In this week’s episode of Carbon Removal Newsroom, hosts Radhika Moolgavkar and Dr. Jane Zelikova are joined by Heirloom’s Head of Research and Process Engineering, Noah Mcqueen. Heirloom is a Direct Air Capture company that launched in April 2021.
Noah and our hosts discuss the science of Heirloom’s approach, the techno-economic challenges to scaling DAC, and the kind of continuous research and materials development necessary to grow the industry.
In 2021, Noah and several co-authors published a review of existing DAC technologies in the journal Process in Energy. The paper provided a techno-economic assessment of the two most researched and developed DAC methods- liquid solvent and solid sorbent. The researchers used their findings to examine what will be needed to scale up these technologies quickly. They also made recommendations for how research can be directed to support the widespread deployment of DAC.
Heirloom received investment from Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital and sold carbon removal credits to Shopify and Stripe. The technique they are pursuing has not been commercialized before and was co-invented by some of the leading experts in the industry, including Dr. Peter Keleman, Dr. Jennifer Wilcox, Dr. Greg Dipple, and Noah.
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, everybody, and welcome to the February 3rd, 2022 Carbon Removal Newsroom. Today, we are focusing on science, and as always, I’m happy to have Dr. Jane Zelikova, Executive Director of the Soil Carbon Solution Center and Joint Faculty in Crop and Soil Science at Colorado State University. Hey, Jane, how are you?
Jane Zelikova: Hi, I’m good.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Good. And also excited to have Noah McQueen, Co-Founder and Head of Research at Heirloom Carbon. Hi, Noah. Thanks for joining.
Noah McQueen: Hi, thanks for having me.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And as always, this is Radhika Moolgavkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI. So today we’re going to continue our exploration of DAC. If anyone listened last week, they’ll know that we were kind of looking at some of the business Insider business pieces around DAC, and today we’re going to look at more of the science part around direct air capture, and that’s where Noah comes in. He has, and several co-authors, published a review of existing DAC technologies in April 2021 in the journal Process and Energy. So Noah, I took a look at that paper and it is comprehensive and very impressive.
So congratulations on it.
Noah McQueen: Thank you.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I would love for you maybe to just kind of give a little bit of an overview of the two different types of direct air capture processes you discussed, liquid and solid sorbent, and kind of maybe highlight the key differences and which companies are pursuing which methods.
Noah McQueen: Absolutely. So I guess maybe taking a step back, director capture describes a suite of engineered technologies that capture CO2 directly from air and typically produce a concentrated stream of CO2 that can be geologically stored or used for CO2 utilization. So in these director capture systems, they use a capture material. And this is typically a synthetic chemical that selectively binds to CO2 in air and That’s at atmospheric conditions, and then it releases the CO2 in a concentrated form at some kind of elevated conditions. So the primary difference between the two technologies, sorbent and solvent direct air capture, is the type of capture material used in that bind and release process.
So in solid sorbent direct air capture, the capture material is a solid material. And the most common form of solid material used is amines that are grafted onto some kind of porous support. By porous support, that’s things like activated carbon or cellulose that kind of increases the overall surface area of the material and leads to faster capture rates. So these processes are typically a batch process where you adsorb the CO2 or capture the CO2 in one stage at the atmospheric conditions and then you kind of flip it into the reverse desorption.
And in that process, a vacuum is pulled, the temperature is raised and you get a concentrated stream of CO2 coming out of that system. So sorbent DAT companies, the two highlighted in the paper are Climeworks and Global Thermostat, although other more recent companies like Carbon Collect and Carbon Infinity are also looking at solid sorbent director capture. With respect to solvent director capture, the capture material is a liquid solution or a liquid solvent. Primarily, this is strong bases, so potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide, but it can also take the forms of different solutions, specifically with some of the newer director capture companies out there.
So in this process, you have a liquid solution that flows over this highly porous structural material and that material facilitates a thin layer of solution on top of it. And that allows for the capture solution to come in contact with the CO2 and air at a higher surface area. So the liquid solvent will capture the CO2 from air and then it’s pumped to a regeneration facility. So this is more of a continuous process than the solid sorbent direct air capture. That regeneration process is more complex and requires multiple stages, but in the end, you end up with a pure stream of carbon dioxide or a near pure stream, just similar to solid sorbent direct air capture.
The company highlighted in the paper is Carbon Engineering, although there are newer direct air capture companies like Noya and Mission Zero that are also using some form of liquid solvent direct air capture. Yeah, that’s kind of like the main differences between those two technologies.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Wow. Super complex. Really interesting. My brain goes a lot of different directions. I often say that on this show because I think carbon removal in general is like that. But I think one of my first questions for you is I’ve read a lot about some the challenges around DAC because of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air and how How that makes it more difficult to maybe pull it out through an industrial process. Can you just talk a little bit about that? Because I think it feeds into some other questions.
Noah McQueen: Yeah, absolutely. So the concentration of CO2 in air is like about 410 parts per million in this day and age. So you’re talking about a very dilute gas. So in order to capture CO2 from the air, typically that means you have to flow massive amounts of air through these engineered contactors that facilitate The contact between your capture material and the CO2 and air. So that adds capital expense to the system, the direct air capture system. And in addition, there also are thermodynamic limitations to the amount of energy required for direct air capture.
So when you’re talking about separating a stream of 410 parts per million, you’re talking about a significant energy input into that system that ultimately defines the fact that direct air capture requires, you know, Several gigajoules of energy per tonne of CO2 captured.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. So Jane, as a nature-based carbon removal expert, how do you think about the two technologies when you think about a nature-based versus an industrial-based? They obviously have their pros and cons, but curious what your perspective is on a technology like DAC.
Jane Zelikova: Yeah, I’m really excited about the potential for technologies like DAC to be scalable. We’re gonna run out of space in terms of deployment of nature-based climate solutions. I don’t even really like the term nature-based climate solution, to be honest. And I think there are these really cool opportunities to think more holistically about how to integrate these direct air capture systems that are engineered Into our built environment and infrastructure that we have today or that we need to build. So I think there are just really cool opportunities here. I don’t think of it as an either or.
I think of it as an yes and kind of a situation.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And one of the things that often, and this is for you again, Jane, that I think about is when we think about the built environment, obviously we’ve had unfortunate historical cases. Precedences where things that are not as much wanted are often given to or placed in places where there are, you know, people with less political voice. So how do you think through the issue of the pipelines that are carrying these very high concentrations of carbon dioxide and how we think about citing those? And then, Noah, I also will let you take a stab at that.
But I’ll start with you, Jane.
Jane Zelikova: I think it’s a really good thing for us to think about as we envision these solutions where they’re going to be deployed, what infrastructure they’re going to need, and what the sort of social acceptance of those solutions would be based on the fact that, you know, we need to build pipelines to move CO2 around. And we know that there is a lot of resistance from a diversity of stakeholders, including sort of environmental activists, farmers, landowners, that sort of don’t want to have pipelines going through their backyards, have experienced a lot of environmental impacts from sort of pipelines and moving gases around.
Yes, like CO2 is not as problematic of a gas to move around as let’s say methane or natural gas, but it still can cause like serious damage. And the people with the least political power are often the ones that have to get these things built in their backyard. So I think it’s really important that as these solutions are being developed, we are being really thoughtful about where they’re going to be placed, but also working in really close collaboration with the communities that are going to be sort of dealing with the impacts.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Noah, how are you thinking, or how’s Heirloom thinking about this more broadly in terms of the kind of social justice and equity piece?
Noah McQueen: Absolutely. I think from a sighting perspective, it comes down to quite a few different things. And one of them is, you know, having co-location to some of these resources. So instead of utilizing things like pipelines, can we put direct air capture directly next to geologic storage of CO2? So those kinds of synergies Allow for reduced infrastructure requirements like CO2 pipelines, although we will definitely still need pipelines. And one of the key aspects of that is community engagement, engaging with community groups in areas that are optimal to site direct air capture and making sure that you have enthusiastic consent from those communities and also providing educational resources in order to make sure that people really know what Director of Capture is doing and how it can impact the surrounding communities.
Ultimately, I think it does come down to that engagement and enthusiastic community consent for citing Director of Capture in a given location.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So can you touch a little bit on, because some of our listeners may not be familiar with, what are the requirements for geological storage for these DAC companies? I know that it can’t be stored just anywhere and there’s some pretty specific requirements.
Noah McQueen: Absolutely. I think when it comes to geologic storage, I am by no means of expert. So I guess I’ll caveat my statement with that. But in order to inject CO2 into the subsurface, you have to have a suitable geology. So a lot of the geology that people have been looking into are sedimentary basins. And these are similar geologic formations to where people currently remove oil and gas. So some of the key geologic features are that you have to have I guess what we call an impermeable cap rock. So something that enables the CO2 to remain trapped underground.
And you also have to have suitable volume and porous structure inside a reservoir. So those are some of the geologic features that you need in order to store CO2 in the subsurface. You also, you have to develop capital infrastructure in order to actually pump the CO2 underground. So injection wells and kind of similar capital infrastructure along those lines.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And to be clear, this is not the same as point source capture. So people might think about it when they hear some of that language, but they’re very different ideas. And one is about removing carbon from the atmosphere and one is about removing Emissions from oil and gas companies. So different, totally different ballgame. So one of the things I want to pivot back to your paper a little bit, you talked about scaling up sorbents. So is that the main limiting factor in getting DAC moving? Or what would you list as the top three limitations to getting DAC scaled?
Noah McQueen: That’s a great question. I think some of it is the resource requirements to scale and the capital being moved into direct air capture. So we’re talking about systems that require a pretty significant capital investment in order to get to a certain scale. If we wanna reach gigatonne direct air capture, you’re talking billions of dollars of infrastructure that needs to go into creating and deploying direct air capture. Scaling supply chains are one facet of scaling direct air capture. But then maybe number one is the capital requirement to deploy direct air capture.
Jane Zelikova: I could chime in on the first point.
Unknown speaker: Yeah, go for it.
Jane Zelikova: So one of the cool things that I really liked about the paper is this discussion of modularity, which I think is a factor to consider when thinking about capital investment. So some systems lend themselves better to being modular, meaning that you can Create smaller units that can be deployed as single units or stackable units, so you can sort of scale up and down depending on the size of the opportunity, the size of the reservoir, the size of the utilization potential, etc. With modular systems, I guess, and the other upside is that you can have economies of scale and producing those modular systems.
So the capital investment might not be as heavy as for the systems like solvent-based systems that require a larger facility and more investment kind of at the front. So they’re kind of these trade-offs between the kind of sorbent that you use and the capital investment that’s required. And I love that point in the paper, Noah. Thank you.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So capital costs being one of the big burdens or big barriers, any other ones that you’d want to highlight, Noah?
Noah McQueen: Yeah, I think maybe as a second point, there is the lack of storage infrastructure currently. So there are two operational CO2 storage class six wells in the United States, and they’re both in Decatur, Illinois. So in order to kind of really scale the capacity of carbon removal, specifically through director capture, we have to have some place to put the CO2. So, you know, that involves permitting, Creating these wells physically and then also the monitoring and verification that goes along with that. So I think that one of the big levers that we have is creating the storage infrastructure to support direct air capture.
Radhika Moolgavkar: The last show, Naeem and Susan both mentioned the opportunity around cement and using cement as a potential capture location. What do you think of that as is a solution? Is that feasible and is it in the short term?
Noah McQueen: Well, I think that’s a great solution in the short term. Cement is just produced at a very large capacity, both in the US and abroad. So it really does provide an avenue to put the CO2 somewhere where it is permanently stored in a product that you can then sell, which has a huge economic opportunity as well. I think I recall in the last episode, one of the comments was that you have to find the consumer that will pay the green premium on those products. So there’s a consumer market fit there as well that we have to consider.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Jane, you have something to add, I think?
Jane Zelikova: Well, I think what’s cool about some of these solutions is there are these really clear policy implications. So the way we think about creating the enabling policies really matters here. So one example for the green premium cement is that who is the biggest buyer that could potentially purchase the cement? It’s the federal government. So there’s this huge procurement opportunity where the federal government can, you know, is still building stuff with cement. It’s not like it’s changing anything, can be the first buyer and can help bring the cost down. And similarly, when Noah was mentioning the class six wells and then the sort of The need for the right permitting and sort of administrative infrastructure to move these projects.
One of the things that was really successful about the Sunshot for Solar program at DOE was this like co-developing solar panels that could be cheaper with like developing the incentive structures and the sort of administrative and contracting Enabling structures that were needed for solar to actually move into like a broader market. And so the government can really think about how to couple both like the technological development and the policy landscape that enable these solutions to move more quickly.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I’ve, and this somewhat pains me to say it, but I mean, I think the vaccine development is another example where the federal government actually was able to Step in, provide the right types of incentives to get something developed in record time. And you can see technologies like DAC, which really need some sort of financing mechanism that the government would be an interesting partner in that. And I think they’re showing a lot of interest, right? They’ve definitely hired some high-powered DAC folks into the administration, one of whom I think was your co-author, Noah.
And so I’m optimistic that they’re thinking in that way. But one other thing I wanted to ask you about your paper, just directly to you, Noah, is what recommendations do you and your co-authors suggest for future research? And is there an intersection maybe with the government that you see in not so much on the permitting side, but on the research side?
Noah McQueen: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. And maybe I can summarize them in three key points.
Unknown speaker: Sure.
Noah McQueen: The first related to sorbent direct air capture is that the sorbent itself is a really high leverage item in that system. So, you know, we can create cheaper sorbents with higher uptake capacities and longer lifetimes that could really be a lever in the cost of direct air capture, as well as the scalability of direct air capture. The second point with respect to more of the solvent based approach is that there are a couple of different recommendations, but ultimately, you know, novel solvent development that allows you to uptake more CO2. And potentially reduce the amount of energy requirements to push the large volume of air that we need through that engineered front end contactor could be pretty significant from a process perspective.
And then finally, and the one that intersects most with this conversation on more government levers is we need to deploy direct air capture. And to get to the gigatonne scale, we probably needed to start deploying direct air capture yesterday. So in order to really get to the scale of direct air capture we need and push DAC down the learning curve to reduce costs, we really have to put in policy levers that enable that scaling. And I think that one good example of this is the DOE’s direct air capture hubs and the opportunity for the government to put down infrastructure that could be limiting to direct air capture facilities like this class six wells in order to geologically store CO2.
And, you know, renewable energy infrastructure required to provide energy to these direct air capture companies.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So as we talked about in the last episode, if I obviously know you listen to it. So there are new tech, newer technological approaches is coming to DAC. I think some of the interesting ones are particularly in my, from my perspective about lowering the energy usage or the, you know, finding renewable energy usages if you can to Power DAC facilities, because even though we didn’t touch on that, that is a huge barrier towards, you know, carbon neutrality, carbon removal costs, all of those things. But other than Heirloom, Noah, which we’ll talk about in a second, what other novel approaches interest you?
I’ll start with you, Noah, and then I’ll move on to you, Jane.
Noah McQueen: Yeah, this is a fun question. I think a lot about the direct air capture landscape and how it’s changed over the last year or so. And obviously, I’m super excited about Heirloom. But in addition to that, I think Noya has a really interesting business model, specifically being able to integrate a solvent direct air capture approach into existing infrastructure, specifically industrial cooling infrastructure. That seems like a really interesting lever in order to decrease the capital costs associated with direct air capture. In addition to Noya, I also am super interested to see where Verdox goes, which is a fundamentally new kind of approach to direct air capture that uses electrochemical potential In order to take in and release CO2, they currently use some novel and assumedly expensive materials, but I’m super interested to see where that technology goes.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Cool. And Jane, what about you?
Jane Zelikova: Yeah, this is very outside of my area of expertise, but I sort of think about the need for interdisciplinarity in this space and thinking about all of these amazing engineering breakthroughs that are happening in the DAC development space and how to integrate them with the kind of things that city planners are doing. If we want to have DAC everywhere, we need to scale it, which we obviously do. Part of that is thinking about like, what does a city look like that DAC is a part of? Like maybe we have DAC machines on top of rooftops and integrated into our HVAC systems, et cetera.
So I would love to see more sort of integration across disciplines with folks that are working in architecture, city planning, sort of like social Systems, like what we talked about earlier, we need enthusiastic sort of consent from people to have these systems be deployed. So I just think there’s a lot of opportunity for more interdisciplinary collaboration in this space.
Noah McQueen: I like to point the term HVAC, Doc.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. I mean, that’s a dream, right? I think, Jade, you and I would probably agree that We can use interdisciplinary approaches across all types of carbon removal. I mean, it never is singular to science or policy or business. It’s all of those things. So last question, and I think I’ll pitch this to you, Noah. Learning by doing is kind of an important part of reducing costs. And obviously, we talk a lot about solar and how its cost curve came down so quickly. Do you think that DAC can follow the same pattern?
And if so, why? If not, why not?
Noah McQueen: That’s a great question. And to be completely honest, DAC is such a new technology that it’s hard to kind of hypothesize how it’ll come down the learning curve. And I also think that generalizing to direct our capture as a whole suite of technologies, there won’t be one learning rate. There’ll be several different learning rates. As Jane kind of mentioned earlier, we have this concept of modularity and I think approaches that exhibit more of that modularity tend to come down learning curves more quickly. So direct air capture approaches that are inherently more modular, increases the manufacturer ability of those approaches, decreases construction costs and allows for kind of this quick iteration process that will likely exhibit learning more in line with solar and batteries, but It’s kind of hard to say at this point.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I think you made an interesting, you touched on something really interesting that I want to highlight, that solar was kind of one specific type of technology. DAC is more like renewable energies, right? There’s all sorts of different approaches, different technologies. So trying to make a one-to-one comparison may be unfair to DAC.
Noah McQueen: Yeah, it’s definitely complex. Yeah.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Definitely complex and lots of interesting engineering and science work out there. So I’m excited to watch it develop because like you said, Noah, the explosion in the last year has been phenomenal. But now I really want to pivot to your company. And you know, you guys launched in April of 2021, which is I can’t believe because it feels like you’ve been around forever. Can you kind of give us an overview of what Heirloom does and what makes you unique within the DAC world?
Noah McQueen: Yeah, absolutely. So Heirloom is a direct air capture company that uses earth abundant naturally occurring minerals to capture CO2 from the atmosphere. So specifically Heirloom uses calcium carbonate or limestones. And what we do is we take that calcium carbonate and we feed it into an electric high temperature reactor where it decomposes into CO2 and calcium oxide. So the CO2 from that reaction can be captured and stored geologically. Well, the calcium oxide from that reaction is really thirsty for CO2. So if you leave it exposed to the atmosphere, it naturally takes up CO2 and reforms calcium carbonate.
Now that process occurs in nature on the order of months to years and heirloom has really accelerated that to occur in less than a week. So we’ve kind of engineered the mineralization process there. And once we reform that calcium carbonate, we can send it back into that high temperature reactor where it once again decomposes to form a CO2 and calcium oxide. And then we kind of continue that process cyclically. And I would say that Heirloom is similar to other direct air capture companies with two really key differences. The first one is that capture portion where the calcium oxide or calcium hydroxide is taking up CO2 from the atmosphere is passive.
So we don’t have any forced airflow. It’s allowed to occur just with the natural airflow over the surface of the earth, which reduces the front end energy requirements of the process. Additionally, the second point I’d like to make is that, you know, the sorbent in this case is a low cost earth abundant mineral. So it essentially means we’re doing direct air capture via carbon mineralization, which is kind of different from some other approaches to direct air capture and allows us to really leverage the fact that reaction is naturally occurring and doesn’t require significant energy input.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, it’s really pretty amazing. Jane, did you have something you wanted to add?
Jane Zelikova: It’s super cool. I guess the secret sauce is really in how to speed up what is a naturally occurring process, which is a really impressive feat in and of itself to be able to do that. But yeah, it’s cool. I love it.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So you guys obviously know are doing great. You received investment from breakthrough energy ventures and low carbon capital, and you’ve already sold your credits to Shopify and Drive. So there’s obviously tonnes and tonnes of excitement and it seems so simple, but I would assume there are some things to work out. So in the next year or so, what is heirlooms plans? What are, what are you thinking about in terms of how to make this even more accessible to the world?
Noah McQueen: That’s a great question. So we’re working on our first plant. That’s really where a lot of our effort is going over the next year is to get to the point where we can start deploying against that learning curve and scaling our direct air capture process. And the more data points we have against that, the better we can anticipate how our technology will come down that learning curve and how We can deploy in other locations aside from kind of this first plant where you noted we sold our offtake to Stripe and Shopify.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Are there specific things you need for this to be a successful site? Like we talked about earlier with the type of storage, if you co-locate it in a certain place, is that kind of a limitation for you guys?
Noah McQueen: Yeah, we’ve actually, you know, renewable energy and geologic storage are two big, big aspects of that for us, as well as, you know, access to utilities and land for the physical air to material contact. I wouldn’t say right now that’s a limitation. As you noted earlier, we can both partner with cement industry to do offtake of that nature and that’s permanent storage or There are other options in order to, to offtake CO2 and kind of like a permanent storage manner.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Cool. And then Jane, like when you hear about what they’re doing, what do you think about from a scientific perspective? Like my first thought was, I wonder if that could be used for soil amendments, but I’m not a soil scientist, but you know what I mean? Like, what do you think about when you hear this? This is pretty amazing technology.
Jane Zelikova: So there are other companies that are sort of harnessing the same kind of general mineralization process where particular minerals have a high affinity for binding with CO2 or dissolved carbon that comes through soil water. And so there are other companies that are trying to sort of do direct air capture In a more soil amendment kind of a way like one that is an example is a called a on and they also were just sold carbon credits to stripe during the last strike process and they’re developing a different kind of rock sort of mineralization process where the rock would be kind of ground up.
And deployed into agricultural contexts where their contact with the air would be kind of the surface area where the rock is deployed contact with the air would facilitate this mineralization process. And the big question really is about how do you verify that process is taking place when it’s deployed across a large landscape. So in the case of heirloom, I think that you have methods of verification that are different. Then what somebody would be doing if they’re deploying it as a soil amendment. But that’s kind of the big crux is like, how do you know how much carbon is being taken up and removed from the atmosphere?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yes. The never ending accounting and verification question we struggle with daily. All of us, I’m sure.
Jane Zelikova: What makes it harder in soils is like, we already know the soil part is really hard. And for that enhanced mineralization process, the carbon ends up in the ocean. And there are very sort of clear equations that describe that process, but how do you actually measure it?
Unknown speaker: Yep.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yep. Yep. Yep. Shane, you and I could talk about that for a long time. I think that might be where Noah is a little bit, you know, fortunate that measurements in DAC seem a little bit more straightforward to me. I don’t know, maybe I’m being unfair, but, or fair.
Noah McQueen: You know, if you’re producing a CO2 stream at a known concentration, it’s as easy as like sticking a CO2 meter on the back end of the process and knowing how much is coming out.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I know, that’s what I love about it. So, you know, We’ve talked about this quite a bit about what you think policy folks need to do to make DAC more successful. But I’m particularly curious from your perspective, Noah, what you think markets need to do having kind of been inside of a startup looking to sell carbon removal credits. Jane, I’ll ask you that as well because I’d be curious your perspective too. But what would you like to see markets or the business community be working on to help scale?
Noah McQueen: Yeah, I think that’s a great question and it’s an incredibly timely question. So the first is that the market right now is dominated by these voluntary carbon credits. So companies like Stripe and Shopify and Microsoft that are offsetting their emissions by purchasing voluntary offsets. So we really need to implement the compliance markets that meet voluntary markets where they are and help continue to scale direct air capture. Voluntary markets will push us so far. Compliance markets will get us to that gigatonne carbon removal that we need to combat climate change. Additionally, I like to think that in the long run, maybe governments can also become the purchasers of carbon credits in order to offset current and historic emissions.
Maybe that’s a bit further down the line than trying to create a baseline compliance markets. One other thing that I don’t think is talked about enough is financing for direct air capture. So I mentioned earlier that it’s this Kind of very large capital investments in order to get to the scale we need. So low interest or even like free loans from the government to finance deployment of direct air capture is another kind of critical policy lever that we can implement in some capacity.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Cool. Thanks Noah. And Jane, I saw you nodding. So I assume you agree with much of what he had to say.
Jane Zelikova: Yeah, I totally agree. I think financing is a big crux point for all of these startup companies and Having really favorable loans is important because it is a large capital investment. Research and development money is also really important. Like Noah was saying, there are these new kind of frontier direct air capture technologies that are still getting flushed out and research money is always really helpful. And so getting funding rates up for DAC would be really good. And I mean, I totally agree the need for regulatory lovers to be deployed as much as people hate to hear the words regulation.
I think ultimately when we say compliance market, the implication there is that there are sectors that are regulated and required to not just reduce their emissions, but to really drive them down to zero and purchase carbon removal where they can’t. And so Right now in the voluntary markets, they can purchase carbon credits at a really cheap rate. So only a few companies like Noah mentioned, you know, Stripe, Shopify and Microsoft are spending large amounts of money per tonne to buy these like carbon removal credits that are real, that are verifiable and that are really expensive.
And we need, you know, that’s a limited number of customers. We need the customer number to grow. And we need sort of the markets to actually pay the price that they should be paying. So there are $3 a tonne, tonnes on the voluntary market. So why would somebody pay 300 for DAC?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. All right. Well, my wish for the end, by the end of 2022 is we never, we don’t only say Microsoft, Shopify, and Stripe when we talk about carbon removal. It’d be great to see other Companies and groups jump into what right now is a voluntary marketplace to push some of this technology forward. You know, shamelessly plug Nori. That’s what we hope to do someday too, help push these marketplaces forward. But I will end with a little bit of good news. And it’s not related to carbon removal or it’s related to the environment in the sense that I just heard that the California reservoirs are in good shape and that the snowpack is looking great.
Therefore, I can, as a Washington State resident, rejoice in the fact that we’re expecting a drier than normal February. And if anyone has followed the weather in the Pacific Northwest, you will know we had 120 degrees in June and then we had 14 degrees in December, which is like an Tonnes and tonnes of snow to the point where they call out the National Guard for parts of the eastern parts of the state. So I will be very happy to have a dry February and go into the spring with a nice snowpack so I don’t feel guilty about it.
With that, thank you both Jane and Noah for joining us today. I really appreciate it. Noah, best of luck with Heirloom and the upcoming year. You guys have phenomenal things to do.
Unknown speaker: This may be your last episode for a while.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I don’t know. We’ll see. We’ll see. But if it is a best of luck in your next adventure, I don’t, you know, it’s for you to say what it is and you’ll let us know when you’re back.
Jane Zelikova: Yeah, totally. Noah, thank you so much for joining. I hope you still continue writing these amazing papers that are so informative and So we can keep learning about the space as it develops. And yeah, maybe I’ll be back next month. Maybe not. We’ll see.
Radhika Moolgavkar: We’ll see. All right. Thanks, you guys. Take care. Bye. Thank you.
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