Robert Höglund refers to himself as a "chronicler of CDR" or Carbon Dioxide Removal. He has established himself as an authority in this area, providing enlightening insights through his popular blog, Marginal Carbon. His significant contributions to Milywire, a CDR fund, coupled with his extensive involvement in various roles as a Climate Advisor, have further solidified his status as a thought leader.
Recently, Robert attended Carbon Unbound, the world's first conference solely focused on carbon removal businesses. His reflections from this groundbreaking event, which he shared under the intriguing title "Cautiously Optimistic Removers," shed light on the current state and future direction of the CDR sector.
Radhika and Robert delve into his eight key insights from the event, uncovering the crucial issues facing the CDR sector - from the challenges of scale and certification standards to the essential role of public engagement.
This episode is an inside look at the pressing issues of carbon removal and their significance in our increasingly carbon-conscious world. Why, despite the hurdles, is Robert’s mood was one of cautious optimism? Tune in to find out.
On This Episode
Radhika Moolgavkar
Resources
Robert’s Blog Post about the conference
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: Hello and welcome to the May 30th edition of Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m really excited today to have Robert Hoagland, a self-described chronicler of CDR. Beyond that, he has become a thought leader through his insightful and widely shared blog, Marginal Carbon, his work with the CDR Fund Milky Wire, and many other roles as a climate advisor. We’re going to start off with a conference that Robert and I recently attended, Carbon Unbound in New York City, where he walked away with some really interesting observations that he shared through his Substack. One of the takeaways from he brought was the current CDR landscape and its future trajectory.
While his post outlined many challenges, the title Cautiously Optimistic Removers gives an idea of the upbeat attitude shared by many attendees. The CDR sector faces significant challenges, particularly concerning scaling up to meet the demands of an increasingly carbon conscious world. Robert’s thoughts, reflections offer insight into the sectors pressing concerns from certification standards and scaling hurdles to the crucial role of public engagement. Today, we’ll dive into his eight observations from the conference and also ask him about a few other things that have popped up in the last few days that I think anyone who listens to Carbon Removal Newsroom is probably familiar with.
But let’s start by talking about cautiously optimistic remover. So thanks, Robert, for joining. We’re super happy to have you.
Robert Höglund: Great to be here. Really excited.
Radhika Moolgavkar: First off, tell us like what your experience was at Carbon Unbound. How did you enjoy it?
Robert Höglund: It was wonderful to be there and this ecosystem haven’t met that much and especially since it’s spread across the world. So there was a lot of people I’ve never seen in real life before. So I was very excited to be there and meet everyone. And I think it really had a wonderful vibe and everyone feels like great people that are there for the right reasons. It doesn’t feel like... And, you know, it’s a business that attracts people who are just in it for the money or have kind of other motives.
So it’s really people who want to get together and build this new sector basically from the ground up so that can play this pivotal role in helping to reach global climate targets.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So, you know, one thing that I found interesting and you highlighted in your post was the widely shared concerns about the lack of demand for carbon removal. And I think At Nori, at least, we’ve always considered supply to be the place that where we’ll be constrained, not demand. So what can you tell us about that? And why do you think that is the current situation?
Robert Höglund: Yes. So the number one question. Issue, I think, is actually the lack of demand. So the supply demand thing is a little bit confused because it depends on how you look at it. So if you look at tonnes that already have been removed and are in the ground, yes, there are. That’s a supply constraint, actually. But it’s a chicken and egg situation where you really need to have that sort of demand lined up before the tonnes are in the ground. And that demand is not sufficiently there, although we’ll talk about some of the new developments.
What we’ve been seeing, I also helped run this CDR FYI, where it tracks all the transactions in this durable carbon mobile space, is that the number of buyers that go out and make meaningful purchases is quite small. So in 2022, there was only 16 corporates that bought more than a thousand tonnes, for example. And that number is growing, but not as fast as we’d like to. And also the number of tonnes purchased by most of them is still quite small. And we talked about the Milky Wire Fund, but we had a call for proposals with 117 CDR companies sent in an application and the overall quality was really high.
But one thing that really stood out was that 70% of those haven’t made any sales. And those that did make sales have quite small sales. So many companies have access to a bit of funding, maybe some seed funding, et cetera, and sort of can be operational.
Radhika Moolgavkar: But if they’re going to build their first plants and especially Yeah, I mean, we’ll talk about it more in detail, but it is an interesting chicken and egg because there’s the risk of buying something That you don’t know that it’s going to be delivered, and how do you, one, account for it, two, how do you pay for it on the demand side? And people are impatient too, I think, is another thing, right? They want results today, and waiting 10 years can be problematic. But we’ll dive into that a little bit more when we talk about some of the developments that have happened in the last week.
The other thing that actually I found interesting, and I think there was a little bit of a debate around this at the conference, was the rushing to certify carbon removal. I think at least from what I heard, like there are some people who very much want to get started on certification, but then there are others who are arguing for not certifying. So one, if you could explain to our listeners some of the nuances around that, and two, tell us why you don’t think we should rush or the industry shouldn’t rush to certify carbon removal.
Robert Höglund: There are a lot of nuances to this topic where the methods used in carbon removal are so different and have different sort of scientific levels of understanding of how they work. So if you do direct that capture and store it geologically underground, there’s not too much unknown about that. There are unknowns, there’s how to do it cheaply, basically, but that you capture carbon and store it underground is... It’s not that difficult to measure. So creating a standard and certification for that is not at all difficult and we can move ahead with it.
But for some other carbon removal methods, such as enhanced rock weathering and also regenerative agriculture for soil removal, where the science is still kind of Not that developed on exactly how this works, how much carbon is stored, how quickly. And we need to develop more knowledge about exactly how to measure this and to account for this. And in some cases, we’re not 100% sure it will work at all. So unless you do know that for sure, you can’t certify a tonne. It’s going to create immense harm if... A few years down the line, companies have been buying lots of tonnes that have been certified.
This is a real tonne. It has the certification stamp. And then it turns out, whoops, the new scientific development here showed that actually we only got 10% of the volume that was certified or maybe even zero in some cases. And we have to avoid that. So I think... We can still get started and we can do enhanced rock weathering, we can do things like where we don’t have full knowledge, also ocean, but they should be kind of more done with The nuance communicated that we’re not completely sure how this works.
We’re not completely sure how many tonnes this would remove. We estimate that maybe this is the amount of tonnes that will be removed. But you can’t certify that in my world. Maybe for other people, certifying means something else. But I think that in the general public’s eye, it would mean that we’re sure about it. So you could say that we’re following best practice and we think that this is likely to remove this much. But once it’s certified and you start using it maybe to fulfill commitments, you really have to have a high level of scientific proof.
So yeah, I know some people, that makes me unpopular with some people, but that’s okay. I think they also would agree on the need for keeping the public trust. So we really need to have to be tread careful here.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I mean, I think that also plays into one, the demand question, right? If you don’t know What you’re buying, or what it’s worth, or how it applies to you, it makes it even harder. So from what I think you said, basically, at this point, the only place where you may feel comfortable with certification is a closed system like DAC, where it’s pretty clear.
Robert Höglund: I wouldn’t go that far to say that it’s only, but there are more uncertainties with enhanced rock weathering and ocean, et cetera. By Char, I think there’s some uncertainties, but The level of knowledge is larger. The number of sort of meta studies from like field studies, etc. And it has advanced a bit longer. So like you might be able to feel more secure about what that one, for example, and say that. 80% will remain after 100 years or something like that. Although there’s still questions left to answer, but you pass a point where you could say that now we feel recently sure that we have the scientific evidence to be sure that it’s at least this much that is removed.
And then you can certify that bit.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So much still to understand. Yeah. Another point you made, because we’ve got to keep moving because we have lots to talk about, is money isn’t the only thing we need to scale CDR. And I think you’ve kind of touched on this, but what are other bottlenecks or things that you think are currently hindering CDR growth?
Robert Höglund: And this was also brought up in the conference. I think Agent Corliss by Carbon Capture, he mentioned it, that It takes a long time just to order components, for example. So it can take several years to get the things that you need to build your DAC machines. So things like that and access to skilled people when we scale up could become a bottleneck, although it’s probably not the biggest bottleneck right now. And then, of course, I think the biggest issue for the whole grand green transition in sort of the developed world Is permitting and how extremely difficult it is to do that in a past way.
And I think the US example with the Inflation Reduction Act really shows how difficult it is now where you need to build a huge amount of transmission lines in addition to the new energy projects and how extremely difficult that is because it goes across state lines. And I think the last transmission line that was in the news, like a couple of weeks ago, what was it? It was like 15 years or something more that it took to get it in place. So for the whole green transition, we need a kind of permitting reform.
And that shows that, yeah, it will take time to, even if you have a lot of money, you might get stuck. And there’s so many renewable energy products that just are waiting, right? Like the capacity of all those products that filed applications in the US and Europe is like so massive. And it’s not the capital that stops them.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I think what goes in hand in hand with the permitting is also the community outreach, which I don’t think has been very well solved either. And so, and the one thing is like a permanent is only enough. I mean, it’s a baseline, but it’s not enough on like the community outreach piece. And I think that’s another area where the carbon removal community has to get better and build an ecosystem to support different startups.
Robert Höglund: For sure. Yeah.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. So moving on, tell us a little bit about the different policy designs that we heard kind of mentioned at Carbon Unbound and what your thoughts are on the implications of the various suggestions.
Robert Höglund: State support, right? I think there’s still a lot of uncertainty how state support should be designed in the best way to sort of interact with the private markets. And my thoughts on this are not fully developed. I want to write something about it, but you could at least observe that If the state support is designed in some ways, it might kill the additionality, for example, of buying also from the private market. If you know that the state will pay for it anyway, for example, and just use your dollars from buying from a product to...
And to lessen the cost from the state’s budget, as in some proposals have shown, then why would you buy from that project? The state is going to pay for it anyway. And then there’s some foreign issues around the accounting of tonnes. Most countries plan to also account for carbon removal tonnes within their own targets, so their own obligations to remove carbon. And that can have... A little bit different implications also depending on how that sort of state support is structured. And we see some different alternatives here, like US 45Q is a tax credit with also direct payment.
It doesn’t have a cap either in dollars or in tonnes. So I would say it’s highly additional. You just get more car removal when you buy from products that use it. Then you have procurement. Sweden is going to procure Bextons, for example, and that’s what Denmark did as well right now, where there’s partial payment and Sweden might be full payment. We’re not completely sure, but then sort of how that is shared with the voluntary markets. Now, the Danish example, it’s Microsoft going in and buying, being the other big buyer aside from the Danish states, but all of it is counted toward Denmark’s target.
So I really need to dig my teeth into this and talk to others as well, to lay out all the different implications of various types of policy support, but we can at least observe some of the potential difficulties and for any questions.
Radhika Moolgavkar: One thing you said that I thought was really interesting is that, and I’m paraphrasing, but I hope I get it right, like you think the voluntary carbon markets play a role in sort of the zero to 10 part, and then the government plays a role in the 10 to infinity part. So can you, for the listeners who didn’t get to hear you say that, can you kind of explain to them what you’re thinking is around that?
Robert Höglund: The private market is quite fast and can support new efforts and get things that are quite small also started. Just a purchase of like $200,000 can mean the world for a new carbon market. And often state support is not designed to do this kind of smaller early stage support to companies. R&D support to national labs and universities, et cetera, which helps a lot. But this stage where companies are going, just getting formed and trying out new solutions, I have seen at least sort of from the empirical evidence that we have now is that the private market is better at helping those than the state is.
And that really widens the playing field. I think we’ll still get car removal. Even if there’s no private buyers, but it’s going to be kind of a monoculture or the risk it’s kind of more a monoculture and it’s not this beautiful meadow with lots of different flowers. So we can really, the private market can really help to get this wide range of solutions tested out and then also de-risked. Maybe you get it to certification or you get it to, you know, you try it in the real world and once something is de-risked and you can see that, well, we removed 10,000 tonnes here with this new solution, then it might be illegible for state support as well.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So the final thing or topic I wanted to talk about related to carbon unbound, related to permitting, you know, is that the whole storage of captured CO2 is a significant challenge. I mean, for new market entrants for anybody, right, getting the classy six permits. And then in the U. S. you have lots of people who don’t want it in their backyard. So how do you think about strategies to address these issues? And is this more of a U. S. issue or are you seeing it more worldwide as different types of companies come online across the world?
Robert Höglund: Yeah, it’s hard to get a good understanding of sort of how the negotiations for space in classic swells look like. So I don’t have any particular insights on that. But from what I’ve heard, it might become difficult for small players. They just want to store a few thousand tonnes, for example. The DAC hubs will likely help, but it’s a few years in the future. So I do see kind of a short term to midterm, like what are you going to do with your 5,000 tonnes in 2025? That might become an issue.
We have concrete, so some of the early players are putting it into carbon cure or something like that, which might work, but it might add cost as well. So something that might not be suitable for everyone. There’s no simple solution, but is there a way to ensure that small players get a share of these classics wells? Is there some kind of collaboration in the US and in the EU? It’s not called classics, but we still have similar things. Is there some way where A portion of this can be set out to get these kind of small players.
And then we have Carbfix and 4401, which are more innovators in this space. And I think they are more well suited to work with small players. And we do see this. Carbfix has an announcement yesterday that they have a new collaboration with a Norwegian DAQ company. I’m going to start that up as well. So that could also be an option.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Okay, well, we’re gonna turn now to CDR headlines for the month, really for the last week. But we touched on this a little bit, but I wanted to come back to it because I think it’s so important that we earlier this month had planetary technologies on our show. I don’t know if you saw their presentation at Carbon Unbound, but they kind of talked about the difficulties of attempting a deployment A small deployment to a test case and, you know, the public response they face. So from your perspective, what do you think companies need to do to win public trust and how do we as an ecosystem within CDR help build out the resources that these companies need?
Robert Höglund: It’s a very telling example. I was quite shocked to hear about all the resistance they got from this test. But yeah, it is something that we can see with other technologies as well. This is definitely not my expertise, how to engage with communities in the best way. It’s just something that we can observe that really needs to be done at an early stage and kind of come in and before everything is set down and Not saying that this is going to start next week or something like that, but being early and listening to people and sort of avoiding this kind of This kind of ways where it becomes like the company against the community, et cetera.
I think there are experts that have various ways to where you can do community engagement in a smart way where people really feel like they’re listened to and their concerns are taken into account without it becoming kind of a town hall screaming at a company representative, for example. But yeah, I would like to learn more also about what type of practical strategies actually work to do it. I mean, we can more observe That is really needed so you don’t get into a situation where you have a big crowd of protesters that want to stop your projects because that’s nothing anyone wants.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I think this is a place where the CDR industry might need to learn from other groups who have faced opposition to what they’re doing, right? And one thing I’ve said many times is like, The government approval is like the base. It’s the floor. It’s not the ceiling. And you can’t stand behind that and expect the community to accept it, especially something as scary as putting something in your ocean, I guess. You know, I think that emotional attachment. So it takes a lot. It’s like this weird to me, this weird dichotomy where it takes a really long time to get the community’s trust, but we want to do it so fast.
And I don’t know if anyone has figured out how to marry those two.
Robert Höglund: Yeah, we can see it, but almost any industrial development, right? It is quite tricky.
Radhika Moolgavkar: It’s very tricky, yeah. But I want to move on to actually some good news, which is your organization, Milky Wire, recently supported eight CDR organizations. You mentioned that you had a whole bunch more apply. Yeah. With funding from 10 companies, including Spotify and Klarna. So can you give us a little insight into how you selected the companies and the announcement and all that?
Robert Höglund: Certainly. So this is the third round, basically, a part time we’re selecting products for this Climate Transformation Fund, which also includes products within restoration and protecting of nature, as well as decarbonization, where we support advocacy and policy. But the CDR part is what we talked about now and the eight organizations are CDR organizations. And our strategy there is to be as catalytic as possible to really try to help widen this playing field. I mean, in a similar way that... Stripe and then Shopify and Frontier’s early pre-purchases have been done as well, where we look at what is the long-term potential of this solution, sort of not at the price today, but the cost at the end of the line and the resource use and sort of the novelty of the solution.
At the technical readiness level and sort of how large is the chance that this potential will actually be fulfilled? And then also at the effect of our support. So is this a well-supported actor already? Do they have all the money they need to test it out? Or could our support be especially catalytic here? And that’s something we put a lot of weight on. So the organizations supported our early stage, in most cases, carbon removal solutions. And we are trying to represent a range of solutions also, not just one type of method.
And yeah, it’s both Bioshar and direct air capture and ocean capture and enhanced rock weathering and bikers as well.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And how much are you funding for each of these companies approximately? Like what’s the range?
Robert Höglund: Yeah, the funding that each would get through the contract is in total like a couple of hundred thousand, a little bit more. So in those kind of smaller ranges, but it does mean a lot for, especially when you’re the first purchaser to get your first few hundred or if you first few thousand tonnes into the ground.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And my last question about this, just because I’m curious to see or how it differentiates from Frontier and Stripe or similar, do you look for them to hit certain milestones to release the money or how are you thinking about just the risk around delivery of the carbon removal credits and how do you manage that?
Robert Höglund: So these are pre-purchases where it is money paid upfront and it’s not off-take agreements. Of course, the contracts try to put as much details as possible in it, but in some cases it might be that you need to reach some kind of threshold before the money is paid out, but normally it’s kind of a pre-purchase where we’ve done a lot of vetting of the company and also their financial situation right now. Is their big this? Is it going to default very soon or something like that? So we do our due diligence, but we also recognize that, of course, there are some risks here, like you might not get everything you paid for.
And if you support 10 organizations and you think it’s like 90% chance that they are delivered, then one will default by kind of expectation. So we don’t think any of these will, but... If someone does, that’s a risk that we know of. But if you’re going to support new solutions and if you’re going to get completely new companies off the ground, then you have to take risk. And it’s similar to VC investing. But I think we don’t expect 90% to fail like a VC would. It’s sort of turned around. But still, you need to be open about that.
And I think Frontier has been as well. I think Ransov also said that we don’t expect all of these to deliver, and that’s okay. But it’s also different between different methodologies. Methods. I mean, the very early ones where there’s higher technological risk and might be a very small company is different from kind of a little bit more established company working with already known solutions. So it definitely differs a lot. And it’s something you need to take into account when designing a portfolio as well.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it is what it is, right? Risk comes with this territory right now.
Robert Höglund: So, but ultimately, But also reward, right? So if you’re the first buyer of a new solution that is going to lower costs of car removal a lot and you get that started, the effect you get of that, the catalytic effect you had as a funder is huge as well. So if you avoid risk at all costs, then you lose a lot of impact for sure.
Radhika Moolgavkar: For sure. I think anyone in this business has to be okay with that. So there are also a whole slew of announcements about buyers, which is interesting after going to that convention just two weeks ago, but $200 million from JPMorgan to Kleinworks, Charm and the Frontier Fund, and then Microsoft’s Bex purchase. And I think there are more coming. I mean, what do you make of all of these announcements? And how does that play into sort of the feeling that you saw when you were reviewing applications that so many companies are not having buyers?
Like, how does that work out in your mind?
Robert Höglund: No, it’s very encouraging. And that’s just in two weeks since Carbon Unbound. So it’s been a crazy period in the CDR world. The Airbus purchase of 400,000 tonnes was by far the biggest. And now it’s been like fairly broken. That’s great. The actors that are buying now, they have been active before, like JP Morgan have been buying some tonnes and Microsoft, of course, for several years. So they’re not like new buyers. So still the ones that have gotten a bit more experience that dares to do this kind of larger purchases.
And so that’s one observation. But of course, that... That there are companies willing to put serious amounts of money and not just kind of small testing budgets or something like that, but actually real business affecting maybe. Although these are huge companies with a very, very large amount of profit. So they are the ones that can pay. But it’s also interesting to note that... The companies in Frontier, Microsoft and JP Morgan are all these kind of high profit per tonne companies. We did an analysis last year looking at sort of the ability to pay with carbon gap and seeing that There are different types of companies depending on the carbon intensity and also the profit per tonne.
Banks, insurance companies, software companies, tech companies often have like $10,000, $100,000 in some cases in profit per tonne that they emit. And then buying carbon removal at a cost of a few hundred pounds, a few hundred dollars per tonne. It’s feasible. So it is great to see this group start taking that role. But we need a lot more of them to do it. And especially if we want to have this kind of wide playing field of many different organizations, many different solutions.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I think that was my favorite tidbit from the conference, the per emission calculation you talked about, because it really does bring home how limiting in some ways at the current prices it is for most companies to do carbon removal, right? If you think of it as their profit per emission, gives you a whole different perspective.
Robert Höglund: Yeah, but everyone can contribute some, like you have to get rid of the, I’m going to offset all my emissions mindset. So you could buy carbon removal for 1% of your emissions or just get started. I think we have to hammer in the narrative that all All companies have to contribute to the financing climate. It’s going to be very different levels. So a big emitter is going to use, hopefully, their money internally to transform their business. But they also need carbon removal in the future and other climate solutions. So it should be putting some amount of money into that today.
And it should be sort of default expectation of all companies that should contribute to climate solutions in general, not just CDR, also outside their own versions.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, from your mouth to God’s ear, I don’t know. You’ve also been active recently on some online discussions about enhanced rock weathering. It was in response to a paper that came out, I think, from the Carbon Drawdown Initiative, if I’m getting the title right. Can you just give us an overview of the current, as you would understand it, state of the science of ERW’s effectiveness and how should folks listening to this call think about it as they work through all the different uncertainties of these different CDR techniques?
Robert Höglund: So enhanced rock weathering, I think, has a lot of potential. It can be done at massive scale, and it’s the Earth’s natural way of removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere. What is lacking is evidence from the field studies on exactly how it works, how fast and how much, and also how to measure it, where models... Where you’re relying on the results that you had in labs, have been shown to be hard to replicate those results in the real world. And it’s more tricky than might have been expected to actually measure the signal of the rock weathering.
It doesn’t mean that it’s not happening, but it means that we need to do more work on measuring it in the field to be able to say how much, how fast, and also to be sure, 100% sure that it does work in sort of human time scales and there’s a lot of things happening when you put rock into soil and where there’s a lot of other organisms and you know a lot about that from the work that you do even if it’s not enhanced rock weathering. So buyers I think could still be supporting that of course and we need more money into all solutions but we have to be And it’s related to the certification question.
We have to be nuanced about how we communicate that support. I don’t think you should say that I offset all of my emissions with this because there’s still a lot of uncertainty. So we could say we’re supporting Deployments that increase the knowledge about how enhanced dropwatering works and we’re trying it out and slowly at larger scale. And we’re going to support Inplanet with a purchase and really aim to deepen the knowledge.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I mean, I wouldn’t want to do that. Anyway, until we understand the impacts, like beyond carbon, right? Like what are the biological impacts of hundreds of thousands of tonnes too, right? I don’t.
Robert Höglund: Yeah. I mean, it’s done with, we know we can do liming, for example, fields. So putting rock on field is like, there’s a lot of knowledge about that, but it depends on what rock. And some rocks are very safe. They don’t have trace metals, such a, but how much like you couldn’t like cover the land in rock. But yeah, of course, there’s other questions that, That you might need to answer as well, especially depending on what rock you’re using.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. Sometimes I feel like we get so in such a mindset of carbon removal, we lose the broader potential impacts.
Robert Höglund: Yeah, but there’s a lot of potential for co-benefits as well.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Generally a positive thing, but I always have a little anxiety, I have to admit. Yeah. So I want to end on a positive note, Robert. You obviously enjoyed the conference. I really enjoyed the conference. What are some things inspirational or something that you took away that made you feel good about the future of carbon removal?
Robert Höglund: So seeing all the different people working with different solutions, and it’s something we saw on this call for proposal as well. And just compared to a few years ago, you can really see how There’s people that jumped into kind of labs starting to do hard tech, they’re trying out new things, and people that sort of heard about car removal, saw that it was necessarily part of the solution, and then, you know, Got their hands dirty trying to create new solutions for this and not just the people who work on hard tech.
We see a lot of innovation in other fields as well and people coming from really diverse places like within different type of educational background and different parts of the world. We see now Octavia Carbon becoming a direct air capture manufacturer in Kenya and we have a storage cell as well. And seeing this spread across the world with so many different ideas and people, I think that’s really super encouraging. It’s not a small clique of people sitting in one part of the world working on one type of solution. It’s really becoming this global industry with so many different ideas and pathways.
So that’s super cool.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, thank you, Robert, for joining us. You know, I’m a huge fan of your work and I’m glad we could finally get you onto Carbon Removal Newsroom. I really appreciate your thoughts and insights.
Robert Höglund: Thank you. I’m a huge fan of the show, so I’m really glad to be on it.
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