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Episode 64: How Twelve is turning captured carbon into jet fuel

The complete transcript for episode 64.

Episode 64: How Twelve is turning captured carbon into jet fuel

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood.

This week, we’re talking about carbon capture again. This is a really complicated topic and there are lots of different types of carbon capture you might hear about, pre-combustion, post-combustion, direct air capture, capture and sequestration, and today’s topic carbon capture and use or C-C-U.


In this case, that use is to turn capture carbon into sustainable materials like jet fuel. The company I’m talking to today just raised $645 million dollars to build renewable energy powered facilities that use captured carbon to make sustainable aviation fuel that they say emits 90% fewer emissions overall than conventional jet fuel. Let’s get to it.


Etosha Cave:

My name is Etosha Cave and I'm a co-founder of Twelve. Twelve is a carbon transformation company. So we are taking the CO2 molecule along with water and we're breaking it down to smaller atomic bits and transforming those bits into new molecules. And our main focus is jet fuel.


Molly Wood:

You make it all sound so easy. So I understand that Twelve came out of Stanford, right? It was you and some Stanford colleagues who came up with the company. Can you give me a little bit of the origin story before we dive into how it works?


Etosha Cave:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I will also say too, though, I make it sound easy. I will also say it is very prevalent. I trees are transforming CO2 all around us. So in some ways, it's very familiar and very unknown, this industrial version of it that we're creating at 12. But our origin story basically started 15 years ago, I guess, when I was an early grad student in a new lab in the chemical engineering department and I joined and there was another grad student there named Kendra Cool. And we worked together. We were one of the first two graduate students to work on what's technically called CO2 lecture reduction. And we were one of the first grad students in the US to really work on this type of CO2 lecture reduction under our advisor, Thomas Jaramillo.


So we worked side by side for four or five years working and understanding the basic science side of this technology. And then when I was looking to graduate and Kendra had already graduated and was doing a postdoc at Slack, I approached her and said, hey, know, I'm trying to figure out what I'm to do next. What do you think about looking at this science work that we've been doing as an industrially scale up company? And so we teamed up with Nicholas Flanders who was in the business school and Nicholas and I met initially in the Stanford Space Club.


And then later on, there was a Saturday event for clean tech, both business school students and engineering school students. And I told the group that was there that, there's a business plan competition coming up from the department of energy. Love to work with a business school student on that competition with Kendra Cool, who was in the lab at Slack at that time. And Nicholas approached me afterwards and was like, hey, let's see if we can do something together and that was really the start of the three of us working together on this business plan competition to generate the first two ideas around how we would get this company off the ground.


Molly Wood:

Amazing. Also, I would like a do -over on life just so that I can be part of the Stanford Space Club. That is a whole other hour -long conversation that I want to have with you.


Etosha Cave:

I know. Totally. Well, and at that time they were talking about some of the first few iPhone satellites, which is another really cool technology that's taken off since then. Yeah. In fact, they had a, they, put up a satellite themselves that, that club that year and you could pay like, I think it was like 20 bucks to get your name.


Molly Wood:

No pun intended.


Etosha Cave:

inscribed on a plate they were putting on the satellite. So my name is up there somewhere in space.


Molly Wood:

That's awesome. That is amazing. Okay, I'm going to try to wrench my brain off of space and back to CO2. Well, so it sounds like 15 years ago, a big part of your motivation was this interest in clean tech, right? And climate. was that the big part of the drive to want to do this?


Etosha Cave:

Yes, absolutely.


Molly Wood:

How did that come about?


Etosha Cave:

Yeah, I have a drug for quite some time, going back to my teenage years. I grew up in Houston, Texas and grew up in a neighborhood that was adjacent to an abandoned oil and gas waste site. And there was actually a class action lawsuit and all these politicians and so forth were coming into what effectively was the greater neighborhood to talk about this waste site that had leached into the water supply and was linked to a higher rate of rare forms of cancers and diseases. So from that moment, I felt like waste and clean energy felt very personal to me that seeing neighbors, friends, and so forth go through this process of this discovery of what some of the effects of waste that's not treated responsibly can have on humans


So I basically from then on, whatever science or engineering class I was in, was always thinking about, how can we make energy cleaner? What can we do to service waste in an irresponsible way? And how can we really kind of have an impact in that industry and in the world, really, and make it so that a neighborhood never has to go through that experience because we have just such clean and abundant energy.


So, you know, my...when I started grad school, I was looking for something along those lines. And I read a booklet that had a description of all the professor's research. And my advisor's research was talking about mimicking nature and understanding catalysts can convert carbon dioxide into other things or make other molecules, but in this more benign and cleaner way. And so I was really attracted to that.


Molly Wood:

Right. Perfect segue. Let's talk a little bit more about the process. So it mimics nature. I mean, give us the sort of halfway version between the science version and the layperson. Like combining CO2, you know, like what part of it mimics nature, and then what parts have you had to augment to be able to do this at scale?


Etosha Cave:

Yeah, so if you look at what a tree does, so a tree takes in CO2 from the air, water from the ground, and uses sunlight as an energy source to break down that CO2 and water molecule into smaller atomic bits and reform those atomic bits into sugars plus oxygen. And the sugars it uses for its own growth and development or makes fruits out of them to spread their seeds. in a lot of ways, we're very analogous to that. We are taking CO2 from an industrial point source or from the air. We're using water, industrial sources of water, and we're using electricity as our energy source. So that electricity could come from solar, could come from wind, could be nuclear, could be anything, any type of electricity.


And we're using electricity to break down the CO2 and water molecule into smaller atomic bits, reform those atomic bits into a new industrial carbon molecule for industrial growth and development. And we also make oxygen as well. And the oxygen right now, we...

currently look at venting it. But there's industries that use oxygen. in medicine, when you have compressed oxygen, and even rocket launches, liquid oxygen is used for that. So we could certainly sell it. But right now, it's just kind of vented into the atmosphere.


Molly Wood:

Right. Because you have a pilot plant right now, right? Like tell us kind of where, before we dive into the uses, where are you in the commercialization process?


Etosha Cave:

Yeah, so we started off with our core technology, which would be the equivalent of the leaf of the tree. It's where the, we call it a membrane electrode assembly, and it's basically a square. We started off with something that was about the size of a postage stamp, and it had our catalyst and everything that was on that electrode. And then we scaled that up to the size of something that's about the size of a desktop monitor, computer monitor. And we did that in four iterations. So that's one scale up that we've done. Then we've taken those electrodes and we've stacked them into a stack. So that'd be kind of equivalent to like a branch of the tree that has many leaves on it.


We have a stack that has many electrodes in it. So that stack we've made, we've added more and more of our leaves or added more cells as we call them. And we have a facility in Alameda that basically takes that stack and puts all the piping and so forth, like bringing the water, bringing in the CO2, the valves and so forth, we need to operate that in a safe way. It does all of that so that's effectively like the trunk or the rest of the tree, like all the vessels and so forth that make a tree work.


That is all built in Alameda at commercial scale for us to then deploy into our air plants that we call them, where we would deploy our trees and use the output of those trees to make jet fuel and then sell that jet fuel to commercial airlines. We've announced partnerships with Alaska Airlines and IAG, which is the parent company of British Airways. So we're really excited about those partnerships and look forward to delivering on that fuel.


Molly Wood:

Do you use like tree puns in your, I mean, it's a rich metaphor for naming. I'm just wondering how much you talk about trees in your conference rooms.


Etosha Cave:

I know it. That'd be a fun activity or maybe some type of food or drinking game we could do. mean, some sanks and drinking, but it's got to lead to like how many tree puns can you come up with that's relevant for technology.


Molly Wood:

Mm -hmm.

Yeah, right? Like that sort of, feels like maybe just working into your job interview process. I don't know, just, so I'm just thinking about trees. So how did you, okay, so you have.


Etosha Cave:

Yeah.


Molly Wood:

You're creating these sort of industrial atomic bits that could become a lot of materials, it sounds like. How did you settle on jet fuel?


Etosha Cave:

Yeah, was many iterations. We went through many pivots to come to Jet Fuel. And our most recent inspiration, you would say, really came from the Inflation Reduction Act. When that piece of legislation came out, there were several key amplifications to existing laws or production credits that were in that bill and in new ones that really opened up the economics to get us to market quicker with jet fuel specifically.


So we haven't just solely focused on jet fuel yet. We do have a kind of ENAPSA molecule that can become an array of consumer products. So we are still looking at the consumer product line. But in terms of volume and getting to scale and being able to reach customers and meeting a strong demand and being able to offer a product that can enter to the market and has a much stronger carbon footprint, can be, has a measurable carbon score and carbon impact. That was really powerful for us to look into.


And we got to this point from many years ago when we first started off, we were looking at making ethanol with CO2, which is another product that we can make. And there our value proposition was,

with corn ethanol production, for every ton of ethanol you make, you make a ton of CO2. And we thought we could take that CO2 and improve the yields by up to 50 % for corn ethanol producers. And what we realized in having conversations with corn ethanol producers and actually visiting a corn ethanol site was that in order to make a plant that was interesting to a corn ethanol producer, we would need to be at a really large size in our first of a kind plant, you know, with this new technology we're developing and the need to get project financing, it seemed like it would be too many really challenging steps at once. And so what consumer products allowed us to do was to make a smaller system, make the molecules, test them out, like show that we can make these materials and de -risk the technology along the way.


Molly Wood:

Right. Can you, before we go back to Jet Fuel, can you give me some examples of the consumer products that it's possible to make?


Etosha Cave:

Yeah, so we've made component anti -detergent, and we did that with Procter & Gamble. We made lenses and sunglasses with Pangaea. there's a little back story there, because the sunglass industry has been looking to make green sunglasses for quite some time. And for the frames, you can use recycled plastics. But for the lenses, because you need a transparent lens, need basically version.

high purity materials that you really aren't able to use recycled plastics for making lenses. So with our process, you could still recycle basically carbon, but you could make that high purity material such that you can still make the transparency in sunglasses. So that was one kind of unique thing. And then we've also made a car part with dimer bin.


Molly Wood:

Interesting.


Etosha Cave:

So we made a polymer that frames one of the back windows. It's called a C pillar and we made that a few years ago.


Molly Wood:

And as kind of as tests or are those still in production?


Etosha Cave:

They were as tests basically or demonstrations.


Molly Wood:

Yep, got it, got it. Yep. OK, so it sounds like that part. the overall takeover of the world plan will include those eventually, but now because of the economic opportunity. And we've heard a lot about this. the kickstart that the sustainable aviation fuel kind of topic writ large got from the IRA cannot be overstated, it seems like.


Etosha Cave:

I think the Inflation Reduction Act was huge for a lot of companies in the climate tech space. so, yeah, I hope that they continue a lot of those pieces of the bill and even expand upon them, because I think there's a lot of measurable outcomes from that.


Molly Wood:

Yep. If you wouldn't mind, could you give us sort of an overview of like, it seems like there are several different types of SAFs, Or replacement Jeff fuels, there's like bio -based, there's what you're doing, like to the extent that not to make you the expert on all the types, but can you give us kind of an overview of which ones exist and maybe, you know, get, there are some pros and cons, it seems like.


Etosha Cave:

Yeah, effective right now, there's the bio or agricultural based SAFs that really dominate the SAF market. So you have different types of agricultural feedstock. So there's switchgrass or other types of wheat based grasses or so forth. And then there's also believe there's way to use animal products like animal talons and like leftover waste from kind of animal processing. So, you know, all of those require ultimately a lot of land and water to grow those plants or to feed the animals. And, you know, there's kind of growing concern of like, you know, should we be using land for fuel versus food? And, you know, what our technology is kind of in the power to liquids category.


And there's different ways in which you can take electricity and make a liquid out of it. Ours is unique in that umbrella of like being able to use low temperature electrolysis, CO2 with a metal catalyst being converted into a new molecule using electricity. And we can do that and couple.

with renewable electricity so we can handle intermittent loads. We use far less water and far less land, so about 1 ,000x less water, 30x less land to build these SAF plants. So there's a lot of advantages to this power to liquids category.


And right now there's a few startups who are tempting this in different technologies, but there really isn't a strong power liquids market share yet. So we hope to really build this industry by building out our E -Jet product. But it's a pretty big industry that we fly a lot of planes. There's billions of gallons of jet fuel being flown every year. so if all of that's converted into sustainable aviation fuel, that would be a very huge market. So we have many, miles to go before we will reach any sort of peak or close off the demand for sustainable aviation fuel.


Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll learn more about this sustainable jet fuel compare it to other SAFs on the market and do a little cost comparison.


Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Etosha Cave, C-E-O of Twelve which is currently making sustainable jet fuel and eventually hopefully many other things out of captured carbon.


Molly Wood:

Talk to me about the fuel that is created and does it have a different emissions profile? Like when it's burned, does it emit less or is it more the savings are all in the process of creating that fuel in the first place?


Etosha Cave:

It's more the latter, but there's a bit of a former. So I'm referencing the GREET model for lower carbon fuel standards, which is a model that was developed at Argonne National Labs. And if you look at their petroleum -based jet fuel, most of the emissions that are attributed to that do come from the fact that it's petroleum think it's somewhere around 90 % of the emissions are because it's like net carbon being added into the air. Now there is also some impurities in petroleum -based jet fuel, some particulate matter, some sulfur compounds and so forth. So we don't have that. So that's where the lower overall emissions come in.


We're not emitting these sulfur compounds because they don't exist in our jet fuel. But the main emissions gain is the fact that we are taking CO2 from the air, from a biogenic source. And so we're not taking it from underground. And so by starting with a feedstock that's already taken from the air, when it does get combusted in the airplane, it goes back in the air. It's a CO2 neutral or recycling of that CO2, not putting that CO2 into the air.


Molly Wood:

So at the worst case, you break even. And you have a chance to do a little bit better. Yep, got it. And you take out all. And ideally, if the goal is to leave all the fossil fuels in the ground going forward, this does that. OK, talk to me about the feedstock part. Is it direct air capture? It sounds like, as you describe it, you know,


Etosha Cave:

Yeah, exactly.


Molly Wood:

as it scales, sounds like there are various options for getting the CO2 feedstock, but also the water, and then also what type of energy powers future plants. Yeah.


Etosha Cave:

Yes. We are pretty agnostic to where we get the CO2 from a technology standpoint. Now from a policy and leveraging the state and federal incentives, their biogenic CO2 has an advantage. It's not always the case, but oftentimes if you do biogenic CO2, that captures some of the state and federal incentives. Biogenic CO2 can come from paper and pulp, can come from corn ethanol.


Molly Wood:

Okay, what is that?


Etosha Cave:

come from landfills, municipal landfill waste emit CO2. So there is a preference for biogenic. But as this industry grows and we would, in theory, run out of biogenic CO2, we could certainly use industrial point source CO2 emissions. there, you're looking at glass manufacturing concrete or cement manufacturing, cement making where you're emitting CO2 that's inherent in the process. We could use that CO2 and make our jet fuel and then we would love, we have had conversations with direct air capture companies about coupling with their system and using the CO2 that's directly captured from the air.


We don't, as a company, make those systems or wanna innovate in those systems because there's so many other companies doing that, but we would love to partner with them. And that would be a dream to have direct air capture of CO2 made into jet fuel. One advantage of some direct air capture systems as well is that they capture water from the air as well. So then you'd have your CO2 and you'd have your water right there, which would be great. I mean, that'd be even more like a plant.


Molly Wood:

Right. Right. So that's the science as magic future ideal, is to be able to have a direct air capture plant that's harvesting CO2, harvesting water, that then gets fed into this fuel. And it just is like a virtuous cycle of production. But it sounds like that's far off. Because as I am talking to you now, I'm thinking, OK.


Etosha Cave:

Yes. Yeah.


Molly Wood:

direct air capture is at what, like $1 ,000 a ton of carbon. That probably doesn't create a jet fuel replacement that's super affordable. Like it's a, it feels like it right now it's a cost question.


Etosha Cave:

Yeah, I was gonna say, it's very much an economic one. So, you know, the technology's come down a cost curve. And I think right now there's, you know, with the federal funding that's coming, and hopefully will continue to come in the next four years specifically, then, you know, there are some ways in which one can put together a project and kind of show end -to -end solutions with that. So even though the full economics at scale aren't there yet, we can still kind of show that the magic, as you say, can still be realized.


Molly Wood:

Yeah. And then what would you say is the kind of, how do you ballpark the cost gap now? Like how much more expensive is 12 jet fuel versus what's on the market now?


Etosha Cave:

Yeah, I would say, know, our jet fuel is roughly competitive with kind of agricultural and, and like, you know, animal feedstock, jet fuel. And so


Molly Wood:

Okay. Which I'm just going to call in my mind, like ethanol, like jet fuel ethanol, right? Like it feels like that's the best comparison in some ways is like those exist as an alternative to petroleum based jet fuel, but they're the middle step.


Etosha Cave:

Yeah, because you can directly make jet fuel from ethanol. There's an ethanol jet process. So yeah, it's a corn ethanol, though, jet fuel, as an example. Yeah, and I would say.


Molly Wood:

Okay, so you're cost parity with existing sustainable aviation fuels that are made from other feedstocks. Okay.


Etosha Cave:

Yeah, from what we know, mean, you know, we're kind of, no one's like super open with their unit economics, you know, we, what we can surmise, we're at cost priority, which is good because like we're basically leveraging the, a lot of the federal and state, you know, incentives that have been created, you know, that industry did really pioneer them. So we're able to really rely on them to get to market quicker. So now,


Molly Wood:

Sure, right, good point.


Etosha Cave:

you know, all of those SAF players, you know, are, you know, around three to four times more costly than petroleum. Petroleum does fluctuate. So this is kind of based on like an average cost. So yeah, it's roughly where we're at. But we see a lot of room to come down the cost curve by getting to scale, by learning about our systems, understanding how we can, you


Molly Wood:

Right.


Etosha Cave:

you optimize and reduce the cost of our air plants and our overall manufacturing and also our core technology as well. know, improving the performance, improving energy efficiency and all those things cut costs.


Molly Wood:

And then what are the levers for the airline industry? Like they're certainly being incentivized. It doesn't feel like it's a pure cost. It doesn't feel like a pure economics equation for them at this point. Like some of it is they're just going to buy petroleum jet fuel because it's the cheapest option, but they are certainly being pushed in a different direction. Talk about some of those incentives and carrots and sticks.


Etosha Cave:

Yes.


Etosha Cave:

Yeah, in the US, I think a lot of it really is from consumer demand. I think that right now, if you go on Google flights, you can see your carbon footprint and pick a flight with at least carbon footprint. You can offset your carbon emissions sometimes through the airlines, sometimes through a third party right now. So I think a lot of that is a consumer pressure, also some policy of, you know, on state and federal levels around like, hey, let's decarbonize aviation. And, know, in the US is much more of a carrot. In Europe, it's much more of stick. So they're they are really feeling the pressure from a policy lens.


And so we've, you know, in general, we've gotten a lot of interesting questions about how can they reduce their emissions and increase their sustainable aviation fuel. There's also been a lot of interest from the Middle East, from UAE and Saudi Arabia. There's a pretty big clean initiative. And there may be some mix of carrot and stick, but certainly I've seen a lot of companies being funded from that region. And there's a big green city initiative, NEOM, that's going on. So think a lot of funding from that has come to the US with sustainable startups receiving that funding.


Molly Wood:

How do you SAFs to, I mean, it feels like they're sort of competing technologies to address airline emissions specifically, right, in flying. There's electrification on shorter haul flights, regional, there's hydrogen. I wonder, how do you think about the timeline? Are you going to get there first? Because certainly I have interviewed some founders in the hydrogen space who are like, know, sustainable aviation fuel is more like an offset scheme as opposed to like a purely we only emit water kind of fuel.


Etosha Cave:

Yeah, so I'm generally a pro -hydrogen. think it's hydrogens are very interesting and phenomenal molecule. And I think it has a lot of purposes. it's like, yeah, mean, from agriculture, like fertilizer, all the way to industrial chemicals, to even using it to make energy.


Etosha Cave:

My challenge was a little bit just from the laws of physics and the volumetric energy density that you can get for hydrogen. And also how you know, hydrogen does require a whole new engine. It requires kind of new safety protocols for flying with the gas that, you know, technically jet fuel is combustible as well, but the volatility of jet fuel is very different than hydrogen. And it's just a different, it's just a whole different beast.


And I think it's all the regulations around it, I think will take some time before we see a wide adoption. With sustainable aviation fuel, I'll just use our product name of EJET. It's a drop -in direct replacement. So there are already planes that have flown with powder liquids, sustainable aviation fuel. We're already flying right now with agricultural -based sustainable aviation fuel. We're already doing that, because those are already drop -in components.


So to say that this completely new technology which requires a whole new infrastructure and new safety protocol and regulation and so forth, it's gonna overtake something that's already off the ground. I mean, know, I just wanna see how that will happen, although I will say it's such a big, big industry. I think if you look 50 years in the future, more people are gonna be flying. I I want a future with the Jetsons where it's like we all have our flying car, you know, and I want that car to be clean, burning fuel. And so, you know, maybe that maybe my flying car that flies around the city will be hydrogen.


But, you know, if we're still flying intercontinental intercontinental flights with 200 passengers around the world, which I think we want to do, I think we love flying and seeing the world in that way, then we're going to have liquid hydrocarbons. If we're going to have liquid hydrocarbons, you know, let's make them in a more sustainable way. And so, you know, yeah, I just think we're gonna have a future with the good hydrocarbons. They're not going away. So let's just make them from.


Molly Wood:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, on the theory that we don't have time, we should get after every solution immediately..


Etosha Cave:

Yes. Yeah, right. It's an all hands on deck moment. you know, every solution should be considered. But, yeah, I mean, I think we're going to get there. We're going to get there pretty soon. So it's, you know, it's not, it's just a matter of, yeah, yeah, we're doing it. Yeah.


Molly Wood:

You're already doing it. You're doing it. Yep, exactly. Itasha Cave is the co -founder of 12. Thank you so much for the time today. I love it. It's wonderful. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you want to make sure we talk about?


Etosha Cave:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Molly.


Molly Wood Voice-Over:

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening. And by the way, I was recently introduced to an interesting technology for carbon capture, biochar. I know there’s at least one company in the Bay Area working on this and if you know any others or happen to run one, email me in at everybody in the pool dot com.

You can find transcripts, recent episodes, and sign up for the Everybody in the Pool newsletter at the website at everybody in the pool dot com. And find and follow us on Instagram and Threads at in the pool pod. Thanks for listening and see you next week.

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