SPEAKER_00: we've only got one planet earth so we better take care of it right you know this is something you

SPEAKER_01: know elon said to me maybe 15 years ago and uh we were talking about the controversy around this when it was like a little more controversial people talking about yeah and i said what do

SPEAKER_05: you think and he said i think this is a stupid experiment to run and that's why i'm doing tesla

SPEAKER_07: and i said you know what the risk is totally asymmetric isn't it right if if we do nothing and climate change is a real thing we're we're up a creek this week in startups is brought to you by

SPEAKER_10: linkedin jobs a business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters post your first job for free at linkedin.com unicorn fount do you want access to the performance protocols that pro athletes and special ops use with fount an elite military operator supercharges your focus sleep recovery and longevity all powered by your unique data want a true edge in work and life go to found dot bio slash twist for 500 off and catalog stop wasting time and money with expensive design firms and unreliable freelancers get fast three-day turnarounds for a flat monthly fee with catalog get 1200 off right now at try catalog.com twist all right everybody welcome back to this week in

SPEAKER_01: startups we're doing our next unicorn series and ridiculous uh what um amazing group of founders

SPEAKER_05: we've had on the program we had victor from synesthesia making ai generated video avatars had andy from path ai building ai software for pathologists helps them make diagnoses uh faster more accurately we had shiv from a bridge they're doing a hipbook approved speech to text ai software saving doctors a couple hours a day which really does that up nick from light matter building photonic computing chips for ai that's going to make data centers uh less hot and make data move faster do all those big jobs that was episode 1787 definitely worth your time gabriel from proprero uh it's a surgical platform it uses computer vision ar to teach surgeons to do very complicated uh surgeries and to have them do complicated surgeries without looking at some x-ray on the side nope they can see everything right there up close and personally uh while they're fixing your spine delian from varda he's building space factories for some pharmaceutical companies i mean it sounds like science fiction peter from covariant full stack robotics platform basically he's using ai to help robots um function in the real world right c3po decker uh and then we had celine from loyal working on life extension drugs not for humans but for dogs because that would be a great stepping stone and and hopefully can be super profitable for the team over there uh we had suits from sardine uh they're building an ai powered fraud detection platform you know because you got all these new ai hackers right think about all those incredible industries biotech ai chip space robotics healthcare really deep tech is happening in a major way in the venture capital silicon valley space and you know all over the world we haven't had a climate founder on you know why i looked at a lot of climate companies a lot of these are hippies they're doing stuff that's not going to matter or is low impact and we searched and we searched we said who's doing something that's super high impact well we found the guy so uh will kane is with us he's the ceo and

SPEAKER_17: founder of avnos avnos is a hybrid direct air capture startup basically it's building machines that are going to capture carbon from the air and uh turn it into something we all need water well

SPEAKER_18: welcome to the show chasen thanks so much for having me it's a pleasure to be here and that list it's been a great series it's been a terrific list of founders you've had on it's uh it's a pleasure to

SPEAKER_17: be here yeah uh it's great to have to add you to the list okay we're all going to need a bit of an

SPEAKER_21: education here we hear the term carbon capture over and over again why is carbon catch capture

SPEAKER_05: important how does it work and then what technique uh and strategy are you bringing to the table with

SPEAKER_24: your startup avnos yeah important place to start um so carbon capture is a broad rubric under which

SPEAKER_25: there are a whole bunch of different individual technologies that refers to the process of pulling co2 emissions out of some airstream um you may have heard of point source capture which is going on the back of industrial processes for example and pulling co2 and other pollutants out of the exhaust stream of industrial processes you may have heard of things like nature-based solutions so growing trees and other types of biomass that naturally pull co2 out of our atmosphere and that's actually a certain form of what we call direct air capture and that is what we do at avnos so we are pulling legacy co2 emissions so the co2 content that's already in the atmosphere around us right we are pulling those emissions legacy emissions as we call them out of the atmosphere to reduce the total co2 content in the atmosphere you've read and heard that we are approaching 420 parts per million co2 content in our atmosphere carbon dioxide being the chief bad actor among a variety of greenhouse gases that create effectively kind of a heat dome that trap uh heat in the low earth atmosphere and generate what we know as climate change or has been called global warming um over the years as well and in order to get to a net zero economy that's another term that a lot of folks out there have probably heard where that net zero refers to net zero emissions of co2 uh in our economy um we have to

SPEAKER_27: deploy things like carbon capture and direct air capture in particular that's the only way yeah is the

SPEAKER_29: co2 that's in the the atmosphere yep uh co2 itself comes out of humans right when we breathe out it helps

SPEAKER_31: trees grow there it is not in its of itself um a challenge except when it gets to an extreme amount and this uh chart i think sort of displays that the the uh over time it was pretty steady and we know this from the science uh of looking at i guess trees or minerals and then carbon dating

SPEAKER_21: them or how do we know that and just so we level set here because there's a lot of client deniers there's a lot of like people now who are trying to spend misinformation and listen there's also people on the environmental side who have been worked up and maybe gotten a little hot under the collar in some cases hysterical so it feels to me like the climate discussion has lost some rationality you can see that on both sides so just to be clear there is nothing controversial

SPEAKER_31: about co2 necessarily it's the amount that we have and then that's causing heat uh and temperatures to rise and maybe your your best explanation of why this is not a controversial statement yeah yeah

SPEAKER_25: well you've got it co2 in and of itself is not a bad thing right carbon is kind of the basis of all life forms so it is not in and by itself a bad thing but as the expression goes poison is in the dose right and so the chart that you just showed yeah we know from pretty sophisticated carbon dating and carbon model historical looking carbon modeling that up until the industrial age and on the chart that you just had there you can look at that as roughly 1800 let's use sort of rough numbers as of 1800 to early early to mid 19th century you saw that co2 content in the atmosphere was pretty steady at about 280 parts per million so you almost think of that as kind of a natural equilibrium state that's where the co2 content in the atmosphere has been for centuries but then again you look at that chart you can see there's a bit of a not a bit of a there's a significant move upward as of the beginning of industrial life significant industrial activity uh in the early 19th century so that 280 parts per million which again think of that as equilibrium plants live pretty happily humans live pretty happily right the the temperatures on the globe are um quite conducive to uh to supporting life right and supporting a comfortable existence for most forms of life but then yeah you can see as of about 1800 you go to uh you get sort of sharp ever sharper slopes headed up into the right in terms of the co2 content and by the year 2000 that 280 parts per million had become roughly 370 parts per million and then just in the last 23 years since the year 2000 we've seen another 20 parts per million of co2 added to the overall content of our atmosphere and we're 420 417 if you want to be

SPEAKER_27: particular about it but we're roughly 420 parts per million co2 content in the atmosphere and um you

SPEAKER_25: know what what that points out is the human activity around industry is the thing that has changed there

SPEAKER_21: on this graph that we're looking at controversial about that controversial about that exactly right

SPEAKER_31: we built cars these were incredible human innovations they moved the species forward but there are downstream effects of them that's right all right listen you're listening to the

SPEAKER_48: next unicorns right that's table stakes well if you want to start on the path to becoming a unicorn yourself you're gonna need to find and hire great candidates and how do you do that linkedin of course you're on linkedin i'm on linkedin over 900 million users now the march to a billion continues for the amazing team over at linkedin then you can attract both the passive and the

SPEAKER_21: active job seekers and all you have to do is put that purple hiring ring on your profile then you post some interesting content when they see that purple hiring ring it says whoa wait a second i know that founder i know that ceo i know that vc well they're hiring let me click and check it out and then all of a sudden you start getting this great inbound right we love linkedin i mean i've gotten some of the most amazing people in fact i just got a new personal assistant because things are going so well and i've got the new uh accelerator that we have uh coming in san mateo and i need somebody to help me run that and set it all up and i said you know what i need to i need to have an executive assistant again so we found somebody amazing on linkedin of course and so here's your call to action linkedin jobs helps you find qualified candidates you want to talk to fast post your job for free at linkedin.com unicorn that's right linkedin.com unicorn to post your first job for free terms of conditions apply because linkedin is so generous it's kind of strange when i i heard vivek uh you know who's i don't want to say he's a climate denier but he i guess is using the climate as like part of his you know technique for for getting votes

SPEAKER_52: he and i aren't necessarily on the same side of the discussion but uh but yeah he was sort of saying

SPEAKER_17: like hey the co2 is like helping green the planet uh because we all know trees need co2 so this is a

SPEAKER_55: true statement also a true statement there's a lot of co2 so there's a lot of undeniable facts here but

SPEAKER_01: it is um i think the the next part of this puzzle is once you accept okay yeah if we burn a bunch of fossil fuels that puts pollutants in the air not good for anybody so i don't think anybody can debate that

SPEAKER_31: but the co2 obviously then uh creates heat so just let's make that next jump there and there's there

SPEAKER_01: shouldn't be anything controversial about co2 in the atmosphere i don't think so if we can all agree

SPEAKER_60: on that because this is pretty irrefutable science it's irrefutable science yeah yeah that's right yep

SPEAKER_31: okay now we get the next jump which is temperatures increasing right so let's make that next jump

SPEAKER_25: how certain are we co2 is causing that heat jump yeah um the certainty is uh sort of as high as it gets in the scientific community right you've seen the same stuff that i have that when you consider the ipcc reports and surveys of climatologists around the world who are certainly experts in the space uh that i can of of a level that i cannot claim to be um that co2 is the primary again bad actor in trapping heat and creating um global warming and and broadly climate change right because global global warming is not the only feature is not the only features too too positive a word is not the only ramification it's really climate extreme climate extremes that are being created by virtue of this excess co2 in the atmosphere and if we go back a second you said you're exactly right trees do absorb co2 uh that's they're great at that but we the actions of the industrialized economy over the past you know roughly 200 years have overwhelmed trees capacity to absorb co2 and to kind of bring us and keep us at an equilibrium level with respect to the co2 content in the atmosphere and and it is that excess co2 you know to give a couple of numbers since roughly that dawn of the industrial age so since roughly 1800 we've emitted roughly two and a half trillion tons of co2 into the atmosphere as a global economy and something like 700 billion tons have been absorbed by land map by trees and plants and other photosynthetic organisms as well as the oceans and that leaves you know roughly 800 billion tons of co2 of excess co2 right that has gone into our atmosphere and so i come from the school of thought that that's creating an existential climate crisis for us us being humanity um but even if you don't necessarily subscribe all the way to that level right what you've got ultimately jason is a significant waste management problem i mean you think about that volume of waste that has been emitted into the atmosphere and ultimately that's what co2 emissions are that's what pollution is is it's waste and it's inefficiency and when you see that level of weight think about other forms of waste co2 is a hard one to visualize given that it's an invisible gas but when you think about sort of waste management uh you know you can't imagine our industrial trash for example um just going into our environment and not creating uh negative impacts and the negative impacts that we're seeing now are really all around us um climate change has been one of those uh a bit esoteric concepts for much of certainly my lifetime and much of human existence it's been hard to visualize and wrap your arms around what climate change actually means but the big thing is heat you're right and you're seeing july of 2023 was the hottest month in recorded human history okay in june of 2023 we had the hottest week in recorded human history 2022 was the sixth hottest year in recorded human history and how's this one 10 of the 10 hottest years in recorded human history have happened since 2010 so you know and that's and that

SPEAKER_70: is then and yeah john's got another great article and chart up here which then you start to see the

SPEAKER_25: effects not just of the heat itself but you see more extreme droughts and more extreme flooding and sea level rise and ocean temperature rises and acidification and you know all of those effects

SPEAKER_75: that have start to have a meaningful effect a negative effect on our everyday life as humanity

SPEAKER_31: so when um and i don't want to i don't want to tag anybody with being hysterical or denial or being in

SPEAKER_01: denial right so let's take the 20 of the lunatics on either fringe 10 whatever people who are chaining themselves you know to nuclear power plants saying you got to shut this thing down whatever it is and

SPEAKER_25: then interrupting nba interrupting nba games which i have no interest in an nba game being interrupted you

SPEAKER_01: know so let's put the lunatics aside and we won't call people climate deniers we won't call people hysterical but just looking at the facts here the heat fact is undeniable and so i guess the question

SPEAKER_31: then becomes twofold one is there any when you hear people say like well we've had other times we've had spikes and climate and temperatures is there any way to give that any credence i mean you said 10 of the

SPEAKER_17: last hottest were since 2010 so that's like 10 out of the last 13. yeah do you think there's any

SPEAKER_21: thing there that is in any way logical um in terms of looking at this heat as it might be some temporary

SPEAKER_25: pattern that just happens to correlate with co2 and all the science yeah i you know i think i defer to to the science as as you say there and there doesn't seem to be a lot of room for argument quite frankly that the increase in co2 levels has resulted in more trapping of heat and the resultant you know climate change madness that we see uh manifested in many of these extreme events that we talked about so you know i i'm a bit of a big tent kind of guy so i'm certainly happy to um i went to the university of virginia and thomas jefferson had a saying one of my favorites was for here we are not afraid to tolerate any error as long as reason is left free to combat it so you know if we want to have a discussion about well heat maybe is good right or co2 is good let's let's look at some data let's look at some facts and you know sort of put a point counterpoint together and i just think as you said it's incontrovertible when you put the point counterpoint together that climate change being manifested as heat and those extreme events is ultimately a purely negative uh proposition for humanity for the world for our economy um maybe more importantly which is something i'm sure we'll talk about is that you know that there's a lot of economic rationality to uh fostering this energy transition and to fighting and mitigating and preventing the worst effects of climate change which is a bit of how i think i approach it i said before i come from the school of thought that um climate change is an existential crisis for humanity uh but i also think that it represents a meaningful economic opportunity to um you know to create uh wealth in our economy and to create to reduce negative externalities which as i said are ultimately waste and inefficiency and create better

SPEAKER_00: economic outcomes across the economy all right which is what's exciting about about this energy transition

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SPEAKER_31: let's assume there's some group of people we won't convince that this is real or existential

SPEAKER_01: right so i think that existential word becomes triggering for people because they're just like well if it's too hot by the equator why don't you move north and canada will become more like you know new york and san francisco and new york and san francisco be more like la and mexico

SPEAKER_21: city and la and mexico city will become you know unlivable during certain months yeah but no big deal people can then just get in their cars and go to their ski houses in uh colorado or something but which seems to be the argument on the other side is like yeah hey you know it's not the end of the world um it's not going to be existential but it also seems like hey what a heck of an experiment to run if given the choice to run the experiment or not probably would be on the side of maybe we don't run an experiment with the one planet we have since we only have

SPEAKER_01: one of these and we haven't found another one yet uh what do we know how to terraform so let's talk about the cost of capturing all this carbon that's there sure and your approach to it we we had uh uh that startup rising tide i think that was building kelp and then running tide yeah marty and the team there yeah yeah which is a great solution they i think they're they're building kelp they put it out into

David Friedberg: the middle of the ocean they cut it after it absorbs a bunch of co2 it gets cut and goes to the bottom

SPEAKER_107: of the ocean and sticks to the bottom of the ocean and it stays there under pressure right under the

SPEAKER_25: osmotic pressure the of the ocean so no big deal no big deal yeah that so that's a nature-based solution right as i referenced previously so harnessing the power of nature uh to absorb co2 um what we what we do at avnos and in direct air capture dak broadly speaking is think of these as engineered solutions so we're trying to take the best aspects of nature and turbocharge them right if you think about a nature-based solution for example you know a tree roughly you'll get a ton of co2 per acre per year out of a out of an acre of trees for example one of our machines can do sort of like 20 000 tons of co2 per acre per year um so as i say you're turbo charging sorry easy for me to say uh turbo charging the best effects um of nature and so you know the the threshold that we are all as a sort of climate community and i think as a global economy we should be targeting to try to stay beneath is at 1.5 degrees celsius warming right the ipcc um has educated us on that and in order to do that we both need to eliminate the next emission so we need to go to wind and solar and geothermal and other forms of renewable power which we can talk about the positive economic and job impacts there by the way especially relative to traditional kind of fossil sources but then we also need to reduce the co2 content in the atmosphere as we talked about previously even if we go to a zero marginal emission society tomorrow which we're not doing right so yeah that 420 parts per million co2 content in the atmosphere is problematic we have to pull that down and get to a more rational level and that's what we're doing so this is a physical device you're building at avnos exactly it's a physical device and there's a rendering of it on the screen right now that is actually a device that we have built that is installed in bakersfield uh and is capturing water and co2

SPEAKER_31: um as we speak so yeah explain you know how this works you know broadly in terms of because this

SPEAKER_21: takes energy to power it energy tends to put co2 into the atmosphere so i assume that let's we'll talk

SPEAKER_01: about the process here and then we'll talk about the energy and the displacement there and the economics of the energy because i assume you're using renewables to do this but i don't know that

SPEAKER_25: um so let's talk about it sure yeah so direct or capture writ large as i said it it does a bit of what uh trees were designed to do you pull ambient air into a chemically charged system the chemicals that the system is is charged with or refer to those as adsorbents right or or sorbents so those sorbents are are chemically made up to be what's called selective for carbon dioxide so you pass air over those sorbents through that sorbent charge chamber and the sorbents adhere to the co2 content in that air so the rest of the the exhaust if you like from a dak plant is co2 lean air is reduced content co2 air the co2 has been captured inside of the direct air capture system and then more often than not we differ here but as a broad matter more often than not you got to heat up that adsorbent to release the co2 they'd be captured you've captured and then there are two things to do with the co2 one is utilization which are things like sustainable aviation fuel or e-fuels where you can use that co2 and combine it with hydrogen uh to create synthetic uh hydrocarbons effectively so carbon neutral fuels is one pathway so that's utilization that'll be the smallest pathway to of things to do with the co2 the bigger one is to is to sequester that carbon dioxide in the subsurface so think of old depleted oil and gas wells old saline aquifers those rock formations those geologic formations are really well suited to retain gaseous co2 so you can put those this is miles underground right think of like under the gulf of mexico for example is an area that's drawn a lot of attention for co2 storage subsurface storage and that co2 can then go under the gulf of mexico and stay there in air quotes permanently but for hundreds or thousands of years so that's director capture writ large and i'm going to tell you why avnos is special in the director capture landscape but let me let me let you ask any questions there

SPEAKER_31: no no i i i i get the concept here we're sequestering it we can then store it somewhere put it

SPEAKER_01: somewhere it makes total sense to me the thing i always wonder about just like uh desalinization

SPEAKER_21: you know this technology has existed desal for forever but carbon capture for a decent amount of time my understanding of it as a neophyte um but who's talked to a bunch of founders is the the issue becomes energy how much energy does it take to do this and so how much carbon can you capture versus

SPEAKER_01: how much are you creating and so if we had a renewable source like if this was at a nuclear power plant and at night nobody's using the nuclear we got this extra nuclear energy instead of doing bitcoin mining or something we could be having these buy a nuclear power plant and at night just run them full bore for free i guess or you know essentially free for what would have been wasted energy is that the vision here or is there some other vision do you run batteries and solar let it just become sustainable because i don't know how much energy it takes to do this process and is that that is that

SPEAKER_25: the blocker yeah broadly speaking you've got the idea is that you know you want to think of these processes in sort of a resource from a resource efficiency perspective right is what resources are we investing in order to generate what benefit and what resources on the back end and so yeah and energy is one of the key factors uh to consider so um i'll use gross generalizations you know most of the the rest of the space will tell you that they're going to consume somewhere between 2500 and 3000 kilowatt hours per ton of co2 and that's sort of a a rough uh generalization of what the rest of the space it looks like and that's on the order of 2000 kilowatt hours per ton from thermal energy so think of that as burning fossil fuels to generate heat and as i told you previously a lot of the other systems use heat that's the way that they get the co2 off of the sorbent well that's what you need that's how you generate that heat is by burning fossil fuels to generate that heat which has a greenhouse gas emission profile associated with it making those systems less resource efficient that was one of the big realizations that i had when i started looking at the director capture space in 2017 was that energy consumption profile and particularly the heat consumption profile was going to be a rate limiter for the broad scale employment of deck exactly as you said how many molecules of co2 are we putting into the air to to draw it down the other piece of the equation is water which is something that often gets lost in the discussion of climate change but water is obviously a massive vector in climate change and drought throughout the world 50 of the global population is going to live a water scarce existence by 2025 but the water consumption profile of many other forms of director capture is consuming somewhere between 5 and 10 tons of water per ton of co2 captured and if you extrapolate that out to billions of tons per year of co2 capture you're increasing the industrial water draw on the planet by 25 oh so really an unsustainable proposition so that was the other piece that i looked at in direct air capture was all right energy consumption and heat consumption in particular and then water consumption right pick in california where we live um you can't get an industrial process permitted and built in california that has a significant greenhouse gas emission profile and a significant water consumption profile and many more jurisdictions around the world are going the direction of california than not right and so i set out to identify uh emerging interesting director capture technologies that that address those issues and and i found that at pacific northwest national laboratory which is one of the department of energy's delegated research facilities in washington state and that is hdac that is hybrid direct air capture that's what we're commercializing now at avnos and we use the word hybrid in front of direct air capture to reflect the fact that we're capturing both water and co2 from the same airstream in the same system god and so whereas everybody else in the space is consuming five to ten tons of water per ton of co2 captured we produce five to ten tons of distilled water per ton of co2 captured and then in so doing capturing that moisture uh capturing that water from the air actually allows us then to use the moisture to release the co2 that we've captured so we eliminate that thermal energy input that i referred to a moment ago so whereas others in the space are consuming somewhere between 2500 and 3000 kilowatt hours per ton in order to to perform their director capture processes we're closer to a thousand kilowatt hours per ton you can see a major difference and why that became really attractive to me uh in

SPEAKER_01: looking at the landscape for differentiated technologies and so a key piece of this is this atmospheric water generator kind of function i think is what they call them we might call them in our homes dehumidifiers like when you get a leak you put it in your basement yep and it captures and all of a sudden you got a bucket of water or when you put a hose on it drip drip drip so somewhere in your process you're extracting water from the atmosphere that's right to help this process um i'm curious you can't use salt water for this process would it not be or is this not conducive to doing it wait so there actually there are some

SPEAKER_25: other folks uh in the space who are looking at sort of combined direct air capture and desalination processes but for us um you know you're moving some of the the uh interesting insight into the technologies that there's water and co2 in every molecule of air right and so atmospheric water extraction units atmospheric water generators are a thing as you rightly point out and so is director capture so when we started looking at hdac we thought well you're pulling molecules out of the same air stream so how do we create some efficiencies by putting these two processes in series and so the air that we crew that we or the water that we generate excuse me comes from the air

SPEAKER_01: and obviously that water is super efficient because you've got a fan or whatever reverse fan is sucking in it anyway so you're sucking in air anyway you're processing a lot of air might as well take some of the water out there another stupid question yeah uh you know different regions have different amounts of water in the air different humidity levels so uh do these devices work better near nuclear power plants that are near you know places i don't know maybe the pacific northwest canada etc places where maybe the humidity is just naturally higher than places like texas or arizona where it might be much drier yeah so we've got that unit that john

SPEAKER_41: pulled up uh previously that rendering that's in bakersfield uh california so about two hours north of la

SPEAKER_25: here um and our next year that that unit will do about 30 tons per year of co2 captures it's small it's a pilot unit the next scale will be 300 tons uh which will also go in bakersfield about this time next year and it turns out that bakersfield's a pretty good spot for us so it's not too hot uh but also not too dry um you know we we actually prefer to be slightly lower on the humidity scale if we're talking about optimal conditions um because the point of the system ultimately is to bring about the most efficient um co2 capture and that goes back to some of the economics is that for better or worse water is a horribly mispriced resource yeah in the world relative to the value that it provides to humanity into the world and so you know even though we're producing five to ten tons of water per ton of co2 on a volumetric basis on a revenue basis or it's 20 times in the co in the favor of co2 um so ultimately the economic case is there to be made on producing the co2 and so you're incurring at more energy the more water you produce actually the more energy you you consume and so having a little bit less water in the air is better how having said that um our system uh you know our team we've got a a team of of um you know we have seven phds i think six are chemical engineering phds ones mechanical engine engineering phd that are working on creating the most robust system possible such that the performance of the system looks really similar in texas in canada in south africa in chile in japan right that's ultimately our mode of deployment is to take more of a manufacturing approach and to build the same unit over and over again out of a single or a small number of infrastructure you know production infrastructure assets and then deliver those units to individual sites for assembly as opposed to the more cost intensive uh more expensive you know stick built kind of customized engineered on-site construction deployment mode that some others in our space and some other industrial processes have

SPEAKER_91: which just ultimately adds cost when i see a startup that's got bad design it's hard for me to take it seriously in today's day and age why because having great design having world-class design it's kind of table stakes today with consumers with employees with partners and of course with investors but you know design agencies they're very very expensive and there's a lot of back and forth to figure out what you want it's not for startups you know you can't spend a quarter million dollars a half million dollars getting some design agency to do your look and feel and it's hard for you to hire somebody full-time because that's a full-time staff position so let me tell you about an amazing service it's called catalog a full service design studio tailor-made for startups and catalog does all of your branding they do ui and ux they'll do landing pages pitch decks they'll do it all it's half the price of a typical design agency but they offer a full team including a dedicated project manager and a design director they've worked with hundreds of startups so if you have a problem chances are they've already solved it you can stop and start back at any time it's a monthly subscription and catalog will never waste your time they do three-day turnaround okay that's more than enough stop wasting time stop wasting money with all these expensive design firms and unreliable freelancers who disappear what you want is fast three-day turnarounds for a flat monthly fee with catalog and you're going to get 1200 off right now at try catalog.com twist that's 1200 off at try catalog.com twist are we still increasing the amount

SPEAKER_31: of co2 we're putting into the atmosphere each year or have we started to slow down we're still increasing

SPEAKER_41: it we're still increasing it yeah yeah we are increasing so yeah i mean interestingly um covid when

SPEAKER_25: we're all at home you know we we were increasing at a decreasing rate but since we've come out of covid and economic activity has resumed full bore or something close to that anyway um that you know the the the emissions are back on the rise um and so that's you know we we as a global economy emit something like 50 billion tons of co2 per year uh and that is the challenge is to get that 50 down to zero

SPEAKER_144: and again that's what net zero refers to is that's what net zero can we stop doing this so at least

SPEAKER_01: the temperatures theoretically if we stop putting carbon in then we would stop seeing the temperatures increase at least we could pause what's happening but that's right what is the realistic net zero date

SPEAKER_40: do you think yeah i i think um you know i am uh i'm a techno optimist when it comes to climate solution

SPEAKER_25: broadly speaking and and when it comes to climate solutions i think we've got a shot at 2050 at net zero it's something like 2050 but you know it's going to take herculean efforts from here to there you know maybe the the the more likely case is something like 2075 um but uh yeah the carbon budget

SPEAKER_01: is that based on uh any revolutionary technologies being created or is that just based on incrementalism and you know the increase in solar nuclear renewables it's a lot about the increasing penetration of

SPEAKER_25: renewables which doesn't require a major breakthrough continued uh cost reduction in batteries for example but then yes certainly significant step changes in my space in carbon removal i think the technologies are there i think they exist i don't think we're starting you know got to invent these technologies out of whole cloth but we got to go fast to to get up the curve and deploy carbon dioxide removal um at at a much faster pace uh certainly than we have been who's your customer who's going to fund

SPEAKER_01: this i know venture capitalists are interested in investing in this but ultimately you're selling to governments you're selling to people who put carbon in the atmosphere and need to you know because of regulations become uh carbon neutral you know factories or something who's your customer who's going to buy these what are they what does it cost to build this uh you know these

SPEAKER_24: giant units you're making yeah so the primary monetization mechanism for co2 removal today is

SPEAKER_25: this 45q tax credit that was passed in the inflation reduction act uh a little over a year ago right here here in the us so that pays director capture companies like mine they capture co2 and store it in the subsurface 180 per ton of co2 so that's the the the leading regime for co2 monetization co2 removal

SPEAKER_01: monetization in the world so the government in the section 45q they're giving a tax credit that's

SPEAKER_107: right uh for people direct pay which you'll know but it is a bit of a esoteric but ultimately you

SPEAKER_25: know you have to be a tax a taxable entity right it's it's a cash pay program to to the the capturer

SPEAKER_01: uh as it were of the co2 got it so that's so you could just build these things and the government will pay you for it so then it's your job to figure out if fifty dollars per you say fifty dollars per

SPEAKER_25: metric ton it's 180 uh and and had it so how do we deliver co2 for 100 bucks a ton right is is is ultimately the challenge and so to get from here to there right because we uh the director capture is not at 100 bucks a ton that's the level what is it at now how far are you um you know the the some of the folks in the space have put out numbers like 600 to a thousand bucks a ton is sort of where the the clearing price seems to be work to do you gotta there's work to do yeah you gotta be 10 better a

SPEAKER_107: month for you got you gotta be yeah you gotta be jamming on cost out for sure and the doe has set

SPEAKER_25: a hundred dollars per ton as as sort of a threshold um that that they've said as a target for for director capture companies to get to and at avnos we've got the most direct line of sight to get into less than a hundred dollars per ton and it's because of those features that i mentioned it's that water production as opposed to water consumption so we've turned a cost line item into a revenue line item and then as i say in eliminating the heat input right we use this moisture responsive co2 adsorbent material so we can use the moisture that we capture in our atmospheric water generator that is the method by which we liberate the co2 that we capture so we're generating that uh media that that liberation media inside of our system we don't have to add heat and that has a couple of effects one is obviously operating expense we don't have to pay for the generation of heat but then the other is that you can use more cost effective materials in building our systems because we don't have to manage heat the way that some others in the space do and that's really important jason because as you think as a broad matter the components of a cost of a ton of co2 delivered from an avnos machine is sort of a two-thirds one-third proposition between the amortized cost of the capex and operating expenditures so every every bit that we can pick up on the capex on capex efficiency um really is is magnified relative to to the opex in terms of reducing the total cost of of of co2 and that's where i when i talk about the manufacturing approach as opposed to assembling on site if we can build again the infra invest in infrastructure to make our units and we're just making the same unit over and over again again you very well know the sort of cost implications of

SPEAKER_158: being able to mass manufacture um units be they avnos units or or any other type of widget this 45q

SPEAKER_01: uh legislation that was put out there was done as a challenge almost to the community hey we'll pay 100 we know it's costing you 600 to without a thousand to do this so here's here's the carrot get moving and has that spurred a lot of investment because you've been able to convince

SPEAKER_25: investors i think we can get there and here's how it has it has yeah it's spurred a lot of interest uh it's spurred in additional investment you know um i i'm proud to say that you know we've brought on a number of really high quality industrial partners we announced recently you know shell and conoco phillips and and uh jet blue ventures have have joined our team um from a partnership perspective and we were engaged with those folks prior to that ira passing in the 45q passing but certainly it supports the case right supports the theory of the case that there is an opportunity here that a marker has been set you can monetize this and you can generate returns on a project basis at that 45q level um if we do all the right things and and as i said we've got uh we think the most direct line of sight to get into less than 100 per ton which makes then those projects deliver returns that are attractive enough to um equity investors in those projects you know uh uh project finance um credit providers things of that nature to ensure that that we've got an economic case this is where

SPEAKER_01: incentives really matter they put this incentive out there and it sends vcs who are taking a 10 plus year approach but eventually if you start getting in spitting distance i suppose you know two three four hundred dollars it's going to incent maybe some short-term thinkers could be private equity firms etc or high net worth individuals hedge funds or whatever maybe to want to get it on this 100 million metric tons of co2 captured per year at a hundred dollars per 10 billion dollars a year yep how how much did you say was already in the atmosphere we had 800 800 billion tons yeah so we got we got some wood to chop yeah a lot of wood to chop so this is gonna put a very small dent into it but uh it seems like there's like three or four steps that have to occur here you have to get to the hundred dollar level and then somebody's got to you know not just the government decide we want we

SPEAKER_17: want to pay for that um taken out so that's right you know getting to a hundred and then getting to

SPEAKER_25: carbon neutral yeah um well you know the the good news is that this space has generated a lot of interest uh in early what are called voluntary carbon buyers right so microsoft for example has has decided that they are going to be a net zero company i believe it's by 2030 and as a part of that um they are going to purchase carbon removal offset so there are multiple steps right in in getting to net zero the biggest chunk of that probably 80 to 90 percent of abating or eliminating those 50 billion tons per year of co2 emissions will be in switching to renewable uh power sources for example and then the last 10 or 20 percent is going to have to address what are called hard to abate uh emissions so think of you know

SPEAKER_99: shipping hey you know you can electrify your ship right yeah yeah yeah yeah particularly dirty oil uh when they get out into the ocean they use indeed clean oil to get out of port and then they put the

SPEAKER_01: cheapest most disgusting pollutants and that that's pollutants which are different than co2 but it i

SPEAKER_25: think it does do more there's also co2 yeah that's right and so so those hard to abate emissions right those are those are the that's where carbon dioxide removal comes in you're talking 10 to 20 billion tons per year um well the ipcc says 5 to 10 billion tons per year by 2050 of co2 removal capacity and to get us there you know you've seen folks like the frontier uh group that came out of stripe that's a couple billion dollars now you've got microsoft that are out there willing to pay significant prices 600 a thousand bucks a ton to help to get our industry off the ground and to come up the

SPEAKER_41: maturity curve and and down the the cost curve i mean i think as as you do that the really interesting

SPEAKER_25: thing jason i think is yeah i referenced it previously is you've got a bit of a waste removal problem which is a collective action problem ultimately yeah right is is we all pay whatever we pay uh for our trash bins at our homes right so as as taxpayers and now i don't want to get into the the discussion i'm not saying you'll go there but with anybody in particular who should be paying for that right i'm i'm not i'm not necessarily involved in that specific conversation as much as you could see a world and i think the government may be late this is totally my opinion i don't know anything about what the government's thinking um i don't know if they do half the time but uh in any event the you know you could see a world and in this 45q there's some groundwork being laid to where this becomes again a collective action problem and with a collective action solution where the government becomes a direct buyer of co2 removal credits in order to reduce the co2 content uh in the atmosphere allow us to avoid the worst effects of climate change and ultimately manage a waste problem um that is not currently being managed um so i think you could see that there's a lot of precedent for

SPEAKER_01: this you know if we just look at the hudson river in new york and pollution in the oceans collective action problem we came up some regulations we came up with some technologies uh and eventually you know people are in the olympics going to be doing water sports in the sand river and you know you're seeing whales and dolphins show up around manhattan again like there there are green shoots here uh and there's precedent now listen of course i know the sen is also human waste being put in there sure sure sure

SPEAKER_31: but there's a lot of issues here that you can solve with technology and regulation it's unpopular for

SPEAKER_01: some people i think because there is the counter argument that oh people are going to have to suffer and this is a tax on society yada yada and so leave it to the next generation or you know why are we giving india china frontier markets emerging markets a hard time about this um and you know that's i think where the economics requires leadership and then people like microsoft stripe are in a unique

SPEAKER_20: position to to show that leadership because they're highly profitable companies and it matters to their employees and to their investors that's right and and and it matters to society right it's it is i would

SPEAKER_211: argue it is more inflationary for you know state farm to pull out of california i can't get a homeowner's

SPEAKER_25: policy on my house from state farm anymore right because of climate activity and health insurance costs that ultimately get socialized right whether it's co2 or other forms of pollution so we don't

SPEAKER_01: need to go particularly down that rabbit hole but i think you're making excellent point which is hey you

SPEAKER_31: know some people will not believe this is worth addressing until they see the cost of it you know

SPEAKER_21: what people did see the cost of the hudson river and you know other bodies of water being polluted and they said oh this is going to impact tourism it's going to impact my life if i want to go swimming

SPEAKER_01: you know the southern california yeah where you live is is dealing with this now like everybody knows santa monica doesn't have a really great sewage system it goes right out into the ocean

SPEAKER_21: if if it rains don't go surfing the reason you should not go surfing is because the fecal material sorry to be graphic in santa monica by the piers and everything from dogs and waste and everything that gets put into that sewer system is going to be disastrous right and i think they're well into the process of fixing that so sometimes a direct feedback loop is necessary let me ask you a really stupid question if you are super successful at this yeah will that incentivize people to keep burning fossil fuels because they're like oh you got this so i know that's a 30 year from now kind of problem and is that actually a problem if you get got so good at this and it allowed us to keep burning fossil fuels would that be a bad thing in other words like we would have solved the problem and hey yolo

SPEAKER_25: burn some more right yeah no that's that's a criticism that we hear uh oftentimes and is anything valid about that yeah you know i i guess i guess maybe a deep at its core but the the thing the the credibility that i give to it is actually it co2 is not the only pollutant that is a bad actor coming from sort of burning fossil fuels right you got all kinds of other uh knox and socks and with the pm 2.5 and there are all other there are a whole other mess of pollutants that are bad actors that all things being equal you look to get rid of um but you know for us like i guess taking taking the fossil fuel question off the table my our goal at avnos is to prevent warming from reaching 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees c and that's sort of it and so let's bring whoever we can within reason i guess but with the skill sets and the expertise to help us get there right and that's that's the approach that we're taking and you know with uh for for us also being able to to deliver a drought a drought solution in addition to a co2 removal solution that's something that i think everybody can get excited about and it's something that you know here in california folks are are in particular very excited about you are well aware obviously of the the drought issues in california very southwestern we have

SPEAKER_01: times when we have too much water and flooding and then sometimes droughts you know and this is and

SPEAKER_125: this is part of the sort of weirdness of climate change right it's extreme droughts extreme flooding

SPEAKER_25: um and it is it is those extremes um but you know but so this so you're going to produce a meaningful

SPEAKER_01: amount of water during this process yeah all right another stupid question because energy is a big part of this yeah water is a big plus uh we have hydro in different places yep hydro means free energy or very cheap energy that's why people put bitcoin near it do you put these near um well this is kind of

SPEAKER_21: blowing my mind just thinking about it out loud if you were to put these near a dam and the water that was being thrown off got put on the other side of the dam to top off the reservoir has that even come

SPEAKER_01: into your thinking that like it possibly could the water coming out of this could then power the

SPEAKER_25: energy through the dam etc yeah that's been that's something that we've thought about the math on hydro power gets to be pretty staggering like the amount of water that you have to produce and the the drop right the vertical drop that has to be generated in order to have sufficient velocity so that's i love

SPEAKER_41: that idea by the way um and it's that's a good a good thought it's great on creating concept bad on paper maybe yeah yeah yeah maybe that doesn't work in the spreadsheet but the bigger one the thing one

SPEAKER_25: of the ones i really love is put this you know put our avnos hdac machines on the green river in wyoming right where there's excellent subsurface storage capacity so we can take take the co2 and store it subsurface and permanently sequester it and then put the water in the green river which is a head water to the colorado and that flows down through the seven states that are fighting each other and you know figuring out how to save three trillion gallons between now and 2026 right and that again that's a a differentiator for us in that in areas where we can monetize the water that opens up a whole new geographic operating envelope for us in areas where the water is high value and so we're producing as opposed to consuming water um and uh you know so that opens up a whole new geographic operating envelope as i say in addition to which we as we think about citing options they're they're i guess three key things what are you doing with the co2 what are you doing with the water and access to renewable power as you said so there's a concept in direct air capture in carbon dioxide removal writ large it's known as additionality so give like the california air resources board in particular uh is is out front about this that if you're going to build a direct air capture plant and you want to qualify in the lcfs market as a co2 removal credit that can then be traded in the california lcfs market then your system must be powered by additional renewables so you got to build new renewables you're not you can't cannibalize those renewables from somewhere else you got to build new renewables in order to power yeah that our system and i guess the other thing to consider to your point is you know and back to the capital is the bigger part of the expense of a levelized cost uh the levelized cost of a ton of co2 then you can actually use the grid as a battery so if you overbuild the solar capacity and you can over produce during the day when the sun's shining you can use the grid as a battery overnight um and then as we continue to green the grid you've

SPEAKER_18: actually sort of eliminated all potential emissions um from the system does it ever like kind of blow your

SPEAKER_01: mind when you're working on this that all of these components there's a lot of different people working on you know new desalinization techniques the atmospheric uh capture we talked about the awgs we're actually kind of building these components of uh terraforming planets and it does feel like at a

David Friedberg: certain point there because we keep bouncing from hey well where's the energy source hey where's the

SPEAKER_01: water what where's the output of the water where's the right place to put this where does the carbon capture go we're starting to have some amount of understanding of the the ego system on the planet

SPEAKER_31: and some amount of dexterity with it that we could do things that uh may have seemed you know 100 years ago inconceivable like taking a desert and turning it into something other than a desert a rainforest or

SPEAKER_21: whatever does this come up when you come go to conferences with your peers of how close are we to

SPEAKER_246: just mastering the planet weather you know ecology and everything in between yeah no i think natural

SPEAKER_25: systems are always hard right you mastering natural systems um there are a number of sort of feedback

SPEAKER_18: loops that are hard to anticipate right the law of unintended consequences comes and smacks you in the mouth very frequently when you're dealing with natural systems but as i said before you know i'm a total

SPEAKER_25: techno optimist uh when especially when it comes to climate solutions you see the ability to harness the wind and the sun to produce the lowest cost electricity in the history of the world and you see the the cost curve for batteries that allows us to firm up those wind and solar assets and you see progress in geothermal and nuclear and you're figuring out how to generate water from the atmosphere at low cost and decarbonize systems or you can then use that carbon and water that you capture from the atmosphere to produce fuels to generate the energy that that you know makes the economy go so you know all of those things are are super exciting the technology and the approaches are pretty well understood you know in really good news i'd like to say that the early the first you know 12 or 15 years of this century um there was a ton of return to technology uh in in the climate tech space if not you know the world's greatest return to investment but there's a ton of return to technology and with those technologies there's so much now that we know how to do and we can do and the challenge becomes an integration and scaling challenge how do you really drive down costs and that's again you know something that we think about all the time at avnos and it comes up at conferences you know is how do we ultimately continue to push down the cost curve to make the economically rational decision jason the the cleanest decision right because ultimately that's that's where all of this

SPEAKER_01: has to go right which did happen already with solar right my understanding from a lot of folks is you put a coal plant and a solar plant the wind farm solar you know battery with solar you start modeling out this stuff it's cheaper to build the renewables uh and then to continue to run the fully depreciated

SPEAKER_213: coal plant how you like that it's cheaper to build a new solar plant than it is to continue to run a

SPEAKER_05: fully depreciated coal plant and you know we saw this compounding technologies and compounding innovation

SPEAKER_01: lots of people working on seemingly disparate projects apple working on batteries for iphones tesla then coming in and working on cars and using all the benefits that the smartphone revolution and

SPEAKER_31: then video gamers and crypto working on making nvidia you know chips faster and gpus faster results in the ai

SPEAKER_01: boom all this stuff is just compounding in different pockets of excellence different problems being solved but then they compound i guess that would be a good place for us to end here um is ai having

SPEAKER_31: any impact in this space yet um and do you see any connection where with your company you're like hey

SPEAKER_01: you know we can put some of these models or some of the chemical based stuff you're doing finding new

SPEAKER_12: chemicals we there are a lot of research being done there so yeah ai's impact on any of this yet

SPEAKER_25: that's that the last part of what you say is is so it's early days to be sure i mean i guess it's early days maybe writ large and ai but certainly for the energy transition it is early days i think the most exciting part of ai machine learning deep learning quantum computing the that whole uh sector of the economy is exactly what you said is is there chemical formulations right how do you cycle and test and model and simulate more and more chemical formulations much faster so that we can arrive at the next generation of our adsorbent technology the higher performing version of the adsorbent technology faster that again allows us ultimately to get to that hundred hundred dollars per ton um of co2 captured so that's that's i think the most exciting piece in our in our little corner of the world here well uh

SPEAKER_01: appreciate you dedicating your life to this uh congratulations on a really strong start and raising the money uh wish your team over there the best i know you're hiring uh everybody go to avnos.com a-v-n-o-s.com please go to the careers page please do not go work at facebook making advertising 0.01 percent more effective yeah the world does not need more effective advertising marketing or

SPEAKER_05: privacy uh and spying that's me saying that not what the world needs is people going to work with will and his team try to no matter how where you fall on how critical this issue is you know uh i think we all agree something's happening here and it's generally not good everybody can agree on that let's all try to solve the problem you know and uh man i just think this carbon capture stuff has incredible incredible potential and i'm really stoked that you're working on it so thank you for

SPEAKER_00: on behalf of humanity i will thank you well thanks jason it's a pleasure to be here and you're right we've only got one planet earth so we better take care of it right you know this is something you know elon

SPEAKER_01: said to me maybe 15 years ago and uh we were talking about the controversy around this when it was like a little more controversial people talking about yeah and i said what do you think and he said i think

SPEAKER_05: this is a stupid experiment to run and that's why i'm doing tesla and i said you know what the risk

SPEAKER_07: is totally asymmetric isn't it right if if we do nothing and climate change is a real thing we're

David Friedberg: we're up a creek i'm gonna also advise people you know when you're you know uh going down the river on a boat and you see like a nice cliff you can jump off of into the water and you don't know if it's deep enough or there's any rocks underneath maybe don't jump off maybe like check and make sure it's deep enough that you can jump off like just generally you know check the parachute before

SPEAKER_187: you jump out of the plane uh-huh silly stuff silly like that's i think that's sage council i think that's sage simple checklist am i wearing my parachute or not it's happened people have jumped out of planes

David Friedberg: and you know who jumps out of planes without parachutes the instructors the most experienced people because they get complacent like let's not be complacent people yeah let's not be complacent is

SPEAKER_176: right yeah we'll see you all next time on swing stars bye-bye