Episode 33 Transcript: Soaking up Carbon From the Atmosphere

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast for the climate economy. We dive deep into the climate crisis and come up with solutions. I'm Molly Wood.

This week we’re exploring a topic that once seemed fanciful … or at least maybe … not that likely … that topic … is carbon … removal. Literally taking carbon dioxide OUT of the air … and storing it … so it doesn’t keep warming the planet.

In 2022 … when a lot of other stuff was going on so people didn’t pay as MUCH attention as they might have otherwise … the UN’s climate panel released a report that said … basically … developing carbon removal technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere is … non-optional … in ADDITION … to cutting emissions.

That is … of course … if we want to limit global warming to levels that won’t trigger catastrophic outcomes … in terms of biodiversity … species and crop loss … and increasingly extreme weather. Which … we do.

Lots of companies and scientists are working on carbon-removal technology … right now it’s happening at a very small scale … and it’s expensive … and some people have criticized it as a way for humans to KEEP emitting carbon instead of cutting overall emissions.

But listen … you know me. I ain’t about the problems. If it’s not optional … let’s look at who’s working on it … and that’s what this week’s guest is here to discuss …

Charles Cadieux:

I am Charles Cadieux, the co-founder and CEO of Spiritus, and we provide carbon removal services with high quality and at an accessible price using direct air capture.

Molly Wood:

Um, there is so much to dig into about the actual company, but I have to start with the name. Where did the name spiritus come from?

Charles Cadieu:

Oh yeah, Spiritus indeed. Yeah, it is from the Latin to breathe. And we just feel it's kind of inspiring to think about kind of giving human civilization the ability to kind of give lungs back to the earth and get the CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Molly Wood:

Okay, so let's start with, I'm gonna sort of take your description of the company piece by piece. Let's start with carbon removal, which I think for some people is all by itself a topic that they're unfamiliar with. So tell us what that is and why it's so important.

Charles Cadieu:

Indeed, yeah. I think this is a perspective on climate change that is becoming more and more relevant and pressing and people are starting to understand the need here. And really carbon removal is the process of taking that CO2 out of the atmosphere and storing it away in a way that it no longer affect climate change and create warming effects. And this is different than I think the majority, I think of climate talk, which is about like mitigation, where we're trying to just stop emitting as much as we have in the past. And people, of course, are making huge progress on this, you know, in terms of alternative energy and various things like electric cars. But the reality is that in order to meet some of these climate goals, we are just going to be challenged to get away with just reducing emissions. What we have to really start doing is removing those emissions. taking that CO2 out of the atmosphere and storing it away. And there's a couple of perspectives, on how this is needed. And there's this macro perspective about, what are our climate goals as a human civilization and how do we keep below certain warming thresholds? And honest truth is just we're not reducing emissions enough to meet those goals. And really the models are telling us that we've got to start removing carbon at a really astounding scale. to cheat to meet those goals. So I think that's sort of a macro perspective. And then of course there's sort of our own individual perspectives as running companies or as individuals. And how do we move from emitting or even just reducing emissions, but actually getting to net zero and even removing our emissions from the past. And that's really the important difference of removal versus carbon mitigation or emissions reductions.

Molly Wood:

Right. This is, it feels like it is, this was almost a dirty little secret, which feels like an accidental pun. This sort of growing awareness that because we're not reducing emissions fast enough, the only way, I mean, I think I first heard it, frankly, from Greta Thunberg, right? That it was being unsaid.

Charles Cadieu:

Mm.

Molly Wood:

that really the only way to meet targets would be through removing carbon and that led to this kind of race to figure out methods, both natural and technological. Right, is that fair?

Charles Cadieu:

Yeah, yeah, indeed, indeed. And it's sort of a bit of a mystery as to why that is to me, you know, that we've kind of reached that point in addressing climate change. But I think, you know, one, you know, some realities that we hadn't, you know, acted fast enough and we're not continuing to act, you know, fast enough and, you know, new energy production, you know, globally is a major issue. There's some like sort of the physics and the earth science of it as well, which is that the CO2 just stays in the atmosphere for an awfully long time.

And so even if you just turn off the spigot today, it has essentially like a hundred year or like multi-generational effect here. And what that means is that, we had to stop admissions generations ago and here we are having not done that. And so really the removal becomes a need. Another perspective on it is also just the how, and it does sort of seem both magical and like a... a duh moment, like, well, why don't we just take the CO2 out of the atmosphere? And it's like, why don't we just solve that in the most direct way possible? And like the one, you know, beautiful origin story of some of this CDR and direct air capture technology was a conversation between a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and his daughter. And he was talking about climate change and the CO2 in the atmosphere. And she said, well, why don't we just take the CO2 out of the atmosphere? And that was a little, you know...

Molly Wood:

Right. Okay, good.

Molly Wood:

Hmm. Wow.

Charles Cadieu:

spark of a moment for that scientist. And he began to think, you know, how could we actually do this? And that was a bit more than 20 years ago. And that sort of dinner conversation, you know, propagated a bit of the first forays into how do we actually do this from a technical point of view. It is certainly challenging, and that's, you know, really where spiritus comes in to try to solve that challenge.

Molly Wood:

Right. And then one last question before we get more into what Spiritus does. This is also, it feels like it's important to draw a bright line when people talk about, for example, planting millions of trees or billions of trees. It is in order for them to act as a carbon sink, right? That carbon removal encompasses this idea of natural carbon sinks and that we have kind of realized that's not enough or not feasible.

Charles Cadieu:

Indeed, indeed. And yeah. Indeed, yeah, there's something into some territory here. But the.

Molly Wood:

I'm not trying to make you the bad guy on the tree topic here, but...

Molly Wood:

My philosophy on the show is that we need everything. So let's just, let's stipulate that we need everything.

Charles Cadieu:

Exactly. So we'll put that premise on the table that we definitely need everything. And yeah, forestry is a very direct path there. And that's why people have gone behind it because it's a very accessible, the cost points there are there to make it viable for meeting certain goals. So it makes tremendous sense. When you start running numbers, you just start to get into some challenges of how this is really going to meet those removal goals that we have set for civilization or even just individual companies.

I mean, I think there's been certain situations where certain specific companies have touted their net zero goals. And even just for a single company, it can be that they're going to plant the entire earth of trees, such as phenomenal amount of land and impact effectively that would be had there. So that being said, that is part of the solution. And then the question then becomes, how do we have something more scalable? And from an impact point of view, and really creating create.

we call it sustainable stewardship of the atmosphere. It's like, how do we create this resource, this shared resource of atmosphere where we utilize by having emissions that we have had or will have in the future that we can't avoid and be able to take that CO2 out and make it more circular or have a situation where it's more under our control than it just feels like completely out of our control. And these technology solutions, I think the field is feeling that this is necessary beyond the forestry.

and it has a variety of scalable impacts. Our technology can easily do a thousand times more carbon removal per acre than a forest can. And secondly, when we store that carbon underground, for example, the durability is going to stay down there for thousands, maybe millions of years. Where forestry has impact from forest fire, it sort of is in a more fragile position than otherwise we can with these tech.

solutions.

Molly Wood:

Right. OK, let's talk about technology. What goes into CDR? You've mentioned a couple of times carbon dioxide removal and specifically direct air capture. What goes into doing that?

Charles Cadieu:

Indeed, there's a phenomenally expansive space in the technology here. It's super exciting. You know, new solutions are coming up, uh, nearly daily here, uh, of how we, we try to do this and, uh, the process of, you know, removing the carbon, uh, you often are doing it with, you know, uh, chemistries that, you know, grab onto that CO2 in some way. Uh, it then is like cycled such that we can release that CO2.

Molly Wood:

It's not like a vacuum.

Charles Cadieu:

and then we can have that CO2 then stored in some method or used into products. And there's a couple of different avenues for all those different choices along the technology of capture, the technology of storage, the technology of transformation, CO2 transformation. So it's a big amazing field and just a lot of different solutions that are out there. And our perspective on this is that

Cost is kind of the king here in terms of how you actually meet the need at scale. And we kind of analyze that from that principle, like, you know, in our internal metrics, the guiding principles from the top to the bottom are all about how do we do this at the lowest cost possible such that our customers can meet more of their net zero goals with higher quality carbon removal.

Molly Wood:

Let's talk about you then. Let's talk about how you're doing it, because it does feel as though you have been a little bit the anointed one in terms of the technology you've created. Tell me about the technology you've created and how it works and how it does drive down cost.

Charles Cadieu:

Oh, my.

Charles Cadieu:

Indeed. Yeah. We are a group of, uh, you know, scientists, engineers that have come together to really solve that problem from a first principles, uh, perspective. And we have been privileged to kind of look at some of those solutions that have come before us and seen, you know, the major challenges in the way that director capture has done today. And, uh, we're big fans of many of those approaches that are out there. And we kind of have looked at the best of, of multiple categories.

And so simply what we've done is created a breakthrough solid sorbent approach, which is like a material that soaks up CO2. And this material is really a game changer. It is a breakthrough. There's innovations that my co-founder, Matt Lee, has brought to the table here that change the game for these types of materials. The numbers speak for themselves then. We're able to do this 10 times faster.

So if CO2 is 10 times faster than other state of the art sorbents, we're able to make that sorbent at 1 tenth the cost. We're then able to use less than one half the energy of previous approaches. The cost of the facility is also in certain key components, like 1 sixth of what's previously been achieved before. So it's not magic, but you do got to get all of these elements to line up correctly to drive down costs dramatically across the table. And that's how you're able to get to, you know,

high quality carbon removal with direct or capture that is at a more affordable price that allows people to really make that a real meaningful part of their portfolios and get to that scale that was really needed.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

It’s not magic … BUUUUUUT … ok time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll hear more about this sorbent … which you’ll see described elsewhere as kind of like a lung … and how it becomes part of carbon-sucking orchards … straight out of sci-fi.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Charles Cadieu … co-founder and CEO of Spiritus … a carbon removal company that’s raised millions of dollars from high-profile venture capitalists … about the company’s technology and some of the objections … to the idea of removing carbon dioxide instead of just emitting less in the first place. First … more about the magic.

Molly Wood:

Right. OK, so let's break it down even further. You have invented a novel. I love any sentence, by the way, that starts with it. It's not magic, but it's super close. You have invented a material that can attract and absorb CO2. And then that CO2 can be removed from that material, so it can be reused again.

Charles Cadieu:

Mm-hmm.

Charles Cadieu:

That's exactly right. And

Molly Wood:

Okay. And like, how is it deployed? Because I'm picturing a t-shirt gun and I'm certain that that's not accurate.

Charles Cadieu:

I'll take that back to the mechanical engineers as a new concept here, the t-shirt gun carbon removal.

Molly Wood:

I feel like everything at some point could involve a t-shirt gun or a similar technology.

Charles Cadieu:

Indeed, indeed, indeed. We look at the sorbent, we call it like an artificial fruit, or it is like in an orchard, and we have many, many of these ball-shaped sorbents that are soaking up CO2, and the beauty of this one that we've created, it doesn't require fans to force air inside of that material. It is so porous and so accessible to the air.

that the air and the CO2 is just able to go right inside of it and be grabbed onto the surfaces of that sorbent, that artificial fruit. It's kind of like a lung inside there where it has these pathways that go and branch and branch and create indeterminate amounts of surface area, but at the same time you can get a lot of air in and out of it. That's the first part where we just put the sorbent out into the environment to collect CO2.

Molly Wood:

Mm-hmm.

Charles Cadieu:

The second part is that we then transport that back in to disorb it to get that CO2 off of the sorbent. And we do that using low temperatures, which makes it accessible for energy inputs from renewable sources and low cost in terms of energy that's needed to make this happen. That sorbent then is able to go back out and to reabsorb CO2 out there in the environment. And that process repeats over and over again.

which then allows us to make really efficient use of that sorbent and that material, even though we're able to produce it for such a low cost, we're even able to get a lot of cycles and utility out of that sorbent.

Molly Wood:

You will notice, by the way, I turned off, you may not see my video, I pushed us to low data mode because I was noticing a little bit of freezing in the video, but it'll still record locally in high quality, just FYI. So then where, I know I'm being extremely literal, but what does this look like? And where does this, or will this deployment happen? Like, are you deploying the fruits?

Charles Cadieu:

Gotcha, okay.

Charles Cadieu:

Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood:

around, for example, a highly emitting facility? Or can they just sort of go anywhere?

Charles Cadieu:

Mm.

Charles Cadieu:

Yeah, we create the fruit into a concept we call a spiritus carbon orchard. It's a little bit like a solar farm. We've got carbon orchards. And really the beauty of this whole process of direct air capture is that you can do it anywhere. You don't need to do it near smokestacks or where there's emissions or big cities or where you think about typically sources of pollution.

across the globe is very well distributed. And therefore we can do direct capture anywhere. And therefore we do it in the places that make the most sense to make it the easiest. And where does it become the easiest? Well, it has to do with where you store that CO2 after you've captured it. And that's a process called geological sequestration, which is kind of a big word for just saying we're gonna bury it underground and specific.

geological formations that can trap and hold CO2 underneath the Earth's surface. And therefore, we put these carbon orchards right on top of those geological formations that can hold the CO2. And there's a phenomenal capacity in the United States. I think the United States is going to be, I believe it's going to become the worldwide leader in this whole field because of some of these, the technology side, but then also the...

the geology and the ability to store CO2 at massive, massive quantities. So these carbon orchards will be going up right above these sequestration areas. And we are well on our way to making that a reality. And we'll definitely be having some announcements about that around the corner.

Molly Wood:

about new orchard deployments. Amazing. What are the geological characteristics that make it a good spot to store carbon underground?

Charles Cadieu:

That's right. That's right.

Charles Cadieu:

Yeah, the formations, I like to think of them as upside down coffee cups. So you've got some sort of like dome like shape underneath the ground. And remember down below the surface of the earth, there's like, you know, 10,000 many feet below there with many different layers over the millennia that have, you know, formed. And you can find these like upside down coffee cups that are like an impermeable cap rock. So it's like a really hard shell on top. And inside you've got

really, really salty, sandy water below that. And what you then do is you take that coffee cup, you drill your well from the top to the surface all the way to the side of that coffee cup. You then poke your hole in the side of that coffee cup and you then inject your CO2 in a state where it's a little bit lighter than water. So the CO2 is gonna float to the top there and you essentially fill your coffee cup from the top to the bottom with CO2. And because of that hard

rock on the top, the CO2 can't get out. And because of the water below it, it can't get out the bottom. And it will then just stay down there in a way that most people think it will stay down there for millennia, just as in other formations, like oil and gas has stayed down there for millions of years. Properly chosen, properly monitored. These sequestration systems of these wells and carefully chosen areas are likely to hold CO2 for...

for indefinitely beyond our horizon.

Molly Wood:

Wow, that is fascinating. It also sounds as you describe it, like something that could represent a fairly easy skills transfer from, you know, people in companies that are already doing all kinds of drilling. Like let's say you weren't drilling for oil and gas anymore, you can still have jobs sequestering carbon.

Charles Cadieu:

Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

Oh, absolutely. There's, there's tremendous, uh, transference of skill sets. Even just the fact of like trying to find these formations, it's sort of like, uh, taking oil and gas prospecting and finding the places where you were unsuccessful. It's like, we want to find places where there were duds, where you found these formations that didn't actually hold oil and gas, but had the right shape as if they, they could have. So people that have those skill sets from seismology and, and surveying and.

in geology, very applicable. Then when it comes to building out the models of how the C2 is gonna be moving through those formations when you pump it in there, the actual welling and the drilling, all those service professionals that come through the whole stack are completely transferable here. And I do imagine at a point in time where we've gotten the regulation, the technology and the market figured out where we are,

certifying new wells every couple of months, just as if you're utilizing an oil and gas field, you might be putting in a new well every month or two. Here, we're going to be finding these formations where we can store CO2, and every month or two, we're going to put a new well in there to meet the demand as the orchard scale, and the market is seeing this as a solution to their net zero goals.

Molly Wood:

It's amazing. I mean, that really is remarkable. One quick follow up just on the orchard, which I love as a concept. We talked a little bit about kind of the land. You know, there's always this question of cost and also land use when it comes to these solutions. How big does an orchard have to be compared to maybe, like in concrete terms, but also maybe compared to that question of planting petroleum trees?

Charles Cadieu:

Yeah, thank you.

Charles Cadieu:

Hmm.

Yeah, the stories are with, compared to forestry and trees, these carbon orchards are 1000 to even 3000 times more carbon capturing per acre. So you just get a tremendous amount more utilization from this type of technology than you do from forestry. Forests are not designed to capture carbon. They do that to stand up the trees and the leaves and all, but it's not their sole purpose where...

these orchards that we create, these carbon orchards are really designed to do that as efficiently as possible. In terms of the acreage position, we're talking about things that are on the order of solar farms today in terms of their land footprint when you start to expand them out over some regions. And so they will create some impacts on the land. But in order to get to...

you know, the goals of removing all of the United States' emissions. This is a very achievable land footprint using this type of technology.

Molly Wood:

Wow. Tell me where you are as a company in terms of funding and deployment. We're not quite at that nationwide scale just yet. So I'm going to go ahead and start

Charles Cadieu:

No, not just yet. Not just yet. Yeah, we're coming off an exciting year here. We announced our seed round with Coastal Ventures, a great, phenomenal climate tech investor. They've looked at a tremendous number of companies in this space and had passed on all of them until Spiritus and just saw that cost that we were able to bring to the table. We've also gotten our first purchasing from Frontier.

Uh, announced that earlier this year and an advanced, uh, market commitment and advanced purchase to dispiritus with Stripe and Shopify. We've also brought in. Yeah.

Molly Wood:

And for those, I'll jump in here, for those who are not familiar, Frontier is a, at least it started, I think, as a billion dollar fund, but a fund set up specifically to do procurement of carbon capture, right?

Charles Cadieu:

That's exactly right. And then they look to providers or service providers like us to fulfill those contracts. And so they are helping to spur that market demand, which is so critical for these early technologies. So we've had a purchase from them. We've also had purchasing from TerraSet, which allows individuals to buy carbon removal and actually get tax benefits for that.

We've also had purchasing through a watershed, which helps companies, uh, you know, meet their nets, your goals and, and helps, uh, advise them on that. And then, uh, enables them to buy removal through that process as well. So we are funded. We've got the customers, we've got our operations in Los Alamos where we are building up the demonstrations of the technology, uh, you know, working on the, uh, the fundamentals here.

and starting to scale in that kind of demonstration phase for the company. But we are going for the full package here and we've got a lot of work done to realize this in the world with our sequestration projects, which will be announced fairly soon here. And we're also keen to build up the whole supply chain of how we get this. Cause really what we're doing is we're creating a system and enterprise that meets that market demand. That does the R&D, manufactures the sorbent, creates the process design, and does the project development to make this happen. So we think that that's really needed for this market to materialize.

Molly Wood:

This is a good opportunity to talk about the economics of carbon removal. You've mentioned buying carbon removal. Put a finer point on that and how the business model is somewhat similar to selling offsets, but obviously different in some key ways.

Charles Cadieu:

Yeah, indeed. The market is really made up of a couple of different segments. We've got the voluntary market, which is what you were just referring to there, Molly, with people that are companies that are buying removal to meet their net zero goals. You've got the compulsory market, which is developing, but exists in certain jurisdictions where the government is essentially saying you've got to remove an amount equal to the amounts that you emit.

And then there's also the sort of incentives and then the tax credits and whatnot that go along with that as well. So piecing these together kind of creates the overall ecosystem for the economics. Focusing though on that first bucket there with the, I'll say companies that have net zero goals and there are many of them out there. Many, the majority of Fortune 500 I believe is got these net zero goals now. What are they looking at internally? Well often they...

first go through a carbon accounting and they understand, you know, where their emissions lie. They try to identify things where they can reduce those emissions, but inevitably they're just left with a whole bunch of the mission that they cannot figure out how to mitigate. And then they're left with how do we, you know, spend some dollars to make that offset with removals. And that removal is supplied to by companies like us and other marketplaces out there as well.

What's that decision that they're really facing? Well, it often comes down to the three C's. It's like cost, complexity, or control. And sometimes they look at a situation and just too costly to change. And therefore a better solution is to go with removal services. Sometimes it's complex, like they might miss a business objective if they try to under change out one of their processes that might be emitting.

Molly Wood:

Mm-hmm.

Charles Cadieu:

And finally, the control side. Many companies, of course, they can't control their entire supply chains and the ecosystems that they operate in. And they're just not able to change the actions of others that are emitting and supplying them either energy or services. Take a company that needs a data center in a certain region that has a coal-fired power plant. And that just creates a very challenging situation. And this carbon removal marketplace and carbon removal purchasing allows them to meet those goals and to spur the market in a way that allows them to become net zero.

Molly Wood:

And then I feel like this is where the cost that you talked about at the beginning, your ability to do this at a much lower cost, this draws that kind of bright line. It's important for you to be able to offer carbon removal to companies that's cheaper than the competition and cheap enough for them to want to do it.

Charles Cadieu:

Indeed, absolutely, exactly. And so what they're faced with is a certain budget to meet those goals there. And they have a spectrum of choices. And majority of those choices are in the low cost, but they don't have those quality attributes that we talked about earlier in the conversation, which are the permanence, like how long is that CO2 going to be stored away? How verifiable is it?

Are we able to monitor and watch that CO2 that our dollars went towards, where it came from, where it is today, and that it's been stored away? And even just things of simple things like jurisdictions that allow recourse if things go wrong. And to be able to do things in the United States is really important to a lot of these companies and jurisdictions that allow that recourse there. So that is some of the major...

drivers towards this high quality side of the market. And so these companies, they have a budget and they're looking across the spectrum and they want to spend as much as they can in this high quality side, but they've got to meet that overall target at the same time. And so the more companies like Spiritus can provide more volume at lower cost in the high quality bucket, the more these companies are able to do for their net zero goals, the more rock solid they'll have the ability to stand on those statements about.

reaching that zero, they'll be less encumbered by situations where maybe they planted a forest that gets burned down. Maybe it's in a jurisdiction that is hard to evaluate if that's really come to fruition. But here in the high quality bucket, we feel that they can more easily make those statements, more easily get those needs met. And the remaining thing is the cost. And that's where spiritus we feel we can really just change the equation there.

to deliver that high quality at an accessible price.

Molly Wood:

What does that price look like? It's per ton, right? So that's the price.

Charles Cadieu:

It's per ton, it's per ton indeed. And so we are, you know, signing up customers here at those early prices, but we are seeing this pathway to that $100 per ton, which is really what a lot of people feel is like the Holy grail for high quality direct air capture, which will really just unlock that market and provide, you know, a real solution versus the technology that's hoping to get there.

Molly Wood:

Right. How important, wait, that's a bigger question than I want to go to now. You alluded earlier to this idea of a circular market. It sounds like right now you're focused on sequestering carbon. But what else could this carbon be? I've talked to a company that's using director capture carbon to make diamonds. Talk to us about what else this material

Charles Cadieu:

Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood:

potentially be used for in the future.

Charles Cadieu:

Indeed, the CO2 transformation technologies and market is a really fascinating one. I think people are quite excited about, well, jet fuel is the one that people tout quite a bit and I think there is an opportunity for that future. There's other like polymers and plastics and things like that, which are also accessible and likely very achievable from those technologies. That is sort of the second part.

of this whole equation, we can think about sequestration for our current needs and that circular carbon economy out there in the future, where let's say we're in a situation where energy is inexpensive, but it's really about where and when you can use that energy. And when you're doing a transcontinental flight, it's just kind of hard to get solar panels up there and get that low energy to where you need it. And so maybe that these fuels...

Jet fuel is going to be a needed resource for us for a long time. And so if we could have a situation where as you're flying, you emit the CO2, but then you've got these facilities on the ground that effectively vacuum up that CO2 from the atmosphere and then turn it back into jet fuel and send it down to LAX to repeat the cycle, that is a sustainable future here that some people are excited about and may allow us to keep certain aspects of our lives.

moving forwards and to give those to further generations and also the developing world that also wants to do these things that we do on a daily basis here in the US.

Molly Wood:

Yeah, I wonder, I want to get your perspective on that. One of the, you know, I think early on in the carbon capture and director capture conversation, there was this resistance, which I liken actually to some of the early resistance, the idea of adaptation and resilience, right? Which is like, we need to focus every ounce of energy and dollar on mitigation and emitting less. And so one of the sort of...

bubbling controversies about

Molly Wood:

removal is that it allows these practices to continue, these kind of polluting fossil fuel burning practices. What is your perspective on that?

Charles Cadieu:

Yeah, indeed. This is a complex kind of moral thicket. And I do think the honest answer is that they do start to allow you to continue to emit. And

Molly Wood:

Mm-hmm.

Charles Cadieu:

Let me just maybe make an analogy to try to get one way that I've tried to think about this a bit, which is that, let's say we take our use of things in our home that eventually need to be thrown out, like food or other types of waste, and in some ways, CO2 in the atmosphere is another type of waste that's present here. And if you go back into our home and you think, all right, we have trash collection today, and that removes waste,

Does that actually make me think less about the things that bring them into my home because I'm able to have an easy trash collection? Well, yes, it does. So in some ways, I probably do create more waste because I have trash collection. But to tell me that we should stop trash collection so that I can stop buying so much stuff and creating more waste, that seems like a pretty preposterous proposal here. But in the atmosphere, we're just in a different situation where we haven't...

Molly Wood:

Mm-hmm.

Charles Cadieu:

you know, invented trash collection yet. We haven't invented that CO2 removal yet. And so for those to say that, you know, we should not emit that, we should not invent that trash collection because that might allow people to continue to emit. Well, I mean, I feel like that's just a challenging proposition to stand on. I like it in the idealistic sense, but I think in the practical sense, I just would prefer a world that we do have trash collection.

that does allow us to create sustainable stewardship of the atmosphere in a way that we take for granted in other aspects of our life, whether it's in our home, our wastewater disposal. We can't really imagine a world without those things. I think this is really the third pillar of civilizational waste removal. We've got water treatment and water and sewage. We've got trash collection and we really need carbon removal. That's that third pillar.

so that civilization can move forwards in a way where we are able to engage in those activities that make life great, but in a responsible way that takes care of their impacts.

Molly Wood:

Right? And you make an excellent point about industrialization. There's, you know, the conversation we often tend to have is about rich countries and rich people and what we produce and emit and use. And that's an important place to start, but there are countries who have yet to fully industrialize who are likely to do so with the cheapest available fuels. And those might still be fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.

Charles Cadieu:

that it may likely be the case. And of course, that's a constant struggle when you're trying to set these goals at the international level. And it gets even a little bit more wicked when you think about it, which is that the developed world has really been responsible for the vast majority of those emissions. And here, we're in a position where we're going to try to put the economic brake on others because we've emitted.

That's a very challenging proposition I feel to make here. And so I think, you know, focus on solutions, focus on removal as one of these pillars, drive down the cost such that we can go faster towards that net zero and that balancing out the carbon economy. And that technology can hopefully be part of the solution for the developing world and also for the developed world where energy is real.

cost today. It's not how we just live in a free energy world here. You know, gas prices are a thing. They do put a brake on the economy. And, you know, having technologies that just allow us to find better strategies to net zero is, I think, a good thing for everyone.

Molly Wood:

Mm-hmm. And then let's talk briefly about carbon pricing. You mentioned that sort of $100 a ton price that people feel will unlock this economy. Can you explain that a little bit more?

Charles Cadieu:

Yeah, indeed. And of course, we want it to be as low as cost as possible. But what cost really makes this attainable as part of the solution. So if you think about how much each one of us emits like in the United States, it's about 16 tons per year. And if you think about trying to mitigate some of that...

And then how much is left? What do we do through removal? Well, if you start to get, you know, mitigating, let's say half of our emissions as individuals in the US, and we get those price points down at that $100 per ton, then all of a sudden, the cost of removal, of carbon removal to get yourselves net zero, to get themselves net neutral there, is about the same price that we pay today for wastewater treatment. So it's like, you know, another utility bill, and no one wants another bill, but...

the wastewater treatment bills that we've got today are not insurmountable, right? It's like a sort of very standard thing that we just take for granted, but we see, of course, the value from that. And if you can get carbon removal into that $100 price point, all of a sudden that third pillar of waste removal becomes just another utility bill that's part of society and allows us to function without the cataclysm.

you know, clismic effects of climate change and all that goes along with it.

Molly Wood:

Yeah, I mean, I think that this question of a price on carbon and what it unlocks in terms of potentially a tax, you know, potentially a cost for either nations or businesses or even individuals is obviously quite new, but really, really important, like just a true potential game changer in terms of an economic instrument.

Charles Cadieu:

Indeed. And I like to kind of highlight the Inflation Reduction Act and the way they kind of went about this, which is actually through carrots and less about taxes or sticks there. And I believe that we are going to create society eventually that's able to take care of carbon in the atmosphere. And it sort of becomes a question if that reality is going to be the future, who's going to own that from an economic...

point of view, who's going to own the technologies, who's going to own those services. And I think that the US again is well positioned and the more we can spur that industry through incentives, and that's where the Inflation Reduction Act has really come in strong there where they provide $180 per ton in credits or direct payments. And that then has really spurred the Director of Capture.

industry here in the United States because of those, you know, those carrots, those incentives, which could just, you know, propel the technology forward, propel the market forward and make the U.S. a really dominant leader in this space.

Molly Wood:

What does, in our last couple of minutes, what does the timeline look like for deploying this technology at scale?

Charles Cadieu:

Mm-hmm. I think we are looking at, yeah, that is the question, indeed. As an entrepreneur, I always want to go faster. And we are pushing as fast as we possibly can. We see major deployments by the end of this decade, where they are really having some impact in terms of removals.

Molly Wood:

That suggests that that's the question.

Charles Cadieu:

And then in the next decades after that, to get to like 2050, we think that there's a massive scaling that can happen with that market coming to bear with governmental support, with societal support across the board, where the field would like to get to 10 billion tons of removal per year by 2050. And so we've got a long ways to go, but we're talking about getting to millions of tons by the end of...

this decade with these high quality technologies. And if the cost and the price point can prove out over these next few years, I think that's very attainable, that 10 billion tons.

Molly Wood:

And then finally, tell me about yourself. How did you come to be doing this and what is your background?

Charles Cadieu:

Yeah, my background, I am a deep technology entrepreneur and I have been involved in technology startups and innovation for over a decade. I was drawn to carbon removal not just because of its potential for impact but also because of the challenge it presents. It's a complex problem that requires a multidisciplinary approach, which really appealed to me. I saw it as an opportunity to make a significant difference in the world while pushing the boundaries of what's technologically possible.

Molly Wood:

Charles, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your insights. It's been a fascinating conversation.

Charles Cadieu:

Thank you, Molly. It's been great being here.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

And that's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. We hope you found today's discussion enlightening and that it's sparked your interest in the critical role of carbon removal in combating climate change. Join us next time as we continue to dive into the solutions that are making a difference in our planet's future. 

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