September 11, 2025 • 38 mins
Shashank Samala is the CEO and co-founder of Heirloom, a carbon capture start-up.
His problem is this: Can you use crushed up rocks to permanently suck carbon out of the atmosphere? And can you do it cheaply enough to have a global impact?
On today’s show, Shashank explains why he believes rocks could be the backbone of carbon capture, how his childhood in India shaped his outlook on climate change, and how government policy is shaping today’s direct air capture industry.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, How did spend in your childhood in Southeast India?
Ef fact that we think about climate change.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
The place where I grew up, you know, just had
to have had their path. When things got dry, they
got really dry, and when things got wet, they got
really wet. You know, the monster's got more and more extreme.
The droughts got more and more extreme over time. And
it's a pretty normal thing to show up to school
one day and your friend just like doesn't come to
school for like six months at a time because they're
(00:46):
helping their parents recover from a flood that happened in
months ago. And it's a pretty common thing for me.
You know, I didn't know it was climate change growing up, honestly,
Like it was just like a thing that happened.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
It was just climate.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
That's what nature was, and things just got worse and
worse every year, and that's just how things are. As
I grew up and started learning a lot more, and
it started connecting the dots. What I realized was that
the folks who are facing the worst impacts of climate
change are the ones who are least educated about it
and then the most vulnerable to it already. And I
(01:21):
think That's what I think gives me a lot of
motivation and drive that fundamentally, this problem is an unfair
one where it's created and where the impacts are most felt.
People ask me like, how did you decide to work
on climate? How did you decide specifically to work on
carbon removal? But for me, it was a no brainer.
Of course I'm going to work on this, and of
course this is the most scalable way to solve the problem.
(01:44):
Being an engineer myself, like building these cost models so forth,
it's like it's actually possible. So why didn't we actually
go about doing it? It was just a matter of
putting together right team and right partners and going on
the journey.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem? The
show where I talk to people who are trying to
make technological progress. My guest today is Shashank Samala Sschank
is the co founder and CEO of Airloom. Shashank's problem
is this, can you use crushed up rocks, specifically limestone,
to permanently suck carbon out of the atmosphere? And crucially
(02:26):
can you do it for one hundred dollars per ton
of carbon? To that end Heirloom has built a pilot
plant in California near its headquarters, and is currently working
on a much larger plant in Louisiana. By the way,
I learned about Shoshank from my conversation a few weeks
ago with Nan Ransahoff. If you missed that one and
want to hear more about carbon removal, you might want
(02:49):
to check that out. Shachank began his career in manufacturing.
He wasn't an environmental scientist or a geologist, so to
start I asked him about rocks.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
We love rocks. I've dedicated my life to rocks.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
When did you discover rocks?
Speaker 2 (03:05):
When I realized that carbon capture is like the thing
to do, Not everyone has realized it yet, but like
people will. In that journey, I started just reading papers
and books at night, and you know, it was basically,
what are the natural things that I already doing this? It's
biomass and rocks.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Basically plants and rocks.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
When you start looking at this, it does seem like
there's sort of three very crudely kind of modes. Right,
people are using fans, plants, and rocks, right, Yeah, Why
did you wind up ruling out fans and plants.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
So that's a great question. I think at the beginning,
when I first got started, I wasn't married to any approach.
I come from a manufacturing background. I was making electronics
for satellites and robots and so forth, and you know,
manufacturing is superkin margins and you have to understand where
your costs are. And for me, when I first started
looking at this problem, it was very clear that at
(04:01):
the end of the day, what matters has cost costs
pertanos two. You know, it's not like we're designing an
amazingly beautiful car for people to drive around. All the
matters is how many molecules of CO two in the
air are and how cost effectively you remove it, how.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Many molecules of CO two per dollar you can get exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
So I was just so obsessed about, like, you know,
what is the absolute simplest way you can solve this problem.
And there's a bunch of other folks who are using
synthetic ways to you know, using fans and so forth
to pull carbon, And I think the best way to
approach an engineering problem is just like what is the
bare minimum you need and then add complexity from there.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
So why does this idea of like cheapest absolute bare minimum,
why does that lead you to rocks?
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Rocks basically have a couple of principles, right, Like, if
you start with the idea that you need CO two
to be permanently sequestered so you know it doesn't decomposs
back into the atmosphere, you need a sponge With rocks,
it's the CO two only goes one way and it
doesn't respire back you, so it doesn't decompos and they're
(05:11):
super cheap. Earth has already spent billions of years creating
this sort of crystal instruction in this geochemical mineral that
is thirsty for CO two, and it helped balance the
CO two in the atmosphere, So it already paid this
energy penalty to make this rock that is super abundant
and cheap. So the mineral the view using it's you know,
(05:31):
thirty to forty bucks a ton, and we can reuse
it over and over again. So you know, if you
can reuse it s a hundred cycles, you can get
the cost per ton for the rock down to twenty
thirty cents.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
So you land on limestone. Right, you haven't said limestone,
but you're talking about limes. Ztone, tell me about limestone.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Yeah, So limestone is this amazingly beautiful chemical. It's a
naturally occurring mineral. There is four percent of the Earth's
crust is made up of limestone, and the chemical formula
for it is calcium carbonate, and Earth produced a lot
of this over you know, billions of years to partly
to help balance the CO two in the atmosphere. It's
(06:11):
like if you're a rock climber, it's a chalk that is,
it's a carbonate limestone. It's it's incredibly abundant, basically looks
like white powder.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
So that's limestone. It has carbon dioxide in it already,
so it's already done the thing you want to do
Exactly when you're figuring out what's going to be your
play for air capture, like how do you get to
where you wind up? Like you see that limestone has
already done this thing. Limestone already has the carbon, but
that's not what you want, Like you want to capture
more carbon exactly.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
I think carbon removal and directory capture. It's all a
energy optimization play. Yeah, how do you spend as little
energy as possible to remove a bunch of cooto molecules
from the air, and you know, and there's a lot
of different directions, a lot of different philosophies on how
you approach this problem. And our thesis was, you need
(07:01):
a sponge to remove the CO two, and there's an
energy that goes into capturing the YOU two, and there's
an energy that goes into releasing that CO two so
that we can capture more CO two with that sponge.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Right, you got to capture the CO two from the air,
and then you've got to do something with it to
basically stick it in the ground for ten thousand years exactly.
So it's a two step process. There's capture and storage. Right.
All the different angles are doing some version of that, right,
those two step process exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
It's a capture and a release, capture and regeneration. And
the whole play is how do you minimize energy in
both of those steps.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Yeah, because the energy basically winds up being cost, right,
like the cost the key input ends up being energy.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Exactly right, exactly right. It's you know, whether it's in
the form of capital equipment, whether it's in the form
of literal electrons going in, it's energy. At the end
of the day. Is the thing to optimize around, and
so for us when we looked around, that was not
a PhD in material science when I started this, right, like,
I come from a manufacturing background, and I literally just
(08:09):
like picked up my chemistry books from high school and
reread them to you know, first getting started and basically like,
if this is the framework and you're trying to optimize
energy on both sides, first you start with the capture step. Okay,
well what already does this naturally? Right? And there's a
bunch of carbonates, calcin carbonate, machnicin carbonate, and so forth.
(08:31):
And we ended up with calcin carbonate limestone because it
needs the lowest amount of energy to capture CO two, okay,
just thermodynamically, and it's thermodynamically favored. It's so thirsty for
COO two, Like if you figure out a way to
break it to release that COO two and you put
that on your desk, it just starts gobbling up COO
(08:52):
two molecules whether you like it or not.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
So it's very energy favorable for step one exactly capture,
but it doesn't want to release it once it has
it right as you put it out. There's two steps.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
There's two steps.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Now you've got this limestone full of carbon, but you
got to get it to release it. And it does
seem like for you that's the hard part. That's certainly
the energy intensive part.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
That is certainly the energy intensive part. Not just for us,
it's actually basically everyone else.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Oh you mean, for all of the carbon capture and removal.
It's actually the release is the hard part.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
The release is the most energy intensive part. And when
we first picked limestone, we liked the way of releasing
CO two in the second step because cement industry already
does this, cement and lime industry. They take limestone, they
break it into calcium oxide CO two put the cootwo
into the air, but they take the calcium oxide, put
(09:43):
a bunch of other stuff to it, and turn it
into cement.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
And just to be clear, like let's just pause there,
because this is a giant global industry that in fact
is a huge emitter for this reason, right fact, the
key input to cement is limestone. And the basic thing
you do when you're making cement is you put limestone
in a kiln, make it very hot, and you just
burn off the CO two and then you're left with lime,
which is whatever, it's calcium oxide something. Yeah, So there
(10:09):
is a question I have there, which is like, there's
already a giant global industry of people doing this. Yes,
would it not be more efficient to just capture that
CO two that they're already releasing literally today in great
quantities and stick that in the ground.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
We should absolutely do that, And there's many companies already
doing that as well. And that's that's called points source capture,
So where you're essentially avoiding emissions from a cement plant
or national gas power plan fitting the CO two into.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
The air, and then you get to sell the cement, right.
I feel like the economics there are much more favorable.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
Well, you're selling cement, but it's actually an added cost
to capture that CO two.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Right, sure, So I mean ideally you could sell the
cement and sell the carbon capture and removal.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Yeah, it's a different technical method. It's it's points source capture,
and there's a bunch of folks already working on it.
What we're focused on is removing COEO two that's already
in the air.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Are you assuming that like in X years ten or something,
everybody making cement's going to do that? Anyways? And you
want to do a marginal benefit.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
So if you look across four thousands CEM in plants
that already exist on the planet, there's a bunch of
other infrastructure that needs to be in place for points
source capture to happen. There's a bunch of cemen plants
that are close to where energy is cheap and underground
storage is available, where they can do points source capture,
and we should absolutely do it. But there's also many
(11:34):
many cimon plants, thousands of cimon plants that are not
near where a COE to underground storage is available or
energy is not available. To actually capture that CO two
from from the flue gas that it would be very expensive.
You would have to transport that CO two hundreds of
miles away and that costs a lot of money, and
effectively it becomes a cost benefit analysis where it could
(11:57):
actually be cheaper to remove the CO two than putting
a point source capture on top of it.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
So okay, so that's why not do it with cement
or not just do it with cement exactly. So you
have this idea, what are the obvious problems with it?
When you come up with the idea, what are the like, oh,
here's why it's going to be difficult.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Here's why it's going to be difficult. So I think
at the beginning, you know, when before the start started,
and I think people knew that rocks can capture CO two,
but the problem was it was too slow. You know, geochemically, naturally,
it would take maybe six months or a year to
fully saturate itself with CO two in the air. So
(12:37):
if you put that on your desk, it would take
that long. And if you put that into a cost model,
you pretty quickly realize that there's just no way this
can get to one hundred bucks a ton long term.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Just because you've got to have like essentially a factory,
and all that's happening at your factory is rock is
sitting there for a year exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
You need gobs and gobs of limestone, yea, And I
mean think of you know, thousands of scure kilometers to
capture you.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Know, not gonna work.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
It's not gonna work. So, you know, it was pretty
clear from the beginning that this thing needs to be
at least ten times faster, if not more. And at
the beginning, we're not sure whether this is even possible.
And you know, we just had a few scientists just
playing around with a few different things, and they figured
out how to basically give it superpowers to pull carbon
(13:25):
from the air faster. And over the last been seven years,
where you know, we started at six months, and we
first went to you know, three months, and then you know,
it went down to a month, and then it went
down to two weeks and five days and four days.
We're way down below that today. And what's been interesting
is people will always ask me, why is this so
(13:46):
important for you to cycle time? And it's so important
because the difference between ten days and five days is
for the same amount of capital equipment, I can get
two x to through put right, and the costs come
down just dramatically. So that's been our biggest lever and
it's been amazing. Every twelve to eighteen months we figured
(14:07):
out a way to make it about two ks faster.
I think that's where a lot of optimism comes from
for cost reduction.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Is there one particular improvement that would be interesting to
talk about, one particular thing you figured out or your
team figured out to go faster.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
There's about fifteen to twenty different parameters internally, you know,
there's like particle size, particle size distribution, the porosity of
the particle, the surface area of each particle.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
So these are just physical traits. You sort of mash
up the rock in different ways, grind it up one
way or grind it up another way.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yeah, so we actually grind it up only once at
the beginning, when we first get the feed stock from
the mine. But how you run the process, you know
what temperature and what residents time you have in the oven.
You know, it's sort of like when you're baking cookies
in an oven, right, Like there's a few levers you have,
and it actually turns out they have a big implication
on how the physical properties of these things are.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
But it's not chemical. You're not like adding chemical inputs.
You're just monking with the limestone in different ways to
get you know, a magnitude of it's.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Pretty insane, Like it's the science is a lot more complicated.
But there's a specific parameter space that the nature really
loves limestone to be in, and we're constantly experimenting with
how you get into that tight space.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
When you say nature loves that, you mean that makes
it particularly eager to absorb carbon dioxide.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Exactly Yeah, humidity. For example, we love humidity. It actually
forms a thin layer of water on top of lime
and it makes it even more thirsty for COO two,
And all these things kind of work together. And our
technology is all about how do you keep this rock
in that tight space so we can capture you know,
(15:54):
CO two about one hundred times faster.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
That tight possibility space, that tight space of possible, and.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
As cheaply as possible. Right, Like, we're not adding chemicals,
we're not adding catalysts, just a bunch of rocks sitting
on trace.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Let's talk about the facility. So you built this facility
in Tracy, California, right east of San Francisco. That's sort
of a pilot plant. Let's talk about that as a
way to understand the process. What does it look like
if I drive up there? Like, how big is it?
What does it look like?
Speaker 2 (16:20):
So you drive up there and the first thing you
see is that there's a big box and the box
is basically, you know, it's a semi open building.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Like the size of Costco or something. When you say
big box, like how big are you talking?
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Yeah, it's this specific one is probably a quarter size
of a Costco. And once you go in, you will
see these tall stocks of trays. Imagine very large baking trays,
stock multiple stories.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
How many stories? How tall?
Speaker 2 (16:52):
So this specific one is about forty feet tall, a
couple hundred trays stacked all the way to the top.
And if you come closer to each tray, you'll start
seeing kind of like a large white cookie crumbled sitting
on a tray, and.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
It looks like it's just sitting there, but actually it's
absorbing carbon dioxide out of the air exactly.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
And what's cool is when you so you start out with,
you know, a bunch of white powder, and there's a
small amount of water that basically makes it cohesive, and
over time it's actually growing, just like growing like a cookie, right,
And as it's growing, it forms all these cracks and
it crumbles and so forth, and all that extra mass
(17:32):
is COO two. The only thing that captures is CO
two from the air.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
And so at this point, how long does that process take?
It takes a day or something.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
It takes a few days. The ones upcoming are much faster,
So I'll keep that under the rest.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
So then you have your big cookie full of carbon dioxide.
What do you do with it?
Speaker 2 (17:54):
After a few days. We don't wait until one hundred
percent saturation. We wait until eighty five ninety percent, and
then we bring it over to a hot kiln. And
this kiln is running. You know, it's electric, it's renewable
energy powered, so.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
It's super high, right, what is it like, nine hundred
degrees celsius or exactly right? Wildly hot? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Basically, you're exposing this material for ten to fifteen seconds
to very high temperature, and it's decomposing. It's releasing the
CO two that it captured from the air, and now
you essentially have high purity CO two coming out of
the kiln. We compress it and in the case of
(18:34):
the Tracy facility, we store it in concrete, but in
the future facilities it's either going underground or it's used
for synthetic fuels and so forth. The line that comes
off of it, it's ready to capture more CO two.
So we're sending it back into the tray, expose it
to the air, capture more CO two, Wait a few days,
(18:55):
put it back in the kilnt and the cycle repeats
over and over and over again.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Heating get kiln to nine hundred degrees See is wildly
energy intensive, right, And obviously for your project, you're not
going to burn fossil fuel to do that. But is
that in terms of the cost of the whole thing,
Is that the expensive part?
Speaker 2 (19:13):
That's the expensive part, Yes, And I think the one
thing to realize is that the cement industry does this
incredibly efficiently. Obviously they use cold natural gas and so forth,
and you know, they've had decades of learning around how
to do this efficiently so that you know, there's all
sorts of heat exchange and heat recovery, and what we're
(19:33):
doing right now is basically learning from that industry to
incorporate that heat recovery so that the energy is as
low as possible. I often think about, you know, what
is the energy that's required for us to hit one
hundred dollars per ton And we will talk about why
hundred dollars per ton in a minute for that project,
about two mega wat hours pertennaco two And if we
(19:57):
adopted everything the cement industry alreadopted like, we could be
a lot lower than two mega what hours. So you're
not breaking physics in terms of the energy required to
get to that. So you know, for us, the main
goal is to make it as energy efficient as possible,
recover heat, reuse the heat, and so forth, so that
(20:18):
you're not losing that heat to the atmosphere.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
So you're saying you just have to be as efficient
as a industrial cement plant.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Is that what you're saying exactly?
Speaker 1 (20:26):
I feel like it's harder than that.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Sound Well, it's harder because folks have not done this
yet for an electric kiln.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
I see, there's a reason fossil fuel is awesome, right, Like,
it's incredibly efficient way to generate heat. It has one
notable downside which you're trying to fix. How many mega
wade hours per ton does it take you? Now?
Speaker 2 (20:49):
It takes us maybe I want to say three ish
mega white hours.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Okay, you got to get a third out of that.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah, A lot of it is just heat recovery, right,
Like how the cement kilns have done it is they have,
you know, multiple decades of experience just figuring out how
to reuse the heat. And for us just doing that
with an electrical system with fossil fuel, you know, what
you're doing is you're spending a bunch of energy burning
that fuel that you don't get back with electrical it's renewable, right,
(21:19):
Like once you put in the energy, you can actually
use those electrical heating elements over and over again, so
overall thermal efficiency is actually higher. So that's actually what
makes me so excited that like we're getting closer and
closer to what's actually possible.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
We'll be back in just a minute. Tell me what
you're working on in Louisiana.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
We're building Project Cypress and this is a director capture
hub that is funded by the Department of Energy and
US along with our partner Client Works and BTEL. We're
building a hub.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Clim Works is fans, right, using fans to do air capture.
They've they've been working in Iceland, right. And Battel is
like a big what are they like an oil field
services coming to their big like industrial firm. Am I
thinking of the right company.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Battel is a engineering and procurement and their government contractor
they're the hub owner and they're the ones interfacing with
the government because this is a public private partnership.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
So how big is the thing you're building there, Like,
what's it going to look like?
Speaker 2 (22:37):
It's multiple phases and it's going to scale up to
about a megaton one million tons of CO two removed
over the multiple phases of the project.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
What you said about a million tons per year, right,
that's per year, and so that's like a big natural
gas power plant. That's about what that is, right, order
of magnitude.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
In terms of coog omitted, it's about it's a very
large national gas.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Power maybe two maybe two x. Or are there something
like a thousand of those in the country five hundred
one thousand.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Right now, depending on you. Yeah, at least a thousand
across the world. There's yeah, multiple thousands.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
When I was sort of figuring out that math, I
was praying for the interview, like I got disheartened, to
be honest, Like I was like, Oh, here's the great,
big one, and the government is supporting it and putting
in hundreds of millions of dollars. Right, that's the order
of magnitude for this project. And it's like, oh my god,
it's just like one two little power plants and there's
like a thousand of them. I don't know, it just
(23:38):
felt so small when I did that math. Do you
feel that way?
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Like how does it play for you if you just
take a step back and think about the climate problem? Right?
Like it's you know, if you're emitting fifty billion tons
of CO two into the air every year, you know, agriculture, automotive, shipping, airplanes,
all sorts of things are emitting SEO two oil and gas.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Plants fifty billion, fifty thousand million, we're talking about one
million and then this is fifty thousand million.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah, and you know us about one hundred hundred and
fifty years of infrastructure. So, you know, I think when
we think about building a carbon and mobile industry, that
is essentially reversing that and removing that. You know, right now,
what we're focused on is creating a blueprint, creating a
template that we can emulate. We can if you make
(24:29):
this so cheap, right, if you make this so cheap
such that it's an economic no brainer and it uses
materials that are very abundant and scalable, and you can
emulate this all across the world, then I think making
this a blueprint and showing that it is scalable, that's
really the first goal of what we're trying to do.
And this is not dissimilar to the first utility solar
(24:52):
plant that was built in two thousand and nine twenty
ten in the US where it took us multiple years
and lots of government subsidies. But once we build that,
now we're building them every week.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Yeah, solar is a good model of like an incredibly
fast ramp, right. And it is amazing when you look
at those estimates from like big credible government organizations over
the last fifteen years of how big is solar going
to be? Like every year they underestimate what's going to
happen the next year. Right, The line keeps getting steeper,
So I guess that's a good model. Right, And that
(25:23):
is a model of just like it just got so cheap, right,
because it's so simple.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Yeah, it's just so simple. There's so many things we
can learn from solar. One is the cost floor and
the abundance of materials that went into making these solar
panels and silicon basically sand is the raw material for
making those solar panels. And the cost floor for the
solar panel is so cheap that the more you make them,
the cheaper it got. And the second thing that we
(25:47):
can learn from it is the adoption really started taking
off in ways that humans found it very hard to predict.
Is grid parity. Once the cost became as cheap or
cheaper than the cost of electricity from other sources in
the grid. It was an economic no brainer to all
(26:08):
of his deploy because it was always the cheapest thing
for us. How do you translate that into a director
capture one, you know, use abandoned materials, use cheap materials.
Whereas you the more you deploy, the more you learn,
the cheaper it gets. So if you're doing that with
limestone and you're seeing those learning rates every year, And
the second thing is, you know what is that cost?
Where does that real adoption come in? And you know,
(26:32):
for us, we think that's probably around two fifty three
hundred dollars per ton. And that's where it really starts
to say, okay, like removing carbon starts to be an
economically cheaper thing to do than say other types of
hard to decarbonized methods. And that's when you start turning
the flywheel to further reduce the costs down to one
(26:53):
hundred dollars per ton.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
I mean, there is a problem that you have that
director capture has that solar doesn't, right, which is people
are paying for electric power already, and if I pay
for electricity, I get electricity. And there is this basic
public goods problem with direct air capture, which is I
pay for direct air capture, everybody gets the benefit of it,
(27:15):
and I get literally like one five billionth of the
benefit of it. Right, So that is a profound problem.
How does that look to you? How are we going
to deal with that one?
Speaker 2 (27:25):
So the way to think about public goods generally, and
at the end of the day, there needs to be
a price on carbon in some way, shape or another,
and different economies approach the problem differently.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
A price on carbon imposed by the gum Like the
government has to pass a law that says if you emit,
you have to pay a tax, or there's a cap
and trade or something exactly.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yeah, and you're seeing this. United Kingdom's emissions trading scheme
just started to incorporate carbon removal into their cap and
trade scheme.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Is that good for you? Does that mean companies in
the UK can come to you and pay you to
stick carbon in the ground and get the credit they need.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
That's a direction that they're going. So economies across the
world are coming up with schemes where carbon removal is
integrated into how they think about broader climate mitigation. Carbon
will be priced one wayship or another. And for us,
what that means is that while those markets are coming
online and getting more robust, or do we get off
(28:27):
the ground. And you know that's where Frontier and Microsoft.
You know, these folks have been incredibly catalytic.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Basically companies, companies that are paying for director capture now exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
I often compare them to you know what Germany did
to solar in two thousand and six. You know, they essentially,
you know, catalyzed the demand and helped bring down the cost.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
They created a subsidy, right, the government created a big
subsidy that was sort of the birth of the modern
solar power movement.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Tell me about what's happening politically in the US for
a director capture.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Director capture is an interesting one politically because we've generally
found pretty good bipartisan support for it. I think the
best way to put is forty five Q. Forty five
Q is a tax credit. It's one hundred and eighty
dollars per ton that the government payss for every time
a CO two vise a questor underground.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
Which is a lot. That's a really significant subsidy.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Essentially, it's huge, it's essentially the US putting a price
on carbon for director capture. Right, So before the IRA
it was fifty and IRA increased to one eighty. And
the most recent one, Big Beautiful Bill has preserved it
and it actually enhanced it.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
That is surprising, I think on a certain level. Right.
I mean, clearly many of the sort of energy transition
climate change subsidies from the IRA were reduced or eliminated
in the Big Beautiful Bill and the bill that just passed.
Why did director capture subsidies survive when others got eliminated?
Speaker 2 (30:02):
I think generally the way to think about DAK is
you're producing COEOTO molecules from the air and you can
use THEOTO molecules support underground for removals, or you can
use THEOTO molecules to make synthetic fuels for ships and planes.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
You can also use them to get more oil out
of the ground. Right, this is the thing some people
do with them.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
This is a thing that some people do. Yeah. So
I think what the technology is a platform. What it
gave for boths in the aisle are it's both a
climate and mitigation tool, and it contributes to us being
able to produce a lot more energy.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Uh, huh.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
You know, in this case, you know synthetic fuels like
clean energy, so you.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
Can tell the sort of energy dominance story. It's kind
of a drill baby, drill story if you want it
to be well.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
In this case, I think there are ways to make
low carbon synthetic fuels. And as you know, you've signed
a partnership with United.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Well talk about that with United Airlines. So talk about
that partnership.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
It's a strategic partnership where they're both investor in the
company and an off take agreement for the future. It's
five hundred thousand tons of CO two that they have
an option to either choose to store underground or utilize
it to make low carbon synthetic fuels, sustainable aviation fuels
to run their planes.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
And so in that ladder universe, it's sort of turning
airplane fuel into a circular economy. Like they fly the
plane and that emits CO two and then you capture
CO two and turn it into more fuel. That's the
model there. I mean, the political valance of director capture
is really interesting. An oil company owns the biggest director
capture facility in the US, right, and then on this
sort of relatively far left, you have director capture skepticism, right,
(31:49):
People who are like it just will give people permission
to keep burning fossil fuels and not transition fast enough.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
As you know, the problem is just so so massive
that I think the argument of this will only continue
what we're doing. It's hard to see much of many
lakes to it because at the end of the day,
we need to reduce as much as possible, Like you know,
first we need to reduce emissions in all sorts of
different things, and anything that we cannot reduce we should remove.
(32:19):
And unfortunately, the slower we reduce, the slower we decarbonize,
the bigger and the bigger gap that we have. Yeah,
that we're you know, the removal gap just gets bigger
and bigger. And that's what's happening right now.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
Why did you get into the director capture business?
Speaker 2 (32:37):
I think a couple of reasons. One is the size
of the problem was so massive, and the number of
people working on it as rigorously and with the right
approach that I thought was right was just limited. When
first Guards started.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
You looked at what people were doing in carbon removal,
and what did you think.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
I thought either they were not as scalable or they
would be too expensive.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
You thought you could do better.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
I could do better. So I mean, at the end
of the day, like hopefully there will be fifty hundred companies,
massive companies, just like there's fifty two hundred basket of
oil and companies that remove carbon. Each have a different approach.
And I think what attracted me to director capture also
is just the level of impact you can have. I
mean technically, you know, because the abundance of limestone is
(33:26):
so hi, the impact is infinitively scalable. Right, There's not
many solutions you can say you can scale it up
to hundreds of gigatons.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Hundreds of gigatons would be carbon negative as a world
if it were.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
That big, right, right, And we need to do that
this century. First, the goal is to get to net
zero as a society, hopefully by twenty fifty. Yeah, and
IPCC predicts that from twenty fifty to twenty one hundred
we are in the negative territory.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
So we're net negative, sucking more carbon dioxide out of
the air than we are emitting. Yeah, do you think
that'll happen? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (34:00):
I mean I think I take my cues from solar
and wind.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
You want solar more than wind, right, yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
Yeah, you want solar more than wind for sure. I
think once you get to a cost that is societally
acceptable and affordable, it will take a life of its
own in terms of its scale. And obviously you want
the you know, carbon markets, compliance markets to incorporate the
price of carbon across the world as well. But I
think there's a flywheel there as well. You know, as
(34:27):
you deploy more, it gets cheaper. And I think that
it will happen because you know, there is a future
that we can create, a future of abundance where you know,
we can have all the intelligence we want, we can have,
you know, all the things that we want, and we
can take care of the planet provided that it is affordable.
That's why this one hundred dollars per ten I think
(34:48):
is so important. Where I do think at that point,
the closer we get there, the faster it scales up.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
We'll be back in a minute with the liking round. Okay,
I want to ask you some lightning round questions. Now,
what was one thing that was really striking to you
(35:17):
when you were in eighth grade and you moved from
Southeast India to Maine.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Man, so many things. Let me think about that for
a sec. Yeah, there was a lot of culture shock,
academic shock, language shock for a twelve year old kid
to be dropped into bangor Maine coming from India. It
was very interesting. To make it simple, but I think,
you know, one thing that I found, which I'm actually
(35:47):
grateful for, the way that the education system in India
grew up was very much like memory based. I think
what I really appreciated moving to the US at that
age is sort of that flip in to thinking of
being a lot more analytical, a lot more vigorous, which
I just found a lot more natural.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
I heard you say in another interview that companies fail
because they stop having difficult conversations, and so I'm curious,
what is a recent difficult conversation that you had at work? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
You know, one of our main principles is radical honesty.
It's one of our three main principles, and for so
many reasons, it's the right thing to do. Right. It's
you know, pursuing physics, pursuing truth, pursuing merit, and you know,
how do you create a culture where it's vulnerable and
open and safe to have honest and difficult conversations and
once you get it, it's it's really amazing. For example,
(36:40):
yesterday I was given feedback by one of my reports
around asking a individual contributor for their time working on
a project without working with the manager on exactly the
scope of it.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
So somebody who was like, hey, don't ask this person
to do this thing without asking their manager if they
have time in surance?
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Right, pretty straightforward, right, you know, because the manager has
understanding of the fool and doing the scope and a
lot of the times, like this type of feedback is like, ah,
I don't know if this is worth talking to the
CEO out right, but like this person fall safe enough
to share with me, and I was so proud of
it that it's like, man, thank you for sharing this.
I could have just spent an extra minute thinking about
(37:19):
how to approach that conversation and then this person fell
safe enough to do it. And one thing I'd tell
other founders is, you know there isn't inherently that power dynamic.
You know, the emperor has no clothes, right, Like, how
do you create a culture, how do you create a
bi directional feedback loop between leaders and folks working on
the problem at the core every day.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Shashank Samala is the co founder and CEO of Airloom.
Please email us at problem at pushkin dot fm. We
are always looking for new guests for the show. Today's
show was produced by Trinomanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang. It
was edited by Alexander Garretton and engineered by Sarah Bruguerrett.
(38:07):
I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with
another episode of What's Your Problem
Speaker 2 (38:21):
MHM.
Pushkin, How did spend in your childhood in Southeast India?
Ef fact that we think about climate change.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
The place where I grew up, you know, just had
to have had their path. When things got dry, they
got really dry, and when things got wet, they got
really wet. You know, the monster's got more and more extreme.
The droughts got more and more extreme over time. And
it's a pretty normal thing to show up to school
one day and your friend just like doesn't come to
school for like six months at a time because they're
(00:46):
helping their parents recover from a flood that happened in
months ago. And it's a pretty common thing for me.
You know, I didn't know it was climate change growing up, honestly,
Like it was just like a thing that happened.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
It was just climate.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
That's what nature was, and things just got worse and
worse every year, and that's just how things are. As
I grew up and started learning a lot more, and
it started connecting the dots. What I realized was that
the folks who are facing the worst impacts of climate
change are the ones who are least educated about it
and then the most vulnerable to it already. And I
(01:21):
think That's what I think gives me a lot of
motivation and drive that fundamentally, this problem is an unfair
one where it's created and where the impacts are most felt.
People ask me like, how did you decide to work
on climate? How did you decide specifically to work on
carbon removal? But for me, it was a no brainer.
Of course I'm going to work on this, and of
course this is the most scalable way to solve the problem.
(01:44):
Being an engineer myself, like building these cost models so forth,
it's like it's actually possible. So why didn't we actually
go about doing it? It was just a matter of
putting together right team and right partners and going on
the journey.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem? The
show where I talk to people who are trying to
make technological progress. My guest today is Shashank Samala Sschank
is the co founder and CEO of Airloom. Shashank's problem
is this, can you use crushed up rocks, specifically limestone,
to permanently suck carbon out of the atmosphere? And crucially
(02:26):
can you do it for one hundred dollars per ton
of carbon? To that end Heirloom has built a pilot
plant in California near its headquarters, and is currently working
on a much larger plant in Louisiana. By the way,
I learned about Shoshank from my conversation a few weeks
ago with Nan Ransahoff. If you missed that one and
want to hear more about carbon removal, you might want
(02:49):
to check that out. Shachank began his career in manufacturing.
He wasn't an environmental scientist or a geologist, so to
start I asked him about rocks.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
We love rocks. I've dedicated my life to rocks.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
When did you discover rocks?
Speaker 2 (03:05):
When I realized that carbon capture is like the thing
to do, Not everyone has realized it yet, but like
people will. In that journey, I started just reading papers
and books at night, and you know, it was basically,
what are the natural things that I already doing this? It's
biomass and rocks.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Basically plants and rocks.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
When you start looking at this, it does seem like
there's sort of three very crudely kind of modes. Right,
people are using fans, plants, and rocks, right, Yeah, Why
did you wind up ruling out fans and plants.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
So that's a great question. I think at the beginning,
when I first got started, I wasn't married to any approach.
I come from a manufacturing background. I was making electronics
for satellites and robots and so forth, and you know,
manufacturing is superkin margins and you have to understand where
your costs are. And for me, when I first started
looking at this problem, it was very clear that at
(04:01):
the end of the day, what matters has cost costs
pertanos two. You know, it's not like we're designing an
amazingly beautiful car for people to drive around. All the
matters is how many molecules of CO two in the
air are and how cost effectively you remove it, how.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Many molecules of CO two per dollar you can get exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
So I was just so obsessed about, like, you know,
what is the absolute simplest way you can solve this problem.
And there's a bunch of other folks who are using
synthetic ways to you know, using fans and so forth
to pull carbon, And I think the best way to
approach an engineering problem is just like what is the
bare minimum you need and then add complexity from there.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
So why does this idea of like cheapest absolute bare minimum,
why does that lead you to rocks?
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Rocks basically have a couple of principles, right, Like, if
you start with the idea that you need CO two
to be permanently sequestered so you know it doesn't decomposs
back into the atmosphere, you need a sponge With rocks,
it's the CO two only goes one way and it
doesn't respire back you, so it doesn't decompos and they're
(05:11):
super cheap. Earth has already spent billions of years creating
this sort of crystal instruction in this geochemical mineral that
is thirsty for CO two, and it helped balance the
CO two in the atmosphere, So it already paid this
energy penalty to make this rock that is super abundant
and cheap. So the mineral the view using it's you know,
(05:31):
thirty to forty bucks a ton, and we can reuse
it over and over again. So you know, if you
can reuse it s a hundred cycles, you can get
the cost per ton for the rock down to twenty
thirty cents.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
So you land on limestone. Right, you haven't said limestone,
but you're talking about limes. Ztone, tell me about limestone.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Yeah, So limestone is this amazingly beautiful chemical. It's a
naturally occurring mineral. There is four percent of the Earth's
crust is made up of limestone, and the chemical formula
for it is calcium carbonate, and Earth produced a lot
of this over you know, billions of years to partly
to help balance the CO two in the atmosphere. It's
(06:11):
like if you're a rock climber, it's a chalk that is,
it's a carbonate limestone. It's it's incredibly abundant, basically looks
like white powder.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
So that's limestone. It has carbon dioxide in it already,
so it's already done the thing you want to do
Exactly when you're figuring out what's going to be your
play for air capture, like how do you get to
where you wind up? Like you see that limestone has
already done this thing. Limestone already has the carbon, but
that's not what you want, Like you want to capture
more carbon exactly.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
I think carbon removal and directory capture. It's all a
energy optimization play. Yeah, how do you spend as little
energy as possible to remove a bunch of cooto molecules
from the air, and you know, and there's a lot
of different directions, a lot of different philosophies on how
you approach this problem. And our thesis was, you need
(07:01):
a sponge to remove the CO two, and there's an
energy that goes into capturing the YOU two, and there's
an energy that goes into releasing that CO two so
that we can capture more CO two with that sponge.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Right, you got to capture the CO two from the air,
and then you've got to do something with it to
basically stick it in the ground for ten thousand years exactly.
So it's a two step process. There's capture and storage. Right.
All the different angles are doing some version of that, right,
those two step process exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
It's a capture and a release, capture and regeneration. And
the whole play is how do you minimize energy in
both of those steps.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Yeah, because the energy basically winds up being cost, right,
like the cost the key input ends up being energy.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Exactly right, exactly right. It's you know, whether it's in
the form of capital equipment, whether it's in the form
of literal electrons going in, it's energy. At the end
of the day. Is the thing to optimize around, and
so for us when we looked around, that was not
a PhD in material science when I started this, right, like,
I come from a manufacturing background, and I literally just
(08:09):
like picked up my chemistry books from high school and
reread them to you know, first getting started and basically like,
if this is the framework and you're trying to optimize
energy on both sides, first you start with the capture step. Okay,
well what already does this naturally? Right? And there's a
bunch of carbonates, calcin carbonate, machnicin carbonate, and so forth.
(08:31):
And we ended up with calcin carbonate limestone because it
needs the lowest amount of energy to capture CO two, okay,
just thermodynamically, and it's thermodynamically favored. It's so thirsty for
COO two, Like if you figure out a way to
break it to release that COO two and you put
that on your desk, it just starts gobbling up COO
(08:52):
two molecules whether you like it or not.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
So it's very energy favorable for step one exactly capture,
but it doesn't want to release it once it has
it right as you put it out. There's two steps.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
There's two steps.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Now you've got this limestone full of carbon, but you
got to get it to release it. And it does
seem like for you that's the hard part. That's certainly
the energy intensive part.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
That is certainly the energy intensive part. Not just for us,
it's actually basically everyone else.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Oh you mean, for all of the carbon capture and removal.
It's actually the release is the hard part.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
The release is the most energy intensive part. And when
we first picked limestone, we liked the way of releasing
CO two in the second step because cement industry already
does this, cement and lime industry. They take limestone, they
break it into calcium oxide CO two put the cootwo
into the air, but they take the calcium oxide, put
(09:43):
a bunch of other stuff to it, and turn it
into cement.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
And just to be clear, like let's just pause there,
because this is a giant global industry that in fact
is a huge emitter for this reason, right fact, the
key input to cement is limestone. And the basic thing
you do when you're making cement is you put limestone
in a kiln, make it very hot, and you just
burn off the CO two and then you're left with lime,
which is whatever, it's calcium oxide something. Yeah, So there
(10:09):
is a question I have there, which is like, there's
already a giant global industry of people doing this. Yes,
would it not be more efficient to just capture that
CO two that they're already releasing literally today in great
quantities and stick that in the ground.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
We should absolutely do that, And there's many companies already
doing that as well. And that's that's called points source capture,
So where you're essentially avoiding emissions from a cement plant
or national gas power plan fitting the CO two into.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
The air, and then you get to sell the cement, right.
I feel like the economics there are much more favorable.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
Well, you're selling cement, but it's actually an added cost
to capture that CO two.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Right, sure, So I mean ideally you could sell the
cement and sell the carbon capture and removal.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Yeah, it's a different technical method. It's it's points source capture,
and there's a bunch of folks already working on it.
What we're focused on is removing COEO two that's already
in the air.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Are you assuming that like in X years ten or something,
everybody making cement's going to do that? Anyways? And you
want to do a marginal benefit.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
So if you look across four thousands CEM in plants
that already exist on the planet, there's a bunch of
other infrastructure that needs to be in place for points
source capture to happen. There's a bunch of cemen plants
that are close to where energy is cheap and underground
storage is available, where they can do points source capture,
and we should absolutely do it. But there's also many
(11:34):
many cimon plants, thousands of cimon plants that are not
near where a COE to underground storage is available or
energy is not available. To actually capture that CO two
from from the flue gas that it would be very expensive.
You would have to transport that CO two hundreds of
miles away and that costs a lot of money, and
effectively it becomes a cost benefit analysis where it could
(11:57):
actually be cheaper to remove the CO two than putting
a point source capture on top of it.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
So okay, so that's why not do it with cement
or not just do it with cement exactly. So you
have this idea, what are the obvious problems with it?
When you come up with the idea, what are the like, oh,
here's why it's going to be difficult.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Here's why it's going to be difficult. So I think
at the beginning, you know, when before the start started,
and I think people knew that rocks can capture CO two,
but the problem was it was too slow. You know, geochemically, naturally,
it would take maybe six months or a year to
fully saturate itself with CO two in the air. So
(12:37):
if you put that on your desk, it would take
that long. And if you put that into a cost model,
you pretty quickly realize that there's just no way this
can get to one hundred bucks a ton long term.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Just because you've got to have like essentially a factory,
and all that's happening at your factory is rock is
sitting there for a year exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
You need gobs and gobs of limestone, yea, And I
mean think of you know, thousands of scure kilometers to
capture you.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Know, not gonna work.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
It's not gonna work. So, you know, it was pretty
clear from the beginning that this thing needs to be
at least ten times faster, if not more. And at
the beginning, we're not sure whether this is even possible.
And you know, we just had a few scientists just
playing around with a few different things, and they figured
out how to basically give it superpowers to pull carbon
(13:25):
from the air faster. And over the last been seven years,
where you know, we started at six months, and we
first went to you know, three months, and then you know,
it went down to a month, and then it went
down to two weeks and five days and four days.
We're way down below that today. And what's been interesting
is people will always ask me, why is this so
(13:46):
important for you to cycle time? And it's so important
because the difference between ten days and five days is
for the same amount of capital equipment, I can get
two x to through put right, and the costs come
down just dramatically. So that's been our biggest lever and
it's been amazing. Every twelve to eighteen months we figured
(14:07):
out a way to make it about two ks faster.
I think that's where a lot of optimism comes from
for cost reduction.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Is there one particular improvement that would be interesting to
talk about, one particular thing you figured out or your
team figured out to go faster.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
There's about fifteen to twenty different parameters internally, you know,
there's like particle size, particle size distribution, the porosity of
the particle, the surface area of each particle.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
So these are just physical traits. You sort of mash
up the rock in different ways, grind it up one
way or grind it up another way.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yeah, so we actually grind it up only once at
the beginning, when we first get the feed stock from
the mine. But how you run the process, you know
what temperature and what residents time you have in the oven.
You know, it's sort of like when you're baking cookies
in an oven, right, Like there's a few levers you have,
and it actually turns out they have a big implication
on how the physical properties of these things are.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
But it's not chemical. You're not like adding chemical inputs.
You're just monking with the limestone in different ways to
get you know, a magnitude of it's.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Pretty insane, Like it's the science is a lot more complicated.
But there's a specific parameter space that the nature really
loves limestone to be in, and we're constantly experimenting with
how you get into that tight space.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
When you say nature loves that, you mean that makes
it particularly eager to absorb carbon dioxide.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Exactly Yeah, humidity. For example, we love humidity. It actually
forms a thin layer of water on top of lime
and it makes it even more thirsty for COO two,
And all these things kind of work together. And our
technology is all about how do you keep this rock
in that tight space so we can capture you know,
(15:54):
CO two about one hundred times faster.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
That tight possibility space, that tight space of possible, and.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
As cheaply as possible. Right, Like, we're not adding chemicals,
we're not adding catalysts, just a bunch of rocks sitting
on trace.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Let's talk about the facility. So you built this facility
in Tracy, California, right east of San Francisco. That's sort
of a pilot plant. Let's talk about that as a
way to understand the process. What does it look like
if I drive up there? Like, how big is it?
What does it look like?
Speaker 2 (16:20):
So you drive up there and the first thing you
see is that there's a big box and the box
is basically, you know, it's a semi open building.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Like the size of Costco or something. When you say
big box, like how big are you talking?
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Yeah, it's this specific one is probably a quarter size
of a Costco. And once you go in, you will
see these tall stocks of trays. Imagine very large baking trays,
stock multiple stories.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
How many stories? How tall?
Speaker 2 (16:52):
So this specific one is about forty feet tall, a
couple hundred trays stacked all the way to the top.
And if you come closer to each tray, you'll start
seeing kind of like a large white cookie crumbled sitting
on a tray, and.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
It looks like it's just sitting there, but actually it's
absorbing carbon dioxide out of the air exactly.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
And what's cool is when you so you start out with,
you know, a bunch of white powder, and there's a
small amount of water that basically makes it cohesive, and
over time it's actually growing, just like growing like a cookie, right,
And as it's growing, it forms all these cracks and
it crumbles and so forth, and all that extra mass
(17:32):
is COO two. The only thing that captures is CO
two from the air.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
And so at this point, how long does that process take?
It takes a day or something.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
It takes a few days. The ones upcoming are much faster,
So I'll keep that under the rest.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
So then you have your big cookie full of carbon dioxide.
What do you do with it?
Speaker 2 (17:54):
After a few days. We don't wait until one hundred
percent saturation. We wait until eighty five ninety percent, and
then we bring it over to a hot kiln. And
this kiln is running. You know, it's electric, it's renewable
energy powered, so.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
It's super high, right, what is it like, nine hundred
degrees celsius or exactly right? Wildly hot? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Basically, you're exposing this material for ten to fifteen seconds
to very high temperature, and it's decomposing. It's releasing the
CO two that it captured from the air, and now
you essentially have high purity CO two coming out of
the kiln. We compress it and in the case of
(18:34):
the Tracy facility, we store it in concrete, but in
the future facilities it's either going underground or it's used
for synthetic fuels and so forth. The line that comes
off of it, it's ready to capture more CO two.
So we're sending it back into the tray, expose it
to the air, capture more CO two, Wait a few days,
(18:55):
put it back in the kilnt and the cycle repeats
over and over and over again.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Heating get kiln to nine hundred degrees See is wildly
energy intensive, right, And obviously for your project, you're not
going to burn fossil fuel to do that. But is
that in terms of the cost of the whole thing,
Is that the expensive part?
Speaker 2 (19:13):
That's the expensive part, Yes, And I think the one
thing to realize is that the cement industry does this
incredibly efficiently. Obviously they use cold natural gas and so forth,
and you know, they've had decades of learning around how
to do this efficiently so that you know, there's all
sorts of heat exchange and heat recovery, and what we're
(19:33):
doing right now is basically learning from that industry to
incorporate that heat recovery so that the energy is as
low as possible. I often think about, you know, what
is the energy that's required for us to hit one
hundred dollars per ton And we will talk about why
hundred dollars per ton in a minute for that project,
about two mega wat hours pertennaco two And if we
(19:57):
adopted everything the cement industry alreadopted like, we could be
a lot lower than two mega what hours. So you're
not breaking physics in terms of the energy required to
get to that. So you know, for us, the main
goal is to make it as energy efficient as possible,
recover heat, reuse the heat, and so forth, so that
(20:18):
you're not losing that heat to the atmosphere.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
So you're saying you just have to be as efficient
as a industrial cement plant.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Is that what you're saying exactly?
Speaker 1 (20:26):
I feel like it's harder than that.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Sound Well, it's harder because folks have not done this
yet for an electric kiln.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
I see, there's a reason fossil fuel is awesome, right, Like,
it's incredibly efficient way to generate heat. It has one
notable downside which you're trying to fix. How many mega
wade hours per ton does it take you? Now?
Speaker 2 (20:49):
It takes us maybe I want to say three ish
mega white hours.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Okay, you got to get a third out of that.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah, A lot of it is just heat recovery, right,
Like how the cement kilns have done it is they have,
you know, multiple decades of experience just figuring out how
to reuse the heat. And for us just doing that
with an electrical system with fossil fuel, you know, what
you're doing is you're spending a bunch of energy burning
that fuel that you don't get back with electrical it's renewable, right,
(21:19):
Like once you put in the energy, you can actually
use those electrical heating elements over and over again, so
overall thermal efficiency is actually higher. So that's actually what
makes me so excited that like we're getting closer and
closer to what's actually possible.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
We'll be back in just a minute. Tell me what
you're working on in Louisiana.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
We're building Project Cypress and this is a director capture
hub that is funded by the Department of Energy and
US along with our partner Client Works and BTEL. We're
building a hub.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Clim Works is fans, right, using fans to do air capture.
They've they've been working in Iceland, right. And Battel is
like a big what are they like an oil field
services coming to their big like industrial firm. Am I
thinking of the right company.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Battel is a engineering and procurement and their government contractor
they're the hub owner and they're the ones interfacing with
the government because this is a public private partnership.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
So how big is the thing you're building there, Like,
what's it going to look like?
Speaker 2 (22:37):
It's multiple phases and it's going to scale up to
about a megaton one million tons of CO two removed
over the multiple phases of the project.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
What you said about a million tons per year, right,
that's per year, and so that's like a big natural
gas power plant. That's about what that is, right, order
of magnitude.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
In terms of coog omitted, it's about it's a very
large national gas.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Power maybe two maybe two x. Or are there something
like a thousand of those in the country five hundred
one thousand.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Right now, depending on you. Yeah, at least a thousand
across the world. There's yeah, multiple thousands.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
When I was sort of figuring out that math, I
was praying for the interview, like I got disheartened, to
be honest, Like I was like, Oh, here's the great,
big one, and the government is supporting it and putting
in hundreds of millions of dollars. Right, that's the order
of magnitude for this project. And it's like, oh my god,
it's just like one two little power plants and there's
like a thousand of them. I don't know, it just
(23:38):
felt so small when I did that math. Do you
feel that way?
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Like how does it play for you if you just
take a step back and think about the climate problem? Right?
Like it's you know, if you're emitting fifty billion tons
of CO two into the air every year, you know, agriculture, automotive, shipping, airplanes,
all sorts of things are emitting SEO two oil and gas.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Plants fifty billion, fifty thousand million, we're talking about one
million and then this is fifty thousand million.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah, and you know us about one hundred hundred and
fifty years of infrastructure. So, you know, I think when
we think about building a carbon and mobile industry, that
is essentially reversing that and removing that. You know, right now,
what we're focused on is creating a blueprint, creating a
template that we can emulate. We can if you make
(24:29):
this so cheap, right, if you make this so cheap
such that it's an economic no brainer and it uses
materials that are very abundant and scalable, and you can
emulate this all across the world, then I think making
this a blueprint and showing that it is scalable, that's
really the first goal of what we're trying to do.
And this is not dissimilar to the first utility solar
(24:52):
plant that was built in two thousand and nine twenty
ten in the US where it took us multiple years
and lots of government subsidies. But once we build that,
now we're building them every week.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Yeah, solar is a good model of like an incredibly
fast ramp, right. And it is amazing when you look
at those estimates from like big credible government organizations over
the last fifteen years of how big is solar going
to be? Like every year they underestimate what's going to
happen the next year. Right, The line keeps getting steeper,
So I guess that's a good model. Right, And that
(25:23):
is a model of just like it just got so cheap, right,
because it's so simple.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Yeah, it's just so simple. There's so many things we
can learn from solar. One is the cost floor and
the abundance of materials that went into making these solar
panels and silicon basically sand is the raw material for
making those solar panels. And the cost floor for the
solar panel is so cheap that the more you make them,
the cheaper it got. And the second thing that we
(25:47):
can learn from it is the adoption really started taking
off in ways that humans found it very hard to predict.
Is grid parity. Once the cost became as cheap or
cheaper than the cost of electricity from other sources in
the grid. It was an economic no brainer to all
(26:08):
of his deploy because it was always the cheapest thing
for us. How do you translate that into a director
capture one, you know, use abandoned materials, use cheap materials.
Whereas you the more you deploy, the more you learn,
the cheaper it gets. So if you're doing that with
limestone and you're seeing those learning rates every year, And
the second thing is, you know what is that cost?
Where does that real adoption come in? And you know,
(26:32):
for us, we think that's probably around two fifty three
hundred dollars per ton. And that's where it really starts
to say, okay, like removing carbon starts to be an
economically cheaper thing to do than say other types of
hard to decarbonized methods. And that's when you start turning
the flywheel to further reduce the costs down to one
(26:53):
hundred dollars per ton.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
I mean, there is a problem that you have that
director capture has that solar doesn't, right, which is people
are paying for electric power already, and if I pay
for electricity, I get electricity. And there is this basic
public goods problem with direct air capture, which is I
pay for direct air capture, everybody gets the benefit of it,
(27:15):
and I get literally like one five billionth of the
benefit of it. Right, So that is a profound problem.
How does that look to you? How are we going
to deal with that one?
Speaker 2 (27:25):
So the way to think about public goods generally, and
at the end of the day, there needs to be
a price on carbon in some way, shape or another,
and different economies approach the problem differently.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
A price on carbon imposed by the gum Like the
government has to pass a law that says if you emit,
you have to pay a tax, or there's a cap
and trade or something exactly.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yeah, and you're seeing this. United Kingdom's emissions trading scheme
just started to incorporate carbon removal into their cap and
trade scheme.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Is that good for you? Does that mean companies in
the UK can come to you and pay you to
stick carbon in the ground and get the credit they need.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
That's a direction that they're going. So economies across the
world are coming up with schemes where carbon removal is
integrated into how they think about broader climate mitigation. Carbon
will be priced one wayship or another. And for us,
what that means is that while those markets are coming
online and getting more robust, or do we get off
(28:27):
the ground. And you know that's where Frontier and Microsoft.
You know, these folks have been incredibly catalytic.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Basically companies, companies that are paying for director capture now exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
I often compare them to you know what Germany did
to solar in two thousand and six. You know, they essentially,
you know, catalyzed the demand and helped bring down the cost.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
They created a subsidy, right, the government created a big
subsidy that was sort of the birth of the modern
solar power movement.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Tell me about what's happening politically in the US for
a director capture.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Director capture is an interesting one politically because we've generally
found pretty good bipartisan support for it. I think the
best way to put is forty five Q. Forty five
Q is a tax credit. It's one hundred and eighty
dollars per ton that the government payss for every time
a CO two vise a questor underground.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
Which is a lot. That's a really significant subsidy.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Essentially, it's huge, it's essentially the US putting a price
on carbon for director capture. Right, So before the IRA
it was fifty and IRA increased to one eighty. And
the most recent one, Big Beautiful Bill has preserved it
and it actually enhanced it.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
That is surprising, I think on a certain level. Right.
I mean, clearly many of the sort of energy transition
climate change subsidies from the IRA were reduced or eliminated
in the Big Beautiful Bill and the bill that just passed.
Why did director capture subsidies survive when others got eliminated?
Speaker 2 (30:02):
I think generally the way to think about DAK is
you're producing COEOTO molecules from the air and you can
use THEOTO molecules support underground for removals, or you can
use THEOTO molecules to make synthetic fuels for ships and planes.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
You can also use them to get more oil out
of the ground. Right, this is the thing some people
do with them.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
This is a thing that some people do. Yeah. So
I think what the technology is a platform. What it
gave for boths in the aisle are it's both a
climate and mitigation tool, and it contributes to us being
able to produce a lot more energy.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Uh, huh.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
You know, in this case, you know synthetic fuels like
clean energy, so you.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
Can tell the sort of energy dominance story. It's kind
of a drill baby, drill story if you want it
to be well.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
In this case, I think there are ways to make
low carbon synthetic fuels. And as you know, you've signed
a partnership with United.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Well talk about that with United Airlines. So talk about
that partnership.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
It's a strategic partnership where they're both investor in the
company and an off take agreement for the future. It's
five hundred thousand tons of CO two that they have
an option to either choose to store underground or utilize
it to make low carbon synthetic fuels, sustainable aviation fuels
to run their planes.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
And so in that ladder universe, it's sort of turning
airplane fuel into a circular economy. Like they fly the
plane and that emits CO two and then you capture
CO two and turn it into more fuel. That's the
model there. I mean, the political valance of director capture
is really interesting. An oil company owns the biggest director
capture facility in the US, right, and then on this
sort of relatively far left, you have director capture skepticism, right,
(31:49):
People who are like it just will give people permission
to keep burning fossil fuels and not transition fast enough.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
As you know, the problem is just so so massive
that I think the argument of this will only continue
what we're doing. It's hard to see much of many
lakes to it because at the end of the day,
we need to reduce as much as possible, Like you know,
first we need to reduce emissions in all sorts of
different things, and anything that we cannot reduce we should remove.
(32:19):
And unfortunately, the slower we reduce, the slower we decarbonize,
the bigger and the bigger gap that we have. Yeah,
that we're you know, the removal gap just gets bigger
and bigger. And that's what's happening right now.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
Why did you get into the director capture business?
Speaker 2 (32:37):
I think a couple of reasons. One is the size
of the problem was so massive, and the number of
people working on it as rigorously and with the right
approach that I thought was right was just limited. When
first Guards started.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
You looked at what people were doing in carbon removal,
and what did you think.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
I thought either they were not as scalable or they
would be too expensive.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
You thought you could do better.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
I could do better. So I mean, at the end
of the day, like hopefully there will be fifty hundred companies,
massive companies, just like there's fifty two hundred basket of
oil and companies that remove carbon. Each have a different approach.
And I think what attracted me to director capture also
is just the level of impact you can have. I
mean technically, you know, because the abundance of limestone is
(33:26):
so hi, the impact is infinitively scalable. Right, There's not
many solutions you can say you can scale it up
to hundreds of gigatons.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Hundreds of gigatons would be carbon negative as a world
if it were.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
That big, right, right, And we need to do that
this century. First, the goal is to get to net
zero as a society, hopefully by twenty fifty. Yeah, and
IPCC predicts that from twenty fifty to twenty one hundred
we are in the negative territory.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
So we're net negative, sucking more carbon dioxide out of
the air than we are emitting. Yeah, do you think
that'll happen? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (34:00):
I mean I think I take my cues from solar
and wind.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
You want solar more than wind, right, yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
Yeah, you want solar more than wind for sure. I
think once you get to a cost that is societally
acceptable and affordable, it will take a life of its
own in terms of its scale. And obviously you want
the you know, carbon markets, compliance markets to incorporate the
price of carbon across the world as well. But I
think there's a flywheel there as well. You know, as
(34:27):
you deploy more, it gets cheaper. And I think that
it will happen because you know, there is a future
that we can create, a future of abundance where you know,
we can have all the intelligence we want, we can have,
you know, all the things that we want, and we
can take care of the planet provided that it is affordable.
That's why this one hundred dollars per ten I think
(34:48):
is so important. Where I do think at that point,
the closer we get there, the faster it scales up.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
We'll be back in a minute with the liking round. Okay,
I want to ask you some lightning round questions. Now,
what was one thing that was really striking to you
(35:17):
when you were in eighth grade and you moved from
Southeast India to Maine.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Man, so many things. Let me think about that for
a sec. Yeah, there was a lot of culture shock,
academic shock, language shock for a twelve year old kid
to be dropped into bangor Maine coming from India. It
was very interesting. To make it simple, but I think,
you know, one thing that I found, which I'm actually
(35:47):
grateful for, the way that the education system in India
grew up was very much like memory based. I think
what I really appreciated moving to the US at that
age is sort of that flip in to thinking of
being a lot more analytical, a lot more vigorous, which
I just found a lot more natural.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
I heard you say in another interview that companies fail
because they stop having difficult conversations, and so I'm curious,
what is a recent difficult conversation that you had at work? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
You know, one of our main principles is radical honesty.
It's one of our three main principles, and for so
many reasons, it's the right thing to do. Right. It's
you know, pursuing physics, pursuing truth, pursuing merit, and you know,
how do you create a culture where it's vulnerable and
open and safe to have honest and difficult conversations and
once you get it, it's it's really amazing. For example,
(36:40):
yesterday I was given feedback by one of my reports
around asking a individual contributor for their time working on
a project without working with the manager on exactly the
scope of it.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
So somebody who was like, hey, don't ask this person
to do this thing without asking their manager if they
have time in surance?
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Right, pretty straightforward, right, you know, because the manager has
understanding of the fool and doing the scope and a
lot of the times, like this type of feedback is like, ah,
I don't know if this is worth talking to the
CEO out right, but like this person fall safe enough
to share with me, and I was so proud of
it that it's like, man, thank you for sharing this.
I could have just spent an extra minute thinking about
(37:19):
how to approach that conversation and then this person fell
safe enough to do it. And one thing I'd tell
other founders is, you know there isn't inherently that power dynamic.
You know, the emperor has no clothes, right, Like, how
do you create a culture, how do you create a
bi directional feedback loop between leaders and folks working on
the problem at the core every day.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Shashank Samala is the co founder and CEO of Airloom.
Please email us at problem at pushkin dot fm. We
are always looking for new guests for the show. Today's
show was produced by Trinomanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang. It
was edited by Alexander Garretton and engineered by Sarah Bruguerrett.
(38:07):
I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with
another episode of What's Your Problem
Speaker 2 (38:21):
MHM.
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