 1: are always looking for new guests for the show. Today's
Speaker 1: show was produced by Trinomanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang. It
Speaker 1: was edited by Alexander Garretton and engineered by Sarah Bruguerrett.
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with
Speaker 1: another episode of What's Your Problem
Speaker 2: MHM.