Startup Series: Carbo Culture
Today's guest is Henrietta Moon, Co-Founder and CEO of Carbo Culture.
Carbo Culture makes functional biocarbons and Biographite from waste to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere. They're working with green and blue infrastructure and carbon-negative materials developers to start a new era of Carbon Culturing. The startup describes its process as an "ultra-rapid conversion" where woody residues are turned into functional biocarbons at an extremely high temperature. The process then "locks" the carbon into a sort of charcoal that won't degrade for 1,000 years. Before Co-Founding Carbo Culture, Henriette was in the Spring 2019 StartX Cohort, Stanford's prestigious founder community and supported by serial entrepreneurs. She also was a board member at Yleiselektroniikka (YE International) and a Helsinki Hub member in the Global Shapers Community, a World Economic Forum initiative.
In this episode, Henrietta and I deep dive into biochar, its impacts on climate, and why the climate community has been apprehensive about embracing it. Henrietta explains what motivated her to co-found Carbo Culture, the startup's mission, and why decarbonization is essential to addressing climate change. It was great to understand more about Carbo Culture’s solution, and Henrietta is a fantastic guest.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@myclimatejourney.co, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded September 29th, 2021
In Today's episode we cover:
An overview of Carbo Culture, how the company is working to decarbonize the planet, and what led Henrietta to co-found the company
Whether technology informed their solution or did the solution inform the technology
The problem carbo culture is addressing
The most challenging aspects of disposing of agricultural waste
How to balance scale and cost-effectiveness
How Carbo Culture thinks about staging and phasing of the company
How Carbo Culture thinks about scaling the capacity of their technology and the various types of capital best suited for each stage
Whether the science risk scares investors away from Carbo Culture and the role non-dilutive capital plays in the funding for the startup
How Henrietta navigates building the company as the technology is being innovated and how sources of capital factor into decisions
Key priorities for Carbo Culture over the next 12 months
Why bio-char has a bad reputation within the climate community
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
Carbo Culture is hiring! Open positions here: https://www.carboculture.com/jobs
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Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone. Jason, here I am. The my climate journey show host four. We get going. I wanted to take a minute and tell you about the, my climate journey or MCJ as we call it membership. Membership came to be because there were a bunch of people that were listened to the show that weren't just looking for education, but they were longing for a peer group as well.
So we set up a slack community for those people. That's now mushroomed into more than 1300 members. There is an application to become a member. It's not an exclusive thing. There's four criteria we screen for. Determination to tackle the problem of climate change ambition to work on the most impactful solution areas, optimism that we can make a dent, and we're not wasting our time for trying and a collaborative spirit beyond that.
The more diversity, the better there's a bunch of great things that have come out of that community. A number of founding teams that have met in there, a number of nonprofits that have been established, a bunch of hiring that's been done. A bunch of companies that have raised capital in there, a bunch of funds that have gotten limited partners or investors for their funds in there, as well as a bunch of events and programming by members and for members and some open source projects that are getting actively worked on that hatched in there as well.
At any rate, if you want to learn more, or you can go to my climate journey.co the website and click, they become a member tab at the top. Enjoy. Hello everyone. This is Jason Jacobs. And welcome to my climate journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help.
Today's guest is Henrietta moon, CEO, and co-founder of carbo culture. Carbo culture makes functional biocarbon and bio graphite from waste to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere. They're working with green and blue infrastructure and carbon negative materials developers. So start a new era of carbon culturing.
We have a fascinating discussion in this episode about the origin story of the company Henrietta's background and what led her down the path of caring about this problem. In the first place we talk about the carbo culture approach. They're starting point their traction to date their long vision and what's coming next.
And then we have a great discussion about the industry in general and what the different steps are to scale a company of this nature, what the right capital sources are, what some of the challenges are and what some of the changes could be that could help carbo culture and other companies like it move faster.
And Henrietta welcome to the show.
Henrietta Moon: Thank you, Jason. Great to have you.
Jason Jacobs: I'm so excited to learn more about Carbo culture. Gosh, the company name comes up everywhere and it sounds like you're doing some fascinating stuff and it's just such a great honor to carve out an hour and dig in with you on, on the company and on your journey.
Henrietta Moon: Thanks. I'm super psyched to be here. It's wonderful to be part of the community as the unit grows so much. And yeah, it's definitely a pleasure to be here.
Jason Jacobs: Awesome. We'll take things from the top. What is Carbo?
Henrietta Moon: Yeah, what do we do? Well, we remove carbon and put it in a stable forum. So it doesn't reenter the atmosphere for a thousand years. And how do we do that? Is that we let plants capture the CO2 from the atmosphere, but if there were let to be lying around, they would decompose and re return. So we take that plant matter. AKA biomass. We use waste biomass and we turn it into a stable form of carbon by taking it to a very high temperature for a split second.
And it turns into almost pure carbon and this is called biocarbon or bio char, and then it can be used for soil and husband, for example. So it's a way to take that plant matter and turn it into a stable form of carbon.
Jason Jacobs: Uh, huh. And I was going to ask you how the company came to be, but maybe looking even further back, tell me a little bit about your journey. How did you come to be doing the work that you do and caring about the problem that you care about?
Henrietta Moon: I was born and brought up in Finland, which is a country that's still 76% covered by forest. So nature is a big thing there and I've grown up, you know, scraping my knees on rocks and going out to sea and stuff like that.
And so, so it's been a very big part of my life. I was a Scouts and as I was a kid and I did Marine Scouts or sea Scouts where we were sailing a lot, um, Environment has always been close to my heart, but for some reason, I didn't think that I was good enough to study biology or something. So I didn't go down that route.
But later on in life, How I ended up working in this is that I found that entrepreneurship was just my vehicle of doing stuff like getting stuff done and making an impact. I'm a very impatient person. So, so startup seems like my cup of tea, where everything goes, you know, 10 times faster than everybody else.
That's what we like to think. And so entrepreneurship plus this purpose of environment was kind of like the perfect fit. Um, Even in like the past couple of years or the decade past decade, I've seen environmental change with my own eyes or when we. When we take groups out to sail, I'm a sailing captain now.
And when we used to take groups out to see like kids, sometimes I couldn't let them swim, even if it were a super hot day, because there was a toxic algae bloom in the Baltic sea, and this directly linked to humans, just putting too much nutrients in the sea has been a dumping ground for nutrients for, for the past, you know, however long.
And now obviously we're trying to clean it up. But taking something out of somewhere where, when it's once already in there, like, like these parts of nutrients from the entire sea is very tedious. And now obviously that's a direct analogy to, to what we're doing with climate change, where we've just put too much carbon in the atmosphere and it's heating up.
Jason Jacobs: And how did those dots end up connecting? So, so you were sailing and you were out at nature and you were seeing some of the changes with your own eyes and very concerned about it. And you had discovered the, I don't know if you call it a craft or the sport of entrepreneurship. So how did those end up interstate.
Henrietta Moon: Yeah, that's a great question. So I used to used to do other stuff. I was running a company called me hackathon was creative technology education. It's a little bit of impact entrepreneurship there. It started a couple of like entrepreneurs at festivals and whatnot. Been like super active in those early community in Helsinki and, and Europe in general.
And we brought some Stanford professors to Finland to talk about entrepreneurship. And, you know, I drank the Kool-Aid, let's say, um, In any case at one point then, because of my work with rails girls, community that we, I helped build up, my friends launched a community for women in programming, and I, I helped kind of bring it to a global scale.
The global community it's totally open source project and it's in 300 different cities, completely volunteer run. But in any case, because of that work, I was kind of like drafted into this program called global solutions program, which happened at NASA. Ames in California in 2013, it was called singularity university.
It was a very cool nerd camp. Back then, I was three months of trying to figure out which technologies to deploy, to solve some of the world's biggest challenges. And I mean, as an impact entrepreneur who had, you know, dabbled with a couple of companies or organizations, I was like a fish in the sea. It was amazing to find other people that wanted to solve.
Like global problems, like, you know, cancer detection or, or something else. And suddenly you're surrounded by these peers who want to do something. And over there I met my co-founder Chris Karstens, who we ended up starting carbo culture with later on, we just decided that. We want to work on environment and the most imminent, like big problems to us seem to be climate change.
And then we were kind of looking at different aspects of climate change and what we could do. And Chris had looked at a bunch of different technologies before as well, and we just tried to find the most elegant solution to actually. Make direct impact as soon as possible. And that's how I kind of ended up here.
So I had a technology partner who brought in the idea of what we're doing today, and I had the experience of launching stuff and that's kind of two things combined and then cargo culture could exist.
Jason Jacobs: And so did the technology come first or did the idea for a potential solution come first? And then you went searching for the technology? Like what was the spark that actually led to this becoming.
Henrietta Moon: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, the spark was me and Chris meeting because we just had so complimentary skills that it was, it was just a, a good combination. And Chris had already scouted and he had worked on different kinds of technologies, everything from graphing research to looking at biofuels and all sorts of stuff, and kind of lived in that world for over a decade already.
And so his knowledge of. Kind of what's worked and what hasn't was very, very important for us when we set out. And at that stage, we actually went to need a. Professor and a research group at a university who had been doing basic research on a technology already for over a decade. So like all the best things, no technologies are actually new, like direct air capture is, uh, you know, 80 years old or something.
It was used in submarines already in the wars. This technology also had kind of like existed already for a decade, but nobody had thought of. Commercializing it and taking it to scale and testing it in the real world. And so that's what we sought out to do.
Jason Jacobs: Got it. And then the technology itself. So you said it, it takes waste from, is a forest.
Henrietta Moon: Yeah, right now, we're using agricultural waste. So think of things like nutshells peach pits and not just the hard stuff we've been doing, experimenting with beet fruit POL or industrial waste streams that have Woody residues and all sorts of things. So we'd rather not touch new forests unless it's from an area that's like fire clearing or something else.
So there's enough waste biomass going around. So, where do you get the waste? Well, right now we're parked behind a Walnut processing facility or actually a almond processing facility. So in central valley in California, the food industry is humongous. It's impossible to imagine how big these things are.
So they take all the. You know, not from a 50 mile radius and bring them to, to one of these processing plants where the food gets packaged for consumers and we get the waste. So actually we don't go and collect it from the fields or anything like that. It's already centralized for us, which is nice and convenient for us as we're working on the technology.
But in trying to minimize logistics at this stage with these processing plants do with the waste. If carbo culture wasn't. Well, it's a good question. I mean, they've been used for. Roadsides or, or something else. It is a big problem for some, some of these food processors and in central valley in California, open burning is still a thing.
So, so there are days that farmers are allowed to burn their waste openly because the existing biomass power plants that used to be there used to be the, kind of like the dumping grounds for these. And solar power is so much cheaper and these biomass power plants are filled with forestry clearing from the CRS.
So, so they just have to get rid of the waste somehow. And that's one of the reasons why the sun harken air district or, or the central valley is one of the most polluted areas in the U S in terms of air pollution.
Jason Jacobs: So right now people just try to get rid of it somewhere. Should we be thinking about the problem that carbo culture is addressing as, as reducing the issues caused by how they're disposing with the waste today, or is it a different problem?
Henrietta Moon: I think it's still a different problem. So burning agricultural waste is definitely a problem. And, you know, outside of new Delhi, for example, there's a company. I can't remember their name that are addressing this problem more, you know, in central valley it's a big issue, but. Usually biomass, if it has some calorific value, like it could be still used for food.
It'll probably go to animal food or something like these things should be circular, but they're not, I think it's more of a problem of the industrialization of our, of our food chains. I think what carbo culture. Like our sort of number one problem is how do we get that carbon and make it stable so that it doesn't reenter the atmosphere and this, this waste and getting our hands on it.
It's a, you know, excellent segway for us to get our, get enough of this biomass. But in the future, we might need to be a little bit more creative about where it comes from.
Jason Jacobs: Uh, and so it's not necessarily the carbon that would have been emitted from this waste, but it is sequestering carbon that was already up there from other places.
Henrietta Moon: Yes. So naturally plants and biomass take down hundreds of gigatons of carbon dioxide annually, and also rerelease it. So if we're thinking of, Hmm, how do we get to 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide removal, the fastest cheapest, and most energy efficient. As possible then maybe we should employ these allies of ours called plants that actually use solar power and do it without added electricity with our own chemistry that they've been perfecting.
But if we leave these plants lying around somewhere, like if you think of a forest, it will not 10 X in size. After as maturity, it will remain a certain size and all the excess biomass that's generated. Just the case and re returns to the atmosphere. So that's where we want to intersect. Right. We want to take that biomass and turn it into a stable form and build a carbon bank so that it's away from the atmosphere.
And if you think about, you know, all the ways that we're thinking of removing carbon from the atmosphere, whether it's. You know, direct air capture or pumping it underground, deep into an oil. Well, uh, potentially to get more oil or trying to mineralize it or something else. This is like one of the great solutions that could help us do this quickly.
And without putting a huge amount of. More strain on the grid as we're trying to transition into a greener green.
Jason Jacobs: So I'm going to try one more time just to make sure I understand before we move on. So essentially there's this agricultural waste that would be disposed of other ways, whether it's in the landfill, whether it's during the controlled burnings, et cetera in you are. Utilizing your proprietary process using extreme heat that will help get the carbon from this agricultural waste into more stable form that could then be sequestered so that it doesn't end up making its way into the end.
Henrietta Moon: Exactly.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. Yeah. Great. And what are the most challenging aspects of that? Is it, I mean, is it mostly stuff that's off the shelf that you're cobbling together or is it new stuff that you've got to invent? Like maybe talk a bit about the process and about some of the most challenging elements.
Henrietta Moon: Yeah, so turning stuff into charcoal or making, making carbon has been something that humans have done forever. So that's not maybe the tricky part, but the tricky part is if you want to do it efficiently in a way that you actually maximize your carbon retention, instead of just kind of burning it up in the air.
And if you want to do it at millions or even billions of tons of scale, that's where your problems. Emerging. Right. So definitely we are developing proprietary technology. We have this patient that we've been building on and, or, you know, the original innovation that was done in academic setting. And now we've been building on top of that and aiming at scaling our technology.
And that's definitely like. One of our pinpoints now, like how much, how fast, what are the best ways of designing this for scalability, repeatability, functionality, safety, et cetera. So those are the things that technically we're focusing on now. And then there's the whole business side of things, right?
Who's going to pay for carbon removal, which kind of clients do we want to target? Do we want to, because we're not just selling carbon removal, we're also selling our excess heat. So this is an exit. Process, which makes energy instead of needing it. And so where do we sell our heat and how much do these people pay for it?
And what are the optimal areas where we can do that without too much heat loss. And then there's the bio char itself, like who can we sell it to? And how can we push the price of bio char down? So. Agriculturists or farmers do not have to pay a high price for the polluters who are actually paying for the carbon removal.
So how do we balance out these things? And then on top of that comes operations logistics, where do we find a half a gigaton of biomass? And is it an optimal areas for the heat use, et cetera? So, and so definitely I'd say we have a couple of things on our plate.
Jason Jacobs: And do you take the waste to you and to a large-scale facility? Or is it more distributed in nature? Where there's you take the process to the.
Henrietta Moon: Yeah. So we're distributed in that sense that we don't definitely don't want to build a few huge funds and then transport everything there. I mean, when you're transporting biomass, it's mostly air and water, so you don't want to do that.
So definitely building as close as possible to the source of the waste. And in this, this sense we are modular, but they are not trailer models that we can just shift around, you know, one week to another. So we're talking about. 10,000 tons of biomass and up, like, let's say our medium-sized plan would be something like using 30,000 tons of biomass annually. So that's actually quite a lot. And that's also a lot of heat that we're generating. So these kinds of things need to be considered when we're thinking about locations.
Jason Jacobs: And the, these kinds of deep tech innovations where there's staging and phasing. This is been one of the biggest learning areas for me coming in, given that I had no experience in any of these domains prior to focusing on climate change.But if I look at fusion as an example, it seems that when you're trying to. To make fusion work at scale in a cost-effective way that there's different proof points. You can almost decouple from each other and you focus on this one, you know, the magnet, and then you focus on the next layer and you kind of work your way out. Are you building carbo culture in a similar way? And if so, it'd be great to understand a bit about how you think about unbundling those things and what that staging and phasing.
Henrietta Moon: Yeah. So I've also had a very steep learning curve let's say, and I'm happy that that's happened. I really enjoy that. And we're lucky to have good people working with us as well.
So things need to happen simultaneously, even though, you know, R and D people. I think that, Hey, we just will only release this to the world when it's perfect. And then business people are like, no, we need to sell it. And we need to make sure that the market wants what we're building and so forth. So these forces need to be managed in a way that we're working in parallel because.
At the end of the day sales and business development. And just even thinking about the logistics and the plan for who you're even going to hire, or how do you scale out and what are all the things that are involved in that it takes time and it takes time to find good partners to work with. So I think that that's often underestimated.
The amount of other work that goes into stuff, not just a technology that's of course the critical key part, but things have to happen in parallel. That's kind of like what we're aiming for and it just takes scheduling, scheduling, scheduling, revisiting those plans, making sure that. Your stakeholders are aligned.
Is somebody late? How does that affect everybody else? Can we get this agreement through, you know, all sorts of things need to work in parallel. And I have to say it has been challenging during COVID when we're not all in the same office, you know, meeting face to face we're in different time zones sometimes.
And, and yeah, it's definitely something that, that we need to get better at, but that we've recognized that it's yeah, we need to do that.
Jason Jacobs: And what about in terms of scaling the capacity? Do you prove it out small and then a little bigger, a little bigger, a little bigger? Or how do you think about that? And also, how do you.
Henrietta Moon: Yeah. Great question. So it's tech started out on a laboratory scale, like let's say, size of a microwave. And when we got it, we were at a 250 pound size, which we've since scaled eight times in volume. So we've done one scale up towards the end of the year. We're doing a second scale up and that's going to be.
Sort of like the pre version of our first commercial unit. So, so of course we're doing R and D all the time, but these are kind of like the big sort of scale milestones for us. And they're when we're handling material, there's a couple of different things. Like there's not just the volume, but there's like, throughput, how fast can you do things?
Is it stable? Is it reliable? How many hours a year can you run it, et cetera. So, so there's kind of like the fundamental things, which are the. Big things that you can, you know, easily see from externally, like, whoa, that's a lot bigger than the previous one, but then there's the more mundane things. Like how do things move from place to place that people often forget about, but those are actually the really critical parts.
And so, yeah, but we're, we're scaling up in stages and it's very different to a linear scale up. Ours looks more like, you know, huge steps that we're taking one by one.
Jason Jacobs: And is it different types of capital that are better suited to each one of those stacks?
Henrietta Moon: Yeah. So definitely. So until now, we've, we've had some grant funding from the Finnish government actually, and also from some competitions and things like that on non diluted financing, but then we're VC backed.
So we have incredible investors who believe that this is and huge opportunity. And that's why they've been funding our technology R and D as well. But as we go into commercial deployment, even for the first facility, We will be doing non-dilutive funding for that. And especially for the later ones, when we go into commercial development, those facilities need to be funded by not VC money.
So basically project finance is a hot topic in climate tech. So how do we funnel that non-dilutive financing into projects when they're out there? Earlier stages, you know, before normally project financiers who want to see scales of a hundred million, 500 million, like how do we get those guys in earlier who have the experience of doing these types of projects, but also who could have a little bit more risk appetite when it comes to these new technologies?
Jason Jacobs: And it is there some kind of chasm that you'll need to cross where in the early days it doesn't require that much capital, but as you try to build bigger facilities, it requires more capital, but the project finance I've heard and you're way closer to. And I am, but oftentimes look for things that have been done and proven before.
So if you're trying to do something where it requires big capital, but there's also science risk, for example, it can scare them away. So are you seeing that chasm for carbo culture? Do you see that chasm in general? Is it all over the place in terms of where each company hits that wall or, or is it really like an acute spot that it's like, oh, this is the, this is the valley of death or something.
Henrietta Moon: Yeah. I mean, we're definitely seeing it already, even in the funding for our first sort of commercial facility that will still be owned by us, but we'll have non-dilutive capital in it. The risk profile is very different. So I really want to show that, Hey, this is how we're reducing technology.
Operational risk and all these other parts of the story that they want to see. And of course, part of that was critical. Maybe also to the listeners is the customer side. Who's going to off-take these products that you're making the carbon removal and these other things. And those are really that key areas like operational, technical and business risk that we're trying to take down.
And now. There are, you know, we've been approached by all sorts of capital investors who usually do much more conservative projects. So let's say solar or wind, or even something more established, you know, where the technologies are very known, how much you pay for the outputs is very, very standardized and so forth.
So, so these people trying to come into these new climate technologies, there's obviously a little bit of a gray zone, whereas in like, How early can they go and how much needs to be approved on the technology side before they can come in as a fund. But I do see changes here just like, you know, a couple of years ago.
Probably seeing this very closely, like in VC, when we were raising like, you know, four years ago or something people were like, are you out of your mind VCs don't do climate stuff. Not hardware, not like whatever you're doing. And now there's so many, so many climate investors, at least starting to look at even the harder stuff.
So that's like amazing. And I think the same thing is going on at the other capital sides. There's a lot of capital and the people who are putting in the money, the families, the corporates, the pension funds, they want to see it go to green stuff. So now these people who are. Going the capital are being pushed towards, Hey, why don't you do something more in these fields?
So now they're trying to come up with ways that they could actually enter into smaller tickets or earlier than what they're used to. So I think it's changing a lot. That's good news for all the climate entrepreneurs out there.
Jason Jacobs: Well, one question that I wrestle with, and I'd love to get your thoughts on it, given that we come from similar backgrounds in this way, but on the one hand you have the. Critical importance of domain expertise when you're solving these hard, deep tech types of problems, where there are clearly lessons learned and institutional knowledge where you can avoid making mistakes that you would otherwise have made. Head-on if you just hadn't been around to know better. And on the other hand, not many of these kinds of companies historically have Achieved significant scale. And I would argue that it's a skill set in itself to know how to. Bringing the right talent and manage to the index of the phase of the company in a blitz scaling mode, where you're constantly needing to revisit. And you're building the plane as you're flying the plane and you are needing different sources of capital on the way in different phases and everything is kind of compressed, right?
Like that is a skill set. And so how do you think about. Tension where the optimistic Silicon valley style entrepreneurs that are coming in, they think big they're brimming with optimism and ambition, and you kind of need that to build something big. Right. But at the same time, if you, if you lose that domain expertise, then, then it can be a repeat of the past.
So, yeah, like is any of that making sense? How, how do you think about that? And I love to just kind of hear you think out loud on, on that.
Henrietta Moon: Yeah. I mean, you're so right. And I think I was one of those people who were like naive to the challenge as in like, well, this seems pretty logical. Why don't we just do this?
And then like, oh God, there's so much stuff to learn here. And the kind of mountain keeps growing a little bit every day. So I think definitely you need to have the passion and the enthusiasm when you jump into this. But. It is a long haul job, I'd say. And, and also like, yeah, I'd say the commitment needs to be pretty strong, but not to scare anybody off the opportunity's huge.
And there's so much space for different kinds of people with different kinds of technologies to come and come and wrangle this climate change and turn or a future into a greener one. So I think, yeah, definitely that bullishness of Silicon valley and the kind of like. No problem too big to solve type of thinking is, is very needed.
And maybe, maybe these people can work together with the researchers and with scientists who have been there for decades going like duh, and, and now like bring those two things together and actually actually make something happen. But you know, sometimes there is a little bit. What I'm sometimes annoyed at is like this technological simplicity that, oh, well you can just push a button and then the problem will go away.
Well, that's not going to happen here. It's going to take a lot of work unless somebody comes up with fusion and we actually like push a button. But, but that's like, I'd say we have a good 20 years to wait for that moment. So in the meantime, we need to actually get smarter. Have different forms of capital enter the stage investors who are educated and entrepreneurs who can rely on each other to help us, you know, grow as a. As a community and tackle these problems. So I've learned so much from some entrepreneurs in actually different lines of business. So I have, one of my mentors is from health technology who was growing like a company through a laboratory phases and kind of like expensive stuff that was real and not just.
You know, hiring more brains, but actually having to have buildings, locations, you know, scientific releases, all sorts of things on, and that's actually helped me a lot. Having somebody who's been going through that a couple of times. And I think there's good communities forming around around entrepreneurs and bringing it back around to carbo culture.
Jason Jacobs: So what are your key priorities over the next 12?
Henrietta Moon: Gosh, hiring, hiring, hiring. So obviously you're looking for incredible people to join our team who are dedicated to solve climate crisis with us. I am also looking, you know, now that we spoke about the community, I'm also looking forward to. Meets a lot of my fellow carbon removal entrepreneurs who, you know, we've been going around in circles on the internet, but now that events are actually resuming, it's going to be wonderful to meet people.
And I think we all need, you know, so many of us need to succeed and, but for Carbo culture, it's technology scale-up is number one, hiring is number one and perhaps, you know, Driving our strategy together and forward is super, super critical. And we are going to be looking a lot more at the non-dilutive capital side as well in the next month, if I'm being brutally honest here so that we can secure, you know, how do we start scaling up faster without just dilute of capital?
Jason Jacobs: Uh huh. Got it. And as you think about the path to success for a carbo culture, I mean, we. The technology scale-up we talked about the non-dilutive capital to fund that scale up. What about looking outward things maybe outside of the scope of carbo culture control, what is most relevant to carbo culture success?
And what do you worry about the most? Yeah, that's a great question. So I have this like personal fascination with, with a little bit of like biology and ecological integrity. So, so I am wondering how we can play a part there and what the future brings. That's not our year one or year two worry, but perhaps, you know, can we find, find new solutions where to deploy the bio char or how can we enhance the.
Draw down capacity of biomass or, or something else, you know, reckon we'd be most useful is my question beyond just carbon removal. Can we tap into existing natural systems where you can have cascading benefits, just like you could on the negative side as well? I'm sure we can unlock that kind of positive cycles where, where if we do one thing, other things follow.
So that's kind of like a dream dream scenario for what we can do in a day.
Jason Jacobs: One of the things I've been wondering. I mean, I don't know that much about bio char, to be honest, but as I've been making the rounds, I've noticed that some people who've been around for a while, maybe the clean tech 1.0 crowd or people like that, you mentioned bio char and they kind of roll their eyes. Why do you think that is? Why does bio char get a bad rap in some circles? And, and is there any.
Henrietta Moon: Yeah. I mean, it's definitely not a miracle drug that you can dump in the soil and things are going to grow 30% more. It's not going to do that. It's not a fertilizer or it's not a replacement for like other nutrients going into the soil.
It is just pure carbon. It's not a nutrient even. So I think it's had a bad rap because it's been misunderstood and the tasks and stuff that have been done on it. Tough. Perhaps there have been many of them. Oftentimes, perhaps small-scale. And with different bio chars in different laboratories, different conditions every time.
So hopefully, you know, that can change in the coming years. But bottom line is that buyer Char's is here now to solve a new problem. And that is carbon removal. So the IPC has given us pretty clear instructions. Number one, we need to decarbonize and cut our emissions in every place possible. And we need to have 50% of those emissions down by 2030.
And by 2050, we need to be net zero. Meaning everything we emit needs to be physically brought down from the atmosphere every year. And that's an incredibly arduous task. And to put that into scale, McKinsey estimates that by 2030, we need about 2 billion, tons of CO2 removal. And by 2050, about 10 billion, tons and global capacity today is at like 30 million tons.
And so now if we put aside like bar chart, doesn't work for crops. Well, guess what? It can work for this other problem. That's gargantuan and that's going to need. Tens of different kinds of technologies to actually get anywhere near the scale that is needed to avoid catastrophic, like over two degree warming.
So here's the thing, like, sorry, if it didn't work for a specific crop that was being studied or something else, maybe it can hold nutrients. Maybe it can hold water or do some other benefits. But right now the number one benefit is the carbon removal. At least in my head. And since it's needed, it's a good solution.
Jason Jacobs: So, if you could change one thing outside of the scope of your control or carbo culture's control, that would most accelerate the progress of you and other companies trying to do similar, what would you change and how.
Henrietta Moon: That is a great question. I think one thing that would be great that is completely attainable is that the carbon price should go up and that should be in the near term.
People do expect that carbon removal today could be, you know, somewhere near 200 bucks a ton, or maybe even under that, if it is, there's probably somebody else picking up the bill somewhere elsewhere. So true. Carbon removal should call it. Money because the main job of carbon removal is not just to actually physically bring down the carbon, but it's to show how difficult it actually is so that people go and actually reduce their emissions.
It should not be cheap today. Like it should be driving down those emissions. But of course we want to bring that price down as we scale and so forth over the years. So one thing is that buyers, if your company is a tech company or whatever company you are, who's looking at. Compensating emissions. Think about adding some percentage of that emission compensation, which typically is just emission avoidance, like supporting green energy.
For example, try to add some carbon removal in there. Even if it costs a little bit more, maybe add 10%, maybe add 50%, see what you can do because. Everything. That's kind of pushing that industry forward is going to help at scale. We're not going to magically scale if the demand goes from zero to a hundred in 2029.
So we need to kind of ramp that, that demand side up as well. So that's one thing. And then another thing is. Companies can do, and governments can do long-term purchase agreements. So essentially that's the key to getting project financing for a lot of these technologies that need significant capital to build infrastructure.
So basically when you say, Hey, we want to buy carbon removal. Don't say that you needed by your fiscal year, end in December or something, say that, Hey, we need this much carbon removal within the next three years. And here's the price for it. Or ideally five years, give the developer some more flexibility.
And in that way, you're a great buyer because you're offering flexibility to the companies along enough timeframe that the lenders will see that there are some actual. Company trying to buy what you're making, et cetera.
Jason Jacobs: So, so really the power of the purchasers is humongous here and can help the industry transition forward, Henrietta. Anything that I didn't ask you that I should have, or any parting words for listening.
Henrietta Moon: Well, even if we're talking about carbon removal here, I just want to remind everybody that, yes, we're talking about carbon removal here, but again, the, the main thing needs to be emission cuts. Like everybody needs to drive down their emissions and that needs to be the agenda everywhere.
Carbon removal can maybe get us to like a third of the Paris agreement. But not beyond that, we need like deep, deep, deep emission cuts. And I think that's not happening now. So, so that's the kind of reality we need to remember as well. And in addition to scaling up on all fronts, but yeah. Thanks, Jason.
It's been amazing. I got one, one more bonus question I'm going to put in, which is just, if you look out 10 years or 20 years and carbo culture is successful beyond your wildest dreams, what have you. Yeah, that would be amazing. I think, you know, somebody said that the carbon removal industry could be as big as oil and is today.
So that would be pretty cool. If the climate industries were actually the top dogs in, in, you know, the stock exchanges and so forth. And actually we would wake up to a greener and cleaner world. I mean, that would be pretty, yeah. Awesome.
Jason Jacobs: Well, Henrietta, thank you so much for coming on the show and tutoring me and listeners on the world of, in entrepreneurship as well. But this was awesome. So thanks again and wishing you and the carbo culture team every time.
Henrietta Moon: Sweet. Thank you so much, Jason.
Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone, Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on my climate journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at my climate journey dot C O note.
That is dot C O. That calm someday. We'll get the.com. But right now, God, see, oh, you can also find me on Twitter at J Jacobs 22, where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests. You'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes.
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