Aldyen and Paul are back in episode 3 to discuss the moves large oil and gas companies are making when it comes to investing in the future of direct air capture technology.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m lead strategist at Nori. I’m here again with Paul Gamble, CEO of Nori, and Aldyen Donnelly, Director of Carbon Economics at Nori. Today we’re going to talk about some articles we’ve been seeing about carbon engineering and about the interaction between oil and gas industry and direct air capture.
Aldyen Donnelly: Well, the great news I feel is that Occidental Petroleum’s venture capital arm and Chevron announced they’ve invested in carbon engineering, which is a pre-commercial technology that removes CO2 from the atmosphere and then either stores it in an underground reserve or the carbon is then processed into carbon neutral fuels and other things. And I think that’s great news. There’s a lot of work to be done. To make the process more energy efficient itself. Right now the process uses a lot of energy to make energy. But with players like that getting behind it, the progress could be made and great breakthroughs could happen.
So it’s pretty exciting.
Ross Kenyon: One of the things that I see about this is that as oil and gas is no longer able to do their core business practices because of the carbon taxes or just people are no longer willing to participate in fossil fuel economies, that they’re not just going to die, they’re going to fight and evolve. And instead of being a net emitter, they’ll be a net remover of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases.
Aldyen Donnelly: Self-cannibalization. Why do you think Coca-Cola owns Minute Maid orange juice?
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know. Why don’t you spell that one out for us?
Aldyen Donnelly: Market shifts and what you used to think, you make decisions that change your ideas about what your core business is.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and so there’s a new term that we’ve heard about this called atmospheric services.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, so there’s an article in the Houston Chronicle back on January 18th titled Atmospheric Services Industry May Emerge from Oil and Gas. And it was an interview with a man named John Gibson, who’s the chairman of energy technology at Tudor Pickering Holton Company, which is an energy investment bank. And he was basically preaching the Nori message, I thought. I was really excited to read this because I have been super interested in the idea of getting the oil and gas industry on board with investing in direct air capture technology. Because if you think about it...
Like on a grand scale of like dealing with our carbon budget, we globally emit around 50 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent, including all greenhouse gases. And if we were to maximize the absolute carbon reduction. So we’re going to have to rely on industrial methods like direct air capture, like embedding CO2 and construction materials. So If you look around the world, which industry has all of the engineering talent, the access to physical manufacturing infrastructure, and the access to energy, and all of those things of which are needed in order to deploy direct air caps.
So oftentimes when talking about ecological methods of carbon removal, we hear the term ecosystem services thrown around. So these ecosystem services are like the different values. So carbon removal in agricultural soil, that is an ecosystem service. And John Gibson in this article, I think maybe coined the term atmospheric services, which is what the oil and gas industry needs to get into. I’m just really excited to hear people in the oil and gas industry starting to talk about this because that’s the inevitable outcome that I foresee.
Aldyen Donnelly: We should, when I’m congratulating and excited about Occidental Petroleum and Chevron’s decisions, we should probably mention Murray Edwards and Bill Gates, who were the first private sector individuals to put their money into carbon engineering. And Murray Edwards was the founder and is the founder and still CEO of the largest independent oil and gas company in Canada. He’s based in Houston now. So that’s pretty good leadership to be walking around with.
Ross Kenyon: And what exactly is Carbon Engineering doing up there? What’s unique about them? And what’s just the general state of the direct air capture industry?
Paul Gambill: Well, right now, there are a bunch of different startups around the world. Carbon Engineering is in British Columbia. You have Climeworks out of Switzerland, Global Thermostat out of California. And there are others, too, that are pursuing different... So absent something like an incentive from Nori, they’re using the captured CO2. I think carbon engineering’s main focus is on using that captured CO2 to turn into a carbon neutral fuel. So all of these different methods that they’re pursuing right now would eventually release that CO2 back into the atmosphere. But they are building the early stage technology that could eventually be used for long term carbon storage.
And it’s just necessary for them to do this in order to get the business model to work.
Aldyen Donnelly: In most cases, if not all, the big challenge is right now, it takes a lot of energy to make those systems work. So when smart, innovative people with resources at their fingertips focus on scaling it up and reducing the energy intensity, I think there’s promise there.
Ross Kenyon: I do too. We’ll be talking about this more in the future. Direct Air Capture is something that we all care a lot about and think is very fascinating and science fiction and soon to just be science, it appears. So thanks for listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom. Please subscribe. Tell your friends about us. This is our first three episodes and we hope that you like it. Thank you.
