What is Photochemical Carbon Removal?
In this episode of Carbon Removal Newsroom we learn how two professors from the University of Washington went from studying coral on the late Marlon Brando’s private island, to developing an energy efficient process that removes carbon dioxide from the ocean.
Join co-founders Dr. Alex Gagnon and Dr. Julian Sachs of Banyu Carbon, as they dissect their groundbreaking photochemical process. Learn how carbon dioxide is the most abundant dissolved gas in water, making it a more concentrated source than ambient air.
Discover the scalability of photochemical CDR, and why Banyu’s been gaining so much momentum lately. Could Banyu’s process end up being energy negative? In other words, will it produce more energy than is actually required to remove the carbon?
Listen now.
*A special Thank You from our guests to the Seeley Family:
“Thank you to David Seeley and his father who brought Tetiaroa to our attention in 2014 and encouraged us to take advantage of the pristine coral ecosystem there for our research. The Seeley family generously supported our research and that of several others ever since. A kind, fun, and remarkable family we are grateful to have worked with.”
On This Episode
Resources
University of Washington marine research on Tetiaroa
Activate FellowshipOcean Visions Launchpad
Subscribe to Climate Workers Anonymous
My other show, Reversing Climate Change
Books referenced in the podcasts, at Bookshop
Full Transcript
Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom. Believe it or not, we are already into February of 2024 and Seattle has had a string of 60 degree days for the last four days. Insane for us. And last week’s average at Mauna Loa’s carbon dioxide readings were 422. 8 parts per million. The same week in 2023 saw an average reading of 419. 6. So as we always talk about on this show, there isn’t time to lose. And that’s why every month we like to talk to teams building solutions. I’m Radhika Moolgavkar, VP of Supply and Methodology at NORI, and today I’ll be speaking with Banu Carbon, a pioneering carbon removal company based in Seattle, Washington, and spun out from the University of Washington.
Banu uses a novel photochemical CDR process to capture carbon dioxide from seawater. Not only that, Banu is a member of Frontier’s portfolio and was just selected to be a recipient of the DOE voucher program to accelerate market adoption of clean energy technologies. And they come out of my alumni, University of Washington, so I’m extra proud. Joining me today are Banu co-founders, CEO, Dr. Alex Gagnon. Hello, Alex.
Alex Gagnon: Thank you for having us.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Oh, super excited you could join. And CTO, Dr. Julian Sachs.
Julian Sachs: Great to be here with you, Radhika.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Banu Carbon is the first photochemical DAC company we’ve had on the show. Are you the first company to use this technique? And can you tell our listeners how your photochemical process works?
Julian Sachs: Thank you for that question, Radhika. To our knowledge, we’re the first company to be using a photochemical approach to do carbon removal. And certainly the first company to be using these special compounds that we’re working with called photoacids to do carbon dioxide removal. There are some really promising lab-based studies that have been published in the literature recently where people are exploring the use of these similar photoactive molecules to do carbon dioxide removal, but those techniques have been geared toward gas streams like Point source carbon capture or direct air capture. Our process uses this super interesting class of molecules to do carbon removal from natural waters.
And we specifically target natural waters such as seawater or certain rivers because they naturally concentrate carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So a lot of the hard work that direct air capture companies need to do is to unmix The one out of every 2,500 molecules of gas in the atmosphere that is CO2 and overcome a fairly significant entropy penalty. It just takes a lot of work and energy to do that. Whereas in the ocean and in certain river systems and freshwater systems, Carbon dioxide is the most abundant dissolved gas in the water, so it’s almost as though you can use the ocean as your fan farm to sponge up the CO2, and it makes the removal process somewhat easier.
Okay, so how does our process work? We have a compound that when you shine light on it, it changes its structure, okay? It changes its shape. And when it does, it becomes about a thousand times more acidic than when it’s in the dark. And that happens almost instantly. Okay. And you’re saying, okay, we want to remove carbon. What good is it if we have an acid? It turns out that if you want to get the carbon out of water, most of it occurs as forms other than carbon dioxide. So you actually have to temporarily acidify the water in order to convert all of that great dissolved carbon into CO2.
So that it can be removed. And so this is often referred to as a pH swing. We temporarily acidify seawater using these reversible photo acids. It’s important to know that we do this without ever putting our photo acids, this small molecule in the seawater itself. That sounds like magic, but for those chemists in the audience, you’ll know that acid is just charged Positively charged hydrogen atoms. Okay. So we shine light on our solution of photo acid. It produces these positively charged hydrogen atoms called protons. And then we basically soak up those protons almost like in a proton battery.
Okay. And once we fill our proton battery with those protons, then we stop running photo acid solution through it and start running seawater through it. And that does the temporary acidification of the seawater, which causes all the dissolved carbon to be converted to CO2. And then that CO2 is pretty easily removed with industrially available gas separation membranes. Then before we return the seawater to the ocean, it was temporarily acidified by our proton battery. We return the protons that we added to the seawater temporarily. Back to our photo acid solution, do another proton battery, a proton exchanger, and then the seawater goes back out to the ocean unchanged other than having had its carbon dioxide removed.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So I just want to make sure that I understand what I think is a very important selling point for your process, which is it’s relatively low energy. Is that correct? And a lot of the energy you do require is from a renewable source, obviously the sunlight. Am I understanding that?
Julian Sachs: Yeah, it’s one of the things we’re really excited about. One of the challenges to adopting direct air capture or direct carbon removal processes in general is that they generally require a tremendous amount of energy. A lot of that has to do with the fact that in the case of direct air capture, you’re making chemical bonds to remove the carbon dioxide from this large amount of other But then you have to use energy, often in the form of heat, to release that carbon dioxide that you captured. Our process is really energy efficient because it’s using sunlight, okay, to drive the chemical reaction that produces the proton, that produces the acid that causes the carbon to come out of the water.
Yes, there’s energy required for pumping seawater, and there’s Mostly pumping seawater, let’s just say, but we rely on the sun and in essence free photons to drive the chemistry underlying the process. Even the gross energy needs of our process are projected to be quite a bit lower than best in class direct air capture processes. But what’s even more exciting to us is the fact that our photochemical Only requires a very narrow portion of the sunlight spectrum. It absorbs a very small region in the blue part of the rainbow. Okay. The rest of the light passes right through our photo acid solution.
So in our, we’re at the lab, I don’t want to give the impression that we’re doing this on some large industrial scale. We’re at the lab scale right now, but at our lab scale, We’ve demonstrated that you can just put standard sort of hobby shop solar panels, just silicon solar panels underneath our photo reactors that have the photo acid solution running through them. And you can generate a lot of solar electricity by all of the light that’s not needed, all of the sunlight that’s not needed to drive the chemistry. So our projections, our calculations are that You can generate up to 60% of the amount of electricity with solar panels that have our photo reactors on top of them as you could if you had nothing on top of them.
And what this means, getting back to your question is that in net, we project our process to be Energy negative. In other words, it will produce more energy than is actually required to do all of the carbon removal process, including the seawater pumping, the photo acid pumping, the compression of the CO2 that we recover to supercritical. So that’s really exciting.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, that’s a huge step forward for the industry. And so it’s really, I can’t wait to see how you transition from lab to pilot. But Alex, I’m curious because obviously you’re both professors from the University of Washington. What inspired you to focus your time and energy in this photochemical CDR process? And what path brought you to this point?
Alex Gagnon: Yeah, so I can speak confidently here for Julian as well. We are academic researchers. Has been largely focused on paleoclimate, understanding the connections between ocean chemistry, the carbon cycle and climate through the history that’s brought us to this point. And that really puts in perspective how different of a regime we’re entering in climate compared to previous times. It really establishes that baseline and helps us understand the implications that the large amounts of carbon dioxide that are Being put into the atmosphere through industry and land use changes, what those sort of impacts look like and how unprecedented the rate at which we’re injecting carbon dioxide in Earth’s history.
It’s something that we have been studying for a really long time, but I think we are, like many of our students, we are really challenging ourselves to try to do something more about it than just put it into this context, right? This ability to The concept that we came up with and that we’re commercializing is an opportunity to have an impact and make a real contribution instead of just studying climate change. I think that’s the real motivator. Both Julian and I are tenured faculty at the University of Washington. The university has been really supportive of letting us step away from our responsibilities.
We’re largely step away. We’re on leave of absence so that we can focus on bonyo carbon. And I think that’s because the mission of the university really is about having a positive impact on the planet and These sort of commercialization endeavors, like the one that Julian and I are on, I think we see as, and we’ve gotten support from the university this way, as a way to extend that impact. It’s just the way that we’re taking innovation out of the lab and into the world. So we’ve had a lot of support doing that.
This is a sort of an opportunity of a lifetime for us to be able to take What we’ve been working on and studying and try to make a real positive difference for the planet. So that makes it just exciting to be working on this opportunity every day. The path that we got here, like most things, is not direct, right? I’m really lucky Julian and I have been collaborating together for 10 years. We work on a really neat study site in the South Pacific. There’s an island called Tetiaroa. That is a small island just north of Tahiti where Julian and I have been working on Understanding the impacts of ocean acidification on coral reefs at this site.
And as part of that work, we were simulating, we were taking a small patch of reef and trying to simulate what conditions, what chemical, the chemical conditions of at the end of the century, if we continue to emit at the rates that we have, what impact that would have on a patch of reef. And so we were doing, we’re tending to starting to move into more engineering work than just science because we were trying to figure out ways to move larger. And that really started framing this problem of what’s it take to move carbon dioxide in and out of seawater?
And if we could do it, could we turn this in another way and actually develop a carbon removal? And so that really framed the question for us. And we were like, this pH swing thing could really, you know, that’s the problem that needs to be solved. And that led us to looking around and saying, well, what’s the most efficient? This is the big energy use. What’s the most efficient way you could do this pH swing? Other people who have really moved forward and really moving the marine carbon dioxide community forward, like Captura and EbCarbon are solving some of these things using electrochemical techniques, but we want to see if there’s something that we could do different that could add a totally new sort of approach.
And that’s how we, researching that is how we came across photo acids. So you can say that the spark for this idea grew in working together in this amazing tropical location surrounded by pristine reefs and all the experiences of the South Pacific. And that really was where the spark of some of this innovation came from. It’s a funny story about how we came to be working together. I don’t know, maybe Julian, you want to kick, start sharing a little bit about how that research in Tetaroa even came about?
Julian Sachs: Yeah, sure. Tetaroa is, it’s a privately owned island. It was Marlon Brando’s private island. Marlon Brando, of course, would be a well-known movie star to those that are probably our generation, my generation, at least. He was in the godfather. Anyway, Marlon Morano, a movie star, shot a film down in French Polynesia, fell in love with it, bought this private island. And when he died, he wanted his, in the early 2000s, he wanted his island to be used in part for scientific research. He also said that an eco-resort could be developed.
So a very high-end eco-resort, we’re talking $5,000, $10,000 a night type of eco-resort, has been built down there. And it’s wonderful. But also this small research station was built and the folks that were involved with Marlon Brando’s estate and also the building of this eco resort and the research station had connections to University of Washington. They’re a wonderful local family. Somehow they got in touch with me, asked me if I had any interest in potentially doing research down there. They were building this thing out. And who’s going to pass that down?
Private Island, just north of Tahiti, Marlon Brando, movie stars. And I knew that in order to do the best science, I needed to bring on someone like Alex, who’s just a brilliant aquatic chemist and chemical oceanographer. And yeah, so that’s the backstory.
Alex Gagnon: Yeah, I got this call from Julian. I was doing some work, probably my first year of faculty position here. You got totally overwhelmed as I’m sure most junior faculty are. And I’m in Eastern Washington working on some of the real incredible instrumentation they have at the Department of Energy Lab at PNNL. And I get this call from Julian and it’s, hey, Alex, I wonder, do you want to work on this private island together, this tropical paradise, and do really cool research together? And dropped the instruments I was working on and just tried to hit you.
We hammered out a page little proposal and it was sort of history from there. One of the things that’s really neat about that location is that because it’s an eco-resort and it’s really its claim to fame or one of its advantages is it’s a pretty private place. And so it brings a lot of policymakers, people who are really influential and When we have scientists there, we sponsored one of our former undergraduates to be a scientist in residence there for almost a year. When these sort of movers and shakers come through, we can show them the reef and tell them about the impacts of climate change on the reef and show them the science that’s going on in the science at the University of Washington and others are doing there.
So we’ve had the chance to, when Barack Obama was writing his memoirs, he was there and was really generous to give about an hour of his time to our research project and some other projects that were going on there and be able to share that. Leonardo DiCaprio went snorkeling with our student out there and she showed him.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Okay. When’s my invitation coming, guys?
Alex Gagnon: I think you were definitely famous enough to sort of... I recognize that’s a little bit adjacent and a bit of a backstory from what we’re trying to do with carbon removal, but really the sort of energy to work on this, the inspiration was really forged in this special place that was a real special convergence of a lot of things that bring together the University of Washington story community together. It’s a really incredible family. That really wanted to bring University of Washington researchers to a special place to make a difference for the planet.
Facilitated bringing us together, facilitated a bunch of science and research that happened there. And we’re incredibly thankful for that and have been trying to embrace that momentum with what we’re doing at PON.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, that’s a great backstory. And you will always be remembered because you’re always going to be associated with Marlon Brando. So it’s wonderful. And of course, warms my heart. As I already said, University of Washington alumni. I love to hear about all the oceanography stuff that university is doing because I think it’s amazing and way undervalued across the country. But let’s talk about momentum because you guys, holy cow, have had some momentum in the last six months. Just, I think, was it last week you were selected for the DOE voucher program, or at least it was announced.
The DOE voucher program highlights market adoption hurdles that Let me tell you that I know a lot about market adoption hurdles from the marketplace perspective, but I want to know what specific barriers are you facing in bringing your technology to market, and how will the voucher program help address them? And as just a small little add-on to that, as academics transitioning to private markets, how do you think about it?
Alex Gagnon: Yeah, so the DOE program specifically is really helping us overcome something really important and specific. They helped us specifically pair with a third-party verification firm. So an engineering firm that can validate the performance of our planned field pilots. This is in-kind support that the DOE provides and helps also be the matchmaker, pair companies with new technologies like ours with these established people in the field who can supply a really needed service. So this is a chemical engineering firm. That’s sort of helping us set up the standardized measurement methodologies. They’re going to collect some independent validation data to make sure that what we’re measuring makes sense and then help analyze and summarize performance.
And there’s a lot of credibility that comes with having this. This sort of third-party auditing of our performance. And I think it’s really crucial having these other parties. As academic scientists, could we nerd out and really get excited about how we would do these measurements? Absolutely. And are we doing some of these measurements ourselves? But having someone that’s just really... So that’s really important. DOE should be credited for both seeing this opportunity to be this matchmaker and make these things happen, but they’re also moving really quickly in this program. The time between submission and went through a review process and selection, but then it was relatively quick.
As federal programs go, but especially the times go with which they’re pushing out the milestones and saying, we’ve got to get these matches made, got to get the MOUs signed and the agreements put together. They’re really trying to deploy resources to accelerate the industry. And I think they’re really forward thinking and doing a great job in execution in that way.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I’m curious if either of you know how they found experts to do something like this In an area that doesn’t usually have experts. It’s an area I struggle in finding good verifiers and auditors. So do you have a sense of how the DOE selected the other side? I know you’re the CDR side, but how do they look for the auditors?
Alex Gagnon: What was really good that we had this matchmaker because I think we had the same question. We were like, who is the best third party to work with these? Who has the background? And the bandwidth as entrepreneurs, we’re trying to hire. We’re trying to find the best talent. We’re trying to make all these partnerships. We’re trying to make all these connections. And so anyone who has some expertise that can take a little bit off our plate is really welcome. So I don’t have a whole lot of insight into how they picked the partner, but we think that our interactions today, it’s a really good fit.
And what the partner suggested and where they have experience before is there’s some standard methodologies and certifications for new environmental technology, which are by design more general, right? As a field develops, there’s more. And boy, I’m sure you could write many books on this. You guys think about this day in, day out or whatever. But my basic understanding is that as a field develops, that you can refine the methodologies and it comes to consensus and how you do things and how you measure things. But this firm has particular experience in applying sort of measurement and validation of new technologies.
And so there’s a set of guidelines, ISO guidelines, I believe that sort of supposed to encompass a sort of framework, a logical framework of how do you deal with less well-defined questions, but nonetheless document and really show a clear logical chain for how you’re analyzing at least what the basis of your decisions are and what’s the data that’s underlying those.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Julian, obviously, first step in going commercial is getting out of the lab, validating kind of what Alex was just talking about. What other things are you thinking about on helping your cost efficiency and making your technology commercially viable and competitive?
Julian Sachs: Yeah, great question. As we told you, we are at the lab bench scale. So when we say that we will typically, we might remove milligrams of carbon a day right now and plan to be at kilograms by summer. And then by the end of 2026, at least a tonne, tonnes. Okay. Because our process is really simple. Like if you were to look at a sort of a flow diagram, Or a piping diagram or just a system diagram of our process compared to many of the other carbon removal processes you’re familiar with.
It is really simple. There are a relatively small number of components to our system. We need to make a photo acid. We’ve got a photo acid that works. We need to make improvements to it. Have certain performance characteristics that we’d like to improve upon. And then we’d like to make sure that we can produce the stuff in the quantities needed for a price that makes sense. So that’s one thing. We need to develop our sunlight collection system so that it can be scalable. One of the great things about collecting Sunlight for an industrial process is the world is now really good at doing that.
Solar electricity is down to however many cents per kilowatt hour. Panels are cheap and widely available. The racks to put these things on are cheap and widely available. So one of our modalities is basically Use existing utility scale solar infrastructure and just strap on our photo reactor, which is like a clear centimeter thick box above it. Is that the way to go? We’ve got engineering challenges and milestones in terms of coming up with what is the best way to collect our photons from the sun and also generate solar electricity. And then there’s issues on the back end.
We’re going to remove the carbon dioxide from the water using these commercially available Gas separators, but there’s a wide variety of these things, and we have a couple different types that work in the lab, figuring out what are going to be the most efficient, most durable, and most cost-effective ways of doing that once we’re at scale, another issue that we’re going to be dealing with in the coming months. I hope that gives you some sort of flavor of the types of questions and issues we’re looking at when we think about scaling this up.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, you sound like many, which may be a relief or not a relief, but like many CDR companies, you’re going to be dealing with supply chain issues and Location issues and figuring out some really big engineering and technical questions as you grow from pilot stage to multi-tonne stage. It seems like you’re right on track, so that’s all good news. So looking ahead, obviously you guys have had some really great news in 2023, early 2024. We didn’t even mention your selection by Frontier, but what are your biggest hopes and aspirations for Banyu Carbon in the next few years?
What do you imagine happening in, let’s say, 2030?
Alex Gagnon: Yeah, so it has been a really good last year plus. And I think that it’s nice to take a moment to reflect on this because we’re just so focused on forward momentum. But you’re right, you mentioned the Frontier pre-purchase was a really nice external validation and the first customer. I think when I think about And so our last bit of conversation was both sort of the technical challenges. And you had initially asked a little bit about what it means to be an entrepreneur and transitioning from an academic to try to grow into these roles.
And that’s a part of the growth of the company as well, too, as Julian and I stepping into this role. And I think one thing that really As we try to challenge ourselves to grow as quickly as the company is growing was the Activate Fellowship. So both Julian and I, I feel really honored and lucky to have been selected as Activate Fellows. Last summer was the start of the program. That’s the two-year program that’s designed to take people who are trained as scientists like us, but also recent PhDs or postdocs and help them develop hard tech.
So climate tech or defense related or materials related. Innovations and bring them to market and the programming and especially the cohort is help us focus on the right challenges, help us recognize that we’re not the only ones that are going through some of these things and really get the community is really helpful for sort of lessons learned in connections and network. And so that’s been really good. And I think that a lot of the things that we’ve drawn as we are developing our company is the network of experts. How do we bring advice in to sort of overcome these challenges?
And I’ll note that we, this was just on yesterday, I think this was announced. We share with the world that we had been selected as from Ocean Visions as one the new Launchpad cohorts. So happy to share that too. So it’s been a dizzying We have had a lot of technical advancements. We grew a lot of staff over the last year. We have this incredible team now. We’re getting a lot of traction. It’s really exciting. We enjoy these moments because there will be ups and downs, but now looking forward, how do you keep going with this?
What is that vision that we’re looking for? We have, as Julian mentioned, plans to deploy a field pilot by end of 2024. That’s our plans. We’re currently planning to do that in the San Juan Islands, keeping up the theme of working in amazing places, amazing and inspirational places. And that’s designed to hopefully help us test, to the extent that we can bring everything together, the key components that would be used in a commercial scale deployment. And then the hopes are with the lessons that we learned there. I’m sure that we’ll learn some things and some modifications, but that’s hopefully close enough to a basic module that you could stamp those out to make a first commercial demonstration.
And then that first commercial demonstration will help us achieve our commitment for Frontier, which is 360 tonnes by the end of 2026. These milestones are pretty ambitious, right? We’re going to work really hard to push there. And I think that’s the goal of Frontier. It was to really accelerate the technology, and we’re embracing that. But then as you look really forward, there is a lot of seawater pumping capacity globally and in the United States. And so if you just think a lot of our energetics we imagine building We’re building facilities that pump their own seawater and that are standalone units.
But in the beginning, we can take advantage of the fact, we hope to take advantage of the fact that there’s a lot of facilities that are pumping lots of seawater. So one’s two cool power plants that we hope that we can partner with and that will help us deploy rapidly because they’re already using a bunch of seawater. We can take what’s effectively their waste and turn it into a source of carbon dioxide, a new revenue stream for both of us. There’s a few hundred thousand tonnes per year capacity in our sort of initial estimates of once through cooled power plants that are illuminated with good sunlight in the US.
If you look just at the large end of seawater pumping facilities in the world, like the Javel plant in Saudi Arabia, there’s a few at this size. They pump enough seawater that we think with our process that if all that seawater was used for our process and we have the efficiencies that we think that we could achieve, that would allow an individual unit like that to remove 500,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. And so if you’re saying the pumping of seawater at scale is old tech, when there are facilities like this, then it’s not too hard to imagine 2,000 plants like that around the world.
Now you’re at a billion tonnes per year. And so we think that there’s a lot between here and there. I don’t want to sort of deliver all the technical challenges and commercialization challenges and all the things that we’re engaged with. But you can see how there might be a path to getting towards the scale that we need to be climatically relevant. And bond-new carbon is not likely to be the only solution. We’re really hopeful. You guys are really think about the breadth of solutions. Out there at Nori, you think about this, and we think that there needs to be as many different approaches, shots on goal as possible.
We need all the ingenuity that we can to solve this problem. We think there’s a space for bonducarbon that if we continue to be successful, if we hit our goals, that we could really help and contribute towards removing carbon dioxide at the scale that’s necessary to keep the planet temperature below dangerous levels.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more, Alex. We need all the shots on goal. We don’t know what’s going to succeed, but certainly what you’re doing sounds very promising and really looking forward to watching you grow. So my final question for you all, and this is for both of you, what piece of advice would you have to young scientists interested in CDR, entrepreneurship, And how should they think about their research efforts? I find this area of CDR the most interesting, the juxtaposition of science and business and what that looks like and how people transition and think about it.
So open to both of you.
Alex Gagnon: I think that taking the lessons that we’ve learned in science and trying to commercialize them and bring them out to the world. Is exhilarating, empowering. It’s a great way to try to have an impact. And so I think that can be an inspirational message that there are pathways that you can take what you learned in your foundational education a university like the University of Washington or elsewhere and apply that to solve problems in the real world can be that perfect antidote that we need to The kind of at times overwhelming news about climate change.
At the top of the episode, you started with sharing the update on atmospheric concentration of CO2. And I can remember when I entered the sort of the climate change field as an undergraduate researcher, we were at about 350 ppm. You can use that to exactly figure out what age I am. But 350 ppm to where we are, that’s just a unprecedented rate of increasing atmospheric CO2 and it can be overwhelming and I think I find this as a teacher, as faculty that I worry that by sharing all the important to digest and important to know changes that the planet’s going through or could go through can be overwhelming and we can make a generation of nihilists of people who are so overwhelmed by The dire predictions of climate change that people give up.
And I guess it’s a long-winded way of saying you can have an impact. Climate change is a place that is not just a great challenge, but it’s a challenge that you can use the tools that you’re learning or learn new tools to try to make a difference. And I think Julian and I just feel really lucky to be able to be working on a problem like this that can have such a potential positive impact.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Julian, anything else you want to add?
Julian Sachs: I love what Alex said, a piece of advice to young scientists interested in carbon dioxide removal. I think it’s really important for folks to realize this is a wide open field. Alex mentioned earlier that we need a lot of shots on goal. Nobody knows how we’re going to tackle this problem affordably and effectively. If you want to think just economics, the market opportunity is massive. If you want to think about planetary importance, the potential Climate consequences of not doing things about carbon dioxide levels is massive, but we have no solution that is a slam dunk.
Clever people, scientists, or for that matter, even folks in business, take your ideas that you’ve written down on the back of a napkin, discuss them with your friends and faculty advisors. Start companies, reach out to the likes of us and the other CDR startups out there. There is no really established CDR company. The largest one is doing 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide removal a year. I believe that’s a thousand automobiles or something like that. We’ve barely scratched the surface. The point is lots of room for new creative ideas. It’s rapidly growing and the money is flowing in to support these efforts.
So Please join us, start something yourself, and let’s help solve this problem together.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Thank you both for joining. I am super excited both for the tech and for the growth that it’s going to bring locally in Seattle to the CDR industry and just your vision, which is amazing. I look forward to watching Banu become a huge success.
Alex Gagnon: Thank you so much for having us on for the conversation and for all the work you’re doing to share these stories.
Julian Sachs: Yes, thank you, Radhika. We’re just thrilled to have the opportunity to be on the Carbon Removal Newsroom podcast. It’s one of our favorites.
Radhika Moolgavkar: We’ll have you on again at some point.
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