June 1, 2023 • 25 mins
Dan Friedmann is the CEO of Carbon Engineering. The company is at the frontier of a new industry, direct air capture. They just broke ground on a big plant in Texas that will pull carbon dioxide out of the air.
Dan’s problem is this: how do you bring the price of direct air capture way down? And how do you convince companies and governments to pay for scrubbing carbon out of the air?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. The other day I spoke with Dan Friedman. He's
the CEO of a company called Carbon Engineering. Maybe we
could start with what's happening out in Texas, Like, there's
actually somebody's building something big in Texas and you're mixed
up with it in a good way, right, tell me
(00:36):
what's happening in Texas.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yes, and in Texas happened big. That's the good part
about Texas. Yeah. We are building well. Our partner is
building our first commercial scale plant. Just broke ground about
a couple of weeks ago, and all the big pieces
of equipment are under order, which is, you know, quite substantial.
(00:59):
We got all our permits, took about a year, and
the road's been put in place. It's just a big
bunch of desert with some shrubs. And yeah, construction has started.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Construction has started on a billion dollar project that will
be by far the biggest plant ever built to suck
carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere. I'm Jacob Goldstein,
and this is what's your problem. Carbon engineering is at
the frontier of an infant industry called direct air capture,
(01:35):
as in directly capturing carbon dioxide from the air. Direct
air capture won't be able to solve climate change on
its own. There's no way we could capture anywhere near
enough carbon to do that, but it might help at
the margin, pulling hundreds of millions of tons of carbon
out of the atmosphere every year to buy us some
time as industry is decarbonized over the next few decades.
(01:58):
To get there, the direct air capture industry needs to
solve a bunch of problems, including how to bring the
price of direct air capture way down, and also how
to convince companies and governments to pay for sucking carbon
out of the air. I talked about both of those
problems with Dan, but to start, we talked about what
exactly he's building out in the Texas Desert. Let's say
(02:22):
it's two years from now and you and I drive
out to this spot in the middle of Texas and
you've just turned it on, the thing is working. What's
actually going to be happened? Well, first of all, we
get there, what do we see. What's it look like?
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Okay, so you know, when when you build any direct
air capture facility, you've got to process a lot of air.
So the main thing you see in all of them
is what's what we call an air contactor, which is
a fancy name for a huge box with a huge
fan that's drawing air through the contents of the box.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
So it's a giant box fan like the one I
have in my living room, but way bigger.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
How big A couple of stories with stories, okay, so
you know it looks like it looks like a small
a small apartment. You know, I've quite a small apartment,
but it's still like couple of stories, and you know
the width of a narrow house.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
The fan is right on the roof of it. Okay,
So the fan turns on and air is drawn in
from the sides and goes up the top. So you
would see about seventy of those in two years when
this is done, lined up in rows.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
So danisying, there would be seventy of these apartment sized
fan buildings, like a little subdivision out there in the desert.
The fans suck in the air and then they have
this liquid that binds to the carbon dioxide. And one
of the things I'd heard Dan talk about in other
interviews is that the chemistry this part of removing carbon
(03:51):
from the air is actually pretty straightforward. But what's hard
is removing it efficiently because of how little carbon dioxide
is in the air, Like carbon dioxide is way less
than one percent of the atmosphere.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
It's very, very tiny, and that's what makes it so
hard because you you have to touch so much air
to get at the little tiny you know, mining a
tiny bit amount from the air. And traditionally, you know,
people have been extracting carbon dioxide from the air for
a long time. If you recall the Apollo thirteen movie,
(04:27):
they were suffocating from breeding their own carbon dioxide, and
in a couple of hours they built that.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
And just to be clear, that's the Houston We've got
a problem. Yes, their problem was that there was too
much carbon dioxide in their in their space capsule.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah, their director capture machine in there. The little one
wasn't working, so they were suffocating in their own so
they built one and they scrabbed it out. So the
hard part, and that's what's unique about what we're doing.
The hard part is to pull a million tons of
carbon dioxide out of the air. So it's all about
how much we have to do. It's not about doing it.
(05:01):
The doing it is not that hard, but doing a
lot of it is incredibly challenging.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
So it's a scaling problem.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
It's coming up with a process that will scale and
that want use so much energy and materials that it
becomes useless. Right, so we need to be net negative,
not net positive. So the challenge is, you know, is
how much power do you use doing this? And how
much steel do you use to build these air contacts
and so on, and how do you scale that smartly?
(05:31):
So in the end you are net negative, which is
what the business is all about.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
How long do you have to run the plant do
you estimate before it will capture all of the carbon
that was emitted to build the plant and to build
all of the materials in the plant.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
I don't have that figure, but it's because it depends
who the final contractors are and their footprints and so on.
It's similar to electric cars. It's not significance a few
months and their I year for sure.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
So Okay, you get the plant up and running, you're
sucking carbon dioxi out of the air. So far, so good.
But now you've got tons of carbon dioxide and you
have to do something with it, right.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Yeah, you know, that's that's the hard part that it
alver forget. What we do is we hand it to
the world's expert on how to deal with carbon dioxide.
Occidental our partner who has you know, been burying carbon
dioxide for a lot of years to.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Be clear, that's Occidental Petroleum, the big oil company.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Yes. Yeah, they are the companies that understand how to
handle carbon dioxide. So what they do is they bury
that carbon dioxide safely underground according to the US government regulations,
so that it's permanently stored, meaning that it's scanteed for
at least one hundred years to be underground.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
So Occidental is they're an investor in carbon engineering. They're
on the board, right, and they're they're the ones building
this biggest in the world by far, direct air capture plants, right,
They're the one paying for it.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Is that is that?
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Yeah? Well why is why is Occidental Petroleum doing this?
Where are they paying all this? And they're the ones
spending a billion dollars to do it? Right?
Speaker 2 (07:12):
They were trying to figure out how to become net
zero meaning net zero in their own production, net zero
in everything they subcontract and buy, and net zero, and
what the customers like you and I would burn so
all the emissions, and they decided to use this to
decarbonize themselves. And then they said, whoa, we can offer
(07:35):
this as a solution for other people that don't know
how to do this, for them to decarbonize like airlines.
It was a period took a period of years to
develop to the point where it is now. And so
they went from being a partner to being a customer
to also being a part owner and then to being
a deployment partner of all this thing. And they're trying
(07:58):
to make this their next business after oil is done, basically.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Basically selling carbon removal as a service. Let me ask
you a question. You said in there that Occidental wants
to be net zero? Why do they want to be
net zero? And like in particular, given that you know,
they have an obligation to their shareholders to maximize profits,
Like why are they spending a billion dollars to the
extent it's for them to be net zero? Like why
(08:26):
is that a sensible thing for them to do?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
You know that kind of gets the heart of this
whole problem. You know, it's not just Occidental. Microsoft wants
to be in net zero. Amazon wants to be in
net zero. Air travel wants to be net zero. Most
of ninety odd percent of the world GDP has set
a target to be net zero. So I think everybody's
realizing Occidental included that in order to survive in the
(08:51):
long term, we need to get to net zero. So
at some point, I think society is going to say, well,
if you're not net zero, you're not in business.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
So the sort of the financial case for getting to
net zero is the assumption that policy governments will basically
force companies to be net zero, like that's the or
customers or customers right right, they will say we will
only do business with a net zero support.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
You know. I think it goes deeper in terms of
their management team that they're just committed to kind of
lead the whole oil sector to get there, just recognizing
that this has to happen. And in the end it's
good for shareholders because if you keep your head in
the sand, then eventually people don't buy from you one
way or another.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Yeah, I mean, I will say, given the history of
oil companies behavior with respect to climate change, I'm wary
of their involvement at some level, like just based on
the fact that they knew that emissions were driving climate change,
(10:00):
and they obfuscated that fact. Not occidental specifically, but that
was clearly a widespread practice in the industry, and so
it makes me some what weary of their involvement.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Now, yeah, you know, I can't comment on that. All
I can tell you is that when you scour the
planet to find somebody that can deal with a megaton
a year coming out of one plant, and then a
thousand megatons a year coming out of one thousand plants,
only the oil companies can do that, for better or worse.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Huh you mean in terms of how do you stick
it back in the ground. Yeah, you're the only ones
who know at vast scale, how do stick carbon dioxide
back in the ground.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yeah, and understand the underground. They've been mapping the underground
for fifty years. They understand. Any country you go to,
the oil companies the only people that understand what's under there,
how to operate under there, how to keep it under
there and not have it leak out. If you want
to do this at scale, you've got to go to
the world's experts, and the world experts that have been
(10:58):
looking at what goes underground with the geology. Because of
the oil business. Are the oil companies, there's nobody else.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Yeah, No, it is interesting the way this is, you're
basically running the oil business in revert.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Right.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
For one hundred plus years, they have been digging hydrocarbons
out of the ground, and then we've been burning them,
and they've been going the carbon dioxide's been going into
the atmosphere, and now it's like, okay, let's just it's
like on the It's like on my power drill at home.
You know, you push the button one way and it
drills in, and then you push it the other way
and it drills out.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Right, like exactly, it we got to I think the
saying goes, we got to put it back where it
came from. Yeah, and you know, anything else is mucking
around with this natural system and I don't know what
the output of that would be, but this is pretty straightforward.
We just put it back, bring the carbon back down,
and everything should return to normal.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Let me ask you one more thing, just on the
oil company thing, and then we'll leave it. There's basically
a concern that direct their capture will act as a
fig leaf to allow for even more emissions, right, and
it will slow the energy transition that we need. Do
you buy that?
Speaker 2 (12:02):
No? You know, whoever says that just hasn't done the mass. Yeah,
this is not going to be an excuse for not
doing anything else. We already know from very well done
studies that there's only so much we can do to
avoid emissions. In the end, you're left with depends who
you talk to, you're left with somewhere between ten and
(12:23):
twenty percentage you just cannot avoid. And that's where direct
their capture comes in. It's the last bit of garbage
that you can't recycle, you can't do anything about it,
and you've got to take it out. And that problem
alone is an immense challenge to think that we could
do ten times that and have everybody go one in life.
(12:43):
People just haven't done the math. It's just just not possible.
And then the other key thing is that if we
stop today and don't emit another carbon molecule into the air,
we've already emitted enough that we're going to crash through
one point five at some point.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
One point five degrees of warming one.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Point five degrees because it's cumulative, and we've, like you
just said, we just spent the last hundred years burning
oil and coal, So you know, at some point beyond
twenty fifty, we want to bring stuff back down.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
In other words, we don't just need to stop emitting
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We need to reduce the
amount of carbon dioxide that is already out there in
the atmosphere. In a minute, the big problem with direct
air captured, where's the money going to come from. That's
(13:38):
the end of the ads. Now we're going back to
the show. Last year, Congress passed and the President signed
into law the Inflation Reduction Act, an act that confusingly
did not do much to reduce inflation, but did do
a lot for direct air capture. Specifically, it said that
the federal government will use tax credits to basically pay
(14:01):
companies to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
If we prove to them that we have captured a
ton of CO two from the air and we've buried
it up to their requirements, they write your check for
one hundred and eighty dollars.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
And one hundred and eighty dollars per ton.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Per ton, so it's one hundred and eighty million per
million tons.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
And how much this this big plant that you and
accidental are building in Texas. How much does that pull
out of the air per year?
Speaker 2 (14:28):
The first plant half a million tons, so that'd be
like ninety million a year from the US government. And
you know, the plant would not have happened without the IRA.
This wouldn't have taken off in any kind of speed
without the IRA. You just couldn't do it without something
like that.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
So, if one hundred and eighty dollars per ton is
the carrot is, what is the cost to you per
ton on your plant?
Speaker 2 (14:49):
That is confidential, but it's significantly over that today it's more.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Yeah, And so to be a real viable business, there
needs to be some combination of getting more than one
hundred and eighty dollars a ton and or bringing your
costs down a lot.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Yeah, but you've put your finger on it. We need
to bring the cost of production down over time by
improving the technology and making it more and more efficient.
And that's really the job of carbon engineering. That's what
we do for a living.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Can you give me a specific example of some detail,
some part of the process, either that you have made
cheaper or solved.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah. I think the easiest example, and the one we've
worked the most done, is Hey, let's get those seventy
things down.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
To fifty seventy units.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Yeah, there's seventy units. Let's make the way the whole
thing is configured, and the way the fan runs and
so on, and the way we place it to the
prevailing wind. Let's make that more efficient. So the next
plant has fifty not seventy. You save yourself a pile
of steel, You save yourself a pidle of sorbent, you
use less electricity, it becomes more efficient.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
I mean, that's a way of saying, let's pull out
more carbon with every thing, right, with every spin of
the fan. Let's get more carbon right out of the atmosphere.
And is there an example of how you have done
that already? I mean, presumably that is the endless quest
for improved deficiency. Is there just one little example you
can give of a way you have improved efficiency so far.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
So inside what we call the air contact or where
the air is flowing through. In our case, the reaction
is from a very thin film. That film is exposed
to the air and react to the carbon. So if
we can pack a honeycomb structure in it, we got
more surface that the air is going through.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Wait, is that one. Is that one you've done already?
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Have you already turned it into.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
A honey yes, well not a honeycomb, but yeah. We
have been improving what we call the fill of the
air contact or what's inside it for many years, and
then in the last year before we went to final production,
we made our own custom filled what we call the
CE one, and it was twenty percent better. And we're
(17:15):
now working on the second fill, not going into the
deck the director capture plan we just talked about, but
we'll go into the next one and that might be
another twenty percent and we might be down to fifty
five fifty six air contact us once we do that.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
What else should we talk about?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
So you know, we know we have to do this,
and right now our partner is selling these credits. They're available,
we can go buy them today. But it's not really happening.
I mean, there's a few sales going on, but it's
not really happening. And if it was really happening, we'd
probably be building four plants, not one plant. And that's
(17:55):
the real challenge that bothers me. How do we make
this happen. We all know we have to do it,
but if you and I do it, and nobody else
does it. We just spend a lot of money and
accomplish nothing. We need everybody to do it at the
same time kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
But it's a weird product, right, Like you're selling you're
selling a thing that is like the absence of a
thing globally, right, Like you're selling a weird product. Nobody
in the absence of policy, really well, nobody in the
absence of policy or very different customer demand than we're
seeing now has to buy your product, like nobody, nobody, nobody,
(18:30):
And so people aren't going to do it out of
the goodness of their hearts, right, Like they're just not
gonna They're not even gonna do it for marketing at
any meaningful scale. So like, I have to think the
only way it's gonna work is with way stronger policy levers,
be they carratter sticks.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yeah, that's the key thing. We need to make this
happen at the scale we need it.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yeah, what really has to happen for it to work
at scale? Like, what is the policy you need for
this industry to actually be a thing?
Speaker 2 (19:00):
You know where the US is once again taking the
lead is the governments are one of the largest polluters
in the world pickarly. About thirty percent of the carbon
dioxid problem in a country comes from the government operations,
the military in particular. So the US is pushing policy
right now compelling government to clean up after itself and
(19:24):
buy so to the extent that governments begin to buy,
that would be amazing. So there are many different ways
in which we can do this. You know, we already
cleaned up our garbage used to flow down the streets
and cause plagues. We then cleaned up our rivers, and
now we've got to clean up the air.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Yeah, it's interesting thinking of this like a basic hygiene problem, right,
like water quality. Water quality is an amazing one. Right,
If you go back one hundred and fifty years, the
advent of modern sewage systems essentially was like one of
the great public health breakthroughs in the history of the world. Really,
(20:05):
and thinking of this in those terms is interesting.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Right.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
There was a sort of collective action problem. It was
a kind of early government doing something other than fighting wars.
Like this reminds me a little bit of that when
you put it that way, right, this is like a
global version of sewage collection. Yes, with similar things.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
The hard part about this one is you know, when
when the sewer is running down the street or the river,
I can see it's in my backyard, and unfortunate climate
is not in my backyard, or is in everybody's backyard. Yeah,
so it's harder, but you.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Know, yeah, there's a collective action problem here, right, Like
London cleans up as sewage, London is better off, right,
But if London is the only one taking carbon out
of the atmosphere, nobody's going to be better off.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
That's it.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
It makes it a much harder problem.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
But that's it. Just you know, when when we first
cleaned up the sewers, it was really your neighborhood. When
we cleaned up the rivers, it was quite a big neighborhood.
And now it's the whole planet. We got to expand
to the whole planet. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Yeah, we'll be back in a minute with the lighting around. Now,
let's get back to the show. Okay, we're going to
do a lightning round.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Now.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
It's going to be way more all over the place
than the rest of the interview, but it's gonna be fun.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Okay, Is it correct.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
That you got a patent in nineteen eighty three for
an electric field detector.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Oh myself, Yes, I did. Yes.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Was there anything you learned inventing that electric field detector
in the process of inventing it or patenting it or
whatever that was helpful to you when you went to
work in industry.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Oh? Absolutely. You know, when you're sitting in engineering school,
you think the problem is solving the technical problem. When
you invent something, you realize the problem is getting it
to market.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Huh, same problem you have now, same problem you have.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Now.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
What's one thing I should do if I go to
Chile where you grew up.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Oh, go skiing. I'm a skier.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Huh. If I want to go skiing in August, that's
the place to go.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
I should go to chill That's the best place to go.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
That's one thing I should do if I go to
British Columbia, where you live and work.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Now, oh, you should also come skiing here. I'm a
boring guy, you know, this is paradise.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
If I want to ski in January, I go to BC.
If I want to ski in August, I'll go to Chula.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
When you were the CEO of an aerospace company, you
started writing books on the side and not like typical
CEO type books, right, tell me about those books.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
You know, I studied physics engineering fixes in school, and
when we worked with NASA for years. One of the
other things we did with we also built the robotic
arm on.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
The Shuttle on the Space Shuttle.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
The Space shuttle on the Space Shuttle, so we built
a robotic arm called the Canada Arm. One was on
the Shuttle, the Shuttle arm that was instrumental in fixing
the Hubble telescope. So I interacted directly with a Hubble
team and kind of kept track of all the advances
in cosmology. And I came to the realization that after
(23:07):
having left school thirty odd years, we still had a
lot of questions to answer. And I had seen some
allusion to those questions in the Jewish literature related to
my religion, and you know, when I had a bit
of time, I went to work on whether one could
draw us something from each tide to get to a
(23:29):
better answer of what all the stuff looks like. So
didn't intend to do much, accept a little bit of research,
and I talked to a few people and they said, well,
you should really write this up. And about four or
five six books later, still doing that, but taking a
pause in the last.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Year, and I mean the basic theme is reconciling the
Old Testament of the Bible with modern cosmology. Is that
the basic project.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Yeah, in the sense that we're both looking at the
same world, so we need to be we need to
be describing it the same because we know it's real
out there. And if we do that, then we can
go peel back to how how each of those bodies
or knowledge gets to that answer and see if we
can learn about how it all came came to happen
(24:13):
and put those things together.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
If everything goes well, going back to carbon engineering, if
everything goes well, what's a problem you'll be trying to
solve in say five years.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
How to build dozens of plants a month, or not
build them in a month, but have them come out
of the production line. Yeah, so start a dozen and
finish a dozen two years later, and then the next
month another doesn't and finish a dozen.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
In that universe. Direct air capture is becoming a massive industry.
It's these giant industrial direct air capture plants are springing
up every month, every week all around the world. That's
what you're hoping for, and you're hoping that will happen
in five years, Like is that possible? Like that seems
like a lot from one.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
Yeah, it will look it will look like a bit
like a solar farms do. Right. Yeah, they're springing out everywhere,
all the solar panels. So just have little bigger buildings
with on top and capturing carbon problem in the same
places because we need the solar power to power them
and so on. Right, But it's exactly what it will
look like, and we will have to have them springing
(25:20):
up everywhere to clean this carbon problem out.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Dan Friedman is the CEO of Carbon Engineering. Today's show
was produced by Edith Russello. It was edited by Sarah
Nix and Robert Smith and engineered by Amanda k Wong.
I'm Jacob Goldstein. You can find me on Twitter at
Jacob Goldstein, or you can email us at problem at
Cushkin dot FM. We'll be back next week with another
(25:50):
episode of What's Your Problem.
Pushkin. The other day I spoke with Dan Friedman. He's
the CEO of a company called Carbon Engineering. Maybe we
could start with what's happening out in Texas, Like, there's
actually somebody's building something big in Texas and you're mixed
up with it in a good way, right, tell me
(00:36):
what's happening in Texas.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yes, and in Texas happened big. That's the good part
about Texas. Yeah. We are building well. Our partner is
building our first commercial scale plant. Just broke ground about
a couple of weeks ago, and all the big pieces
of equipment are under order, which is, you know, quite substantial.
(00:59):
We got all our permits, took about a year, and
the road's been put in place. It's just a big
bunch of desert with some shrubs. And yeah, construction has started.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Construction has started on a billion dollar project that will
be by far the biggest plant ever built to suck
carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere. I'm Jacob Goldstein,
and this is what's your problem. Carbon engineering is at
the frontier of an infant industry called direct air capture,
(01:35):
as in directly capturing carbon dioxide from the air. Direct
air capture won't be able to solve climate change on
its own. There's no way we could capture anywhere near
enough carbon to do that, but it might help at
the margin, pulling hundreds of millions of tons of carbon
out of the atmosphere every year to buy us some
time as industry is decarbonized over the next few decades.
(01:58):
To get there, the direct air capture industry needs to
solve a bunch of problems, including how to bring the
price of direct air capture way down, and also how
to convince companies and governments to pay for sucking carbon
out of the air. I talked about both of those
problems with Dan, but to start, we talked about what
exactly he's building out in the Texas Desert. Let's say
(02:22):
it's two years from now and you and I drive
out to this spot in the middle of Texas and
you've just turned it on, the thing is working. What's
actually going to be happened? Well, first of all, we
get there, what do we see. What's it look like?
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Okay, so you know, when when you build any direct
air capture facility, you've got to process a lot of air.
So the main thing you see in all of them
is what's what we call an air contactor, which is
a fancy name for a huge box with a huge
fan that's drawing air through the contents of the box.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
So it's a giant box fan like the one I
have in my living room, but way bigger.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
How big A couple of stories with stories, okay, so
you know it looks like it looks like a small
a small apartment. You know, I've quite a small apartment,
but it's still like couple of stories, and you know
the width of a narrow house.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
The fan is right on the roof of it. Okay,
So the fan turns on and air is drawn in
from the sides and goes up the top. So you
would see about seventy of those in two years when
this is done, lined up in rows.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
So danisying, there would be seventy of these apartment sized
fan buildings, like a little subdivision out there in the desert.
The fans suck in the air and then they have
this liquid that binds to the carbon dioxide. And one
of the things I'd heard Dan talk about in other
interviews is that the chemistry this part of removing carbon
(03:51):
from the air is actually pretty straightforward. But what's hard
is removing it efficiently because of how little carbon dioxide
is in the air, Like carbon dioxide is way less
than one percent of the atmosphere.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
It's very, very tiny, and that's what makes it so
hard because you you have to touch so much air
to get at the little tiny you know, mining a
tiny bit amount from the air. And traditionally, you know,
people have been extracting carbon dioxide from the air for
a long time. If you recall the Apollo thirteen movie,
(04:27):
they were suffocating from breeding their own carbon dioxide, and
in a couple of hours they built that.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
And just to be clear, that's the Houston We've got
a problem. Yes, their problem was that there was too
much carbon dioxide in their in their space capsule.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah, their director capture machine in there. The little one
wasn't working, so they were suffocating in their own so
they built one and they scrabbed it out. So the
hard part, and that's what's unique about what we're doing.
The hard part is to pull a million tons of
carbon dioxide out of the air. So it's all about
how much we have to do. It's not about doing it.
(05:01):
The doing it is not that hard, but doing a
lot of it is incredibly challenging.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
So it's a scaling problem.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
It's coming up with a process that will scale and
that want use so much energy and materials that it
becomes useless. Right, so we need to be net negative,
not net positive. So the challenge is, you know, is
how much power do you use doing this? And how
much steel do you use to build these air contacts
and so on, and how do you scale that smartly?
(05:31):
So in the end you are net negative, which is
what the business is all about.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
How long do you have to run the plant do
you estimate before it will capture all of the carbon
that was emitted to build the plant and to build
all of the materials in the plant.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
I don't have that figure, but it's because it depends
who the final contractors are and their footprints and so on.
It's similar to electric cars. It's not significance a few
months and their I year for sure.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
So Okay, you get the plant up and running, you're
sucking carbon dioxi out of the air. So far, so good.
But now you've got tons of carbon dioxide and you
have to do something with it, right.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Yeah, you know, that's that's the hard part that it
alver forget. What we do is we hand it to
the world's expert on how to deal with carbon dioxide.
Occidental our partner who has you know, been burying carbon
dioxide for a lot of years to.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Be clear, that's Occidental Petroleum, the big oil company.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Yes. Yeah, they are the companies that understand how to
handle carbon dioxide. So what they do is they bury
that carbon dioxide safely underground according to the US government regulations,
so that it's permanently stored, meaning that it's scanteed for
at least one hundred years to be underground.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
So Occidental is they're an investor in carbon engineering. They're
on the board, right, and they're they're the ones building
this biggest in the world by far, direct air capture plants, right,
They're the one paying for it.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Is that is that?
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Yeah? Well why is why is Occidental Petroleum doing this?
Where are they paying all this? And they're the ones
spending a billion dollars to do it? Right?
Speaker 2 (07:12):
They were trying to figure out how to become net
zero meaning net zero in their own production, net zero
in everything they subcontract and buy, and net zero, and
what the customers like you and I would burn so
all the emissions, and they decided to use this to
decarbonize themselves. And then they said, whoa, we can offer
(07:35):
this as a solution for other people that don't know
how to do this, for them to decarbonize like airlines.
It was a period took a period of years to
develop to the point where it is now. And so
they went from being a partner to being a customer
to also being a part owner and then to being
a deployment partner of all this thing. And they're trying
(07:58):
to make this their next business after oil is done, basically.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Basically selling carbon removal as a service. Let me ask
you a question. You said in there that Occidental wants
to be net zero? Why do they want to be
net zero? And like in particular, given that you know,
they have an obligation to their shareholders to maximize profits,
Like why are they spending a billion dollars to the
extent it's for them to be net zero? Like why
(08:26):
is that a sensible thing for them to do?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
You know that kind of gets the heart of this
whole problem. You know, it's not just Occidental. Microsoft wants
to be in net zero. Amazon wants to be in
net zero. Air travel wants to be net zero. Most
of ninety odd percent of the world GDP has set
a target to be net zero. So I think everybody's
realizing Occidental included that in order to survive in the
(08:51):
long term, we need to get to net zero. So
at some point, I think society is going to say, well,
if you're not net zero, you're not in business.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
So the sort of the financial case for getting to
net zero is the assumption that policy governments will basically
force companies to be net zero, like that's the or
customers or customers right right, they will say we will
only do business with a net zero support.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
You know. I think it goes deeper in terms of
their management team that they're just committed to kind of
lead the whole oil sector to get there, just recognizing
that this has to happen. And in the end it's
good for shareholders because if you keep your head in
the sand, then eventually people don't buy from you one
way or another.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Yeah, I mean, I will say, given the history of
oil companies behavior with respect to climate change, I'm wary
of their involvement at some level, like just based on
the fact that they knew that emissions were driving climate change,
(10:00):
and they obfuscated that fact. Not occidental specifically, but that
was clearly a widespread practice in the industry, and so
it makes me some what weary of their involvement.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Now, yeah, you know, I can't comment on that. All
I can tell you is that when you scour the
planet to find somebody that can deal with a megaton
a year coming out of one plant, and then a
thousand megatons a year coming out of one thousand plants,
only the oil companies can do that, for better or worse.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Huh you mean in terms of how do you stick
it back in the ground. Yeah, you're the only ones
who know at vast scale, how do stick carbon dioxide
back in the ground.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yeah, and understand the underground. They've been mapping the underground
for fifty years. They understand. Any country you go to,
the oil companies the only people that understand what's under there,
how to operate under there, how to keep it under
there and not have it leak out. If you want
to do this at scale, you've got to go to
the world's experts, and the world experts that have been
(10:58):
looking at what goes underground with the geology. Because of
the oil business. Are the oil companies, there's nobody else.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Yeah, No, it is interesting the way this is, you're
basically running the oil business in revert.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Right.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
For one hundred plus years, they have been digging hydrocarbons
out of the ground, and then we've been burning them,
and they've been going the carbon dioxide's been going into
the atmosphere, and now it's like, okay, let's just it's
like on the It's like on my power drill at home.
You know, you push the button one way and it
drills in, and then you push it the other way
and it drills out.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Right, like exactly, it we got to I think the
saying goes, we got to put it back where it
came from. Yeah, and you know, anything else is mucking
around with this natural system and I don't know what
the output of that would be, but this is pretty straightforward.
We just put it back, bring the carbon back down,
and everything should return to normal.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Let me ask you one more thing, just on the
oil company thing, and then we'll leave it. There's basically
a concern that direct their capture will act as a
fig leaf to allow for even more emissions, right, and
it will slow the energy transition that we need. Do
you buy that?
Speaker 2 (12:02):
No? You know, whoever says that just hasn't done the mass. Yeah,
this is not going to be an excuse for not
doing anything else. We already know from very well done
studies that there's only so much we can do to
avoid emissions. In the end, you're left with depends who
you talk to, you're left with somewhere between ten and
(12:23):
twenty percentage you just cannot avoid. And that's where direct
their capture comes in. It's the last bit of garbage
that you can't recycle, you can't do anything about it,
and you've got to take it out. And that problem
alone is an immense challenge to think that we could
do ten times that and have everybody go one in life.
(12:43):
People just haven't done the math. It's just just not possible.
And then the other key thing is that if we
stop today and don't emit another carbon molecule into the air,
we've already emitted enough that we're going to crash through
one point five at some point.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
One point five degrees of warming one.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Point five degrees because it's cumulative, and we've, like you
just said, we just spent the last hundred years burning
oil and coal, So you know, at some point beyond
twenty fifty, we want to bring stuff back down.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
In other words, we don't just need to stop emitting
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We need to reduce the
amount of carbon dioxide that is already out there in
the atmosphere. In a minute, the big problem with direct
air captured, where's the money going to come from. That's
(13:38):
the end of the ads. Now we're going back to
the show. Last year, Congress passed and the President signed
into law the Inflation Reduction Act, an act that confusingly
did not do much to reduce inflation, but did do
a lot for direct air capture. Specifically, it said that
the federal government will use tax credits to basically pay
(14:01):
companies to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
If we prove to them that we have captured a
ton of CO two from the air and we've buried
it up to their requirements, they write your check for
one hundred and eighty dollars.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
And one hundred and eighty dollars per ton.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Per ton, so it's one hundred and eighty million per
million tons.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
And how much this this big plant that you and
accidental are building in Texas. How much does that pull
out of the air per year?
Speaker 2 (14:28):
The first plant half a million tons, so that'd be
like ninety million a year from the US government. And
you know, the plant would not have happened without the IRA.
This wouldn't have taken off in any kind of speed
without the IRA. You just couldn't do it without something
like that.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
So, if one hundred and eighty dollars per ton is
the carrot is, what is the cost to you per
ton on your plant?
Speaker 2 (14:49):
That is confidential, but it's significantly over that today it's more.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Yeah, And so to be a real viable business, there
needs to be some combination of getting more than one
hundred and eighty dollars a ton and or bringing your
costs down a lot.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Yeah, but you've put your finger on it. We need
to bring the cost of production down over time by
improving the technology and making it more and more efficient.
And that's really the job of carbon engineering. That's what
we do for a living.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Can you give me a specific example of some detail,
some part of the process, either that you have made
cheaper or solved.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah. I think the easiest example, and the one we've
worked the most done, is Hey, let's get those seventy
things down.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
To fifty seventy units.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Yeah, there's seventy units. Let's make the way the whole
thing is configured, and the way the fan runs and
so on, and the way we place it to the
prevailing wind. Let's make that more efficient. So the next
plant has fifty not seventy. You save yourself a pile
of steel, You save yourself a pidle of sorbent, you
use less electricity, it becomes more efficient.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
I mean, that's a way of saying, let's pull out
more carbon with every thing, right, with every spin of
the fan. Let's get more carbon right out of the atmosphere.
And is there an example of how you have done
that already? I mean, presumably that is the endless quest
for improved deficiency. Is there just one little example you
can give of a way you have improved efficiency so far.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
So inside what we call the air contact or where
the air is flowing through. In our case, the reaction
is from a very thin film. That film is exposed
to the air and react to the carbon. So if
we can pack a honeycomb structure in it, we got
more surface that the air is going through.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Wait, is that one. Is that one you've done already?
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Have you already turned it into.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
A honey yes, well not a honeycomb, but yeah. We
have been improving what we call the fill of the
air contact or what's inside it for many years, and
then in the last year before we went to final production,
we made our own custom filled what we call the
CE one, and it was twenty percent better. And we're
(17:15):
now working on the second fill, not going into the
deck the director capture plan we just talked about, but
we'll go into the next one and that might be
another twenty percent and we might be down to fifty
five fifty six air contact us once we do that.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
What else should we talk about?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
So you know, we know we have to do this,
and right now our partner is selling these credits. They're available,
we can go buy them today. But it's not really happening.
I mean, there's a few sales going on, but it's
not really happening. And if it was really happening, we'd
probably be building four plants, not one plant. And that's
(17:55):
the real challenge that bothers me. How do we make
this happen. We all know we have to do it,
but if you and I do it, and nobody else
does it. We just spend a lot of money and
accomplish nothing. We need everybody to do it at the
same time kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
But it's a weird product, right, Like you're selling you're
selling a thing that is like the absence of a
thing globally, right, Like you're selling a weird product. Nobody
in the absence of policy, really well, nobody in the
absence of policy or very different customer demand than we're
seeing now has to buy your product, like nobody, nobody, nobody,
(18:30):
And so people aren't going to do it out of
the goodness of their hearts, right, Like they're just not
gonna They're not even gonna do it for marketing at
any meaningful scale. So like, I have to think the
only way it's gonna work is with way stronger policy levers,
be they carratter sticks.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yeah, that's the key thing. We need to make this
happen at the scale we need it.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yeah, what really has to happen for it to work
at scale? Like, what is the policy you need for
this industry to actually be a thing?
Speaker 2 (19:00):
You know where the US is once again taking the
lead is the governments are one of the largest polluters
in the world pickarly. About thirty percent of the carbon
dioxid problem in a country comes from the government operations,
the military in particular. So the US is pushing policy
right now compelling government to clean up after itself and
(19:24):
buy so to the extent that governments begin to buy,
that would be amazing. So there are many different ways
in which we can do this. You know, we already
cleaned up our garbage used to flow down the streets
and cause plagues. We then cleaned up our rivers, and
now we've got to clean up the air.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Yeah, it's interesting thinking of this like a basic hygiene problem, right,
like water quality. Water quality is an amazing one. Right,
If you go back one hundred and fifty years, the
advent of modern sewage systems essentially was like one of
the great public health breakthroughs in the history of the world. Really,
(20:05):
and thinking of this in those terms is interesting.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Right.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
There was a sort of collective action problem. It was
a kind of early government doing something other than fighting wars.
Like this reminds me a little bit of that when
you put it that way, right, this is like a
global version of sewage collection. Yes, with similar things.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
The hard part about this one is you know, when
when the sewer is running down the street or the river,
I can see it's in my backyard, and unfortunate climate
is not in my backyard, or is in everybody's backyard. Yeah,
so it's harder, but you.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Know, yeah, there's a collective action problem here, right, Like
London cleans up as sewage, London is better off, right,
But if London is the only one taking carbon out
of the atmosphere, nobody's going to be better off.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
That's it.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
It makes it a much harder problem.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
But that's it. Just you know, when when we first
cleaned up the sewers, it was really your neighborhood. When
we cleaned up the rivers, it was quite a big neighborhood.
And now it's the whole planet. We got to expand
to the whole planet. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Yeah, we'll be back in a minute with the lighting around. Now,
let's get back to the show. Okay, we're going to
do a lightning round.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Now.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
It's going to be way more all over the place
than the rest of the interview, but it's gonna be fun.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Okay, Is it correct.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
That you got a patent in nineteen eighty three for
an electric field detector.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Oh myself, Yes, I did. Yes.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Was there anything you learned inventing that electric field detector
in the process of inventing it or patenting it or
whatever that was helpful to you when you went to
work in industry.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Oh? Absolutely. You know, when you're sitting in engineering school,
you think the problem is solving the technical problem. When
you invent something, you realize the problem is getting it
to market.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Huh, same problem you have now, same problem you have.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Now.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
What's one thing I should do if I go to
Chile where you grew up.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Oh, go skiing. I'm a skier.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Huh. If I want to go skiing in August, that's
the place to go.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
I should go to chill That's the best place to go.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
That's one thing I should do if I go to
British Columbia, where you live and work.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Now, oh, you should also come skiing here. I'm a
boring guy, you know, this is paradise.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
If I want to ski in January, I go to BC.
If I want to ski in August, I'll go to Chula.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
When you were the CEO of an aerospace company, you
started writing books on the side and not like typical
CEO type books, right, tell me about those books.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
You know, I studied physics engineering fixes in school, and
when we worked with NASA for years. One of the
other things we did with we also built the robotic
arm on.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
The Shuttle on the Space Shuttle.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
The Space shuttle on the Space Shuttle, so we built
a robotic arm called the Canada Arm. One was on
the Shuttle, the Shuttle arm that was instrumental in fixing
the Hubble telescope. So I interacted directly with a Hubble
team and kind of kept track of all the advances
in cosmology. And I came to the realization that after
(23:07):
having left school thirty odd years, we still had a
lot of questions to answer. And I had seen some
allusion to those questions in the Jewish literature related to
my religion, and you know, when I had a bit
of time, I went to work on whether one could
draw us something from each tide to get to a
(23:29):
better answer of what all the stuff looks like. So
didn't intend to do much, accept a little bit of research,
and I talked to a few people and they said, well,
you should really write this up. And about four or
five six books later, still doing that, but taking a
pause in the last.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Year, and I mean the basic theme is reconciling the
Old Testament of the Bible with modern cosmology. Is that
the basic project.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Yeah, in the sense that we're both looking at the
same world, so we need to be we need to
be describing it the same because we know it's real
out there. And if we do that, then we can
go peel back to how how each of those bodies
or knowledge gets to that answer and see if we
can learn about how it all came came to happen
(24:13):
and put those things together.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
If everything goes well, going back to carbon engineering, if
everything goes well, what's a problem you'll be trying to
solve in say five years.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
How to build dozens of plants a month, or not
build them in a month, but have them come out
of the production line. Yeah, so start a dozen and
finish a dozen two years later, and then the next
month another doesn't and finish a dozen.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
In that universe. Direct air capture is becoming a massive industry.
It's these giant industrial direct air capture plants are springing
up every month, every week all around the world. That's
what you're hoping for, and you're hoping that will happen
in five years, Like is that possible? Like that seems
like a lot from one.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
Yeah, it will look it will look like a bit
like a solar farms do. Right. Yeah, they're springing out everywhere,
all the solar panels. So just have little bigger buildings
with on top and capturing carbon problem in the same
places because we need the solar power to power them
and so on. Right, But it's exactly what it will
look like, and we will have to have them springing
(25:20):
up everywhere to clean this carbon problem out.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Dan Friedman is the CEO of Carbon Engineering. Today's show
was produced by Edith Russello. It was edited by Sarah
Nix and Robert Smith and engineered by Amanda k Wong.
I'm Jacob Goldstein. You can find me on Twitter at
Jacob Goldstein, or you can email us at problem at
Cushkin dot FM. We'll be back next week with another
(25:50):
episode of What's Your Problem.
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