Photo credits: Meghan Kenny and Jonas Lee

Meghan Kenny: Our prototype is called Hobbes. All of our major pieces of equipment are named after cartoon characters. Hobbes's predecessor is actually named Calvin.

Dan Morrell: That's Meghan Kenny (MBA 2019), the director of strategy and projects at Carbon Capture Inc. She's describing the technology at the heart of the young company's ambitious decarbonization efforts.

MK: Hobbes is pretty big. He's taller than me. I'm about six feet tall. I wouldn't say he's particularly exciting looking. He is a giant steel box, essentially.

DM: Inside, you can see waffle-shaped sorbent cartridges designed to remove carbon directly from the air and—critical to Carbon Capture Inc's model—designed to be replaced as scientific advances produce materials that can capture carbon more efficiently and more cheaply.

MK: We as an organization fully believe that the best sorbent or the best technology has not yet been developed.

DM: And they don't believe we can wait around for that to happen.

MK: I don't think that we as a world probably can afford to wait to deploy DAC or other carbon removal technology. At this point I think we need to try anything, even if it's not necessarily the best technology.

DM: I'm Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck. Welcome to the second episode of our Skydeck mini-series on carbon capture. In the first episode, we explored the scope of the problem—and the potential size of the business opportunity at this moment. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, go back and check it out. It will help you understand why Carbon Capture Inc. just can't wait.

READ MORE

In this episode we're headed to the company's headquarters in Downtown Los Angeles, where the Hobbes prototype was built. And to Southwest Wyoming where the company is planning the first large-scale direct-air capture facility in the United States. They call the effort "Project Bison."

If everything goes according to plan, several of Hobbes' successors will be in place in Wyoming by late 2023. By 2030—that's just seven years from now—Project Bison will be at full capacity, removing 5 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.

Jonas Lee: When we wrote our mission statement, 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 Jonas Lee (MBA 1993), chief commercial officer of Carbon Capture Inc. He's pretty used to explaining what it takes to decarbonize the atmosphere. The basic science has been understood for nearly a century and the first movers in the sector got their start more than a decade ago. But the process is still a mystery to most people.

JL: There are many ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. There's growing trees, there's growing algae, there's kelp. We're focused specifically on direct-air capture.

DM: You'll also hear direct-air capture referred to as D-A-C or DAC.

JL: direct-air capture is, generally, take large volumes of air, take as much CO2 out of that air as possible, and then either utilize that or store that CO2 somewhere. Our approach is what you call a solid sorbent-based approach. When we say sorbent, it's a carbon sponge, essentially. Sponge doesn't sound too technical, but that's kind of what it is. That sponge is made of a material that has an affinity to CO2. It likes CO2. And typically, when cool or cold or coldish, it will absorb CO2. And then you kind of close off the chamber, you heat that sponge up, it gives up its CO2.

DM: Then, of course, you have to do something with that CO2. Carbon Capture Inc. has partnered with a company called Frontier Carbon Solutions to store the CO2 captured by Project Bison underground. Wyoming's geology is great for that. And with the carbon dioxide sequestered underground, Carbon Capture Inc. can sell "engineered carbon removal credits"—which are offsets for companies with net-zero emissions goals.

That's when removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at scale becomes less a question of science and more a question of economics. The United Nations' climate change commission, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, for short—has set a goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have estimated the world needs an additional 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide removal each year through various mitigation strategies in order to meet that goal. But can we afford it?

JL: So I think that's the good news is that from an economic perspective, assuming the world continues to do okay and there's not some big disaster between now and then, we can afford to decarbonize the atmosphere to the point where we're not going to explode in a ball of flames.

DM: The number you hear a lot is $100 per ton. The idea is, if companies can get the cost of removing and storing one ton of carbon dioxide below $100, it will be a feasible mitigation strategy. And Jonas Lee is optimistic.

JL: I think well before 2050 the cost per removal of a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere and then permanent storage will be under $100. Well under $100, actually. And that includes profit. I think we can afford to remove a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere to get us to where the IPC wants us to get, even though we've got to create a giant new industry in the process.

DM: There isn't much of anything to see in Southwest Wyoming where Carbon Capture Inc. plans to build Project Bison. But Meghan Kenny, the project manager, can see the future.

MK: Have you ever seen a train going by with many different sort of rail cars attached to it? That's probably not too far off of what it would look like to someone looking at it from far away. All of our modules are going to be in this sort of shipping container form factor.

DM: There's a lot to do before the first modules arrive.

MK: So I would say that the two biggest things on my mind right now are probably our permitting strategy—this is fairly new to both us and the people in Wyoming—and also our energy strategy

DM: She's thinking about energy cost and capacity, but she's also concerned with emissions.

MK: We can't sell gross carbon removal; we only sell net carbon removal. So we as a company need to take into account any of the emissions associated with the work that we do.

DM: And there's the challenge of introducing this nascent industry to the public.

MK: I think DAC is still relatively new to people—both in this community and I think more broadly. So a lot of the work that we're doing around community engagement is partially just educating the public on what we do as both a DAC developer, but also what the end of this process means. I think people have a lot of questions.

DM: In October 2022, the company held a town hall meeting on Project Bison in Rock Springs, Wyoming. About 130 people attended the meeting, which included a two-hour Q&A.

MK: Questions pretty much spanned the gamut. Everything from how is this project being financed, how much energy does this project require? Lots of questions around sequestration. We get asked everything.

DM: People want to know if the facility could affect wildlife, if it will limit access to hunting areas, if there will be solar panels and windmills and if Project Bison will capture carbon dioxide produced in Wyoming, or emissions from everywhere.

The answer to that last one: carbon dioxide disperses quickly through the atmosphere, so a reduction in one place is a reduction in every place.

But one question that doesn't come up as much as it would have even five years ago is: Do we need to do this at all?

MK: I think a lot of the reports that are, for instance coming out of the IPCC and other places now are helping to move the needle on people understanding that DAC has to be part of the equation.

JL: Between the government support and corporate support, we now have a business and that business was really not there 10 years ago. Now it's there in spades and our job is to scale as quickly as possible. That's sort of, from a business perspective, great. You have a market that wants you, you don't have a lot of competition, the demand is insane. But on the other hand, it's also a bit concerning that we have so much to do. It's not an easy problem to solve.

DM: The direct-air capture sector has been jump-started. Now the question is "what's next?" In the next episode of this Skydeck mini-series, we'll look at all the potential new uses for captured carbon.

Todd Brix (MBA 1997): And that's what we aspire to—to enable a circular carbon economy using humankind's CO2 emissions or the CO2 that's already in the air.

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.

Post a Comment