Crbnly tackles Carbon Capture

In this episode of Crbnly Conversations, the hosts delve into the significance of carbon capture, contemplating its potential as a real-world solution rather than a sci-fi concept. The discussion encompasses various carbon capture methods and explores the business dynamics, particularly the sale of carbon credits. The episode concludes by prompting listeners to consider whether they would actively choose products manufactured using captured carbon.

Useful Information
In a U.S. First, a Commercial Plant Starts Pulling Carbon From the Air (NYT)
Heirloom Carbon
Direct Air Capture - Energy System - IEA
CarbonCure
Occidental and BlackRock Form Joint Venture to Develop Stratos, the World's Largest Direct Air Capture Plant
DOE Announces $35 Million to Accelerate Carbon Dioxide Removal | Department of Energy
Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030

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Transcript

Shane (00:02.686)
All right, hello everyone, Shane here. Welcome to another episode of Carbony Conversations. Today we'll actually dip our toes into the carbon capture space, kind of nerd out a little bit and be informative, maybe be a little uninformative and ask out loud to anyone who'll listen, isn't this just an atmosphere size CO2 vacuum cleaner pretty much? We'll see what your guys' thoughts are, but.

Chadwick (00:27.566)
Pretty much.

Shane (00:32.034)
Before we dig into that, we want to remind all the listeners that we are a podcast. We're two friends. We're examining the intersection of community, lifestyles, and consumption in our lives. We created this to share our stories and curiosity to motivate actions to help lessen our carbon footprints. And we want to use our platform to create a space for everyone out there listening and community members to share their carbon lead journeys as well. So.

Please join us in on the, join in on the conversations. Um, whether you're a first timer, Carverly deep diver, um, or just one of our loyal fans, we made it easy for you to listen to us on your favorite podcast app. Um, literally all you need to do is scroll down to the show notes and click on find and join the conversation. And there you'll be able to explore all our past conversations, upcoming conversations, which we, we try to release every Wednesday.

And then also make sure to follow us on Instagram, Twitter, also known as X. We're also on TikTok and we have a YouTube where we post the full form video of our conversations. So we appreciate any support on those and hope that you all are loving the content.

but we'll get into today's conversation. We'll let Chad kick that off and let us know what we'll be conversating about today.

Chadwick (02:05.634)
Awesome, Shane. Happy day to you. These bright, sunny apartments that we, or rooms we find ourselves in. So I wanted to put a conversation together around carbon capture. And as I think you succinctly described, isn't carbon capture just really vacuuming all the CO2 or a bunch of the CO2, or maybe to put it more environmentally, vacuuming the excess CO2.

Shane (02:08.878)
Thank you.

Chadwick (02:35.03)
out of the atmosphere. And I would say, yeah, it kind of is. But just like those vacuum cleaners we use, some are canisters, some have bags, some are just like little trinkets that you have to like empty. What do you do with all that, right? I don't know about you, but mine usually either goes in the garbage or in the compost pile. But if you're vacuuming up all that excess CO2 in the atmosphere, it's gotta go somewhere. Otherwise it's just gonna go back up in the atmosphere and keep causing the same.

Shane (02:43.822)
Mm-hmm.

Shane (02:50.783)
Right.

Shane (03:03.819)
Right.

Chadwick (03:04.83)
same problems that were happening. So I've been kind of reading and learning about this for a while, because years ago it was pretty like, we'll just call it environmental studies fan fiction. And now it's really evolved because the New York Times has published an article just recently about the first commercially opened carbon capture firm, which happens to be in California.

Shane (03:24.682)
Uh-uh.

Chadwick (03:30.574)
and they're actually working to make money and profitize the ability to vacuum or suck the excess CO2 out of the air. We'll get a little bit more about how they're doing and different ways of doing it. And then monetizing that process either through different supply chains or material chains or being paid for offsetting carbon credits by companies. And so they're in business, they're doing this now. There's a couple other businesses going on.

And for those that are really like nerdy like ourselves, you'll know that there's been research been going on this a while and there's been the well-known space in Iceland where they've actually set up a big giant vacuum cleaner. I'm not kidding, it just sucks in air, scrubs out the things that are good for the air, lets it back out and then captures CO2 and injects it into this like slushy that hardens. And because it's in Iceland, they're

Shane (04:13.131)
Mm.

Chadwick (04:26.582)
built this on top of like a former volcano and underground, there's all this like porous ground. So they're just like injecting it hundreds, if not thousands of feet below ground and filling all those pores that holds up with solidified or calcified CO2, which, you know, takes it out. And they've really proven that concept to a work, but there isn't a lot of places like Iceland around the world with that, we'll just call it free storage space underground. So,

Shane (04:51.66)
Right.

Chadwick (04:56.438)
Lot of long windows there that we're gonna talk about carbon capture today and I and it kind of hit on the what is it? But we'll get really specific for our listeners because it is a little techie sci-fi You know live long and prosper nerdy kind of thing So it's another way to cause direct air capture which involves vacuuming greenhouse gases from the atmosphere I literally pulled that from the IEA website like so I'm not it is funny. I keep talking about vacuuming

Shane (04:59.767)
Yep.

Chadwick (05:24.418)
So they take carbon dioxide, you know, and they pull it from the air and they find a way to seal it permanently in concrete, but baked into rocks or use it for carbonated beverages or pumped underground where it can't heat the planet. And everyone wants to go back to their earth science classes and like the greenhouse effect, like all this extra CO2 in the air, like blocks sunlight, but it also captures the heat that we're producing and it kind of creates a blanket.

Shane (05:24.919)
I mean, literally.

Chadwick (05:53.91)
over the earth and it warms the oceans, it warms the atmosphere and it changes the weather patterns. It's just a natural cycle. It's been increasing and doing that more dangerously. So this is a big deal. So the idea of using technology to suck CO2 from the sky has gone from science fiction to big business in the past 10 years. And it's kind of like my diatribe before this explaining that. And there are currently 27 direct air captures or DAC plans.

Shane (06:00.327)
Mm-hmm.

Chadwick (06:22.222)
that have been commissioned to date worldwide as of today. And there's plans for at least another 130 facilities that are now various stages of development, whether they're gonna be really successful, lose funding, lose interest, like is all TBD, but their ability to vacuum out CO2 from the atmosphere is going to, we're gonna go from what, 27 to 130, that's like a factor of five. You don't cross our fingers and toes over the next 10 years.

Shane (06:47.978)
Yeah.

Chadwick (06:52.606)
So that's a lot to unpack, Shane. How's your head spinning? How's it feeling?

Shane (06:56.099)
Yeah.

Well, when you mentioned the using for carbonated beverages, I just thought about like America, we drink a lot of soda, unfortunately. So it's just like, carbon dioxide has so many different uses, you know what I mean? And so I think that it's like a win-win, you're pulling it out of the environment, which is...

Chadwick (07:10.317)
We do.

Shane (07:27.686)
healthier and safer for us. But it's not like it's like this toxic gas that like can't be used for anything else, you know what I mean? There's so many other uses for it. So I think that that's another kind of advantage of capturing it and having this natural resource to be able to, you know, use for other things. And the soda just stuck out to me with carbonated beverages.

Chadwick (07:36.686)
Mm-hmm.

Chadwick (07:55.69)
Yeah, that's really what carbonated beverages are filled with is CO2. All that that's sparkling water and seltzers that are popular around the at least America and probably Europe. That's just CO2. And it there's so much science to unpack that we're not going to get into. But just because we're capturing the CO2 and putting in our beverage and drink it. Some of it like you open it and goes like some of that CO2 goes back in the you know, but some of it we consume some of it's been like caught into those like

Shane (07:59.489)
Yeah.

Shane (08:17.162)
Yep. It's releasing. Yep.

Chadwick (08:24.17)
water molecules, so now they're in our bodies. So CO2 is a good thing, just too much of it in our atmosphere is creating more heat, more storms, more you know, I don't know, it's just all the things that we're experiencing with quote-unquote global warming slash just climate change. So I think the big deal about how this works is that it's expensive, right? They got to build these plants and the first commercialized one...

Shane (08:40.938)
Yeah.

Shane (08:48.889)
Yeah.

Chadwick (08:51.466)
means they want to make money on this, right? So how are they doing this? So the one in California is called heirloom carbon. And what they're doing is using a little bit of chemistry, i.e. limestone. So they process limestone to remove the element that they need to use, limestone uses to capture carbon dioxide. So they turn this powdery thing.

Shane (09:15.352)
Mm.

Chadwick (09:17.358)
create this powdery thing with limestone that's missing the CO2 and they get it wet, which means it goes out and it actually pulls CO2. So instead of actually vacuuming, they're using this chemical process for deconstructed limestone to glom onto CO2 in the air, reattach itself to that slushy goo, forms all these rocks that they can then reprocess by heating up, pull the CO2 off that was been extracted from the air. This is so nerdy.

Shane (09:26.363)
Mm-hmm.

Shane (09:45.495)
Yeah.

Chadwick (09:47.198)
And then they use that stuff to make concrete or inject it in the ground. And their business model is like that secondary value stream. And they're also selling like carbon credits. And I think the big thing around these carbon credits and how they're making money is like places like Microsoft recorded in the article. And Microsoft, I think they had a really good quote about, they won't buy traditional offsets such as paying people to protect forests because they are difficult to verify. It may not be permanent.

Shane (10:07.236)
Thank you.

Shane (10:16.841)
Hmm.

Chadwick (10:17.142)
Whereas like a carbon credit from a place like this carbon capture company, like it's measurable, it's maintained. So it's a much more consistent and reliable carbon credit system. And that's what they plan on and have been investing in a lot of these direct air capture systems to actually hit their zero emission pledge by 2030 is through a lot of these carbon credits and these carbon.

Shane (10:22.996)
Yeah.

Shane (10:42.134)
Now is carbon dioxide needed when making concrete anyway or is it just so?

Chadwick (10:50.054)
It's that limestone is needed or the whatever that product is in the cement making process. My guess is they probably need a little bit of carbon dioxide and you know in the mixture of stuff but not enough at volume. I remember reading about like oh we can use all this crushed up concrete to like make stuff but they're like well we have too much crushed up concrete like there's enough demand for all the crushed up you know so there's enough there's enough demand.

Shane (10:54.953)
Okay.

Shane (11:13.682)
Yeah, there's yeah.

Chadwick (11:18.638)
to take all the excess carbon out of the atmosphere and turn it into concrete. Because we already have recycled concrete, we could do.

Shane (11:26.179)
But adding the excess carbon into the cement mixture, is that just a way where it kind of locks it in from ever escaping again, basically? Okay.

Chadwick (11:35.726)
It, yes, because it chemically changes it from a gas to a solid form. And unless someone like would reverse the process, the carbon dioxide wouldn't escape.

Shane (11:41.332)
Okay.

Shane (11:46.59)
Okay, that's pretty interesting.

Chadwick (11:48.622)
Good question. It truly is like the article literally put it a simple bit of chemistry, you know, it's not so simple to us, but they've solved on how to do it and are trying to like create value chain, supply chain value chains with that process.

Shane (11:57.166)
Yeah.

Shane (12:05.014)
Mm-hmm.

Chadwick (12:11.562)
Yeah, I'm just kind of reading through my notes here. So the carbon dioxide still needs to be dealt with like a company that mixes the gas in the concrete where it mineralizes can no longer escape into the air. It's literally what it reads there. So that's just like two ways. We talked about carbonated beverages. Another one that I think is a little alarming, but interesting, because it really depends, I think this is where like the carbonate conundrum, like topical statement kind of comes.

Shane (12:18.691)
Mm-hmm.

Shane (12:23.951)
Wow.

Chadwick (12:41.134)
comes into play. So there's a company called Occidental Petroleum and they've been capturing carbon, have also are developing a plant in West Texas to direct air capture carbon dioxide. And then they'll use that in a slurry that they're going to inject or push into oil wells that they're either partnering with or actually extracting oil to push all the oil that they can't get to through.

traditional drilling means out. And what they've declared, and this has been in their value sheets, their term sheets, so they've like literally done the science and the math in their publicly traded company, so they talk about this. They say that emissions from the new oil would be offset by the injected carbon dioxide that remained underground, creating a carbon neutral fuel that could be used in airplanes or ships that are difficult to decarbonize. So they're taking this approach of, hey we still need oil.

We're still, you know, producing it and people are going to keep buying it. So let's actually take excess CO2 out of the air, make a slurry, push it in underground and get more oil out. But by doing that in such a way that all the oil that we're extracting is net zero carbon, because even as the process is there and it burns or gets used, they've pulled that much carbon out of the atmosphere. So it's not like maybe they can go negative if they

Shane (13:41.142)
Yeah.

Shane (14:03.639)
Thank you.

Chadwick (14:09.742)
capture enough carbon through this process and put more underground and seal it there. But we're also just injecting more into the atmosphere. So it's not getting worse, just didn't get better. And allows systems of pro, yeah, me too, but.

Shane (14:10.664)
Right.

Shane (14:21.214)
Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about that. Yeah.

Chadwick (14:28.318)
I don't know, kind of just a big sigh there for like, it's a good solution and it's definitely very profitable because oil still sells well and there's a lot of industries built around it. Just what do we do?

Shane (14:37.028)
Right.

Shane (14:42.354)
And to me, it just seems like with those other, with the other options, it seems like there's not a way for, like we were talking about the cement, like it turns the carbon dioxide into something completely different to where it could never really escape back into the atmosphere. But with these, they're just basically the underground oil tanks will just be filled with it, but there's still a way, the same way they pulled the oil out.

I would assume there's still a way that CO2 could just be leaked back out into the atmosphere to make room for more oil or whatnot.

Chadwick (15:19.818)
Yeah, my guess is slowly but surely over time it'll find its way out, but it is pretty far underground and stuck in stuff, right?

Shane (15:26.73)
Yeah.

Chadwick (15:31.603)
I mean, we didn't share any research on this, but that same process, like people are finding ways to like capture carbon into biodegradable kelp or other like biomaterials that they would then wanna sink to the bottom of the ocean, right? And then you think about this, like, oh, we just captured a million pounds of carbon and we put it in this biomass and we're gonna sink it.

Shane (15:53.241)
Yeah.

Chadwick (15:56.35)
And it's like, it'll be so far underwater, it'll take forever for it to come back up into the atmosphere. That's kind of like the oversimplification of it. But what's it doing with the life cycle and the ecosystem at the bottom? Is that good or bad for us? Well, it causes more problems. So as you can see, a carbon-like conundrum has definitely erupted from this research and thinking. But it is. I mean, let's go back to where we started, Shane.

Shane (16:01.537)
Yeah.

Shane (16:07.452)
Exactly.

Shane (16:11.071)
Yeah.

Shane (16:17.882)
for sure.

Chadwick (16:24.45)
If you had a giant vacuum cleaner that would hold a lot of carbon, how would you deploy it?

Shane (16:31.778)
It's a good question. I mean, I guess kind of using our, like you were speaking about, you know, our own household vacuums, I tend to dump it into my compost, which just help. And from what I've read, it's very healthy for the compost, like all of your hair molecules and just whatever that it gets sucked up in your own household adds to it. So I see that as a way of like.

just going back into the earth in a way. So to me, I just, so far just from the little bit of things that I know about the carbon capture, I just feel like the limestone and the cement just seem like a better option. I mean, especially with cement is just a very important, I mean, there's...

very important thing. Like there's so much building and things like that going on with highways and everything like that. It just seemed to me, it just seems like a better solution than the oil tank process. So I mean, if I had this giant vacuum, that's probably what I would use mine for. But

Chadwick (17:35.628)
Yeah.

Chadwick (17:54.646)
So I hear you. I'm thinking through the logistics of setting up those direct air capture plants everywhere where cement plants are and getting them, whoever is selling them that are limestone and bicarbonate that has all the ingredients to make their cement, right? To stop producing or only buying from those places instead. Like it's doable, it just will take some time. I think the other question that's interesting for us and our listeners is...

Shane (18:03.82)
Yeah.

Shane (18:11.209)
Mm-hmm.

Shane (18:16.949)
Yeah.

Chadwick (18:23.35)
Would you seek out products that have used captured carbon to produce? How would anyone market that?

Shane (18:32.158)
Yeah, that'd be kind of cool. I would. I mean, I think going back to the whole CO2 for like fountain drinks, McDonald's, I mean, they're everywhere in the world. Like they should almost switch to where they only use like this captured CO2 for their drinks would be kind of cool. But yeah, I think I would personally probably

invest and kind of pay a little bit more money for certain products if I knew that, me personally.

Chadwick (19:13.302)
Yeah, I don't think it would be that hard to market.

I say that like, will people understand like what captured carbon is? It's like, you could almost call it like recycled carbon or like reusing carbon and knowing that like, hey, this product helps us take excess carbon out of the air, you know, keep buying it because you're doing a good thing. And then you start offsetting with your consumption, right? Would it be really, I mean, I mean, I'm just kind of brainstorming out loud, but imagine if you could just.

Shane (19:26.489)
Right.

Shane (19:37.111)
Yeah.

Shane (19:46.123)
Yep.

Chadwick (19:51.062)
bingo card your way into a net zero lifestyle. But I only buy brands that have repurposed carbon dioxide. Just like they repurpose flooring materials into new flooring materials, or compost into soil to grow more in a regenerative way. That'd be fun. So I think carbon-based listeners, that's the question to yours. Would you seek out products that use captured carbon to produce?

Shane (19:54.871)
Yeah.

Shane (19:58.667)
Yep.

Shane (20:08.43)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Shane (20:20.478)
And I mean, money talks. So once these companies that are getting this off the ground show like, Hey, this can be a lucrative business. I think that that's the only, I think that's kind of the only way for it to really become a popular strategy. Because of course, you know, unfortunately money makes the world go around like these large corporations at the end of the day.

they want to make is more money than they currently do. And hopefully, like I said, these startup companies, Heirloom and everything, like can figure it out and show that it can be lucrative. And I think that would be the only way for it to really become popular, you know.

Chadwick (21:11.158)
Yeah, yeah, it's got to get to scale. That is, I mean, always the number one thing ahead of us, whether it's EVs or batteries.

Shane (21:16.511)
Yeah. So.

Chadwick (21:22.686)
QR codes on recycle on your materials, robot sorters, all those topics we cover in past episodes. Gotta get it to scale.

Shane (21:30.942)
everything we cover. Yep.

So just like anything, just like any of our other topics, like this sounds cool, it can be confusing. You know, we didn't even break the ice of all the data that goes along with carbon capture. This is just kind of like a very simple overview of it, but it's part of the future. It's part of the future of being carbonly for sure. So.

Chadwick (22:01.73)
Definitely.

Shane (22:08.149)
Hopefully we introduce this topic to some of you out there and it sparks something in you to learn more about it. And the more products that we can figure out that we can make from this carbon capture, the better.

Chadwick (22:25.342)
Yeah, plus 100. Feel like that's a good way to end the episode and go pull out the vacuum cleaner and do some well-needed fall cleaning. Ha ha ha.

Shane (22:33.482)
Yeah, yeah pull the Dyson out

Chadwick (22:39.434)
Yeah, Paul the Dyson. Yeah, maybe that'll be Dyson's new business venture.

Shane (22:43.181)
Yeah.

Chadwick (22:44.762)
funny. Well have a great day, Shane. Till next time we meet. Have a great Carbon League week, everyone.

Shane (22:48.558)
you as well. Thank you.