On April 22nd, XPRIZE announced the 15 winners of the second round of their competition for carbon removal solutions. Each of these teams has been awarded $1 million to help them compete for the grand prize of $50 million, or 3 $30 million runner-up slots, awarded three years from now.
The grand prize winner may not be one of the 15 Milestone awardees, but these teams are a step ahead of the competition and have already demonstrated an ability to impress the Xprize judges.
This episode features two segments with interviews of Milestone-winning teams.
First, Radhika and Na’im spoke with Carbin Minerals CTO Peter Scheuermann. Carbin’s work with mine waste streams is based on the pioneering research of Dr. Greg Dipple. Peter joined us to discuss how they plan to make mining carbon negative, their testing so far, and how their MRV approach will be “modular.”
In the second segment, CRN producer Asa Kamer fills in as guest host to talk with the two companies who make up the XPRIZE team “Project Hajar”: Mission Zero and 4401. 4401 Commercial Lieutenant Karan Khimji and Mission Zero CEO Nicholas Chadwick join us for a discussion on their DAC to Mineralization approach in Oman, their progress so far, and what keeps them up at night as they scale up.
On This Episode
Na’im Merchant
Resources from pt. 1
Elon Musk seeks sustainable nickel
Resources from pt. 2
Resources
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, everybody, and welcome to our two-part series. Today is Wednesday, September 21st, and we’ll be having a second recording tomorrow, Thursday, September 22nd. On different XPRIZE winners. In the past, we focused on some of the XPRIZE winners and we’re happy to have additional folks on the show. So today we have Peter Scheuermann, the Chief Technology Officer at Carbon Minerals, joining us from beautiful Canada. Hello, Peter.
Peter Scheuermann: Hi, how are you doing?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Really good. Thanks for joining us.
Peter Scheuermann: Thanks for having me.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And as always, we have Na’im Merchant, who runs Carbon Curve, a consultancy that works with NGOs and startups on scaling up carbon removal solutions. He publishes the Carbon Curve newsletter and has a podcast about the carbon removal industry and the new carbon economy. And Naeem, it’s so nice to see you on Zoom, but even better, it was to see you here in New York in person yesterday.
Na’im Merchant: Yeah, it was great to finally meet in person, Radhika. Thanks so much for having me on.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Always. And so for our listeners, Naeem and I are both in New York at Climate Week and got to meet for the first time in person and had some funny interactions where people recognized our voices from this podcast, but actually had never met us and didn’t know what we look like. And finally, I’m Radhika Moolgavkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI. So let’s get started. As most everybody of this podcast knows, on April 22nd, X-Prized announced the 15 winners of the second round of their competition for carbon removal solutions.
Each of these teams have been awarded $1 million to help them compete for the grand prize of $50 million or three $30 million runner-up slots that’ll be awarded in three years. We don’t know if the grand prize winner will be one of these 15 milestone awardees, but obviously these teams have done something that have impressed the XPRIZE judges. And of these 15 teams, six are building fact solutions, three are sequestering carbon dioxide from seawater, three are producing biochar, and one is growing algae, and one is utilizing enhanced weathering and one which encourages tree planting.
So obviously the XPRIZE is looking at all sorts of technologies, which I think is great. Today we’ll be speaking with one of the winners who’s categorized as a rock solution, carbon minerals. Carbon’s work with mine waste streams is based on pioneering research of Dr. Greg Dippel and we’ll be speaking, like I said, to Peter, their chief technology officer. So Peter, I guess let’s just get started by you describing the technique that your company is working on and how you think it kind of advances carbon removal. Into the next stage.
Peter Scheuermann: So right. So we’re developing technologies that utilize mine tailings to capture and permanently store and mineralize carbon from the atmosphere. So a little bit of a primer. What is a mine tailing? It’s basically waste from a mine. So if you’re thinking about a nickel mine, for example, the nickel is the precious commodity and but nickel can only In many cases only comprises about one weight percent of an ore body. So 99% of the rock that actually gets passed through a mine is waste. And that’s what becomes the tailings. So they’re ground up really finely, like pulverized to like a sand size or even smaller.
And then they’re deposited in these engineered facilities called tailings storage facilities. Which you can see if you go on Google Earth and look up various mines, there are several square kilometers in many cases. They’re highly engineered systems and the purpose is to store safely all of these tailings. And so there are certain tailings, specifically those that come from mines and ultramafic rocks. So rocks that are just a fancy word for rocks that are rich in magnesium. Those tailings can be reactive to CO2 either naturally or through our technology. And so those are the ones that we’re going after.
And so our vision here is that we’d like to take these TSF, tailing storage facilities, and turn them into extremely large air contactors. And so we’re capturing directly from air and storing as a carbonate mineral in a single step. So capture and storage, sorry, in a single step, but our process is actually a two-step process. So the first is a mineral treatment or activation. So this increases the reactivity of a rock to CO2, both the rate at which it captures CO2 from air and, you know, the capacity to store carbon.
So that’s the kilogram of carbon per kilogram of tailing. And so following that mineral treatment, we envision the tailings going out into the storage facility. That’s our air contactor. And while they’re out there, we’re optimizing the surface of the tailings to maximize reaction with atmospheric CO2. And so we’re doing that. We’re measuring several physical and chemical parameters over the surface of the tailings. And then we’re deploying autonomous rovers to actually churn and move the material So that the rate of capture remains elevated. Yeah. And so that, like I said, the end result is capture and storage in a single step.
And our goal is to get to the scale where mines are actually net negative with respect to carbon. So mines are going to be a carbon sink at the same time that they’re producing nickel and other precious metals that are going into your electric vehicle batteries and other elements of the electric grid.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I mean, so interesting and I have lots of questions about the process, but I think my first question really quickly is what inspired Dr. Dippel to even look into this as the research area or if you happen to know like it’s so timely, but I’m sure it’s involved years and years of research.
Peter Scheuermann: Yeah, so Greg’s been at this. Better part of two decades. He’s a geologist, geologist, geochemist. UBC, where carbon minerals is spun out of, has a long history with collaboration, academic industry, collaboration with the mining industry. There’s something called MDRU, which is the mineral deposit research unit. So Greg was going to mines all over the world, mostly focusing on the, you know, the precious metal side of things. Then, and my understanding is that he took a sabbatical at Los Alamos National Lab down in New Mexico, and there were some crazy folks down there looking at carbon mineralization.
And so that got the wheels turning. Greg knew about these enormous tailoring storage facilities and said, Hey, what’s going on out there? Are some of these with the right mineralogy actually capturing CO2 passively without anyone really paying attention? And the answer was yes. And so from there, it’s built and built. And we spun out carbon minerals from the UBC lab officially kind of September of last year, so about a year ago.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, it’s phenomenal that you guys have won the X Prize or won A milestone prize in such a short period of time. Two more quick questions about the process. One, is this technology available at any type of mine or does it have to be a nickel mine specifically? And two, once the carbon is created or drawn down, is it stored in the tailing or is there any other process that needs to happen to store it for the long term?
Peter Scheuermann: Sure. So it is mine dependent. We’re focusing on the mines with the highest reactivity, kind of at Earth’s surface conditions. And those, those are the ones, those are the ultramafic mines that I was talking about. And so yeah, ultramafic mines, it just means that there’s got a lot of magnesium and magnesium oxide in the rock. And there are those minerals often dissolve So there are constraints on what the best mine looks like. And then some mines, like for example, we’re not going to be going to do this at like a coal mine.
I think, I mean, maybe that goes without saying, but the carbon’s already in the coal. We need to put the carbon into the coal. So there are definitely some constraints on where we can operate or where it’s best to operate, I should say. And then in terms of the second part of your question, we don’t see the carbon moving once it’s mineralized in the tailings. So storage facilities are continuously refreshed, so new material is getting discharged with whatever frequency the mine decides. So the carbon will mineralize at the surface, form a magnesium hydrate or magnesium carbonate that’s permanent indefinitely, and then it’ll get buried, and that’s the storage mechanism.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So you guys avoid a lot of the permitting issues that other long-term carbon storage companies have. That’s really, really interesting. I can’t wait to see as this all develops. But Naeem, you know, you and I have been in some of these conversations yesterday in particular about kind of the difficulty of growing a startup from the promising scientific piece to something that is actually a viable business that can be supported and, you know, draw down Multiple millions of tonnes of carbon as we need. So I’m kind of curious what your perspective is on what a company like Carbon Minerals needs to do to keep moving it forward.
Na’im Merchant: That’s a great question. And Peter, also thank you for just so clearly walking us through your process. We’re really excited to see how this all evolves. I think a couple of things come to mind and Peter, I’d love your reaction to it as well. It seems like the tools and processes that you’re using to do measurement reporting verification or MRV, those probably will need to scale with the solution. You know, an MRV solution that works in the lab may not be practical to deploy at larger scale. And so that kind of has come up as a potential bottleneck for scale for some carbon removal companies.
So it’s something that I think companies that are trying to go from You know, lab scale to early pilot to larger scale need to think about. And then, you know, I’ve had a chance to speak to folks on the carbon minerals team in the past. And, you know, the model is really, really interesting. And it really involves partnerships with mining companies, obviously, in order to make this work. And so there’s, you know, a lot of front end investment of time that are needed in establishing partnerships. With these mining companies and with carbon removal companies in general.
There are stakeholders that are involved in your deployment and engaging those stakeholders early on is critically important just for any carbon removal company, but in particular in this case because it’s so integrated within a mining company’s operations. And those partnerships enable a company like Carbon Mineral To have the ability and leeway to learn and iterate as they build out their process in larger and larger demonstrations. Before their solution can actually become a more replicable model, so I think you know when we’re kind of going from this lab scale and then to pilot you know stage then to larger scale.
The MRV tools and processes are important and need to scale with the solution. And it sounds like conversations I’ve had, and I’d love to get into this with you more, Peter, is something that I think Carbon Minerals is thinking deeply about. And then these front-end investments of time and energy with mining companies in deploying solutions are critically important to scaling up these kinds of solutions.
Peter Scheuermann: Yeah, those are both really valid points. On the MRV side, I’ll just start with a quick description of how we do it and then how we’ve scaled it so far. So we use a tiered approach. And by tiered, I mean, we’re measuring the rate of capture at various scales. And we use a range of geochemical techniques. So TIC, which is total inorganic carbon, that’s the smallest scale. And that’s actually measuring The solid material itself and the change in carbon over time. So that’s the smallest scale that involves going out and collecting grab samples from the material after it’s carbonated for a length of time.
If you move up a scale where you’re employing, they’re called chambers, they’re called CO2 flux chambers. They’re well established in soil science and agronomy. And so those will measure the rate of CO2 capture into the tailings over several square meters. That’s kind of their range for deployment. And then going even further, there’s another technique from kind of the forestry agronomy world called eddy covariance, and that’ll measure the rate of capture and measure the flux of carbon into or out of the ground over the scale of Thousands of square meters. And so what we’ve done over the last three years as part of the UBC lab is progressively larger field tests.
So I’ve done ones that kind of two square meters to six square meters and then others in the lab have gone to the size of several tennis courts. And we’ve shown that using these MRV techniques that we can That the various tiers I was talking about converge to a single answer in terms of the total amount of carbon that’s being captured. And so what we see long term is that we’d have kind of a modular system that can move a mobile MRV system that’s able to transit the surface of a tailings facility and dynamically read and tell us how much carbon is being captured.
On the partnership fronts, yes, definitely key to moving to scale is working with the mines. We’re in conversations right now with several of those mines, mining companies. One is very promising. And if things keep going, we’ll be on site kind of Q2 of 2023. But yeah, I mean, I think there is significant investment of time mining companies. There is there are liabilities related to tailings. It’s which is and safety on tailings is a huge issue. So for us going out in these first kind of iterations, doing it safely is paramount.
I mean, that’s going to be key to getting this ball rolling and moving, you know, capturing more and more carbon at larger and larger scales.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So, Peter, I’m curious, what is the motivation for the mining companies to work with y’all? Is it regulatory? Is it driven by consumer sentiment around this? So, you know, when you’re identifying key partnerships, how do you provide a value prop to these mining companies?
Peter Scheuermann: Yeah, so mining companies are getting pressure from a number of different places in order to decarbonize. Investors, you know, the Blackstones, the large institutional investors, governments, Canada, you need to be net zero by 2050. And then also the automakers are... Making a big push. Elon Musk has publicly announced, you know, the huge, what’s his quote, like ginormous contracts to anyone who can produce nickel sustainably. And so we kind of fit into that puzzle broadly. Whereas if we can help a mine, If we can remove carbon on a mine and show that this is possible at scale, that’s really attractive to them in terms of how they display themselves to their investors and their downstream customers.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, that seems positive to me that you don’t have a needed government regulatory mandate to get interest from them because that’s also something we’ve been talking about here in New York is this But the government hasn’t been able to get its act together worldwide. And so I’m happy to hear that companies are doing it for other reasons that the markets are more in control of because it does feel like the private markets are moving more quickly than government in this space. So pivoting a little bit to the actual XPRIZE, what will this million dollars that you won help you guys do over the next year or two?
Peter Scheuermann: Yeah, so we’re doing a number of things. One is taking all those learnings from the field experiments and pilots I mentioned and kind of making them modular such that we have a product, if you will, that can go out and increase the rate of capture over baseline and then also monitor that capture. So that’s a lot of kind of in the lab, in the field work. And then the other thing it’s helping us do is being able to, you know, talk to the prospective minds and say, hey, we can come and work on your site.
We’re ready to go. We just need to, you know, figure out the details and, you know, what do you need us to do? Because we’re here ready to pull the trigger.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Do you have to transport a lot of stuff to these mines? So is it easier if you’re more local in British Columbia or is it something that you were talking about, creating a modular system? Do you have something that you can take anywhere in the world right now and you just have to test it?
Peter Scheuermann: Yeah, so everything’s packable in those shipping containers that you see in large boats. So that’s how we intend to move. And then once there, We’d like to stay there for as long as possible and minimize all those transportation costs.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I guess that has to go into the LCA when you’re figuring out your overall carbon accounting on this stuff, which is difficult. So Naeem, pivoting a little bit to you, because you just released a report this summer with Carbon Plan about the barriers to scaling this long term CDR industry. And so when you think about and you hear about a company like Carbon Minerals and this report, what stokes your interest and what is your advice to them as they think about as they grow?
Na’im Merchant: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that report with the Carbon Plan, I think, really helped just clarify a lot of the perspectives that are out there on what it takes to scale carbon removal. And I think those perspectives are pretty varied. So I don’t know that there’s a kind of a clear answer. But some of the things that emerged that I think are probably relevant to this particular case is, and we’ve already talked about this a little bit, but the importance of getting MRV right. I think that’s critically important longer term for companies like Carbon Minerals in order to continue to gain traction.
And I think that kind of links to another issue that was an insight from the report as well, and that is the greater need for public sector support. And that’s especially true for non-direct air capture carbon removal solutions. I’m a big fan of direct air capture. But we’re seeing that a lot of the policies that are being advanced right now are pretty focused on direct air capture. And that’s because it’s a bit more of a well understood technology for policymakers and other experts in the field. And so when you have the MRV working well for a particular carbon removal solution, it can also make it kind of more attractive for getting more public sector support so that So that it allows policymakers to shift away from a specific technology in terms of supporting carbon removal through tax incentives, for example, like 45Q in states, or there’s an investment tax credit, again, just for DAC in Canada.
And so by having those kind of MRV standards and protocols in place that really kind of set some strong groundwork for measurability, additionality, and permanence, Which I think carbon minerals might kind of check a lot of those boxes or all of those boxes. But by getting that MRV in place and having something really robust there, it makes it more possible for government incentives like 45Q or even down the line, potentially government procurement to consider a lot more, a broader spectrum of carbon removal solutions that would qualify for these sorts of things.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Naeem, one of the interesting conversations I was having yesterday was an entrepreneur describing how MRV is becoming very, it’s almost part of the tech stack of these companies, and there’s a lot of IP potential around it. So, which is not how it works in soil right now, where we don’t, you know, we collect data, we have a model, but the verification is done by a third party that’s completely separate from And so I’m curious if you have given any thought to this sort of privatization of particularly the verification piece, which then I think makes it harder to explain to policymakers what you’re doing.
So what do you think about that?
Na’im Merchant: So when you say privatization of the verification piece, it kind of means like the project developer or technology developer owns the verification essentially. They’re verifying their own work.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I mean, you know, exactly, you know, like, you’re verifying, but they’re doing it themselves. So, yeah, how does that work?
Na’im Merchant: And I guess they’re developing technology that makes it, I guess, a little bit more measurable and therefore, you know, easier to verify someone, you know, I think, I think, if that’s where we’re starting from right now, you know, I think that’s, that’s, That’s fine in the very near term, but ultimately we don’t want to have a system, no matter how good your technology is, where verification is happening by the actual project developer or technology developer. That’s just not how verification should work. It should be done by a third party. I think that the challenge is that you’re just not seeing the development of Third-party standards as it relates to methodologies and verification and all these other kind of components that relate to standards within CDR happening from any kind of third party or moving forward in a way that carbon removal companies can kind of just sit around and wait for that to happen.
And so if companies want to innovate internally and privatize this approach internally to start, I think that’s fine, but what would be I think much more preferable is then for very, very quickly, if this is going to happen is for these processes to abstract up into something that is a more kind of a third party arm’s length approach that, you know, these, these technologies that are being developed and these approaches that are being developed, uh, that they can be, um, that, that these verification processes that, that stem from that can be owned by a third party.
Cause I think that’s just, that’s just how it seems to work.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, it always makes me nervous if we start from the wrong place and try to pivot versus starting from the right place and doing it more slowly. Though I appreciate the urgency and I also appreciate that these companies are developing very innovative technologies and things and need to protect to create revenue streams around it. So not an easy question, but it’s one that definitely piqued my interest yesterday as we were talking to some of the entrepreneurs.
Na’im Merchant: And the fact that these companies are developing the technology to improve MRV, I think that’s great if that’s happening internally. But as you start to scale and grow, you need to have third party verification. And if your technology makes it easier to do that verification, then great. But it still needs to be handled by a third party.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. And I think that’s one of the attractions of DAC, right? I can see why policymakers grasp onto it because it’s pretty easy to measure and figure out there’s not a ton of complications so it’s like I get DAC I get how you measure and I get how you verify it like you don’t need a full in super super literate I guess verification force in the way that you would for some of these nature based and industrial solutions that. Meet in nature based solutions kind of. So, Peter, the last question for you is, you know, probably last question for you is, what do you think you all need to achieve in the next three years to be an XPRIZE grand prize winner or alternative?
Alternatively, what are your goals and dreams for the company in the next three years before the XPRIZE is awarded?
Peter Scheuermann: I’ll go back to something I said earlier. Has to do with XPRIZE as much as just the rollout and scale up of tailings as a removal solution. And that is demonstrating that we can do this safely and at modest scale over the next, you know, one to three years. That’s going to be huge in terms of the mining and in terms of getting partnerships. With the mining industry and moving up the how much carbon we can sequester an individual mine. So I really see that as a focus for us. It plays into our ability to, you know, shoot for that grand prize, XPRIZE, but also just longer term for us.
It’s really important as a company.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And Naeem, I’m going to throw one last question at you. If you were an XPRIZE judge, what would you be thinking about when you were evaluating for the grand prize? What are things you think the industry needs to show in the next three years to have really meaningful movement?
Na’im Merchant: Yeah, I’d be looking at a few things. One, I want to see a pathway to Driving down the cost of these carbon removal solutions. I think in three years, we’ll still be talking about very high premium prices for these particular solutions, but it’d be great to see a pathway to getting that price per tonne down. The second thing I’d look for is just the ability to deploy quickly. And that’s why those partnerships with mining companies in this case, but other stakeholders as it relates to carbon removal solutions more broadly, How have these technology developers figured out how to work with partners to deploy their technology so that it can be deployed quickly?
I think that’s another key area. And then finally, and we’ve talked about this a lot, but having a really robust MRV protocol and system at least contemplated and potentially in place. So MRV is the product. That’s what you deliver in so far as carbon removal is concerned. Peter Reinhart from Charm Industrial said to me recently, you know, you don’t show up at a loading dock with carbon removal, right? So making sure you get MRV right and that it’s really robust and it’s really well thought through, I think is going to be critically important to a company’s scale potential.
And so that is kind of the third criteria I’d look for as an express judge.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Well, with that, thank you both for joining us today. And like I said at the beginning, tomorrow will be part two of our other talking to other XPRIZE winners. Peter, as I’m so happy you could join us today. And I hope you have a wonderful rest of the week.
Peter Scheuermann: Thanks so much for having me.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And Naeem, it was good to see you over Zoom and good to see you in person. Thanks as always for joining.
Na’im Merchant: Thanks so much, Radhika. And thanks, Peter.
Asa Kamer: All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Carbon Removal Newsroom. This is our second segment this week with an XPRIZE milestone award-winning team. Our regular host, Radhika, is not with us today, so I’ll be filling in today as the guest host. This is Asa Kamer. I’m Carbon Removal Newsroom’s producer. And we have a really exciting team joining us today. So let’s get into it. We’re going to be talking with representatives from two companies, Mission Zero out of the UK and the carbon mineralization company 4401 based out of the UK in Oman.
So their submission proposes to use DAC powered by renewables to store captured CO2 in peridotite formations found in Oman’s Al-Hajjar Mountains And we’re going to learn a lot more about that right now. So joining me is Nicholas Chadwick, the CEO for Mission Zero and Karan Kim Ji, the Commercial Lieutenant at 4401. And I will start with you, Nicholas. So what I’m wondering is, you know, the cohort of existing DAC installations that we have deployed in the world is not particularly large and it’s not particularly diverse in terms of technique. However, there’s a stack of well-funded DAC concepts working towards deployment in the next few years that is much larger than what we’ve seen and consists of some different methods than what we’ve seen.
So can you tell us a little bit about Mission Zero, your approach, and share what makes you excited about it?
Nicholas Chadwick: Yeah. Thanks, Asa. I’m really pleased to be here. You know, I think that’s a really good analysis is that, you know, there are a few deployments of DAC around the world, mostly aligned around a few companies essentially, but you’re right, over the next few years, there’s going to be a lot of deployments going on of a range of different DAC concepts essentially from a variety of different companies. I think what I’d say about our approach at Mission Zero is that particularly what’s exciting about it is that we’ve built it around this idea of scalability and modularity.
With a focus on being as energy efficient as possible. And so we have built the technology around a specific chemistry and house this chemistry within technologies that have already gone undergone essentially like scale experience curve work over the past couple of decades. So in the first step, we use essentially cooling tower infrastructure to provide the efficient solvation of CO2 into a solvent that we developed. You know, these things work day in, day out. They are required for power generation so the lights wouldn’t be on, we wouldn’t be having this call right now if they didn’t work in a reliable way and hadn’t been scaled and deployed at massive installations all around the world.
And then the way that we would generate our CO2 is using electrochemical water purification technology which handles something like 20% of Barcelona’s clean water every year. If you were to take the plants that have been built already and Instead of using them to process dirty water and use it for carbon dioxide regeneration with our solvent, they’re actually plants which already represent megatonnes of CO2 regeneration capability. So again, this technology has been around for several decades. People in Project Finance built it and deployed it at a massive scale. So the joining of these two approaches together allows us to run our DAC technology using only electricity, and it’s incredibly modular.
So this means that we can almost Copy and paste the technology to deploy it almost anywhere that we want. So yeah, there you go.
Asa Kamer: Excellent. That’s a great answer. Thanks for getting into that. So I’m going to jump over to you, Karan. Why did 4401 decide to focus on mineralization of CO2 rather than more conventional underground storage of CO2? And why did you select this region in Oman?
Karan Khimji: So mineralization is the most permanent form of the removal of carbon that exists on the planet today. Compared to conventional oil and gas, conventional storage of CO2, storage really implies that the CO2 can be re-released again. In the case of mineralization, CO2 is eliminated permanently, literally immobilized in solid form, solid carbonate inert mineral form in the subsurface, and therefore remains that way for millennia. So we really wanted to focus on mineralization because it is permanent. So, we really wanted to focus on that type of permanence and build that into our DNA.
In terms of Oman, We focus on Oman. Firstly, I am Omani. So I did grow up in the region myself, and I’m very attached to the abundant and beautiful nature that the country hosts. We started to see a lot of impacts of climate change in the country itself, but then also realized that we sit on a particular rock, peridotite, which has a natural capability to mineralize CO2 from the atmosphere on a daily basis. But that reaction is very, very slow. So what we effectively do at 4401 is we’re able to speed up that reaction using our process.
You know, mine in particular, the peridotide deposit is one of the largest peridotide deposits found on the surface of the planet, which is why we wanted to start there. It enables us to scale up our technology and enables us to have the cheapest and easiest form of access to the resource that we require for our process.
Asa Kamer: Excellent. Excellent. Just to stay on that, because it sounds like your your approach is to have the DAC in the storage located in the same general area. And it sounds like you’re starting from scratch. You’re not building around existing CO2 pipelines, which is interesting because obviously the transport, the potential transport of CO2 from a DAC plant to underground storage would theoretically be a big part of the cost of carbon removal via DAC. So I’m interested just to hear a little bit more about that. I mean, are there pros and cons to siting a DAC near the storage site?
Does that create other challenges? And I know that Climeworks, for instance, is in Iceland. They have their much publicized project there where they’re doing their DAC right at the basalt formations where the storage takes place. So is there similar thinking there? And does that present its own challenges? I mean, how does that work into the overall equation?
Nicholas Chadwick: At least with the way that we have built our DAC technology and the way that it works specifically allows us to deploy it in places where it wouldn’t be able to deploy otherwise. And so for us, having access to the right resources in the area, Is a really important thing for us, but this is something that actually in Oman, particularly around this project and working with 4401 enables us to do. And I think this interesting aspect of transport and storage of CO2 with pipelines and this kind of thing, actually, if you can eliminate this, then you should, because whilst it is nice to say, sure, maybe other people have built the infrastructure already, there are costs associated with either utilizing it or actually having to build it yourself.
So if you can take that out of the equation, then you will just make the whole system more efficient.
Karan Khimji: No, I think, Nick, you’re right on the money here, literally. The amount of cost reduction from not including a transportation element is significantly beneficial for both parties, the direct air capture and the elimination of CO2 through mineralization. So to have Mission Zero stack units on our sites from a deployment perspective is also much easier to host and operate those units next to the injection site itself instead of having it in a different location, operating it elsewhere with a different team, transporting the CO2 and then Having a separate operations team on the ground for mineralization.
So to combine all that in the same area is extremely beneficial for not just eliminating transportation costs, but in terms of the OpEx involved in operating the entire project for the couple of decades long lifetime that we hope that this will be operating.
Asa Kamer: So would love to hear a little bit about what you all are working on now. And so, you know, what I would love to know is like, what are the challenges that you got, that you’re finding currently? What is this $1 million that you were awarded earlier this year going to help you accomplish the scale of your current operation, you know, and just the current challenges that you’re finding yourselves working on? I’m really interested to hear more about that.
Karan Khimji: Sure, I can start off here this time. On 4401’s perspective, we’re currently working, we’re still working through our pilot injection tests. So we’re creating certain parameters and doing injection tests using our fluid mixture injection technique to test certain elements and hypotheses with the mineralization process. So things like injection rates, mineralization rates, injection quantities, and the reaction of the subsurface to the injection of fluid mixture. So we’re working through that and then basically scaling up our parameters towards a commercial scale injection sync that should be coming online middle of next year.
It just some time to be able to host Mission Zero’s direct air capture unit.
Asa Kamer: Wow. So is that a test site that’s in the Al-Hajjar mountains? Is this in a lab?
Karan Khimji: It is in the field in the Hajjar mountains. It is actually the exact site that will be hosting the direct air capture unit.
Asa Kamer: Wow. Amazing. Cool. Nicholas, do you want to speak to the question a bit?
Nicholas Chadwick: Yeah, sure. And I mean, from our side, what we’re really focusing on this moment in time is ensuring that our systems are integrated. Specifically, we’re demonstrating the right KPIs to ensure that we have the right level of confidence to make jumps and scaling required to go orders of magnitude from where we are now to the thousands of tonnes of removal that we need to achieve to be able to win the XPRIZE. I think for us, You know, echoing what Karam was saying about the 4401 zone scaling journey is that, you know, we’re going through the piloting process as well in 2023, with the intention that when we come to the beginning of 2024, we have ironed out all the kinks that we need to, to ensure that we can deploy this on the ground in a way that we intend to, in a kind of synergistic, holistic way, working together to ensure this kind of very efficient conduit of CO2 from the atmosphere, and then permanently mineralizing it in the ground.
Asa Kamer: Excellent. I want to get, Karan, a little bit into another detail of the carbon mineralization process, and that’s the water, how that works. Because my very, very layman’s understanding is that the captured CO2 is mixed with water, and then that mixture, when injected into rock formation, And so can you tell us a little bit about the plan for where does the water come from in the Hajar Mountains? And I’ll just skip to my second question as well, which is, is there a possibility of, in addition to using freshwater, possibly using seawater or other water sources?
Karan Khimji: So the current pilot site that we’re operating on uses the natural groundwater aquifer that sits under the site itself. So it’s literally an existent aquifer. In the subsurface, in the prototype formations. So we pump that water out, use it for mixing with the CO2, and then perform our injection process. But we do recognize that there are limitations to that, especially in water-scarce areas. So we do plan to deploy our future sites at the coast. And in Oman, in the UAE, basically the Samael Ophiolite, where we’re working on in the Hajar Mountains, there are prototype deposits all along the coastline.
So we do absolutely intend to build sites and then use seawater as a substitute for injection.
Asa Kamer: Great. And so it sounds like you all are pretty confident that seawater will work for this technique.
Karan Khimji: It is quite new, a new process that we’re looking into. So there has been some research done already that shows that the fluid mixture is possible to create, but there will be some efficiency losses because of the competing ions from the naturally salted saline water. Compared to the CO2 that we would be mixing into that water. So with that, we do expect around 10 to 15% efficiency loss when it comes to the amount of CO2 that you can inject and dissolve into every unit of water. But on the other side, the flip side of that coin is that now we have an abundant source of water.
So we do believe that we can still make the economics work regardless.
Asa Kamer: Wonderful. And unfortunately, there will be a lot more seawater in the future from Okay, that’s really interesting and that’s something I’d like to learn more about because if you don’t have that limitation with the water and It can be done in other coastal areas. It seems like that would be very beneficial for your technique. And I can’t help but be curious, and I’m sorry, I’m kind of, I’m getting into the weeds here, but one more question about the actual injection, if I can. I recently saw a tweet from Jack Andreessen.
I think I’m saying your name right, Jack. And he sent out some info about a site visit he was doing in Wyoming with a carbon storage site, you know, an existing well. And the... Basically he sent out a picture of it and it’s, you know, it’s very small. It’s really not a large facility where the actual injection will happen. And I just thought that was interesting because, you know, it’s some of the extrapolations that we hear about for, you know, getting to gigatonne scale, for instance, there’s going to need to be a lot of DAC facilities, a lot of storage facilities, but to see this, you know, Rather small little gated area where the injection happens, it maybe takes away a little bit of the intimidation for how much physical space that would take up.
What can you tell us about the physical footprint of a DAC and storage site in the Project Tajar vision?
Karan Khimji: Sure, absolutely. Asa, you’re absolutely right. We do inject into the subsurface, so it’s really not a surface area constraint for mineralization. It’s a subsurface area constraint. So in the case of mineralization, when we inject the fluid mixture into the subsurface, peridotide is a naturally fractured rock with basically a natural fracture network. And that fluid mixture flows through that fracture network and mineralizes. But that fracture network spreads in a radius around that existing borehole. So you do not see from the surface the size of the surface area coverage of the fluid mixture, but it indeed requires a significant amount of area in the subsurface itself Which is why when we deploy multiple boreholes across multiple sites, we do need to estimate to have a certain amount of distance between each borehole so that we can cover the most amount of surface area in that fracture network underground.
Nicholas Chadwick: I think everyone’s aware of the mock-ups that are floating around the internet of what DAC deployments look like. So there’s a variety of them and they’re all over basically a lot of boxes with fans and this kind of thing. I think it’s always going to be the case almost that DAC deployments are going to be the larger surface area or volume constraints in these kind of projects. As Karam was saying, The injection one is probably like a fairly unassuming piece of infrastructure, really. The real space it takes up is like under the ground beneath you.
And so from our perspective, at least at the XPRIZE scale, we’re really thinking about its deployment should be a footprint of several shipping containers in this kind of modularized format of our technology. But if you are looking to get towards megatonnes or even gigatonnes of capability, DAC is going to be the thing that takes up the most space for sure, I think. Probably not in the subsurface, comparatively speaking, but the thing that people will see, it’s always going to be DAF that takes up the most space.
Asa Kamer: I see. And speaking of that, you know, speaking of the scale and the sort of extrapolating to what it could get to, have you all done calculations for this site, for the Hajar Mountains and for the Project Hajar kind of scope for what kind of scale we’re talking about? I mean, is there a size or a storage capacity that you guys are hoping to reach?
Karan Khimji: So in general, across the entire Samaelophyllite in Oman and the UAE, if we were to, we did some back of the envelope calculations and basically if you were to snap your fingers and convert every molecule of peridotide into the inert carbonate minerals that we create through our process, we could theoretically mineralize trillions and trillions of tonnes, all the CO2 emissions ever emitted by humans since the pre-industrial age. The real question is how much of that can we actually access for our process? But even if we’re able to make a drop in the bucket there, that’s still billions of tonnes a year.
So we think we can make quite a lot of headway in this one rock formation that we’re looking at in Oman and the UAE. When it comes to the Hajar site itself, there is definitely large scope for expansion of Hajar on that specific site. The real question is water limitation, as we spoke about earlier. So we’re still, during our pilot test, going through the estimation of what that restriction would be. But it is going to be An order of magnitude larger than what we are currently doing, what we will be doing for HR.
Asa Kamer: Wow. Some impressive numbers there. That’s very cool to hear.
Nicholas Chadwick: I think just to follow up on another aspect is, as Karam was saying, if we can snap our fingers and mineralize all the industrial emissions, or rather all the CO2 emissions that humanity has made pre the industrial revolution, then this is going to be a fantastic opportunity that we’d almost be remiss to not explore and not try and achieve. And I think the one question for us as part of Project Hajar is that how do we create the conduit to enable that mineralization? And so what we’re really trying to achieve here is the demonstration of We have thousands of tonnes of CO2 removal if we can as a minimum essentially as part of this project because we judge essentially that if you can demonstrate that as a capability, then there’s no reason you can’t begin to access the infrastructure, the permitting, the planning and everything else required to scale this up and the right capital stack essentially.
It is the kind of flag in the ground needed to show like this is a thing and actually everyone should jump on board because this is a real solution that could really, really fight climate change.
Asa Kamer: And, you know, you all did win the milestone award. So some real experts in CDR seem to agree that there’s potential with your plan. I mean, between abundant capacity for renewables, the specific rock formations uniquely, you know, across the globally speaking, unique in their ability to capture CO2. But it seems like there’s a lot going for this strategy. And so I’m just curious, what is it that keeps you two up at night? What are the hurdles, the big hurdles, or are there any, that you see between where we are now and getting to, let’s say, gigatonne scale for this kind of technique?
Karan Khimji: In terms of reaching gigatonne scale in amounts of Every site is basically going to be slightly different in terms of the prototype layers that exist in the subsurface. So it’s very site-specific, which means that we can’t use the same assumptions that we’ve developed for, let’s say, the Project Hudger site to extrapolate across the entire globe. There will be a little bit of variation. So it doesn’t keep me up at night, but it’s definitely a consideration as we look to scale. The thing that keeps me up at night, I would say, is access to a cheap cost of capital for project financing, for taking Direct air capture plus mineralization from its first commercial deployment to the multiple tens and hundreds of deployments we require to get to that gigatonne scale value.
At the moment, there is a little bit of gap in the financial markets where venture capital is a high cost of capital and is willing to fund early technology developments. And then you get your project financiers that have a very low cost of capital that wants an established technology that has been operating for X amount of years With regurgitating data and a long-term off-take agreement. So there’s a little bit of a gap there. But what really keeps me up at night is that who’s going to fill that gap and help us get to those multiple deployments on an annual basis.
Nicholas Chadwick: I think I would simply echo many of the things that Karna has just said. And I think from a DAC-specific perspective, You know, this is a nascent technology in a way which is, as we alluded to at the beginning of our conversation, is still waiting for multiple deployments to occur in a kind of varied way and really for the limits of the technology to be ascertained, essentially. And so when it comes to things like permitting, planning, like how do you get insurance for these projects? How do you make this a bankable proposition?
I think one of the main things that keeps me up at night is that In this kind of modus operandi for this technology where you are focusing purely on removing CO2 from the atmosphere and mineralizing it and then commercializing it through the sale of carbon credits or offsets is that The voluntary carbon credit market itself at the moment is fairly nascent and there is an ongoing debate within society and industry about what are going to be the rules and how people are going to interact within this market, are governments going to step in or not.
There’s still a lot to be figured out by everyone in this space and so that does keep me up at night a little bit. I think one thing that, however, kind of assuages my fear is that we have time that, you know, we’re deploying this technology in 2024. I think governments are starting to catch up. You’ve seen the passage of the IRA in the US. You will inevitably find that other governments start to follow suit, essentially. So I do think the rules and boundaries of this market will sort themselves out.
And my hope is just that by the time we come to say, right, we’ve proven this and it works, and now we need the right capital stack to get this in place, that the market is there, that the finances are there, that this isn’t seen as such a risky proposition. But that’s the Point of this project is to prove that it’s not such a risky proposition that actually you can have that assurity on the permanence of CO2 removal through this method.
Asa Kamer: Can’t say envy you both on one hand at lab scale at, you know, pilot scale, figuring out very specific, you know, chemistry questions. And then on the other hand, having to worry about the fate of geopolitics and climate negotiations and the whole economy. So it’s sounds challenging.
Nicholas Chadwick: Yeah. I think there’s one more thing that keeps me up at night a little bit, and it’s quite a large thing. And I think it’s that if you look at the scaling of many technologies, and what conducts are removal in many ways is like a technology stack that requires a much larger capital stack to enable it, is that if you look at things like solar cells or lithium-ion batteries, These had a long time to find their way in the market and scale and go down the cost and experience curve to get to the point where they’re ubiquitous and cheap and we’re now going to be relying on them in many ways to deploy our own technology.
But DAC specifically has to get to megatonnes of removal by 2030 for us to ensure that we’re hitting a 1. 5 degree of warming pathway. And that is one thing that keeps me up at night is that once we prove this project works, we need to scale like crazy. And I’m a firm believer that it’s possible, but we need to ensure that the whole ecosystem comes behind us in what we’re doing. And I think that’s a large part of what we need to do as part of our work in Project Hajar is to ensure that it’s not just about us.
Squirreling ourselves away and doing this really cool project, ensuring that we’re cultivating this ecosystem of finance, of government interaction, of people who really see the value from a social perspective on what we’re doing. This is ultimately almost a project for humanity in a way, right? And so we need to bring everyone with us as we do it.
Asa Kamer: What do you both think you all need to do at Project Hajar to win the XPRIZE grand prize? Speaking of Low cost of capital, that’d be one way to do it. But to win the XPRIZE and what hurdles or breakthroughs do you feel that stand between you and the possibility of winning that prize?
Karan Khimji: I think for us, it’s achieving that first commercial scale deployment. We’re moving now from a pilot scale to a commercial scale, and we want to make sure that we have the right infrastructure to be able to host Mission Zero’s direct air capture unit on our site and the right resources that we can provide them for the full operation. Of the removal that we require to win the XPRIZE. And that means for us performing continuous injection in our first commercial scale borehole and increasing injection rates to be able to host the 1000 tonne per year removal that Mission Zero’s direct air capture unit will be providing us.
So looking forward to basically taking learnings from our first commercial deployment and prepping it for that Mission Zero direct air capture unit.
Nicholas Chadwick: I think the kind of hurdle or breakthrough that we need to overcome essentially to ensure that we’ve had a really good chance of winning the X Prize is that it’s always almost been the case that there’s a lot of technologies And parts of the kind of value or technology chain that want to integrate with DAC and they’re like, can you deploy this amount of DAC on this timeline? You go, no one can. And DAC always seems to be the kind of rate determining step in many ways. And other nascent technologies as part of that technology chain have their own development timelines and they’re very difficult as well.
And so I think the thing that is a unique challenge from Mission Zero is that I think we need to ensure that we have the confidence in the way that our technology scales as early on as possible to ensure that we can get from where we are right now to thousands of tonnes of capability. And that is something that I’m feeling pretty confident on. But it is a question that’s been begged of us in a very short space of time. Can we scale the technology orders of magnitude and capability to ensure that when 4401 are ready to integrate the DAC technology or unit that we’re going to be deploying, that we’re ready to make the most of the capability that they’ve built.
But I think if our two technologies and our companies could ensure that we communicate adequately, that we’re working in synergy with each other to deploy this, There’s a very real, real possibility we can do this on the time running usage. I’m feeling very confident.
Asa Kamer: Wonderful. Well, that is a great note to end on. I want to thank you both very much for joining us and we’d love to have you back on sometime. Thank you for the listeners for listening in. Radhika will be back with you next time. And this has been Carbon Removal Newsroom. Thanks for listening.
Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom. If you like the show, the best way you can help us is by giving us a great rating and review in Apple Podcasts, following the show on Spotify, and by sharing the show on social media. Tell your friends and help us spread the word about what’s happening in the world of carbon removal.
