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Can We Really Engineer a Climate Fix?
Photo credits: Aaron Sabin; Russ Campbell
Dan Morrell: Hi, this is Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck.
This is the first episode of "Clearing the Air", a three-part series focused on the business of carbon capture, a technology that could help address the climate change crisis by removing excess carbon dioxide right out of the atmosphere. The promise of this approach has launched a raft of companies that not only capture but also store and even reuse the carbon—creating an industry that has attracted several billion dollars of government and investor capital in just the last few years.
But the scope of the problem is massive and growing, which means that all of these promising new ideas need to launch and scale quickly.
This series will take you inside the world of carbon capture, guided by innovators and experts at the forefront of the movement who will help you understand what is possible. Can we really engineer a climate fix?
But first, we're going to hit the golf course.
Aaron Sabin (MS/MBA Candidate) and HBS senior lecturer Jim Matheson
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[Sound of golf club hitting ball]
In 2020, Aaron Sabin was working as a mechanical engineer at the golfing equipment company TaylorMade.
Aaron Sabin: What I would do is I would design a golf club on the computer and before manufacturing it, we would simulate it, which means, on the computer, you would launch a golf ball at it and watch it come off. And the simulation program would measure the speed the golf ball was moving at, its spin, all that. And it would give you a really good idea of how effective your design was.
DM: That process worked well, but it was manual, requiring several redesigns and tweaks to perfect the models. It was frustrating. So Sabin designed a machine learning program that would test all of various parameters of club head design, iterate countless models, and then simulate their efficacy until it found a design that would drive the ball farther and straighter more often.
It was incredibly effective: Sabin would set the program in motion, come back a week later, and voila—a perfect, data-backed design.
It was an amazingly useful tool.
But when Sabin came to HBS's MS/MBA program in 2021, he was on a mission to make an impact on climate change. So now he's exploring how to apply that same machine learning approach he used to design golf clubs to design sorbents—these molecules that can bind to carbon dioxide and make carbon capture more effective.
Molecules aren't as simple as golf clubs, though.
AS: So unfortunately, we can't simulate molecules the same way that we simulate larger physical objects. And that's because we don't have quantum computers yet; simulating the interactions between atoms takes quantum-scale computing. But what we can do is do simple experiments and some simulation on the computer to predict important properties of molecules.
DM: Like how much energy it takes to bind the molecule to CO2. Or how much it costs to produce the molecule.
AS: And the other part is using machine learning to connect the dots between what you've observed in the real world and how you predict you'd fill out the rest of those properties that are important to you. And you essentially use that to invent molecules that we haven't seen before or used before for direct air capture.
DM: As Sabin begins his search for the breakthrough molecule, he enters a space with few solutions and many suitors.
AS: The demand in the market right now is functionally infinite.
DM: One of the big movers in the space is the Frontier Fund, a group led by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey that committed just short of a billion dollars to early-stage carbon removal companies this spring. And there's been government support as well, with the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act creating new tax credits for carbon capture. And, in December, the Department of Energy announced $3.7 billion worth of prizes and programs meant to further kick-start the industry.
To HBS senior lecturer Jim Matheson, these investments signal a real urgency.
Jim Matheson: I think in the last 10 years, we've seen now not only the measurable rise of greenhouse gas emissions, we've seen the good work of the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change and their reports.
We've seen the impact of the COP process, which essentially is the gathering of the global community to discuss climate. I think all those things combined with the experience that humans are having, living in the world with changing weather patterns, with rising sea levels and changing climatic patterns—and that's sort of conspiring to have us all be focused now on this problem set.
DM: In addition to teaching at HBS, Matheson is also a special partner at the Engine, an MIT-founded venture firm with heavy climate tech investments, and senior advisor venture partner at Breakthrough Energy, a Bill Gates–founded investment firm focused on climate change.
JM: Primarily all of my focus for the last 10 or 15 years has been in climate and sustainability and the impact that that technology can have as it scales to meet the size of the problem that we're facing in climate change.
DM: In other words, he's had a front-row seat for the cleantech sector's evolution. So what makes carbon capture special? Why is it commanding so much attention and capital?
JM: It really is a math problem.
DM: And the big number in climate change calculations is 1.5 degrees Celsius or about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the amount of global temperature rise, compared to pre-industrial times, after which serious climate catastrophes are likely, scientists say. And the UN reports that we've already reached 1.1 degrees Celsius of rise.
JM: Essentially, the challenge I think that we all have is trying to limit atmospheric temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Right? And if you look at all the curves, that means that we have to not only stop the increase of greenhouse gas emissions, but we have to significantly drive those down to zero by 2050. And we're still going to have a huge amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Simply mitigating or reducing greenhouse gas emissions is going to be insufficient. So we have got to start to find ways to actually actively remove greenhouse gasses, CO2 specifically, from the atmosphere if we're actually going to win this race.
DM: Right now, there are two basic ways of actively removing those gasses: Point-source capture or direct-air capture, both of which use filters or sorbent materials that can chemically bind to the CO2 to isolate it.
Point-source capture means collecting carbon right at its production source.
JM: …whether it's an automobile or a power plant. We've been doing point-source capture for a long time, but we need to do more. Intuition would tell us that would be the easiest way to do it, because you have a concentrated source of the molecules you're trying to gather.
DM: But not all carbon dioxide can be easily collected where it is generated. Which is why we also need direct air capture—which isn't tied to a specific place. Those systems can be anywhere that CO2 is available in the atmosphere. Which is everywhere.
JM: The density of those molecules is much less, therefore it's a much more difficult sort of energy mass problem. And energy mass challenges turn into cost problems in the end. So it's really about, can we do this job? Can we capture these molecules in a cost-effective way?
DM: And even after we capture the molecules, where do we put them?
JM: The trick is once you capture these molecules, you actually have to make sure that they don't release in the future or else all that good work and all the costs that you incurred to capture them is for naught. So we've got to find a way then to sequester, to store, or to reuse them in a way where they're permanently sequestered, where they can't be released. And that's both a practical consideration, but it's also an economic consideration.
Because you have to have a whole measurement and verification process that says, yeah, in fact, you did capture these set of molecules. You actually did move them someplace where they can be stored or sequestered or reused in a way that they're not going to then be released.
DM: Capturing, transporting, sequestering, reuse: It's a complex economic ecosystem, and each part is dependent on the other. But Matheson says the energy in the sector is promising.
JM: It's a really exciting time to be in the world of climate and sustainability, both because it matters so much and it's such an interesting, complex problem. But I'm also seeing this massive proliferation of invention and innovators and entrepreneuring and capital.
DM: Which is good, says our student entrepreneur Aaron Sabin, because carbon capture isn't some supplemental sustainability initiative. It's not a nice-to-have. It's a necessity.
AS: There's an idea that if we know enough about climate change and people get scared enough, we're going to change our behavior and we're going to solve the issue. I'm not convinced by this idea because, in 2022, we know more than we ever have about climate change—and we are emitting more than we ever have.
We have to innovate our way out of this problem. We engineered our way into it. We're going to have to innovate our way out. And even if we were to stop emitting CO2 today, we've increased the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere by more than 50 percent since before the industrial revolution.
And that carbon dioxide stays in our air for hundreds of years. It will continue to warm the globe. So not only do we have to decarbonize our economy, we have to decarbonize our air. And in reality, we're not going to decarbonize our economy that quickly.
My brilliant atmospheric chemistry professor told me the best way to keep carbon out of the air is to not put it in the air. Unfortunately, we're putting it in the air and we're not going to stop doing that. If I could wave a magic wand, I wouldn't invent the best direct-air capture machine in the world. I would invent a way for us to stop emitting carbon dioxide. But that problem is just so, so hard. So we have to build direct-air capture capability to cover for our failures to decarbonize now.
DM: In the next episode, we're going to introduce you to two HBS alumni who are working on just that—helping to develop the first large-scale, direct-air capture facility in the United States.
Jonas Lee: When we wrote our mission statements, it's like, it's pretty simple. Like we're here to decarbonize the atmosphere and we don't need a lot of flowery language around that. It's a big deal.
DM: That's next time, on Skydeck.
This episode of Skydeck was co-produced with contributor April White, with additional production by PRX Productions, and was edited by Craig McDonald. [It was developed in collaboration with the HBS Business and Environment Initiative.] It is available wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.
And if you are interested in hearing more about what businesses are doing, can do, and should do to confront climate change, be sure to check out HBS's Climate Rising podcast with host Professor Mike Toffel, which is available wherever you get your favorite podcasts.
Editor's note: Since this recording, Aaron Sabin has launched a carbon capture company, Lasso Flow.
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