Transcript

HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher

Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. So most everyone has heard the grim predictions about climate change that In order to keep our planet from warming more than four degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century, We have to reduce carbon emissions by more than half.

And we have to do that by twenty fifty. But that's not all. And I'm not trying to depress you here, but It won't be enough to just cut our global carbon emissions in half. just to keep our planet from getting unsustainably warm over the next fifty yeah?

We also have to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So To be clear, not only do we have to stop producing it, we also have to suck it out of the air. In fact, we have to suck a lot of it out of the air. The IPCC, the United Nations group that represents the scientific consensus on this stuff,

says that by twenty fifty we need to remove 10 billion tons of carbon from Earth's atmosphere each year. This is a huge monumental task. The good news is the technology to do this exists. It's pretty straightforward.

Imagine a shipping container outfitted with a bunch of large fans. Each fan essentially sucks in air. filters that air. removes the carbon, blows out carbon free air, and then injects the carbon into rocks about a mile deep underground.

The bad news is with our current technology You need about 10 million of these shipping containers deployed all over the earth to remove 10 billion tons of carbon a year. And the cost, at least right now? is so high that it makes this goal seem daunting. But a few enterprising entrepreneurs are actually undaunted.

One of them is a German engineer named Jan Bürzbacher. Jan and Christoph Gibald co-founded a company called Climworks, which has already built carbon capture facilities, including the biggest one on the planet, In Iceland. They call it the Orca plant. Right now, the Orca facility only removes about 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.

That's a drop in the bucket, but Jan believes this technology will scale very fast. In fact, he believes that within 30 years, The carbon capture industry? will be among the biggest in the world. Yanberg's buffer. Welcome to the show.

Hey guy, great to be here. Alright, so Yan, first of all Tell me a little bit about Your background. I know you studied

To be um a mechanical engineer, right, initially, right? That's right. Uh that's that's correct. I actually came to Zurich back in two thousand and three. Personally I'm originally from Hamburg in Germany, um, but now almost

Nineteen years ago moved to Zurich. I wanted to to study here at ETH Zurich, the main technical university. And uh well, that was thought to be for three years or five years at first, but then as it happened really at the at the first day when you're introduced to to the university, you're then we were organized in small groups of students uh to Get a tour through the thro the university and I happen to be in the same group uh as Christoph it was and and the two of us became friends very quickly, really, in in the first days. And um both had the dream of of founding a company and uh well then it happened just uh six years later. So so the two of you, you and Christoph Gabald were uh w went to study mechanical engineering. at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. And uh you both had the intention of maybe one day starting a business. Tell me what

at that time what you thought you might want to do with your life. Uh, yeah, that's a that's a good question. Probably we didn't have that that many thoughts. It's it's rather this dream of of building up something. By by your own. I mean I was I was always interested in solving hard technical problems. That's maybe one ingredient uh from from my end. And uh

On the other hand, I You know, when I when I was in school I organized parties and and I did some stuff here and there. And I always thought like I doing something, building up something, that that was always something I I was intrigued by And uh Christoph pretty much the same. So that was really when when we met and we asked each other, Hey, what do you want to do one day? We didn't we didn't know about direct air capture or of course we knew about the climate topic and climate change, but it was not at a level of attention where it is today. Yeah. Back in those days. So we had drove really just a stream, hey, one day we found a company. And that that was something that that drove us through the studies somehow. So we always like if we were at a student party, we would high five and say, Hey, we found a company one day, right? Yeah, yeah, let's do it. And then yeah then

Yeah, so that was kind of the beginning. All right, so you and Kristoff uh are friends and in this m mechanical engineering program and How did you start to to kind of Learn about This idea of direct air capture which we're gonna talk about in a sec, but tell me how

This idea even developed. So it was not us who had this idea for the first time, there was actually a project. at the Swiss Institute of of Technology. It was a project at the um Professorship of Renewable Energy Carriers by Professor Steinfeld And he he is a researcher who's been working for the past twenty years or more than that on

solar fuels or solar materials. So he developed solar driven reactors that could um renewable hydrocarbons. So basically turn concentrated sunlight into something valuable. And and he, like a couple of years before we started, he had this idea and he said, Hey, if if we want to do that at large scale, We need a closed cycle. So we need to take CO two out of the air. We can then combine it with sunlight and water and make, say, renewable jet fuel out of that. Then the jet fuel is burnt, the CO two is emitted again to the atmosphere, and then you have to recapture it from the air. So you have to

Like turn it around in a cycle. That's that's what can be done really long term sustainable. And then so there was this idea, there was a project on that, totally different technology. And when we started, was kind of the job of coming up with a different technology, which is more efficient, which is more scalable. So really when we started, it was like I I remember the first days after we had incorporated the Climeworks. Like the first thing I did is is really sitting down with a Blank sheet of paper. And writing down

Pure numbers like doing Back off the envelope. Calculations, estimations, what can we do? What cannot we do? I I I can give you an example, like to to take a ton of CO two out of ambient air. You need to filter around two million cubic meters of air. Wow, one out of two thousand five hundred molecules in the air.

is CO two. Only one out of two thousand five hundred. So so imagine I don't you you walk on the on the Broadway or whatever and imagine you need to pass two thousand five hundred people. until you find one one person that you're looking for. And then you continue walking, you need to pass another two thousand five hundred people until you find one person. So that's literally what A CO2 capture system does. So you need to filter a lot of air to to take uh like a significant tonnage of CO two out of the air. All right. We know that um that there has to be a vast reduction in carbon emissions in order to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Right. But but it's not enough. I think people don't most of us don't understand that it's not enough to just stop burning carbon. Right and I think the reduction.

It has to be something like forty five percent reduction. By twenty thirty alone. And on top of that We also need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Like I I I think the UN's

report, the I l latest I P C C report, so something like By the middle of this century, so twenty fifty. We have to remove six to ten billion tons of carbon dioxide from The air.

Every year in addition to reducing emissions, which seems Like a massive Enormous. Daunting Tacillets.

Let's understand What has to happen here. uh on the on the carbon capture side. Basically We need to have giant Turbine engine fans?

All over the world just sucking in air and filtering out carbon. Yeah, first of all, you you're making exactly the right point, Guy. You you said it, you said additionally, and that's that's a very important point. Like when we started Climerx, many people asked us, hey Is that really what we need to do today? So why are you bothering capturing CO two out of the air while there are still so many coal power plants and so many cars and planes uh driving and and flying around and producing CO two? Should we not stop first first all of these? And and the answer to that is we could have Asked that question, maybe phew. two, three decades ago, then we we that this would still have been possible, but it's just too late. Like it's it's too late to ask that question. So the only chance of meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement is

being bold on both ends. So so again, the major portion has to come from reduction of emissions, from switching to renewables, but then to address these 10 billion tons of of CO2 that need to be removed, we don't have a big portfolio of things to do. So you asked, what does that mean? Does that mean we have like huge giant turbines all over the world? Uh well there there are a few things we can do. We can Very simply speaking. Plant trees. they take CO two out of the air. Right. However, they have they have some some issues attached to them. So so first of all, it's good we should plant as many trees as possible. And by the way, we should avoid

burning down trees and and deforesting trees in the first place and then plant more. But or And let's not say but and trees need A lot of area. And they are not necessarily there forever.

They might burn down, uh, the land might degrade, they might not be growing for the next thousands of years. So that CO two that is stored in trees is not necessarily And Very simply speaking, if we just do the calculation, what about capturing these ten billion tons of CO two from the air just by planting trees or doing similar biological methods, then you'll end up with huge areas that you need to fill with new trees. It's like you need something like the area of whole Europe or or twice the area of of India. And that's very likely not feasible. I mean right now

We are entering a food crisis, uh, very likely, uh if if we look what's happening on the world markets. So so typically the area we have at our disposal for for planting anything. We need it rather for food production. So so that's that's then where where technical solutions come in, like such as as Climeworks, as we are doing. If you build machines uh like like we are doing, you can you can do it on Much, much less Area. So you are about a thousand times more area efficient. So at the same area uh where you can take one ton

out of the air with trees, you could take a thousand tons out of the air with machinery. So that's important. You need substantially less area. You need energy. So you'll you need, for example, solar or wind or geothermal, like like you would want to use typically renewable energy. So that's the thing. So you you can Scale. technology based solutions for direct air capture to a scale of ten billion tons of CO2 from the earth. That's possible. So we'll probably it it'll not be one technology, it'll be not s one solution. We need we need a lot of things to do it. But technological or like scaling up such direct air capture and similar solutions will have to

carry a major part of these ten billion tons, otherwise there's it it's it's just not going to happen. Okay, so so you decide that you are going to build a company. around capturing removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This is not A simple business proposition. You you need a lot of money.

to to do this kind of work. Just put aside the the science. Let's start with the business. part of it. I mean once you once you sort of prove this concept out

How did you go about building and and you know, getting financing to start to build these commercial scale Direct

No, definitely that was a big challenge in particular given the fact that when when we started two thousand nine, two thousand ten, eleven what we were proposing was not generally accepted. Like people were even fighting us. There were professors writing articles saying you should not invest in direct air capture. Because it's a waste of resources, we should focus on getting getting our coal power plants off the grid, just just to give an example. probably not ready. To accept

that it was too late just to stop burning coal. And that is something that has fundamentally changed over the past, say, five years or so. But when we started, we weren't there yet. So you said how how did we start? We started actually looking for niche applications. So we did something totally different. Our first Planned we build here in Switzerland. And that is taking it that's still an operation, that is taking CO two out of the air to then sell the CO two to a greenhouse. They are fertilizing their plants with CO two and also to Coca-Cola. Who are making sparkling drinks with it. So anyone who's got like a a like a soda stream at home. basically knows knows sort of version of this is because it's basically a a cartridge of CO two that you put in your

So do stream too. So you this is really interesting. I mean so you were basically Initially just to kind of see if there was a market for this Product which is captured CO2. You're selling it to Coca Cola and presumably that is not sustainable. I mean that you we we're we're not drinking enough Coca Cola or any carbonated beverage to

Account for all of the It's it's it's just kind of a Uh uh I guess an initial step to show that what you could do with this.

Exactly. Like in terms of Climate Effects. That market is totally irrelevant. Like is that is that a market? Could you grow a sustainable business on that? Yes, sure. So you we we could have decided just to become a

a a small medium sized company uh developing direct air capture plants and building them around the world to supply beverage factories. That that could have been an option, but that was not what we were interested in. You would have had zero impact on the climate. Exactly. Well and and and just keep in mind like when you drink your Coke, right, the CO two comes out again. So it's not it's not a permanent storage of the CO two. So those first plants they were not meant to reduce the CO two content of the atmosphere. It was just an initial market That we were tapping into to scale our technology. I guess when you burp after you drink your Coca-Cola, it's going right back into the atmosphere.

That's exactly how it works. When we come back we're gonna hear more from Jan Birchbacher and uh what he has built and what he's building with Climbworks and carbon capture technology. Stay with us, you're listening to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz, back in a moment. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I am talking with Jan Birchbacher. He's the co-founder and CEO of Climeworks, a company.

That is creating direct air carbon capture technology. Um okay, let's talk about the technology now. sort of the the kind of the next phase of this, which is um uh it's somewhat different than Then Yeah, removing carbon and then Selling it.

to Coca-Cola and the agricultural industry to use. It's about like injecting it deep underground. Uh and permanently storing it. Tell me how that wor how how does basically how does it work. So Start with the first part, a Climber's Direct Air Capture Plant. So we have our modular

containers that we call CO two collectors, and they contain a filter material. Yep. You can imagine that as a It's kind of a sponge, like a sponge likes water and would suck up water. Yep and this filter material is similar like a sponge. It has a high surface area, it is very porous. and and it just reacts with CO two when when CO two molecules pass by. So we have this filter inside the containers. And then in a first Step

of our filtering process we just turn on the fans that are at the side of the filter box. We pull air through the filter. That takes about one to two hours, after which the material is full. It's it's saturated with CO two. Then we close the lids of these filter boxes. We heat them up.

Uh to around a hundred degrees Celsius, um that's two hundred something Fahrenheit. It's like m boiling water temperature. So we don't need high temperature. We don't need fancy stuff to do it. Just like heat it up a little bit. You can even do that with with solar heat. Uh and by that Temperature.

Increase The CO two is released again from the surface of the filter material. And you can turn on a pump that is then sucking out basically the pure concentrated CO two from the filters. You can then

uh handed over to injection. Uh that's what we do in Iceland with our partners from Carphix. They have developed this this method where they inject the CO two in underground Horus Rocks. where the CO two is mineralizing with the rocks, so within two years the CO two is just turned into stone there. And then on the other hand, our filter will just start again from the beginning. So we'll cool it down, expose it to the next portion of airflow, we'll capture more CO two, and then you this can go on for years. After like a couple of years you have to replace the filter then.

Wow. So you and your co founder, Christoph, decide. That uh it's not enough to just, you know sell this the the CO two to, you know, Coca Cola. Tell me what the next step was. I mean, you first of all To build these plants on a large scale.

Even on a small scale, uh, you need hundreds of millions of dollars, right? Yeah, that's right. Uh it's it's it's capital intensive. We are building hardware. We're putting tons of concrete on on and steel in the ground uh to to start capturing CO two. And uh well that's why we've just closed our Financing round number six in the history of the company, just in April twenty twenty two. And what what was the amount that you you raised? That was six hundred fifty million US? Wow.

And and it's really it and because you have to build these massive facilities to just begin to suck in air. Right. Oh, that's right. And yeah, I mean for us as a company that's that's a large amount. Uh that that's much more funding than we had available before. The the previous financing round that was at around a hundred million. But if you look at it from the other side, if you look at what this world needs to invest Into corresponding infrastructure into such types of technology, that's still a tiny sum, right? We need we need to invest, as you said, we need to invest billions, tens of billions, and and hundreds of billions. And that's that's what we see.

On the horizon now, so governments start understanding what is needed. There are programs like the Department of Energy is starting to to um promote those type of technologies. They are creating funding programs to like increase the speed of scaling. Think of it As The very, very early phases of the solar PV and wind industries, where you had the first prototypes out there. And there also massive programs helped scaling that up. And that was a great success story, right? Today, solar PV is the cheapest method on earth to create electricity. How how great is that? And it didn't take that long. And like the The initial expectations on how this technology could first scale and second reduce costs, they were like outperformed massively. Like ten years ago, you would have been called crazy if you had predicted a solar PV plant producing solar electricity at five cents per kilowatt hour. Today they're doing it at one cent. Yeah. So so that's that's that's massive. And that's the same what has had to has to happen at at our industry, and and I'm sure that will happen over the next uh two decades to come.

All right, Yan, l let's just talk for a moment. About just the challenge of doing this, right? Because W we're talking about six to ten billion tons of carbon needs to be removed from the earth's atmosphere.

every year by twenty fifty. Right now, how much carbon is being removed from the from from the Earth's atmosphere every year? through this t technology. Well, right now as we speak, Climber's we have the largest operating plant um running. That's that's our Orca plant in Iceland. We're speaking of thousands of tons per year. So it's it's it's a small scale. So we need to

Thousandfold. that to get to millions of tons and like this this industry is set up to scaling up to the million tons per year scale in the next couple of years towards the end of this decade. So that's that's what will happen. We are doing that, uh like a handful of other companies are working uh towards that. So so that's that's happening. Then the next question is how can we scale up from millions of tons to billions of tons? If you look at what what other industries have done, again referring to solar PV or the wind industry, They did something like uh ten X every ten years. Uh if we can do the same, maybe we can do twice as fast as them.

then it is feasible that we can scale to the billions of tons per year scale. By mid of the century, so by twenty fifty. And that's where we need to go. So other industries have shown that you can do that. Uh it's not an um impossible and also in terms of In terms of size, maybe maybe let me give you one example just that you have like something to to imagine in terms of what does it mean in terms of equipment that you need to put around uh on the to put put on earth. Our plants are built out of modular systems. We call them CO two collectors and then one CO two collector has The form of a forty four chipping container. So

How many containers would you need to take one percent out of global emissions? So so the climate science tells us by by mid of this Century we need to take ten, twenty percent out of the the emissions out of the air. So so let's take one percent of that. And you would need something like seven hundred fifty thousand containers uh for that, which Is that a large number? It's actually not a large number. It's it's actually what goes through Shanghai port in in two weeks, right? It's like it's not a lot compared to global economy. And and that's one percent, and then you can tenfold it, then you have ten percent, and then you're nearly there. Okay. But let me ask you about this,'cause I and again, I'm I am rooting for you. We all are. We want this to work.

But I mean I'm imagining like We need to be like Covering the deserts of the Western United States. Like we need these containers Deploy it in a massive

Now As soon as possible. Uh that that's right. In terms of the area that we need to cover, it's it's not that bad. If you think of all the area that is covered for open pit mining of lignan or or coal, uh that that's even much worse. So I mean energy infrastructure is large. And in any case. So so that infrastructure will also be large, but not larger than than other infrastructure. So in in terms of

Speed of scaling. In terms of required financing in terms of required Area and then in terms of industry output of the world that

Those are all numbers where you can show it's feasible to scale up. But it's big, it's a Big job we have to do. It's it's a certain portion of the global economy output that needs to go in there. But it's it's just like in the end, like you know, what we are talking is the creation of a new industry of the size of today's oil and gas industry. That that's basically it. you just you chose such a complex business to get involved with and I commend you for that because it's just challenge after challenge. So we're talking about like the challenge of scale. The challenge of financing that scale.

But there's the other challenge that we haven't talked about, which is right now, with few exceptions. It's very energy intensive. To remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. You need energy And so

Right now, in order to make this sustainable You'd have to use renewable energy, like you'd in addition to putting these modular shipping containers of full of turbine fans all over the world. You need to deploy like wind and solar farms next to them to power them. Totally right. It's at the same time an energy challenge. The good news is there is way enough energy arriving on this planet every minute from the sun in terms of solar energy, wind energy, so in terms of

availability of renewable energy capacity. That's like Not an issue at all. But it's like when when you think of building up this infrastructure, you need really need to do both. So you need to build the direct air capture plans and at the same time you need to build our renewable energy producing capacity, which on the other hand, however, can also be a good thing if you build direct air capture plans, let's say, in regions where there is not a good Electricity supply, no good electricity grids, there can be good synergies, right? You can support local communities by uh the same solar P V fields and wind farms that are built up to to deploy direct air capture. But you you need to do both. The good thing is, since we're doing direct air capture, we are very flexible in terms of location. So air is everywhere. So we have our CO two source everywhere. We are really looking

To where is the best place? To source. sufficient renewable energy. And then the second question is where can we store the CO two? Fortunately there are many, many regions around the world uh where you can do safe and permanent CO two storage, in saline aquifers, in the side rock as we do it in Iceland, which is the best way to do it, because the CO2 is just mineralized and turned into stone. So that's that's a great way to do it. But there are there are many other ways. So we are basically what we're doing is mapping the world for renewable energy potential and storage potential. And where the two intersect, those are the sweet spots for large scale deployment of diode capture.

We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be back in just a moment with more from Jan Birtsbacher, co-founder of Climeworks. Stick around, you're listening to how I built this lab. Hey, welcome back to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. I'm talking with Jan Werspacher. He's the co-founder and CEO of Climeworks. It's a company that's working to develop and deploy carbon capture technology. All right, so you you built and and I think um it debuted just r just recently in l in l last year

A plant. And Presumably you built it in Iceland because Iceland is basically geothermally powered. I mean most of their energy comes from geothermal power. And so I'm assuming that this plant in Iceland doesn't require, you know, fossil fuels. That's right. So that's really Iceland is the the sweet spot of starting uh to do what we're doing. You have geothermal heat and electricity.

um to power our plant and we do have the developed storage sites and storage reservoirs where we can uh inject the CO two on the ground where it just then mineralized. It's it's really those two factors. So so this this facility in Iceland, how many containers does it have? That one has eight containers. So that ends up then with a total nominal capacity of uh four thousand tons of CO two per year that can be captured. And it's exciting, but really it's designed to prove the concept, to show what is possible.

It's both. For us, it's exactly to prove the concept. Uh of course we learn a lot from that. Like based on that, we are now building a ten times larger plant. Uh we we take, of course, all the learnings. But at the same time it's also the first commercial plan. So we are providing CO two removal services with that plan to our corporate and private customers as well. Alright, explain this because I'm assuming it's like basically companies that are just are paying you to offset their carbon emissions. This is It's like when you buy a plane ticket, you have the option to, you know, spend some money to to offset your emissions and they might plant some trees or something.

Is that essentially the same principle happening on a on a larger scale?'Cause I know there are big companies like Microsoft and Audi and and Shopify and That are are are they essentially saying Look, we want to do our part. We're gonna pay you X number of dollars.

In order to offset our Emissions. Yes, that's that's very similar. So it's it's it's really the pioneering ones. among the large corporates who have come up with very ambitious like either net zero or even net negative goals of becoming carbon neutral or or carbon negative.

And those companies who are our customers are typically the ones who have who have had a very sophisticated look at the market and looked at what is available. And like Microsoft has done a great deal of work there and and they they employed a bunch of scientists to look at the different ways and they they turn out uh with with the uh understanding that what we are doing at Climeworks is is really what they believe is ultimately scalable. And that's why they are using our services. As you said, they pay us to remove a certain amount of tonnage of CO two from the atmosphere. and and and then put it on the ground for them in a really, really long term permanent way, right? So it's it's fully additional. Uh so it's not it's not some certificates uh from some project that might have happened anyway. So it's it's additional. Um it's it's permanent and it's safe. And those are the attributes that are that are so important to them. Well here's what here's what I'm trying to understand because

What did they get out of it aside from doing their part for the planet, which they should. But really what do they get out of it? I mean aside from being able to say, Hey, look, we're we're actually doing this voluntarily,'cause there's no requirement. They don't have to do it. Well, not yet, first of all. So they are they are all anticipating that things will will come up and they are already uh showing up on the horizon. But on top of that It can be a very vital element of their business for a simple fact because their

customers and their stakeholders might just ask them to do it. So so those companies who are currently our customers, they know that they, if they can provide CO two neutral or CO2 negative products to their customers, and in particular achieved with a technology that is really bulletproof, such as such as we are providing that, that has like hard economic benefits on their business model. And then we we spoke about corporates a lot. Important is that that we are also serving serving just uh private individuals. So when we started this actually in two thousand sixteen, seventeen, like a lot of people asked us, hey, like it's cool what you're doing at Climeworks. You're taking CO two out of the air. What what can we do to to to help? And and that's then when we decided like after being an engineering company, a hardware company for many years, which which we still are, for the first time, we introduced the digital business model and and we opened a web shop, which is which is active today. So everyone like like you and I, we could go to ClimeRooks.com and have our personal subscription to remove

A certain amount of CO two from the atmosphere. every month with our plans. And that's been quite successful. So so we've we've had uh since the beginning over fourteen thousand customers. Uh that that's increasing and and that's really for us, that's a good thing. Like the fact that so many individuals are into that then drives also more corporate actions. Right. I mean I understand the why some people would be motivated to do that because they are Good.

global citizens, but the reality is humans are motivated by different things and generally not by by by being virtuous. I mean look you and I may may try and live as virtuously as possible. I drive an electric car. I bike most of of the time I buy food from a farmer's market, but I know at the end of the day, simply by living in a home In a developed country. in in even minimizing my electricity and water usage.

My global carbon footprint is much higher than somebody in India. or somebody in China, right? And so What would motivate somebody on their own to just send you money every month? um to remove carbon on their behalf. Like what do they get out of it aside from feeling good? Yeah, well, uh you know, we we also have to think what we need during this first phase, during like during this decade we're currently living in. So what they get out of it is well, for themselves. Uh they have

taken care of their carbon balance, but they have also enabled a new industry and that is uh I think what is what is most intriguing. I'm I'm fully with you, like ninety five percent of the population would likely only do this when they are forced to it. And that's eventually to get to billions of tons of CO two removal. We need regulation, we need corresponding legislation. We need governmental procurement programs, that might be CO two taxes or CO two burdens or incentives. Um that that we need for the masses, all right, and for for really removing removing billions of tons of of CO two from the air. But that's not what we need now. Like for the next ten years, Climworks and the other companies around us, this whole industry, they need uh like a couple of billion or let's say ten or or twenty of billions, and that's a relatively small amount. So like those pioneering customers on the private and on the corporate side, they are really enabling

us to do the next sta scale up step and to get to the next level. Once we are there, we need more than that. That is clear. But it's really what they are getting out of it is being a pioneer and enabling a new industry. Which I think is a pretty cool thing. So essentially you are setting yourself up for a future where most governments around the world will require their citizens and their businesses to pay some kind of tax to offset

their emissions and in order to do that they're gonna have to use The technology that you are developing If you're a leader in this industry in ten years, Then It could be a very profitable business.

That's definitely the case. As you said it in the very beginning, we do have to be a profitable business in order to become climate relevant. There's no other way. And and so it's not it's not charity what we're doing. We we have to become a business. That's the only way how we can Change the world for better. It's a it's a huge, huge undertaking. I mean the just the work that you have put into this over the last

Thirteen years ago. You have this amazing facility in Iceland, but Still just four thousand tons a year. I mean I shouldn't say it that way'cause it's an incredible achievement, but man, it just feels so Daunting and overwhelming

Feel that way. Yeah, you know, we've we've been doing this for almost thirteen years now, and I think Christoph and I have just always been running and running, and it's it's a marathon we are on. Maybe we are at kilometer five or kilometer ten, but it's a bit like you know, when you're starting your marathon. You shouldn't think of kilometer forty when you're at kilometer five. Uh, but you should rather like Make sure that you that you save your forces uh for the next five and the next five and the next five kilometers. That's a bit what it is. And and and look at where we're coming from. We started with capturing of CO two from the air with our laboratory reactors. And it went from milligrams to grams, from grams to kilograms, from kilograms to tons, from tons to thousand tons, so we did.

Quite a few years. uh scale up steps already. Uh so there is there are a few left. Of course those are the the largest ones then. But um we we we need something to do for the next ten to fifteen years, right? It's like a marathon, but it's also like a sprint. It's also like the hundred meter dash. Because time is running out. That's right. But yeah, you know, on the other hand, uh don't don't forget that that people typically underestimate what technology scale ups can do. I always say, like, well there are there are many solutions uh how we can approach this this challenge, uh but if we look at where humans are really good in is massively scaling up technology. So if we

If we can make it, developing and implementing and scaling good technology. We can be fast. We can be fast. There's a saying, I think Bill Gates said that uh once like you typically overestimate what you can achieve in one year, but you typically underestimate what you can achieve in ten years. And that's that's a bit the philosophy we are we are following, and that's how we're racing. Yan, do you think we can we humans can reverse climate change? Do you think we have the capacity to be able to do that within your your my lifetime. I I'm convinced that we can.

You're convinced we can. Yes. Between us and achieving that, there are just humans in between. Technology and physics can do it. It's very easy. You can show it. We just have to do it.

Amazing. Amazing. Um. Thanks so much. Thank you, okay.

Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This, and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, I'm at guy.ros. If you want to contact the team, our email address is hib. at id.wondery.com.

This episode was produced by Chris Massini with editing by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Maggie Luthar. Our music was composed by Raptine Erablui. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Carla Esteves, Casey Herman, JC Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, Carrie Thompson, Catherine Seifer, Josh Lash, and Elaine Coates. Neva Grant is our supervising editor, Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening. How I built this.